Science vs. The Bible subject of February Town Hall

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Southern Indiana Democracy for America’s February Town Hall will tackle the subject of Science vs The Bible on Wednesday February 5, beginning at 7 PM in the Browning Room A of the Central Library.

Evolution or creationism, 6,000 year old Earth with everything created in just six days and or a billion plus year old planet with human like creatures more than 200,000 years ago. These are questions that both religious conservatives and scientists continue disagreement.

This is another topic that SOINDFA looks forward to airing and giving people who attend a chance to express their beliefs and ideas in a civil discussion in which all in attendance are encouraged to speak out.

New topics are chosen every month and the Town Halls are held on the first Wednesday of each month at the same location.

Check out the Valley Watch website at: http://valleywatch.net

John Blair
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi

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21 COMMENTS

  1. Why not compare apples vs dogs? One has nothing to do with the other.

    Sounds like a stroke job for the churchies.

    Evolution.

    • Boom! And there was order and design! Amazing isn’t it?

      And where are all those transitional lifeforms when you need them anyway?

  2. What a waste of time. Let’s have a debate over the existence of gravity and whether the Earth is a sphere also.

    Analogously the fundies can jump out the windows to prove us wrong.

  3. There are still a lot of these people in the country you know. They are becoming fewer and fewer upon the arrival of each new generation of kids they have as those kids realize their creationist elders are either uninformed or stick-head-in-the-sanders. The Christian right wailing against science is ghastly…but freedom of religion is a civil right nonetheless.

    • If they just wouldn’t be so uncivil while practicing their civil rights things would be ever so much nicer in the universe, no matter where you think it came from.

  4. I saved this from 2012 during the republican primary. It’s from a HuffPo blogger.

    This my friends is a CLASSIC.

    Slight edits on my part.
    =============================================

    Today the Indiana state legislature submitted legislation to have the value of pi taught as exactly three because the bible implies that the value of pi is exactly three. Numerous republican legislators supported the move saying “we need to teach our children conservative Christian values”.

    The media swarmed on the controversy. Numerous conservative commentators went on most of the cable TV news channels and were allowed to debate Harvard professors with PhD’s in mathematics about the value of pi. The conservative commentators said it was about time we recognized the value of pi as exactly three. The cable TV hosts promised to continue to cover the controversy. Religious leaders jumped into the controversy saying it violated their religious beliefs to teach pi was irrational. The archbishop said “The Bible clearly states in First Kings 7:23 that pi is exactly three”. Presidential candidate Rick Santorum said “only snobby liberal elitists teach their children this stuff”, Rick Perry said “Texas might secede from the Union if conservatives were not allowed to teach that pi was exactly three”. Newt Gingrich claimed there was a liberal media cover up and that Ronald Reagan had known all along that pi was exactly three. Presumptive republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney stated that calculating Pi as exactly three would not be the way he calculated it, but then later in the day backtracked and said the Mormon church states clearly that the value of pi is exactly three. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter said that this controversy proves that liberals were insecure and afraid of a different opinion. Sarah Palin said strong patriotic conservative women should home school their children and teach them that pi was exactly three. Michelle Bachmann said that teaching pi is irrational was part of the homosexual agenda and just one more reason to repeal Obamacare.

    All the republican presidential nominees agreed that they had “heard” the value of pi was exactly three, but they also that said “mathematicians didn’t know exactly what the value of pi is and that’s its value had changed over time so we should go with what the bible says.”

  5. I could never blame God for directly creating liberals, so I am on the evolutionist side.

    The Pi Bill. Liberals always get it wrong. What a pity that Brains-in-his-behind did not know that Taylor Record, the legislator who introduced the so-called “Pi Bill,”(which was not actually about legislating the value of pi at all) was…yes, a Democrat. The mathematical gobbledygook within the bill was cooked up by a Dr. Edwin Goodwin, a migrant from antebellum Virginia to Posey County, a place where a likely Democrat might feel warm and snug.

    • Ummmm maybe you didn’t realize this isn’t about whom introduced what when or the the conservatism of the D party in the 1800’s it is parody.

      An allegory for the continual current day conservative anti-intellectualism, ignorance, and adherence to preposterous myths and absurd superstitions.

  6. I have been reading a very good book, “Total Turth” by Nancy Pearcy. http://totaltruthbook.com/related/contents.html Nancy does a very good and intellectual job in challenging the naturalistic assumptions prevalent in science. Modern science has turned a blind eye to the problem of naturalistic science in problems such as the lack of proof for transitional spices and the problem of irreducible complexity.

    Pearcy teaches that Christianity needs to reclaim the intellectualism of the past challenges Christians to engage our culture on that level rather than fiat creationism? Good and honest questions deserve good and honest answers. However, it is also going to take more intellectualism from skeptics also to have truly enlightening exchanges.

    I can’t see why such a town hall would be a bad thing unless one has already discovered the origins of the universe.

  7. I can think of dozens of better ways to spend an evening. Some of them involve alcohol and/or gambling.

  8. This is one discussion I’ll stay as far away from as possible. There is no debating or reasoning with someone who can look at all the available geological and astronomical evidence, and all the accumulated intellectual wealth of mankind and conclude that a book makes more sense that was written predominantly by a bunch of Bronze Age Jews who invented circumcision and thought, ‘hey, what a fabulous idea! Let’s lop off parts of our junk and kill, rape, and enslave everyone else and say “God” told us to do it.’

    Simply put, creationists are nutcases. They are so lost in the morass of religious fervor they have turned all the capacity for critical thought they might once have possessed toward the task of preserving their worldview – one which make less and less sense with each new scientific discovery, yet one which gets constant reinforcement with the simple dismissive idea: that scientific thought, i.e. reason itself, is the devil. That the Bible is the indisputable, immutable, indelible Word of God and all that which challenges it must, it follows, be wrong.

    Knowing John Blair through some of his Facebook posts, he derives pleasure from mixing it up with creationists as a curious form of entertainment, or maybe even a form of study, like an anthropologist might study a frozen caveman, or a naturalist study a wolf pack hunting. I, however, just find the whole business to be somewhat sad at this juncture in my life.

    • We could and have talked about nutcases and evidence, I suspect both sides can provide a roster of candidates for both, but you did solve a mystery for me. The topic and sponsor didn’t strike me as a great fit. I can mix it up enough to make Mother Theresa cuss, but I’m really not interested in being someone’s Wednesday night’s entertainment.

      I would rather go watch LKB get drunk and lose her money.

      • I don’t get drunk, and I very seldom lose. I prefer games of skill to games of chance. In other words, I may enjoy a glass of wine or a Maker’s-and-water while playing cards or betting the horses.

  10. So, I ended up attending anyway. A friend asked me along. It was way better than watching LKB get drunk and lose her money. (my money if we were married) Just kidding you LKB.

    John did an excellent job facilitating the meeting, and everyone was respectful and had excellent input.

    I would highly recommend it to anyone.

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