Proud to be a Pennsylvanian

[Boxlicker101]

70 million Evangelical Christian is not a sect.

That's 24 percent of the population.

God, I fucking hope NBC is wrong about their numbers... that's a lot of chances for someone to get in my face about being Catholic.

I knew eventually other people's stupidity would get me in the electric chair.

*sigh*

Sincerely,
ElSol

I absolutely can't believe there are anywhere near 70 million fundies in the US. Protestant denominations that are classified as being evangelical might claim that many members but many of them are lukewarm at best about the chrch preaching. I am one such. I go to churgh and hear the preacher railing against homosexuals and abortions and then go and vote against any ballot measures that would place any restrictions on them. I don't know, but I suspect there are tens of millions like me.

 

[cloudy]

shrug back atcha.

Religions have indeed affected many people, largely by killing them wholesale. They didn't let Galileo up until 1992. A lot of people who dared to begin thinking for themselves were tortured to death. Without these 'effects' we could easily have had the internet by 1600.

Yep.

The Maya were highly civilized, and extremely advance, yet only 4 of their codices survive today. Why? A priest sent to "civilize" the savages.

It makes me sick.

Bullet: you reminded me of that old joke about the guy that goes to heaven, and St. Peter is showing him around. They look into a room, and St. Peter tells him that's the Catholics, and so on, and so forth. They finally come to a room, and St. Peter opens the door while putting his finger over his lips to silence the man. They peek in, then St. Peter shuts the door.

The man says, "Who were they?"

St. Peter answers, "Those are the Baptists." He laughs. "They think they're the only ones here."

 

[cloudy]

I absolutely can't believe there are anywhere near 70 million fundies in the US. Protestant denominations that are classified as being evangelical might claim that many members but many of them are lukewarm at best about the chrch preaching. I am one such. I go to churgh and hear the preacher railing against homosexuals and abortions and then go and vote against any ballot measures that would place any restrictions on them. I don't know, but I suspect there are tens of millions like me.

I applaud you, Box, for voting as you do, with one caveat:

How can you, we, us expect change in our institutions if we sit quietly, and just accept what is thrown at us, as you're doing when you go to church?

edited to add: I bet you give when the collection plate comes around. By default, when you do that, you're supporting the anti-gay, etc., agenda. Do you realize that?

 

[thebullet]

Protestant denominations that are classified as being evangelical might claim that many members but many of them are lukewarm at best about the chrch preaching.

An example is Jimmy Carter and his Congregation in Plains, GA. When the Southern Baptist Convention totally changed the nature of the religion it represented, the local congregation just ignored the main church's rules. Carter himself resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention.

This is not to say that the congregation doesn't consider itself to be evangelistic. But neither does it consider its interpretation of the Bible to be the only interpretation.

 

[thebullet]

St. Peter answers, "Those are the Baptists." He laughs. "They think they're the only ones here."

Thanks, Cloudy. I needed that.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I give up. I've said at least a dozen times that I'm agnostic, and that I'm not promoting God or religion. All I've been saying is that I concede that it's possible that a force greater than us may have had a hand in how things developed here.

I'll come down on your side, WK. I think there's a lot more to evolution that we don't know yet, and I expect there'll be some big, big shockers down the line. I seriously dodubt that any of them will involve the hand of God, but I'd be the first to say that there's a lot we don't know.

I'm also open to the possibility that UFO's are real, or astrology, or mental telepathy, or ghosts, and if you want to discuss those things in science class, how we might detect these things or do experiments to prove or disprove them, that's fine with me.

But if you're going to come into a science class and state that astrology is on a par with astronomy, or that aliwen abduction is a scientific fact, or that you can talk to ghosts, them I'm going to demand that you either prove it scientifically or get out. Because unless you can prove it, it's not science. And I'll tell you something, the evidence for UFO's and astrology is a lot more convincing than the evidence for ID.

The ID people are not just a bunch of misunderstood free-thinkers asking that we keep an open mind. That's the way they present themselves, but the truth is that they're liars and fabricators. They misrepresent, distort, and intentionally confuse and mislead. They attack the very integrity of science for the sake of their religious agenda. This is not an honest disagreement. It's an outright war on raionality in the name of religious\ fundamentalism.

And then where does it stop? Do we also teach that the laws of astronomy can be suspended because the bible says Joshua stopped the sun in the sky? Why not? Planetray motion is only a "theory." Do we start teaching that a human's normal lifespan is 972 years like Methuselah's? Why not? It's possible. You let one piece of junk in, you'd might as well let it all in.

Incidently, the thing about science dealing only in testable facts is really a simplification. There are some branches of science in which experimentation is pretty much impossible, like astronomy and geology. But here we demand that theory conform to observation, and that any theory must still have testable consequences or ramifications. If you theorize that Scotland was once attached to Nova Scotia, then the rocks in the two places better match up pretty closely. That theory has testable consequences.

Theories can never be "proven." They can only be disproven. (I can never prove that there are no unicorns because there might always be one hiding somewhere I don't know about. But all it takes is one unicorn to disprove my theory that they're only imaginary beasts.) When a theory stands up to all challenges for a hundred years or so and has ramifications and makes predictions that also turn out to be true, it's pretty much taken as fact. Evolution's done just this, standing up to everything the doubters could throw at it for 150 years. It just gets truer every day.

This latest challenge takes the form of: "Since there are some things we don't understand, they can only be due to the workings of a Higher Intelligence." That seems like a pretty crummy argument to me, and yet these jerks are getting away with it, and doing inestiimable damage to science and education in the process.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Creationism is the belief that the earth is only a few thousand years old and that all life sprang de novo from the hand of God. Intelligent design accepts that the earth is millions of years old, but attempts to show that it is mathematically improbable that mere chance can explain the emergence of new species, or the formation of complex biological processes at the molecular level. In that sense, it is falsifiable: orthodox Darwinians simply have to show that all of the staggeringly complex biochemical reactions within higher organisms could be the result of chance.

This is another bullshit ID argument. There are something like 12 amino acids necessary to life. Take a small protein made up of a thousand amino acids. What are the odds of hitting on that combination by random selection? 1000 to the twelfth power, a big fucking number. They ask how that could have possibly happened by random.

But they intentionally look at it backwards. The alley behind my house must contain a million stones. What are the odds of those stones ending up in the exact configuration they're in right now? An even bigger fucking number, and yet there they are. Does that mean that God arranged the stones in my alley? It must. They never could have beaten odds like that on their own.

No. Their logic holds only if you assume that there's only one way to make a protein that works, and that's not true, and if you assume that each protein arose on its own by random joining of amino acids, something we also know is not true.

They know they're distorting, and yet they do it anyway, and you know why? Because their attitude is: fuck you, you dummy! What do you know anyhow? Not enough to challenge their bullshit arguments, that's what they're counting on. They want their God in the classroom and they don't care what kind of lies they have to tell to get him there.

Edited to add: And incidently, it is not the Establishment's duty to disprove every crackpot idea that comes along. It's the crackpot idea's duty to prove to the Establishment that it should be taken seriously.

Science doesn't have to disprove my theory that atoms are actually angels, or that the world disappears whenever I close my eyes. I have to prove to science that there's something to my theories.

So we're under no obligation to prove ID false. They have to prove that they should be taken seriously, and so far they haven't even come close.