Anti-Intellectualism Award
These folks scare me, seriously.
You atheists make it sound like evolution is some kind of special esoteric knowledge that one can only truly appreciate after donating tons of money to an atheist church called a university.
36 comments
By the time I was out of junior high school, if not earlier, I had a pretty good idea of what evolution was all about. I had a better understanding of it than just about any fundie, as far as I can tell. It's not an arcane, complex thing.
You have to shell out money to a university, but that's because your local schools are failing you, and that's YOUR FAULT. Evolution should have been explained in junior high school and amplified by more education in high school science classes, but when teachers have to pussyfoot around your sensitive little religious mythology, you kids are denied a decent education. The church INTENDS for you to remain stupid. Are you sure that's the kind of church you want to be associated with?
Please excuse the random caps, but this is a subject that gets me mad. The students of today are the citizens of tomorrow, and we all have a stake in having more smart people than dumb people in our country. That's true for all countries.
Not even wrong, but some place beyond that.
Why do you want to be so willfully stupid, Anonymous Coward?
(These people are virtually lobotomising themselves for fear of basic knowledge...and evolution is taught long before uni. It's not anyone else's fault you were smoking a bowl during that portion of your coursework...for several years running, apparently.)
evolutionary biology gave me a memorable "aha!" moment way back in high school; that instant when it finally clicked for me, and made perfect sense.
then again, that was thirty years ago and a continent away. perhaps what we covered in high school biology then is university-level learning in the USA of today.
(for reference, my epiphany was that "random mutations are mainly harmful, or at least not beneficial, but that doesn't matter. natural selection takes care of weeding those out, and it's selecting from a planet-full of options over geological time; there's neither shortage nor hurry. let random mutation be slow. random means that some mutations will be beneficial, and selection will make sure they spread.")
You know, why do we even allow Christians to go to school anyway? After all, they just hate learning and are gonna become creationist Trump cultists anyway.
I bet nothing of value would be lost if Christians were banned from attending schools until they gave up their cult. That would prove that they can actually use their brain.
To the extent that people do this, they shouldn't, I'll agree with you there.
The basic principles of evolution you could learn from four or five hours with a book, free gratis, in your local library. Or on this internet thing that you clearly have no trouble accessing. Granted that this won't tell you everything there is to know, but that's only because there's so much of it.
I mean, take carpentry. You'd assume someone who's been practicing carpentry for twenty years would know more than someone who just started, right? So naturally someone who has taken a focused course of study in evolution is going to know details that are lost on lay people. That doesn't make it "special esoteric knowledge", just something that needs a certain amount of study and practice to grasp.
@Mister Spak: If it were really "common sense", no one would have needed to formulate a theory of evolution in the first place.
@Nomen Nescio: The public school I went to had a fairly solid unit on evolution, it's just that nobody paid much attention, but then, that was true of most subjects... Admittedly, while southern New Mexico has its problems, they're more often apathy and/or drug use, rather than our Christians, who are usually fairly okay people.
@ Neo:
I see you're doing that whole "not thinking before you type" thing again.
You don't love tyranny, so stop advocating for it.
@NeoMatrix
"I bet nothing of value would be lost if Christians were banned from attending schools until they gave up their cult."
Then they would start their own cult schools and the next generation of fundies would be more numerous and worse.
Bet you wouldn't like that.
@Jamaican Castle
By common sense I mean evolution doesn't say that one day a monkey gave birth to a man, or fish decided to grow legs, or Darwin said a big explosion blew out mountains rivers and trees that fell on earth in just the right places.
"The basic principles of evolution you could learn from four or five hours with a book, free gratis, in your local library."
Um, no. Fundies know a lot that isn't true. What's printed in the book contradicts what they already "know" so they are unable to process it. They will come away convinced that the evolution book claims a monkey birthed a man, one day for no reason a fish decided to grow legs, and in the beginning it was all blown out into space by the big bang and just by coincidence it fell on earth in the right places.
@NeoMatrix
why do we even allow Christians to go to school anyway?
Really, do you even think before you say something?
I was raised as a Christian. Some of the things that led me to be an atheist were things I learned in my secular education.
Step 1) Pick up a book on evolutionary biology.
1) Go to Wikipedia, it's an excellent starting place.
I still can't say I'm a number theorist or a computer scientist; in a similar sense a person won't be a biologist after reading a few books or fifty Wikipedia pages on evolutionary theory. But if a person keeps their axe to the grindstone and uses the scientific method when asking/answering new questions, who knows what they'll eventually be able to understand or discover.
@Psycho Tits
@KingOfRhye
@NeoMatrix
Did you seriously not understand what I said?
I once was a Christian. I now am no longer one. I'm not the first person that that's ever happened to, either. The people I met and the things I learned in school were a part, a big part, of that.
@KingOfRhye
Then what you need is:
image
"Evolution Revolution" by Robert Winston .
As he's a broadcaster - particularly of the noted medical TV programme "Your Life In Their Hands" and various other documentary series, such as that about DNA "Threads of Life" to "How Science Changed Our World" - he's something of a populariser of science: as demonstrated by him publishing this book for children.
You'd probably accuse him of being a propagandist for Atheism.
As denoted by he having the word Professor before his name, yes: he - as you would further accuse of him of being - is a 'High Priest' of that heinous concept that is the 'Atheist Church' that is a University. He is an eminent Professor of Gynaecology: as well as being a medical doctor, surgeon, author (as shown above), scientist, and politician (Baron Winston of Hammersmith; a peer in the House of Lords. Also a senior member of government/Parliamentary committees on Science & Technology).
With he being the leading mind in Britain re. Gynaecology, and human development, he of course has studied Genetics: and how it changes . This is reflected in the above book by him: simplified for children , thus even you can understand the subject as discovered by Charles Darwin.Therefore a question: if he were religious in any way, do you think he would have written such a book which is a propaganda tool - certainly indoctrinating the youngest & therefore the most vulnerable, from your point of view - of something which goes against religious faith: certainly that of the most devout?
And now for the punchline: Professor Robert Winson is Orthodox Jewish. Enjoy your paradox.
As should a certain someone else we could mention...!
@NeoMatrix
I called myself a former Christian because, well, I used to consider myself a Christian. That's how I define being a Christian, or a person of any other faith, for that matter. If someone says they're a Christian, well, they're a Christian in my book. It's obvious to me that Christianity means different things to different people, so who the hell am I to judge who's a Christian and who's not?
@NeoMatrix
Also yeah, I first read about evolution when I was 14 and I was immediately fascinated by the concept, which seemed elegant and logical to me. Esoteric knowledge? Only for the willfully ignorant.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register . Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.
