At this rate, why send them to school at all? “Oh noes, they might actually LEARN something…”
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Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. --Arthur Miller, "Why I Wrote 'The Crucible'", The New Yorker, October 21, 1996
All opinions here are the brain-wrackings of Sabina C. Becker, unless otherwise credited. If you cite them, please give credit where due.
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Y’know, ‘Bina, as I read that screed with all its misspellings and atrocious grammar, I wondered where in the Hell did it all go so wrong? I never remember having this kind of idiocy in school when I was growing up. Maybe someone didn’t have the $2.00 so you ‘loaned’ it to them, never expecting repayment. Or you shared lunch if it was needed. But this?
The first time I ever caught a whiff of this stupidity was when I came back from Minnesota to South Carolina, after an absence of almost 20 years, to go to Law School. Three of us, who had become good friends (and remain that way now that we know not to talk about religion) were leaving our study group meeting and the third guy in the group said something about the stratified rock that lined the wall of a sunken little park where you had to descend to a tunnel under this busy street so that you could get to student parking without getting run over. He was saying that he wondered what kind of creatures lived when each layer was formed. The young man next to me looked first at the guy who had spoken and then at me and asked, incredulity think in his voice, “You guys don’t believe all that evolution crap and the world being billions of years old, do you?”
I was stunned. The other young man, who was rather feisty, in fact they both were, began to argue and soon there was a full fledged fight brewing with books slammed down, etc. Being the old man of the group (42. Can you imagine? I knew I was a father-figure to my 15 year old son, but 23 year old young men?) I stepped between them, told them I was playing Supreme Court justice, and both of them were to drop the subject immediately. With a few mutterings and some return snarls from me, we walked on to our cars and the next day were back as fast friends again.
But the thought that this college graduate, MBA holding, soon to be JD holding, young man believed that the earth was 6,000 years old floored me then and still does today.
Aargh, that makes me want to bang my head against a wall!
And the worst part is, this whole idiocy is due to some nineteenth-century nimnul doing a very selective calculation, based on the creation mythology (and that’s just what it is, mythology) of one Middle Eastern culture, no doubt in response to the “threat” to his entire worldview that Darwin represents. The assumption is that the tribes of Israel represent all of humanity, but they don’t! We all came from Africa originally, much longer ago than 6000 years. That much is not a mere “theory”, but known fact, established by findings of skeletons and carbon-14 dating. It is not “evolution crap” at all. Evolution is law, Darwin’s “theory” is a postulate of how he thinks it all went down. To this day, no one’s been able to prove him wrong, and in fact, he’s being confirmed and re-confirmed as I write this.
You should see some of the comments on this piece at FailBlog, too…some of them argue very earnestly that radiocarbon dating is NOT accurate, because carbon-14 supposedly doesn’t decay at a constant rate after all. Um, FAIL–we learned in high school that it DOES, and at university I also learned WHY it does! Where did these people go to school, I wonder?
I used to teach a class “Math for linguists” for linguistic undergrad majors, and once had an undergrad seriously disturbed by a logic problem set where they had to show the validity of an argument whose conclusion was that God doesn’t exist, she wouldn’t do the homework problem. I had of course told them a million times that a “valid argument” was one whose conclusion followed from the premises, so if they didn’t like the conclusion of a valid argument, they had to have a problem with the premises.
(I have to say, the problem was kinda cool)
Well, so much for Intelligent Design. If it really worked the way they said it did, this woman would have no problem trying to solve that problem, because she’d have been intelligently-enough designed to figure it out, threat to her world-view or no…or so one would think.