Another fine propaganda technique backfires. "Ethnic cleansing" is a term that was made so it sounds like "genocide" and "mass murder" but can be used to describe anything that makes people of "undesirable" origin leave the area, discriminate against them blocking their access to privileged parts of society, etc. So burying "ethnically cleansed" people would be a pretty difficult thing, however it sounds great in political speeches and propaganda pieces presented as news to claim that widespread racism, discrimination and other kinds of assholeness, things that are pretty common around the world, are "ethnic cleansing".
"Ethnic cleansing" is also a very convenient term to apply to genocide when you'd rather not rock the boat by doing anything about it. It's easier to wait it out until everybody is dead (which is what we've been doing for years) than to take on the burden of actually stopping it, and if you use a word like "genocide" people expect you to get off the couch.
If we'd have sent troops to Darfur instead of Iraq then the leftists would be whining about the atrocities that were being committed against the poor, innocent, oppressed Janjaweed militias while completely ignoring that the Janjaweed militias had been systematically slaughtering thousands of people. The leftists would probably even find a way to blame the Janjaweed militias' victims for inciting the Janjaweed militias to slaughter them.
Maybe your giving them more of a pass because of your predisposition to their side of things.
That's a possibility. There's a second possibility, though. When I see something out of the scientific mainstream (which is basically what talkorigins.org presents--it digests the relevant scientific consensus and makes it understandable to the public) that doesn't make sense to me, I read a little bit more about it. I've found that the few times that talkorigins.org made a claim that sounded dubious, a little more research into the actual data and reasons behind the result made it clear.
Basically, when I see a potential problem with something that's widely accepted by the scientific community, there are three possible reasons:
1) I have noticed, with essentially no experience and a few minutes' reading, a devastating problem that the entire community of experts and professionals has managed to miss for years/decades.
2) I have noticed, with essentially no experience and a few minutes' reading, a devastating problem that the entire community of experts and professionals would rather cover up (and continue to be wrong about) than correct.
3) I just don't understand what's going on and should do a little more reading before deciding that they're frauds.
So far, I've found 3 to be the case in every one of those incidents. So far, I haven't found anything that, upon close research, was incorrect. Tough to follow, maybe, but not incorrect. Generally, I try to dig a bit into a topic before I call a large class of experts incompetent or liars.
Does that [discussion that appears to be about stratigraphic dating] make sense? I didn't think so either. But stuff like this is what I am seeing.
I think that you're referring to the stratigraphic dating of fossils, which creationist sites often accuse of being circular reasoning. This is one of those cases which appears to be true on the surface but, if you look into it and the iterative nature of the process, it's clearly not the case. Based on your description of it, I'm guessing you haven't looked all that deeply into the process, so it's hardly fair to go out and complain that all sides are equally dishonest/mistaken and the experts simply agree to disagree. I would tend to assume conclusion 3 in this case if I were you.
Certainly, it's possible that the whole geological timescale is wrong and what appear to be obvious logical errors have gone unnoticed by the best and brightest minds in geology for decades, but the simple question is, where would you put your money? Where would you put your money knowing that reality isn't always intuitive and techniques for interpreting data aren't always simple? Where would you put your money given that practically every person in the world who deals with that data for a living agrees on the general interpretation, and the only people who don't are religious apologetics organizations for whom the results contradict a statement of fate? Sure, it's possible that I'm just giving talkorigins.org the nod because they make me feel good, but I doubt it. I think it's more likely that we're dealing with a fairly well understood system that a few cranks are trying to undermine for less than honest reasons.
Well, yea, when you go back what created water, the earth and the sun, they are going to say god created it. but that doesn't mean anything to a process that uses what was created as the mechanics of the process. If water caused erosion, god creating the water or some rogue chemical caused Hydrogen to lose an electron permanently and bond with Oxygen or what ever the explanation is doesn't have any impact on the erosion being caused by water.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, more fundamentally, "Where did all the water go? If water covered the planet completely, where is it now?" I've found that one typically involves the hand of god in it somewhere. The same goes for the stacking of the geological column and, of course, how kangaroos and koalas all got to Australia and nowhere else after the worldwide flood.
Try taking a look at This It doesn't say god did anything other then create the heavens and the earth. It shows how the grand canyon could have been created in little time. I also have seen where experiments with small dams have show the same types of results.
Touché. I had forgotten about Walt Brown. He certainly does come up with an entirely naturalistic theory with no magical hanky panky after the creation. Of course, he deals with questions about the geographic distribution of animal life by... well... ignoring them rather than invoking miracles. He also tapdances rather vigorously around what happens to fish when you change the salinity of water on them (his argument is that there were pockets of floating freshwater and the rest of the fish just sort of toughed it out).
Among his geological and paleontological issues, he doesn't seem to account for the fact that there is at least one lava flow running through the layers of sediment that his catastrophic flood put down, and that the fossil evidence completely fails to bear out his theory. For example, pollen, which wouldn't really be subject to the type of sorting he claims occurred, is still distributed neatly in the geological column. On top of that, there are fossil footprints and burrows (some of which cross "flood" layers) in between the layers. We are asked to believe that some sort of aquatic "lensing" accounts for this. Finally, I have to ask again, where the heck did all the water go? Seismologists have not discovered the giant pockets of water that Brown's theory would predict would be left over after such a catastrophe, and they would be a pretty easy thing for them to find. The fact is, it's a very clever idea, but it's fraught with problems, and it fails to explain even a fraction of what plate tectonics explain. Partial credit for a mechanistic theory, but not full credit because it just doesn't work with the observations and doesn't really pass the parsimony test.
If I see an objective refute of the evidence or science in question and that refute doesn't turn into someone saying process A proves B to be wrong when B is claiming process A isn't correct, I will consider it for what it is worth.
Well, considering Dr. Brown discards just about all of geology, he's got his work cut out for him describing a framework that works with all of the observations. I don't think that anything I pointed out would fall into that area, though.
Too many rebuttals are provided by the less then scientific agenda oriented people who have an interest in something not being accepted. Talk origins, realclimate, are a few places that do this. There are plenty of others too like climatescience and a number of other places.
I can't speak to realclimate or climatescience as climate science really isn't my cup of tea (although fringe science is, so maybe I should start poking around more), but I honestly haven't found any dishonesty or even meaningful inaccuracy at talkorigins.org. I've chased down a few of their references and the sampling I've se
I don't blame Clinton's budget cuts for our failures in Iraq. I think the cuts are large contributors to the level of strain on the Guard and Reserves. I believe that strain is excessive given the scale of the war we've taken on. But even with that strain, our objectives could be achieved with proper management/execution.
My point is simply that the military was plenty large when Clinton left office. Bush simply used it for something it shouldn't have been used for, and he used it in a completely stupid way. The only contributor to the strain on the reserves and the national guard is our crack headed foreign policy. Saying Clinton's budget cuts are a contributing factor is technically accurate, but about as enlightening as saying that not wearing a helmet was a contributing factor to the death of a guy who jumped off of the Sears Tower. It wasn't Clinton's job to make sure we had a nice beefy military so the inept leader who followed him could crash it into a tree and still have plenty left over.
I'm not saying "god made it" was the rejected process. It was because "you believe in god and want to prove the bible correct" that it is being rejected. I don't even think they are claiming it happened to the grand canyon, I think they are just saying it is possible. well, some might be. But that doesn't take away from any validity if it is possible.
I have to say that I've seen a lot of discussion about the Grand Canyon's formation, and it never begins with "God made it" but if the discussion goes long enough, that's what the young earther eventually has to retreat to. It's never "God made it directly using magic." It always starts as a flood, then appeals to a bizarre hydrodynamic sorting process, then some weird physics to explain radiometric results. Usually when it comes to hydrodynamic sorting or obvious questions like where all the water came from / went is when tiny miracles start to creep in. If I could actually see an argument that didn't resort to miracles and actually passed the laugh test, I'd be pretty impressed.
As for the scientific community rejecting arguments due to the sources, you're not too far off. The arguments aren't simply rejected, though. There's usually a point by point refutation available. They are, however, much more skeptical of sources like AiG and ICR because those sources have along history of torturing data and coming up with bogus conclusions. Like it or not, there's still a credibility issue if you cry wolf enough. Your arguments could be good, but if you have a long history of doing thoroughly dishonest things, it's going to be pretty hard to convince the scientific community that you're on the up and up.
Your challenge means nothing. I am not attempting to prove anything and I am not going to look anything up in order to lessen your time spent on google.
Well, OK, but I think it's pretty obvious that you're full of shit on this one. May I recommend that you don't throw out ridiculous claims to support your point if you're only bluffing?
It shouldn't be hard to find. Be a sport and look for it yourself or take my word for it. Oh yea, And before you spout about how hard it is and you can't find it, remember that others will probably look for it too. Be sure of your conclusion before you make yourself out to be something you don't want.
The emperor has no clothes. Finding credible evidence that flood geology has made any meaningful predictions (much less struck oil) isn't hard because people who don't believe you are stupid. It's hard because it has not happened. I'm sure that there are plenty of post hoc explanations of how flood geology could have predicted something that real geologists had already predicted, but that's hardly what we're looking for.
How about this? We know that modern geologists are correct because some physicists somewhere invented a time machine and went back and took a look around. All of their theories are correct. Google for it if you don't believe me. I'm not going to do your homework for you. If you don't find anything, though, it means I'm right and you're dumb.
For you and now it is probably not really unusual to not to kill other people, but a "few thousands of years ago" it probably was a big breakthrough. Like what could be as simple as a wheel but it took some time to be invented.
That still doesn't explain the fact that somehow people were supposed to figure out the difference between "kill" and "murder" without having the ethical tools to understand that killing is undesirable to begin with.
There are so many reasons why humans do "irrational" things, though. Even if religion is number one on this list, the list is long and varied.
I'm not sure I follow the reasoning. There are many diseases that kill people, but it doesn't follow that eliminating one particularly prevalent one fails to improve the situation.
People do irrational things for wealth, fame, because they're hungry, because they're high, because they want to win their Tuesday night softball game... etc.
I think that we have differing definitions of irrational. There's real reward in wealth, fame, etc. In fact, doing something because God tells you to ("Do this or I'll roast you") is completely rational as well. My point is that if there's no particularly strong reason to believe that God actually is telling anybody anything, it's not particularly rational for people to act like he is. From my perspective, any action that can't be motivated outside of an invisible entity telling you to do it is decidedly irrational. If I'm lucky, that entity will tell you to be nice to me. If not, well, sucks to be me.
If all religion is, is one source (of a large number) of motivations, to sometimes make people act in a negative way against their fellow person, then I'm unconvinced that we should all be atheist. I need better evidence then that.
If you reread my post, I'm not saying that's the primary reason. In fact, that would be a silly argument from adverse consequences. My reason for rejecting religion is that there's no rational way to distinguish among them and no particularly strong evidence for any of them. Given that, I don't see any reason to believe in a particular one. In my opinion, that's the only rational reason to be an atheist. If you're an atheist because, while you believe in a diety, you think that it makes people do bad things, then you're not really an atheist. My only critereon for belief or lack of belief in something is whether or not I see it as likely to be true.
The question of whether we're better off with religion or not I would certainly leave up in the air. To the extent that religion may cause people to reject objective reality, it's probably a net negative. However, it may be a net positive in that it tends to codify behaviors that are conducive to healthy societies (and I think that there are obvious reasons for that). I would argue strongly that using religion to inform government policy in a pluralistic society is a bad idea and that a secular government is the only way to create a stable long term government in any society where more than one religion is represented, but that's another question.
Why do you believe this? What scientific proof do you have to make such a statement?
I don't see religion as the root of most of the conflicts that people often attribute to religion. I do, however, see it as an easy motivator or excuse. Absent religion, leaders would have to use something else to whip their followers up into enough of a froth to do whatever crazy thing they want them to do. Islamic terrorism is a classic example. The reasons behind it are largely political, but absent the religious motivator, it would take quite a bit more work to find hordes of young men willing to kill themselves. No, there's no shortage of non-religious terrorists, but that's the excuse that's being used in this particular time and place, and it's certainly an effective one.
My problem with religion in general is less a complaint about specific activities and more a result of one simple fact: Religion is good at getting people to do things that they might not otherwise do. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" are completely orthogonal to the religion in question. I'm always surprised to see people trying to dump all of the bad things done in the name of religion on religion while ignoring the good or vice versa. The simple fact is, in either case religion has simply acted as a way of getting people to do something that they might not otherwise do. My problem is that things done in the name of an invisible entity whose will only "I" know are inherently irrational and potentially dangerous. They're not healthy motivators, even if they result in "good" actions.
The idea, for example, that our next President should necessarily be a "person of faith" is downright frightening to me. The idea that the statement "I believe things without evidence and act on those beliefs" somehow makes one qualified to make public policy decisions strikes me as nutty.
It just seems to me that there is an assumption that if human societies just stopped propagating religion, then many social ills would be resolved. If that's not the case, then why argue for atheism over theism.
While I think that a certain number of disasters could be averted if religion simply went away, I also think that we'd find other excuses to kill each other. What fascinates me is that implicit in your argument is the idea that one should believe in something not because it's likely to be true but because it's somehow good for society. Absent the "there'd be fewer wars" argument and the like, I think that the single strongest argument for atheism is that any single religion being correct seems highly unlikely, and there's no particularly good reason to believe it.
Are there fewer wars and political problems if nobody believes in unicorns than if people do? Probably not. Does that mean that arguing that there's something logically wrong with arguing that the belief in unicorns is silly? I don't particularly think so.
What I fail to understand is if science and evolution are the truth, then why are we so civilized? Why not kill the weak, the sick, the poor, the defective among us and propagate the stronger more perfect among us?
Simply put, most of us have empathy for other people. We see ourselves in our fellow humans and generally avoid doing to them what is unpleasant to us. Of course, even without those instincts, the fact remains that we're social creatures and it makes quite a lot of sense for us to take care of one another. Everybody is better off if we act that way. It's not that hard to figure out.
Of course, you're making the age old mistake of assuming that something that describes how reality is somehow prescribes how we should act. The fact that dense objects naturally fall to the ground when dropped off of buildings doesn't necessarily mean that we should all start throwing bricks off of our balconies as a moral imperative.
So if it's "factually correct" based on the science of economics to, euthanize people with an IQ under 60, in order to create a more efficient and productive society, that would be OK with you?
No. Let's take, for the sake of argument, that such a statement is factually correct. It may very well be the case that euthanizing people with low IQs would result in a more economically productive society. I'm simply saying that the fact that it produces "bad" results doesn't make it any less true. Should we act on it? I suppose that depends on whether your ethics are informed only by economic efficiency or by other factors. My personal ethics are the product of more than simple economic resource allocation, so I wouldn't go along with it. At the same time, I wouldn't call the statement false simply because it's upsetting.
You seem to be working on a variant of the "evolution says we're animals, and that's bad, so evolution isn't true" or at the very least, "evolution says we're animals, and that's bad, so we shouldn't believe it" argument. I don't think that either one of those makes sense. My reasons for believing something to be true center entirely on whether or not I think it's likely to be true, not on the ethical or emotional ramifications of it being true.
And besides aren't atheist making a value judgment when they argue that to raise a child in a theistic belief system is "bad" for the child...
Well, yes, I suppose they are. How is that a problem? Does the truth of evolution or the lack of a deity suddenly make value judgments impossible to make? I will come out and say that to the extent that religious teachings may cause a child to reject objective reality, they could be bad for a child. I wouldn't go much further than that, though.
To reflect your last question back to you, if where you end up for Eternity is on the line, meaning an eternity with God or without God based on your choice of accepting or rejecting Him, doesn't it behoove (love that word!) you to think it through?
I'm not the grandparent poster, but I'm not sure that it does behoove me to think it through. How, for example, would I rationally decide between following a god who will reward me for eternity for believing in him and a god who will punish me for all eternity for believing in the first god? I could try assigning probabilities to the various gods, but I'm not sure that's a solid way of going as it appears that the accepted probabilities vary depending on who you ask and what time you're living in.
I suppose that the most rational way to approach it would be to believe in the nastiest, most petty and vengeful god, as that's the god whose bad side I'd least like to be on if I'm wrong about his non-existence. Probably one of the Aztec gods, I would guess. I don't think that's a totally satisfying answer, though.
Discovery Channel has a special on noah's flood not too long ago. IIRC, their conclusion was that Noah probably did exist, he already had an ark (that he used to transport goods), and one day it rained and swept him out to sea, and he assumed the whole world was flooded. or something like that.
When he got back, how did he convince the people back on shore that the city they were in had been destroyed and that they were all dead and that they should probably write this down?
Isn't it strange, though, that the same museum which is an insult to those involved in science today would probably have been virtually in agreement with Galileo and Isaac Newton and others who were brilliant and logical scientists from yesteryear?
The same could be said about a museum that denied the germ theory of disease. That doesn't mean that it would be wrong of us to point and laugh if such a museum should be built. The fact that Newton dabbled in alchemy in his day doesn't make modern alchemists any less ridiculous.
If you read any modern translation, it says "Do not murder." There's a difference between murder and killing in English, and I'm told there are similar distinctions in the original Hebrew.
As far as I can tell, the main distinction is justified killing vs unjustified killing. Of course, if you need God to specifically tell you that you shouldn't kill people without justification, you probably need a smidge more guidance as to what constitutes justification. It's like saying, "Don't kill people when it's wrong to do so." Not much of a moral code, really.
And I admit that perhaps the "great flood" that all of the ancient civilizations talk about could have just been local floods to those regions at different times.
That seems the most likely answer to me. Historically, human societies have tended to like to live in or near flood plains, so it's not surprising that they experienced floods and probably saw them as about the most upsetting thing nature could do to them.
I simply believe it to be one, but one of the reasons I believe it to be, is that if I am not mistaken (and I admit that I might be), all of those civilizations existed around the same time, and recorded the flood(s) around the same time.
I would be absolutely shocked if it were true, and I haven't been able to find any evidence that it is. Flood stories as I have seen them are less historical primary source observations ("I saw a big flood") and more stories about a hero some time in history ("The great Bob and his family weathered a flood that COVERED the WORLD!"). As such, it's hard to place them in any reasonable timeline. IF that is true, and like I said it may not be, that is an awfully big coincidence that all of them would report massive floods at the same time.
More interesting to me is the cultures who don't have a story about a worldwide flood. More interesting still is that more than one of those stories is about everybody being wiped out except them, so either it's the same story from the manifold descendants of the one group of survivors or the stories aren't entirely correct. Given how easy it is to make up a flood story and what good fodder it is for legends, I'm not surprised to see so many such stories pop up, and I'm not surprised that they're not really logically consistent with one another.
While I do admit that it could have been multiple floods, I simply ask, can you admit that it could have been one flood?
I'm not the grandparent poster, but I can say that while I suppose anything is possible, the "one flood" answer seems vanishingly unlikely. The physics of such a disaster alone make it practically impossible for me to reconcile it with observed evidence. Where would the water come from? Where would it go? Why doesn't the geological record show such a thing? Simple back of the envelope calculations show that unless we're missing some serious variables or evidence yet to be observed, it simply didn't happen that way.
It just seems to me that there is an assumption that if human societies just stopped propagating religion, then many social ills would be resolved. If that's not the case, then why argue for atheism over theism.
Should one's belief system be dictated by appears to be "good" for society or by what appears to be factually correct?
PS. By way of comparison, belief in the possibility of extra-terrestrial life (despite a complete lack of hard evidence at this time) has become much more mainstream of late among scientifically minded people, but that isn't openly mocked on Slashdot -- how many of you are running Seti@Home?
I don't think it's particularly irrational (although I'm not running Seti@Home). If you believe that life arising on this planet was simply a function of the materials and conditions present at the time (and not the result of a divine being saying, "There will be life HERE and only HERE") the idea that intelligent life elsewhere follows fairly logically. There are countless stars and countless planets. What are the odds that we're the only ones out there? If that's a logical question, why not search for evidence that there are others out there?
I'll accept your assertion that appeal to authority is not part of the scientific method, I was simply pointing out that it's unreasonable to label all creationists as ignorant, unscientific, Taliban-loving, Neanderthals. We are in good historical company.
I'm not sure that your appeal to the likes of Newton for the rejection of evolutionary theory is a good one. By the same reasoning, Newton would be against antibiotics, general relativity, and atomic theory as he did not believe in them in his time.
There are people finding and using young earth theories and making some significant geological finds. The last oil field we found was done so using the same.
Challenge! I'm going to have to call bullshit on that one. Where did you hear it?
Major problem: As low as his approval ratings are the house Democrats are just as low. Basically it would be a cripple fight and nobody (or everybody depending on your disposition) wins a cripple fight. Bush could be impeached but he would not be removed and that, in the end, would help him just as it did Clinton.
I have to say that "cripple fight" is about as accurate as you can possibly get to describe most of the wrangling that's going on these days. Although I'd add to it and it "fake cripple fight" kind of like pro wrestling. We have way too many issues here where one party is going to do something the other party thinks is a bad idea, but the opposition party sees it as politically advantageous to voice weak opposition but still let it happen, and then blame the party in charge later. The only thing more pathetic than a cripple fight is a cripple fight WWF style.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, when I see a potential problem with something that's widely accepted by the scientific community, there are three possible reasons:
1) I have noticed, with essentially no experience and a few minutes' reading, a devastating problem that the entire community of experts and professionals has managed to miss for years/decades.
2) I have noticed, with essentially no experience and a few minutes' reading, a devastating problem that the entire community of experts and professionals would rather cover up (and continue to be wrong about) than correct.
3) I just don't understand what's going on and should do a little more reading before deciding that they're frauds.
So far, I've found 3 to be the case in every one of those incidents. So far, I haven't found anything that, upon close research, was incorrect. Tough to follow, maybe, but not incorrect. Generally, I try to dig a bit into a topic before I call a large class of experts incompetent or liars.
I think that you're referring to the stratigraphic dating of fossils, which creationist sites often accuse of being circular reasoning. This is one of those cases which appears to be true on the surface but, if you look into it and the iterative nature of the process, it's clearly not the case. Based on your description of it, I'm guessing you haven't looked all that deeply into the process, so it's hardly fair to go out and complain that all sides are equally dishonest/mistaken and the experts simply agree to disagree. I would tend to assume conclusion 3 in this case if I were you.
Certainly, it's possible that the whole geological timescale is wrong and what appear to be obvious logical errors have gone unnoticed by the best and brightest minds in geology for decades, but the simple question is, where would you put your money? Where would you put your money knowing that reality isn't always intuitive and techniques for interpreting data aren't always simple? Where would you put your money given that practically every person in the world who deals with that data for a living agrees on the general interpretation, and the only people who don't are religious apologetics organizations for whom the results contradict a statement of fate? Sure, it's possible that I'm just giving talkorigins.org the nod because they make me feel good, but I doubt it. I think it's more likely that we're dealing with a fairly well understood system that a few cranks are trying to undermine for less than honest reasons.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, more fundamentally, "Where did all the water go? If water covered the planet completely, where is it now?" I've found that one typically involves the hand of god in it somewhere. The same goes for the stacking of the geological column and, of course, how kangaroos and koalas all got to Australia and nowhere else after the worldwide flood.
Touché. I had forgotten about Walt Brown. He certainly does come up with an entirely naturalistic theory with no magical hanky panky after the creation. Of course, he deals with questions about the geographic distribution of animal life by... well... ignoring them rather than invoking miracles. He also tapdances rather vigorously around what happens to fish when you change the salinity of water on them (his argument is that there were pockets of floating freshwater and the rest of the fish just sort of toughed it out).
Among his geological and paleontological issues, he doesn't seem to account for the fact that there is at least one lava flow running through the layers of sediment that his catastrophic flood put down, and that the fossil evidence completely fails to bear out his theory. For example, pollen, which wouldn't really be subject to the type of sorting he claims occurred, is still distributed neatly in the geological column. On top of that, there are fossil footprints and burrows (some of which cross "flood" layers) in between the layers. We are asked to believe that some sort of aquatic "lensing" accounts for this. Finally, I have to ask again, where the heck did all the water go? Seismologists have not discovered the giant pockets of water that Brown's theory would predict would be left over after such a catastrophe, and they would be a pretty easy thing for them to find. The fact is, it's a very clever idea, but it's fraught with problems, and it fails to explain even a fraction of what plate tectonics explain. Partial credit for a mechanistic theory, but not full credit because it just doesn't work with the observations and doesn't really pass the parsimony test.
Well, considering Dr. Brown discards just about all of geology, he's got his work cut out for him describing a framework that works with all of the observations. I don't think that anything I pointed out would fall into that area, though.
I can't speak to realclimate or climatescience as climate science really isn't my cup of tea (although fringe science is, so maybe I should start poking around more), but I honestly haven't found any dishonesty or even meaningful inaccuracy at talkorigins.org. I've chased down a few of their references and the sampling I've se
As for the scientific community rejecting arguments due to the sources, you're not too far off. The arguments aren't simply rejected, though. There's usually a point by point refutation available. They are, however, much more skeptical of sources like AiG and ICR because those sources have along history of torturing data and coming up with bogus conclusions. Like it or not, there's still a credibility issue if you cry wolf enough. Your arguments could be good, but if you have a long history of doing thoroughly dishonest things, it's going to be pretty hard to convince the scientific community that you're on the up and up.
The emperor has no clothes. Finding credible evidence that flood geology has made any meaningful predictions (much less struck oil) isn't hard because people who don't believe you are stupid. It's hard because it has not happened. I'm sure that there are plenty of post hoc explanations of how flood geology could have predicted something that real geologists had already predicted, but that's hardly what we're looking for.
How about this? We know that modern geologists are correct because some physicists somewhere invented a time machine and went back and took a look around. All of their theories are correct. Google for it if you don't believe me. I'm not going to do your homework for you. If you don't find anything, though, it means I'm right and you're dumb.
I think that we have differing definitions of irrational. There's real reward in wealth, fame, etc. In fact, doing something because God tells you to ("Do this or I'll roast you") is completely rational as well. My point is that if there's no particularly strong reason to believe that God actually is telling anybody anything, it's not particularly rational for people to act like he is. From my perspective, any action that can't be motivated outside of an invisible entity telling you to do it is decidedly irrational. If I'm lucky, that entity will tell you to be nice to me. If not, well, sucks to be me.
If you reread my post, I'm not saying that's the primary reason. In fact, that would be a silly argument from adverse consequences. My reason for rejecting religion is that there's no rational way to distinguish among them and no particularly strong evidence for any of them. Given that, I don't see any reason to believe in a particular one. In my opinion, that's the only rational reason to be an atheist. If you're an atheist because, while you believe in a diety, you think that it makes people do bad things, then you're not really an atheist. My only critereon for belief or lack of belief in something is whether or not I see it as likely to be true.
The question of whether we're better off with religion or not I would certainly leave up in the air. To the extent that religion may cause people to reject objective reality, it's probably a net negative. However, it may be a net positive in that it tends to codify behaviors that are conducive to healthy societies (and I think that there are obvious reasons for that). I would argue strongly that using religion to inform government policy in a pluralistic society is a bad idea and that a secular government is the only way to create a stable long term government in any society where more than one religion is represented, but that's another question.
My problem with religion in general is less a complaint about specific activities and more a result of one simple fact: Religion is good at getting people to do things that they might not otherwise do. Whether those things are "good" or "bad" are completely orthogonal to the religion in question. I'm always surprised to see people trying to dump all of the bad things done in the name of religion on religion while ignoring the good or vice versa. The simple fact is, in either case religion has simply acted as a way of getting people to do something that they might not otherwise do. My problem is that things done in the name of an invisible entity whose will only "I" know are inherently irrational and potentially dangerous. They're not healthy motivators, even if they result in "good" actions.
The idea, for example, that our next President should necessarily be a "person of faith" is downright frightening to me. The idea that the statement "I believe things without evidence and act on those beliefs" somehow makes one qualified to make public policy decisions strikes me as nutty.
Are there fewer wars and political problems if nobody believes in unicorns than if people do? Probably not. Does that mean that arguing that there's something logically wrong with arguing that the belief in unicorns is silly? I don't particularly think so.
Of course, you're making the age old mistake of assuming that something that describes how reality is somehow prescribes how we should act. The fact that dense objects naturally fall to the ground when dropped off of buildings doesn't necessarily mean that we should all start throwing bricks off of our balconies as a moral imperative.
You seem to be working on a variant of the "evolution says we're animals, and that's bad, so evolution isn't true" or at the very least, "evolution says we're animals, and that's bad, so we shouldn't believe it" argument. I don't think that either one of those makes sense. My reasons for believing something to be true center entirely on whether or not I think it's likely to be true, not on the ethical or emotional ramifications of it being true.
Well, yes, I suppose they are. How is that a problem? Does the truth of evolution or the lack of a deity suddenly make value judgments impossible to make? I will come out and say that to the extent that religious teachings may cause a child to reject objective reality, they could be bad for a child. I wouldn't go much further than that, though.
I suppose that the most rational way to approach it would be to believe in the nastiest, most petty and vengeful god, as that's the god whose bad side I'd least like to be on if I'm wrong about his non-existence. Probably one of the Aztec gods, I would guess. I don't think that's a totally satisfying answer, though.
I would be absolutely shocked if it were true, and I haven't been able to find any evidence that it is. Flood stories as I have seen them are less historical primary source observations ("I saw a big flood") and more stories about a hero some time in history ("The great Bob and his family weathered a flood that COVERED the WORLD!"). As such, it's hard to place them in any reasonable timeline. IF that is true, and like I said it may not be, that is an awfully big coincidence that all of them would report massive floods at the same time.
More interesting to me is the cultures who don't have a story about a worldwide flood. More interesting still is that more than one of those stories is about everybody being wiped out except them, so either it's the same story from the manifold descendants of the one group of survivors or the stories aren't entirely correct. Given how easy it is to make up a flood story and what good fodder it is for legends, I'm not surprised to see so many such stories pop up, and I'm not surprised that they're not really logically consistent with one another.
I'm not the grandparent poster, but I can say that while I suppose anything is possible, the "one flood" answer seems vanishingly unlikely. The physics of such a disaster alone make it practically impossible for me to reconcile it with observed evidence. Where would the water come from? Where would it go? Why doesn't the geological record show such a thing? Simple back of the envelope calculations show that unless we're missing some serious variables or evidence yet to be observed, it simply didn't happen that way.
In reality, that's what it is. Unfortunately, creationists would rather be martyrs and paint it as religious persecution.
Hey, I for one sleep easier knowing that I my government is protecting me from The Cuban Menace.