Ugh! This is just so infuriating. I want to refute every point the curriculum makes but it’s just too much to take in one sitting. It’s a fucking Gish Gallop masquerading as education.
I will say this though, religionists demand atheists must learn their religion inside and out and read not just the Bible but all the apologetics and be versed in the verses and then research other religions as well before atheists are allowed to argue the conclusion that god doesn’t exist. However the religionists get to refute evolution with this willful ignorance of even the basic concepts of English (they don’t understand the meaning of the word theory) science and evolution. They constantly conflate evolution with abiogenesis and astronomy. But if an atheists misquotes or forgets the verse numbers from the bible, we’re the ignorant ones. Puh-leeeease.
“A body of students who have been taught hostility to non-Christians may also threaten a pluralist society…”
May threaten a pluralist society? May? Of course they threaten a pluralist society, we are seeing it in real time right now. There was a rash of pipe bombs made by homeschooled morons for political reasons. Local and state governments filled with unqualified, theocratic, pig-ignorant politicians creating laws that forward theocratic nonsense. Project Blitz. January 6th. And then some.
If you're expecting a creationist extremist to be smart, good luck. 🙄. I assume some of them are. However, when someone can't understand that I can paste and post a comment no matter how many times he deletes or hides it, there's something wrong.
Person A supports Bill Donohue. Person B supports person A. Person B doesn't want either of them to be called out on that support. Both of them deserve to be called out.
Martin Luther scored an own goal without realizing it when he famously stated the following:
"Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never come to the aid of spiritual things, but more often then not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."
Luther was well-justified in fearing reason ... because in the final analysis, it is reason which will ultimately dismantle the hallucination which is religion and render it to the dustbin of history. It'll take a while, certainly. Reason and disciplined scientific thought are only a few hundred years old, while religion can measure its age in millennia, but this is a contest between reality and unreality.
And when you boil it down, unreality hasn't Leg One to stand on.
He was right about that, although maybe not the whore bit, reason doesn't charge. He was also right about how bad the RCC was and continues to be. I'm pretty sure that's all he was right about, but the only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is his beliefs about Jewish people and that was so wrong I'm not even going to bother.
The immorality of selling salvation, the idiocy of priests not marrying, giving heavy support to the idea (while not originating it) of letting regular people read the bible in common tongue, rejecting any special authority or power for priests beyond what "human good at their job" should get. He had some good reform ideas. But yes, he was also raging antisemite and his view of women was mixed at best.
That saying from Martin Luther epitomizes and illuminates Christian thinking at its best. It doesn't use reason, indeed reason is the enemy. I am reminded by the quote from Sam Harris:
"If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?"
And never forget his other great dictum: "The multitude of books is a great evil." Burn 'em all!
Weirdly, though, Luther did make one statement I can wholeheartedly endorse: "Why should my freedom be taken away from me by someone else’s superstition and ignorance?" —Luther, “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church” (He was talking about his desire to marry, which of course the church wouldn't permit. Ironic that his followers have no problem denying other people's right to marry. Still, as a general principle, I'd say the idea he expressed is quite sound.)
BJU press and Abeka aren't any better. Or at least they weren't when I was a kid in the 80's.
To be fair, the English language and Math education I received was very good at the time.
But the History was all right-wing, Lost Cause propaganda. (Our library had multiple hagiographies of Robert E. Lee that made the son of a bitch into a saint.)
The "science" was all fundamentalist lies. The social studies were also steeped in right-wing, Lost Cause nonsense.
I didn't learn about the true horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, genocidal campaigns, racial pogroms, and evolution until my late 30's/early 40's. Once I found out I had been lied to repeatedly, well, Hell, I'm still angry about it.
“If a man says that something is true, but no one has seen it happen, then it is only an idea. It is not a scientific fact. The only things that do not have to be proven by experiments are the things God tells us in His Word, the Holy Bible.“
What makes this far worse is that there are so many version of God's Word™, whether you want to talk about the Abrahamic, Norse, Greek / Roman, Vedic / Hindu, or any one of thousands of others, none of which agree with any others.
And this is a fact which Christians in particular are insistent on IGNORING.
I've notice creationists using only the King James Bible every time they mention cherry picked, fragmented Bible verses in their drivels, rejecting every other version of the Bible except at times when they use a different version of the bible just when it suits them.
"In evolutionary circles, a bird is considered more complex than an octopus."
Say who ?
"Yet, the eye of an octopus is much more complex than the eye of a bird."
From the babble, animals were created before humans who are supposed to be god's masterpiece. Yet insect eyes are better than ours. Prometheus and Epimetheus creation story is more logic than the christian one.
"If a bird evolved from the octopus, why does the octopus have a more complex eye?"
Someone never heard of Carl Von Linné and is not interested to learn.
By the way, multiple choices questions were only used in third grade for parts of history lessons in my time (late 80's). The rest of the time ? You had to think to write an answer who was not a carbon copy of the textbooks.
After consulting the Diocese of St. Petersburg, parents and other area Catholic schools, “we decided that we need to take maximum advantage of this dramatically expanded funding source,” Monsignor Robert Gibbons, the St. Paul pastor, said in a YouTube video the school shared publicly.
“Otherwise,” he added, “we would be negligent.”
So instead of paying $6,000 per child, families at the school who are St. Paul parish members will now be charged $10,000 per child. Nonmembers will be charged $12,000 per child, instead of $7,000. Discounts for multiple-student families will be eliminated.
"If you’re not giving anything in terms of a financial investment in the school, I just have a sense it’s going to change our culture too dramatically.”
No discovery of science has ever pointed to the truth of any religious doctrine, and has totally debunked some of them. The Biblical story of creation being chief among them. In a bizarre way, the Creationists have a point. If the Biblical story isn't true, then there is no need for Jesus. Rather than accepting the facts, they try to bend the facts to fit their preferred narrative.
Evolution is not the theory proposed to explain how "living organisms first came to be without a Creator and how they keep evolving into higher life forms"
It never ceases to amaze me how little Christians actually know. Evolution is descent with modification. You can't get descent from non-life, so evolution does not explain life from non-life. That's an area of science called abiogenesis and is an active area of study for many biologists. Science includes inductive reasoning. It was used to determine heliocentricity, gravity, and is used in most areas of science. When you invoke supernatural beings or processes as the explanation for something you don't comprehend, you are not using inductive reasoning, you are using religion.
Also, evolution is simply change in the inherited traits of a population through successive generations. This can be due to many reasons and not every reason yields "higher life forms". Evolution only leads to increases in complexity when complexity is beneficial to survival and reproduction.
IMO it's usually not a matter of knowing too little. They know exactly why *you say* you accept evolution (evidence etc.). They generally know what evidence you will cite. They just think you're lying about it. The bible tells them that everyone knows God and Jesus in their heart and those who reject it are intentionally doing so in order to sin. So either you're lying, or the bible is wrong. Therefore you must be lying.
What's more, if you're an atheist out of "honest mistake based on limited information" rather than "intentional rejection because you want to sin," then God sending you to hell would, for most Christians, be a horrible injustice. So for those Christians who are not so fundie that they love the thought of honestly mistaken people roasting in hell, but who are not so progressive that they think God has some other path to salvation for 'honestly mistaken' people, the only way to make the bible consistent with the notion of a just God is to place the blame on you: you must be lying about your reasons for nonbelief, you must actually know the truth and be intentionally rejecting God.
And yet there are numerous instances of Christians who love to sin without remorse, guilty, or regret out there, proving you don't need to hate or reject God in order to love committing sin. Case in point: These guys.
"The bible tells them that everyone knows God and Jesus in their heart and those who reject it are intentionally doing so in order to sin"
Actually the Bible says the opposite, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." While it is true it says the "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" that is a far cry from knowing God and Jesus in their heart. The bible says spiritual things are essentially impossible for them to know without God's intervention.
Most are simply against the notion of a god who "makes children" through a long, agonizing, bloody and inefficient (not to even mention relentlessly BLIND) process because it is in such stark contrast to the vision of a creator presented in Genesis that it simply cannot be squared.
Or perhaps more accurately, I can't see how having once squared those two things there are any two things that one could NOT then square.
Romans 1:20 is the most commonly cited "everyone must know" passage. " For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
But I guess a broader point here is that this (humans knowing God) is another area where the bible says contradictory things.
Yea, I guess the Psalmist was looking at those who are very corrupt and postulating they have somehow denied their accountability to a revengeful God. But that would simply be the opinion of the writer and his faith. It doesn't prove that somehow everyone "must know" that God exist. It merely shows that's what the writer believed to be true. But then the Christian may retort that "all scripture was given by inspiration of God", but even that is a faith proclamation.
The Bible seems to suggest that an unregenerated man is dead in trespasses and sins and is incapable of knowing spiritual things without regeneration. So, though they may loosely believe or not in a God's existence, but beyond that, they are incapable of knowing God's will and purpose. The without excuse a Christian argues means he should know enough to be without excuse from doing hideous crimes because even his nature knows wrong is wrong.
Personally, that doesn't account for psychopathy and people who are amoral. There are people who cannot recognize right from wrong in even clearly defined situations. So, just from basic biology and psychology Christianity is in gross error on those fronts as well as many others.
I fear for the future of the human race. This sort of garbage moves well beyond 'what I want to believe' and into 'the land of pipe dreams and flights of fancy'. This isn't education anymore, this is just straight up indoctrination of children by people looking to ensure the fullness of future collection plates. Sacrificing science and math - which last I heard, we needed more people in desperately here in the US - for the sake of religious education is such a bad idea, you'd think George Lucas was involved.
This is the primary reason I want religion out of education: they just flat don't educate. They don't teach anything to kids in the way of skills or knowledge that will help them succeed in their adult lives. Education is supposed to produce productive, contributing, socially aware adults who do not, typically, need assistance from outside organizations (as in, the government or churches, mostly). The destruction of education undermines the US economy and ability to compete with other nations on the world stage among other problems. I'm sure everyone here is aware, but let me be clear anyway: 𝒘𝒆 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒔𝒖𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒏 𝒅𝒐 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒂 𝒒𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝒆𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏.
I'm not quite that pessimistic about the future of the human race. But as for the future of the United States, as a democratic embodiment of the great principles of the Enlightenment, I'd say it's time to hook up the life support monitors.
I reject creationism then, I reject creationism now, and I'll reject creationism forever. This what is shown in those ACE garbage books is exactly why.
Rejecting creationism all the way is the right call.
Intelligent design (Creationism in a newer package) lacks consistency, violates the principle of parsimony, is not scientifically useful, is not falsifiable, is not empirically testable, and is not correctable, dynamic, provisional or progressive. It fails as a science. This explains that no reputable science organization endorses it.
Guess who else believed in Intelligent Design? None other than Adolf Hitler himself. Here's a couple of quotes from "Mein Kampf"...
"Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise." (Chapter I)
"It was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will." (Chapter X)
So would the ID crowd be supportive of Hitler's words?
They mean wisdom and understanding in the religious sense. You know, not questioning the Boss and knowing what Bible passage to quote in any given situation, *that* kind of wisdom and understanding.
Ugh! This is just so infuriating. I want to refute every point the curriculum makes but it’s just too much to take in one sitting. It’s a fucking Gish Gallop masquerading as education.
I will say this though, religionists demand atheists must learn their religion inside and out and read not just the Bible but all the apologetics and be versed in the verses and then research other religions as well before atheists are allowed to argue the conclusion that god doesn’t exist. However the religionists get to refute evolution with this willful ignorance of even the basic concepts of English (they don’t understand the meaning of the word theory) science and evolution. They constantly conflate evolution with abiogenesis and astronomy. But if an atheists misquotes or forgets the verse numbers from the bible, we’re the ignorant ones. Puh-leeeease.
“A body of students who have been taught hostility to non-Christians may also threaten a pluralist society…”
May threaten a pluralist society? May? Of course they threaten a pluralist society, we are seeing it in real time right now. There was a rash of pipe bombs made by homeschooled morons for political reasons. Local and state governments filled with unqualified, theocratic, pig-ignorant politicians creating laws that forward theocratic nonsense. Project Blitz. January 6th. And then some.
Not to mention idolizing murderous, men like TFG, Putin, Hitler, Stalin, and Bush Jr.
The burden of proof is on the accuser. Since they accuse gawd of existing, it is up to them to prove it. It is not up to us to disprove gawd.
Wait, you think they should have to prove their claims? Stop persecuting them, you damn heathen!
If you're expecting a creationist extremist to be smart, good luck. 🙄. I assume some of them are. However, when someone can't understand that I can paste and post a comment no matter how many times he deletes or hides it, there's something wrong.
Person A supports Bill Donohue. Person B supports person A. Person B doesn't want either of them to be called out on that support. Both of them deserve to be called out.
(Hope this reads better. )
Martin Luther scored an own goal without realizing it when he famously stated the following:
"Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never come to the aid of spiritual things, but more often then not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."
Exactamundo.
Luther was well-justified in fearing reason ... because in the final analysis, it is reason which will ultimately dismantle the hallucination which is religion and render it to the dustbin of history. It'll take a while, certainly. Reason and disciplined scientific thought are only a few hundred years old, while religion can measure its age in millennia, but this is a contest between reality and unreality.
And when you boil it down, unreality hasn't Leg One to stand on.
One thing we can take comfort in: Atheism predates any and all religions.
Fear not. Unreality can always audition to play Tarzan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njK6zQp2Fdk
He was right about that, although maybe not the whore bit, reason doesn't charge. He was also right about how bad the RCC was and continues to be. I'm pretty sure that's all he was right about, but the only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is his beliefs about Jewish people and that was so wrong I'm not even going to bother.
The immorality of selling salvation, the idiocy of priests not marrying, giving heavy support to the idea (while not originating it) of letting regular people read the bible in common tongue, rejecting any special authority or power for priests beyond what "human good at their job" should get. He had some good reform ideas. But yes, he was also raging antisemite and his view of women was mixed at best.
Was going to mention his anti-Semitism but left it.
That saying from Martin Luther epitomizes and illuminates Christian thinking at its best. It doesn't use reason, indeed reason is the enemy. I am reminded by the quote from Sam Harris:
"If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?"
Facts, reason and logic--the tools of humans--are the enemy of God.
And never forget his other great dictum: "The multitude of books is a great evil." Burn 'em all!
Weirdly, though, Luther did make one statement I can wholeheartedly endorse: "Why should my freedom be taken away from me by someone else’s superstition and ignorance?" —Luther, “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church” (He was talking about his desire to marry, which of course the church wouldn't permit. Ironic that his followers have no problem denying other people's right to marry. Still, as a general principle, I'd say the idea he expressed is quite sound.)
BJU press and Abeka aren't any better. Or at least they weren't when I was a kid in the 80's.
To be fair, the English language and Math education I received was very good at the time.
But the History was all right-wing, Lost Cause propaganda. (Our library had multiple hagiographies of Robert E. Lee that made the son of a bitch into a saint.)
The "science" was all fundamentalist lies. The social studies were also steeped in right-wing, Lost Cause nonsense.
I didn't learn about the true horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, genocidal campaigns, racial pogroms, and evolution until my late 30's/early 40's. Once I found out I had been lied to repeatedly, well, Hell, I'm still angry about it.
"[I]f fish evolved into frogs, fish should no longer exist, but obviously they do."
If man was created from dirt, why does dirt still exist?
Don't get people to think who are incapable of that. You'll only confuse them further.
If women was created from man, why do men still exist?
And why do they have the same number of ribs? Hmm? Hmm?!?
*coughs* It wasn't a rib bone...
HA! Good one. :)
She got a bone that's for sure!
Beat me to it. Damn.
“If a man says that something is true, but no one has seen it happen, then it is only an idea. It is not a scientific fact. The only things that do not have to be proven by experiments are the things God tells us in His Word, the Holy Bible.“
Special pleading. Your argument is invalid.
God created special pleading.
What makes this far worse is that there are so many version of God's Word™, whether you want to talk about the Abrahamic, Norse, Greek / Roman, Vedic / Hindu, or any one of thousands of others, none of which agree with any others.
And this is a fact which Christians in particular are insistent on IGNORING.
Christians can't even agree about basic things...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLu9GmzKTcw
I've notice creationists using only the King James Bible every time they mention cherry picked, fragmented Bible verses in their drivels, rejecting every other version of the Bible except at times when they use a different version of the bible just when it suits them.
The irony of using the a gay king's revised bible to justify their anti-gay (wide) stance.
"Everything must have a creator, no exceptions. Except God."
That's exactly what they sound like.
"In evolutionary circles, a bird is considered more complex than an octopus."
Say who ?
"Yet, the eye of an octopus is much more complex than the eye of a bird."
From the babble, animals were created before humans who are supposed to be god's masterpiece. Yet insect eyes are better than ours. Prometheus and Epimetheus creation story is more logic than the christian one.
"If a bird evolved from the octopus, why does the octopus have a more complex eye?"
Someone never heard of Carl Von Linné and is not interested to learn.
By the way, multiple choices questions were only used in third grade for parts of history lessons in my time (late 80's). The rest of the time ? You had to think to write an answer who was not a carbon copy of the textbooks.
The hallmark of good design is simplicity, not complexity. Something that is entirely lost on the creationist crowd.
They aren't even doing multiple choice questions right.
OT - The grifting never stops
𝐀 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐚 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬. 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰?
After consulting the Diocese of St. Petersburg, parents and other area Catholic schools, “we decided that we need to take maximum advantage of this dramatically expanded funding source,” Monsignor Robert Gibbons, the St. Paul pastor, said in a YouTube video the school shared publicly.
“Otherwise,” he added, “we would be negligent.”
So instead of paying $6,000 per child, families at the school who are St. Paul parish members will now be charged $10,000 per child. Nonmembers will be charged $12,000 per child, instead of $7,000. Discounts for multiple-student families will be eliminated.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/florida-s-new-voucher-law-allows-private-schools-to-boost-revenue/ar-AA1bT6Al
Only repuklicans couldn't see this happening.
DeSantis has to make up for the loss of revenue from businesses caused by his reckless idiocy.
It’s good bidness sense — and we know Republicans don’t have bidness sense.
Rules Of Acquisition #263: Never allow doubt to tarnish your lust for latinum.
Even the Ferengi have shown more scruples than the GQP.
They at least make no secret of it.
"If you’re not giving anything in terms of a financial investment in the school, I just have a sense it’s going to change our culture too dramatically.”
🤮
No discovery of science has ever pointed to the truth of any religious doctrine, and has totally debunked some of them. The Biblical story of creation being chief among them. In a bizarre way, the Creationists have a point. If the Biblical story isn't true, then there is no need for Jesus. Rather than accepting the facts, they try to bend the facts to fit their preferred narrative.
Evolution is not the theory proposed to explain how "living organisms first came to be without a Creator and how they keep evolving into higher life forms"
It never ceases to amaze me how little Christians actually know. Evolution is descent with modification. You can't get descent from non-life, so evolution does not explain life from non-life. That's an area of science called abiogenesis and is an active area of study for many biologists. Science includes inductive reasoning. It was used to determine heliocentricity, gravity, and is used in most areas of science. When you invoke supernatural beings or processes as the explanation for something you don't comprehend, you are not using inductive reasoning, you are using religion.
Also, evolution is simply change in the inherited traits of a population through successive generations. This can be due to many reasons and not every reason yields "higher life forms". Evolution only leads to increases in complexity when complexity is beneficial to survival and reproduction.
IMO it's usually not a matter of knowing too little. They know exactly why *you say* you accept evolution (evidence etc.). They generally know what evidence you will cite. They just think you're lying about it. The bible tells them that everyone knows God and Jesus in their heart and those who reject it are intentionally doing so in order to sin. So either you're lying, or the bible is wrong. Therefore you must be lying.
What's more, if you're an atheist out of "honest mistake based on limited information" rather than "intentional rejection because you want to sin," then God sending you to hell would, for most Christians, be a horrible injustice. So for those Christians who are not so fundie that they love the thought of honestly mistaken people roasting in hell, but who are not so progressive that they think God has some other path to salvation for 'honestly mistaken' people, the only way to make the bible consistent with the notion of a just God is to place the blame on you: you must be lying about your reasons for nonbelief, you must actually know the truth and be intentionally rejecting God.
The god the bible describes *should* be rejected.
And yet there are numerous instances of Christians who love to sin without remorse, guilty, or regret out there, proving you don't need to hate or reject God in order to love committing sin. Case in point: These guys.
https://www.joemygod.com/2023/05/ambassador-of-christ-who-screamed-calls-to-hang-that-fucking-bitch-pelosi-gets-sentenced-to-two-years/
https://www.joemygod.com/2023/05/mounties-arrest-catholic-priest-on-child-sex-charges/
https://www.joemygod.com/2023/05/moms-for-liberty-speaker-execute-biden-in-public/
"The bible tells them that everyone knows God and Jesus in their heart and those who reject it are intentionally doing so in order to sin"
Actually the Bible says the opposite, "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." While it is true it says the "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" that is a far cry from knowing God and Jesus in their heart. The bible says spiritual things are essentially impossible for them to know without God's intervention.
Most are simply against the notion of a god who "makes children" through a long, agonizing, bloody and inefficient (not to even mention relentlessly BLIND) process because it is in such stark contrast to the vision of a creator presented in Genesis that it simply cannot be squared.
Or perhaps more accurately, I can't see how having once squared those two things there are any two things that one could NOT then square.
Romans 1:20 is the most commonly cited "everyone must know" passage. " For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."
But I guess a broader point here is that this (humans knowing God) is another area where the bible says contradictory things.
Yea, I guess the Psalmist was looking at those who are very corrupt and postulating they have somehow denied their accountability to a revengeful God. But that would simply be the opinion of the writer and his faith. It doesn't prove that somehow everyone "must know" that God exist. It merely shows that's what the writer believed to be true. But then the Christian may retort that "all scripture was given by inspiration of God", but even that is a faith proclamation.
The Bible seems to suggest that an unregenerated man is dead in trespasses and sins and is incapable of knowing spiritual things without regeneration. So, though they may loosely believe or not in a God's existence, but beyond that, they are incapable of knowing God's will and purpose. The without excuse a Christian argues means he should know enough to be without excuse from doing hideous crimes because even his nature knows wrong is wrong.
Personally, that doesn't account for psychopathy and people who are amoral. There are people who cannot recognize right from wrong in even clearly defined situations. So, just from basic biology and psychology Christianity is in gross error on those fronts as well as many others.
Satan and the Fall. That's why psychopaths, amorality, intersex people, Down Syndrome, etc. exist.
But did God "know" that the fall would transpire?
God is omniscient, omnipotent. Thus, not only did God "know", but engineered the fall and it couldn't happened otherwise.
I once asked a devout catholic why his god would punish me for being exactly what his god created me to be. Surprisingly he agreed with me. 😁😇
I fear for the future of the human race. This sort of garbage moves well beyond 'what I want to believe' and into 'the land of pipe dreams and flights of fancy'. This isn't education anymore, this is just straight up indoctrination of children by people looking to ensure the fullness of future collection plates. Sacrificing science and math - which last I heard, we needed more people in desperately here in the US - for the sake of religious education is such a bad idea, you'd think George Lucas was involved.
This is the primary reason I want religion out of education: they just flat don't educate. They don't teach anything to kids in the way of skills or knowledge that will help them succeed in their adult lives. Education is supposed to produce productive, contributing, socially aware adults who do not, typically, need assistance from outside organizations (as in, the government or churches, mostly). The destruction of education undermines the US economy and ability to compete with other nations on the world stage among other problems. I'm sure everyone here is aware, but let me be clear anyway: 𝒘𝒆 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒔𝒖𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒏 𝒅𝒐 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒂 𝒒𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝒆𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏.
I'm not quite that pessimistic about the future of the human race. But as for the future of the United States, as a democratic embodiment of the great principles of the Enlightenment, I'd say it's time to hook up the life support monitors.
Short and simple:
"Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works."
-- Carl Sagan, from "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" page 430
Somebody said religion has set us back 1000 years. Obviously they want to set us back another 1000 years.
Like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-y_-FSN44g
I reject creationism then, I reject creationism now, and I'll reject creationism forever. This what is shown in those ACE garbage books is exactly why.
Rejecting creationism all the way is the right call.
Intelligent design (Creationism in a newer package) lacks consistency, violates the principle of parsimony, is not scientifically useful, is not falsifiable, is not empirically testable, and is not correctable, dynamic, provisional or progressive. It fails as a science. This explains that no reputable science organization endorses it.
Guess who else believed in Intelligent Design? None other than Adolf Hitler himself. Here's a couple of quotes from "Mein Kampf"...
"Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise." (Chapter I)
"It was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will." (Chapter X)
So would the ID crowd be supportive of Hitler's words?
Of course, he WAS a Roman Catholic.
"If a bird evolved from the octopus"
I'd corner the drumstick market!!!
I tentaclly approve.
No suckers please.
Cheap Cephalopod Monday.
Knowledge has ever been the mortal enemy of superstition.
Even their favorite book of fairy tales acknowledges this. The very first "bad" thing the humans did? Learning shit.
Yet that same book tells them to "get wisdom, get understanding."
Teh bibel needed an editor. Badly. It, like Paul, seems to be all things to all people.
They mean wisdom and understanding in the religious sense. You know, not questioning the Boss and knowing what Bible passage to quote in any given situation, *that* kind of wisdom and understanding.
"It just implies one side is right while the other side has no argument without getting into any substance."
All creation books are like that.
ACE explained"
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fb/cf/e0/fbcfe0abc7cddcbd6fb86ef81ebb6bfe.gif
I pictured ACE as the Ludovico Treatment from "A Clockwork Orange."
ACE Chemicals.
Batman videogame?
Also the third act of the Batman vs TMNT movie.
ACE Chemicals is a fucking HUUUUUGE facility!