Here's the strangest argument I've ever heard against evolution.

[sinkingfeeling]

This is from a LTTE, published in my red state, explaining why this lady 'home schools' her children. It's because the public schools teach such things as evolution.

"...that teaching children evolution will somehow better them is ridiculous. Our government does't search for the truth to teach our children; if they did, why wouldn't they tell them that since around 1880 the size of the sun has been measured every year. The sun as we all know burns, and anything that burns gets smaller over time. If we reversed the size of the sun to go back 14 billion years, we would realize that the sun would reach all the way to Jupiter. How on earth could the earth even exist?"

http://www.nwarktimes.com/nwat/Editorial/45803 /

I would guess she doesn't teach physics or advanced math and has definitely never heard of stellar evolution: as a star ages it will expand into a red giant.

[cobalt1999]

1. just think...she's TEACHING her children.

She doesn't even understand fusion. Probably thinks the sun is big lump of burning coal.

[malaise]

25. Bingo

In a rational world she would not leave her home to face either the sun or the rest of humanity. Pity those poor children.

[thereismore]

33. ...surrounded by an oxygen atmosphere! nt

[Bandit]

39. Fusion..isn't that part of Atomic "Theory"

It is only "Theory" after all that there are atoms. People can't see them so they must not exist. Same goes for Gravity, it is only "Theory" and everyone knows the Earth Sucks...My "Theory" is as valid as their "theory" and mine is that we are the imagination of a turtle.. Prove me wrong..

[cobalt1999]

41. LOL!

Great summary of the first 10 minutes of every conversation I've had with creationists.

[sinkingfeeling]

49. So, if the Atomic theory can't be proven, the A-bomb can't be real.

So what's all the fuss about Iran and N. Korea having bombs?

[proud2BlibKansan]

57. They don't understand what theory means

There was a letter in my hometown paper today. They don't know that 'theory' has a different meaning when used scientifically.

Makes you wonder if they slept through science.

[Fuzz]

2. Wow, there are some homeschoolers that will burn up academia

[treestar]

3. She will learn the history of a star when her children do, I guess.

There are standards for homeschoolers in most states.

What size does she suppose the sun started out as? LOL.

[proud2BlibKansan]

59. There is no oversight in my state

And in the states where there are standards, what happens if they are not met? Are the parents forced to put their kids back in traditional schools?

[treestar]

66. Interesting

http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp

Not that many states even have requirements. It doesn't say there what happens in the red states (red meaning most restricted on their map) when and if the students aren't up to standard - I suppose that means the parents' "right" to keep the children out of school then falls away and the truancy laws kick in.

I wonder how many of these students end up back in school, behind or in special ed.

[SpreadItAround]

4. Wow, that is pretty retarded

[Phredicles]

5. Recommended, for illustrating so beautifully the intellectual might

that we're up against.

or ???

[Warpy]

6. A little learning is a dangerous thing

and this woman is a prime example of that. She knows the sun gets measured. She knows the size remains fairly constant. However, she has no clue about fusion reactions and can think of it only in terms of a piece of wood in her fireplace. Dangerous, indeed.

No wonder she's such a sucker for a fairy tale like the creation myth.

[PreacherCasey]

7. Not to mention the fact that

the star we call our sun did not exist immediately after the inception of the universe.

[sarge43]

12. And it's nowhere near 14B years old

However, this is a battle of wits and knowledge with an unarmed opponent.

[goddess40]

8. Another reason home schoolers should have some regulation

Sorry to all the great home schoolers that are out there.

Parents rights only goes so far, these kids after all won't be kids forever and will have to survive in this world as adults. To send a kid out into life with such an inadequate or erroneous education is criminal neglect.

Edit: Wisconsin has NO regulation for home schoolers except for a single piece of paper they sign that they will be responsible for their child's education.

[Beelzebud]

20. Exactly.

[unpossibles]

9. the title for that letter is so ironic

these people scare me because they will not let any evidence presented to them by people who study these things to change their minds. Isn't that the definition of "faith"?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

10. The Best Argument Against Evolution:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/

[StClone]

21. LOL! De-evolution

Or rise of the Dangerously Dumb Vulcan Gene.

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

11. OH MY GOD SHE'S RIGHT!

The sun is like a giant Yankee Candle! Which we all know shrink as they burn!

And -- and -- and it's resting on the back of a giant turtle!

[sarge43]

13. And ....wow! .... it's turtles all the way down.

I love that story.

[tanyev]

14. Well there ya go.

Stephen Hawking should give her a call. I'm sure she'd be happy to set him straight on a few things.

[lectrobyte]

15. If the author of that LTTE ever figures out that oxygen is needed for

something to burn, then they will be on to our secret science conspiracy that you don't need spaceships to visit heaven since there's air everywhere.

[ddeclue]

16. If they don't get biology, they won't get physics either...

Apparently they've never heard of E=mc^2...

It doesn't chemically "burn", it's a thermonuclear fusion reaction and she's just wrong about the notion that the Sun would reach to Jupiter.

Whaddayaexpect?

Doug D.

[ProfessorGAC]

17. Hey Buffoon! The Sun Isn't "Burning"

There is no consumption of fuel. It's a conversion of one gas to another gas. The mass is barely changing, and the HEAT causes expansion while gravity causes compression. It's at equilibrium!

Yeah, like she knows what "equilibrium" means.
The Professor

[ddeclue]

18. So hell must be infinitely large...

if we are all going to "burn" in hell forever...

[Mendocino]

19. I saw this on a t-shirt

hoamskooeld

[bluemarkers]

22. I home school

and that is the dumbest thing I ever heard

The hardest thing was finding "secular" science books. The series I ended up using was silly when it came to countering the evolution and creation arguments. We read it, and then disproved the argument. Often the books degenerated into name calling! Anyway, we have been careful to read up on Darwin's crazy notions and other scientific ideas - such as the earth being billions of years old. On college applications we noted that independent work done to counter the Christian World View. I really am uncomfortable with the idea of framing everything with a CWV.

It's tough being a liberal who home schools. I call myself the antihomeschooler.

There are a few of us - but most fit the sterotype...

[BurtWorm]

23. I wonder what she tells her children about gravity.

Does she think Jesus and an army of angels are holding us down, keeping us from floating up to heaven?

[Deep13]

30. God made gravity to test our faith.

[Ikonoklast]

70. There is no such thing as 'gravity'.

It is an artificial construct used to describe the deformation of space/time by mass.

In other words, the world sucks.

[Tesha]

31. Gravity is the Devil pulling on their feet!

Gravity is the Devil pulling on their feet, trying to haul
their souls down to his eternal Clintonian damnation!

Tesha

[Viking12]

32. Satan Sucks....

Your post reminds me of a joke told often in my homestate of MN, "Why does the Mississippi flow south? Becasue Iowa sucks."

[cobalt1999]

37. and all that money spent on NASA

when all we had to do was pray "Hey Jesus, take your damn hand off the rocket!"

[BlooInBloo]

24. lol! At least it's *logical*, albeit mistaken....

For someone who was unaware of the gravitional force lost from the expired mass, it *would* be a puzzle as to why stars get bigger (in volume) over time.


EDIT: Subject line typo.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. That woman is Exhibit A about why we need better science ed. in this

country.

Back in the early 1980s, there was a militia movement in Wisconsin that, among other things, did not allow its members to own computers. The reason: they believed that floppy disks were made from the brains of aborted fetuses.

[Gold Metal Flake]

27. This could be satire.

Brilliant, if it were.

[bowens43]

28. What can you say about such ignorance?

There are some people who should not be allowed to have children.

[Deep13]

29. It does not burn. It is nuclear reaction.

The resulting fused helium remains in the sun.

The sun is 5 billion years old, not 14.

The solar system is so big that a little shrinking from coronal mass ejection will not significantly change the distance of its surface to the planets.

What the hell does this have to do with biological evolution?

[Avalux]

36. Well -

If I follow her flawed thinking - the earth didn't exist way back when cause the sun was so damn huge so the scientific age of the earth is wrong and in turn the theory of evolution is wrong.

Yeah, dumbass needs to learn about fusion reactions.

[AllegroRondo]

40. They believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old

so, anything that proves a 'young earth' also proves that Genesis is correct, therefore evolution must be wrong.

[Deep13]

34. You know her friends are congratulating her on cornering those...

...godless evolutionists with their own lie.

[sweetheart]

35. when she should have said...

"They teach our children that the moon is rotating around the earth at a regular speed,
and that the earth is spinning at a constant speed, when it is clearly slowing down,
by the laws of angular momentum, and one day the earth will stop spinning like a top
and fall over."

[Beelzebud]

38. Argument against evolutoin, or an argument FOR birth control?

[Wilber_Stool]

42. Theses are supposedly from

math tests taken by home schooled kids. A couple are pretty funny.

http://immense-world.blogspot.com/2006/09/mathematics-g...

[Bill McBlueState]

43. stunning!

In the late 19th century, guys like Lord Kelvin used this to argue for a young earth. At the time, it was legitimate to wonder about how the Earth's rocks could be billions of years old while the Sun couldn't possibly have been burning for so long.

But then, the freaking twentieth century came and went, and people discovered nuclear fusion. Today, the structure and evolution of main-sequence stars like the sun is one of the best-understood concepts in astrophysics.

It's very odd that the letter writer is aware of this argument without also being aware that it was resolved (not in her favor) a hundred years ago.

[zbdent]

44. Okay, when things freeze, they shrink too

(except with water, which expands ...) and only 126 years of "studying" is enough to know everything about the stellar evolution ...

And, get this ... she's acknowledging that everything is BILLIONS of years old ... I though everything just popped into existence from God's word only thousands of years ago ...

It's amazing that she can write ... maybe it was dictated ...

[Marr]

45. The sun is not a chunk of flaming wood.

It's a nuclear furnace.

These people are so damn dumb, I swear to god. I remember when Limbaugh tried to dismiss global warming fears by equating the globe to a glass with ice in it. When the ice melts, said Limbaugh, the water level in the glass drops. So we have nothing to fear- if the polar caps completely melt, the water level will drop.

Idiots.

[Bill McBlueState]

46. I sent a LTTE in reply

Don't know if they'll publish it, since I'm not from the area:

To the editor:

It's upsetting that someone with as poor an understanding of astronomy
as letter-writer Melanie Prince is allowed to substitute her
instruction for that of a well-trained science teacher ("Common sense
lacking," October 12).

Prince argues against evolution, saying, "The sun as we all know
burns, and anything that burns gets smaller over time. If we reversed
the size of the sun to go back 14 billion years we would realize that
the sun would reach all the way to Jupiter. How on earth could the
earth even exist? The truth of the matter is no one really knows.
Everyone's just guessing."

But everyone's not just guessing. The argument Prince makes, while
not relevant to biological evolution, actually was an important one in
the late nineteenth century. Scientists legitimately wondered how the
Earth's rocks could be billions of years old while the Sun couldn't
possibly have been burning for so long.

Then, early in the twentieth century, scientists came to understand
that the Sun shines by nuclear fusion, not by burning like a log on
your fireplace. Nuclear fusion is a very different process, one which
has allowed the Sun to shine at more or less the same size for the
last four and a half billion years -- not the 14 billion years Prince
claims.

Scientists are not "just guessing;" the way the Sun shines is actually
one of the best-understood concepts in all of astronomy. Any
qualified science teacher should be able to explain this to curious
young minds.

[Beelzebud]

47. Oh come on, we all know campfires emit solar neutrinos!

[Bill McBlueState]

50. we probably shouldn't tell them about neutrinos

I'm sure they'll think it's a UN conspiracy to infiltrate our bodies without our knowing it.

[Beelzebud]

51. LOL

[phylny]

62. So wonderful! Good job :) n/t

[Junkdrawer]

48. Mrs. Santorum should really refrain from sending LTTEs like that....

Even if she does call herself "Melanie Prince"....

[tjwash]

52. Yeah, well, laugh it up at her expense, but remember...

...what a fucked up life her kids are going to have. Completely shielded and lied to children become demented and anti-social adults.

Not to mention when the time comes for them to enter the workforce; what actual chance in hell do they really have of being hired by anyone, and to earn a living and support themselves with zero knowledge in the sciences or math?

I guess there is always walmart or porn...

[sinkingfeeling]

55. She was probably home schooled as well. Why do you think Arkansas

ranks 48th. in per capita income?

[semillama]

64. or walmart porn...

there's a niche for everybody...

[KansDem]

53. Thought I'd offer this amusing little story...

About 10 years ago I was running errands with my 4-year-old daughter one hot summer afternoon. She asked me, "Daddy, will the sun ever burn out?" I answered, "Yes, dear, one day it will, but that'll be a long, long time from now." She thought for a moment and said, "They'll have to have a really tall ladder to replace it."

I smile whenever I think of that day...

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

54. Eh.

That's not really stranger or dumber than the arguments I've heard against evolution.

[mmonk]

56. Well its such a good idea then, that she homeschools her children.

NOT. Should forced ignorance upon one's child be legal?

[HardRocker05]

58. there are all kinds of absurd little arguments like this that fundies use

to convince themselves and other intellectually uncurious people that evolution can't be true. of course they fall apart under any scientific scrutiny, but the fundies are hoping the masses never look that far.

[slackmaster]

60. Noodly appendage?

[Ikonoklast]

68. Covering your bases?

Pastafarian AND "Bob" Dobbs?

Too much frop.

[slackmaster]

71. Too much, as we say in the CotSG...

...is ALWAYS better than not enough!

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

61. People like this DESERVE to be suckered by the GOP

WTF kind of science did she learn and, more troubling, what is she teaching her kids. Oh never mind, I'm certain these people lack the genetic potential to move into this century (or even the last one).

[LibertyLover]

63. She sounds like an undergrad a friend of mine had in his Intro to

Engineering class. He was telling the class about the-then new proposal by, I believe, a Princeton engineering professor, to build rail guns large enough to accelerate payloads into outer space. One of the ideas was to use them to sling radioactive waste into a collision course with the Sun. One of the undergrads stood up and started yelling that that was just great. First we had polluted the earth with radioactive waste and now we wanted to pollute the Sun. My friend said there was a stunned silence in the room for about 10 seconds and then the rest of the class burst out laughing. Some kind soul took said undergrad aside and explained how the Sun worked.

[Mendocino]

65. The sun is but a glowing briquet, in the grill of life.

[slackmaster]

72. White people are cooked rare, Asians, Native Americans medium

And black people are well done.

[opihimoimoi]

67. Stupid People asks the most weird and LOLO questions...You know them

by their statements and questions....below 101 Level....

[philosophie_en_rose]

69. This is best argument against homeschooling.

Homeschooling is a great option for a lot of people. But the downside is that yahoos just make stuff up.

[SmokingJacket]

73. So she's trying to say that ALL science is bullshit, because

scientifically, it doesn't makes sense to her.

Well. I feel sorry for her kids... but they'll have a great memoir to write one day.