It's a song for kids, and it even explains to kids what a scientific theory is. I have no objections with that.

Minus one star for equating angels with unicorns: it reinforces the notion that you can buy into science or believe in God but not both, and that never makes science any easier to embrace.

yeah, TMBG opened their own gigantic money-producing goldmine when they decided to start making childrens' music, so you can debate their relevance all you want over this month's trendy beer at your local irony-and-poverty-infected scenester bar while these guys wipe their asses with cash and throw another 300 dollar an hour hooker on the fire to keep warm

Yeah. It's pretty stupid to equate two things that no one has ever seen, only appear in stories, and have no effect on the world!

That's not what he meant. Think about Ann Coulter's books and who reads them. People who already believe what she does. Then think aout that vvideo of Al Franken talking to those people like they were adults. Straight up saying "What you believe right now is just retarded" as opposed to "Maybe what you think is true, but have you considered..." is maybe not the best approach.

Smellvin: show me any parents who home-school their kids to make sure their belief in unicorns and elves goes unchallenged by science, and you will have a point.

I'm sure you could find some in the Nordic countries...

Now I get what you were saying though.

Hey, Bort -- read your bible. It mentions unicorns several times. Deuteronomy 33:17 for one.

More to the point, religion isn't incompatible with science. We've been making significant headway with documenting religion in the human mind.

If TMBG were no longer relevant, they just BECAME relevant again with this song. Because it is awesome and we need more people with the balls to tell this simple truth to our kids.

Bort- "show me any parents who home-school their kids to make sure their belief in unicorns and elves goes unchallenged by science"

I've met some Waldorf home schoolers like that.

Sorry, correction: from what I gathered, it was that they wanted to make sure THEIR CHILDREN'S belief in unicorns and elves went unchallenged by science. THEIR belief in unicorns and elves was purely tangential, because Goddess forbid they stifled their unique little offspring's natural genius creativity by teaching them too much.

'goddess'

Billy Joe Buttfuck: That same part of your brain gets stimulated if you attend a match with your favorite sports team.

Are sports teams devine?

Or Gods, or Demiurge, or Space Ferret, I have no idea what hippie religious nutjobs worship.

Who's number one? Ween?

(this is great, by the way - sending copies to every one of my friends with kids come x-mas.)

There's a lot of tail at a Ween concert. Now, Devo or the Aquabats, there's some virginity inducing music.

Number one is Weird Al Yankovich.

Hands down, no contest.

Science and religion can peacefully co-exist, however they can't live together in the same house, because then it won't be long before Science starts leaving his dirty socks lying around and religion keeps forgetting to take out the garbage and pretty soon your roommate is screaming in your face and you're holding a gun and then you try to tell the police you didn't mean to shoot but they won't listen!

The correct answer is 'Oingo Boingo'.

Oingo Boingo repels more vagina than, say, some terrible black metal like Bathory? That is just retarded. Im fairly certain more ladies like a band that actually got a song on guitar hero versus a group who sounds like they record whilst gargling glass in a wind tunnel.

Bathory has a song on Guitar Hero?

I'm sure you could bag a mascara-daubed, hiker-booted she-hump to death metal, especially in Europe.

Put on any Oingo Boingo song and watch any sultry heat you've built up with the sex of your choice turn to pensive contemplation, nodding, and intellectual-sounding conversation. Trying to score while listening to 'Nasty Habits' is like trying to score to anything in the Frank Zappa discography.

I'm sorry Mongo, but you couldn't be more wrong.

Having sex to "Nasty Habits" is easy-peasy compared to "Christmas at Ground Zero".

There are plenty of religious scientists; are you saying they should turn in their badges?

Giving up on the Easter Bunny and angels is not a prerequisite for science. Here is a video of a religious scientist.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=49980

Watch the whole thing, but skip to 39:18. This is key: the problem with religion is not that people believe in God, but many of them believe that God and science are mutually exclusive.

There is still a lot of cognitive dissonance among religious scientists. Yeah, you can believe in either or with moderation, but I feel like they are sort of mutually exclusive.

If you truly believe in science and scientific theory God doesn't make sense, and you have to make excuses for why you believe in him.

If you truly believe in God science is only part of the answer and sort of moot.

Perhaps they are more practiced at balancing the two than you are, since they have to live it? Here is one possible split between the two:

science: descriptions and explanations of the natural world, including physics and biology

religion: morality, justice, philosophical questions, and what happens after one dies

Notice there is no overlap between the two (unless you really want to stretch the definition of, say, biology to encompass morality). You can physics your ass off and it doesn't compromise your concepts of morality; you can speculate all you want on whether God approves of buttsex and it doesn't impact whether man evolved from earlier forms.

Philosophy has a lot more crossover with science than religion, and morality is the domain of philosophy - religious philosophy, regular philosophy, whatever. Naturally science has its finger dipped in that too, but there's not a whole lots it can say when it comes to 'oughts' (which is still more than I can say for religion). Really, anything decent you might get out of religion is going to be philosophical in nature - and therefore barely religious at all. Just because religion has swiped a few philosophical notions to bolster its bullshit doesn't mean it owns them.

In what sense does philosophy cross over more with science? Perhaps we are thinking of different things.

Bort,

The video isn't saying you can't have fun with angels, unicorns, fairys & such. It's just making it very clear that these things are PRETEND and not REAL.

I mean, if you believe in angels...BIBLICAL angels...then you believe in giant lions with human faces, cloven hooves and multiple sets of wings who swoop down and destroy people who piss off God Almighty.

Bort:

Back when science was indie - before they sold out - it used to be called 'natural philosophy'. So it's sort of a branch of philosophy that broke off and started beating the tree silly. Science is basically just the kind of philosophy that you can test experimentally. I guess religion started out the same way, as those idiotic ancient savages actually thought their gobbledigook explained the natural world. Now we know better!

So if you believe in one mythological figure, you automatically believe in all of them?

I guess I'd better go tell the local fundies that they all believe in Buddha and Zeus, then.

There are as many belief systems as there are people. And the vast majority of them can co-exist with science just fine. Science's job has always been to tell us how, not why. Arguing for this black-and-white absolutism just perpetuates the same mentality that makes parents pull their kids out of school so they don't learn about evolution.

Which Buddha? Gautama? Adi-Buddha? Amitabha? Or do you mean the concept of Buddhahood?

In practice, Buddhism (particularly Zen) is more of a philosophical system than a religion, which is why it was compatible as an add-on to Shinto, Taoism, and other deity-based religions. Buddha wasn't a creator/nature-divinity on the same scale as Yahweh, Zeus, or Jehovah-1.

While there are some supernatural trappings in the more conservative sects (e.g. Theravadans) I'd hesitate to refer to it as a deity-based religion.

Aside from that, I agree with your point.

Binro, you're calling for a needlessly uphill battle -- that children should respect science AND give up on the silly superstitions that their parents feel is so important to their eternal happiness. It is entirely sufficient to recognize that science and religion can coexist, provided you're allowing them to address different aspects of reality. To put it differently, you're agreeing to frame the debate in exactly the way the most insufferable fundamentalists do.

Maybe TMBG always wanted to be a science band for kids, and they're having the time of their lives inspiring a future generation of geeks.

IT'S STILL REAL TO ME!

Reality Check: Angels don't exist.

You like Ana Ng though, right?

Any band with more than two fans will be passionately despised by someone.

I felt their sound became kind of "meh" after they took on a full-time band. They went from being a wildly experimental indie band to writing sugary pop TV show theme songs and commercial jingles.

It's like how Mark Mothersbaugh went from writing songs like "Mongoloid" to doing the opening theme for Rugrats.

When they took on a full time band they were LESS sugary, at least at first. John Henry is easily their least jingly album. It's probably my 2nd favourite after Lincoln. I still haven't heard The Spine or The Else tho - Mink Car was where I got off because blargh (though I wasn't real big on Factory Showroom other than a couple of tracks).

@poorwill

Funny you should mention your distaste for "Mink Car" as I knew a few people that actually got on the TMBG bandwagon when that CD came out.

I do have to admit that I enjoy the album immensely, it's got more good songs on it than I expected, and the worst offenders are nicely tucked away near the end.

Actually, Gerald V. Casale wrote "Mongoloid".