The following is a reply to a testy remark I made in a thread concerning evolution, Christianity, and science in general in Great Debates:
*Comparing a poster directly to a three-year-old and then posting metaphorical chest-beating and threats of violence is out of line.
A lot of discussions are rather volatile and nothing in the rules of this forum require that such discussions follow Robert’s Rules of Order or Emily Post’s instructions regarding polite discourse. The line gets crossed when one poster makes the insults directly personal.
I really think that for your own peace of mind you should probably recuse yourself from any such discussions if you are going to feel the need to engage in this personal insults or to refer to such simple expressions as “bullshit” as “crude obscenities.”
–by Tomndebb, as Moderator*
I became convinced that I was getting nowhere presenting my side of the matter, considering an apparently hostile attitude among those posters who disagreed with me.
The moderator made the point that the attitude I was expressing was unsuitable for posts in that forum. I had not meant to be hostile, but I was provoked, so, if there’s anything further to be said on this issue it should be said here.
I shall follow this up with a link to the specific thread in Great Debates to clarify my statement here.
And…yeah. At some point, creationists just need to be pitted. Their dishonesty is obvious. lekatt also needs his pitting refreshed for his own brand of theological dishonesty.
There are good religious believers. Really. How they must writhe in discomfort, though, at the plethora of their dishonest brethren.
Well, sometimes dishonest, and other times they really do not fundamentally understand the science involved in biology. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had creationism/evolution discussions with folks who simply cannot understand simple concepts in science. They are operating at a grade school level of science.
Also, their logical processing skills are frequently very poor.
Now I don’t mean this to insult them - far from it. It just goes a long way to explaining why they cannot grasp basic concepts of evolutionary theory and the other sciences that back it up. It’s not their fault really.
I can see why they want to hold onto a simple creation explanation. When you come right down to it, the science is just too hard for them. They don’t want to admit this, because hey, who wants to admit they can’t understand something?
So it ends up being very frustrating for everyone. I try to explain science to them, and they JUST. DON’T. GET. IT. They don’t have the fundamental background, nor the critical or logical thinking skills. They never will. They’ll never get it.
And what’s worse is that they may not be able to get it. Look at Kirk Cameron. He’s not disingenuous. He has no cunning plan to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. He is simply really fucking stupid, but instead of being a dumb kid who grew up to wash windshields down at Wally’s Filling Station because it was the best for which he could strive, he was a cute dumb kid who lived near Hollywood and had pushy parents to take him to auditions. He’s Baldrick with a fanbase and an agent. Except cuter.
Baldrick. First name…?
Baldrick: Er, I’m not sure.
Blackadder: Well, you must have some idea…
Baldrick: Well, it might be Sod off.
Blackadder: What?
Baldrick: Well, when I used to play in the gutter, I used to say to the other snipes, “Hello, my name’s Baldrick,” and they’d say, “Yes, we know. Sod off, Baldrick.”
I was reading the original thread, and yeah, dougie_monty, you made a bunch of posts that displayed your absolute ignorance of even the most fundamental scientific principles and got called on it. Your whole “Bring me a fainting couch!” routine in response to getting called on it isn’t exactly endearing, either.
What I just don’t get is the imperial ukase—the fiat. I attended grade school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, in the 1950s. We did get science education then, including films (some were partially-animated educational films produced by Disney Studios) that taught evolution and millions-of-years time periods between dinosaurs and mammals, and reptiles and Archaeopteryx, and such.
At one point I repeated something in class that I had heard elsewhere, literally telling a story (from) out of school. In class I said “Adam and Eve were apes and their hair fell off.” The teacher, a woman old enough at that time to be my grandmother, said, “You mean we developed from monkeys?” and all the other kids laughed.
In fact, I rarely gave the matter much thought until I reached the senior year of high school. We had a government teacher who was quite the right-winger—perhaps a prototype of Rush Limbaugh. He turned evolution every way but loose. He was a graduate student at Washington (state) University at the time Piltdown Man was exposed as a fake. His zoology professor had been touting *Eoanthropus dawsonii *as a sterling connection between man and apes, and when news of the exposure came out, the professor was so embarrassed he wanted to crawl into a hole. His delighted students taunted him with “Tell us about Piltdown Man!”
If you think I am relying only on grade-school, or even high-school, teachers, take note of this: an evolutionist named Christopher Booker, commenting about Darwin’s book Origin of Species, wrote:
“We have here the supreme irony that a book which has become famous for explaining the origin of species in fact does nothing of the kind.” (emphasis added.)—The Star, Johannesburg, “The Evolution of a Theory,” by Christopher Booker, April 23, 1982, p. 19.
It doesn’t matter. The medium is not the message, McLuhan notwithstanding.
I once heard a story about a magazine writer who was gathering information about people in the Ozarks, for a feature article. One such person was an aged native rocking and whittling in front of a house on a wooden porch; a small radio on a table was playing country-western music, probably from a station in Joplin.
Suddenly the music stopped and an announcer came on and, in a very serious voice, said there was a tornado warning for the area. The native continued rocking and whittling. The magazine writer was concerned and asked, “Don’t you think you should do something? You heard the tornado warning!”
The native looked up and drawled, “I wouldn’t pay no attention. That’s just a little old dime-store radio.”
In short, Booker’s avocation is irrelevant; his statements shoud be assessed on their merits.
He says (according to wiki- I am on my phone and have not checked the cites)
Asbestos is pretty much harmless
So is second hand smoke
Global warming is not real
And evolution doesn’t explain anything.
People are giving you hard facts, and you hand-wave them away because they contradict your ignorant beliefs. You try to claim a “Gotcha!” by citing an “evolutionist”, and when it’s pointed out to you he’s nothing of the kind, you say it doesn’t matter. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
