Faith is about the here and now

[MrScorpio]

Yearning for the "Afterlife" only gets a lot of people killed.

I'm still trying to get my head around people who think that the planet is only SIX THOUSAND YEARS OLD.

[bridgit]

1. amen!

O8)

[wildhorses]

2. well, maybe they are using that new math...

:rofl:

[MrScorpio]

5. New Fundie Math, goes along with "Creationism"

Why doesn't America believe in evolution?

From New Scientist Print Edition. * 19 August 2006

Jeff Hecht

Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."

Miller's report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That's despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. "We don't seem to be going in the right direction," Miller says.

Clip

The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.

The rest



http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125653.700?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19125653.700

[billyskank]

3. Nice sweeping statement

[Tyo]

4. Scary

How do you deal with people who see The Flintstones as a documentary?

[MrScorpio]

6. Exactly

When they claim that Dinosaurs and Modern Man coexisted, I thought... My God, these people stole this directly from Fred and Barney.


I know Betty was a hottie, but this is ridiculous.

[burythehatchet]

7. Its the delusion of self-importance

Some people like to think of the progress of time as a story where humankind occupies a little blip, albeit a powerful blip in terms of destructive force.

My more pessimistic view sees human kind as a beneficial life form that helped the planetary organism for some time, then became cancerous. The earth will cure itself of humans soon enough.

The believers see Humans a central focus of everything that has ever occurred. The dark ages Vs. the Enlightenment

[MrScorpio]

8. Then again, maybe Agent Smith is right...

And We're a virus on this planet