Hey gang! Want to see something depressing?

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Hey gang! Want to see something depressing?

PZ Myers relates some pretty dismal news about average Americans and their views on the creation museum.


 

 

Hey gang! Want to see something depressing?

Category: Creationism
Posted on: August 1, 2007 5:54 PM, by PZ Myers

Here's a representative slice of average Americana: Parade magazine. I don't read it, and I suspect most of you don't either, but we aren't average—we're freaky flaky outliers. If you want to see what ordinary Americans are thinking, though, it's a useful place to look. Right now they have a very short article on the creation museum with a pol that asks, "Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?"

About a third of the respondents currently answer "yes," which is actually quite a bit better than I feared. The real scary part is the comments, though, and there are a lot of them. Here's a quick sampling of the creationist point of view:

Question????When the dinosaurs were destroyed,how come mankind was not destroyed with them?As we also would have been elimated.

By the tone of your article you seem to be ignoring the many scientists who do not agree with the Billions of years age of the earth. As an engineer with a masters degree, i have many questions about some of the claims of the old earth guyes. I have many books from several scientific fields that look at the evidence available and come to a different conclusion.Your "scientists" are ignoring discoveries that support the presence of dinosaurs in recent times. Like zealeous Prosecutors, they seem to be unwilling to look at anything that doesn't help prove their case.

the Bible clearly says all things were made by God appr. 6400 years ago.If you believe the Bible, then no problem.If you think a day has a different length of time then 24 hours, then you don't believe the Bible and you are just blowing with the wind and you'll believe anything you want to. How do you know that dino's were mean & scarey? Of course they rode the ark...BABIES MAYBE?

I am a college professor in Mathematics and visited the Creation Museum a little over a week ago. I found it both fascinating and meaningful. The exhibits were world class and highly instructive. And the planetarium is, perhaps, the best in the world. I highly recommend it.

If dinosaurs died out millions of years ago how is it possible that their bones have not completely decomposed? I understand fossils being that old ... but do you really think bones could last that long? The earth is not as old as some might project.

I think it's about time someone made a good museum that tells the truth, instead of telling people what our schools and litterature are telling them.

Key words in a definition of the word science are observable, subject to experimentation, verifiable and repeatable. Did any scientist observe,verify or perform an experiment that indicates that dinosaurs were extinct 64 million years before man appeared or that Noah had trouble finding a pair of dinosaurs? Those who make these statements are outside the realm of science.

Pretty dismal stuff, isn't it? A few brave people are putting up rebuttals, but it's like a whole rising sea of treacly stupidity out there.


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I heard that out of the

I heard that out of the proffessors who believe more of them were involved with engering or math. I'd think that would make sense as it would leave more room for god to hide. By sounds of it those people haven't looked into evolution that much...

"Your 'scientists' are ignoring discoveries that support the presence of dinosaurs in recent times." All I'd ask is what discoveries...


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Voiderest wrote: "Your

Voiderest wrote:

"Your 'scientists' are ignoring discoveries that support the presence of dinosaurs in recent times." All I'd ask is what discoveries...

The fundies here are probably referring to the dinosaur blood and soft tissue things, which was new to me (just heard about it today).

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/blood.html

Possibly also the 'footprints' in the creekbed in Texas.

"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert


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Creekbed is in Paluxy.

Creekbed is in Paluxy. Debunked long ago by both sides. That one and another near Hopkinsville KY are key reasons why I am an atheist now. Thank you, 'creation science'.

 

The alleged dino tissue statement was wholly misconstrued and remains so to this date. Click on the 2005 redux link in the talkorigins page you posted for a better explanation.

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Textom wrote: Voiderest

Textom wrote:
Voiderest wrote:

"Your 'scientists' are ignoring discoveries that support the presence of dinosaurs in recent times." All I'd ask is what discoveries...

The fundies here are probably referring to the dinosaur blood and soft tissue things, which was new to me (just heard about it today).

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/blood.html

Possibly also the 'footprints' in the creekbed in Texas.

Thanks for the link, Textom.  I was really wondering about this quote: 

Some Nutbar wrote:
If dinosaurs died out millions of years ago how is it possible that their bones have not completely decomposed? I understand fossils being that old ... but do you really think bones could last that long? The earth is not as old as some might project.

I thought this nutbar didn't know dinosaur bones were fossils. Smiling  At least your link showed me he isn't quite that dumb.  Whew. Smiling

 

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The comments to that article

The comments to that article make me want to cry (as an aspiring MSEE/eventual EE PHD). The oh-so-great "engineer" that capitalizes every other word and can't spell 'guys' is almost as bad as the college math professor (why is your profession pertinent here?).
Both give those of us that don't compartmentalize our brains a bad rep.
It shows in the comments following the article.
I dont know much about that magazine or the article, but the universally shitty grammar of the responses speaks for itself.
These responses, whether they are legit or not, were construed by morons. Game over.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell.


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I read 'Parade.'  It comes

I read 'Parade.'  It comes free with the Sunday edition of the 'Washington Post' here in the DC Area.  If I had to classify it, I'd call it a tabloid.

 

Along with a bunch of supposed archeology stuff that supprts the bible, I've also seen them print interesting, factual articles about NASA space exploration and the age of the earth.  I wonder if the readers ever notice the contradictions. 


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shelleymtjoy wrote: Along

shelleymtjoy wrote:

Along with a bunch of supposed archeology stuff that supprts the bible, I've also seen them print interesting, factual articles about NASA space exploration and the age of the earth. I wonder if the readers ever notice the contradictions.

By the way, did you see the article with Neil DeGrasse Tyson a few weeks ago in Parade regarding the space program and space exploration?

It was an excellent article, let me see if I can find it.

Here it is:

Why America Needs to Explore Space

While China has announced an initiative to land humans on the moon by 2020, experts say that the limited funding of NASA will make it difficult for the U.S. to  return to the moon by then. We asked the nationally renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson what this might mean for our nation.

For millennia, people have looked up to the night sky and wondered about our place in the universe.  But not until the 17th century was any serious thought given to the prospect of traveling there. One English science buff, John Wilkins, speculated in 1638 that the moon would be habitable one day and imagined “a flying chariot in which a man may sit.”

Three hundred thirty-one years later, humans did indeed land on the moon, aboard a chariot called Apollo 11, as part of an ambitious investment in science and technology conducted by a relatively young country called the United States of America. That enterprise drove a half-century of unprecedented wealth and prosperity that today we take for granted. Now, as our interest in science wanes, America is poised to fall behind the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency.

For the last 30 years, more and more students in America’s science and engineering graduate schools have been foreign-born. They would come to the U.S., earn their degrees and stay, directly entering the high-tech workforce. Today, with emerging economic opportunities back in India, China and Eastern Europe, many graduates simply return home.

Science and technology are the greatest engines of economic growth the world has ever seen. Without regenerating homegrown interest in these fields, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

Though recent stories about China have focused on concerns such as tainted drugs and food, China’s growth as a major world player demands our attention. During a recent trip to Beijing, I expected to see wide boulevards dense with bicycles as a primary means of transportation. Instead, I was surprised to see those boulevards filled with top-end luxury cars, while cranes knit a new skyline of high-rise buildings. The controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, the largest engineering project in the world, is six times the size of the Hoover Dam. And China also is building the world’s largest airport.

In October 2003, China became the third space-faring nation (after the U.S. and Russia) as it launched its first “Taikonaut” into orbit. Next step, the moon. Meanwhile, Europe and India are redoubling their efforts to conduct robotic science on spaceborne platforms. There’s also a growing interest in space exploration from a dozen other countries around the world, including Kenya, whose equatorial location on the east coast of Africa makes it geographically ideal for space launches—even better than Cape Canaveral is for the U.S. This emerging community of nations is hungry for their slice of the aerospace universe. In America, contrary to our self-image, we are no longer leaders but simply players. We’ve moved backward just by standing still.

But there remains hope for us. You can learn something deep about a nation when you look at what it accomplishes as a culture. Do you know the most popular museum in the world over the past decade? It’s not the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Uffizi in Florence or the Louvre in Paris. At a running average of nearly 9 million visitors per year, it’s the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., which contains everything from the Wright Brothers’ original 1903 airplane to the Apollo 11 command module. Visitors value the air and space artifacts this museum contains. Why? It’s an American legacy to the world. But, more important, it represents the urge to dream and the will to enable it. These traits are fundamental to being human and have coincided with what it is to be American.

When you go to countries without such ambitions working within their culture, you feel the absence of hope. Due to all manner of politics, economics and geography, people are reduced to worrying only about that day’s shelter or the next day’s meal. It’s a shame, even a tragedy, how many people don’t get to think about the future. Technology coupled with wise leadership not only solves these problems but also enables dreams of tomorrow.

You know you’re in America when every generation believes it’s going to live differently from the previous one. Americans have come to expect something new in their lives with every passing moment—something to look forward to that will make life a little more fun to live and a little more enlightening to behold. Exploration accomplishes this naturally.

The greatest explorer today is not even human. It’s the Hubble Space Telescope, which for nearly two decades has offered us all a mind-expanding window to the cosmos. But when the Hubble was launched in 1990, a blunder in the design of its optics generated hopelessly blurred images. Corrective optics were installed during the telescope’s first servicing mission in 1993, which enabled the sharp images that we now take for granted. But for three years the images were simply fuzzy. What to do? We kept taking data, hoping some useful science would nonetheless come of it. Eager astrophysicists at Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, the research headquarters for the Hubble, wrote suites of advanced image-processing software to help identify and isolate stars in otherwise crowded, unfocused fields. These novel techniques allowed some science to get done while the repair mission was planned.

Meanwhile, medical researchers at the Lombardi Cancer Research Center at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., recognized that the challenge faced by astrophysicists was similar to that faced by doctors in their visual search for tumors in mammograms. Using funds granted by the National Science Foundation, the medical community adopted the new techniques being used for the Hubble to assist their early detection of breast cancer. Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

You cannot script these kinds of outcomes, yet they occur daily. The cross-pollination of disciplines almost always creates innovation and discovery. And nothing accomplishes this like space exploration, which draws from the ranks of astrophysicists, biologists, physiologists, chemists, engineers and planetary geologists. Their collective efforts have the capacity to improve and enhance all that we have come to value as a modern society.

How many times have we heard the mantra: “Why are we spending billions of dollars up there in space when we have pressing problems down here on Earth?” Let’s re-ask the question in an illuminating way: “What is the total cost in taxes of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the space station and shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit and missions yet to fly?” Answer: less than 1% on the tax dollar—7/10ths of a penny, to be exact. I’d prefer that it were more, perhaps 2 cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to no more than 4 cents on the tax dollar. At that level, NASA’s current space-exploration program would reclaim our pre-eminence in a field we pioneered. Right now, the program paddles along slowly, with barely enough support to ever lead the journey.

So, with 99 out of 100 cents going to fund the rest of our nation’s priorities, the space program is not now (nor has it ever really been) in anybody’s way. Instead, America’s former
investments in aerospace have shaped our discovery-infused culture in ways that are obvious to the rest of the world. But we are a sufficiently wealthy nation to embrace this investment for tomorrow—to drive our economy, our ambitions and, above all, our dreams.

 


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darth_josh wrote: Creekbed

darth_josh wrote:

Creekbed is in Paluxy. Debunked long ago by both sides. That one and another near Hopkinsville KY are key reasons why I am an atheist now. Thank you, 'creation science'.

 I think Textom was referring to the dino tracks at Glenrose, Tx.  I took my kids up there last summer.  Pretty neat.  I've read that some locals tried to chizzle in some human tracks around them to prove the bible, but I didn't see those tracks anywhere.

Oh, and there was a Creationist Museum right outside the park.  It's parking lot was empty.  I laughed and flipped the building the bird.

"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci