Inside a Bible Belt Classroom

[finnbow]

The last line of this video is priceless. These are future leaders of America (or at least the GOP).

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by finnbow

The last line of this video is priceless.

Actually, the "Out Of Africa" hypothesis would suggest that "ar differnt skeeins" resulted from black people evolving lighter skins in response to the reduced solar radiation of more northerly latitudes. Wonder how them good ol' boys'd lak thayut.

These are future leaders of America (or at least the GOP).

Yeah, I know but, on the bright side, I'll probably be dead by then.

John

[hillbilly]

[QUOTE=Boreas;32594]Actually, the "Out Of Africa" hypothesis would suggest that "ar differnt skeeins" resulted from black people evolving lighter skins in response to the reduced solar radiation of more northerly latitudes. Wonder how them good ol' boys'd lak thayut.


I'll tell how this good ole boy likes that. He knows better. Show me one fuckin' WHITE man in Africa thats EVOLVING black. We are different, plain and simple. We are all different for a reason. Why? How bout because it's the way God wanted it.

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by hillbilly

Show me one fuckin' WHITE man in Africa thats EVOLVING black. We are different, plain and simple. We are all different for a reason. Why? How bout because it's the way God wanted it.

You don't get a white man "evolving" from white to black or black to white during his lifetime. What you get is populations who live in a particular area changing very gradually over centuries and thousands of years in response to the environment they live in. If large populations of white people moved back to Central Africa or some other tropical locale and stayed there as a discrete breeding population they eventually would develop darker skin. It would take eons though.

Since we're talking about skin color, I'll give you a simplified version of how that works. Human evolution occurred in Africa. That's pretty much undisputed by those who subscribe to evolutionary theory. So, while in Africa, humans - or their prehuman ancestors - developed (evolved) darker skin as a protection against the intense sunlight of the tropics. This protected them (us) from things like skin cancer and just plain old sunburn.

Now, when humans began moving north out of Africa as the Ice Age ended, (this took thousands of years), they found themselves living in areas where solar radiation was far less intense (because of the curvature of the earth). That meant our dark skin was no longer an adaptive advantage for our new environment. In fact, it was a disadvantage. For example, our dark skin inhibited the production of vitamin D, easy to produce in the tropics but much harder in Europe or Asia. Also, the dark pigment in our skin is genetically linked to sickle cell anemia. (Evolution ain't always perfect.) In Africa it was a worthwhile trade-off but not in Europe and Asia. So, what happened is people living in more northerly areas began over time to develop lighter skin because it worked better in their new environment.

In any population there is variation from individual to individual in many many ways. Some of us have lighter or darker skin coloration, even within the same "race". If it turns out that darker skin pigment confers a survival advantage, as it does in the tropics, those with the darker skin will have an easier time of it. That means they'll end up being healthier and stronger and better able to acquire a mate and pass on their genes to the next generation.

So, as these darker skinned people enjoy greater breeding success that means the characteristics of the population will change over time to include more and more people with darker and darker skin until a point is reached where the population as a whole possesses the characteristics that best suit them to their environment.

John

[noonereal]

Originally Posted by Boreas

Now, when humans began moving north out of Africa as the Ice Age ended,

which ice age?

[hillbilly]

Boreas, forgive me for my last quote. It sounded rude. Sorry bout that.


Help me make some sense out of this though. According to my figures, people haven't had all these thousands and thousands of years to evolve. Bible is complex, and ya'll know by now it's alot for me to try to take in with poor learning skills, but, from what I 'think' I understand is man is only 2,000 years old since the flood. Even originating in one place and then migrating to new lands, wouldn't we still speak the same language we spoke before splitting up? How many different languages were called aboard the ark? Alot to me doesn't make very much sense.

[noonereal]

Originally Posted by hillbilly

Help me make some sense out of this though. According to my figures, people haven't had all these thousands and thousands of years to evolve. Bible is complex, and ya'll know by now it's alot for me to try to take in with poor learning skills, but, from what I 'think' I understand is man is only 2,000 years old since .

We need to ask Sarah!

She says man and dinosaurs walked earth together, just like in the movies and dinosaurs go back millions of years.

This guy Dr. Kent Hovind real real smart, like Sarah!
Here he explains it to us just like Sarah would.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...2951687298593#

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by hillbilly

Boreas, forgive me for my last quote. It sounded rude. Sorry bout that.


Help me make some sense out of this though. According to my figures, people haven't had all these thousands and thousands of years to evolve. Bible is complex, and ya'll know by now it's alot for me to try to take in with poor learning skills, but, from what I 'think' I understand is man is only 2,000 years old since the flood. Even originating in one place and then migrating to new lands, wouldn't we still speak the same language we spoke before splitting up? How many different languages were called aboard the ark? Alot to me doesn't make very much sense.

Well, the flood was supposed to have been long before the time of Christ and He lived 2000 years ago. Back in the 1600s an Anglican Archbishop named James Ussher sat down with the Old and New Testaments and set out to discover the age of the Earth. Ussher determined that the Earth was born the night before Sunday, October 23, 4,004 BC. So the Earth is coming up on it's 6,014th birthday. As you will probably guess, I think this is complete and utter nonsense.

There is something interesting about the world 6,000 years ago. It's the time that people began to organize themselves into complex societies, the basis for the way we live today. It's when people started systematically keeping historical records. This happened in the Middle East, the land which the Old Testament talks about. So, the Prophets and Patriarchs of the Hebrews wouldn't have had access to information older than around 6,000 years.

What you're talking about above is pretty much the Creationist argument for world history and I'm not surprised that you say it doesn't make much sense to you. That's because it doesn't make much sense. The Bible was never intended to be an historical or scientific document. The fact that some folks try to make it into one has caused a lot of trouble.

Anyway, according to anthropologists, the oldest known direct ancestors of modern humans lived around 4.5 million years ago. They weren't human. Scientists call them "hominids" which more or less means "like humans". By that time the earth was already very old (around 4 billion years old).

The first humans, beginning with Homo habilis ("handy man"), appeared around 2.5 million years ago. They were really primitive. They didn't really look like us very much but they walked erect, had culture, made tools, etc. There were several other steps on the way, finally getting to Homo sapiens (us) a little less than 100,000 years ago.

The thing is, an all-powerful God who has existed for all time could have created the world in any way and at any time He chose to. To insist that He did it in a way that we humans can understand, at a time which placed us in the world from its beginnings and especially in a way specifically designed for our benefit, is just human arrogance.

John

[d-ray657]

Originally Posted by hillbilly

Boreas, forgive me for my last quote. It sounded rude. Sorry bout that.


Help me make some sense out of this though. According to my figures, people haven't had all these thousands and thousands of years to evolve. Bible is complex, and ya'll know by now it's alot for me to try to take in with poor learning skills, but, from what I 'think' I understand is man is only 2,000 years old since the flood. Even originating in one place and then migrating to new lands, wouldn't we still speak the same language we spoke before splitting up? How many different languages were called aboard the ark? Alot to me doesn't make very much sense.

Taking the Bible literally, mankind is still more than 2,000 years old. The New Testament times - the times of the New Covenant - are around 2,000 years. I haven't taken the time to go back through all of the generations identified in Genesis, although I'm sure some scholars have, but I think the Old Testament times covered several thousand years. From a literal Biblical perspective, man has survived past the flood for several thousand years.

Of course the controversy arises when some of the best scientific techniques available provide data that is inconsistent with the Bible being an historic account of the development of mankind. It is not only inconsistent with the scientific theory of evolution, but with carbon dating, anthropological findings, astronomy, and other scientific means of measuring space, time, and biology. The Bible is even inconsistent within its own text.

However, for those who don't see the bible as a history book, but as a collection of moral and spiritual principles, communicated through the perspective of ancient writers, it takes on a different kind of truth. I don't believe that a God who loves the creatures on the earth would wish to deprive humans of their ability to reason and develop as a species. To the extent that the literal text of the Bible is inconsistent with our developing comprehension of scientific principles, it should not lead to Christians rejecting such scientific findings.

Indeed, the more we learn through science and other intellectual endeavors, the better we are able to apply the greatest of the moral teaching from the Bible - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." As we learn more about the consequences of our actions on the environment, on health, on hunger, and on other aspects of living, we can direct our actions to better serve the purposes of the Golden Rule. That use of scientific advances seems to this simple person to be a better means of fulfilling the New Covenant than condemning others because they don't comply with a series of rules developed in the harsh reality of living on this earth thousands of years ago.

Regards,

D-Ray

[BlueStreak]

[QUOTE=hillbilly;32600]

Originally Posted by Boreas

Actually, the "Out Of Africa" hypothesis would suggest that "ar differnt skeeins" resulted from black people evolving lighter skins in response to the reduced solar radiation of more northerly latitudes. Wonder how them good ol' boys'd lak thayut.


I'll tell how this good ole boy likes that. He knows better. Show me one fuckin' WHITE man in Africa thats EVOLVING black. We are different, plain and simple. We are all different for a reason. Why? How bout because it's the way God wanted it.

Uh, it happened over a period of hundreds of thousands of years...........

Dave