Creationism just got techno on our asses.
Long post, read it if you want. Personally I'm so stunned at the reasoning and sheer all round lunacy displayed below I had to read it twice before it sunk in just how crazy these folk are.
As an avowed agnostic, i.e a great big fence sitter, leaning heavily towards athesim, I often say things like, 'oh now look Za`zoo, let the people believe whatever they want, sure they're not doing any harm. If it comforts them to believe in a big dude with a beard and robes will be there when they die, what of it?'
But then just as I am at peace with the world and all its many foibles The Salon writes up the following and my peace of mind is completely shattered, utterly blunderbussed into oblivion.
Observe.
.May 31, 2007 | PETERSBURG, Ky -- The Creation Museum swung open its stegosaurus-guarded gates to the public Monday, and I have to say it's out of this world. For those of us raised in natural history Meccas like the American Museum in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, or the Field in Chicago, the beautifully designed museum induces an eerie vertigo. All the familiar characters are here: T. rex, giant skeletons of triceratops and apatosaurus, a pterosaur spreading its wings above the crowd, live exhibits of birds, amphibians and reptiles, and the dripping, hooting and chirping soundtrack of the primeval forest. There are also a couple of unfamiliar faces, for a natural history museum, in the tan and finely muscled bodies of Adam and Eve.
At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. "It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom," Ham says. "We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."
The Book of Genesis, that famous first chapter of the Bible, which Ham's group has interpreted to claim that the universe was created in six 24-hour days a mere 6,000 years ago, serves as the blueprint for the museum. Astronomy, geology and evolution, as they are commonly understood in mainstream science, have no place here. As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand, he says, the Book of Genesis is true "from the first word to the last."
With a staff of nearly 300 employees, Answers in Genesis, devoted to "Biblical apologetics," produces a daily radio program fed to 860 stations, operates a Web site instructing visitors how to out-argue Darwinists, and organizes about 300 traveling lectures each year. It's also a well-oiled money-raising machine and opened the $27 million museum without a penny of debt to banks or lenders.The museum is situated in Petersburg, Ky., just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati, an area chosen in large part because it's within a one-day drive for two-thirds of the country or 200 million Americans. Recent polls show that 40 percent of all Americans would feel at home with the views put forth in the Creation Museum. Only about an equal percentage accept the underlying message of the country's mainstream science museums. Only 39 percent answer yes to the question, "Do you believe that human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals?"
The museum's 49 acres of carefully landscaped grounds are encircled by a tall metal fence. Visitors tempted to enter without paying will be discouraged by armed guards in black state-trooper-like uniforms and attack dogs. On Monday, just outside the fence, a group of 50 die-hard atheists and skeptics are gathered in the light rain under a "Rally for Reason" banner. Overhead, a small airplane pulls a sign that says, "Thou Shalt Not Lie." Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, explains that as far as he's concerned, AIG "can teach that things fall up if they want. But we want to make it clear that this nonsense is not accepted by those who do not share its fundamentalist religious views. They are trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages."
Among the damp roadside protesters is Lawrence Krauss, author and physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a member of the advisory board of Defcon: Campaign to Defend the Constitution, the group that paid for the airplane tugging around the Seventh Commandment. Krauss calls the museum "anti-science" and says it reflects an erosion of American science education, posing "a threat to American kids already struggling just to get the basic concept of what science is and how it works."
Inside, the museum is organized according to the "Six C's of History": creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, and the final C, consummation, which isn't given much time or space in the exhibits because there still isn't consensus on just how the apocalypse will come down or who goes to heaven and when. At the Creation exhibit, two young T. rexes peacefully watch fish swim in a placid pond. Two curly-haired robotic kids play nearby. In any other place, this would be the setup for a massacre. But this pre-Noah's-flood Jurassic Park is benign. The animals are vegetarians and plants don't have thorns. The fossil record, says the museum, confirms all of this.
Mark Looy, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, is walking me through the museum. He explains that the great flood is responsible for the fossil record. Plants and animals are distributed in different strata based not on the time of their formation, but on where the flood waters moved them before receding. Those areas where no thorns or other defensive or hostile plants are found, he explains, are pre-flood forms.
Later Ham tells me that his skeptics, who cling to the "millions of years" theory, are wrong about when dinosaurs stalked the Earth. He cites a recent discovery of intact blood vessels in some T. rex tissue, suggesting that the finds are only thousands of years old, not 65 million, as paleontologists say. "They will try to come up with an explanation to keep the fossils old," says Ham, "but we don't need to. The explanation of their age is already right there in the Bible."
For generations, paleontologists have shown that dinosaurs and humans never trod the Earth at the same time, that in fact with the exception of birds (modern-day dinosaurs), they never got within 60 million years of each other on the timeline of natural history. Not so, says Looy. "They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time."
In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren't predators or prey, so the museum's designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.
Buddy Davis, a technician and artist who has also made dinosaurs for use in secular exhibits, tells me he's much happier seeing his dinosaurs at the Creation Museum, promoting faith in the Bible. "I want to see God get credit for his creation," he says. "I look around and see so much beauty -- even if it is marred by sin -- and to think that it all just came from an explosion billions of years ago is just wrong. To me it's obvious the hand of God is behind it. As scripture says, 'They are without excuse' who do not believe."
The Garden of Eden presents a series of scenes down a "trail of life." In the first, a bearded, dark-haired Adam beckons to a mountain lion with one outstretched arm, while the other is wrapped around a little lamb. Smaller animals appear drawn to Adam, who is perhaps naming them, God's first assignment for him. A bit farther along we're introduced to Eve, looking like a great big brown Barbie and staring intently into Adam's eyes. Adam and Eve are naked, and Maggie and Tom Thorne, a pair of Christians visiting from Michigan, are smiling at the scene. They agree it seems a little unfair for God to expect two such well-designed specimens not to get around to sinning pretty quickly. A few yards further we see Adam and Eve again, this time standing in a pool of water, their genitals coyly obscured by lily pads. Now they definitely appear to be grappling with the chemistry that will get them in big trouble.
An oversize cobra-like snake makes an appearance, and before you know it, Eve is holding grape-size, blood-colored fruits in her outstretched hand, offering knowledge of good and evil to a flummoxed-looking Adam. "We're not sure what kind of fruit it was, but we do know it wasn't an apple," says Looy, perhaps to demonstrate the kind of questions the several Ph.D. researchers at the museum are now toiling over in the labs behind the walls of the exhibition space.
In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before, are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice has a practical value -- the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are skinless -- and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. "Well, it wasn't enough," he says. "God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin." When I tell him that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before moving on.
Inside the Garden of Eden, Nancy Senai, who is visiting from Lansing, Mich., tells me, "It feels pretty nice to have something that is for God and about God, instead of all the evolution in other places." I ask her if she thinks the history presented here is true. "God said it clearly, and I believe it the way he said it," she says. "Everything else is uncertain."
The great flood, which washed away all life on earth, is the key to understand the Catastrophe exhibit and the museum's version of natural history. After Adam and Eve's original sin, God told Noah to build an ark. He sent him two of every kind of land animal to repopulate the earth. Visitors to the museum walk among robotic representations of Noah and his building crew as they construct a supposedly full-scale section of the boat. After Noah has invited his sinning neighbors onto the ark and warned them of the coming flood, they mock him or are dissuaded from heeding his advice by the small pressures of daily life. The door slides shut and they are left behind to drown in the 40-day deluge that formed everything we see on Earth today, from Mt. Everest to Death Valley.In Ham's view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon, he informs me, was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed. In the exhibit, you walk through a winding canyonlike corridor with spinning, dizzying lights into a wide-open room with videos, exhibits and diagrams explaining the hydrology of instant canyon-making. Ham says that instant canyon-making is based on the fact that volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens, created reservoirs of water for a time in their altered topography. When those reservoirs breached, deep grooves were cut by the flowing water, leading to the fast formation of canyons.
After the flood, Noah's descendants multiply again on Earth, but not quickly or broadly enough to satisfy God, who then introduces a slew of new languages to drive people apart, resulting in their dispersal around the globe. The ensuing C-for-Confusion theme is represented through a gritty and menacing back alley postered with newspaper headlines about the rise in abortion, drug use, homosexuality and teen suicide.
The entire exhibit, in fact, is awfully grim. A montage slide show of fetuses, starving kids, swastikas, tourniquet-bound arms ready for the needle bombard the wall in a room with a soundtrack of blaring sirens, boots marching in unison, and crying kids. In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world's problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief "is at the root of modern evil."
Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. "I don't care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon," he tells me. "It's not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin's theory has no God. It can't be right. I don't know if this story is truer than Darwin's theory, but I do know it's better."
That last line alone is enough to send shivers down my weary spine. Might not be truer folks, but it's better. Don't let the facts bother you young man, it just all about how you 'feel.' Huzzah!
As an avowed agnostic, i.e a great big fence sitter, leaning heavily towards athesim, I often say things like, 'oh now look Za`zoo, let the people believe whatever they want, sure they're not doing any harm. If it comforts them to believe in a big dude with a beard and robes will be there when they die, what of it?'
But then just as I am at peace with the world and all its many foibles The Salon writes up the following and my peace of mind is completely shattered, utterly blunderbussed into oblivion.
Observe.
.May 31, 2007 | PETERSBURG, Ky -- The Creation Museum swung open its stegosaurus-guarded gates to the public Monday, and I have to say it's out of this world. For those of us raised in natural history Meccas like the American Museum in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, or the Field in Chicago, the beautifully designed museum induces an eerie vertigo. All the familiar characters are here: T. rex, giant skeletons of triceratops and apatosaurus, a pterosaur spreading its wings above the crowd, live exhibits of birds, amphibians and reptiles, and the dripping, hooting and chirping soundtrack of the primeval forest. There are also a couple of unfamiliar faces, for a natural history museum, in the tan and finely muscled bodies of Adam and Eve.
At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. "It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom," Ham says. "We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."
The Book of Genesis, that famous first chapter of the Bible, which Ham's group has interpreted to claim that the universe was created in six 24-hour days a mere 6,000 years ago, serves as the blueprint for the museum. Astronomy, geology and evolution, as they are commonly understood in mainstream science, have no place here. As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand, he says, the Book of Genesis is true "from the first word to the last."
With a staff of nearly 300 employees, Answers in Genesis, devoted to "Biblical apologetics," produces a daily radio program fed to 860 stations, operates a Web site instructing visitors how to out-argue Darwinists, and organizes about 300 traveling lectures each year. It's also a well-oiled money-raising machine and opened the $27 million museum without a penny of debt to banks or lenders.The museum is situated in Petersburg, Ky., just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati, an area chosen in large part because it's within a one-day drive for two-thirds of the country or 200 million Americans. Recent polls show that 40 percent of all Americans would feel at home with the views put forth in the Creation Museum. Only about an equal percentage accept the underlying message of the country's mainstream science museums. Only 39 percent answer yes to the question, "Do you believe that human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals?"
The museum's 49 acres of carefully landscaped grounds are encircled by a tall metal fence. Visitors tempted to enter without paying will be discouraged by armed guards in black state-trooper-like uniforms and attack dogs. On Monday, just outside the fence, a group of 50 die-hard atheists and skeptics are gathered in the light rain under a "Rally for Reason" banner. Overhead, a small airplane pulls a sign that says, "Thou Shalt Not Lie." Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, explains that as far as he's concerned, AIG "can teach that things fall up if they want. But we want to make it clear that this nonsense is not accepted by those who do not share its fundamentalist religious views. They are trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages."
Among the damp roadside protesters is Lawrence Krauss, author and physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and a member of the advisory board of Defcon: Campaign to Defend the Constitution, the group that paid for the airplane tugging around the Seventh Commandment. Krauss calls the museum "anti-science" and says it reflects an erosion of American science education, posing "a threat to American kids already struggling just to get the basic concept of what science is and how it works."
Inside, the museum is organized according to the "Six C's of History": creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, and the final C, consummation, which isn't given much time or space in the exhibits because there still isn't consensus on just how the apocalypse will come down or who goes to heaven and when. At the Creation exhibit, two young T. rexes peacefully watch fish swim in a placid pond. Two curly-haired robotic kids play nearby. In any other place, this would be the setup for a massacre. But this pre-Noah's-flood Jurassic Park is benign. The animals are vegetarians and plants don't have thorns. The fossil record, says the museum, confirms all of this.
Mark Looy, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, is walking me through the museum. He explains that the great flood is responsible for the fossil record. Plants and animals are distributed in different strata based not on the time of their formation, but on where the flood waters moved them before receding. Those areas where no thorns or other defensive or hostile plants are found, he explains, are pre-flood forms.
Later Ham tells me that his skeptics, who cling to the "millions of years" theory, are wrong about when dinosaurs stalked the Earth. He cites a recent discovery of intact blood vessels in some T. rex tissue, suggesting that the finds are only thousands of years old, not 65 million, as paleontologists say. "They will try to come up with an explanation to keep the fossils old," says Ham, "but we don't need to. The explanation of their age is already right there in the Bible."
For generations, paleontologists have shown that dinosaurs and humans never trod the Earth at the same time, that in fact with the exception of birds (modern-day dinosaurs), they never got within 60 million years of each other on the timeline of natural history. Not so, says Looy. "They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time."
In the Garden of Eden in Genesis, says Ham, when everything was still perfect, animals weren't predators or prey, so the museum's designer, Patrick Marsh, is able to crowd grizzly bears, wildcats, zebras, kangaroos, an iguanodon and several other dinosaurs into the same little chunk of primeval Eden. After the fall, such a scene would result in a bloody mess.
Buddy Davis, a technician and artist who has also made dinosaurs for use in secular exhibits, tells me he's much happier seeing his dinosaurs at the Creation Museum, promoting faith in the Bible. "I want to see God get credit for his creation," he says. "I look around and see so much beauty -- even if it is marred by sin -- and to think that it all just came from an explosion billions of years ago is just wrong. To me it's obvious the hand of God is behind it. As scripture says, 'They are without excuse' who do not believe."
The Garden of Eden presents a series of scenes down a "trail of life." In the first, a bearded, dark-haired Adam beckons to a mountain lion with one outstretched arm, while the other is wrapped around a little lamb. Smaller animals appear drawn to Adam, who is perhaps naming them, God's first assignment for him. A bit farther along we're introduced to Eve, looking like a great big brown Barbie and staring intently into Adam's eyes. Adam and Eve are naked, and Maggie and Tom Thorne, a pair of Christians visiting from Michigan, are smiling at the scene. They agree it seems a little unfair for God to expect two such well-designed specimens not to get around to sinning pretty quickly. A few yards further we see Adam and Eve again, this time standing in a pool of water, their genitals coyly obscured by lily pads. Now they definitely appear to be grappling with the chemistry that will get them in big trouble.
An oversize cobra-like snake makes an appearance, and before you know it, Eve is holding grape-size, blood-colored fruits in her outstretched hand, offering knowledge of good and evil to a flummoxed-looking Adam. "We're not sure what kind of fruit it was, but we do know it wasn't an apple," says Looy, perhaps to demonstrate the kind of questions the several Ph.D. researchers at the museum are now toiling over in the labs behind the walls of the exhibition space.
In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before, are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice has a practical value -- the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are skinless -- and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. "Well, it wasn't enough," he says. "God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin." When I tell him that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before moving on.
Inside the Garden of Eden, Nancy Senai, who is visiting from Lansing, Mich., tells me, "It feels pretty nice to have something that is for God and about God, instead of all the evolution in other places." I ask her if she thinks the history presented here is true. "God said it clearly, and I believe it the way he said it," she says. "Everything else is uncertain."
The great flood, which washed away all life on earth, is the key to understand the Catastrophe exhibit and the museum's version of natural history. After Adam and Eve's original sin, God told Noah to build an ark. He sent him two of every kind of land animal to repopulate the earth. Visitors to the museum walk among robotic representations of Noah and his building crew as they construct a supposedly full-scale section of the boat. After Noah has invited his sinning neighbors onto the ark and warned them of the coming flood, they mock him or are dissuaded from heeding his advice by the small pressures of daily life. The door slides shut and they are left behind to drown in the 40-day deluge that formed everything we see on Earth today, from Mt. Everest to Death Valley.In Ham's view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon, he informs me, was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed. In the exhibit, you walk through a winding canyonlike corridor with spinning, dizzying lights into a wide-open room with videos, exhibits and diagrams explaining the hydrology of instant canyon-making. Ham says that instant canyon-making is based on the fact that volcanoes, such as Mount St. Helens, created reservoirs of water for a time in their altered topography. When those reservoirs breached, deep grooves were cut by the flowing water, leading to the fast formation of canyons.
After the flood, Noah's descendants multiply again on Earth, but not quickly or broadly enough to satisfy God, who then introduces a slew of new languages to drive people apart, resulting in their dispersal around the globe. The ensuing C-for-Confusion theme is represented through a gritty and menacing back alley postered with newspaper headlines about the rise in abortion, drug use, homosexuality and teen suicide.
The entire exhibit, in fact, is awfully grim. A montage slide show of fetuses, starving kids, swastikas, tourniquet-bound arms ready for the needle bombard the wall in a room with a soundtrack of blaring sirens, boots marching in unison, and crying kids. In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world's problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief "is at the root of modern evil."
Inside the Confusion exhibit, I strike up a conversation with Tim Shaw, a high school student visiting from Florida. "I don't care how long it took to make the Grand Canyon," he tells me. "It's not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin's theory has no God. It can't be right. I don't know if this story is truer than Darwin's theory, but I do know it's better."
That last line alone is enough to send shivers down my weary spine. Might not be truer folks, but it's better. Don't let the facts bother you young man, it just all about how you 'feel.' Huzzah!
Labels: mumbo jumbo frauds
posted by fatmammycat at 10:09 a.m.
47 Comments:
Linzi was raised in a very religious family, and, though her life doesn't revolve around it like it does the rest of her family, she does have some fundamental beliefs that we've had some big arguments over.
Her family very much take the Bible at its word, and recently her mother bought Erin a kiddie's picture book with a theme of creationism. I was fucking raging that she was being brainwshed at this young age with this bollocks, but because of all the family politics, could not say a word.
Linzi's on the fence about it, I think it's patently ridiculous, and her family think it's true, word for word. It's a recipe for disaster if it ever blows up, which is why I will forever keep my mouth shut about it.
I was asked outright on the weekend about my feelings on God and I had no option but to shrug and go, 'well, to be honest I find the whole premise ridiculous.'
That's not to say I don't understand why people need someting to believe in sometimes. And as I have stated before, when the shit hits the fan, say someone has been in a terrible accident, most of us have a wobble and a little prayer. (I think) But then I figure that's pretty disingenuous too. I"m guilty of it, but I know I"m guilty of it.
But this creation stuff takes the biscuit. Vegetarian T-rex dinosaurs walking about with curly headed children, apples? Talking snakes? Happy go lucky grisley bears playing hopscotch with lambs?
Come the fuck on. There's having faith and then there's having blind faith. This is the latter.
Christian like to pick and choose form the bible too, that's why they give me a pain in my hole. Cherry picking is bogus. They're always banging on about homosexuality and saying nothing about lobster eating or polyester wearing or raking the yard on a Sunday.
On top of that I like to point out there is no mention of homosexuality in the 7 deadly sin or in the commandments, so why does it make up such a huge crux of their wafflings?
Cherry picking.
All in all, I'm heartily fed up of all major religions.
If you take a regular university text as an example, say over a twenty-year period, it'll probably undergo eight or ten revisions. The original from twenty years ago can often bear little resemblence to the modern text.
So how any credence can be given to the Bible, a book that was written by regular men, not Gods, and has doubtless undergone hundreds, if not thousands, of revisions, translations, and the like, over the course of a couple of thousand years, is just completely beyond me.
Quite right, especially true when you consider many of the books openly contradict each other.
The Bible is basically Wikipedia - written by who knows how many people all with their own agenda. At least Wikipedia can be corrected...
I met one of these people while on the piss in Gothenburg a few years ago, she latched on to us as we were speaking English and started going on about the creation in a heavy Scottish accent, she had leaflets and pamphlets and the whole thing was most bizarre. There was no arguing with her either, you either believed in the Creation or you were wrong. I think these people are more scary than the Islamic fundamentalists. Having being brought up a Catholic, I don't believe in that God anyway. I feel sorry for the brainwashed, but then again they are probably happy.
A few days ago I read the percentage of Americans who hold with creationism, and the number of candidates for the Presidency who also fervently believe this stuff, and both figures were so high and barmy that I resolved to forget the specifics. (something like half, though)
This form of Christianity is all about bullying. Didn't we all grow up with devout Christians who were capable of grasping the concept of believing in what they needed to without finding the dinosaurs a threat to their beliefs?
Who would ever have thought these whackos would end up giving credance to Raquel Welch in a stone-age bikini at the same time as the dinosaurs roamed? This is dangerous stuff.
Religion is dangerously divisive. Can't reason with these people because if you reason/question, you are an evil non-believer. Catch 22 par excellence. Unfortunately the more fundamental you are the more you seem to breed. Why can't atheists propagate like Catholics? Maybe it's part of God's divine plan to rid the world of evil atheists... and fill it with lovely catholics... and polygamous mormons. Oooh cant wait to get to Heaven. The craic will be something else.
GAHHHHHHHH!!!!!
I only got to about the third paragraph before I was shivering with rage.
The fantasies people create because they can't get their heads around simple science, the way proteins behave, the sheer magnitude of species diversity (oh yeah, they'd have ALL fit on a boat...uh-huh.) and the fossil record... you know these people will be the undoing of the whole planet.
"No need to worry about global warming, because the Second Coming is nigh..." Someone in Bush's cabinet actually said that. (Or was it Bush Sr.? anyway, it was said...by someone...in power...ugh.)
Oh, I'm on a real tangent now...
I saw that poll, Eolai. It found that 30% of Americans believed that the bible was literally true in every word. It also found that 1 in 5 Americans thought it was a myth made up by men. I take heart in the second part.
It's not even an interesting myth at that. The pagans had much better characters and plot lines.
I wonder if Eve was a size "0"
Every time I come across this unmitigated shite I feel inclined to subscribe to the Big Bong Theory... you know, like, everything just sorta happened... man... at least it keeps god out of it and is non-threatening. Now, please excuse me while I work on my breathing...
I'd been aware of the plan to build that museum and thought it was just a bunch of kooks but reading that 40% of Americans believe it....
WTF's happened America and it's citizens in the last 15 years? Do you remember when most people/countries revered them?
Oh, and not related, but can we kill Fox's Bill O'Reilly?
Bill 'the truth is out there, somewhere' O'reilly (small r) amuses the hell out of me. He's so rabid and right wig he's almost a parady.
IN case any of my 'merican chum think I'm sniggering at all things American, I just want to proclaim loud and clear, I am not.
America is a massive massive place, so you're going to get a pretty broad sweep of beliefs and so forth in place. Some of the very best thinkers I ever met were American, and most surely they wince horribly when they read such stuff as creationism and that woman who keep trying to get Harry Potter banned before it brainwashes all the kids inot witchcraft.
But we just can't get that kind of kooky claptrap here, we're too small an island, all we have is bloody Ian Paisley Junior and Dana.
How crappy is that?
There's an Ian Paisley Junior? Christ With A Cough - he was allowed to breed??
I'm reading Christopher Hitchens's book God Is Not Great: How Religion Ruins Everything. Love him or hate him - I don't agree with him on a lot of political stuff but I respect and like him a lot - this book is shaping up to be the best, most coherent argument against religion I've ever read. I've been interested in this stuff since I was a teenager and have read a lot from both sides of the argument - CS Lewis; Karen Armstrong, Herman Woulk etc. on the one side. But on the other, this Hitchens book is far more compelling and rigourous than some of the latest atheist books spear-headed by Richard Dawkins - who seems less of an atheist apologist and more of an atheist ranter, these days.
Like you. I'm an agnostic who heavily leans towards atheism. At any rate, whereas I might believe in a God who started it all off - I sure as hell don't believe in a personal God who listens to our prayers for our soccer team to win or that the job interview will go well or to "please don't let that Tutsi hack off my limbs." Maybe Hitchens is preaching to the choir then, with me but at the very least it's a beautifully written and reasoned book and I highly, highly recommend it.
Lord preserve me from anything remotely 'Happy Clappy' but based pm nothing bur faith I am a believer and it is as much a part of my make up as that my eyes are green and I have a birth mark on my bum.
Really Sam? I might give it a go, I must say I found Dawkins a bit too 'It's coz yer stupid, nah nah ni nah nah,' for my liking. Perhaps he's just getting a bit bored with repeating himself. I've going to get his 'Selfish Gene' book and give it a go though. But I've always found Hitchens to be a better bet-when he's sober enough for tacklin' the subject. Sam Harris now, he needs to put in more effort.
OH and Twenty has one of Ian PaisleyJnr's latest bon mots up. Charming man, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
Pat, no one here would here would rob you of that. Not without my foot up their rear. LIke I"m always telling the Little Goth Kid-a staunch atheist- everybody has different opinions on stuff, and you just have to accept that.
One of these days she'll listen.
It's great. I'm a big fan of Hitchens. "Love, Poverty and War: Essays" is what first turned me on to him and "Letters To A Young Contrarian" sealed the deal. Almost everything I know about Orwell comes from him - I can really see why Orwell still matters today and I just wonder why more scholars haven't tackled that.
It's a pity when he turns up for an interview plastered because it just allows critics to dismiss him more readily, but I think some of his best bon mots have come when he's off his head. The more drinks he has in him the more articulate are his arguments and the more grounded his reasoning and that's quite a trick to pull off.
His politics are bizzare sometimes but he is always curiously convincing and, although he starts out from a different on what's acceptable and what's not than me, his reasoning is sound and sincere and love him or hate him, which I know many do - and I can see why - he's a valuable voice in the fray, I reckon, and is far less shrill than many pundits.
He's a hard man to defend and often I can't but I admire him a lot, even when all the people in the room are screaming at me about what a nut he is. This has happened more than once with people saying at me "But how could you like him, Sam?" I think he's sincere and thoughtful and frighteningly clever, is all. And he rarely loses his sense of humour even when he's larroping sozzled. But he'll take anyone on.
I'll never convince anybody who doesn't like him though because there's so much cant about him. The best I can do is to direct people to his writing - his Jefferson biography is supposed to be one of the best studies there's been on Jefferson - 'cos he's definitely someone you have to discover for yourself. He's worth the chance though. I really think he is.
I appear to have gone a bit off topic with my Hitchens apologia but he's a complicated man and does have a lot that is fresh and unique and good to say that doesn't get covered as much.
I agree with you on Dawkins - he' an intellectual snob every bit in thrall to his own credo as any religious fundamentalist. He's coming off as not even being that likeable these days.
I loved Hitchen's take on the death of Jerry Falwell. It was freaking awesome and he pulled no punches nor dribbled no platitudes. Much respect.
how do you get so much time to write so much? I nearly shit myself when I saw how much reading there was involved. I don't have the time or attention span to read a blog that long.....help!!!
Since the wine recently (17 mins ago) ran out I am experimenting with vodka nad (sic) tonic (obviously I am a bloke). It doesn't really taste of anything but is hit easy to drink. My teeth might rot soon, but apart fom that I still feel relatively sober. Answer me this: why do bird's drink vodka? (I was going to write much more, but I think I made my point (??!!))....thank fuck it's friday tomorrow.......bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Er, it's easy to drink. Doesn't that rather answer your question?
Anyway, ka-phoeey to vodka, Rum's yer only man. Have a Spiced Morgan and coke, or a Havana 7 with a splash of lime and some ice.
And indeed, finer words were never spoken. Thank Fuck it IS friday tomorrow.
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/creationist-antibiotics-p1.php
Intelligent design my arse. I cant even get a bloody link to work properly.
why the fuck was I called "anonmyomous" earlier??
This comment has been removed by the author.
AAAARRRGGGHHHH! I have got to learn to be quicker on the draw. I've had a half-written up post on this very thing in draft for well over a month now, dammit. That's like the 14th one you've beaten me to! I swear, one of these days I'm just gonna set up my blog to re-direct people over here, and save me the trouble of writing posts.
All that aside, those creationists are wacky fuckers, no? If they don't believe in evolution, how on earth do they account for all the new dog and cat breeds that have popped up just in the last 200 years alone? Or their infection that is suddenly resistant to antibiotics? Sure, it's genetic manipulation by humans, but it's still evolution.
The problem is, they do not have a grasp of basic scientific facts. I've tried to explain to them that God, or the idea of a deity, is only a theory; it can't be proved or disproved. They really don't like that, as these are people who want very clear-cut, black-and-white answers to everything in life.
Like the chap says Fat Sparrow, 'sounds truer.' Aw well then.
In a way you've got to admire the sheer ballsiness of their thinking. They're like scientologists in a way. You can say to them, 'Look, dude, Xenu? I'm not buying it, I think you're nuts.'
And then they counter with.
'You don't know about Xenu, I do, therefore you're wrong.'
Hard to argue with that kind of logic.
FMC, I am reading Dawkins - The God Delusion at the moment and while he does tend to state the obvious and may at times be shouting Hey Stupid cop on at least he is being honest about what he believes and what he cant prove.
The problem with creationists is that they just say its right becasue its right. They never mention that the Bible was written by man not God and as such is error prone and forget the fact that it was written well after the so called creation so even if as they claim the waorl was created how the fuck would we know if what is written is the correct version.
One point you should knwo is that Noah's Grandaughter Cesair was one of the first people to land in Ireland. She landed with 49 other women and three men. Her farther Bith, her husband Fintan and Ladra the pilot. the split up into Three groups, Bith and 17 women,Fintan and 17women including Cesair and Ladra and 16 women. Ladra complained about being given one less women. He is said to be the first man to be buried in Ireland and they say he died of an Excess of Women. Fintan left Cesair soon after arriving and he is said to have become the salmon of Knowledge that Fionn Mac Cumhail ate 500 years later.
Well all od the abouve is as beleivable as creation taking 6 days.
"Hard to argue with that kind of logic."
Exactly. When I was a kid, I went to a religious school where they taught logic and reasoning, and then they were all offended when I tried to point out to them that they were using circular reasoning. Go figure.
Sometimes you have to wonder if God is like the board manager who comes up with great ideas that he likes to share - but just can't be arsed putting his hand in to do anything to help. So everyone else dicks each other over whatever he says in the hope that they will gain the most notice and repect. In the end the great idea is lost - but the advertising department are good at selling these half baked ideals - and idiots lap them up like TV dinners cause it's easier to be given the answers than to think of something yourself.
This is a really good tip especially to those new to the blogosphere.
Brief but very accurate information… Appreciate your sharing this one.
A must read post!
Feel free to visit my web-site african mango extract
Grеat ԁeliѵery. Sound arguments.
Kеeρ uр the great ѕpirit.
My web site : http://www.prweb.com/releases/silkn/sensepilreview/prweb10193901.htm
Very shortly this website will be famous among all blogging visitors,
due to it's good posts
Here is my site :: easy diets for women
An intriguing discussion is worth comment. There's no doubt that that you ought to write more on this subject, it might not be a taboo matter but usually folks don't talk about
these subjects. To the next! Many thanks!!
my site; diet plans to lose weight
I am full of confidence that the majority was concerned with this question.
It means the more the number of followers, the expensive would be the cost of the package.
Go to twitter sorter dot com and type your twitter username in the “twitter name” box, select followers from
the next box and the number of followers you want to sort.
my blog: increase Twitter Followers
Yes! Finally something about bank of the west.
My webpage: bmi chart for women
At the same time, you can compose and send informative
tweets to encourage other users participate in the online conversations.
Many people do not understand the purpose and idea of Twitter till now.
In this brief post I'm heading to be sharing with you anything I know about this topic, as nicely as the greatest areas to get what you're searching for.
Look into my webpage - get Twitter Followers
The only hurdle to accessing this is of course human limitations and the
fact that the brain does not function solely as a learning tool for the
human being. * Team answer sheets - Basically a grid lined A4 type
sheet with answer write in numbered boxes and a line on top for the team name.
8.
Also visit my blog pub quiz Austin
Thesе modeгn dаy fitness deviceѕ aге
woгn around the waiѕt, positioned рrоper arounԁ the аbs
and then employing what is known as elеctronіс muscle stimulation.
Feеl fгеe to visit my wеb blοg http://l2militesdei.com/
Aging: As we grow older, our circulatory system declines
and becomes less effective. Though the validity of many benefits
claimed by men who buy Cali - Plus is not tested, nevertheless they exist.
Intake of best herbal pill can be described as a best alternative to surgical treatment.
My web site: Corrie
Really when someone doesn't be aware of afterward its up to other users that they will help, so here it occurs.
Feel free to surf to my site - ideal waist to hip ratio
Excellent post. Keep writing such kind of info on your blog.
Im really impressed by your site.
Hello there, You've done an incredible job. I'll certainly digg it and individually suggest to my friends.
I am confident they'll be benefited from this website.
My blog post; http://www.fo-24.de/pg/forum/topic/1195148/the-benefits-in-the-prevalance-in-entertainment-in-the-mass-media/
Alice Liddell, one of the tierce daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of natural herbal extracts including ail and nin-sin which makes maleextra good.
Here is my web page ... homepage
I am really impressed together with your writing skills
as neatly as with the structure in your weblog. Is that this a paid subject or did
you modify it yourself? Anyway keep up the excellent high
quality writing, it's rare to see a great weblog like this one nowadays..
Feel free to visit my website visit
The players would begin as members of the SCA, going to Phoenix for the Estrella
War. At the end of the party all of the papers write down who they think was the prohibition agent.
Play games all night long in keeping with the twenties theme such as various card games and crossword puzzles.
Here is my page ... wal mart
Wonderful article! We are linking to this particularly
great post on our website. Keep up the good writing.
Check out my blog post ... diets that work fast
Excellent blog here! Also your web site loads up fast! What
web host are you using? Can I get your affiliate link to your host?
I wish my web site loaded up as fast as yours lol
My page Email Console
Post a Comment
<< Home