“So, Group A thinks one plus equals three? Well that is silly. I can prove it. See that other group, Group B, with equally silly beliefs? Well, they have an old rule written down in a really old book somewhere that says 1 + 1 equals four. So clearly Group A must be wrong.”

Doesn’t make sense.
-JC

It’s that sort of refusal to make alliances against silliness that make many suspicious of atheists.

Or many join them.

whaaaaaaaat?
The first half of this post was pretty good - but your take on educational theory is a fantasy. Critical thinking = perpetuating the ‘white power structure’? How many teachers do you claim hold this view? If 30 million teachers were all radical leftists - and we’re talking something so fringe-y as to make Atrios seem like David Frum - wouldn’t Dennis Kucinich have done better in the 2008 primary? Do you think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama believe that critical thinking = “white power”, and more importantly, is that how they rose to popularity?

Teachers are ordinary people. Educational theory does not have the power to conduct mass brainwashing.

Crazy stories are popular because people have no capacity to tell falsehoods from truth and because critical thinking is a genuinely hard thing that most people will fail at often enough to be non-unusual. No country on earth has ever been uneducated enough to avoid massive ignorance outbreaks, and none ever will.

If you spend a lot of money, or just try really really hard, for a long time, to tell people anything, singificant numbers of them will believe you.

A ghost is a ghost: Be it a holy ghost or otherwise. So why is one considered sacred and the other silly?

*Notice, I did try to insert my beliefs into the conversation… I am just poiting out the hipocrasy of it all.

Food for thought,
-JC

(*The initials stand for Justin Case, not “THE” J.C.

It is sad that those, who believe, are ridiculed by those, that don’t

The comma. I do not think it means, what you think it means.

I believe he was an extra large, actually…

I love this site.

Thanks, Rick, keep up the great posts…

Religion is the umbrella beneath which all superstitions flourish.

Religion, much like politics, does not flourish because of the extremists. It flourishes because of the every-man in the middle making calculated decisions based on faith.

People who believe in something based on evidence but no proof have faith. Sneering at them claiming superior knowledge is sophomorish and juvenile. It’s easy to get carried away, though, because those global warming faithers are such easy targets. I just wonder which religious umbrella that falls under.

Particularly in the era of Google and Wolfram Alpha teaching methods aren’t just outdated, they’re absurd. Now more than ever before it’s about how you know what you know, how you weigh sources, how you parse the data. Which is not on the curriculum.

Exactly right. It’s nearly pointless to be having teachers commit their students to memorizing dates and names of places rather than teaching them the mechanisms in place to find the answers to the challenges they’re going to be facing. Memorization is not knowledge or education. It’s a parlor trick at best.

Oh, and I suspect the 2012 garbage will not be near the “let down” that Y2K was. There’s just not enough people selling it. I remember watching midnight strike first in Australia (I think) and being shocked that the whole continent didn’t just simply go up in a puff of smoke.