It struck me more of a political move than striking any blow for truth. It seemed clear that their goal was to combat the rise in home-grown Islamic extremism:
quote:The law is being presented in Sweden as if it mostly concerned fundamentalist Christian sects in the backwoods; but the Christian Democratic party, which represents such people if anyone does, is perfectly happy with the new regulation. There is little doubt that combating Islamic fundamentalism is the underlying aim, especially in conjunction with another new requirement that all independent schools declare all their funding sources. This would allow the inspectors - whose budget is being doubled - to concentrate their efforts on those schools most likely to be paid to break the rules.
In the background to these announcements comes the release of a frightening documentary film on Swedish jihadis, which follows young men over a period of two years on their slow conversion to homicidal lunacy.
Fundamentalist extremism of any stripe is a problem (though Islamic extremists do seem to present more physical danger than Christian extremists who seem more intent on destroying science education and religious freedom) and governments do need to figure out how to deal with it. It's a tough problem even to address, particularly in any society that values religious liberty and tolerance. As Tom Lehrer had put it: you feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. If we hold too strong to tolerance, then they'll literally physically destroy us, but if we try to stop the madness, then we're abandoning tolerance. There must be a balance, but the trick is to find it.
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"UNDERSTANDING CREATIONISM: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE BY A FORMER YOUNG-EARTH
Today on FaceBook Ed Babinski linked to this blog entry: http://ageofrocks.org/...by-a-former-young-earth-creationist . The link contains a repost of former creationist David MacMillan's essay, "Evolution of Evolution", part of a series of eight essays posted at Panda's Thumb, the link to which is contained within this link. Excerpts from the intro:
quote:The article below was originally published by Panda’s Thumb and is the fifth in an eight-part series, which can be found here in its entirety. David offers a profound look at the young-Earth creationist movement, specifically with respect to how they approach evolutionary theory.
quote:My primary aim on this page has been to elucidate how geologists reconstruct Earth history through historical scientific methodsformulating hypotheses from collected geological data and making predictions about what kind of corroboratory evidence might exist. Biologists do the same with respect to the history of life and its diversification through time, but David writes in his introduction to the series:
quote:Creationists don’t see it the same way. Creationists artificially classify medicine, genetic research, and agriculture as operational science, and believe that those disciplines function in a different way than research in evolutionary biology. They understand the theory of evolution, along with mainstream geology and a variety of other disciplines, as a philosophical construct created for the express purpose of explaining life on Earth apart from divine intervention. Thus, they approach the concept of evolution from a defensive position; they believe it represents an attack on all religious faith.
I remember well just how effective this portrayal of evolution can be. It becomes impossible to discuss the topic critically in the context of science, because ultimately it determines the validity of one’s faith. The same is true when a particular reading of the Bible commits one to a firm stance on the age of the Earth. How can we honestly discuss geological evidence for Earth’s antiquity if it is regarded as an attack on biblical authority? These sorts of closely held, philosophical labels awarded to modern biology and geology allow creationism to thrive, even in an educated society.
quote:Below, David discusses the perceived ad hoc nature of evolution. It is vital to the success of creationism that evolutionary theory not be constructed from tested hypotheses, but rather through retrospective fitting of data to an anti-theistic philosophy. I believe his comments are also relevant to critiques from so-called ‘Flood geology’, as we saw last week with respect to Milankovitch theory and orbital tuning. Any opportunity to depict circular reasoning in the historical sciences is a victory point for young-Earth creationism.
quote: ... YEC’s bring to scientific literature the same expectations as they do to the Bible: either it conveys truth unblemished and immutable, or it deserves our unreserved skepticism. Since the very nature of science is to refute and refine (else why would we call it research?), YEC’s feel justified in cherry-picking data to support their views and selectively build a quasi-scientific alternative.
Of course, we are all familiar with creationists' repeated accusation that Darwinism is to blame for Nazism. Actually that claim goes back to the hey-day of the anti-evolution movement, the 1920's, though at that time it was German imperialism and WWI atrocities that Darwin was being blamed for. Falsely, as we all know.
Nazi racial ideology was creationist and explicitly rejected Darwin. Instead of accepting that all races descended from common ancestors, they believed that they were all created separately by God with the Aryans being the superior special creation, the Master Race. Their condemnation of inter-racial marriage, their purity laws, and their breeding efforts were not attempts to "breed the Master Race," but rather to preserve it from mixing with "sub-humans". Nazi ideology and practice taught and relied entirely on artificial selection (used by breeders of livestock), not Darwinism's natural selection.
Long and well-researched quoting from many primary sources from Nazis and from the founders of their ideology. The author also examines creationist treatments to find that they instead quote from sources writing about Nazism and have to rely on innuendo instead of the facts (eg, blaming the Holocaust on Darwin because "evolution devalues human life", when instead it can be directly blamed on Nazi creationist beliefs).
I wouldn't call the philosophy nonsense, but I would agree that in order to be classified as an atheist one has to have a deeper philosophy than simply I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden or Everyone today is a disbeliever in Thor or Zeus, but we simply believe in one god less!
Yet Christians keep telling us that a Christian is just one who has a personal relationship with Jesus. No deeper philosophy in that.
Of course, then Christians go off into deeper theologies, most of which conflict with each other. Similarly, most atheists also have deeper philosophies, most of which don't agree with the deeper philosophies of other atheists. So what's your point?
Here's a glimpse into mine. All theists have created their own gods. Even if some supreme supernatural entity does exist, not only are we incapable of determining that, but even if it were to communicate directly with one of us we are incapable of understanding it accurately. Therefore, theists have to create their own gods just to be able to talk about such ideas.
I cannot believe in your made-up gods. I cannot put my faith in your misunderstandings about your made-up gods, especially when you insist that your made-up understandings are the absolute truth. We all have to work that out for ourselves and your own heresies would just get in my way (refer to the first quote in my signature).
This topic is not a debate topic.
{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy. ("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one. (Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)
Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates. ("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)
It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias. Steven Colbert on NPR
This is a series of 12 short videos, each a couple/few minutes long and which briefly answer some common questions about and objections to evolution.
The titles are:
#1 What Is Evolution, Anyway? #2 Is Evolution Random? #3 Have We Ever Seen Evolution Happen? #4 Can Evolution Make an Eye? #5 Have We Ever Seen A New Species Arise? #6 Evolution Is Dumb #7 Why Do Men Have Nipples? #8 Does Evolution Violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? #9 Can Evolution Create Information? #10 Why Are There Still Monkeys? #11 Are Humans Still Evolving? #12 Does Evolution Have a Point?
In the comments section of the last video, I found this little ditty:
quote:
On the 12th day of Evolution, Darwin's Beard gave to me: 12 evolutionary potentials , 11 "yes we're changing"s, 10 evolutionary branches, 9 duplicate genes, 8 thanks to entropy, 7 looks at nipples, 6 good enough traits, 5! Isolated Mosquitos! 4 light sensitive organelles, 3 silent crickets, 2 DNA blue prints, & an explanation of evolution.
BTW, the title screen is a sketch of Darwin with an extra-long beard in which we see 12 finches nesting. I didn't try it, but apparently you can choose any of the 12 videos by clicking on the appropriate finch.
YouTube video, part of a series. This one is an interesting examination/explanation of natural selection using an a-life simulation. A population with a few defined traits (eg, speed, size, sensing range) are run through many generations and the results are graphed out and discussed. Basically, what we would assume to be more advantageous traits (us playing "intelligent designer") doesn't always match what prevails in an actual system.
quote:Yet unanswered questions piled up. In the film, Ken Ham, founder of the Ark Encounter, remarks that his followers should listen to young-Earth “experts,” even though they are too smart for most people to understand. For a while, that was enough for me. Even when I went to college as a physics major, I was expecting to learn the skills I needed to prove the young-Earth doctrine. As I began doing real academic research, though, I saw over and over that deep time and evolutionary biology have real, demonstrable applications. My trained skepticism of mainstream science weakened.
When I was finally able to accept the truth about the world”””that creation is much bigger and older and more complex than I could have ever imagined”””everything changed. I still had the same fascination with the world, but I was seeing so much more than ever before.
And concluding:
quote:Yet, even now, I still think in the language and framework of creationism. When I read about a new discovery from an ancient civilization, my first instinct is to wonder what part of the Old Testament it fits into. Medical research that depends on evolution seems suspicious to me. I still assume exposed rock layers on a cliff face represent a global, cataclysmic flood. When I look up at the night sky, I catch myself again wondering how God managed to make starlight traverse billions of light-years in mere centuries.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Every time I catch myself thinking in creationism, I experience the same thrill at rediscovering how vast and beautiful the cosmos really is. God became much bigger to me when I accepted the truth about the cosmos.
I no longer have to know all the answers; I don’t have to struggle to cram creation into a 6,000-year box. I’m not afraid of losing my whole worldview over a difficult question. I get to learn, rather than endlessly debate. Every day is a brave new world.
So then yet again you did not read the source, but rather you "reply" out of ignorance. That has never worked for you before, so why would you think that it would work for you here?
quote:Growing up as a creationist, I always knew that the time it takes for light to travel to us from distant stars and galaxies was a huge problem. We believed that both the Earth and the whole universe were created instantly just sixty centuries ago, rejecting the scientific consensus about the Big Bang. With only 6,000 years for light to travel toward us, the problem of distant starlight is one of the oldest and most obvious challenges to the young-earth framework. It was one of the reasons I was motivated to pursue physics, and pursuit of this question ultimately helped provide the final straw that broke down my faith in creation science after years of questioning.
As with virtually every obvious challenge to their beliefs, creationists have developed numerous explanations to avoid plain conclusions. . . .
...
The cycle proceeds like a cosmic game of whack-a-mole, with each new explanation more creative than the last. This is all most creationists need. In We Believe In Dinosaurs, Ken Ham is caught on film saying, “You should listen to our PhD experts talk, even though you won’t be able to understand anything they say,” and his slip keenly illustrates the underlying strategy of the movement. Creationism doesn’t have to prove anything; it only has to maintain a veneer of scientific respectability. Their goal is control, abusing science to safeguard their authority. As long as they can maintain that their pseudoscience is “just as plausible” as the mainstream alternative, their power to interpret Scripture unchallenged remains protected.
But plausibility wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know the truth, to figure out explanations that would get stronger over time, not weaker. I wanted young-earth creationist models that could make real, testable predictions about reality. Scientific advancements don’t happen just because a new theory springs up; they happen when a new theory is able to explain both the failures and successes of the previous one. I decided to major in physics so I could understand every theory for myself.
As the years passed, I spent more and more time reading everything I could about geology, biology, and astrophysics. My limit for inter-library loans was always full. I was looking for a pattern, a reason why astronomy and geology and evolutionary biology seemed to be so good at making predictions and lined up so well with other areas of science.
No matter how much I learned, the problem of starlight and time never seemed to get any easier to solve.
. . .
The universe simply could not be young, and my whole edifice crumbled.
If I had seen the same image even a year earlier, I don’t think it would have had the same effect on me. My deconversion from creationism was the result of years of learning new information and exposing myself to different ideas. It just happened to reach the breaking point at the right time.
Over the decades I've been collecting testimonials from ex-creationists; David MacMillan's is just the most recent. The first I heard of were the ICR-trained creationist geologists doing petroleum exploration field work who suffered severe crises of faith when faced with rock-hard geological evidence that the ICR had told them did not exist and could not exist if Scripture were to have any meaning. It wasn't any your phony "word magic", but rather a massive dose of reality in the form of actual evidence. In all the other testimonials, what led them away from creationism was learning what the science actually is and says and what the evidence actually is.
In contrast, creationism relies and very heavily depends on misrepresenting the science and the evidence to create a fabric of lies and deception to feed its audience. The only way for that to work is for their audience to be ignorant and to remain ignorant. The last thing that they want is for their audience to go and learn the actual science, even when the motivation is like David MacMillan's: to prove creationism to be true. Instead, the outcome is always to expose creationism's falsehood and deceptions.
Creationists are the ones who deal in "word magic", with you as a prime example in how you continually redefine the meanings of words in your desperate attempts to change reality. Creationists use words and definitions to deceive and confuse and convince, like the worst kinds of shyster lawyers.
In contrast, science uses words and definition to describe their observations as clearly as possible. Furthermore, science does not simply proclaim its conclusions and expect you to accept them unquestioningly, but rather it demonstrates how it arrived at its conclusions, including starting from the most basic physical/chemical/biological processes and building upon those to develop all levels of scientific thought.
Given a scientific explanation, you can analyze all the physics et al. that went into it and you can test it. Most scientific explanations can stand up to and survive such verification and testing -- indeed such verification and testing is SOP in science. Given a creationist explanation, it almost immediately falls completely apart when you attempt to verify or test it.
Those experiences are not lost on creationists who bother to learn the science, nor was it lost on David MacMillan. That was the point in providing these links here. Your nonsensical complaints of non-existent "evo word magic" are worse than useless, serving only to expose how intellectually and morally bankrupt creationism and those religions that depend on it are.
If you want to continue with this, then please start a topic.
Now it's more concise and hopefully more readable. I've adopted an approach of telling the story of how the site had come about and how my experience with creationism had grown and had developed my attitudes towards "creation science" and creationists. I also offer some basic facts (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/index.html#FACTS) and some advice for creationists and non-creationists (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/index.html#ADVICE).
Share and enjoy!
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fixed link per message 136.
It examines a German teacher's YouTube video about a multiplication method that was taught in Germany more than a century ago -- some middle-aged and senior commenters remember their grandparents having shown it to them once. It's also called Russian Peasant Multiplication.
With it, you can multiply any two integers without knowing how to multiply. All you need to know is how to multiply and divide by 2, how to add, and how to tell whether a number is even or odd.
Just thought the more math-minded here might find it interesting.
SPOILER: it's based the binary multiplication algorithm.
The impression I get from Lehrer Schmidt's video (it's in German with no subtitles) was that it was how multiplication was taught long ago but I didn't catch how long ago that was supposed to be -- judging by the age of commenters who mention a grandparent having shown it to them (ie, middle-aged and senior), I would guess that was in the late 1800's.
I would assume that regular long multiplication would have been taught too, or maybe for the students destined for higher academics while the farm children were given this (big assumptions). Also in my 1914 copy of The Walsh-Suzzallo Arithmetics primer (for grades 1 to 6 or 8, going from counting up to keeping a store's accounts), I see at all levels many mental calculation drills to be done in class. With that in mind, I could see methods like this being taught as supplemental methods to make all that work by hand quicker and easier and less prone to error, as well as accessible to those whose multiplication table skills are weaker.
I just thought how neat it was that it's based directly on the same binary multiplication algorithm that I had learned in my computer training.
Here's that YouTube video. Remember, it's in German with no subtitles. And, yes, that is how they write ones, sevens, and nines.
I just noticed the past tense. Sorry. There have been so many things after his death that I would have wanted to share with my father.
Does that "frozen wasteland" where you're from happen to be in Manitoba, maybe around "The Peg" (Winnipeg)? When I was stationed due south from there in northeastern North Dakota I learned about the "Germans from Russia" who settled heavily in that area. The story I was told was that the Russian government recruited German farmers to colonize and develop the Ukraine with the promise that they'd be left alone and not treated like Russian serfs (who weren't freed until 1861). But then about a century later politics changed and Russia started treating them like Russians, many emigrated to the US and Canada and settled in the prairie that was so much like where they had come from.
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