Posted on 08/24/2005 6:51:49 AM PDT by Quick1
Topeka — From Darwin to intelligent design to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The debate over teaching evolution in Kansas public schools has caught the attention of a cross-country Internet community of satirists.
In the past few weeks, hundreds of followers of the supreme Flying Spaghetti Monster have swamped state education officials with urgent e-mails.
They argue that since the conservative majority of the State Board of Education has blessed classroom science standards at the behest of intelligent design supporters, which criticize evolution, they want the gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster taught.
“I’m sure you realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory,” writes Bobby Henderson, a Corvallis, Ore., resident whose Web site, www.venganza.org, is part FSM tribute and part job search. Karl Gehring/Journal-World Illustration
Karl Gehring/Journal-World Illustration
“It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” he wrote to the education board.
Henderson did not return a telephone call for comment. He says in his letter that it is disrespectful to teach about the FSM without wearing “full pirate regalia.”
Board member Bill Wagnon, a Democrat, whose district includes Lawrence, said he has received more than 500 e-mails from supporters of FSM.
“Clearly, these are just supreme satirists. What they are doing is pointing out that there is no more sense to intelligent design than there is to a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Wagnon said.
Intelligent design posits that some aspects of biology are so complex, they point toward an intelligent creator.
ID proponents helped shepherd a report and hearings that have resulted in science standards that criticize evolution and have put Kansas in the middle of international attention on the subject.
John Calvert, of Lake Quivira, the lawyer who was instrumental in writing the science standards that criticize evolution, said he had seen the FSM e-mails, and was not impressed.
“You can only use that misinformation so long,” Calvert said. Calvert said the science standards do not promote intelligent design, but show that evolution has its critics.
Wagnon and the three other board members who support evolution have written Henderson back, saying they appreciated the comic relief but that they were saddened that the science standards were being changed to criticize evolution.
Then what *does* it postulate?
I wasn't talking to you, but you did miss the point. Then you went off on some tangent that ignored what I was actually addressing to someone else.
Look at this.
ROFL!!!
This thread is a hoot! :-)
Um, you're posting on a public forum. That means you're talking to everyone here.
Then you went off on some tangent that ignored what I was actually addressing to someone else.
No, it didn't ignore what you adressed. It just mocked your statement.
I am not a fan of NS, but if you post a response to a 100 ago post without any references, don't expect people to treat you better than a meatball without sauce.
DK
I loved reading Algernon Blackwood, August Derleth, and H.P. Lovecraft when I was a kid. :-)
IOt postulates an intelligence which designed life.
It does not say that this intelligence:
(1) Created matter and energy from nothing
(2) Is omniscient, or even much smarter than we are
(3) Is omnipotent
(4) Is immortal, or even still alive
(5) Is a spiritual, as opposed to a material, being.
Yet all these qualities are normally associated with divinity.
But it is still not science.
So you say. However, it fits all standard criteria for science, regardless.
Okay, then at least have a clue when you reply to a post not addressed to you.
Divinity takes away from the true discussion. How can you discuss divinity and the origins of life when divinity doesn't have a yolk? It's not even a true egg religion!
Go back to a true noodle. I would suggest Rotini, but everyone on this thread knows my calling. Can you even imagine divinity in the great collander? Nothing would remain.
DK
You forgot omnipresent.
Quick1 wrote in #32 (and not to you, BTW):
When was Intelligent Design elevated to the level of Theory? It has no testable, falsifiable hypothesis.
You responded in #136:
You're not clever, not funny, not even original...just another follower of the 1960's attack the underpinnings of our law and culture movement.
Considering just how much of a non-sequitur your comment was, I don't think you have much of leg to stand on when you tell others to "at least have a clue when you reply to a post not addressed to you."
And it is not pasta either.
DK
No, you blew it again. You just took a guess and responded without a clue to a post not addressed to you, just a bum guess. Must have struck a nerve for you to have such a jerkey knee all ready to react.
Bless me Flying Spagetti Monster, for I have sinned. Often have I consorted with Angel Hair Pasta. I have soaked it with thy holy sauce, mixed it with thy holy lamb and pork, and adorned it with thy chantrelles and morels (the latter first dehydrated, then reconstituted in cream and wine).
Amusing subterfuge.
If ID postulates a divinity, you claim it is not science. If ID does not postulate divinity, you claim it is not science.
Evolution begins with minimal assumptions as well - is it also not science?
No physics? No chemistry? And you want to pass this off as science?
Evolution, as postulated by darwin, began without the slightest clue as to how traits were transmitted. No mechanism was provided. Yet I would doubt that you would deny evolution as "science" at that time, despite its shortcomings in that regard.
...shakes head in disbelief...
How quaint.
(Evolution=Fact)
Evolution = 150-year old uproven theory
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