Creation Museum (HT, txyankee)
When the Gallup Poll asked people about their views on the subject in March, 47 percent of Americans polled said that God created humans pretty much in their present form some time in the last 10,000 years. That belief was strongest among those with less education, regular churchgoers, people 65 and older, and Republicans.
Cornell American parodies Islamic Awareness Week (HT, anna)
4:30 ” IED Construction Dos and Don’ts with the Chemistry Department (Baker 101 E) What has some bang? What fizzles? Don’t embarrass yourself”come to this instructional seminar!
7:30 ” Make your own kidnapping video with the Film Department (Schwartz SB23) Ropes, victims, masks, and large blades provided.
My own run-ins with the clueless
Of course, they fight with all of those languages and cultures. I mean, look at us, all we have is English and we get along, while the Iraqis with their Shiites and Sunnis can’t stop fighting one another.
Are we ensconsed in a sociopolitical era where individuality, logic and objectivity don’t matter any more and hive-mind anecdotes prevail? Such egregiously fallacious outlooks are increasingly reinforced to the extent that they are taken as fact. Considering the wellbeing of America’s educational and legislative future, this is very troublesome.
This museum is ridiculous. I remember reading about it when it was just a few plans… Unbelievable. They’ll fire a teacher for walking her students past a painting of a naked woman, but then use this nonsense as a teaching tool?
But, the title of the article is hilarious.
Linky from NYT
“It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.”
Great. These people accommodate fossils and dinosaurs as fact in their faith now but are not willing to accept evolution as fact. But, whoa, wait, let’s get back to this whole “fact” thing. Where is the room for fact in the realm of faith, and when did certainty begin to hold a place in what is essentially a belief system? In other words, your faith is not so strong that you must now reach for certitude of what must be appreciated through a powerful faith alone?
Such a blurring of the boundaries of science and Christian faith (and good judgment) can only be attributed to the assault on reason and a misunderstanding of the scope of religion, concepts I have been arguing for a good 7 years now (actually since the entry of neo-cons into politics at a national level. Incidentally, Al Gore went and wrote a book about the former).
Where’s Voltaire to help sort all of this out when you need him?