In article <475528dc$1@news.povray.org>, Sabrina Kilian <"ykgp at 
vtSPAM.edu"> says...
> I was not suggesting that scientific reasoning was bad. The connection I
> was making was that both the very religious and the ardent atheists make
> the same judgment about the other group: They are wrong and worthy of
> scorn. What does that judgment actually gain either group, though? It
> doesn't convince anyone else, it doesn't invite discussion. It just
> alienates anyone who might have a question.
> 
Some, and maybe a few vocal ones, might use similar arguments to 
religious people, but even people like Dawkins are ***very*** clear in 
their books that they reject such arguments. They are worthy of scorn 
not because they are wrong, they are worthy of it because, as a rule, 
they use the same debunked arguments over and over and over and over 
again to defend themselves, they lie about what everyone else, 
especially atheists, say and/or mean, they think complaining and 
accusing their detractors of persecution qualifies as argument, and even 
when they lose so completely that someone blind and hearing impaired can 
tell they lost, they will insist they where unjustly harrassed, or that 
they really did win, and any day now the unbelievers are going to admit 
it.

I don't scorn these people because I think they are completely nuts 
(though I do pitty them for being unable to think rationally, at least 
the ones that don't just brush off 150 years of evidence based 
exploration as, "stuff I didn't bother to learn and won't read about, 
because I don't need to know any of it"), but because they absolutely 
refuse to learn anything, accept that they might be wrong, or do any 
kind of experimentation or tests to prove their views. Mind you, there 
are minor exceptions, like the studies done that showed that people who 
"knew" they where being prayed for died more often than the ones that 
didn't know they where, which was quickly glossed over with *facts* from 
other *studies* that showed some minor positive result (returned by 
invalid, non-double blind testing methods, such as placing the "less 
sick" in the group to be prayed for *intentionally*).

Like the one clown on the View people are talking about today, who 
previously stated she wasn't sure if the earth was flat or not, and 
*now* insisted that Jesus predated the Greeks, while talking about one 
of their philosophers (the same ones I posted in thus thread the saying 
from). Umm. If you are going to argue for your world view, wouldn't it 
be useful to, you know, start by having a clue what your own religions 
history is?

And just to be clear, the argument that atheists don't read Bibles, or 
study them, so are just like these people, won't hold water. About 50% 
of the ones I know started as Evangelicals or Fundies, and realized how 
insane the people around them where. And even the ones that are not, 
probably *own* more copies of the Bible, in various translations, and 
books about the history of it, and some people that make carriers out of 
studying it. Its not like your average atheist is as clueless about the 
Bible as most of these people are about just about anything from basic 
biology to why it makes no sense for the sun to be orbiting the earth. 
Ignorance is practically a mantra to the far right, and the DI made it 
clear years ago that its whole purpose was to replace "all" of science, 
and anything else that could be based on "materialism", instead of 
"revealed truth", with Biblical explanations. And that, I have no 
problem imagining, would including rewriting world/US history to claim 
everything positive was envisioned, predicted or inspired by God, and 
that everything else was the work of the devil.

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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