Bat shit insane group say dinosaurs are a lie

[Flagg]

Umm, isn't the official position of the Mormon Corporation/ "Church" that dinosaur fossils are a hoax?

Not quite, but they did disprove their own holy books via genetic testing based on their research into genealogy. Their work in genealogy is caused by their belief in baptism of the dead(which caused quite a scandal when they baptized holocaust victims).

In the Book of Mormon(what the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith created by staring into a hat to translate a set of gold plates) there were two warring groups in the Americas before Columbus. There were the purely good light skinned Nephites and purely bad dark skinned Lamanites(until 1978 Mormons followed the Mark of Cain doctrine, forbidding black members from being ordained). After the Lamanites killed off the Nephites, they became Native Americans.

The problem is that both groups were supposedly one of the tribes of Israel. Genetics has shown that Native Americans are genetically related to Asia, thus making the beliefs of the Book of Mormon hard to reconcile with what they had shown. This is in addition to the numerous references to European technology that did not exist in America before Columbus. The two big issues are references to steel, which never existed, and horses, which archaeological evidence showed dying off long before the Book of Mormon.

In case one is wondering how I know all of this, my sister converted to Mormonism when we were both teenagers and thus the rest of my family took the same initial lessons from the Missionaries as she did. I simply researched it and questioned everything, she didn't. My parents also failed to convert. My Mom is more or less agnostic while my Dad claims himself to simply be a heathen.

The best part of Mormonism is how every time the Church faces a crisis threatening its tax status (or way back in the early 1900's i's existence) the current "Prophet" will have a vision saying they must do as the Government asks, even when it's one of the prime pillars of their belief system. Also interesting is the Book of Mormon having all of the same mistranslations and typo's as the then-current King James Bible.

[Patroklos]

I guess a bigger question is, are loonies like this becoming more numerous or have they always been there, just that the internet allows them to get more attention than in past generations?

Dude, this described like 90% of people only 100 years ago. In any case most definetly less, but as some already mentioned social media allows them to easily find each other and commingle. It also provides a nifty counting feature!

[TheHammer]

I should have been more clear - I was referring to things like hard sciences. Sure, there is a time and a place to teach softer subjects, like philosophy, art, music, etc, but to teach creationism or religious dogma as though it were indisputable, verifiable truth, is just wrong. I don't even see this as an issue of parents' rights - it's to protect children from the whims of those parents that willingly or neglectfully teach their children "facts" that are just plain wrong.

That would lead to the sort of thought policing that is in general just a bad idea... A better way to handle this is simply to emphasize critical thinking skills in school, something that I think isn't done enough. Teach them to question the premise of any "fact" that they are presented to determine its validity. Once they have the skills to recognize a logical well made argument, contrasted against a poorly reasoned and unsupported argument, they will be just fine.

[Simon_Jester]

I should have been more clear - I was referring to things like hard sciences. Sure, there is a time and a place to teach softer subjects, like philosophy, art, music, etc, but to teach creationism or religious dogma as though it were indisputable, verifiable truth, is just wrong. I don't even see this as an issue of parents' rights - it's to protect children from the whims of those parents that willingly or neglectfully teach their children "facts" that are just plain wrong.

The issue is that we then need an official state list of "sanctioned truths" that it is acceptable to teach children. And we classify it as child abuse or whatever to teach them anything that contradicts those truths.

That in turn leads to several problems:



1) Science marches on.
The people who compile the list in any given era may well think they are listing only hard, proven facts... and turn out to be entirely wrong. This becomes a very hot potato to juggle when you think about scientific fields with direct applications to the way we think about ourselves or our place in the world- like medicine, ecology, cosmology, and so on.

For example, a list of "hard facts" about biology, as written by a group of respected scientist circa 1925, would include a number of very poisonous ideas about birth defects, eugenics, racial differences, and so on.

Remember, a lot of what the Nazis believed was based on things that were widely accepted as scientific fact at the time. They were objectively wrong, or they were badly misinterpreting things that were... questionably correct. But at the time biology was not a mature enough science to identify these untruths and reject them. The science of the era didn't know enough, or have enough information, to be able to prove that things did NOT work the way these people thought they worked.



2) Even if we ignore that problem, we're basically encouraging parents to propagandize a certain scientific paradigm to their children, which they may or may not understand, especially if they were already propagandized in whatever the official paradigm was twenty to forty years ago. This leads to obvious miscommunication... but we've made it de jure child abuse to do anything other than actively collaborate in spreading the miscommunication.



3) Related to (1) we have the problem of defining what is and is not a 'scientific fact,' versus what is a 'political' or 'philosophical' claim. For example, suppose it turns out dolphins are intelligent. Does that make it a violation of 'scientific fact' to teach your child that a dolphin's life is less valuable than a human's? One can argue the case either way- because it's a moral consequence of the fact that is involved, not the fact itself.

[LaCroix]

I guess a bigger question is, are loonies like this becoming more numerous or have they always been there, just that the internet allows them to get more attention than in past generations?

Just look at various superstitions that once -for example, Victorian Britain, which had some hillarious traditions based on them that were followed almost religiously - very common, and now are something you'd chuckle about.

The "loonies" got less, they just stand out from the rest even worse because of their rarity.