Letters to the Editor
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I demand equal time for the "Moon is made of Cheese" theory!
After all, the moon kinda looks like it's made of cheese, and while people have flown to the moon and brought back rock samples, those were probably just from the thin, tasty crust around the moon's rich, creamy cheese center.
But seriously, the biblical creation myth is just as entertaining as the Hindu Rainbow Snake or the Australian aboriginal Giant Turtle. Great story telling from the bronze age. To think that people who are technically clinically sane could have such a bad case of Christianity that they'd take it literally (all the while burning dino juice to drive their cars to this Temple of Inaneness) does, ever so slighly, boggle the mind.
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fun with fundamentalists
Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and Chronicles 16:30 state that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Psalm 104:5 says, "[the LORD] set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "the sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises."
The reason the creationists don't bring this up, of course, is that it is a battle -- against heliocentrism -- they know they can't win.
But do they actually believe the earth is the still center of creation? With the sun and planets and stars going around it?
And if they don't, why not? If the bible is inerrant then how can the above citations be wrong?
Either it's the literal truth, or it's not.
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If there is a hell
we're all going there...except the athiests, they will go to heaven...
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Botany
My favorite part was, "We don't know what kind of a fruit it was, but we do know it wasn't an apple."
Am I the only one that thinks that is hilarious? I imagine it being read by the news flash guy in Kentucky Fried Movie.
That said, I would very much like to know what evidence they have against it being an apple. The conspiracy theoritst in me thinks that what they are afraid of admitting is that it was...wait for it...passionfruit.
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flintstones redux
If you ever needed proof that the human race is nothing more than a bunch of shaved apes look no further than this demeaning monument to willful, tribalized, prideful, superstitious ignorance.
There are a relative few who in their humility admit that some small but growing portion of the universe is understandable to our ape-brains. It is for the betterment of the entire species that they devote their lives to this task. What sorrow must they bear when they contend with such a well-financed, cynical, politically connected and public relations-savvy enterprise?
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Any journalists left on staff at Salon?
Hey, guys: I've paid for Salon Premium membership from the very beginning because I supported your independent journalistic voice. This bit of Slackware doesn't qualify as journalism: it's simply a puff piece. It could have been written by Ken Ham's PR agency. Where's the analysis, the context-setting, the critical thinking? If this is the best you can do, don't bother to renew my subscription.
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My take on the photo of "Adam and Eve" mannequins
I saw where several writers made witty comments about Adam and Eve as depicted by the museum. Don't know if anyone mentioned this yet or not but I see Adam reaching out to get affection or initiate sex while Eve seems to firmly grasp his wrist to stop him while holding out her other hand upturned as if to say, "Pay if you want play." And I'm not sexist either, I swear. Just my two cents of humor about the picture.
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Going to places where going to bodes ill for humankind...
Zealotry when combined with religous based certainty opens to some very unpleasant outcomes for those who wish to sample/impose intolerance,bigotry,persecution,hatred,torture and death dealing. One need only research,read about and compile the results of historical European religous based intolerance,hatreds and warmaking to know this is a bad place for humanity to go.
A trouble causing upward trend over the past 25 years in American political-social excluding/proscribing activity centers around an increasingly dangerous,reckless proclivity to mix religion with the politics of governance,education and foreign affairs. This truly is a dangerous direction to seek and desire on the parts of some Americans who then would proceed to impose it upon all Americans. It is a dubious form of misplaced missionary zeal being heedlessly mixed with politics.
For those who wish to impose the dogmas of their relgion into the forums of science,politics and foreign affairs it should be fully understood that this may easily become a very slippery slope for the proponents of doing so with terrible unforseen opposition backlash and blowback outcomes lurking in the dark corners of that pursuit. Push to push-back. Shove to shove-back. Intolerance to no-tolerance. Hate held to hate-back. Such levels of malevolence are easily triggered when those who would toy with the darker side of human existence become heedless and hatefully senseless.
The creationists are entitled to their views and beliefs as are the rest of us. However trying to impose creationist views and beliefs in ways that undermine reasoned public discourse and the multiple tracks of historical knowledge based enlightenment and secular humanism is simply regressive---not progressive.
Seeking out and nurturing the better instincts of humanity for diverse cultural,intellectual,racial,sexual and gender ascents is surely the better way sought and taken.
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Here's my favorite conundrum
From the King James, which as every fundie knows is the word-for-word, perfect and literal truth, self-evident without need for interpretation or use of words in senses other than the common sense meaning of them, the opening of the book of Genesis:
1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 6And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13And the evening and the morning were the third day. 14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Okay... here's the problem. What, exactly, is a day? More specifically, what is an evening, and a morning? Isn't a morning when the sun comes up, and an evening when the sun sets? Or, more specifically, when the sun appears to rise and set, based on the rotation of the earth?
But the sun wasn't created until the fourth day. So, what, exactly, does it mean when it says morning and evening were the first, second, and third days? What exactly is supposed to be happening? The sun can't be rising and setting, because God hasn't made the sun yet, so the common-sense interpretation of the words isn't possible.
Not to mention, isn't it obvious to those of us who have traveled in airplanes or seen photos of the earth from orbit that morning and evening are LOCAL phenomena, which have no meaning from any perspective other than the perspective of a single spot on the surface of the earth? It's dark here, now, as I'm typing; in Australia, it's not. Didn't God create the whole world, a world in which it's always morning and always evening, someplace?
(Note to any Fundies who might be revving up to answer these questions: they are rhetorical.)