Atheists "are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public," according to a study by Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota.It's obvious that the American public wouldn't trust an atheist to be the best candidate for the Presidency of the United States. What picture does this paint for all of us? Atheists are distrusted. That's a no-brainer. What makes somebody, who believes in the Christian god, more trust-worthy? It's this; believers think that atheists are off their "moral rocker". As if atheists are incapable of discerning right from wrong. But if you claim to have Jesus in your life then I guess you're pretty much a shoe-in.
In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6—only 2 percent answered "don't know"—and only 37 percent said they'd be willing to vote for an atheist for president. (That's down from 49 percent in a 1999 Gallup poll—which also found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual than an atheist.)
Never mind all that. Let's get back to the study and the poll. As most Christians believe that atheists are wrong. What does this say about Christians? To me it says, "I am better than you."; "Follow me and you will find the way to Jesus and live a true and better upright life than you live now."; "What you atheists believe is immoral and not conducive to the betterment of humankind."; etc, etc...
I really don't understand how it's immoral. How, by my very existence, can I not contribute anything of merit to humanity. That's bullshit. I do plenty outside of this blog. I get great satisfaction from employing my abilities to help those that can't help themselves. Not because I'm doing "gods work", but because of my own actions and deeds. My choice to do so carries with it a knowing that I live my life "in the right"; without accepting that a god had anything to do with it.
This is the conundrum. Accepting that a god influences our actions and influences our daily affairs. That's not free will. That's not free thought. Christians (and many other faithfuls) just can't come to grips with this. They live their lives believing that god has had a plan for them and has orchestrated their existence since the beginning of time. Having a religious faith is NOT free will. It's NOT free thinking. They are brought up to believe in one particular ideology and in most cases without question. Me, I've been brought up to believe nothing of the sort.
What's "wrong"? What's wrong is believing that other people are wrong, if whatever ideology you have been indoctrinated under disagrees with the "other" viewpoint. That's wrong. I know this will get turned around on me, such is the circular logic.
But hear this: the goal of religion is to use the tool of indoctrination to stamp out dissidence, to make everyone of "one mind", to make everybody conform to the status quo. What better way to manipulate the masses? If we all fall lock-step with these power plays then the majority rules and the minority gets trampled and silenced.
I AM IN THE MINORITY! Gladly. I AM different, I AM individual. I'm not so sure that the sheep really understand this. Because they are willing to follow [insert ideology] without being given the chance to believe it otherwise. Granted, I would hazard a guess that there are those who have been offered the chance to believe otherwise, yet give up the chance to think about it for themselves.
Does this thinking make me wrong? No, most Christians might say no, but of course it "does" and they are lying to themselves. They think they are being open-minded when in reality they can't stand and often despise and hate atheists. The study and polling data spells it out clearly. It is a litmus test.
If you don't believe in god you are shit and unworthy to participate in society.
On a side note. I've stumbled upon another blog saying that "the atheist movement" should not be compartmentalized to so-called "rational" discourse, because in essence we all (atheists) express our opinions in different ways.
I, for one, am happy to hear that there is no litmus test to have a "rational" discourse. I communicate how I see fit. I express myself how I see fit.
Guess what? If I feel somebody needs to shut the fuck up; or shove "it" up their fucking ass. I'll have no qualms of saying so. Not that I ever did. LOL.
Call me uncouth. Call me barbaric. Call me "wrong". Call me Larro.
I'm evil according to the sheep! Never those mind those dumb fucks have done more damage in the name of god. I said it before I'll say it again...Stupid fucks!
ReplyDeleteStop whining about it. Why would a Christian vote for an atheist anything? Pyramid head, wrong again, I have said time and again, and shown at least a few times, atheists have done more damage.
ReplyDeletebut if you really want to know why, it's because the bible says atheists are willingly ignorant, among other things. I'd vote for a homosexual Muslim before I vote for an atheist.
ReplyDeleteWell.....I am glad to hear that Shaun is not prejudiced against gays and muslims. That means he would trust a muslim to be president and have a muslim have call to prayer in schools in the direction of mecca? Not saying that would be up to a president to decide but who knows? And if it were a gay person, most likely they would push for gay marriages and be able to adopt children. Let's say it was an atheist, what's the worst thing they could do? Take god out of the pledge or off from money? If a christian doesn't believe in mohammed how would they deal with a muslim as president?
ReplyDeleteShaun, I am disappointed in you, and I'm not even christian! There probably already has been plenty of atheists as president, just too scared to let it be known.....
What scares christians so much about a person being atheist?
ReplyDeleteThat they are ignorant. Willingly so, most of the time.
ReplyDeleteWhy would you be against gay marriage anyway Tina? And Christians would deal with a Muslim president the same way Muslims and Hindus and everyone have dealt with A Christian president. What's the worst an Atheist leader could do? Look back in history.
ReplyDeleteAnd you have the right to be disappointed in me, I said I'd never vote for you.
Atheists keep complaining people try to shove religion down their throats. I don't see many atheists converting to any religion, the real crime is being committed by atheists, shoving the theory of evolution down children's throats in schools and universities, then later on using it to convert them to atheists. See the theory of evolution is the tool of Satan, and it's in all the school books. that's the real sin right there, I believed in evolution and the big bang and all the rubbish till few months ago too, now I see it's rubbish. Thank God I realized it before someone used it to destroy my faith.
ReplyDeleteFor those who justify their atheistic ways with evolution, Satan has had his way with you.
To be generous & give Christianity the benefit of doubt, we could say it is just a stepping stone to a higher consciousness. Unfortunately, Christian philosophy & it's theology doesn't leave any room for higher consciousness. The highest it can go is it's God...A primitive God of magic & myth.
ReplyDeleteThey claim to have Gods perspective, but look at the God they've constructed with their primitive scriptures. Their God can't even accept the truth of modern science. Their god has Noah putting all the animals of the world in a wooden boat, Their God has Jonah swallowed by a big fish & puked up again. If that it what the masses want to believe, then I'm happy to be in the minority with you.
1. Has senility set in Shaun?
ReplyDelete2. And according to the Christian doctrine we would know that the earth is flat and at the center of the universe.
Christianity has time and time again suppressed knowledge that would contradict "the word of god". As far as evolution being the tool of Satan; fact is a scary thing, but you choose to live in a fantasy world. And the other thing is I want a list of the supposed and alleged crimes atheists have committed. How can a minority commit more crimes than a majority? Last but least, from now on I'm just going to rip on you.
You pompous ass!
Shaun said>Why would you be against gay marriage anyway Tina? And Christians would deal with a Muslim president the same way Muslims and Hindus and everyone have dealt with A Christian president.
ReplyDeleteI never said I was against gay marriage, aren't you? Isn't it in the bible that homosexuality is wrong? That's what I meant. I am all for gay marriage, abortion, free speech...etc.
Also I highly doubt that this "christian" (sarcasm) nation would want to pray five times a day and have readings of the Koran in schools, or the muslim prayers at football games...etc.
Atheists scare you because we are ignorant...is that what you just said? Oh boy, better go look in the mirror!
Shaun; "I don't see many atheists converting to any religion"
ReplyDeleteHello?
Wait, no wait. You may have hit on something here. Because [atheists] aren't willing to forfeit our individuality. This argument falls on my premise of conformity. I don't want to conform to the norm. It's a perfectly acceptable position. After all, your Jesus, was a so-called dissident, right? I leave this open for discussion.
"evolution is the tool of Satan, and it's in all the school books"
Yes! Holy fucking shit! How the hell did I miss that? Fucking bastards! I really need to read between the lines better. I'm a fucking idiot. I totally missed that Satan was on the board of education that approved these books. Crap.
I bet this bastard claimed to be a Christian. What a fucking ass-munch!
Do you still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? How about the fucking Tooth Fairy?
Sin? This is a control mechanism. A tool. It's a way to compartmentalize human morality. A way to get the masses to believe that guilt is somehow going to justify their impending, doom-filled road to hell. Yes, I feel guilt at times. I regret things that I have done in my life, but that doesn't justify an eternal punishment. According to the likes of you, atheism is a sin and therefore warranting summary damnation to your perceived hell. How do you justify that? Oh, I forget. It's gods will! The cosmic McMuffin! Why not just ship me off to a concentration camp and get me out of the picture altogether?
Larro, if you feel you have to use cuss to make a point, it's because you don't have one.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I've made myself read through the all the cuss, there's no eternal damnation, actually there's eternal life in the kingdom of heaven(that's a good thing). All you have to do is ask for forgiveness. I don't see why that's so hard for you to do. Ask for forgiveness, and try not to do the same sin again. it's that simple.
ReplyDeleteWhy are you so narrow minded? you're completely ignoring the possibility of God. With no evidence whatsoever against him. Evolution, if it ever made sense(it does not), is still no evidence against god.
So in the meanwhile, when you're still not sure God doesn't exist, doesn't it make sense to at least refrain from committing the one, solitary sin that will never be forgiven. That's senseless, if you had no clue about God, if you'd never even heard of him, you wouldn't even want to blaspheme him, but now that you're being asked not too, it suddenly becomes a violation of your rights when you're asked not to blaspheme.
that's exactly what Eve did, she ate the one fruit God told her never to touch, and she wouldn't even have wanted had God kept quiet. if you still don't believe in the bible, there's at least a good moral story n there for you to make something of.
Pyramidhead, I just read what you wrote, go ahead, rip all you want, the more anger I manage to stir up in you, the sooner you're gong to die, and consequently, the sooner you're going to know I was right, cos ending up in hell should be proof enough that god exists, unless you want to deny that too.
ReplyDeleteAnd how can a minority cause more damage that a majority? I left out the 'smallness' factor that atheists have. And you still won, would you believe that? Considering you're such a small number of people, it makes it even worse, please look back in history before writing something. In the meanwhile feel free to blow a few gaskets.
I don't have a blog, so I've posted anon
ReplyDeleteShaun has nothing original to contribute--amazing that he would fall back on an ancient text of superstition to support his arguement that atheists have..."done more damage?" A text, mind you, that the author of this blog, and a great many of it's readers have acknowledged they put no credence in.
Closed minded? Shaun, my friend, you do realize most atheists (myself included) were xtians at one point. And don't argue we weren't "true xtains" (whatever that means); we certainly believed we were at the time and belief/faith is what your supersition is all about, right?
Amazing that someone who would post nothing but baseless accusations and make little attept to support them rationally would dismiss someone elses arguements soley because there was profanity contained within. While I would agree that a point can often be made more effectively w/out profanity, and pyramids use of it is gratuitious, your summary dismissal based soley on some "naughty words" demo's the mentality of someone who is unable to effectively counter the contents/merits of a statement or arguement --for you, the packaging is more important than the its contents.
The "evolution as a tool of Satan," or Santa, or whoever else, is so rediculous and overdone, I won't even get into that one.
Finally, Shaun of the dead, your true colors come out when you essentially wish an early demise upon Pyramid. Very telling and very Xtian I might add.
Perhaps I am overstepping my bounds here, but I suggest everyone ignor Shaun from here on out.
Fritzy
I did justify my claims, just not in this post, it's somewhere here. Look back a few Posts.
ReplyDeleteI said Larro was narrow minded, from what I know, he was never a Christian. The ones who were Christian, and then atheists, they're just plain ignorant.
Would you care to try to patch all the holes poked in the theory of evolution? Since you're so much for justification.
Of course you're going to want to ignore me, you wouldn't want to face the truth.
Shaun; "Larro, if you feel you have to use cuss to make a point, it's because you don't have one."
ReplyDeleteWrong. Because, if I didn't have a point you wouldn't have read through it. And I'll tell you what I told DRD; I'll cuss, swear and profane whenever I fucking feel like it.
Ok, can you follow me in this next part? Please, I need your full attention here. The following two sentences come from you:
"...there's no eternal damnation..."
"...cos ending up in hell should be proof enough that god exists."
You just contradicted yourself.
"it suddenly becomes a violation of your rights when you're asked not to blaspheme"
Because it IS my right, asshole.
"if you still don't believe in the bible, there's at least a good moral story n there for you to make something of"
I've already said it's full of lies Shaun. ALL of it.
I couldn't help but notice this comment "if you still don't believe in the bible, there's at least a good moral story n there for you to make something of"
ReplyDeleteI wonder if all the good moral lessons in the bible couldn't be found somewhere else? I wonder if a person might get the same dose of morality by reading say...Aesop's Fables?
One I'm pissed off all the time. If I die so fucking what. But nothing takes way from the fact that your still retarded.
ReplyDeleteOne dumbass pick a history book. That is if you can read(which I doubt at this point). If you want to argue history we can argue history. You sound like a broken record. You have nothing new to add. If I go to hell I'll keep a rock warm for you. Your responce is just typical of a small minded christian. You distort truth for your lies. Your still a dumb fuck and I cuss alot so get over it.
ReplyDeleteyikes!
ReplyDeleteUmmm....double yikes,yikes!!
ReplyDeleteThe whole bunch of you are apparently hell bent on bent on defending atheism. larro, I meant to say there's no eternal damnation if you repent, small mistake, it it was quite obvious what I meant, if you're going to use that against me, again, it just shows you have nothing real. You may have the illusion of free will, I've got it too, Fact is God controls most things. Take the people in Singapore for example, I spent some time there, they wouldn't really know much about free will if not for TV, and people traveling abroad, and books, and the likes. And it's funny, they never start complaining till they've been exposed to the idea of free will. Then all hell brakes loose. Ask beast. Humans aren't born with a desire for free will, it's something they acquire.
ReplyDeleteThe rest of you, insulting my intelligence and calling me retarded doesn't help you one bit. One of you wanted to argue, history, if you think arguing is spewing out a bunch of obscenities, think again. Anyone will tell you the one who gets mad is the one who has nothing, of course, you'll claim that's a lie. I have not distorted anything in favor of Christianity, to my knowledge, I believe you could bend it quite far the atheist direction, and still loose terribly. Here's something atheists choose to ignore, Hitler was a Christian, but his killing were driven by the superior race idea, see, that's evolution there(the atheist non sense). he thought his race had evolved into something higher and he had to kill everything else so that they didn't dilute back down to the lesser race. But it's ok, you can use Hitler for your argument against religion. Please present your argument, I already gave mine, it's a few posts back.
I see you're all keeping mum about the holes in the evolution theory. thank you, proves my point, it's garbage.
Shaun, you ignorant bigot
ReplyDeleteWhat you know about Singapore is nothing compared to what I know, so if you wish to comment, please read further. As I said earlier, we have legalized prostitution, and America doesn't, so beat it, moron.
As for evolution and its "holes", you might want to tell me how the world can be 6000 years old when the Sumerians were already a colony of victorious warriors 7000 yrs back, and caves depicting cavemen hunting mammoths abound in caves in the Australian continent and even in Europe.
Beast
I don't get the legalized prostitution thing. It's got nothing to do with free will. And it's debatable that you know more about Singapore, you've got the insider's perspective. It's usually the case that something is better understood from the outside. I bet you think you've got the world's 2nd best nightlife too.
ReplyDeleteThat thing about the Sumerian is as ridiculous as me asking you how could they have been warriors 7000 years ago, when the world's only 6000 years old. where's the proof that they're 7000 years old, did you hope I would miss that, or did you think I was stupid?
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8evds10h.htm
there's a web page for you to chew on. Full of evidence against evolution. And try your best to find an article with evidence against God that isn't filled with sarcasm or ignorance.
Shaun; "larro, I meant to say there's no eternal damnation if you repent"
ReplyDeleteYou still claim there's a hell, a place to go and get a really good damning. But, previously you said there was no such place. You're lying.
"You may have the illusion of free will, I've got it too..."
Oohh, I just had the most gut-wrenching laugh of the day! NEWS FLASH! Bushism spreads like wild fire to the Christian masses! They love him so.
"Hitler was a Christian, but his killing were driven by the superior race idea, see, that's evolution there
You're absolutely wrong Shaun. It wasn't evolution. It was Eugenics. You know, the same principle as animal husbandry that's been around almost since the dawn of mankind. There is a difference. And yes he was a Christian who was endorsed by the Catholic Church.
"...did you think I was stupid?"
I sure the fuck do. This is what happens when our politicians dumb down our educational system and make cuts to funding them. This is what happens when you get evangelical Christians left alone to approve school text books in the state of Texas, which the vast majority of the country (US) then adopts. Like the "evolution is JUST a theory" thing. Is it JUST a theory Shaun? Can you answer that? Is evolution just a theory? Nobody give Shaun any help with this one please.
And that eBook, looks chock-full of Christian scripture. Would you mind recommending a Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist perspective arguing against evolution? I think not.
I assure you I wasn't lying. I may have worded something in a way it could be misunderstood easily, I have always believed there's a heaven and a hell, if you are forgiven, you go to heaven, if not, hell. Your claim that I'm lying is either ignorance or a lie. It's easy for you to catch a small mistake in my wording and try to discredit me with it. I hope you don't sincerely believe I was lying.
ReplyDeleteYou don't know what evolution is do you? I bet you never thought till now that to be an atheist you kinda had to agree with evolution, the other option is to accept you don't have a theory for how life started. And you think I'm stupid? Did you really read the stuff on the web page, did it not make sense to you. if it didn't I think you're ignorant, the other option is stupid.
And to believe in eugenics you first have to endorse some sort of evolution, That's an argument you can try and win after showing that it was indeed eugenics that drove Hitler, and not evolution. And even after that, I said you can take Hitler for your case against religion, atheists still mass murdered more people. Are you beginning to see how vain your attempts are? Taking from the bible, a camel will go through the hole in the needle before you prove religion has done more damage than atheism.
I would say evolution's not even a theory now, given all the evidence against it, maybe it was a plausible idea a century ago, it shouldn't be one now. People refuse to dump it because the other option is God, and clearly, you and the likes of you have a problem with authority/God. The lack of free will I mentioned had nothing to do with Bush, it was God.
You want Islam's evidence against evolution? here's one, I doubt this is even the best one out there.
http://www.allaahuakbar.net/ATHEIST/evolution/index.htm
Here, I even found an atheist denying evolution.
http://www.atheistperspective.com/evolution-is-a-lie/
That's a smart atheist right there.
That was me above this.
ReplyDeleteApparently he's a dumb atheist too, managed to trick me. Anyway, well I don't have an atheist denying evolution just yet. Sorry about that.
ReplyDeleteMost of the stuff I read in the Guttenberg site is rubbish which is easily countered by a sceptical individual--one not need even be well versed in evolution to see the holes in these arguements. The arguements are spurious and rely on the logical fallicy or causation leading ot correlation.
ReplyDeletePlease site a peer reviewed, published book, by a non-christian (or someone w/out a prior religious agenda), complete with references. Anyone can litter the internet with non-sense to "prove a point." I hold as much respect for internet publications as they are due...which is virtually none.
Fritzy
Well, then counter them first.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/ISD/index.asp
ReplyDeleteAnyway, here's a book. it's on a christian site, and maybe the authors a christians, that's only because no atheist is going to throw evolution out. They're all scientists though, surely you don't think you're smarter than them.
Why is it so hard for you to accept you're wrong? I did. You keep saying that all the arguments can be challenged but you never do.
Well shaun all this reading you are doing must be convincing you anyway. :)
ReplyDeletehmmmm....no comment on that one concerned citizen...:)
ReplyDeleteAlso, very little commentary about the premise of the post.
ReplyDeleteIt's not convincing you? when 'evolution' requires 20 billion years but everything else points to the universe being a lot lot younger. You still want to believe you evolved from a rock, at least admit ignorance, and quit calling me stupid.
ReplyDeleteI'd have replied earlier, but I stumbed here during lunchbreak, and posting at work is verboten.
ReplyDeleteDear, dear Pyramidhead; when you write a post, finish it, get up out of your chair and go for a walk. Get some air. Then come back and read what you wrote as though you were a disinterested observer. Why am I parsing this simple mote of sage advice? You come off as an asshole. It might make you feel better, but it doesn't help our rationalist cause, such as it is, if you act like a buffoon. Curse if you must, damn it, but try to be coherent, and realize that people see "fuck" and click off. My theory is that they end up thinking about fucking, but that's not a theory in the scientific sense. Rule #1 to dialog: don't be a dick.
Shaun, I think part of the problem is that you think atheism is more than it is. I don't believe in God, gods, any gods. That's atheism. Some may pick fleas and say "There are no gods", but the thread is the same. As such, it has no moral code. For that, try secular humanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism) or utilitarianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism, basically the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility, or the greatest happiness for the most). Are they absolute and immutable? No. Things change (even religion...we don't burn witches anymore. Nor is trial by ordeal considered "just" in any sense of the term). What does "our" (if the various groups that comprise the above) ethical framework revolve around? Rationality (revelation is not a valid path to knowledge) above superstition, evidence over faith (believing that something is so is far different from proving that something is so) and, well, the Golden Rule. I try to treat others well, because that's how I hope they'll treat me. Is that last one self-centred? Heck yes, and benignly so. And believing that God (capital G) made the entire universe for us is not? That's hubris of the highest order; higher even than butting ahead in line at the DMV because you're in a hurry.
As for evolution:
Evolution is not the cause of men behaving badly. Men are the cause of men behaving badly. Sometimes beer makes it worse. Or money. Or power. Mix in the sexy, sexy ladies and you'll have men behaving badlier. Granted, that's not a word, but you get the gist.
As for The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved, by William A. Williams: some quick and easy refutations to "proofs" against evolution picked at random, found on a single page of Talkorigins.org (a good site that's tough to navigate, unfortunately).
1. THE POPULATION OF THE WORLD http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB620.html
8. NO NEW SPECIES NOW http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB910.html
10. THE AGE OF THE EARTH - 1. Age of the Sun http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE310_1.html
Also "The estimates of the age of the world vary from 16,000,000 years to 100 times this number or 1,600,000,000 years"...try 4,500,000,000 years. 6,000 years is simpler, as 4.5 billion is an amount of time well beyond the human scale, but it's not true: no matter how accurately dear Bishop Ussher calculated the age of the Earth (to the day, apparently) it's still garbage-in garbage-out (bad data will generally result in bad data. It's endemic to the nature of bad data).
20. SEX http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB350.html, http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB610.html
28. SCIENTISTS CONDEMN EVOLUTION http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA111.html
49. PROBLEMS FOR REVIEW
29. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?". How about . "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall ignore the real world because it's complicated and things that hard complex make him feel uncomfortable?". Or maybe "Why did God make the world 6,000 years ago while going through all the trouble to make it appear much older?". What about "If God is love, why don't I have better hair?" Maybe not that last one.
There's more here http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/index.html. Heck, there's more everywhere...
This is what happens when you use an apologist text from 1928. If you'd used a more modern one...well, it would use the same arguments. Mostly arguments of the logical fallacy-type (argument from ignorance, arguement from incredulity, argument from design, bare assertion fallacy, etc)
While I can see the appeal of creationism (the universe is a warm, snuggly blanket made just for you, you miserable sinner), it's simply not true. Truth is discomfitting. The Earth, our home, only vaguely tolerates us at the best of times, while the rest of the universe (thus far) is distinctly hostile. This little fecund blue-green ball off in a dismal corner of a heartless universe is practically miraculous. Not, notice, actually a miracle. On a clear night go lay down in a field, look up, stare, and you'll see that the universe, while uncaring (indeed, it's not anthropomorphic in any way), is truly majestic. The world around you is far more complicated, far vaster, more beautiful (if nasty and gross) and far more magical (figuratively speaking) than that which is contained between the covers of any book.
Use the short time that you have between nothingness and nothingness to make the world a better place. Believing that the creation myth of a war-prone iron age tribe is literally true is not making the world better, it's dragging us back. Mankind has moved on. You're welcome to join us. Just remember that "God did it" is not an answer, it's an excuse, and faith that something is so doesn't make it so.
Really, Shaun. If there is a god, it's working on a level way beyond Genesis.
Cheers, Modusoperandi!; excellent comment. If you are a woman, I am in love; if on the other hand you are a man, I guess I am a little gay for you. You have put into words, far better than I can, the atheist philosophy. You also successfully exposed the Bible as the antiquted collection of folk ledgends of a bellicose, xenophobic, genocidal tribal cult. You did it with grace and humor--well done.
ReplyDeleteThank you also for discussing the Guttenberg text--I recall many of the arguements from this text (which appeal to those who need little convincing) when I went through my "fundamentalist phase" in junior high (the mentality that is open to such irrational drivel). I also recall when I was presented with the refutation of these arguements--it was psychologically and emotinally painful, but it was inevitable that I had to reject Guttenbergs "arguements"--these "arguements" had more holes than Ron Jeremy could plug. As painful as it was for me, I'm happy to be out from under the rock of religion.
The fact that fundies still use such an old text as their arguement is telling (science may be self-correcting, but religion is always immuteable (and boastful of this fact)--who needs a newer resource to site when your true source is the "immuteable word of gord...yadah yadah yadah.")
At any rate, thanks for pointing out to Shaun that wishing hard enough doesn't make fantasies come true.
Oops, that last comment was from Fritzy
ReplyDeleteI agree, I'm not saying I know how God did it, I just said he did it.
ReplyDeleteThe evidence against evolution is not scientific evidence for God, I never said that. I just said atheists looking for justification shouldn't cite the theory of evolution.
I also agree with you that God is working on a much higher level than the book of genesis, genesis is just what he did, not how he did it, and how he keep it going.
The talking origins website is full of invented theories, pulled uf of thin air to defend atheism. They claim that we are seeing stars from a billion light years away, They claim to know it's that far away by studying it's relative brightness to other stars near it that they can measure the distance to with geometry. If that's the case, why wouldn't they use geometry to measure the distance to the star that's a billion light years away itself, and not have to depend on guess work. Then they use it's relative brightness to these other stars and guess it's distance. Couldn't it be that it's just a dimmer star, isn't it possible that it just appears dimmer because there's space debris blocking the light. The sun gets dimmer in the evening, does that mean it's moving away?
They can claim they found a new species of mosquito, that's because they can redefine what a species is whenever they find an opportunity to use it as evidence for evolution. It's done a lot, evolutionists have always manipulated and distorted information to fit in with evolution. All of this for what? to find an alternative to God.
I refuse to give up my belief in creation because it's my religion, atheists refuse to give up evolution because it's their religion. The difference is I call my religion a religion, while you call yours science.
ReplyDeleteYou're clueless about the Gutenberg book, those aren't Gutenberg's arguments, that's merely the name of the website I found it on. fritzy pretended it's something he's had experience dealing with. And what does it have to do with 1928, is there something I'm missing? if there is, it just means evolution hasn't been able to clean up it's act in 80 years.
And it's you who needs little convincing, not me, they told you you came from a rock and shoved a few fossils down your throat and you bought it. I questioned it and saw it was rubbish. It took me a while though.
However, I believe this is an argument that won't be settled until evolutionists/atheists end up in hell, simply because you can't be reasoned out of religion. so it all boils down to whose right and whose wrong. Only time will tell, but until that time comes, how do you justify living like God doesn't exist when you don't know that he doesn't? No atheist's been able to answer this, even Dawkins made a fool out of himself when asked this, mumbled some rubbish about a pink juju under the sea and what not.
Shaun "They claim that we are seeing stars from a billion light years away" I think we're getting off topic, but since we've been off topic for a while already;
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_structure_of_the_cosmos and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Size_of_the_universe should help to illuminate...probably. Astronomy and its children make my eyes glaze over. Me: "So, you sit here for hours and look at a dot?" Astronomer: "Yes. Many dots, actually. Isn't it fascinating?" Me: *Snore*. I do know, however that it's more than their "relative brightness". Things as big as cosmology/astronomy rarely depend on a single type of measurement to form a theory (redshift, background radiation, gravitational lensing, etc). Indeed, a good sign of a weak theory is that is relies on a single source. One bone doesn't make evolution. A hundred bones doesn't make evolution. Tonnes of bones (literally), carbon dating, geology, physics, chemistry...together, bits from a wide variety of sciences make evolution. Oh, and time. Ungodly amounts of time: 4,200,000,000 years of lifeless Earth (or life that didn't make it, anyway), 300,000,000 years of blobs of goo and another 500,000,000 of multicellular life. Even the 65,000,000 years between dinosaurs and now makes my mind reel. The chain of events that lead to us is, frankly, incredible. The universe is truly fascinating. Ignoring most of it because it doesn't fit in to Genesis and twisting the scraps that remain to fit that same myth demean it greatly.
"They can claim they found a new species of mosquito, that's because they can redefine what a species is whenever they find an opportunity to use it as evidence for evolution. If the "No new species" link I gave you for talkorigins only had that one example, you might have a leg to stand on. Rememer too that evolution happens on what by human standards is an enormous amount of time. If you're expecting a mouse to give birth to a bat, you don't understand the theory at all. Baby steps, tiny mutations, fractional changes build up over time, resulting in one's progeny becoming something else over time (even the "rapid changes" in Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium take place over 10,000 or more generations. Ten thousand generations! The scale is well beyond what we're used to comprehending. This should help explain why "evolutionists" like bacteria and fruitflies so much. 10,000 generations isn't so bad when each generation is short). Yes, there are differing theories on exactly how it occurs (Dawkins, Futuyama and Gould, for example, disagree. http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/09/evolution-poll-of-sandwalk-readers.html), but that doesn't make evolution wrong, just incomplete.
"...evolutionists have always manipulated and distorted information to fit in with evolution." You've got that backwards. The theory is modified to fit the evidence. Sometimes theories are discarded entirely, if new evidence is entirely incompatible with the old theory. Science evolves. It has a voracious hunger for information. Sweet, tasty info. Sure, scientists don't like having to toss out a theory that they may have spent their entire adult lives on, but the old coots eventually die off and the modified (or new) theory moves into the mainstream. Creationism doesn't evolve; its proponents are still using the same arguments that they've always used. These two seem to be the most common (both are logical fallacies, by the way):
1) Argument from ignorance. "Boy, things sure are complicated. We don't know how X works, therefore God did it.". This is the same argument that results in the God of the Gaps. Science, inquiry, and the scientific method keep making those gaps smaller. Sometimes this gets mixed in with the argument from design, as we have a habit of Anthropomorphizing things that we don't understand.
2) Argument from authority. "The bible says so."
If anything, your sentence makes more sense with "creationists" and "biblical creation", rather than "evolutionists" and "evolution".
"I refuse to give up my belief in creation because it's my religion, atheists refuse to give up evolution because it's their religion. The difference is I call my religion a religion, while you call yours science". Religion is based on revelation. Revelation, by its very nature, is anecdotal and inconsistent. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence at all (see homeopathy for this dirty truth writ large). Science works on evidence. Sometimes imperfect evidence (for most of the "digging in the dirt" ones. Oh, if only all science was as clean and perfect as math...), but new evidence is constantly being added to the old, creating a giant pile of evidence. If the evidence points in a different direction, so goes the theory. As such, if the evidence ends up pointing to the Earth balancing on the head of the Galactic Banana, King of all Soup, then that's what I'll believe. I won't like it, but denying the truth about the One True Banana won't change the fact that the One True Banana is the One True Banana. Bananas are mushy and smell bad. *Blech*.
As for the Gutenberg thing, "the Gutenberg project" is converting public domain books to electronic form. The book (The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved) is from 1925 (sorry, I mistyped earlier). Also this must be later, revised edition, as a text from 1925 probably wouldn't know that Piltdown Man was a hoax ("discovered" in 1912, exposed in 1953, if Wikipedia is correct. My favourite piece of "evidence" from the Piltdown dig site was what turned out to be a mangled cricket bat. The fraudsters may smear the good name of science, but some of them have a wicked sense of humour. Also, Charles Dawson, the discoverer, appears to have been a sucker. A cricket bat? C'mon! I've seen it, and it looked just like a big chunk of a cricket bat... But I'm getting farther off topic than I was before, when I was off topic). This doesn't mean that ...evolution hasn't been able to clean up it's act in 80 years. This means that, while the theory of evolution has advanced, creationists are still using the same arguments that they used eighty years ago. Bad arguments from back then are still bad arguments now. Science improves, creationism is literally (ahem) stuck in a different time.
"...they told you you came from a rock and shoved a few fossils down your throat and you bought it". No, "they" showed an enormous pile of evidence across a wide range of scientific disciplines and I decided that a 6,000 year-old universe, with species now almost exactly the same as they were in the beginning is bunk. Evolution, incidentally, states little to nothing about the origin of life (the "coming from rocks" thing, although it's more a "coalescing in ooze" thing). That's abiogenesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis). It's a baby science, thus far. Mostly it just lays on it's back and shakes it's chubby little fists. It's adorable.
"I believe this is an argument that won't be settled until evolutionists/atheists end up in hell...". Gee, thanks. The threat makes its inevitable appearance. Odd, the "hell" bit is normally preceded by Pascal's Wager...
If I get to the end, and I stand in front of god, and it's the big "G" god, and he (big "H" he) asks me what I believe, I'll tell him (big "H" him) what and why, in my own mumbled prose. If curiosity and a thirst for knowledge buys me a one-way ticket to an eternity of firey burning, while willful ignorance of all the knowledge we've accumulated since the OT finally got written down, plus a belief in a preposterous story (Someone named God impregnated immaculately a virgin with His Holy Spirit, Himself, creating His child, who was also Him. After she gave birth to Him, He wandered around telling people about how His father, who was also Him, sent Himself to Earth to show the people thereon that He was the one and only path to Himself. This ensured that He would be martyred, which was just what He had planned to happen to His son, who was also Him. He then resurrected Himself and returned home to sit beside Himself at His own right hand. This sacrifice was necessary because, in an earlier episode, He made a horticulturally-based rule that Adam broke after his sister and identical twin, Eve, told him that a talking snake said that the voice in their head, played by God, was lying about the immediate consequences of disobeying this rule. That's a "bit" I wrote for a page on another site, but it's apropo, so I'm using it here, too. Sometimes, the muse is kind. But I digress.) gets a seat in the eternal tabernacle, then eternity will be a disappointment in any event.
"...how do you justify living like God doesn't exist when you don't know that he doesn't?" How do you justify living like Dionysus doesn't exist when you don't know that he doesn't? How about the Bogey Man? Existence or non-existence of anything, I try to always do the right thing (the Golden rule, again). Beliefs don't define a man; actions do. I don't need to justify living. I, simply, am.
Modusoperandi; "I, simply, am."
ReplyDeleteThank you! This is what I have been trying to present all along. FUCK!
Modusoperandi...I'm sorry but I get very passionate about my arguments and I fly off the handle. And more so most of these comments have been aimed at shaun because he's narrow minded. So in the future I will take a breath, shave the cat, wait until the rage has passed and in order to give a calm response. Disclaimer: shaun will still bear the brunt of my rage. The reason shaun is my whooping boy is his negative comments about Larros wife marrying an atheist if she were Christian. And the other reason my posts come off being crude and not "rational" is because I'm dyslexic. So my posts sometimes come across as being crude on account of my limited spelling and grammar can be a problem.
ReplyDeletePyramidhead, no biggie. Grammar and spelling aren't huge issues; attempting to be civil is (especially when you disagree).
ReplyDeleteIf you need a hug...
Well, I still think a christian should have the sense to not marry an atheist. Like how a muslim knows not to marry a hindu. And like I said pyramidhead, you're welcome to be as pissed off as you want for however long you want. it'll only proove my point quicker, to you atleast. It doesn't really bother me. BTW, you're not 'passionate' about your arguments, Larro claims passion too. That's just your nice way of saying you loose your temper. Try thinking why next time.
ReplyDeleteShaun "They claim that we are seeing stars from a billion light years away"
ReplyDeleteAha! I just figured out an answer so simple that I can't believe I missed it before (shame on you too for not seeing it).
Astronomers on Earth look at a star. Six months later they look at the same star. They then take off the Starfleet uniform, pull out their calculators and math out the answer.
Scientific experiment time! (Don't forget your labcoat)
You'll need (well, you don't technically need 1, 2 or 3 if you can picture this in your head):
1) an object
2) string
3) protractor
4) you
5) online trig calculator http://www.carbidedepot.com/formulas-trigright.asp
6) labcoat
Set an object down on the ground (point A). Stand at point B, an unknown distance from A (Lay a string down from A to B, line AB). If you keep this distance small, say 5' or so, you'll do less walking and need less string.
Now move one foot to the left, perpendicular to AB, to point C (lay a string down from B to C, line BC, and another from C to A, line CA). This gives you a right triangle.
You don't know yet the distance to A, but you know almost enough to calculate exactly how far away it is from both point B and point C:
angle CBA (90 degrees), distance CB (1').
Now measure the angle ACB (that being from the object through the point to which you moved to where you were). A protractor will make this a lot easier.
This gives you known measurements for a base (line CB of 1') and two angles (angle ACB and ABC). With simple math you can figure out the missing internal angle BAC (180 -90 - angle ACB = angle CAB). With trig you can then calculate both of the remaining distances, AB and AC:
For example: If the angle ABC was 40 degrees, the line AB is 1.19', while line AC is 1.55'.
Note that for stars the variance between AB and AC won't be nearly as large, as the diameter of Earth's roughly circular orbit, that being the 1' step to the left in our experiment, is far smaller than the distance to any star but our own.
Isn't trig fun?
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI wonder if anyone of you has ever been a Christian for a long time, and then decided to be an atheist.
Do you know of any help available for such as these?
A Recent De-converted.
Also, set up this way (with six months in between measurments) this experiment won't for our own sun (as you'd end up with a "flat" triangle). Set up slightly differently it would work (using, say, 1/4 of a year, rather than 1/2).
ReplyDeleteOops, didn't realize I was butting in in the middle of a discussion. Apologies.
ReplyDeleteaulddwone said...
ReplyDeleteHi,
I wonder if anyone of you has ever been a Christian for a long time, and then decided to be an atheist.
Do you know of any help available for such as these?
A Recent De-converted.
28 September 2007 01:15
Aulddwone, Check out http://exchristian.net
myqel1960@aol.com
Modusoperandi, you're one of the politest atheists I've come across on this blog, thank you for that. That was a very nice idea, the triangle. consider this, say a star is 1 billion light years away. With earth's orbit, the furthest distance we could get between B and C is around a thousand light seconds, while AB is a billion light years. So BC : AB would be something like
ReplyDelete1 : 30 thousand billion.
Working backwards from this, you'll find you need a protractor accurate down to the thousand billionth of a degree to measure ACCB. If such a protractor exists, it could have only been made by God.
angle ACB, I meant, not ACCB, sorry. and this was for a star just a billion light years away. For 15 billion light years it'll get even crazier.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's not that only method, and the "stellar protractors" that astronomers use would be far more accurate than the little plastic one in your pencil box. There's also things like redshift and parallax (my original example was going to include an example of parallax, using the apparent motion one distant object in relation another when the observer moves, but without illustrations I found it a bit confusing). There are more, but you'll probably need to talk to an astronomer.
ReplyDeleteMy point, and there was a point, was with accurate instruments, sufficient time and a little knowledge, you yourself could do the same measurements that scientists do to figure these things out. "We" don't have to take it on authority that X is true; we can prove it for ourselves. "Our" books are only right until they're proved wrong. Good science doesn't claim to have all the answers; it only claims to have the best answer based on what we know so far.
You yourself could learn about carbon dating, geology, plate techtonics, chemistry and a few other disciplines and prove (or disprove) evolution! Just imagine having your theory, Shaun's Special Creation Theory, supplant evolution!
Isn't science wonderful?
Yes, science is a cool thing and all, I quite like it myself. Evolution isn't science though, maybe it's a theory, or a religion. Carbon dating has also been shown to give wildly inaccurate results.
ReplyDeleteI agree we don't have to believe everything scientists say, but isn't that what happens most of the time? I believed the theory of evolution to be true. I knew it didn't fit in with the bible, but I didn't really bother to try and make sense of the differences. If not for my faith in God, I would have dumped the bible and chosen to be an evolutionist too, probably turned atheist also. It just so happened that I decided to question evolution, and if you do that sincerely, I believe you'll find a lot of flaws in it too.
You're not using AIG as a source, are you?
ReplyDeleteStatements like "When a scientist’s interpretation of data does not match the clear meaning of the text in the Bible, we should never reinterpret the Bible." on just about every science-topic they've got clearly show their bias. Notice, it's not "the data", it's the scientist's enterpretation of that data (which is a bit like saying "If you add 2 and 2 together and get 4, you're misinterpreting the data"). Remember, science is only right until it's wrong; religion always insists that it has the right, and only, answer. This is religion's greatest weakness and the scientific method's greatest strength.
I remember stumbling on to a Biblical Astronomy site whose front page basically said that if the real world conflicts with scripture it's the real world that is wrong...I can't find it now, or I'd give a link. Some of it's arguments where hilarious. The lengths they go to to make the universe six thousand years old are amazing...and a little sad. The real world and its long history are far more beautiful than any story, even if it means that Jesus died to cleanse the original sin of a figurative couple.
Some carbon dating experiments have given "...wildly inaccurate results", when the samples were contaminated. If you ever run across the "Carbon dated snails showing up as 50,000 year-ago" story, remember that snails absorbs whatever they walk on. The snails in the story lived around fossilized trees. That's why they show up as ancient, because they've oozed their snailish way across a fossil log and absorbed enough of it to show a false positive.
Good science publishes all results, even the ones that are out of mean (accompanied by a hypothesis on what caused the deviance). This means, unfortunately that creationists can cherry-pick the experiments, ignore the reason why they're out of mean, and say "QED, evolution is false".
Even if their QED actually followed logic, and evolution turned out to be a gross miscalculation, that doesn't make creationism any stronger a theory than it was before. Just because what I had for dinner was proven not to be a hamburger does not prove that it was soup.
Remember, too, that carbon dating is not the only method used to measure age (indeed, C14 is only useful up to about 60,000 years). The geologic column is a good example; one of several other methods, which when combined, result in consistent outcomes in favour of both an old Earth and evolution.
http://www.amazon.ca/Beginning-Scientist-Shows-Creationists-Wrong/dp/0879752408/ref=sr_1_1/701-8921403-5287506?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191054586&sr=8-1 is a good book that solidly debunks most common creationist arguments. I don't know if you'll like it, obviously, and it's old enough to be out of print, but it doesn't talk down to the reader nor does it wheel off in to minutae. (My own posts here would be far better if I dug it out and reread it. Hmm, maybe I should unpack. My Spongebob DVDs are in there somewhere, as well...)
Well, rereading this, I seem to be meandering...so I'll hit "publish" and turn in for the night.
No, I didn't even know what AIG was until now. The thing about carbon dating being all wrong was on some youtube video. And the snail was only one of like 10 different things they mentioned. And on that same video there was a picture of a tree standing through about 20 layers of 'geologic column'. so so much for that. While these may not be arguments for creationism, they definitely are arguments against evolution. And I know the theory that the evolutionists put forward to try and explain the tree, so don't bother.
ReplyDeleteGosh, again you're missing the point. You yourself can go see living trees growing through multiple layers of the geological column right now. Trees do that, what with the roots and all. Given a prompt burial (by, say, volcanic ash or a flood) they can then fossilize, leaving a fossilized tree that covers several layers (including the layers that were deposited after the tree died). http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/geologic_column/out-of-place.html this explains it (and more) far better than I could.
ReplyDeleteHeck, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe-HAQqxyY8. It's Kent "Dr Dino" Hovind, a YEC. Gasp at him stating (or implying) that "Scientists say that petrification always takes millions of years to occur" and "Scientists say that layers always take millions of years to occur", when they say nothing of the kind (they say that it varies with conditions). Then at around 4:30 his attempt to disprove what he thinks is the common theory of the geologic column (where evolutionists say that everything takes millions of years, and the various strata always form everywhere perfectly; another strawman), falls to shit when he shows that it can happen quickly by any flood (which is what any competent paleontogist would've told him, if he'd asked).
I know you said to not bother, but I can't leave statements like that alone. Try to be more logical. The tree one has always bugged me, as it's so easy to debunk.
If you bring up the Paluxy River footprints or "If man came from apes, why are there still apes?", I may just give up on you. I don't want to, but you're accepting strawmen, bad science and poor logic, and when I cast a little light on one logical fallacy with fun science experiments and handy internet links, you dig up another one. We all suffer from logical fallacies, they're endemic to the human condition. The hard part is stepping back and seeing bad logic for what it is; irrational. Every creationist argument has been refuted, not because "evolutionists" are sneaky, not because scientists are trying to push you away from god, but because biblical creationist arguments are so poor. They ignores anything that doesn't fit (blaming it one those darn "evolutionists") and distort the little bit that remains (just enough to fit within two measly chapters at the beginning of the Torah and chapters six to eight, if memory serves) with such tortured logic that a even a dimwit like me can generally see the fault (and if I can't, a cursory internet search can).
1Cr 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Sorry, that last "evolutionists" in quotes should've been "darwinists". Biblical literalists like using that term because it implies that Darwin's theory was cast in stone when he wrote it, and they can therefore attack the theory that was, rather than the theory that is.
ReplyDeleteSo what your saying that my passion is a lie kind like your intellect.
ReplyDeleteYou're kinda shooting yourself in the foot showing me that video there. he does have a bunch of points. If you want to say that these layers formed quickly, how can you be confident that the other ones you claim to be accurate took longer to form. And when you showed me the triangle method of calculating a distance to a star I didn't just "dig up another one", I explained why that would be pretty much impossible. Then dug up another one. I know they have more accurate protractors and methods and what not that the one you get at school, but what you're claiming is they're trying to measure light coming in at an angle about a trillionth of a degree less than 90, from a billion light years away, while the earth's flying through space at at least a thousand miles per hour(relative to the direction if the light they're trying to measure), and spinning at around the same speed, give or take a bit depending on where they were. If there's a scientist who actually agrees with this method of finding distances to stars, he/she must be an evolutionist. And shame on me for not seeing it. Right, I didn't see it because it's ridiculous. And if you want to claim you're a dimwit, think about the possibility that that's what's causing you to not be able to see though evolution.
ReplyDeletePyramidhead, I don't know what you're talking about. Take his advice and get some fresh air before reading what you wrote, and see if it makes sense before publishing.
I didn't shoot myself in the foot with that video: all of his other arguments are easily refuted (Most, if not all were debunked in that book I gave you a link to earlier). Now I have to find my copy, dagnabit.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest, *sigh*, just because you can't conceive of accurate instruments doesn't mean that there aren't any. Things have come a long way since Newton & Gottfried Leibniz make calculus and since Galileo ground lenses by hand.
My example was merely to illustrate a grossly simplified version of a single method to calculate distance. Again, they don't use one method (remember, a weak theory relies on a single measurment).
We can accurately measure the electromagnetic spectrum up to gamma radiation, at 300,000,000,000,000,000,000Hz. That's a whole bunch of zeros. We can measure a bunch of other things accurately, too. None of these things point to a young universe.
I'm sure the evolutionists have an answer for everything. You're welcome to believe whatever you want. I read some of the things on that web page you gave the link to. it's just pulling theories out of thin air, and then expecting the creationist to prove them wrong. That's an evolutionist right there, his goal in life, to never be convinced God exists.
ReplyDeleteI really believe only time will settle this argument. I'm not a scientist, so I can't prove or disprove anything. That's the advantage a real scientist has, authority on a matter. Unfortunately, by the time someone becomes a 'scientist' they've been brainwashed, and kind of pre-determined to mindlessly defend evolution. And that's what they're doing. And they're the scientists, nobody questions them.
That book is actually on that website, as an e-book, read some of the things in there and see if there really is any evidence for them, or is it just theories to fit in nice and snug with evolution.
Here's what you believe, you think all of life on earth, in all it's complexity and amazingness evolved out of molten rock billions of years ago, and that molten rock, along with trillions of other rocks and trillions upon trillions of megajoules(this is a gross underestimate) of energy, all came from a 'singularity', of which an infinite would fit in a pixel on your computer screen. If you believe there's science in that, it shouldn't be too hard to believe in God.
shaune "That's an evolutionist right there, his goal in life, to never be convinced God exists."
ReplyDeleteNo, as with other scientists in other disciplines, the goal is to find out how things work. Newton wanted to work out God's divine universe and ended up with planetary mechanics, among other discoveries. There are still (and always will be) gaps in our knowledge of, well, everything. Sweet beautiful gaps. The scientific mind abhors a vacuum. Unless it's studying vacuum, then it thinks that it's the coolest.
"you think all of life on earth, in all it's complexity and amazingness evolved out of molten rock billions of years ago...all came from a 'singularity'..."
How come a vast, practically infinite (by human standards) universe coming from a supercompressed speck in a void of nothing (literally nothing, no time, no space, no matter, no energy); a universe, in effect without a first cause, makes no sense, but the exact same thing with a god (and not just any god, the God) without a first cause does?
The evolutionist claims the universe came from nothing, not a spec, it's less than that, they claim it came from a 'singularity'. that's nothing, all 3 dimensions, and maybe even a few more, are all zero. A spec would imply some small volume. The term singularity can be quite misleading that way.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't know how God did it, I never said I did, but here's the thing, I said God did it, and call it religion, you say it did itself and call it science.
I know you don't believe in God, but you should have an idea of what God is, there's nothing a God can't do. Maybe he's outside the universe, maybe he's right here, only in a different time, maybe he's hiding in the 4th spacial dimension watching everything, who knows. he's God, he can do what he wants. If my understanding of the bible is correct though, heaven should be somewhere right above atmosphere. So how come Neil Armstrong didn't see God? I don't know. like I said, maybe he's in a different time, I don't try to explain it with science because it's my religion. You can't deny though, that the bible did predict atheists, and even an end that quite resembles a nuclear explosion.
It would even be quite sad, if humans took 5 billion years to evolve, then wiped themselves out in under 3 thousand years.
shaun "you say it did itself and call it science."
ReplyDeleteNo, I say we don't know yet, but science is getting closer. Religion is no closer now than it ever was. It pretends to have answers that it doesn't have. "God did it" is bafflegab for "I don't know".
I don't know what came before the Big Bang. I doubt that we can ever know (how do you measure something before there was something to measure, or time to measure it in?), but adding god on to the front of it doesn't answer anything. I'm willing to admit my ignorance (I'm pre-bang agnostic, I guess). "God did it", meanwhile, continues to be bafflegab for "I don't know".
shaun "You can't deny though, that the bible did predict atheists"
Yes, actually, I can. Atheism preceded the Bible. It was generally used in a derogatory sense to indicate people who believed in the wrong gods or had non-standard views of the right ones (In Defense Of Atheism by Michel Onfray, http://www.amazon.ca/Defense-Atheism-Michel-Onfray/dp/0670067245/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/701-1861335-9182748?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191145710&sr=8-1, if I remember correctly, covers the history of such things. I've read so much in the last few years that it's all running together as mush in my head. I think I'll have to reread all of it, if only to get it organized).
Well, the big bang theory and evolution are what are being taught in science books, I learned it too. So you do actually consider it to be science. I said my theory was that God made the universe, I didn't say I know how. Are you really not getting the difference, or are you just trying to be a good atheist?
ReplyDeleteI said we call it religion, you have absolutely no idea how it came to be either, and teach it as science. And it should make more sense to you to believe it was made by something or someone really powerful, we call it God, you choose to believe it came from nothing.
You don't think thy had bombs back in the day, before the bible was written do you? And how could anyone know there were atheists before the bible? You don't, you just accepted someone's theory. None of your links actually lead to anything, and all your books seem to be missing. That's quite the typical atheist. You seem to have been doing a lot of reading, you should question what you read every now and then.
And God did it does make more sense that it did itself, considering there's absolutely nothing after that for either theory.
shaun "Well, the big bang theory and evolution are what are being taught in science books, I learned it too. So you do actually consider it to be science."
ReplyDeleteand
"you have absolutely no idea how it came to be either, and teach it as science."
Yes, they're both the best theories based on the data we have so far. The Big Bang theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang, attempts to describe what happened before the Big Bang, much as evolution, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution, doesn't describe what lead to it (that's abiogenesis).
shaun "And it should make more sense to you to believe it was made by something or someone really powerful, we call it God, you choose to believe it came from nothing."
and
"And God did it does make more sense that it did itself, considering there's absolutely nothing after that for either theory."
No, it makes more sense to admit that we simply don't know how it started. Adding a deity, whether the creator in deism, Yahweh, Ted "the Electrician" Miller, or some other unknown or forgotten god or set of gods, just adds another big question mark behind the question mark of "what happened before the beginning of our universe?". What made the creator? It just always was? Couldn't there be a creator in front of the creator? What about a loop, where it was formed from the collapse of a previous loop? The problem is that it, like "what happen before the beginning", is another unanswerable question, based on what we know so far; less of a theory than a hypothesis with zero evidence. Eventually we might push back to the very beginning (I doubt it), or even before the beginning (again, I'm not getting my hopes up), but currently it's just blue sky thinking. Theoretical physics and other, more mature sciences may one day get us close, but it's still a giant leap from the baby science of quark theory to the eureka moment of putting it all together.
shaun "You don't think thy had bombs back in the day, before the bible was written do you?"
I don't know if they had bombs, back in the day. Greek fire, no. Explosive, no. The earliest recorded greek fire was in the 7th century and gunpowder was in China in the ninth century. Burning pitch or oil? Sure. They are not really explosive, per se, but a big blob in a clay jar, catapult-launched would spread wildly when it hit something.
shaun "...how could anyone know there were atheists before the bible?"
From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism, though that "Defending Atheism" book I mentioned earlier has a better history
"In early Ancient Greek, the adjective atheos (ἄθεος, from the privative ἀ- + θεός "god") meant "godless". The word began to indicate more-intentional, active godlessness in the 5th century BCE, acquiring definitions of "severing relations with the gods" or "denying the gods, ungodly" instead of the earlier meaning of ἀσεβής (asebēs) or "impious"."
From "A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong (pg. 66). An excellent book, if a little obtuse for boobs like me (particularly when it gets to Islam, with the, by western ears, odd names):
"The {Greek} gods were extremely important to the city, and it was believed that they would withdraw their patronage if their cult were neglected. Jews, who claimed that these gods did not exist, were called "atheists" and enemies of society. By the second century BCE this hostility was entrenched..."
shaun "You can't deny though, that the bible did predict...an end that quite resembles a nuclear explosion."
...or a sizeable volcanic eruption...or a meteor strike
shaun "None of your links actually lead to anything, and all your books seem to be missing."
The non-hypertexted links should work fine, if in a cut-and-paste manner. I just tried one of the Talkorigins ones, and it worked. Did you try turning it off and on again?
I noticed earlier that the Amazon link was incomplete, with the ends cutoff. That's why I put the title in the last one as well as the link (to recap, they were "In the Beginning... A Scientist Shows Why the Creationists Are Wrong" by Chris McGowan, "In Defense Of Atheism" by Michel Onfray). I'm still learning this whole "posting to a blog" thing. Sorry for not correcting it earlier.
shaun "You seem to have been doing a lot of reading, you should question what you read every now and then."
I do. I read The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S (it appeared on my Amazon recommendations, for reasons which I never understood. It, for example, continues to think that since I bought a few select anime DVDs, I must like all anime...) and rejected it because it used poor logic and questionable references. She'd make concrete statements based on little to no evidence. Some of it was okay, but it was a disappointment overall. "Kicking the Sacred Cow" by James P. Hogan (a hard sci-fi authour that I like) was another one; it raised some good questions (to hot topics like evolution, Aids, global warming and others), but some of its evidence and answers were slapdash. The chapter on Velikovsky, a disgraced cosmologist who ended up being partially vindicated, is fascinating. It's rare that you see an intellectual smear Sagan (with Sagan's own words, no less), but Hogan got him good.
There have been other books as well, but those two are the only two that come to mind. Well, there were Kafka's Metamorphosis & Other Stories and The Trial, but, while those made me question what I was reading, they mostly made me question why I was reading them. But that's another story...
Volcanoes and asteroids don't really fit the description in the bible. And there's no way they people who wrote the bible could have predicted that that's how the world will end. So it would have been unwise of them to put it in there, just hoping. They weren't unwise, if it is true that they just invented religion, they still managed to get a third of the population to believe them 2000 years in the future, so they must have been wise, intelligent people.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you find something really amazing, super cool thing that you've never seen before, maybe a ball that didn't roll. would you think it just evolved out of nothing? or would you think that some supremely intelligent thing made it? I would believe it was made by something. Hence my claim that
"God made the universe" makes more sense than "it made itself." I don't know what made God, maybe we'll find out when we die.
What do you think is the strongest evidence for evolution. List a thing or 2, I'll see if they make sense to a non evolutionist.
shaun "And there's no way they people who wrote the bible could have predicted that that's how the world will end."
ReplyDeleteSo they were right? Did the world end and you compared the real end with the one in the book and they matched? Don't ruin it for me, I'm waiting for the movie!
shaun "if it is true that they just invented religion, they still managed to get a third of the population to believe them 2000 years in the future."
Are you arguing that if it's fake they did a good job because lots of people fell for it? That's the oddest argumentum ad populum I've ever heard.
shaun "And if you find something really amazing, super cool thing that you've never seen before, maybe a ball that didn't roll. would you think it just evolved out of nothing?"
ReplyDeleteI have found stuff that's really amazing. Not an evolving ball that doesn't roll, but amazing none the less. Example: I was out having a puff late at night and saw a tiny movement out of the corner of my eye. I moved in closer to see what it was. It was the tiniest, most adorable millipede you ever saw. All those body segments forming "S" shapes around obstructions like pebbles, as its many, many legs moved with perfect precision...I thought to myself, "That's a miracle." And it is. It truly is.
That little guy is the current pinnacle in its niche, backed with 800,000,000 years of things going just right.
Many predators lunged at its many predecessors and missed.
Many competitors in its, and its many predecessors, environmental niche just weren't quite good enough to out-survive it.
Many feet from many lumbering beasts of too large a scale in relation to the little millipede and its many little predecessors almost stepped on it.
Many biological diseases and viruses and fungi failed to kill it, and its many predecessors, before it managed to reproduce.
Many dry summers and many dry forest floors failed to completely dry out the little patch of rotting underbrush where it, and its many predecessors before it, waited out the drought.
And it isn't the end. Given time, that little guy's children will face, and may beat, all of the miseries of a universe that literally cares not a whiff about what lives and what dies.
And its childrens progeny will span out over many years and many generations, tiny mutations wiping out entire branches, while those lucky few, oh so few, end up with a beneficial change, like a slight in colouration or longer legs or more sensitive antennae, that gives that line a tiny bit of extra protection from a new predator that had to widen its hunting territory because it was fleeing a beast that, like most things, is a predator to a predator; eating what's below it and hiding from what's above.
All predators fall as prey, eventually.
That one line will split and split and split again; the many lines filled with many fractional variations that may or may not continue help them better survive will split and split some more.
The many lines will mix and separate, mix and separate, mix and separate, until eventually two groups are separated for enough time (and generations upon generations upon generations) that the two no longer recognize each other as family. The two become four. A rainier than normal rainy season five hundred miles away washes down a single valley from the mountains to the sea, taking an single line of little millipedes with it.
The rest continue to mix, continue to survive, continue to separate, continue to thrive.
And none of it requires a god.
Any god.
Yours, his, theirs.
None.
Life...even on this ball of mud and sand and snow and sea, while a mere hair's breadth away lurks a vacuum that doesn't tolerate life at all, orbiting a sun that's this close to killing it, protected from that sun by a magnetic shield that flips and flops and lets in just enough solar radiation to cause just enough mutation, but not so much that everything gets cancer and dies...it just is.
Life is a miracle that doesn't require a miracle. It's an infinite line with no map and no goal, with infinite branches with no maps and no goals, from the distance past through the present to the future, and it never reaches the finish.
Life is racing against itself to win a race that never ends.
Man is not the epitome of life; the peak will never be reached.
And none of it requires a god. The mere concept of god demeans everything that the billions of predecessors went through to end up (before moving on) at that one beautiful, tiny millipede, temporarily spooked when my moments took it from shadow to light, giving me just enough time to marvel at the genius who created it, pause, and marvel even more that there was nothing behind its little life except the billions of lives that came before it. And the billions of things that died to feed those lives. And the billions of things that died to feed those lives. God or gods. He, she, it, or them did nothing to help that little millipede find a snack and a place to rest its many, many weary feet. God or gods did nothing for it, or its parents, or their parents, or their parents. It got here anyway.
Keep your gods. I've got this millipede.
Shaun I will come down to you level. So I will dumb this down for you to understand. Your (are you still with at this point) an idoit!
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot pyramidhead, means a lot coming from the descendant of a molten rock.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how the world will end, but a nuclear war would be a decent guess. A much better guess than the idea that everything will shrink back down into a 'singularity'. I'm not saying if the bible is fake, they did a good job writing it. I'm asking how would you make sense of the things in the bible, since you claim it was faked 2000 years ago.
ReplyDeleteWhat you wrote about the millipede didn't have a shred of evidence for evolution, it's just a testament to the abilities of God. It survived 6000 years because God designed it to do that. You can't show that God did nothing for it, neither can you show that evolution did.
Try again.
shaun "I don't know how the world will end, but a nuclear war would be a decent guess."
ReplyDeleteA reasonable assumption, although my bet is on Death. Famine and pestilence have pretty good odds, as well. War is so passe. Also, remind me later not to let you near my nuclear arsenal.
shaun "I'm asking how would you make sense of the things in the bible..."
I don't make sense of it. It's a mess.
It's wordy,
it's confusing,
it's got no rhythm (now, this is just blue sky thinking here, but you'd figure that an infinite god who really wants us to spend eternity with him would take some time out for a course on prose or two. Genesis flows. Song of songs flows. The rest? Not so much. Revelations? It manages to make a mess of the apocalypse. Literally a mess. Even Luther thought it was crap),
it's less of a manual of everything important than a mangled documentary (told by four people who weren't there, two of which based their recollections of events on the writing of the third. The fourth guy was late because he got stuck in traffic) followed by a bunch of letters (Dear Paul: My uppity wife keeps telling me what to do. Can you give me any advice to shut the bitch up?),
it fails to condemn the slavery that the Tanakh explicitly supported (instead settling for the status quo),
Paul is an asshole...there, I said it. Paul is an asshole. Pro-authouritarian, misogynist, body-hating and zealous. The quintessential asshole.
Very little corroborates a story that would, if it were true, have an assload of people writing about it and the events around it (earthquakes might not get too close a look, but earthquakes and the dead getting up and wandering around would be front page all over the Roman Empire, not to mention everyone who saw it who could write would write down "Saw grandpa today. He seemed less dead than usual. Grandma too. Odd. I wonder if one of them Hebrew fellas had anything to do with it...I'll try to ask one of them next time they come around to smash my idols. I sure wish that the Roman governor would clamp down on their shenanigans, perhaps in some sort of Jewish war from the consulship of C. Luccius Telesinus to Imp. Caesar Vespasianus Augustus II, or so (66-70AD)."). Most of the "evidence" for it is poor, at best, whereas the silence that indicates its lack of truth is deafening (Ooo! I've always wanted to use that metaphor!). A mention of "Christus" is virtually useless. A forged passage is more useless still, although I should point out that, as with what follows a little bit below (No! Belower! Up a bit! There!), I have no doubt that the forgers believed that what they wrote is what the historians would have written had they written it.
The story makes no sense. Good people go to heaven? No! Believers to go heaven. Hell? Don't get me started. Infinite punishment for finite crimes is infinitely unjust, no matter how infinite god is. Adam & Eve? What's up with that? If one student fails, it's the student's fault. If the whole class flunks out (of the Garden of Eden, in this case), it's the teacher's.
shaun "...since you claim it was faked 2000 years ago."
I don't claim that it was faked. I'm sure that whoever wrote Mark around 65-70AD believed he that he was writing down the truth. I'm sure that the unnamed writer who read Mark truly believed what he read before he wrote Matthew in 70-100AD. I'm sure that whoever wrote Luke in 85-90 read and believed Mark also. I'm sure that whoever wrote John, around 90-100 believed his words to be the truth. I'm sure that Paul believed every zealous word he wrote, right up to his martyrdom.
None of that, however, makes it true.
shaun "What you wrote about the millipede didn't have a shred of evidence for evolution, it's just a testament to the abilities of God."
Then God works through evolution. We are finally at least partly somewhat in agreement. Mazel tov!
Also, it means that you're not paying attention. I can only unlock the door (through verse, in this case), you have to walk through it. Make sure to turn the handle first. It's a bit sticky, you may have put your shoulder into it.
shaun "It survived 6000 years because God designed it to do that. You can't show that God did nothing for it, neither can you show that evolution did."
6,000 years? You're killing me, man. Go talk to a geologist. Then a paleontologist. Then an astronomer. Then a chemist. Then a biologist. If 1Tim6:20 still makes sense to you, then you should go talk to a psychiatrist.
Admittedly, I'm no poet, but I thought that it illustrated how the natural world works fairly well. Verse isn't my strong suit (for example, it didn't rhyme. Nor did any sentence end in "Nantucket". C'est la vie.). I'm weak at prose, too. Silence, now that's what I'm good at! Woo! /me runs around being silent.
...
It's like we're from two different worlds. I try to be nice in my posts, but I haven't slept in a couple of days, and the kitten on my calendar is telling me to reach through the interweb and smack some logic into you.
Should I listen to my calendar? Would that, like Paul, qualify as divine revelation? Is this Mo's "calendar conversion", where he goes from a polite guy trying to explain things that really aren't so complex when you take away the illusion of design, to a guy who reaches through the tubes of the interweb to do the same? Why is Mo talking about himself in the third person? Should Mo just go to bed?
Still couldn't find evidence for evolution?
ReplyDeleteShaun "Still couldn't find evidence for evolution?"
ReplyDeleteWhat? Have you been reading what I've been writing? I have, and frankly is phenomenal. But then, I am my own worst critic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_biology
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
I hope the damn links aren't too long this time...
I learnt all that stuff in school. Maybe you didn't understand what I was asking, a web page on evolution isn't proof of evolution. It just means that evolutionists know how to use the internet. I hope a wikipedia page didn't convince you of evolution.
ReplyDeleteThere must be some piece of information in you brain, when you think about it, you go "well, that makes the theory of evolution look good". That's what I was asking for.
unless you're on of those people who listen to Richard Dawkins and go "yah, what he said."
shaun "There must be some piece of information in you brain, when you think about it, you go "well, that makes the theory of evolution look good". That's what I was asking for."
ReplyDeletePhylogeny.
Nice try.
ReplyDeletePhylogeny isn't proof of evolution. it's something like the history of evolution. It assumes evolution if correct in the first place. It's wikipedia page, since you're so fond of wikipedia, says it often looks to evolution to fill in it's blanks.
Even a creationist will have more irrefutable evidence for evolution that phylogeny.
you're welcome to try again.
shaun "Phylogeny isn't proof of evolution. it's something like the history of evolution."
ReplyDeleteYou misspoke, it's not the "history of evolution", it's simply "history".
If putting everything down according to when it lived on Earth shows a progression that looks exactly like evolution isn't irrefutable proof evolution, in the very least is a good case for it.
Is chemistry wrong because when you put the elements down by weight and group, it forms a pattern? Well, except for those dastardly lanthanides and actinides...
shaun "It's wikipedia page...says it often looks to evolution to fill in it's blanks."
So, when you dig up a C that looks like an A and also a E, and lived between the times of A and E, does it not follow that B would probably fall somewhere between A and E? And when you find an B that lived between the time of A and C and looks similar to both, does it not follow that it falls in between them?
Yes, there are gaps. There always will be. We can't find everything that ever lived. We can, however, attempt to fill in the puzzle (you don't need all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to know that the vaguely lighthouse-shaped thing in the middle is probably going to be a lighthouse. Nor do you need to complete its base to know that there will probably be a door there.), and we will continue to find more and more pieces of the puzzle.
"The most commonly used methods to infer phylogenies include parsimony, maximum likelihood, and MCMC-based Bayesian inference. Distance-based methods construct trees based on overall similarity which is often assumed to approximate phylogenetic relationships...." emphasis mine, from Wikipedia. I don't particularly like Wikipedia, by the way. It's just a quick way to get okay information.
shaun ."Even a creationist will have more irrefutable evidence for evolution that phylogeny.
What? So creationists have more irrefutable evidence for evolution than phylogeny? Enlighten us!
To close:
Evolution is not irrefutable-anything. It is simply the best theory to fit the data so far. It's supported by evidence from a wide variety of scientific disciplines. It's incomplete evidence, yes, but it's more complete than the evidence for creationism (particularly YEC, which is refuted by the entire universe), because creationism has no evidence.
Lastly: if evolution is eventually proved false, and it could be, that does not make Genesis true.
Phylogenists don't put everything according to when it lived. They put a few things down from what they know, and ask an evolutionist where to put the rest. How do they do the maximum likelihood analysis and all of those other things you mentioned? Simple. they feed a computer the trends of evolution, and then give it a starting point and see if what it comes up with next matches the trend of evolution. Which it certainly will. You could write a software that says 1+1=3, then prove that 1 plus 1 is actually 3 by running the software.
ReplyDeleteIf I were an evolutionist, I would probably say something about the closeness between ape and human DNA.
If evolution is a theory that fits the data, it would be like plotting a 3 dimensional buckyball from two (x,y) coordinates, except a couple thousand times more absurd. Evolution's actually data to fit the theory.
yes, disproving evolution won't prove God, but it'll open up the window a bit, to accept at least the possibility of God.
The variety of science disciplines that give evidence for evolution are all studied by scientists who are like I said before, pre-determined to defend evolution. And there are still scientists who do say evolution is a rubbish theory.
shaun "You could write a software that says 1+1=3, then prove that 1 plus 1 is actually 3 by running the software.."
ReplyDeleteSomeone did write that program. The first line of code starts "In the beginning...". It worked all right for the longest time, but then people started noticing that its truth claims ended up not matching the natural world.
shaun "yes, disproving evolution won't prove God, but it'll open up the window a bit, to accept at least the possibility of God."
If evolution is, then evolution is. If god is, then god is. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
shaun "The variety of science disciplines that give evidence for evolution are all studied by scientists who are like I said before, pre-determined to defend evolution."
Yes, pre-determined. It's on the statement of faith before science class. Plus there's that No Jesus' sign on the door. Pesky scientists! When will they learn that everything they need to know is in the bible?
I just have to say, this whole comment thread is very entertaining. :)
ReplyDeleteconcerned citizen "I just have to say, this whole comment thread is very entertaining. :)"
ReplyDeleteThank you. Our vaudeville act was quite popular back in the day. While most of it just isn't entertaining anymore, like my blackface and Shaun's Curse-of-Hamface, the Who created First? baseball-themed skit, at least, stands the test of time. Indeed, while my half of the skit (John "Monkey Boy" Scopes) has been updated every decade or so to keep up with new discoveries, Shaun's half (William "Six Days" Bryan) continues virtually unchanged. The only time his role really deviated from the norm was when Shaun was out for back surgery in '87. His character was played by an understudy who, if I remember correctly, had a tendency to "...pity the fool that don't believe in Genesis" and buttressed his side of the argument with a well-thought "Shut up, foo'!". Also, he loved it "...when His divine plan comes together.", the last of which should clearly be a Hannibal line, rather than a B.A. Baracas one. But I digress.
I'm making a diorama to commemorate our conversation. It would be done by now, but I ran out of macaroni.
shaun
ReplyDeleteShaun, you sexy YEC you, you're adorable. I carry our dialogue on the this thread in my heart, just to the right of the cockles. The way you ignore what I say and ignore any other resources that I point you to because rationalists prefer an incomplete view of reality to a complete view of a fantasy makes me want to put you in my pocket and keep you safe from harm. I can't promise that I will write more millipede-centric poetry, but I can promise to continue to stumble, mumble and fumble back and forth across line between terse prose and verbose rambling. I'm like that.
On this thread our two separate batches of words together are like a dance; one where I'm a bit drunk and your legs are asleep.
Seriously, I just want to warm you up in the dryer with some fabric softener and squeeze you tight to my chest for ever and ever.
In fact, I'm waiting for whereveritis that you live to legalize gay marriage (I'm assuming that we're both male) so that we can get together and life partner the heck out of each other. I imagine us, on our long nights together, opening a box of wine and having more conversations where you continue to ignore most of the natural world because it can't be jammed in Genesis, and fold, spindle and mutilate what little remains so that it does.
Afterwards we can spoon.
Perhaps one day we will have time to lay down on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire and read some of the Song of Solomon to each other. You can play the God parts and I'll be Israel. Or maybe the divinely-mandated butchery of Joshua will help stoke the fire of your loins?
When the sun goes down, we'll make s'mores and you can romance me with some exotic ukulele music. I'll break out my tambourine. We'll jam on Ebony and Ivory and Reunited, then countdown to Armageddon ("...5...4...3...2...1...1...1...1...checks watch...1...1...1...checks calendar...1...1...1..."
Maybe after a few years together, we can adopt a little baby and raise it all by ourselves in a box, so that the nasty, confusing and cold realities of reality can't intrude. A big cardboard womb, just for our kid. We'll decorate it with a mobile of Jesus casting devils out of men and in to around 2,000 pigs. Then when he or she is grown, he/she can raise his/her kids in that same box. We'll make it a family tradition.
Hugs,
Modusoperandi (not my real name, but I've used it enough times in enough places for a long enough period of time that it practically is anyway)
Wow shaun did it take you and a team of monkeys to come up with that witty comeback! I hope you never breed.
ReplyDeleteNo, actually the tips of my fingers did the thinking. and I've got a much better chance of breeding that a molten rock(The fingers again).
ReplyDeleteModesuperandi.
ReplyDeleteI didn't ignore anything. All the 'proofs' of evolution don't make sense to me. there's always something missing, or something made up, or something that refers back to evolution for proof, and then claims to prove evolution. lots of garbage. and yes, evolution has to change it's story every once in a while, when they can't possibly manipulate the data to fit the theory. The bible on the other hand, hasn't had to change a thing in 2000 years, if you read the King James version, like I do.
And I don't know what all the rest of the rubbish was, It's got nothing to do with evolution, unless you claim homosexuals evolved from heterosexuals. Which would actually imply evolution's trying to put an end to life.
But in the meanwhile feel free to claim you had a better argument that I did.
shaun "...and I've got a much better chance of breeding that a molten rock."
ReplyDeleteKeep in mind that it took that "molten rock" several billion years just to get to microbes. That's "billion", with a "B", not "thousand", with a "whateverletterisitthatthousandstartswith".
shaun "All the 'proofs' of evolution don't make sense to me."
I never gave you proof of evolution. I gave you evidence. There is way more out there in the real world, too. And more is being learned every day.
shaun "...evolution has to change it's story every once in a while, when they can't possibly manipulate the data to fit the theory."
Yes, the theory evolves. As more is learned about the natural world, the theory changes. Sometimes, more complete data supplants old data (like when a dinosaur built on a bone or two [A] is realized to be a different existing dinosaur [B], once a specimen [C] more complete than either [A] or [B] is found [C]).
shaun "...when they can't possibly manipulate the data to fit the theory."
The data changes the theory, not the other way around. You're thinking of creationism. Again.
shaun "The bible on the other hand, hasn't had to change a thing in 2000 years...."
It's just as wrong now as it ever was.
shaun "...if you read the King James version, like I do."
Ah, yes. KJV only. "If it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me", I believe the urban myth goes. Or maybe that was Paul. Ringo?
shaun "And I don't know what all the rest of the rubbish was, It's got nothing to do with evolution, unless you claim homosexuals evolved from heterosexuals."
It's not nothing to do with evolution. It could, as homosexuality in the animal is more widespread than we though it was thirty years ago (have you ever seen the story about the male penguin couple that raised an abandoned egg? A-friggin-dorable!), but in this case, probably not.
Simply put, I'm gay for you, man. Be gentle.
shaun "But in the meanwhile feel free to claim you had a better argument that I did."
Okay. An argument based on incomplete evidence is better than one based on no evidence at all.
Move on please.
ReplyDeleteThis is a warning. I've been thinking about shutting down commentary for (my) posts that just ramble on and don't stick to the premise of the post. Sorry, but it's kind of irritating.
I wrote the post for a reason.
Billion, trillion, trecentillion, who cares? You still claim you evolved from a molten rock. you never game any poofs for evolution cos there aren't any, the evidence doesn't make much sense either, until it's been twisted to fit evolution. Many times 'evidence' for evolution has been faked by over zealous evolutionists. I mean, I would be embarrassed if I were an evolutionist.
ReplyDeleteThe KJV bible has never been proven wrong, funnily enough, it's the Muslims who at least come close, they still fail. The bible was never wrong, unlike the theory of evolution, which is getting wronger by the day.
I don't know what Larro's complaining about, the post was about wrongness right? I think evolution's wrong and Modesuperandi thinks I'm wrong, there you go, wrongness. We're discussing it. Anyone got evidence against creation? let me hear it. maybe there is somewhere.
shaun On practically everything you've ever posted here.
ReplyDeleteYou're not listening. You ask. I try to explain. You ignore me. You ask. I provide links to pages with more and better information. You ignore and obfuscate and distract.
You ask for evidence. I give you evidence. You ignore it. You ask for evidence. I give you evidence. You say "That's not proof", and ignore it.
No, it's not proof. It's evidence. One piece of evidence points in a direction. Another, too. Still another, and another. All of it points to evolution, with the exception of a few easily explained variants (which I explained and linked. You ignored them). All of it points to an old universe. None of it points to Genesis.
If you believe in creationism, bring some evidence. "In the beginning..." is not evidence. It's a creation myth based on what people who knew virtually nothing knew. As such, most of the truth claims of Genesis have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be false, whether through direct evidence against, or a lack of evidence for. Continuing to say that it is so doesn't make it so. If you have reality-based evidence, bring it, just make sure that it hasn't already been debunked before you bring it here.
Instead, you bring nothing to the table. You say "But evolution says 'this'. How can it be true if 'that'?" We attempt explain that 'that' is based on not understanding 'this', and then attempt explain 'this' and present information from other sources that also explain 'this'. You ignore all of it.
For example: "You still want to believe you evolved from a rock..., :"...and I've got a much better chance of breeding that a molten rock." & "You still claim you evolved from a molten rock." are based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Evolution claims no such thing. No living thing evolved from a rock, molten or otherwise. As the theory of abiogenesis presently stands, life came from non-life in Earth's primordial sea, a soup of the building blocks of life. Over many millions of years these blocks combined to more and more complex forms, like Lego, except with amino acids. Eventually (and this is a big gap, admittedly) over more millions of years, these self-replicating strands became simple life.
Will the theory change as we learn more? Of course. It wouldn't be science if it didn't adapt to new information. Modern abiogenesis theory is less than a century old and will gradually fill the gap in.
Even the very definition of life may change when we explore that grey area between amino acids and single-celled organisms, which blows my mind.
I described our interaction to a friend who spends more time on this interweb thing than I, and he says that you are a troll. I told him that you neither force travelers to answer questions before you'll let them cross a bridge, nor do you eat them if they answer incorrectly. He laughed a hearty laugh before telling me that you're an internet troll, and that an internet troll (in your case the sub-species of "YEC Christian troll"), "trolls" the internet looking for trouble. You, apparently, didn't come here looking for information. You didn't even come here to convert us to your beliefs. Instead, you came here to leech off my good-nature, baiting me and waiting for me to snap at you, so that you could run back to your little box with "proof" that "we" (atheists, rationalists and secular humanists) are all vicious, god-hating, foul-mouthed, close-minded and ignorant. This would mean that you could go back to living in your box, comfortable in the knowledge that the mean outside world really is against you. I'm not. We're here to help. People are good, generally.
Take advantage of our generousity, but don't take advantage of us, it's unchristian.
Although I have descended somewhat to poke fun, I'm not going to give you the martyrdom that you're seeking. You're not worth it. Nobody is worth compromising my humanity and amicable nature over.
If you have evidence, bring it. If you have evidence against evolution, check the internet before you come here, because (and this is the last time I'm going to say this) all common creationist arguments against subjects like evolution and an old universe are based on bad logic and bad, grossly distorted or obsolete information. As such, all common creationist arguments have already been debunked.
If you're here to learn and discuss, I will continue to welcome you. If, however, you continue to dig up creationist tropes about the rational world and then ignore the generally simple rebuttals, my time is better spent on other things.
Let's not change the topic, i never tried to prove creation, only to show why evolution was nonsense. I'll say however, that my belief in creation is mostly faith, and you can't blame me, that's what religion is. And I haven't seen any evidence against creation.
ReplyDeleteI asked for evidence, you gave me a bunch of evolutionist web pages, that's not evidence. In that case the bible is evidence for Jesus, read it.
I asked you to tell me why you believe in evolution, a reason from your mind, and a got a bunch of web pages again, then I got phylogeny, which I addressed, and explained why it does not come close to being conclusive evidence for evolution.
Lastly, don't write such long comments, I'll read your long comments when I feel you has some substance. I got better things to do with my time too.
shaun "Lastly, don't write such long comments.
ReplyDeleteYou're not the boss of me. If it takes me a decade to explain how to tie my shoes, then it takes me a decade to explain how to tie my shoes.
That being said, I will try to be more terse, or less verbose.
shaun "I asked for evidence, you gave me a bunch of evolutionist web pages, that's not evidence
Evidence is evidence. If the real world is X, the real world is X.
Can it be distorted? Yes. Most creationist tropes have been logically debunked precisely because they are based on distorting evidence.
shaun "I asked you to tell me why you believe in evolution, a reason from your mind"
...and I wrote a poem (from my head), based on the real world, that illustrated natural selection and common descent/speciation.
You just want a reason? Evolution fits.
shaun Things like this - "What do you think is the strongest evidence for evolution. List a thing or 2..."
Here you go:
*evidence of common descent:
**The origins and divergence of Drosophila simulans and close relatives D. mauritiana and D. sechellia
**Pollinator preference and the evolution of floral traits in monkeyflowers (Mimulus)
*Observed speciation
Wups, that last one should be:
ReplyDelete*Observed speciation
""Three species of wildflowers called goatsbeards were introduced to the United States from Europe shortly after the turn of the century. Within a few decades their populations expanded and began to encounter one another in the American West. Whenever mixed populations occurred, the specied interbred (hybridizing) producing sterile hybrid offspring. Suddenly, in the late forties two new species of goatsbeard appeared near Pullman, Washington. Although the new species were similar in appearance to the hybrids, they produced fertile offspring. The evolutionary process had created a separate species that could reproduce but not mate with the goatsbeard plants from which it had evolved."
ReplyDelete(from an article in Scientific American)
I think I'm starting why you believe in evolution. I'll leave it at that.
ReplyDeleteStarting to understand why you believe in evolution*
ReplyDelete