It's sad that the fear of boycotts and protests can lead to a volcano movie being removed from theatre's. Our society has changed quite a bit within the last 5 years. Between Bush, Janet Jackson, and the extreme christians were slowly heading to a orwellian society.

Next stop - removing text books with evolution because school districts may not buy the books.

I thought that steps in this direction have already been made?

Just a bit of a joke about an inane topic. When I lived in Oklahoma, a group called Oklahoma Citizens defending children and families or something like that decided that the file the Tin Drum was child pornography. This is the Academy Award winning film based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Some asshole judge decides to back them up and you have police going into Blockbuster stores and confiscating it from the shelves.

Members of the local ACLU went out and rented them and were refusing to give the copies up, and this judge is talking about prosecuting these people as pedophiles. Thankfully, this got to a higher court and order was restored, but you get a bunch of ass backward people with some money and pull together and just about anything can happen.

You are right, as The Artist Formerly Known As Saved has also pointed out.

For those of you who think that things are getting worse, get this:

According to a Gallup Poll drawn from more than a thousant telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45% of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.". Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.

[two paragraphs on additional polling data omitted]

The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades. Gallup interviews posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997 and 1999. Thre creationist conviction—that God alone, and not evolution, produced humans—has never drawn less than 44 percent.

That was from National Geographic, November 2004.

Now, consider this. If one of every two people you know believes this way, how many of them also take the action to boycott such displays that may be contrary to their creationist beliefs? Quite few I would assume.

The reason, of that 45%, only a minority actually feel so strongly to raise a ruckus about these sorts of exhibits. Mainstream Christians aren't the ones raising a fuss over these issues. Mainstream Christians may believe that abortion is wrong, but they aren't the ones holding up signs of bloody fetuses or shooting doctors.

To automatically leap to the most extreme assumption, dig in and show outrage is not an effective way to change anything. I get the feeling from member of both sides that are ridiculously exclusive. Furious Bible-toters who ignore "Love one another", and and self-professed open-minded progressives who would rather watch O'Reilly than allow a Christian with strong beliefs share a roundtable discussion. Both sides are guilty, and both sides are wrong.

This also occurs when a bunch of ass backward people with some gasoline pull together and torch a Hummer dealership.

Huge difference- if the Elves want to try to defy and break the law for a cause- they know the risk they are assuming by getting caught. A religious group using money and influence to get a judge to alter laws based on extreme viewpoints which bear little to no scientific merit is much scarier and much more destructive.

Scary and destructive from a scoiological point of view of course, if someone is in the Hummer dealership cleaning up or working late, then the group has just eliminated any sympathy to their cause.

Okay, so if the OCAF had just checked the copies of The Tin Drum out from the library and local video rental outlets, then subsequently burned and destroyed them, you would be okay with that?

By the same token, if the anti-Hummer factions had petitioned a judge who decided that the beasts were unfit for our roads, would that also be okay?

Or, would it still be evidence of fundamentalists out of control trying to force their will over society?

I would fall within that 45% of the Gallup poll up there. But heck, go ahead and show your little volcano movie. I like IMAX, anyway. Beats the crap out of Gap monitors.

Didn't say I was OK with either one, said they were different- thanks for illustrating the point. Actually environmental groups are attempting to create restrictions on several heavy vehicles and they are using science to back their cause, not an invisible dude in the sky who doesn't exist.

So, is that easier for me to accept? yes.

http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html

I'm an agnostic, and even I am not so arrogant as to assume the impossibility of the existence of a higher power nor the absolute existence of a higher power.

You can't prove there isn't any easier than they can prove there is.

I have a hard time believe those who claim to be open-minded or moderate but blast the invisible dude in the sky at every opportunity.

I want a t-shirt that says "Jesus Hates Volcano's"... that would rule.

This has been proven. Fossilized remains of what were thought to be early humans actually turned out *not* to be our ancestors at all.

Either current humans are aliens who crash landed on Earth, or God created us in pretty much our present form. In this case, I think the God hypothesis is, incredibly, the more likely scenario.

on what crazy scientist's opinion are you basising this "proof"?

PAGE 237
READ THE BOOK.

holy fuck. i mean - even my friends who go to church generally believe in evolution.

I can't believe I read that shit. That's fucked up. Damn you Haq.

You're only cheating yourself. Greatest movie of all-time.

i am guessing it is no accident that Ms. Henn has a jewish-looking nose. jesus is rolling over in his grave.

Brain cloud.

I shouldn't have called it a proof; I know very well that gravity, evolution, and creationism are theories. Theories just carry a lot more weight than most of the non-scientific population assumes.

Due to contradictions within evolution regarding our own ancestry, as well as the fact that evolution is not useful since everything can be explained by saying "God did it that way to trick us", it is logical to dismiss the theory of evolution.

Creationism is also supported by the lack of evidence for abiogenesis, which is a necessary precursor to evolution. It is sad that it takes a crazy scientist to speak the truth, but then again, science is the opiate of the masses. During the time of slavery, people turned to science to justify enslaving others, and science bent over backwards to verify "racial differences." You might say that a scientist willing to admit equality would have been called "crazy" at the time.

Yeah, I'd like to see statistics from well-known science journals on these findings. I find it hard to believe that the majority of scientists in the world recently concluded that some deity created human beings around 10,000 years ago.

edit: is this dead alive guy for real, or is someone just messing with us?

Um, ok.
So, it is logical to say that the hypothetical big guy... wait a minute, that sounds like faith. Which must transcend logic to be meaningful. Seriously, I have no idea if there's a god or not, but that's not logic, there.