08 hawk Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 http://www.snopes.com/religion/chalk.htm the site says that it has an undetermined orgin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
disEnchanted Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 Did you read the entire article at Snopes? The story is a legend. There is no proof that it is true at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a skeptical believer Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 this sighting gives a better idea how old the tale is, it fails to validate the legend. From further down the article. Think outside the box! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godlessgrrl Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 Short answer: no. Nobody knows for sure if this actually happened. Longer answer: no, it probably never happened, and here's how you can tell. "Undetermined origin" generally translates into "urban legend". Which generally translates into "really cool story for particular purposes, but most probably never happened." The problem with urban legends is that they're missing traceable facts. There aren't any details given that could be tracked down, such as the names of the people involved, the school they attended, what the class was, approximate dates, the name of the student, nothing. The story isn't verifiable. Which leaves it strictly within the realm of fiction, until demonstrated to be otherwise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lycorth Posted July 13, 2007 Share Posted July 13, 2007 And even if it did happen, it still proves nothing. We in the western world have a bad habit of relying on so-called "signs" and looking for magic tricks to verify the existence of the Xian god, rather than relying solely on logic and facts. It's why so many people are still clinging to Xianity, I think. Looking for these illusions is the fun and easy way out and doesn't require any thinking or other hard work. The facts are that a piece of chalk can indeed be dropped and not broken, if the right conditions are met. One can drop a coffee mug on a hard floor and it can break each time, but there will always be the one exception to the rule - but the exceptions by their very nature do not disprove the rule, since the rule holds true in the majority of cases. Furthermore, there are a wealth of logical and reasonable arguments for the nonexistence and total impossibility of the Xian deity, or any deity with similar attributes. Those, not flimsy non-evidence like a dropped piece of chalk, is the real determining factor as to the non-existence of the Xian god. But, we've been raised in the Western world with loads of myths about the Xian god and how he is somehow real when all evidence to the contrary is screaming in protest; it's like claiming God must exist because he saved my life in a car crash when someone else died and yet didn't save that other person. Even if this were completely true, it only proves that the professor relied on emotions and didn't stick with his facts when push came to shove, and neither did his class. That's it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OnceConvinced Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 If it were true, would the professor really walk out of ther embarrassed? I doubt it. It slipped from his hand and it got lucky. He would have just picked it up and prepared to do it again, properly this time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grandpa Harley Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 From dim and unverifiable memory it's been doing the rounds since the 19th Century... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Sage Nabooru Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 It's just another one of those constantly emailed glurge stories supposed to make your heart feel all warm and fuzzy for accepting Jesus. The kind my grandfather sends me. I don't think too many people ever actually take them as something that actually happened, except of course for idiots who also believe also that God's power and Americo-Evangelical favoritism is evident in a picture of the US flag with light shining through it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grandpa Harley Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 We all know that God is English... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R. S. Martin Posted July 16, 2007 Share Posted July 16, 2007 That story is totally unrealistic. First there are the even numbers of 300 students and 20 years. Nothing in real life ever comes out to even numbers like that. In real life, a certain course does not have the exact same number of students every year. And there are too many changes in real life for the exact same things to be said in the same class for so many consecutive years. It just doesn't happen. As for a prof who is proven wrong--he/she does not run from the room. This is obviously an undergraduate class. It is practically impossible for undergraduates to prove their prof wrong in the classes he/she teaches. Why? Because the prof will have seen all the arguments for and against the central questions that undergraduates can raise. Not even a seasoned prof can prove another wrong in one short simple conversation. (Maybe they can but the rest of us could not understand it because they would use highly specialized language, and only the few people on earth who also specialize in that specific field could understand it. And by that time it would hardly be "simple.") There are simply too many angles to any given topic for this to happen. A look at the history of scholarly achievements shows that in order for a prof to prove anyone wrong, he or she has to work an entire lifetime. Even then, his or her idea will simply be seen as one more position on the topic. No one in their right mind these days will try to prove or disprove God's existence. As for a whole class of university students sitting and listening to a single fellow classmate without interupting--that doesn't happen. Not in real life. In a class of three hundred there will be several who will take on the speaker--not just one. Most students will leave when the prof leaves. Unless the discussion becomes extra-ordinarily interesting and lively, by the end of that half hour only the disputants will be present. Everybody else will have left. Most students have to be in another class in short order, or at a job, or attend to some other responsibility. The person who wrote that story has obviously not seen the inside of a university classroom in the past twenty years. The story was posted in 1996. LATER: I've been looking at it more closely. 1. The only thing that can be copied from the page is the ad by Google. 2. Under the article there are notes to go with it. Under the heading "origins" it says the story has been around at least since 1968. 3. Under variations it says what other objects are sometimes used for the story rather than a piece of chalk. STILL LATER: Click on "site info" in the circle at the top of the page, on the far right. That will take you to FAQs. There they explain a bit more about the goals of the site. This is written in ordinary language that does not take special tricks to understand. For what it's worth, the points I mentioned above are some of the things I use when trying to determine whether or not a story is real information or "just a story." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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