Orange Julius - Named for the Pagan Emperor of Rome. This company's mascot was once a devil, until they changed it to hide their true intentions. Orange Julius, born 230 bc. Died 100 bc. I must have been reading the American Eagle edition textbook. I can't stop with this. It's just funny stuff...as I type this from a terminal in Hell's airport.
Hey... this is pretty darned cool! Wonder what Habu might think when he bumps inot you wearing that tshirt.
Just strikes me many of the great merchandise (for hardcore christias only) was already picked up by people. Where's that divine intervention when you need it.
Re: Re: Christian Site: Parody, or Legit? I get startsurfingplus.com, whatever that is. This site sounds great though. Let's all sent e-mails praising Satan. I mean, you can't have a reasonable debate with them, so you might as well p_ss them of in an immature manner.
So it appears not to be available in Britain. Maybe we're already lost causes. My mum's been telling me that for years.
It's too bad the site can't be seen by people overseas... it may have something to do with its ".us" URL. For at least a taste of what's on there, you can probably check out the Objective Ministries shop on CafePress.com: http://www.cafeshops.com/objectivemin/
it's a joke The site is an intended joke. Do you really think a paranoid ultra-fundamentalist christian sect that doesn't like "long-haired hippies" would sell women's underwear with a red heart pictured over the genitalia? Think about it. In addition to being amusing, the website though does make some interesting points: 1) People are willing to believe that fundamentalists will believe anything (some definitely will, but the televangelists give a bad name to evangelicals--for learning about genuine mainstream evangelical theology, starting with a John Stott book would be good. And no, I am not an evangelical, but I know some ofo them). 2) Mass consumerism and "Only 250 Days Left to Christmas!" really has destroyed a lot of the joy and peacefulness of Christmas, hasn't it? 3) Darwin's 'natural selection' is like the 'atomism' among the ancient Greeks--the right idea (that all animals are somehow connected), but not 100% correct in the details: genes seem to have way more adaptability built into them than Darwin gave them credit for. That is, natural selection is not a sufficient mechanism to create the complexity around us (anecdotal evidence being the many examples of less complex life-forms surviving quite well, thank you very much)
Re: it's a joke Yeah, I wondered about that one, too. And when you look closely, the original work is only a handful of essays - there's alot of links to serious creationists but that's not his work. Hmm, just imagine......Tammy Faye Bakker in one of those thongs........
If that site is based of satirical ideals, cheers to the guys who sat and planned this stuff out. They are truly ahead of the curve!
Re: it's a joke The problem with this is that "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" are not synonyms. Most evangelicals are not fundamentalists, and not all fundamentalists are evangelicals. Based on my (somewhat limited) experience of fundamentalist theology, I'm willing to go ahead and say for the record that fundamentalists are pretty much defined by their capacity to swallow any number of transparent idiocies in the name of their belief system, like those satirized on the website in the first post. I would never dream of making the same generalization about evangelicals. This is rather unfair to Darwin. Democritus and the other Greek atomists postulated (as opposed to "theorized") that matter was made of indivisible particles. That he was (kind of) right is not because of any great insight on his part; he just made a lucky guess. If I predict right now that it will rain in Minot, ND two months from today and it actually does, that doesn't mean I know anything about meterology. Contrast Darwin. His theory of evolution wasn't some idea that popped into his head one morning while he buttered a scone; he spent years gathering fossil data, studying the works of contemporary geologists, sailing around the world, spending waaay too much time thinking about pigeons, etc. There is a reason that biologists characterize modern evolutionary theory as "neo-Darwinian", and it's not because Darwin was the first guy to come up with the abstract idea, it's because he pretty much nailed it. (Interestingly enough, another Greek philosopher, Anaximander, was the first person in Western history known to have postulated something like evolution, but he, like the atomists, was pretty much just guessing.) Darwin didn't give genes any credit. He didn't know they existed. Mendel didn't discover the mathematical laws of inheritance until about ten years after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, and no one really noticed or followed up on Mendel until the early 20th century. Complexity is not to be equated with greater survival value, and no self-respecting biologist would say so. Last year, I was reading a monograph by (I think) Dobzhansky for an exam, and I was struck by his claim that natural selection is a fundamentally conservative process--in the absence of change in selection pressure, variations tend to get squashed rather than promoted by natural selection. Natural selection, then, isn't a relentless drive towards greater complexity; it's just a process whereby variations with relatively high survival value are more likely to be passed on than variations with low survival value--a process which is more than sufficient to account for all the complexity of life on earth, thank you very much.
Unfortunately, I can't access the site either, so I'd appreciate it if you guys can post as much of the content here as possible. Thanks in advance, Mattbro
fan Thanks for dropping some historical science on us, Godot. My main point re: Darwin is that his theory is not the same as modern evolutionary theory, which is way more complex (as far as I understand, and I am certainly not a historical biologist), though he started the craze. My second point re: Darwin was to get people thinking about natural selection thoughtfully, rather than just assuming things they read in a book (text-, Biblical, or other). Very interesting that natural selection prefers the status quo rather than innovation, as you mention. Given that you know some things, I'll run some of my half-baked ideas past you. I have to say, that I find natural selection to be amazingly inefficient. Take, for example, the bubonic plaque. Wiped out 1/2 to 3/4 of Europe (depending on the area) in AD 1346-48. You would think we would become immune to it. Do we? No. Thanks a lot natural selection! Same thing with women who are at risk of death (now only in the 3rd world) at birth. Why are the genes that produce these conditions still around given that they kill off early the people who carry them (if they attempt to reproduce)? Not very efficient. I'm not saying that natural selection doesn't play a role in species change (viruses are the best real-life lab here), but it seems to need pretty big pushes. I think that the mechanism for these pushes must lie in the genes, and we simply don't know enough about genetics to figure it out yet. Crediting natural selection and an as-yet-undetermined genetic feature with evolution, however, doesn't undermine theism, of course. If you are religiously inclined, you simply point to these processes as the means by which God/Vishnu/whoever accomplishes his/her goals. Ford still built the cars whether he made them in a factory or forged the metals himself, afterall!
I was channel-surfing the other night and came upon an episode of "700 Club", which I left on for a few minutes (say what you will about fundamentalists, but they're entertaining). Pat was answering viewer e-mails. One woman wrote the following (paraphrasing except for the last bit): Honest. I couldn't make this up.
The site in question is definately a spoof. The links are not off-site to any 'real' christian websites. The fact that they mention Landover Baptist church (a more obvious spoof) is also telling.
OK, here's the kicker. On the "Members" page (see above post, there are links that to e-mail addresses to the various members of "Objective Ministries". The addresses are likely bogus, but go to domains such as "myministry.net" "jesusanswers.com" "truthmail.com" and "youthpastor.com." If you type those as URLs you'll find that those are real sites offering free or low-cost Christian webmail (and sometimes web hosting)! It may be a spoof, but this kid who created the site did his homework.
Re: fan The significance of Darwin is not that he was the first person to conceive of evolution. He wasn't. Anaximander and other ancient Greek philosophers aside, Lamarck proposed a full-blown theory of evolution a century before Darwin's. Darwin is significant because his theory was (and is) in accord with the physical evidence. Evolution really does seem to have proceeded largely along the lines of the theory as laid out in The Origin of Species and Darwin's other works. There's been refinement over the years, of course, but it's very much still Darwin's theory. The best analogy I can come up with at this ungodly hour is if you were to travel back in time and watch a soccer match from the 1870s. A few of the rules would be different, and the player's costumes would look odd, and they wouldn't know about a lot of the tactics we take for granted today, but you wouldn't have any trouble recognizing it as a soccer match. A laudable goal. Having said that, I am hesitant to equate assuming what a scientific paper (or a competently written textbook) is true with assuming that, say, the Bible is true. You never have to defer to the absolute authority of a scientific paper, because two of the things that make a scientific theory a scientific theory are reproducability and falsifiability--you can always test it out and or try some experiment that would prove the conclusions you read about to be false. On the other hand, if I were to prove that it's physically impossible for a grown man to walk on water or to turn water water into wine or for someone to bring a dead person back to life, would any Christian believers stop believing? Not bloody likely. Religions make claims that are for the most part unfalsifiable--you simply believe or you don't. This is going to sound insanely picky, but I'm a little hinky about the word "prefers" there. It's not like there's a conscious actor making a decision. It's simply a question of mathematics. Say you had a population of 1,000,000 insects, 100 of whom had a recessive genetic trait that made them immune to a certain kind of pesticide. If they lived in an environment free of that pesticide, the odds of one pesticide-immune bug mating with another one and producing immune offspring are pretty low. So long as the mating stays totally random and the environment stays perfectly stable, the proportion of recessive genes in the population will stay exactly the same from generation to generation. (This is why.) Now say you took that same population of insects and introduced the pesticide into their environment and 99% of the bugs without the immunity dropped dead instantly. The next generation of bugs is going to be very different in its genetic makeup--there will be a much larger proportion of recessive genes in the pool. If you kept bombing each successive generation with that same insecticide, you will eventually all but wipe out that dominant trait and breed a population of pesticide-resistant bugs. The problem is not that natural selection is inefficent, it's that diseases are. If the bubonic plague killed off everyone who didn't have a genetic immunity to the disease (if there in such a thing) before they could reproduce, then we would become immune to it. But the black plague tended to come and go in waves and killed (among others) older people long after they had passed their genes on to their children. Another thing: you're forgetting that the bacteria that cause the bubonic plague are also products of natural selection. Disease-causing bacteria and virii are parasites, and parasites which kill their hosts too quickly don't reproduce as well. Imagine a sexually transmitted disease like AIDS which kills the infected person approximately 24 hours after he or she contracts the virus. Pretty scary stuff, and there's no inherent reason why such a disease couldn't exist, but it's unlikely that it would exist for very long, since such a virus would only be able to reproduce via people who have unprotected sex with multiple partners within a 24 hour period after contraction. That's the reason why the most prevalent diseases are the ones which don't usually threaten your life (the flu), or the ones which take a long time to kill you (AIDS), or the ones which mostly kill people after the ages when people typically have babies (cancer, congenital heart disease, etc.) It's only a problem if you think of natural selection as an optimizing mechanism that will eventually work out all the kinks in the species. It's not. If a woman dies in childbirth, she has by definition already passed on those genes which made her a less-than-optimal mechanism for birthing babies. I'm not sure what you have in mind here, really. Genes are the agents of heredity. Without heredity (that is, if traits could not be passed on in a semi-predictable manner), adaptations to changes in environment could not be preserved, and evolution could not happen. But that's not a mysterious process seperate from natural selection, that is natural selection. Unless one's brand of theism compels one to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that the world was created in six days plus break time approximately six thousand years ago. If, however, one is a) not religiously inclined and b)a terminal smartass, one could point to the fact that the once mysterious questions like "where does life come from?" and "why is it so incredibly diverse?" are increasingly being answered satisfactorily without reference to god-talk of any sort and, as a result, ask the religiously inclined people why, exactly, they feel the need to go through the bother.