Oh right. It’s all the fault of the “left” for not being clear about what evolution is or is not. Gotcha. We must really confuse the hell out of them with our “facts” and “logic”.
Actually, I think it’s really more the fault of the evolution-deniers for being ignorant, uneducated fuckwits, and not understanding the first thing about what they’re talking about. Your mileage obviously varies.
SA’s entire schtick is that he makes about eighteen semi-coherent dumb points at once, leaving you wondering exactly what he’s claiming, and then he jumps back and elaborates on a few, making newer and dumber points as he does so, sometimes explaining that he was kidding about dumb point #14, or exaggerating for effect (as any simpleton could see) on the third part of dumb point #8, or being sarcastic in dumb point # 11…
This is not a left-right thing, as much as you’d like to believe it to be so. It’s a science vs. anti-science thing. Hell, Darwin himself implied that it doesn’t matter how life first got here, only that it did:
So, no. People are confused because they’re dumbasses who don’t bother to actually, you know, learn, and instead just repeat the crap they’ve been fed by others who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. And it sure as hell ain’t the scientists going on about how abiogensis = evolution.
I’ve noticed this effect to varying degrees with all of my conservative acquaintances. Here is a list of stuff that they have believed in the past few years:
The estate tax applies to everyone even our mother who is not likely to have enough of an estate to trigger the estate tax but since the right calls it a “death tax” my sister thinks that anyone who dies pays this tax.
When I was a kid, my uncle didn’t believe smoking caused cancer.
An acquaintance think the Holocaust is exaggerated and thinks “only” about a million Jews died.
My dad’s friend thinks global warming is all caused by sunspots.
One friend believes that lowering taxes INCREASES tax revenue. He also believes that we can balance the budget by cutting earmarks and the “over the top” parts of welfare. He was a much nicer, saner guy in college.
My mother is still confused about Obama’s religion.
My brother in law thinks that Republicans are the party of fiscal discipline.
This is starting to depress me. I’m gonna stop now.
So, it looks like the Catholic church does not officially embrace evolution, they just allow for it.
The souls v. bodies thing seems like a convenient little side-step that allows one to have one’s cake and eat it too. I suppose the Pope believes that a human soul would have inevitably been created at some point, and if god had to throw it into a big-ass lizard body because that’s all that’s evolved, then so be it. I’m not sure how T Rex would have prayed the rosary with those little hands, but whatever.
You said “it is possible that humans never existed ever in the whole history of the universe,” to that they **do **indeed say possible.
Of course it is “convenient” like the church lady would say, that is one reason why I’m a lapsed Catholic.
I’m only saying that they do conveniently cover their bases, their position is less anti scientific than many organized churches that are followed by many conservatives in the USA, and they even do science, by not denying a very ancient universe a Catholic priest gave us what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.
As a Boulderite, I’m going to call BS on the city being a hotbed of the anti-vax movement, and it’s ties to political ideology. The example in the linked article was a couple hundred kids in a school tied to an educational philosophy that discourages the use of antibiotics and vaccinations. It has nothing to do with politics.
The article also points out that half of the pertussis cases reported in the community are in vaccinated kids.
Considering that Boulder is filled with national laboratories, tech companies, and biotech firms, and with all the attendant engineers and scientists who work there, I’d be surprised if it weren’t one of the better vacccinated cities in the state.
It’s neither factual nor logical when you phrase things in such a way as to create a false impression of what you’re trying to say. If you don’t want people who haven’t been schooled in evolution to confuse it with abiogenesis, don’t phrase it in such a way that you appear to be doing just that.
I would think that if certain would-be ivory tower intellectuals were nearly as smart as they think they are, this would be obvious.
You keep repeating that, however you have not show any examples of leftists or scientists saying that, I suspect that it is just the straw man in your mind.
Not only that, but Starv never believes anything else that liberals say. To hear him tell it, they’re all drugged-out, poorly-dressed, unhygenic liars. Why the conservaties would choose this one time to take liberals at their word is anyone’s guess.
