Oklahoma's repeat-offender Republican Creationist lawmakers take another run at science education

If those are t-shirts I will buy them.

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Yep.

I used to have one of their Science! shirts.

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A Pro-Evolution for Christians website is the one of two informative websites I have been thinking about making. While I will never win over the zealots, there are a lot of people who are just simply ignorant of how the facts and faith can work.

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It will be really interesting when OK high school graduates find they are ineligible to apply to anywhere but Liberty University, not to mention Oklahoma State and its equivalents will be the only federally accredited institutions without local students.

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Any religion taken too seriously is turned into a farce.

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I agree. This pattern is already being demonstrated in Kansas beautifully. In 5-10 years, Kansas will be barren remains of a failed state. at that time, a sensible secular regime can sweep away the rubble and make it suitable for human habitation again.

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Nor am I, I was making a practical point. I am sure that the great majority of educated Muslims know the shape of the Earth. Enough stars have Arabic names (Wezen, Nair-al-saif, occur to me off the top of my head) to remind us that Arab astronomers once led the world. I get rather tired of the people who write “Muslims believe that…” followed by some bit of the Qu’ran, whereas if someone wrote “Christians believe that the Earth is a flat plate that can be flooded by a combination of rain and springs and that God occasionally stops the Sun moving in the sky” he would be ridiculed.1

The worry is that some schools will implement it. How it would play out in the US I don’t know, but in the UK it has just been revealed that a Hassidic school was identified three years ago as not teaching English, and only now after three years of refusing to comply with the law is it being forced to close. Never underestimate the sheer stubbornness of the wilfully ignorant.

1 Except in Fundiban circles, obviously.

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Perhaps Ken Ham will reveal that “donkey” in the New Testament should have been translated as “tyrannosaur”.

And behold, Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a tyrannosaur.
And the people cried “Shit, we cannot deal with this stuff” and ran for the hills.

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You are describing someone who seems to have a mental illness that does not prevent normal functioning. Sadly, these occur even in the most advanced societies. This kind of behaviour is associated both with schizophrenia and OCD, (though of course I am not pretending to any kind of diagnosis). The British psychiatrist who, in a similar way, accused someone of child abuse on the basis of watching a television interview was, I think, struck off, but was not diagnosed as being mentally ill.

For most of history it has been a social norm to accept ideas that are to say the least irrational, and this makes it difficult to distinguish the sane from the delusional. I hope we are heading for a time when, at least in the developed world, we will be able to make the distinction because anti-rational thought will be so rare. The rapid collapse of the Christian churches in England and then in mainland Europe is now being matched even in Ireland.

I’m sure such a thing exists, especially given that the vast majority of Christians (including the entirety of one of Christianity’s largest sects, the Roman Catholic Church) acknowledge and accept the theory of evolution. The issue is that such a site would be outright condemned or pilloried as equivocal blasphemous Satanic claptrap by the very people it meant to educate.

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I respectfully suggest that you don’t bother.
Stephen J Gould spent a long time on this subject and eventually decided that there is no overlap; the spheres of religion and science are distinct and no attempt to reconcile them will succeed. Most mainstream Christians and Jews subscribe to this view even if they are not specifically aware of it. If you tell them that the first chapter of Genesis is a myth, a retelling of the drying out of the Middle East and the development of agriculture in personalised terms, they are unlikely to argue. But there is no way of reconciling Genesis 1 with cosmology and evolution, and so it is not possible to argue with or to persuade Christian (or Hassidic) fundamentalists unless, for different reasons, they decide to reject the religion they have been taught.

"Josh Brecheen has introduced Creatonism education bills, declaring that he wanted ‘every publically funded Oklahoma school to teach the debate of creation vs. evolution.’ "

They do. There isn’t.

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Your periodic table is incomplete; to accommodate the planets and the stars you need Qe, quintessence.

The last one, though - in the Discworld, wouldn’t the Creationists be teaching that the world was a big ball suspended in space? The Omnians didn’t believe in Great A’Tuin.

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Next time, try this one: cancer patients who get radiation treatment have to be tattooed (to make sure the multi-million dollar machines are focused EXACTLY on the right spot every time). I myself have 4 tattoos as a result. They’re tiny, but they exist. Would he say that I am evil?

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All subject-matter aside, that house-cum-[book]storefront is an awesome thing.

I think that student would be in deep doo-doo in Oklahoma.

unicorndogs:

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Ramen!

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If only this was the only crap that students are taught who will grow up to vote.

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I’m an equal opportunity mocker of all fundamentalists, be they Islamic, Christian, or Pastafarian :stuck_out_tongue:

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