Michael Tobis wrote:
Maybe we should just ask everyone posting to this list whether or not
they believe the earth to be over a million years old.


God in her infinite wisdom created the Earth 6000 years ago already 4
billion years old. Surely an omnipotent being can create the universal
state machine to any desired initial state.

This will tell us who is arguing from evidence current as of 1850 or
later and who, essentially, made their minds up longer ago than that.

It's interesting that people who don't use the past couple of
centuries' evidence tend to be a bit cagey about their opinion. I
think
we ought to encourage them to express themselves.

The concept of bigotry in this context is very interesting. From
dictionary.com:

--
big·ot n.
One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or
politics and is intolerant of those who differ.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[French, from Old French.]
Word History: Bigots may have more in common with God than one might
think. Legend has it that Rollo, the first duke of Normandy, refused
to
kiss the foot of the French king Charles III, uttering the phrase bi
got, his borrowing of the assumed Old English equivalent of our
expression by God. Although this story is almost surely apocryphal,
it
is true that bigot was used by the French as a term of abuse for the
Normans, but not in a religious sense. Later, however, the word, or
very possibly a homonym, was used abusively in French for the
Beguines,
members of a Roman Catholic lay sisterhood. From the 15th century on
Old French bigot meant "an excessively devoted or hypocritical
person." Bigot is first recorded in English in 1598 with the sense
"a superstitious hypocrite."
--

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mt