From: Darryl Maddox (dpmaddox@arn.net)
Date: Fri Sep 26 2003 - 09:09:40 EDT
I love satire as much as the next person but I don't find things such as this humerous. I certainly disagree with these peoples' science and as a scientist I will be critical of their science but as a person I will not ridicule them as people or as a group. As a Christian I can't feel good about doing so and as a scientist I can't see any way it would facilitate any attempted conversation with them for them to know I made such statements when talking about them to others - and if the statements are made they will find out.
I didn't like being called names when I was a child and I won't call others names now. I suppose it's great fun for all those on the inside of "the group" but it is Hell for the outsider, and somehow I have never been convinced such things were "all in good fun" and it is definately not what I consider a good scientific argument.
Can we as scientists or as Christians point our friends to such correspondences as good examples of how things should be done?
Many people have been running around the past few years askings "What would Jesus do?" and I suppose that helped some make better decisions. Having worked for many years at a place that was held in low esteem by the local community, riddled with interenal problems and frequently facing law suites and possible closure my guiding questions is: If it will look bad as the headline in the Sunday morning paper don't do it, don't say, don't even think it the second time. Referring to the last part of the previous sentence - some 30 years ago a friend of mine and I were talking about how to avoid improper thoughts about young women and he said "The first thought is on the Devil, the second one is on you!". And there was a cartoon in a Mormon missionary newsletter a few decades ago that showed two missionarys walking along a sidewalk past a young woman sunning herself on her front lawn. One of the missionarys was looking at the other as if to ask what to do in that situation and the captioned reply to the implied question was: "Sing a hymm brother, sing a hymm!". I've found that to be good advise when I get really mad at some piece of bogus science or some really stupid action. The most recent of which was trying to use a computer that had been issued to my wife by the school where we both teach. She needed a lap-top computer so she could access teh school network from off campus and one night I needed to be able to access the network from a class room where I was going to give a geology lecture so I took her computer with me only to discover that the computer tech who had set it up had set it up where my wife was the only one who could use it to log into the network. Well there went that hour lecture right down the electronic drain, I didn't "Sing a hymm." and wound up saying a lot of things about our network people that are true but didn't need to be said then and to that group. Should have followed my own advise. WARNING--I'M GOING TO GET A LITTLE PREACHY HERE SO SOME MIGHT WANT TO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS POST.
Advise not practiced never becomes a habit and thus it never becomes a characteristic form of behavior. I would like to not see anymore word play on acronyms. It could become a habit, then a characteristic. Both as a person and as a Christian my experience has been (and isn't experience a form of experiment and are we not supposed to be scientists who learn by experimentation?) that every step I take is either one step toward or away from where I am trying to get. By anology (and since I do this several times a year) - there are many ways to climb out of Palo Duro Canyon but no matter which path you choose, it's frequently easier to take a step down than one up but for every step you take down you have to take one up just to get back where you were. So the fewer you take down, the quicker and easier you get to the top. Work = force x distance and it's about 600 feet out of the canyon, unless you take a lot of steps down, then it's more than 600 ft up because you had to go up the same foot more than once and that takes both more time and more work.
Darryl
----- Original Message -----
From: Dick Fischer
To: ASA
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: It happened!!
Shiela wrote:
What is ICR????
Here are some useful acronyms.
ICR: The Institute for Creating Ridicule.
AIG: Agonizing in Genesis
Dick Fischer - Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org
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