Exams and more fundamentalist bigotry

I haven’t posted for exactly twenty five days! Shame on me.

Well I have been going through exams, started last week on Thursday with English, followed by Friday math, then Monday Science and Commerce. Most of the exams were fairly easy, nothing too challenging, many an hour of reading the same three chapters in my textbooks seems abit like overkill in hindsight. Especially for Science which was far easier than I imagined.

History shouldn’t be too much of a problem, I usually do exceptionally well in all history tasks, although I do dread Geography this Friday. Quite abit to remember and there are always lots of difficult questions that test your place knowledge and skills.

IST exam tomorrow also looks set to be dubious. New teacher is here to replace our original one who is about to depart for England. I don’t think our new teacher even knows about tomorrow’s exam, let alone what’s in it and what to study. Luckily another IST teacher was nice enough to tell me just to study pseudocode and flowcharts.

I generally found that pseudocode and flowcharts, (related to programming) was fairly difficult to understand, probably because the concept of it was never really explained to us. I quite well understand it now, but it took an unnecessary amount of time for me to pickup on it, with little assistance from the teacher. Also I find that there plenty of different ways to create a solution to a problem through programming, yet the teachers always seem to only accept one method. Their own. In the textbook it even says ‘The beauty of programming is you can use many different methods to solve a problem’. But in all truth, looking over my old work thee are several errors that are quite… evident in my solutions.

A band performance with some friends also looks set in the near future, perhaps in two or less weeks. Performing in front of year 7, in conjunction with a ‘macabre’ circus performance. The macabre theme for the drama performance is in all truth quite lame and probably will not get too far off the ground, nevertheless a gig’s a gig.

I am quite looking forwards to after the exams. Plenty of time to concentrate on writing, drumming and gaming. Plus my mum and sister are leaving at the end of November which means plenty of freedom and gaming for me.

Finally to end I’ll mention a book I saw, ‘The Answer’s Book’. Edited by Don Batten, Ph.D, by Ken Ham, Jonothan Sarfati and Carl Wieland. A most offensive part I came across was “The Bible’s civilizing influence. The Bible’s message elevated the blood-drinking barbarians of the British Isles to decency”

I, despite not being in any way related someone English or having a Celtic or Anglo background think that is extremely bigoted. If the Bible did do one thing it was start the Dark Ages.

“Indeed, the decline in acceptance of the Biblical-world view in the West had been paralleled by a decline in the beauty of art”

Where the fuck did they come up with that? America, prime example of the West is more Christian than communion wafers dipped in holy water before being thrice blessed. Europe, majority Christian. Australia majority Christian. Wherever you want to look in the West there are Christians.

Decline in art? Who are you? An art critic?

“The Bible’s Scientific accuracy: The stars are countless (Gen 15:5)”. What in the world does that prove? I can make the same observation as a poet or as any person. Perhaps they are trying to prove people in the Bible can count?

Also in this book of total ass holity (I know not a real word, but the book’s authors would have probably done the same knowing their intellect) is talk of how the Bible mends lives, in particular one ‘Dr. Ironside’ who was challenged by an agnostic to a debate. Ironside challenged the agnostic to bring forth any criminal or drunkard who has been living a degraded life and show that the philosophy of agnosticism has ‘improved’ or brought them out of their situation. In return Ironside said he would bring forward a hundred men and woman who have had their lives and wellbeing changed through the Gospel. The agnostic withdrew his challenge.

Several problems there Mr. Ham and fellow authors, first of all the book never actually said anything about any hundred people materializing. The very promise of such a deed seemed to have made the agnostic shy away. I could quite easily say that sure the Bible may mend lives, how it does I have no idea, money raining from the sky? People suddenly claiming their situations are all fine because they know they are saved? Look the problem is I went through the same thing, I thought I was saved at one point, all the worries of the world went away for quite awhile. Then it all came back to me, the reality of it all.

If you want to go about thinking everything is just fine and such then go right ahead. If you are a drunk and have no money and when you receive the gospel and ‘miraculously’ have your life transformed, tell me, are you truly better off than the man who thinks realistically?

You are still drunk, drunk on the Bible and it’s promises and it’s feeling that everything is fine, you are saved, God loves you, Jesus died for you.

The agnostic philosophy is not some rigid set of rules as the Bible is. It doesn’t demand anything except the belief that we cannot know God, let alone if there is a God. It doesn’t demand you to love Jesus, it doesn’t demand you blindly believe or put your faith in something. Does it promote morality? No, it is unrelated to morality, it merely says that God’s existence cannot be known and that the individual’s actions are up to them.

D r Ironside wasn’t proving anything. If the Bible was indeed more ‘morale’, despite the obvious fact that the debate really shouldn’t have had anything to do with morals and that agnosticism has really nothing to do with morales, is it still better if your are believing a lie? Trusting all everything into this one basket? Or will you honestly say, ‘I see no God, I hear no God and yet I see hundreds of them about me everyday, preaching and spouting their truth. Which is right? I don’t know, they can’t all be right. I have no other option but to take none of them seriously and rely on logic and science. There may be a God, but I can honestly not know him, and if I ever come face to face with God, I made an honest mistake’

There are many other problems throughout this book, arrogant doctrines, accusations and all sorts of other nonsense. I shall make more posts on this book in the future. Although it is interesting to note this book is actually primarily concerned about battling science and establishing the problems in evolution, which I honestly don’t really care about. So what if this universe was made by a God or Gods? Does that automatically mean the Christian God is right?

I’ll leave you with two quotes.

Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

Robert Ingersoll

Many today think science is anti-god. Atheists encourage this view by claiming that their way of thinking is ’scientific’.

The Answers Book

~ by Charybdia on October 29, 2007.