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You'd pay to know what you really think.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 21:21 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 02:50 |
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Gorilla Salad posted:It's like the old Emo Phillips joke: That's a pretty good joke, except I read it and hear it in my head with Emo Phillips' voice and delivery.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 21:23 |
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Another gem:Dungeons and Dragons posted:Dungeons & Dragons (D&D or DnD) is a role-playing game with a medieval theme featuring mythical creatures such as elves, dwarves, orcs, and dragons, but also semi-fictionalized demons.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 21:48 |
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Sarion posted:Another gem: Oh oh, this is fun. Do they consider it bad because the demons are semi-realistic or semi-fictional? It's the glass-half-full test of fundie idiocy.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 22:13 |
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Harik posted:Oh oh, this is fun. Do they consider it bad because the demons are semi-realistic or semi-fictional? It's the glass-half-full test of fundie idiocy. And how do they argue away the fact that the demons are explicitly evil? I mean it's not even that they do bad things and act like dicks, alignment is an actual thing in the D&D universe and theirs is Evil.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 22:24 |
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Much of the rest of the article is pretty tame, reading like it was written by someone who didn't really see any controversy and then edited by someone who did. And the editor threw in occasional things like the "semi-fictional demons". There's a section on "Demons and Devils" but it doesn't really say anything surprising or even reference the "semi-fictional" classification at the beginning of the article. There is a nice paragraph in the "God and Gods" part of D&D: God and Gods posted:Ravitts already understood the power of role-playing, which is now well known. Namely, role-playing is a powerful behavior modification tool. The concept is that if you pretend that you believe something, eventually you will believe that thing. For this reason, he posited that it was important to avoid role-playing in a polytheistic world. Referencing the classic argument from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Ravitts explained how polytheism is really just atheism or monotheism in disguise. He believed that if players and DM's actively played in an atheistic world, they would eventually become atheists. I like how the entire bolded section just proclaims that role-playing makes you eventually believe you really are what you role-play, with no reference at all. And then they use that to say that if you Role-play being polytheistic long enough it makes you an atheist.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 22:49 |
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Amarkov posted:And how do they argue away the fact that the demons are explicitly evil? I mean it's not even that they do bad things and act like dicks, alignment is an actual thing in the D&D universe and theirs is Evil. They don't except to say that since players can do anything, they might side with the evil demons. And they also mention some controversy where people were upset that there were Demons but no Angels; and then people were upset because they added Angels. But it reads like they're just relating controversies that existed during its early years rather than agreeing with those views.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 22:51 |
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But it did lead me to the Dragons page.Dragons posted:Dragons are reptillian or snake-like creatures that share many characteristics with dinosaurs and may well be the same creatures. The World Book Encyclopedia declares that: "The dragons of legend are strangely like actual creatures that have lived in the past. They are much like the great reptiles [dinosaurs] which inhabited the earth long before man is supposed to have appeared on earth." [1]. Dragons are usually evil and associated with Satan, however, in the pagan belief systems of Asia, dragons tend to be regarded as divine creatures. Some creation scientists have postulated that the differing nature of dragons in the west and east may be because after the Great Flood, predatory, carnivorous dinosaurs tended to migrate westward, whereas large, plant-eating dinosaurs tended to migrate east from Mt. Ararat. The folk memories of sea serpents such as the Loch Ness monster, Ogopogo, Gaasyendietha and Argont are likely inherited stories of encounters with dinosaurs.[2] Some creation scientists have suggested that dragons, as dinosuars, died out around the end of the ice age.[3][4] However, that can not account for later encounters with dragons. Nevertheless, dragons are now either extinct or extremely rare. I like how they mention fictional stories of Dragons from difference cultures as evidence that Dragons are real.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 23:23 |
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Sarion posted:But it did lead me to the Dragons page. I'm more into the last part. "Scientists say dragons are like snakes, but dragons aren't like snakes ergo scientists are wrong and dragons are totally real." I love their reasoning.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 23:46 |
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Sarion posted:I like how the entire bolded section just proclaims that role-playing makes you eventually believe you really are what you role-play, with no reference at all. And then they use that to say that if you Role-play being polytheistic long enough it makes you an atheist. See, that's something that I think they actually get right, but for the wrong reason. Roleplaying a person with beliefs, ideas, etc. different from your own, whether it be in table-top RPGs, video games, film/stage/TV acting, etc., allows you to understand other people and their differences. This can cause you to understand that your faith and even your other secular ideas (e.g. political ideology) aren't as objectively true and correct as you previously thought, which can lead you to atheism as you understand that all religions are equally subjective and rationally suspect. This might actually be the reason for artists, including those in Hollywood, being more often on the left side of the political spectrum than the general population. Their lives generally entail putting themselves into other people's positions as their full-time jobs, so it's understandable that they drift to he Left, as they have spent so much time empathizing and sympathizing with other people. Sarion posted:But it did lead me to the Dragons page. I think it's the saints part that is their real rationale for believing in dragons. They basically give no fucks what non-Christians believe unless it somehow confirms other, pre-existing Christian beliefs. So, if there were no accounts of dragons in the lives and miracles of Christian saints (e.g. Saint George), then they wouldn't believe in dragons because some Shintoists, Buddhists, etc. believe in them. Binowru posted:I'm more into the last part. "Scientists say dragons are like snakes, but dragons aren't like snakes ergo scientists are wrong and dragons are totally real." I love their reasoning. What's great is how Schlafly's conservatives act like all those Medieval peoples were the investigative equivalents of modern scientists. They completely misunderstand and/or ignore how people just make poo poo up to embellish their stories to seem more bad-rear end (e.g. Christian saints killing dragons) and how other people just get quick glimpses of animals and their minds fill in the blanks (e.g. gestalt psychology), especially when they combine their bits and pieces of recollections with other people.
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# ? Jul 28, 2011 23:57 |
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Almost every ancient civilization has a flood story, too. So that proves the Noah story! Ha! Everything in the Bible's correct and must be taken literally (except when it doesn't further our cause). Had a friend use this kind of argument but with the part with the Earth as a circle. Told her it really wasn't a stretch for early man to hold a straight-edge up to the horizon and see it wasn't straight. Bible contains some great observations but there's really not a lot of quantization to any degree of scientific precision. Hell, their value of pi only goes to one significant figure!
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 00:09 |
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perianwyr posted:You'd pay to know what you really think. the universe is on our side, praise bob.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 00:50 |
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Sarion posted:But it did lead me to the Dragons page. The funny thing is, its entirely possible the plethora of dragon myths may well come from earlier cultures digging around, finding dinosaur fossils, noticing the skulls are vaguelly lizardy and "Oh gently caress what sort of god drat lizard monsters this loving things supposed to be". The imagination + deduction fills in the rest (breathes fire! Wings!) I'm sure the structuralists have a funkier explaination based on their narrative roles, but it seems a pretty plausible explaination.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 00:53 |
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duck monster posted:The funny thing is, its entirely possible the plethora of dragon myths may well come from earlier cultures digging around, finding dinosaur fossils, noticing the skulls are vaguelly lizardy and "Oh gently caress what sort of god drat lizard monsters this loving things supposed to be". The imagination + deduction fills in the rest (breathes fire! Wings!) But see, creationists will agree with that by saying that the earlier culture was Adam and Eve and their direct descendents. Even if all the dinosaurs died out before or during the supposed "Great Flood," dragons would have still existed and stories of them were just been passed down like all the canonical stories of the Bible. DemeaninDemon posted:Almost every ancient civilization has a flood story, too. So that proves the Noah story! Ha! Everything in the Bible's correct and must be taken literally (except when it doesn't further our cause). That flood bullshit just irks me to no end. They try to claim that all those flood stories are evidence for the Bible instead of realizing that many cultures centered their civilizations around bodies of fresh water to allow for easy natural irrigation of their crops. Bodies of water frequently experience floods that can sometimes be catastrophically immense, so there's a rational, scientific explanation for these stories and phenomena that in no way lends itself to Christian metaphysics and bullshit.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 01:42 |
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perianwyr posted:You'd pay to know what you really think. The world ends tomorrow and you may die! Is there anything sadder than someone taking Discordianism or the Church of the Subgenius 100% seriously as their own religion? I've seen it. It's crushing.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 01:49 |
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Huitzil posted:The world ends tomorrow and you may die! I don't actually think anybody takes the subgenius thing seriously. Its just a wierd old club for ex hippies with a trollish sense of humor. Pretty much your original played out net meme. Not so sure about the discordian thing though. I've met a few people who are.... bit of a worry.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 02:01 |
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Bruce Leroy posted:That flood bullshit just irks me to no end. They try to claim that all those flood stories are evidence for the Bible instead of realizing that many cultures centered their civilizations around bodies of fresh water to allow for easy natural irrigation of their crops. Bodies of water frequently experience floods that can sometimes be catastrophically immense, so there's a rational, scientific explanation for these stories and phenomena that in no way lends itself to Christian metaphysics and bullshit. In some cases its not even that. There's a flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh that is almost completely identical to the story of Noah and the Ark. Even down to sending out a bird to check for dry land. The story was Babylonian, and around 586BCE the Babylonians conquered Judah. More than likely the story of Noah is just them taking the Flood story that the Babylonians had already been telling for centuries and adapting it to their own God.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 02:11 |
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duck monster posted:I don't actually think anybody takes the subgenius thing seriously. Its just a wierd old club for ex hippies with a trollish sense of humor. Pretty much your original played out net meme. I used to be into Discordianism (see: my username) because it was fun and silly and nobody ever heard of it, but an undergraduate degree in philosophy set me straight.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 02:16 |
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Bruce Leroy posted:
Actually I thought it was determined that the clustering of near eastern religious myths involving a flood wiping out all land all refer to one specific big flood somewhere in Turkey that got magnified in mythology to "covering the entire Earth"?
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 02:20 |
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Pope Guilty posted:I used to be into Discordianism (see: my username) because it was fun and silly and nobody ever heard of it, but an undergraduate degree in philosophy set me straight. There was actually bit of a sad story about the subgenius guys. One of the women involved was a stage performer who had a fairly adults-only act, had her kid taken off her by her estranged husband who convinced the court the COTSG was some hosed up sex cult. Rev Stang + co had to intervene to point out that its not a real religion, just an art society for creative wierdos and that nobody in the group actually believes its a real religion or cult or really much in common except for outsider humor. She ended up getting her kid back, but the court last I heard still had banned her from having any COTSG materials in her house, which frankly is a bit 1st ammendment suspicious.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 02:40 |
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duck monster posted:There was actually bit of a sad story about the subgenius guys. One of the women involved was a stage performer who had a fairly adults-only act, had her kid taken off her by her estranged husband who convinced the court the COTSG was some hosed up sex cult. Rev Stang + co had to intervene to point out that its not a real religion, just an art society for creative wierdos and that nobody in the group actually believes its a real religion or cult or really much in common except for outsider humor. She ended up getting her kid back, but the court last I heard still had banned her from having any COTSG materials in her house, which frankly is a bit 1st ammendment suspicious. poo poo, I remember that. The ACLU didn't seem to care much and the CotSG has of course never had the cash to get litigious.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 02:47 |
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Huitzil posted:The world ends tomorrow and you may die! Stang says he occasionally has encountered a rare 'bobbie' (church slang for stupid fanboy) who actually believed it was real. They never lasted long that way though as it became clear no one in the church aside from themselves took it serious. I expect some of them might have wound up as new agers or conspiracy theorists or otherkin or something though. Now if you really want to take Eris and "Bob" seriously, then you have to be very serious about not taking it seriously. gently caress em if they can't take a joke etc. Of course it is fun to pretend it's all real. Subgenus is like a game of cowboys and space aliens in a way and the social satire and art is fun too. The fact that it is no more or less 'true' than any other religion on the planet also gives it a bit of oomph.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 03:05 |
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DemeaninDemon posted:Almost every ancient civilization has a flood story, too. So that proves the Noah story! Ha! Everything in the Bible's correct and must be taken literally (except when it doesn't further our cause). Actually just the ones that lived near rivers and oceans had flood myths. Hmm wonder why that could be.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 03:08 |
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I wonder how much credence they give to other aspects of non-Christian mythology!
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 03:46 |
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Times posted:Actually just the ones that lived near rivers and oceans had flood myths. Hmm wonder why that could be. That reminds me of another thing that bothers me about die-hard biblical literalists, the Egypt portion of Exodus. There is a wealth of archaeology that establishes that there weren't any Jewish, Hebrew, or Israelite slaves in Egypt (though there were eventually some free Jews migrating to the region and Jewish soldiers that were stationed there to fight the Nubians WITH the Egyptians) and that the major monuments of the civilization (pyramids, sphinx, temples, granaries, etc.) were almost entirely built by free Egyptians that were either paid for their work as laborers and/or were farmers who were waiting out the Nile flooding their farmland by helping out on public works projects. http://skeptoid.com/episode.php?id=4191&comments=all#discuss
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 04:12 |
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I had a friend point out an interesting observation in divining real science from cranky science. Real science research tends to try and establish one piece of fact at a time. So a paper that purports to disprove a piece of the science used in establishing climate change AND then leading on to say climate change isn't real kind of fails that by establishing two pieces of science when one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. (Ie yes maybe CO2 isn't the problem and infact its something else, but the climate would still be changing. The disproof is bigger than a single factoid) So a paper that says "Ok, it looks like CO2 isn't as absorbing of heat IR as we earlier thought *bunch of science why*" would be a potentially serious piece of science. But a paper that says "Ok, it looks like CO2 isn't as absorbing of heat IR as we earlier thought *bunch of science why* and therefore climate change isnt real" has a fundamentally higher cliff to climb to establish its credentials because it has to address all the OTHER science". But lets say that it isn't real, and the lynch pin is the CO2 absorption of heat thing, the correct methodology is to first get the CO2 heat thing out there, let it be peer reviewed, and THEN if science is working as it should, if the CO2 thing is indeed the king hit to the theory, ANOTHER paper can then tie it all together. Its pretty common across crank papers Carbon dating is wrong therefore evolution is wrong. Footprints found near bones therefore old earth is wrong. Flaw in newton found therefore physics is wrong. Woah 1=0 therefore all maths debunked ..ahem.. cellular automata is awesome therefore all science changed forever and so on.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 04:50 |
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duck monster posted:I had a friend point out an interesting observation in divining real science from cranky science. You make some good points, but I'd like to expand on your ideas a bit. The misconception that many people have when it comes to claiming that a single study or research paper completely disproves a previously well-support theory (e.g. evolution, anthropogenic climate change, etc.) is that they assume the aspect of that theory they are supposedly refuting (correctly or not) is somehow the lynchpin/keystone for the theory and everything else falls apart if that one part of the theory is refuted. In reality, scientific "theories" aren't based on just one observation or phenomena, they are explanations for groups of phenomena that converge on a truth. To "disprove" one of those theories, you don't just need to refute one of those observations/phenomena, you need to refute each one in turn until they are all at least suspect, if not disregarded as evidence and support for the theory. Michael Shermer specifically mentions this idea in his book "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time." He references it in regard to a personal anecdote where he was brought on a TV show (Phil Donahue's talk show, I believe) to refute the claims of some Holocaust deniers who were also on at the same time. The deniers claimed that because some people got part of the history wrong (including a Holocaust survivor who was also present on the show) in that they incorrectly claimed that Dachau was a death camp with gas chambers (rather than just a "regular" concentration camp with deaths on par with actual death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau) it meant that the entire Holocaust never happened at all. Shermer noted that Dachau isn't the only piece of evidence for the Holocaust, there are numerous and diverse different pieces of evidence proving that the Holocaust occurred, including actual memos discussing it among Nazis officials, physical evidence from the camps themselves, testimony from the survivors and Allied troops that rescued them, and confessions from Nazis themselves. He said that the deniers would have to empirically refute each of those pieces of evidence in order to cast doubt on the acceptance of the Holocaust as a historical fact. Interesting, Shermer, who describes himself as a libertarian, rejected the theory of Anthropogenic Climate Change until just recently, when he admitted the preponderance of evidence converges on the theory being true.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 06:26 |
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I wish Ian Pilmer would examine his own bias's. The guy was a great (if not occasionally bungling and over-agressive) defender of evolution during his battles with Duan Gish. Unfortunately in his new found role as mining company hitman against AGW, he's deploying almost the exact same rhetorical devices the creationists would use against evolution and it really makes me wonder about the guys ethical compass.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 06:37 |
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Sarion posted:But it did lead me to the Dragons page. They're pretty common on cryptozoology sites for this reason, they think a living dinosaur would sink the Theory of Evolution (which it wouldn't). Bruce Leroy posted:That reminds me of another thing that bothers me about die-hard biblical literalists, the Egypt portion of Exodus. U.T. Raptor fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Jul 29, 2011 |
# ? Jul 29, 2011 07:00 |
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U.T. Raptor posted:Young-earthers love their "dragon=dinosaur" bullshit. There's many pages on the Internet full of vague artwork that could be anything, misidentified depictions of known animals, known hoaxes, "sea monster" carcasses (seriously, the Zuiyo-maru carcass was ID'd as a shark years ago, give that one up! ), etc. If you look at some of the comments from theists (most likely Christians) on that skeptoid article I linked, the believers hand-wave that away by claiming that the records for things like that are simply lost to history or will eventually be found. They're basically saying that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, which is true, but really isn't consistent for some Christians who pull that "where's the missing link/transitional fossils" bullshit to try and refute evolution.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 07:10 |
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This is a serious argument from creationists: that the Egyptians, the culture noted for documenting tons and tons of information no matter how asinine, with tons and tons of scribes recording everything going around the place on the papyrus which Egypt had the monopoly on in the ancient world and was best equipped by far to record information...were too emberassed by the Jewish slaves escaping and the plagues and such...so they didn't record it. Somehow. Like, not even an offhand mention of it somewhere. Yeah. Sure. Incidentally the monotheistic sun god one Pharaoh forced on the people for a period predates the invention of jehovah.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 07:46 |
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Times posted:This is a serious argument from creationists: that the Egyptians, the culture noted for documenting tons and tons of information no matter how asinine, with tons and tons of scribes recording everything going around the place on the papyrus which Egypt had the monopoly on in the ancient world and was best equipped by far to record information...were too emberassed by the Jewish slaves escaping and the plagues and such...so they didn't record it. Somehow. Like, not even an offhand mention of it somewhere. Yeah, it really doesn't seem possible that such incredibly important events like killing all the Jewish infants, the 10 plagues, and all the slaves leaving at once wouldn't be written about extensively in one way or another so that there would have been some kind of historical record confirming it. Hell, Pharaoh could have just spun the story and said that he released all the slaves on purpose because he's the all wise and merciful Pharaoh. Times posted:Incidentally the monotheistic sun god one Pharaoh forced on the people for a period predates the invention of jehovah. SHHH! Those "Zeitgeist" assholes might hear.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 08:14 |
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Times posted:This is a serious argument from creationists: that the Egyptians, the culture noted for documenting tons and tons of information no matter how asinine, with tons and tons of scribes recording everything going around the place on the papyrus which Egypt had the monopoly on in the ancient world and was best equipped by far to record information...were too emberassed by the Jewish slaves escaping and the plagues and such...so they didn't record it. Somehow. Like, not even an offhand mention of it somewhere. Slightly off-topic, but it's amazing how much Akhenaten's religion and philosophy was able to propagate in such a short amount of time.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 09:02 |
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Bruce Leroy posted:SHHH! Those "Zeitgeist" assholes might hear. Sun...god? Son OF God? Makes you think.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 14:05 |
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As an Atheistic Liberal Scientist who recently finished his Phd in junk science, I just wish I had read this advice earlier, it would have been so much easierconservapedia posted:In the mind of the atheistic junk scientist…
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 15:30 |
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duck monster posted:I wish Ian Pilmer would examine his own bias's. The guy was a great (if not occasionally bungling and over-agressive) defender of evolution during his battles with Duan Gish. Unfortunately in his new found role as mining company hitman against AGW, he's deploying almost the exact same rhetorical devices the creationists would use against evolution and it really makes me wonder about the guys ethical compass. When awareness of climate change was just starting to take off, Plimer had some really interesting perspectives on it. He took the geologist's view and looked at it in terms of thousands and millions of years - something nobody else was doing. Well, not doing in the public sphere in layspeak, anyway. Looking at it in that scale, it didn't seem to bad. Thanks to the earth's natural cycles and really cool stuff like how a warmer world would redistribute millions of cubic kilometres of water across tectonic plates which would in turn affect their balance on the mantle so that the ocean floor would go down and the land would rise up like a goddamn seesaw He made a great case for the innate ability of the world to balance the change we're doing to it across deep time. But where Plimer initially fell down was in the human scale of things - decades and centuries. Then, as you pointed out, he started getting paid by Big Coal. I still have my (very well-read) copy of Telling Lies for God, but I distance myself from everything else Plimer's done since.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 15:56 |
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Bruce Leroy posted:That reminds me of another thing that bothers me about die-hard biblical literalists, the Egypt portion of Exodus. JN Hudson posted:On a side note I was recently told by my mother that the newest pastor has handed down a list of books of the bible that should be avoided because, and this is an exact quote, "The pastor said that the bible scholar Andy Schlafly (Yes that Andy Schafly) had recently proved that several books of the new testament had been altered to present a liberal bias and those books should be avoided until they were retranslated to reflect their true meanings."
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 16:54 |
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Man this website is the gift that keeps on giving. There's a whole page of wonderful Conservative Parables. They claim many are based on true stories, though perhaps lies would be more accurate. Others are just crap conservative jokes. My favorite so far: The Troubled Pregnancy posted:
It's especially great because of the bold faced lie. The doctors weren't worried he would be disabled. His mother had a placental abruption; the placenta had started to detach from the uterine wall. Not only was there a high risk of the baby being stillborn, it posed a risk to the mother's life. Hardly comparable to "your kid might, maybe have down syndrome". But it's doubly great because telling women to ignore their doctors is a wonderful lesson to be teaching.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 22:10 |
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Sarion posted:It's especially great because of the bold faced lie. The doctors weren't worried he would be disabled. His mother had a placental abruption; the placenta had started to detach from the uterine wall. Not only was there a high risk of the baby being stillborn, it posed a risk to the mother's life. Hardly comparable to "your kid might, maybe have down syndrome". But it's doubly great because telling women to ignore their doctors is a wonderful lesson to be teaching. There's also the added hypocrisy that Tim Tebow's mom made the choice to carry her son to term, a choice that Conservapedians want to deny to every woman in America. It's gone now, but I think the Conservative parables page is also the one that used to have "This actually happened" as a citation in the footnotes.
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 22:14 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 02:50 |
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Bruce Leroy posted:Hitler literally banned Charles Darwin's books in Nazi Germany and explicitly repudiated evolutionary theory. I got into an argument, with Doug TenNapel, of all people, over the movie Expelled, in which I posted quotes from Darwin about how they shouldn't try to mirror natural selection in society and mentioned that Hitler had Darwin burned. He suggested that Hitler hated Darwin for advocating compassion
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# ? Jul 29, 2011 23:16 |