AlAyeti wrote: Bazillions of contradictions in evolution do not bode well for it as a science.
It is hysteria-driven by its proponents and adherents.
This is an amusing assertion. Do you have evidence to back it up? In reality, you won't find contradictions or hysteria. Still, I'd be interested to hear what your reasoning is here.
AlAyeti wrote: External genital morphology is the basis of a rational decision as to what they are designed for. Going against there design becomes a belief system not grounded or founded on facts.
Brains and minds are where society finds the law protecting it against individuals that use their minds and brains wrong.
Does this mean that you think people should use their genitals instead of their brains? No? I didn't think so. Where I come from, the brain is a more rational organ than the plumbing, and that it's really important to use the brain for making decisions. Going against the design of the brain is not a good idea. Of course, humans are clever enough that they can rationalize any wacko behavior, especially if there are others doing it, and really-especially if doing it makes you a member of a special group. Hmmm...suppose your church said you had to do _______ to be correct (where ______ is whatever horrible licentious sinful immoral act you particularly abhor). It might work just fine for the plumbing, but your brain might recoil at the thought. This would be much the same as your current insistence that gays do what you say, and not what god designed them for.
Defining someone else's "design," without considering them as you do so, is pretty dictatorial.
Uhhh...and how do you interpret the thousands of babies born each year with indeterminate genitals? How do you define them? Surgeons usually "adjust" them so they look female, because it's easier. We know why this happens at the biological and chemical level. Since it happens in utero, it must mean that god is directing it. Are you going to go against god and make up your own mind about who these kids should be? And what if you do it wrong, and surgically "correct" a male baby to be "female" and try to raise "her" as a girl? There are too many documented cases of this type of trick not working for us to accept the dogmatic stance of the fundamentalists, that gender is "learned," and that the plumbing is all that matters.
AlAyeti wrote: There is observations not based on belief systems but on facts. Like genitalia.
uh, right. Those hermaphrodites are facts, but you've got to determine how to ensure that they live normal, productive lives. God tricked you so that you can't go by the genitals. What do you do? Go by their toes? The only thing that makes sense is their brain.
They know who they are...it might be helpful to listen to them.
It's a funny thing. So many people really, really insist that sexual orientation is learned from parents and society at large. It turns out not to be. But that's just scientific facts, and if they contradict our religous training, we conclude that the facts are wrong.
AlAyeti wrote: Sperm and ovum are not fuly human.
They aren't? What are they? Chimpanzee? Daffodil? I'd say they're 100% human. They're also alive, and derived from living cells, which were derived from living cells, as far back as there have been living cells. You'd previously said only that "science knows when life starts"...it's a different question to ask when any particular genome is reprogrammed to turn on the genes that produce an embryo.
And then there's the issue of the soul...now there's a tricky one. Is it put in at fertilization? Or is it put in later? Is the soul relevant any more? Be careful here...you have to accomodate twins. Do they share the same soul? Does each have only half of a soul, or does it jump back and forth between them? If they each have an entire soul, then what do we call a lump of cells that doesn't have a soul?
AlAyeti wrote: What I object to is what is being explained to children that is for sure. Teach sexuality correctly and include deviant behavior in the part that opposoes normality and you are doing the right thing scientifically. Teach aberrant behaivior as a choice and ulterior motives exist
Hmmm. You've said over and over that someone, somewhere, is teaching people to follow aberrant behavior. I think you'll need to explain to us what you mean. What are the examples? Where's the data? I know of no one who is teaching kids to do weird things. What are these mysterious ulterior motives, and what is the evidence that they exist?
AlAyeti wrote: Bazillions of facts about evolution? I love that. Now dinosuars, those great huge lizards. . . are now birds. So much for all of those history books and all of those facts.
When do schools get the revised versions of facts?
This is a problem, all right. Science teaching has pretty much become the listing of the conclusions, or inferences, that are drawn from the facts. I recently looked through a bunch of textbooks, and for most of the topics, they didn't give any data--just the conclusions. There are reasons for this, of course. Partly, it's just historical. That's how it's always been done; it just doesn't work so well now that the sputnik episode is over, and people like to pretend that science is "bad." Another reason is that there has been an attempt over the last few decades to make science more understandable to students, so they've taken out the hard parts (like actually thinking about
how we know the things we know). The result turns out to be that the books have the conclusions drawn from the facts (like "evolution happens") but not the facts upon which those conclusions are based. It's quite unfortunate.
The result is that people tend to think that science is just a bunch of facts to memorize, when in reality, it's a bunch of inferences drawn from data. People think the inferences are supposed to be facts, and they rarely see the actual data, which is the real facts.
Schools have access to all of the facts, and to all of the interpretations. But, it's hard to keep up, because new things are discovered all the time. It would be best if we could teach science as the "current best explanations" of the data, and present some of the data--so that everyone will see more clearly that the explanations are likely to change when and if we find more data that help us re-think things. People think it's static, and it's not. Unfortunately, this allows them to imagine that "scientists lied to them" if something ever changes. Of course our interpretations are going to change! We don't start out knowing the answer, so we have to try to figure it out. This is where creationism differs from science: it claims it knows the answer at the outset, and only looks for little bits of data that seem to support that pre-defined answer.
There's also the problem of textbook publishing. It's a big business, but the publishers tend to use old texts as the models for new texts. No single author can possibly know all of science, so there's a fair amount of reiterating what has been in the books before. Consequently, it takes a while for the new information to get into the textbooks.
If we add to this the fact that the Big Markets for textbooks don't like evolution and insist on assessing "knowledge" with multiple choice tests (ie, Texas), and we end up with rather little of the real data in any of the textbooks. All of those bazillion facts that support evolution tend not to be described in any detail; it's usually just the conclusions that make it into the texts.
So, it's understandable that you would think it goofy when we note that there are bazillions of facts supporting evolution. We've discussed many of them in these threads, so feel free to read about them. As for your dinosaurs/birds comment, I'm not quite sure what you meant by it. The animals we call dinosaurs were quite diverse, with many species being quite small, and others being quite large. The popular vision is just of the large ones, but there were many, many others. So, you don't need to try to imagine a T. rex going "pop" and becoming a sparrow. T. rex's lineage died out after the Chixulub disaster, but some of the little guys managed to squeak through. So did those little shrew-like ancestors of you and me! (Now
there's a relief...otherwise, we might both be prairie dogs.