"An unvaccinated, out-of-state traveler" who tested positive for measles recently visited the Creationist attraction, according to the Kentucky Department of Public Health
Science doesn't conflict with faith? Seriously? No discovery of science ever pointed to the truth of any religious doctrine. Very few of the world's truly great scientific thinkers were deeply religious. Pascal was, but then he died two hundred years before Darwin published his works. The Ark Encounter is a monument to ignorance.
Science helped us drive many diseases in the developed world to nearly undetectable levels... Look, Measles can cause brain damage, deafness, blindness, and wipe your immune system's memory of prior exposures to common diseases and vaccinations. Mumps can cause sterility and encephalitis. Just wait until Polio rears its ugly head.
Imo, science does not conflict with faith, but faith, as this essay demonstrates, often conflicts with science. Faith does not require scientific evidence to exist or to impel adherence to doctrine. That's exactly why faith is a very sharp but double-edged sword.
I'm agnostic at best, but I appreciate persons of faith who co-exist comfortably with science--not so much those who cannot and who also put the rest of us at risk or who want us to bend the knee to their way of thinking.
My problem with faith is simple. Faith is essentially belief without evidence. There is another word, nowhere near so pretty or well accepted, which also describes that definition:
To me, faith and hope are useless without ACTION. Deprive either word of actual pursuit of a goal and they amount to nothing more than mental dithering, without any chance of resolution.
As I cited with Bob Heinlein, they are dirty words to me, far worse than the four-letter expletives that believers get upset about.
Karl Marx, eh? In my case, my statement really is about my tendency toward pragmatism. I am an engineer (retired), after all, and on top of that, an actual troubleshooter. Taking action toward a positive result continues to be what I want to be about, whether it's resolving a problem with a customer's system or having to face down irrational beliefs and those who believe them.
I don't consider them the same, or describing the same condition, but they certainly can be related. I think many consider faith and religion to be always intertwined: I do not.
Good point, but you need a little faith to do things like get married, start a business, start a family, choose a career. Not faith in a vague God, but faith in something to believe that you will succeed in the endeavor.
Sorry, but I refuse to call that "faith." Confidence based in experience, perhaps a wild (or not so wild) extrapolation of facts on the ground. Those I can sign up for.
But believing something, let alone taking action, on NO evidence? NO. Abso-freaking-lutely NOT.
When you weight the vast range of things in which it is possible to have faith against testable evidence which is all but non-existent, what ever you believe is almost certainly wrong as a matter of probability.
1. On claims of fact, *some* sects and religions agree with science, but many others don't. (Consider YECers.) To say religion is compatible with science on claims is kinda like saying a dalmation is a white dog. In both cases, you have to ignore the many obvious spots where it isn't. With possibly the biggest spot of incompatibility being souls and afterlives.
2. On the methods they use/trust for knowledge generation, they are widly incompatible. Science says observation, testing, peer review are pretty much the only way to generate reliable knowledge, while arguments from authority, internal cogitation, and divine revelation can't (or at least, don't) get you there. Religion says practically the opposite: that knowledge of the divine must come from revelation, internal cogitation, this authoritative book or that authoritative person, etc.
So on a 1 to 10 scale of compatibliity, I'd give them maybe a 3. Points for most theistic faith claims agreeing with most scientific claims on how the world works. But not all theistic beliefs agree, and practically no theist goes whole-hog on accepting scientific claims of how the world work (see souls, afterlives above). Maybe most undermining for "is too compatible" crowd is that anyone claiming a book/revelation/"i've thought about it" reason for god-belief is demonstrating a strong incompatibility of method.
Only problem there is that he'd say, "It's a fallen world, blah-blah-blah," but that still doesn't allow him to dodge the consequences of either foolish action or irresponsible inaction. He's smart enough to know that the situation is dangerous.
The question is whether he's responsible enough to take effective action.
He couldn't even be bothered to properly treat/stain the wood of his half-boat, half-office building, resulting in water damage caused by (ironically enough) rainfall.
The first part has nothing to do with the second part. When Christianity is mandatory on pain of death, 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦 it's going to be a Christian pioneering the branch of science. Although, it is the ancient Greeks preserved by Muslim scholars that laid the foundations thos Christians used to found their branches of science.
As for science conflicting with faith? Tell me again how many 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 it took before the RCC formally acknowledged that Galileo was right and they were wrong. The current measles exposure warning, which will definitely lead to outbreaks across the country, is just the latest manifestation of the conflict that faith has with science.
Whereas Christians did pioneer a lot of science including what.we call the scientific method, this would not have happened if they had not traveled to lands where scoence and technology had more advanced aspects and brought the knowledge back, often obtained by conquest.
I find it pretty ironic that measles originally came back to the USA because of a so called left winger crunchy Hollywood elite blonde, Jenny McCarthy. The right held her in contempt until their lunacy aligned on this issue. Now we have the COVID pandemic to thank for the current wave, but we never would have had the legs for the vaccine fear during the pandemic without Jenny’s original lies.
So, now we get to see pandemic after pandemic after pandemic of diseases that we’ve beaten a generation or two ago.
Mostly though, I blame Cheeto Mussolini for his terrible, self serving policies and politics for our current situation. MAHA is clearly only interested in wealthy people, their solutions only work when you have money to pay for the expensive foods, technologies, and healthcare. Everyone else can die. Trump is fine with that, unless you’re a teen girl with no money, he isn’t interested in your life. Anyway, this anti-vax movement shifted from far left to far right in a finger snap.
Apart from cosmology, the age of the universe and the earth, the fact that the earth is spherical and not flat, evolution...
"Christians pioneered most branches of science"
The person who produced this might want to glance at something like Grant's "The History of Natural Philosophy". Christians come into the picture only in medieval times, after translations from the Greek, Arabic and Persian became available. Gerard of Cremorna had to learn Arabic in order to translate the many scientific books in that language, and regretted "the poverty of the Latins" (i.e. the scarcity of books in Latin).
Were the natural philosophers of the Renaissance and onwards Christian? Yes, they were. But would you be able to become a natural philosopher and publish your works if you were not? And even then, consider your fate if you published works that ran counter to the views of the religious authorities.
What Ken Ham conveniently ignores is that, if a scientist who is also a believer applies themselves to the scientific technique and principles and does NOT allow personal belief to interfere with their study, experimentation, research, and analysis, then no, there is no conflict. Ham is the utter antithesis of that attitude and approach, though he would probably never admit it.
I wonder if Ham even knows the name, "Francis Collins."
He probably does, just refuses to acknowledge him. One Christian who is a scientist he does acknowledge is Mary Schweitzer, mainly because he can misuse her work to claim non-avian dinosaurs loved with humans. She is on record as being royally pissed that YECs do that.
Exploiting her work for personal gain is without a doubt criminal along with ignoring the part about her findings of red blood cells inside of a 75 million year old Tyrannosaur fossil being entirely microscopic rather than what creationists think.
The difficulty arises when both science and religion (some Muslims are also creationists) make ontological claims.
If, for example, science claims that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and creationism claims that it is on the order of 6,000 years old, then in each case ontological commitments are being made and 𝘰𝘯𝘶𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪 therefore applies to both.
And the bottom line is: who has the goods? When asked for proof, Ham points to a book that was written before (some) people knew the earth was spherical (or an oblate spheroid, if you will). Ask a scientist for proof and you had better be prepared for a considerable explanation, complete with experiments, observations, and corroborations by multiple other observers.
The comparison is ludicrous, and you and I both know it.
Hambone only cares about cash flow, power, and control. He would be the last person to urge visitors to get vaccinated. I half expect him to spout some anti-vax nonsense while being fully vaccinated himself.
Well, if there's a better place to spark an outbreak of a disease that shouldn't still exist, I sure can't think of it. Better even than a megachurch- those at least keep the problem local; this one draws the dupes in from far and wide. The entire stupid edifice is a monument to willful ignorance; if you drew a Venn diagram of the people least likely to be vaccinated, and the people most inclined to believe in the bullshit that Ham is selling... it wouldn't 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘦 be a circle, but it'd be damned hard to tell from a distance.
At minimum, it's good to see that the state of Kentucky is doing its due diligence to inform the public about the potential for the spread of a seriously problematic and virulent disease. Set that against Ken Ham's clear disregard for science and his insistence on the verity of the bible, and a dangerous conflict is pretty clearly more than possible. As I posted yesterday:
The reality of measles is unavoidable. It IS, however, PREVENTABLE, if those in proximity to the disease can be bothered to be RESPONSIBLE. Time to either step up or SHUT UP, Ken.
My parents showed great responsibility and got us vaccinated against the measles and other diseases. Those vaccines are still at work in my body today at the age of 73.
I probably missed at least a couple vaccines, since I managed to get both measles and mumps (one "mump" at a time, too!). Thing is, too, that was back in the early 60s, before the standalone measles vaccine had been developed and LONG before MMR was around. Too many people these days have NO IDEA about the virulence or the danger represented by those childhood diseases because THEY HAVEN'T SEEN THEM.
And they have no idea about what it would be like to learn the hard way.
I received a nice case of the mumps before there was a vaccine for it, though never caught the measles. Was out of school for two weeks. It was the most boring “vacation” I’ve ever had: a classmate brought all my homework assignments that I was missing.
My bride and I recently had a blood titer to see if we were still in good shape against measles. We are. We are of the exact age where they were switching from the live to the dead virus (or dead to live?) and neither of us knew or had anyone to ask. My bride’s older sister by 5 years needed to get re-vaxxed.
Christian faith is intentionally, specifically anti-science: patriarchal cults evangelize chauvinism when women are not biologically or intellectually inferior to anyone for horrific example. Since its inception Christian belief disorder has violently fought reality on every topic from medicine to outer space while hysterically torturing, hanging and burning people, but of course the group is anti-history as well for the same reasons. This entire ark was funded by stolen tax dollars, to make it worse.
The combination of police misconduct and AI hallucination has to be one of the most low-key terrifying things to come out of that shitty technology. If you thought the problem of cops planting evidence was bad already, just wait until they hit on the idea of using AI to manufacture video "evidence." If it hasn't happened yet, it will.
What? Antivaxx Religiou$ Fanatics at a religionite mass gathering place, where churchlings galore meet, got infected with measles? WHO could've even imagined that happening?????????
Send them thoughts & prayers . . . thoughts that they're stuuuuuupid & mocking prayers that by ridiculing then so much might at least inspire the few amongst them capable of rational thoughts to repent of their churchling ways.
Science doesn't conflict with faith? Seriously? No discovery of science ever pointed to the truth of any religious doctrine. Very few of the world's truly great scientific thinkers were deeply religious. Pascal was, but then he died two hundred years before Darwin published his works. The Ark Encounter is a monument to ignorance.
Science helped us drive many diseases in the developed world to nearly undetectable levels... Look, Measles can cause brain damage, deafness, blindness, and wipe your immune system's memory of prior exposures to common diseases and vaccinations. Mumps can cause sterility and encephalitis. Just wait until Polio rears its ugly head.
Imo, science does not conflict with faith, but faith, as this essay demonstrates, often conflicts with science. Faith does not require scientific evidence to exist or to impel adherence to doctrine. That's exactly why faith is a very sharp but double-edged sword.
I'm agnostic at best, but I appreciate persons of faith who co-exist comfortably with science--not so much those who cannot and who also put the rest of us at risk or who want us to bend the knee to their way of thinking.
My problem with faith is simple. Faith is essentially belief without evidence. There is another word, nowhere near so pretty or well accepted, which also describes that definition:
Gullibility.
This says it better than I did.https://substack.com/@serialparkingviolator/note/c-194157746?r=bjaw
To me, faith and hope are useless without ACTION. Deprive either word of actual pursuit of a goal and they amount to nothing more than mental dithering, without any chance of resolution.
As I cited with Bob Heinlein, they are dirty words to me, far worse than the four-letter expletives that believers get upset about.
"To me, faith and hope are useless without ACTION."
Hmm, sounds like "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it"
Karl Marx, eh? In my case, my statement really is about my tendency toward pragmatism. I am an engineer (retired), after all, and on top of that, an actual troubleshooter. Taking action toward a positive result continues to be what I want to be about, whether it's resolving a problem with a customer's system or having to face down irrational beliefs and those who believe them.
It's all of a piece to me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/unumfund/p/faith-is-what-moves-us?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=bjaw
I agree with you that faith w/o action is pointless. The essay I incompetently linked above links faith and action.
I don't consider them the same, or describing the same condition, but they certainly can be related. I think many consider faith and religion to be always intertwined: I do not.
𝐹𝑎𝑖𝑡ℎ! 𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑎 𝑑𝑖𝑟𝑡𝑦 𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑜𝑠𝑦𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 – 𝐽𝑖𝑙𝑙, 𝑤ℎ𝑦 𝑑𝑖𝑑𝑛'𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑡 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑛'𝑡 𝑏𝑒 𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑦?
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Bob speaks my line here pretty well.
Good point, but you need a little faith to do things like get married, start a business, start a family, choose a career. Not faith in a vague God, but faith in something to believe that you will succeed in the endeavor.
Sorry, but I refuse to call that "faith." Confidence based in experience, perhaps a wild (or not so wild) extrapolation of facts on the ground. Those I can sign up for.
But believing something, let alone taking action, on NO evidence? NO. Abso-freaking-lutely NOT.
Okay, that makes sense to me.
I’m easy, but I’m not cheap.
The correct link:
https://open.substack.com/pub/unumfund/p/faith-is-what-moves-us?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=bjaw
When you weight the vast range of things in which it is possible to have faith against testable evidence which is all but non-existent, what ever you believe is almost certainly wrong as a matter of probability.
It conflicts more than it doesn't.
1. On claims of fact, *some* sects and religions agree with science, but many others don't. (Consider YECers.) To say religion is compatible with science on claims is kinda like saying a dalmation is a white dog. In both cases, you have to ignore the many obvious spots where it isn't. With possibly the biggest spot of incompatibility being souls and afterlives.
2. On the methods they use/trust for knowledge generation, they are widly incompatible. Science says observation, testing, peer review are pretty much the only way to generate reliable knowledge, while arguments from authority, internal cogitation, and divine revelation can't (or at least, don't) get you there. Religion says practically the opposite: that knowledge of the divine must come from revelation, internal cogitation, this authoritative book or that authoritative person, etc.
So on a 1 to 10 scale of compatibliity, I'd give them maybe a 3. Points for most theistic faith claims agreeing with most scientific claims on how the world works. But not all theistic beliefs agree, and practically no theist goes whole-hog on accepting scientific claims of how the world work (see souls, afterlives above). Maybe most undermining for "is too compatible" crowd is that anyone claiming a book/revelation/"i've thought about it" reason for god-belief is demonstrating a strong incompatibility of method.
I won't argue with that.
"Very few of the world's truly great scientific thinkers were deeply religious"
Newton was, the volume of his writing on religion far outweighs that on science.
Christians have to be careful about claiming Newton though, he was a heretic, an Arian who rejected the idea of the Trinity.
Newton died in 1727. Given what we know to be true today, I kind of doubt he would have been all that religiouis.
Michael Faraday was also devout.
Indeed, and another heretic, he was a Sandemanian.
There are many others. What Ham neglects to mention is that some scientists are Jews or even Muslim.
Well, I imagine Noah brought two measles on the ark so I don’t see the problem. All glory to God!
When a Mommy measle loves a Daddy measle very much ....
….you get lots of baby measles.
Ahhhh, the pitter patter of tiny hemagglutinin.
BOTH of you are certifiable! 🤣🤣🤣
We all are. That's why we're here!
Oh, so THAT's what's going on! 🤪🤪🤪
I live in a place where people still insist on calling me "Pastor Donald".
This is my happy place of sanity. You are my people.
That's one of the great mysteries of life explained.
Ken Ham's "perfect creation by a perfect creator" reveals its flaws for all to see yet again.
Superstition causes disaster.
'Ken Ham's "perfect creation by a perfect creator"'
As ever, says the man wearing glasses.
He denies that we are evolved apes, while his resemblance to Dr Zaius is uncanny.
*startled gasp* Wow. Just went back and looked up photos of each. Never noticed it before now I can't unsee it.
No doubt he's a real life "[dumb], dirty ape."
Only problem there is that he'd say, "It's a fallen world, blah-blah-blah," but that still doesn't allow him to dodge the consequences of either foolish action or irresponsible inaction. He's smart enough to know that the situation is dangerous.
The question is whether he's responsible enough to take effective action.
He couldn't even be bothered to properly treat/stain the wood of his half-boat, half-office building, resulting in water damage caused by (ironically enough) rainfall.
𝑆𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛’𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑡ℎ; 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑝𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒.
The first part has nothing to do with the second part. When Christianity is mandatory on pain of death, 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦 it's going to be a Christian pioneering the branch of science. Although, it is the ancient Greeks preserved by Muslim scholars that laid the foundations thos Christians used to found their branches of science.
As for science conflicting with faith? Tell me again how many 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 it took before the RCC formally acknowledged that Galileo was right and they were wrong. The current measles exposure warning, which will definitely lead to outbreaks across the country, is just the latest manifestation of the conflict that faith has with science.
Whereas Christians did pioneer a lot of science including what.we call the scientific method, this would not have happened if they had not traveled to lands where scoence and technology had more advanced aspects and brought the knowledge back, often obtained by conquest.
Including the branches of science dealing with fear and torture to effect conformity.
I find it pretty ironic that measles originally came back to the USA because of a so called left winger crunchy Hollywood elite blonde, Jenny McCarthy. The right held her in contempt until their lunacy aligned on this issue. Now we have the COVID pandemic to thank for the current wave, but we never would have had the legs for the vaccine fear during the pandemic without Jenny’s original lies.
So, now we get to see pandemic after pandemic after pandemic of diseases that we’ve beaten a generation or two ago.
Mostly though, I blame Cheeto Mussolini for his terrible, self serving policies and politics for our current situation. MAHA is clearly only interested in wealthy people, their solutions only work when you have money to pay for the expensive foods, technologies, and healthcare. Everyone else can die. Trump is fine with that, unless you’re a teen girl with no money, he isn’t interested in your life. Anyway, this anti-vax movement shifted from far left to far right in a finger snap.
"Science doesn't conflict with faith"
Apart from cosmology, the age of the universe and the earth, the fact that the earth is spherical and not flat, evolution...
"Christians pioneered most branches of science"
The person who produced this might want to glance at something like Grant's "The History of Natural Philosophy". Christians come into the picture only in medieval times, after translations from the Greek, Arabic and Persian became available. Gerard of Cremorna had to learn Arabic in order to translate the many scientific books in that language, and regretted "the poverty of the Latins" (i.e. the scarcity of books in Latin).
Were the natural philosophers of the Renaissance and onwards Christian? Yes, they were. But would you be able to become a natural philosopher and publish your works if you were not? And even then, consider your fate if you published works that ran counter to the views of the religious authorities.
What Ken Ham conveniently ignores is that, if a scientist who is also a believer applies themselves to the scientific technique and principles and does NOT allow personal belief to interfere with their study, experimentation, research, and analysis, then no, there is no conflict. Ham is the utter antithesis of that attitude and approach, though he would probably never admit it.
I wonder if Ham even knows the name, "Francis Collins."
He probably does, just refuses to acknowledge him. One Christian who is a scientist he does acknowledge is Mary Schweitzer, mainly because he can misuse her work to claim non-avian dinosaurs loved with humans. She is on record as being royally pissed that YECs do that.
Exploiting her work for personal gain is without a doubt criminal along with ignoring the part about her findings of red blood cells inside of a 75 million year old Tyrannosaur fossil being entirely microscopic rather than what creationists think.
The difficulty arises when both science and religion (some Muslims are also creationists) make ontological claims.
If, for example, science claims that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and creationism claims that it is on the order of 6,000 years old, then in each case ontological commitments are being made and 𝘰𝘯𝘶𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪 therefore applies to both.
And the bottom line is: who has the goods? When asked for proof, Ham points to a book that was written before (some) people knew the earth was spherical (or an oblate spheroid, if you will). Ask a scientist for proof and you had better be prepared for a considerable explanation, complete with experiments, observations, and corroborations by multiple other observers.
The comparison is ludicrous, and you and I both know it.
We differ only on one point, "proof" is for logic, mathematics and whisky. What science builds upon is "evidence".
𝐼𝑓 𝐾𝑒𝑛 𝐻𝑎𝑚 𝑜𝑟 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝑎𝑡 𝐴𝑛𝑠𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑠 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑢𝑚, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑝𝑢𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑙𝑦 𝑢𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑣𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑡 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑖𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦.
Hambone only cares about cash flow, power, and control. He would be the last person to urge visitors to get vaccinated. I half expect him to spout some anti-vax nonsense while being fully vaccinated himself.
"There's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity." -- P.T. Barnum
"'I'll say whatever I want, because I own the platform.'
--Donald Trump and Elon Musk
Well, if there's a better place to spark an outbreak of a disease that shouldn't still exist, I sure can't think of it. Better even than a megachurch- those at least keep the problem local; this one draws the dupes in from far and wide. The entire stupid edifice is a monument to willful ignorance; if you drew a Venn diagram of the people least likely to be vaccinated, and the people most inclined to believe in the bullshit that Ham is selling... it wouldn't 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘦 be a circle, but it'd be damned hard to tell from a distance.
Especially with an astigmatism. :)
"People who visited Ark Encounter may have been exposed to measles"
And stoopid. A whole boatload of stoopid.
No kidding. BTW, note who that is, second from the right!
https://ibb.co/fdg9W727
At minimum, it's good to see that the state of Kentucky is doing its due diligence to inform the public about the potential for the spread of a seriously problematic and virulent disease. Set that against Ken Ham's clear disregard for science and his insistence on the verity of the bible, and a dangerous conflict is pretty clearly more than possible. As I posted yesterday:
𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ, 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑝 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑖𝑡, 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛'𝑡 𝑔𝑜 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑦.
-- Philip K. Dick
The reality of measles is unavoidable. It IS, however, PREVENTABLE, if those in proximity to the disease can be bothered to be RESPONSIBLE. Time to either step up or SHUT UP, Ken.
My parents showed great responsibility and got us vaccinated against the measles and other diseases. Those vaccines are still at work in my body today at the age of 73.
I probably missed at least a couple vaccines, since I managed to get both measles and mumps (one "mump" at a time, too!). Thing is, too, that was back in the early 60s, before the standalone measles vaccine had been developed and LONG before MMR was around. Too many people these days have NO IDEA about the virulence or the danger represented by those childhood diseases because THEY HAVEN'T SEEN THEM.
And they have no idea about what it would be like to learn the hard way.
I received a nice case of the mumps before there was a vaccine for it, though never caught the measles. Was out of school for two weeks. It was the most boring “vacation” I’ve ever had: a classmate brought all my homework assignments that I was missing.
A "nice" case of the mumps? No such thing! 😉 Was about the same deal with me: one week for the first mump, then another week for the second.
Was NO FUN. 😝
My bride and I recently had a blood titer to see if we were still in good shape against measles. We are. We are of the exact age where they were switching from the live to the dead virus (or dead to live?) and neither of us knew or had anyone to ask. My bride’s older sister by 5 years needed to get re-vaxxed.
Faith interferes with science if a doctor won’t prescribe or a pharmacist won’t fill a prescription if it doesn’t align with their religious hooey.
A better picture of the Office Building with a Boat Facade:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2xby42c/an-aerial-over-a-replica-of-noahs-ark-at-the-ark-encounter-theme-park-in-kentucky-2xby42c.jpg
"Truth will our."
-- Shakespeare, from "The Merchant of Venice."
Christian faith is intentionally, specifically anti-science: patriarchal cults evangelize chauvinism when women are not biologically or intellectually inferior to anyone for horrific example. Since its inception Christian belief disorder has violently fought reality on every topic from medicine to outer space while hysterically torturing, hanging and burning people, but of course the group is anti-history as well for the same reasons. This entire ark was funded by stolen tax dollars, to make it worse.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d2d8c80d9601f7c979707b73325fc75d7ef489a77dcd6cc852b7362801a64179.jpg
The combination of police misconduct and AI hallucination has to be one of the most low-key terrifying things to come out of that shitty technology. If you thought the problem of cops planting evidence was bad already, just wait until they hit on the idea of using AI to manufacture video "evidence." If it hasn't happened yet, it will.
What? Antivaxx Religiou$ Fanatics at a religionite mass gathering place, where churchlings galore meet, got infected with measles? WHO could've even imagined that happening?????????
Send them thoughts & prayers . . . thoughts that they're stuuuuuupid & mocking prayers that by ridiculing then so much might at least inspire the few amongst them capable of rational thoughts to repent of their churchling ways.
Nice idea but it won't happen.
Faith is what you cling to when you lack facts.
And no amount of belief will make that faith the truth.