Laurascomputerhatesher
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Post by Laurascomputerhatesher on Jan 13, 2004 21:42:56 GMT -5
Wow, that made my head hurt. How can he not possibly realize how idiotic he is? I could tear apart those emails in less than five minutes, altogether. It would be so easy. I have had enough conversion attempts over break, and enough people talking about god to me to want to eviscerate the next person who says anything remotely religious.
Laura "not her usual efflusively bubbly self" McIntosh
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Post by Rama on Jan 13, 2004 21:58:10 GMT -5
Heh, by all means feel free to respond. I didn't publish my email to these asshats when I wrote my letter to the State News. If I wanted their opinions or thought they had anything I haven't already dealt with to say, then I would have gone trolling for them on allmsu. They sent me unsolicited correspondence, no reason you shouldn't do the same thing to them. You could really confuse them too. Just send them their reply without telling them what you're replying to. Oh yeah, I got another one today too, I'm suspecting it'll be a trend in the next day. This one was pretty friendly though, some muslim guy asking me to come to their prayer love-in. Turning him down obviously, but it's interesting that he's the only one who's actually invited me to discuss something at length.
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Post by FishBait on Jan 14, 2004 0:21:19 GMT -5
he invited you to a prayer LOVE-IN?? that sounds dirty
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Post by Rama on Jan 14, 2004 0:31:52 GMT -5
Well...I was paraphrasing him.
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Post by Ravenlock on Jan 14, 2004 8:52:39 GMT -5
I also hate that EVERYONE throws down that "Darwin converted!" card as if it's the key to our world.
"What !?! DARWIN CONVERTED!? Well shit I guess I'm a christian now."
It's a completely unsubstantiated crock of shit invented by people who don't understand that it's the theory we take from the man, not the man himself.
~Roger
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Post by Valvilis on Jan 14, 2004 9:43:42 GMT -5
Darwin died an atheist on his deathbed, people are retarded.
Nathan, are you sure it said "prayer love-in" and not "pure lovin'?" Maybe he's foreign and his spelling is no so good (or maybe he went to my high school).
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Post by Ravenlock on Jan 14, 2004 10:22:50 GMT -5
I also hate that EVERYONE throws down that "Darwin converted!" card as if it's the key to our world. "What !?! DARWIN CONVERTED!? Well shit I guess I'm a christian now." It's a completely unsubstantiated crock of shit invented by people who don't understand that it's the theory we take from the man, not the man himself. ~Roger Mmmk.. don't understand why it's inserting random smileys. Odd. ~Roger
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Post by Seany-D on Jan 14, 2004 10:26:29 GMT -5
c'mon, Rog, isn't ;Darwin nicer to see than :(arwin, or even :Parwin? It's obvious that God has favored our undertakings.
Sean "just warming up for tonight's meeting" Davis
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Post by FishBait on Jan 14, 2004 10:50:45 GMT -5
what about :oarwin, or :Parwin, or the ever cool 8-)arwin, or >:(arwin the destroyer
Carolyn "I have too much free time on my hands" Kemp
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Post by Valvilis on Jan 14, 2004 12:09:40 GMT -5
Darwin help Seaquest...
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Post by Rama on Jan 15, 2004 18:10:17 GMT -5
hee hee, finally got around to replying to this guy. One down, two to go. I was wondering what you guys would think of my letter though, did I miss making any really obvious points I should have? I'm assuming it doesn't matter since this guy appears to be the sort who doesn't care if he's wrong or not as long as he can still believe in something. I've got two more letters I might bother responding to, but I found John Bice's blog (Fuckin hilarious, I loved his piece in today's paper) today and might just forward them that since the fuckers all use the same ignorant arguments anyhow.
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Thanks for your time and your thoughts on my letter. I apologize for the time it's taken to respond to your mail, but I've been rather busy lately. I also apologize beforehand if I sound condescending with my response, but I've heard all your arguments a dozen times before and been able to dismiss them every time.
--I just got done reading your opinion in the state news and felt that it deserved a comment. I agree with your point that using faith as the sole basis for argueing a point is ridiculous at best. However, don't tell me that all religions are wrong because at some point they rely on faith.--
Actually, my argument was more along the lines that faith is a dirty word, and to use it in any way shape or form, for any purpose, at any time, is to be irrational. Faith is defined as "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence". It is obvious that if belief in something is substantiated by evidence or logic and reason, there is no need for faith. Because, as I mentioned in my letter, faith does not separate truth from falsehood while logic does, logic and reason are superior to faith. Faith can only exist where rational thought is absent, because if you know through science that taking those two pills of aspirin will help your headache, you have no reason to take it to faith, or even more to the point, to invent some sort of Aspirin-God who deeply cares where you put your genitals and what kind of food you eat. We must all grow up at some point in our lives, and a hallmark of doing that is developing a rational and inquiring mind, giving up things such as santa claus and the easter bunny, and dismissing claims which are defended with "you can't prove it wrong!" because they are unscientific, irrational, and un-testable assertions. You may not be able to prove that I don't have an invisible and magical pet unicorn, but that's not support for my belief in it. Neither is saying "Oh, it's magic, so it can't be judged by the laws which apply to all other reality". Neither is saying "I don't understand the way my world works because I'm ignorant about such things, so I will irrationally use that to validate my faith". This leads nicely into my next comment and your next chain of mistakes.
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Post by Rama on Jan 15, 2004 18:10:33 GMT -5
-- Last time I checked, science relys on a lot of faith too, maybe even more than religion.-- Check again. And look harder this time. I'm amazed that you can't recall what the scientific method is when they taught it to me when I was in elementary School. Science does not deal with 'truths' or 'proving' anything to any absolute degree. This is one of the ways it is separate from religion. It does not claim to know the unknowable. Admitting you don't know something is not a bad thing to do, and in fact is the only rational thing to do when you are faced with a mystery of nature. Science deals with levels of certainty. Theories which have large amounts of evidence and testing to support them are given a higher degree than ones that are not. Nothing in science is taken on faith because nothing in science needs to be taken on faith. The entire point of science is in fact to completely eliminate faith and illogical beliefs and replace them with those that are best supported by reason, physical evidence, and testing. --Last time I checked, nobody was there when the Big Bang happened. Have scientists "proven" how the elements responsible for that explosion were created? NO, they just have faith that either matter can just appear out of nothing, or that those elements just always existed.-- Exactly. Nobody was there when the big bang happened, so the only thing scientists do is propose theories which are then tested and evaluated against opposing theories for degrees of likelihood. Only a creationist would claim that scientists have "proven" anything with any level of absolute certainty. This deficiency in your thinking is at least in part based on your flawed belief that morality and reality are objective. Furthermore, you are not an astrophysicist. You are a criminal justice major. Your complete ignorance in the fields of evolutionary theory, astrophysics, quantum physics, and science in general does not support your claims that a god exists. Simply because you do not know something or cannot comprehend something does not mean that whatever alternate theory you hold is right. And when millions of scientists have produced millions of pages of scientific research on the matter, and have become knowledgeable with their theories, and reached a general consensus on what is more likely correct and true, it further belies your argument. When only 7% of scientists are christians, that belies your argument. When your arguments are based on and held up by commonly known and recognized fallacies of logic, that belies your argument. But I digress. --Has anyone ever found "the missing link"? Add that to the fact that ever animal on earth today is said to have evolved from other animals, yet we cant seem to find a half evolved fish-reptile fossil, or reptile-mammal fossil, but lets just have faith that this is what happened.-- I guess you aren't an anthropologist or zoologist either. Just to get it out of the way real quick, do you know what a duck-billed platypus is? It's a mammal, not a bird, not a reptile. It has fur, a bill, like a duck, venom glands, like a snake, webbed feet, and is the only mammal known to lay eggs. Humans and the rest of the animal kingdom are covered with evidence of evolution, from oddities like the duck billed platypus that shows a particular stage in evolution, to the simple fact that our bodies have useless things like appendixes or tonsils which serve no practical purpose now but are left from our earlier stages in development. It's the same thing with wisdom teeth. Again, you are not a zoologist, and neither are your pastors and youth-group leaders. DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM FOR SCIENTIFIC DATA. Argumentum ad ignorantiam is a fallacy. Fallacies are illogical. Now, to quickly deal with your little comment on the missing link, let me again remind you that you are not an anthropologist, the scientific community of which agrees that evolution is the most likely explanation for our present existence. Do you know what you mean by "missing link"? Do you have any idea what the steps in evolution are, or that it is a process that happened over more years than you can possibly imagine, and is in fact still going on? Are you asking for homo habilis, the earliest member of the genus homo? If you'd perhaps like to read a recent and informative article then go to www.csmonitor.com/2003/0612/p03s02-stgn.html (and note that not once is it indicated that scientists consider creationism to be a valid theory. Real scientists do not believe in creationism, theologists do). Again, faith plays no part whatsoever in science. Each theory is repeatedly tested and analyzed for evidence before it is accepted as probable by the scientific community. --Or do we have any way to test how old the different layers of the Earth's crust are? Nope, but we want to believe that it is really really old so that our theory can sound realistic, we just have faith.-- You are not a geologist. In fact, I'm lead to assume you've never even taken a basic 100 level course in geology. What you are asserting is a flat out lie, and whoever told it to you was lying, ignorant, or irrational to the point of being blind. Modern geologic science has very reliably been able to date the earth, and all evidence that has been gathered argues against the validity of any Christian creationist or young-earth beliefs. When you are comparing tested and validated scientific and rational theories to faith, you cannot choose faith and still consider yourself anything other than irrational. --Or how can you ever prove that the speed of light is the fastest thing in the universe?-- You can't. But you can analyze Einstein's theory of relativity and use that to become reasonably sure about it. --You mean that since we can't even take any mesurements out of our tiny solar system, we just have to have faith? Wow, I guess you really haven't proven your theory after all. Sounds like what you have is a faith based system to me.-- Sounds like what you have is the result of a failed public education system or a failed parenting system. I'm not trying to be too terribly offensive here, but did you actually spend more than three minutes typing your email or thinking about what you were saying? You have straw-manned my statements, used fallacies and your own misunderstanding of science and reality and the English language to back yourself up, and have not provided a single valid statement anywhere in your email. You have proven that you do not know or comprehend things which are taught to 13 year olds, and are too lazy to do so much as a google search for actual facts regarding any of the things you're ignorant about. Faith is the most cleverly disguised four-letter words of all. We should ban it from our schools, our court-houses, our homes, and our lives. It is used to justify absurd claims, racism, bigotry, hatred, and power-mongering. Inquisitions, crusades, witch-hunts, terrorists, and of course 9/11 are all the fruits of faith. We have penicillin, modern agriculture, computers, medical technology, and a standard of living to thank science and reason for. Which do you really think deserves to be a part of us? Sincerely, Nathan Thompson "Black is a blind remembering" -Frank Herbert
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Post by Ravenlock on Jan 16, 2004 8:28:44 GMT -5
Aggressive. But damned good and thorough.
If he shoots back with a dig that you didn't provide an example of a fossil half-something, half-something creature, I have a card for you to pull. Archaeoptryx. A dinosaur with asymetrical wings designed for extended flight. Oh. And it had feathers. Hmm.
I'm sure if you don't know about it, a search on the net will provide embarassing amounts of information.
~Roger "stupid wankers" Smith
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Post by Rama on Jan 16, 2004 8:41:25 GMT -5
Heh, he did in fact go down that exact same route. Here's the message he sent. I figure I'm going to give him one more chance to say something intelligent. I'm going to lay out the rules for him, and if he can't provide good firm evidence and a testable hypothesis in three tries, he loses, I make fun of him some more, and I ignore him. I love the part at the end where he idiotically suggests that the reason we haven't done tests to prove the existence of a god or a soul is because scientists are only interested in winning grants! As if you know, nobody would try to profit off the confirmed existence of a deity...oh, wait...people already ARE trying to do that! Shit! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: "Lee Ehlers" <msugreen598@hotmail.com> Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 9:24:41 PM America/Detroit To: thompson3ns@earthlink.net Subject: Re: State News
Hey, glad that you actually took the time to respond. No offense taken at all. I'm glad that some people can still debate without taking everything personally. But anyway, back to your email.
Like I said before, if you are making an arguement, and the only evidence that you can muster to support your cause is, well I have faith, than you are an idiot. And to be completely fair, I know a lot of Christians who believe what they believe because that was what they were taught by their elders. I'm sure you have run into your fair share of these type of people and I am sorry.
However, I'm not stupid enough to buy into your assertion that science is simply logic. Please, its just like you imply in your response. You wont admit to not being able to find skeletons of half-evolved animals. So what do you do? Instead of admitting that the fossil record doesn't lend credibility to your beliefs, you make some excuse about "well the process took millions of years." And then you point to an animal that has characteristics of many different species. But does it have a half evolved beak, or have half evolved eyes that wont work for another million years? Of course not, it somehow has all its parts, and all of them are fully functional. And if you were truely a scientist based completely on reason, would you say that humans have stuff that doesn't serve a purpose? Do we have tonsils for a reason? I don't know, maybe in 50 years we will uncover some purpose that they serve. It seems that you have faith, BASED ON FACTS BUT ENTIRELY UNPROVABLE, that tonsils do not serve a purpose. Are you a doctor? If not, does that count against your arguement? My degree seemed to make you think less of my arguement. Or is that a deduction not based in fact? Can you be knowledgable about the human body without holding a degree in anatomy? Can I be knowledgable about science without a biology degree?
Darwin Himself said that the only problem that he had with his theory is that it wasn't supported by the fossil record. However, he was confident that over time, people would unearth more stuff. So...did he have faith that based on the facts as he understood them, someone would someday find more evidence? I know you want to believe that science is better than religion, but it isn't. If you really had a lot of time I could go into all the facts that point to Jesus being a lot more than just a guy. But I know you aren't interested in this. You see, people like you don't want to see the evidence that actually supports Christianity. You would rather just assume that it is false because you have some facts that seem to prove some aspects of a belief system that you have. Can I prove the existance of God? No, but if we use the facts that we do have we can prove that the existance of a God is far more likely than any other alternative.
So once again we go full circle. If science was all about proving and disproving, and not about getting grant money so that people can continue doing experiments, than you would look at alternatives to evolution and athiesm. If I take the facts that scientists have presented, I can make a far greater case for a creator than you can for spontaneous generation. Yes, it does take faith to believe in God, but it takes a lot more to believe that there isn't one.
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Post by profdunebastard on Jan 16, 2004 9:39:39 GMT -5
Actually Roger, many more dinosaurs have been discovered to have feathers since archaeopteryx, even velociraptors. Creationists have gotten used to archaeopteryx used against them in debate for so long, they've just been dismissing them as hoaxes, but so many other theropod dinosaurs have them that there are enough new examples to throw them for a loop. There should be a real good dinosaur site by a museum or discovery channel or something to confirm this.
As for the letter, seems to me this guy isn't listening at all-eyes not formed fully?-sure that kinda missing link would surely be selected for survival.
It may be also helpful to point out that , yes, uncertainties to exist science, and yes, sometimes people to have to go out on a limb and make a prediction. It's called a hypothesis-an educated guess. That is what differentiates my "faith" in the age of the earth and my "faith" in the big bang, from faith in jehovah, namely an education. It is human nature to not know everything, to have doubt, and to agree with someone elses conclusions(ie of an experiment) even if you are not there. Science is a tool used by humans, a process for ruling out false information, not logic incanate or the answer to every question.
By the way Nathan, I know you know all this stuff, partly I'm just venting. It is hard to be confronted with such pure, unadulterated ignorance and not shudder with anger and fear.
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