I don’t want to put you on “ignore” and I don’t want you to go away. All I ask is that you, for once, remove your head from your rectum, accept that the ideas you pulled out of the same place might possible be so much shit, and make an effort to read and understand what people say to you and follow the links these kind, patient people provide. You know, LEARN SOMETHING. Evolution is a fact of existence; please reach some small measure of understanding of it before you shoot your mouth off again. Ghosts are not real and John Edward is a charlatan, a thief, and a vicous creature who preys on people who are mourning a loss, which is about as low as you can go in my book.
Science will help you understand the world better than witch doctors. Being gullible is not a virtue and being subborn in your gullibility makes you look like an idiot.
“Lekatt is an idiot” has long since passed beyond the realm of “the cow says moo” in the field of things that are so obvious I can’t imagine a time when everyone didn’t know it.
NOTHING is going to help lekatt understand the world.
Look like an idiot. Hah.
“Lekatt may look like an idiot. He may talk like an idiot. But don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”
I know it feels good to pit him, but it’s been done so many times before it’s pretty much a traditon now. Perhaps we can designate one day a year to pit lekatt and treat it as a holiday. We can sing “lekatt is an idiot” carols and exchange cards, perhaps.
Good luck trying to get him to listen to anything. He is a mallet-headed one-trick pony, impervious to reason or logic, and so afraid of science and the order it provides to the universe, he cannot bear to apply any tools of critical thinking to his own philosophy. He lives in fear of the truth, so he must keep repeating his mantra over and over; “I do believe in spooks!, I do believe in spooks!” just to keep the truth from breaching his addiction to mythology and legend.
And from breaking through his self-delusion with the realization that he’s wasted his life. He has spent decades clinging to his lies and crap instead of pursuing some kind of truth. He’s spent decades flinging crap instead of doing things that might actually help people.
He has torn out his eyes, sawn off his legs and convinced himself he is a collossus who bestrides the world and sees angels. For him to accept that what he believes is crap, he’d have to accept the decades he’s wasted and the cripple he has made himself.
Besides, Pitting him doesn’t do any good, you know. Lekatt won’t sully his delicate soul by venturing into the cesspool that is the Pit. Instead, he prefers to make his outrageous claims in Great Debates where he’s safe. He can protect himself from things which contradict his bizarre beliefs and avoid having to justify them and his actions. He can avoid seeing the disconnect between the love and truth he speaks of and the cruelty and falsehood of his words. It’s frustrating, I know, but as far as I can make out, we’re pretty much stuck. I keep telling myself I should avoid any thread he’s in, but he tends to like threads on the same topics I do.
One of these days, you know, I’m going to forget to restrain myself and step over the line in GD. I came close during the Terri Schiavo debates earlier this year when he said that anyone who supported Michael Schiavo was against religion. When and if it happens (hopefully it won’t!), whichever mod tells me off will be perfectly justified, but, so help me, it’ll be a bit like the little brother who annoys you to the point where you forget who you are and where you are and pop him one. It may be justified, and he may have started it, but it still doesn’t make your (or my) actions right.
(battening down the hatches, putting on flameproof gear, preparing for a major hijack)
Can someone explain to me the basic tenets of Intelligent Design?
Putting it another way: I’m a Christian. I believe in evolution because frankly, IMHO, it’s rather stupid at this point not to. I do believe, however, that the entire complex, intricate process was overseen and kicked off by a Big-Cheese figure.
Yes, but you’re not proposing to replace evolution with ID, since you seem to understand, from your post, that evolution is not the explanation for How It All Began.
SisterCoyote: Understood. I mean, I know we evolved from apes and Neanderthals and became what we are today in response to the changing environment, and different stimuli, and all that. Not arguing with Darwin here, he’s better at it than I am. But, within the context of my beliefs, I figure that God (whoever or whatever God is) can put those changes and stimuli in place–alter events in history–and watch His experiment unfold. Kind of like a scientist with a lab mouse, but there you go.
Mostly I think God exists on a spiritual level, in a spiritual realm, so I’m not much bothered by the fact that Genesis is a beautiful bit of poetic fiction.
Just FYI we didn’t evolve from Neanderthals, they are a different branch of the Hominids that is now extinct (despite Lekatt’s apparently Neanderthal grasp of reality).
Evolution is something you know. God is something that you believe to be.
Belief is faith. Believing in the unseen. ID people see the hand of God in the design of things. If you can see it than you don’t believe in it. You know it. You know God in you heart. You know evolution in you head.
You appear to be an adherent of theistic evolution. While you believe in a Creator, you are willing to accept the evidence that the universe operates in particular ways that do not require direct intervention by that Creator. You may believe that the Creator has or has not directly intervened in the events of the Universe or the affairs of humanity, but you generally expect to find those interventions in singular events which may or may not be discoverable.
Intelligent Design (capitalized) is a specific attempt to modify the Theory of Evolution (with no reference to astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, or other disciplines) by the specific statement that some evolutionary events are so improbable, that “obviously” some “designer” intervened to make them happen at some point. No evidence of Intelligent Design has ever been discovered and the few attempts to claim such discoveries have turned out to be applications of the “god of the gaps” fallacy. In that error, someone claims that there is no way that events could go from point A to point B without a “god” carrying the event across a gap. For every “god of the gaps” hypothesis that has been proposed, real scientists have found intermediate points C and D between A and B, indicating that there is a naturalistic path between points A and B. Intelligent Design advocates, instead of recognizing that their hypothesis was in error, simply declare that the “god” is still in the gap between points C and D.
Some people who do not closely follow scientific discussions are sometimes misled by the proponents of Intelligent Design to think that the theistic evolution which they accept is “really” Intelligent Design. Sometimes that is simply honest confusion based on a lack of knowledge regarding ID, but often it is due to deliberate efforts by ID proponents to confuse the issue so that they can get their pseudoscience accepted by school boards.
Tomndeb, that is an extremely useful post. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll save it for the next time someone tries to convince me of the wonders of creationism and ID. They just don’t get it.
What pisses me off is his tossing out of strawmen (“Scientists just want to prove God out of existence, and they say that life was created randomly”), and when someone like tomndebb politely points out to him that this isn’t the case, he completely ignores it, doesn’t even ATTEMPT to address what was said, but continues to tilt at windmills.
But, within the context of my beliefs, I figure that God (whoever or whatever God is) can put those changes and stimuli in place–alter events in history–and watch His experiment unfold. Kind of like a scientist with a lab mouse, but there you go.