On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 07:53:02 +0000, eyelessgame wrote:
> 4. The underlying assumption seems to be that "if one thing is wrong,
> everything must be wrong". I find this particular "brittleness of
> truth" notion to be characteristic of certain sorts of conservative
> faiths; it is foreign to science and observation. (It's found, for
> example, in the fundamentalist claim that if a single contradiction is
> found in the Bible, or a single biblical story can be found to be false,
> then faith must crumble; hence the vehement and absurd insistence that
> every single thing in the bible must be literally true -- hence YECism.)
Yes, the primary rhetorical tool for "my sect is right and yours is wrong"
is to nitpick some specific aspect of creed or ceremony, preferably with
steaming heaps of false dichotomy, appeals to authority, quote mining, and
all the other stuff we see here.
Watching fundamentalists in t.o. and elsewhere indicates that they try to
practice science the same way they practice their sectarian conflicts.
It's doubtful, IMO, that even 1% of the evolution deniers active on the
internet even know what science is trying to do, let alone how it works.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
|
| Follow-ups: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
|