The_Sage wrote:

Reply to article by: Stuart Grey <stuart.grey@nospam.comcast.net>
Date written: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 08:57:26 -0700
MsgID:<RpidncoZLb3qIqfeRVn-sw@comcast.com>

What a sad, sad, sad, sad  joke!

A newly formed vested-interest organization known as The Campaign
to Defend the Constitution is sending a lettero all 50 U.S.
governors signed by Nobel laureates and other leading scientists,
calling on them to ensure that science classes in their states teach
evolution and do not allow any curricula based on intelligent design.

LOL! They're making an appeal to authority!!

How ironic. Of course, this is lost on most of you. Appeals to authority have been considered a logical error since it was shown that Aristotle, considered an absolute authority for centuries, was full of shit about many things. (Objects in motion come to rest, heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects, and so on.)

"Teach science! We're authorities, we say so!"

Scientists tried appealing to reason with believers but believers didn't want to
reason,

Many people don't want to or are incapable of reason. To be blunt, we are not long out of the trees and the small fraction of intelligent people dragged many stupid apes out of the trees too early; people who should have remained in the trees.

so the scientists also tried an appeal to politics because believers
will listen to politics.

How was an appeal to authority (in the philosophy context) an appeal to politics?

Even if, why would people in the right listen to people on the left, just because the people on the left say they're authorities? They didn't listen to them the FIRST time. They are not going to start doing so now.

But in no way, shape, or form are scientists using
their appeal to politics as an appeal to authority because it isn't a reason, it
is a plead.

That is irrational. They are not making an appeal to authority because it's not an appeal, it a plea that people should listen to them because they are scientist; that is, authorities.

In science, there is nothing but reason. If they are making a plea based on anything else, then they are not being scientist. In the scientific world, you use reason. Anyone who doesn't use reason doesn't matter. In science, other people's opinions don't matter. Science is for reasoned people and not for the irrational.

Most people can't understand the concepts, and they don't matter. Like I said, they SHOULD teach ID in school.

It won't matter what the kids who can't reason think; they are never going to be rational.

The kids who can reason are going to say; "Hey, the teacher is full of shit. Having the authority of being a teacher doesn't mean that you're right. Authorities will tell you any number of irrational things due to their own hidden agendas."

It really doesn't matter since the believers are bound to lose, again, just as
they always have in the past ever since the Scope's Monkey Trial. The problem
just is that believers are sore losers so they keep trying to shove their stupid
nonsense down everyone's throat anyway.

The Sage

Yes. We all have our stupid nonsense we're trying to shove down everyone's throat.

The right wants to tell us that evolution and physics is wrong, and that we were created by God in God's image.

The left wants to tell us capitalism and freedom is evil, slavery to the state is the way to go, that all races have equal intelligence and thus any demographics that shows a lack of minorities in certain groups is proof of racism, and that the world is warming due to greedy capitalist.

The right lies to me to get me to feel better about myself, and the left lies to me to try and make a slave out of me.

If I must be lied to, I'd rather be lied to by the right.

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"All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality
       -- history, religion, duty, social position --
          all were illusions, mere opium fantasies"
         John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
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Nice website.  Only one page isn't completely blank.