History Channel today...

[onager]

Yeah, I had a ton of stuff I needed to get done today...

...but I sat down to have lunch and flipped on The Hitler Channel.

That was all she wrote. What to my wondering eyes should appear but a "documentary" about the search for Noah's Ark.

I have to admit, this one was fair and balanced compared to some others I've seen. One of the experts just came right out and said: "If you believe Noah's Ark exists, you'll believe it's on that mountain no matter what. But that is faith, not science."

Didn't keep several asshats from playing expert. One one of them kept agreeing that various expeditions were probably on the right track, even though he was contradicting himself all the time!

With unintentional irony, this crap was followed by several documentaries about ancient scientific and medical knowledge.

They made me think Sam Harris was right in "The End Of Faith." Without the various religions constantly interfering, we might have had the Internet in the Fifteenth Century.

e.g., Heron Of Alexandria invented the first coin-operated vending machine hundreds of years BCE.

More irony: he invented it to dispense a measured shot of Holy Water at one of the temples in Alexandria.

[beam me up scottie]

1. Do people really believe

that Noah had two of every living creature on a wooden boat?
I'm just a born and raised atheist, I can't quite understand how adults can buy that.
Do they shut down the thought process altogether or is there some way they can bypass just the part of the brain that makes one question the validity of outrageous stories? Maybe it's missing completely on some?

[trotsky]

2. Well, at least that one expert was honest.

This is the kind of shit that's expected when your faith is so weak you have to try and make reality fit it.

We live in an era of space exploration, supercomputing, microbiology, and this creationistic bullshit. Something's gonna have to give, and I hope it's the latter. Otherwise I'll see you in the deathcamps.

[rexcat]

3. I was flipping through the channels yesterday...

and saw the ark thing and promptly changed the channel. I can't stand "documentaries" of stupid topics.

[shrike]

4. Yeah, the Noah's ark searches are pretty stupid

I'm not an atheist, and I think so. Even if the boat did exist, why would it still be around, after so many eons? I should think wood would not last long under the elements.

Some of the reasons man has not progressed (i.e., internet in the 15th century) is because of disease, famine, wars over resources and power struggle. Man is a rather hopeless creature in many ways.

[Kolesar]

5. Now I am glad I was ordered to scrape and varnish all day yesterday

And it was "orders".

[Synnical]

6. Day long run of "Histories Mysteries"

(edit to change funky placement of wording)


I saw it, too.

I enjoyed it. Loads of teasers, but in the end, no evidence.

I don't have a problem with this type of programming. If more people watched A&E's "The Mysteries of the Bible" they'd be a great deal more skeptical of that ridiculous book. (I hope.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Prior to the Ark show, there was a show about Vikings, very cool, I thought - perhaps because I'm of Scandinavian descent. It stated, and I don't know if this is true or not, that the 12 person jury trial was started in Europe by the conquering/socialistic Vikings (who were "Pagans" or poly-theistic) around 900 CE.

A thought struck me at the time, and I'm no historical scholar, that if the Pagan Vikings envisioned the European judicial system (which I'm pretty sure is what the "Founding Fathers" based the US system upon), then this claim that the US is founded on "Christian-Judeo values" can be further undermined by pointing out the Viking underpinnings of the European justice system.

Just throwing this out there. I don't mind being corrected.

-Cindy in Fort Lauderdale :-)

[onager]

7. More undermining!

I saw part of that Viking show, where they talked about the democratic assemblies held once a year. Didn't see the part about trial by jury, though.

Believe it or not, American Fundies were claiming the common law was based in Xianity way back in the Eighteenth Century.

Thomas Jefferson tried to straighten them out, but even he snuck in a phrase implying that it was a hard struggle to overcome the lie:

"If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians, and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are all able to find among them no such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.""

Lots more here:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/Tripoli.htm