Aint No Right

http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold- ... igins.aspx

In U.S., 46% Hold Creationist View of Human Origins
Highly religious Americans most likely to believe in creationism
by Frank Newport

PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God's guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

Perhaps the most disturbing data is this:


Really? 25% of POSTGRADUATES are creationist nutbags?

I find this really frightening, because in order to truly believe this and be consistent, there are a ton of other beliefs you'd have to have that are just flat out wrong, and possibly morally wrong.

It is frightening. I'd like to know specifically why it's "10,000 years" Do these people believe in dinosaurs? Or did 'God' decide to go one better by creating human life in their minds?

Bandit72 wrote:It is frightening. I'd like to know specifically why it's "10,000 years" Do these people believe in dinosaurs? Or did 'God' decide to go one better by creating human life in their minds?

Bill Hicks explains this once.. there was a guy, a Catholic Bishop I believe, who added up the ages of the people chronologically in the Bible and reached something like 4004 years BCE . (+2012= 6016, give or take). So they usually say "Less than 10,000."

The other great thing about the "10,000" number is that that would place the origin of the Earth AFTER the domestication of the wolf. That's why I said that belief is beyond crazy... it's not just a singularly stupid belief to have, it also means you have a ton of other associated beliefs, like that the Earth was created AFTER humans domesticated wild animals, developed agriculture, learned to use tools; it also means you think all of geology, physics, chemistry, and many other sciences is false too.

I personally know one postgraduate who is a young-Earth Creationist, so I suspect that the majority of those 25% are in theology or law or other stupid departments.

evolution is too complicated.

i don't understand why we can't just all accept that one day everything was created as it is now?

Bandit72 wrote:It is frightening. I'd like to know specifically why it's "10,000 years" Do these people believe in dinosaurs? Or did 'God' decide to go one better by creating human life in their minds?

I've read online evidence that MANY of these sub-humans actually don't believe in dinosaurs. And as Hype said, they disregard anything that happened before the 10,000 years margin as lies from science, the smsrtest creation of Satan to take us away from our holy father.

they don't believe in dinosaurs!? fuck, never heard of that. Are these people on youtube somewhere, I'd love to hear them say it themselves?

God created the internet. YouTube is on the internet. Therefore, Al Gore is God.

Matz wrote:they don't believe in dinosaurs!? fuck, never heard of that. Are these people on youtube somewhere, I'd love to hear them say it themselves?

You can look up Ken Ham, but you would be disappointed. Because not only is he a creationist who believes man lived at the same time as dinosaurs, he also believes that there were fire breathing dragons on Noah's Ark.

I'd suspect many of them grew up in fundamentalist households (of course) and just have a difficult time saying outright that the whole thing is a sham out of respect for their upbringing and childhood. It doesnt necessarily make them "creationist nutbags". At least not as I would define such a description.

Maybe, but this isn't about publicly admitting you do or don't accept the scientific fact that evolution by natural selection explains our origins, it's about what you say when asked by a pollster... Seems odd to think you'd report something you don't really believe to someone you don't know when no one will know it was you in the first place.

Maybe there are a lot of people who have trouble admitting it to themselves in the first place... but 25% of post-graduates (i.e., graduate students) still really scares me. That's way too high.

If you look at the raw data carefully, though, even though the percentage of Americans who believe in Creationism is roughly unchanged, the number of non-believers appears to have gone up.

What does Bill O'Reilly think?

WHO CARES!

But Richard Dawkins basically tells Bill he's an utter, utter fuck wit. In the nicest possible way of course.

I usually find bill o'reilly repugnant, and I do very much agree** with his argument and reasoning, but he was rather pleasant in those clips (at least for him). not that dawkins' is any prize pig.


EDIT: shit, I meant disagree

Pure Method wrote:EDIT: shit, I meant disagree

I was going to say! What arguement and reasoning?!

"Tides come in, tides go out. Sun goes up, sun goes down" Sounds like Homer Simpson.

Is this man still on prime time American TV? FFS. How many Americans watch him and agree with him? Must be shit loads.

Well, the moral metaphors of Jesus are sometimes pretty good. I wouldn't mind if the vast majority of Christians just tried to live good lives according to Jesus's demand that you love your neighbour... which has got nothing to do with miracles or knowledge, scientific or otherwise. You don't have to know much, if anything, to try to be a good person, and that's pretty much the only useful content of the Bible, when it's there, which isn't very often.

Bandit72 wrote:Is this man still on prime time American TV? FFS. How many Americans watch him and agree with him? Must be shit loads.

Fuck, I couldn't make it past 1:30 minutes. The guy is just unbearable.

Adurentibus Spina wrote:Well, the moral metaphors of Jesus are sometimes pretty good. I wouldn't mind if the vast majority of Christians just tried to live good lives according to Jesus's demand that you love your neighbour... which has got nothing to do with miracles or knowledge, scientific or otherwise. You don't have to know much, if anything, to try to be a good person, and that's pretty much the only useful content of the Bible, when it's there, which isn't very often.

It's just a bit sad that they have to look up to another (maybe imaginary, may be not) human being (?) to give them moralistic values on how to live their lives. I always thought common sense would prevail.

Larry B. wrote:

Bandit72 wrote:Is this man still on prime time American TV? FFS. How many Americans watch him and agree with him? Must be shit loads.

Fuck, I couldn't make it past 1:30 minutes. The guy is just unbearable.

He is. However, he does make you feel like a fucking boss, he's that retarded.

Bandit72 wrote:

Adurentibus Spina wrote:Well, the moral metaphors of Jesus are sometimes pretty good. I wouldn't mind if the vast majority of Christians just tried to live good lives according to Jesus's demand that you love your neighbour... which has got nothing to do with miracles or knowledge, scientific or otherwise. You don't have to know much, if anything, to try to be a good person, and that's pretty much the only useful content of the Bible, when it's there, which isn't very often.

It's just a bit sad that they have to look up to another (maybe imaginary, may be not) human being (?) to give them moralistic values on how to live their lives. I always thought common sense would prevail.

We teach a course called "Life, Death, and Meaning" where the kids get to read a lot of philosophical views about these kinds of questions. It's really interesting to read what 70 kids think about about the claim that life really is ultimately absurd and has no externally generated meaning, but even if there were an external source of meaning (i.e., a God, or real moral values) that source would be absurd too unless you could internalize it.

I think there are good arguments that can show that one of the biggest mistakes you can make in life, including a religious life, is failing to internalize real value. That is, it's not that things are good or bad, and so you should do the good things and not do the bad ones, whether or not you want to. It's that you should want to do the good things (because that's precisely what makes things worth doing), and want to avoid the bad things. And if you don't want to do good, or don't want to avoid bad, your life isn't going to go as well as it otherwise might.

But as I was saying, it's really interesting that in an arbitrary group of 70 high achieving young kids going to a top university, nearly all of them have difficulty seeing things like this clearly. Maybe it's sociocultural, or maybe it's evolutionary, but people seem to be conditioned to feel like meaning has to come from obedience to, and approval from, authority figures.

What bothers me as much as anything else this fuckwit says, is his insistence on addressing Dawkins as mister rather than dr. Bush league intellectual goonism. Fucking coward.

And the 42% of postgrads who see God as the prime mover in evolution is most alarming.....inherent contradiction and very lazy.

Adurentibus Spina wrote:But as I was saying, it's really interesting that in an arbitrary group of 70 high achieving young kids going to a top university, nearly all of them have difficulty seeing things like this clearly. Maybe it's sociocultural, or maybe it's evolutionary, but people seem to be conditioned to feel like meaning has to come from obedience to, and approval from, authority figures.

Firstly I'm assuming you're meaning 17/18 year olds? Interesting you think it's either sociocultural or evolutionary. Maybe a bit of both? Whether we like it or not, choose it or disregard it, religion is abundant wherever you are, so maybe it's subconsciously engrained within us as we grow up. And as we all know, the older you get, you either get deeper into it or further away from it. That's how I see it anyway.

SR wrote:What bothers me as much as anything else this fuckwit says, is his insistence on addressing Dawkins as mister rather than dr. Bush league intellectual goonism. Fucking coward.

To be perfectly honest, most professors -- at least, most I know -- would prefer to be addressed by their first name, at least by peers. If you look at the author's name on books published by academics versus books published by self-help scam-artists, it's always struck me that professors almost never add "Dr." or "Ph.D" to their name (they don't need to affirm their credentials), but pretty much every fad diet or fad self-help program is by some "Dr. Snakeoil McFuckface PhD."

Worse, I've noticed a tendency, especially among smarmy religious apologists, to refer to academic opponents (especially in debates, but also in interviews) as "Professor --" or "Doctor --" in a way that's almost sarcastic. They seem to be implying something like: "The good professor doctor here may have a lot of book learnin', but up in his ivory tower, he's forgotten what real humans are like."

I've also heard Dawkins ask people to call him "Richard" quite a few times.

Bandit72 wrote:

Adurentibus Spina wrote:But as I was saying, it's really interesting that in an arbitrary group of 70 high achieving young kids going to a top university, nearly all of them have difficulty seeing things like this clearly. Maybe it's sociocultural, or maybe it's evolutionary, but people seem to be conditioned to feel like meaning has to come from obedience to, and approval from, authority figures.

Firstly I'm assuming you're meaning 17/18 year olds? Interesting you think it's either sociocultural or evolutionary. Maybe a bit of both? Whether we like it or not, choose it or disregard it, religion is abundant wherever you are, so maybe it's subconsciously engrained within us as we grow up. And as we all know, the older you get, you either get deeper into it or further away from it. That's how I see it anyway.

My view is roughly that biology (and its evolutionary history) provide a baseline collection of desires and dispositions for any particular person, and that these can be used, modified, or co-opted by the various religious, regional, and cultural traditions into which people are born, or find themselves drawn to later (probably as a result of incompatibilities between their personal sets of desires/dispositions/preferences and those of their original communities). Some of these desires and dispositions are going to be more or less biologically robust. It just depends.

Adurentibus Spina wrote:

SR wrote:What bothers me as much as anything else this fuckwit says, is his insistence on addressing Dawkins as mister rather than dr. Bush league intellectual goonism. Fucking coward.

To be perfectly honest, most professors -- at least, most I know -- would prefer to be addressed by their first name, at least by peers. If you look at the author's name on books published by academics versus books published by self-help scam-artists, it's always struck me that professors almost never add "Dr." or "Ph.D" to their name (they don't need to affirm their credentials), but pretty much every fad diet or fad self-help program is by some "Dr. Snakeoil McFuckface PhD."

Worse, I've noticed a tendency, especially among smarmy religious apologists, to refer to academic opponents (especially in debates, but also in interviews) as "Professor --" or "Doctor --" in a way that's almost sarcastic. They seem to be implying something like: "The good professor doctor here make have a lot of book learnin', but up in his ivory tower, he's forgotten what real humans are like.
I've also heard Dawkins ask people to call him "Richard" quite a few times.

yes, but these fuckwits are the mouthpieces for the rampant anti-intellectualism that exists today. The PhDs I know use their letters on on business documents, but differ wildly on their preference in classroom settings. On student work, the proff is almost always addressed by Dr. if that is their title. I have no doubt bill, in the above vid, purposely omitted the title. Dawkins would most likely not care to have his credentials noted by bill, but universities still bestow the letters. Until they stop, I'll always appreciate the acknolowledgement even in the face of humility or false humility within the ranks