That was some great reading there. What you’re describing is exactly why while I choose to live without the “supernatural” in my life, I still enjoy learning about religions, local beliefs, etc. I have not heard the label “ethnohistory” before. It is quite fitting.

Good job getting people to think.

I also love how religion threads spiral out of control on MCS.

More I think about it, the more pointless it is to argue over the internet. There’s no way I am going to be convinced of god, and no way a believer will be convinced otherwise.

This has something to do with mankind having trouble admitting a wrong. Most people (including me) would rather die that admit doing a wrong. We’re not machines and we’re not gods, we do stupid stuff all the time.
I can imagine how stupid it must feel devoting your life to a faith, only to rejecting it later. That is a very harsh barrier to cross. Same goes with pseudoscientific medicine, spiritual healing, astronomy, pyramid schemes, and just about any other quackery of mankind.

Still, the dialogue is extremely insightful, especially at exposing the lack of education on the believer behalf.

the3g_ipwn. Here’s some reading to get you going:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang Begining of the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth Beginning and history of the earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis The study of the begining of life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution Evolution

Now don’t confuse these concepts together. I really smiled when you mentioned something about stars colliding. You got me there. How very clever.

Just take a moment to know your enemy if you really want to hit where it hurts. Nonsense just gets you laughed at.

If you really set off to collect all the knowledge about the atheistic model of the universe, you’ll note that it really doesn’t require two stars colliding(lol!). Just one blowing up hehe.

Really the only mystery that can’t be explained is the Big Bang. This is because there was no time before the Big Bang, and its really hard to do experiments or observations when there is no concept of time.

“evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next.”-taken from a link you also posted-

I’m sorry. You did change a few words around.

What I should have said is this:

The local tribe, the Ktunaxa has this big long cycle of myths about a mountain spirit playing tricks on humans, who were defended by Wolf Spirit (a trickster like Cayote).

It’s pretty long, I heard it in full in three sittings, and heard parts of it from a couple other elders.

If you memorize this myth, you’ll memorize exactly all the mountain passes around this valley that are prone to landslide. And, according to the elder, that’s why you need to learn it.

Now a geographer would come in and start doing his normal aristotlean stuff: Defining various features based on common features, fitting rocks into their categories, blah blah blah. And in the end *he would come to the exact same conclusion*.

Because the elder and the geologist are teaching their community the exact same thing: To know which passes aren’t safe to climb.

Each is just a method of explaining the world to other members of your tribe, really.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, the key word is ‘ethnohistory’. It’s basically like Boas/Sapir put into a diachronistic context; or like understanding now just how cultures via how they change. That’s pretty much everything I did in grad school and it is very new and exciting, and seems to actually fit the facts.

“EVOLUTION HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED! Hell, it has nothing to do with how life started, all it describes is how life develops into distinct species with different characteristics.”

You see, kido. This is exactly why you get ass whipped on here every single night. You argue evoulution over creation theory, yet claim that one has absoutely nothing to do with the other.

That’s like saying apples are better than oranges because oranges don’t exist.

@reboot & statistics/null-hypothesis: Too bad we’re not doing math here. I could just take your line of argument ad absurdum by making my null-hypothesis “God doesn’t exist!” Now, can you find any overwhelming data that supports the alternative hypothesis?
There’s a certain reason that up until today no mathematician has found any proof for the (non-)existence of any god whatsoever.

The problem is: We don’t have any proof for the existence of God. Fine. That doesn’t prove his non-existence. The only thing that could prove that would be a coherent proof AGAINST the assumption of his existence – which we don’t have. And that works vice versa. And as long as we cannot prove anything believing in God and not believing in God are just constructs we can either adopt or not adopt. And while it is arrogant to claim to KNOW that God exists it is just as arrogant to claim to KNOW that he doesn’t. So why all the proselytising?