Linguistic fundamentalism

They could just say but God is ultimate. Whatever keeps their delusion infalsifiable. That is a good point though. It deserves a pm to talkjesus members.

The real question is why make an issue out of one part of Genesis but not another when science has a wholly different explanation? Why choose one and not the other?

I have a feeling it doesn't come down to relative importance of passages in the Bible. It comes down to the fact that humans are set apart in the creation story, but we are just another animal in the evolution story. Linguistics doesn't challenge such a fundamental aspect of self-identity.

In other words, they pick a fight over evolution primarily because the idea that we're hairless apes is anathema.

Right, it's the connection to other primates. And, to a lesser degree, headlines. The fundamentalist intellectuals grabbed hold of the evolution issue immediately. Most people just don't think about the origin of language.

So very sly of these fundamentalists to chose to be slaves to a God almighty, as if to convey some false-altruism in opposition to their inherent ego that ties this whole knot together.

They are like zombie philosophers. Seeking (well, without the act of seeking I suppose) truth and purpose, denying the absurdity of life, even willing to adapt a delusion perhaps even subconsciously to distort the fact.

Though about the linguistics. The bible has to be so ambiguous by inventing double entendres (triple, quadruple?) for words that become rubbish, just to achieve one's own end. So a fundamentalist could say you interpreted the bible wrong. It will always revolve around keeping God untouchable to it's own infalsifiability.

If there was no such thing as logic as there wouldn't have to be having logic already presented to us "ultimately", then there wouldn't be a textbook thick bible. There'd just be the word God and the syntax would follow naturally. Heck there wouldn't be anything. Just an imaginary actuality.

Wow. I don't believe in fundamentalism either but, my goodness, you're describing them as an evil group. I don't think I would carry it to that extreme.

I don't think evil, or stupid; just ignorant.

They're evil when they have power.

See: Iran

Meh, about fundamentalism and linguistics, Simple answer. Its not a big deal because its not a big deal in the scientistic community either. To a bible fundie the correlation of people and languages is simply explained by Babel. The Lord confused the language 'into many'. Makes sense that those with like speech would form their own speech communities and migrate etc... When the Atheist crowd starts to make a deal out of it there will likely be a fundie response.

Gah, about the accuracy of historical linguistics etc.. Morris Swadesh and several of his students Sydney Lamb et al. proposed that a chronology could be constructed by taking what was originally 200 "culture free vocabulary" words and creating the generational half life of the rate of cognate change in a given language by mimicking the formula used for C14 dating.
Problems with this were, the qualitative data entered is not fit for a quantitative analysis making the results at best suspect, at worst arbitrarily bogus. "culture free words", sub and super stratum influences, areal migrations, war, catastrophe, and any other influence affecting a speech community are functions that radically change the evolution of language but do not necessarily have an archaeological signature. Also there is the highly scientific arbitrary function of "meh roughly 80% of the vocabulary in this language is a cognate to that one, they're related" All in all most people who originally started using these correlations have stopped using them as anything but a rough guide to what may have been the case.

The evolutionary rate of language change is not epochally multigenerational like that of genetics. It can happen in one generation, however in most cases of traumatic language evolution it happens in three generations. This is a blink of the eye in the face of species evolution. So if the fundies support that people have only been around during the chronology of the Bible, and that there was one language spoken until babel and people moved around after the languages split, its no big deal that the different populations have correlate languages, because humans didn't exist in the fossil record anyway etc...