...Anti Science people

I'd been having a good day. A day with friends, good food, good activity, and hell, I got some work done. But then I got home, and my blissfully naive day was ruined by the internet.

Now, I'd like to have faith in humanity, and believe that some day we'll stop being lame, backwards beings that blind ourselves from truth. But every time I try to reinforce my hopes that one day this will be so, The hopes I manifest are shattered.

One of the news stories posted on fark.com mentioned how a Particular Texas lawmaker believed that the "earth revolving around the sun is a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the old testament" (Link)

Lets avoid the obvious fallacy of this argument and look at the slightly more subtle problem with this statement. Why in the world would a JEW, who reads the Torah, which happens to be what Christians call "THE OLD TESTAMENT" undermine his OWN FRIKIN' RELIGIOUS TEXT? I hope this one Texas lawmaker knows that the old testament is in fact the Jewish holy book, but I'd bet money that he does not.

Secondly, and more obviously, what gives about particular people backing down on centuries-old scientific facts? The earth DOES orbit the sun. I'm not going to write an argument for this, because it'd be a waste of time to explain it. But nonetheless, it's so completely backwards to believe that it's not true. If the catholic church can acknowledge that the earth does in fact orbit the sun, and not the other way around, why cant other religious groups do the same? But Oh no! the bible is never wrong, and it was written by the hand of god, AND everything that we -think- is scientific fact is actually just a deception by god to get us to fall to the devil. I write this in sarcasm, but I'm sure some people do in fact think of this sentence as truth, and that just makes me weep.

There's also this wonderful website called "the flat earth society" which holds the archaic belief that the earth is flat to be true, which they point out with contradictory and self-supporting evidence (which you can read for yourself on their forums). In lieu of this, lets recall the Mayans. The Mayans built beautiful stepped pyramids to warship their gods and to show the world they occupied their power. More importantly, they used these pyramids for astronomy. The Mayans mathematically proved that the world is in fact a globe, not a flat plane, and if I recall correctly, they did some amazing feat to the likes of calculating the earth's diameter, to only be off by a few hundred miles.

It befuddles me that some people can be more aloof about scientific fact than ancient peoples like the Mayans.

Science really isn't out to hurt people. It's out there to find the truth. it is not a goal of science to belittle religion, but people will continue to be insecure about their beliefs, and lash back at science because of these insecurities. An amazing part of science is that it's able to look at itself and say "I was wrong about that" then change its stance to reflect a more correct assessment of a topic. Its too bad religion sometimes fails to do the same thing.