Reply to article by: Stuart Grey <stuart.grey@nospam.comcast.net>
Date written: Sat, 01 Oct 2005 19:59:58 -0700
MsgID:<vcWdnWySForf0qLeRVn-iA@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.

To be blunt in return, people never dragged apes out of trees to become people.
Modern day homo sapeins did not evolve from apes, they evolved from
neanderthals.

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?

It wasn't. It was an appeal, not an appeal to authority.

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.

That's your opinion and not everyone has the same opinion you do.

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.

That is ignorant of the facts. They are not saying "evolution is correct because
we are authorities on the topic", they are simply making a request for science
to continue to be taught in the classrooms.

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.

You have no clue what they are doing.

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

You have yet to give an intelligent reason why it should.

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

Teaching the ID will only make it worse because ID is based on blind stupid
faith instead of reason.

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."

What hidden agenda is behind evolution?

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.

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

No. You do, I don't.

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

What God?

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.

What a bunch of paranoid and propagandistic nonsense.

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

You must like be lied to.

The Sage

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My Home Page      :           http://members.cox.net/the.sage

"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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