This is splendid evidence FOR the seperation of church and state.

Personally, Rep. Broun should probably heed the advice of Saint Augustine, who cautioned would-be evangelists about running their mouths in De Genesi ad literam 1:19–20, Chapt. 19.

Over 1600 years ago.

Creationists:

Neanderthals. Have you people seen their skeletons? They LOOK nothing like modern human skeletons. NO seriously compare them side by side. Different DNA too. So........what do you consider them human or monkey?

I'm skeptical of some of the rather politicized science being used to formulate policy as well. Eugenics, anyone?

It takes all kinds of people I suppose......

I have no problem with him being a creationist. I have a problem with him using it to craft laws we all have to live by.

Leviticus 15:19 states that a woman shall be unclean for seven days and exiled for the duration when she has her monthly cycle.

Actually, now that I think about it, that's not such a bad idea... KIDDING!

Science and the Bible aren't mutually exclusive. I see the Bible as allegory, not literal word.

He has no business on the science committee.

I really dislike this sort of fanatical thinking, and I'd feel just as strongly about an elected official who believes that vaccines cause autism. But weirdos get elected all the time.

Fundamentalism makes people stupid.

I can never understand peoples aversion to eugenics.

The only Fundy I've known in real life, a truly, epically "world is 9000 yrs old" and all the rest, I hated not because of his stupidity, but for the way he cheated, lied, stole from me and then on sunday would go to church, because God forgives everything. Monday morning he'd be the same greedy, lying asshat he always was. Guess he missed the memo about "earning your forgiveness by NOT repeating your transgression.".

It takes all kinds of people I suppose..

Nah, it really doesn't, we just got all kinds...

"Science and the Bible aren't mutually exclusive. I see the Bible as allegory, not literal word."

so that means verses like : "This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die" = call the cops or take your child to AA? Then what are the stones and death all about? It is not allegory, it is a big book of bad advise for everything from personal issues to law and science.

Y'know, back in the day, I did some creation-vs-evolution debates. I even argued the creationist side a few times, just to see how the other half lives. It was fun.

But here's a logical trap that I've never seen any creationist escape from. When the debate about the age of the universe begins, I always go to the radiological evidence -- the various radioactive isotopes found in rocks and fossils and such that give us pretty good evidence that the Earth is about 4 billion years old. I sometimes get a counter-argument that the radioactive processes must have changed, but there's absolutely no evidence that the laws of physics have fundementally changed since, well, a few minutes after the Big Bang.

So they turn to this argument: Sure, you find dinosaur fossils and rocks that date as much older than 9000 years. But that's because God created the Earth with those things built in. They are evidence of a past that never really existed. I have two responses, one snarky and one logically devestating:

1. You mean the God you believe in, the God that you hold to be responsible for all of the magificence of existence, is some kind of practical joker?

2. If God can create the Earth with fossils of a past that never really existed, then he can also create you and I as adults, at our current age, with memories pre-stored in our brain of childhoods and past events that never actually existed. So if this process is how the universe was created, how can you provee that it happened 9000 years ago and not... just now?

One argument used about fossil evidence is that the matter that composes Earth actually comes from different planets that god decided to meld together when he made the planet (no mention of the absurdity of much older planets being used to make younger ones...). The other argument I have heard is that 'days' are much different for god than it is for us (i.e. a 'day' for god may last millions/billions of years) thus explaining away the age of the universe.

It is too bad such ignorant physicians disgrace the whole profession. Just a warning to never trust a person simply because they have letters behind their name.

BTW: is it just me or does the sheer number of mounted deer heads seem creepy...

CD- Remind me to remind you about something. It may take awhile, I have to look it up.

Will do, Crid.

CD: I think this guy is who's coming to mind, Gould wrote about him once.

In Gould's telling, Gosse was dumbfounded that no one was interested in his idea that God had so perfected the illusion of our genesis such that there was no point in studying it, or anything else, any further... It was the all-time conversation killer.

Where does the 9,000 figure come from? The way I'd always heard it, it was supposed to be 6,000 years. (I'm guessing that's based on the theory that WRITING didn't exist anywhere in the world before 4,000 B.C.E.)

And, as Sam Harris pointed out in "Letter to a Christian Nation," 4,000 B.C.E. is about a millennium after the Sumerians invented glue. (I wonder why he didn't point to the Sumerians' invention of the wheel, instead, which was quite a few centuries BEFORE glue! But who cares.)

Crid, thanks for putting me onto that... I have to admit that I had not heard of Philip Henry Gosse. Interesting read. You can see the problem with Gosse's theory -- if it were true, it would demolish all of science, since science is observational and in Gosse's world, no observation could ever be trusted. There's actually an interesting parallel there to Islam, which claims that no (non-elite) person can understand the universe and should not make the attempt; instead they should just submit blindly to God's will. In Gosse's world, the individual would submit blindly to fate since, in a universe with no reliable physical laws, any attempt at self-determination would be pointless.