The Mecca of creationism stupidity is the newly opened, $28M Creation “Museum”, an Evangelical Christian attempt at a natural history museum. In this temple of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty, young and old are taught:
From the Flikr set Behold the Creation Mesuem
- The Earth is 6,000 years old.
- Predatory dinosaurs (and all animals) were herbivores before the fall of man and lived in harmony with humans.
- Dinosaurs were beasts of burden and wore saddles.
- Some dinosaurs joined Noah on the ark, while the rest were killed off in the flood.
- The continents separated during the 40 day flood, not over tens of millions of years.
- After the flood, the descendants of two rhinos evolved into 300 new species in 200 years.
- After the flood, animals dispersed to other continents by floating on drifting logs that carried them across the sea. (I’d love to see the size of the log the carried the Bison to North America or the amazing log that carried kangaroos to Australia.)
- Incest between Cain in his wife was OK because genes were less tainted. (NB: The homophobic propaganda at the end)
The intellectual poison of Idiot America scares me more than al-Qaeda does. I won’t over-simplify and place the blame solely on the low priority placed on public education and rampant religious indoctrination – although, they would be my first two culprits. I will, however, say that the biggest obstacle to progress, to solving the health care crisis, to stem cell research, to equality across gender, sexuality, race, age, and class, to the protection of our civil liberties against an over-reaching, obstructionist executive, to sound reproductive rights policies, and all the ideals and principals that BMGers hold dear, is the obstacle of an ignorant electorate.
Ask yourself, cui bono? Who benefits from an ignorant, under-informed electorate? Certainly not we the people.
Al Gore did it with the environment. Michael Moore is attempting it with health care. But if we want a healthy, vigorous republic, and if we want to positively impact the climate and health care, then we must radically attack the root, smashing the brick wall of ignorance separating America from progress. We must reprioritize education above all domestic issues – from failing public schools to the absurdly high cost of college – and cultivate true critical thinkers.
The religious right harps on the lie that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principals. We need to reclaim our founding fathers and position America back where it was truly birthed: as a child of the Enlightenment.
Your post was a refreshing as the water off the RI beaches today. Thank you.
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Well, we certainly know it is not the working person and regular taxpayers who are benefiting….and it’s not the poor, despite what the “right” would have Americans believe about those ‘wretched welfare mothers and their godforsaken children‘. The grab from the middle class to the owning class (hidden behind corporate doors) and the rampant, albeit well orchestrated, apathy of Dumb America has made the grab analagous to taking candy from a baby, except that the baby usually notices.
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“The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself.” -Alan Greenspan
Well, don’t you know, capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
thread. We are talking about absurd religious beliefs and Greenspan was/is a member of the Ayn Rand Society—devout atheistic conservatives. I think the fact that his wing of conservatism has made political common cause with the conservative religious fundamentalists reveals the cynicism behind both groups
…Greenspan was a Randian. Ye gads, what a bunch of idiots.
I think you’ll like Pierce’s article, too. It was the main inspiration. I’ve been sitting on it since I read it in 2005, and in light of the Gallop Poll showing 68% of Republicans think that evolution is false and the opening of the OMFG Creation “Museum”, I thought it was a good time to dust it off.
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Really, is it that hard to make people who believe that humans had T-Rex’s as pets (see post) buy into phrases like “if we don’t fight them in Iraq, we’ll be fighting them at home”?
People will believe what the want to believe. If it makes people feel tougher or more worthy in comparison to a scapegoat — what’s not to believe?
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There is a nexus between cynicism and ignorance that is as old as the people who domesticaled dinosaurs!
Because it is nonsense.
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Maybe there IS a Gallop organization trying to pirate the Gallup name?
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I really need to see what the QUESTIONS were. If you were to ask if the hand of God guided evolution, that evolution was a manifestation of God’s creation, that a strictly random evolution was improbable – would THAT mean that you didn’t believe in evolution?
IF you cliked through, you’d see the questions. And I can assure you that there is no conspiricy to hijack Gallup’s name to make Republicans look bad. At this point, why bother? This was widely reported; I first learned about this from USA Today.
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You’re correct – It is nonsense for adults to believe that evolution is false. You just happen to belong to a political party in which 68% of its members deny evolution.
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A sample size of 1,000 with no information as to whether the 800 Catholics with the 8% margin of error are included in that number?
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You seem to place a great deal of faith in polls…
Is not a river in Egypt.
…polling. Nor does she understand statistics. It is not worth the time to explain it to her.
Polling seems to predict elections fairly well, unless of course we’re talking about Kerry Healey’s fictional internal polls that showed her trailing Patrick by single digits.
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If you don’t like my sources, research the topic yourself. I posted these other other two sources in a different comment.
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If you can show polling that contradicts the statements made by the 2005 and 2007 surveys, post it. I mean, did you look at the Creation Museum? A $28M museum seems like a sizeable chunk of money to spend if the support wasn’t out there. I suspect that the owners commissioned research that said a significant portion of the US populace will buy the idea of pet T-Rexes and Adam riding a triceretops before they sunk a fortune into that place.
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Peter, wake up.
It’s $28 million they don’t have at their disposal to get their creationist crackpots elected to office where they can do real damage. Just sayin’.
II look at it a.) as poisoning/brainwashing young people with out-right lies and b.) as $28M that could have been spent on hungry people, orphans, darfur, REAL EDUCATION!
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But, whatever. It’s not my $28 mil.
I was just being a jerk.
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There’s a YouTube video on Pharyngula, my favorite science blog, about the Ordovician shale underlying the area of the museum. lol. I have an undergrad degree in geology, so I find this stuff interesting:
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Here’s the link.
I finaly watched the video. I love the irony that the Creation “Museum” sits on a bed of fosilized sea life from 450 million years ago.
….said that 40% of DEMOCRATS don’t believe in evolution, either!
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I’m not going to search out some boutique poll to garner different statistics, but I find it hard to credit that almost half the people on BMG don’t believe in evolution – that IS the kind of extrapolation you’re trying to make about Republicans, isn’t it?
To quote myself: “Although Democrats are significantly less delusional, 40% of Democrats disbelieving evolution is true is nothing to be proud of.”
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40% of Democrats denying evolution is not the same as 40% of BMG denying evolution. If you’re curious of the ratio here, let’s conduct our own unscientific polling, shall we?
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And you won’t search out a poll to garner different statistics because that poll dosen’t exist.
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The fact is that a significant portion of our America’s population (aproximately 40%) believe the bat-shit crazy idea of Young Earth Creationism. This fact is a threat to the health of our republic. Denying thatsuch an intellectual crisis exists makes one complicit with the peddlers of the creation lie.
What the heck, most people in the US don’t believe in evolution.. 80% of people think the US is hiding evidence of extraterrestrials. Why, most people in the US even think the New Deal pulled the US out of the Depression. Rubes.
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Takes all kinds. Viva la difference.
obviously, is the willingness to substitute wishes for facts. And to indulge Americans who want to do this.
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But I think the really interesting question is, what is so appealing about believing some of these goofy things? WMDs, creationism, Plame and New Orleans revisionism, et cetera.
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Is there a kind of structure to the pleasure that causes people to willfully disregard the truth and choose fairy tales? Something along the lines of George Lakoff’s critique of the “strict father” ideology? (Or Freud’s critique of religion?)
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Or do we just have a subset of American’s conditioned to believe whatever the Right tells them too, like good Newspeakers in 1984?
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Either way I don’t see how it can be reduced to any one cause, e.g. religious indoctrination or failures of education.
The gist is that I’m uncomfortable with the idea that of the people eligible to vote on my future, 20% believe the Sun revolves around the Earth, and 44% think evolution is a lie. It’s nuts – these are the people we have to ask about Iraq and Iran?
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Do educated, intelligent people believe dumb things? Of course. Better education will not eliminate wacky beliefs, but I think it will reduce the number of people who believe the wacky things. And perhaps a strong basis in critical though can help break the hold of
Fox Propaganda, et almodern good Newspeakers. Michael Shermer actual wrote a book on this subject called Why People Believe Weird Things<
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I mean, people are going to a $28M “museum” that shows a triceratops, an animal that went extint 68 Million years ago, wearing an English riding saddle living side-by-side with humans 6,000 years ago.
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To paraphrase Louis Black, “these people watch the Flintstones as if it’s a documentary”. How are we ever going to explain stem cell research or global warming to them?
I’d suggest that the key problem is religion.
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Religion teaches us that it is healthy, useful, saintly, and good-for-our-kharma to believe stuff that defies reason. It also suggests that there is a Source more telling (and more deserving of capitalization) than mere empirical evidence for determining the truth. Once you’ve practiced hard at accepting certain improbabilities at weekly gatherings, it is not difficult to imagine herbivorous tyrannasauruses and alternative cosmologies.
my religion doesn’t ask me to defy reason, but instead calls me to study, to question and to work towards social justice in general. In fact most modern day religious thinkers in my religion believe that evolution is true, and supports science as a way to understand our world and universe.
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Science and religion aren’t a priori opposed to one another, but they do have to be placed in the proper private and public sphere. In my view, it’s the balance that’s important.
Yes, there is a difference between fundamentalists and those who subscribe to modern, sophisticated and often benign theologies.
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However, it is fair to say that all religions require faith; and faith could be defined as believing in something on insufficient evidence.
I was making an effort not to name names. As a result, I sounded more general than even I would agree with. Apologies Mr Afertig.
In fact, it’s a tension I’ve thought a lot about and had many conversations about. I think it’s very hard in today’s society to maintain a liberal spirituality which recognizes both the fundamental and necessary reasoning that science teaches as well as the need for a sense of spirituality. The reason for this, I think, has something to do with how superstitious many religions have gotten. Believing in the Bible literally, to me, is (and I don’t mean to offend here) pretty crude. To believe in the creationism as expressed in that creationist exhibition is absurd, and I have little to no tolerance for that sort of thinking.
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The next time somebody says that they don’t believe in evolution, ask them if they’ve had a flu shot this year or ever. Because, if there’s no evolution, no mutation, then there’s no point in getting the most recent flu shot, is there? It’s a pretty simple test.
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Still, I happen to agree with Moses Mendelssohn, who argued that many different individuals may need many different types of religions; the true test of a religion, though, is its effect on conduct. So when we go around denying science – from evolution to stem cells to global warmin – that doesn’t exactly help anybody and hurts a lot of people and living beings.
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The way I sort of think about it is (roughly):
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Science teaches us about our world and universe – it teaches us how living and non-living things function, how they came to be, what we can predict for the future of the physical world etc.
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But religion can teach us how to live a meaningful life given all that.
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To stay on global warming: Science teaches us that global warming is a real and present danger. But religion, I believe, can help answer how we live our lives to deal with the threat on a moral level. What are our moral obligations to the earth as a whole and other living beings which inhabit it? Is there a reason, outside of the huge economic and human toll the climate crisis takes, we should care about the earth?
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How can we find meaning and order in a world that seems so chaotic? Should we even try to find some sense of order? Is there something that binds us together as human beings besides the fact that we’re all human? Neither science nor religion can answer questions like these alone or even together. But to ignore one, the other, or both seems unwise.
in the Globe Sunday
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God and country
What it means to be a Christian after George W. Bush
By Charles Marsh | July 8, 2007
If God’s on our side, He’ll stop the next war
— Bob Dylan
EARLY ONE SUNDAY morning in the spring of 2003, in the quiet hours before services would begin at the evangelical church where I worship in Charlottesville, Virginia, I opened files compiled by my research assistant and read the statements drafted by Christians around the world in opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.
The experience was profoundly moving and shaming: From Pentecostals in Brazil to the Christian Councils of Ghana, from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East to the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, from Pope John Paul II to the The Waldensian Reformed Church of Italy and the Christian Conference of Asia, the voices of our brothers and sisters in the global ecumenical church spoke in unison.
Why did American evangelicals not pause for a moment in the rush to war to consider the near-unanimous disapproval of the global Christian community?
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http://www.boston.co…
As these exchanges race toward the right margin of the page, many thoughts.
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1. The Jewish tradition, to the extent that I understand it, includes an ongoing tradition of interpretation. This is different from the quasi-scientific claims certain folks read into the Bible. Aren’t there some Jewish religious leaders who even see a continuity between current poetry and scripture? (I mean this as a real question. Is this true Afertig?)
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2. There’s evidence that the religious are happier than the atheists. I’m not sure what to make of that evidence: either there is some sort of crying need for spirituality or religion is one of the few avenues for community in a fragmented society.
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3. Nietzsche has some wonderful passages asking about this desire for “truth”. “Why seek truth?” he asks. “What’s it good for?” (Disclaimer: I’m quite fond of truth.) Again, the evidence from positive psychology is that some kinds of optimism, that border on very mild self-delusion, make people happier, more productive, and have better marriages. There is no evidence at all that we are here for a purpose. (In fact, there can be no evidence for that.) That we find comfort in the idea of life purpose does not mean it is true. Still believing it is true can make us more resilient.
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4. Voltaire makes excellent fun of our using our religious beliefs to make metaphysical or cosmological claims where modesty would be called for. Reading St. Augustine’s Confessions is an odd experience as St. Augustine informs God of God’s wishes, desires, attributes, origins, etc. Some may find it pious; to me, it seems immodest. I’m dubious of jumps from the need for spirtuality to metaphysical and cosmological claims.
Anything to back up this defamatory claim? Judging by the beastly words and deeds of many a religionist during the Bush Reign, I’d say that religion makes some people downright bitter, nasty, and in a constant state of spiritual putrification.
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-A Very Happy Atheist
it is the establishments of religion that are the problem, not religion in and of itself.
to this from KBusch:
S/he was talking about people, not institutions (or lack thereof).
There were a number of studies done. I tend to remember stuff that runs against my world view precisely because that’s the stuff one really has to chew on. Martin Seligman, in Authentic Happiness, pages 59ff discusses this quoting a summary article by D. Myers, “The funds, friends, and faith of happy people”, American Psychologist, 55, 56-67. Seligman is the founder of the field of Positive Psychology and former chair of the APA. He’s an expert on happiness, as it were. The effect of religion is only moderate and it is weaker than the effect of being married versus single.
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Please keep in mind the following:
One of the unfortunate traps a lot of liberals fall into is imagining that the hordes of self-identified conservatives are miserable, crabby people eking out lives of hate and bitterness. They’re not. Many of them are downright serene.
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Might I add that I’m supposed to be the partisan ideologue with the terrible blinders, not you?
for clarifying as you should have done earlier (thereby nullifying your original statement), and no thanks for lumping me in with liberals who lump all conservatives in the miserable category. that does not fairly follow from what i wrote.
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i dont’ know, are you supposed to be the partisan ideologue with terrible blinders? if so fret not, as apparently you still are.
Please check your spam container in case my email address is not recognized.
After Nietzsche’s death, his papers were sequestered by his sister, who was a vile anti-semite. As far as I have read, he himself was not.
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As far as I’m concerned, his best quotation should be
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Gott ist tot. Gott bleibt tot. Und wir haben ihn getoetet.
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God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
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That was in a writing that preceded Also Sprach Zarathustra, the most famous source of the “God is dead” Zitat.
Yes, Jewish tradition, throughout the centuries, has been based on a continued level of reinterpretation and change. Whether through the Talmud, a collection of Rabbinic law in which debates over actions, traditions, etc. span over centuries or through modern Reform Responsa which essentially take a modern question and try to give guidance. Responsa might answer questions like, “Is abortion allowed in x instance?” or “Is y an appropriate time to get a divorce?” etc.
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I’m not really sure what you’re asking about about poetry, to be honest. What do you mean by, “a continuity between poetry and scripture,”? I know that a lot of people use poetry or stories to reinterpret or reframe a given passage in the Torah, but that isn’t exactly continuity so much as finding a modern twist to an ancient story… so I’m not sure how to answer that question.
Informative and interesting.
I don’t think I can speak with any real authority on what “all,” “most,” or even “most Reform” Jews do. In part that’s because I just don’t have the knowledge base. Remember that I’m just a guy with a computer who happens to have a little bit of knowledge. More importantly (I hope), is that there is no central organization which makes all choices for all Jews. Even within different modern denominations – Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, (and I’m sure there are more) – there’s no one organization telling the group the way it’s got to be. So certain practices and traditions will often vary between different congregations, so I suppose it’s possible that somebody somewhere does see a continuity between poetry and Torah, though I don’t, personally.
Thanks you. I was reading through the comments to see if someone was going to hit on this point, so you’ve saved me the effort. The problem is the ignorant but muscular religious masses of this nation who cling to their mythologies; their views inform everything they do. Scratch the surface of the silliness noted above, and you’ll find a faith-based reason behind it.
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Fortunately, we are beginning to see a change in the zeitgeist, given the phenomenal success of people like Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and now Hitchens in pushing back. The pendulum, I believe, is starting to swing back slowly as more and more people are increasingly willing to utter the very sort of comment you describe as “inappropriate at dinner parties.”
I’m not sure that just spending more money on education is the answer. I’d like to see how the current data stacks up against Americans’ belifs each decade for the past century–my suspicion is that the head-in-add percentage has been on the rise since the 1980s, even though more people than ever are finishing high school.
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Maybe our schools aren’t teaching the right things. Maybe schools are so afraid of being labeled “intolerant” (or of being sued), or maybe we’ve swallowed a bit too much cultural relativism (a mental poison concocted by the stupider elements of the left) that they’ve become untillign to teach students that there are FACTS and that it is indeed possible to be wrong.
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I don’t know what the exact solution is, but it’s got to be more than “more money, please.”
I think people learn from about 4 years old that dinosaurs didn’t live at the same time as man. However, that doesn’t mean they accept it. You can lead a horse to water, etc.
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I knew somebody who took a geology course at a Christian college in the Midwest. At the end of a semester filled with scientific models and readings, the last five minutes were devoted to the professor announcing that everything they’d learned was wrong. Necessary in this world, but wrong, as God created the world in 7 days. This man had a doctorate in geology, but rejected it all based on the misinterpreted oral histories of a small desert tribe.
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This dovetails with what KBusch was saying: some people abdicate their understanding of right v. wrong, morally and factually. Be it a preacher, a teacher, or a neighbor, people will simply throw out any knowledge, regardless of its grounding in common sense or trust, because of its purveyor. Though this isn’t exclusively a religious phenomenon, it seems to strike there a fair bit.
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So once these folks decided to believe George W Bush, they joined the 20% that will believe anything he says. I think the cognitive dissonance scientifically and politically are one and the same: once you’ve given up on evaluating knowledge and its sources for yourself, everything becomes equal, whether it’s about Allosaurs in the living room or Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
It’s no secret that America’s education system, pre-school through graduate school, is vastly underperforming. Also, considera poll of 32 European nations and the US that shows only Turkey has a higher percentage of evolution deniers in it’s population.
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That does not make us look good. I have no illussion that education will solve all of our democracy-related problems, but what could it hurt? Even if better education doesn’t solve the problem I layed out in the post, wouldn’t we still be better as a republic with a better educated populace?
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What could it hurt?
If education does not encourage people to think independently, then it is little more than glorified indoctrination, creating a nation of followers.
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Look at working-class African-Americans as an example of a group which may not have lots of formal education, but seems more cognizant of its interests than just about any other demographic out there.
The crazy over-emphasis on test-taking at the expense of developing critical thinking skills.
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Robert Reich actually had bit on Marketplace yesterday evening that sums things up quite nicely, I thought.
…The Flintstones told us that in the 1960s.
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I’ve read about the Creationist Museum–it’s actually been “reviewed” in Der Spiegel, and apparently has been reviled by some in southwestern Ohio (Cincinnati) and northern Kentucky as a stain on their reputations, such as their reputations may be.
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One of the things that needs to be realized in order to understand this phenomenon is that people will oftentimes reject facts that do not conform to their preconceived notions. If they want to believe that the earth is 6000 years old and that people co-existed with Dino, you can argue with them until you are blue in the face and present facts that show that they are wrong, and it won’t do any good. If you ask them, where did the Flood waters go? they will tell you that they are in vast underground caverns. I’ve seen it. It’s hilarious. But it’s true. (NB: the Deluge is a Chaldean myth that predated the bible.)
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They will even argue that god put the fossils where they are to test their faith. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
I see we have quite a potential controversy here.
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On the one hand, we have the Creation Museum telling us that dinos were beasts of burden. And on the other, we have Carl Everett (remember him?) telling us that dinosaurs never existed at all!
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What’s a good anti-rationalist fundamentalist to do?
OK, regardless of the scope of the problem, I admit that I find the tendency to deny evolution to be the most painful and troubling thing about the American Right.
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Reading the article, a few things strike me:
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The data indicate some seeming confusion on the part of Americans on this issue. About a quarter of Americans say they believe both in evolution’s explanation that humans evolved over millions of years and in the creationist explanation that humans were created as is about 10,000 years ago.
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and
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Now thinking about how human beings came to exist on Earth, do you, personally, believe in evolution, or not?
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Yes, believe
in
evolution
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No, do
not
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No
opinion
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2007 May 21-24
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49
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48
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2
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It is important to note that this question included a specific reference to “thinking about how human beings came to exist on Earth . . .” that oriented the respondents toward an explicit consideration of the implication of evolution for man’s origin. Results may have been different without this introductory phrase.
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So I think maybe the questions are being posed in a way that seems to challenge people’s religious beliefs, in an all black or all white “do you believe in God” sort of way. And thats why people are tending towards creationism. Well, thats my apologist theory anyway.
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But hey, you on the hard left are no strangers to fiction – how many people here believe that 9/11 was known in advance? That Bush lied us into Iraq for Oil? (Where’s the oil!!)
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How many take their lessons and activism from movies tailor made for that purpose?
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Ignorance is everywhere.
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Where’s the oil!!
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…probably much of it is still in the ground.
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Not 48 percent of the population.
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The oil is located in several regions of Iraq. Here is a map for your perusal.
…Saddam had direct links to al-Qaeda, Saddam was trying to by nukes, Pat Tillman was ambushed, Jessica Lynch was captured while fighting, etc? I’ll take the realtively benign conspiricy theories of Rosie over the catastrophic conspiricy theories propagated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.
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http://www.bluemassg…
Exactly right! That is why Bush screwed it up so badly. Not only did he get us into Vietraq for no good reason except to line the pockets of his cronies, but he also failed to get us any oil and wasted over $400 billion of our dollars in the process — not to mention tens of thousands of soldiers dead and injured and many civilians killed and maimed. If gas were at $2 and the invasion had been profitable — reconstruction paid for from oil revenues etc., as promised by Perle and the neocon gang — there would be a lot less dissatisfaction right now. (Of course, if gas were $2 global warming would be accelerating even faster, but never mind).
Next you’re going to say that we didn’t get any oil because we had no plan to get the oil, right? (Like we had no plan to win the peace)
Well, since there was no plan for post-invasion Iraq, it’s a simple corollary that there was no plan to get the oil. There was no plan to do much of anything really.
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The hypocrisy of it all is quite stunning: Iraq, we’re told, is the central front in the war on terror, but the Administration could not actually plan for the peace. If one took them at their word, one would have a lot of trouble trying to figure out why they were so cavalier going into the invasion and so slipshod in its aftermath.
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And yes, Demolisher, responses on the Iraq invasion and occupation are not going to provide you a variety of interesting, surprising, witty, and amusingly unpredictable posts from us here. That, unfortunately, is not the least of the tragedies of this awful war. Sorry you must put up with the terrible boredom this must cause you.
Thank you for agreeing that, in your own words:
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there was no plan to get the oil.
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Of course there wasn’t.
There wasn’t any plan for anything at all, other than perhaps for victory parades, and the best angle to photgraph Bush in a jumpsuit.
to say – with conviction – that you believe in something that is absurd. It is like some kind of a loyalty oath like pledging to the Grand Dragon. The more absurd – the more absolute loyalty and dedication is takes to sign on.
I have been a reader of BlueMassGroup for a while. I have enjoyed learning the positions of the many left leaning thinkers this site has brought forth, but never have I witnessed such animosity for religion as I have witnessed here in this particular post.
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The fact that the author has seemingly lumped people of faith into a bucket with “bat-shit crazies” is offensive. I know that not all the viewers of this blog agree with the author’s premise, but I find it disturbing nonetheless.
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Let me state my position on religion and God. I believe in God. And I believe because I have been given more reason to believe than to not believe. Certainly there are areas of the Christian faith that are mysterious, but then again we are dealing with things that are considered above our consciousness. I would also say that faith isn’t easy to adhere to nor is it easy to understand. My feelings and beliefs about God are probably much like many other people’s feeling about global warming. They have been given more reason to believe than to not believe.
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That being said let me share a quick story about faith. My wife has a sister that is handicapped. The sister is mentally retarded, blind and undergoing a twice daily regimen of kidney dialysis. The sister lives at home with the mother, and my wife visits many days a month to care for this sister. Without a faith in God my wife and her mother would not be able to undertake the grueling task of caring for a completely disabled relative. There are endless doctor visits, blood tests and medicines to be administered; all this while the sister’s bedroom serves as a makeshift medical center for the dialysis process. The majority of their lives are dedicated to caring for a disabled person and the only sense of comfort that they have is the knowledge that there is somewhere a God that cares for them as well. Without their faith in God they could not provide the sense of comfort for the sister.
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Their faith has given them strength. Their faith has given them courage. Their faith has given them a sense of purpose. Perhaps the author of the post is luckier than my wife and her mother and does not have the difficult life situation of caring for a highly disabled person. They should count their blessings. We are not so fortunate, but every day my wife and her mother get up and face another day of work with dignity and grace based solely on the fact that they believe in a loving and caring higher being.
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While the author spends time trying to untangle the confusing details of scripture and religion, my wife and her mother are putting it to good use. Religion is not for people that seek to understand every last detail; rather it is for people who can demonstrate faith in light of the sometimes confusing facts and figures.
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One could argue that it was the same faith in God that inspired the Pilgrims to give up their homes and sail to our shores nearly four hundred years ago. It is the same faith that got many families through the second world war, slavery, plagues of disease that have swept the world and countless other calamities that we wrestle with today. It is the very same faith that caused the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to march through the streets demanding freedom for his people. Your facts do not support our cause, but you are helpless to deny the results of the faith we share. I would ask what the author plans to use to face the eventual difficulties that life throws around. Will the belief in evolution comfort a terminally sick child? Will the author?s obvious command of polling numbers offer relief when a loved one slips away due to the ravages of cancer?
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Religion is not the intellectual poison that you speak of. Religion is the glue that has held people together for countless generations and through the most difficult of times. Your condemnation of it does nothing to strengthen our community or enlighten those in need. On top of my full time job I also serve as a youth Minister and have found great joy in giving some of the many young people I work with a sense of hope. Young people are troubled by what they see today and all the reports, surveys and polls will do nothing to calm their fears or inspire their dreams for a better tomorrow. The world we share is becoming more secular with every passing day and the troubles of gang violence, murder, rape and drugs will not disappear with the final abolition of religion. In fact, I would claim that the world we see ?devolving? before our very eyes will one day be saved by that God you hate so vehemently.
Reread my post carefully.
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I did not call all people of faith bat-shit crazy. I stated that people who believe that humans spontaneously popped into existence 10,000 years ago and deny the fact of evolution believe a bat-shit crazy idea.
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I did not mention scripture once. Scripture is irrelevant to my post.
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One could argue that the Pilgrims left England because they were religious extremests and their radical beliefs were not welcome in England. One could argue that, although abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison were inspired by Christianity, Christianity did a lot more to justify and maintain slavery (see: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass). One could argue that Religion has helped the spread of disease – see the policy of not distrubuting condoms in AIDS-ridden regions of Africa.
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I did not make the blanket statement tha religion is intellectual poison. I stated that ideas such as HIV being transmitted by tears, the denial of evolution, dinosaurs living with humans, and the Sun revolving around the Earth is intellectual poison.
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I also know plenty of non-Christians who care for the sick. They have the strength to do so with out the help of your God. To imply that people need your God to have the strength to care for the sick is offensive.
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The idea of the world devolving before our eyes is a myth. 80 years ago women couldn’t vote. 50 years ago so-called Christians were lynching Black people and White Civil Rights workers and bombing churches. 100 years ago 9-year-old kids were loosing arms in mills because child labor was unregulated. The US illegally imprisoned tens of thousands of Japanese citizens in the 40s. in the 60s, we still had segregation for cripes sakes. Human rights and equality is at an all time high. Saying that we are devolving implies the myth of the good ol’ days; The good ol’ days weren’t that good for everyone.
Perhaps my comments might be construed as hatred? I don’t know.
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There are lots of people who credit various kinds of strength they have to religion. A generous reading of vote34dpartynow’s remarks would be that he is saying religion gave some people strength, but that he is not saying the converse, i.e., that religion is necessary for strength.
I don’t have a God. God has me. Everyone has a choice based on what they have learned and experienced. You either believe in God or you don’t believe in God. Nobody is forcing you to believe. My retort was based on your implication that anyone who believes is somehow weak minded.
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I can’t comment on what you have read or seen from other people and their adherence to a faith or religion. I certainly can not comment on the museum of which you speak. But, I do know this – the only way to truly know about God and the relationship that you could have with Him is to find out for yourself. I wasn’t always a believer. But, I put all the crap that is out there aside and went to the source – scripture. I read it, I pondered it, and I thought about it long and hard. Furthermore, I went and found other books that discussed the goings on of the times mentioned in the bible so I could better understand the text and context of what the writers meant. In the end it has been a huge blessing to me and my wife and children, but especially my mother in law.
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You may not have the same experience. You might investigate it and in the end decide you don’t believe, but never base that decision upon the influences of others who wiosh you to think their way. Certainly, do not base it on what you have read about a museum somewhere.
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I would also ask that you not speak poorly of those who have come to a different conclusion about God. In the church I attend there are a number of noted researchers, humanitarians, writers, scholars and even a PHD from MIT with a degree in nuclear biology or something of that sort. The people that go to my church are smart, and well educated and have not come to their position easily. many of them still struggle with their faith – they aren’t perfect.
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Alas, you are correct that there are many people who do not have a grounded faith that still do many wonderful things. I applaud them for their work and quite often work side by side with them at the many volunteer efforts I am involved with. I see people who have no faith spending time working with the unfortunate at food pantries, hospices, training programs and many other places. I pray for them. Maybe they are being blessed by God without them even knowing it? God works that way sometimes…….
…the triune God that is Yaweh, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost as opposed to Allah, Krishna, Ganesh, the wiccan ‘God’/’Goddess’, the ‘Deity’ of Jefferson and other diests, Thor or any other entity that has been worshiped by humans. And I was very specific about who I thought had flaws; the people who delusionally deny facts such as the Earth’s orbit of the Sun and denial of Evolution.
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Where have I spoken inaccurately about people who have come to a different conclusion about God then me?
Why not respond to what he actually said rather than to what you believe he “implied”? You risk responding to your misunderstandings rather than to tblade’s intent. The result will be circular and confusing.
I suspect you’d find Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything an interesting read.
…as it is an issue of establishments of religion. There is a difference, which is lost on many people. Establishments of religion are not very nice. Just ask the Cathars, murdered by the Roman Catholic Church, Inc.
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Do a google search on the RCCi’s torture implements that were used by the various inquisitions. You’d be surprised at what you would find.
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It isn’t so much religion that is the problem. It is the establishments of religion–particularly those that vye for political power–that are the problem.
Answering numerous of your comments all at once:
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That is not the topic of this discussion. We’re talking about why people believe stuff that is counter-factual. Part of the discussion is whether religion has a role in such popular beliefs. We are not discussing the church-state separation.
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If you wish to discuss the establishment of religion and why it is a bad thing, that’s fine, of course. It just doesn’t have the merit here, in this thread of being the core issue or the most relevant topic.