Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaydelart
That's pretty rude. No manners towards the "nutters", eh? Classy.
No, sir, you're pretty close, there may be diminishing hope for the likes of me. I can, in fact, appreciate the possibility that the world is merely thousands of years old, instead of billions. I can, in fact, appreciate the possibility that dinosaurs co-existed with humans. I may be an absolute idiot. But I would rather be an idiot, capable of appreciating new ideas, while also having the capacity and humility to acknowledge the wonders we have already established as true than a closed-minded bigot. Science and Christianity aren't enemies; they do not necessarily negate one-another... The interpretations of people do. If you can agree with this concept, then, ultimately, you would realize that you're just as bad as any radical, religious "nutter". Proclaimed intelligence shouldn't excuse treating people badly.
I'll keep my fairytales, thank you.
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But to accept those things as possibilities means that you have to ignore science. It's not being open minded at all. Science is all about having an open mind but with a healthy bit of scepticism.
Science can't co-exist with religion if you want to believe that dinosaurs and humans once lived at the same time (even as remotely possible). There is no evidence whatsoever of this. In fact all the evidence supports that the last of the dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago and the human species just wasn't around at that time. You also can't accept as even a remote possibility that the earth is only 6,000 years old because all of the scientific evidence shows that it is much, much older. There is such overwhelming evidence that the earth is billions of years old that it truly is ridiculous to consider otherwise. It is the sort of evidence that anyone of any religion or cultural backcground could do experiments to verify and all come up with the same results if the same good scientific methodology is followed.
The sort of thinking you are talking about is credulous thinking. Where anything is possible regardless of any evidence to support it. So you believe in one of the myriad of gods that have been worshipped over the millenia and basically there is virtually nothing you could consider impossible once you start down that road. There is just as much proof in the existence of vampires, fairies, werewolves, ogres, etc, etc. You believe in something for which there is no proof whatsoever and are unconvinced by things for which there are mountains of proof by some of the most intelligent people the human race has ever produced. If this isn't idiotic I don't know what is.
When you have schools teaching kids creationism over evolution or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans once upon a time then we have a huge problem. If you teach that the earth is only 6,000 years old instead of billions then religion negates science. We may as well accept that all human advancement over the years has been for nothing if we cannot accept that our understanding of the world has moved on quite a bit since some old blokes sat around a few thousand years ago and assembled a book of stories called the bible.
The biggest hypocrasy of fundamentalist religious nutters is that most of them happily live in the modern world using the creations of science and technology whilst denying the basic precepts of the science that helped create such things. Surely there is something mentally wrong with people who support such delusions?