Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Creationism, or, please don't challenge my dearly-held paradigm with nasty evidence

I am speechless. I have just read this article * about Creation, a movie about the life of Charles Darwin. People do not want to see the movie because apparently evolution is "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying".


It suggests a serious lack of understanding of evidence, of scientific method, and imho, of faith. Believing in a deity doesn't mean you have to avoid all knowledge. Accepting evolution as a valid theory doers not mean you can't believe in God. If I were Christian I'd be loads more impressed by a God who designed a universe to adapt and evolve than by one who just made things from clay and sort of stuck them there. And whether or not you believe in macro-evolution, you can't deny micro-evolution** - the ways in which species change and adapt in such small and rapid ways that humans can observe it.


Anyway, I suppose some people are just more comfortable avoiding anything that might challenge their comfort zone.



*thanks to Marcia for the heads up


**thanks to Andre Croukamp for the terms, not to mention lots of material to think about wrt evolution and numerous other things


P.S. I was tagging this and thinking that I need a "wtf?" tag. then discarded that idea because just about every post would require said tag. The world is a strange place, people :)

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

You have the right to freedom of expression, as long as you say what we tell you

This article frightens the crap out of me. Does anyone else think this law is a throwback to apartheid days, when the government decided for you what you were allowed to see or hear? Can you say "unconstitutional"?

It is bleeding obvious what the aim of this law is - to protect our corrupt and incompetent officials against exposure. I can't help seeing in this yet another, and an ominously significant, deviation from that promising path of freedom and democracy that lay before us in 1994. The longer the ANC is in power, they more they resemble the Nats L