I'm gonna be in Tampa tonight!

This is so upseting that we have to debate over this...

What the heck... it's Friday, have fun there~! Spread the gospel of FSM!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(geologyrox @ Sep 29 2006, 11:14 AM) [snapback]325614[/snapback]</div>

Wait a minute here! The ID movement has resorted to mock debates. Both of these guys are notorius ID'sts! The levels they stoop to..

Go and spread the Gospel of the Noodly Appendage!

 

I'd love to be there with you, but only to help spread His noodly Word. However, even in my Prius, that's a long drive. Have fun!

 

As I've said elsewhere, it's not about providing evidence. It's about giving the faithful a rope they can hold onto as the ship of creationism sinks.

We have much to be thankful for, though: If the church still had the political power it had a couple of hundred years ago, they'd be burning us at the stake (after pulling our fingernails out) for daring to believe in the evidence of the rocks.

The one good thing capitalism did was to shift political power from the landed gentry to the commercial class, substituting greed for religion and money for god, thereby creating freedom of religion and stripping the church of the political power to torture and kill people for disagreeing with it. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Greed is a vile religion, but all the others are worse.

 

ahahahah, that's GREAT!

If I had more ambition and motivation ( :lol: ) I'd somehow get involved, and make sure to tie in the evils of liberalism against the Darwin/anti-ID folks, and present giant larger than life images of conservative candidates to vote into in office. Might as well make good use of such mobs, and shape it into voting power....!

h34r:

 

"Religion convinced the world that there's an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there's 10 things he doesn't want you to do or else you'll to to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! ...And he needs money! He's all powerful, but he can't handle money!"

George Carlin

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(geologyrox @ Oct 2 2006, 09:20 AM) [snapback]326802[/snapback]</div>

Man, I have such delusions of rallying a big crowd like that.... Fist pumping frenzy, then pointing out into some direction and yelling, "ATAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!" As they all pour out of the convention center like angry ants turning over cars setting crap on fire, that sort of thing, while Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the name of" is blasting!!!! h34r:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tbstout2 @ Oct 2 2006, 06:24 AM) [snapback]326804[/snapback]</div>

Carlin is brilliant!

 

These reports always distress me. The few scientists that hold these kinds of views are, essientially, engaging in an anti-recruitment effort that will ensure that young Christians do not enter the sciences. They are linking the truth of God, as writ in their hearts, with a specific, solely American cultural vision that has very little to do with theology. And in so doing, they are robbing the Christians of the wonder of cosmology, the beauty of the sub-atomic world, and the awe of nature.

When two things are true that seem in opposition, you don't hold to one and reject the other. You reason, and think, and find out how both can be true. Sadly, scientists do that, but American Christians do not.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Oct 2 2006, 10:02 PM) [snapback]327185[/snapback]</div>

I worked for a Mennonite in North Dakota. And I knew Mennonites in Winnipeg, Canada, just about a 4-hour drive north of where I lived.

The Mennonites are deeply religious people who take their religion seriously and live by its precepts as they understand them. My employer never judged other people, never treated me differently for being an atheist, and only discussed religion if I asked a specific question. And he never asked me to do an unpleasant job that he was not willing to do himself. In particular, he and his family did the most unpleasant job (shovelling manure) most of the time, and he only asked me to do it when they had to be doing something else at the time.

Now to the point of this post:

The Mennonites in the U.S.A. do not believe in evolution. But the Mennonites in Canada do. The Canadian Mennonites are just as sincere in their religion, but they believe that god, in his infinite wisdom and mystery, used evolution as the means by which he created the world we see around us.

The clash between science and religion is artifically created by religious institutions that cannot let go of mistakes made by their own (human) authorities. They insist that to question their own errors is to deny god. It seems to me that creationists are guilty of hubris when they insist that to question their interpretation of the Bible is to question god. They are trying to put themselves on the level of god when they insist that they cannot be mistaken in their interpretation of scripture. Hubris, remember, was Lucifer's sin. Weep, o weep, all ye fundamentalists, for you walk on dangerous ground!

(Note that it's a very different thing to maintain an argument, e.g. that evolution doesn't happen, than it is to maintain that to oppose your argument is to oppose god, because in the latter case you are claiming to possess the wisdom of god.)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Oct 3 2006, 09:06 AM) [snapback]327326[/snapback]</div>

Actually, I wasn't aware of the Creationist stance of the American Mennonites. That surprises me. My exposure to Mennonites has been to "socially liberal" ones who were involved in hospice-style AIDS ministries in Southern California when my wife was a geriatric social worker. While I never talked to them regarding this, I didn't view them as dogmatic about much at all (other than the core Christian beliefs).

I really think the hostility toward science in American conservative churches is a purely cultural bias, more akin to the American insistence on abstinence from alcohol, with no basis in Christian scripture or history.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Oct 3 2006, 09:45 PM) [snapback]327716[/snapback]</div>

The Mennonites I worked for were not hostile towards science. They simply did not believe in evolution. They had no objection to their kids learning about it in school. But they and their kids believed it was untrue. I didn't argue the point, because they were not argumentative about it. I merely asked their view, and they told me. I asked their views on a number of religious subjects. And I respected them deeply for their belief in the core christian values, such as nonviolence and non-judgementalism. The only time I ever saw this farmer angry was when we were moving some cows from the pasture to the farm and one particularly stubborn cow refused to get on the truck.

They knew I am an atheist, and never remarked on it. I even asked them if they believed I was going to hell for being an atheist. Their reply was that they did not know, and that they could not know. They had no hostility toward me, and they did not believe that god was obligated to judge people according to any particular rules. God, in their view, could do what he liked, and that was fine with them. This was in sharp contrast to, for example, Pentacostals, who seem to believe that god is required to judge people according to their own particular interpretation of scripture.