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Help defend science: flunked not expelled
Author: cbit on April 18 2008 Viewed 6903 times. 29 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
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Apologies, a completely non-music related post.
The creationist/ID friendly pseudo documentary called Expelled will be screening near you soon. In the film, Ben Stein claims that scientists critical of the theory of evolution are being silenced by the powers behind "big science". Through ham fisted montages the film also tries to establish a link between the theory of evolution and Nazism and other genocidal ideologies.
Christian fundamentalists are lobbying hard to promote this film, even offering incentives to school groups to go and see it.
A counter site has been launched by the national center for science education that lists, and refutes, the lies and important omissions of the expelled film.
Publishing hyperlinks to the expelled exposed site, using 'expelled' as the visible link text, will help make the counter site more visible in search engines, and help ensure that people really do hear 'both sides' of the story. If you can, please help out.
Here's a review of the film:
link
Digging this page will help spread the word too (there's a subtle digg link beneath this blog post)
edit: "help defend science" == shorthand for 'help protect people from being robbed of the chance to understand the scientific method, to understand the crucial importance of evidence based reason in evaluating truth claims, to understand the principles or critical thought, to appreciate the enormous weight of evidence in support of evolutionary theory.' | |
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04/18/08
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license
see, if I was the sort of god that could vaporize people or send them to hell, the first ones I'd go after were the ones disrespecting my other projects. there's no excuse for that shit.
04/18/08
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p
I mean COME ON PEOPLE!! God made a person fully grown and fully functioning man out of clay and god breath. and the devil planted fossils to trick us...the only proof is in a very hard to read magic book. Perfectly rational.
Then science comes along with there "reese monkeys" and "fossils" and "evidence" and dares to suggest that we evolved from some simpler life form. I just don't buy it.
don't believe science!! what has this so called science ever brought us?
04/18/08
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license
maydaycapsiz said: "I think I might be the only Christian at this site. Whilst my view on creation is not as pragmatic as some.....I completely believe the bible is inspired by God and he made freaking everything..... I just enjoyed the birth of a daughter...surely in moments like that you don't at least question the existence of a beautiful, creative and loving God....
let the flaming begin"
welcome. actually we used to have another Christian here named ryansupak, and I for one really enjoyed his contributions. I haven't seen him around recently.
two things:
1) I understand this thread is against HEGEMONY, not Christianity itself. I have no problem with Christianity, besides the fact that I don't agree with it, or Christians, until it they bully everyone else.
2) you can't reasonably assume that anyone else perceives the same truths and feelings from an experience, no matter how strong they are for you, and no matter how universal the experience.
04/18/08
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zach
I hope no one flames you, maydaycapsiz. What you wrote is miles removed from things like Christian Reconstructionism and other frightening, fundamentalist doctrine. Believing in deity or the supernatural - or hoping it exists (or finding your thoughts anywhere on that spectrum) - is not the same as seeking to promote anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and other hallmarks of the folks like Rushdoony, Robertson, etc.
(What license said.)
04/18/08
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mlbot
maydaycapsiz said: "I think I might be the only Christian at this site. Whilst my view on creation is not as pragmatic as some.....I completely believe the bible is inspired by God and he made freaking everything..... "
which can be 100% congruous with the theory of evolution.
Evolution doesn't state there is no god, or that everything is here by accident. Evolution also says absolutely nothing about the creation of life, or the universe (although some try to draw parallels, which often ends up being just bad science). Heck, the big bang theory sounds a lot like Creation to me.
Evolution says that AFTER life began, it is plastic. It changes. Often for what we interpret as "better". To say that life hasn't changed one iota since the creation of life requires a level of ingorance... you have to ignore dinasaurs, extinction, changes in species we measure in our own lifetimes, you have to ignore archaeology and geology and astromony, which all say the earth is much older than 6000 years old, etc...
Heck, even Mendel, who discovered the backbone of evolution with his work on genetics, was a monk dedicated to understanding God's work.
In conclusion, I'm with OF. It seems to me so many proponents of ID aren't expounding "the right of religious freedom" so much as trying to force people into their own sect.
edited: Apr 18 2008
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cbit
hi maydaycapsiz. In this instance I don't care if you're a Christian, this call to action goes out to you too. I think every honest minded person should be interested in ensuring that the lies of films like Expelled are not allowed to be propagated without a challenge. I hope you agree.
04/18/08
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zach
p said: "God made a person fully grown and fully functioning man out of clay and god breath."
And that's not at all a retelling of Greek mythology's description of humanity's origins... which I'm sure was not a retelling of an even earlier belief.
04/18/08
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Jetsom
I got trapped on the plane to Athens with a guy trying to chat christianity with me but in quite an aggressive way (Him: "So do you have a church in Edinburgh?", me "No, I don't like it there". Him "Oh really, what you're not a christian?", me "What about my appearance made you think I was a Christian!?"). He was also telling me if I got good enough at Lazer Quest (my way of getting the conversation about hunting into territory that was more fun for me), maybe they'd send me out to Iraq (!). He told me the the Calvin and Hobbes book I was reading was "weird". He was like a cliche out of a documentary that you don't expect to meet in real life. Like that therapist guy too.
As we said months ago cbit, if we can save ourselves, the planet will look after itself. Trashing it won't help much though. I suppose you could manipulate that statement to mean 'save ourselves by turning to Jesus', rather than defining what we're saving ourselves FROM. Anyway, I digress..
04/18/08
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11t1
maydaycapsiz: questioning "the existence of a beautiful, creative and loving God" is all well and good so long as you realize that something that can't be quantitatively measured has no place in the scientific method. i myself have many mystical and divine suspicions since becoming a parent, but the jury's out until there's some conclusive evidence to look at.
by the way, I've done my bit for the unintelligent design community: What deep, dark hole was Ben Stein Expelled from?
04/18/08
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subset
I never paid much attention to Ben Stein - I guess I thought of him as another flippant rich guy who wanted to be on TV to get chicks or something. Isn't he doing some reality/game show about how dumb models are? How Christian is that?
maydaycapsiz - stick around, we need more variety of opinion - of course it won't be easy being in the minority, but I for one would like to hear what you have to say.
Re: birth of a daughter - congratulations. I think when someone in a predominantly Christian culture experiences something awesome, amazing, ineffable etc, they are culturally conditioned to attribute it to the hand of God. God may be awesome, but awesome does not equal God. If a devout Hindu experiences something wonderful and incredible, do you think they are inclined to switch to Christianity because they've seen proof of a Christian God? Or would it reinforce their devotion to a Hindu Deity? Or maybe an atheist can experience the same amazement and think about how intensely beautiful the process of evolution is?
04/18/08
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jdg
is this about that movie al gore in it?
04/18/08
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tylth
are you all satanists
04/18/08
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p
Sorry about my earlier rant.
I have strong opinions on this topic due to my christian upbringing. Jesus taught that you shouldn't concern yourself with human governments and that you are instead governed by your king (god). So I'm wary of so called christians who influence government institutions (ie the incentives for schools thing they mention on the website and those that lobby to teach creationism.
04/18/08
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cbit
I just enjoyed the birth of a daughter...surely in moments like that you don't at least question the existence of a beautiful, creative and loving God.
There are unquestionably moments in life where we have an impulse to be thankful, and in order to give expression to that feeling we might very well want to direct that thankfulness to a person. If we believe in a god, he (or she or it) of course gets the credit in times like this. Daniel Dennet has written about this impulse we seem to have to personify nature, he calls it the intentional stance, and provides a very plausible darwinian account of why it may have evolved.
04/18/08
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mlbot
Setting out to prove what you believe is just plain bad science. It supposes that you are smarter than nature/God.
OMF the pro-ID people STILL use the flagellum as one of their "signs of irreproducible complexity"?!?!?
(there's an image of it in the trailer of the movie)
Fuck, sure, 20 proteins come together to form a complex thing.... just becuase some human can't understand it doesn't prove God exists scientifically. That's both stupid and hubristic.
It also ignores the fact that 15 of those proteins are also part of another complex mechanism, the bacterial secretory complex.
No wonder thsese people are "expelled" from science. They are making stupid arguments that simply ignore data that doesn't fit their model. That's called bad science. PBS had a great special on the US case where the lawyers who invented ID were found, by a court of law, to be guilty of trying to reclassify Religion as Science. My favorite scenes: where the scientists subpoenaed the work-in-progress copies of the ID Textbook to show the 500 instances where the writers had tried to do a find-and-replace, switching Creationism with Intelligent Design, but messed up and had a book full of the phrase Crintelligent designonism. Also, when one of the scientists gets up on the stand with a broken mousetrap as a tie clip... explaining that "yes, if you remove one piece this no longer functions as a mouse trap. but it makes for a perfectly good tie clip... the same way that complex organs can arise over time, without having to be invented de novo."
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