Come on, Come all, to the most exciting, new, and vigorous religion to rear its oddly shped head since Homo sapiens neanderthalensis decided that the stars were groceries for some larger animal.
  I am here to invite you , yes YOU, to membership in the Anti-Hermetic Order of the Mystical Golden Platypus.  Even better, the cost of joining in this exclusive 1000’s of times offer is absolutely free.  No offerings, dues or what-have-you will be accepted (bribes on the other hand are a-ok).
  What, you must ask, must you do to join this fascinating new faith?  The answer, my friends, is simple.  All you have to do is think of the Platypus for the oracularly determined 2.3 seconds every day.  And so you say, why in the name of the Platypus should i do that?  The answer again is simple, and i shall tell you now.  No matter how screwed up life is, the
Platypus is more screwed up.
    Will thinking of the Platypus gaurantee me a place in Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Shangri La, Arcadia, Elysium, or Fairyland, you must ask yourself.  The answer is no, I have only so much money for cab fare and I’m not sharing.  However, thinking of the Platypus might make you laugh or feel a little better, and that’s more good than most religions can put claim to.

Christian
High Poobah of the Anti-Hermetic Order of the Mystical Golden Platypus

No matter how screwed up life is, the
Platypus is more screwed up.

Here I was, ready to sign up for the best religion I’d heard about in a long time, and you had to go and spoil it with this little disquisition on a hapless monotreme.  Platypuses are far from screwed up (although the males do have forked penises)- not only are they (along with the spiny anteaters) the last remnants of an ancient mammalian lineage, but they can detect the electrical fields of their prey with their snouts.  Try that yourself sometime!  In addition, they are way cute.

would you prefer the term bizarre?

Wow, I’ve never had the chance to change a religion before!  Maybe I can put it on my resumé, and get a job editing the second editions of the Bible and the Koran.  I could put the “fun” back into “fundamentalism”...

Sure, “bizarre” is fine.

I think this blog is an

obsessive-compulsive rituals that take up hours and days and weeks and months of our lives

  If you’d had any interaction with churches you would know that they serve a social function.  Yeah, we’d love to “free” ourselves from discussing philosophy, learning music, serving our community with both our time & money & enjoying nature through activities & sports to sit in front of a computer to criticize other people all day long, but ... fear of the invisible ...

an omnimax bearded guy in a toga made humans, placed them in a garden, and told them not to eat apples

not necessarily bearded, not necessarily guy, likely eat is metaphorical, & where the hell’d you get apples from, but other than that, your understanding seems “pristine!“

As I understand it, “scientists” were telling us the world was flat & that stupid, silly, superstitious Bible was out of date for calling is a shere, etc.

As for hard evidence, a WWII plane buried under 50 billion years (equalling the number of variations in carbon dating caused by water) of arctic ice was enough bullshit for me, although granted, science bores me enough that the few times I glanced through the Hovind threads were enough to convince me that most of the people posting were just as pretentious as he was the 2 times I met him.

Overall, it entirely boils down to what do you do when you run into shit you don’t understand…trust or keep searching.  Everyone has to find their own mix of what direction to go with each.

I don’t think it’s so much a question of going to hell, but an intensified continuation of your state here on earth…are you generally unhappy/disatisfied/bitter or content/satisfied?  Multiply that by a bunch, & there’s your eternity.  It’s just that I shake my head at how wrapped up so many (I)gnostics that I encounter in my life seem so wrapped up in being right & their world shatters while they insist on not admitting they learned something rather than already knew it & spend so much time talking rather than doing ANYTHING fun.  So no, the reward doesn’t seem to be a Darwin heaven, but a temporary “I’m the smarter, more informed” heaven.

Which is why I think Shana NAILED it

It’s less of a choice and more of me following what appears undeniably true to my mind.

No matter the set of arguments, it’s what level of trust & ego you’re willing to live within yourself.  Most of the (I)gnostic stuff I read here confuses & bothers me as much as the egotistical, manipulatively dressed shit I hear at church, it’s another side of the same coin to me.  I’m honestly suprised every time Les takes the time to bother with them, I wouldn’t, & usually don’t, even enough to get beyond bothered to frustrated.

We all have to live in some sort of ignorance & prioritize because we aren’t infinite beings or part of an infinite being yet…some just seems more appaling than others.

PS, Les, does anyone beside you know who my evil twin from awhile ago was?  I must admit it was flattering that someone put so much time into that…I still laugh my ass off about it & show the post to people…

Ellie,

I don’t particularly think I’m right when it comes to religious issues.  I just think that I, despite my best efforts, have found anything, whether spiritual, logical or empirical, that leads to hold a particular position.  I don’t think that’s a particularly egotistical position.  I admit that there are mysteries, I admit that there are many questions that I don’t have ready answers for.  It is because I acknowledge that there are things that I don’t understand and can’t explain that I don’t make the pretense of having answers that I don’t. 

That said, there are some things that I’m pretty sure of.  I have spent enough time in labs working with various organisms to be fairly convinced that Darwin did have it generally right when he wrote the Origin of Species.  It does seem that competition does lead to the shifting of traits over time (in species that have short generational periods you can witness evolution happening before your eyes).  However, that said I don’t think this discounts the notion that there might be divine powers, and those divine powers might shape things. 

That said, I’m not sure how to identify whether that is the case or not.  Humans are quite limited creatures.  Our epistemic faculties don’t extend that far, we have very little access to the world, there are many things that we think exist that we, in principle, can never directly experience.  It just seems to me, that if we are being completely honest with ourselves, we just have to admit that we don’t know about a lot of things and that we’re making best guesses about them. 

Oh, and about the bearded toga wearing guy thing, that was actually a quote of a person I talked to on an airplane one time.  He was quite a literalist and apparently was quite influenced by early renaissance church art.  He did believe, well at least he reported that he believed, that God was quite literally anthropomorphic, and male because of the biblical lines referring to the fact that we were made in his image, and the reference to Him as Him and not Her.  He also referred to the Cistine Chapel, which is where I got the bearded toga wearing part from.  As for the Eden story he was talking to me about Genesis and he did seem to take the entire book quite literally.  So there are people (well at least one person) who would hold that a bearded toga wearing guy made us out of dust and ribs put us in a garden and told us not to eat literal apples.

Yeah, we’d love to “free� ourselves from discussing philosophy, learning music, serving our community with both our time & money & enjoying nature through activities & sports to sit in front of a computer to criticize other people all day long, but ... fear of the invisible ...

Apparently the fear of the invisible can be overcome temporarily to critizise others once in a while.

Overall, it entirely boils down to what do you do when you run into shit you don’t understand…trust or keep searching.

ellie, you’ve left out a third way of dealing with shit you don’t understand, and this is what sets apart the scientific from the religious attitude: you can try to understand it.

Of course it’s easier to swallow a prepackaged worldview whole, but then you’re wrapped up in oversimplifications and outright misconceptions, and at the mercy of the package designers (human and memetic), who have their own agendas.  Not that science has all the answers, or is free of its own agendas, but science is testable and correctable- religion is not.

zilch said: ...but science is testable and correctable - religion is not.

I partly disagree. It seems that religion is corrected constantly by persons with varying beliefs. No two person’s beliefs will ever match exactly and this is Christianity’s greater problem. If absolute truths were revealed in the Bible, you would expect everyone to agree concerning them. Instead, believers have general agreements and pointed counter beliefs that, rather than defining the meme, create convoluted and non-complimentary elements.

Through the ages religions have gotten increasingly complicated, bloated with useless and senseless information, and this is exactly what you could expect from a fabrication.

I agree with Brock.  That’s the main difference I see in the lives of (I)gnostics: they have huge problems if something turns out to be wrong/corrected/changed.  One of the few unwavering truths I hold to is forgiveness, mercy & grace.  They help me deal the numerous times I swerve wrong (as exemplified on this site more than a few times).  What SS & zilch describe sounds like my approach to evolution.  Adaptation is a no brainer.  But you have to have faith in the existence of “billions & billions of years” for it to work out.  Plus, the massive excellerating changes we’ve obsered in just the last 1,000 years doesn’t seem to match up to in infinite time period before that for me.

Just for the fun of it, I ran ellie’s response through Alice and here’s what I got:

I’m glad we agree. You and your Brock Brock Brock. Is the holding of hands a symbolic gesture for humans? One what? Who does “they” refer to? I would do a search for it. I think Adaptation is more than that. Umm. I don’t have to do whatever you say. I have my own free will. Is that a fact.

Curious green dreams are sleeping furiously in the pink Jabberwock?

Ellie babbled: “As I understand it, “scientistsâ€? were telling us the world was flat & that stupid, silly, superstitious Bible was out of date for calling is a shere, etc.

As for hard evidence, a WWII plane buried under 50 billion years (equalling the number of variations in carbon dating caused by water) of arctic ice was enough bullshit for me…“

...and then babbled some more: “Adaptation is a no brainer.  But you have to have faith in the existence of “billions & billions of yearsâ€? for it to work out.  Plus, the massive excellerating changes we’ve obsered in just the last 1,000 years doesn’t seem to match up to in infinite time period before that for me.“

Ellie, you’ve said many times that science isn’t your gig, so I shouldn’t be surprised by this. 

The planes I think you are talking about were buried under many layers of snow, which compacted into ice layers, but each of those layers (formed in a region of unusually frequent snowfall) was a subset of the seasonally-identifiable annual layers.  In either case there were nowhere near 50bn of them - think about that for a moment.  If each layer were only a hundredth of an inch thick, that would be an ice sheet nearly 8,000 miles deep.  (The Earth is only 7,000 miles across)

When YEC’s toss around numbers like they have no meaning, they step into the “I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about” circle and yell, “Here I am!!!“ 

Ditto for saying anything was carbon-dated to 50bn years. That’s beyond carbon-dating’s 50,000-year reach by approximately a factor of one million. You’d think YEC’s would at least try to construct higher-quality bullshit.

As for “massively accellerating changes” that’s just garbage.  The only thing accellerating right now is the rate of extinctions, due in no small part to the prominence of one particular species worldwide.  Mass extinctions have occurred before for other reasons.

Well, there may be some climate change accelleration due to the aforementioned species digging up ancient carbon (from when the Earth was a lot warmer) and releasing about 27bn tonnes of it into the atmosphere as combustion byproducts.  A billion tons here, a billion tons there, next thing you know you’re spewing a lot of gas! 

It worries me that you’re a schoolteacher.

Oh Noez, teh fax, teh facts!

I love you dof.  I want to be Ahnold to your DeVito—I want to bear your bastard alien love-children.

That’s the main difference I see in the lives of (I)gnostics: they have huge problems if something turns out to be wrong/corrected/changed

Huge problems?  I’m trying to picture an agnostic or atheist suddenly freakin’ out because the theory of relativity gets modified, or dark matter turns out to be a crappy theory, or if it turns out that life was seeded on earth by an alien civilization.  If there’s evidence for it, and it’s true, it’s not something to be upset about.  How we, as people, choose to -use- what we’ve learned might be something to get all cranked up about, but information, in and of itself, is not offensive.

Of course, ‘information’ that’s complete bullshit can be kind of irritating. 

Shite.  My wife just pointed out to me that I’m combining my Ahnold movies.  Apparently Ahnold gets pregnant in one of them, but it wasn’t by Danny DeVito.

I still think my version would’ve made a better movie.

Lets leave the man on man stuff to me, shall we nowiser?

Maybe I missed the YEC memo DoF dabbled…what’s the (no doubt unflattering) acronym?  So if nothing can be carbon dated past 50,000 years, do you take them on faith?  & what about the carbon dating on documents with known dates?  I love that data.  So your litmus for writing teachers is if they trust science enough?

The huge problems I refer to are personal, like my roomate whenever she finds out she wasn’t paying attention to a business error or in her personal life, finding out she unintentionally (or intentionally) fucked someone else over & got caught.

Danny deVito was in that movie, but he wasn’t the father…oh oh oh, Les do that cool thing where you figure out where I’m posting from…!

PS, I also missed the memo on A.L.I.C.E.

So if nothing can be carbon dated past 50,000 years, do you take them on faith?

Yes.  It requires faith.  There are no other dating methods.  Follow the watch with your eyes.  repeat after me.  Evilution is only a theory.  only a theory. only a theory.

Lets leave the man on man stuff to me, shall we nowiser?

LOL.  Sorry Brock!  I wasn’t tryin’ to poach on yer turf, dude!  I swear!  I’ll just quietly step off. 

The huge problems I refer to are personal, like my roomate whenever she finds out she wasn’t paying attention to a business error or in her personal life, finding out she unintentionally (or intentionally) fucked someone else over & got caught.

I have a hard time understanding why that has anything to do with being agnostic. 

& what about the carbon dating on documents with known dates?  I love that data.

And what about that data, Ellie?

I partly disagree. It seems that religion is corrected constantly by persons with varying beliefs….

However: What you’ve described is part of the mechanism by which culture and religion are both changed and preserved similtaneously, such that it becomes inaccurate to call them sets of beliefs and more appropriate to call them ranges of beliefs—but the truth remains that observation and testing of fact are usually only indirectly involved and that changes are largely driven by a sense of moral right or wrong.  That morality may be affected by science, but, as we are seeing lately with the fundies, it seems more often affected by self-righteousness and imagination.  For every Baptist minister that advocates abortion, there may be 5 who bomb abortion clinics, and for every change, there is, at some other point along the range, an act of preservation.

Good scientists, on the other hand, willingly give up their long-held paradigms in favor of overwhelming evidence.  (Though I imagine there are many who mourn the loss of a life’s work…)
While on the surface, it may appear that both are changing—but to what result?  Religion changes with trends (thus, it’s not really being corrected—is there really a state of correctness for religion?) while science (ideally) changes in favor of knowledge and understanding.

I would imagine that religions have always been so confused and muddled—there seems no other way to have them.

Ellie, YEC refers to Young Earth Creationist, and yes, it is unflattering from this keyboard.  You may take it as a compliment if you like. Insults often work that way.  Call me a “materialist” and I’ll just smile, because it probably means something different to me than it does to you.

To repeat what many others have said, one does not “trust science” in the same way one trusts religion.  Science is the opposite of trust - it is about changing and refining your theories to fit the data.  A failure to understand the difference between science and religion is at the root of many such endless-loop discussions as this.

Religion begins with a body of knowledge (and in certain flavors of Christianity, a “personal relationship with Jesus”) that must be accepted uncritically.  Many religionists appear to assume that this is how science works, too, resulting in a great deal of confusion.

Often this approach sets in stone a picture that is far astray of how things actually are.  When religion strays into areas that are subject to being disproved, such as the age of the Earth, each millimeter of ground is yielded only after pitched battle.  Or not at all, as the religionists put their fingers in their ears and yell, “Nanananana… I can’t hear you!“

Science is a method of inquiry, not a body of knowledge.  The scientist begins with an hypothesis and works through the data toward a theory.  This is called, “testing the hypothesis.“ 

I think a lot of kids in school just blow right past this crucial juncture waiting for the bell to ring or asking, “When do we get to mix chemicals and dissect frogs and stuff?“

Does a writing teacher need to understand it?  I don’t know but maybe you should read Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal.

PS, I also missed the memo on A.L.I.C.E.

Google didn’t.

You guys are too much!
Brock, I must partly disagree with your partial disagreement with me.  Yes, religion is correctable too, or at least is capable of changing to cope with the environment in various ways, the better to survive.

What I meant is that science, at least ideally, has a less subjective template to compare and correct itself to: the physical universe.  Religion, especially that of fundy persuasion, is largely constrained to massage its worldview to fit a more or less invariant text. Science is descriptive, religion pre- and proscriptive (to oversimplify, of course)

brock: “Lets leave the man on man stuff to me, shall we nowiser?“

nowiser: “I still think my version would’ve made a better movie.“

  Hey Brock, we were makin’ a bit o’ progress here and anyway, isn’t that how Kahli-forniia got its present governor?