Saudi cleric: Earth does not revolve around Sun, moon landing was faked, because religion

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Is it heartwarming or depressing that achingly retro hicks with delusions of legitimate authority start to sound the same no matter where they come from?

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The most discouraging thing about this: He looks relatively young.

If here were some old hick from a dusty backwater town, yeahhhhh, you could lump him in with your nut-job creationist uncle and the weird old guy who still produces a mimeographed book about the flat earth.

But he looks way younger than I am, and he is talking in front of a TV camera, and potentially he has a goon squad of angry bored guys with rubber truncheons to beat up people who publically disagree with him.

The enemy isn’t Islam, it is fundamentalist crazy of all faiths.

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That’s a bunch of bull. Anyone saying the that Shuttle didn’t land on the moon should get punched in the face by Louis Armstrong.

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I’m certainly lucky to live in a time and society where it’s virtually impossible to be that ignorant about the world around us.

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Hmm… He must not have been informed about the infinite stack of turtles on which we are precariously balanced.

Not everyone can accept the Turtle Doctrine.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are the only way to shell-vation.

And there was pizza, and it was good.

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It does explain why trips to Japan are always longer than trips back from Japan. Sci-ligion, bitches!

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By his same logic a snail and cheetah moving at top speed in the same direction would travel the same distance in 60 seconds.

Velocity, …helping people move between two points since the dawn of man.

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“And I think to myself, what wonderful world…”

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A part of me still thinks that the believers are mostly in on it.
It’s Truer than reality because religion but whenever use of rational thought is advantageous, rational thought comes out of it’s compartmentalisation and drives the bus for a while.
Until the next time ‘because religion’ is needed to self-identify or ‘win’ an argument.

I’m aware a small minority will, for example, allow themselves or their family members to die, rather than use a life saving medical technology but still think that they are just more committed to their fantasy than to something they do recognise as reality.

But I guess there is an uneducated, uninformed, cut off and lied to minority for whom this misinformation effectively is reality.

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Not since Feynman on the Challenger disaster have I seen such eloquence in delivery and use of visual aids to make a point.

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Well, technically he’s right…

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/technically_the_earth_does_not_orbit_the_sun.html

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sigh Science needs to find a cure for religion.

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Is that the GOP frontrunner?

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Science is a cure for religion.
But too few people use it.

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The idea that the Earth doesn’t orbit around the Sun is a surprisingly popular one in US creationist circles as well. Twenty-five percent of Americans surveyed say the Sun orbits the Earth (though some percent could just be confused by the question). Seven percent of Americans think the Moon landing was faked, apparently. I’m sure a fair number of those people are young as well.

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Well, he is a Bandar. Wasn’t that the clan that the Bush family was so tight with?

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Certain religious events - like the beginning of Ramadan - are dependent on the sighting of the new moon at Mecca. Sometimes the weather doesn’t co-operate and things get messed up. You might go to bed happily and wake up in the morning to find Ramadan started already and you missed breakfast. I suggested to a Saudi once that this is all science - you can actually predict the new moon’s appearance, so why not do it that way. He replied that, aaaah, that’s your moon, not ours…

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And also, perhaps, by Neil Armstrong.

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I think you mean Lance Armstrong.

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