once more in the "yeah, right, whatever..." category...

[acroyear]

A "Creationist" theme park that exists, "Dinosaur Adventure Land to counter all the science centers and natural history museums that explain the evolution of life with Darwinian theory. There are dinosaur bone replicas, with accompanying explanations that God made dinosaurs on Day 6 of the creation as described in Genesis, 6,000 years ago."

excuse me, but let me actually back my case up with a citation: From gospelcom.net: Search words "dinosaur"

Sorry, we found no verses matching your specifications. Try a different search type, or a different Bible version.

yeah, genesis REALLY says that, doesn't it...

but wait, there's more:

"There are a lot of creationists that are really smart and debate the intellectuals, but the kids are bored after five minutes," said Mr. Hovind, who looks boyish at 51 and talks fast. "You're missing 98 percent of the population if you only go the intellectual route."

uh, maybe because 98 percent of the population simply decide not to use their fucking intellect? Sure seems that's the right percentage of assholes who can't drive out there...

also talks about "creationist" tours like tours of the Grand Canyon ("raft the canyon and learn how Noah's flood contributed to the formation").

uh...yeah, right, whatever...again...

my problem now: I used to think that "home schooling" wasn't necessarilly a bad thing. Until now. the article quotes: "Rachel Painter, camp director at the Alpha Omega Institute, which runs several creationist family summer camps in Colorado, said creationist vacations had gained popularity as the number of Christian home-schooling families had grown."

It seems that home-schooling parents and their students/kids are the #1 customers of these places, which means that home-schooled kids are getting nothing in the way of a legitimate science-based biology curriculum, which is going to be devestating to them in the long run, when they have to face the truth of how things really are.

of this dinosaur park's founder, the NYTimes notes: Escambia County sued him in 2000 after he refused to get a $50 permit before building his theme park, saying the government had no authority over a church.

If that's not a poster-child statement for taxing the churches, then I don't know what the hell is...and dammit, I'm religious and this asshole's making me feel this way...b.t.w., the guy's had major IRS dealings already over the same subject, but the times decided to gloss over the details of it.

"We've been to museums, discovery centers, where you have to sit there and take the evolutionary stuff," Mr. Passmore said. "It feels good for them to finally hear it in a public place, something that reinforces their beliefs."

yeah...and science is always a matter of "belief" isn't it? we used to believe the world was flat. we used to believe that "demons" and demonic possession were responsible for most physical and mental health illnesses. we used to believe that bad things happen to people who do bad things.

well, wake up. take that vision of nature and throw it out the window. it doesn't work that way.

god created something FAR more fantastic and incredible. Its something that really can't be explained, or even really summarized, in a mere 150 words at the beginning of a book written 3200 years ago by a nomadic peoples who had no incling of science, nor any real need for it. it presented a view that was all that particular people needed to know at that time of their intellectual growth. we've moved on. we've grown. we've seen that the rules aren't what was written back then in that little "let there be light" passage.

they are much more simple than that. and infintely more complex.

and those rules, many of which we've figure out, are not the type of rules that can be "chosen at will". When we see through observational methods of dating that a rock is 135 million years old, it is 135 million years old. the methods that can date a formation to a thousand years or so also date that formation to a million years, or a hundred million. the rules don't change. God didn't and wouldn't just casually try to "fake" that. it really is that old. and so is the fossil of an allosaurus embedded inside that same rock.

That allosaur really lived that long ago, 131 million years before our own ancestors got up onto 2 legs and said "wow, i can see my house from here! this view is great! Now how the fuck do I get to Detroit?"

Comments

its been predicted before...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Something about "knowledge through deduction only" hit me and i was trying to figure out why. then it just came up on the Cosmos reruns i'm watching on DVD.

Pythagoras.

To quote the book form of "The Backbone of Night:"

Many Ionians believed the underlying harmony of the universe to be accessable through observation and experiment, the method that dominates science today. However, Pythagoras employed a very different method. He taught that the laws of nature could be deduced by pure thought. He and his followers were not fundementally experimentalists. They were mathematicians. And they were thoroughgoing mystics. [...]

The Pythagoreans delighted in the certainty of mathematical demonstration, the sense of a pure and unsullied world accessible to the human intellect, a Cosmos in which the sides of right triangles perfectly obey simple mathematical relationships. [...]

They did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practiced a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their own errors.

So it has already been demonstrated that deduction alone can not accurately describe the universe. The mathematics, the logic, the reason may be correctly deduced and accurately applied, but of the axioms its built upon are flawed, the logic remains unsound.

Aristotle fell into this trap again and again. Simple things like falling bodies having speeds based on weight, that there is no curved motion on earth but only in the perfect heavens, or "objects behave the same in all mediums", can quickly be demonstrated to be false. And often were. Bias in people can be quickly recognized by other observers.

Logic is, alone, not enough. Logic has the means of supporting itself, but not the means of defending itself from its own misapplication. To accurately apply logic to get the answer to all things, you would have to know to 100% accuracy the nature of the universe, the axioms upon which nature itself is built.

[philosophical speculation follows]: I simply do not see that as possible. Philosophically, such knowledge would change a man. To know things so purely at so basic a level, for all things to be "just that simple", would lead the man who knows it to have no incentive to derive or deduce. He would simply "know" as you say.

But he would be unable to share his thoughts with anybody who doesn't know to that same degree. His knowledge would become useless to all but himself.

Re: its been predicted before...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Sagan goes on to imply (and James Burke has said similar things in his works) that Plato and Aristotle's taking of the Pythagorean approach to absolutes led pretty much directly to the supression of science in mainland greece and rome, isolating it to Alexandria (destroyed in the 500s) and a few isolated bits and pieces of books that Arab scholars preserved, copied, used, studied and experimented with...

...until their own culture and religion hit its own fundementalist crack-down in response to the crusaders and the need for an absolute unification against them.