This annoys me. In 1971, Dick Van Dyke starred in a movie called Cold Turkey. It was a comedy about a dying town attempting to win a prize sponsored by a tobacco company that was betting against any town remaining "smoke free" for a certain length of time. Van Dyke…
One of the many miscommunications between people of science and Creationists is the assumption that the universe was created for man. If so, the engineer behind this place was wa-ay off the mark. The universe is nowhere near human scale, and the vast majority of it has nothing to do with Man.
We only began to understand the heavens when some very careful measurements were made using precision instruments. Copernicus had to note the precise movements of dots in the heavenly sphere for a long time to be sure enough that they were centered on the Sun, not the Earth. It was easier for Galileo, who polished some chunks of glass to see that even these dots had smaller dots in orbit around them. Dots that couldn’t possibly be seen by, nor affect, the average human.
Then Leeuwenhoek ground some smaller lenses and noticed that there were complete creatures too small to see, and that they were everywhere! He opened up the microscopic revolution in which it turned out that humans (and other creatures) are not made of continuous stuff, but rather each organ is composed of colonies of lesser lifeforms, cells. In fact, each organ is an ecosystem. Our skin (our largest organ after birth) is host to an abundance of microbes, mites, bacteria, and fungi that ideally coexist peacefully to maintain the health of our skin. These “parasites” are essential to our well-being, but they do not share our DNA.
When Mendeleev worked out the periodic arrangement …
OMG! I just installed the FireFox 2 browser and noticed something. It spell checks form entries as you type! Just as Word and its ilk do in their documents. Since its inception, I'd been using FireFox just because of speed, safety and security advantages. I added the Google toolbar only…
Recently on Huffpo,George Lakoff has written an important piece on the ongoing political battle to define words.
I’m keenly aware of this battle. Here’s one way it affects me. I do not believe in a sentient Creator. Some would label me an atheist, but that would be horrible unfair. Why? Because that term has been successfully loaded with far more than lack of a belief in a traditional God. The conservative movement has successfully defined “atheists” as strident, immoral, untrustworthy and threatening to America’s families.
This ugly baggage is why I have embraced the term Bright. I am a “bright.” I have a naturalistic worldview free of supernatural and mystical elements. Does that make me threatening? I don’t think so. Does it make me prone to mob violence like members of many religious groups? I would think the opposite—I have to cut my own philosophic path thorough life. I doubtless have different politics and beliefs than many other Brights. Narrowly construed, I’m an organization of one. But there are certain people are perturbed with me, I’m sure, because I refuse to claim allegiance to the insecure God of the Bible and we just can’t have that.
The word battles, however, are taking place on many other fronts.
As Lakoff writes, such word battles comprise “the struggle to define our democratic principles and values. The right wing has worked for decades to alter the meanings of concepts that define our way of life.” For instance, consider the word “liberal.” …
My earlier post regarding Bart Ehrman was not meant to provoke in an outrageous way, although I suspected that it might distress some people. That post drew much more traffic than we are used to at the site, approximately 25,000 unique visitors in three days. It also pulled in more than 200 comments. I was intrigued by the nature of the comments, especially those comments written by people who ostensibly disapproved of Ehrman’s work or his conclusions. In fact, I did a small informal analysis based upon the comments posted by last night (I believe there were about 150 comments posted at that time).
I need to state at the outset that there were more than a few Believers among the commenters who appreciated and even applauded Ehrman’s work. Some of these Believers specifically stated that even if Ehrman was correct, they could still believe in God and Jesus, they could still be good Christians and they found that Ehrman’s work had enriched their understanding of the Bible. My criticism of the distressed commenters is not directed toward these people.
Approximately 35 of the comments were written by people who appeared to be distressed or dismayed by Ehrman’s work. Notably, only three of those commenters acknowledged the basic points made by Ehrman.
What were Ehrman’s basic points? That earlier manuscripts did not contain some information that was contained in some of the later manuscripts that were ultimately adopted part of “the Bible.” Therefore, the new material found in later writings …