Mahnmut

Call out bullshit for what it is - bullshit. Use scientific arguments to demonstrate how it stinks. Then improve education. And I do mean scientific, not pseudo-scientific education.

Still, if someone so much insists that their kids learn some pseudo-science, make an optional school subject about it. Astrology is nice and interesting but it shouldn't be presented as if it's 'science'.

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Tough to do but not impossible.

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Though I'm a Christian I must agree that teaching evolution in the schools is both senseless and a bad precedent for society to have set. Creationism is one of those things that I just do not understand. Taken at its own word it creates a scenario where God is Evil.

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"I must agree that teaching evolution in the schools is both senseless and a bad precedent"

Not what you intended to say?

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Yep. I meant that "teaching religious nonsense and propaganda in the schools is both senseless and a bad precedent." The "Religious Right" is a totalitarian disaster waiting to happen. People didn't think Ayatollah Khomeini would ever be more than the thorn in the Shah's flesh, either.

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prader.livejournal.com

Did you mean to say "I must agree that teaching creationism in the schools...?"

Creationism is one of those things that I just do not understand.

I would go so far as to say that Creationism, as I understand it to be presented, is largely not what the Bible actually says. According to my reading.

My opinion on this subject is that what can be demonstrated through inerrant repeatable experimentation and observation ought to be treated and taught as Science. What may be perfectly valid guesswork based on those observations ought to be clearly identified as such. And Creationism is better suited for a Philosophy class... unless you can come up with a testable hypothesis from it.

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The problem is that there are as many ways to read the Bible as the number of people there are. It's something like the Nostradamus prophecies. All sorts of interpretations. And fundies who read the Gospel literally 1:1 are just one part of the myriad of ways to read it. I don't see why one group among all should be given unfair advantage over the rest.

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prader.livejournal.com

There is only one correct way. The problem is that I'm not absolutely certain the way I'm doing so is it. I am fairly sure the strictly literal way is not it either, though.

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As above, yes.

It is what the Bible says. The Bible also says that the Earth is the center of the Universe, which is supported on pillars. It makes no mention of anything like dinosaurs, but does mention two seven-headed dragons, Leviathan and Rahab, respectively. It also makes no mention of the existence of North and South America, or that the Pyramids were there, as they were there long before the Bible was even written.

The people of the Patriarchs' day are described with completely anachronistic caravan cultures, and the armor Goliath wears is not that of contemporary Palestinian culture but actually that of the Greek hoplites, which did not themselves exist to that degree at the time.

The Bible also identifies bats as birds, claims insects have four legs, claims rabbits chew cud, attributes to the Israelites in Egypt numbers far greater than lived in the entire Levantine region at the time, to the point that even thousands of years later 1 million people wandering the Wilderness would in fact leave traces, particularly in the arid Sinai peninsula. And most importantly the Bible credits Israel and Judah both with armies far larger than those possessed by the Assyrian Empire when that was the first great Mediterranean Empire.

The Bible has no legs to stand on historically or scientifically.

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my favorite:
And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron. (Judges 1:19)

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Yes, that's a good one.

*My* favorite one to trip up the literalists is when God explicitly says that Nebuchadnezzar will destroy Tyre the coastal city and the Island. They try to fudge the issue by claiming that Alexander the Great was a deeper fulfillment of that but it's bunk. The Bible has two such prophecies that are ones that give inerrantists fits.

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It also claims that Tyre will never be rebuilt!

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It also claims that Nebuchadnezzar was going immediately thereafter to leave Egypt barren for 40 years. That would have been news to the Achaemaenids, Ptolemies, Romans, and Byzantines, to say nothing of the Muslims. XP.

Yeah, there's a reason I have nothing but contempt for the Fundies.

The other one I was referring to was Jesus's statement that one of the three, Peter, James, and John would live to see his Second Coming. Last I checked all of those Apostles are dead and it's 2000 years later......

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That is to say, 40 years where Egypt was entirely uninhabited by human beings, this in the lifespan of the one truly great later Babylonian Empire-builder.

Perhaps the single biggest stinker, as far as the Bible's historical problems, is that it claims that the Jews were anachronistically monotheistic. There are inscriptions in Palestine that indicate that the Jewish culture of the time was at the very most charitable henotheistic, and was in reality polytheistic, including the Asherah as consort of YHVH.

If the Biblical state had been half of what it was claimed to have been, the Egyptians and the Assyrians would have been able to wipe it out simply due to sheer isolation. But the Bible was very clearly written by partisans of the Judaean court at the expense of the Northern Kingdom, which can be deciphered from several passages and explains the BLAM where Simeon and Levi sack and massacre an entire town in Genesis. Both of which were founders of Northern tribes.

Which in turn raises the *real* problem of to what extent anything in the record can be trusted.

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Luke 9:27 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”

Mark 9:1 And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

Matthew 16: 28 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

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Not to mention that as far as Biblical inerrancy is concerned there's another issue that people seldom bring up that's hard for the inerrantists to fudge: the Bible can't even keep the 12 tribes of Israel straight from list to list. The theology only attempts to fudge that and give a meaning to the reality that the Bible was mixed together haphazardly and edited poorly afterward.

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Well, it is what the bible says, first book.

First story included in the old testament:
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Second story added in the old testament:
7And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

8And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

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In a round about way you recommended me a movie! Or had a part in it.

Being dawin day, you posted about 'the god of the gaps', which off the cuff had me websearch 'a wizard did it' which took me to 'tvtropes.com', as normal on tv tropes, I went from 'a wizard did it' to 'fridge logic' to 'tomato surprise', at which point I came across the movie 'Lo'

Which I now need to see.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1047490/

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