The internet is routinely characterized as the venue where facts and reason part company and you can say anything, whereas print journalism is still the standard for credibility in reporting and opinion pieces. Wrong. At least today and in Orange, Texas, where a newspaper published a piece written by a local woman who believes that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time in history and “waked’ side by side with one another. It is starting to make terrifying sense why Greg Abbott is the governor down there. Patheos:
Some newspapers will literally publish anything.
Take The Orange Leader, in Texas, which just published an essay by Karen Y. Stevens, the Executive Director of the local chapter of Meals on Wheels. Instead of talking about the group, where she might have some expertise, Stevens wrote about why Creationism is true. Which it’s not. Which makes the entire essay a parody of itself.
It’s bad enough that we’re told this essay is only part one of a two-part series. Then we get the first sentence:
I believe that Dinosaurs walked this earth but not 140 million years ago like scientist [sic] claim.
I recently watched a video on dinosaurs, and a school teacher of Science was the one sharing the facts. But this Science teacher got it right. He stated that dinosaurs waked the earth with man. How else would they know what pictures to draw on cave walls that look exactly like dinosaurs? They have found drawings of Woolly Mammoths, Triceratops and men, drawn together fighting.
This is a classic hunter, posing with a 10-point deer these days, showing off his trophy, except they didn’t have cameras then.
Well. If an unnamed video said it, it must be true. And if a random school teacher verified it, it must be true. And if there were no cameras thousands of years ago, then checkmate, atheists!
This is why we have a culture war, because we literally have two cultures living in this country and education is the line of demarcation, not race, no economic class, none of that. It appears that politics is the dividing line, but the difference in political ideation is due to the marked difference in knowledge and information possessed by the two groups. We literally have informed, rational people living side by side with uneducated idiots, and that, my friends, is how it is — as Walter Cronkite used to say — in March of 2021.
That a responsible, employed adult would write this drivel, which those of us who completed the fifth grade over half a century ago could tell you is false, is appalling in and of itself. But that a newspaper, any newspaper, would publish it, is beyond any reality I know — and I say that as somebody who studied journalism in college, again, some forty years ago.
The dumbing down of America has got to stop, before all of us go the way of the dinosaur and the cave man. This essay is Exhibit “B”. Exhibit “A” is Greg Abbott doing away with masks and opening up the state in the face of all that is sane. This is yet another anti-science, anti-reality dirge and it would be comical if it wasn’t so pathetic. These attitudes will also cease to be amusing when a lot of people start dying in Texas — but of course, the set up for that is already in the works, it’s all the illegal aliens with diseases poring across the border.
Exhibit “A” should help eliminate the problem of Exhibit “B”.
Ursula, shame on yooo — ever’body knows that them dinosaurs bein’ chased by them hoomans is wot made the world flat!
That’s right. The world was like pizza dough and then the dinosaurs flattened it out. How silly of me. Now the world is flat on both side, with cream filling in the middle, like an Oreo cookie.
Now, now everyone knows the world can’t be flat.
Otherwise cats would have knocked everything over the edge by now.
Pareidolia – incorrectly finding patterns and meaning in shapes. People see a rabbit in the moon, they draw a rabbit in the moon. There is no rabbit on the moon.
I have family in rural Texas…this isn’t even close to the least logical thing one might hear. And it’s fascinating that in an era where knowledge is more available than its ever been, humans are still hard wired to believe things that are totally disprovable and wrong. It’s an interesting evolutionary feature.
But everyone who has seen those Hollywood movies know that dinosaurs were hunted and killed by blonde haired, blue eyed, clean shaven cavemen using stone clubs while wearing fur swimming trunks (and their girl friends invented the bikini)
Maybe Wood Alcohol doesn’t kill or blind people but causes other injuries? Otherwise I got nothing.
It’s definitely opinion, not fact, and anyone who believes it’s fact needs to take some courses in paleontology. Or bible history and interpretation.
And we wonder why any species smart enough to cross the vast distances of space doesn’t make an appearance on this planet of cretins? I believe Twain wrote never argue with a fool, they will drag you down to their level & beat you with their experience.
It’s an absolute verity that an idiot will drag you down faster than you will elevate the idiot. Unfortunate but true.
I think you should have pointed out that there are NO pictures of dinosaurs drawn by ancient man and they can verify that using Google unless they think Google is part of a conspiracy.
“We literally have informed, rational people living side by side with uneducated idiots.”
I’m adding this to my list of favorite quotes.
Always glad to be of service.
Most of the discussion about creationism is badly misplaced. We do not need to debate its truth or falsity. We only need to make sure creationists do not try to have it both ways. They cannot be allowed to claim creationism is science because for a theory to be considered scientific, the only data that the theory is allowed to account for is that gathered through observation. Observation means by way of the five senses even if those senses are augmented by equipment such as microscopes. Creationists try to redefine the foundation of science by allowing information from outside the five senses. We have to simply keep bring them back to the foundational rule of science, no matter how hard they try to redefine that foundation to include creationism. We do not even need to bring truth or falsity into it. We can logically accept that creationism might be true, but it just isn’t science. that fact that it is not science does not make it false, only that it is not science. In discussions, we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted from this main point by all their tangential arguments.