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It would be my pleasure.

Depends on what you mean by feelings.

My personal belief is that you CAN program a machine to act as if it possesses feelings, but emotions and emotional health are generally not well enough understood to be accurately represented. This may change in the future, but I doubt that it will be possible, at least with traditional programming to give machines emotions.

Personally I am more interested in how long it will take to get robots that can move in a way that mimics human movement without the jerks and stops that betray the fact it is a machine.

This one has been done to death by people who understand the answer better than I do. Basically, DtorR is correct.

He was probably talking about the particles that were measured travelling faster than the speed of light. There are all sorts of ideas about time and how it interacts with space, and I don't know nearly enough to actually talk about it with any accuracy. The basic idea behind the experiment and sort of what your friend is referring to, is that you can not, at least according to Einstein's theories of relativity, accelerate something that has mass past the speed of light. (Possibly not even to the speed of light, though I am not sure on that point) The trick is a particle can go faster than the speed of light provided that it is created already travelling at the speed.

Mostly it is an issue of enforceability. There is not much point having a law, and it might even be a law in this case, if it can not be enforced. Do you really want to be the cop checking who goes into a disabled toilet?

I am curious on how you define anti-religious. I think I understand what you are getting at though. I think the big thing to remember that people without religion are still in the minority, even in Western society. This has never been a huge issue as far as religion versus science until the last couple of decades even, and even that debate is ridiculous. Science and religion can coexist, but that is another kettle of fish. The big issue, which is where it being against the law to be anti-religious is when one religion oppresses another.

One quick question, minimat; Is Atheism a religion?

It is a combination of instinct and behaviour learning. Young animals learn how to behave from their parents or pack. They watch what the older animals do and try to mimic the behaviour. Much of the pack hunting behaviour is more instinct and filling gaps than it is communication and thought. This is similar to human infants which will mimic their parents and siblings until they have developed enough mental and physical capacity to talk and reason to a limited extent. As far as I am aware animals do not get to the reasoning stage, which is what separates humans from all other animals.