Letters to the Editor
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Question...
How many T-Rex and Brontosaurus Rex can you fit on an arc?
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nah it corrects itself over time
Stupid is as stupid does. Eventually whatever it is they wish for comes to be and everything stops functioning. America the Dumb will eventually wink itself out. Picture an ignorant near-theocratic reactionary bankrupt America 30 years in the future. A veritable backwater like Zimbabwe is today. Squalorous, dumb, inbred and violent. All the professional jobs are done by foreigners and Americans subsist on an economy of low wage service jobs and selling life insurance to one another.
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My Problem With This
What's the big deal? We read and enjoy Greco-Roman, Asian, Middle Eastern and Norse mythology; we admire and appreciate great and lesser works of literature, art and music based on these themes; we find fascinating and worthy of study Native American as well as African and other indigenous traditions and beliefs. Why should Judeo-Christian mythology be any different?
I don't have a problem with myths but this 'museum' is trying to pass this off as science, and that's my problem with it.
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Thank you, nancerich
You have hit upon the very crux of the issue. Atheists, agnostics, and NOTAs (like myself) did not create these problems for Christians - other Christians did.
Are we responsible for Christianity fragmenting into two major divisions and hundreds of sects? No, Christians are. Are we responsible for the fanaticism and dogmatism that infects so many Christians orders? No, Christians are. Are we responsible for some Christians' inability to reconcile their faith with an ever-changing world? No, once again, Christians are.
My Christians friends, we didn't create your ignorance, your distrust, your anti-intellectualism. You did. Or at the least you sat quiet and let it happen. And if we weren't here, if tomorrow you woke up and the whole world was Christian, you'd immediately start battles over which flavour of Christianity was right. And you'd never stop, because religion is tribalism, us-versus-them, and there's always someone else who is not quite as pious as yourself.
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Seriously...Darwin?
It really makes me sad that the whole of science is boiled into one man's work, and then tossed out with the bath water by others.
Darwin was a pretty on the ball guy, and his theory of natural selection was an elegant beauty that has stood the test of time. But it took a more than a few decades to truly understand what it meant in terms of science.
People obsess on the macroscopic world, and think that their piddling understanding of what they can perceive with their limited senses equates to understanding of the world.
The fossil record isn't proof or disproof of Darwin's theories. The closest proof we've come to in understanding how life changes is antibiotic resistant bacterium.
In that is the answer. If you want to counter act blind faith against reason, your answer isn't Darwin, it's Watson and Crick, it's Newton, it’s Plank, Bohr and Einstein. Teach children the building blocks of the universe, the forces and interactions that make up the world and evolution explains itself.
Trying to teach evolution without first teaching chemistry is like teaching language without first teaching an alphabet.
Science is taught backwards in our country, starting with biology and approaching chemistry and physics only in high school. It's no wonder that people doubt the validity of evolution, most have only the word of an English teacher to go on. They never learn the interactions of atoms and the behavior of chemicals. By the time the smartest kids do get the education on the real mechanics of the world most children are lost.
Anyone familiar with the bible knows that creationist theories are no more based on biblical writing than Darwin's work. But because we've never bothered to explain the universe to people, one all encompassing theory accepted on faith can easily replace another.
We teach children to trust men in white coats without explaining to them what the men do. Is it any wonder that a number of charlatans have dawned butchers coats themselves and were granted the imprimatur that true scientists receive?
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Checked their website - no family admission rate!
Which is a shame, because I would imagine that Mary Cheney, Heather Poe, and baby Sam would love to go.
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stupid always wins?
Stupid is as stupid does. Eventually whatever it is they wish for comes to be and everything stops functioning. America the Dumb will eventually wink itself out. Picture an ignorant near-theocratic reactionary bankrupt America 30 years in the future.
So that's an inevitability and you're going to sit around and wait for it?
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@RealName
Picture an ignorant near-theocratic reactionary bankrupt America 30 years in the future. A veritable backwater like Zimbabwe is today. Squalorous, dumb, inbred and violent.
Except for one very important difference (which I mentioned about 1,000 comment pages ago in this big thread):
We're a nuclear power.
I get scared when I think of ignorant, near-theocratic, reactionary, bankrupt, dumb, inbred, violent, veritable backwaters with many thousands of nuclear weapons on hand -- especially when they are following an apocalyptic religion that has the End Times(tm) as a core tenant of its belief system and irrational hatreds of so many things alien to it.
Maybe I'm just too Gen X, too acutely conscious of nuclear (or, as Bush says, "nucular") annihilation, but it's a ghastly future. When you cross scientific illiteracy with bellicose nationalism and fuel it with shallow, fanatical religiosity, then it makes bad things likelier to happen. Really bad things.
Nuclear proliferation is scary on its own, but if America goes down that dark and dirty road you imagined, it's scarier still. We're Goliath, not David, lest anybody overlook that.
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They should have made two...
...Creation Museums, to account for the duplicity of creation myths contained in Genesis (chapters 1 and 2).
'As Ham later tells me, the conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of man and a modern antagonism toward faith. On the other hand, he says, the Book of Genesis is true "from the first word to the last." '
I guess Ham and his team of PhD's didn't read closely enough to discern any inconsistencies between the two myths. (ie. God's work in 7 days vs 1 day, man and woman in one shot, or man first and woman from man's rib, Creator entitled God in one and Lord God in other, etc.)
Hmmmm... could it possibly be that fallible humans came up with these two creation myths?