what many creationists think of science and the public education system

[Perciful]

I think you all need to lighten up like a ton.

Have a laugh on me!

[Todderbob]

@BigT

I thought everyone already knew this, or I’d have told you.

This.

[Lemur866]

@Hold_Fast

Thats not a universally accepted catholic idea. I tend to think that that was just a PR move by the papacy. The theory of evolution just doesnt jive with the bible. The order that the bible claims that species were created is different then what evolutionists believe the order was.

Seriously?

Seriously?

And one more time, Seriously?

You think Genesis should be taken literally to show the order in which creation took place? And they didn’t tell you what the Darwinists would say next? I guess not, so I’ll have to be the one to break it to you.

What exactly was the order of creation? Which were created first–animals, or man?

Because in Genesis 1, plants are created first, then animals of various sorts, and men and women created last. But then we see in Genesis 2:

@YHWH

In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up–for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; 6 but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground-- 7 then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Then YHWH planted a garden, then he created animals, then he created Eve. So that’s man, then plants, then animals, then woman.

So which is the literally true history? Genesis 1 or Genesis 2? Which should we be teaching in science class? See, the Bible contradicts itself in the first two chapters. Of course, this is because the first two books of Genesis are two separate stories written down by different people at different times for different reasons. But if YHWH wanted us to take them as Geology texts, maybe he should have redacted them so they’d agree.

[Cyningablod]

I think we should all maybe lay off for a while and give either Hold Fast or Perciful a chance to respond to one or more of our challenges. This is turning into a pile-on.

[BrainGlutton]

@Hold_Fast

Athiests love to wave the banner of the first ammendment as evidence that the founding fathers would take theri side. Yet even the slightest research can refute this. Now I could line up a scores of quotes that show the weight that the founding fathers put into Chrisitanity, but again, for brevity’s sake, I’ll simply name some facts. The first ammendment in no way says thats religion cannot be prommoted government, it says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What this IS saying is that the state cannot restrict or interfere with religion in any way. You see, its the atheist community that slaps “Seperation of Church and State” onto the first ammendment. The phrase of which, I feel I should mention, is not written in any legal document of that time–if ever for that matter. God is invoked four times in the Declaration of independance. Now does that sound like seperation of church and state?

If you want to disagree with the founding fathers, by all means go for it, but don’t fool yourself into thinking they’re champions of modernist values.

1. The phrase and the concept go back to the Founders:

Jefferson, Madison, and the “wall of separation”

The phrase “[A] hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world” was first used by Baptist theologian Roger Williams, the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, in his 1644 book The Bloody Tenent of Persecution.[13][14] The phrase was later used by Thomas Jefferson as a description of the First Amendment and its restriction on the legislative branch of the federal government, in an 1802 letter[15] to the Danbury Baptists (a religious minority concerned about the dominant position of the Congregationalist church in Connecticut), assuring that their rights as a religious minority would be protected from federal interference. As he stated:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their "legislature" should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Jefferson’s letter was in reply to a letter[16] that he had received from the Danbury Baptist Association dated October 7, 1801. In an 1808 letter to Virginia Baptists, Jefferson would use the same theme:

We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.

Jefferson and James Madison’s conceptions of separation have long been debated. Jefferson refused to issue Proclamations of Thanksgiving sent to him by Congress during his presidency, though he did issue a Thanksgiving and Prayer proclamation as Governor of Virginia.[17][18] Madison issued four religious proclamations while President,[19] but vetoed two bills on the grounds they violated the first amendment.[20] On the other hand, both Jefferson and Madison attended religious services at the Capitol.[21] Years before the ratification of the Constitution, Madison contended “Because if Religion be exempt from the authority of the Society at large, still less can it be subject to that of the Legislative Body.”[22] After retiring from the presidency, Madison wrote of “total separation of the church from the state.”[23] “Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the Constitution of the United States,” Madison wrote,[24] and he declared, “practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government is essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”[25] In a letter to Edward Livingston Madison further expanded, “We are teaching the world the great truth that Govts. do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Govt.” [26] Madison’s original draft of the Bill of Rights had included provisions binding the States, as well as the Federal Government, from an establishment of religion, but the House did not pass them.[citation needed]

2. Many important Founders were not Christians:

Our Godless Constitution

By Brooke Allen

This article appeared in the February 21, 2005 edition of The Nation.
February 3, 2005

It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best–and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him–is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration’s current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton’s flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of “foreign aid”; according to another, he simply said “we forgot.” But as Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the “only Heaven knows” sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” and the famous line about men being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: “In God We Trust” did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, “The Battle Over the Pledge,” April 5, 2004].

In 1797 our government concluded a “Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary,” now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:

As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen--and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate’s history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a wall of separation between church and state.” John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans–the fundamentalists of their day–would “whip and crop, and pillory and roast.” The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers,” as Jefferson wrote, “civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.”

If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were deists–that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian.

George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that “religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize.” He spoke of the “almost fifteen centuries” during which Christianity had been on trial: “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not as “God” but with some nondenominational moniker like “Great Author” or “Almighty Being.” It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism.

[BrainGlutton]

@Hold_Fast

The first ammendment in no way says thats religion cannot be prommoted government, it says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

And, BTW, “establishment of religion” is an 18th-Century way of saying “promotion of religion by government.”

Didn’t you know that?!

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Perciful

I think you all need to lighten up like a ton.

Have a laugh on me!

I’ll get to it later. Meantime, post #36 still has a thought experiment for you.

[Kolga]

@Cyningablod

Yep. If I hadn’t taken my Christian faith as deadly bloody serious as I did, I probably wouldn’t have lost it.

In my case, it was actually an astronomy class, in which the evidences for the age of the earth were discussed, that was the crack in the dike, for me.

@CurtC

I grew up with a similar background in the rural woods of East Texas. What shattered my religious belief was going to college and learning of the evidence for evolution.

I sometimes think that if my religious belief had not been so hard and tight, whether that belief would have been flexible enough to adapt to my college education and remain intact. But as it was, “shattered” is the only word to describe it.

/hijack

I would be most interested in reading about your personal experiences regarding this profound, abrupt, and probably traumatic shift in your worldview, if either (or both) of you want to start an “Ask the former fundamentalist who was exposed to evolution” thread, so as not to hijack this one.

[Bryan_Ekers]

It was the movie Ghost that crystallized my atheism, though I admit I was leaning in that direction already.

[Face_Intentionally_Left_Blank]

@Perciful

They should not be teaching anything in public schools that is against the law or constitution. Science is a slippery slope because a lot of it is not based on facts.

School has failed you.

Wharrgarbl

[Face_Intentionally_Left_Blank]

@begbert2

The thing that bugs me about these types is they’re not consistent. If science is an evil conspiracy, why don’t they declare that the images on televisions are glamours of the devil and shun them?

In middle/high school, I had a friend from a large Pentecostal family that wouldn’t go to the movies for some bizarre reason that I can’t exactly recall. Evil lived there, or the devil, or something. They were a large family and didn’t have much money, so I always thought the real reason was that they couldn’t afford to take everyone, so they just said it was evil. They didn’t have a problem with television.

I met up with my friend about 10 years after HS, and he said his father had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and increasingly went off the rails until he died a couple years later. Having seen him speak in tongues, I think he had that tumor longer then they knew. Apparently, speaking in tongues sounds an awful lot like “abba-dabba-aabba-dabba”. I wonder if my friend ever thought about a connection between the two, but I could never have asked him that.

[Cyningablod]

@Kolga

I would be most interested in reading about your personal experiences regarding this profound, abrupt, and probably traumatic shift in your worldview, if either (or both) of you want to start an “Ask the former fundamentalist who was exposed to evolution” thread, so as not to hijack this one.

Good idea, Kolga, I just might do that.

[Nicolas_Bourbaki]

@Perciful

I think you all need to lighten up like a ton.

Last page, you were the only person posting nonsense; this page, you’re the only one talking sense.
YA GUYS A WALL OF TEXT THREE SCREENS LONG IS TOTALLY GONNA TRANSFORM ME INTO A GODLESS BABYKILLER AND/OR SNAKEHANDLING KOOK
I WILL REJECT EVERYTHING THAT IS MORAL AND CONSIGN MYSELF TO THE ETERNAL FIRES OF PERDITION AND/OR BORING-ASS SUNDAY MORNINGS JUST BECAUSE YOU PERSONALLY ARE SO QUICK-WITTED AND CLEVER OVER THE INTERNET

@Bryan Ekers

Meantime, post #36 still has a thought experiment for you.

I’m not seeing how this going to mindfuck anyone’s worldview. No archeological evidence for the BEV predating Tuesday, but the Hebrew the NIV is distantly based on can be traced back two thousand years (which if you recall is a full third of distance between now and the Creation). Since both sides agree that one cannot prove any statement about the physical world stronger than cogito, ergo sum, we can only speak of the relative strength of the evidence, in which NIV > BEV by a lo-ong shot. (Immediate next thought – “If this is really the other team’s A-game, it’d be a waste of time to entertain their ideas seriously!”) If your goal was to give her the flash of insight that Godless Atheism > both, you’re being counterproductive.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Nicolas_Bourbaki

I’m not seeing how this going to mindfuck anyone’s worldview. No archeological evidence for the BEV predating Tuesday, but the Hebrew the NIV is distantly based on can be traced back two thousand years (which if you recall is a full third of distance between now and the Creation). Since both sides agree that one cannot prove any statement about the physical world stronger than cogito, ergo sum, we can only speak of the relative strength of the evidence, in which NIV > BEV by a lo-ong shot. (Immediate next thought – “If this is really the other team’s A-game, it’d be a waste of time to entertain their ideas seriously!”) If your goal was to give her the flash of insight that Godless Atheism > both, you’re being counterproductive.

Y’know, I honestly appreciate your ability to string all these words together, but the original question wasn’t nearly complicated enough to deserve this effort, so I’ll just ask, again, for Perciful to give it a shot.

[Cyningablod]

@Nicolas_Bourbaki

Last page, you were the only person posting nonsense; this page, you’re the only one talking sense.
YA GUYS A WALL OF TEXT THREE SCREENS LONG IS TOTALLY GONNA TRANSFORM ME INTO A GODLESS BABYKILLER AND/OR SNAKEHANDLING KOOK
[…] (Immediate next thought – “If this is really the other team’s A-game, it’d be a waste of time to entertain their ideas seriously!”) If your goal was to give her the flash of insight that Godless Atheism > both, you’re being counterproductive.

I’m utterly lost here.

This post strikes me as a strange hybrid mish-mash of the Matrix screen code and the rhetoric of L. Ron Hubbard in his later years.

[sqweels]

@Chronos

You know what baffles me? It’s the extreme fundamentalists who are always complaining about “moral relativism” in the first place, and then they turn around and talk about truth as relative. You know what you call someone who considers there to be an absolute truth, and tries to found out what it is? A scientist.

Amen, brother! Preach it!

[Miller]

@Nicolas_Bourbaki

Last page, you were the only person posting nonsense; this page, you’re the only one talking sense.
YA GUYS A WALL OF TEXT THREE SCREENS LONG IS TOTALLY GONNA TRANSFORM ME INTO A GODLESS BABYKILLER AND/OR SNAKEHANDLING KOOK
I WILL REJECT EVERYTHING THAT IS MORAL AND CONSIGN MYSELF TO THE ETERNAL FIRES OF PERDITION AND/OR BORING-ASS SUNDAY MORNINGS JUST BECAUSE YOU PERSONALLY ARE SO QUICK-WITTED AND CLEVER OVER THE INTERNET

There’s about three or four posters (including the OP) in this thread who describe themselves as former fundamentalists who changed their mind about their religion. Presumably, some part of that entire process depended on hearing different points of views from people who didn’t share their religion. That’s not to say I’m expecting Hold Fast to read one of my posts and suddenly decide to chuck his entire belief system over the side in favor of secular humanism, but it does indicate that there is some actual value in discussing these ideas.

I’m not seeing how this going to mindfuck anyone’s worldview. No archeological evidence for the BEV predating Tuesday, but the Hebrew the NIV is distantly based on can be traced back two thousand years (which if you recall is a full third of distance between now and the Creation). Since both sides agree that one cannot prove any statement about the physical world stronger than cogito, ergo sum, we can only speak of the relative strength of the evidence, in which NIV > BEV by a lo-ong shot. (Immediate next thought – “If this is really the other team’s A-game, it’d be a waste of time to entertain their ideas seriously!”) If your goal was to give her the flash of insight that Godless Atheism > both, you’re being counterproductive.

What?

[Cyningablod]

A great big “What??” was my reaction, too, Miller.

Simply incomprehensible.

[BrainGlutton]

@Perciful

Science is a slippery slope because a lot of it is not based on facts.

This is a whoosh, right? Even from you, this has got to be a whoosh.

[Nicolas_Bourbaki]

@Miller

There’s about three or four posters (including the OP) in this thread who describe themselves as former fundamentalists who changed their mind about their religion. Presumably, some part of that entire process depended on hearing different points of views from people who didn’t share their religion. That’s not to say I’m expecting Hold Fast to read one of my posts and suddenly decide to chuck his entire belief system over the side in favor of secular humanism, but it does indicate that there is some actual value in discussing these ideas.

Same here. Thing is I could say the exact same thing as the OP with respect to how I grew up; I remember being very combative when Sunday School teachers tried to say something too ridiculous, but the idea of spending eternity in agony kept me from thinking too hard about it. I became less obsessed with hell around the same time I stopped being afraid of the dark, and I self-identified as atheist before I was 18. Most everybody I’ve talked to on the subject had their identity in place by 25, and the overriding factor in every decision was whether they had a visceral fear of hell or not. If OP starts his Ask the . . . thread I’ll talk more about it there.

@Miller

What?

Haha oh wow
I would surmise that BEV stands for Bryan Ekers’ version of the creation story, and NIV, New International Version. Honestly, I’m very proud of how well my thoughts came out there.