genericAIMname (11:24:58 PM): and only old people watch cbs, meaning god is king among oldies
genericAIMname (11:25:08 PM): which we all knew

But in all fairness, I think that that number, if tracked over a period of 200 years or so, is an improvement. It would be interesting to track that number over the next 100 years and see where it goes.

In other words dude, I personally think the noise created by the fire and brimstone crowd is only getting attention because the media is focusing on the bottom 35% of the bell curve. Don’t fret too much over it.

“…and everything about him was ripe for the harvest.” Become a teacher and you will have the ability to touch the lives of countless. But it would have to be a young enough age … like high school kids. By college most people have formed their opinions on this matter. IBM is paying it’s professionals to basically become teachers, something about ensuring the future of the nation’s technological prowess. One avenue would be to get hired by IBM then become a teacher.

Which I think you’d be a cool one if you could put up with the childishness of the audience =P.

It’s not that reason is above anyone, and I don’t claim that it is. In fact, I believe the opposite: that logic and reason are fundamentally accessible to everyone born with a functioning brain. Which is why it bothers me so much that so many people — the majority, according to this survey — wholesale reject the very concepts of “reason” and “evaluation”, and yet that so many people in that boat insist at the same time that they’re right, and fervently defend the positions they haven’t even begun to survey.

You may not have noticed, but the title at the top of the page says “complacence is the enemy”. Blind faith is the very essence of complacence, whether it’s blind faith in what the preacher in front of the church says, or blind faith in what the media says, or blind faith in what the science textbook says.

But, as you say, “people who say that you’re going to hell for not thinking the world was created in 6 days” are “retarded”.

Believing in things that fall apart under the slightest reasonable examination is the distilled essence of complacence.

You come across as conflicted about whether you agree with me that the majority believing in a literal interpretation of the Biblical creation story (I think you called them “YECs”) is a bad thing, or disagree with me saying that the very process of reasoning and examination is necessary to be of any intellectual value, or maybe it’s that you just don’t think that “science” in the context of the pile of corporatized and heavily biased crap that the scientific community is today is of any value (which is a whole other discussion).

But please don’t put words into my mouth… it’s not the dissenting belief that I have a problem with. What I have a problem with is the explicit rejection of every value I have, with such fervor, such venom as to invoke the belief that the things I have continue to value (reason, exploration, freedom, human decency) will never be values shared by our irrational, complacent, heartless society.

Maybe you consider them in the same boat: that my values are ultimately just beliefs, just like whatever I think about the creation of the world, but I think they’re different: one is endorsement or rejection of a theory, and the other is endorsement or rejection of the only evaluative framework we have that isn’t strictly emotional.