College Credits For Trolling the Web? 1164
A user writes "Some undergraduate and masters level courses at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary require trolling as part of their requirements.
In William Dembski's classes on Intelligent Design and Christian Apologetics, 20% of the final grades come from having made 10 posts defending Intelligent Design Creationism on 'hostile' websites.
There seems to be no requirement that the posts contain original writing; apparently cut-and-paste jobs are sufficient. Is this the first case of trolling the net being part of course requirements?"
Full disclosure (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as the students fully disclose that they are doing this for a class requirement, this could be a good thing, for the students, for the school, and for anyone participating in the resulting discussion.
It can be a good thing for students, to expose them to real-world reactions - both civil and less than civil - to their posts. It can train them to make their posts in non-trollish manner. It may also expose them to ideas they would not have otherwise considered.
It can be good for the school and professor when the school gets feedback from others involved in the discussions and from websites.
It can be good for those participating and reading the discussions because THEY may be exposed to ideas they would not otherwise consider.
It's one thing to have an idea, study opposing ideas, then confirm your belief in your original idea. It's another to blindly accept an idea and refuse to think about or even expose yourself to other ideas. Such willful blindness is bad for individuals and, on a larger scale, bad for society.
No your wrong see... (Score:1, Interesting)
The Giraffe has to be intelligently designed because how could you pump that much blood up to it's head when it's 13 feet high and when it bends down to drink....
I don't know it's trolling per se. What I envision is a Fark comments thread of religion or even a slashdot thread just like this one. If you are of a college level and hopefully if you are masters level you should be able to write eloquently enough to defend your point without resorting to WHARRGARBL to get your credit for the class. I would certainly hope that the professor grades on the validity and completeness of your defense of the position.
Seminaries are different (Score:3, Interesting)
Many if not most seminaries won't grant you don't actually believe what they are teaching. After all, most seminary graduate go off to become preachers and other religious teachers.
Undergraduate school is ideally designed to teach you to think.
Many/most/maybe all seminaries are designed to filter in those who think like the school wants them to and give them the education necessary to propagate their beliefs to others.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Copy-and-paste is okay... scary. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
What's the change? (Score:3, Interesting)
Happy shiny people come by my house to troll in person from time to time. I find that WAY more annoying than trolling on websites such as this where we all can have a good laugh at them. When they ring my doorbell (despite a no soliciting sign in the neighborhood), I now have to deal with my dogs and stopping what I'm doing. Trolling on one of these boards doesn't interrupt my morning breakfast or a good wank etc. So to me, if this replaces the door to door brainwashing service it's a good thing (TM).
Sheldon
Apologetics (Score:5, Interesting)
someone post this to /b/ (Score:4, Interesting)
...and that'll blow the uni off the net for a while, i think :)
Re:Full disclosure (Score:3, Interesting)
>>It can be a good thing for students, to expose them to real-world reactions - both civil and less than civil - to their posts. It can train them to make their posts in non-trollish manner. It may also expose them to ideas they would not have otherwise considered.
If they get civil responses, I'd be shocked.
Even when I posted a way of reformulating ID so that it is a scientificly formulated and testable hypothesis, people still flamed the shit out of me, even though at some point in the near future we WILL need a test for intelligently design. (Namely, when we have to investigate bacteria, virii, etc., to guess if they were naturally evolved or engineered by Saddam & Co.)
I think the entire freaks list here on Slashdot is from this. Note that I wasn't even defending ID, per se, merely reformulating it so that it would be "scientific". This is the objection you always hear to ID, right? (Right?)
So you'd think that people would be happy to see it formulated this way, since it would give them an opportunity to prove it false. But they're not. Instead, they rather act like rabid wombats.
Re:Intelligent Design Creationism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither creationism or ID have anything to do with young earthers
Creationists divide in Young Earth and Old Earth camps, depending on how literal they are about genesis.
Re:Full disclosure (Score:3, Interesting)
If they're really so wrong, we should be able to demonstrate it without such disclosures.
No we can't.
It's impossible to prove any theory, as long as there is an alternative theory with an almost allmighty entity (God, CIA, AlQuaida, in general: Them) that is granted the ability create fake evidence for all other theories.
Thats what They want you to think.
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not a religious man, but I'm going to play devils advocate here.
To say that these religious systems don't make useful predictions is false. These systems must be useful, or they would have driven their adherents to extinction many generations ago. History is littered with ways of looking at the world that have killed their adherents and thus destroyed themselves. Yet these systems have not done so, but rather have led their adherents to dominance. To dismiss this fact is to dismiss evolution. Scientists believe that they can intelligently design a social framework for sharing knowledge about the nature of reality and governing human behavior that is better than evolution can achieve. They might be wrong. Their perspectives might lead their people to extinction in a handful of generations of man. We will never know.
* I do not attend Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary College.
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, an open mind within the bounds of reason is the best you can accomplish. This is also not the same thing as a lack of an opinion, which would be all but impossible. So what's outside reason? People who accuse scientists of not having an open mind are actually accusing them of not having blind faith in homeopathic medicine. You see, they posit that scientists, being hateful curmudgeons, despise homeopathic medicine as not made from enough harmful chemicals, and their negative thoughts cancel out the natural psychic abilities that all water has. Thus, tests fail because scientists are too malevolent, and water refuses to work for them. Why don't true believers conduct tests? Testing implies a lack of faith, and as such will still hurt the water's feelings. @discovery.ca did a big test years ago. They had a team of psychic healers who said they can protect tomatoes from tomato blight. After a month or so, they looked at the results. The control group and the psychically healed group were within the margin of error of each other, with the control group faring slightly better than the "healed" group. The psychic's conclusion: The viewers hate psychic healing, and were sending negative thoughts at them. So you see, if you're too "open minded" you can't believe in science anymore ;)
Re:It's unclear why this is a bad thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Your statement that science is NEVER dogmatic would have to take into consideration the 1000s of years science has been practiced
Sigh. Before continuing to make a fool out of your self, try to understand the difference between "science" and "scientist". Of course scientists can be dogmatic, every time they stop being scientific and let dogma rule, they become dogmatic. Science is never dogmatic however.Ever. Well, you could call geometry dogmatic if you were asinine enough, but that is another matter.
Read that carefully. Try to understand it.
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:2, Interesting)
These systems must be useful, or they would have driven their adherents to extinction many generations ago.
Not true. That reasoning only works if belief in religion was a purely genetic trait. But religion characteristics shows it as behaving far more like a parasite or symbiote. And there is no need for a parasite to be useful to be able to survive. It just has to be able to spread among hosts and not kill of the whole host population.
An ID'er *could also* believe in evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
I've tried to spend some time examing the scientific evidence for the age of the universe and the evidence for evolution. I've come to the conclusion that the Universe most likely is Billions of years old, because there are just too many things that can't reasonably be explained simply by the idea that God created the Universe 6 or 10 thousand years ago (if he did, why bother making the universe have bizarre things that otherwise would indicate a very old universe).
However, looking at the amazing complexities of life, I still feel that given the long odds, the 'completely random permutation moderated by natural selection' isn't wholly sufficient to explain all life either. So, I fall into the camp of those who believe in God, believe that he had a plan when creating the Universe to cause life to arise on Earth (and possibly elsewhere; the Bible neither excludes the possibility, nor indicates it positively, and science has yet to find evidence of life elsewhere, but allows and renders it likely).
I believe he used a mechanism of evolution in 'creating' life on earth, but I think it's also possible that he fine-tuned the Universe to overcome the 'long odds' that would otherwise be against the random generation of life and rise of very complex organisms. That's not to say he was constantly intervening in evolution. If God is all knowing and all powerful, then it's perfectly plausible that he fine tuned everything from the start of the big bang such that from that point on, everything would happen that was necessary for life to arise somewhere in the Universe.
Am I an IDer? Am I a creationist? Am I an evolutionist? I'd say I'm not really a creationist, and most of the creationists would say I'm not, I suspect. Am I an IDer? My views, I think, would loosely fall into the ID camp because it is much less stringent about the 'how' and 'when' of the way that Intelligent Design was worked out (although, probably most IDers believe in a much more 'active' intervention in the design of life than I do). I do basically believe that evolution is correct, though I view it as less random than pure evolutionary theory suggests.
I think your statement that ID == Creationism (in disguise) is ignorant of the facts of the differing views of people.
However, all that said, I don't think ID should be taught in *science* class. It's not a matter of science, and I have no problem admitting that. I think it would be appropriate for it to be part of a philosophy and religion class, because that's more of what it is. I think it's appropriate for schools, both public and private, to have classes that educate students about the most commonly believed religions and philosophies (such classes, particularly in public schools, should be held from, as much as possible, a neutral perpective - anthropology rather than catechism - learning *what* people believe, rather than trying to convince students to believe one thing or another). People shouldn't graduate from high school without knowing anything at all about Judeaism, Chrisitianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Universalism, Atheistic Humanism, Existentialism, etc).
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:3, Interesting)
"To say that these religious systems don't make useful predictions is false."
Tell me one experiment whose outcome can be predicted using the "theory" of ID.
"These systems must be useful, or they would have driven their adherents to extinction many generations ago."
I did not say that religion wasn't "useful" (at least for some values of "useful"). Anthropologists and psychologists can probably give you a huge list of reasons why religion may have had beneficial effects on the survival of certain societies, not least of which the fact that it often makes people willing to die for said societies (of course, science is making the requirement to die for one's society more and more moot as we can now easily kill people without being personally involved - today, the society with the better science usually wins, not the one with the people more willing to die).
As for the rest of your post, I'm honestly not entirely sure what your point is, and how it contradicts (or has anything to do with) what I wrote. You seem to imply that society might always require religion to survive. I honestly doubt it, but even so, your point seems to be entirely orthogonal to my point. I merely said that religion "doesn't make any kinds of useful predictions".
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a religious man but I wouldn't defend religion by saying that religious systems make useful predictions. Nowadays you don't see many burning bushes or calls to build arks. If you do start hearing voices, it's more likely some form of mental illness than the Voice Of God. Similarly, I wouldn't say that Intelligent Design has a place anywhere near a science class unless the Philosophy or Religion classroom happens to be right down the hall.
Yes, religions that say "no one can ever have sex and if you do you must kill any resulting babies" are bound to die off, but that the surviving religions have the "correct social framework." I'm Jewish and adherents of the Jewish faith are far from dominant (conspiracy theories aside). Does that mean that we have the wrong social framework compared to Protestants/Catholics? What about Buddhists, Wiccans or even (*gasp*) Atheists?
The real reason that Christianity is the dominant religion today is that, millennia ago, a Roman emperor converted to Christianity. The might of the Roman empire was then put to task converting "heathens." Christianity itself was even altered at times to better position itself to convert non-Christian groups. For example, Germanic tribes values virginity so suddenly Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived and husband Joseph was tossed to the curb. Christianity didn't become the dominant religion because it was the "right" religion, but because it had the backing of a powerful empire and was willing to change itself to grow. I guess, in a way, you can say that Christianity evolved to better survive.
Re:Troll, n. - Someone who disagrees with me (Score:2, Interesting)
They are not required to take part in an actual discussion. If posting material that everyone on a forum can be expected to disagree with, and then not bothering to stay around to defend your views any further than that, does not quality as "trolling," then I do not know what does.
It's more than that. if you look at one of their syllabi (sp?) here [designinference.com] they refer to science as the "chief antagonist" of Intelligent design. Further evidence is shown by your remark. The problem here is that they are encouraging their students to have open hostility towards anything science (or at least anything anti-ID) rather than a simple "let's sit down and talk", which is far more effective.
I remember once having a roommate who was HARDCORE Christian - always church, everything was because of God etc.. I, on the other hand, am an agnostic, and to me everything has to be proven scientifically (or reasonably well) for me to bother with it. In other words, we were polar opposites. Yet, he was probably my best roommate I have ever had. Why? Because in our frequent science vs. religion conversations we had, we never referred to each other as the "bad guys" (even jokingly) and we always tried to see the other person's POV. There was nothing "antagonist" or "hostile" about either of us, yet we managed to have some of the best conversations I have ever had with anybody.
The approach they are taking here is the opposite: science is the bad guy, and ID is the good guy and anybody who sides with the beliefs of the bad guys are equally bad. This is no different (in principle, anyways) than the fundamentalist islam when claiming their superiority over western culture. Both unacceptable, and both breeding ground for contempt.
Also, would someone care to explain their NEGATIVE percentage attributed to "active class participation" here [designinference.com]?
Re:Wait, wait, wait... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is exactly what I didn't want to get started into, but oh well.
He did no such thing. If God did, and Abraham wrote it down, then that would make Genesis *the definitive* science text. But we see no evidence of that. Instead, we see a few sentences that are not descriptive at all.
That's sort of the whole point of Genesis 1. Now, maybe Abraham just completely pulled that out of his ass, but I happen to believe it's the truth, which would mean that God must have told Abraham at some point.
>God doesn't create anymore.
CITATION NEEDED
Ok, you caught me. I should've said "God doesn't appear to create anymore." (If God created something nowadays you'd be hearing about it – from the ID proponents, of course... trust me.)
"By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work." Genesis 2:2 (NIV)
He's done. He doesn't need to create anything else. Now, it didn't say he definitely never would/will. It did adequately explain why he doesn't seem to be creating anything.
the accepted definition of what a theory is
Um, maybe we're on different pages here, but a theory is basically an explanation. You look at the evidence, you look at the explanation, and you say either "yup, that could be right" or "nope, I don't think so". Useful theories also make predictions, which can sometimes be used to disprove the theory (when said predictions don't come to pass).
an exercise in futility
I already said I was willing to agree to disagree. I just didn't like the way you used straw men to try to make ID proponents look stupid: weird notions that no intelligent ID believer would claim to have. (Yes, there are a lot of sheep – on BOTH sides – but some of us can actually count without using the Pope's fingers.)
Posting non-anonymously because I don't care if you know who I am; I've been pretty civil and I haven't said anything that I'm ashamed to believe. I was only posting anonymously to save the mod points that I'd spent on this thread, but I gave those up already on a different post.
Re:Wait, wait, wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
Judaism holds that the text of the Torah was written by God but that man has exclusive rights to interpreting the text. To give an example of this, there's an old Jewish story about a group of rabbis debating some point of Jewish law. They all referred to the same verse, but had two different interpretations of it. One rabbi, insisting that he was right and the others were wrong, keeps commanding various natural events to happen if he is right. Invariably the events occur, but the other rabbis are unimpressed. Finally, the dissenting rabbi calls for the heavens themselves to affirm that he's right. God declares the dissenting rabbi correct but the group tells God to stay out of this as the Torah is for man and not the heavens. ( See http://jhom.com/topics/lions/voice/bat_kol_bab.htm [jhom.com] for the full story.)
The lesson here is that, by Jewish custom, you can interpret "6 days" as being "6 periods of time totaling somewhere around 14 billion years" and no heavenly voice can boom at you pronouncing you wrong according to Scripture. Of course, I'm guessing that you are Christian and not Jewish, so Your Religious Mileage May Vary.
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:2, Interesting)
It has predicted that the spirits of the dead will invade your body if you go to the house of the dead. Which is true. Though, nowadays, a person would say "you will be infected with the disease that killed that person if you go to their house without taking precautions".
Religion is a way of conveying real world knowledge, just like science. They just use personification metaphors instead of abstract technical language. That fact leads to a lack of precision and the possibility of misinterpreting the metaphor or reading too much into it. However, it also gives it a durability in that it can be propagated through the generations by those who do not fully understand it, and thus not be lost to mankind.
People who think religious texts are literal and not a metaphor based technical language in and of themselves do not get it. God is a label, it means the universe.
The achievement of "the one true god" as opposed to a different polytheistic religion for each tribe was to create a more universal technical language that would allow people from different tribes to share knowledge about the nature of the universe, aka "the nature of god". Prior to this achievement, I would discover something about the sun and express my discovery to my fellows by telling them I had discovered an unknown thing about the nature of my tribe's sun gods personality. My fellows, who understood this technical language, would get what I was saying. But someone from the next tribe over would not understand, because they have an entirely different technical language. I would need to translate by expressing that I had discovered something about the nature of the chariot which is the sun, or whatever, before they could understand.
Frequently, both in religion and in science, the humans behind it all get it wrong. We "misunderstand the nature of the universe", we "misunderstand the nature of God". Same thing.
Until you appreciate these subtleties, you cannot begin to understand religious texts. Unfortunately, the scientific nor the religious communities are both chock full of people who do not understand, and they spend their life arguing semantics and perceiving nothing. The fact that the vast majority of social structures in history led to the death of the civilizations that adhered to them, and yet a few did not, that is very important, and should be given a greater level of respect by intelligent men than it currently is.
Oh, and I'll shut the fuck up when you come make me, you ignorant asshole.
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:2, Interesting)
You science guys don't get it. Religions are high-level compsci protocol abstractions, and everybody's just arguing over the RFP content.
Ladies and germs, we have here an entire alternative explanation for the thousands of obvious errors of fact in the world corpus of religious tracts, and the millions upon millions of murders performed in the endless battles over which of those sets of erroneous facts are The One True Word. And all we need give up to achieve this glorious synthesis is the silly belief that words mean what they say, that a prediction isn't a prediction unless it can be relied upon, that human reason has some value, and that an explanation of good hygeine positing possession by unseeable non-material entities is a wee bit less valid than an explanation where we have *photographs* of the possessing *material* entities.
My hat's off to you, sir or madame. I honestly don't know whether you're the dumbest creationist troll Slashdot has ever seen or the most brilliant apologist for nonsense to ever walk the Earth. I suggest a career with the Society of Jesus, and hat in hand, ask you nice: Please STFU.
Re:It's a bad thing. (Score:3, Interesting)
Please. Over 2/3 of the US population self-identifies as Christian. You are not being persecuted. Atheists on the other hand are frequently ostracized for their lack of belief. We even had a president (GHWB) who argued that atheists should not be considered citizens.
Re:Nice trolling (Score:3, Interesting)
Shakrai merely wanted to equate Daily Kos in particular, and Democrats in general, with the lunatic fringe of intelligent design.
Umm, no, Shakrai had no intention of doing anything of the sort. My only point was that there are lots of hostile audiences on the internet and it seems strange to limit such a project to ID. Would you be whining as loudly if my example had been "go to redstate and argue in favor of single payer" or is your outrage limited to examples that contrast with your political beliefs?
This is typical of the fact free, anger filled rants of the rapidly disappearing regional rump party known as Republicans
What makes you think I'm a Republican?
A better example might have been 'why not try to argue with the Republicans that Obama was born in the US
You won't find very many mainstream Republicans that question where Obama was born. In fact I'm pretty sure in my original post that I called out these people for the morons that they are. Any "Republican" that questions where Obama was born deserves to be taken as seriously as the "Democrats" that think Bush allowed 9/11 to happen so he could invade Iraq.
I doubt you care but I was actually a flag waving Democrat until a few months ago. What changed? State and local issues for one. Half of my state is dictated to by the other half that regards us as inbred hicks and tries to impose urban solutions on rural areas that face different problems. More than that though was seeing the asshats of the Democratic Party once they realized that they might have actual power. The Republicans have personalities like Sean Hannity -- you guys have Keith Olbermann. The Republicans have hyper-partisans like Tom Delay and Mitch McConnell -- you guys have Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Republicans have their corruption [wikipedia.org] -- you guys have your corruption [wikipedia.org]. See the trend here?
Both parties are all to happy to see an election where they get 50%+1 as a "mandate" and pretend that the other 49.999% of the country doesn't even exist. Both parties are willing to run the Congress in such a way that the minority party has no effective power and no real ability to represent their constituents. Both parties condone processes (gerrymandering) that corrupt our electoral process. Both parties are in bed with lobbyists and special interest groups. As far as I'm concerned there's no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. The only reason that most of my criticism is directed at the Democrats is because they happen to be the ones who are currently driving our bus over the cliff. Once the GOP is back in the drivers seat I'll start aiming some criticism at them as well.