Love 4 Science

On my morning walk, I see a big placard on someone’s garden fence, advertising a website titled love4science. I went to have a look:

http://love4science.co.za/

Yup, a creationist outfit, though they are not very obvious about it, and their kit focuses mainly on straightforward physics and chemistry. Not sure if they slip in a bit of preaching anywhere.

But I see they claim their science kit is compatible with the Apologia Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics book. I looked around on the web, and this is what Apologia is all about:

https://www.christianbook.com/page/homeschool/apologia

Ought to be a hoot to look through those, er, textbooks. But I ain’t buying one. :slight_smile:

So: creationism is alive and well and living in South Africa.

I obtained a PhD from the University of Pretoria in the field of Metallurgical Engineering

:frowning:

Creationism seems to be quite rife among engineers, and perhaps not surprising: they look at living things, and from their point of view, such things are obviously designed.

Noooo!!! Really?

Would appear so. After the demise of apartheid, Afrikaners turned to religion big time, and judged by what I see on Facebook and in magazines like Juig, fundamentalism is rife among them.

Whoah easy there tiger. If anything Afrikaners have become WAY LESS fundementalist over the past couple of decades. I know multiple afrikaans atheists and the music… man the music has changed completely. The Afrikaans churches are, for the most part, becoming museums for how it used to be. Young people (in the main) have mostly abandoned them.

Now perhaps this has the effect of concentrating the fundamentalism into a less dilute pool OF CHRISTIANS. That may perhaps be true… but I find your strokes way too broad Brian.

True; I think it actually demonstrates that the Afrikaner isn’t and has never been only one thing. I am after all one myself. Let’s rather say that among a particular subset of Afrikaner, there is huge apartheid nostalgia, and to console themselves, they now have religion. They actually have a lot in common with American right wingers and fundamentalists. Lucky for the rest of us, they have zero political clout left.

It was always my impression that those idiots had religion all the time :wink:

They did, but my subjective impression is that it has greatly intensified. I seem to see much more fundamentalism nowadays than I did in my youth, when most of them belonged to the susterkerke.

Maybe the form has changed. I definitely as a child saw guys arguing on the church steps on sunday about how Evolution was guaranteed 100% hogwash… but it wasn’t really “a thing” that distinguished “us” from “them” back then.

I’ve been thinking about this and I think if anything, things have just gotten a whole lot more polarized. Those people were just “the people next door” when I grew up, their fundementalism focussed more on matters of race than of human origins for the most part, but their kids were still in school with us… with the seriously religious teachers giving us bible class every morning “school” wasn’t something to fear. So their kids ended up hearing the science too… When people heard them talk nonsense the “thing” wasn’t to try and corner them with logic, it was more of a “leave em be” attitude.

I think this CHANGING has made things worse. If anything, the increasing secularity of education and people around them, and unstoppable progress of science has caused these same types to recoil from the public institutions and start to “home school” their children. I think they have been emboldened (as most are) by their perceived persecution.

They’re always going to exist. Every village needs one… I wouldn’t say the afrikaans community is especially bad, most notably compared to some other communities in SA… they’re positively scientific.