Hey Stultis, your evolutionary soup is missing a key ingredient. It’s called (linked) evidence.
==Ah, a “birther” too. Just goes to show that people who are fringey, kooky, paranoid and conspiratorialist about one thing, like evolution, are almost always the same way about other things as well.
LOL...Haven’t you heard, various scientific polls peg the evo-atheists as the kookiest fringies around. To wit:
“The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html
PS If you had read the thread, you would have noted that I’m not buying the Evos horizontal gene transfer argument. It sounds like the evolutionary equivalent of epicycles to me.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2305557/posts?page=44#44
Thanks, GGG, but (excepting the Baylor survey specifically) I was already aware of all that. I have that book by Gardner, and even remember reading that article in the Skeptical Enquirer way back in the 1980s.
I don't think it contradicts the observation, however much anecdotal on my part, that those who believe in one nutty thing tend to believe in others.
And no, despite being a secularist myself, I do not consider religious belief per se to be nutty at all. Nor, on the other side of the question, do I consider paranormal and occult beliefs to complete the universe of nutty beliefs.
As far as "evo-atheists" specifically, I doubt they make up much of that "31% of people who never worship" who "expressed strong belief in the "occult and the paranormal". First, strict atheists tend to consider such beliefs to be religious and disdain them also, and second atheists only make up about 9% percent of the population anyway.
You'll find (as your own quote indicates) wide disparities on this among regularly worshiping religionists, as there are likewise disparities in acceptance of antievolutionary creationism. Interestingly, modern young earth creationism was initially devised, developed and promulgated by Seventh Day Adventists, (no offense to them, but) often considered to be a "cult" by other Christians.
It is obvious that conservative Adventists pushed YEC and flood geology in defense of founding prophetess Ellen G. White's visions of The Flood and her insistence that it was global and had deposited the fossil record. One nutty thing led to another at least in that case. Of course, on the other hand, sober and generally unexciting Lutherans also tended to be early adopters of YEC