I don’t care if this guy is a genius. You can be a genius and read the wrong books– and be WRONG.
Creationism is silliness.
Why?
Because all creationists are either liars or ignorant fools.
Every argument they make can be reduced to lies or simply not knowing the facts.
Do you think I should be nice to these people?
Especially when they take a condescending line against me?
I don’t believe in magic.
I don’t believe in Bronze Age myths or Medieval superstition.
Creationists don’t deserve our respect.
They deserve our scorn and ridicule.
They are thinking like little children.
Not adults.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/01/21/creationism-chases-people-out-of-church/
It is, but they always counterclaim that christianity is dying in northern Europe because the churches accept reality.
No. It’s more like the churches over there are bloody boring to attend. They are the state churches over there, too.
Christianity is not the same as The Church. If people don’t go to musty buildings and listen to some guy drone on for an hour anymore, that’s not ‘Christianity dying’. That’s organized religion dying. Now, I’m all for that. I see it as a positive development. =P
Most people like absolute (i.e., simple) answers to complex questions–black OR white, good OR evil, yes OR no, male OR female. Religion and by extension, Creationism supplies simple answers. Evolution is complicated, Boolean (i.e., OR, but also AND, as well as IF THEN ELSE, and probably some arguments we haven’t even thought of or recognized as yet) and very elegant. Boolean processes create problems for religious authorities because by their very nature such processes can’t be absolute.
Religionists look for beauty & fulfillment in an idealistic and nebulous hereafter, evolutionists see the beauty and find fulfillment in what is already before and around them. Religionists quest for miracles in the midst of the real miracle of life.
Evolution is an observable, systematic, repeatable and ongoing process–a fact! Only the details of its mechanisms remain to be fully defined. Whether by happenstance or Divine Will, it is a primary driving force in all living systems. It is the engine of adaptation and speciation–life’s (or, if you choose, God’s) answer to the inherent entropy that defines reality.
LOL. On a political form I visit, the creationists without exception, are conservative and even hate liberals. I have on record over there, a really long thread on evolution where the creationists not only hate “Darwinism”, they are racist and believe white people never came from Africans.
My other thread that the creationists hate is my claim that Jesus is a myth, much like King Arthur and Robin Hood- a charismatic, fictional, strictly literary, leader who is surrounded by a band of Merry Men, all their adventures and their deaths. All three myths arose out of resistance movements that eventually failed and all are a collection of stories of the major and minor heroes of the movements whose actions and sayings teach the audience about the movement.
In fact, the insults I get from some dog people on my blog is laughable compared to the banging I have taken over on that forum. Sometimes my only refuge is critical thinking and pointing out logical fallacies, which annoys the heck out of them.
I disagree on one point Kate, I believe that Jesus, like most Folk Heroes, was a real person–history seems to bear this out. I even believe that he was a wise and basically good person.
What has been written about him, on the other hand, is most definitely open to debate. Most religious accounts about him are suspect if for no other reason than that they have been “interpreted’ by some extremely misogynistic, agenda-driven people before making it into print. These same people picked and chose not only what slants, but what passages and versions of the Gospel (ex: the Apocrypha) to include in “their” Bible.
I have a lot more trust in the historical accounts, though even there I use a generous grain of salt. History is, after all, written by people, and is thus open to error and interpretation. That old saw about history being ‘written by the victors’ is all too true.
As for many self-proclaimed Christians being conservative & hating Liberals (nowadays that appellation includes those once considered political Centrists) & Darwinists: Its not that they’re particularly hateful people (though it is ironic considering what Jesus taught), but rather that we threaten their comfortable view of reality. Religious belief is to them, like a warm fire on a cold night–it keeps the wolves of mortality at bay. Any challenge to this belief is tantamount to throwing water on that fire. It leaves them out in the cold and dark, at the mercy of those wolves. Parallels to this kind of thinking can be seen in those people who would deny the threats of global warming and overpopulation–uncomfortable; or those who are willing to give up their civil liberties for promises of increased security (aka comfort).
Arguing with them is fruitless, as they’re clinging to what they prefer to believe–their comfort zone–vice what can be empirically proven to be true. Engaging in name-calling with them, though it may be cathartic, is counter-productive. The best we can hope for is to convince them that a “live and let live” policy is best for all parties.
On the whole, H. sapiens isn’t really all that sapient. It’s really just another species of ape responding to poorly understood instinctual drives while rationalizing to itself that its decisions are the result of thoughtful consideration.
Oh they are bad.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this footage:
Oh, I don’t think bad is the right word. I’m not sure I can come up with a word or words to describe how I feel about the concepts and statements presented in this video, so I’ll just have to go with silly. Having grown up in the Bible-belt and been raised in an Evangelical family, I’ve been there/done that, and early-on realized it wasn’t for me. I don’t think I’m any smarter than my kin but I do think I’m a bit more introspective, and lot more analytical. I’ve read that some believe there is such a thing as a religious gene. If so, it skipped me, something for which I’ve always been grateful.
Again, we can talk till we’re blue in the face, but no logic, evidence, nor observable processes/repeatable experiments, will make a whit of difference. They will believe what they choose to believe because that’s what makes them comfortable. To think that we “unique” human beings might have sprung from a lesser being is abhorrent to the anthropocentric viewpoint espoused by most, if not all religions. I can only imagine how they’d rationalize things if we ever encountered a sapient, extraterrestrial entity, much less recognized another terrestrial species as being sapient.
Over the past 6+ decades, I’ve watched people move the goal posts for what defines human beings as “unique” from all other creatures way too many times. We as a species, seem to be driven to stand apart from and above nature rather than admit to being a part of it. Rather than work with nature, we make war on it–an attitude many Evangelicals will justify with the argument that it will hasten the “Rapture.” All we can really demand is that they don’t try to force us to espouse they’re medieval credos. Of course there is a real danger here in the US that they might actually gain the political tools to do just that, in which case I hope Canada will be very understanding.
The word describing how I felt while viewing this video recently came to me–disappointed.
I had truly expected that the upcoming generation would be less gullible than the past several seem to have been. But human nature prevails it would seem. As a species, we’re really too dumb to survive the results of our own excesses.
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