Recently, I attended a christian presentation showing a little movie "Die Millionen fehlen" (the millions are missing). For those who speak/understand German may follow the YouTube-links below.
Such creationists/young earth-"scientist" documentaries are widespread and I usually ignore them or watch them just for amusement. The whole presentation was more a sermon than a movie with subsequent discussion. I was really disappointed in almost every aspect.
In the first place the announced coffee buffet was not as rewarding as expected, which essentially is a mistake on my part. The movie and the arguments to support a young earth were pretty bad and it was one of the worst creationist movie I had ever seen. After the presentation there was a preacher talking about the usual Christian stuff and I do not dislike it a priori. But one thing really annoyed me: He said that even every child is a sinner and will only find redemption in the acceptance of Jesus. Holy Crap! Although I know about protestant Religion (I am baptised and confirmed but I don't give a crap) I never expected such a harsh statement. It really came obvious to me (for the first time) how sick this stuff is. I already read Dawkins "the God Delusion" but I felt quite distraught to experience from first hand how serious people are about that.
After the show, I strolled around, enjoyed the coffee and one guy (same age as me) approached me and asked me who I am and what I felt during the ceremony. I am a very polite guy and I didn't start a religion-is-stupid-discussion. I really wanted to know what he thinks about the movie because I know plenty of religious people who are convinced that creationism is just weird drivel, so I was interested in his position. He was that kind of "every word in the bible is true"-guy accordingly the earth can't be as old as scientists say. I replied, well, you may be right but I can easily disprove the hypotheses supported in the movie with simple considerations that students learn in their first year. So my central question was why do you think those “scientists” are right although every evidence points against those hypotheses. The main pitfall and most hypocritical statement of the movie was the following: The bible doesn’t provide answers for every aspect of the world. But this doesn’t means automatically that it (the bible) is wrong. However, this is exactly the reproach of creationists to scientists. Something like: Science is not able to explain everything, accordingly science is wrong because religion does so.
Fig. 1: The proof that Jesus doesn't know anything.
My reply to such stupid "arguments" is that this is (to quote Dawkins) the beauty of science. If everything would be solved no further research is needed. So shut down all universities and go home. Furthermore the bible or God doesn't explain how evolution works. How the first cell evolved or how it "has been built" (see fig. 1). None of the big questions is answered with God. The guy said ok but my "considerations" are biased because I attended non-religious schools and I didn't experience the truth as offered by Jesus blablabla. Paradoxically, he admitted that the world is constrained by the laws of nature. But when it comes to evolution he just don't believe in what science found out. Here I wondered why, why, why, creationists always exclude evolution, palaeontology and biological research from natural science?
After 90 minutes or so we came to an end and he said that I may be right but if God doesn't exists and the bible is just a nice book like any others what justifies his moral behaviour? So he can start killing and plundering because it doesn't matters at all. How fucked-up is this opinion? I mean (its so trivial, I know!) do we need an ancient book filled to its half with blood and punishment to know how to behave in the modern world? The next point is that he believes (as the protestant followers in general do) from his heart and soul that Jesus was sent to our world to suffer for our sins in advance. If Jesus took all the burden of humanity’s sins so all what you have to do is to confess your sins to god and you will be saved? This is the point where you can just go and kill people isn’t it?. Jesus was a very nice guy and took the load already. Just confess it and everything will be fine. This really is beyond any logic.
To come to and end. I never felt more dismayed about people that should know better.
Amen.
2 comments:
So true. I never saw such a badly argued creationist movie. If I was listening right these guys didn't even get their mathematics right when calculating. Sigh.
Du liebe Scheiße.
That's not even funny.
I just don't get the argument about the filling up of the lake – if I understand the table from Kelt's dissertation correctly, the 25000 year old sediment is from a “depth in core” of 545cm. (Of course they cut off the column to the left, where more information may be hidden… And most ages in the table are quite younger – is this an outlier?) Then they say that “in this time, the lake would have already filled up”, comparing apples (that C14 age) to oranges (the time for filing up the rest of the lake under current conditions).
Calculations on the rise and flattening of mountains: oh the joy of linear extrapolation!
And of course, there are no sediments with signs of erosion, anywhere.
Deposition of kilometres of sediment in mere months? They don't even bother that you would quickly have to change between seas, deserts, rivers etc.
Die Dumm, es brennt.
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