My upbringing was a little atypical – my parents never mentioned religion at all that I can remember. To this day, I’m only 50% sure they are also atheists, the other 50% is that they straddle the line between atheist and just-don’t-care. Though every year my dad says the Singularity is only 10 years away (he’s been saying this for the last 20 years), so they do have their little oddities. As a child, religion for me was no different from other bits of make-believe or the fantasy books I was constantly reading.
That started to change in high school – I was talking to people my age that were religious, and generally trying to figure the universe out. I went to church once or twice with my grandmother, but found the sermons pretty offensive. I stumbled into paganism after a blow up in a star trek email discussion group (long story), and thought that it sounded nice.
Actually, lets talk about the email group thing for a minute, because it really encapsulated for me for the first time how religion makes people crazy. This was an email group for discussing Star Trek Voyager (no, liking Voyager was not the crazy part). It was maybe 20 people, and our policy was that anyone could join if they were spoken for by another member. A new girl was getting introduced, so we sent her a “get to know you” form with things like birthday, interests, favorite books, etc. Under “interests” she talked a little bit about Wicca – it wasn’t a long thing, just sort of mentioned in passing.
A few of the existing members of the group Lost Their Shit. We couldn’t have a Wiccan in our group! They’re Evil! We ended up having a huge argument about it. In an email group for discussing Star Trek. Where religion had pretty much never come up before. It was so WEIRD. Several members, myself included, ended up quitting the group in protest.
Anyway, I floated that way through the rest of high school and most of college, but I always felt a little uncomfortable about it. It took a while, but I finally forced myself to confront why the whole pagan thing wasn’t working for me – it was just as silly as my other fantasy books. I realized that I wanted to believe, but that isn’t the same as actually believing. I found the thought of dying – of just not existing – to be terrifying. But that didn’t make me a believer. I couldn’t pretend to believe just to make myself feel better.
That’s one of the reasons I became a scientist, actually. If there’s nothing after death, then I should leave something behind me after I’m gone – some little bit of research that pushes our knowledge outward. It’s much more satisfying than fairies.
Sharon C
United States
Great story. I can closely relate to this story, although I got involved with some New Age stuff and Western interpretations of Eastern religions instead of Paganism. Part of what kept me from embracing atheism was the idea that I must have been missing something; how could so many otherwise reasonable people be so off base. But after awhile, as I contorted reason further and further to justify even the faintest bit of faith, I had to accept that I was swimming upstream for no purpose. My flailing about in religion is something I regret and I really wish atheism would’ve been more apparent to me at the time; it’s sad, but the most reasonable conclusions seemed so unreasonable to me when everyone else seemed to reject them.
And my parent’s are also probably atheists, but upon questioning they deflect and refuse to give a serious answer. If I push my Dad, he will say that perhaps there are spirits in the upper atmosphere and we should drop his ashes from a plane just so he can be sure. I’m not sure why because he hates flying.
‘I should leave something behind me after I’m gone – some little bit of research that pushes our knowledge outward. It’s much more satisfying than fairies.’
I like that, it’s a great quote. Thanks for sharing.
Second on that quote resonating.
Subjectively, those last two sentences had a lot of power. After seeing the comments, it seems they are objectively powerful.
Isn’t that funny how so many Star Trek fans completely overlook Gene Roddenberry’s humanist, agnostic views, which were on display in so many ST plots.
@Patrick J – Don’t regret your “flailing about” with religion. I’m sure you’ve come away from it with more information about other cultures (and subcultures) than many people have.
Agree with above posts – this little gem at the end is why I read every one of these WIAAA posts all the way through:
“If there’s nothing after death, then I should leave something behind me after I’m gone – some little bit of research that pushes our knowledge outward. It’s much more satisfying than fairies.”
The Force wasn’t with them.
Glen Davidson
Obviously. They’re Star Trek fans. They are blind to it.
My parents sound a bit like your parents. Religion just never really came up an my father was a science buff (we always had some Gould kicking around the house, it seemed). I am still not sure what their religious feelings are. I doubt my father would call himself an atheist, but he may be one, or as Sharon said he might “straddle the line between atheist and just-don’t-care”.
I never really dabbled in religion, the idea of god never really made sense to me despite going to church with relatives a few times and knowing plenty of religious folk. However, I did get interested in UFOs, ghosts and lots of paranormal things for a while. I think it stemmed from my interest in science as a young person but a lack of knowledge about science and how it worked. Paranormal “scientists” seemed to be doing research and showing this was true. Needless to say I got better (actually, the change was very sudden, started reading people like Dawkins and Sagan and I quickly realized they were not doing anything that one might label as science). I still find the topics interesting but more from the perspective of someone like Joe Nickell, I like to understand why people think they see things and just what the real explanation is.
There’s a school of thought that the singularity has already come and gone without much fanfare. That might give your dad some peace. Either way you should not let the belief that our own inventions will become smarter than us detract from his probability of being atheist
+1 to the last lines here’s hoping you have a hundred papers and a thousand citations.
Those last lines are sobering. Well, not literally: it’s Saturday night here, and I am in drink. But, dayum… maybe I need to find something useful to do tomorrow.
Travis:
Ditto. I had an appetite for anything sciency-sounding, though much of it was bullshit. I remember being fascinated by the “fact” that a razor blade could be sharpened by placing it under a pyramid with certain dimensions, years before I had any need for razor blades. I’m glad that I discovered Asimov when I did: his writing started the calibration of my bullshit meter, and possibly spared me a few years of believing nonsense.
“I went to church once or twice with my Grandmother, but found it pretty offensive”. – Just out of curiosity, Sharon, what aspects of the church service, or its message, offended you? In evaluating your Grandmother’s lifestyle and behaviour, was there any differences between her, and your parent’s code of ethics or the way each coped in everyday life?
It appears you wish to leave a legacy of knowledge – an imprint if you wish. Every human being I have spoken to in every culture has thus- innately programmed. From burning money to give to dead ancestors in Japan, to attending a shrine annually offering fruit to spirits that look after the family in a Netherland….
Death is also an issue for all. Folklores and stories worldwide deal with rites of passage to death, myths about ‘the undead’, and thoughts and traditions passed on about how to live forever, and how to live a life that reflects a ‘right’ moral code.
From a Scientist’s point of view, is this innate desire for immortality, morality and legacy a reflection of something that may truly originate from something real our ancestors knew? Or something they truly possessed?
What do you think, Sharon?
Antigodless, you say, “It appears you wish to leave a legacy of knowledge – an imprint if you wish. Every human being I have spoken to in every culture has thus- innately programmed. From burning money to give to dead ancestors in Japan, to attending a shrine annually offering fruit to spirits that look after the family in a Netherland….”
A legacy of knowledge doesn’t equate with attending to ‘spirits’, now does it? That’s a basic failure of logic on your part. Just as one would expect from someone with a name such as yours.
The rest of what you wrote is muddled too. Haven’t you heard of Darwin?
Antigodless, I found the most offensives part of the sermons were how at odds they were with what I knew about my grandmother. She was heavily involved in politics with a socially liberal/feminest bent, and a lot of the church content seemed like a slap in the face of all she worked for.
Actually, outside of the few times she asked us to go to church she didn’t talk about religion much. But she didn’t seem any more or less capable of loving her family and enjoying life than my parents.
I’m trying to type this on my Kindle, so I’m going to stop here. I think Dick the Dammed did an excellent job addressing your second point.
Japanese don’t burn money to ancestors.
Dick the damned stated:
“A legacy of knowledge doesn’t equate with attending to ‘spirits’, now does it? That’s a basic failure of logic on your part.”
You, my friend, aren’t obviously acquainted with Sociology, Anthropology, or Archaeology. Otherwise, you will know that your argument is irrelevant and my logic hasn’t failed. Ceremonies and traditions handed down often defines part of the wider culture. It also points to an inner search, that may well be based on something true. Archaeologists can reconstruct a culture and its mores from studying its artifacts, its folklore and its way of life. I don’t care about the rites of passage in every culture, or the ways that a particular culture remembers its departed. I am talking about the ways immortality and the search for significance is played out in every culture, thus reflecting an innate search for immortality and significance. Why do humans find the need to find immortality in the first place? Why is immortality, or indeed ‘leaving a legacy’ appear to be an integral part of all societies that have ever existed? Does it point to a wider and more ancient body of truth that points to an actual Creator?
This is where I ignore Darwin. I ignore the flawed dating methods and scientific premise that needs to extend the age of the universe countless millions of years when a fossil find doesn’t add up. I laugh at apparent attempts to produce transitional fossils that do not exist. And I laugh at a scientific community that fails to see that remarkably preserved forms of life and micro-organisms found in rock layers today cannot point to a worldwide Flood that happened far later than they expect.
At Sharon C:
I now see your background. To comfort you, the Christian book, the Bible, was groundbreaking in its day in treating women as equal. It is a shame that your Grandmother didn’t reflect a greater difference in lifestyle and speech than your agnostic parents. Those who attend Church are supposed to be ‘salt’ and ‘light’, and be radical reformers of their culture. In many areas, indeed they were. General William and his wife, Catherine Booth was one pair. William Wilberforce in the area of slavery, and indeed the Founding Fathers of the USA. Perhaps scientists aren’t into reading too much history, but perhaps you should see the pioneering efforts of Christians in mental health, nursing, social reform historically, and community development in so-called Third World countries.
The whole point of my post was that it doesn’t matter how “comforting” something is, if it’s not true. I refuse to stagnate with a pretty lie.
Anyway, I take much more comfort in Lord of the Rings than in the Bible. They’re both fiction but Lord of the Rings has better heroes, morals, and is WAY better written.
To Sharon C –
glad you mentioned ‘Lord Of the Rings.’ JRR Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic and was one of the catalysts for the conversion of an Atheist academic called CS Lewis (remember Narnia?)
In some letters Tolkien wrote, he clearly stated the themes and worldview presented in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy:
“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
You are right …. The Lord of the Rings is valuable if only it is seen in the proper way. Perhaps the writings of the Bible may even offer more to the reader if it is taken in the way it was meant to be read by the original writers, rather than being seen as a fictional work.
antigodless, as logic isn’t your strong point, how about some poetry?
So, here’s a Hudibrastic verse on woo,
for superstitious folk like you.
The Christian’s Jehovah, an Almighty God,
is a capricious and cantankerous clod;
and, so far as I can tell,
the Christian often is as well.
Confused by dogma, the god-fearin’ fogey
can’t fathom the nature of that Bible Bogey.
Is it a father, his son, and an apotropaic ghost too?
Well, it should be obvious that’s ridiculous woo.
And Christians claim this god, in its Empyrean lair,
is omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent and fair,
but, with the unresolved problem of theodicy,
their dogma is eristic, Christian idiocy.
The Jew’s Yahweh, that meshuggeneh, the jerk,
set Jews strict rules on when to work,
how to dress, and what to sup or sip,
and giving baby boys the snip.
The myths of Bronze Age, goat-herding nomads,
have them, metaphorically, by the gonads.
The Moslem’s Allah, a fierce desert djinn,
demands under ‘Islam’, literally, ‘Submission’.
Apostasy is treated just like a crime;
they’ll threaten to kill you, to keep you in line,
and if you dare draw Mohammad in a comic cartoon,
there’ll be riots and killings from here to Khartoum.
Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist,
Zoroastrian, Baha’i, Mormon, and Scientologist,
Confucianist, Shintoist, and Taoist too,
Spiritualist, Wiccan, and the New Ager into woo.
Yea, verily, those of each and every religion,
are mired in the miasma of superstition.
The gods from the Bronze Age up to modern times,
and from the Arctic down to tropical climes,
have inspired theology that’s unsubstantiated twaddle,
on what an invisible and silent god’ll
devise as its inscrutable, eschatological plan,
but all the gods were made in the image of man.
So, why should yours be the one true faith,
in a magic, phantasmagorical wraith?
Belief, without evidence, is just plain crazy,
ignorant, stupid, or thoughtlessly lazy.
When evolution happens, it’s due to Natural Selection,
so life derives no purpose, at a theistic god’s direction.
The evidence is we have just this one life,
with all its pleasures, challenges, toil, and strife.
As social beings we evolved our moral sensibility
to combat selfishness, lust, and venality.
Religion misunderstands, and so invokes the supernatural,
while Humanism strives to promote the good and rational.
Even if you ignore the good science that dates fossils, astronomy says the universe is older than 6000 years. Much much older.
It doesn’t except in your delusional presuppositional mind. Anybody who looks at the evidence acknowledges there is no evidence for a creator. You are scared to acknowledge the truth–your deity only exists between your delusional ears.
This is why we ignore your fuckwitted and inane OPINIONS. You have no evidence.
We laugh at your inability to understand interpolation. Which is all the transitional fossils are. And you are a transitional species too. All species are transitional, as evolution never stops, no matter what you inane OPINIONS say.
Your flood never happened. Show us the discontinutity in each continents fossil record and in the radiometric dating of the geological column, showing that a one-time-all-world-killing-all-life flood took place 6000 years ago. That evidence is found in places like this library, and not in anything that falsely presupposes you babble, a book of mythology/fiction, is inerrant. Anything based on false presuppositions is false.
Your babble is nothing but a work of fiction, and a worse written book than most fiction. Nothing of interest there, and not inerrant. You haven’t shown that it is anything other than mythology fiction.
Time to put up or shut the fuck up antigodless. For your imaginary deity, show conclusive physical evidence, evidence that will pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers, as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Something equivalent to the eternally burning bush. Or, shut the fuck up about it, as all you have is your delusional OPINION, which without evidence, can *POOF*, be dismissed as the nonsense it is.
antigodless,
You really have to be pretty stupid not to see the obvious answer: because people don’t like the idea of ceasing to exist.
No. Wishful thinking points to nothing other than features of human psychology.
Liar: you just mentioned him, so you’re not ignoring him.
Liar: a wide range of dating methods give consistent results where they overlap, and there are none which give seriously inconsistent results.
Liar. We have multiple examples of fossils that are transitional between groups of organisms as they appear today*: between fish and tetrapods, between reptiles and mammals, between birds and their flightless ancestors, between whales and their land-living ancestors, between humans and their ape ancestors.
Whoops! You accidentally reversed the sense of the lie you undoubtedly meant to tell. Indeed these fossils cannot point to a worldwide flood, because no such flood has ever occurred. That the Noachian flood never happened in the way described in Genesis was established in the 1820s and 1830s, before Darwin wrote, by geologists including the Rev. William Buckland and the Rev. Adam Sedgwick, devout Christians who, unlike shameless liars such as you, were honest enough to admit that the belief in a universal flood they had started out with, was clearly contradicted by the evidence.
*I use everyday language terms rather than modern scientific terminology for clarity in what follows.
@ Sharon C
Actually Paganism is certainly not as bad as xtianity. It is not the monster that xtianity tries to project.
Indeed it is a very humanist project.
Xtianity is a death cult. I teaches you that one can ignore your life as little more than an entrance exam to an imaginary paradise. And a very derivative one at that.
Atheism says there is no heaven and no hell. When you are dead you are dead. OK, that much is true, but compare to teh Pagans:
Paganism (Hellenism, fuck that other crap) says that you do come back, But that you come back in a really crappy place. That means that you really try your best. It is not just nothing when you die. You have then wasted the only opportunity to be happy… EVAH! Everyone will suffer. Make the most of your life. Leave a legacy. The afterlife is hell for everyone. If anything, the pagan way is the way that helps humanity the most in the long run.
Interesting that you and a couple of other commenters also had this experience. It just never came up in my family, and while my father is openly contemptuous of organized churches, I likewise still don’t know whether my parents believe in any kind of god or not. Growing up in Massachusetts (not exactly a hotbed of fundyism, in a mostly Catholic and Jewish town) I didn’t know anyone who took religion seriously; a lot of my schoolmates had to attend CCD and hated it as a chore, so that was pretty much my only religious interaction. It was taking a class on the New Testament (which can’t avoid showing how fake it is, and how much more Greek than Jewish influence is in it) that started to change me from mostly apathy to antipathy toward religion.
@ KG: KG, your comments only reinforce the fact that you have not done your research in errors in dating, in accepting media, artist and hopeful Scientist views that there MAY be transitional forms, but which in fact show the same characteristics as modern species, and you succeeded in quoting two geologists who stated a hypotheses that geological formations exclude a worldwide flood, but in fact too many times shows specimens in old layers that does not correlate with their supposed age dated by traditional methods. A common experience, that you may not be aware of, is that a date may be acquired but, if it comes lesser than current research, then it will be scrapped and dated again.
So…. who has REALLY been lying to you? Have you swallowed naively all the textbook science theories (theory is man made postulations open to challenge and review), but then criticise anything that has a label such as ‘God’, ‘supernatural’, ‘faith’. Who, then, is lying to you?
“Whoops! You accidentally reversed the sense of the lie you undoubtedly meant to tell. Indeed these fossils cannot point to a worldwide flood, because no such flood has ever occurred. That the Noachian flood never happened in the way described in Genesis was established in the 1820s and 1830s, before Darwin wrote, by geologists including the Rev. William Buckland and the Rev. Adam Sedgwick, devout Christians who, unlike shameless liars such as you, were honest enough to admit that the belief in a universal flood they had started out with, was clearly contradicted by the evidence.”
Really? So you are relying on data from the 1820s and 1830s now? I can give you names of geologists who would contradict this, and they live in the tHwenty-first century. Again, you are relying on the opinions of a couple of so-called ‘experts’ you probably learnt about in Geology 101 without looking at science as a continual body of theories that are currently using a popular theory as a foundation for postulating dates of fossils, dates of the universe, dates of research, and who could possibly be providing inaccurate data because of the very premise it has used since Darwin, and any other so-called scholars you would like to mention.
antigodless “rejects” Darwin because of ignorance and incredulity.
Listen up, asshole, you may be able to peddle your bullshit among your creationist buddies but you’re dealing with people who know something about science here.
Radiometric dating is not an iffy thing. The universe is not a few thousand years old. Evolution is better established than most other scientific theories.
No, asshole. What he’s saying is that as far back as the 1820s and 1830s it was known there wasn’t a Noachian flood. Despite the lies of your creationist sources, no geologist since then has thought such a flood happened.
@ ‘Tis Himself
Tsk, tsk. Touched a nerve, have we. Doesn’t humanism strive to promote the good and rational, as Dick the Damned states in his comment #20. Anger, crudity and other such actions only prompts violence, racism and bigotry. Do Atheist Scientists really resort to that when challenged. I think perhaps we HAVE found the missing link after all – irate Atheist Scientists. Ho, Ho, Ho.
Your laughter is hollow and desperate, because it is based on what is false. You may not admit that it’s false, but if you’ve actually studied the science of radiometric dating, or geology, then you know that what creationism says about radiometric dating and geology is false.
Science is based on facts. And if you’ve actually studied the science of radiometric dating, or geology, you know that they are facts.
Not really. There are a few verses that can be read as promoting equality — and far more that deliberately denigrate women, either explicitly or implicitly.
Tolkien may have said that — but the characters in his more popular books never speak of God, and never perform worship of any sort. He may have intended a Catholic work, but his potrayal of the relation between God and his creations is far more similar to that conceived of by pagans.
Where are the forms that show the same characteristics as Tiktaalik, Archaeopterix, and Australopithecus?
Creationists. Always creationists, because creationism is a lie.
The data from the 1800s has not been contradicted by any more recent data; therefore, it stands.
Creationist “geologists” are liars. Always liars; only liars.
If they were not liars, they would publish these supposed “contradictions” in the peer-reviewed geological literature, but they do not. When and if they do publish in the peer-reviewed geological literature, they only publish in accord with the accepted geological dating methods.
Not only are they liars, they don’t even really believe their own lies — they just lie to fellow creationists.
This is nothing more than a sign of pathetic desperation.
You touched a nerve alright – trolling creationist twaddle on Pharyngula gets irritating very quickly. Creationism has been rejected a bazillion times, but you don’t care as long as you get attention?
Let’s see if you can pick out how flawed Christianity is. Here’s a very concise summary of Christian belief:
The belief that a walking dead Jewish deity who was his own father although he always existed, commits suicide by cop, although he didn’t really die, in order to give himself permission not to send you to an eternal place of torture that he created for you, but instead to make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically promise him you accept him as your master, so he can cleanse you of an evil force that is present in mankind because a rib-woman and a mud-man were convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
The whole thing would make Jesus die laughing, if he wasn’t already dead, and assuming he ever existed.
andrewscott,
Let’s rewrite that scenario. You can do better than that. How about a story of an American soldier who ran out into the line of enemy fire to protect a child he sees stumbling down the road. Or perhaps a mother who gives birth to a son, and gives him everything until he turns 20. He has a promising life, but he suddenly decides to ignore her mum totally, and tell her he will go somewhere without telling her where he lives. She then reads months later that he became involved in a drug racket, and was recently placed on death row in a foreign country.
Furthermore, The theory of a higher being beyond our time and dimensions creating an orderly universe is far more plausible than a conjecture that an atom suddenly came into existence, then other chemical elements came from nowhere, and over millions of years came together to form DNA. Then, life forms with separate instincts, characteristics, and abilities were able to mutate, or create their own unique patterns of living in an orderly fashion without assistance of a higher intelligence.
So where did the higher being come from? Seriously, it’s not more plausible since it just adds a level of complexity.
And what the fuck were those scenarios for? Really? What actual relevance were they?
PZ, we might have another case of incurable stupidity! Quarantine to TZT could be needed, stat!
Magic man done it…
…because you don’t understand science. Therefore, Jesus.
Do you ever feel like thinking?
Except that Christians actually can’t make a sane “scenario” out of their mythology. It makes no sense.
Except that the only “driver” on the road is the soldier himself, and he’s got a mutant healing factor, so the “enemy fire” is only a momentary inconvenience.
Wait, what? This is so distant from anything to do with Christianity that there’s barely any mapping between your characters, and those of the Christian myth.
Who is the “mother”? God? God knows everything that the son is supposedly doing, and is in fact responsible for the son doing everything he does.
The son is Jesus? In a drug racket, seriously?
Well, anyway, he’s joined the drug racket because his “mom” wants him to. And being on death row doesn’t matter because, hey, mutant healing factor! He’ll just get better. And his “mom” knows this.
OK, you don’t actually know any science. That’s par for the course with creationists, of course. Never taking a science class; never reading up on science, then thinking that ignorance of science is just as good as knowledge.
Feh.
@ Owlmirror
“Where are the forms that show the same characteristics as Tiktaalik, Archaeopterix, and Australopithecus?”
27th July,2011 a discovery in China led to a hypotheses that Archaeopteryx wasn’t a bird, because there were dinosaurs that shared the same features that looked bird-like, such as wishbones, three fingered hands and even feathers. Check the article out in ‘nature.com.’ Did you know that even Tyrannosaurusses had a wishbone???
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110727/full/news.2011.443.html
tiktaalik- In January 2010, tracks with digitals were found in rocks more than 10 million years older than the tittaalik (dated by evolutionists. flood theorists, of course, would date earlier) . This means the Tiktaalik would have lived millions of years earlier which, many Paleontologists say is impossible. More of story – inaccuracies of theories extolled as transitional fossil evidence in 2006 has been displaced in 2010. See ‘Nature, 463, 40-41, 7 January 2010’
Australopithecus – artists impressions, in the past have proven to be apes, humans with deficiencies, or with such diseases as rickets. Considering a whole lot of assumptions based on questionable dating levels, and unproved theories fueled by media exaggeration, and we get … Not a lot.
In conclusion: evolutionary theorists need to keep changing their theories with constant data collection and questionable dating methods based on rock layers, assumptions such as levels of carbon and radioactive isotopes in the earth here and whatever period they study, and interpret data based on uncertain facts.
Keep trying, atheists.
antigodless, it’s you that is trying.
You’re showing faulty reasoning. If scientists have some minor details wrong, based on the incomplete fossil record, it doesn’t matter at all to the veracity of evolution.
You say, “… evolutionary theorists need to keep changing their theories…” That, you poor unfortunate person, is the strength of science. As new evidence is obtained, theories can be refined. The over-arching theory that evolution occurred due mostly to natural selection is not affected by this.
That’s so much better than believing the myths of Bronze Age tribesmen that is the bible.
antigodless,
Liar. You cite no specific examples for the claims you make here, because you can’t.
More lies. I cited honest Christians from the 1820s and 1830s in the hope of shaming you, but you are clearly shameless. You may be able to name a couple of risible modern-day cranks calling themselves geologists, but you know as well as I do that the vast, overwhelming majority of geologists laugh at them for their stupidity as they would at you. The relative dates of the main rock strata, back as far as the Cambrian, were worked out before either radioactive dating or evolutionary palaeontology, both of which have confirmed these relative datings and in the case of radioactive dating, made them absolute. Again, you cite no specific examples because you can’t, liar.
You really are quite amazingly stupid: the very fact that Archaeopteryx is not easily classifed either as a bird, or not a bird, is a strong point for the evolutionary hypothesis that birds evolved from non-avian dinosaurs. Here’s a quote from your link:
So the argument is not about whether birds evolved from non-avian dinosaurs, but about which of the dinosaurs with some birdlike features are most closely related to modern birds.
What is this garbage? There are no such beings as “flood theorists”, and haven’t been since the 1830s: only ignorant idiots like you believe in a universal flood, and AFAIK, they all claim the earth is only a few thousand years old. The article you cite does in turn cite evidence that tetrapods existed before Tiktaalik. So what? The evolution of tetrapods from fish undoubtedly took place over millions of years, and contrary to the cretinous caricature of evolutionary theory propagated by lying creobots, there is no requirement that it take place in a neat series of stages, such that all the representatives of one stage disappear when the next arises.
Give specific references, or admit you’re lying once again. Oh, and if “Piltdown Man” and “Nebraska Man” are the best you can manage, you needn’t bother: both the fraud (Piltdown) and the error (Nebraska) were of course uncovered by real scientists, not by creationist liars and fools.
I see AntiIMAGINARYDEITYless is back, showing its ignorance. Time to present a lesson to the lurkers, as AID is probably incapable of learning.
First thing is a quote from Christopher Hitchens on skepticism:
This means anything AID shows that it doesn’t back with evidence can and will be *POOF*, dismissed as mere OPINION, compared to science and logic.
Science is a methodology for investigating the universe. And it works, as it is designed, as much as possible, to take investigator bias out of the work and let the evidence speak for itself. It is also a work in progress. Only fuckwitted idjits like godbots and creationists pretend science is or should be a static endeavor. Science is asymptotically approaching truths, as they aren’t revealed, and must be figured out using evidence. It isn’t always a smooth process and may require some backtracking and rethinking. Science organizes itself with overriding scientific theories, such as atomic theory, molecular theory, and the theory of evolution. Now, scientific theories are more than what fuckwitted idjit godbots and creobots try to pretend are mere guesses, which is the common usage of theory. Scientific theories are backed by solid and conclusive evidence. The threory of evolution has a million or so scientific papers backing it, both directly and indirectly, so there is no question that evolution is happening. Now, science is only refuted by more science. That means that the refutation must be printed in the peer review scientific literture as articles or series of articles, and those articles are found in journals in places like this, a science-engineering library at an institution of higher learning.
To be continued.
@antigodless,
So this urge for immortality is something you believe is universal in all human cultures and you think this indicates some kind of need for/communication with the supernatural?
Animal behavior promotes survival. The goal is to reproduce. Fear is a useful mechanism to achieve this end. Humans can contemplate the future, we know we are all going to die. Quite understandably, we fear it. There are all kinds of emotional and or intellectual coping mechanisms for dealing with the knowledge of our own mortality: denial, stoicism, mindfulness etc… We see both the desire to leave something behind for egotistical reasons and the desire to leave something behind for altruistic reasons. And there are those who want to leave something good behind as evidence for their upcoming trial by the terrifying sky judge.
Religion falls under the category of denial. You will believe anything so as to pretend you will not die, that you will live forever. I don’t fault you for your cowardice. It’s scary stuff. I’m less compassionate about your chosen coping mechanism, this belief in your magical superhero with his ridiculous set of rules. And when you try to foist this crap on other people, that is when you have richly deserved my contempt.
You are so afraid of the dark and dying you will believe rubbish. And it is thin, improbable and ridiculous rubbish. Of course, it is very hard to for you to believe if you are not surrounded by fellow cultists. You want to silence any questioning. That is why you can’t tolerate our billboards, our bus posters. We can’t be allowed to speak it aloud, that your religions are make believe, hideous cruel make believe. So you come here, you fool.
It’s worse than LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU. You want us to shut up so you can pretend more easily. But we won’t shut up, because we won’t have you imposing your loopy crap rules on us. We’ve seen the end run of theocracy and it is very ugly indeed. We aren’t interested in a world run by those rules. We aren’t interested in being controlled. We aren’t interested in having human civilization destroyed by a war to decide which group of followers of which spiteful jackass deity gets to be in charge.
We are not shutting up. We are not going away. And we aren’t going to give you free rein to do whatever whack job thing the voices in your head tell you to do.
That is not scientific thinking. That is a flight of fancy unsupported by any evidence that explains it better than any other hypothesis. Such as people simply not wanting to die and not wanting to live without their loved ones, and thus inventing fictions to compensate. Occam’s Razor.
And let me guess, all those cultures got the details of this creator wrong except for one tribe in the Middle East during the middle period of the Roman Empire. You should really drop the mantles of Science (with a capital s!) and particularly sociology and anthropology, because you suck at all of them.
Nope, taking it as a fictional work, in addition to being the more parsimonious hypothesis, tells us much more about ancient people and human nature than thinking that it’s really about a magic man in the sky who did all sorts of smiting for these people and then disappeared completely.
Who died and made you Grand Poobah of Literature?
Even if that were true, which is laughable, it would still have no bearing on today’s world. We have thousands of much better books now.
antigodless,
Ah yes. Jumping between evolution and the Big Bang ‘cos they’re totally the same thing!
This is why I fucking love science– our universe didn’t “come from nowhere”– it very well may have been “born” in a black hole.
No impossible magic man needed!
Some more background information. Science and skepticism makes great use of a few principles. Two of the biggest are the Null Hypothesis, and Parsimony.
The Null Hypothesis is used to counteract the dithering can occur with the concept of say, my deity hasn’t been disproved. The problem is that negatives can’t be proven, unless what is being disproved is sufficiently defined it can be falsified. This allows for a look at positive evidence for a claim (say the existence of bigfoot), see nothing conclusive, and make the null hypothesis for bigfoot (or Yahweh) as non-existent. There is nothing in the null hypothesis that doesn’t allow for positive evidence for the claims of bigfoot or Yahweh to be presented, just that claims of not disproving either can be *POOF* dismissed. Science and skepticism puts claims of deities into the null hypothesis as non-existent, and puts holy book into the category of mythology/fiction. Positive evidence, not just OPINION, is needed to move things out of the null hypothesis
Parismony is the principle that the simplest explanation, requiring the least unevidenced presumptions, is often right. Godbots and creobots don’t understand this principle. For example, they claim science says the universe came from nothing. Now, they make the presumption (presupposition) that their imaginary deity said *POOF*, and the universe came about. The problem, is that their creator came from nothing too, and had to be created or *POOFED* into existence. So, they get the same results as science, but with an added presuppostion, that of their creator. Parsimony says science is right, as it is the simpler explanation, requiring less presuppositions.
More to come.
From the little i know of hunter-gatherer societies, i can’t see that the premise of the first question would be true. The second question is risible because hunter-gatherer societies don’t have a ‘body of truth’ other than their mythology, & only fools would attribute any scientific worth to that.
By no means true. They always have a knowledge of their own language and social norms; and generally have an intimate knowledge of the geography and natural history of their environment, and considerable knowledge of tool-making, tool-using and pedagogical techniques.
Godbots and creobots excel at logical fallacies. For example, science is only refuted by more science. Science is not refuted by opinion, the babble, philosophical questions, philosophical sophistry, inane questions, attempts at ridicule, and anything other than more science. Pretending science is refuted by anything other than more science is a logical error, in particular, a category error.
Take the case of radiometric dating. It is not refuted by saying you don’t think it is right, that it is wrong without citing the scientific literature, it is wrong because the dates refute the babble, etc. The only thing that refutes radiometric dating is more science. In particular, what would be needed is conclusive physical evidence that the weak nuclear force has varied with time, and the result would be that the decay rate isn’t constant over time. But, this would have to be done over all nucleotides, and any variance would have to result in the present ratios of isotopes and present decay rates. Any sign of this in the scientific literature? Nope. Therefore, the null hypothesis is that the science of radiometric dating is correct until clear and conclusive evidence is presented to refute that conclusion.
Honesty and integrity are also important. If a person has honesty and integrity, they are prepared to present real evidence to back up their claims, or shut up about said claims until they have the necessary evidence. If one can’t back their claims, and can’t shut up about their claims, they are con men, that is liars and bullshitters, and everything they say should be considered bullshit until they demonstrate otherwise with third party evidence.
Take the claims for imaginary deities. Since it is an extraordinary claim, it should have a larger level of evidence than normal. Godbots go the opposite direction and pretend that vague and ill-defined evidence is all that is needed. To provide real evidence for a deity, it should be physical, and should be conclusive enough that scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers, all conclude it is of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. It needs to be the equivalent of the eternally burning bush. Is any such evidence ever produced? No.
Just like their babble, if it was inerrant, they should be able to go to the scientific literature, and find a discontinuity in the geological column for each continent that corresponds to their babble’s flood, that shows all life being extinguished, and dates to the proper time with radiometric dating. Nope, not in the scientific literature. Also, funny how old civilizations have a continuous presence during that alleged flood time without any more than normal loss of life…and that is never explained away…and solidly refutes the babble’s big flood, bringing the whole babble into the category of non-inerrant mythology/fiction.
KG, my abject apologies. Of course they do – i should’ve qualified my statement to indicate that i only intended it to apply to a putative body of knowledge within the context of the creationist’s question.
@ Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls: you are close to seeing the issues of science with regards to delving into the origins of life and some uncertainties they grapple with.
@ Sharon C- all the best on your journey in making a mark with your existence. I hope I have challenged you a little about the value of faith – as both Science and religion needs to base claims on untested assumptions. I, for one, look forward to my death and base my faith that an eternal creator with no origins will replace my ageing and weak body with a strong and immortal one. I am a god-bot and proud to be. To scientists everywhere, medical and technological discoveries have immensely changed our world with ground breaking research. Thank you.
Just to encourage you, though. You don’t need to be an Atheist scientist to make a difference in the world. Many scientific discoveries are made by scientists who believe in an eternal being who loves every individual on this planet.
I shall reply no more – unless Sharon C has something more to say. Thank you, fellow debaters. Your comments have been considered. And I say ‘may God bless you all’ because…. As a Godbot, I can. :)
Antigodless
No, I am seeing a liar and bullshitter who can’t prove its deity isn’t imaginary, and its babble isn’t a book of mythology fiction lie and bullshit about science. Either cite the literature to back up your claims of a deity, or you are a proven liar and bullshitter. Your deity isn’t the null hypothesis. Your deity is imaginary.
Atheists don’t have faith. That is for delusional fools who can’t put up, and can’t shut the fuck up like yourself. You lie to yoursel and then lie to us. Pathetic and dishonest, but typical of those trying to support their imaginary things in the face of reality.
And we say “fuck you too”, because that is what you are saying in passive-aggressive delusional speech of fuckwitted fools.
What we saw here lurkers was the typical last desperate ploy of the godbot/creobot AntiIMAGINARYDEITYless who knows they will have their ass handed to them on a silver platter if they go against people who know their weakness, which is their lack of evidence for their imaginary deity and their babble being inerrant. They put on the attitude that they won, declare victory, and fade away.
It is a tacit acknowledgement that they have nothing that they can defend in a real argument over evidence. Not OPINIONS, but real and solid scientific evidence. They are acknowledging they lost.
Some of us lurkers would really like to see this one stick the flounce.
antigodless,
The difference is that science is always willing to test its assumptions, which are always provisional, while the religious proudly proclaim their refusal to do so.
Grounded, of course, in the very same fundamental physics and evolutionary science you tell brazen lies about, you hypocritical ingrate.
Yet another lie from you.
You do know, I’m sure, that it is highly insulting to say that to someone you know to be an atheist.
antigodless #28
Are you using the royal, the editorial or the pregnant “we”?
Yes, asshole, you touched a nerve. You came to a science blog and tried to get rational people to abandon reality for 2,500 year old religious myths some bronze age goatherds stole from the Babylonians. You do know the basis for the Noachian flood is the legend of Gilgamesh, don’t you?
Just because you fear reality doesn’t mean the rest of us do. So take your religious fear and hatred and shove it where the Sun don’t shine.
It’s sad that this person can’t break out of his/her mental straight-jacket, & taste intellectual freedom.
What a sad case that antigodless is – but an excellent example of the damage done by Xinanity.
Nothing self-serving about that.
It’s always been known that Archaeopteryx wasn’t like any bird that exists now. Even back in the 1860s, scientists could look at it and note the teeth and long bony tail.
These are characters that do not exist in any modern bird, or anything like a bird.
So, in other words: All theropod dinosaurs have characters that are also shared by birds.
And therefore, Archaeopteryx is an excellent example of a transitional organism between ancestral theropod dinosaurs and modern birds.
Do you really not notice that you’re not supporting creationism, and that you are in fact are presenting facts supporting evolution?
So?
Since “flud theorists” have no idea what they’re talking about, their dates — no matter what confused, convoluted, and fallacious logic they use to arrive at them — must be wrong.
No, it doesn’t.
Since actual palaeontologists are not creationists, and are not as confused as creationists, it follows that what creationists pretend that palaeontologists say cannot actually be what those palaeontologists say.
Once again, the actual facts you point to support evolution — specifically, the evolution of tetrapods from earlier lobe-finned fish. And what they actually support is that process of evolution having taken place earlier than originally thought.
This does not mean that Tiktaalik is not a transitional organism. It just means that there are more transitional organisms, and earlier ones.
Citing from the last line of the abstract:
There is no question that the fish-tetrapod transition occurred, here.
You either have not read the paper and understood it — or you read it and understood it all too well, and are lying by omission.
Only in the sense that all hominids, hominins, and hominans are apes.
Once again, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
The false idea that Neanderthals — much later than Australopithecus, of course — were humans “with rickets” was based on false reasoning and ignoring data. It was bad science.
The false idea that Neanderthals were humans “with deficiencies” is simply a creationist lie.
The Creationist lies about Neanderthals have nothing to do with Australopithecus, anyway.
We get that Australopithecus was a transitional organism between earlier non-hominan apes, and humans.
We also get that you have no facts in support of creationism, and that all the facts that there are support evolution.
Or rather, improving theories.
Because that’s how all theories are improved: with new actual data, rather than with ignoring data, like creationists do.
Creationists “question” dating methods, because they don’t actually understand them, and indeed, refuse to allow themselves to understand them.
We know, for a fact, that you have refused to allow yourself to understand dating methods.
Because if you actually had any understanding at all of dating methods, you would never have brought up carbon dating with regards to dating the fossils of any of the three organisms mentioned above.
In other words, you’re an ignorant, stupid person, and you refuse to learn, and you refuse to think.
Which is far better than what creationists do, which is lie and make up lies about what scientists do.
You’re doomed, creationist. Your pathetic myths fail and fall, and you know that you cannot support them. All you can do is lie and blather nonsense, like a liar who isn’t even any good at lying.
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The only “untested assumption” of science is that reality is consistent enough to be tested.
Religion is based on make-believe. Creationism is based on the refusal to acknowledge when religious make-believe about reality has been refuted by science.
…because you know, for a fact, that other dead people are around with “strong and immortal” bodies?
Do they talk to you?
What do they say?
Technically, since most scientists are atheists, far more scientific discoveries are made by scientists who know that “an eternal being who loves every individual on this planet” is an absurd statement with no foundation in reality.
Because you know that you have no facts in support of your arguments?
Meh. You’d probably find some way to be evasive or dishonest about your replies to her as well.