@parados,
Odd you should ask me a question like that after a few hundred of wande's newspaper cuttings all saying more or less the same thing. Your subjective sensitivities seem to be on display to me.
The point is not so much that Darwin's work is so simple and obvious, which he couldn't help being such a silly old randy goat, but rather that people on here are posturing as scientific on the strength of having a tenuous grasp on what Darwin did, easy as that is, and offering advice and making unmannerly demands of elected people regarding how the nation's kids should be taught on the selfish basis of needing to justify some infractions of the Christian teaching on sexual morality they have engaged in at some time or other and which they are unable to justify in any other way except by trying to get the rest of us to put them on Ignore. It is precisely what is in front of us, the teaching of the next generations, that I am concerned with here. I can look at the stars when I want to.
Also, Shaw is a novelty to the thread and obviously of some interest because there have been 95 views of it since I posted the quotes and I can't see that having been caused by your or ci's post.
I'm betting that not one of my opponents have read the Shaw preface I posted the other day, and it's very relevant to them, because they are unable to. Which automatically disqualifies them from preaching vituperatively about education at those a democratic system has elected to administer it. They are barely literate.
Have you taken it on? It's only two hours or so to a fairly careful reader and a mighty lesson. Mighty lessons don't often come so cheap. But it is a bit out of date. It says very little about mood having an effect on metabolism and cell function, and nothing about it having an effect on reproductive selection procedures at both the macro and micro levels, so to say. Religion does create "moods". As atheism does. In religious ecstasy, even those not going all the way, moods are exaggerated, learned and remembered.
It's really a question of whether the moods created by Christianity are beneficial to society compared to those of non-Christian moods or atheist ones. It is irrelevant to the story of the Flood that the logistics were impossible. The mood it creates of the intrepid survivor battling the forces of nature and getting through creates a mood in people and especially young ones. However nutty old Noah was you can't help admiring him.
The simple and obvious fact that the logistics of the Ark are impossible, a fact equally obvious to the writer of the story, points the reader at the real point. There was no question of Noah not making land for that very reason.
The opposition of the population which would have to sweat to bring the project together, it's a hot climate before the monsoons, and sawing wood was not as easy as when fm saws it, nor was rounding up a male and female mosquito with certainty, must have been a lot more fierce than anything these anti-IDers can offer. Can you imagine that opposition when all Noah had was that it was going to rain. Even Mubarak has more going for him than that.
When the kid comes to smile, as it matures, at the logistics it doesn't mean it has forgotten the mood the Noah story creates. An admiration of certain qualities. Which eventually led to a trial Ark blasting into space from the Cape. That mood, soft-wired into the Christian psyche. The Right Stuff.
Stretching this nonsense a bit tighter one might say that the madman with authority, fortitude, vision and faith is what we look to when in a fix we haven't seen coming. Psychologists are creating hierarchies on the matter by spinning it out and it's in a few verses of the Bible. But speed reading the story, or hearing it a millionth hand, and declaring it "a load of crap", not an original phrase, and disdaining to stop and say--"hang on a minute--this is the most famous book in the world which every great artist has studied and borrowed from. Who am I to sit here in my little corner making snap judgements on it?"
