Is it a theory or a law that as it gets later one’s coding skills get worse?
Yeah it’s pretty retarded. I was born in Swainsboro, GA and spend most summers back there drinking sody pop and eating boiled peanuts and there is no lack of dipshits there (as I suspect is true almost anywhere).
Still I’m less than crazed about this as the entire nation’s education system is one festering pile of horse shit. Just look at the deference given in courses such as history, literature, or any of the arts. The history taught in public schools is scatterbrained and seems to be usually based as much on local legend as actual fact. Great deference is given to authors who’s long dead nature seems to outweigh literary merit and which results in kids developing little to no interest in reading. God forbid your school play is something more recent that Gilbert And Sullivan or some hackneyed revamp of “The Man Who Came To Dinner”. Here in Oregon in one of our more urbane and affluent cities we actually had parents protesting when a local senior high did a production of “Rent”. God forbid!
Educational guidelines are set up to teach 50’s era children. It’s all going to hell and the only thing you can do is pull your hair out and worry. Try home schooling and run the risk of child welfare stepping in (where are they when teachers are passing illiterate kids?), or you can get rich and try private schools, most of which are just uniformed versions of their public counterparts with dieties thrown in to really screw up your kids.
Not that I think about it much.
All quotes orignally posted by dreamer
For purposes of high school studying, it is best to regard the big bang “theory” as very close to fact, if not completely infallible.
That’s because it is not necessary to mention such a thing. Every single statement one can make could have this statement following it, but it would be pointless.
For instance, from the Encarta 97 Encyclopedia (the material in italics are my additions)
“Elk, common name for two different members of the deer family. We could be wrong; it’s a theory. In Europe and Asia the name is applied to a genus of deer that in North America is known as moose. We could be wrong; it’s a theory. The deer known in North America as the elk is also called the wapiti, a Shawnee word meaning “pale” or “white.” We could be wrong; it’s a theory. This article deals with the European elk, or moose. We could be wrong; it’s a theory.”
That is because God had nothing to do with the creation of life and the earth.
Or maybe they’ll think, “it’s one of those crazy fundies”
Kids are perfectly able to question evolution, without learning about idiotic fairy tales.
Religious parents can tell their kids, “you shouldn’t believe what that school tells you. You don’t need to know science. Gravity is magical glue. Babies are brought by the stork. Everything that isn’t the bible is lying. In fact, times tables are the tool of the devil.”
People are free to be idiots.
It’s perfectly fair to expect a science teacher to teach science and only science. If they want to go proselytising, they can go join a convent.
There are no sides here. There are predictions determined from observation and then there are people who make up stuff and expect people to believe them.
Because it is.
Somewhere along the way, students are taught the scientific method. I was. This is that disclaimer. Except that it better reads as “we are right beyond reasonable doubt.”
Fundamentalism is synonymous with idiocy. It is to reject millennia of study and learning; it is to reject one’s own senses, and it is to reject the way we interact with the universe.
Hate to break it to you, DDG, but I’m right and you’re wrong, at least according to every history of fundamentalism I’ve read. You are a Christian (and a very cool one BTW), but “inspired by God” is what every Christian believes. That the Bible is literally true is one of the Five Fundamentals. Look it up.
Just so you know, even though we are disagreeing, I think that you are an awesome debater and somebody I admire. Like Governor Festus in Acts, “almost thou persuadest me.”
It’s just the same old cycle rolling over once again. People with inadequate scientific education judge what they’ve learned about science the same way they judge what they’ve learned about religion, because they’ve learned them in the same way: because someone told them so. It’s the fault of the educational system that they don’t understand that the “rote facts” of modern science–i.e., the current scientific consensus, or paradigm–have been arrived at by centuries of self-correcting observation and experimentation: they still simply learn it as “rote facts.” Science, as it’s taught, might as well have been dictated by a burning bush and taken down in shorthand by a desert-addled shepherd. Until the process of science is given as much value in the public school curriculum as the product of science, this will continue to be a problem. Of course, as long as there are desert-addled shepherds running for the local school board, it will continue to be a problem. But perhaps a better scientific curriculum will help to marginalize them.
**
Right. I did. It’s only one of the Five Fundamentals if it’s listed as such by somebody whose theology dates from the 1970s. My theology goes back to the 1910 original declaration.
The History of “Inerrancy”
Picking the brain of the Better Half, who was a seminary student in the late 1970s and early 1980s and who was “there”, so to speak. Ah, the long-ago evenings when as a Young Married Student Wife I would listen to him and his cronies from Dallas Theological Seminary sit around the living room and argue about inerrancy… 
“Inerrancy”, as a word, and as a concept that is used to mean “every jot and tittle in the Bible is literally true”, first came into wide use in the 1970s. The person who did the most to popularize it was Harold Lindsell, whose The Battle for the Bible, published by Zondervan in 1976, was a tremendous bestseller.
http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showarticle?item_id=1823
Even back in the 1970s, many of us dismissed this with a big " :rolleyes: ", as an obvious fringe element. You could believe the Bible was God’s inspired word without having to believe that God created the world in six days. It was obvious that the Bible wasn’t a science textbook. Even my mother, a lifelong Southern Baptist Church Lady, and about as theologically conservative as they come, didn’t believe that God created the world in, literally, six days. When as a little girl I asked her how God managed that, she replied, “Well, a day to God could be like a hundred million years to us.” And when I asked her about dinosaurs, she simply said, “There are lots of things that we know are true that aren’t in the Bible.”
Anyway, little did we suspect that “inerrancy” would soon take over large portions of the evangelical mindset.
However. It isn’t mentioned in the original.
Here is the original text of the 1910 Declaration of Deliverance that listed the Five Fundamentals.
http://www.pcanet.org/history/documents/deliverance.html
Notice that the word “inerrancy” or “inerrant” is not used. Neither is the concept that the Bible is entirely, literally, true.
What IS here is the concept of the “inspired word of God”, that everything that’s in the Bible is there because it has been handed down by the Holy Spirit. What was intended was a move away from the growing secular humanism movement that said that the Bible was only a collection of human-generated stories, myths, folktales, what-have-you. The Presbyterians wanted to make it clear that the Bible is God’s words, not man’s words, that everything in the Bible is the Holy Spirit speaking, and that thus it is “free from doctrinal error”. They didn’t mean “free from error” in that when it says “six days”, it means “144 hours”.
It was the burgeoning Inerrantist movement through the decades between 1910 and 1976 that extrapolated from this “keep them from error” phrase to get to the doctrine that keeps Ken Ham in business.
Thus, when you hear the word “inerrancy” being thrown around today, especially on websites that are talking about, and supposedly listing, the Five Fundamentals, the word “inerrancy” is an anachronism. The concept that “every little thing in the Bible is 100% literally true” was not the original concept, back in 1910.
So when I am saying that the Fundamental about the Bible’s authorship that I believe in, that makes me a “Fundamentalist”, is the one that says that the Bible is the “inspired word of God”, I am referring to the original list, and not to Harold Lindsell and Jerry Falwell’s concept of the Bible being completely, totally, literally, true. They added that on there, themselves, and it got really popular in the 1970s, and lots of other people who otherwise didn’t know much about theology, but who liked the comfort of the “sure thing”, jumped on the “inerrancy” bandwagon.
And because they are the sort of people who find comfort in the sure thing, because it means they don’t have to think, they are the ones who get the most upset when you question their value system. You’re making them think, dammit, and the whole reason they bought the “inerrancy” package was so they wouldn’t have to think. It’s just easier–“the-Bible-is-100%-true–end-of-story”. So this is why they come across as ignorant–people who resent having to think about things always do.
My original quibble is only with you lumping all Fundamentalists in with Harold Lindsell and Jerry Falwell. I hope I am able to make you see that there are a lot of us out there who are “Fundamentalists”, but who don’t believe the Bible is totally, literally, true, and who don’t have any problem with things like teaching evolution in the schools.
Well, I will grant your point about the Christian tradition of accepting the Bible as the inspired Word of God is what the authors of “The Fundamentals” meant, but it seems to me that Lindsey/Falwell/Jenkins/LaHaye have effectively hijacked Biblical inerrancy to mean that every word of the Bible is meant to be taken literally. Certainly the creationist lobby would agree.
“Hijack”. Yes. That’s a good word for it. I am actually starting to wonder whether maybe I should stop describing myself as a Fundamentalist, since their hijack seems to be so complete.
And so–loud, somehow…
DDG… could you do me a huge favor and help to explain to the more misguided fundamentalist Christians who breathe down the necks of school boards and set up websites like Answers in Gensis how they’re giving the rest of you thinking theologically conservative Christians a bad name? You see, because it seems that every other self-labeled fundamentalist I’ve come across has on prominent display an automatic button that, once pressed, starts an amazing looped-feed playback spitting out lies and misinformation about evolution, the Big Bang, and/or science in general. It’s getting a tad annoying for some of us who actually work in these fields to have to deal with people who claim to have high moral standards on the one hand and then blatantly lie to our faces on the other.
Thank you.
**
Hmmm…Gex Gex, you are a creation of Dr. Suess, are you?
:rolleyes:
You’ve whooshed me.
I grew up outside of Atlanta (east not north) and way back then we would hear that Georgia rated 46th in some category and we would automatically say "Thank God for Alabama and Mississippi (Alaska and Hawaii were not states at the time).
Now I live in Mississippi and when I saw this thread I was hoping to make some comment like “Thank God for Georgia”. That is until this statement from DDG
Fact is that I’ll proudly tell you that Tupelo is the birthplace of Elvis, but overlook the fact that it is the home of Mr. Wildmon, who deserves every bit of the scorn DDG heaped upon him.
I’m wondering now about the “Equal Time” principle applying to those of us who know we are the creation of alien+chimpanzee cross breeding? What about the science of cabbage patches and storks? Do thos folks get equal time as well? And while we are on the subject, when is the theory of Midgard and Asgard and how Bifrost connects them going to be taught? Or that we all live on the back of a giant tortoise?
BTW: To the fundie who dropped the “S” bombs earlier. You are an excellent example of your kind, keep up the poster child behavior.
I’ll see what I can do, but ya know, it’s an uphill battle.
Actually, next time you’re confronted with a Young Earth Creationist who insists that Genesis 1 is literally true, that it’s a word-for-word account of the Creation of Everything, that in 144 hours God did so create every species that has ever existed, and that 200 million-year-old fossil trilobites are just clever fakes, (“the temptation of the Devil!”), and that there’s no such thing as “species evolving into other species”, you can ask him three questions:
- When were insects created?
- What about kelp?
- What about mushrooms?
Genesis 1, courtesy of the Bible Gateway, doesn’t say when insects were created. Plants, birds, fish, mammals, and people are all mentioned, but the closest you can get to “insects” is to assume they’re included under “creatures that move along the ground”, which doesn’t happen until the Sixth Day. So, the question is, since seed-bearing plants were created on the Third Day, what was pollinating them until Day Six? Or did insects just get left off the list (“oops”)? If it’s that they were just left off the list, then why couldn’t other things, like trilobites, have been left off the list, too?
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The plants that were created on the Third Day specify only “land-based vegetation”. God says, “Let the land produce vegetation.” What about water plants, like kelp and other seaweed, and duckweed and that icky algae that grows in farm ponds, and things like water hyacinths? They’re not mentioned. So when were they created? Or did they just get left out of the list, too? Or did they–perish the thought–“evolve” from the land-based plants?
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The plants that were created on the Third Day also specify only"seed-bearing" plants. What about things like mushrooms, that don’t make seeds? When were they created?
And you can always bring up Cain’s wife, if you’re really bored, although it isn’t really connected to “creationism” as such. (I’m fascinated by Ken Ham’s response to this–“she was his SISTER, of course, duh…” He doesn’t seem to have any problem with incest as long as it supports his agenda of Biblical inerrancy.)
And if the YEC says, a little huffily, “Well, God doesn’t tell us everything,” you can respond with, “But I thought that was the whole point of using Genesis 1 as an inerrant creation account–that ‘it’s all in there’.”
I mean, seriously.
Oh, this annoyed me quite a bit. I thought that the creationists were finally waning, that they were down to grasping at straws. And now they’re back in the limelight, and managed to bamboozle an entire freaking school district into “equal time”. I wonder if anyone there gave serious thought to the implications of “equal time” to all theories, or was just using this as a crobar to get God into public schools. Does this apply to history? Mathematics? Will we have to start learning Vedic Math, and the “zero point energy” so everyone’s represented? When will it ever stop?