You said: "Hello, Stalin.com! Why do you hate your own country so?"

Jeepers, I think that's a loaded question Zoltan

You said: "Barry and Billy A weren't close because they each say they were not close. Is that really enough evidence for you? Do you suspend all critical thought when these luminaries of the left speak?"

No, but in the absence of any other evidence linking the two, there is no reason to believe otherwise (despite paranoid, conspiritorial fulminations from the right wing noise machine).

You said: "He (McCain) could have really hammered Obama on his 20 year association with Trinity United Church and it's demagogue pastor, but he did not. Had he, he might have won, but he did not want a victory which might have been tainted by cries of racism.

Were you watching the same election that I was? McCain's campaign did attack Obama's pastor--even thought McCain had accepted support and endorsements from the likes of the pastor John Hagee and several other hate spewing fundie bastards.

You said: "You guys do not recognize honor because you have no honor of your own."

What can I say; we all bow our heads in collective shame in the face of your superior morality!

"Newton is reported to have said, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants.""

From what I understand, Newton reportedly said that as a thinly veiled insult to Alexander Pope, an intellectual rival who was well under five feet tall. If it's true it makes the quote much better.

"Focus on the Family is on the wrong side of history."

Focus on the family is on the wrong side of everthing; including what they choose to focus on as far as the family goes.

Jackie O—and her skinny, flat ass—wasn’t the first woman in the White House! If you take a closer look at the pictures of past first ladies I think you will find that the seats in the White House have felt the weight of many abundant derrieres over the years. Some of the prior posteriors of first ladies make Michelle Obama’s look like something out of a weight watchers ad in comparison.

Steward Kauffman has a problem with reductionism and feels uncomfortable with the messy, unpredictable and seemly meaningless nature of the universe. To deal with this Kauffman wants to reinvent the sacred—-a kind o lower case ‘god’ that can well, um… address the awe and the um… reverence and… blah, blah, blah. At one point when Paulson asks him to explain his work on ‘self organization’ and he responds with; “It's harder than you think. I wrote a whole book, "The Origins of Order," and I very carefully never defined self-organization.” Good for you Stewart, you wrote a whole book on a subject without defining what it is. No wonder you have a problem with reductionism; it requires you to get to the point.

I’ve been critical of this ‘Conversations about Science and Faith’ series for the simple reason that I think that science and faith are mutually exclusive terms. But with that said I also like to give some credit where credit is due. In the last nine questions of this interview (actually seven questions and two statements), Paulson does make a noble attempt to get Kauffman to explain himself. He fails. Kauffman prefers to dance around Paulson’s questions by spouting the kind of vague, mystical claptrap that parades as scientific discourse in pseudo scientific coffee klatches.

It’s always sad to see great minds waste so much time on ethereal hogwash.

“…I think Richard (Dawkins) is wrong….I think that there's something else. I think the creativity in nature is so stunning and so overwhelming that it's God enough for me…”

How exactly is Dawkins wrong? Since when did he say that nature was not ‘stunning’? I’ve read many of Dawkins’ books and have watched him lecture and I would say that from his writings and lectures he finds nature pretty stunning. Do you really think that scientists have to abandon reductionism to see “awe and wonder” in nature?

“Richard's view, and those of the new atheists, is simply not going to reach out and persuade those who hold to the standard Abrahamic religious views to consider something else. Whereas I hope what I'm saying may help create a new kind of sacred space.”

First of all, what are you, a scientist or a counselor? It’s not the job of the scientist to try to “bridge the gap” between science and superstition with some kind of middle of the road touchy feely claptrap.

Secondly, the tag of ‘new atheist’ is a misnomer. There isn’t anything ‘new’ about it. Atheist comes from ‘a’ (without) and ‘theist’ (deity). Putting ‘new’ in front of it implies that something has somehow changed. Atheists today are exactly the same as atheists from a thousand years ago or atheists a hundred years ago. Some things really do never change!

"We don't need a new word for "god" - art and science will fill the gaps when we let go of religion. Don't worry about finding "meaning" - we do it by making it ourselves with or without religious metaphor."

Right on!

Georgie boy hasn’t given a hoot about public opinion before so I doubt that he’s going to start worrying about it now. Just take a look at the 11th hour move against endangered species that he and Dickie are shoving through. It’s a piece of legislation that goes completely against both public opinion and the administration’s own science advisors—but they don’t care. The neocon pathology doesn’t take public or expert opinion into consideration when making decisions for the simple reason that to them, democracy, reason and science are completely subordinate to their dogmatic political philosophy. Even sicker, these nabobs think that history will vindicate them.