Yeah that was weird to me, too.
I like the internet (I know, I'm an iconoclast). There's a place for everyone. You can be vapid and materialistic, you can share your menstruation story, you can make cat puns - whatever, there's room for everybody. If you're gonna be like "eww I can't handle even reading about this thing that literally 50% of all humans experience" then fine, stick to trampolines, but don't act like you get to arbitrate what gets shared.
As a former Christian, I totally get that feeling of embarrassment. Because... Christianity is embarrassing. God will forgive you for being what he made you if you can suppress your healthy skepticism enough to believe Jesus rose from the dead? But God "hardens" some people's hearts against repentance just so he can show off his power (Exodus 4:21, Romans 9: 16-24)?
It's 2011. We know there was never an Adam & Eve. There was no fall from grace. All those stories about Jesus performing miracles and being born of a virgin and rising from the dead - that stuff was ripped off from earlier Hellenic myths (so much so that some early Christians believed Satan planted those Greek myths in the past so that people would doubt Jesus). The gospels were written not by eyewitnesses; at best they came 30 or 40 years after the events they described. Based on a few decades of the telephone game. If adults today can swallow Scientology, of course people in a Roman province in 70 C.E. could swallow the Jesus myths.
Most Christians don't actually care whether or not it's true. They just like the benefits: community, a sense of purpose, etc. I'm just saying that you can have love, wonder, grace and meaning without faith. But to be a crusader, or an inquisitor, or a homophobe, or to believe that hellfire awaits anyone who doesn't accept their own "sinfulness" and buy into the fairy tales you happened to grow up with - that kind of misanthropy takes faith. I can tell from your posts that you're not that kind of awful Christian, so thank you; no need to apologize for the moronic ones. But I don't think they're misrepresenting Christianity, unless you've adopted a new, Jeffersonian Christianity that omits all the human pettiness and superstition.
Dmitry Belyaev bred tame foxes within a few generations, so you could probably do the same with cheetahs and bears if you had enough of them. And you could breed for smallness the same way humans bred toy dogs.
Gabe is our Anwar al-Awlaki. Inshallah, I will make jokes with him soon!
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/13/the_world_of_holy_warcraft?page=0,0
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