201. Fleabytes

Comment #143542 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 7:37 am

Thanks, MPhil. I find that your posts require me to pay attention, so I will try to read them more thoroughly tonight!

al-rawandi: Last time I checked the PM it was some moody looking bloke who used to be chancellor (boom boom etc)

202. Fleabytes

Comment #143525 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 7:25 am

My girlfriend is (nominally) Muslim, in the sense that that would be the caption underneath her picture in the Dawkins' Nativity Photo thought-experiment. Although I was quite heartened to find, after I'd lost my heart to her, that she was often punished at her Islamic school for "being disruptive" (i.e. asking questions they didn't like). She believes in god, I can't understand why, but she seems to hate all the things about religion and religious people that I hate, so it has caused no real trouble so far.

With the exception of all that shite going on with her family, who would probably like to have me shot. Ho hum. I hate religion because I not only think its claims are untrue, but people seem to take the most absurd and hurtful attitudes because of it.

203. Fleabytes

Comment #143514 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 7:16 am

Looking back at my comments today, I tend to use a lot of:

"brings to mind"
"seem to recall"
"reminds me of"


I quite like "it seems to me", but I often overuse "to me, personally", as if people would assume I was declaiming THE TRUTH if I didn't qualify it enough. But I can quite often be very dogmatic. Usually when boring my girlfriend with talk of stupid religious people.

204. Fleabytes

Comment #143505 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 7:00 am

Ah, sorry Steve! It has been such a long time since my physics education, so I was worried that I'd got it all wrong.

But, in any case, my analogy might be a little flawed.

MPhil: Thanks for the refs, I shall try to look at them.

This brings to mind the Chinese room thingy that I remember reading about. I can't remember who came up with it. But I could never understand what the problem with it was: if you have a book of rules that tells you what to do when you receive certain inputs, then that, to me, *is* all that our brains are doing when we do, well, anything. It seemed to me to be a bit of a cheat that the guy in the room with his cards of Chinese translations was an actual person, with therefore a brain that wasn't being described by the thought experiment.

I'm rambling again... maybe a philosopher could pick up on this?

205. Fleabytes

Comment #143498 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:53 am

Tyler: I can't believe I didn't expect that!

206. Fleabytes

Comment #143495 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:51 am

Steve,

Phonons are to do with vibrations in matter. You can get individual photon "particles" - quanta of vibrations that act very much like the familiar particles of matter - electrons, protons and so on)

207. Fleabytes

Comment #143489 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:46 am

It seems to me that we tend to assume that other humans think like we do and experience things like we do, just because they look like we do. I don't think I really have any more evidence that my girlfriend is in pain when she makes "painy noises" than a dog is when it does the same.

208. Fleabytes

Comment #143484 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:41 am

Steve,

Having read the 4 Space Odyssey books recently, I am reminded of how ACC gets around having to explain how HAL could be conscious: it turns out that, as you mention, intelligence and self-awareness simply "pop out" when the complexity is right. I sincerely hope that this is true, cos it would be "cool".

Whenever I read about how, supposedly, neurons cannot lead to consciousness because one could take the brain apart and not find a small bit of "mind" in there, I think of phonons. Phonons exist, but take a solid apart into its constituent atoms and, pow!, where have those damned phonons gone?! Clearly they cannot have existed in the first place!

209. Fleabytes

Comment #143468 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:21 am

irate:

If I had some coffee handy, I would fill my keyboard up with it in your honour!

210. Fleabytes

Comment #143467 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:20 am

I used to have a pretty long foresty walk to my old workplace, and in the summer I would get fascinated by the really HUGE ants that made nice little trails along one of the paths I would cross. And I would always try very hard not to tread on them. Somehow it just seemed really wrong not to care if I killed some when I could avoid doing so.

This now seems a little silly, because I just had some nice ham sandwiches, and am rather partial to a nice big burger. Yum. Perhaps ethics are just what most people feel comfortable with at a particular time. Reading Stephen Baxter's "Time's Tapestry" books lately, there were some rather graphic depictions of what the Norsemen would do to people. If it were obviously "wrong", wouldn't they all have felt so guilty after the first time, that they wouldn't be able to rape/pillage again?

These sorts of ideas bother me.

211. Fleabytes

Comment #143464 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:15 am

I am now concerned about why I am not a vegetarian. Damn! If only we could just artificially grow the meat without the brain.

Hungarian:

You reminded me of an old Twilight zone episode where a man and his dog were walking down the road to heaven, being tempted through a particular gate, but the man chose not to enter (what turned out to be hell) because his dog wasn't allowed in. But, it turned out, dogs were welcome in heaven.

Isn't TV much nicer than reality? :)

212. Fleabytes

Comment #143457 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 6:06 am

Hi Sharon,

Yeah, sorry, I was getting into the old "what-ifs" again. The law in the UK is probably still 24 weeks, which I tend to think is a bit long, being 4 months or so. But, you're right, in my reading of various blogs and articles about this sort of thing, I've not seen anyone trying to say "we want the right to abort all the way up to when the labour starts", and so I was bashing around with an implausible hypothetical.

And I do know, anyway, that one *can* abort all the way up to birth if the mother's life is in danger. And that seems perfectly sensible to me.

And the Irish case recently of the young girl pregnant with a baby that had no brain made me almost weep with anger. I could not understand even the theistic reasoning behind not letting her abort a clearly non-viable, non-living object.

gah!

213. Fleabytes

Comment #143449 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 5:53 am

Bonzai,

I agree entirely. I am often just one of those annoying types who likes to ramble around in the mire of ethical "what-ifs" just for the fun of it. While at the same time often being accused of being quite black and white. Ho hum.

Steve,

I recall reading that Peter Singer once made the point that some retarded humans could consistently be regarded as having fewer "rights" than some great apes. I've not read any Singer at first-hand though, so this is all reported speech, as it were.

I am a supporter of the idea that the Great Apes should be protected, though. But, then, I tend to agonise about my girlfriend keeping goldfish in a tank that is, apparently, of a perfectly good size for them. Still kind of makes me uneasy at times though. And I'm not even a vegetarian! Bah, I am a conflicted mess.

214. Fleabytes

Comment #143446 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 5:48 am

Steve,

I was recently looking at some of the sample questions from the UK citizenship test, on behalf of my beloved, and there was a question in there about when all people (both sexes, over 18) got the vote, and I was horrified both to get the answer wrong and to find out how recently it had happened.

I'll bugger off now and stop trying to change the topic...

215. Fleabytes

Comment #143441 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 5:46 am

Maybe, in the end, it all comes down to a kind of instinct? The discussion in TGD about the different types of moral dilemma (about train tracks and people in the way etc) and people's reactions to them rather shows that ethics are, to some extent, built-in. We think certain things are wrong "just because we do". So, perhaps my (slightly woolly) views on permitting abortion up to a certain time limit (with exceptions for mother's health etc) is just pretty much the same as the prevailing one because of instinct.

Does this make ethics pointless? Maybe one day we will be able to read the brain and find out why we think all these things. And then maybe get some mental Tippex to change our instincts...

216. Fleabytes

Comment #143439 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 5:43 am

The idea about being able to develop into a person is an interesting one. Not something I had really thought about before. It would bring up the interesting prospect of future technology being able to carry out in some mechanical way, all the steps in the full gestation period. Which would suggest that abortion would always be wrong, since the fertilised egg would always be able to become a person.

But, by then, we'd probably have much better ways of preventing pregnancy anyway, so perhaps none of these things would crop up.

I kind of hesitate to say this, because I am male and on shaky ground with some people when it comes to this topic, but I don't agree with Sharon's position. Only because I can't see that the *current* views on the autonomy of an individual are necessarily obvious and absolute truth. I don't remember the proper word for this sort of philosophical point, sorry.

However, clodhopper's point about how abortions still will go on even if they were banned is a reasonable one. But it always makes me think "well, people will always steal things, so maybe we should just let them". Which I know must be a poor analogy, but it bothers me that I can't always see quite why it is...

217. Fleabytes

Comment #143424 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 5:31 am

The idea of making viability a good criterion has interested me a lot, because I often read statements along the lines of "well, if we were to take the "baby" out of the womb, it wouldn't survive, so it is dependent on the mother, so the mother can do what she wants with it."

The reason this bothers me is that I had to be in an incubator when I was born a little too early. So... it could be true to say that I wasn't viable. Would it have been morally ok to have let me die? I am sure people also bring up the argument of a baby's being dependent on people for food. If we were to starve a child, would this be ok because it is dependent upon others for its life?

I naturally think the answers here are that these actions would not be ok, but I'd like to know *why* I come to that conclusion. Is it all just down to getting used to certain ideas?

Sorry to continue this off-topic thing. I was rather concerned that people would think I was an absolutist anti-abortionist.

218. Fleabytes

Comment #143420 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 5:23 am

Hi.

Well, when I can get around to thinking about it carefully, my opinion about abortion tends to be that I would prefer the world to be a place in which it was not necessary, but given that it is, I think that it ought to be made as simple as possible as early as possible to those who want it. But I still have this niggling feeling that there is a definite point beyond which it would be wrong.

Then I start to worry about innate misogyny, and get all worked up about trying to find out why I have the various opinions I do.

Ultimately, I no doubt come down on the "allow abortion" side of the fence, if only because the only criteria that I, personally, think one can use to determine right from wrong in these sorts of arguments is a utilitarian one. The permission of abortion has made the world a better place.

I think.

In a way, despite the obvious Euthyphro problem, I can see the attraction of big-beardy-morals, handed down from the sky.

219. Fleabytes

Comment #143404 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 5:10 am

Could I tiptoe in and give a response to clearthinker's response to Sharon?

The whole topic of abortion is so very emotionally charged that it is almost impossible to say anything about it without being lambasted, but doesn't clearthinker have a reasonable point here? I don't agree that there are certain actions that are intrinsically, god-givenly "wrong", but I could interpret clearthinker's response as saying "well, there are circumstances in which a person's autonomy is overridden, so might it not be even more appropriate when that autonomy might damage another living thing?"

Isn't it just as incorrect to say that there is an "obvious" right for every woman to control her body in the intimated way, as it is for someone else to say that it is clearly wrong because god says so? Isn't the most we can say simply that, at this point in time, given the state of the world, our society in general has come to the conclusion that some things are ok and some things are not?

The abortion question is often presented as "do you think there are circumstances in which a woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against her wishes?" Well, at great risk to myself with regard to possible replies: isn't the answer yes? Would our society permit a woman who is, say, 38 weeks pregnant to take deliberate actions to kill her baby/foetus?

In a lot of abortion discussions, it seems to me, there is a tacit "we're only talking about when the embryo is still in its small blob stage".

220. Ban anti-Catholic books in schools, says bishop

Comment #143301 by Sargeist on March 14, 2008 at 12:25 am

Thanks for pointing those out to me, Bonzai. As usual, I read the story, found a bit that got my blood boiling and didn't stop to think about the other issues.

I should have been immediately heartened by the fact that the story exists at all: this already intimates what the BBC's attitude towards the views is. If the opinions of this madman were perfectly reasonable, there probably would have been no story.

However, when I went to the (gorgeous and wonderfully information-ful) Parliament website yesterday to find the transcript of the bishop's evidence, I found that it was not yet there. Based on the dates of the evidence that one can access, it looks like we might have to wait 2 weeks to see the full thing. Unless I've just missed it being under my nose?

221. Ban anti-Catholic books in schools, says bishop

Comment #143095 by Sargeist on March 13, 2008 at 12:43 pm

Although it is all pretty absurd, I was most bothered by his referring to the "deluded theory that the condom can provide adequate protection against Aids". I know that some Catholics have been claiming that, unbeknownst to other, less religious, virologists/microbiologists that HIV can nip between the atoms in condoms, but surely this cannot be becoming that widespread that people are starting to believe it in this country?

222. Fleabytes

Comment #142923 by Sargeist on March 13, 2008 at 7:54 am

A party sounds like a very good idea, aside from the spectre of having a load of trolls turn up. Can we perform some kind of rationalism test at the door?

Or, re: Steve's comment about madness some time earlier, perhaps we would all fail?

223. Fleabytes

Comment #142907 by Sargeist on March 13, 2008 at 7:30 am

Well, I for one would be very grateful if someone could sum up the last 2500 posts for me.... Otherwise I'm going to need a strong gravitational field so that my time can run more quickly than yours so I can catch up.

Although.. my recall of my general relativity course is somewhat vague, so I may have that backwards. Damn.

224. Fleabytes

Comment #142876 by Sargeist on March 13, 2008 at 7:01 am

Have I missed anything outstanding since all that talk of the omnipotence paradox, several hundred comments ago? Might need to rush off and put in 6 months of heavy duty philosophy study before being able to make any useful points here, though. :(

225. Fleabytes

Comment #142860 by Sargeist on March 13, 2008 at 6:42 am

Please please slow down! I spent a great deal of my free time yesterday reading these comments, and only made it to page 42!

226. Two More Fleas

Comment #142769 by Sargeist on March 13, 2008 at 5:00 am

In fact, Diacanu even explicitly stated earlier on that a particular book (s)he drew attention to counted as a flea book because it was aimed at "the new atheism".

Although MeIM was not so clear about why the book (s)he mentioned was a flea. And I know I should have gone off to look on Amazon at it, to find out. Sorry.

227. We're All Going to Hell (Music Video)

Comment #113897 by Sargeist on January 21, 2008 at 12:50 am

In a similar vein, examine, if you will, the book at around 1:55 in the following (superb) video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ta7mkgrOU

228. The God Delusion: Now Available in US Paperback

Comment #113073 by Sargeist on January 18, 2008 at 2:19 pm

I would much have preferred "How religion poisons everything" than "The case against religion". If anything, given the attitudes of the UK and the US to religious topics, I would have expected the subtitles to be the other way around.

Although the UK can be just as stupid as other places of course. Witness the news stories not so long ago just because there was the suggestion that children might learn about atheism in school R.E. lessons.

Excuse me for clearly being obtuse, but I'm entirely staggered that the question of whether to explain that not everyone is a numpty-headed crazed buffoon with an imaginary friend is even debated.

229. The God Delusion: Now Available in US Paperback

Comment #113003 by Sargeist on January 18, 2008 at 12:28 pm

For once, the American version of a book's cover is actually rather nicer than the British one.

God be praised!

230. 'Purity' ring case in High Court

Comment #51298 by Sargeist on June 22, 2007 at 8:39 am

Those crucifixions make it more amusing to me that some girls wear rings to say how they don't want to get nailed.

231. 'Purity' ring case in High Court

Comment #51292 by Sargeist on June 22, 2007 at 8:12 am

What we need, of course, is a time machine. Just get Hawking to fix us up with one, nip back in time, get Jesus to carry around a huge bloody great cross, maybe on his back, and then we can get all our children humping them into school for some "equal treatment".

Oh, hang on, maybe he did do that. Come on Christians! Where's your imagination?!

232. 'Purity' ring case in High Court

Comment #51290 by Sargeist on June 22, 2007 at 8:09 am

I am kind of in agreement with icanus, above. I am aware that I have a tendency (like Michael Jackson) to being black & white, but to my mind this sort of situation leads us to a simple either/or situation:

Either:

Children can wear what the hell they like to school

Or:

They can only wear clothing prescribed by the school.

What bothers me most (and not just me, of course) is that religions don't have any definitive statements about what their supposed adherents should wear/do. We've all seen lately the argument that goes "ah well, that's not *my* religion, those people are not *true* X's". But there is no way to examine this claim and see if it holds up.

An analogy I have used involves programming languages. If I am writing a program that begins:

program test
implicit none

integer :: i,j
double precision :: dblArray

233. Rushdie knighted in honours list

Comment #50893 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 10:37 am

It occurs to me that perhaps the reason why Pakistan is such an important ally in the War Against Terror is that they are producing all the Terror.

(ok, I'm kidding, it's really Saudi Arabia)

234. Rushdie knighted in honours list

Comment #50890 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 10:22 am

This is the "British Way", though. Someone treads on your foot and *you* apologise.

Oh, I'm really sorry that I'm about to been blown up by you. What awful things I must have done to cause you (who are obviously perfectly sensible) to take this attitude towards me.

raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhh!

What a fucking stupid stupid stupid world this is.

235. Debate between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges

Comment #50886 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 10:08 am

Hi Rtambree,

Sorry, I was only trying to be funny before. I don't think we should attack people with physical force simply because their ideas are absurd.

I tend to think that I agree with the position of Christopher Hitchens (his position is not unique, of course) in that freedom of speech should include freedom to make hateful speech.

Yes, even threats of death.

Although, I am aware that I could probably be persuaded otherwise.

236. Rushdie knighted in honours list

Comment #50883 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 9:49 am

While looking for the Margaret Beckett update on BBC news site, I saw that the use of the HPV vaccine on schoolgirls has been approved. So at least it's one small victory for common sense against religious nuts.

237. Debate between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges

Comment #50877 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 9:34 am

I realise that Bonzai simply mistyped in the last point, but:

Islam is under attacked

238. Debate between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges

Comment #50837 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 7:00 am

That post earlier about Sunni and Shiite has got me humming "I Got You Babe" all afternoon.

Thanks very much. :P

239. Rushdie knighted in honours list

Comment #50827 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 5:33 am

Those lucky Pakistanis - it always seems to be Guy Fawkes night over there.

Just think of all those pennies they can collect on the streets.

To show some solidarity (well, by providing him with a few pennies through royalties) I was going to buy a copy of The Satanic Verses. But I did browse it once in a bookshop, and it didn't really grab me.

240. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50825 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 5:23 am

A Catholic girl I was speaking to the other day said to me, in response to my ridiculing of the Trinity:

She: "You know a clover leaf?"
Me : (cautiously) "Yeeees..."
She: "Three parts, one body." *smug look*
Me: *totally mindboggled*

I should probably have brought up 4-leaved clovers. (The 4th one is Satan)

241. Rushdie knighted in honours list

Comment #50815 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 4:40 am

I've been trying to find some kind of official government statement with the gravity that is appropriate to the circumstance in which the government of a supposed ally tells us that we deserved to be bombed by terrorists.

Nothing in Hansard this month about Rushdie, so far as my searches can tell. All I have found so far is the comment from the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) on the number 10 website:

Asked how the Prime Minister had reacted to a member of the Government effectively saying that this justified retaliation by giving Salman Rushdie a knighthood, the PMOS replied that he was not going to get drawn into it, as it was best left to the proper diplomatic channels.

242. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50814 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 4:35 am

I really want to make a comment about how religions often think that the birth canal is a One Way Street, but I don't want talk of road signs to overtake the thread.

243. Rushdie knighted in honours list

Comment #50798 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 2:38 am

Sorry, just another comment.

It only occurred to me last night that there is the obvious impending problem of the extra security that may well be needed when Rushdie turns up at the Palace to be knighted.

At least the Queen will have a large sword with which to defend the honour of her subjects.

*cue Yoda-like gymnastic displays and instant YouTube celebrity, resurgence of monarchism, dissolving of government, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria*

244. Rushdie knighted in honours list

Comment #50793 by Sargeist on June 20, 2007 at 2:30 am

I agree with PrimeNumbers. People don't tend to worry about offending the BNP, or other groups who have views that we find absurd, unreasonable or just basically wrong. This is the attitude of a lot of atheists towards religious protest.

The interesting thing about this whole Rushdie affair is the way in which it has kind of morphed into a discussion of whether he deserves his knighthood at all. If we imagine for a moment that the whole fatwa thing had not coloured our views of him - would anyone on the television be making so much noise about it? I mean, for goodness' sake, Nicky Clarke has been honoured for "services to hairdressing"!

Yes, the honours may well be a stupid anachronism, but the point the news should be focussing on is how godawfully *barmy* those effigy burning cretins are.

Has there been an official statement from our esteemed Government yet?

245. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50664 by Sargeist on June 19, 2007 at 10:08 am

I've rather liked the idea that the Jesus Passion story contains a number of elements nicked from the Julius Caesar cult. You know:

crown of thorns = laurel leaves
Betrayed by a friend = er.. Betrayed by a friend
Judas = Brutus

I really have no idea at all, naturally, whether it is plausible, but I do like it as an idea. I fear, though, that the hypothesis might be a secular example of wishful thinking and over-rationalisation.

246. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50646 by Sargeist on June 19, 2007 at 7:49 am

Dammit, just cos I'm bored with work and would much rather write my long rambling posts here than do what I'm supposed to be doing, doesn't mean that I can answer *everyone*. :P

What can we do?

Well, I personally seem to have become very good at pissing off my (nominally) Muslim girlfriend at every available opportunity by slagging off religious beliefs and telling her (actually) Catholic friend that her father is a nutter (Antichrist living in the White House since 1960s? Do me a favour...) and that she herself needs to start turning her brain on and *thinking* (oh, the pain).

All that is true. But, seriously, I am not sure what we can do as "body of people". My preference is for the sustained don't-take-it-lying-down attitude of questioning people when they make statements that contain tacit or implicit acceptance of religious ideas.

Someone earlier on said a similar thing - it was lostpoet @ comment 18 of this thread.

I regard myself as a militant atheist - I've offended my mother, girlfriend, girlfriend's friend, various other people at work, including agnostics, and, yes, actually I rather enjoy it. There are worse things than being thought an annoying intolerant godless bugger.

247. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50645 by Sargeist on June 19, 2007 at 7:44 am

I ought to try to do some non-rambling and be concise (for a change):

If Adam did not exist
Then "he" could not have disobeyed god
So he and Eve could not have been condemned to die and Eve could not have been punished with painful childbirth (thank the good Lord for epidurals, eh? Beholdest thou the anaesthetic works of SATAN!!)
And they could not have stained mankind with "sin"
And so Jesus could not have been saving mankind from that sin that did not exist

I am sure that skeptics have been saying that sort of thing for *ages*, but what are the "official" answers supposed to be? If I want to know the truth about biology, I can pretty much go to any textbook and, if my question is not at the bleeding edge of research, get the right answer.

By contrast, every damn thing in religion seems to be at that bleeding edge. There seems to be nothing that they can agree on, and it really pisses me off. What are the official answers? And, more important of all, how can we know that those official answers are correct?

One could say that Adam never existed, and so Genesis is a philosophical discussion in story form about why it is that we humans seem to always screw things up. But I, personally, would need to see some evidence that that was the intention.

248. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50638 by Sargeist on June 19, 2007 at 7:18 am

Hi fides,

Sorry, I should have said what I meant about Mass vs Science, specifically Physics. I was referring to the way in which transubstantiation contradicts atomic theory. The rather interesting book "Galileo: Heretic" by Pietro Redondi argues that it was Galileo's support of the idea of atoms that led to his trouble with the Inquisition. Something to do with "accidents" and Aristotle, not my area of knowledge. But, at bottom, how can the wine be blood if it still looks and tastes and responds to scientific enquiry like blood?

well, bang goes your atomic theory, and people just say "cos we say it does".

As for the whole "Adam" thing, well I may have to bow to your higher knowledge of etymology, but it has never been very convincing to me this suggestion that Genesis was *not* meant to be actually referring to the first ever human. Of course I know that the word Adam has its origin as a word meaning "man", but this does not mean that Genesis is referring to *all* of mankind; to refer to just myself, I thought it was talking more about the species of man, and not people collectively.

Maybe they're just wrong and know nothing about what the words are "supposed" to mean, but the Catholic church seems to be quite clear in the catechism that Adam was "the first man" and that Adam and Eve were "our first parents" (taken from http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p6.htm - sorry I don't know how to do links).

I'll go out on a limb: it seems perfectly clear to me that the words that were written in the Old Testament were meant to be taken as being things that had happened. It doesn't seem honest to me to take those words, realise they don't make sense in the light of what we now know, continue to assume that they must, nevertheless, be correct, and seek some way of reconciling them with attitudes of "metaphor", "allegory", "etymology" and so on.

249. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50633 by Sargeist on June 19, 2007 at 6:45 am

AdrianB:

In fides' comment, he was saying that he has taught in several Catholic schools and that they did not teach Creationism. Much as I find that hard to accept (and my comment was meant to point out that I think that one cannot meaningfully have a "faith school" without that religion's supernatural stuff coming in and pooing all over our children), I don't really think that fides was saying that *all* schools are teaching ID/creationism, or even implying that.

If anything, he/she was saying that *we* are saying that *they* are saying it, and they're not. Or something.

250. Atheists: stand up and be counted

Comment #50629 by Sargeist on June 19, 2007 at 6:35 am

I'd also like to ask fides_et_ratio to enlighten me as to what Christopher Hitchens couldn't respond to on Radio 4. I didn't hear it.