But, frankly, if I had guidance to offer on how to raise money for research, I wouldn't. You're seeking to do harm, whether you know it or not. Any belief system that requires lies to defend it, is a belief system that does not deserve to be heard, and ID is built entirely on lies and misdirection. If you aren't aware of the distortions of truth behind ID, then you're certainly not equipped to call yourself a "scientist" in the field.

To everyone else: there is absolutely no need to entertain Intelligent Design trolls.

To the poster, you're not going to find any funders here, but there are probably some groups elsewhere interested in funding people to put together a case for ID. Your best bet is probably working through an evangelical school like Liberty University.

Yeah, those nasty mean judges.

(ObFrTed: Down with this sort of thing.)

Regardless of my interests, isn't this something you'd want? Why go through all the effort of a start up if there's a quicker way to get independence?

--- If there is one thing I think should be censored here it is the intelligent design debate. The entire movement is one big troll that feeds off of its own debate. Let's start marking it dead on arrival.

I think mentioning controversial subjects should be alright, like if someone wanted to know what I would pursue if given the means, but debates about them should be done offline.

If it's my money, why isn't what you're proposing to spend it on relevant?

It's not about you.

If you believe in God, then doesn't 'figuring out what God is up to' simply mean 'science.' In that case, what does it mean for science to to be 'ID based' ? That your research pursuits are guided by the bible? If so, why don't you just go work in a lab somewhere?

Come to think of it, those ideas might themselves be directly related.

I am not an ABSOLUTE apologist for capitalism, but I will say that the vast majority of useful tasks have some money in them. Sure, in some places, it's hard to capture the value that you create, but in most areas of inquiry, you can capture the value you create.

Thus, 99% of the time, your expected pay out accurately reflects your expected contribution to society (yes, I am simplifying somewhat).

The wonderful thing about a free market is that it channels people's talents and labor into those areas that are ACTUALLY useful to other people.

I am not convinced that you noodling around, thinking about ID, is of much use at all to society (this is entirely orthogonal to my thoughts on ID - I am commenting specifically on your desire to noodle around). Your other wide-ranging interests also, without more detail, do not immediately sound like they are of much use to anyone.

Now, there may be ways to convert your desire to noodle around into something that is of worth to other people (which means that other people would be interested in paying you for it).

A lot of people look at business plans as an arcane exercise, especially because the plan itself is often deviated from quite quickly. In fact, business plans are tremendously useful as a self-discipling tool: they force you to confront not just what you want to do, but what value people might find in what you want to do, and they force you to tweak your plan until you deliver a noticeably amount of value to others.

Your problem here is that you are concentrating JUST on what you want to do. You have to spend some time thinking about how this creates value for others. Until you have done that, I do not believe that you would do anything useful with the money, if it were to be handed to you.

Funding an intellectual to stare at his navel for 5 years is of not use to anyone (and is barely of any use to the intellectual, who - if he is honest with himself - will look back on the 5 years as wasted, and without result).

Funding an intellectual to work on something that sounds useful, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense.

Bottom line: stop focusing on yourself, and focus on the value that you're going to create. Once you do that, you'll have a real plan that might be deserving of someone else's hard earned dollars (after all,if you don't want to work for The Man to earn the benjamins, why should someone else who has ALREADY worked for The Man give you his dough, which is to say, the crystalized value of his hours?)

Perhaps the debate about ID, abortion, pigs swimming with sheep, etc should be taken somewhere else. That makes sense to me. It's not relevant to the purpose as I understand it of the board and we're never all going to agree. But the business ideas that spring from controversial ideas should absolutely be part of a startup board, in my opinion.

So aside from the joke I made, in all seriousness, the question is: what kinds of business opportunities are there that relate to your interests? It would seem to me that the more controversial your interests, the tighter the market niche you are going to find. Perhaps bear polishers are a tight-knit group and have been looking for a social portal website. Perhaps cigarette smokers who like the Three Stooges are underrepresented in the market.

Let's face it: a lot of web applications have a big marketing/popularity aspect to them. Anybody who feels passionately about any topic should ask themselves how many other people feel the same way, and is there some service that could be offered to them that would help them out. That's what it's all about, right? So yes, I'd be very interested in talking about some issue I might have problems with in terms of what the business opportunities were.

Now there's a moral component: you don't want to support cigarette smokers, you don't want to help IDers, etc. I can respect that. Personally, I think it's awful to devise something to help out Islamic Fundamentalists. I could not do or support anything like that because I feel it hurts other people directly (as in kaboom, not as in it makes their mind mush). So on those topics, perhaps it is best to self-censor in order to allow the business conversation to continue, at least as much as possible. And yes, the post was a troll, but it brought up an interesting point,

(That is, if it really was "Rant rant rant!! Rant." when it was downmodded).

As enjoyable as getting money for just existing would be, imagine how much more fun it would be to get money for doing something that you love and that made a difference to other people.