Creationists

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Why should anyone care if you are annoyed? Feel free.

That was never my point.

Are you absolutely positive about that? Your remarks seem to indicate otherwise.

I mean that I wasn't saying, "Hey! Look at me, I'm annoyed." It's 10 to 1 in the morning, but I'll try and clarify:

Benbob seemed to me to be advocating that atheists behave in exactly the same way as the evangelist Christians he hates so much, but promoting atheism instead of Christianity. My point was that this is essentially fighting fire with fire -- at best it doesn't improve the situation and at worst it's actually hypocritical.

Fighting fire with piss may be a worthwhile attempt but the atmosphere becomes very obnoxious. But that's the way these things go.

Okay, forget the metaphor. I don't see how behaving in the same way as the Christians he hates would further his cause. From a logical and practical standpoint it doesn't make sense.

Perfectly correct use of the word 'militant'.
The word is not a synonym for 'violent' ( though terrorism is an extreme form of militancy).
"Militant" means what folks here on PPR use the word "strident" to mean.
It means going beyond just having a belief-- to obsesively promoting that belief, and demonizing and quashing other POV's with missionary zeal. Falwell wasnt violent (as far as I know) be he certainly was militant,and Dawkins comes pretty close to being an atheist equivalent of Falwell.

Yes, this is what I meant.

A well-known teaching technique is to advocate an extreme position when things are currently too far towards the opposite extreme, as a corrective measure to bring things back towards the middle.

The extreme of Biblical literalist evangelical Fundamentalist Christianity is actually a small minority of most Christian denominations worldwide, but it is a very vocal minority, so much so that even members of some denominations that aren't anti-science are misled into thinking that their churches are against the reality of evolution happening or the earth being old.

Since these evangelical fundamentalist Christians are so in-your-face about it, and lobby school boards and politicians so heavily to the detriment of our children, our country, humanity and the planet, it is only right that some people speak actively against them.

The fundies wouldn't be a problem if they kept their beliefs to themselves or to others like them, but instead they try to force their beliefs on everyone, insisting their way is the only correct way for everyone because that is what they sincerely believe. Even then, if all they did was preach to adults I wouldn't have a problem with them. What ticks me off is they try to present their interpretation of Scripture in public school science classrooms as if it has as much scientific evidence supporting it as evolution, when in fact ALL the evidence supports evolution and NONE supports a literal reading of Genesis. Also, NO evidence yet found falsifies evolution, but much evidence has been found that falsifies a literal reading of Genesis.

The contrast, that the reality of the evidence found is so incredibly one-sided in this "controversy", is amazing, but those against evolution have been LIED to about this evidence. IF they would check out some honest sources that actually describe and explain the evidence, maybe, if they aren't too blinded by faith and fear, maybe their eyes can be opened.

The curious thing is, I am as certain as one can be without actually having spent a lifetime in a parallel universe that IF from earliest youth the schools had taught the output of the Institute for Creation Research with fanaticism I would have rejected it; if they had taught it neutrally I would have had the same number of questions and issues I have currently.

As it was - ah, the Peabody in the golden days of my youth - the schools taught contemporary evolution. And I came up with the same number of questions and issues I have currently. If, in a different parallel universe, I had been taught Dawkins fanatically, I would have totally rejected it.

Sure, there are people who do NOT think, I have met a lot of them. But how many of the unthinking are going to make serious contributions to either the Popular Sciences or Philosophy and Theology?

And while we are on the subject of how Straw Men evolve and Paper Tigers devolve, I think it is time I pointed out again:

Despite what unthinkers hear from rabble rousers, Christianity does NOT vanish like a soap bubble if any one portion of it can be shown not to be literally true.

Christians MAY be in danger of being suppressed as insufficiently loyal to the State. We ought to be; the emperors keep wanting us to sacrifice to them. But if Christianity had to flinch every time a false or contradictory doctrine got taught, we would not be around.

AND the other one:

Hands up everybody who believes that teaching Genesis in the schools means all the chips disintegrate and the cars stop working and all the telescopes fog over? Even if my brother is right and Genesis would kill off biology - which is highly dubious though I will not go into it here - precisely how will that stop all science?

Agreed. It is the fundies themselves who insist this is the way it is though, more than the atheists do. They seem to think that if Genesis isn't literally true in every detail, then there was no Fall, no need for the Crucifixion, and the whole Bible is pointless. But if they're going to go the whole inerrant literalist route, they need to be consistent. The Bible also clearly teaches the earth is flat if one insists on taking it literally.




No, planes wouldn't fall from the sky or anything like that. However, if science education is sabotaged by fundies, fewer and fewer people would understand how and why airplanes and other technologies work, fewer still would be able to come up with new technologies. Our wolrd may end up as in the film Idiocracy (a great film btw).

@ crustacean
Somebody needs to take a stand least the creationists infect of schools with their mind viruses. Labeling people that do take a stand or people that are vocal about the issue as militant is.. gah, go back to my original comment, you're part of the problem.

@ philogos
I hope you weren't advocating teaching both and letting the kids decide. They allowed that here and do you know what all the stupid kids did? They skipped school and still passed exams by writing the equivalent of "goddunit".

Um, sure, but for every child who then becomes a scientifically illiterate fry cook, that's one less scientist. I'm sure plenty of mediocre people can "make a serious contribution" to theology - it doesn't take a genius, but what good does that do?

I disagree. A literal reading of Genesis isn't really the problem. It is in what way those "literal" words are interpreted. Genesis 1 leaves so many things open, so many questions that a book of "holy scripture" won't concern itself with. An inflexible reading of Genesis 1 is unnecessary, and THAT is where literalists often fail. I do claim to be a literalist. However, faith in the creation of the world in 6 literal days does not indicate whatsoever that those days were consecutive! There is even a hint that a prior creation existed that might (speculatively) have ended in some kind of catastrophe resulting in a mass extinction, hence leading to the ascension of new species. The days of creation would have followed the order that those things appeared--first, a settling of airborne debris that would have revealed light but obscured the "greater" and "lesser" lights, the appearance of plants, then animals, then the clearing of the skies to reveal the sun and moon, and finally the special creation of man (by no means is this a complete or accurate overview of Genesis 1, but hopefully you get my point). The same evidence that supports evolution would ALSO seem to support this order, and this reading of Genesis would also explain how the earth seems to be VERY old--though geological evidence seems to suggest that life is as old as the earth, which OUGHT to be impossible OR the earth is a lot older than we think it is...

The main point of Genesis is God created everything and everything belongs to God. The Bible is not concerned with the mechanism of HOW this happened, only that they happened at all. Science and Genesis do not contradict each other; neither is a literal reading of Genesis really problematic if one is flexible in understanding any possible connections between scientific discoveries and the creation account.

Evidence, please.

The Flat-Earth Bible

I agree with AngelRho that the main purpose of Genesis is to teach us there is a Creator who has a plan. Some people though deny the fact we are biological cousins to chimpanzees, as if God couldn't have created us that way if He wanted to.