I think they feel threatened, Brad, because, after all, it's all they can do, with their limited imaginations and "intellects," to conceive of 6,000 years, much less the "billions and billions" of Carl Sagan, and their egos are so bloated by thinking they know things that they see people who disagree with them as inferior. They think hot dogs are raised on dog farms and the buns are grown in the good old bun fields. I can't imagine how you could have a deep tweet about such a shallow subject as the mind of a religious fundamentalist, but then what do I know?

I must beg to differ, czaragorn.

How can you say they have shallow minds when so many of them have obviously gone off the deep end?

I don't 'get' tweeting, and I suspect a lot of others here don't either.

But that was a good tweet.

Nice contra coup.

The War On Science

Right, Brad. I use the term "Profossional Religious Elite" to highlight the biz aspect of the theocratic industrial complex.

Funny how the religious right are also social darwinists.
Only the wealthy and well connected deserve to survive.

I also just saw a BBC article that said authorities concluded the census worker, taped himself up, wrote on himself and hung himself, a suicide. Interesting.

Does it really matter? 6,000 years old 6 billion years old just a technical detail.

The Religious Right/ Right Wing...and...

The authoritarian personality...Seems the mass manipulators know how to create and manage authoritarian personalities

According to Adorno's theory, the elements of the Authoritarian personality type are:

Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong

Respect for submission to acknowledged authority

Belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different

A negative view of people in general - i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity

A need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power

A belief in simple answers and polemics - i.e. The media controls us all or The source of all our problems is the loss of morals these days.

Resistance to creative, dangerous ideas. A black and white worldview.

A tendency to project one's own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group

A preoccupation with violence and sex

Shit Brad, I just got home, was gonna relax with a beer...now I gotta pop a BP pill. Thanks!

Sorry SR. Was on the road all day long and *trying* to stay outta trouble, or at least give you a day off. Failed again.

Actually if you think about it, even according to science both science and religion can be true without them contradicting each other.

Religion is concerned with things outside and inside of space-time and science is concerned with things in space-time. Could be religion encompasses more than science. Therefore it's not religion which has a limited point of view, it's science.

K,

What was formerly the domain of mysterious and uncertainty we call religion slowly yields to the domain of science. That will be so until the human race exterminates itself.

Hmm Konstantin...and I might be OK with that idea (Could be religion encompasses more than science) if wasn't for ALL THE HEINOUS BULLSHIT that religion endorses. Could be that if religion wasn't such a HAVEN FOR BIGOTRY AND HATE, I might be able to just let people freely "believe" - I mean, who would it harm?

However, there's a reason the word 'religion' is coupled with the word 'dogma.' It's because, as Colbert astutely put it at the WHPC Dinner a few years ago...some people believe on Wednesday the same thing they believed on Monday, regardless of what happened on Tuesday.

That does not describe science. And that is the strength of science, not its weakness, as small-minded people would have you believe.

Is Tweeting what golfers do when they hit a birdie?

For me there appears much in the realm of science and in the history of science that looks a hell of a lot like religious belief. So many discoveries hailed with such excitement and absolute assurances of their great benefit to mankind that turned out so disastrously. Thalidomide being a great idea, for instance. Or how chlorofluorocarbons were going to be such a boon to humankind. And DDT and on and on. And then of course there's the bomb. For all the murder and mayhem you can reasonably lay at the feet of religion, the blind mindset that led all those scientists at the Manhattan Project to giddily pursue such an immediate means to our own demise while so oblivious to the death, destruction, and trouble their "brilliant" work would cause is hard to top for displays of blind faith.

My father, a famous scientist, liked to remind us of the pitfalls of science with a great quote he'd use from time to time in his speeches. To paraphrase-"Half of what we now know to be true in pharmacology will be shown to be false in the next fifty years. Trouble is we don't know which half."