Letters to the Editor
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Dawkins & Harris aren't going to outlaw religion
To the Christian Indian who practices drum circles. Dawkins and Harris aren't going to outlaw religion or persecute believers or become Atheist "Custers".
They are going to treat religion like the personal interest that it is, like tea-cup collecting or Soren Kierkegaard societies or union membership. But they won't put "In God we Trust" on the money or make people swear on Bibles in court, or teach religious concepts like creation in public school, or determine political sexual policy by looking at the Bible, or justify oil wars with Christian logic, or let churches go untaxed, etc. This Adam & Eve museum would be just fine legally in an atheist society, but it is going to pay taxes like everyone else, including the flying saucer museum down the street.
I. E., they want to de-couple religion from politics. By the way, Custer was a Christian, and many Christian's of his day believed Indians were pagans and should suffer for it. I think Dawkins and Harris are better defenders of religious liberty than fundamentalists of many stripes - Muslim, Jewish, Hindi or Christian, who only want THEIR religion to rule. Look out if you are not their religion, in their society.
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Build it
and the morons will come.. I wonder, is there an exhibit that speaks of the other religions in this marvelous and diverse world of ours? I'll bet that God says "Multiculturalism is dirty word". 6000 years is apparently not long enough to smite the security blanket of complete and utter bullshit. I'd say that I'm going to Hell but now I'm pretty certain that I'm already here.
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Everybody knows
that Eve was a blonde.
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Expectations
The 40% is, as others have mentioned, most definately an overestimation. In polls about religion, most people are afraid to state that they aren't believers. 90% of people in the US claim to be religious and yet church attendance is falling off year after year. The megachurches have huge turnovers of members and are mostly just draining other local churches. Chruches are having trouble finding priests, probably another reason for the consolidation into megachurches.
Even so, the number of people that state outright that they are athiests increases every year. Same with agnostics and pagans. Why are the Right Wing Christians braying so loud? They can see they're losing. Same with fundimentalists of every stripe. Hell conservative politicians are in the same boat. They've been losing for hundreds of years, that's why they love lying so much. They have no other way to pretend they're winning in the long run.
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And another thing ...
There are several different theories of creationism (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fabnaq.html). Before a creationist is allowed to babble on about why evolution has failed, they should be asked to explain first which theory of creationism they represent, and why they chose that one.
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On what day... did He create Elvis?
Is that addressed in the museum?
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"Killing God"?
Wilson:
"The museum has nothing to do with moral compasses, or right vs. wrong. It panders to the fear that science is out to kill God."
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I was about 5, IIRC, when Santa got killed for me. I got over the acute trauma rather quickly.
Not that I disagree with your general point about the equivalent arrogance of "hard athiests" vis a vis the Christiabanists.
An excellent read, BTW, is Ken Wilber's "The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion."
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Wilson
The place exists because moderate and liberal Christians have allowed the fundies and literalists and extremists to coopt your religion, without your people doing a damn thing to stop them. This place exists because liberal Christians don't have the heart to fight back against ignorance, and as your congregations are dwindling and once great progressive institutions turn to dust.
And what is your answer to this? Kick the atheist! As if secularists are responsible for your own pathetic response to the theocrats and zealots.
And it is your own damn fault that when people think Christian, they think Pat Robertson. Not the atheists.
The progressive churches have done next to nothing for the last 20 years to stop the hemmoraging of their memberships, and the prominence of their influence.
So, give it a rest, leave the atheists alone....and take responsibility for your abject failure the most important religious battle of your lifetime.
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'C' for Confusion is Right
I'm a Christian and I don't understand why this exhibit supposedly honors God as the Creator.
When I was a child, and learned about the continents drifting on their tectonic plates over millennia, I looked at my globe of the Earth, and had confirmed what I had long suspected. South America and Africa had been one land mass eons ago.
Their appearance of fitting together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the globe would have made any child wonder about this. Back then, I would have been shocked to have someone tell me that plate tectonics was not a "Christian" belief. The dichotomy of Science and Religion did not seem to mean that believing in one excluded the correctness of another.
Although we can all point to examples where the belief that the world is 6,000 years old is ludicrous, (mine is the presence of sea fossils at the top of the Himalayan mountains, indicating that the mountains had once been an ocean bed), I don't think facts or science will prevail upon these individuals.
In my own world view, I see the scientific explanations of creation as our best theories and very credible. The fact that the Bible says that there was a moment where creation was called into being is very consistent with the idea that the universe had a definite beginning, in the Big Bang.
Today, I see science as revealing more and more of God's mystery and majesty on every scale, from the quantum microcosm to the multiverses and branes of string theory. I am troubled that the faith which these Creationists express seems to be bent on suppressing enlightenment and the findings of scientific discovery.
For a true believer, the Bible is not meant to be a scientific treatise, or a "how-to" guide for science. If God had chosen to impart scientific knowledge in the Bible, it would have had to be dumbed down in orders of magnitude for even the best of our present-day scientists to understand at all.
For the Creation Museum builders, those that I would call "unbelievers", God is not sufficiently great enough and his creation not sufficiently wondrous enough to inspire any awe whatsoever. Instead, these unbelievers feel that they have to apologize for God and the fact that, in their eyes, science and God cannot coexist. Their faith cannot withstand any serious test of scrutiny or exposure to reality. Therefore, they build a Creation Museum, a false idol to their own arrogance and short-sightedness.