Evangelical atheists are just as stupid as blindly religious people.
As an atheist its not my job to preach to people and convert them. What's next? An atheist watchtower and front door confrontations with belief system sales people.
Why should I care what makes people act with civility and obey the law. If its a 10,000 foot golden turkey why should that bother me? The important thing is that they behave like modern human beings.
Last edited by Badgers Nose; 02-04-2014 at 05:59 PM.
Evangelical atheists are just as stupid as blindly religious people.
As an atheist its not my job to preach to people and convert them. What's next? An atheist watchtower and front door confrontations with belief system sales people.
Why should I care what makes people act with civility and obey the law. If its a 10,000 foot golden turkey why should that bother me? The important thing is that they behave like modern human beings.
*sigh* As if *this* hasn't come up 1000 times before. The problem is that they DON'T behave like modern human beings. Nye is at this debate because he is very frustrated with school boards bringing creationism into the science class. So what are we to do? Sit on our hands and say nothing while those that worship the 10,000 foot golden turkey convince people that evolution is malarky?
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I certainly applaud what Nye was trying to do there. However, was there not a better "champion" available for the gig? I understand that the audience wasn't a room full of post-docs, but this was a fairly high-profile debate (saw it on TV, /r/atheism has been talking about it a while, etc). Was there not a celeb with evolutionary biology credentialling available? Greg Graffin maybe? I just found it difficult to take him seriously given the goofy things he does on his show.
I certainly applaud what Nye was trying to do there. However, was there not a better "champion" available for the gig? I understand that the audience wasn't a room full of post-docs, but this was a fairly high-profile debate (saw it on TV, /r/atheism has been talking about it a while, etc). Was there not a celeb with evolutionary biology credentialling available? Greg Graffin maybe? I just found it difficult to take him seriously given the goofy things he does on his show.
Don't pay attention tho the fluff. Nye is incredibly intelligent; that's what matters. He came out with science, not touchy-feely crap. Loved it.
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Evangelical atheists are just as stupid as blindly religious people.
As an atheist its not my job to preach to people and convert them. What's next? An atheist watchtower and front door confrontations with belief system sales people.
Why should I care what makes people act with civility and obey the law. If its a 10,000 foot golden turkey why should that bother me? The important thing is that they behave like modern human beings.
Nope, they aren't as stupid.
And you don't have to care. It's the great thing about living in a secular, modern, Western society, where the secular (including the evangelical Atheists) people are able to keep the blindly religious out of our schools and out of our private lives.
Of course, if it was the blindly religious with a little more power, you would have to care.
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Yeah Bill Nye is extremely accomplished, don't let the fact that he had a kids show fool you. In fact, he's exactly the type you would want, someone who knows the science, but is very good at explaining it to the layman or uninitiated. Like Neil DeGrasse-Tyson.
Yeah, on second thought, I do change my stance. Effective communicator, solid examples to explain every point in an audience-appropriate fashion. Nye did an alright job. I forget sometimes (as a doctorate in a science-based field) that it's not at all about the number of 1st author publications on a topic that a person has*.
*to be clear, i have no intention of making that last sentence sound cocky in any way.
Bill Nye and Degrasse Tyson are exactly the type of scientists we need more of these days. While they may not be the most accredited individuals in any one field, they are still both extremely intelligent and can communicate with the public better than the vast majority of their peers. We need guys like them to not only bridge that gap, but to influence a new generation to take up science. Watching them deal with kids gives me a bit more faith that we won't end up down the path of Idiocracy
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I agree fully about Bill, he's such a great communicator and he and the likes of Tyson are ideal people to be out there preaching to those who would seek to hold back or be dishonest with science.
On a personal note he has accepted my invitation to Iceland in 2015 for our 25 anniversary conference, hopefully we can make it happen be awesome to meet the guy.
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I didn't realize that the debate was well over 2 hours long... so I could only watch the first little bit of it this morning. Unfortunately the bulk of the first half was Ham going about how agrees with the layering of rock at the Grand Canyon. He said his only difference of opinion with Bill is that Bill thinks it took millions of years to create the Grand Canyon while Ham thinks it just took a few hundred. "It's not the observable that we disagree on, but how we believe the observable was created in an unobservable past". *sigh*
I'm not sure why Bill opened with that stupid bow tie story that he always tells... he wasted a good 2 minutes of his opening 5 minute statement.
Only watched the first 5 min and 30 min statements so far. Ham did not present much evidence for his case - a little bit about about there are "kinds" and there is an "orchard" of life, not "tree" of life. A lot of time spent on the logical fallacy of argument from authority - "here is a creationist who is also a scientist". So what? Ham played this semantic shell game about "observational" and "historical" science, which was all quite meaningless.
There are so many lines of inquiry that demonstrate how old the universe is. I would have liked to have seen Nye talk about Mitochondrial Eve, for example. I liked how Nye showed there was no evidence of kangaroos migrating from Central Asia to Australia. Nye seemed to have the louder applause after the 30 minute statements.
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