Flame away!
Posted on 12/01/2005 10:55:04 AM PST by curiosity
Edited on 12/01/2005 11:11:54 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board seeking re-election were defeated. This expressed the community's wholesome exasperation with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of "intelligent design'' theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution "is not a fact.''
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Scintillating rebuttal.
I can understand how that must be comforting to a person who's hobbled by insecurity. It does take a certain amount of self-confidence to accept that we don't know everything. This gives us the patience to do the hard work that's necessary to eventually answer all those hard questions about how the world works.
But to a person who can't handle uncertainty, it's easy to blurt out, "it must be a miracle!" every time they're confronted by some aspect of the natural world that they just can't figure out. When you exclaim, "it must be a miracle", that sick feeling of frustration & stupidity dissipates, and the world is suddenly comfortable again. (OTOH, WE try to eliminate that feeling by simply working harder to understand the phenomenon that's frustrating us. That's why we're the ones who make all the scientific breakthroughs and not creationists.)
Flame away!
LOL. So in your world, no one is allowed to have a viewpoint unless they are trained in that field. I'm not an astrologer (and, I wager, neither are you) so I'm not allowed to have an opinion about it. But you are.
Care to show me where I said that?
Answer: I never did. I did say that words mean things, and that trying to re-define words to suit a political agenda is just more PC nonsense, and unworthy of people who style themselves "conservatives." But I never said that one had to be trained in a subject to have an opinion on it.
That would be pretty funny, since I'm not particularly highly "trained" in science. I simply have a keen interest in it, and a great hatred for PC in all its forms.
the only real solution appears to be to end the government monopoly on education. no government schools. then we have no convoluted "first amendment establishment" issues. then everyone can pay to have their kids taught what they want. 50 years from now - we could then see the results. i have no doubt who would end up the productive members of society, who would be producing children at a rate sufficient to replace the population and who would be creating wealth and dispersing it to those in need - that is unless the darwinists killed us before then. ideas have consequences - you may have come from an ape but i was made in the image of the living God - to whom all humanity will one day account for every second of their life here on earth. believe it or not.
Do we need another pretentious bow-tied pencil neck with an overwrought thesarus patronizing us?
Evos, terrified of a potential loss of prestige, turf and money are not exactly a powerful resource for the right. Given how they behave on FR, they are the whiniest of bad-termpered wusses who show up in gangs to bolster each other--surely these are weaklings who couldn't do us any good in any case. "All your science are belong to us." I don't think so.
I question whether they were ever on the conservative side to begin with--or are part of the 'tarians who are wild with distaste that they might have to eat at the same table as Conservative Christians.
The only word I can use to describe this is 'paranoid.'
Ah, the cardinal sin - patronizing you. Apparently this is the best we can expect by way of substantive criticism - not whether what he said is, y'know, true or anything, but rather than he's mean and nasty. What's next, a diatribe on how damaging it is to the creationist self-esteem to have your widdle feelings hurt?
LOL. Have a cold compress and a rest on the couch, Blanche - the vapors will pass soon enough.
Will is a wordy weinie. He's not read among this century's conservatives--who have a little more verve. Readers on FR prefer the Malkins, Rushes, Levins, Coulters--the new guys in town.
He patronizes, because his millieu has entrapped him--the millieu where meek Republicans valued collegiality with our overlords over making any progress rightward. He's lost his usefulness. He should stick to writing about the finer points of baseball rules.
The taliban doubts the overreaching capacities that evos claim--
Other folks (some Christians) doubt the overreaching capacities that evos claim--
Therefore, anyone who doubts the overreaching capacities that evos claim for the theory of evolution must be the Taliban!
This lesson in logical sillygisms brought to you by our finest science departments in our finest universities.
I thought you had it all figured out - this is merely the screen name used to deal with you. Or something.
Or maybe some just find such posts too ridiculous to be worthy of a response - personally, I like to insure that such things get the ridicule they deserve. Not that it matters - even after some less-than-gentle prodding on my part, you still can't bring yourself to address the substance of what he says. Why bother, I guess, when it's so much easier to simply complain that he's a patronizing dork, and ignore any question of whether or not he's correct.
But this is an old tactic - let's give credit to the inventor:
Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There's no end to that. It will be quite enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.- V.I. Lenin
To wit--"The voters will reject us if we seem unsophisticated! We must sign on to the overreaching claims of evos or the voters might think we're ignorant rednecks!" Argument to potential embarrassment.
Just a plain weak argument. Will is arguing from elitism, because he's been arguing that way for twenty years. Twenty years ago there weren't many conservative writers. Now we've got lots of them, and they're also better looking. He's not paid attn to--he's the Phil Donahue of the right.
The right has much more strength from those icky ole "fundies" than they do from these evo weaklings--if they're scared to death to entertain a new theory, even one that's preposterous to them (physicists do it all the time, but the prospect turns some biologists to shivering jello)--then what else are they scared of?
Who needs a scaredy cat?
PH, he's on to you. I told you not to use your credit card to buy that army of Robot Zombies for the Darwin Central Sercet Lair.
Hey, if you wanna be the Evangelical GED Party, be my guest, but outside that core of Protestant non-high school graduates, support for creationism is a bit thinner. Good luck winning by appealing only to such a hugely "strong" base.
It's not about "embarrassment", it's about the political landscape and what would be winning platforms versus losing platforms. But hey, it's not a total loss - we've learned something about your skills with respect to reading comprehension. Or the lack thereof.
...if they're scared to death to entertain a new theory, even one that's preposterous to them (physicists do it all the time, but the prospect turns some biologists to shivering jello)--then what else are they scared of?
Oh, now - here's a hankie. I almost think you believe that. Actually, you probably do believe that. Let me disabuse you right now. ID isn't rejected because someone's "scared", ID is rejected because it sucks. Now, I've no doubt that saying so makes me some sort of nasty elitist too, but science is not a democracy and you cannot vote or poll your way into scientific truth. Sorry, but there it is.
Now that's pretty cute--and so persuasive. Slam evangelicals as being non-high school grads. We so trust you now. This is an argument to the "ick" factor. You find Christians icky, which is what was always suspected from the first.
First of all, you vastly overrate the importance of this issue. It's not really of much concern compared to the WOT, Taxes, Natural Disasters, Stock Market...only a few lonely grantgrubbers find this a compelling Single Issue.
There 'tarians who want to cut the conservative religious off the GOP, very old story--and there are lots of Democrats who'd love to do the same thing. The 'tarians just can't get over their personal distaste against the religious...(irrational--they tolerate druggies quite handily, why not a Baptist?). "Tarians like low taxation, but their cultural familiars are urban liberals. Jazz bars and lattes, not sixpacks and Nascar. The Democrats just want the GOP to lose.
But the table remains big, The Evangelical GEDs get to sit at it, and ideas that you regard as "sucky" won't be shouted down by so few voices. You don't think science is democratic? We'll see about that. Evos don't deliver anything but whining--and not many folks care about the prestige, turf, and financial concerns of a few evos.
That's good. Very good. Not to be confused with the message of my tagline, however.
See, this is that "reading comprehension" thing I was talking about above. That's not a "slam" on evangelicals - it's a reference to the true fact that support for creationism is highest among evangelicals who haven't graduated from high school. Does that mean that all evangelicals are not high school graduates? Well, apparently if you're the terminally thick Mamzelle, it does. For everyone else, it also indicates that for Evangelicals, like the rest of the population, support for creationism declines as educational level increases. Or, in other words, Evangelicals who have gone to college are less likely to support creationism than Evangelicals who have not.
Really, now. Is this really the sort of argument you want to make, blundering about and demonstrating a critical inability to read and comprehend the material presented to you? Can you actually, legitimately, with a straight face sit there and claim that you still don't understand why virtually nobody on the other "side" wants to deal with you? Can we now see that it's because very few have the patience for such blockheadedness that I do, Mamz?
You know, now that I think about it, most of your objections seem to be to the method (sneering condescension!) rather than the material. But I figure that the truth is a little like medicine - it's not supposed to taste good, it's supposed to be good for you. So, you're welcome. If I can light just one little candle in this land of darkness....
First of all, you vastly overrate the importance of this issue.
And yet, here you are, unimportant as it may be.
Make an issue out of it, and it's a loser. Dover showed that, and smart politicians were listening. But hey, you've probably won dozens of elections, right?
I should really stop talking to myself like this...
I addressed Will's assertion, as per your request, more than once. It was a weak assertion--Will is trapped inside a millieu and he thinks it's the whole world. He needs to retire. The GOP is not going to be "embarrassed" enough to throw away a huge constituency just because some unreliables squawk. 'Tarians are notorious for staying home or voting their own party.
When the issue is discussed, I think most will shrug as ask, "So what?" and "Why not give this ID stuff a listen? Would it kill ya?" whether they care about ID at all.
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