61% Americans beleave in Adam & Eve

[JonnySpeed]

This is unbeleavable - surely not? 'Intelligent Creation'... jokers. Surely the level of education can not be that low in the US?


ooops... edit: source: http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040216-113955-2061r.htm

[pille'ocheoni]

lol who? and who? weirdos

[pongoid]

It's not that the level of education is so low (well...these days it is) but that the level of indoctrination with bullshit, and lies is so high. I'm amazed at the level of surprise and misunderstanding from most folks about this.

I mean why waste so much of your life looking for answers and trying to be mindful when you can just have the answers spoonfed to you so you can get on with getting everything that the TV tells you that you want?

[thembuzz]

... and emphatically NOT adam & steve



it's not really that surprising, though, is it? america was colonised relatively recently by various religious nuts. bound to take a while to shake it off

[JonnySpeed]

reading further it seems like selective belief. The bible is 100% accurate except the bit where it says that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus.

On ABC tonight there was a story about one girl who's taking her County to court because teaching 'intelligent design' (creationism) as it lacks any scientific basis (or even simple evidence) so therefore should not be taught in school. And tht it is wrong to state that evolution is just a theory.

think the phrase is 'you go girl!'

[mlexicon]

i thought the SPice channel took over adam n eve?

[Hagbard]

Originally posted by JonnySpeed
And tht it is wrong to state that evolution is just a theory.

Evolution is as much a theory as the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, or the theory of the cause of global warming.

Best not to get your terms wrong in such a heated debate!

Yes evolution has a lot more scientific proof than the stories in the bible, you can't consider it a 'truth' though

[jukka]

i believe in the power of water.......and in the power of american natives.

[JonnySpeed]

agreed only the X Files is the truth.

[Orang Utan]

I love these kind of statistics. Remember Michael Moore's TV Nation?
17% of college graduates would punch themselves really hard in the face for $50
More here: http://bednark.com/tvnation.polls.html

[Spandex]

Originally posted by Steev
Evolution is as much a theory as the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, or the theory of the cause of global warming.

Best not to get your terms wrong in such a heated debate!

Yeah.. the way to think of it is that the entire body of science is "just" theory... in that it is there waiting to be disproved... however, some things have such a HUGE body of evidence that it's VERY unlikely they'll ever be disproved.

To paraphrase something someone clever once said... Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the best supported theories ever. We may change the details of exactly how the mechanisms of hereditity works etc, but we're about as likely to abandon the underlying theory as we are to abandon the theories of Copernicus and Galileo and decide to go back to a flat earth with a sun going round it.

edit: Did nobody notice I wrote hereditity up there instead of heredity? I think I prefer hereditity.

[JonnySpeed]

Originally posted by thembuzz
... and emphatically NOT adam & steev


damn

[Tec]

"These are surprising and reassuring figures"

No shit.

lol

[Hagbard]

"The poll, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points"

you think some people only believed in eve?

[kams]

haha...

[CLEAN DEVIL]

yeah, been doing some research into the creationist 'it's only a theory' comedians. quite strong links with this other bunch of muppets http://www.raptureready.com/

[Hagbard]

It is only a theory.. you shouldn't repeat their mantra, because on that small point they are right!

[[sik]]

"37% of Americans agree that while they would hate being British, they wouldn't mind having a British accent. "
LOL

[pille'ocheoni]

hehe thats a good one, but i still think you brits talk funny. lol

[Sheridan]

Originally posted by pille'ocheoni
hehe thats a good one, but i still think you brits talk funny. lol

shit pille', you should check out that documentary called 'do you speak american?'. It was on PBS a few weeks ago. there are some ameican dialects where they speak funny as hell. makes the brits seem down right normal. here is some info (http://www.pbs.org/speak/)

[fzv]

well, anthropologists reckon there WAS a mitochondrial Eve...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A703199

so perhaps it's not such a silly idea. apart from the fig leaves.

[garew]

Yes, it's fun to make fun of Americans. I do it all the time, but it's a religion. What do Hindus believe? Or Muslims? They aren't as much fun to make fun of though. I agree.

[Spandex]

Plenty of American Christians manage to maintain their religion without having to hide books from their kids... and manage to have sane interpretations of Genesis and the rest of the old testament... so I'd imagine it's the same for non-fundamentalists from other religions where things that used to be divine miracles can now be done in laboratories by people in white coats.

I think the thing people are making fun of is the attempt by a few loons (who happen to be American) to stick their hands over their ears and go "la la la la" while the rest of the world moves on.

[garew]

But these threads pop up all the time everywhere. Almost exclusively American. There must be a connection. Entire countries in the middle east hide books from their children. Heck, north Korea hides all books from everybody. It's a product of belief. Again, it's cause American Christians are the class clowns of the west.\..

[Spandex]

Hehehe... yeah.. I think it's the fact that the US is the world power at the moment... so things like this enrage the rest of the world particularly... even when it's an unrepresentative sample.. i.e. "And THESE are the halfwits who get to elect the government that determines what happens in the world???" :)

Also.. maybe it seems different to you, but in the countries where many of us live (Europe, Australia etc) Christianity was the major religion a century ago.. but has long been in decline... and for the majority of not-particularly-religious-people, the idea of people being fundamentalist Christians is just piss funny... or it would be if these halfwits didn't get to elect the government that.. etc.

I expect if I knew more about Islam, I'd find the idea of Islamic fundamentalism more amusing too. I'm sure the Koran is full of comedy gems about how often you must eat rice cakes and how you're supposed to wash your cock and which way to pour milk and where to build greenhouses and which hand to wave to your grandmother with and how many times to dunk your biscuit in your tea and why curly hair is evil or some such arsepiss.

[garew]

I can see your point. And I agree with it, actually. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Bush didn't sound like such an idiot.

[Lady E]

i expect all the religious texts have some funny anachronisms in them, but i dont find religious fundamentalism amusing in the slightest.

beware: creationism is leaking into british schools' science classes. there was an article in the guardian weekend magazine about a school in the north east that was going to be invested in to the tune of 2 million (taxpayers' contribution: 20 million) by some christian fundamentalists, who were going to be allowed (nay encouraged) by labour to promote their intolerant, superstitious, medieval agenda. thankfully some parents contested it all the way and it didnt go ahead.

[darrell]

Holed on boys and girls and remember contrary
to what Richard dawkings will tell you …
Darwin’s theory of evolution is just that a theory
nothing more nothing less

[Spandex]

Aw come on.. Literal interpretations of Christianity and the rituals of the church just make me laugh. What about when Father Ted invites Bishop Brennan to come and see his likeness miraculously appearing on the skirting board? Or talking about the various grades of miracle attributed to the Holy Stone of Clonrichert? Maybe it's my catholic upbringing :)

It only stops being funny when they inflict it on people (e.g. when they have a disproportionate say in choosing the US government). Even so it's fragile... if the only way you can preserve a fundamentalist interpretation of your faith is by hiding whole sections of the library from your kids.. well.. it's gonna come crashing down fairly soon. I think fundamentalist Christianity is a reaction to people losing the faith... the death throes of a religion.. not a revival. IMHO.

[Spandex]

Originally posted by darrell
Holed on boys and girls and remember contrary
to what Richard dawkings will tell you …
Darwin’s theory of evolution is just that a theory
nothing more nothing less

Dawkin's writing on evolutionary theory doesn't pretend it's anything other than a theory. His theories propose changes to the way we think about "fitness" in an evolutionary context. Everything I've read by him has been brilliant (edit: Have to admit I've only read old stuff like Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype... maybe he's gone nuts these days.. I dunno).

I try and avoid watching him on telly when they wheel him out to debate with religious leaders though. He gets a bit wound up :)

btw.. while I agree with the "it's just a theory" bit, the "contrary to Dawkins" implies you don't accept the current scientific orthodoxy... what's your position? Creationist?

[decadnids]

i like the big bang creationist theory.

its just as fantastical as any of the beliefs / myths / ideas others have put forward.

[bitch one]

ahem, i think you are overselling dawkins by calling it 'his' theory, like. he communicates these ideas to the masses, but he doesn't invent them

[Spandex]

Originally posted by bitch one
ahem, i think you are overselling dawkins by calling it 'his' theory, like. he communicates these ideas to the masses, but he doesn't invent them

Heheh.. :)

Selfish Gene for me was almost a revelation about what fitness meant... whoever's ideas they were :)

[darrell]

The post-Darwinist, er, "position"
Interviewer: What causes a new species to arise?

Post-Darwinist: I dunno, and neither does anyone else. But it sure isn't "natural selection" a la Darwin, since that' s only a subtractive method and by definition can't create anything new, certainly not a whole new species. All it does is kill off what doesn't work of various random mutations inside a species. It's impossible to conceive even of getting from a randomly occurring photo-sensitive cell in an organism to the camera-type, ball-shaped eye we have via "natural selection." And whatever else may be the case, something more than just "random chance" -- as required by Darwinism -- is clearly at work both to develop an eye or to generate a new species. What that is. . .ah, there's a whopper mystery!

Interviewer: Oh, so you must be a "Creationist" then. . .??

Post-Darwinist: Nope. Just a "post"-Darwinist*. . .in a holding pattern. . .but with a little bit of "attitude". For instance, I love evolutionary theorist, Sir Fred Hoyle's, famous joke about the Miller-Urey hypothesis. This was the "pre-biotic soup" of gases and other molecules struck by lightning, whereupon some parts of it became proto-amino acids which are essential building blocks of life. This 1950s experiment has become a Darwinist staple in classrooms everywhere to "explain" the origins of life on earth. It is, of course, seriously defective and incomplete as Hoyle notes when pointing out that even a one-celled living organism emerging by chance from such a pre-biotic soup is about as likely as that "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."

<<Click here for a 2002 article from NEXUS by Lloyd Pye that goes into full and witty detail about the problems with the Darwinist approach to human origins I'm sketching here. For an excellent, detailed critique of all the problems with the "pre-biotic soup" idea, see Pye's recent [late '97] book with the delightfully challenging title, Everything You Know Is Wrong: Book One - Human Origins. The section headed, "What is Life?" [p.10ff] will strip your grade-school science teacher's, er, "explanations" right to the funny bone. And click here for another article giving more background especially about the notorious tautology properly attributed to Edmund Spencer, not Darwin, "survival of the fittest". The piece refers liberally and well to Richard Milton's recent book, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (2000). See our Bibliography page for more.>>

Interviewer: Well, if you're not a Darwinist, how can you be talking about "evolution" at all?

Post-Darwinist: Right. A thorny issue. What Darwinists themselves seldom notice is that to use the term "evolution" at all in the context of what they interpret to be just a random set of events is an oxymoron. "Evolution" implies that there was some goal or plan involved before the process started, however dimly conceived it may have been. In common usage, something can be considered to be "evolving" only if it's going somewhere. So, encountering this contradiction right at the "front door", so to speak, any newcomer to the issues of evolutionary theory is bound to get a headache in a hurry.

New Being Project staffer: Let me break in here for a minute and explain how, in light of the language problem you just pointed out, we can still use a phrase like "evolutionary jump": Quite honestly, it's mostly by default. Darwinism is unsupportable even by the fossil record; creationism is clearly badly flawed and its advocates typically extremely dogmatic (though no moreso than the mainstream academic Darwinists). But, however flawed both positions are, something big and enormously important has been going on among all the organisms here on this planet for uncountable millions of years. Something that goes through lots of changes. The fossil record alone is adequate testimony to that, sometimes showing whole phyla suddenly disappearing (with and without natural catastrophes) and -- even weirder -- suddenly appearing, without a trace anywhere of the ancestry required by Darwin's theory. In fact, sudden movements and long plateau periods** are much more the rule than gradual changes, thus we can suspect the possibility of a "jump" in the works.
. . .But, of course, it's also technically incorrect to use the word "evolution" for this process, since we have no idea where it's going or, indeed, if it's going anywhere. Maybe closer to correct would be "non-linear cladistic variability with apparent increasing complexity over time" or another piece of high-tech jargon. Trouble is: Who'd understand what we're saying at all if we wrote stuff like that? So until the post-Darwinist, er, "position" gets a firmer foothold and is not so scary to the Establishment (who mistakenly fear that the only alternative is fundamentalist, Bible-thumping Creationism). . .well, oxymoronic "evolution" it'll have to be. And the inelegant, almost disco-dance-step, phrase, "evolutionary jump." Anything else is Yawn City for most readers.

Post-Darwinist: I just want to add one more point about how scared the mainstreamers seem to be running. Not only do they immediately try to brand anyone who questions Darwinism a "Creationist", they pull another subtler, but even less logical trick: They claim we have no basis to argue against Darwinism unless we can adequately replace it. "However wrong the current answer may be, it stands until a better answer arrives. It is as if a criminal defendant were not allowed to present an alibi unless he could also show who did commit the crime."*** How this strategy squares with any notion of "scientific inquiry" is beyond me.

[decadnids]

http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/other/create.html

http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/ariel.htm

[Spandex]

Darrell... almost every sentence of that is complete shite :)

[darrell]

Originally posted by Spandex
Darrell... almost every sentence of that is complete shite :)

same as Dawkin's then

lol

[stinkfinger]

i've heard darwin admitted it was a lot of shite whilst on his deathbed...lol

[Lady E]

makes me laugh too spandex, and i also was raised in a Catholic environment (covent girls school)
but i dont equate that fairly benign Catholic frippery with religious fundamentalism...i know what you mean but even our nuns had to admit that the pope not letting Catholics use condoms was ridiculous in the face of AIDs and world poverty. they werent the types to murder abortionists, let's put it that way. they were very far from being progressive, but had some toleration and respect for other points of view - we even did comparative religion in RE.

fundamentalists tend to believe that everyone who disagrees with them is evil and should be forced to submit.



Originally posted by Spandex
Aw come on.. Literal interpretations of Christianity and the rituals of the church just make me laugh. What about when Father Ted invites Bishop Brennan to come and see his likeness miraculously appearing on the skirting board? Or talking about the various grades of miracle attributed to the Holy Stone of Clonrichert? Maybe it's my catholic upbringing :)

It only stops being funny when they inflict it on people (e.g. when they have a disproportionate say in choosing the US government). Even so it's fragile... if the only way you can preserve a fundamentalist interpretation of your faith is by hiding whole sections of the library from your kids.. well.. it's gonna come crashing down fairly soon. I think fundamentalist Christianity is a reaction to people losing the faith... the death throes of a religion.. not a revival. IMHO.

[Spandex]

Originally posted by emma

fundamentalists tend to believe that everyone who disagrees with them is evil and should be forced to submit.

I guess I'm a fundamentalist :)

[pongoid]

Well, then I guess it's the stake for you, eh Spandex?

In all seriousness though, while not having "been there", the theories of Natural Selection seem to be quite well supported if only by the fact that when an epidemic of some lethal virus occurs, it is a genetic difference that often spares the "naturally selected". Of course there are other factors, but with ten people infected with the same Ebola Zaire virus, in the same basic state of health beforehand, and given the same treatements, one in ten of those people will survive and it's only due to a geneticly linked resistance to the mechanism of that virus. The other nin are killed by it. That one incident gives credence to the Theory of "Natural Selection" which is the motor of Evolution.

Whether Darwin felt it was shit on his deathbed,(think "Confessions under Torture" here) and afraid of going to his grave with nothing after to look forward to, or trying to be repentant, etc. is immaterial; his theories were capable of being supported with readily reproduceable evidence under controlled conditions.

Of course trying to get a bible-basher to see the logic of that is nigh impossible because their argument is just going to be "but the Bible says ____". which is no evidence at all.

The thing that always makes me laugh is when I ask "Well...who wrote the bible?" They answer these names of 'divinely inspired' individuals. I then say " "Everything that has ever been written about God is complete and utter bullshit, as God cannot be encompassed by words, nor can God's will." Those were just as divinely inspired words. What about the validity of your Bible now?" Gets them all kinds of fucked off. lol

Ape