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Saudi Instructional Video - How wives should be disciplined

Buck says...

My anger at this and religion in general make me sick. The Catholics also "hate" women and almost all religions hate gays.

Fuck you islamists. Fuck you.

oh and this: from another of my posts.
It is a long letter to creationists but I'm re dedicating it to islamists too.
Call me hatefull but between this and the recent video of a child dying being circumsized, I AM FED UP WITH THIS BULL SH*T.

Religion HAS to go.
OH you're moderate you say? This stuff isn't what you and your flock believe? Unless you've gotten up in front of your church or temple to proclaim this crap WRONG, you are complicit in my eyes.

*language*insults*dissing religion*wall of text* (if these things offend DO NOT READ)

Dear Creationists, and Islamists,

You are stupid.
Genuinely stupid.
By every conceivable metric that we can assess intelligence, intellect, mental ability, reasoning and sense. Even the very ability to string words together in coherent ways. You fail at this. You are stupid. There is no way of getting out of this accusation; it is as close to an absolute, proven fact, that a scientific assessment can get.

Not ignorant. No, that’s something else. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge. That’s fine. I cannot blame someone for merely not knowing, or not being exposed to information. You don’t get a choice in ignorance and merely not knowing. For a start, you’re born ignorant of everything in the entire world. New born babies don’t even know what things in the world are part of their own bodies and what things aren’t – they really do have to learn this for themselves. So, no, you’re not just ignorant because if you were, I wouldn’t be here writing this.

No, this is something fucking different, far fucking worse. What you stand not only accused of, but proven guilty of, shits and pisses all over the innocence of ignorance and goes into dark territory of deceit and lies. This is wilful ignorance. This is prideful ignorance. You take your ignorance and wave it around at every opportunity to say “hey, look at me, I’m so fucking stupid” and expect people to respect you for it. Do I want to blame you for it? When your elders, and priests, and preachers, and the unqualified crank pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophers they get to back them up, have all conspired to brainwash you into thinking this is a good thing? Yes, I fucking do. You have made a choice to stay ignorant, and be happy with it. You’re a fucking idiot, and you damn well know it. You know it, and you Just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.

Why do I bother with you? Just why? Why do I drag myself down to that sort of level?
Let’s look at some clear facts here.
I have a fucking masters degree. I took four years out of my life learning quantum mechaincs, management, nuclear physics, organic, inorganic, analytical, green, environmental, atmospheric chemistry, mathematics, and a fuck-ton of life skills and problem solving skills possessed by a tiny fraction of people.

I can write, I can draw, I can play and compose music, and I can program a computer to do a little jig. Importantly, I know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re” – and fuck knows that’s a rare skill. I’m even nice on occasion and, if I try, even likeable. I’m just going to blow a trumpet and say I have most talents bar singing (sigh).

I wrote a whopping four-hundred-fucking-page book to get a doctorate. It’s sat there on a table right now, all bound and shiny with gold letters and my name on it, looking thick enough to bludgeon someone to death with. To get that far, I was locked in a room with two experts who read it and who spent nearly three hours ripping it to shreds and finding any excuse they could not to give the final award to me. At the end of it all, half a dozen people with the same level of qualification and beyond have all conspired to say “you’re good enough to be one of us”. I fucking starved. I fucking wrote ’til I dropped. I stayed up late and got up early. All to get that. And as blasé and modest as I try to come across in public, I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think it was all worth it.

And I’ve taught students. People even better than me, who have fought their way through the same shit and more, have said I’m good enough to be their proxy or their replacement to teach the next generation. I’m actively passing on knowledge, whether established or cutting edge, to students who one day will grow up to be the next me. Some days I hate those little shits, but to be fair to them, one day a good chunk of them will also be locked in that room with a pair of experts, shitting themselves and wanting to all go away. They will come out of it alive, as One Of Us, and they will fucking well deserve every bit of it. I am a cog in that machine, and damn well proud of it.

In short, I’m smart. I’m intelligent. I’m rational. I’m reasonable. I’m brainy as fuck. By every conceivable metric, I am at the top of the grey matter tree. If I believed in the absoluteness of the IQ test, I’d be bragging my ass off about being in the 98th percentile (I dunno, actually, last time I took one I was 15).
That’s me.

You, however, as someone who thinks the planet magically poofed into existence 6,000 years ago, you’re at the bottom of that tree. I’m may well be in the 98th percentile, but you, you dumb fuck, wouldn’t even know what “percentile” means without Google – which, by the way, has been built by the kind of people who know what “percentile” means without using Google. Because they had to have some way of knowing what it meant before they fucking built the thing – since you, you dumbfuck imbecile, need every little fucking thing explained to you in small words that don’t tax your brain too hard.

You, because you manage to be mentally retarded in such a way that it’s actually an offence to those with genuine learning difficulties, couldn’t fucking understand the mere basics of anything I could possibly teach you about anything. About chemistry, biology or physics. Even the fucking basics of logic, or language, or how to frame an argument, or what evidence is, or why it’s important, or how science even works. Hell, the hurdles I would have to leap just to get you people to the point of discussing actual evolutionary biology or actual geology or actual radiometric dating would require me to type thousands of words, and spend months of my life. And it wouldn’t be worth it because you would ignore it. You wouldn’t even address the basics. I could try to exemplify every nuance, meaning and deconstruction of, say, the phrase “evolution is a religion”, and you’d zone out as soon as I broke into polysyllabic words and then, just as a little bit of drool came out, you’d say “but evolution is just a religion”.

It’s all just fucking voodoo shit to you, something you’re actively scared of and don’t want to understand. You’ve rendered yourself physically incapable of understanding and basic comprehension and so I find myself almost constantly, every time I see one of you dumb shits opening your mouths, struggling not to outright scream from the rooftops. Every single word in this extensive rant has been compressed in my head into a single thought and that thought fires in my brain every time I see you people speak or type or even making a motion to open your mouths or put fingers to a keyboard.

You sit and worship people like Kent Hovind, whose entire thesis wouldn’t even count as a winning entry in NaNoWriMo (which requires 50,000 words in a month) and has a Flesch reading age of a pre-teen (by contrast, the Flesch-Kincade reading complexity for my own thesis goes to the part of the scale where “reading age” stops being a meaningful concept, and a single chapter is larger than Kent Hovind’s entire derp-fest, and there’s fucking diagrams to boot). Or you shout “amen” after every little tiny piece of faeces that oozes out of the mouth of Ray Comfort – a man, lest we forget, who thinks the word “bibliophile” is a fucking insult derived from “paedophile”. These aren’t just people amongst your ranks, these are your fucking experts.

You repeat mantras that have been refuted countless times. Even if you ever get around to addressing one of these refutations all you can ever come up with is restating the point again or whining about some other pathetic and irrelevant detail. I’m not even going to bother with examples here. I’m breaking plenty of my usual rules about dealing with you stupid-as-fuck individuals already, so I’m going to break another and tell you to do your own simple cursory fucking research on this. Not that you’d manage that, as anything you ever cite must always come from an approved source like “CreationWiki” – a site, may I add, that actively makes a point, and a proud point at that, of stifling any potential disagreement. Do you see that on skeptic or “evolutionist” websites? No. You don’t. You want to know why? Because we want the world to see the best you dumb-fucktarded intellectual rejects have come up with, in all their mundanely pathetic glory, just so everyone can see how fucking terrible each and every one of your so-called arguments are. Sometimes, we don’t even bother responding, we just quote you verbatim (that means “unaltered” (which means “we didn’t change it” (ooh, look, nested parentheses (that means “brackets”) I bet that’s blown your tiny fucking mind))) because even casual scrutiny makes your points look terrible, and frankly, a full refutation just isn’t worth the fucking effort. Not because we can’t, but because – as I said above – I’d practically have to teach you the English Fucking Language from scratch to point out the flaws.

You, who thinks a fucking single man and rib-clone woman and their two sons populated the entire earth without any freaking-frakking-fucking incest occurring because “hey, don’t ask awkward questions”, hold in high regard people who aren’t even worthy of pissing in the academic shadow of people like me. So where does that place you in that pecking order? You intentionally refuse to understand simple things; like how irrelevant evolution by natural selection is to abiogenesis; like the fact that “macro” and “micro” evolution are just things you made up (at least in the way you morons use those terms); or like how natural selection has nothing at all to do with eugenics. It’s all OH-YOUR-FUCKING-GOD-IT’S-HITLER all the fucking time. I mean, seriously, you intentionally avoid learning. You avoid understanding. You actively train yourself to not to understand and you revel in all this. You memorise your silly little one-sentence replies that mean sweet fuck all, and by some magic expect educated people like me to bow down to your right of free expression; well here’s my “free expression” in response you fucking lunatic, you’ve damn well driven me to it over the years. You have no intellectual rights to this “debate” at all because you cannot even speak the language it requires. Even worse, you seem to think this actually qualifies you more. It doesn’t. It never will. Get with the fucking programme already; if you cannot comprehend basic facts, you cannot expect to be invited to the debating table as an academic equal. You’re not my academic equal. In terms of intelligence and knowledge you’re fucking scum rotting at the bottom of a dark and forgotten barrel while I’m basking in the sun. I would love, genuinely love, to help raise you up to being on my level. I would love it. But you wouldn’t listen. I would tell you to read X, Y and Z. Hell, I’d even write my own summary of X, Y and Z, but you wouldn’t listen or care. It would fall on intentionally deaf ears.

You know what the worst thing is? Some creationist out there, probably you because it’s being addressed to you, is probably going to find this rant and say “oh look at the little evolutionist, running out of points and resorting to insults”. Well fuck off. You think this is my attempt to prove you wrong? No. This is my attempt to insult you. This is my attempt to degrade and belittle you, your beliefs and your reasons all in one; because they’ve already been shown to be wrong. I don’t need to add to that. If you want to complain that I’ve ran out of legitimate responses by writing this, then that just proves every single point that I’m making in this profanity ridden rant; that you don’t fucking listen, and are even proud of the fact that you’ve left yourself bereft of the ability to do so.

You’re not stupid because you believe the world appeared out of nowhere sometime more recently than the domestication of the dog – and no, I’m not going to tentatively say something like “evidence suggests that”, no, it’s a Fucking Fact that the dog became domesticated in the tens of thousands of years ago. You’re a fucking shit faced idiot because of why you believe it. If you haven’t got the gist of this already; you’re proud of being stupid, you actively refuse to learn, you don’t examine anything critically, you fall for any piece of shit “evidence” your masters tell you. You don’t question them. You don’t realise they’re just out there wanting to keep you stupid, keep you ignorant and keep you not wanting to learn about the universe from sources that actually took the time to look at the universe. They want to keep you that way because you buy into their shit, with money. Your actual hard-earned money. You actually value these people with your working time. That’s galling to the rest of us who have a working and fully functioning brain that we deign to actually use.

You pay them. You donate to them. You buy their books and DVDs that they produce for fuck-all money and sell at a premium. You show them to your kids so they grow up stupid and buy more DVDs and books by the Comforts and the Hovinds and the Hams and the Gishes of this world. You show them Jesus riding a fucking dinosaur and pictures of Noah mucking out a boat that’s chock-full of animals that somehow managed to survive and reproduce to form every living thing we see on the planet in a geological blink of an eye – and you think this is right? You don’t think this is the most ridiculous idea in the world? If it wasn’t for the coincidental fact that you’re backed by a non-falsifiable belief shared by a significant proportion of the population, you would actually be declared clinically insane. No joke, there are actually people with more coherent and rational beliefs in their head being secured in mental health wards.

Despite being as embedded as you possibly can in the evidence for it, you don’t realise that there’s an entire industry that makes a fortune from retarding your ability to think. You accept this, and refuse to actually exercise your innate abilities to think, question and explore so long as you say the magic words “but I am thinking, questioning and exploring”. No you’re fucking not. If you were, you’d be in my position. You, too, would find yourself locked in that room, actively battling and fighting with people tearing your ideas apart and demanding that you defend them and stand by them and justify every single thing you say. But you’re not. You never will be. Though, let’s be fair to the non-doctorate holding non-creationists reading this for a brief moment; you don’t even have to be in that position of getting an academic qualification, you just want to be in the position where you’re willing to explore, and learn, and discuss and adapt. You refuse even that, and you think it’s a good thing.

There are a lot of people I think are stupid. Really fucking stupid. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to this stupid. There are people who think the World Trade Centre wasn’t hit by planes, but by holograms. There are people who think the skies are filled with mind-altering chemicals that can be dispersed – from miles away, no less – by spraying vinegar in the air. There are people who think we’re not being faced with a potential disaster of epic proportions because of how our society has polluted the planet. There are people who think vaccines cause autism and will find any old piece of shit evidence to prove it no matter how many times even the mere correlation is disproved.

But creationism is something else. It has that industry supporting it and perpetuating it, and it has people who buy into it so willingly. And you, because you think that everything came from nothing in a fucking click of a magic man’s fingers, are part of this. You’re out there derping on daily on something that we, using the entire knowledge collectively gathered by the human race, know is a lie. Honestly, you probably think it’s a lie too – but you’re both too damn proud of yourself and too damn proud of your stupidity to admit it. That’s your problem. It’s not about fossils, or genetics, or radiometric dating, it’s about your unwillingness to learn and better yourself. And it always will be.

In conclusion. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. And may the god you believe in have mercy on your pathetic, idiotic, morally and intellectually bankrupt soul."

Religion Reverses Everything

Buck says...

--------------------- I saw this on the interweb and laughed and laughed.

I would hope shineyblurry is NOT a creationist with his strong religious beliefs, but if so it's dedicated to him.

*language*insults*dissing religion*wall of text* (if these things offend DO NOT READ)

Dear Creationists,
You are stupid.
Genuinely stupid.
By every conceivable metric that we can assess intelligence, intellect, mental ability, reasoning and sense. Even the very ability to string words together in coherent ways. You fail at this. You are stupid. There is no way of getting out of this accusation; it is as close to an absolute, proven fact, that a scientific assessment can get.

Not ignorant. No, that’s something else. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge. That’s fine. I cannot blame someone for merely not knowing, or not being exposed to information. You don’t get a choice in ignorance and merely not knowing. For a start, you’re born ignorant of everything in the entire world. New born babies don’t even know what things in the world are part of their own bodies and what things aren’t – they really do have to learn this for themselves. So, no, you’re not just ignorant because if you were, I wouldn’t be here writing this.

No, this is something fucking different, far fucking worse. What you stand not only accused of, but proven guilty of, shits and pisses all over the innocence of ignorance and goes into dark territory of deceit and lies. This is wilful ignorance. This is prideful ignorance. You take your ignorance and wave it around at every opportunity to say “hey, look at me, I’m so fucking stupid” and expect people to respect you for it. Do I want to blame you for it? When your elders, and priests, and preachers, and the unqualified crank pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophers they get to back them up, have all conspired to brainwash you into thinking this is a good thing? Yes, I fucking do. You have made a choice to stay ignorant, and be happy with it. You’re a fucking idiot, and you damn well know it. You know it, and you Just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.

Why do I bother with you? Just why? Why do I drag myself down to that sort of level?
Let’s look at some clear facts here.
I have a fucking masters degree. I took four years out of my life learning quantum mechaincs, management, nuclear physics, organic, inorganic, analytical, green, environmental, atmospheric chemistry, mathematics, and a fuck-ton of life skills and problem solving skills possessed by a tiny fraction of people.

I can write, I can draw, I can play and compose music, and I can program a computer to do a little jig. Importantly, I know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re” – and fuck knows that’s a rare skill. I’m even nice on occasion and, if I try, even likeable. I’m just going to blow a trumpet and say I have most talents bar singing (sigh).

I wrote a whopping four-hundred-fucking-page book to get a doctorate. It’s sat there on a table right now, all bound and shiny with gold letters and my name on it, looking thick enough to bludgeon someone to death with. To get that far, I was locked in a room with two experts who read it and who spent nearly three hours ripping it to shreds and finding any excuse they could not to give the final award to me. At the end of it all, half a dozen people with the same level of qualification and beyond have all conspired to say “you’re good enough to be one of us”. I fucking starved. I fucking wrote ’til I dropped. I stayed up late and got up early. All to get that. And as blasé and modest as I try to come across in public, I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think it was all worth it.

And I’ve taught students. People even better than me, who have fought their way through the same shit and more, have said I’m good enough to be their proxy or their replacement to teach the next generation. I’m actively passing on knowledge, whether established or cutting edge, to students who one day will grow up to be the next me. Some days I hate those little shits, but to be fair to them, one day a good chunk of them will also be locked in that room with a pair of experts, shitting themselves and wanting to all go away. They will come out of it alive, as One Of Us, and they will fucking well deserve every bit of it. I am a cog in that machine, and damn well proud of it.

In short, I’m smart. I’m intelligent. I’m rational. I’m reasonable. I’m brainy as fuck. By every conceivable metric, I am at the top of the grey matter tree. If I believed in the absoluteness of the IQ test, I’d be bragging my ass off about being in the 98th percentile (I dunno, actually, last time I took one I was 15).
That’s me.

You, however, as someone who thinks the planet magically poofed into existence 6,000 years ago, you’re at the bottom of that tree. I’m may well be in the 98th percentile, but you, you dumb fuck, wouldn’t even know what “percentile” means without Google – which, by the way, has been built by the kind of people who know what “percentile” means without using Google. Because they had to have some way of knowing what it meant before they fucking built the thing – since you, you dumbfuck imbecile, need every little fucking thing explained to you in small words that don’t tax your brain too hard.

You, because you manage to be mentally retarded in such a way that it’s actually an offence to those with genuine learning difficulties, couldn’t fucking understand the mere basics of anything I could possibly teach you about anything. About chemistry, biology or physics. Even the fucking basics of logic, or language, or how to frame an argument, or what evidence is, or why it’s important, or how science even works. Hell, the hurdles I would have to leap just to get you people to the point of discussing actual evolutionary biology or actual geology or actual radiometric dating would require me to type thousands of words, and spend months of my life. And it wouldn’t be worth it because you would ignore it. You wouldn’t even address the basics. I could try to exemplify every nuance, meaning and deconstruction of, say, the phrase “evolution is a religion”, and you’d zone out as soon as I broke into polysyllabic words and then, just as a little bit of drool came out, you’d say “but evolution is just a religion”.

It’s all just fucking voodoo shit to you, something you’re actively scared of and don’t want to understand. You’ve rendered yourself physically incapable of understanding and basic comprehension and so I find myself almost constantly, every time I see one of you dumb shits opening your mouths, struggling not to outright scream from the rooftops. Every single word in this extensive rant has been compressed in my head into a single thought and that thought fires in my brain every time I see you people speak or type or even making a motion to open your mouths or put fingers to a keyboard.

You sit and worship people like Kent Hovind, whose entire thesis wouldn’t even count as a winning entry in NaNoWriMo (which requires 50,000 words in a month) and has a Flesch reading age of a pre-teen (by contrast, the Flesch-Kincade reading complexity for my own thesis goes to the part of the scale where “reading age” stops being a meaningful concept, and a single chapter is larger than Kent Hovind’s entire derp-fest, and there’s fucking diagrams to boot). Or you shout “amen” after every little tiny piece of faeces that oozes out of the mouth of Ray Comfort – a man, lest we forget, who thinks the word “bibliophile” is a fucking insult derived from “paedophile”. These aren’t just people amongst your ranks, these are your fucking experts.

You repeat mantras that have been refuted countless times. Even if you ever get around to addressing one of these refutations all you can ever come up with is restating the point again or whining about some other pathetic and irrelevant detail. I’m not even going to bother with examples here. I’m breaking plenty of my usual rules about dealing with you stupid-as-fuck individuals already, so I’m going to break another and tell you to do your own simple cursory fucking research on this. Not that you’d manage that, as anything you ever cite must always come from an approved source like “CreationWiki” – a site, may I add, that actively makes a point, and a proud point at that, of stifling any potential disagreement. Do you see that on skeptic or “evolutionist” websites? No. You don’t. You want to know why? Because we want the world to see the best you dumb-fucktarded intellectual rejects have come up with, in all their mundanely pathetic glory, just so everyone can see how fucking terrible each and every one of your so-called arguments are. Sometimes, we don’t even bother responding, we just quote you verbatim (that means “unaltered” (which means “we didn’t change it” (ooh, look, nested parentheses (that means “brackets”) I bet that’s blown your tiny fucking mind))) because even casual scrutiny makes your points look terrible, and frankly, a full refutation just isn’t worth the fucking effort. Not because we can’t, but because – as I said above – I’d practically have to teach you the English Fucking Language from scratch to point out the flaws.

You, who thinks a fucking single man and rib-clone woman and their two sons populated the entire earth without any freaking-frakking-fucking incest occurring because “hey, don’t ask awkward questions”, hold in high regard people who aren’t even worthy of pissing in the academic shadow of people like me. So where does that place you in that pecking order? You intentionally refuse to understand simple things; like how irrelevant evolution by natural selection is to abiogenesis; like the fact that “macro” and “micro” evolution are just things you made up (at least in the way you morons use those terms); or like how natural selection has nothing at all to do with eugenics. It’s all OH-YOUR-FUCKING-GOD-IT’S-HITLER all the fucking time. I mean, seriously, you intentionally avoid learning. You avoid understanding. You actively train yourself to not to understand and you revel in all this. You memorise your silly little one-sentence replies that mean sweet fuck all, and by some magic expect educated people like me to bow down to your right of free expression; well here’s my “free expression” in response you fucking lunatic, you’ve damn well driven me to it over the years. You have no intellectual rights to this “debate” at all because you cannot even speak the language it requires. Even worse, you seem to think this actually qualifies you more. It doesn’t. It never will. Get with the fucking programme already; if you cannot comprehend basic facts, you cannot expect to be invited to the debating table as an academic equal. You’re not my academic equal. In terms of intelligence and knowledge you’re fucking scum rotting at the bottom of a dark and forgotten barrel while I’m basking in the sun. I would love, genuinely love, to help raise you up to being on my level. I would love it. But you wouldn’t listen. I would tell you to read X, Y and Z. Hell, I’d even write my own summary of X, Y and Z, but you wouldn’t listen or care. It would fall on intentionally deaf ears.

You know what the worst thing is? Some creationist out there, probably you because it’s being addressed to you, is probably going to find this rant and say “oh look at the little evolutionist, running out of points and resorting to insults”. Well fuck off. You think this is my attempt to prove you wrong? No. This is my attempt to insult you. This is my attempt to degrade and belittle you, your beliefs and your reasons all in one; because they’ve already been shown to be wrong. I don’t need to add to that. If you want to complain that I’ve ran out of legitimate responses by writing this, then that just proves every single point that I’m making in this profanity ridden rant; that you don’t fucking listen, and are even proud of the fact that you’ve left yourself bereft of the ability to do so.

You’re not stupid because you believe the world appeared out of nowhere sometime more recently than the domestication of the dog – and no, I’m not going to tentatively say something like “evidence suggests that”, no, it’s a Fucking Fact that the dog became domesticated in the tens of thousands of years ago. You’re a fucking shit faced idiot because of why you believe it. If you haven’t got the gist of this already; you’re proud of being stupid, you actively refuse to learn, you don’t examine anything critically, you fall for any piece of shit “evidence” your masters tell you. You don’t question them. You don’t realise they’re just out there wanting to keep you stupid, keep you ignorant and keep you not wanting to learn about the universe from sources that actually took the time to look at the universe. They want to keep you that way because you buy into their shit, with money. Your actual hard-earned money. You actually value these people with your working time. That’s galling to the rest of us who have a working and fully functioning brain that we deign to actually use.

You pay them. You donate to them. You buy their books and DVDs that they produce for fuck-all money and sell at a premium. You show them to your kids so they grow up stupid and buy more DVDs and books by the Comforts and the Hovinds and the Hams and the Gishes of this world. You show them Jesus riding a fucking dinosaur and pictures of Noah mucking out a boat that’s chock-full of animals that somehow managed to survive and reproduce to form every living thing we see on the planet in a geological blink of an eye – and you think this is right? You don’t think this is the most ridiculous idea in the world? If it wasn’t for the coincidental fact that you’re backed by a non-falsifiable belief shared by a significant proportion of the population, you would actually be declared clinically insane. No joke, there are actually people with more coherent and rational beliefs in their head being secured in mental health wards.

Despite being as embedded as you possibly can in the evidence for it, you don’t realise that there’s an entire industry that makes a fortune from retarding your ability to think. You accept this, and refuse to actually exercise your innate abilities to think, question and explore so long as you say the magic words “but I am thinking, questioning and exploring”. No you’re fucking not. If you were, you’d be in my position. You, too, would find yourself locked in that room, actively battling and fighting with people tearing your ideas apart and demanding that you defend them and stand by them and justify every single thing you say. But you’re not. You never will be. Though, let’s be fair to the non-doctorate holding non-creationists reading this for a brief moment; you don’t even have to be in that position of getting an academic qualification, you just want to be in the position where you’re willing to explore, and learn, and discuss and adapt. You refuse even that, and you think it’s a good thing.

There are a lot of people I think are stupid. Really fucking stupid. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to this stupid. There are people who think the World Trade Centre wasn’t hit by planes, but by holograms. There are people who think the skies are filled with mind-altering chemicals that can be dispersed – from miles away, no less – by spraying vinegar in the air. There are people who think we’re not being faced with a potential disaster of epic proportions because of how our society has polluted the planet. There are people who think vaccines cause autism and will find any old piece of shit evidence to prove it no matter how many times even the mere correlation is disproved.

But creationism is something else. It has that industry supporting it and perpetuating it, and it has people who buy into it so willingly. And you, because you think that everything came from nothing in a fucking click of a magic man’s fingers, are part of this. You’re out there derping on daily on something that we, using the entire knowledge collectively gathered by the human race, know is a lie. Honestly, you probably think it’s a lie too – but you’re both too damn proud of yourself and too damn proud of your stupidity to admit it. That’s your problem. It’s not about fossils, or genetics, or radiometric dating, it’s about your unwillingness to learn and better yourself. And it always will be.

In conclusion. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. And may the god you believe in have mercy on your pathetic, idiotic, morally and intellectually bankrupt soul."

Drilling A Water Well Just Goes From Bad To Worse.

MilkmanDan says...

I "got" it, except not in exactly the way you meant. Here's how I qualified:

1. I'm the right age -- 1981. *edit* ahh, the commercial is from 1981. So nope, I probably wasn't comprehending TV beer commercials just yet.
2. Nope, Kansas.
3. Nope.
4. While watching the video, I remembered my college Geology 101 "Rocks for Jocks" class and learning abouthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artesian_aquifer>artesian aquifers. Kansas has conditions that are good for those in some locations due to water in our local aquifer system flowing down from the Rockies (all subterranean, but still down). I'm betting that isn't what you were referring to?
5. Is the joke that Olympia Brewing used an artesian well, and he plays it like "Artesian" sounds like a nationality or ethnic group? Or is it a Pacific Northwest region/group? Wikipedia disambiguation refers to an Artesian South Dakota, but I don't think that's it.

Anyway, I've honestly enjoyed this little snipe hunt I embarked on due to your comment mentioning "artesian" which was my first thought when watching the video, but now I'm coming up empty trying to nail down your actual reference (and therefore the reference of the video you linked also). But it's been fun!

Payback said:

To "get" this reference, you will need:
1. to be old, like me (beer, circa 1981),
2. to be from the Pacific Northwest,
3. to know who Richard Farnsworth is,
4. to know what an Artesian is,
5. this link: http://videosift.com/video/Artesian-Gardener

How to Justify Science (Richard Dawkins)

Fletch says...

I think teaching students basic scientific method when they are young can prevent willful rejection of science, due to ignorance, later in life. Non-scientists can't possibly know everything, yet, if they are sufficiently enlightened in scientific method, they can comfortably accept truths that are revealed using scientific method. Additionally, scientists needn't require proof for knowledge widely accepted by the scientific communities outside their particular areas of expertise.

Specialization also eliminates the need to know everything. Scientists know they stand on the shoulders of giants, that there was much to discover and learn long before they arrived in the world. But they don't have to know everything. It's like Sean Carroll discusses (kind of) in this video. You can be a physicist and know little of geology.


Edited: clumsy, nonsensical sentences

VoodooV said:

...There is a scientific pathway that takes you from Newton's apple all the way to the most advanced computers and medical knowledge. The problem is, you can't fit that pathway into one easy to read book. You can't explain complex things in sound bites. We're talking the cumulative efforts and trial and error of human beings over the course of thousands of years that takes us from the discovery of fire to the interwebs.

You can't summarize that shit into a few simplistic parables and stories....

Help a petition to get Susan Crawford appointed FCC Chairman (Politics Talk Post)

charliem says...

It really boggles the mind. These guys have been told time and again, that for wireless to replace fixed line infrastructure, youd need more wireless spectrum than is currently available, youd need about 5000 times more towers (power and fibre to those towers!!), and even then it would still be sub-par, and severely limited upgrade path!!

Im a telecoms engineer, I work for an equipment vendor specialising in FTTx products (point to point, and PON), and HFC products (traditional docsis 1 - 3, RFoG, DPON etc..)...so take it from me, there is honestly no contender for technology upgradability, serviceability, cost, quality, life span...etc...etc....it ticks every single box (short of direct P2P equipment, but thats a discussion for another day, I dont think it suits our geological landscape here).

Reading what comes out of their mouths on a daily basis for the past 2-3 years, and seeing peoples reactions of trust and agreement to it...it just makes me cry, honestly. They are so misleading and its all for political points.

Destroying our communications future at the cost of an election.

dag said:

Quote hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I'm with you. I can't believe the Libs are still talking about WiMax as a suitable alternative to the NBN. I'm a little more hopeful about Tony Abbot torpedoing things before the actual election - even if polls currently have them ahead.

Creationist Senator Can E. Coli Turn Into a Person?

Babymech says...

The other key issue that makes it really hard for religious people to 'get' evolution on a core level is their understanding of evolution as teleological - goal-directed - and their understanding of humanity as the 'end goal' of evolution. Even if they get the geological scales involved and they get the basic genetic mechanism of evolution, they still see it as a process intended to create humans; as us being the 'best' life forms. That fucks their ability to actually understand evolution all to shit, because they can't get their minds around the randomness of it, and the fact that protozoa that haven't changed much for the last several hundred million years are clearly earth's evolutionary 'winners.' Sometime I think it would be easier for these fundamentalists to deny the existence of God than to accept that the existence, shape and role of humanity on earth is just a meaningless accident.

Creationist Senator Can E. Coli Turn Into a Person?

raverman says...

"they evolve into a person?"

"In practice yes, over billions of years, a time period btw that is evidenced in scientific fields including chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy and biology."

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

shinyblurry says...

You do a lot of talking about what I do and don't know, with vague accusations of not speaking scientifically, or thinking scientifically. Give me a specific example, with a fact based argument backing it up, and we'll talk about it.

I never said I provided enough evidence thus far to convince anyone that the theory of Uniformitarian geology is fundamentally flawed; however I did present many substantive arguments, particularly to bicyclerepairman. You didn't really address any of them, but rather came back with your routine argument from incredulity (how could the scientists be so wrong?). I provided the video to give you a more thorough explanation but you refused to even look at it. If you don't understand the argument then what case do you have against it? What you are saying basically is that while you don't understand the argument, you know what science *sounds* like, so therefore you can dismiss everything I'm talking about. I really don't think you understand it as well as you think you do..so let's talk about it. Show me where you think I'm going wrong. Don't give me a vague generality (you dont use critical thinking) but lay it all out, point by point..since you're a self-proclaimed expert, break it down and make your case.

messenger said:

Every paragraph you write to me lately is simply stringing the same three ad homs together in a different order (you are a dogmatist, you dont understand science, you dont engage with critical thinking).

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

shinyblurry says...

You, as a devoutly religious person, trying to reframe my flippant attitude as dogmatism is like a child playing at being a police officer talking to a real police officer and going, "Wooooo woooooo woooooo I'm a police officer! I caught a hundred bad guys today! I'm taking you to jail!" You can't expect me to take you seriously. Every paragraph you write shows your lack of scientific understanding and unwillingness to honestly seek truth. If I saw some scientific thinking or efforts on your part to see things from my point of view, I'd gladly continue to make the extra effort, as I did for many months (was it years?). Consider I've spent most of our conversation time trying to understand your point of view, but you have never once inquired about mine. And then you accuse me of being "incurious".

Every paragraph you write to me lately is simply stringing the same three ad homs together in a different order (you are a dogmatist, you dont understand science, you dont engage with critical thinking). This is all that you ever really say to me, and when you're not saying it, you're pointing at something else to make the argument for you. Your point of view is apparently whatever scientists say is true, and that is the essential argument you are presenting; it must be true because scientists couldn't be wrong.

I have inquired about your views; we have had extensive conversations about what you believe and why you believe it. I'm interested in what you think; I'd love to actually have an actual conversation about this but you have already said you're not interested in putting any effort into it. How can it be my deficiency when you don't even understand the basics? It is an intellectual incuriousity; you see it as nonsense without even understanding what the creationist position actually is. You just dismiss it out of hand.
This is the nut of it for me with you. This illustrates your perfect failure to understand science. If you can't see why just from reading it, I don't have the skill to show you.

Yes, this looks good to the empiricist, who doesn't understand the problem of induction. There is no such thing as pure interpretation without bias. You are always bringing certain assumptions to table. What he is really saying when he says to exclude scripture is this: we reject the idea of a global catastrophe in geology, or that the features we see today could have formed quickly. They therefore interpreted all of the data through their uniformitarian assumptions and excluded that hypothesis completely. It wasn't that they had hard evidence, it was that they interpreted the evidence through the predetermined conclusion. I gave you a good example of this but you essentially ignored it.

messenger said:

How can we have a substantive conversation if you're not willing to put in any effort to actually understand the subject matter, either for or against? If you're content with your blind faith in whatever scientists tell you, then you're just as dogmatic as you accuse me of being.

You, as a devoutly religious person, trying to reframe my flippant attitude as dogmatism is like a child playing at being a police officer talking to a real police officer and going, "Wooooo woooooo woooooo I'm a police officer! I caught a hundred bad guys today! I'm taking you to jail!" You can't expect me to take you seriously. Every paragraph you write shows your lack of scientific understanding and unwillingness to honestly seek truth. If I saw some scientific thinking or efforts on your part to see things from my point of view, I'd gladly continue to make the extra effort, as I did for many months (was it years?). Consider I've spent most of our conversation time trying to understand your point of view, but you have never once inquired about mine. And then you accuse me of being "incurious".

As you can plainly see, Charles was scheming to deceive the church into accepting his uniformitarian theories even though he knew they contradicted scripture. He wasn't interested in a scientific investigation of the facts:

"... the physical part of Geological inquiry ought to be conducted as if the Scriptures were not in existence"

He had an agenda and his bias is plain to see.

This is the nut of it for me with you. This illustrates your perfect failure to understand science. If you can't see why just from reading it, I don't have the skill to show you.

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

messenger says...

How can we have a substantive conversation if you're not willing to put in any effort to actually understand the subject matter, either for or against? If you're content with your blind faith in whatever scientists tell you, then you're just as dogmatic as you accuse me of being.

You, as a devoutly religious person, trying to reframe my flippant attitude as dogmatism is like a child playing at being a police officer talking to a real police officer and going, "Wooooo woooooo woooooo I'm a police officer! I caught a hundred bad guys today! I'm taking you to jail!" You can't expect me to take you seriously. Every paragraph you write shows your lack of scientific understanding and unwillingness to honestly seek truth. If I saw some scientific thinking or efforts on your part to see things from my point of view, I'd gladly continue to make the extra effort, as I did for many months (was it years?). Consider I've spent most of our conversation time trying to understand your point of view, but you have never once inquired about mine. And then you accuse me of being "incurious".

As you can plainly see, Charles was scheming to deceive the church into accepting his uniformitarian theories even though he knew they contradicted scripture. He wasn't interested in a scientific investigation of the facts:

"... the physical part of Geological inquiry ought to be conducted as if the Scriptures were not in existence"

He had an agenda and his bias is plain to see.


This is the nut of it for me with you. This illustrates your perfect failure to understand science. If you can't see why just from reading it, I don't have the skill to show you.

shinyblurry said:

falsified.

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

shinyblurry says...

How can we have a substantive conversation if you're not willing to put in any effort to actually understand the subject matter, either for or against? If you're content with your blind faith in whatever scientists tell you, then you're just as dogmatic as you accuse me of being. The video I provided is very good and it chronicles the history of deep time, as well as the science behind it, in exacting detail using the methodology of geologists. You could watch 10 minutes of it, and if you decided you didn't like it, you could turn it off.

As far as the paradigm shift goes, here is a quote from the father of uniformitarianism, Charles Lyell:

I am sure you may get into Q.R. [Quarterly Review] what will free the science from Moses, for if treated seriously, the [church] party are quite prepared for it. A bishop, Buckland ascertained (we suppose [Bishop] Sumner), gave Ure a dressing in the British Critic and Theological Review. They see at last the mischief and scandal brought on them by Mosaic systems … . Probably there was a beginning—it is a metaphysical question, worthy of a theologian—probably there will be an end. Species, as you say, have begun and ended—but the analogy is faint and distant. Perhaps it is an analogy, but all I say is, there are, as Hutton said, ‘no signs of a beginning, no prospect of an end’ … . All I ask is, that at any given period of the past, don’t stop inquiry when puzzled by refuge to a ‘beginning,’ which is all one with ‘another state of nature,’ as it appears to me. But there is no harm in your attacking me, provided you point out that it is the proof I deny, not the probability of a beginning … . I was afraid to point the moral, as much as you can do in the Q.R. about Moses. Perhaps I should have been tenderer about the Koran. Don’t meddle much with that, if at all.

If we don’t irritate, which I fear that we may (though mere history), we shall carry all with us. If you don’t triumph over them, but compliment the liberality and candour of the present age, the bishops and enlightened saints will join us in despising both the ancient and modern physico-theologians. It is just the time to strike, so rejoice that, sinner as you are, the Q.R. is open to you.

P.S. … I conceived the idea five or six years ago [1824–25], that if ever the Mosaic geology could be set down without giving offence, it would be in an historical sketch, and you must abstract mine, in order to have as little to say as possible yourself. Let them feel it, and point the moral.”

As you can plainly see, Charles was scheming to deceive the church into accepting his uniformitarian theories even though he knew they contradicted scripture. He wasn't interested in a scientific investigation of the facts:

From a lecture in King’s College London in 1832

I have always been strongly impressed with the weight of an observation of an excellent writer and skillful geologist who said that ‘for the sake of revelation as well as of science—of truth in every form—the physical part of Geological inquiry ought to be conducted as if the Scriptures were not in existence

He had an agenda and his bias is plain to see. He completely excluded the testimony of scripture apriori before he even began. That is the beginning of why there was a shift in geology as the intelligentsia embraced his theories and began to teach it at Universities. There was no spectacular confirmation of any of this; in fact the evidence he gave about Niagra Falls to supprt his theory has been completely falsified.

messenger said:

That doesn't sound like circular reasoning to you?

It would sound circular if none of those had any other basis for their timelines other than each other, which, not being an expert, I have to guess is not the case. You, the one making the enormous claim that the entire field of geology is unscientific, have to demonstrate that.

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

messenger says...

That doesn't sound like circular reasoning to you?

It would sound circular if none of those had any other basis for their timelines other than each other, which, not being an expert, I have to guess is not the case. You, the one making the enormous claim that the entire field of geology is unscientific, have to demonstrate that.

I found some more cherry-picking. From that article about mudstones, you take this one quote: "One thing we are very certain of is that our findings will influence how geologists and paleontologists reconstruct Earth's past" and determine from it that the age of the planet will be scientifically revised from many billions of years to a few thousand. You have no basis for that. Also, why are you quoting geologists? That isn't even a science, I thought, right? Is it just because these ones happen to sound like their story could be twisted to agree with yours?

Your argument from incredulity not-withstanding, I think Max Planck sums it up rather nicely: " A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

If by that quote you mean that old people tend to have a hard time changing their minds about things in face of contradictory evidence, you're right -- that's human nature. If you mean that scientific theories change randomly because new opinions grow and the old ones die out like cultural habits, you're wrong.

There was a paradigm shift from catastrophism to uniformitarianism in the late 19th century. It was a deliberate move away from the idea of a global flood. To make their theories worked, they needed vast amount of time

This is another grand claim. Can you give a verifiable non-biased (non ID) reference as to the deliberateness of the shift, and the pre-formed idea that they needed to conjure up vast amounts of time? Science doesn't become conventional wisdom without a preponderance of evidence to back it up. It doesn't mean any of it is correct, just that there's a lot of supporting evidence.

In other words, you believe whatever the scientists say and there is no reason to understand the alternative viewpoint.

No. You're the one making ridiculous claims. I'm rebutting for fun, for sport. I don't believe your religion is real. I trust scientists more than dogmatists, and if I have to choose how to spend 1.5 hours, it's going to be reading Feynman or watching TYT or studying math or practising card tricks. You brought up the topic, and I happen to only care enough about it to rebut a bit, not to dedicate hours to it. Also, you have a history here of providing horribly unscientific quotes and references without any attempt at intellectual honesty, and based on that, I can guess the quality of that video, and I don't need to spend 1.5 hours only to be disappointed in myself for trying. If I were really that curious, I would go to the geology department of my university and ask some professors about the circular argument, and what the original basis was for the dating. If you care that much about actually finding the truth, you'll do just that. But I think you're too afraid to learn something contradictory to your dogma.

It's all predicated upon the philosophy of deep time. Deep time is the cornerstone of modern research, and it supported by flimsy, circumstantial evidence.

Non-ID reference for the flimsiness required for grand claims.

shinyblurry said:

evidence of non-scientific thinking.

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

shinyblurry says...

You're cherry-picking. That sentence isn't the key one. I'm not sure what is meant by that sentence (the use of "constraint" is ambiguous), but it would be utterly unscientific if it meant that the stratigraphic position pre-determined the outcome. Geology would be scientistic nonsense like ID, not science.

Yes, and that is the point. If Geology worked like that it would be scientific nonsense, and it does work like that. The stratigraphic position is determined by the index fossils and radiometric dating. The age of the index fossils is determined by the stratigraphic position and radiometric dating. Radiometric dating itself is "checked" by stratigraphic positioning. That doesn't sound like circular reasoning to you?

On the other side the date is determined by the uniformitarian assumptions about radioactive decay rates in the past, and many other things. It assumes, among other things, that the rate will never change. As I showed in my reply the Bicyclerepairman, the rates can indeed change.

Even the next two sentences demonstrate this: "There is no way for a geologist to choose what numerical value a radiometric date will yield, or what position a fossil will be found at in a stratigraphic section. Every piece of data collected like this is an independent check of what has been previously studied."

Now this is the intellectually dishonest part. They say they can't choose where a fossil will be, but they have already the determined that the presence of certain fossils and radiometric dating igneous layers above and below it determines the age of that layer. They don't choose where a fossil is, but they do choose what the age of the layer is that contains the fossil based on their assumptions. So they are basically saying that radiometric dating and stratigraphy is validated by index fossils and radiometric dating, and vice-versa.

The date that is returned is indeed chosen by the scientists as it is based on uniformitarian assumptions that they've made about the past. Perhaps you don't understand how it works, but there is nothing about the rock which reveals its age. They use the secondary evidence of how much radioactive decay of certain elements they believe have occurred, but if the rates aren't always constant, the measurement is worthless. As I showed in my reply to Bicyclerepairman, even secular scientists have acknowledged the rates can change. Therefore it is unreliable on its own, and what is essentially happening is that they are propping up one unprovable assumption with the evidence interpreted through another unprovable assumption.

If geologists were in the habit of treating data this way, scientifically-minded people who entered the field would be disgusted and leave, and form their own new scientific discipline of the study of the earth. The fact that this hasn't happened means the geological method appears scientific to scientific-minded people, if not dogmatists.

It's far more likely that you, a dogmatist and a non-geologist, are cherry-picking information to come up with data that supports your dogma. Dogmatists, by definition, cannot be relied upon for unbiased information that either challenges or confirms their dogma. Their dogma pre-disposes them to coming to wrong conclusions far more than non-dogmatists.


Your argument from incredulity not-withstanding, I think Max Planck sums it up rather nicely:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

There was a paradigm shift from catastrophism to uniformitarianism in the late 19th century. It was a deliberate move away from the idea of a global flood. To make their theories worked, they needed vast amount of time. Most of the contention comes down to how fast or slow certain geological features take to form. Scientists have staked all of their modern research on the theory of deep time, and they interpret all of the evidence through that conclusion. In other words, it has become conventional wisdom..IE, dogma. Please read my reply to Bicyclerepairman to see how bias effects interpretation.

If you examine the history of science, you will see that scientists have had it wrong many times and wasted decades and decades of research on things ultimately proven to be false. The near universal agreement of scientists on any issue is not any indicator of truth.

I'll take 10 minutes to respond to your comments, but I'm not taking 1.5 hours to watch more non-scientific nonsense framed in scientific terms. If there were strong enough evidence that the Earth were a few thousand years old, there would be a branch of geologists studying it. And I'm excluding the dogmatic "creation geology". It is pseudoscience.

In other words, you believe whatever the scientists say and there is no reason to understand the alternative viewpoint. Your dismissal of the material as "non-scientific nonsense framed in scientific terms" flatly shows your intellectual incuriousity, not even having looked at it. Dr. Emil is an accomplished geologist and his discussion is framed in the terminology and methodology used in that field. If you want to debate this subject, you should at the bare minimum understand the basics of the position you are defending and the position you are arguing against. Also, the video is about 1 hour with 30 minutes of questions.

FWIW, according to Wikipedia: "Flood geology contradicts the scientific consensus in geology and paleontology, chemistry, physics, biology, geophysics and stratigraphy". Do you think you can knock all those scientific fields down as well? Have at it.

It's all predicated upon the philosophy of deep time. Deep time is the cornerstone of modern research, and it supported by flimsy, circumstantial evidence. If you can show deep time is false, then all of it crumbles.

Also, "former atheist" means "current dogmatist". You don't find it astounding that his conversion happened to coincide with his discovery that the evidence didn't hold up? I do. Evidence of non-scientific thinking.

It's interesting you're still inventing reasons why you shouldn't watch the video. You don't know anything about the man but you make wrongheaded assumptions about him. Such as that he converted because he had doubts about the evidence in Geology not holding up. Yet, that isn't the reason he converted, and it had nothing to do with his work as a geologist. Your conclusions here are evidence of non-scientific thinking.

messenger said:

Also

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

messenger says...

I'll take 10 minutes to respond to your comments, but I'm not taking 1.5 hours to watch more non-scientific nonsense framed in scientific terms. If there were strong enough evidence that the Earth were a few thousand years old, there would be a branch of geologists studying it. And I'm excluding the dogmatic "creation geology". It is pseudoscience.

FWIW, according to Wikipedia: "Flood geology contradicts the scientific consensus in geology and paleontology, chemistry, physics, biology, geophysics and stratigraphy". Do you think you can knock all those scientific fields down as well? Have at it.

shinyblurry said:

@messenger @BicycleRepairMan

I want to share this video with you because it really gets to the heart of the issue. It shows how the conception of deep time came about, the history of it, the experiments that supposedly proved it, and the minds that contributed to it. It is presented by a PHD in Geology, a former atheist and professor who has published many papers and was involved in the scientific community before going into creation science. It is very interesting, even if you don't agree with all of the conclusions:

Bill Nye: Creationism Is Just Wrong!

messenger says...

You're cherry-picking. That sentence isn't the key one. I'm not sure what is meant by that sentence (the use of "constraint" is ambiguous), but it would be utterly unscientific if it meant that the stratigraphic position pre-determined the outcome. Geology would be scientistic nonsense like ID, not science.

Even the next two sentences demonstrate this: "There is no way for a geologist to choose what numerical value a radiometric date will yield, or what position a fossil will be found at in a stratigraphic section. Every piece of data collected like this is an independent check of what has been previously studied."

If geologists were in the habit of treating data this way, scientifically-minded people who entered the field would be disgusted and leave, and form their own new scientific discipline of the study of the earth. The fact that this hasn't happened means the geological method appears scientific to scientific-minded people, if not dogmatists.

It's far more likely that you, a dogmatist and a non-geologist, are cherry-picking information to come up with data that supports your dogma. Dogmatists, by definition, cannot be relied upon for unbiased information that either challenges or confirms their dogma. Their dogma pre-disposes them to coming to wrong conclusions far more than non-dogmatists.

Anything scientific can be independently verified by someone else, and if a scientists makes a strong claim and it's later proven wrong, that scientist's credibility is shot and their career severely damaged. So-called ID "scientists", on the other hand, can make all the wild assertions they want, and if something is proven false (again) they lose nothing, and may even gain standing in the ID community for trying -- they've shown their heart is in the right place, even if they're incompetent scientists.

shinyblurry said:

I will elaborate a bit. Here is the key sentence from that link:

When a geologist collects a rock sample for radiometric age dating, or collects a fossil, there are independent constraints on the relative and numerical age of the resulting data. Stratigraphic position is an obvious one, but there are many others.

Notice it says there are constraints on the age placed by such things as stratigraphic position, but then they deny circularity. It's actually using the stratigraphic position which entails circularity!



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