
> ...4.56 billion years. In fact, we possess a rock from the times of genesis...
If he means the biblical Genesis, don't the God botherers claim that the Earth is only a few thousand years old?
A chunk of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which wounded more than 1,000 people when it exploded over Russia in February, has been found and raised from its resting place 20 metres under in a lake. Chelyabinsk meteorite The Chelyabinsk meteorite in one piece, but not for long It took Russian divers a month to successfully …
>>don't the God botherers claim that the Earth is only a few thousand years old?
Well I'm in a church of 200 people which would be regarded as pretty fundamentalist and I know of 2 people who think this, and I know they are considered weird even within our weird church.
So I think the answer is no.
that's alright then. The kids of the sane majority wont be there in 20 years. And no, I don't mean that escapist fantasy that has been knocking around for only 100 years or so about rapture. More likely indifference to an incompetent ${deity} of impoverished irrational human imagination. Ever heard of the universal acid that Dawkins speaks of ?
Only a subset of fundamentalist nutters claim Earth is only a few thousand years old. Even the Catholic Church acknowledges the very old age of the planet as well as teaching evolutionary biology in their universities and colleges.
As with so many things, the lunatics are so loud they drown out the voices of reason that are present in most things.
>Only a subset of fundamentalist nutters claim Earth is only a few thousand years old.
Sadly not in my country at least when it comes to the age of the human race (not that our political theater doesn't give the crazy away).
Participants can choose one of three answers:
1. "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." It's fair to describe this as the creationist view.
2. "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process." We'll call this the theistic view.
3. "Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process." I'll term this the naturalist view.
Between 1982 and 2006, the number subscribing to the creationist view has ranged from 44 to 47 percent, while those who buy the naturalist take on things account for 9 to 13 percent. The middle-ground theistic position gets 35 to 40 percent of the vote. There's no clear trend over the 24 years; if anything, the naturalists have gained a few percentage points. Polls by the Pew Research Center and NBC News have found similar support for creationist belief, while surveys by CBS News from 2004 to 2006 and a 2005 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll give it a slim majority, at 51 to 53 percent.
How does the U.S. compare with other countries in terms of belief in evolution? Not so hot. A study of attitudes in 34 countries published in Science in 2006 shows that the United States ranks last in popular acceptance of evolution except for Turkey. Almost 40 percent of Americans in this study flatly rejected evolution, whereas the comparable numbers in European countries and Japan ranged from 7 to 15 percent.
But those aren't the only three answers available here in the US. Those are the three answers that the media and some in government have chosen to present. One does not have to chose any of those, and the majority of the educated do not: They'll tell you 'I don't know'.
Many religions have a serious image problem because many of their visible 'adherents' aren't adherents at all. They are manipulating very simple philosophies and twisting them to suit their own needs. They'll raise 'religion' as a defense, but turn right around and ignore the other 98.65% of what that religion teaches as long as they get their way.
The rub in all this is that those who actually follow the teachings of any of the 'big' religions won't demean themselves and their beliefs by getting into mudslinging opinion manipulation tactics. They take a better road and let people form their own opinions and if someone is too closed minded to actually learn about the religion they claim to follow, well, that's their problem.
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Why demaean yourself by using histionics "from the time of genesis" in such hushed reverent tones? A solar system condenses about 4600 MEEELLION years ago. Small bits hang around not doing much. The bigger bits are active and reprocess stuff through impact, geological processes, boiling things etc.
Surely the more scientifically interesting thing would be if the rock had processes working on it more recently? Looks like this might be the case as the paper says "the history of meteorite formation
included an impact event at approximately 290 Ma". If only I knew what Ma was - Millions of years Ago? Or it could be Ma Baker for all I know.
Also, it looks like the main lab work was done on the little bits that fell in the snow, not the Holy Covanent that baptised itself. so they could give the latter to the Church of Flake. Not that he actually has a church to put it in.
It does seem a little odd to refer to the time that the Solar System began to form as 'the time of Genesis'. nothing was actually created at that time (which, after all is the literal meaning of the word genesis), it is just the generally accepted time frame in which material that was to formt eh solar system began to coalesce.
The universe was 'created' in the big bang some 13.5 billion years ago (IIRC), so surely, if you're going to use the word genesis at all, then it should refer to that, and to be frank, so little is known (and possibly is even knowable) about the cause of that (if the word 'cause' even makes sense in this context) that 'genesis' is probably exactly the wrong word to use anyway.
On the other hand, those who believe that our planet was 'created' a few thousand years ago by some sort of all powerful space ghost, despite the lack of any material evidence (books and men in dresses telling you so don't count) need to learn the art of rational thought, that the rest of us use to understand the nature of the universe from observation and experiment.
"with the necessary skills to decode and translate the messages being broadcast from the rock so that they can be exposed to the rest of us"
...for a slight fee.
Of course the decoding will demand ... careful interaction ... with young russian women lest the signal/noise ratio of the retrieval process suffer due to male spiritistic emissions.
"but at least their scientists are pretty much first rate."
If they're so first rate, then they can't possibly need all 570kg of rock. I could make millions flogging Genesis meteor (tm) fragments to the rich and vain around the planet. Maybe commission a few famous designers to come up with suitably pretentious artefacts, have my rock sliced, disced and polished accordingly, and then market through the normal channels for selling to those with money to burn.
Please, cultural sensitivity here please ! You should have Rasputin listed first. As for the state of Russian science, sounds like laments heard in UK, USA, OZ etc. The existence of untreated people obsessing over incoming stones seems to be evidence that mental health services are lacking.
Out of a bored curiosity, what was insane about Jesus ? Witty factual response please, life is too short for rehashes of tedious guesses fresh from the 1800s.
I'm game. He apparently believed that one or more demons lived inside a human, and that he could and did transfer said demons into multiple pigs. The only way that's not insane is if he was correct. This is a million miles from the default assumption, as many other explanations are much more likely. (He was deluded; he was a charlatan; he was using a metaphor and didn't expect to be taken literally; the events were honestly but incorrectly reported; the author was a liar; later revisions exaggerated or omitted details...)
("Insane" is a deprecated term in mental health circles. I'm suggesting JHC (if as described) was deluded.)
To be fair, looking at the 'recorded' acts of Jesus with skepticism is what real Biblical scholars do. There is no first hand recording of anything he did, it is all after the fact. Even assuming the original authors tried to stay close to the known facts (highly unlikely anyway) there is a 100% certainty that things were altered simply through the 'telephone game' effect.
Most educated religious people will say "I don't know" a lot more than you'll ever them say "yes, (x) is absolutely true because the Bible says so". Again, even the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Bible isn't a verbatim fax direct from God and is a physical construct of Man. It's kind of hard for them not to acknowledge that, seeing a how they were the original editors and simply destroyed information that didn't jive with their purposes. The Church knows this, scholars know this, it is still the same subset of loons who refuse to acknowledge the facts and big up their own fictions. There's nothing to be done for those people except ignore them.
Conman, certainly. Loon, probably. That's the thing with conmen, CEO's and politicians, they are actually convinced of their own bullshit. It may begin as a ruse but after a while they perfect the act to the point it is no longer an act, it is their actual perception of reality and it is only reinforced when they experience successes.
When you buy into your own scam and start believing your own lies, that's when you cross the line into lunacy.
1. Survived the hostility of space *tick*
I'm not sure that space, where nothing happens for long periods of time, is very hostile to rocks, up until the point at which they manage to hit something.
2. Survived entering through planet's atmosphere *tick*
Entered Earth's atmosphere, had its surface heated to thousands of degrees centigrade and promptly exploded into lots of smaller bits, injuring ~1000 people over a wide area.
3. Survived on impact *tick*
Thousands of pieces of various sizes were either vapourised, or hit various things on the surface, suffering differing degrees of damage.
4. Survived contact with humans ...
The one piece of debris in question, which was what was left after a large explosion and collision with a lake, and was already so damaged that simply dropping it again from a small height caused it to split into several smaller pieces...
“On February 15 it intercepted the Earth at a shallow angle and was traveling at 54,000km/h before it exploded about 23km off the ground due to the heat and pressure of reentry.”
I might be mistaken, but shouldn’t that be
- “due to the heat and pressure of ‘entry’.“ ?
As it didn’t leave the earth’s atmosphere to reenter, it just entered?
(icon for irony)