Slashdot Mirror
College Credits For Trolling the Web?
Jafafa Hots writes "Some undergraduate and masters level courses at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary require trolling as part of their requirements.
In William Dembski's classes on Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics, 20% of the final grades come from having made 10 posts defending Intelligent Design Creationism on 'hostile' websites.
There seems to be no requirement that the posts contain original writing; apparently cut-and-paste jobs are sufficient. Is this the first case of trolling the net being part of course requirements?"
As long as the students fully disclose that they are doing this for a class requirement, this could be a good thing, for the students, for the school, and for anyone participating in the resulting discussion.
It can be a good thing for students, to expose them to real-world reactions - both civil and less than civil - to their posts. It can train them to make their posts in non-trollish manner. It may also expose them to ideas they would not have otherwise considered.
It can be good for the school and professor when the school gets feedback from others involved in the discussions and from websites.
It can be good for those participating and reading the discussions because THEY may be exposed to ideas they would not otherwise consider.
It's one thing to have an idea, study opposing ideas, then confirm your belief in your original idea. It's another to blindly accept an idea and refuse to think about or even expose yourself to other ideas. Such willful blindness is bad for individuals and, on a larger scale, bad for society.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Many if not most seminaries won't grant you don't actually believe what they are teaching. After all, most seminary graduate go off to become preachers and other religious teachers.
Undergraduate school is ideally designed to teach you to think.
Many/most/maybe all seminaries are designed to filter in those who think like the school wants them to and give them the education necessary to propagate their beliefs to others.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't know, man... this is a *seminary* that we're talking about. The people graduating from this program need to be able to defend their beliefs and preach to the "unpreachable". Maybe it's an odd way to go about it, but I can honestly see some benefits in doing this. You have to make a stand and really be able to defend your beliefs, and defend them well because there are some really well versed atheists out there, both in terms of science and theology. This will force you to be equally well-versed in both. As for students "retaining their rights to their own opinions"... these are seminary students. Shouldn't they all desire to convert the fallen, so to speak? My father-in-law is a preacher, and I don't think he's particularly like doing this, but I think he would and not feel as if he were being forced or coerced into it (believe me, this is minor compared to most of the crap that you have to go through to be a full-time preacher... their hiring practices would be illegal anywhere but in a church).
That underlines the basic problem with fundamentalism in religion- it is anti-creativity and anti-intellectual and very proud of it. Of course copying and pasting the 'argument' is just fine because unlike most institutions of learning, theirs teaches students not to think for themselves.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
This is not Apologetics, even when using original material. The tipping point is the "hostile websites" requirement. If a town doesn't want to listen, kick the dust off your sandals and move on.
...and that'll blow the uni off the net for a while, i think :)
I've tried to spend some time examing the scientific evidence for the age of the universe and the evidence for evolution. I've come to the conclusion that the Universe most likely is Billions of years old, because there are just too many things that can't reasonably be explained simply by the idea that God created the Universe 6 or 10 thousand years ago (if he did, why bother making the universe have bizarre things that otherwise would indicate a very old universe).
However, looking at the amazing complexities of life, I still feel that given the long odds, the 'completely random permutation moderated by natural selection' isn't wholly sufficient to explain all life either. So, I fall into the camp of those who believe in God, believe that he had a plan when creating the Universe to cause life to arise on Earth (and possibly elsewhere; the Bible neither excludes the possibility, nor indicates it positively, and science has yet to find evidence of life elsewhere, but allows and renders it likely).
I believe he used a mechanism of evolution in 'creating' life on earth, but I think it's also possible that he fine-tuned the Universe to overcome the 'long odds' that would otherwise be against the random generation of life and rise of very complex organisms. That's not to say he was constantly intervening in evolution. If God is all knowing and all powerful, then it's perfectly plausible that he fine tuned everything from the start of the big bang such that from that point on, everything would happen that was necessary for life to arise somewhere in the Universe.
Am I an IDer? Am I a creationist? Am I an evolutionist? I'd say I'm not really a creationist, and most of the creationists would say I'm not, I suspect. Am I an IDer? My views, I think, would loosely fall into the ID camp because it is much less stringent about the 'how' and 'when' of the way that Intelligent Design was worked out (although, probably most IDers believe in a much more 'active' intervention in the design of life than I do). I do basically believe that evolution is correct, though I view it as less random than pure evolutionary theory suggests.
I think your statement that ID == Creationism (in disguise) is ignorant of the facts of the differing views of people.
However, all that said, I don't think ID should be taught in *science* class. It's not a matter of science, and I have no problem admitting that. I think it would be appropriate for it to be part of a philosophy and religion class, because that's more of what it is. I think it's appropriate for schools, both public and private, to have classes that educate students about the most commonly believed religions and philosophies (such classes, particularly in public schools, should be held from, as much as possible, a neutral perpective - anthropology rather than catechism - learning *what* people believe, rather than trying to convince students to believe one thing or another). People shouldn't graduate from high school without knowing anything at all about Judeaism, Chrisitianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Universalism, Atheistic Humanism, Existentialism, etc).
"To say that these religious systems don't make useful predictions is false."
Tell me one experiment whose outcome can be predicted using the "theory" of ID.
"These systems must be useful, or they would have driven their adherents to extinction many generations ago."
I did not say that religion wasn't "useful" (at least for some values of "useful"). Anthropologists and psychologists can probably give you a huge list of reasons why religion may have had beneficial effects on the survival of certain societies, not least of which the fact that it often makes people willing to die for said societies (of course, science is making the requirement to die for one's society more and more moot as we can now easily kill people without being personally involved - today, the society with the better science usually wins, not the one with the people more willing to die).
As for the rest of your post, I'm honestly not entirely sure what your point is, and how it contradicts (or has anything to do with) what I wrote. You seem to imply that society might always require religion to survive. I honestly doubt it, but even so, your point seems to be entirely orthogonal to my point. I merely said that religion "doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions".
I am a religious man but I wouldn't defend religion by saying that religious systems make useful predictions. Nowadays you don't see many burning bushes or calls to build arks. If you do start hearing voices, it's more likely some form of mental illness than the Voice Of God. Similarly, I wouldn't say that Intelligent Design has a place anywhere near a science class unless the Philosophy or Religion classroom happens to be right down the hall.
Yes, religions that say "no one can ever have sex and if you do you must kill any resulting babies" are bound to die off, but that the surviving religions have the "correct social framework." I'm Jewish and adherents of the Jewish faith are far from dominant (conspiracy theories aside). Does that mean that we have the wrong social framework compared to Protestants/Catholics? What about Buddhists, Wiccans or even (*gasp*) Atheists?
The real reason that Christianity is the dominant religion today is that, millennia ago, a Roman emperor converted to Christianity. The might of the Roman empire was then put to task converting "heathens." Christianity itself was even altered at times to better position itself to convert non-Christian groups. For example, Germanic tribes values virginity so suddenly Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived and husband Joseph was tossed to the curb. Christianity didn't become the dominant religion because it was the "right" religion, but because it had the backing of a powerful empire and was willing to change itself to grow. I guess, in a way, you can say that Christianity evolved to better survive.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Judaism holds that the text of the Torah was written by God but that man has exclusive rights to interpreting the text. To give an example of this, there's an old Jewish story about a group of rabbis debating some point of Jewish law. They all referred to the same verse, but had two different interpretations of it. One rabbi, insisting that he was right and the others were wrong, keeps commanding various natural events to happen if he is right. Invariably the events occur, but the other rabbis are unimpressed. Finally, the dissenting rabbi calls for the heavens themselves to affirm that he's right. God declares the dissenting rabbi correct but the group tells God to stay out of this as the Torah is for man and not the heavens. ( See http://jhom.com/topics/lions/voice/bat_kol_bab.htm for the full story.)
The lesson here is that, by Jewish custom, you can interpret "6 days" as being "6 periods of time totaling somewhere around 14 billion years" and no heavenly voice can boom at you pronouncing you wrong according to Scripture. Of course, I'm guessing that you are Christian and not Jewish, so Your Religious Mileage May Vary.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.