No Cure for DUMB

[furrbear]

From SlashDot:

Louisiana Passes Intelligent Design Law

"The US state of Louisiana has passed the "Science Education Act," a piece of legislation that could allow Intelligent design to be taught in schools. From the article: 'The act is designed to slip ID in "through the back door"'"

Comments on this one are hilarious.

Comments

[genxcub.livejournal.com]

http://www.shoutfile.com/v/pU42Mfcn/Family_Guy_Evolution_Explained

The two most misquoted and misunderstood men: Jesus & Darwin!

[bearbarry.livejournal.com]

I.ntelligent D.esign I.nforms O.ur T.eachings (IDIOT)

As a biology teacher, I find the dumbing down of evolution in public schools to be an affront to all reason. What was once a Babylonian Creation myth was later repackaged as "Creation Science" and has now been re-repackaged as "Intelligent Design." What is seldom considered in this march to scientific mediocrity is that as the fundamentalists continue to build "universities and colleges" (aka centers for indoctrination) they are using them as a cover to grant degrees to those who profess the faith and call it science. To me that may be an even greater threat to credible, scientific research than foisting intelligent design on the public as a theory has been.

BTW, if you have ever asked someone who is a firm believer in intelligent design what they know about Charles Darwin, you have probably heard that he was an atheist who hated God and couldn't wait to overthrow the teachings of the church. The real truth supported both by history and the writings of Darwin's own journal clearly prove that he was a religious man who sat on his theories for over 20 years while he gathered more support for it. He knew that it was in direct contradiction to prevailing theories that described life using "principles of natural law." This viewed life in context of biblical teachings and beliefs that man was the ultimate goal of creation. He published when he did because Wallace had essentially replicated his work and was about to publish himself. Certainly not the virulent atheist that the IDIOTs would have you believe him to be.

Re: The two most misquoted and misunderstood men: Jesus & Darwin!

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

The IDIOTs probably also get upset when they're told the Vatican has no problem with the Big Bang theory of cosmology.

Re: The two most misquoted and misunderstood men: Jesus & Darwin!

[bearbarry.livejournal.com]

One of the most reasonable and enlightened men I have ever met is a Catholic priest who coaches debate at a parochial high school. He asserts that there is no conflict between biblical teachings and evolution. What I have seen is that so many of the fundamentalists are not capable of reading the bible in symbolic terms as opposed to seeing it as absolute truth. The only time they will read the bible symbolically is when it contradicts there own long-held prejudices or compels them to do things that they'd rather not do.

Re: The two most misquoted and misunderstood men: Jesus & Darwin!

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

I was just going over the same points with a friend the other day ... not someone who believes in "ID" but someone who wasn't really sure how Darwin arrived at his ideas.

Among other things ... and correct me if I'm wrong .... my impression is that a great many people in the 19th Century had accepted the idea that organisms evolve. They could look all around and see the effects of human intervention on the breeding of animals and plants. The big news wasn't "evolution" per se, it was the mechanism of natural selection acting over millions/billions of years; the time scale for the age of the earth as suggested by Lyell and other geologists was outside people's experience (and can still be hard to get the mind around).

But "evolution," in the sense that modern fundies want to get their pants in a wad about, was a given.

I sometimes suspect that the increasing urbanization of the US has something to do with the ascendance of people who can't think their way through natural selection, beyond the religious angle. If a new breed of kitten comes from the pet store at the mall, rather than from making cats boink each other until you get a new type, maybe evolution is beyond one's imagination. God is behind the scenes like some star designer on Project Runway, coming up with *fabulous* new lifeforms and delivering them to us in neat little packages.

Re: The two most misquoted and misunderstood men: Jesus & Darwin!

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

And of course, God has to be FABULOUS.

Re: The two most misquoted and misunderstood men: Jesus & Darwin!

[bearbarry.livejournal.com]

By Darwin's era (early to mid 1800s) most scientists accepted that the biblical age of the earth which was calculated by going back through all the lineages of the old testament and aligning those roughly with the Judaic calendar could not be accurate because it meant that the earth was less than 6000 years old. Way too young to explain what was seen in the fossil record. Going back to the time of the Greeks, the philosopher, Anaximander, had argued that organisms were mutable over time. Aristotle believed that species were fixed and immutable. Of course you know who won that argument because you've probably never heard of Anaximander but I'm sure you've heard of Aristotle.
The biggest problem most fundamentalists have with evolution is that it does not require a creator nor is there any indication that evolution has any goal. It pulls humans off the top of the tree of life and places us among the many branches. Oh well, things in the world of religion move slowly. It took the Vatican over 400 years to absolve Galileo of heresy for saying the sun was the center of the solar system.

[bookish-cub.livejournal.com]

As a former resident of Louisiana, this doesn't surprise me in the least.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Although what I'd LOVE to see is colleges not accepting high school biology credit from states that have these laws.

Amen! Praise Jeebus.

And folks like the NSF and others yank their science curricula like they did in Kansas.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

It's crap like this that makes me think the late Arthur C. Clarke's solution in the novel The Songs of Distant Earth will be the only way to rid some portion of humanity of the corrosive Religious Idiocy meme.

[grizzlyzone.livejournal.com]

I'll tell you, it not only was "intelligent", it was freakin' brilliant to come up with a prostate gland, and place it where the only way you're gonna get it rubbed was by being "buggered". I mean it. And, I'll tell you, making that hole exactly the right size? Another sign of "intelligent design".

Hey, if he didn't want "buggery" to happen, the parts wouldn't fit so well, right?

[bearbarry.livejournal.com]

Dolphins, whales, bonobos and humans are just a few of the highly intelligent, social animals that use sex (between the same gender quite often) for purposes of social bonding and not just for procreation. If sex, as the fundamentalists often assert, was intended only for reproduction, then we would be no more evolved than insects.