Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Sometimes I Despair

Sometimes it just seems that the world is being over run by a tidal wave of fundamentalist nut jobs.

Check out this BBC story about the creation "museum". Just look at the scene of the kids playing with baby T-Rexs.

The main thing that I take away from this is the 40% of the worlds richest nation are either sheep, brainwashed or just plain idiots. The thought that just one normal person could be convinced by this rubbish is deeply disturbing, perhaps its time we came up with some way to fight back for reason and sense, otherwise all us rational people are going to be caught up when this bunch of religious fundamentalist madmen decide to take on some other bunch.

Personally I'm hoping to move to Mars, at least you can guarantee you won't have to put up with this lunacy there, its fairly unlikely that any of these types that won't read anything but the Bible is going to make it that far.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Mark,

As a scientist who has lately been discovering/exploring Christianity, here a couple of my thoughts on the "rational fightback".

1) People like that... you won't convince. Using a "war on terrorism" analogy, we need to "drain the swamp". Just as terrorist individuals probably wouldn't have ended up as such if there was not sympathy for their ends/views (if not their means) in their communities; so we need to convince the majority of non-literalist Christians that science is not a threat to religion, which is what creationists see it as. My experience is that many Christians who don't believe in 6-day nonsense still feel threatened by science.

2) We need to stop using science as a stick with which to beat religion. No scientific data or theory sheds any light on the existence (or otherwise) of God, and we should make this very clear.

3) We need to stop over-selling evolution. Let me make it very clear that I am completely and utterly confident that evolution is the answer to the origin and diversity of life!! BUT... knowing the framework within which life developed does not mean we can explain all the contingent events that actually occurred along the way. By analogy, if your house collapsed you couldn't predict the exact location and orientation of where everything landed, just because you know the laws governing falling objects and where all the furniture started off. A riposte to evolution is often "but how did x evolve?". The answer from the scientist is, unfortunately, often bluster and harumphing; but it is perfectly acceptable to say "we don't know (yet)". In short, a little humility wouldn't go amiss.

Failing all that, Mars is good!

Cheers,
Pete

Anonymous said...

Personally I'm hoping to move to Mars

Nah, the apostles of Christus Apollo will eventually end up there as well.

Me, I want to have my consciousness uploaded to the computer on an interstellar probe and just kiss Solsystem so long!