God said it, I believe it, that settles it! - Page 3

Gee, the version of evolution I understand doesn't expect, or need to expect, biology to be "fine-tuned", just good enough to get by and survive. The evolutionary theory I'm aware of in fact expects things like junk DNA and vestigial organs -- while it's also being smart enough to know that some of what looks like junk and looks vestigial now might merely have useful functionality we haven't discovered yet.


I wonder if the biologists these universities turn out will be as impressive as the as all those University of Jesus lawyers the Bushies packed the Department of Justice with. Maybe now that Laura Goodling is out of a job at the DoJ, she can go back to Messiah and pick up a PhD in Christian Biology for her next stunning career.


Poor ickle downtrodden Christians, can't make it in the real world, so they've got to build their own protective bubble world instead.


Odd, I don't recall how early Christians had to go off and build themselves a parallel protective bubble world before being able to supplant Roman paganism, which was pretty weak at the time anyway. Nor do I recall a great flourishing of the sciences that came with the ascendancy of Christianity. In fact, I recall something of the opposite effect.

Intelligent Design, Science Education, and Public Reason

Yes, but how many vestigial organs are there today? What if there is no Junk DNA at all? Why not just go find what the designer left us to discover, and skip the middle part? The belief in a predictable universe drove science in the Christian West for this very reason. segovius can tell you about the other guys.


Do they have a Jesus Bar Exam for the fundies, and another one for the 'real' attorneys? (I don't think Bill Marr prepared you to answer that.)


I don't remember the world coming to an end when the home/private schoolers pulled 10-15% of the school-age kids from the system.



The Christians had their own social system in many respects, charities, courts etc. (the pagans knew they could get justice from the Christian 'judges' and would use them.) And it wasn't a protective bubble, they simply went about their business, while the existing systems rotted away.


Yes, I thank the Protestants for making all that possible, too.

Excellent. Then we can publicly humiliate:

Illegal Aliens, so that others would not want to break the law to get here.
Gays, so that those who are questioning would stop it.
LIberals, so that we could all see what happens when you try to take money from others for your own purposes.
Jews, for the same reason as Christians.
You, so that others can see what happens when you make stupid, intolerant posts while demanding toleration for other groups.

Sounds great.

Its been happening since the early 1980s. Most Christians are already starting their own institutions separate from those that are hostile to their faith. Take homeschooling, for example.

Asshole. You'd consider the same (just like the gay movement, or any other movement for that matter has done) if your particular faith or characteristic was under perpetual assault, by, uh, people like, uh.. YOU.

A "counterattack" is not the answer right? Toleration and bridge building and all that, right?
Are you part of the ongoing war or part of the solution?

No, but it sure helps if your a member of the Federalist Society (check mark beside your name on GWB, et. al. list of appointees) or if you received your law degree from Regent University, (founded by Pat Robertson) like Monica Goodling. There are 150 graduates of the Regent law school in the White House.


TFTFY!

Yes, but that's back to politics, not whether they can pass the Bar Exam. You still bury them 12 feet, rather than the usual six, because deep, down, they're not that bad.

We're in PO are we not? This whole thread is basically about the politics of disinformation as practiced by the usual suspects.





Regent University Law school

Please see the previous link I posted;

Intelligent Design, Science Education, and Public Reason

Nooooooooo!, franksargent, I can't. I did look at the TOC (which has pagination errors, btw), 'the pedigree of intelligent ID' hells bells, the movement is neonatal at this point. 'Teach the controversy' is naïve, at best.

Short three-round burts of consise points, the endless linking could go one forever. Unless it's an Op-ed in the WSj, that is.

The fact that a school is "4th tier" has little to do with the quality of its law students.

What's troubling is the agenda those students were hired to help further.

23


What if the moon is made out of green cheese? What then, smart guy?


Because assuming a designer first is kind of begging the question? Because assuming a designer has no explanatory value whatsoever, other than adding an extraneous entity (as in those things you shouldn't needlessly multiply) which becomes nothing more than a black box -- a God of the Gaps -- to which one assigns all processes one doesn't understand, and which by definition isn't subject to further experimental examination of any sort? Because of all the things in biology which look like colossally stupid "design", if one assumes an intelligence being at work behind the "design"?


Belief in a shortcut to India drove Columbus and other explorers to find the New World. It seems the motivation for the search doesn't always match the things that are found. Would you like to recommend that future space explorers doggedly keep looking for the Northwest Passage because that search was so fruitful before in unexpected ways?


And this is related to what I said exactly how? My ribbing you for a retreat into the protective bubble didn't carry any suggestion at all that such a retreat would lead to any sort of general disaster.


But what you suggest does sound like a protective bubble...


...and other than in your wishful imagination perhaps, there's no parallel between the current fairly robust scientific community and the then already-failing Roman empire.


Which all started with questioning religious dogma, and which lead inevitably to questioning religion itself.

Unfortunately, that one will never come to term, even if there were an infinite number of ID "monkeys" sitting in front of an infinite number of test tubes.

About all ID will ever amount to are arguments from ignorance or arguments from personal incredulity as we have seen to date.

I don't think so, I think we're down into the single digits. I'll check.

Edit: As far as wholly useless, the number is essentially none. I guess there is a contention over whether the holdovers can have any use at all.



Please let it be Gruyère. Seriously, what I'm saying is looking more and more likely.



But that's the thing, it's never happened that way in the West -- your Eastern religions are prone to do that -- but the Calvinistic Where's the baby's room?! dominion overdrive motif, is the exact opposite.


Actually the Greeks had the diameter of the Earth nailed by ~350 B.C. Columbus was using a screwed up measurement based on star inclinations (everyone was then). He would have never, ever, made that trip if he'd known the real distance to China.

But the point is kinda/sorta okay, in a Kuhn sort of way, unless your worldview casts a sickly, dysfunctional view of Nature, when it's actually a much different thing. You'd end up wasting a lot of time on the different parts of the Elephant.



No, that was directed at the social aspects. Science doesn't need anyone's defense.



Not before they had massive blossoming of scientific discovery.

ID is in a tricky situation. They want the beef, but wont recognize the brand. There's a lot of slight-of-hand about 'what is science,' but in the end, I don't really know if they can hold what they're doing together philosophically. It may be enough to identify materialism as one ideology among many.

I'm part of the precipitate.

First of all you make it sound like the existence of vestigial organs and junk DNA are the threat that evolutionary theory can't deal with, now you're making it sound like it's the lack of such things evolution can't cope with.


Seriously looking that way to whom? Those fine fellows at the Discovery Institute? Whatever it is you're saying.


1 Q: Why not just go find what the designer left us to discover, and skip the middle part?
2 A: List of problems with assuming a designer in the first place.
3 But that's the thing, it's never happened that way in the West...
^

Error: Non sequitur detected in line 3.

Care to provide an antecedent for the "it" which has "never happened that way"? You asked a question. I gave you my objections to the premise of that question. My objections stand whether your religion is east, west, or on a heading 20 degrees west of north at a speed of 50 knots.


It was the questioning of religious dogma, the awaking of rational thought, and the idea that systematic examination of the natural world could lead us to greater understanding of that world which was the secret of success. To the extent that for quite some time many scientists were inclined to speak of the order they discovered as "God's order", and perhaps even a few scientists like to do so today, it's nothing but window dressing on the actual work done and the approach which is taken, or perhaps an emotional component that for some drives the effort.

dmz doesn't know what he is talking about with regard to anything scientific, so don't bother attempting to pin him down on facts or else he will start his tongue-in-cheek nudge-nudge monty python inspired materialism bit...

You do realize that number of professing Christians has nothing to do with the assault on Christians, right?

*quotes obtuse song lyric or poetry lines in response*

..or

*offers a made-up idiom that no one understands*

I think we're already there. I nominate "the Calvinistic Where's the baby's room?! dominion overdrive motif."

If you read that a lot of times in a row if makes your face melt.

Oh come on, Adda.

Right now, I want to start a band called "Dominion Overdrive Motif."

You're right, but it does help contextualize the complaint a bit. "Our hegemony isn't hegemonic ENOUGH!!!"

Is it even really an assault on Christians?

Is it?

Are secularists (other than whipping man of the century Dawkins) actively pursuing the Christian Dogma? Are they attacking it's lack of any semblance of a quality intellectual frame work? And are they doing this anywhere near the level that the Christian majority is attacking anything that isn't Christian (tm)?

It is a classic ruse -- claim your actions are justified by accusing your opponent of engaging in tactics you are actively employing as if they are offenses of the worst order. It isn't surprising that the militant Christian 'intellectual' *scoff* movement is so hypocritical, after all look at the entire history of the religion itself. It reads like a manual for moral, intellectual and personal duplicity.

Well, the rhetoric of oppression works. Just look at the Republicans.

But you are absolutely correct. My point, however, was that you can't be the biggest religion on the planet and claim that you're being oppressed.

right...

so did anyone watch the phillies game tonight?

I was there. it sucked. why do people go to these events?

It's the fundamentalists Christians, the Bible literalists that seem most threatened. Beyond those types, other Christians are convinced God created the universe, setting things in motion at the vary least.

Science is an attempt to understand all that is around us through the principle of causality. The thing about science is that it is never satisfied, is always tested, revised, updated as new knowledge is obtained. Science doesn't start with the premise of the existence of a creator in order to attempt well constructed models/theories from observations.

The spiritual versus the material.

Science is also being attacked vigorously here in the US, which is odd since it isn't a formal belief system, it's a tool or method of understanding our existence in a quantifiable way.

We all fear our mortality, we want there to be something more than just our earthly existence.

I do feel that like the Amish, the most fundamentalist groups will form their own communities throughout the US, to protect their way of life.

Already quite acceptable and being done by the MSM.


And the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.


I don't recall advocating tolerance. In fact I have stated quite the opposite in the past. To some extent (mainly on the internets) I am an intolerant person, I just happen to have a "liberal" bias.

Their first release: Anemone Hegemony, a concept album chronicling humanities enslavement by an evil race of stinging, tentacled sea-dwellers.

First single: "I Have a Single Opening To My Stomach Which Serves As Both Mouth and Anus, Deal With It Bipedal Fucks."

No, no, no, my little grasshopper of argumentative goodness, both those things were/are blind alleys that were self-inflicted dogmatic wounds.


Well, I don't know, I figured if someone quotes Nature maybe they weren't making it up. Check out "Its the junk that makes us human" in the Nov. 2006 issue.



Oh, stop it, the West has never experienced the 'Oh God did it, so who cares?' problem. A big part of that reason is the dominion mandate.



No, I think it was a moral push, or impetus then, where today, yes, it's more of a 'let's control nature, and by extension, ourselves/our destiny.

And you missed the Sam Kinison refernce?! Why Delilah?! Why!?




I am outa here till the weekend. Ciao!

Huh? That's in direct contradiction to your earlier bullshit that the reason there are so few hate crimes against Christians is because so many people are Christian.

Did you learn logic from the Bible, too?

Oh... actualyl I think that argument was made by DMZ... sorry...

So DMZ and Jubelum are arguing the exact opposite thing to prove the same point. Hmm...

Kinda goes to show that people make up all kinds of bullshit to support an argument.

Imo, the opposition should not be to religion - especially not to any specific religion - but to limiting and damaging inflexible beliefs particularly if these beliefs can be proved to be false and the result of bias and prejudice.

As Dawkins himself rightly points (albeit interminably and sans humour) religion contains many dogmas that would fall into this category.

Unfortunately so does Dawkins himself.

But to place religion en masse in this category and give science a free pass is exactly what the intolerant Christians do. And the only justification both offer when confronted with this is that they are 'speaking the truth'.

Well, maybe they are. Maybe not. Doesn't matter - we are talking about intolerance. Take this quote from Dawkins for example:


That seems to me a stupid and specious argument. I would not call Dawkins stupid though - but his opinions are illogical and do not gel with his '#1 intellectual status'.

I am against fundies and creationists as much as Dawkins is and while I believe some in that camp may be 'evil' (for want of a better term) I would not see the individual as stupid. Brainwashed perhaps. An unquestioning sheep very likely. But they are not stupid in as much as they have the possibility to wake up.

It seems Dawkins does not believe this - not surprising really as it is a quasi-religious model and a form of 'redemption'.

Dawkins and his ilk however believe in 'stupid people' and 'clever people' which is in essence an immutable power structure (with them at the top). Radical Wahabis believe this also viz the position of women and men, fundies of all descriptions believe it re 'saved' and 'infidels'.

The basis is the same......

Flexible beliefs which nlead to scientidic and philosophical enlightenement can exist in any framework. There is nothing in religion that limits this; when Europe was in the Dark Ages chafing under the yoke of the Church, Muslims enjoyed hot and cold running water in their houses and had street lighting and schools for everyone. Of course this resulted in incredible scientific discoveries that are the basis of much western thought.

Most anti-religionists deny this by the method of ignoring it and continuing to claim that religion as a whole is anti-science. That is in essence a lie. So is the refusal to consider other phenomena or artefacts which do not fit the current scientific paradigms.

At least religion teaches one should NOT lie whether its adherents choose to abide by that or not....

What "argument" do you think I am making, before you take issue with it? Or are you just attacking out of reflex? I'm not talking about hate crimes. I'm talking about anti-Christian sentiment having nothing to do with the popularity of the faith.

And thanks for getting your facts "straight" with me vs. DMZ. Just keep firing blindly at those who might disagree with you. I makes your argument that much more compelling.

Once the word "grasshopper" appears, it's all downhill from there.

These threads never solve anything. Just allow a forum for a whole bunch of people to get their faceless angst expressed in a safe environment. And it polarizes further almost everyone. Not much reconciliation and "progress" being made. Ever.

Are those planets 6000 years old too? Hmm, the speed of light MUST be wrong, all the scientific evidence be damed! God said it, I believe it, that settles it!

Ok then. You say there is a disproportionate amount of "anti-Christian sentiment". I thought hate crimes against Christians might be evidence of anti-Christian sentiment.

So what do you consider evidence of anti-Christian sentiment?

I'll give you a hint. I've never said a single thing on these or any other boards that is anti-Christian.