Letters to the Editor
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The problem with God's will
The problem to me is that believing to this level means no longer having the capacity to ask questions. If everything is God's will, then why wonder how disease strikes? If God intends to send the rapture, why worry about what to do with spent nuclear waste?
I'll bet there are many people who go to that Museum who agree that terrorist struck the US because of abortions and same-sex marriage. God was mad.
When you throw your hat into a creation myth, it's a short ride to answer God's will to just about anything. And if we stop asking questions because the answer is always known, then we're really in a bad place in this country. See President, faith.
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The Creation Nauseum
Allie (glad you liked "Frankenfaithful") wrote...
If anyone here has any suggestions for how to convert Fundamentalists to a belief in truth, reason, and reality, I'd love to hear them.
I don't think it's possible to convert them, to be honest; it has to be they who make the step away from it, on their own. Fundamentalism seems a reaction to science, secularism, reason, and reality -- a retreat from the uncertainty of the world to a seemingly solid, if mythological, foundation, akin to fingers in the ears and saying "Nanananananana can't hear you, Satan."
I guess that's the appeal of orthodoxy -- the appeal of authoritarianism, where nobody asks why (heretics end up on the bonfire, along with the books, scientists, intellectuals, the pop culture, all that nasty, effete, sexual stuff), and if anybody left does still ask why, the answer is "Because God said so, that's why."
Never mind that they place a HUGE value in appearances, in putting up a false front -- the appearance of virtue to camouflage the uncertainty and hypocrisy that gnaws at their hearts like a worm inside an apple. The only cure for that doubt is to find a scapegoat, fast -- a witch to burn, whether it's gay marriage, or secularism, or the United Nations, or Darwin.
Even so, I think people probably leave frankenfaiths all the time; on some level, their totalitarian drive and their urge to proselytize are connected to it -- eliminating alternatives (e.g., diversity of thought, the corrosive "Satanic" pop culture) and relentlessly trying to recruit new believers to make up for losses that inevitably occur as people get tired of drinking the Kool-Aid.
They only win if there are no alternatives to their shallow faith, which is why they invoked the Culture War, and why they still talk about it in those terms, and why they are opting out of the secularist education system, building their own parallel world.
The Creation Nauseum represents another step in the march of this Frankenfaith. I imagine similar insanities will be created elsewhere. It's weird, really -- we've got War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery with Bush; the Creation Nauseum and the fundamentalist movement increasingly sounds like Ignorance is Strength. Yikes.
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This looks like a job for the FSM
I think that the Flying Spaghetti Monster's Museum should be built nearby. The whole area should be dedicated to alternate history museums to allow it to develop into a true tourist trap. Don't forget the roller coasters!
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Genesis Shmenisis
Every once in a while (although more rarely over the past six years, I admit) I see or hear about things going on in the world and I thank my higher power I was born in the United States.
A story like this really compels me to be more specific in my gratitude...I feel like it's not enough to just be thankful to have been born in America...So here's the thanks I gave the universe after reading this story:
Thank goodness I was born in a time when critical thinking was valued by my teachers.
Thank goodness I was born in a time when reason, too, was valued.
Thank goodness I was born in a time when scientific inquiry and the scientific method were the foundations of..not just my science classes, but all learning...
Although we lived in low-income housing for my first twelve years and my family struggled financially, Thank the Maker I was raised and public-schooled in an upper-middle class suburb in liberal, elitist Massachusetts.
Thank goodness my parents were of differing faiths, which resulted in my being raised in a relatively secular household.
Thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness...The list could go on and on...
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A Question For The "Museum" Curators, Please!
Umm, if GOD commanded Noah to place two of every species in the ark before the great flood, why did Noah disobey GOD and NOT include any dinosaurs? Perhaps because Fred and Wilma Flintstone were keeping Dino, their pet, on a short leash, huh?
Most telling is the last paragraph in the "news" story. Florida high-school student, Tim Shaw, while touring the museum, says to the interviewer, in essence: "I don't know if the Grand Canyon was created in a few days by the aftermath of the great flood or over millions of years by erosion because I DON'T CARE! I care only that the bible says so."
That pretty much sums up the deplorable state of education in America today. Fact is replaced by fiction...faith replaces reason. If Tim Shaw had his way, libraries would close, scientific explanations would be banned and the only thing we would all rely on would be the bible.
I hardly think...pardon the expression...that GOD would put us here simply to be automatons. One can have a brain to think and still have faith in a creator.
This alleged "museum" is sad...so very sad.
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Science versus "science"
Dan Sexton: But evolution is not science. Neither is archeology and much of astronomy.
These fields are certainly a different kind of science than, say, neurophysiology, in that they rely for their data on inference and observation rather than controlled laboratory experiments. But they are most definitely still science, in that they build up bodies of knowledge from testable hypotheses that can be objectively verified or refuted.
Not only are these conjectural, but, they take on a life of their own which forms the foundation of future work. If there's a wrong direction discovered anywhere, it is heresy to reveal it and it will never be proven.
And this is total BS. Theoretical cosmology, for example, has undergone enormous changes over the past thirty years with the discovery of phenomena like dark matter and dark energy that contradicted previous assumptions about the make-up of the Universe. The theories behind archaeology and evolutionary biology have also been, and continue to be, extensively revised in light of new discoveries in the field.
Creation "science" does not have anything like this kind of self-correcting mechanism based on external, objective data, which is why it is not science.