The Kid wrote:

kenoki wrote:
That's a lot different than being told by your entire network of people from day 1 that the world was created one way and by one thing and that is the center of your existance, and then have that picked apart by yr only other social and educational network. Which do you believe? How do you believe both? I'm saying, these questions exist sure as pages in a textbook (perhaps in conjunction with) and both can be relevent topics at the same time.

The problem is that the theories of evolution and natural selection are fundamentally incompatible with creationism. And make no mistake, "intelligent design" is a trojan horse full of creationist bullshit.
They can't both be given equal "relevance" at the same time unless you think science and religious fantasy are the same thing.
It's too bad that kids are born into families that teach them that the world is 5,000 years old and that Eve was made from Adams rib, blah blah blah insane nonsense blah blah.
That's not my problem, nor should it be the problem of the country's public schools.
Fundamentalists have always had the option of home-schooling their kids, if they want to protect them from facts. But it's not really about "equal time" for "competing theories," it's about fundamentalists trying to impose their fucked up fantasies on the entirety of the population. That's how it works. Jesus speaks to them, so your scientific method is meaningless.
It's a zero-sum game, there is no compromise. Evolutionary biology won't become any more valid or acceptable in their eyes because it's in the chapter next to the creation story.

The Kid, I feel like we are involved in two separate arguments and you are using my quote, which bears virtually no relevance to yours, as a jumping point... I am not comparing the scientific relevance of evolution v. creationism (though I am getting a little tired of typing those words). I am not exploring the nuances that could or could not be as one. I don't know much about the official topic of "Intellectual Design" except that if there is a God, I suspect he would be smart enough to create everything by the evolutionary design and felt humans weren't down enough to spell it out to 4000 years ago.

But again, that is not my point... now I have a new point that sort of goes along with my old point which is... when you divide the fundamentalists from the "scientists" "realists" or whatever the fuck... yr doing just that, maintaining a divide rather than setting up a bridge for people to come over and live in your world. If that bridge is "Intellectual Design," however fallible by the designated skeptic, then I think that is ok. You could consider it a trojan horse, I suppose... or you could look at it from the glass half full perspective and say, well there's a stepping stone I didn't hear about in bible study.

But again, I am not talking about discussing Intellectual Design or the Origin of Man under the thumb of a Supreme Being as part of the study guide for finals. I am just saying that it shouldn't be so horrible to be discussed informally in a classroom full of peers from different backgrounds... I don't know about you but I did not go from believing one thing to believing the exact opposite all at once... It took some time, and I like to have believe that the same time is available to others WHILE still gaining the soil-tracked facts of the universe. And I also hope every fundamentalists child isn't sent to home-school just because their parents are misguided, perpetuating a new crop of fundamentalists to beotch about.

If you do not think a public classroom is the place for the traditional protestant values this country was founded upon to be questioned, mulled over and inevitably re-evaluated... then, where else?

I'm not joking, but in Europe and Australasia this isn't something that is open to debate. You yanks look like fucking cavemen. As I said, get angry and organise or the next time you look up you'll have a gun to your head and someone handing you a Bible. Christians are more dangerous than Nazis.

kenoki wrote: when you divide the fundamentalists from the "scientists" "realists" or whatever the fuck... yr doing just that, maintaining a divide rather than setting up a bridge for people to come over and live in your world. If that bridge is "Intellectual Design," however fallible by the designated skeptic, then I think that is ok. You could consider it a trojan horse, I suppose... or you could look at it from the glass half full perspective and say, well there's a stepping stone I didn't hear about in bible study.

Giving creationism any veneer of scientific credibility isn't "creating a bridge," it's weakening the standards of what passes for science. If we make an exception for creationism, then the value of all scientific discourse is compromised, because we have made it clear that it is okay to make shit up out of nowhere and lie about it.

Creationism isn't science. It is a magical fantasy. The distinction is important, and must not be ignored for reasons of political expediency. It is more important than any temporary political concerns.

You won't hear about evolution in bible study, so we must not allow biology class to become another version of bible study.

Gramsci wrote:As I said, get angry and organise or the next time you look up you'll have a gun to your head and someone handing you a Bible. Christians are more dangerous than Nazis.

uh oh. i don't have a scienticious factuality for you on this one, but i would estimate that since you wrote this, i've looked up dozens of times. and just to play it safe, i have, with a noteworthy though not factually quantifiable degree of attention, "looked up" several times *after* reading your message. i even did it both of the ways that immediately came to mind... first by looking down, and then raising my gaze. then by looking, literally, up. and i am still the only one here...

as far as the Nazis and the Hitlers being brought into this thread... good for you guys. you are exagerating the "facts" of the current situation, the laws of this country as they stand today, making your own bitchen slipperly slope. or straw man, or whatever you call it when people start equating Bush and the Bushies with Hitler and his crew. with the facts that are available to you, to me, to "us" (though "They" know more) today, you will have a hard time illustrating how Bush is comparable to Hitler. Bush has not actively engaged in an overt and unrepented genocide, or at least not one that killed nearly as many people as the Nazis did.

please don't think i'm defending Bush here, i have a whole bunch of issues with him, and for that matter don't believe it's actually *him* behind all the stuff we're discussing today. i don't think he's smart enough to control public discourse like what we see here today. this guy got a bunch of C's in college, right? i'm just saying if we're talking about facts, let's stick to facts then. i'm gonna stop talking about facts part of the way through this message, so be forewarned.

i would be interested to look back on this week from six months or three years in the future. i wonder what it is that's actually going on right now that they don't want us thinking about. i'm interested in the russian sub marooning that we're in the midst of right now. but i am to believing she is much bigger than these.

as long as this thread has already long since been Hitlered, i'd like to point out a couple of couterarguments to some of the brilliantly played points that have been made on this thread.

if we are talking about the Nazis, i am putting forth the assertion that during the historically breif period in which the Nazis were doing their thing, they made a magnitudally significant mark on science, both through the developments that were made in the war to stop them (such as the US developing nuclear technology, even the fact that they brough the subject of Eugenics and Genetics and all such things into public consciousness. that was *them* that really got us all talking and thinking about it, no?), and as much so the massive progress science experienced in their cold, cold hands. they even invented the rocket which is what has us now learning (most folks learning it now) about how our shuttle program is on the out. space travel itself, and satellite technology as well, i.e. Satellite TV, GPS, Satellite data communication in general, things like the Hubble Telescope, which is also on the out, right, all these things owe their very existence to Adolph Fucking Hitler. directly. his crew. this is the road of experimentation without decency. if you could separate your own personal feelings from your actions, and you pursued science, you would *absolutely* engage in vivisection. *absolutely*. science does not tell you it is "wrong" to cut someone to pieces while they're alive. to the contrary, science provides the framework and context in which this is an extremely valuable thing to do. it can be argued that one of the main roles of religion is to teach the morals that humans need to survive in a civil manner. religion is the one that told us not to kill each other, back in a day when people killed people all the time and rather than fear jail they feared, well, being killed. religion is the worldwide force that told people they were wrong to do that. because that's religion's house. right and wrong. true and false belong to science, but right and wrong belong to religion. and by proxy, government. if there are examples of Atheistic societies that outlawed murder or theft on any noteworthy level, please let me know, i need to be aware of their existence. so that's a light in which science looks really, really bad and religion looks like the key. so thank you all for talking about the Nazis.

sociologically, i will bring up the argument that part of the reason shit like Creationism and religion in general are so tightly held by the overwhelming majority of human beings (is this not correct?) is that they can look at where we are today, and where we were in the past, and see things in a light where the old days (centuries even millenia ago) are romantic, struggling and working hard to live and survive, learning to farm, learning to hunt, learning to be human. and look at today and see a bunch of snotnose punk kids, a bunch of old people living WAY too long in medical dorms where they are mistreated badly (and who could stand to be surrounded by dying, delerious, often mean old people, tending to their needs, listening to them complain, wiping up their shit-covered asses) and guns guns guns, and people being so fucking fat, and so fucking lazy, and being such fucking pollution in so many ways, and find our recent, massive, GIGA-fast breakthrough after breakthrough in every discipline (pronounced JIGGAH-fast, for dramatic effect, q.v. BttF)... it's really easy to pin all that shit on science. in fact, all of the things i bring up and way, WAY more, all of these things can be directly pinned on a specific series of scientific breakthroughs. we would not be fat were it not for things like understanding and applying hormones to processed dead animals, and the teevee. and the internet.

science is very, very easy to see as just as heinous as religion. i submit to you, guy who argues till he's bleeding out his ears that religion is the WORST thing out there... without science, the worlds holy wars would be fought with the same vigor and enthusiasm as today, because that's a hallmark of human beings, to have beliefs and to fight about them, but they would be fought with fists or unsharpened sticks and rocks, rather than nukes, genetically wikkedly engineered diseases, RPG's and guns. bombs on trains. there would be no fucking bombs on trains without science. there would be no people dying in car accidents without lots and lots of science. there also would not be people living twenty or fifty years longer than they had evolved to live. don't tell me that human civilization has evolved so much in the past 1,000 years that we deserve to be on every inhabitable corner of this earth, and space, that we somehow should now be living an extra hundred percent of our lifespan. it's completely outside evolution. it's so much less romantic to think of that, isn't it? in short, human evolution is easily demonstrated to be a terrible, terrible process by which all new terrors are unleashed on the earth. yes, i am not bringing up any of the great things we get from science, like corn syrup products, and tube amps, and cameras. you guys are essentially all already arguing the "science is a good thing" position.

okay, so also, somebody please somehow tie in Descartes' Meditations and how it's relevant to the discussion of religion versus science and the nature of man's monitoring and measuring of the physical world during the scientific process. just for all the readers here that haven't taken college-level philosophy yet. you know who you are. Salut, not yet in college kids! you have many wonders yet to discover!

also, i find it funny to think about this, i hope somebody else finds it funny. to think about. if you take a subatomic particle, and use the best science in the whole world, you can't simultaneously know where it is *and* where it's going at what rate. right? but then if you put a whole shitload of them together, THEN you can know. the basis of so many scientific processes involves making such measurements. land a rocket on the moon without ever knowing exactly where it is and at what rate it's moving in what direction. never happen. we *totally* have to know that about our rocket. but then, the rocket is made up of a gazillion things where we can never know that about them. isn't that funny? i dunno, i find that funny. it seems about as sensible to me as the thing with the three doors and changing your pick for better odds. but that's science for you! sometimes it makes no sense.

and to answer the primary issue of this thread, and i say this with a broken heart for humanity, but i think we're past the point where i care. i'm at that point again where if i think about the biggest picture i can picture, humans, humanity, civilization, studying us while attempting my best to put on the eyes of an outsider with a telescope, i think we're past the point where it resolves in a nice long-term more permanent evolutionary process. cause y'know at the rate humans reproduce, evolution takes a LONG time, a LONG time before any appreciable evolution occurs, plus with medecine keeping us alive forever, evolution becomes more about the ability to find a niche in the machine where we end the game with a 401k (social security! heh!) and some kinda health insurance. i don't think that shit matter so much anymore. it's mainly cause of breakthroughs like jet engines, and GPS, and nukeular bombs, and the fact that stuff like "resources" and "infrastructure" and "the biggest, most nastiest guns" do NOT belong to the people, or even to the People's Best Interest, whatever that might be. i think it resolves in mass destruction. i can't believe that we've been heading there, globally, for the past 50 years for NO GOOD REASON.

as evidence you can use to discount me more readily, the most exciting theories to me are the ones where intelligent design is being taught because it lays the groundwork for humans living in a world with (cue spooky SFX) alien lifeforms!!!! and where the government seizes increasing control over societal issues it has no reason seizing control of, in ways that don't really serve la Gente, the cognoscenti find increasingly appalling, because Americans are so fucking docile, reserved, and tired that we're *NEVER* gonna rise up in revolution... and it's the only thing that can stop progress like you're seeing made by the Bushies.

when there's another terrorist attack, and there probably will be, right?, just watch to see how things change following that. watch for the uncommonly-if-not-rarely-discussed Patriot Act to change. watch the *average* American get even more conservative, freaked out, financially unstable (and when we lose our money, that fucks us up so bad, more than anything except crazy stuff like death or dismemberment), racist, and Looking To God for answers, protection, comfort, assistance, you name it.

*THAT'S* how smart the Bushies are. and even way smarter, i'll bet.

VIVA LA GENTE!!!!

It seems to me that this whole issue would be moot if the state didn't run the schools. I think most objections revolve around the idea that it would be a government mandated policy.

steve wrote:

kenoki wrote: when you divide the fundamentalists from the "scientists" "realists" or whatever the fuck... yr doing just that, maintaining a divide rather than setting up a bridge for people to come over and live in your world. If that bridge is "Intellectual Design," however fallible by the designated skeptic, then I think that is ok. You could consider it a trojan horse, I suppose... or you could look at it from the glass half full perspective and say, well there's a stepping stone I didn't hear about in bible study.

Giving creationism any veneer of scientific credibility isn't "creating a bridge," it's weakening the standards of what passes for science. If we make an exception for creationism, then the value of all scientific discourse is compromised, because we have made it clear that it is okay to make shit up out of nowhere and lie about it.

Creationism isn't science. It is a magical fantasy. The distinction is important, and must not be ignored for reasons of political expediency. It is more important than any temporary political concerns.

You won't hear about evolution in bible study, so we must not allow biology class to become another version of bible study.

No no... no no wait. I wasn't saying Creationism is the bridge. That is the camp I'm hoping will step onto the bridge (or just skip it altogether and hang with us in nature's scientific harmony). I'm saying Intelligent Design is the bridge, which is kind of insane but equally as insanely awesome. With Creationism we're talking God popping a globe out his ass 4000 years ago. With ID we're talking a 5 billion year old world intelligently created by maybe God but maybe also ALIENS.

I definitely think going from no science + God to yes science + aliens is a step in the right direction!! Should it be mandatory learning side-by-side with evolution? I think not. Should it be a brief paragraph in the section highlighting all the theories behind and opposed to evolution? It's an interesting idea...

toomanyhelicopters wrote:science is very, very easy to see as just as heinous as religion.

Pure bullshit.

Science is a method, not an orthodoxy. It has no agenda. It pursues the truth, insomuch as we are capable of perceiving it. Religion cannot be neutral, as its "truth" is received wisdom and comes direct from an infallible God. Science has no choice but to be neutral, because it must be wrong first in order to be right. Science cannot abide ideas that cannot be challenged. The method of challenging them is science.

Forgive me if you made (and I overlooked) a more reasoned argument in your post. This is the only sentence I read, and it was pure bullshit.

yes steve, you're right, my statement as made is bullshit. if you replace the word "science" with "the fruits of science", then is maybe not so bullshit.

You know, I saw this topic peeking out at me and I says to myself, I says:

"jesus... a 6 page post in one day?

it has to be about:
1. GW
2. God
3. Both."

...anyway, back to my movie.

carry on!

wiggins wrote:"jesus... a 6 page post in one day?

it has to be about:
1. GW
2. God
3. Both."

And the thread was already Hitlered by the start of the fifth page!

What progress! We must all have been created by one really intelligent fucker.