Read the comments on the Salon.com site, if you can…

To say what he said, that I quoted, is just so many trillions of light years from what anyone would and should think that has a somewhat public soap box that I was shocked… To say that ‘I favor people just making shit up over teaching the truth’ is just incredibly bizarre…

I’m still shocked.

To expound on that illogic, then why have laws, why have justice, why value truth? Why not have groups of people that believe their own concocted bullshit and then have turf wars over who is more wrong.

Sounds like the dark ages?

BTW: I do have stronger respect for Einstein. Nice letter Al… Nice letter… Wish I had the money to buy it…

Whadaya mean, imagine?

I believe freedom of expression is more important than the wide dissemination of correct views.

He’s taking himself too seriously…

Imagine a country where lies are more valued than the truth…

I posted as much to the thread there…

I think we’re using two different definitions of “tribal” here.

But the atheist and the fundamentalist have been good friends for 15 years, so it’s not like they’re strangers to principled disagreement. The atheist is furious because his friend has finally conceded that young earth creationism is a bunch of hooey (or at least deeply flawed). Suddenly, after all this conversation, the now-conflicted Christian turns around an agrees to teach young earth creationism to a bunch of innocent kids.

The atheist is pissed at what he sees as a lack of intellectual integrity on the part of the Christian. He may also feel disrespected because he invested all this time in getting his friend to see the error of his ways, and now his friend is just brushing that off like none of those soul searching conversations ever happened.

I’m not saying that the Christian necessarily deserves all that emotional blowback from his atheist friend. The Christian has just started doubting and it’s almost certainly unreasonable for his friend to ask him to make big waves at work because he’s unsure about the validity of creationism.

If I had an atheist friend who agreed to teach creationism as science for money, I’d have a hard time continuing to be friends with them because I’d be sure that they were knowingly and cynically deceiving children to the detriment of children and science. On the other hand, I’d cut a Christian friend a little more slack if I thought they were honestly conflicted about evolution. It’s hard to ask someone to take a firm contrarian stance on something they aren’t sure about yet–especially if their livelihood might somehow be affected.

no one even in so-called evangelical circles took it as a crucial point of doctrine until sometime in the 70s.

Conservative christians have been interpreting the literal bible for hundreds of years. American Evangelicalism (certainly in the 20th c.) has embraced creationism since the founding of Moody’s Institute and it’s reliance on dispensationalism.

Nonetheless, children need to be taught that we live in a very complex world which exists in a very complex universe and any simple answer usually needs to be treated with skepticism. As our economy falters and our country slips further and further behind the rest of the world, I am amazed that parents would choose to blind their children to science.

The older I get, the more cynical I get about the possible survival of the US. We’re a nation founded by geniuses on a population of religious flakes. They managed to tie us in a straitjacket for 200+ years, but now the population has managed to wriggle loose from the straps.

So what? Indulging the fundies will just continue the US’s slide away from the top of the heap. At some point, when the entire US population is formed of Duggars and equivalent folk and the US economy has collapsed to subsistence agriculture, people might start realizing that duh, the scientific method has its uses.

But I’m not holding my breath.

From the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7399661.stm

via Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/14/2049224&from=rss

Which proves it can’t really be related to any long-held cultural belief, aside from something general like “idiocy”, which unfortunately is probably a small part of just about every culture on the planet.

When people say that FGM is more about tribal affiliation than religion, they don’t mean “people only do it to prove that they are part of a subgroup really super ultra-crazy Muslims”, they mean that it has connections to much older practices within the communities that do it. Practices that predate Islam by millennia. Which is why educated, moderate, and even relatively secular members of said communities still tend to practice it — it’s kind of like how most atheists celebrate Christmas.

New extremist theological interpretations and tendencies crop up all the time — probably dozens can be traced to evangelical Christianity in the 70’s and 80’s, and yes, all of them probably have to do with the fundies finding new ways to differentiate themselves in a rapidly secularizing cultural landscape, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that young earth creationism is, in fact, a primarily theological belief which isn’t a vestigial leftover from some ancient custom.