"Yer Overeducated"

[Taverner]

Yes, that's what I heard from a fundie the other day. This came about after we discussed evolution (his final answer was "the bible doesn't say it, so it can't be true"), politics and whatnot. The guy was a rube - and his final argument was that I was overeducated, and that if I just believed in Jesus I could learn the "right things"

Whooo boy!

Like they say, Reason is faith's greatest enemy. Fuck faith, I'll take reason any day.

[Cant trust em]

1. You should have responded with...

"That is an ad-hominem attack."

[Taverner]

3. That would have been lost on the rube

I doubt they teach reason and logic where he went to school

[Cant trust em]

9. Exactly. That's why it would have been hilarious.

The befuddled look on his face would have been priceless.

I'm really into jokes that make me (and no one else) laugh.

[MUAD_DIB]

16. 1+1= Jeezuz.

[ArbustoBuster]

40. I think you've got that one derived wrong.

Mary + God = Jesus.

There may have been some angels involved, but they came out of the equation because cos(angel) = sin(pi/2 - angel).

(I <3 math puns!)

:evilgrin:

[ProgressiveFool]

12. Last time I used that I got accused of being an elitist /nt

[RaleighNCDUer]

13. "A wha?" nt

[scheming daemons]

17. He probably would've said, "did you just call me a homo?"

[Cant trust em]

18. LOL! nt

[el_bryanto]

2. This should be an interesting discussion

But of course there are those who believe that reason and faith can coexist.

Bryant

[Taverner]

5. I think reason and faith can coexist, but just not in my mind

My brain has room for only one

But if someone out there wants to try, go right ahead! I do like the Methodist bake sales after all :)

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. I Am A Christian But I Once Heard A Fundamental Minister Say "You Want Intellect, Forget Jesus."

~

[Taverner]

7. Yep its exactly that

The fundie doesn't want you to think , just OBEY

I remember at my fundie school, a teacher straight up told me that: Don't think about it, just OBEY.

[LiberalAndProud]

6. Don't confuse 'em with the facts..

Capernicus and Gallileo tried and look at the trouble.

[Mari333]

8. heh. reminds me of a guy who told me once "You ever hear of Jesus?"

"NO, " I said "Ive been living in a cave..on Mars.."
what a stupid thing to ask me.

[RaleighNCDUer]

14. He was probably tired of the responses he got to "have you found Jesus?" nt

[Warren DeMontague]

10. Like the old Bill Hicks routine: "Heyyyy,,,,, Looks like we got us a READER".

:rofl:

[YOY]

11. It would nice to live in a world that has every answer built in for us.

But we don't.

Bad things happen to good people. The only excuse Western Religion has is "The Book of Lot". The God portrayed in it is one of the most childish behaving vindictive bastards I have ever seen...and Lot needed to tell him to "fuck off".

[Taverner]

15. And the resolution to the story bothers me too

Lot asks "why?"

And God says "How dare you ask me why!"

And we are supposed to learn to obey without question.

[Cant trust em]

19. Don't worry. God has a plan for us all.

That may be cancer, or extreme poverty but there is a plan.

[YOY]

22. It is the behavior of a tyrant...not a loving father.

but this book was written by men (and women possibly) who claimed to speak "for God".

I read a psychoanlaysis of God as written by a psychiatrist some years ago. Different books have different personalities.

Overall multiple personality disorder if you take the whole thing as literally "the word of God."

[GoneOffShore]

28. Lot or Job?

I don't believe there is a Book of Lot.

Job is the one who gets boils, his family killed etc. All because of a wager between the sky fairy and his rival, the prince of darkness.

Lot was the Sodom & Gomorrah guy whose wife gets turned into a pillar of salt because she turned around.

[YOY]

31. My bad. Job is correct.

Lot was the gent who gave his daughters to get raped instead of angels in Sodom and Gomorrah.,

[KG]

20. you should've just 'unrecommended' him.

[Homer Wells]

21. I've always assumed Christian-Scientist was an Oxymoron!

:silly: :silly:

[DCKit]

23. Hmmmm. At least the stone lab instruments are durable. n/t

[dysfunctional press]

24. education is satan's toolbox.

[Taitertots]

25. Just say this

I disregard your faith on the same grounds that you disregard the 90% of other people that disagree with you.

[nadinbrzezinski]

26. Yesterday I had one of those ahem encounters

a group of elder folks meets at the local coffee shop, and this guy was ranting to the group over ahem, the command economy that Obama is putting in place. What's next the gulags?

I make a point to leave them alone but I just couldn't help myself and this guy is OLD ENOUGH to have been around for WW II. So I told them, look I usually don't get involved, but tell me you remember the US Economy during WW II.

Nods.

THAT was a command economy... now that we established that, please define one.

Well Obama is a communist he wants to regulate the banks.

You mean bring back Glass Steegal and perhaps move the US to a MIXED economy, like that used by Eisenhower who WAS a republican.

It kept going that way back and forth. I ended giving the rest of the "class" a small lecture on the history of economics in the US, and basically explaining to them how capitalistic it is to actually break monopolies. Yes, it is GOOD to have the Wealth of Nations on my Ipod... silly shit I carry on that thing.

This guy's argument, you are too young to know the evilness of communism

So I told him, first off I have met and talked with REAL communists, and you have no idea what that is, second please define for the class communism. Go ahead, the bookstore is there. Go see if they have a standard POLI SCI dictionary.

The rest were not listening to this guy after they realized he was trying to scare them, but had no clue. Today the same group was there, except Mr. I know everything. Funny, they asked for a readying list... I highly recommended Zinn's Popular History, as well as actually readying Adam Smith. One of them has been voting Republican for many years, due to his friend's influence, he said that at this point he was thinking that they don't know what Obama is, but not a communist. So I explained to him that best case he is center left in the US, and center right for the world, and yes explained that too.

I was thinking, fear works with this age set... but so does a little information, SOME TIMES.

I am sure glad I have that silly education.

[Taverner]

27. DEVILS!!!! GARGOYLES!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3mDLsyn6ns

Seriously, that is how I can imagine fundies responding to your lesson :)

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. My my

[Taverner]

30. Well you know those crazy fundies - the devil can be screamed at obviously

:)

[mnhtnbb]

32. Probably gets his info/opinions from Rush, which means you can't

reason with the guy.

The Bible doesn't say a lot of things that have been proven true over time. Start with the earth isn't flat and isn't the center of the universe. See if you can get agreement on those two things and pose the question whether it is possible that as Man has gained more knowledge since the Bible was written, just
like people in Biblical times knew more about natural things than their ancestors, that maybe, just maybe,
we have discovered things about nature and the way of the universe that was unknown when the Bible was written?

Good luck. I don't usually bother wasting my breath trying to reason with fundies. What's the point
when they don't value reason or knowledge?

They fit the motto: Ignorant and Proud of It.

[LanternWaste]

33. If faith is...

If faith is (as classically defined) merely trust in that of which we don not have full knowledge, I would hazard that it's a concept used daily by every human-- regardless of whether we want to or not (unless we have full and absolute knowledge of a thing-- and I don't have that kind of faith on any one man's intellect...).

I've never thought that faith and reason were mutually exclusive, but I have few doubts that type of rigid dogmatism is embraced by more than just a few people.

But then again, we all think our own personal tenets on life are correct at the expense of all others. Hence, a lot of the problems and personal conflicts we often encounter...

[izzybeans]

34. I heard this from a potential employer after a job interview.

If you replaced the part where he said "that if I just believed in Jesus I could learn the "right things", with "we decided to go with more junior candidates" then the conversations were nearly identical.

[BlooInBloo]

35. Sigh. Even the great Kant couldn't help himself...

:(

[EC]

36. I don't know, but an awful lot of Ecclesiastes

seems to back up evolution in the terms they would use then...

[Soylent Brice]

37. sounds like the end result of every conversation me and my wife have

with my mother-in-law almost every week.

she thinks we "overthink" religion. she says it's not complicated, just believe and live by. of course i have to smash her dreams when i do a point by point analysis of how myself (atheist) and my wife, her daughter (also atheist) live a more moral and "xian-like" life than she ever has.

the irony alone is enough to shake her up. that usually shuts her up.

[mitchum]

38. "Jaysus don't like no smartypants!"

Although, he allegedly had quite a smart mouth himself

[unblock]

39. reason and faith are not incompatible, but reason and fucking stupidity are.

this fundie didn't make an idiotic argument because he has faith, he made an idiotic argument because he's an idiot.

i've known plenty of remarkably intelligent people who have faith, they make far more reasoned arguments to support their positions, even if i disagree with them.

for the most part, faithful intelligent people find a way of reconciling their faith with facts and reason. for instance, they take evolution as fact and interpret the first genesis creation story as being accomplished by means of evolution, and "day" as meaning an unspecified period of time that doesn't relate at all to today's concept of that period of time. they also recognize that today's english bibles are not necessarily accurately translated from the original, and beyond that, the original cultural contexts have been lost, and such contexts are a key to deep understanding of any written work.

[14thColony]

41. Well you did choose to stay in school past 6th grade

So you were kinda asking for it.

[Wednesdays]

42. K&R

:kick: