Earl wrote:i_like_1981 wrote:Earl wrote:I have half a mind to leave this website ...
It's a shame that you're discontented and thinking of leaving us, Earl. You're more appreciated on here than you might think. I've noticed that every obnoxious sports bore attacking the forums during your time on here has taken a more respectful tone when talking to you. Like Ivy League and even mike_the_pain_train. The 4channers seem to have more regard for you than any other member on here. One of my recent Google searches on the 4chan threads for references to this website turned up a quote saying "Earl was OK. Everyone else was a massive faggot." But if you do choose to leave, then I must respect that decision. Given all that's been going on here this year, I can very much understand why.
Best regards,
i_like_1981
Thanks for your post, i_like_1981. It's quite encouraging to me. My apologies for speaking out in anger. I lost my temper. I intend to stay here indefinitely. Posting in this forum has been a learning experience for me. Because of this website, I've learned about the movement to reform P.E.; and I've also learned that there are people who break stereotypes. I have learned how to be more communicative. And receiving compliments from unexpected sources has meant a lot to me. My discontent has not been caused by the rude or disrespectful critics of this website (as opposed to the civil ones).
Good evening
Earl.
I hope you had taken the time to read my earlier post just before I_like_1981's post.
I had apologized if you have found my topic to be offensive.
Please note: this topic was NOT meant to be an attack on ALL believers.
When I discovered the Jesus Camp videos, it was late at night, and it was about 1:30 AM when I saw the last one in the series of nine videos.
It was very disturbing, and after watching the last one, I went to bed, but I had difficulty trying to get any sleep. I would doze off only to wake up from a bizarre dream in a cold sweat, and I would try to fall asleep again, only to wake up again from another really bad dream.
If you're still mad at me, I'll understand.
It's people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell (now deceased) Ray Comfort (The Banana Man), Kent Hovind (currently serving 10 years in the slammer for tax fraud) The Discovery Institute (A creation "science" organization now in deep shit for filing false DMCA claims against the YouTube users who produced educational videos on evolution) Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church with his "God hates fags" and his "thank God for dead soldiers" and Becky Fischer (whom I call Psycho Bitch) of the Jesus Camp, these are the people who are giving Christianity a bad name.
It was NOT my intention to put down ALL believers, but merely to expose these false Christians who make Christianity look bad.
I'm sorry, but this Psycho Bitch really scares me.
She is brainwashing these innocent little children, which has got to be the very worst form of child abuse, second only to physical and/or sexual abuse. Mental abuse is just as bad.
In an earlier post you had said . . . . .
Yes, boys and girls, be sure you always remember what Fat Man says. All believers are evil. All Darwinists are as pure as the driven snow. After all, neither the Nazis nor the Communists held Darwinist views, did they?
Fat Man, you talk so much about what happened to Galileo. Why don't you ever talk about Stalin's bloody persecution of the Medelian geneticists? Oh, I forgot. Only religious people persecute scientists (sarcasm intended). Oh, no! Mendel was a Catholic monk. We can't have that! How horrible.
Actually, when Hitler had books burned, the Origin of The Species by Charles Darwin was among those books that were burned. Also, they had a distorted view of Darwin's Theory. Charles Darwin never used the terms "survival of the fittest" but actually talked about how diversity within a species improves their chances for survival, and he never said that any one race was superior to another, and he actually had great admiration for many primitive tribes. We humans are the most adaptable because we have adapted to live in all kinds of different environments around the world from tropical to Arctic, so it's the diversity of our species that enabled the human race to survive. As I have said before, Darwin would be appalled by the racism of the Nazis, the KKK, and the skinheads.
OK, I know I haven't mentioned Medelian geneticists. But, here's is another interesting fact. The Stalinist regime also rejected Darwin's Theory of Evolution in favor of Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism was a distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.
Formally, Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named "Michurinism".
Lysenkoism turned out to be just another pseudo science.
Here is some more information at:
http://www.skepdic.com/lysenko.html
Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism refers to an episode in Russian science featuring a non-scientific peasant plant-breeder named Trofim Denisovich LysenkoTrofim Denisovich Lysenko [1898-1976]. Lysenko was the leading proponent of Michurianism during the Lenin/Stalin years. I. V. Michurin, in turn, was a proponent of Lamarckism. Lamarck was an 18th century French scientist who argued for a theory of evolution long before Darwin.
Lamarck's theory, however, has been rejected by evolutionary scientists because it is not nearly as powerful an explanation of evolution as natural selection.
According to Lamarck, evolution occurs because organisms can inherit traits which have been acquired by their ancestors. For example, giraffes find themselves in a changing environment in which they can only survive by eating leaves high up on trees. So, they stretch their necks to reach the leaves and this stretching and the desire to stretch gets passed on to later generations. As a result, a species of animal which originally had short necks evolved into a species with long necks.
Natural selection explains the long necks of the giraffes as a result of the workings of nature which allowed the species to feed off of the leaves which grow high on trees rather than graze as short-legged, short necked animals are prone to do. There was no purposive behavior which was a response to the environment which was then passed on to later generations. There was simply an environment which included trees with leaves up high and that was a favorable food source to long-legged, long-necked animals such as the giraffe. In fact, according to natural selection, if that were the only food source available, only animals with long- necks, or animals which can climb or fly, would survive. All others would become extinct. There is no plan here, divine or otherwise, according to natural selection. Furthermore, there is nothing special signified by the fact that a species has survived. Survival of the fittest means only that those who have survived were fit to survive.
It doesn't mean that those who survive are superior to those species which don't. They've survived because they were fit to adapt to their environment, e.g., they had long necks when there was a good supply of food readily available high up in the trees and there were no other catastrophic disadvantages to their height. For example, if a species got so tall that it became impossible to mate, it would become extinct. Or, if the only food source on high happened to have a substance in it which rendered giraffes sterile, there would be no more giraffes, no matter how hard they tried to will themselves potent.
Lamarckism is favored by those who see will as the primary driving force of life, e.g., the 20th century French philosopher Henri Bergson. Evolution is hated by many of those who believe God created everything and everything has a purpose: the fundamentalist teleologists of the world. One might think that Marxists would prefer Darwin's theory of evolution with its mechanical, materialistic, deterministic, non-purposive concept of natural selection. Lamarckism looks like it might be preferred by free market advocates with their emphasis on will, effort, hard work and choice. But then Russia and the Soviet Union weren't really Marxists. They turned the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the professional dictator (Lenin, then Stalin). And even with the death of Stalin, the dictatorship of the communist party leaders who controlled everything, including the economy, took over.
In any case, Michurin's views on evolution found favor with the party leadership in the Soviet Union. When the rest of the scientific world were pursuing the ideas of Mendel and developing the new science of genetics,
Russia led the way in the effort to prevent the new science from being developed in the Soviet Union. Thus, while the rest of the scientific world could not conceive of understanding evolution without genetics,
the Soviet Union used its political power to make sure that none of their scientists would advocate a genetic role in evolution.
It was due to Lysenko's efforts that many real scientists, those who were geneticists or who rejected Lamarckism in favor of natural selection, were sent to the gulags or simply disappeared from the USSR. Lysenko rose to dominance at a 1948 conference in Russia where he delivered a passionate address denouncing Mendelian thought as "reactionary and decadent" and declared such thinkers to be "enemies of the Soviet people" (Gardner 1957). He also announced that his speech had been approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Scientists either groveled, writing public letters confessing the errors of their way and the righteousness of the wisdom of the Party, or they were dismissed. Some were sent to labor camps. Some were never heard from again.
Under Lysenko's guidance,
science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology. Lysenko's methods were not condemned by the Soviet scientific community until 1965, more than a decade after Stalin's death.
Could something similar happen in the U.S.? Well, some might argue that it already has. First, there is the creationist movement which has tried, and at times been successful, in banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. With Duane Gish leading the way, who knows what would happen if Pat Robertson became President of the United States and Jerry Falwell his secretary of education. Then, of course, there are several well-known and well-financed scientists in America who also seem to be doing science in the name of ideology: not the ideology of fundamentalist Christianity but the ideology of racial superiority. Lysenko was opposed to the use of statistics, but had he been clever enough to see how useful statistics can be in the service of ideology, he might have changed his mind. Had he seen what J. Philippe Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, Richard Herrnstein or Charles Murray have done with statistical data to support their ideology of racial superiority, Lysenko might have created a department of Supreme Soviet Statistics and proven with the magic of numbers the superiority of Lamarckism to natural selection and genetics.
So, the Soviet Union under Stalin actually rejected Darwin's Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection for a different "evolutionary" theory, Lysenkoism, which had no basis in scientific methodology.
Also, sorry I forgot to mention Mendel, a Catholic monk who was a geneticist.
But I have mentioned in another topic
A Columbine bully who became addicted out of guilt on page 2 of the topic at
http://www.sportssuck.org/phpbb2/viewto ... 8&start=15
when the subject of evolution came up, about Carl Linnaeus who was the first to classify humans as primates about a century before Charles Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, and Carl Linnaeus was a Christian AND a creationist, and yet, he was the fist to classify us humans as primates before Darwin came along.
So, I'm sorry if I forgot to mention about Mendel and Medelian geneticists, but since you have mentioned it, then I now feel the need to add that the persecution of the Medelian geneticists was probably because the Stalinist regime actually rejected Darwin's Evolution in favor of Lysenkoism.
But the main focus of my topic is NOT on ALL Christians, but rather, on Psycho Bitch Becky Fischer and her Jesus Camp where children have been brainwashed.
What I found most disturbing was in one of the videos, a mother home schooling her children, and one of her kids talked about how Galileo gave up science for Jesus, which is a crock of shit!
No! Galileo was always a Christian!
He just didn't interpret everything in the bible so literally, and he even once said, that the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go!
He ran into trouble when he said that the earth and all the planets revolved around the sun while the Catholic Church doctrine held that the sun and all the planets revolved around the earth and after being forced to sign a false confession, he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.
Even then, despite all, he was still loyal to his church, even after all his church had done to him.
Sir Isaac Newton was a Christian, but not a Catholic, and he even refereed to the Catholic Church as The Great Whore of Babylon as depicted in the book of Revelations.
So, I'm not down on all Christians.
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton were all Christians, even though they did not interpret everything in the Bible so literally.
As anybody can see, I'm actually defending some Christians here. OK?
And the only reason why they were creationists was because the theory of evolution had not come along yet. But if Charles Darwin have been born a few centuries earlier and proposed his theory of Evolution back then, no doubt, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton would have accepted it because they were always seeking scientific explanations for any and all phenomena, and I'm sure that Evolution would have made a lot more sense to them than creationism.
Another thing that really gets my proverbial goat is when Psycho Bitch says, that science has never proven anything.
SAY WHAT??? EXCUSE ME!!!
I think the theory of the sun centered solar system, Kepler's law of Planetary Motions, Newton's Law of Gravity, Michael Faraday's Law of Electromagnetism, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity etc. etc. has very much been proven.
And all of these wonderful technological toys that we enjoy so much, our computers, micro-chips, flat screen digital TVs, cellphones, etc. etc. these are the results of what science has proven. These things did not come about by black magic or wizardry, or was given to us by Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.
These are the products of science, bitches!!!
Notice how all of these (and I'm going to use the offensive terminology here) how all of these Christian Funny-mentalist whack-jobs, like Pat Robertson, and Psycho Bitch Becky Fischer, etc. etc. how they all love to sit around in their nice great big fancy houses and drive their nice fancy cars and enjoy all the benefits, all the conveniences and comforts wrought by modern science, yet rejecting science and pissing in the fountain of knowledge!
I say . . . . . FUCK THEM ALL TO HELL!!
What really makes me angry was that, when I was in school, I wanted to study science. As I had mentioned so many many many times before, my mother taught me how to read and write before I even started school, and when I was only in the 3rd grade, I was already reading at the high school and adult level, and when I was 13 years old I scored 150 points on a standard IQ test, but I was being harassed because I was lousy at sports.
I'm living in poverty while these right-wing Funny-mentalist Ecclesiassholes grow rich while wanting to ban the teaching of science and spreading their creationist fairy tales. They are growing more and more wealthy while spreading their lies and brainwashing innocent little children.
These moronic Christards grow rich while I live in poverty.
And I'm NOT referring to ALL believers. OK?
I'm only referring to those who are getting all the media attention because they have the big bucks.
I have two broken front teeth and I can't afford to have them fixed!
Time to pour another small shot of Vodka and swish it around inside my mouth to dull the pain and take 4 more Aspirin. I need medical attention that can only be provided by medical science. Praying isn't going to do jack-shit! Praying is not going to mend these two broken teeth.
If I had become a jock or a Bible-thumper, I would now have big bucks, but I couldn't become a jock because of my cripple up left knee, and I could not become a Bible-thumper because I have too much brains to believe in the bullshit I would have to spread. I would only be lying to myself.
Sorry, but I can't believe that the cosmos was created in only 6 days, or the the earth is only 6000 years old, when I know for a fact the universe is about 13 BILLION years old.
But I'm living in poverty because I don't believe in fairy tales!
And then Psycho Bitch even says that giving everyone equal freedom will ultimately destroy us!
Why do I feel like I'm getting my head bashed against a brick wall again?
Remember boys and girls . . . . .
Galileo died for our sins!
The sin of ignorance that is!