After almost losing out to public opinion where 54% of those polled thought Intelligent Design (ID) should be taught in British schools, the officials in charge of such stuff decided to teach evolution only.
Contrary to many school boards here in the US, it seems they actually listen to and believe their scientists in the UK. The Guardian.UK reports:
“It’s a great birthday present for Darwin in his 200th anniversary year. For the first time, evolution will be on the national curriculum for primary schools when the new version is published later this year. It was initially excluded from the draft curriculum when it was published for public consultation but sometimes, if not always, it seems government will listen to scientists and experts, many of whom were signatories to an open letter (pdf) to Ed Balls organised by the British Humanist Association in July which called for evolution to be included.”
The scientists rightly argued that teaching such a travesty of true scientific thought would totally confuse young children and seriously hamper England’s future.
“The new primary curriculum, together with the 2007 government guidance that prohibits the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in science lessons, should put English schools in the forefront of education about evolution. Coming in the month which marks the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species and at a point when good science education is a matter of urgency, it could not be more timely.”
Those evangelical fundamentalist creationists here in America and abroad should be ashamed of their efforts to screw over our school children and cripple their education and development in our modern world. I just can’t fathom what they want of the rest of the world. Do they really want all of us to go back to how the world was at the time of Jesus, 2000 years ago?
Some religions discourage their children from going on to higher education so that they will not learn the truth of how our world works. Do they seriously want everyone on earth to think and act like they do? Do they want to overthrow our secular government and install a theocracy? We know they want to burn Darwin’s books (and many others) and totally blot out any reference to them and him. Would we want to live in a world controlled by their kind? I know I wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t want my children and grandchildren living in it either.
And just who the hell do they think they are… trying to decide how I and my family and friends live our lives and educate our children?
Some of our missing links and when they lived. Note that some or all of these times and general information may change as new data emerges or new finds are made. Sorry, that’s the way science is.
Ardipithicus ramidus The Ardipithecus specimen, an adult female, stood four feet tall and weighed about 120 pounds, almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy. Its brain was no larger than a modern chimp’s. It retained agility for tree-climbing but already walked upright on two legs, a transforming innovation in hominids, though not as efficiently as Lucy’s kin. 4.4mya to ??
Australopithecus afarensis
The most famous member of the species is Lucy, an adult female skeleton discovered in 1974 and nicknamed after a Beatles song. Lucy lived about 3.18 million years ago and was fully capable of walking and running on two legs.
Australopithecus africanus
A. africanus was an early descendent of Lucy and lived in Southern Africa between 2 million and 3 million years ago. Its brain was larger than Lucy’s and its facial features were more human-like. Recent finds are probably going to push this timeline further back in time.
Paranthropus aethiopicus
This early ape-like hominid walked on two legs and lived between 2.8 million and 2.2 million years ago. Based on skull measurements, scientists concluded this species had the smallest adult hominid brain ever discovered.
Paranthropus bosei
It is believed that P. Bosei split from the line leading to modern human some 2 million years ago and lived alongside our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years, but died out after failing to adapt their diets.
Homo habilis
Many scientists believe H. habilis is the missing link between the ape-like hominids like Lucy and the more human-like ones that came after. They had long ape-like arms, but walked on two feet and were capable of creating tools. 2.2 mya to 1.6 mya
Homo ergaster
Scientists can’t decide whether this African hominid is just a failed predecessor of H. erectus or the rightful ancestor of modern humans. It had a thinner skull than H. erectus and was more proficient at making tools and using fire. 2 mya to 1.5 mya
Homo erectus
H. erectus is generally believed to be the direct ancestor of modern humans and also the first hominid to live in caves and tame fire. 2 mya to 400,000 years ago.
Cro-Magnon/Homo sapiens
These people were modern humans and lived in Europe from about 65 to 50,000 BC to present. They are found in Africa from about 200,000 years ago to present. Found in Australia from about 50,000 years ago to present. Their cave paintings, petroglyphs, and sculptures are the earliest known examples of art by a prehistoric people.
Neanderthal
Stocky, muscular, squat and well suited for the cold, Neanderthals looked distinctly different from modern humans. But they were like us in other ways: they buried their dead, cared for their sick and injured and were probably capable of language and music. Bones of Neanderthal have been found in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Scientists not long ago put together a complete Neanderthal skeleton, and have just this year (2009), completed their genome. They have a 99.5% gene match to us humans. 250,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago.
Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in the UK, is blaming Europe’s falling birthrate on a culture of Consumerism, instant gratification, and neo-Darwinism.
“Europe is facing a population crisis because of attacks on religion by secular writers,” Britain’s chief rabbi said. “The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians.” He added.
He said the continent was dying and accused its citizens of not being prepared for parenthood’s sacrifices.
The 61-year-old rabbi said: “Wherever you turn today – Jewish, Christian or Muslim – the more religious the communities, the larger on average are their families.
Lord Sacks stated that Europe is the most secular region in the world and the only continent seeing populations fall.
He said parenthood involved “massive sacrifices” of money, attention, time and emotional energy.
Lord Sacks asked: “In Europe where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not born?”
He continued: “Europe is dying, exactly as Polybius said about ancient Greece in the third pre-Christian century.”
“We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no-one is talking about it.”
Well that’s one more burden us poor atheists must bear. We are constantly accused of having no morals or reason for living; we are depraved because of lack of belief in some “floaty thing” in the sky, we must be disguised killers and rapist. Now we are killing a whole continent…Oh the shame.
Some people have said that the earth is overpopulated by about 6 billion people…we’re just doing our part to lower population.
Seriously, that order of God to go forth and populated the world is really not PC anymore, we have to stop growing, not only in Europe but the rest of the world.
For most Muslims, evolution and the fact that plant and animal life prospered without Allah intervening is largely compatible with their religion. However, many, if not most, find it unacceptable that humans evolved, and evolved from primitive primate forms. The Koran states that Allah created the first man, Adam, out of clay and that settles it for them.
Physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy lecturing at Quaid-e-Azam university in Pakistan said that when he talked about the large sweep of time from the Big-Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, his audience listened without dissent until he got to the part where the apes stand up…mentioning human evolution almost started riots and the professor had to be escorted out of the building.
“That’s one thing that will never be possible to bridge; your lineage is what determines your worth,” the professor said about human evolution and Muslims.
Places like Pakistan that teach biology and evolution will omit information and questions about where the human race came from…that is a theological question that science dare not try to answer.
Some Muslim academics are worried that rejection of some aspects of evolution will leave Islamic countries at a decided disadvantage in their scientific education and their ability to compete in a world economy.
Muslim controlled countries continue to be some of the most backward cultures on earth and their human rights record gives Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International workers constant grief. Sadly, the religion controls most of their life and kills initiative to build a better life or culture, and as long as this is true they will continue to be 2½ (not quite 3rd) world countries.
I believe also that as long as these people let Islamic religion control their lives so completely the Jewish and Christian world will have to constantly watch their backs and plan to be under attack at any time. The leaders in the Islamic religion seem to be unable to control their followers or themselves as they often instigate trouble themselves.
I think the following succinctly sums up the whole man made Christian melodrama…
“The belief that a walking dead Jewish deity who was his own father although he always existed, commits suicide by cop, although he didn’t really die, in order to give himself permission not to send you to an eternal place of torture that he created for you, but instead to make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically promise him you accept him as your master, so he can cleanse you of an evil force that is present in mankind because a rib-woman and a mud-man were convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Yeah, the whole thing would make Jesus die laughing, if he wasn’t already dead, and assuming he ever existed.”
Yes this makes perfect sense and is far more logical than those other God stories that men have always made up…you know, like the Hindu’s, Taoist, Buddhist, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Wicca, etc..
The Catholics are getting scared…seems that the young 18-25 year old crowd is rejecting religion in droves. The latest example is atheism clubs in some high schools.
The British internet newspaper the Telegraph.co.uk reports: Here
“A “triumphalistic, self-righteous atheism” inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is winning a following among American young people, leading to “atheist clubs” in high schools, according to Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.”
“The cardinal, who is President of the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference, says that unbelief among young people is more than a question of stopping going to church, it is part of a fashionable “new atheism” which is every bit as intolerant as Christian fundamentalism. He told John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter.”
The Cardinal goes on to say that five years ago there was no such thing, but now by the time they’re sophomores in high school they say they are atheists.
I think the intolerance of the students is justified if you realize just how hard the evangelical fundamentalist have pushed the young folks in the past 10 years of so. There have been religious clubs and organizations that operate in high schools and colleges for years. There is tremendous peer pressure to conform to the Christian norm in many schools..especially in the South and the “Bible belt.”
Think of the clubs you hear about who gather “with no official school backing” to pray to start the day or before football games or other sporting events. In the majority of the Southern United States, school officials covertly “push” religion, of the Christian variety only, onto students as much as they think they can get away with.
According to recent polls atheism is growing in the US, but we still have a long way to go. The Christian right controls the Republican Party, and the stated goal of some popular televangelist is to create a theist controlled government in America. Boy can’t you just picture the Religious Police swat team breaking into your house and arresting you for fornication because you are living with your girl/boy friend.
Religion needs to be kept in a harmless position over modern society; it cannot be allowed to ever again control our lives as it did for near 2000 years. Our morality does not depend on obeisance to some mythical god. Secular society has proven to be as moral (maybe more) as religion controlled society.
The world just keeps sliding slowly into a quagmire of human rights abuses. Ireland recently passed a Blasphemy law that prohibits anyone from talking bad about another’s religion and wouldn’t you know it the Muslims are behind it. In most (or probably all) Muslim controlled countries it’s against the law to write or speak against the religion or its founder Muhammad…fact is it’ll probably get you killed.
The United Nations has this non-binding resolution on “Combating the Defamation of Religion” that is intended to curtail speech that offends religion — particularly Islam. Pakistan and the Organization of the Islamic Conference introduced the measure to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 1999. It was amended to include religions other than Islam, and it has passed every year since.
The non-binding Resolution 62/145, which was adopted in 2007, says it “notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of 11 September 2001.” It “stresses the need to effectively combat defamation of all religions and incitement of religious hatred, against Islam and Muslims in particular.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently came out strongly against this resolution and laws around the world that make religious defamation a crime, saying that freedom of speech and religion should be equally upheld.
“Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called ‘anti-defamation’ policies that would restrict freedom of expression and the freedom of religion,” she said
“I strongly disagree. The United States will always… stand against discrimination and persecution… But an individual’s ability to practice his or her religion has no bearing on others’ freedom of speech,” Clinton said.
“The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faith will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions. These differences should be met with tolerance, not with the suppression of discourse,” she added.
Other critics of the resolution believe this is a dangerous threat to freedom of speech everywhere. There are some religious groups and free speech advocates banding together to fight this resolution which they say is being used to spread Sharia Law in the Western world and will intimidate those who would criticize Islam.
“It’s obviously intended to have an intimidating effect on people expressing criticism of radical Islam, and the idea that you can have a defamation of a religion like this, I think, is a concept fundamentally foreign to our system of free expression in the United States,” said former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.
Kevin Hasson, who is founder and president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm in Washington that opposes the resolution says “It is a slap in the face of human rights law.”
“The whole idea of the defamation of religion is a Trojan horse for something else,” Hasson said. “When you talk about defamation, you talk about people being defamed and people being libeled, but ideas can’t be defamed. Ideas don’t have rights, people have rights.”
He added that “the resolution is a shield for Islamic fundamentalists who retaliate against perceived offenses and want to make Islamic Sharia law the law of the land.” He said the resolution passes under the guise of protecting religion, but it actually endangers religious minorities in Islamic countries.”
“It provides international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, and there are a number of people who are in prison today because they have been accused of committing blasphemy,” said Bennett Graham, international program director with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
We have to remember that many of the governments that are pushing this idea are not democratic governments. Citizens of Egypt or Pakistan who have been two of the prime ringleaders of this movement, are frequently put in prison or arrested for blasphemy or other “crimes” against the Muslim religion, and even if they’re not arrested (rare), the fear of being arrested creates an environment of self-censorship.”
Western democracies are arguing that a religion cannot enjoy protection from criticism because that would require a judicial ruling that its teachings are the “truth.” (I can see fundamentalists jumping all over this)
“Defamation carries a particular legal meaning and application in domestic systems that makes the term wholly unsuitable in the context of religions,” the U.S. government responded on the issue to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
We probably won’t have a problem here in the US with this absurd law because of our Constitutional Right of Free Speech, but you never know, look at what George Bush did to our most precious document. And by the way, it’s still being abused because most of Bush’s presidential decrees that usurped some constitutional laws haven’t been rescinded.
“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible [is] a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.” Albert Einstein
Leo Pardus, writing over at the De-Conversion blogHere has a great piece up. He lists (most) all the things that your God CANNOT do, and that’s in addition to never answering anyone’s prayers.
Below is a small sample.
Your God cannot:
“Give his church enough unity, sense, inspiration, drive, integrity, or guts to ‘accomplish such good works as to shame people of their slander’, or to ‘withstand the gates of hell’, or to ‘overcome the world’, or to ‘keep the unity of faith’, or to do anything else that he said the church should do. (What a great founder and guide!)”
If you go to the site…I urge you to read the post slowly and ponder what he is saying. The whole list is completely true and speaks volumes about the lack of truth of the old Jewish myths. Me and most other atheists have been saying these things for years, but never in such a manner that your mind can wrap around so quickly and completely.
**********
Karen Armstrong’s latest book, “The Case for God”, New York: Knopf, 2009 Reviewed in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy magazine has a great line that has me wondering if it was a Freudian slip, as she is very much on the side of religion. …
She says:”Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures.” (my Emphasis)
Now, this I have been saying for 50 years…we humans created (i.e. made up) religion…not God, glad to finally have someone relatively famous agree with me. Well, I know most of my readers agree with me, and some are famous
A new bunch of atheist books are hitting the bookshelves.
Bruce Sheiman says he doesn’t believe in God, but he believes in religion. Ignoring the question about whether God exists he argues that the benefits of religion outweighs the cost in his new book, An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion Than Without It.
In an interview with writer Daniel Burke of Religion News Service, Sheiman said: “I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to convince me that God exists, but they can convince me that religion has intrinsic value.”
“More than any other institution, religion deserves our appreciation and respect because it has persistently encouraged people to care deeply — for the self, for neighbors, for humanity, and for the natural world — and to strive for the highest ideals humans are able to envision,” Sheiman says.
“Faith provides meaning and purpose for millions of believers, inspires people to tend to each other and build communities, gives them a sense of union with a transcendent force, and provides numerous health benefits,” Sheiman argues.
The last few years has seen an abundance of in-your-face books by prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens who argue that belief in God, or any religion, is akin to being slightly crazy or worse. But, throughout time there have been defenders of religion who may not believe in the religion per se, but recognize its cultural benefits.
Some really evil people in the Dark Ages criminalized non-belief and you could lose your livelihood and/or life if you didn’t believe, and of course if you are a Muslim you’re screwed if you try to renounce your faith nowadays…this is the down-side of any religion…let them get in control and all benefits go away.
Greg M. Epstein, chaplain at Harvard University argues in his new book, Good without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, that morality does not depend on a judgmental deity and that nonbelievers can lead meaningful, even purpose-driven, lives, but they can also learn from people of faith.
“When our goal is erasing religion, rather than embracing human beings, we all lose.” Epstein says.
“Atheists too, can be a blessing for believers,” says co-founder and co-leader of New York’s interreligious Faith House Manhattan and author of It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian, Samir Selmanovic, “Atheists are “God’s whistle-blowers,” who keep believers honest and focused on the here-and-now,” Selmanovic added.
No one expects the God debate to end any time in the near future, but in the meantime, perhaps we can disagree a little more agreeably…or not.
Free will is an illusion. It is synonymous with incomplete perception. —Walter Kubilius
A single uncaused cause could destroy the universe.
“Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is causally connected. For nothing exists or has come into being in the cosmos without a cause. The universe will be disrupted and disintegrate into pieces and cease to be a unity functioning as a single system, if any uncaused movement is introduced into it.”Chrysippus
Is God an uncaused cause?…yes he is according to Christian theology.
The puzzle of free will and moral responsibility
“Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life. … But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns….”Arthur Schopenhauer
Free will in the Hindu tradition “Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is molded by conditions of time, space and causality. … To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here.” Swami Vivekananda
Buddhism on Free Will
In Buddhism it is taught that the idea of absolute freedom of choice (i.e. that any human being could be completely free to make any choice) is foolish, because it denies the reality of one’s physical needs and circumstances. Equally incorrect is the idea that we have no choice in life or that our lives are pre-determined. To deny freedom would be to undermine the efforts of Buddhists to make moral progress (through our capacity to freely choose compassionate action). Wikipedia
If the Christian God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice one makes, the status of choices as free is called into question. If God had timelessly true knowledge about one’s choices, this would seem to constrain one’s freedom.
Biblical fundamentalists tell us they know what will happen to the human civilization in the years to come. It seems God has this plan that he set in motion at the beginning of time. We are to see the “antichrist” take over the world at some point and the forces of “Good and Evil” will fight it out in Armageddon (Megiddo in Israel). Good will win out…of course, and those left alive, and those already dead and buried, will be resurrected and face a sort of heavenly Inquisition to determine if they will live forever in the Kingdom of God…you know, the one that Jesus said his followers alive in his time would live to see.
This plan is evidence that we have no free will at all, as everything that happens (and has happened) on earth is bound to lead up to the final days and the prearranged melodrama. All actions we take as individuals only contributes in some miniscule way to the final outcome…nothing we do by using our “free will” changes the prearranged outcome.
Now some fundamentalists say that they will be “Raptured” up to heaven before this happens and they will not face the final days of earths destruction, some say they will be left on earth to clean-up the mess and achieve a sort of paradise on earth were we will all (those left) live forever. In any event Satan looses and he knows it, and has known since the beginning of time…it’s all prearranged and set in stone…so to speak. I’m sure that some denominations have slightly different versions, but these seem to be the dominate view.
Having the story ‘out there’ and knowing the outcome just isn’t compatible with free will. The bible is no help, as it says we Do have free will, and it says we Don’t have free will.
What do you think?
Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived. – Isaac Asimov
After almost losing out to public opinion where 54% of those polled thought Intelligent Design (ID) should be taught in British schools, the officials in charge of such stuff decided to teach evolution only. Contrary to many school boards here in the US, it seems they actually listen to and believe their scientists in the UK. [...]
Some of our missing links and when they lived. Note that some or all of these times and general information may change as new data emerges or new finds are made. Sorry, that’s the way science is. Ardipithicus ramidus The Ardipithecus specimen, an adult female, stood four feet tall and weighed about 120 pounds, almost a foot taller [...]
Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in the UK, is blaming Europe’s falling birthrate on a culture of Consumerism, instant gratification, and neo-Darwinism. “Europe is facing a population crisis because of attacks on religion by secular writers,” Britain’s chief rabbi said. “The major assault on relig […]
For most Muslims, evolution and the fact that plant and animal life prospered without Allah intervening is largely compatible with their religion. However, many, if not most, find it unacceptable that humans evolved, and evolved from primitive primate forms. The Koran states that Allah created the first man, Adam, out of clay and that settles [...]
I think the following succinctly sums up the whole man made Christian melodrama… “The belief that a walking dead Jewish deity who was his own father although he always existed, commits suicide by cop, although he didn’t really die, in order to give himself permission not to send you to an eternal place of torture that [...]
The Catholics are getting scared…seems that the young 18-25 year old crowd is rejecting religion in droves. The latest example is atheism clubs in some high schools. The British internet newspaper the Telegraph.co.uk reports: Here “A “triumphalistic, self-righteous atheism” inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is winning a following among A […]
The world just keeps sliding slowly into a quagmire of human rights abuses. Ireland recently passed a Blasphemy law that prohibits anyone from talking bad about another’s religion and wouldn’t you know it the Muslims are behind it. In most (or probably all) Muslim controlled countries it’s against the law to write or speak against [...]
“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible [is] a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.” Albert Einstein Leo Pardus, writing over at the De-Conversion blog Here has [...]
A new bunch of atheist books are hitting the bookshelves. Bruce Sheiman says he doesn’t believe in God, but he believes in religion. Ignoring the question about whether God exists he argues that the benefits of religion outweighs the cost in his new book, An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion Than [...]
Free will is an illusion. It is synonymous with incomplete perception. —Walter Kubilius A single uncaused cause could destroy the universe. “Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is causally connected. For nothing exis […]
