… and will probably be headed for Europe and all points East.

I had a back and forth with WBurke [in Christ Bill] on Derek Lowe’s blog , Poor Put-Upon ID. I wasn’t so much interested in debating evo/ID as I was trying to get him and an anonymous to stand still long enough so I could drill down and find a point that was internally inconsistant with these guys. I came close.

Many ID-types have a great capacity for data and for pattern-recognition. This allows them to debate minutia and ideas at great length, and scientist way too often get sucked right into such debates — you can see this on Derek’s blog. It’s a mistake. In this kind of format, IDers can make abundant sense to the general public. There’s evidence these two actually believe they understand what science is.

As a writer and student of communication I see trouble brewing, big time. ID is essentially a giant psychomarketing campaign, and the voices of sanity had better get on the same train, which is leaving the station.

“Icky Chris has a point. I believe in freedom of religion, but only relatively. If your religion is harmful to members or non-members, that’s no good.

How you would decide what’s harmful and how you would enforce such a policy, I have no idea. “

I would (will) decide via the number of news stories a religion generates and I would enforce the policy by medication for the afflicted and education as a preventative.

Seriously, has the concept of combating fundamentalism and other extremisms via teaching critical thinking in schools ever been considered? Ask the person in charge of the curriculum standards in your education system if informal logic and critical thinking skills are mandatory subjects (or even offered) and you will likely be told that that kind of thing is “probably” dealt with in English Language classes (it is not) or else they will just not respond to your inquire.

I think that Kevin Trudeau is running the world’s public education systems.

Banning/destroying religion won’t take away people’s beliefs that suicide bombing/etc pleases God. Undermining the beliefs themselves is the only solution to putting a stop to such things.

It might indeed be better to ask creationists about Biblical pronouncements about killing your own children if they are disrespectful or breeding spotted sheep by letting your ewes gaze upon spotted sticks, or the custom of getting substitute children on female slaves (“handmaidens”). Or that bit about working on the sabbath (Saturday, right?). One could try to get them to see that strict Biblical interpretation has already been modified many times. It is clearly wrong to work on the sabbath, so I guess you don’t want fire or police services on the weekend. Or television or radio or sports announcers. The Bible has clearly stated that spontaneous generation occurs, so where does that leave modern medicine? Does a “good Christian” go to a therapist or to someone who will cast out his devils? It’s possible that one of these questions will open the mind for consideration of scientific evidence in evolution.

That’s messed up

Keep in mind that to the fundamentalist, the BIBLE (not Christ) is EVERYTHING. Some might even argue that liberal and mainstream Christians are more closely following the teachings of Jesus (helping the least among us), while fundamentalists are busy taking money from the poor to prop up their further politicizing of religion; and religion-izing science.

Of course, it’s a bogus a dichotomy that fundamentalists have erected for themselves — namely that nothing in the Christian religion is worth a damn if its 66-book Protestant version (KJV-only to some) holy book is not TRUE in every aspect (according to the interpretation of denomination X).

Personally, I’m with Thomas Jefferson on this one. Jefferson edited his own version of the Christian Bible, stripping away the “dung” (his words) from the “pearls” that were worth embracing. Admittedly, Christ wasn’t original in many of his moral teachings. But, like Buddha and other great teachers, there are some nuggets worth acknowledging without having to buy into the myth of an error-free god-breathed book.

How you would decide what’s harmful and how you would enforce such a policy, I have no idea.

Wrong. I do.

Wouldn’t you have liked to destroyed the 9-11 highjacker’s belief in their religon before they boarded those planes?

Wouldn’t you like to destroy Pat Robertson’s belief in his religion before he takes any more money from the sick and the old?

Wouldn’t you like to destroy my Aunt’s belief in her religion, which kept her from attending her daughter’s wedding?

Hell, the list is endless.

Do you think that those without religion have no morals? I have no religion, yet I believe I am moral.

Science is not a replacement of religion. It is simply a fairly good method of discovery about the world we inhabit.

And why must science comment on morality? In fact, science cannot, since morals are subjective. How can you prove that abortion is good, or bad, okay sometimes?

I wonder where satan’s influence really is at work?

It helps one to understand how people can be taken in by the Jim Jones/Raelian/Scientology types. (Oops! now I bet Tom Cruise will come jump on my couch).

It also shows the despiration fundamentalists are experiencing as science pulls down those nice, ignorant fantasy worlds they have inhabited for so long.

Flat earth, anyone?

100 judges could decide that the evidence doesn’t add up for ID, and its proponents would still claim that the judges are being biased.

This happens on the fundamentalist articles of Wikipedia all the time; in my own experience, on the Jehovah’s Witnesses pages.

Nothing can happen in reality for the fundamentalist that would disconfirm their faith. In other words, their worldview is non-testable. Which, IMO, is as faith should be – EXCEPT when an article of faith makes a claim about an aspect of reality that IS within the realm of testability.

Anyway, it’s hard to know what would eventually cause a fundamentalist to pursue a seed of doubt, but it does happen. Quite frankly, I don’t recall exactly what it was for me. But, I’m sure it was due to some skeptic putting an evil thought in my head that “bore fruit” later in my life when I was open to the possibility that I (and my parents/siblings) were wrong about biblical literalism.

Finally, I would highly recommend the book, “The Mind of the Bible Believer.” While I don’t think you can fully appreciate the fundamentalist mindset unless you have been there, this book does help the “outsider” to at least began to grasp the nature of individuals who tend to gravitate towards a fundamentalist/reactionary worldview.

and children that is why dinosaurs seem to be really really old.

damn that infernal picnic basket of facts!