I don’t really see it as pitting any particular poster. Rather, I see the problem being as follows.
A scientific theory exists.
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Some people insist that it contradicts their deepest held beliefs. Since they are not scientists, they feel free to keep on asking the scientist questions about how they know something is true.
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This takes no effort for the theists, but takes a lot of energy from the scientist.
Some happy Christians, and some pissed off scientists.
Well, mswas is a bit worked up at the moment so he is repeating his memory of the stupid thing that lekatt did say:
Then we segued into a little dance pointing out lekatt’s error both in claiming that religion required an afterlife and that science had anything to say on the topic.
This whole thread is simply an overblown reaction.
Dseid never claimed the “persecution of science” that mswas implies he has. The OP in the thread Science is screwing up the battle for America’s minds. lamented a failure of the scientific community to convey the importance of science to the rest of society. As an example, he noted (briefly) that
and went on to lament the failures of science and to seek suggestions to improve the situation. Within the first five responses, other posters pointed out that science was under attack by non-religious people and also suffered problems with its own internal educational systems. There were a few shots at religion, specifically Fundamentalist Christianity, but most of the posts were pretty much on topic until lekatt barged in with his wild claims of atheistic science that good people needed to resist. Generally the posters were treating lekatt to an education (that he resolutely ignored), and then mswas barged in decrying the attacks on religion that he then brought over here.
My recommendation is a serious reduction in caffeine and maybe some better reading skills.
I don’t drink any caffeine, and I am an excellent reader, and I still don’t understand what the hell all the shouting’s about. Best I can figure is someone somewhere is a Christian and their panties are in a knot because they are being oppressed by being expected to be somewhat rational and logical, and they think all people who aren’t devout Christians should be flawless examples of rational thought and logic.
And people have computers and porn in their houses.
How about the logical fallacies of current “religion”? God loves you but toe the line or you go to hell. God made you as you are but if you act on these traits you go to hell. God made the world and it is good but Satan rules it and it is evil (resist). Life is a gift from God but destroy all unbelievers. God is just and merciful, but if you slip up just once you go to hell. God gave you a brain to think with but don’t you dare think different from what I tell you.
There are no “facts” about God – only the scritpures, and faith. You can’t prove or disprove God and it would be a useless exercise. For the record, I believe (faith), but that doesn’t mean I take the word of ignorant bullshit artists. Neither do I try to force fit my religion into science, which doesn’t even pretend to discuss or analyze God.
You’d be surprised how many of us have read it.
Well good! As long as they stay in their realm, what’s the beef? The problem is the nuts are tryig to encroach into scientific matters where they don’t belong.
I don’t have a problem with your beliefs, I don’t care if you believe in giant rabbits named Harvey. it’s your insistence that religious ideas should be force fed into scienctific areas.
Right now the “ruling” group is the far right wing “religious” faction. Did you even notice? Here’s a clue. REAL christians act properly and lead by example. They do not impose their view or their will on someone else. They realize that to improve or convert or save their fellow, that person has to make a free choice, of their own free will. They abhor ignorance because that robs free will.
They are fucking hypocrites. If they make up strawman arguments and take various statements deliberately out of context they are hypocrites and liars. They cherry pick their own holy books too. If they exhort others to abstain from any small pleasure life offers while they themselves have sexual adventures, if they say send money or God will take me away or take homes and life savings away from their “flock” by promising salvation, etc etc etc, then they are liars and hypocrites. They are hypocrites in every way that is possible.
No, religious nuts (fundamentalists) need to shut the fuck up. They have jack shit to say that is worth while, and they INVENT shit which they then have the unmitigated GALL to call The Word Of God. It is HERESY at its worst, and fucking lies at the least. They need to keep their ignorant noses OUT of all scientific endeavors and discussions.
The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished."
Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, Supreme religious authority, Saudi Arabia, 1993
Does this not look like some religious asshole sticking his nose into science, where it does not belong?
“Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. … Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.” - Rev. Jimmy Swaggart
Does this not look like some religious asshole sticking his nose into science, where it does not belong?
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” - Augustine, in his essay On Genesis
This thread isn’t about them, it is only about people being missionaries for science and forgetting the ideals of rationality in the meantime.
I haven’t made any statements that you are too believe except that the Stupids were eating my soul. That one is true.
I’d say less than 5% of people I’ve met in my lifetime have read the entire thing. There must be this gigantic mass of people I Just never run into who are biblical scholars.
No the real problem is science hobbyists clamoring for science with the rationality of a dusted up cheerleader. It has nothing to do with Christians or Muslims or whomever. They only increase the problem, because they say really dumbass shit like Cliff from Cheers, and then get into arguments with fundamentalists who intuitively know they are full of shit, but make the mistake of attributing their misquotes to “Scientists”.
I never insisted any such thing, only that the truth is the truth regardless of what belief system lead you to it.
You can’t rob someone of free will, that’s why it’s called free will, they have the choice to react to their situation any way that they want. And no the ruling group IS NOT the far right wing religious faction. It is a bunch of aristocratic billionaires trying to form a global energy monopoly using right wing christian fanaticism to stir up support for their cause. The mob in Rome was the source of power, but the mob wasn’t in control, there was always a group of people controlling the mob. We don’t create bread and circuses for those in control, we create bread and circuses for those we WANT to control. The Christian right has very little real power in this country. For instance, abortion is still legal, Bush said he was against Gay marriage, but for Gay civil unions, (Semantic difference but enough to quiet the idiots) and California has one of the biggest stem cell industries in the entire world. Sure the christians have SOME power, and they win a victory once in a while, but the world would be VERY different if they were in control. We wouldn’t have Grand Theft Auto, Burlesque Raves, or the Sopranos if they were in control. Don’t worry, the Satanists still run this country.
Actually every word ever spoken is the word of God as God created everything and is everything. ;p Everyone has the right to make up the word of God as much as they want to. We don’t need sex deprived child molestors to intercede for us anymore. (Sorry MJ)
Yeah, he’s certainly stopped me from fucking robot hookers with his sensible morality.
Come on, that’s Jimmy Swaggart. And everyone knows Evolution IS a theory not a fact, so what? Relativity is a theory that fundie christians hate too, but the fundie science hobbyists never harp on that one.
They do? Other than demonstrate a characteristic lack of understanding about the Big Bang, I have never seen a fund’ist sound off on gravity, the speed of light, or the curvature of space and time. Wacky.
SteveG1: If it helps give you a clue as to my beliefs, I believe that Jesus is a manifestation of the devil and that the Devil is the Lord of the Material plane, and that anyone who believes that the devil chooses them over someone else based upon some bullshit millenia old rhetoric, is an idiot. All words are idolatry. We live in a society that is pyramidally hierarchical. There are people who understand the world better than others, and they have the power. That aristocracy now is no different from Aristocracy in the middle ages, where the ruling class engaged in drug addled orgies and the church was a political tool with which to control the lower classes. Society is still feudal but it’s based off of the ownership of intellectual property as well as physical property. Science ‘explains’ magic, it doesn’t debunk it. That there is a secret history of occult organizations that have engaged in planned manipulation of the social conciousness since the beginning of time, and will continue to do such. I believe in Reiki, Immortals, Astrology, Stem Cell research, Genomics, Quantum Physics, and Chakras, Evolution, Creation and that they all work in concert without a conflict. That paradox is the limitation of the human to understand how something works, and not some inherent conflict in the universe. I believe that every civilization that has lived has had access to some high technology that other civilizations have not, and that the dominion of Europe over the rest of the world, while uniting the world in an increasingly complex web of interdependencies has shoved some of those discoveries into obscurity. I believe that Hellenic rationalism is destroying our society by denying things that it cannot easily explain (though are not unexplainable). That most people have absolutely no understanding of the concept of relativity, and if they did then things would run a lot more smoothly. That one can understand a great deal about something merely by looking up the definition of the word. That thinking debunking a hippie about healing crystals makes all new age thought bullshit is anti-rational. That dictionary.com is a perfectly adequate dictionary, and that the straightdope has a lot of pretentious stupids that deserve a more adequate ribbing than I am able to deliver when their stupidity infects me while they are eating my soul.
Oh yeah, and that I am actually capable of sensing the universe and learning it’s secrets without going through some academic hierarchy that tries to monopolize truth, whether it be an Ivy League College or Sunday school.
Erek
I know I know I committed the ultimate straightdope sin, I trusted my senses over some weak internet cites with confusing graphs and statistics.
Since I’m at work, I don’t really have time to read the whole thing. A quick CTRL-F for “Einstein,” “Riemann geometry”, “gravity”, “spacetime”, “speed of light”, “perihelion”, and “acceleration” turned up nothing. I am starting to believe that Ratzinger probably doesn’t comment about physics in this article.
And this really is the key to understanding where you are coming from, along with the list of your beliefs. I believe the following:
You are not capable of rational thought at an abstract level (or you are potentially unwilling, but I have no reason to suspect that you are not sincere, so I will assume lack of capability).
You have low standards (or no standards) of empirical evidence before deciding something is credible. Astrology being a case in point. This only applies to things you initially wanted to believe in.
You feel under attack by something that really doesn’t exist. Anyone who claims science proves or disproves god is being idiotic. Most scientists would not claim this. I think the feeling of being under attack is comforting from the point of view that it keeps you from thinking about things that are hard to think about. It gives you something concrete as your enemy, a far easier thing to deal with than abstract concepts and real soul searching regarding important issues.
Largely due to number (1), your reaction to statistics that confuse you cause you to lash out at the stats as confusing, rather than at yourself for being easily confused. Given your posts thus far, I believe the latter to be far more likely.
You use the word “stupid” as a noun, which is really weird. However, I’m starting to get a kick out of it, and may try it out in real life conversation. Wish me luck!
With the possible exception of number (5), all of the above is likely to make you think I am stupid (or, if you prefer, that I am a stupid). Likewise, I believe the same of you. I don’t really think there is much either one of us can say that would change each other’s mind and at this point we can both be thankful that we will probably never meet.
I’m not personally threatened by your strange views, so if they make you happy I say go for it. I certainly can’t say my views bring me eternal joy and sunshine, but I think they’re right regardless
Well, you have demonstrated that bit of ignorance pretty clearly in confusing relativism of belief and the relativity of physics. Do you believe that your cousin has an effect on the speed of light, since she clearly has a position relative to you?
And Desid still has not claimed persecution of science by religious people, so your rant is still a baseless excercise in anger unassociated with reason (in both primary senses of the word).
