So I guess this is my first real trip into the Bible Belt. I've been to Texas a lot, but they've got nuthin on this place. Nashville. I was having a beer with a guy from Knoxville, talking about business and the Smoky Mountains and stuff and I made the crucial mistake of mentioning the 2 things that concern me about moving to the US: health care and religion's influence on public schools. So much for pleasantries.
Here are some things I learned tonight (from a seemingly intelligent IT guy):
1. When the 10 commandments left public schools, children started shooting each other.
2. There is no evidence that any species has ever altered its DNA over time, through natural selection or any other mechanism.
3. Paleontologists have found the bones of men and dinosaurs together.
4. The bible (old & new) was written by the very people who experienced the events therein.
5. Noah's Ark was found about 2 years ago.
6. The left wing media does not like to report on stories such as "Noah's Ark Discovered Today"
7. The HIV virus passing through a condom is similar in scale to a marble passing through a hula hoop.
8. Articles from the National Enquirer should be used as evidence in a serious discussion.
This experience was bizarre and caught me entirely off-guard. I just take for granted that if someone is clearly intelligent, they will not turn around and tell me that man and dinosaur co-existed! Several times I had to remind myself that this guy wasn't kidding with me. And why do these people get such a beautful state to live in? Note to self: talk about Oracle. Do not go off-topic.
josh [email] said at 12:35 AM 04-27-2006: i love #7 - people always say that "the virus is smaller than the pores of the condom... which may be true, but are the drops of fluid that the virus is in smaller? morons.
also, woody, now you understand somewhat why many of us are very aggressive against abstinence only education and so forth... imagine states full of these people
myriam [email] said at 10:25 AM 04-27-2006: OMG, this is amazing. Amazing!!!! I've never talked with someone like that in my life, although I have known the states are chock full of them. This is insane--who does he think wrote Genesis? What about the part about the creation of the world before Adam and Eve? Who wrote that?! This is such pure idiocy, even fundamentalist christian dogma doesn't teach you that. He's talking some kind of fundamentalist christian shit gone WRONG.
Wow. I wonder what the corrollary in Muslim cultures is. Now I am REALLY scared.
woody [email] said at 10:50 AM 04-27-2006: He believes that each of the primary characters recorded their stories before they died and they were consolidated into the Dead Sea Scrolls and various other artifacts that exist, though most of these artifacts are not well known. He mentioned the basement of the Vatican a couple of times but I'm not sure if he meant that's where the sacred parchments and tablets are kept or what. He mentioned a few things like that really quickly, as though they were undebatable facts.
I forgot to mention this guy is a Baptist (maybe you figured that out) but he feels that "Southern Baptists" are too extreme in their biblical interpretations. I know I stifled a laugh at that one. I had asked him if he was dunked in a river or if he goes to a church where people stand up and shout things out from the pews. That got him going on Sourthen Baptists, a common misconception apparently.
Oh, he also mentioned that JW's can't study past high school (maybe true?) and that Mormons speak in tongues and use poisonous snakes in their services.
anotherben [email] said at 8:15 PM 04-27-2006: maybe i am getting old, but i just can't get very excited about fundamentalist tangents anymore. as for muslim corrolaries... i would rather have a bunch of god fearing darwin-deniers running around than god loving suicide bombers. not sure if "deniers" is a word. but it should be if it isnt.
brandon [email] said at 8:21 PM 04-27-2006: Why is this a choice? Can't we have none of the above? Is there any reason that muslim's substitute in for injured crackpots on the field? What league is this? Does not being nice to crazy people correlate to more terrorism? Is there a chart for this?
anotherben [email] said at 8:29 PM 04-27-2006: the day any of us start getting to choose the brand of crazies we live with we will wake up in a world of lemmings. "none of the above" is only a choice in the minds of mediocre philosophy professors.
brandon [email] said at 8:43 PM 04-27-2006: What about selecting the range of crazies? Or does this lead inexorably to decanted babies and the savage land? Why can't we just have people that are crazy about beanie babies? Or Golf?
Man on Subway: Would you help me please?
Me: Ohhh! No! You're crazy!
Man on Subway (Perks up): About Golf! I finance it with beanie babies. (opens jacket) perhaps you'd be interested in my Big Ten Themed Tigers
Me: Ohhh!
anotherben [email] said at 10:39 PM 04-27-2006: i would prefer a morning of stampeding lemmings followed by blessed silence and decades of canned foods.
brandon [email] said at 10:41 PM 04-27-2006: FACT: You know, if China walked into the sea in single-file, the line would never stop, because of their reproductive rate.
anotherben [email] said at 10:52 PM 04-27-2006: this depends entirely upon how fast they are walking, and in what order. women and children first? i bet that would make a dent.
anotherben [email] said at 8:40 PM 04-28-2006: wait, this might be misconstrued as mean spirited and fly in the face of brandons semi-goodwill post about killoggs new found peace and harmony. so i change my comment to, there have not been a whole lot of christian terrorist organizations making the news lately.
milky [email] said at 8:56 PM 04-28-2006: yeah...apparently they didn't qualify for Bush's new tax incentives for faith-baised programs. Un-American this administration is, I tell ya.
kiche [email] said at 9:20 PM 04-28-2006: and all those medical clinic they blew up and doctors they shot and proffesor they assaulted in kansas a month ago, etc...
true, they are not as prolific as the muslims; but then again the muslims got a head start on them.
brandon [email] said at 9:24 PM 04-28-2006: It's pretty much impossible to afford two cars, a double-wide and send the kids to good schools working in domestic terrorism nowadays, and the benefits have tanked. Outsourcing it to the middle-east was inevitable.
anthony [email] said at 10:30 AM 04-27-2006: I wouldn't mind spending some time in Nashville myself. I've been to the Grand Ole Opry, and to this sweet hotel there, but not much else.
dave [email] said at 10:56 AM 04-27-2006: Does this really have to do with geography? When I lived in the NE there were plenty of dumbasses there too. Maybe they didn't prop their beliefs up on God, but they still didn't have a clue.
brandon [email] said at 3:27 PM 04-27-2006: I'm surprised this one is even still spoken of. Or that piltdown man is mentioned. For every Piltdown man or limestone giant, there are truckloads of hominid fossils.
The gap argument is stupid. The fossil record is so spotty and so non-comprehensive as its formation was random, that even within species we have a hard time understanding what normative sizes were not to mention structures to some extent. It's as if creationists expect their to be some fossil record like a census record somewhere or a column in a canyon wall, with every trilobite, tiktaalik, hallucigenia and ichthyosaur carefully laid out and ID'd
That there are gaps in the fossil record is silly. Like the path of Zeno's arrow, once the demanded transitional forms appear, more transitionals are required to satisfy the creationist argument that, by its own form, can never be satisfied.
Science: "Hey! Wow! It's a fishy lizard-fish with leggy fins! AWESOME!"
"What's so awesome about that? It proves nothing."
Science: "OK, but, I didn't mention proving anything, but, look at this it's a Lizardy Fish with Leggy Fins, isn't that cool?"
"No, we require a fishy lizard with leggy fins and webby toes.""
Science: "Huh? OK. Hold on. [five years later] Here"
"OK, we demand a fishy lizard with leggy fins and unwebbed toes... and a collarbone."
Science: "*sigh* ok. Here"
"Ok, we require that you, um, document every species that's ever existed, provide full genomes, photos and nicknames for all"
Science: "That's stupid. We refuse."
"See Evolution is a myth! Heresy! Slander! Academic Fascists! Atheists! You don't respect the constitution! Get your filthy lies out of our schools!"
This is what ID and creationism all boils down to.
I say this, but, there's an electrical engineering professor from one of the local universities who, every time evolution is in the news, writes in some snooty shit to the Advocate about how "evolution is impossible, and all REAL scientists know this to be true, then he quotes, and I swear he's done this before, the old Paley argument about the watch and the watchmaker and maybe even the 2ndThermodynamic Law argument, which is crazy and sad. How educated people can be so crazyily opposed to evolution goes beyond me.
art [email] said at 3:48 PM 04-27-2006: There is a new theory about evolution called Punctuated Evolution and it is rapidly surging in popularity. It's premise is that evolution takes place in jumps, not slow continual changes. For example, the evolution from Neandertal to Modern humans could have happened in a relatively brief period of time, perhaps even within a generation.
Fri., June 17, 2005 – Researchers report today that regions of the human genome have been hotspots for acquiring duplicated DNA sequences – but only at specific time-points during evolution. It appears that long periods of genomic stasis, at least with regard to the accretion of duplicated DNA fragments, are _punctuated_ by relatively brief episodes of duplicative activity. This is the first time that such temporal bias has been documented for DNA duplications, and it challenges the evolutionary paradigm that continuous alterations occur during the course of genome evolution.
This is both exciting and chilling in that is explains why there are few intermediate fossils found and also means our own species could jump again at any time.
brandon [email] said at 4:30 PM 04-27-2006: IT's ALREADY HAPPENED so, just sit back, buy some crystals and start chanting. December 22, 2012 is right around the corner.
So, um, let's start this, here. December 22, 2012 party.
meredith [email] said at 5:03 PM 04-27-2006: They love God a lot more in the South than they do in the North, that's why he stays down there and tells them things the rest of us don't know. Duh.
Danny said at 10:51 AM 04-28-2006: I might accept a kind and benevolent God if he didn't accept people who warp and skew his image into something so bizarre. Oh mighty Zeus! Rain down your bolts of lightning and smite the stupid!!!
