Slashdot Mirror
Creationists Silence Critics with DMCA
Gothmog of A writes "As Richard Dawkins' offcial site reports, an organization called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries has been submitting DMCA copyright requests to YouTube. This has resulted in the Rational Response Squad (RRS) being banned after they protested against videos being taken down and accounts being closed. The RRS videoes attack creationism (AKA intelligent design) and promote the atheist viewpoint. According to the RRS, the copyright requests are without merit since the material in question is covered by fair use or has been declared to be in the public domain. Behind Creation Science Evangelism Ministries is the infamous Kent Hovind (AKA Dr. Dino) who is currently serving jail time for tax evasion."
As a Creationist I'm stunned that they would do something this dumb. Honestly, I have no problem with people arguing about religion and trying to prove it wrong, that's to be expected and trying to silence it is akin to saying that your argument is weaker than your opponent's. This is really quite a dumb thing for them to do, I hope some kind of counter-claim is filed and the videos are put back up. There are some extreme Creationists out there who don't want to debate the topic and just want to shut up anyone who doesn't believe, I would hate for those people to become the stereotypical Creationist when they're really the minority (though having been on /. a which that stereotype is already in effect to an extent...ugh).
Not cool guys. Don't go making the rest of us look bad just because you can't take some criticism/arguing. And really don't make the rest of us look back by using a sore subject (DMCA) improperly and illegally to try and silence the criticism.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
1) I am not aware of any known observations of macroevolution (new species created via mutation).
Well then you might learn something today. The mice of Madeira:
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/04_00/island_mice.shtml
And this is 7 years old now, so it does seem your facts may not be up to date.
2) To date, no direct ancestral chains have been established. That is, where one species can be definitively proven to have descended from another.
You mean like Hyracotherium, which evolved into modern horses and all the documented transitory species in between them?
If you need living examples and a DNA chain to follow, the mice above work as an example here as well.
Please do not let this color your opinion of the evidence for the creationist position.
What evidence would this be? I have never seen any. Only religious rhetoric. Surely you're not talking about scripture?
'Thou shalt not bear false witness'?
Technoli
As far as I am concerned, the various religions are a subset of cases within superstition; I would not class astrology as religion, but I do think it slots perfectly into superstition. The same goes for ghosts, all classes of magic that are not simply misunderstood natural events, homeopathy, anthropocentric views in general (religion is that in specific), and a host of others from phrenology to past lives. Creationism itself is a subset of religion.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Case in point, my co-workers. We're having drinks after work and the conversation turns to pothead cosmology, i.e. the stuff that sounds profound when you're 14 and blitzed on something mind-altering. Direct quote: "Man, how do we even know that we're what people say we are? This whole solar system could just be an atom in a booger in the nose of some giant." I swear to God, direct quote. This is the point at which I bowed out of the conversation. Previously the question was "Like how do the scientists even know what they're saying, like space is really expanding?" Redshift, I reply. "Yeah, but how can you really know?" Redshift, it's the doppler shifting of light from radiant stellar objects as they recede into the distance. How do we know that atoms aren't just miniature solar systems? Firstly, the whole electrons as planets around a nuclear as sun model is 19th century. Electrons are actually in zones of probability, the electron cloud. Furthermore, matter does not scale down to the atomic scale and retain all the characteristics we're used to. It's the same reason why "shrinking man" stories won't work, a human whose entire body, including atoms, is reduced to the size of an ant would not be able to breathe normal-sized air molecules, the gas could not exchange in the lungs. A miniature-sized human would need to breathe miniaturized air. "Ok. Well dude, could you imagine what the fourth dimension would be like?" It's time. Length, width, height, time. Four dimensions. You'll get people arguing some strange stuff off of string theory with 11-dimensions but I don't think anybody really understands what's going on there. Quantum mechanics makes grown men cry.
There's so much stuff out there that we don't know, that's completely mindblowing to contemplate, and most people are content getting slackjawed and starry-eyed over shit we already know the answer to. Go figure.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I also don't have a problem with faith-based initiatives, simply because the idea is that the money is for charitable works. It doesn't matter in the least to me who's doing these charitable works, just as long as they're getting done (and reasonably efficiently).
Now, shopping laws, that we can agree is ridiculous. I purchase liquor once in a blue moon, but it's none of anyone's business when I should choose to do that.
Finally, although you don't seem like a particularly intolerant person in general, I agree with what the quoted text in your post says. We should all be tolerant of each others' beliefs, and strive to refrain from mocking them. Disagree, debate, certainly. But the relentless mocking and hatred I've seen religion get at times makes me very sad indeed, because it's something people should be above.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
And why does a religion have to be anthropocentric? When I was on my mathematical christology kick, 'the saviour of elm trees' was one of my standard test constructs. "Can trees be 'saved'? Might they benefit from it? What the f*** would that mean to a human Christian? And what would Jesus of Nazareth signify to a tree?" I would ask myself. But if your religion hands you avatars (as opposed to the standard Christian trinitarian incarnation structure, which is clearly species-indexed), your god can quite easily be a tree, I should think, even if you aren't a tree yourself.
I have no problem with areligious atheists (after all, a creator-god is unobservable by construction, so intellectually honest deism [perhaps even metatemporal theism] and areligious atheism are the same, up to isomorphism), but devout atheists who turn off their imaginations and disallow thought experiments when discussion religion hurt my head. How they think they can have certain knowledge (as opposed to a personal, but not persuasively communicable, belief) about the unobservable is beyond me. They're nuts in exactly the same way as the intelligent design crowd.
Let me put it this way: why would one suppose that Occam's razor is the right tool for answering the question 'what's your favourite story?' How can someone be wrong about their own imaginary friend?
Of course, when people start saying 'God told me to kill you,' it's time to lock them up. Weird thing is, organised religions - being, whether you hold to them or not, evolved social structures as well as metaphilosophical frameworks - will even agree with you on this. Of course there are plenty of homicidal maniacs who pretend otherwise - but they are, for the most part, consciously lying, and should no more be laid at the door of the religions in question than people who get their instructions from their gerbils.