There are so many things I hate about these email FWD: FWD: FWD: lists..

First, some of the items are just bullshit or stupid. "Our lives were governed by the Ten Commandments." Right. As if it's only in the last 58 years that people started killing each other, stealing from each other, sleeping with each others' spouses, etc. It's bullshit. "We'd never heard of yogurt." Yogurt was first sold commercially in the US in 1929, and yogurt itself is millennia old. So, what's the point?

Second, some of the items are clearly good things. This person is complaining about polio shots? Gee, sorry we had to ruin your perfect America so that people like my Grandma could live an extra 80 years. Jerk.

Third, some of the items are just wrong. Draft dodgers? They had them in the Civil War, and I can't imagine there's ever been a draft without a draft dodger.

Then, some of the items are meaningless. Shit cost a nickel? Car cost $600? Gas cost 11 cents? Fantastic. What were you making back then, 50 cents an hour?

Next, the list completely leaves off things like improvements in race relations, etc.

Next, this list is an e-mail forward! Isn't there a certain irony in sending an email bitching and moaning about how software is now a word?

Last, this kind of list could have been written 58 years ago about how much things have deteriorated since 1889. Or in 1889 about how much things have deteriorated since 1831. Or in pretty much any year, about how awful these modern times are. Someone will probably write one is 2060 about how back when we were young, "red" was just a color and not a dangerous street drug, and we used to use two machines to do our laundry, and we didn't have an AIDS cure, and we'd never heard of matar paneer, and the internet was only on computers, and blah blah blah.


Obviously, none of this vitriol is directed at you, TMH, I'm just ranting...

grandpa wrote:pretty scary if you think about it and pretty sad at the same time.

precisely what i think about the fact that anyone would take that email seriously. it's not terribly accurate, i'm afraid.

it's hard to be ignorant anymore. that is the thing.

back 'in the day,' people like gramps had "never heard of" a lot of things. and they could pretend that drugs and homos and black people didn't exist and no one was fucking or beating one's spouse or blaspheming in some manner. can't avoid knowing about such things today.

tmh, a lot of people are gonna dump on your poor gramps

but my gramps would probably agree with most of what he said

it has to be a bitch, having the world rev past you. i intend to avoid this feeling, to the extent it is possible.

Debating nutball creationists is fucking excruciating, I might even say futile as the practice of debate rewards truth, reason and logic. Creationists would not be creationists if they valued truth, reason and logic.

A friend of mine from high school who's a doctoral candidate at Dartmouth calls Dr. Dino ("creation scientist" Kent Hovind) every week on his radio show and attempts to debate him. He then posts these debates online. Though frequently entertaining, it proves that these people cannot be reasoned with as their stance is in itself unreasonable. Jared's fighting the good fight, but getting absolutely nowhere with this dumbshit and his listeners.

But then again, we don't want to give in to these fucks. We can't. So what to do? I don't know.

And I'd like to say that I am fucking sick as hell of reading creationists or creationist sympathizers fire back with the "evolution is a religion" bullshit.

STOP IT.

[qoute]philosophies, like religions, are held personally, and are not subject to fact-checking. [/quote]

i think may philosphers would disagree... even if not, so do i: philiosophy, unlike religion, should take nothing for granted, should be able to logically explain any statement it makes. so it is a subcject of fact checkin, just like science. for example when someone wonders why does god allow bad things to happen, he is not on the therythory of philosophy - this is theology. but when someone tries to come up with a proof which would show that god exists - yes, this is philiosophy.
of course, lots of people's thoughts that are labeled as "philosophy" don't implement this, but it's just a matter of mislabeling, just like saying that "crationism is science". it is not and that's it.

[qoute] y'all are relying on humanity to be moral and make good decisions in a world free of religion...
do you really think that's how it would work out? do you believe that? you're basically saying you want to rely on every jackass out there (the vast majority of which believe in God and religion, which by your words makes the insane and idiotic -- this is the vast majority of people) and you're gonna cut them free to go with whatever they think is best, in their own opinion, rather than having them tag along with the morals and virtues that they learned from their religious texts and religious leaders... you're going to cut loose these insane idiots and then trust them to steer society... what am i missing?
[/quote]

well first of majority of people ignores what they religion says about any given subject. actually they don't evem seem to care, its just something its not on their minds. so what would happend if we somehow replaced religion based morality with philosophy based morality and said "from now on this is your holy book"? nothing, null, nada. people would still act like pigs most of the time and really beauitifull every now and then. so we (or at least i) we are not "relying on humanity to be moral and make good decisions in a world free of religion".
the only way of making people act better would be to convince them to read the book which shows the moral system we want to be suprerior and then explain this to them. this is whas the approach of many philosophers: to act moral people have to understand and accecpt why doing some things is moral, and doing others is not. needles to say that saying "this is what god says. obey or die" is not a way to achieve it. so this why philiosophy based morality is suprerior - no one puts a gun into your head. if you don't like something you can argue against, and prove it wrong if you're arguments are stronger. christianity has to prove the fundament of it's morality, god, otherwise it has no right to demand anyone to follow it what it says.
...rather than having them tag along with the morals and virtues that they learned from their religious texts and religious leaders.
no. all i say is "keep this stuff out of my face or EXPLAIN why i should take it".
obvioslu something like this (having a whole society smart enough to understand why they should act certain way) will never happen, it's a fairy tale. insane idiot will remain and insane idiot no matter to which church he will go. hitler was a christain. stalin was an atheist. in most cases morality stands very low on people's priority list, and this will never change.

tim,

yes, i hope i successfully qualified that i don't agree with everything in my g-pa's email (which again, he's into forwarding all manner of stuff, most of which is pretty bogus and filled with misinformation) but my point was not to say "this is all correct" so much as to illustrate the way people, many *good* people, can look at religion vs science/technology and see tech/sci as fucked up and a source of neverending and increasingly wicked ills.

also, i hope folks don't mind that on this thread i've been trying to assert the positions that i would expect from the people that are being repeatedly condemned here, the dumbass Creationist/ID guy. i hope i've done at least a passable job.

obviously i love some of the products of science, like electric guitars and dr pepper. and while i have no problem envisioning how the process of evolution itself could have been created, along with other unexplainable aspects of our perceived reality, by some sort of super being/force/essence/whatnot that people the world over have, thoughout history, called "God" by one name or another. i also have no problem seeing how readily intelligent people will accept science and its products as incontrovertably "good" things, when in fact that is a very debatable subject, something i tried to address here but didn't do very cleanly at all.

zut alors!!

emmanuelle cunt wrote:hitler was a christain. stalin was an atheist. in most cases morality stands very low on people's priority list, and this will never change.

brilliant! Hitler was a Christian?!?! he followed a religion that worshed a Jew as the son of God?!?!? HA HA!!! yeah, um, right...

well he concsidered himself as christain, or at least as a god (yes, this god) believer. there is tons of stuff to read on it, and i was never interested enough to do it.

...

solum wrote:Surely the method of science is all about having an agenda: progress, advancement, knowledge, etc etc. Science is inextricably tied to the purposes of science, whatever you consider those to be.

I think the same word is being used to mean different things. Science, rightly understood, is nothing more or less than a process by which we understand more fully and accurately the nature of the world around us. I suppose you could say that the agenda of science is progress and advancement (of knowledge), in the same sense that the agenda of digging is more holes. I don't know how useful a statement that is to make. If some scientists, or some diggers, have agendas beyond that, that's one thing. But science itself is value-neutral.

Religious fantasy, coming soon to a science classroom near you:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050810/us_ ... olution_dc

The Kid wrote:Religious fantasy, coming soon to a science classroom near you:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050810/us_ ... olution_dc

Alarming. The kind of thing that would force me to think about moving if it happened here.

And Reuters, just like everybody else, confuses balance for fairness.