When I was in college a few years ago some of us got into a discussion about religion. One of our friends had a great story about Sunday School. The teacher asked him what he thought of the Bible and his response was that it was the greatest piece of fiction ever written.

I don't know what forum you were in, nor do I know where any of these teens were from, but I can tell you that they are not the majority of the country. These groups of people are one of the ones that make me the most furious. They would have us ruled by what the Bible says rather than what science has proven. Funny how the Bible preaches peace, tolerance and love and yet the most devote followers are the first to bash gays or "cast the first stone".

Intelligent Design is another word for Creationism. Creationism is Religion. And Religion has NO BUSINESS being taught in public schools. I wouldn't be there to learn about religion. If I wanted to talk about creation I'd go to church and since I've been in high school up through this moment I personally have had no use for church. There are two types of people in my opinion that go to church. The first are the people who actually enjoy going because they truly get something out of it and that's perfectly fine. The second group are all the people out there that either are forced to go (children who don't want to go or the man being dragged there when he would rather be watching football) or the people who feel that they have to go. Now that could be because they feel if they don't go they'll go to hell or because they will be mocked by others if they don't go. I don't have to go to church to prove that I believe in something and honestly I find it sad that some people fine it necessary to go to church as a means to prove they believe in God.

I never liked science class anyway, but if I were in High School now and some science teacher even mentioned Intelligent Design while he was teaching Evolution I would get up and walk out of the classroom. There are too many religions with different beliefs to choose one idea by one religion and force it down someone’s throat. So if I follow a religion where it said the Universe was created when a cosmic spaceman named Hugo let out an enormous fart thus creating all life as we know it, would that be taught? Or even worse if I was a Scientologist would my beliefs be reflected in the class, because you know damn well Tom Cruise is pounding at the door just dying to brainwash all those High School students just like he did to Katie Holmes. Now look at her. She's going to give birth to some alien baby that was implanted in her. The point is I don't want to hear the views of some science fiction writer, I don't want to hear about Hugo farting, and I don't want to hear from the Christian nut jobs that are trying to turn Public Schools into a ground for teaching their viewpoints. If you want your kids to learn Intelligent Design or Creationism send them to Catholic Schools and leave the rest of us alone!

I like the idea of this god called Hugo fart and created the universe. Must have been smelly though.

Religon and science can't be taught in the same class. It's virtually impossible I think and and both should be taught in 2 subjects, religon should be taught in RE (Religon Education) and science in er science education.

If you believe in whatever religon you believe in and were taught/want to send you kids to relgious school that teaches you relgion as science, then that's fine by me though I personally think that's stupid.

I know a bit about the various main religons, eg Christianty, Islam, etc and am amazed that Christians call themselves Christans even though there's so many Christain religons out there, eg Prostant and Catholic.

Also, religon to me is another word for power and how poeple should be forced to live by whatever religon. For example, the Taliban wanted people in Afaghanistan to worship their version of Islam only which is also their politcal law.

These Dover people in the US believe that God exists, created the universe in 6 days (does this mean that he had Sunday off?) and anything that is older than the universe, eg dinosaur bones, are fake and God will protect his flock from everything. Well he's not doing a good job of protecting his believers from very nasty storms, terrorist attacks, wars, diease, etc.

Science says that the universe started in a big bang and nothing existed before that big bang. Well if that's true then if nothing existed before the big bang then the gases which started off the big bang couldn't have cuased it in the first place and if they did exist then something must have existed before the big bang.

I don't think we will ever find out how the universe started at all with the way we are destroy this planet and ourselves and I don't believe or have faith in any gods, whether they be ET, Allah or the Hugo the Farter at all because these gods aren't doing their job correctly at all.

The only thing I believe in is beer because if you drink enough of it then the pain of seeing and hearing the rest of the human kind running around forcing people to believe in whatever and hating and killing those we don't like.

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker

I still like the idea of Hugo creating the universe by farting.

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker

Ooh, that is a good question.

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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny."

huh. good memory Meridian. here it is again, for your reading pleasure - excerpted from Lifetide by Lyall Watson.

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Evolution makes mistakes. As Arthur Koestler puts it, 'For every existing species hundreds have perished in the past; the fossil record is a waste-basket of the Chief Designer's discarded models.' True, but evolution also gets things incredibly, almost unbelievably, right.

The transparent cornea of our eye could hardly have evolved through progressive trial and error by natural selection. You can either see through it, or you can't. Such an innovation has to be right the first time, or else it just doesn't happen again, because the blind owner gets eaten. Darwin himself admitted that the perfection of the vertebrate eye sent cold shivers down his spine.

Something else which disturbed him as the elaborate life cycle of certain insects, 'in which we cannot see how an instinct could possibly have originated' and 'in which no intermediate gradations are known to exist'. The lyric French entymologist Jean Henri Fabre, who worked all his life alone on the sandy stretches of southern France, put his fingers right on such a sore spot on the theory of natural selection, when he raised the controversial matter of the giant wasps.

Adult wasps are vegetarian, but the larvae of many are carnivores. So in these species the survival of the young depends on the mother's correct choice of food which she herself does not eat. This much can be under instinctive control, but there are refinements in the relationships between the predatory wasps and their prey which are almost impossible to squeeze into an evolutionary or instinctive model.

To take just one example, the wasp Pepsis marginata feeds its young only on the tarantula Cyrtopholis portoricae. The female wasp produces very few eggs but for each one she has to provide an adult tarantula, alive but paralysed. When an egg in her ovary is almost ready to be laid she goes out hunting, flying over the ground late on a sunny afternoon looking for a spider out early in search of its own insect food. The tarantula has poor sight and little or no sense of hearing, relying on an extremely delicate sense of touch to locate its prey. The lightest contact with any of the body hair on a hungry tarantula and the spider whirls and sinks its long fangs into any cricket or millipede that gets too close. Yet when spider and wasp meet, and the wasp starts to explore with her antennae to make certain she is dealing with the right species, the tarantula does nothing. The wasp crawls under the spider and even walks all over it without evoking any hostile response. If the molestation is too great and too persistent, the tarantula sometimes rises up on all eight legs as though it were standing on stilts, but otherwise calmly awaits its fate. 'All is arranged,' muses Loren Eiseley, 'in such a manner as to suggest the victim possesses an innate awareness of his role, but cannot evade it.'

Meanwhile the wasp moves off a few inches to dig its waiting victim's grave. Working vigorously with legs and mouthparts, she digs a hole about ten inches deep and slightly wider than the spider, popping her head out of the excavation every now and then to make sure that the tarantula is still there. Usually, and unaccountably, it is, and when the grave is ready, the wasp returns to complete her ghastly enterprise. First she feels the spider all over once again with her antennae and then slides underneath on her back, working with her wings to get into the right position for a shot at the vital spot. She can penetrate the spider's horny exoskeleton only at the soft hinging membrane where the legs join the body, and only if she stings with surgical precision to the right depth, at the right angle, in precisely the right place, can she be certain of locating the one nerve center which will stun the spider without killing it. And during all this manoeuvring, which can last several minutes, the tarantula makes no move to save itself.

Finally the wasp jabs and the spider tries a desperate but vain defense. The two roll over and over on the ground, but the outcome is always the same. The tarantula falls paralysed on its back. The wasp drags it by one leg down into the waiting tomb where she does another remarkable thing. She packs her big hair larder so masterfully into the hole that, even if it were by some chance to recover, it could never dig its own way out. Each one of the eight hug limbs is literally handcuffed to the earth. Then she lays one egg, attaches it to the side of the spider's abdomen with a sticky secretion, fills in the grave and leaves.

But the extraordinary story doesn't end there. When the wasp larvae hatches, it is many times smaller than its helpless victim, and totally dependent on it. During the long weeks of development it will have no other food, no water and so, working to a complex and gruesome culinary programme, it proceeds to consume the tarantula piece by piece, keeping it alive and fresh by saving the vital organs until last. By the time it has completed its gargantuan meal, and is ready to burst out of the tomb carrying its down surgical instrument, and a map of the operations to be performed on another tarantula, nothing remains of the first one but its indigestible chitinous skeleton.

Mutations in structure or behaviour are, argues Jacques Monod, 'drawn from the realms of pure chance'. But if that were so, we would expect that the tarantula would also by now have accidentally happened upon a defence against its predator. Instead we have a situation in which a spider, quite capable of defending itself against, or even killing a wasp, allows the insect to paralyse it. And we have a wasp who has an uncanny knowledge of the exact location of the nerve centers in its prey. Planted anywhere else, the sting will either kill the spider, rendering it useless as a food store, or fail to have any effect except the probable death of the wasp by retaliation. In neither case is there scope for natural selection. There are no degrees of success in this endeavor. It is an all or nothing situation. You can't go on practicing hypodermic skills on poisonous spiders twice your size. You must get it right the first time.

Evolution asserts that spectacular adaptations have their origins in myriads of minute mutations, the vast majority of which are harmful to the organism; and that natural selection acts like a ratchet, preserving each useful mutation while new changes are being tried out. Which implies that the wasp's master chart of surgery was not always perfect. But a surgeon cannot learn his trade by indiscriminately chasing and slashing at potential patients with a scalpel. This evolutionary marvel in the wasp could not come about by the sort of slow selection that we know from the fossil record worked on the horse's ancestors to give the living members their larger size and greater speed. In the wasp the entire pattern has to work immediately, or the species become extinct. And how could a pattern as complex as this come about in isolation, on the off-chance, without actually being used? Because, before it was complete in all its details, it could not be used at all.

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Trample the weak. Hurdle the dead.

If you're going to teach ID in schools, then present it as a theory in the place where it really belongs - Philosophy classes. But, if you are, then you also HAVE to present the creationist theorys of ALL OTHER MAJOR RELIGONS, and allow the kids to decide for theirselves.

I get worried by people who blindly follow the bible without stopping to think about it first. Times and people change, and we don't follow everything that's wrote down there.

...now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to stone my sister to death for commiting adultary.

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Oh, that box. You'll dream about that box: it'll never leave you. Big and little at the same time; brand-new and ancient - and the bluest blue, ever.

Here, here.

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker

PARIS (Reuters) - The Roman Catholic Church has restated its support for evolution with an article praising a U.S. court decision that rejects the "intelligent design" theory as non-scientific.

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said that teaching intelligent design -- which argues that life is so complex that it needed a supernatural creator -- alongside Darwin's theory of evolution would only cause confusion.

A court in the state of Pennsylvania last month barred a school from teaching intelligent design (ID), a blow to Christian conservatives who want it to be taught in biology classes along with the Darwinism they oppose.

The ID movement sometimes presents Catholicism, the world's largest Christian denomination, as an ally in its campaign. While the Church is socially conservative, it has a long theological tradition that rejects fundamentalist creationism.

"Intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the demand it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation," said the article in the Tuesday edition of the newspaper.

Evolution represents "the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth" and the debate in the United States was "polluted by political positions," wrote Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at Italy's Bologna University.

"So the decision by the Pennsylvania judge seems correct."

EVOLUTION CONFUSION

Confusion about the Catholic view of evolution arose last year when both the newly elected Pope Benedict and his former student, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, said humans were part of an intelligent project designed by God.

An article by Schoenborn in the New York Times in July seemed to signal a Church shift toward intelligent design because it played down a 1996 statement by Pope John Paul that evolution was "more than a hypothesis."

This triggered a wave of "Vatican rejects Darwin" headlines and attacks from scientists, Catholics among them, who argued that had been proved man evolved from lower beings.

Schoenborn later made it clear the Church accepted evolution as solid science but objected to the way some Darwinists concluded that it proved God did not exist and could "explain everything from the Big Bang to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

The Church, which has never rejected evolution, teaches that God created the world and the natural laws by which life developed. Even its best-known dissident, Swiss theologian Hans Kueng, echoed this in a recent book in Germany.

Schoenborn said he spoke up because he shared Benedict's concern, stated just before his election last April, that a "dictatorship of relativism" was trying to deny God's existence.

TENET OF FAITH

Pennsylvania Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design was a version of creationism, the belief that God made the world in six days as told in the Bible, and thus could not be taught without violating a ban on teaching religion in public schools.

It was not science, despite claims by its backers, he said.

This literal reading of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is a tenet of faith for evangelical Protestants, a group that has become politically influential in the United States.

Many U.S. Catholics may agree with evangelicals politically, but the Church does not share their theology on this point. Intelligent design has few supporters outside the United States.

While not an official document, the article in L'Osservatore Romano had to be vetted in advance to reflect Vatican thinking.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute -- the main think tank of the ID movement -- said on its website that reading the Osservatore article that way amounted to an attempt "to put words in the Vatican's mouth."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060119/ts_nm/religion_catholic_evolution_dc - Thu Jan 19, 10:52 AM ET

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Oh, that box. You'll dream about that box: it'll never leave you. Big and little at the same time; brand-new and ancient - and the bluest blue, ever.

You have now put that image of baby dinosaurs chasing Adam now with Benny Hill music playing. OH MY GOD.

Also has anybody mention that if God created Adam and then took a rib out of Adam and created Eve, how did he manage to create the whole human race as their 2 sons met 2 women who came from well no where. Or did God just took a rib each out of Able and Cain and created those women?

Also, Adam must be really happy as he never had a mother in law. Lol

quote:

Originally posted by meridianday It's nice to know where the catholics stand on this. Having done a bit more searching around today (and found lots of information about creationist theme parks - picture Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden with dinosaurs, they all ate fruit of course And apparently there was room on Noah's ark for some baby dinosaurs - surely it would have been full to overflowing with all the animals that the biblical writers at that time would have known about. And when Adam and Eve got thrown out of Eden, suddenly the dinosaurs with pointy teeth got fed up of eating fruit and started chasing Adam. I'm picturing some kind of 70s caveman movie here.) it seems that it causes great embarrassment to proponents of Intelligent Design to be associated with Creationists. Probably because creationism got discredited and banned, and the IDers don't want to be tarred with that brush.

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker

Seems to me one of the kids did go off and find a wife from another tribe.

<Cricket runs off to other site for a moment.>

Yep, Genesis 4.

And God prefered the vegetarian offerings, and bigamy happened at least once in the first five generations.

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Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl