Nope.Quote:
Originally posted by Maelgrim
Must be an aussie thing, Ros
What subject were your university lecturers teaching?
Drilled into your head for 12 years? Really? When did they start drilling?
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Nope.Quote:
Originally posted by Maelgrim
Must be an aussie thing, Ros
What subject were your university lecturers teaching?
Drilled into your head for 12 years? Really? When did they start drilling?
Quote:
Originally posted by Malacasta
Nope.
What subject were your university lecturers teaching?
Drilled into your head for 12 years? Really? When did they start drilling?
I always thought the same like Ros and Mael, though I only remember the TV show "The Magic School Bus" telling me that... Though what do I know I'm obviously not as smart as some of the people here.
If they were drilling nonsense into your head like, "Newton's laws are always correct", then they definitely were wrong.Quote:
Originally posted by Maelgrim
Must be an aussie thing, Ros, because I had the same thing drilled into my skull for 12 years.
Oh well, I suppose 5 high school teachers and 2 university lecturers are wrong.
This law vs. theory argument is getting old. I've presented a lot of examples in this thread of theories that are better than laws, and have totally dispelled the myth that a scientific theory is just some sort of speculation that doesn't fit all the evidence. It would be nice if you will just admit that evidence supporting evolution isn't why you don't believe it. You don't believe it because some book tells you not to, and it doesn't matter what the evidence is. If evidence is important to you, then you would clearly prefer evolution, for which there is plenty, rather than creationism, for which there is none whatsoever.
Quote:
Originally posted by Akhafta
Advertisements that say there is no god and to advertise such horribly shakes the foundations of people who've spent their lives believing in a god. This is not only damaging to them, but to their goals in life.
Anybody whose faith is shaken by a sign on a bus was lacking in faith anyway.
At first I was like :confusedQuote:
Drilled into your head for 12 years? Really? When did they start drilling?
But then,
I loled. :laugh
Not quite that, more like what ros was saying. A law is conclusively quantifiable and always behaves in the same way. A theory is not conclusively quantifiable and contains at least one caveat as to circumstances in which it does not apply.Quote:
If they were drilling nonsense into your head like, "Newton's laws are always correct", then they definitely were wrong.
Of course the last time I actually did science in a classroom setting and not just reading shit like 'Year Million' for lulz was in about '03, so I'm more than willing to concede that my knowledge is hazy at best.
Snnrub, thanks for correcting my mistake.
An atheist who says this type of stuff is probably someone who feels they need to say things on the extreme side of things in order to "combat" the opposite extreme. Maybe it's simpler and they're just assholes. Either way, I think you have a skewed view of atheists. You seem to think that their whole outlook is based on negativity, hopelessness, and pointlessness (now, I'm just gathering this based on what I've read in your one post, so if I missed the mark, I apologize). This really isn't the case, leading too...Quote:
Originally posted by Akhafta
The message of christianity tends to be one of hope verses the atheist message of "ONE DAY YOU WILL DIE, IT WILL BE THE END OF YOU AND YOUR EXISTENSE IN THIS WORLD, AND EVERYTHING YOU HAVE DONE WILL BE FOR NAUGHT."
Again, atheism is not a religion or structured set of beliefs. The only things atheists have in common is that they don't believe that there is a god and/or that god's existence/nonexistence doesn't matter. People who do not believe in a bible do not need a bible. They do not need a bible to know how to live a good life. They do not need a bible to know how to be kind to people or to learn discipline. People who do not follow the bible are not by default misguided. It's time religious people realize this.Quote:
Originally posted by Akhafta
I think if atheism is going to start pushing their 'beliefs' they need to go ahead and write a bible, too, so that we know that they have a sense of morals and positive values. People are scared that non-atheism will equate to mass disease, crime, outright rudeness, etc. and atheist have no common book of codes that they live by. There's nothing that explains them. We're just supposed to trust ALL of you guys? At least you can call a religious man out on his lack of following the codes of the bible.
You have kind people in the world, and you have assholes. You have everything in between. They will be behave accordingly regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
If there are groups of atheists getting together and spreading the negative message quoted above about there being no god, afterlife, etc., well then, that sounds more like a doomsday cult to me. These types of people are the nuts who feel that they need to believe in something zealously, regardless of what it is. So, they will band together and spread/push their message as much as they can. If they chose to believe in god, they'd push that just as zealously. Instead, they chose the opposite. They do not make atheism a religion (though they eventually could, but it would no longer be atheism). For the last time, it isn't. Don't make it into one. The last thing we need is more religious conflict.
Your opinion of them doesn't make a whole lot of difference. Some such people DO call themselves Atheists.Quote:
Originally posted by Jyn
If there are groups of atheists getting together and spreading the negative message quoted above about there being no god, afterlife, etc., well then, that sounds more like a doomsday cult to me.
Atheism is not some perfectly untouchable foundation of truth. It's an idea. An idea that some people take to an extreme in some cases, much like religion.
You can call yourself whatever you want, that doesn't make it your identity.
why is not dying a message of hope? It's only a hope if you fear death..... some folks do not choose to live with that fear as the guiding force in their lives.
That said, I'm religious, and not Christian. I would rather focus on my life, my family, my relationships, and the glory of the world - even decay and death - than what happens after we die. God is the God of the Living, and to live in fear is - to me- to undervalue that gift of life.
There is evidence on both sides, and it is a matter of presuppositions and your starting positions as to which pieces of evidence you deem "compelling", "interesting", "irrelevant", or "illogical". There is actually a wealth of evidence for creationism, and some of the most compelling theoretical evidence for evolution has never been found. For instance, scientists throughout the decades have put forward various skeletons and said "This is half-way evolved from X to Y", but so far they have all been disproved - or at least, all the ones I've ever heard of have. They've all turned out to be completely one or the other (eg a monkey-human cross that was just a human with a back injury), or I think there was a bird-something cross that was actually two separate skeletons superimposed or mashed together, or in some cases even complete and deliberate hoaxes by people who wanted some sensational publicity. (Which I completely understand, incidentally. You'll get lots of lovely funding and your name will be everywhere as The Man Who Discovered {insert name of fossil here}, and that's pretty good reward for a life's work.) There's evidence for the age of the earth, and every measurement method is flawed in some way or other - mostly in ways that we cannot ever control. Everything used to examine the past depends on some assumptions, ranging from the safe-unless-you-like-conspiracy-theories (eg "I assume that my Geiger counter doesn't itself contain radium") to the less certain ("I assume that the rate of change of X has stayed roughly constant") to the downright uncertain ("I assume that nothing has tainted this sample that has sat around for however many years"). If any of those assumptions is wrong, the results will be wrong, too, and so the evidence disconnects from the published result. (The evidence might be "The amount of uranium is this, and the amount of lead is that". The published result would be "This sample is X years old, plus or minus Y". The evidence hasn't changed, but the raw evidence on its own is useless.) Unfortunately, even the published result is often vastly disconnected from what ends up in the popular press, and that makes things very hard to judge fairly without going back to the original documents. There's just way too many degrees of separation between the headlines and the actual facts for me to believe headlines without getting a traceable source. Yeah, call me cynical, but I'm not going to instantly change my beliefs because some newspaper claims that some scientist has proof that fish evolved from insects, or whatever. Not from a newspaper.Quote:
Originally posted by Snrrub
If evidence is important to you, then you would clearly prefer evolution, for which there is plenty, rather than creationism, for which there is none whatsoever.