Creationists are getting smarter...

[Force Lord]

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the ... reationism

These bastards just won't quit, won't they?

[Shroom Man 777]

That's pretty old news. Instead of outright denouncing evolution as falsehood by making drawings of Darwin looking like a monkey, they themselves are now trying to market their own belief as a legitimate science.

Perhaps that's a good thing. Being forced to adopt more innovative techniques means that their older ones aren't working, and if they aren't working, then that's a good thing for us. If they can no longer denounce evolution as "poppycock if evolution was real then why are there still be hippopotamooses" and have instead shifted to presenting their beliefs as reasonable science, then that means reasonable science has become popular and creationism must, ironically, adapt or die.

It's basically like how Christianity shifted from "those gypsie Jew whores are witches bleed their breasts and burn them up" to "Jesus loves the little children in the world, even those Jews... Muslims... and homosexuals".

It means that reason has won and they must erect a flaccid facade of reason to remain acceptable in a more reasonable society, as oxymoronical as flaccid erections and reasonable creationism seem.

[Lagmonster]

The bottom line is that creationism has never BEEN reasonable, so it has been on a lifelong quest to SOUND reasonable. If family or preacher tells you so, you may believe them because people trust family and community leaders. In a way, science is the new god - people will now invoke the name of science to sell placebo cures, frilly behaviours, and ancient superstitions.

[Shroom Man 777]

If family or preacher tells you, you may believe them because people trust family and community leaders, and it sounds reasonable because everyone in your insular little social network believes the same thing and it becomes ideological peer pressure and if you don't follow it, you feel shame and guilt and the belief of eternal damnation they've been drilling inside your brain ever since childhood gets to you and you begin to fear for your very soul over this little thing, and you begin to worry and you begin to fret, you begin to think that you're going to hell for not believing, for not following what everyone else follows, you feel like a deviant and you feel ashamed of who you are, of the things inside your head that you can't change, and maybe you'll even go crazy trying to justify yourself.

You might pray to your inner personal god for some resolution, but because you've been trained like an ape not to follow what your own thoughts say but to await the signal of something greater than you that's never really there, you don't get answers, just more of that same nagging neurosis that's been plaguing you, and maybe you'll begin to think that you're not getting answers because you're hopeless, and you get confused over the things you do, over the natural urges that they've been telling you are filthy, that are evil, that no good person would ever do.

It goes on and on, reinforced from the outside world by everyone you know, people you love or respect, and it echoes in the recesses of your mind just as you enter that stage of your life where you try to decide who you are, who you want to be, and you end up being more uncertain as to who or what you are and it keeps on going on and on and on until you just get sick of the emotional baggage, of all that nonsense, that you just ditch it as unnecessary, as superfluous, and you just go on with less on your back, bare bones, with nothing that you don't need to just keep on living day after day because after you've thrown away all they've taught you since childhood, you don't really know what to do next. You've got nowhere to go. No compass. And no one can help you because there's no one like you around you. Because its shameful, and because those same people want to avoid shattering their preconceptions, they won't want to talk to you about these things for that reason.

After all that... there's no counseling, no one to talk to, no one there since you're the only one there. Everybody's shocked, if not outright then just mildly, because they've never seen something like you before. You're like a dodo bird.


Those creationists and religionists are really smart, make no mistake about that.

[Lagmonster]

Those creationists and religionists are really smart, make no mistake about that.

They're not smart; they're persistant and fanatical. The majority of the people they target are literally babies, the anti-intellectuals and the emotionally insecure; how much cleverness do you think it takes to outwit a baby, particularly if you're its parent?

[Serafina]

Just because you believe in unreasonable things does not mean you are not smart.
Some creatonists are really, really good at sounding reasonable, have godlike (no pun intended) debate skills and are really good at politics - its just that their claim is so unreasonable, not even the smartest person on earth could make it sound good.

[Shroom Man 777]

Those creationists and religionists are really smart, make no mistake about that.

They're not smart; they're persistant and fanatical. The majority of the people they target are literally babies, the anti-intellectuals and the emotionally insecure; how much cleverness do you think it takes to outwit a baby, particularly if you're its parent?

Sorry, I momentarily mistook ruthlessness for intelligence.

[Pinjar]

As has been said any intelligence is applied after they have already made up their minds. The sneaky salesman type intelligence that most people have in varying amounts. Boiled down to “We have a product we must sell it”.

It seems most people take the creationist position for some social or emotional position so any counter argument not accompanied by some greater social benefit or emotional shock has little chance of success.

[Patrick Degan]

Wonder if they would appreciate anybody pointing out that their tactics are evolving by process of selection...?

[Teleros]

Nah, that'd be "microevolution" within a distinct species (creationist arguments) .

[ray245]

Those creationists and religionists are really smart, make no mistake about that.

They're not smart; they're persistant and fanatical. The majority of the people they target are literally babies, the anti-intellectuals and the emotionally insecure; how much cleverness do you think it takes to outwit a baby, particularly if you're its parent?

Sorry, I momentarily mistook ruthlessness for intelligence.

Well you have to give them credit for being smart enough to twist and present their lies as science.

The really dumb ones are people listen to them and get stunned the moment someone argue against their belief.

[Kanastrous]

It means that reason has won and they must erect a flaccid facade of reason to remain acceptable in a more reasonable society,

Wow. That's worthy of Spiro Agnew.

[Mayabird]

Wonder if they would appreciate anybody pointing out that their tactics are evolving by process of selection...?

Beat me to it. They've got rates of memetic mutation that approach that of commercial advertising, which isn't surprising as your modern evangelical and/or fundamentalist church college teaches mostly salesmanship. Which in itself spread quickly after it was spawned because old fashioned methods of teaching religion (like theology) have a bad way of making people think about what they're talking about instead of mindlessly pushing it, and the pushing makes it replicate itself more.

So yeah, no intelligence here. Hardly any intelligent design in the arguments either; enough people throw enough crap and eventually something sticks and then everybody else rolls around in it until they raise another huge stink.

[Darth Wong]

Just because you believe in unreasonable things does not mean you are not smart.

Some creatonists are really, really good at sounding reasonable, have godlike (no pun intended) debate skills and are really good at politics - its just that their claim is so unreasonable, not even the smartest person on earth could make it sound good.

They're not even a fraction as smart as the scientists they seek to attack. The problem is that those scientists have dedicated their considerable talent to advancing human understanding of the universe, not being professional propagandists.

It does take a certain talent to be a professional bullshitter, but that doesn't really make you smart on the wide spectrum of professions.

Also, it's worth pointing out that in my experience, creationists seem smarter than they actually are, because they don't actually compose their arguments during a debate. Instead, they have a selection of canned, eloquently pre-made arguments that they just throw at you based on keywords they hear in whatever you say: that's why their rebuttals are often only vaguely related to your point, if at all. It's also why so many of them use the exact same arguments, almost word for word. Many creationists only sound eloquent for as long as it takes to figure out that they're basically human versions of chatbot AI scripts.

Creationist indoctrination does not really rely on quality of argument; it relies on classic brainwashing techniques of isolation, repetition, and punishment/reward conditioning.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Wonder if they would appreciate anybody pointing out that their tactics are evolving by process of selection...?

Some especially smug moderate/progressive Christians have actually tried to make this point to me as some sort of misguided attempt to make their beliefs appear to be every bit as legitimate and open to improvement as science. When I pointed out that it took them THIS LONG to get to this point, when secularized government has become prominent enough to throw them out on their ear if they attempt to maintain true to the kinds of teachings they originally ordained as the Word of God (see: the Church of Mormon getting phone calls from the IRS), and not sooner, they immediately got evasive. When I also pointed out that their whole tactic of trying to bury their old position as deeply as possible and paint themselves as the architects of all morality via Jesus' popular "hippie" interpretation doesn't hold with the kind of business they're teaching in Africa, where most governments can't afford to interfere with them, they got even MORE evasive.

I've coined this the "herpes maneuver"; herpes might not kill you, but it will fight your immune system to a standstill, go into remission and feign harmlessness until you're weak and old, when it will rediscover it's fangs. Moderate religion is a memetic manifestation of remissive herpes in this case, and your immune system is secular government. The main difference is, secular government doesn't have to get old and weak.

[montypython]

Creationists often remind me of bad fantasy story writers who cobble together poorly thought-out 'nostrums of the week' into their stories and treat it as a gospel truth. At least the fantasy writers have the excuse of saying that 'it's just a story', can't say the same about the creationists though.

[Kanastrous]

I had a rather horrifying conversation last night with my folks, both of whom are research scientists, both of whom insisted that "you have to allow people to have their own truth, everyone has their own truth, you can't apply scientific standards to people's beliefs that are supposed to describe the world."

Maybe it's a generational thing.

[Samuel]

I had a rather horrifying conversation last night with my folks, both of whom are research scientists, both of whom insisted that "you have to allow people to have their own truth, everyone has their own truth, you can't apply scientific standards to people's beliefs that are supposed to describe the world."

Maybe it's a generational thing.

It isn't. I have people like that at my college.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Didn't we have a thread here not just a week or two ago about how some people have difficulty mending a gap in their minds between science and faith, and others don't? The latter set of people simply are more compartmentalized and less consistent in how they apply their beliefs, it would seem.

[Kanastrous]

What's that saying..."(something something) is the ability to hold two mutually exclusive propositions in your head at the same time...?"

[Alerik the Fortunate]

The more I read, the more Creationists remind me of Alastair Reynold's Inhibitors: they seek out and destroy independently developing intelligences, though they themselves are not even sentient. They simply control vast resources and draw from a standard repertoire of techniques when triggered, occasionally raising up more intelligent manifestations when needed to counter new threats. The more intelligent ones may appreciate what is being destroyed, but know that it has to be done in order to further their primary imperatives, which they are unable to question. Also, they replicate quickly.

[Samuel]

What's that saying..."(something something) is the ability to hold two mutually exclusive propositions in your head at the same time...?"

Double Think
-1984

Didn't we have a thread here not just a week or two ago about how some people have difficulty mending a gap in their minds between science and faith, and others don't? The latter set of people simply are more compartmentalized and less consistent in how they apply their beliefs, it would seem.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=130610