How to annoy a creationist: feathered dinosaurs

[Tannin]

She's awake! Bugger! Caught in the act again!

[Tannin]

Ugh it's cold out there!

Hmmm ....

Melbourne: 8.3 degrees.
Ballarat: 5.8 degrees.

I'll swap you!

[think positive]

Sitting out the front of a strange house for half an hour, with another mum, seems the kids phones don't work! I'm too old for this.

Night Tannin.

Cheeky bugger

[Jezza]

My son is doing year 10 Science at an inner-Melbourne State school. He told me yesterday that his class is presently studying what he referred to as "Charles Darwin's beliefs about evolution".

I quizzed him on this a little more closely and it appears that (at least) his science teacher felt compelled to pander to the lunatic fringe on this issue by, first, warning students at the end of year 9 that year 10 Science will deal with the Theory of Evolution ("which some among you may find offensive") and, secondly, by emphasising in teaching the year 10 course that evolution is "a theory" which is "not yet proven".

I am looking forward to my son learning about rust in Chemistry next year. Hopefully, equal time will be given to the phlogiston theory there. Oxygen is against my religious beliefs and I am offended by the concept.

Is there no end to the tripe up with which we have to put in the name of "tolerance" of the superstitions of the semi-literate? What happened to the most important human right of all - the right to call an idiot an idiot and dismiss their nonsense as, well, nonsense?

I've got to admit P4S that when I did year 10 science, my science teacher gave me exactly the same lecture as you describe above. It's eerily similar.

[sixpoints]

This tripe happens at a state school??
If it was at a religious based private school it would still be laughable, but in a state government school it is intolerable. I hope this is made known to the admin of the school so some action can be taken.
There is now a regulatory body - Victorian Institute of Teaching. I hope they find out too and then de-register the twerp.

[watt price tully]

Erdogan, the Sultan of Turkey continues fundamentalist Islam in Turkish society. Kemal Ataturk would be turning even faster in his mausoleum.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... icial-says

[David]

Kind of wishing that military coup had succeeded...

[Jezza]

Kind of wishing that military coup had succeeded...

It's sad what Turkey is being reduced to now.

Another example of how Islamising a society creates adverse effects.

[David]

Not quite sure what you mean by 'Islamising', but I certainly agree that turning a country into a dictatorial theocracy has its downsides!

[Skids]

[Tannin]

it put Turkey in the same category as various parts of the United States of America, where the deeply religious curriculum forbids the teaching of evolution.

FTFY

[Tannin]

Another example of how Islamising a society creates adverse effects.

Same as any other damn religion. They are all poxes on humanity. Some of them look a bit worse and smell a bit worse than others, but there is no fundamental difference. Any belief system that rejects evidence and humanity in favour of irrational myth is a social cancer. We don't have the right to force care and treatment on those who do not wish it, but we do have the right - indeed, the civic duty - to stop them spreading it to others.

Matthew 7:5

[Mugwump]

^ as always, I find the .god hypothesis pretty hard to credit, but I think that the idea of an ideal beyond the perennial human demands of power, lust and greed is a very good thing. If religion is cancer, then the great godless humanist ideas of Communism and Fascism did not provide much balm in the twentieth century. I think we live, in the West, in the afterglow of Christian ethics which are gradually breaking down. Since these stood, for many years, for an objective standard of moral good, we are now finding that almost all standards are dissolving into competing and irreconcilable narratives which will ultimately be arbitrated only through political power. If there is nothing above human vanity and frailty, which human reason serves so well, then vanity and frailty may be triumphant, a la Brave New World or 1984.

Science has its place, but science does not tell us the good, it only tells us the true, and these are not the same thing. This dissolution of Christian belief is fraught with great difficulty in the years ahead. As always, some fictions, or unlikelihoods, may be valuable.

[Tannin]

Bahh... Fine mealy-mouthed words. Since when was religion NOT about power and domination?

[Mugwump]

^ as I said, I'm not a believer (it strikes me as a projection of human wishes)... but I can think of nothing in the Christian gospels that approves human power and domination, and many things that inveigh against it. There is if course much before and after Christ that seems to me all-too-human and those who take it literally should be discounted.

What is very clear to me is that, on average, the genuine Christians I know are more moral, self-critical and virtuous in their actual conduct than the great majority of humanists I know, though there are obviously exceptions. So the words have a good correspondence with reality, in my eyes. None of that denies that religions, even ones that enjoin us to love one another, are always very soiled by human hands.