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Post by JayUtah on Jul 5, 2006 16:36:36 GMT -4
It might be on-topic, but not very productive. Such a debate would likely devolve into trying to prove to someone that his religion is wrong, which is not how I want to spend my time.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jul 5, 2006 17:40:59 GMT -4
I agree that it is a waste of time to debate religious beliefs with a hoax believer but I'm not going to make a rule against it (not at this time anyway). My point was that there are people (like Bart Sibrel) who do make hoax theory claims involving religion so we shouldn't restrict discussion of those claims.
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Post by JayUtah on Jul 5, 2006 18:35:13 GMT -4
Talking about it is the best thing we can do.
Bart Sibrel's approach is odd. He gives us two different films back to back. At first he argues from a religious premise, arguing that various engineering endeavors throughout history have been doomed to failure because they were wantonly hubristic in the face of God. And from that you get the notion that he's winding up to tell you that Apollo was also an act of pride in the face of God. But he doesn't explicitly make that case, and it would be foolish to do so because then we can trot out the case of Apollo 8 and Madilyn Murray O'Hare. Instead he just suggests it through such blatantly emotional appeals as a montage intercutting starving third-world children with Apollo 11's Saturn V launch.
But after he sets the stage for a religious battle -- God and God-fearing people against the ugly hubris of NASA -- he then puts on a completely different play, trotting out the photographic evidence. So it seems Sibrel isn't making much of a religious argument that contributes to his final conclusion. It seems more likely he's bent on making the viewer feel bad emotionally about Apollo, and doing so in the way he personally knows best: good old fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist Christianity.
Neville Jones instead gives us a choice. He states his proposition, but then gives us two basic sources for an argument in favor of it. The first is a one-paragraph statement that if God says the solar system isn't as we conceive it to be, then we have to take that as absolute truth and reject any claims founded on a different model. The second is the allegedly scientific argument: lasers and rockets that he says scientifically just won't work. Since he basically just repeats the standard claims -- scientific inaccuracy and all -- it seems the best interpretation that Jones relies upon the first (religious) reason to support his proposition, and that he doesn't put much stock in or effort toward the scientific one.
At this point we have to give Jones credit. He laid out both alternatives. I don't think we interpreted the way he expected, but there's no real deception involved. What twists my skivvies are arguments that purport to be scientific, but are actually religious -- and clandestinely so.
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