catsittingstill

:-) Thanks.

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peteralway.livejournal.com

What a wonderful analogy! Love it!

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:-) Thanks. I'm glad you like it.

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

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mdlbear

I'm occasionally forced to mention that Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation is also "just a theory" and is, in fact, known to be inaccurate in some details. This doesn't keep it from being taught as scientific fact to schoolchildren, nor from being accurate enough for day-to-day calculations.

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admnaismith.livejournal.com

(music in dark minor key) You know, the Nazis used Newtonism during WWII to drop huge bombs on London! Any ethical scientist ought to be running full speed away from those evil Newtonist theories!

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Heh. If you haven't read Flick Filosopher's review of Expelled, you should.

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admnaismith.livejournal.com

OMGROFLMAO!!!!

Those are the best critical movie reviews I've ever seen! Why isn't she syndicated instead of..um...those muggles whose names I've forgotten, not having read their reviews for years?

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Wow, that's a great review!

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:-) As P.Z. Myers has duly noted.

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Quite so. There *are* controversies in evolution; there's just no point in trying to teach them in high school, because the kids don't have the background to understand them yet. So we teach the simple version, to give something to build further understanding on.

Just like when we teach kids about pi in high school math we don't get into how it is calculated.

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admnaismith.livejournal.com

I am becoming increasingly enamored of the theory of "Incompetent Design", in which the flaws and inefficiencies in known biology are produced as evidence that any Supreme Being who created life must have been intoxicated or clueless.

My Christian brother-in-law, however, was able to answer all my arguments with the polytheistic "Design By Committee" theory.

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Incompetent Design:
As Cecil "Straight Dope" Adams pointed out, this is a common problem for projects rushed to completion to beat the weekend deadline.

Design by Committee:
Well, I suppose that would explain all the "Let Us create Man in Our image" business...

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min0taur.livejournal.com

Apparently the labor force didn't even get a full weekend at the end of it.

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I recall some friends of mine making a well-reasoned and persuasive case that the duck billed platypus was cooked up on a Friday afternoon when the boss was out, and then hastily hidden in Australia in hopes nobody would find it in time to work out who was responsible.

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LOL! Well, it would explain a lot...

The reality of evolution is such that, if intelligence (whatever that is) is involved, it cannot be the sort of intelligence that stands off, does its designing, and sees it all realized, perfect and without flaw. If there is intelligence involved, it's the sort of intelligence that experiments and makes mistakes, just like human designers do. And that just doesn't jibe with that image of a perfect god.

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Best. Rebuttal. Of Intelligent Design. Ever.

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Or perhaps it's a sign of economical design thinking. :-)

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celticdragonfly.livejournal.com

What a fantastic analogy. May I quote you?

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Thank you, I would be honored if you would like to quote it. :-)

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min0taur.livejournal.com

Lots of stuff disturbs me about the proponents of "Intelligent Design", but uppermost on the list (right next to their inability to appreciate the intricacies left behind by turbulence) is a tenet they never mention overtly:

If the proper study object of science is a Supersize Intelligent Lifeform that designed and implemented every detail of everything that exists, then our survival depends entirely on finding out what the lifeform wants and whether we can prevent it from squashing us -- and (gosh, what a handy coincidence) we just happen to have all these religious traditions that would gladly do us the service of making sure everything we think, say, do, feel, or make is subordinated, suppressed, limited, censored, and/or forgotten. Just in case there were Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. In the name of free inquiry, of course. Then we'll never have to bother with all those pesky thoughts, questions, and theories ever again. We can just contemplate the final answer to everything, like a possum counting its tail (one, one, one, one...)

Sorry about that. Rant finished. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm much better now.

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:-) They make me want to rant too.

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stevemb.livejournal.com

Excerpted from a few suggestions on how we can ruin American competitiveness and innovation in the course of this century:

"Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many."

"Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism... act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable."

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I'll take "In the dictionary, next to the definition of 'irony'" for $100, Alex.

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I recall telling a Creationist once that he might be able to destroy the teaching of science in American schools, but I pointed out that real scientists would then emigrate to countries that valued scientists while the US would be left to sink into "ignorance, poverty, superstition, and despair."

I still think that's true, though the process might take a couple of decades.

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These people believe that righteous ignorance, poverty, superstition, and despair is preferable to ungodly knowledge, wealth, and happiness. (I can tell you horrifying things about Dominionists and education if you really want to know.)

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wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com

I've never understood why so many people seem to very, VERY, strongly believe that their God would NOT have decided to use a natural mechanism like evolution within His creation.

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Because it's never about reverence for their God. It's about securing their position as God's Special Creation. It's about clinging fiercely to their entitlement to feel special.

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And boy, nothing makes you feel special like realizing that the God who created the universe 10.5 billion years ago (and Earth 4 billion years later) has been waiting all this time for you to come along so he can follow you around like a spaniel, with a spaniel's passionate interest in what you have been doing with your genitals.

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Is that why it's called "dogma"?

Exit, stage left, dodging rotten fruit all the way.

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(snort) It's a good thing I wasn't drinking anything when I read that.

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mindstalk.livejournal.com

correction: 13.7 billion years ago (I still marvel and wonder at that decimal point, I grew up with 10-20 billion years) for the universe, by current estimate.

You're the author of "The Word of God"? I love (memorized) that song. A beautiful Deist hymn, I saw as an atheist.

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? 13.7? I thought it was 10, or 10.5, I forget. Where does the figure come from? I'm not challenging it; I'm just curious.

Yes, I wrote _Word of God_. I'm glad you like it. I'm an atheist too, actually, I was just taking the viewpoint of "supposing there were a god, what could we rationally examine that would be god's work and no one else's?"

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mindstalk.livejournal.com

Google "age of universe" :) You'll see plenty of articles. They're actually down to 13.73 billion +/- 120 million, though I have trouble believing such precision at a gut level. Don't know where 10.5 came from, though Neil Gaiman picked "ten billion years" for use in Sandman; of course it would have been silly to have Lucifer griping about overseeing Hell for 10-20 billion years.

Bonus on the song is that I was a geology student for a while. How many songs have synclines and anticlines in them? Heh.

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Wow, okay, thanks. I don't know where I heard the 10 billion figure, come to think of it. Obviously the Earth has to be in at least the 2nd wave of stars, since we're made of stuff heavier than helium...

I'm glad you like the syn and anticlines. I knew from very early in writing that verse that I wanted that in there :-)

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I think it ties in with feeling like their holy book must be literally true and 100% correct in order to have any value at all.

The problem is that the holy book contradicts itself within the first two pages (the two accounts of Creation cannot both be correct) so this leads to some pretty serious psychological pressures among people of this persuasion that actually *read* their holy book.

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I think what they feel is their identity threatened. They've been taught it depends on the book--that their souls, literally, depend on their literal belief. The sad thing is that most Christian theologians do not regard the account in Genesis as literal truth; that's been so for a very long time--Augustine (4cy) did not read Genesis literally. But the radicals are rejecting the best work of their own thinkers, as well as the best secular work. Jesus himself was critical of the religious authorities of his time and place. A great deal of what authoritarian churches do is more to do with making people dependent on the church, or the church's beliefs, or even the church's symbols, than with any spiritual teaching that I can see.

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I suppose so. I wish there was something we could do to help from the outside, but I don't think there is.

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I think you already have, when you wrote "The Word of God". But this is not a problem that will be resolved in our lifetime; authoritarianism is not going away any time soon.

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tigertoy.livejournal.com

The greatest failing of human beings is that they'd rather have someone tell them the answer than actually reason it out for themselves. Almost none of the fundies who reject evolution actually know what it is that they're rejecting; they've just been taught that it's EVIL and it's much more comforting to just go with that than to really learn what natural selection means and think about it in detail. In fact, I'd bet that only the tiniest minority of those who insist that every word in the Bible is true have actually considered, on their own, what most of those words mean (although some more diligent Bible-studiers may well have sought out someone to explain what it means verse by verse). And we won't even get into the tiny numbers who've actually learned the original languages and studied the original texts; I don't know about the beginning of Genesis, but there are certainly other verses where everything the fundies rant about comes from mistranslation.

The failure of religion is the nexus of many people who don't want to think about what they're told and the few who are eager to abuse the power of unthinking followers.

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I get the impression that a lot of the people who claim it's all literally true haven't actually *read* the darn thing. Or blended fiber clothes would be a lot less popular than they are.

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Christians, very early on, (I think St. Paul had a dream), decided that they were not bound by the laws of Judaism. So modern Christians who rely on what they call the old testament pick and choose; observant Jews insist on following the whole thing, and have many much-different takes on what they call Tanakh. The Bible is an anthology whose interpretation has been revised over the years. So even reading the thing really doesn't help very much; if one is going to use the book as a guide to life, one has to choose an interpretation as well. And then of course there are different translations. But these people don't want uncertainties; they want something to cling to in an uncertain world.

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mindstalk.livejournal.com

The first part wasn't irrational; Judaism doesn't claim to be a religion for the human race, but is a covenant between the Jews and God. Gentiles have a much shorter list of laws (Noachide) to follow, basically standard civilization stuff + monotheism. Gentile Christians not following Jewish laws makes sense... what's cherry picking is when they use OT stuff to justify hostility to gays or abortion.

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