I can tell you how we handle it in Minnesota. We leave it to the local school districts. We don’t mandate a curriculum or an approach. We allow for something called “intelligent design” to be discussed as a comparative theory. It doesn’t have to be in science class.

Timmy knows he would be lynched if he tried mandating any of that nonsense to MN schools.
Any discussion of intelligent design is NOT in the science class. It is only in the churches, where it belongs.

Don’t bring your religion to my science class & I won’t bring my science to your Sunday school!

ps: I live in MN…

The ones I am referring to seem to be very vocal and organized and determined to tell the rest of us what to do and what to think and what the world is about, and want to use the Republican party to control the government so they can enforce all that. I don’t know that there’s anything like a Taliban (or Khmer Rouge) wing of Buddhists, and I’m not saying there is.

If you think I’m getting “way too hung up on Christianity” because I replied to a question about some Christians, you might think about figuring out the context of the entry. And if I am way too hung up on Christianity to please you, it might be because this group of them are the ones trying to hang me.

The Democrats aren’t helping themselves, though, with their insistence that the Republicans can be reasoned with, giving them concession after concession on bills that they, SURPRISE!, all vote no on. Suckers.

There is no logical reason it should take eleven months to write up and pass a health care bill. Then the finance bill will take another eleven months, the climate bill…eleven months, and you see where I’m going with this – the same place Senate Democrats are going, which is exactly nowhere.

“Khmer Rogue” indeed. An apt turn of phrase, which I don’t recall seeing before.

I’m hoping it will catch on.

Did the Khmer Rouge engage in torturing toddlers testicles* like the Bush admin and all their quasi-Christian cohorts**? I’ve no problem forwarding the Khmer Rouge meme if you will help me move the “torturing toddlers testicles” meme. Folks don’t seem to think waterboarding is torture, so we need to move the argument forward in a way that means something. Jesus loves the little children….all the children of the world. War crimes….for the sake of the children.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1GT-BZvhrw

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z3sT7d4s_c

Enjoy.

Very good.

the Khmer Rhouge faction of dissatisfied cultural conservatives who have been given a really raw deal

Keep in mind these fools gave themselves that really raw deal they’re so pissed about.

Boo-fuckin’-hoo for them, sez I. I hope it hurts them like a bitch because getting left out in the cold is exactly what they were trying to do to everyone who wasn’t like them.

They were so damn pleased thinking they were sticking it to people who weren’t ‘Real Americans’ like them, so intent on wanting to jam a ‘Fuck you’ in dusky skinned people and liberals’ faces every chance they got, that they didn’t realize they hadn’t really got theirs yet nor were they ever going to, and that what they were really going to get was an ugly fucking along with the rest of us.

So fuck ‘em. They insisted on it.

Someone said they were going to Rochester to eat. Rochester is known for how many culinary delights? One. Did you recommend it? Hell no you did not.

You know what it is, DougJ. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Give these people the truth.

Nick Tahou’s at about 2am, that’s all I’m saying.

We can see it in those Left Behind books, which apparently have a huge cult following. The future events are the vengeance, just desserts, whatever you want to call it, that’s supposed to happen here on earth at some point down the road. Apocalypse, millennium, eschaton. They believe that’s a literal promise that they’re on the right side of. In order for that to be true, the earlier stuff also has to be literally actually true. What they say about the events of, say, Genesis, isn’t about Genesis itself; it’s about the other end of the book happening in the real world—that there will be an end times like Apocalypse and its elaborations lay out.

In order for the future to be true, nothing leading up to it can be a parable or a myth or an allegory or anything less than the actual, factual truth. If you question its factual truth, you remove their chance to be saved from the lake of fire.

It puts them in a (to me) strange place where they simply can’t live only in their faith. It’s simply not possible for them to have a realm of faith and a separate realm of science. Their faith is about what will happen in the real world. If they accept scientific method, the only way they can prove their beliefs for sure is to experience the Apocalypse themselves. That’ll confirm it all for them. So they’re fascinated by it.

But until it comes they can’t know for sure, so they can get vicious about anything that might say their beliefs aren’t actual true statements about the actual phenomenal world we all live in. In order to preserve their own faith, in other words, they have to insist that their account of how the world happened (and their own sectarian interpretation of what is, after all, a widely-read and widely-shared text) can be the only true one.

Eventually what probably happens is that they get disillusioned by political efforts to bring about the apocalypse, or internecine squabbles eventually absorb their energy. It’ll take time, whatever it is.

You cheeky fellow. I said it is about man’s struggle to know God, a full chronicle of which I imagine would take up a whole library.

Anyhow, Merry Christmas. May you libs not forget, in the midst of the disappointments and the struggles this year, the victories and the fruit of the fight.

Your repeated insistence on “god of the gaps” theology is weak sauce.

When we don’t know how something works, that doesn’t mean that gods or space aliens or invisible pink unicorns did it. It doesn’t even make space god answers more plausible. It just means that we don’t know.

If Christians want to say that their particular god made everything, then that’s fine by me. Heck, maybe their three-in-one god is responsible for the whole ball of wax. In which case, He/They are behind every bit of evolution that ever happened, starting with the first molecular replicators. There is no necessary conflict between religion and science. But a religion that you only use to fill in gaps in understanding is just the intellectual version of a toddler’s nightlight: illuminating nothing, its only purpose is to make the dark less scary.

Saying that unproven abiogenesis means we have to talk about baby Jesus doing it makes no more sense than saying that questions about JFK’s assassination means we have to teach the theory that Satan shot him. Unknowns, until we fill them in, are just unknowns.

Not completely exterminated, as evidenced by the persistent existence of Brick Oven Bill.

I could really use B.O.B’s skull in my paleo class, you know…

You wouldn’t happen to done with it, would you Bill?

That was pretty frakking depressing. Good luck on trying to explain the geology to them, aimai. Those of us in that field appreciate it.

On a happier note, I did well in structural geology this term :)

Paleontology this spring…

Why some people of a Christian persuasion feel the need to “prove” the validity of their faith via pseudo-scientific clap trap has always escaped me, but so, too, has the need for some people of an atheistic bent to “prove” the invalidity of a person’s faith.

I don’t generally do the latter, but it’s more for temperamental reasons than anything else. I think one core reason is distrust, and it works on both sides. Theists tend to wonder how someone without religion can have any moral sense, while atheists (like me, at least) wonder whether someone might be making choices based on completely irrational beliefs.