Senator Chris Buttars, Utah:





What a pompous ***. This fool is a senator? How did he get elected?!

The article.

Notice how the state school curriculum officials basically convey Buttars as a loony and say there will be no change. Where does Buttars get off issuing such asinine statements?

Ah, how naive taleboy.

Too bad that bull**** like his will never stop. :/

Zoom.

Zoom.

Enhance.

ENHANCE

Oh, Utah.


That explains it.

But... a senator. You know.. one of those immensely powerful dudes that has a say in legislation and presidential appointments.

I don't care where you're from. If you're a senator, you're not that ignorant. Period.

Yeah, some pretty lame people can become senators without much trouble. Take my senator Tom Tancredo(CO), who says if the US gets terrorist attacks similar to those in London, we should respond by.. er.. bombing Mecca.

Not trying to get off topic (if it was the evolution thing), just pointing out how there are some ridiculous senators (including Hillary(NY), Santorum(PA), Schumer(NY)... it goes on).

[edit]Added states for each sen.[/edit]

How would they teach "intelligent design" in schools? Aren't there thousands of religions with thousands of ideas of how man was put on this Earth? How do you even pick one?

You make it so incredibly general that it could fit almost any religion.

But let's face it. In America, you don't have to. Just teach Genesis chapter 1 and misrepresent it as science.

There's nothing 'intelligent' about 'design'. This 'designer' obviously had no clue what he was doing: God's greatest, and often times outrageously retarded, mistakes (partial list!). I can vouch for this one .

Also, if we examine the evidence (it's so crazy it just might work), multiple designers is a far more plausible theory (and even that is retarded).

Or, you know, misrepresent theories as facts.

Before you all jump at me with knives and ****, I'm not trying to start a religious debate or anything. I agree, this guy is an idiot, but on some level he has a point. The theory of Evolution has not been proven. Why should children be taught an unproven theory as fact, and not religion?

Now, as long as the schools make it a point to teach it as a theory, I have no problem with it. Likewise, there should be no problem teaching religions as religion. The minute you start categorizing either as fact before it has been proven is the minute you start trampling on other people's beliefs.

I think this guy's an idiot, but his demands are rather fair; teach a form of creationism equally alongside evolution. Why would that be such a bad thing? It wouldn't be putting one over the other. It'd just give students the ability to make an informed choice of what they want to believe in, without favoring one or the other.





All politicians are this idiotic, with perhaps a few rare exceptions. I don't see why a senator (from Utah, no less) would be any different.

First square applies in this situation..

Actually, it doesn't. I never said they should stop teaching evolution in schools, and the comic does nothing to dispute the fact that evolution has not been proven. So, your post's only point was to insult religion. Way to contribute to a civilized discussion.

No, but it is painfully obvious that you don't have a clue what a theory is. Painfully.

But let's do this Sesame Street style - you fill in the dots:

• atomic ...
• ... of gravity
• cell ...
• germ ... of disease
• heliocentric ...
• kinetic-molecular ...
• plate tectonics ...
• spherical earth ...

Next week, we'll do the letter u !

The last square of the comic also applies, because you are obviously allowed an opinion without knowing what you're talking about. It's so unfair that I actually have to know a bit about what I criticize, while you're above it. Read up, for the good of the city!

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
http://www.berea.edu/SpecialProject/scienceandfaith/essay05.asp

I could've swore Tom was more intelligent then that.

Ugh.

Senators are getting way too rediculous and radical these days.

Jack Tompson is going to be the next florida senator, I guarantee it.

Actually, no. Large parts of the workings of evolution have been proven by DNA research.

Also, millions of years before humans walked the earth, the planet was populated with dinosaurs. Had they not gone extinct by some kind of big disaster, humanity might not have existed at all. What's the religious take on that? God created the dinosaurs but decided he wanted humans instead? My christian roommate was convinced God had only put the dinosaur bones in the ground to mistify people...

I always say, if you want to believe, you better believe God created evolution

[edit]Future Posted[/edit]

Remind me again, why aren't we still evolving?

Even if evolution was true, you wouldn't notice us evolving because it takes 1000's of years to move into the next stage, think your great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren could have gills. :em321:

unless there was some sort of mass extinction, which would cause a period of massive evolutionary diversity.

OK, I'm tired of this. A scientific theory is different than the normal definition of a theory. If has to have evidence supporting it, and to be tested as much as possible without being proven false.

So saying "But evolution is only a theory!" isn't much of an arguement. It IS a theory. So is everything concerning atoms and energy.

Personally, I think both should be taught. Teach the evolution, and then say what Christians believe. Heck, they should even tell what Hindus believe, since they have the only major relgion that believes differently (I'm pretty sure, at least). I'm not talking about studying each one, just adding 5 or six extra sentences. Let people decide for themselves.

don't you have some sort of religious studies class in school? that's where you get taught about all the different beliefs of various religions. whereas science lessons should only teach stuff that's actually science.

Define science?

In response to Detty:

I did. I went to a Catholic high school, where we had Science and Religion classes. From what I learned, I've come to see the Bible as a book of moral lessons, not facts.

[QUOTE=Yummy Cookie]Define science?[/QUOTE]

science attempts to explain the universe via means of the scientific method.

The scientific method consists of proposing a hypothesis, attempting to disprove the hypothesis through experimentation. if the attempts to disprove it fail and it seems likely that it will hold for all relevant and foreseeable situations, it becomes a theory. If somehow it becomes proved (doesn't really happen much, happens a lot in maths though) it becomes a theorem.

Here's how I looked at this.

The senator trying to push creationism into schools isn't doing it for the student's behalf, but rather for his own ego. They're not going to be getting an education, they're just having HIS beliefs pushed to become theirs.

The point of an education is being able to think for yourself, including what to believe. The theory of evolution is science as it can lead to DNA science and whatnot, this is educational material. This makes people smarter and thus able to make their own decisions. If they want to believe in evolution because they have evidence, that's cool. If they want to believe in creationism because they've had a look at the evidence and weren't convinced, that's fine too.

IMO, this is much better than "All your mind are belong to God."

the way i understand it is religion explains why and science explains how.

Alright fair enough but not every religion has the same idea of why, so which one is right?

Obviously the one the senator believes in.

I agree with Ghostle:

[QUOTE=Chaz Ghostle]
From what I learned, I've come to see the Bible as a book of moral lessons, not facts.[/QUOTE]

[edit] Future-Posted ! [/edit]

What do you folks say to those who believe that Evolution is merely the result of the wheels that were set into motion by the gods? I've always been fascinated by the flawed logic of those such as Hawking, and how they're able to get away with such ridiculous leaps in logic. I get so sick of the non-religious bashing Christianity while ignoring the more sensible opinions of those who also believe in divine creation, that don't happen to be Christian. These debates always seem to end in the same way: close-minded Christians vs close-minded rent-a-scientists.



While there are a few interesting points on that site, the vast majority are about as irrelevant and pointless as possible. The author assumes that if there's a god, it must be perfect, and that it must have the ability to do everything. That's a logical leap that not even I would make, and I'm not half as bright as many people.



Why is that "retarded"? I don't know if it's more plausible, but it's possibly just as plausible. I believe in the possibility of multiple gods.

Evolution is fact

Let's start off by addressing the most fundemental misconceptions. A lot of people seem to think that there is some hierarchy of uncertainty, starting with 'guess' to 'estimate' to 'fact' at the top, with 'theory' somewhere in the middle. No. Science doesn't work like that. 'Theory' means a set of falsifiable predictions. 'Intelligent Design' (and Creationism) fail both of those criteria; they cannot be falsified, and there are no predictions. Evolution offers loads of predictions, and most of them are very specific, so very easy to falsify:

1 Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa.
2 Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates.
3 Predator-prey dynamics
4 Ernst Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution.
5 Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates.
6 Evolution predicts that different sets of character data should still give the same phylogenetic trees.

So Intelligent Design is not even a 'theory'; evolution is already superior. But evolution can pull ahead even further.

A fact is a theory that has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. This means that all the predictions that can be tested have been proven true, and that there is no internal inconsistency (this is a requirement for the coherence of a theory). Let's get back to those predictions.

1 has been supported by fossil and genetic evidence (Ingman et al. 2000).
2 has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients (Oliver et al. 2000).
3 (Yoshida et al. 2003).
4 A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction (Webster et al. 2003).
5 On the basis of a detailed study, they found the fossil Haikouella "fit these predictions closely" (Mallatt and Chen 2003).
6 has been confirmed informally myriad times and quantitatively, with different protein sequences, by Penny et al. (1982).

These are the very specific predictions that have been proven true. Paleontology for one wouldn't exist were it not for evolution. Biology as we know it would not exist. Evolution is the fundemental uniting 'theory of everything' of Biology. It is the most important principle of Biology.

If it were some radical fringe idea, I might understand reluctance to accept it. If it were a horriby complicated mathematical idea, I might understand ignorance of it.
But evolution is neither. It is fundementally necessary for any biology to make sense, and its beautiful elegance and simplicity is part of why it is so fundemental.

Evolution has given predictions, and observation has proven them true, time and time again. Were it not for evolution, we'd still be letting blood to cure diseases. We'd have no idea where to even start on antibiotics, let alone antibiotic resistance.
We use it every single day. It works. It explains the world around us.

That is what makes evolution a fact, it should be taught as a fact, and there is no rational reason to think of as anything else.



The problem is really where and when exactly were those 'wheels' set in motion? If you designate that one particular time and place as "This was God", you're basically saying "Oi, science, stay away", assuming that there cannot be a non-God-related explanation for it. You need to qualify this assumption.

And what 'leaps of logic' as Hawking ever made? Yes, he's been wrong on occassion, but because of observational evidence, not internal inconsistency.

The problem with that is that it violates the divide of Church of State, even if it taught all religions, and considered them equal. It's a lot easier to merely separate the state from the church completely (that is, not teach any religion whatsoever) than it is to immerse state with all churches (that is, teach every religion ever). This would please atheists, like myself, who don't want children indoctrinated with religion before they are able to actually understand it and evaluate it logically for themselves.

Of course, there is nothing stopping parents from teaching religion to children, taking them to church, but the state is not doing it.

So you believe in a god, but a non-perfect one? We're not even talking about being *nearly* perfect here - show these designs to any of the people who are into engineering here(I think there are some - RIT?), and these people will laugh at you. Can god do no better than a random dude who studied engineering for 3 years? That's sadder than a total absence of any god.



That's a really interesting stance - belief in multiple non-perfect gods. Tragically, it's more plausible (aka less non-plausible) than the majority of belief systems on earth today.

In terms of atheism, polytheism is actually very interesting. We've been disproving monotheism for the last 200 years, we have a lovely repertoire of why a single God cannot be all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, all-seeing, etc etc, to the point where it's almost boring. They should all work perfectly for why multiple Gods cannot be all-powerful, all-good, all-seeing (that is, every single one of them as all-powerful, all-good ...), but for something radically different, they might not. Like.. one of the Gods being all-good, another being all-powerful, another being all-seeing. Lots of Gods all having one of those characteristics each (because the arguments against God are based on conflicts between them, assuming a single God has more than one). This probably raises questions about the nature of this system, how these Gods would interact, but at first thought I am thinking it would side-step the logical impossibilities.

But I'm not sure. Hmm! These are the sorts of things that make atheism interesting.

I hate how people like this senator give all Christians a bad rap. I am a Christian, but I am by no means a fundamentalist. Although his comment was close-minded and naive, the way some of you people are talking is quite hurtful as well, and shows almost as much ignorance. I have no problem with people having their own beliefs and I certainly don't want them forced on me or vice versa, but that still doesn't justify some of your reactions.

I can't say I blame you, there are many ignorant and aggressive Christians, but don't make the same mistake they are making by trying to put people in a nice, neat little labeled box. There are more open-minded Christians out there, and some of them are as irritated by acts of foolishness like this as you are, but that doesn't mean they have to blow off about it.

I haven't read all of the comments on this thread, so I apologize if I didn't get the whole story, but it just seems to me that people could be a bit more receptive of others POV, even if it's forced on them. If you disagree, state your case, explain why, but don't sink to this guy's level. Just remember the Christians out there like me, please don't brand us and put us all in the same boat!

- Daft

I recently read something, but can't find the source. When Darwin was shown a particular orchid with a very long nectar spur, he predicted the need for a moth with an insanely long tongue to exist as well. He was ridiculed for it, but not long ago, with the technology to trace the moth, he was proven right. Anyone who realizes the accuracy and peculiarity of this prediction, which was proven EXACTLY right, knows how incredible it is. Science doesn't get much better than that.

You know, it's a real good thing that everyone in here has a solid understanding of the diversity of beliefs present in the realm of Christianity (and almost Christians, like myself) and that bashing on 'Christianity' is as obnoxious and ignorant as bashing on 'scientists'.

You see, even within my own Church, there are many beliefs. True, we have a core of doctrine which is set in stone (heh, pun) but there are limitless doctrines which at this time remain speculation. Evolution is one of these things. While very few members of my faith believe that Humans evolved from other creatures (but rather share a basic 'blueprint' or 'mold'), a great many-myself included-believe that not only did and do other creatures evolve, but that humans are evolving, but within a species.

As for the flaws in creation, that shows a limited and narrow minded view of the idea of intelligent design. Not only does it not allow crossover of evolutionary theory and intelligent design theory, but it ignores and alternate explanations for things. For example, much of the oil we consume now is from long extinct microbia and sealife, as well as few dinosaurs here and there. Some believe they were there to allow us to have fossil fuels. Naturally, someone always tells me that if God is so smart, why didn't he make it cleaner burning. I acknowldge that, but then note that they should consider that perhaps he intended it to be dirty, so that humans might have an opportunity to learn a lesson in self control and moderation.

Even the idea that science and God must be seperate is the result of not considering one important idea.

God is the greatest scientist. He (assuming he exists) knows intimately the workings of his own creations (and everything else) and there is no reason that he does not work through these 'natural means'. Often people mock religion for stating that God 'snapped his fingers and created the universe' and plug the big bang theory saying that it opposes creationism.

However, the big bang theory is simply more proof that God must be a man; his wife would never create through the use of an explosion of inconceivable proportions.

But alas I will certainly fight the same battle that I do at Church with exclusivist thinking that dominates, well, everyone. Buddhists and Bahá'ís are generally excepted. Naturally there are exceptions to that exception, but that's how things work.

[QUOTE=Chaz Ghostle]In response to Detty:

I did. I went to a Catholic high school, where we had Science and Religion classes. From what I learned, I've come to see the Bible as a book of moral lessons, not facts.[/QUOTE]

Exactly.

Anyway, despite being an athiest, I've taught sunday school to a local church simply because I believe in the teachings of morals the bible has, as well as it's fantastic method of teaching. Someone is always looking out for you, and he's got a few things to teach you. I, however, believe it should fall down as some sort of santa clause isn't real deal in the end, so they get those lessons and values, but aren't completelly daft to reality beyond their childhood.

I believe a religoins class should be a mandatory learning experience. It wouldn't be a preaching class, it'd be a history of religions, beliefs, and ideas. I don't say this because I want people to make a choice, I say it because people make such sweeping statements about many religions, and tend to bash Athiesm into the ground. Not that many athiests give us a good image, though. I consider myself more of a Theologist Athiest, more than anything.

JediKirby

Do you have any sources for the disproving of monotheism? I've heard several people say this and never been able to figure out what they were talking about. I would much appreciate anything you can provide. Thanks.

Mort: I have a tangent question for you.

As an art major, I've always been confused about something -- we have laws in science too, don't we? like the law of gravity, which seems a lot more wishy-washy since the early 20th century than evolution is made out to be. Why then haven't they just made it the law of evolution?

Perhaps someone can explain to me the difference between theory and law in the scientific community.

Also, I believe the only really tricky two logically in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim idea of one God is "all-good" and "all-powerful." Things like "all-seeing" fall under "all-powerful" and are stated merely for clarification (trust me, I've had WAY too many talks about what power can encompass), and agreeing upon what is good, much less knowing ALL that is good (knowing every right and wrong) is pretty difficult to do as is. Putting the two together mostly just brings up the issue of responsibility, and it's amazing how many people don't think of the idea of co-responsibility...

Just to clarify, Buttars is a STATE[/i] Senator. Orin Hatch and Bob Bennet are our Congressional Senators.

Also, since I believe most high school and junior high schools in this state have seminary classes(where you take one period every day to go a little bit off school grounds to a building where people teach you about the Bible and Book of Mormon, though you receive no credit), I think it's entirely fair to teach the theory of evolution in a SCIENCE class.