LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

Fascinating discussion over on D.U.:

The question seems to be: ought a gov't to protect members of a specific religious belief from challenges to their belief system by allowing them to 'opt out' of any secular public school teachings that pose such a challenge? The cutting af fine hairs and sematics aside, evolution theory, as the main example, is and will remain such a challenge to dominionists (among others).

The original poster seems to think that throwing the Bible Literalists a bone thus would weaken what he sees as their dominionist, defensive 'we must take over in order to safeguard our own community' ardor. (I suspect some on this list would rather cynically, and vigorously, disagree).

But, I still wonder....would allowing such 'opting out' be a dangerous step upon the slippery slope....or would it remove a large part of the dominionists' 'we're being coerced' ammunition, allow them to feel they've 'won' enough to back off from empire-building?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

The Christmas Wars continue (with disagreement over tactics): the Evangelicals vs the Corporatists

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY lihan161051)

Stumbled across some rather strange sites on the sidebar to Heavens Above, which I tend to browse now and then to look up useful satellite stuff. One of them looks pretty suspiciously like what we may get to look forward to in terms of scientific revisionism, the other just makes me wonder what they're up to.

http://cosmicfingerprints.com/

Seems to be trying to prove more or less a different flavor of "intelligent design", or at least disprove non-supernatural theories of the origin of the universe. Very heavy religious overtones, and a peculiarly cumbersome design style that seems to want to *force* the reader to jump through lots of hoops to cut to the chase, some topics requiring downloading audio and playing it back, others requiring various other tedious interactions with the site to dig stuff out of it. Overall, reads about like the self-published book on "squaring the circle" from the 1900's I found in a library one time that was printed in all caps in 72 point type, all hundred-odd pages of it.

http://thesurfaceofthesun.com/

May actually be scientifically legitimate, but after slogging through the first site, the aggressively defensive attitude of the author threw up some red flags.

Both were kind of interesting, seems like if "intelligent design" ever gets a foothold we may have to watch out for a lot of copycats in other fields of science ..

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dark_rekhet)

As a Cincinnati native, I can honestly say that this disappointing. I view museums as a place to learn about the truth, or artistic expression. Now almost right in my own backyard we are having a "Creation Museum" being built. It will be interesting to see how many schools end up taking day trips to this museum instead of our natural history museum.

answersingenesis.org/museum/

It just baffles me that these people can say that the earth is only 6,000 years old, be able to proclaim it as the truth, and have so many people believe it when the overwhelming majority of experts say otherwise.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ellid)

She sure sounds like a Dominionist to me...

http://www.ldnews.com/fastsearchresults/ci_3334340