Arguing evolution with the religious is an exercise in patience. Not moment-to-moment, 'conversational' patience, but the kind of patience it would require to teach rocks how to video-blog on youtube. Long term patience. Patience on the scale of geological time, maybe? Ironic. There is something both ridiculous and pathetic about clinging to a worldview that is routinely refuted by accident, by fucking chain gangs building roads across fossil-laden middle America.
What is so difficult about accepting true ideas and discarding the untrue? Its not always pleasant, but we do it in almost every other area of out lives when the evidence makes continued self-deception seem absurd. I'm going to spare myself listing all the elegant and rock-solid arguments refuting religion; any person with confidence in either side of the debate knows them already. My frustration stems from there being a debate at all, and I mean that in the least totalitarian way possible.
This 'hot-topic' of creation vs. evolution is misleading by way of its own hype - Nobody really considers it controversial. Its become kind of a train wreck, but the kind of train wreck that people don't have to feel bad about staring at because everybody on board was an asshole. Its entertaining to watch the creationists get destroyed in debates, or make themselves look dumb on tv. Its a guilty pleasure, but for them any publicity is good publicity. Their whole game plan is just to go out and get beat up by science in public so they can release movies like "Expelled" and claim to be the whistle blowers on 'big science'. This would be troubling except that the movie itself even fails to support its own arguments. Their whole organization can do little more than use its primary weapons of confusion and self-importance to prey on the ignorant and the credulous.
What do we do then? How long can we be expected to burn calories in some of the sharpest, brightest, most elegant scientific brains, reiterating the simple truth to these people? How many hours does a great scientist have to consider his argument against creation before we can call this debate an offensive, petulant, disgusting waste of human intelligence and potential? Would we go to the same great pains to argue the point with a flat-earthist? We all have more important things to move on to, humanity has greater problems (real problems) to solve. Staring at the train wreck is holding up traffic.
What is so difficult about accepting true ideas and discarding the untrue? Its not always pleasant, but we do it in almost every other area of out lives when the evidence makes continued self-deception seem absurd. I'm going to spare myself listing all the elegant and rock-solid arguments refuting religion; any person with confidence in either side of the debate knows them already. My frustration stems from there being a debate at all, and I mean that in the least totalitarian way possible.
This 'hot-topic' of creation vs. evolution is misleading by way of its own hype - Nobody really considers it controversial. Its become kind of a train wreck, but the kind of train wreck that people don't have to feel bad about staring at because everybody on board was an asshole. Its entertaining to watch the creationists get destroyed in debates, or make themselves look dumb on tv. Its a guilty pleasure, but for them any publicity is good publicity. Their whole game plan is just to go out and get beat up by science in public so they can release movies like "Expelled" and claim to be the whistle blowers on 'big science'. This would be troubling except that the movie itself even fails to support its own arguments. Their whole organization can do little more than use its primary weapons of confusion and self-importance to prey on the ignorant and the credulous.
What do we do then? How long can we be expected to burn calories in some of the sharpest, brightest, most elegant scientific brains, reiterating the simple truth to these people? How many hours does a great scientist have to consider his argument against creation before we can call this debate an offensive, petulant, disgusting waste of human intelligence and potential? Would we go to the same great pains to argue the point with a flat-earthist? We all have more important things to move on to, humanity has greater problems (real problems) to solve. Staring at the train wreck is holding up traffic.