The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
This may be old news to some, but I just got this blog so I am posting it now.
Recently there was some debate going on in a Kansas School Board about whether or not "Intelligent Design" (AKA Creationism) should be taught in Kansas public schools as part of the science curriculum. I'm not sure what ever became of the debate, but I do know that one of the funniest thought processes I have ever come across arose from it...
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was created and the followers are requesting that their beliefs also be taught in science classes, as they can provide as much proof of their belief as Intelligent Designists can provide about theirs. Great stuff...
Now, you may find it hard to believe that your Hero, a practicing agnostic leaning toward atheism, thinks that it's just fine to have religious studies taught in schools. I do not believe, however, that these studies belong in a science class. A good place would be in a World Religions class where many different religious beliefs were explored and discussions were encouraged. I personally think that it's a great idea to encourage our children to know as much as possible when making decisions about the way they live their lives and what place they may or may not have in eternity. But what do I know?...
Anyway, enough of my soapbox diatribe... Check out this website. I encourage you to keep reading until the end as the last sentence is the funniest part of the whole thing. It starts a little slow, but gets better...
Enjoy The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Recently there was some debate going on in a Kansas School Board about whether or not "Intelligent Design" (AKA Creationism) should be taught in Kansas public schools as part of the science curriculum. I'm not sure what ever became of the debate, but I do know that one of the funniest thought processes I have ever come across arose from it...
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was created and the followers are requesting that their beliefs also be taught in science classes, as they can provide as much proof of their belief as Intelligent Designists can provide about theirs. Great stuff...
Now, you may find it hard to believe that your Hero, a practicing agnostic leaning toward atheism, thinks that it's just fine to have religious studies taught in schools. I do not believe, however, that these studies belong in a science class. A good place would be in a World Religions class where many different religious beliefs were explored and discussions were encouraged. I personally think that it's a great idea to encourage our children to know as much as possible when making decisions about the way they live their lives and what place they may or may not have in eternity. But what do I know?...
Anyway, enough of my soapbox diatribe... Check out this website. I encourage you to keep reading until the end as the last sentence is the funniest part of the whole thing. It starts a little slow, but gets better...
Enjoy The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
posted by Marklar at 19:49
8 Comments:
This website is awesome. I have been sucked into this intelligent design bullshit, because......... it is bullshit. "Of Pandas and People" is the literary propaganda these Christian freaks use to suck in narrow-minded people. I plan on reading it, but I might get too angry and light it on fire before I finish. A professor of biology at Brown University wrote a critique on the readings http://www.kcfs.org/pandas.html if you are interested.
Also, check out this site. It's loaded with articles critical of Intelligent Design.
http://www.talkdesign.org/
To be fair, I'll find a site that is pro ID. I'll be back MUCH later with that.
here's the thing, those freaky christians try to set up a false
dichotomy: it's either evolution or creationsim and if evolution isn't true, then creationism is true. now, evolution may or may not be a fact of nature, but assuming that it's not, this doesn't mean that creationism is a fact of nature.
it is entirely possible that there is some as of yet undiscovered natural, or supernatural for that matter, mechanism that drives the whole shebang. i'm perfectly willing to withhold judgment on the accuracy of darwin's theories, and everyone should be, but let's not pretend that just because we're skeptical about evolution we're forced to accept that the world was created by the baby
jeebus. if you're gonna be skeptical, have some balls and go all the way. don't try to use it as a shoe horn to usher in some fantastic set of beliefs. fuckers.
True, there can't be any middle ground with them. No grey area. I won't pretend to have even the slightest idea about the makings of the universe (and neither should anyone else), but I'm sure that there's more to it than anyone on this little speck of cosmic dust can comprehend.
I have yet to see any difinitive evidence for either side of the ID/Evolution debate... It would be great if someone could come up with something to shut the book on the whole thing... I'm getting sick of hearing about it.
As promised, a positive ID site. Hogwash, if you ask me... But no one asked me...
http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/
an iFriend of mine, Maurile, has a blog entry re: intelligent design v. evolution. smart guy.
http://maurile.blogspot.com/
Theories and Facts
There's a trial currently taking place in Harrisburg, PA, challenging the Dover Area School District's policy requiring biology teachers to read a statement to their students regarding evolution and intelligent design. The two-paragraph statement begins:
Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact.
The rest of the statement is no better, but this blog entry will focus on just those two sentences -- mainly on the second one. "The theory is not a fact." What does that mean?
Usually when a person says that evolution is "just a theory," it's because he or she doesn't know what "theory" means in a scientific context. As Stephen J. Gould explained, "In the American vernacular, 'theory' often means 'imperfect fact'—part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess." Not so in science. While usage among scientists isn't always consistent, the essential difference between theories and facts might be framed thus:
theory: an idea that is testable
fact: an idea that is correct
It should be obvious that an idea's testability says nothing about its correctness. Some testable ideas are correct; some are incorrect. Saying that evolution is "a theory, not a fact" is like saying that King Kong Bundy is "bald, not fat." It is possible to be both.
The difference between evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design creationism -- what makes evolution scientific and Intelligent Design unscientific -- is that evolutionary theory is testable. It is in fact being tested all the time. New observations are constantly being made, new experiments being done, that could falsify evolutionary theory as we know it. Many observations would be inconsistent with current evolutionary theory (e.g., "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian" -- J.B.S. Haldane), but no possible observation could ever falsify Intelligent Design creationism.
So evolution is a theory. Is it a fact? Scientists really don't speak much of facts (as opposed to data, observations, measurements, or the like), so that's kind of a funny word for the Dover statement to use in this context. But evolutionary theory has been tested with great rigor for over a century, and it is the only theory of the origin of species we have that has not yet been falsified. Nothing in science can ever be proven beyond all doubt, but the correctness of evolutionary theory is about as sure a thing as the correctness of atomic theory or of the germ theory of disease.
In other words, yes. It is a fact.
I am clearly not as intelligent as the previous responders to this article (what can I say, I was designed that way). My question is this- Who is it that openly supports ID? I ask because if ID was fully believed, shouldn't it replace creationism in the biblical sense? If the same people that swear upon Adam and Eve starting it all are now defending a non-religious theory (non-religious because they are not asking for religion to be introduced into the classroom) isn't this somewhat of a conflict of ideas? Should we be more scared of the fire and brimstone bible beaters, or should we be more scared of the the ones that are evolving?
Good point, Tim. I'm afraid of all of them. I believe they are all the same, though. They are just trying to legitimize creationism by disguising it as science.
The ones who we should REALLY be afraid of are the millions of people who buy into this crap and believe that it really IS science. People are getting stupider and stupider...
The genepool is contaminated and the lifeguard is off duty...
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