Focus on the Family’s got a new plan.
Basically? University and College is pretty poor for “faith” in dogmatic religions. There is little to no onus to keep going to a church and you are suddenly thrown into a mixing bowl of people who are nothing like the small groups you are used to and all this broadens your horizons.
And makes you doubt all the nonsense that fundie christian organisations flog to you. I mean, it’s rather hard to believe in a 6000 year old planet when there’s a Hindu in the next room. In addition? You actually learn things and are taught skills and imparted education that challenges the dogma and ignorance of faith.
So Focus on Family has a series called “TrueU” which is designed to combat the horrific plague of knowledge sweeping across universities while claiming that scientific developments point to the existence of Jehovah (the Christian one… not the Jewish one).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICwmBpTlYhk
And I have some things to inform them about.
- Does a god exist is not a big question. If we are asking such a question in seriousness then it is not a testament to our depth but an adult enquiring about the existence of Santa Claus. A bigger question is “What’s the cause of Autism”. Arguing over the existence of a god is like arguing over the existence of a god you don’t believe in. If we had classes to discuss the existence of Shiva, the good people from Focus on Family would scoff at it as if it were a fairy tale yet we are to take their Jehovah seriously.
- Who is god? What? I thought you knew it was Jehovah. If you don’t know which god is out there then you may have to eat humble pie after killing off all of the Smoking Mirror’s worshippers. No Mictlan for you, only paths of obsidian.
- If we are looking at it from the standpoint of Evidence then there is none for Jehovah.
- The people keep using the world “logic” in a way that’s completely alien to it’s definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. Logic doesn’t mean “imagine an entity outside the universe with limitless power to break all known laws of physics but hates lesbians”.
- Again, the when Focus on Family uses the word “Reason” I am surprised their tongues don’t strangle them in rebellion at such gratuitous misuse of the language.
- I kind of missed that. I kind of came to atheism on my own. New atheism is just people being more pro-active about their atheism and not shrinking from fisticuffs with people flogging bullshit like this. We still don’t believe in any gods. I never ever believed in Jehovah. He is a silly god.
- I am out of touch with the most current developments in science. Have we proved Jehovah exists? Surely there is a Nobel prize for Dr. Meyer who’s claim is that science has proven the existence of a deity.
- The mere existence of Bethlehem doesn’t mean Jesus existed anymore than the existence of the Pyramids prove that the Pharaoh’s were gods. There is no archaelogical evidence for Jehovah any more than there is archeological evidence for the Smoking Mirror and Tlaloc.
- The Bible is so accurate through archeology in the same way that the Ramayana, Mahabaratha, Koran and Harry Potter is.
- Kepler had to dance through extraordinary hoops to prove a geo-centric world against the prevailing view of a heliocentric world of the Bible and to claim that Galileo was “pro-Christianity” is to fail history.
- If you claim that Jehovah is at the beginning you better provide some evidence my good man or else everything that’s come out of your mouth is not education.
- At no point did people ever consider the visible cell as “simple”. It was considered as amazingly complex and wonderful. And the name “cell” comes from the view in a plant as the walls are thick and rigid like that of a “Cell”. Later they found out that animal cells were membrane based rather than cellulose wall based.
- If we are to assume god created the cell then we are to agree that god created HIV and Leprosy and Smallpox and is less benevolent than Stephen Meyer thinks he is. If there exists a god who created these things then clearly he is a god of the bacteria.
- Self assembling structures exist in nature. To ignore the existence of them is to be frightful ignorant of even the most basic chemistry since ice is one of the most common self assembling regular structure that we know off in the form of snow.
- Who Put the Message in the DNA is precisely the sort of question that TrueU thinks is a “Gotcha”. The very message in DNA is evidence of evolution since it’s the same message with few minor changes from prokaryotes (Simple cells) to Eukaryotes (complex).
Dr. Stephen Meyer should remember that Intelligent Design has been ruled as “Bunk” and “Creationism in a Lab Coat” by pretty much everyone. If we are to teach the “Controversy” in our Biology Labs then we must also teach the “Controversy” from your pulpits. It’s only fair…
TrueU represents yet another program designed to “Stupidify” Children.
Children are stupid and gullible. It’s a survival trait. They are born knowing nothing and believe everything we tell them. If we tell them to not eat the red mushroom with the white spots they believe us and if we tell them that they should cut their foreskins off so that god can recognise them (because it’s the divine ID card!) they will believe us. It’s how they survive in the wild.
It’s also how we pass on our superstitions. Setting out new material specifically designed by well meaning parents to help keep their kid from being “Lost” is just a smokescreen designed to re-ignite the old Creationist Wars of the 90s where some of us cut our teeth. Except we won there.
And we never stopped to rest on our laurels. Science never stops because we don’t know everything. Religion stopped 2000 years ago because it declared that tiny book to be the sum total of all human knowledge that was of any importance.
Your Bible is looking awfully small. Maybe if you got it in Large Print?
That’s not even close to the sum total of MY knowledge base (I don’t have my anatomy textbooks in there) or even close to the total sum of all medical knowledge. If we thought like the Christians we would still be throwing out people with vitiligo from tribes and sacrificing goats to appease gods instead of telling them it’s nothing but an auto-immune disease.
The stack of books is nearly 3 feet tall if I had my anatomy text books in there. The Bible doesn’t even come up to the first book.
If this is the second “war” between Creationists and us then I shall only assume that it’s occurring because there is no more Hitchens to scare them off.