Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
This forum…R&P…is depressing. All I see are stories that make me highly concerned for us as humans, and it seems we’ll never run out of such anecdotes. This thread is my pathetic attempt to counter all that deep blue sadness with some inspirational material. After all, what is a Religion and Philosophy forum without some kind of inspiration? It's also somewhat lengthy - but if you noticed the words "Joshua Korosi" in the Thread Starter column next to the title, you already knew that. 
First (as always), the background: Today is/was Martin Luther King Day, and just about every city in the United States hosts some special events to commemorate the occasion. Some events honor Dr. King and his work directly, while others may not be as obviously connected. For example, today most museums in the city of Cleveland had free admission, including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the Great Lakes Science Center, the African-American Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. I spent the entire day touring them all.
The relevant anecdote comes from my visit to the Museum of Natural History, the last stop on my self-guided tour. It, as previously stated, was free today...but I am a museum member and would've had free admission anyway (brag, brag), so I stopped in basically because I was in the neighborhood. One of the cool things about this place is that for 3 bucks (unless, again, you have a membership) you can rent a small mp3 player with earphones, which takes you on something of a guided tour of the museum...taking you from exhibit to exhibit (they're arranged sort of chronologically, from the Big Bang to the Hopewells). I've done that tour, and I highly recommend it; however, on this occasion I was simply guiding myself around, as were many other people.
No Creationist would ever set foot in a Natural History museum – with their families, anyway. The place is too dangerous, and the concepts are defined so easily that too many embarrassing questions would arise. The museum of course tailors all of its notes and captions to be child-friendly - that is, a kid would be able to read through them, understand all the words, and say that yes, these conclusions make sense to me – without taking a tone that would be condescending or down-talking to adults. It’s not just pictures, artifacts, and captions, either. There are videos, kiosks, and all manner of interactive coolness. It’s a place that nobody leaves with too many questions or doubts about what they’ve seen.
I was in the Kirtland Hall of Prehistoric Life. It has a few full-size dinosaur skeleton casts (and one huge real dino skeleton), a sabre-toothed cat skeleton, amongst other things…and a somewhat sizeable exhibit on Human Evolution. There are several items in the evolution exhibit (including a short explanation of the Piltdown hoax), but I would say its "centerpiece" has to be Lucy - Australopithicus afarensis to be more formal, a 3.2 million-year-old pre-human partial skeleton. Actually, it's a painted cast of the numerous separate skeletal remains, joined together with white plastic "bones" to give a viewer an idea of what the original skeleton looked like. The skeleton was found by Cleveland Museum scientists and turned out to be a completely new species; in accordance with treaty the bones themselves were returned to Ethiopia after study. Lucy was an adult female, but stood about as tall as a modern 10-year-old. Lucy is also what one would call a transitionary fossil, another link between modern humans and early primates.
After studying a bit, I moved past the actual evolution exhibit proper and toward a smaller space devoted to Neanderthals. As I was reading, my attention was diverted by the conversation between a mother and her son - he looked to be about 5 or 6 or so. They had just come from the dinosaur side of the gallery, and were entering the human evolution section. They were immediately greeted by "Lucy", and the boy seemed interested and asked if it was a skeleton of a kid. "No," the mother explained, "that's how big normal people were a long time ago..." - she looked at the caption - "more than three million years ago." After recovering from a sense of awe, the son made a cute remark about "how small their kids must've been", and I listened as his mother took him through the evolution exhibit, taking time and explaining the different displays and artifacts defining the different "steps" of man so that he could understand. There was no "what some people say" or "some people think". She lent it all the credibility of simple fact, and the boy hung on every word; he really was genuinely fascinated by it all. When I was 6 I don’t recall being genuinely fascinated by anything, except maybe a bowl of ice cream.
Typically, when I think of kids and museums, I picture a busload of third graders ambling through the galleries, forced to keep up with a tour guide who’s droning on and on and making things boring, while the kids stand around half-paying attention and half-talking to each other about unrelated minutiae, oblivious to what’s around them because “Come on, we’re moving again”. I’d been on one such field trip to the Witte Museum in San Antonio when I was in third grade, and I hated it. There was so much to look at but I couldn’t see anything, because the tour guide concentrated on one or two features per area, and then kept moving. Sure, sometimes parents take their kids to the Great Lakes Science Center, which has many wonderful hands-on attractions that teach about light and sound and air and physics…it can be a fun (and noisy) place. But here was this mother, all by herself with her son, with so many possible places to go and things to do…and choosing to take him to the Museum of Natural History, and teaching him about the world. And he was riveted. And I was amazed.
They were nearly done when another couple walked in, with their son and daughter. I'd seen them earlier in the museum, in the geology section; they were watching a short video about plate tectonics, featuring an animation of Pangaea fracturing and the different pieces drifting into their present-day positions. It was cool because it displayed a conspicuous red "dot" representing the location on land of where present-day Cleveland would've been through the entire process. They took their kids through the evolution exhibit too - with somewhat less depth than the mother took with her son, admittedly, but nevertheless with the same portrayal of the information as the simple truth.
Watching all this, I felt a certain sense…could it have been one of pride? Many times, even on this forum, anecdotes have been posted about the “stupidity” of Creationists and those with a religious agenda. We hear of local, state, and federal-level administration and legislation being influenced by these people, often to spite science. We hear of science – the basic accumulation of knowledge through objective observation and inference – being portrayed as simply another belief system, which is not as good as our belief system for this reason and that reason, and we hear of people buying into such portrayals. It depresses us. Sometimes we tab such anecdotes with sad footnotes…we “weep for the species”, we almost “lose hope/faith in humanity”.
To answer this sadness, I implore you to visit your local Natural History museum on a spare day. Be sure to take in and learn what you can…but also take some time to simply hang around, and watch other people. Watch parents bring their children in, and show them the way the world really is, without polluting their minds with admonitions to hold on to preconceived notions no matter what they hear to the contrary; watch them be filled with a sense of wonder no religion could ever instill in them. They are not completely impervious to the onslaughts of the evangelists, but at least they’ve gone a few steps in the right direction. Look at them, and tell me you don’t see that, in the end, science will win. Tell me you don’t recognize the trend over history of religion and superstition always giving ground to reason, and see that – despite everything you hear, or, rather, are told – the trend has not reversed itself. There is the proof. And my “hope for humanity” is renewed.
First (as always), the background: Today is/was Martin Luther King Day, and just about every city in the United States hosts some special events to commemorate the occasion. Some events honor Dr. King and his work directly, while others may not be as obviously connected. For example, today most museums in the city of Cleveland had free admission, including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the Great Lakes Science Center, the African-American Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. I spent the entire day touring them all.
The relevant anecdote comes from my visit to the Museum of Natural History, the last stop on my self-guided tour. It, as previously stated, was free today...but I am a museum member and would've had free admission anyway (brag, brag), so I stopped in basically because I was in the neighborhood. One of the cool things about this place is that for 3 bucks (unless, again, you have a membership) you can rent a small mp3 player with earphones, which takes you on something of a guided tour of the museum...taking you from exhibit to exhibit (they're arranged sort of chronologically, from the Big Bang to the Hopewells). I've done that tour, and I highly recommend it; however, on this occasion I was simply guiding myself around, as were many other people.
No Creationist would ever set foot in a Natural History museum – with their families, anyway. The place is too dangerous, and the concepts are defined so easily that too many embarrassing questions would arise. The museum of course tailors all of its notes and captions to be child-friendly - that is, a kid would be able to read through them, understand all the words, and say that yes, these conclusions make sense to me – without taking a tone that would be condescending or down-talking to adults. It’s not just pictures, artifacts, and captions, either. There are videos, kiosks, and all manner of interactive coolness. It’s a place that nobody leaves with too many questions or doubts about what they’ve seen.
I was in the Kirtland Hall of Prehistoric Life. It has a few full-size dinosaur skeleton casts (and one huge real dino skeleton), a sabre-toothed cat skeleton, amongst other things…and a somewhat sizeable exhibit on Human Evolution. There are several items in the evolution exhibit (including a short explanation of the Piltdown hoax), but I would say its "centerpiece" has to be Lucy - Australopithicus afarensis to be more formal, a 3.2 million-year-old pre-human partial skeleton. Actually, it's a painted cast of the numerous separate skeletal remains, joined together with white plastic "bones" to give a viewer an idea of what the original skeleton looked like. The skeleton was found by Cleveland Museum scientists and turned out to be a completely new species; in accordance with treaty the bones themselves were returned to Ethiopia after study. Lucy was an adult female, but stood about as tall as a modern 10-year-old. Lucy is also what one would call a transitionary fossil, another link between modern humans and early primates.
After studying a bit, I moved past the actual evolution exhibit proper and toward a smaller space devoted to Neanderthals. As I was reading, my attention was diverted by the conversation between a mother and her son - he looked to be about 5 or 6 or so. They had just come from the dinosaur side of the gallery, and were entering the human evolution section. They were immediately greeted by "Lucy", and the boy seemed interested and asked if it was a skeleton of a kid. "No," the mother explained, "that's how big normal people were a long time ago..." - she looked at the caption - "more than three million years ago." After recovering from a sense of awe, the son made a cute remark about "how small their kids must've been", and I listened as his mother took him through the evolution exhibit, taking time and explaining the different displays and artifacts defining the different "steps" of man so that he could understand. There was no "what some people say" or "some people think". She lent it all the credibility of simple fact, and the boy hung on every word; he really was genuinely fascinated by it all. When I was 6 I don’t recall being genuinely fascinated by anything, except maybe a bowl of ice cream.
Typically, when I think of kids and museums, I picture a busload of third graders ambling through the galleries, forced to keep up with a tour guide who’s droning on and on and making things boring, while the kids stand around half-paying attention and half-talking to each other about unrelated minutiae, oblivious to what’s around them because “Come on, we’re moving again”. I’d been on one such field trip to the Witte Museum in San Antonio when I was in third grade, and I hated it. There was so much to look at but I couldn’t see anything, because the tour guide concentrated on one or two features per area, and then kept moving. Sure, sometimes parents take their kids to the Great Lakes Science Center, which has many wonderful hands-on attractions that teach about light and sound and air and physics…it can be a fun (and noisy) place. But here was this mother, all by herself with her son, with so many possible places to go and things to do…and choosing to take him to the Museum of Natural History, and teaching him about the world. And he was riveted. And I was amazed.
They were nearly done when another couple walked in, with their son and daughter. I'd seen them earlier in the museum, in the geology section; they were watching a short video about plate tectonics, featuring an animation of Pangaea fracturing and the different pieces drifting into their present-day positions. It was cool because it displayed a conspicuous red "dot" representing the location on land of where present-day Cleveland would've been through the entire process. They took their kids through the evolution exhibit too - with somewhat less depth than the mother took with her son, admittedly, but nevertheless with the same portrayal of the information as the simple truth.
Watching all this, I felt a certain sense…could it have been one of pride? Many times, even on this forum, anecdotes have been posted about the “stupidity” of Creationists and those with a religious agenda. We hear of local, state, and federal-level administration and legislation being influenced by these people, often to spite science. We hear of science – the basic accumulation of knowledge through objective observation and inference – being portrayed as simply another belief system, which is not as good as our belief system for this reason and that reason, and we hear of people buying into such portrayals. It depresses us. Sometimes we tab such anecdotes with sad footnotes…we “weep for the species”, we almost “lose hope/faith in humanity”.
To answer this sadness, I implore you to visit your local Natural History museum on a spare day. Be sure to take in and learn what you can…but also take some time to simply hang around, and watch other people. Watch parents bring their children in, and show them the way the world really is, without polluting their minds with admonitions to hold on to preconceived notions no matter what they hear to the contrary; watch them be filled with a sense of wonder no religion could ever instill in them. They are not completely impervious to the onslaughts of the evangelists, but at least they’ve gone a few steps in the right direction. Look at them, and tell me you don’t see that, in the end, science will win. Tell me you don’t recognize the trend over history of religion and superstition always giving ground to reason, and see that – despite everything you hear, or, rather, are told – the trend has not reversed itself. There is the proof. And my “hope for humanity” is renewed.
