Yes, Scylla.
Only pretentious Anglophone windbags refer to “Ockham’s Scalpel”.
Dr F. I have missed you …
But I think it is alot easier for a whole lot of people to lie than for one to go against the grain…my opinion of course…but I know I dont like to be persecuted…especially for a lie.
I recall hearing this story from a missionary when I was about 10 years old. Even then I could see that it was logically inconsistent. The missionary was not amused, and neither was the congregation. Some things never go away. Now about that third word…
Inorder to prove my point…have you heard about the twin boys…I am sure you have. Eventhough doctors, family, ect. doubted they chose to agree for fear of going against the famous.
Uh, yeah, but the truth came out. As it has here, where your story has been throroughly debunked. Also, I think we are talking about slightly different issues here. (I am guessing he’s talking about the boy who was raised as a girl after an extremely unfortunate circumscision accident.) A family keeping some pertinent medical information from a child until they reach the age of consent is not the same as a supposed massive conspiracy to deny an amazing event that was witnessed by dozens.
Did that actually happen? It was last week’s Chicago Hope.
If I’m the only one who doesn’t recognize this, just taunt me, but what’s the story about the professor and the chalk?
dansir, just take a step back and look at it from a rational perspective.
Hank Hill claims to have seen this event occur. He claims to have seen it despite having never worked for a department of NASA that this event would have occured in. It’s similar to me claiming that I saw Monica Lewinsky giving the president a bj while I was on a White Hour Tour. Sure, I was in the White House, but being on a tour doesn’t give me any access to the highly-guarded areas where those incidents are alleged to have occured.
Second- Let’s assume that Hill is right, and that it’s a massive goverment conspiracy to cover this all up. So this would involve:
[ul][li]NASA Scientists and Engineers. Of course, none of them are Christians, so they’d all be perfectly happy to cover this up.[/li][li]The Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations. Of course, all of those presidents and their cabinets were heathen agnostics and atheists, who would never want this kind of information validating the Bible to come out.[/li][li]Every major organized religion. Think about it. Hill published his story years ago, and this e-mail pops up every once in a while. Either the Pope and Jerry Fallwell are surrounded by atheist counter-intelligence operatives who don’t wish this NASA information to get out to the public, or the leaders of nearly every major religious denomination recognize this story for the tall-tale bull-crap it is.[/ul][/li]
Guess it’s you and Hill against every single other person in the world.
Gotta admit, that’d be one heck of a conspiracy, though.
JMCJ
This is not a sig.
Gaudere - not to mention the soundness of Dr.F’s argument in his initial post.
dansir, one doesn’t have to be a nonbeliever to dislike it when believers pass off crap like this as God’s truth. In fact, it genuinely hurts me when my supposed brethren in Christ evidence to nonbelievers that we care nothing for the truth. 
Well, according to Dateline (which I never watched before, but comes across as a cheesy newsmagazine; I don’t know how well-regarded they are). But the guts off the story seem quite true, despite their attempts to spice it up with sinister allegations against the psychiatrist who recommended the gender-switch. Cut the guy some slack; he may have liked his fame bit too much, but at the time they couldn’t reconstruct a penis properly, nor did they know how solidly gender roles were set by genetics versus environment. I think he did what he thought was best at the time.
Actually Gaudy, I have no idea which twin boys dansir is referencing. There have been more than one set of male twins born during the past few centuries.
I also wonder who is being persecuted. 90% of the technicians who worked for NASA in the 1960s were Christian, and I am sure there were a few other Christians in the computer room in Green Belt Maryland who might possibly remember an incident such as described. It is odd that no one else seems able to verify Hill’s tale.
It doesn’t take the wisdom of Solomon to see that here is no reason on God’s Green Earth for NASA to be trying to check the positions of the planets THOUSANDS OF YEARS in the past. Were they afraid that one of the Gemini missions would hit a time warp and accidentally hit Mars in 2000 BC? And, as I said in my first post on this thread, HOW IN THE WORLD would they be able to tell that their calculated observed positions would be off? We do not have sterral charts detailed enough from that era to check the calculations against.
IIRC, dansir is female.
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”
shantih - I’m in the dark, too.
John - there’s a big difference. At least it’s theoretically possible that you could have seen Monica slurping the Prez. But the latter-day Music Man’s story is not.
um, strike “sterral”, replace with “stellar”
D’oh! She is female. I was trying to remember where I knew her from and now I do. Heck, nearly everyone thought she was male last time, too, at least for a while.
I do think I’m right about which twins she’s talking about, though. Sometimes these posts take a little mind-reading.
RTF- Sorry, didn’t make myself clear. I was trying to point out that even if the story Hank Hill was telling was true, that there would be no possible way that Hill would have been present to watch it.
Ergo, regardless of whether or not said calculations could be performed or were performed to show such a discrepancy, Hill did not see them performed, ergo, this story and the idea that NASA is hiding caluclations which prove the veracity of the Bible is absolutely false.
Don’t nitpick with me, man. (grin)
JMCJ
This is not a sig.
It’s just a jump to the left… 
Gaudere - Robby Slaughter may think he’s sooo smart, but he’s not. He must’ve checked the wrong USC - the story must’ve happened at the University of South Carolina, which also is abbreviated USC.
(That’s a joke, of course - in the combined eleven years my wife and I were there, we never heard the chalk story. And given its predecessor, the flask story, it’s obviously a UL.)
BTW, the eastern USC’s teams are the Gamecocks, or, frequently, just the Cocks. The western USC’s teams are the Trojans. Too bad their teams don’t play each other very often - can you imagine the headlines? “Cocks burst Trojans,” “Trojans contain Cocks,” etc., etc.
Hey, it’s my hobby - I just can’t help myself.
Yes that is the twins that I was talking about…and I have always been female. laughing. I believe in God whether or not the above story is bogus. But who am I to say it is real or not. I do not have a clue why Nasa would have to go in the past but at the same time it does make sense to look in the past. Looking in the past to find a sequence or things that were repeated. Maybe ‘history would not repeat itself’ if we chose to learn from others mistakes.
With all due respect, you are now exactly who should say that the story is not true. When someone repeats it, you can say, “Actually, that’s not true at all. Here’s proof. Please do not spread false stories, because they make Christianity look less truthful.”
You see, here at the Straight Dope, we seek exactly that – the straight dope. Once we find it, we spread it (like Gospel, as it happens).
Now go forth, my young friend, and spread the truth at the same time you spread the Truth.
Livin’ on Tums, vitamin E and Rogaine