Hey Bobby, just looking at your site, and I wonder to myself why you got so carried away with your whole FSM thing. I understand your point- religious fundamentalism is getting in the way of a progressive world. The fact that some schools only want to teach Intelligent Design is a bit scary. But then again, it’s probably difficult for you to try and teach your kids something that is being contradicted at school. And religion is not a bad thing in and of itself. A lot of people live good productive lives, and are even directed towards them by religious faith of some sort. Again, religious fundamentalism in all its guises is a bane, and it makes rational belieivers in God (among whom I count myself) feel defensive about their religions when there is actually no need to be. Kind of like the one kid in class who misbehaves and spoils it for everyone else.
This is precisely why I am writing. If your website offered a concise and clear explanation of why you think ID is an incorrect theory or should not be taught in schools, then maybe you’d actually be reaching people who disagree with you, rather than just those who already think the same things.
I think interested and well-informed debate between opposing viewpoints is fundamental for progress of our ideas and society, but that’s not what your site is promoting. Your site simply appears to be a way for you to prove your own popularity to yourself, and make a few bucks with merch and this book while you’re at it.
The fact that you decide to take an extreme approch to this matter is something which is all too familiar of late. I see America raging with political, moral, religious, and social debates. People are hugely polarised. But this isn’t getting anyone anywhere. People are standing on soapboxes as soon as they find something they disagree with just to shout "I disagree," and when asked about their beliefs they respond "I believe the opposite of what that guy said." People are not informing their ideologies with solid values, and so as soon as the argument is over nothing is resolved, and people are just floating around like helium balloons after a little kid’s birthday party.
The problem is that while they’re fighting, nobody sees the middle ground, and so the easy solutions get missed. I don’t think ID and Evolution are incompatible theories.
Look, it’s easy: all life on this planet evolved from DNA. DNA is a really really awesome molecule, because look at all the things it has adapted into to populate our planet! Someone really smart must’ve designed that stuff.
Or you can take it a step back, if you’re going with the ridiculous improbability of DNA forming by coincidence: Wow, a planet showed up with just the right conditions to create this awesome molecule…
or Wow, the universe has laws and constituents which are capable of producing all this life from such basic things…
The point is that nobody, not even the scientists, can explain the reason the universe is this way, or what happened at the moment of its creation. At that point, all we have is our best guess, our gut feeling, and at that point it really doesn’t matter what you believe.
The sort of intervention which the FSM is capable of refers to a very specific sort of belief in God, and pointing out that that particular sort of belief seems silly to you does not bear any relevance to the question of the initial creation of the universe.
Some people just don’t want to put everything down to "dumb luck" which is what science (for all the understanding it offers) ultimately does.
Whatever your opinion of religious faith, you have a right to express it, I’m just a bit puzzled by the way you chose to express yourself if you did actually want incite some sort of awareness or change about the matters which concern you. If you were just trying to piss a few people off and have a few people on your side laughing with you, then maybe you should have just pulled more pranks in high-school, or got the jocks together to beat up some freshman. That’s basically what your website acheives with its current content.
Of course, if you have no interest in changing people’s minds about these issues, then I guess I don’t have much else to say, except that your logic is horribly flawed at several points, even in terms of serving as analogous to what Christians say about creation.
Pach