Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

HAHAHA i was having trouble figuring out real anti ID versus fake, but thanks for straightening things out Smile

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rosborne979 wrote:

Joe Nation wrote:
Quote:
Parents and District Settle Dispute on Teacher's Religious Remarks
(By TINA KELLEY, New York Times, May 10, 2007)

The Kearny Board of Education in New Jersey and the parents of Matthew LaClair, a 17-year-old junior at Kearny High School, settled their dispute on Tuesday night about a teacher who proselytized in class.

The settlement will include training for teachers and students about the separation of church and state and a public statement by the board praising Matthew for bringing the matter to its attention.

Matthew recorded his history teacher, David Paszkiewicz, making comments in class in September, including remarks that only Christians had a place in heaven, that the Big Bang and evolution theories were not scientific and that dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark. After the tapes became public, Matthew received a death threat and was shunned and bullied by some of his classmates, he has said.

Perhaps incidents such as the above are so rare on the little island nation where Spendius spends his time that they would be considered unimportant. In the boondocks of America, this kind of religious rant is not rare at all and neither are the threats to THE CHILD that emerged after he recorded and reported the teacher's odd view of the world.

That is not to say that we should get over exercised about it, no more than we would over any other abuse of children.

Joe(Maybe the teacher could also box their ears)Nation

Kearny New Jersey isn't far from New York City. We may need a new definition for "Boondocks of America".

Isn't it interesting that I went all the way through 12th grade and also went to college in the heart of the Bible belt and in that process attended two elementary schools, two high schools, and various universities for various studies. In all that time I cannot recall a single teacher pushing any kind of religious doctrine including Atheism. I know that a favorite music teacher was Lutheran because she talked about coming out of her church in Norway on Christmas Eve and being so happy that it was snowing. They always had a white Christmas but it was important that it snowed on Christmas Eve.

I know that one typing teacher was Seventh Day Adventist when she declined an invitation we kids extended to something on a Saturday and she explained that she had responsibilities at Church that day as her church held services on Saturday rather than Sunday.

And that's it. I couldn't tell you what church any of my other teachers attended. Neither can my kids or their cousins say what religion any of their teachers were and my granddaughter says it has never come up in the small (and very religious) West Texas town where she goes to school.

And as I previously mentioned, the subject never came up at any time for any reason during my tenure on two separate school boards.

I have to believe inappropriate religious discussions are confined to a very few individuals and are quite rare. The unusually prominent amount of press inappropriate incidents receive testifies to the obsession with such incidents, but I believe this to be a far less frequent problem than some would seem to think.

And I agree that any town within a few minutes of New York City is hardly the 'boondocks'. There are small towns in New Mexico that are a hundred miles from ANYWHERE else. THAT is the boondocks.

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Settin' Aah-aah wrote, and it will take a while to dry out and set-

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"ID" stands for "intelligent design,"

False. The assumption made is that intelligent design is an American idea which it isn't.

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It's an attempt to sneak creationism in the back door of education, all the while denying that it is creationism.

False. Nobody on here, least of all me, believes in what is known as Creationism. And that has been obvious from the beginning.

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Spurious here is a contrarian.

False. Unless a contrarian is defined as somebody disagreeing with the handful of half-baked anti-IDers on here. The last poll I saw quoted showed 97% (of those polled of course) somewhere on my side of the fence which strongly suggests that this handful are the real contrarians.

Quote:

He disagrees with the other members here for the sake of disagreeing, and not because he knows anything about the issue of science in the "intelligent design" brouhaha, because he has consistently shown that he doesn't understand the science.

False. There are hundreds of threads where it is easy to disagree for disagreeing's sake. There is no science, apart from social science, in the intelligent design concept. If there was any science there would be no debate.

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It is not because he understands the American educational system, because he has shown that he knows nothing about that.

False. There is no such thing as the American educational system unless the word "education" is properly defined. And I have read numerous books about the subject which it is quite plain Settin' Aah-aah hasn't. All true educational systems are the same. Indoctrination and conditioning are another matter. And I have referred to these sources many times.

Settin' Aah-aah knows full well that these abbreviations have been used on here, and not just by me, as a convenient way of avoiding typing out long screeds of explanation each time we post. He is simply being pedantic.

I'll admit that I have a lot to learn about the judicial system in the US but it does seem to be run on behalf of vested interest groups.

The Dover taxpayers were victimised.

Quote:

Of course, he considers that those who sued the school board to remove "ID" from the school curriculum were the victimizers, rather than the school board members who attempted to introduce creationism into the science curriculum under false pretences).

According to what wande informed us at the time it was a mere question of reading out a few paragraphs to biology students at the beginning of the year's course. It was not an attempt to introduce Creationism into the science curriculum. It was simply to point out that evolution had a few questions to answer and that is a point of view held by large numbers of people.

Settin' Aah-aah hardly ever appears on this thread and that causes him to not understand the debate as it has developed. He's an interrupter and that is ignorant. So you take notice of the ignorant if you wish OGI. It's a free country. He did used to contribute in order to display his grasp on constitutional problems and historical incidents but vanished probably due to being unable to hack it. So you take notice of the stamina challenged if you wish OGI. Politics is all about stamina. Dilettantes sit at home and brood far from the action.

And he's a serial asserter to boot.

His post is one long, tiresome mish-mash of assertions not one of which is backed by any beef. And it is all abstract and bears no relation to what goes on in the thousands of real-time classrooms or the thousands of teacher recruitment procedures in States of widely differing economic and traditional backgrounds.

In reality the post is contentless. It's actually trolling if I have understood that word correctly. It is aimed at the innocent. It would be laughed out of court in any proper debate about education. It thus insults the intelligence of the many viewers of this thread. It loses sight of people. It assumes this debate is a waste of time and not just on this thread. It is superior in tone which is always a sign of insecurity. It's just a sloppy, solipsistic mess.

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Quote:

Isn't it interesting that I went all the way through 12th grade and also went to college in the heart of the Bible belt and in that process attended two elementary schools, two high schools, and various universities for various studies. In all that time I cannot recall a single teacher pushing any kind of religious doctrine including Atheism.

Guess things have changed a bit since those olden days of yore.

Religion is becoming a much more contentious issue these days.

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My experience is very similar to Foxy's and I was taught by priests in cassocks. The only time any sectarian religious issues came up was basically an excuse, on certain Saint's Days, for attending chapel to hear Father Hall tell us about his experiences as a missionary (some of them it now transpires), sing a few songs and adjourn to the sportsground.

Methinks they squeak too much. It signifies having the neck caught in a trap. They build it up to build themselves up.

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Ogoink, Setantas summary of our pal spendi is so right on the money that I gasped.
Spendi is the personification of the "Lucy" principle (Lucy from Peanuts)

"If you cant be right be wrong at the top of your lungs" Spendi is so full ofcrap that he has no concept of where he even stands on most issues.

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With reference to the muzzling issue-

Baroness Warnock of Cambridge University, and a leading UK player on this matter, wrote about the philosophical concept known as the "slippery slope" in this manner-

Quote:

The 'slippery slope' is the name of an argument based on a certain view of human nature, not on logic, and commonly used in non-philosophical discussions of moral issues. The reasoning is that, though a practice may be unobjectionable in one type of case, if it is once permitted, its use will inevitably be extended to other more morally dubious cases. Thus it is argued that, though research using human embryos immediately after fertilisation may be morally defensible, the period for research will inevitably be extended, until we shall find ourselves using children and adults for research, without their consent. The inevitability here supposed is not logically inevitable, but it is thought to result from from people's always wanting more than they have. In fact legislation or other forms of regulation can usually control an undesireable slide down the slippery slope.

One would have to dispute the assertion that "people always want more than they have" to fault the lady's reasoning. And especially when funding and careers are at stake. I wouldn't fancy disputing that.

The same would apply to Mathos's "culling" and "baby farming" which he offered as two aspects of Total anti-ID.

Obviously a Total anti-IDer would scoff at such wimpy notions and quite rightly as the logic of the position dictates it.

And it is so easy and tempting to end up in the clutches of another philosophical concept known as "Reason- a slave to the passions" which Hume used to rebut the claims of rationalists, pretence he said, that reason can oppose the passions and teach us moral truths.

His words were-

Quote:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Buy into that and you buy into the passions of the anti-ID mindset.

Gee! Fair brings one out in a cold sweat.

Especially considering most anti-IDers can hardly be said to be able to read and write properly and think any old assertion they casually make up on the spur of the moment to provide a flip answer has validity solely on the evidence of them having blurted it and without the necessity of getting elected and offering their ideas for public scrutiny.

It might be worth adding that the "slippery slope" concept was dismissed when media unleashed expert psychologists onto our children with a bag of tricks the children's parents had funded their expertise in for the purpose of getting them to eat poison and now we are in great difficulty in getting them to eat properly and storing up massive costs in terms of lost man hours and expensive treatments. The pain and suffering being neither here nor there.

But hey- if you're selling the treatments it can't be bad.

Many voices warned that legalising divorce would quickly slide into making it easy which will quickly slide into the destruction of the insitution of marriage and the consequences of that.

Dip yer bread in learned counsel.

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fm wrote-

Quote:

Ogoink, Setantas summary of our pal spendi is so right on the money that I gasped.
Spendi is the personification of the "Lucy" principle (Lucy from Peanuts)

"If you cant be right be wrong at the top of your lungs" Spendi is so full ofcrap that he has no concept of where he even stands on most

Total assertion. And very badly written. Worthless. I feel very sorry for anyone who can't see it. fm is relying on stupidity. Can't even get OGI's name right. "Gasped" eh? WOW!.

Any conclusions yet fm on the muzzling issue?

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spendius wrote:

fm wrote-

Quote:
Ogoink, Setantas summary of our pal spendi is so right on the money that I gasped.
Spendi is the personification of the "Lucy" principle (Lucy from Peanuts)

"If you cant be right be wrong at the top of your lungs" Spendi is so full ofcrap that he has no concept of where he even stands on most

Total assertion. And very badly written. Worthless. I feel very sorry for anyone who can't see it. fm is relying on stupidity. Can't even get OGI's name right. "Gasped" eh? WOW!.

Any conclusions yet fm on the muzzling issue?

Spendipus, a thought crossed my mind, reading the issues you have twaddled out today!

Yes or no to the question please.

Are you a woman with menstrual problems, you know, late with the menopause?

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Quote:

And very badly written.

This from the master of senseless prose and the disjointed phrase. You who writes like one just completing electro shock therapy, should not be giving advice on writing, none at all.

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farmerman wrote:

Quote:
Spendi wrote: And very badly written.
This from the master of senseless prose and the disjointed phrase. You who writes like one just completing electro shock therapy, should not be giving advice on writing, none at all.

This is the reason spendi is so endearing. He doesn't know when his statements apply to himself more than others - and still talks with a "straight face."

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I'm not sure why he's responded to more than Rex Red, not that I mind one way or the other, whatever amuses......

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Gentlemen,

I have to voice my opinion; each of you are equally to blame for the damage you have done to the blithering idiot since the inauguration of his presence on this thread.

He has always been suspect, but I have noticed his deterioration over the last fourteen months or so and it is quite alarming.

You! between yourselves, not only elected to have sport with his meanderings, you encouraged them!

It is quite obvious the fool is living and breathing this episode akin to a demented Werewolf. I rather suspect he is dribbling globules of slime onto his keyboard with each and every post he makes.

Have you never given thought to us poor souls on the Trivia and British threads especially, simply having a laugh, and then being forced into unreasonable and apathetic arguments with the clown following each and every session of torment you put him through?

You should be ashamed of yourselves!

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Foxfyre wrote:

I have to believe inappropriate religious discussions are confined to a very few individuals and are quite rare. The unusually prominent amount of press inappropriate incidents receive testifies to the obsession with such incidents, but I believe this to be a far less frequent problem than some would seem to think.

I have to admit, I don't know what the statistics are on the frequency of events like that.

Like you, I went all the way through school without any overt concern about religion being pushed on me by my teachers. I DID feel annoyed with the "Under God" part of the Pledge of Allegience, and I DID feel annoyed with 'a moment of silence' which some teachers would slip and call 'a moment of prayer' (and then correct themselves, ahem, 'a moment of silence'). But over all, I don't remember any grevious invasions of my freedom to choose non-religion.

What struck me about the event in the article was how unexpected it was in geography. It made me wonder just how many times things like this DO happen and no student has a tape recorder on. This kid happened to tape the event, otherwise it probably would have remained hidden, along with his persecution from the other kids.

At this point, I wonder just how much of this really IS happening and not being reported. Maybe it isn't much. Maybe the media is hyping this and it's just a rare event. But maybe not. I don't know. But with several school boards in several states attempting to push ID and Creationism into science classes, and with other states approving warning stickers on biology books and other similar events, it stands to reason that events like in the article are probably more frequent than we know about.

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Mathos wrote:

Gentlemen,

I have to voice my opinion; each of you are equally to blame for the damage you have done to the blithering idiot since the inauguration of his presence on this thread.

He has always been suspect, but I have noticed his deterioration over the last fourteen months or so and it is quite alarming.

You! between yourselves, not only elected to have sport with his meanderings, you encouraged them!

It is quite obvious the fool is living and breathing this episode akin to a demented Werewolf. I rather suspect he is dribbling globules of slime onto his keyboard with each and every post he makes.

Have you never given thought to us poor souls on the Trivia and British threads especially, simply having a laugh, and then being forced into unreasonable and apathetic arguments with the clown following each and every session of torment you put him through?

You should be ashamed of yourselves!

Ok, then I have to voice my opinion... this was just about the funniest thing I've ever read on A2K Laughing

Seriously, I almost spit my coffee into the keyboard. Smile

It almost makes me want to respond to spudboy again, just so I can help push him further into his purile self absorbed egotistical lunacy.

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Chumly wrote:

I'm not sure why he's responded to more than Rex Red, not that I mind one way or the other, whatever amuses......

I agree, whatever amuses. Some people seem to like feeding the troll.

Do you think he's more responded to than Rex? I always thought they both contributed the same non-value, just different styles of it. At least Rex seems like an honestly nice person, although confused.

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I've been reading Hofstadter's anti-intellectualism book half the day to try to find a quick answer to c.i.'s question.

It's quite plain none of you lot have ever done so. Reading it with this thread in mind is very enlightening. The last time I read it I hadn't come across this type of discourse before in male company. I thought the guy was half kidding. Now I know different.

If I remember the book was discussed a bit on another thread at Bernie's instigation. With georgebob I think mainly.

Your asserted self complacency must wash over you like a warm stream of that stuff they rub on baby's bottoms. Why don't you hire a brass band to play tunes in your honour while you sit beaming and glowing all over with a cosy warmth generated from within.

I like purile. It suggests purity of mind. Piety Hoffie called it.

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rosborne979 wrote:

Chumly wrote:
I'm not sure why he's responded to more than Rex Red, not that I mind one way or the other, whatever amuses......

I agree, whatever amuses. Some people seem to like feeding the troll.

Do you think he's more responded to than Rex? I always thought they both contributed the same non-value, just different styles of it. At least Rex seems like an honestly nice person, although confused.

I have not seen the likes of farmerman and others responding to Rex Red's posts with the same frequency and volume. I have admittedly not statistically qualified this. A task a bit too onerous for the likes of me give the (very) questionable benefits!

Your point is taken that at Rex's core he seems a different type of fruit than spenduis. Better / worse? Certainly more direct if nothing else. And yep Mathos posts some very funny stuff!

It is an open forum, and anyone can respond in any fashion they see fit within the guidelines imposed.

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Come on Mathos, round them up.

Get them into the Total anti-ID camp under your leadership. Culling and baby farming are only two aspects of Total anti-ID. Euthanasia and Eugenics. They can't really like being half-baked. They actually think you said something back there. Actually it wasn't just off this topic. It was off all topics.

There's nothing wrong is there with going to university at the taxpayers expense to learn all sorts of brain bending tricks and then getting a job in media operating on the same taxpayer's kids minds in order to get them to eat shite and being unable to eat proper food. $200,000 a year plus exes for the top notchers. Maybe more. A Total anti-IDer would approve of that on the sound Darwinian principle of let the devil take the hindmost. A £25,000 a year worker is obviously unfit for breeding. The proof is staring you in the face.

Even Total anti-IDer's own kids. A kid has no defences against tough,cynical psychologists working on business principles which Veblen categorised as "ambush".

Still- you don't read tripe like that do you?

They have psychologists for bigger people as well. You should bone up on some of the strokes they pull when they don't bother about morality.

What's your take on price gouging?

Hey-Poor old Rex eh? He's confused though honest. Isn't that country bumpkin? The innocent gump. Talk about a back-handed compliment. It pats him on the head. It means he's harmless.

ros- explain how I'm a troll and not you. Look the bloody word up for goodness sake. It's not an all purpose fly swatter. If I called you a name, and I can do better than such a puerile one as that, would it prove you were what I said you were. Would it pump. And neither does it the other way. You are bereft of argument. All of you except Foxy.

Nothing to say about Baroness Warnock then?

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This site is called Able 2 Know.

I have written approvingly on many occasions about various writers.

Whether any viewer follows up on that is not my affair.

But viewers have been offered pointers in certain directions and it is fair to say that all the figures I have mentioned have stood the test of time and are still relevant in places where real education is valued. They also have literary styles and modes of expression which some people might consider worthy of further examination and are interesting people to read about.

What, may I ask, have the posts of anti-IDers offered the people who look in here attracted by the site's title as I first was.

All that Mathos's last post offered is that one is Abled 2 Know what Mathos, one in about 8 billion, thinks at the moment he thinks it and blurts it. He is certainly not Total anti-ID when he gets hand-wringing about the war in Iraq or the joys of marital bliss and power gardening.

Where is there to go with that? Nowhere is the answer unless Mathos has stood the test of time. Nobody is Abled 2 Know one single, solitary useful idea or direction unless Mathos is the source of all wisdom.

There is nothing to be learned or Abled 2 Know from anti-ID except what you can see with your eyes and every anti-IDer has different eyes from every other one. Hence the reflex assertion.

Let us ask a question that is much easier to answer that either Lola's or c.i.'s.

What do we risk in dying when it is annhililation and what do we risk in living?

That question was asked by the only martyr anti-ID has to its name, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, de Sade's main inspiration, long before the technology to die painlessly existed.

How does an anti-IDer prevent mass suicide. Media is obsessed with gruesome modes of death for a very good reason.

Dumping on religion is just one long drawn out suicide note. We need a reason to live. And it is to earn a place in Paradise. With The Goddess.

Is a nice illusion better than bare-assed reality? It is for me. You silly sods can suit yourselves.

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Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

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