lol. No, I can't rebut this. I'd like to try, but I just can't. It's odd, after reading through every post, how many atheist feel the need to profess their beliefs on others--more often than not, through use of profanity and hate. What's even more strange is how often they offer gems of knowledge, such as the one quoted above, that try to attack religion for being something forced violently upon others, when in fact they use profane attacks on another belief system, namely organized religion, to press into others their own ideas of what lies behind the universe. Now that seems hypocritical. Regardless, try a simply mind exercise. Take a new born child from the 17th century and introduce it into 2008. Holding the impact of disease constant, could that infant be raised in our society succesfully? of course. Go back a further 200 years and take another infant. Could that child, hypothetically, be raised in our society? of course. Go back 3000 years and take an infant-- anyone can see the pattern I'm getting at. Humans are humans, for time immeorial. When could this process stop? When would you take a human from a previous era and not be able to compare it, at least intellectually, with our modern era's average human? If you could go human by human, hypothetically, at what point do you reach a creature that either resembles a human, but has no human conscience or mind, or does not resemble a human, yet produced a human offspring. Examining it at the very micro-scale, at what point would you be taking back a "un-human" father and its "human" child? Surely we know that as far back as we can possibly trace humanity, to societies in the cradle of civilizaition and CatalHyuck and beyond, from the evidence that pours forth, we see that these humans had sophisticated political systems, were able to create works of art, had significant infrastructural accomplishments, had realtionships of love and hate-- the list goes on; they were genuinly human, in the very sense that we are. Yet their, or our, trace suddenly stops. This is by no means an explanation proving one thing or another, yet it seems to want to tell you that we are unique. I'm sure there are many rebuttals, and indeed, fossils and other scientific pieces of evidence 'proving' that tribes of unhumans without moral consciences or minds eventually gathered enough food to become physcially fit enough to develope parts of the brain that are crucial for defining humanity. But when you look at it at the very microscale, at what point could you take one of these beings back into our society and have it mesh in perfectly, but not have its father mesh in, in the same respect.
