If you tell it to them that way, they almost certainly won’t. But if you ask them if they think The Flood happened, they will laugh sheepishly and say “No, I don’t believe the flood happened. I believe in evolution.”
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Ken Ham is most definitely a liar, a hypocrite, and a world-class swindler. But the way to deal with someone like that is to rise above it, not to appear far more unhinged and crazy that the people you’re trying to mock. Ken Ham does a good job of appearing to be generous and well-adjusted by doing his prosthelytizing in family-friendly, high-class, well-crafted attractions. Putting up loony-left billboards like this just makes people roll their eyes.
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Right, the way to deal with people is to “rise above it,” says you calling the billboard people “the loony left”… 
There is no one “right way” to deal with Ken Ham. And this billboard proposal isn’t just to address Ken Ham himself, but to mock the concept of his park - it may help rally those who oppose it around the nation due to the media exposure. It doesn’t have to appeal to local Christians to be worth the cost. There are many people, and there are multiple approaches to take with them. This is one. Plus, I don’t actually see you proposing anything yourself. The “atheists need to respect religion” card doesn’t work, though. It’s just an “atheists need to shut up” card, akin to the old “uppity negros need to know their place” card. Both are wrong.
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These billboards in the Bible-belt? These are absolutely worse than saying nothing. These billboards are simply going to be seen as attacking Christianity itself (because they are) while simultaneously giving no clue about the issues that might make actually make non-creationist Christians upset. This would have no effect other than making Christians allies with Ken Ham who normally might be hostile to him, his agenda, and all the tax money he’s going to get for his hybrid church-business. So yes, the only outcome with these billboards is a negative one as all they’ll do is help defeat the cause of the people putting them up, strengthen support for Ham, while also making people needlessly upset at the same time.
Whoever designed these billboards are either idiots or stealth creationists.
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It’s certainly fortunate that we wise people of the BBS are above all those fools in Kentucky and able to discuss things calmly without polarizing viewpoints.
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Assuming that this was actually ironic and not meant literally, what’s wrong with highly polarizing viewpoints? Or do we all have to agree on some mandatory compromise position (“Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour but the Flood never happened”)?
Those viewpoints are real viewpoints, they don’t even cover the full range of the viewpoints that exist, ans neither @Skeptic nor @Shuck have been unfriendly towards each other.
Well, America might be fundamentalist enough that you actually have to care about what happens at the fundamentalist end.
There are multiple “fights” going on here, and something that is a good strategy for one fight is often a bad strategy for the others.
One fight that I particularly care about because it’s one of the fights still going on in my own country of Austria is the fight about what kind of criticism of religion is “appropriate” and “in good taste”.
I fully agree with @Skeptic on this point:
There’s a strange asymmetry at work here; Group A is allowed to tell everyone, including Group B’s children, that there’s this all-powerful being that almost wiped out humanity once and that we should all celebrate that. Ok, no problem. But if Group B says that almost wiping out humanity is genocide, then they’re being disrespectful, “loony-left”, or even “more unhinged and crazy” than Ken Ham and his ilk. And if they tell the same thing to Group A’s children, they’re a corrupting influence.
And the only strategy I know for shifting or widening the societal perception of what the acceptable range of opinions is is to actually state those opinions in public.
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As part of the “loony left”, myself, I was speaking ironically. I’m referring to the way the people who run this park see the kind of people who put up a billboard like this – as loonies. It wasn’t meant as an actual reference to crazy people.
My suggestion was to take the higher road. If Kentucky voters aren’t happy with having Ken Ham opening huge tourist attractions that are supported by the KY taxpayers in a roundabout way, they should close that tax loophole. I lived fifteen minutes from the Creation Museum for seven years, and the attitude out there is that Ken Ham is a big-city interloper bringing his kooky theme park where it’s not wanted; most of his visitors aren’t from the immediate area, but bus or fly in. Putting screaming billboards up won’t help. Cutting off his funds will.
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Ostensibly I’m on the same side as the people proposing these billboards, but the strategy is so damn self-defeating it’s confounding. (It’s almost the atheist version of the Westboro Baptist Church.) But I’m certainly not going to suggest putting up a billboard that calls them idiots, much less a billboard that suggests that all atheists or humanists are idiots… You don’t change minds or win allies by alienating the people who might agree with you.
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I don’t really understand the rancour these kind of things generate amongst atheists. If there is no God then everything everything that happens (including all religious silliness and evil) is just natural. Why get angry? Us religious folks might be idiots, but we can’t help it – our actions arise from the machinery of our brains and social structures.
No. And not because I’m an observant Jew but because this is the sort of Dawkinsite bullying and twisting of words that actually make me prefer a visit by the local JWs than the company of active atheists. Even the street preachers who tell me I’m destined for eternal torment in the fires of hell are preferable to this.
Tax discounts are not “taxpayer funded” plain and simple. Whether or not tax discounts to encourage large scale projects is “right” or not is a separate question.
Muni-bonds often have warning language in the convenient stating that profits may or may not recoup costs. This is standard boilerplate regardless of the risk rating, or lack of formal rating, of the bonds. Newsweek doesn’t provide much info here on the bonds or AiG’s finances, but this blog post from 2014 and the links therein to clarify the bond status somewhat. Note: anyone wishing to rail against bonds/capitalism, save your handwavium, here fats are facts.
As for “genocide & incest park” again these folks are as bad as the young earth creationists. Just makes me wanna slap em upside the head with the Mishna.
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Because you religious folks have been shirking the the law for a long time. You religious folks get special treatment from the government because you think a thing. I don’t get special treatment because I think a different thing, and am not dishonest enough to call it the absolute truth.
Why get angry? Because you religious people have been exercising authority and power, and using the government to speak for people who don’t agree.
When I see “in god we trust” on the money, it implies a specific god, and it implies a god at all. I want the government to give me a big pile of verifiable and replicable evidence, scientific evidence, that this god even exists before they say that I trust it.
How do you account for atheists then? I was, for a long time, a true believer, but I’m not any more. How do you explain that?
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I see what you did there and approve. Maybe not for the same reason but still.
Dawkins is at best a performance artist when it comes to his Crusade against theism. He can’t even get it right on this since even a school child could figure out from the Genesis that après le déluge all mankind is descended from the family of Noach. OTOH, Noach’s son Ham is understood as the father of the African peoples so maybe he got it right despite himself 
Sure because that’s Christian thinking. Putting limits on the divine like this just isn’t part of Jewish thinking. This is after all about a Jewish text.
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Sure. But the question is, what makes you think we have a choice? Aren’t we all directed by our brains? Don’t our brains simply follow the laws of nature? We might be doing things that are bad for the herd/country/world etc but we’re scarcely culpable for it.
Not sure I understand what you’re getting at here in this context. I assume from the perspective of scientific materialism your conversion was a result of social, emotional and rational factors. Just like my belief.
Just because I believe in determinism doesn’t mean I abdicate responsibility for my actions. And your suggestion that one can’t change one’s mind is rather ominous as well.
Also, don’t insult me by pretending reason has anything to do with your belief in god. You most likely believe because you were taught to by your parents. I don’t believe because my parents made the mistake of trying to teach me creationism while I took high school biology. Which led me to discover the numerous lies they taught me.
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” --Mark Twain
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Well, again with the anger. I’m simply saying your anger is irrational given that you are a determinist.
No evidence that exists, so I’m not going to assume it does.[quote=“dug, post:75, topic:75257”]
But maybe you mean “responsible” in a different way?
[/quote]
Yes. Responsibility leads back to the one doing the act. If my brain were, say damaged, I might be less responsible for what I did as a consciousness, since my consciousness wouldn’t be as functional as it should be.
Is it irrational to be afraid of Tigers? Is it irrational to hate neo-nazis?
Your usage here implies that any kind of emotion is irrational. In other words, that strawman you’ve propped up sure looks easy to knock down.
Also, I don’t think that religious people are stupid. I think they’ve fallen victim to a pathological thought pattern. It happens to the best of us.
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I think I see what you are getting at, but the distinction doesn’t work. The only options we have are broken computers or working computers with bad data. In the latter case you might be able to persuade (reprogram) their faulty input. But the fact remains: the current beliefs of any given person at any given time are not a matter of personal responsibility but of the laws of nature.
It’s rational to fear both. But for a determinist, it is as irrational to hate nazis as it is to hate tigers.
[quote]
I think they’ve fallen victim to a pathological thought pattern. It happens to the best of us.[/quote]
That’s what I’m saying! So if you are angry about these victims then you yourself are being irrational – which proves that it does happen to the best of us 
That’s not a plan…that’s just a “shut up and let people do what they are gonna do.” You talk about cutting off funds, but there are no plans to do that, nor do you propose how one might change minds to make that happen.
Something similar came up a few years ago when Chris Mooney argued that Dawkins and other outspoken atheists needed to shut up and let special science communicators do all of the talking so as to not turn off sensitive Christians. There were multiple problems with Mooney’s proposal, one of which is that scientists are often crap about communicating. The other of which is that he over simplified the issue, as if there is one monolithic block of people we are communicating with, but there isn’t. So multiple methods can reach different kinds of people. In this case, the billboard gets publicity. It lets people know they aren’t alone in thinking the park is ridiculous. Will it work well converting hard core Christians? No. But nothing will. So, while some of the calls to tip toe around the sheer ridiculousness of the Ark Park are, I presume, well meant yet it reamins ridiculous that Christians have so indoctrinated our culture that they don’t need to condemn atheists but have managed to conscript atheists to condemn other atheists for them.
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Tax discounts are taxpayer funded. They are special treatment where the rest of us subsidize the individuals or organizations who get the discount. The Churches that pay no income tax or property tax but still get city services, street access, police and fire? Yeah, I’m paying extra tax so they can pay no tax. That’s taxpayer funded.
No, they are are not. Don’t be ridiculous with your false equivalences. YECs deny the consensus of multiple branches of science to claim the earth is ~6,000 years old and that all life was created de novo in its current form. The billboard people are pointing out the uncomfortable aspects of the biblical flood myth, which is that it is about genocide, and required incest to repopulate the earth. You can’t do nuance in a billboard. The billboard is an effective conversation starter. Though it does make some atheists stupid on the issue, much to my surprise.
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Not strictly true. I was a hardcore christian once. But I had some great teachers who walked me though understanding basic philosophy and the scientific method. With those two tools, and a mind that values truth above how a belief makes me feel, my faith crumbled like overdry shortbread.
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