The stupidity, it doesn’t stop

Posted on June 17, 2009 by Michael

This is currently on Conservapedia’s front page:

The killer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, James von Brunn, was a white supremacist and also an evolutionary racist. James von Brunn wrote that “Only the strong survive. Cross breeding whites with species on the evolutionary scale diminishes the white gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically, and behaviorally deprived mongrels.” The evolutionist Charles Darwin was also an evolutionary racist. The shooter, James von Brunn, also appears to have had close ties to neo-Nazis and his ex-wife said his anti-semitism and racist hate “ate him alive like a cancer”. Adolf Hitler was also a rabid evolutionary racist.

Aside from reading like a child wrote it, this is just the same old creationist appeal to emotion. These people have no evidence to back up their horribly stupid views, so they resort to dumb things like this; evolution means racism!!! It’s therefore wrong!!1!!

But here’s the kicker. Even if one were to ignore the glaring logical fallacy in the wee little minds of Conservapedians, the argument still fails. Being wrong is also a major no-no when making any argument.

James von Brunn’s beliefs are not based upon any real understanding of evolution or genetics. If they were, then he’d know that two white people can be more genetically diverse between each other than a white person and a black person. In other words, race doesn’t have any biological grounding. So if Conservapedians actually think it is a valid tactic to judge the merits of scientific evidence based upon inconveniences that it may give, then the real argument here is that evolution informs us that racism has no good basis and is therefore stupid.

von Brunn’s idea of evolution is very close to the creationist idea of the theory. Neither one is anywhere near correct. They both use their particular versions of this revolutionary concept to suit themselves. von Brunn thought there was a significant genetic basis for races. Creationists think evolution actually says that. The only difference between these abuses is scale. von Brunn is one guy with wrong ideas and the crazy to back them up. Creationists are a huge group of poorly educated, unfortunately ignorant individuals* who harm the progress of science by rejecting the most fundamental concept to an entire field.

The Conservapedia piece mentions that Charles Darwin was an “evolutionary racist”. This is more conservative screaming and kicking. Reasonable people keep pointing out just why they are wrong, but the conservatives just switch to more convinced language. That’ll do it.

Darwin held many of the racist beliefs of his day, but he didn’t need evolution to get him there. His science stands firm, regardless of what he may have believed. But for what it’s worth, he was ahead of his time with his race views. He also was a big abolitionist.

As for Hitler, he suffered from the issues as von Brunn. In addition, however, the man may have just been abusing any old idea for his purposes. He invoked all sorts of beliefs, including the words of Jesus, to rally support for his plans, actions, and goals. This says nothing of whether or not he was right.

*Ignorance is no crime. We’re all guilty of it. Fortunately, there are remedies.

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Searches

Posted on June 16, 2009 by Michael

One person used these terms to find my blog:

jehovah witness bad?

The answer is “yes”.

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Those silly conservatives

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Michael

I’ve written about John Lott several times. He’s another crazy conservative who wants everyone to carry guns and thinks that widening the income gap between rich and poor, just as Reagan did, is a good thing. Well, he stopped approving my comments at his crappy little blog long ago. He even de-friended me on Facebook (that one cut deep). It turns out that was a good thing. I didn’t realize just how much of a fraud John Lott is.

For three years, John Lott pretended to be a young woman.

Her name was Mary Rosh.

Mary Rosh often spoke sweetly of her days as a student of John’s, she gave a glowing Amazon.com review of his book “More Guns, Less Crime,” she criticized anyone who questioned John’s research or his conclusions, and she attacked other researchers in her ardent defense of Lott’s idea that more guns on the streets leads to less crime.

She was also a petite defenseless creature. We know this because John, we mean, she said:

“Do you really think that most women can out run your typical criminal?…Even if I am not wearing heels, I don’t think that there are many men that I could outrun.

“As a woman, who weighs 114 lbs, what am I supposed to do if I am confronted by a 200 lbs. man?”

Then a researcher at the conservative think tank CATO Institute discovered the truth about Mary Rosh and undressed John Lott for all the world to see.

Currently, Lott is a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Filed under: Politics and Social | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

The need to challenge

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Michael

More and more, I find myself presenting specific evidence for evolution to creationists. I have done it on For the Sake of Science, and I do it with personal acquaintances. I get the same results from both areas. Creationists have no responses. They are satisfied with believing without evidence, something otherwise known as “faith”. Honestly, these people actually are willing to believe in their inane anti-evolution versions of religion, yet when you tell them that Tiktaalik rosae was predicted to exist in rock layers dating to about 375 million years ago, what do they have to say? They question motivations (atheists just hate god and want to do anything that pleases themselves), quote scripture, and completely gloss over evidence. I’ve never heard a creationist rebuttal to any individual fossil (except maybe to the overhyped account of “Ida” – though not to the non-overhyped account). These people believe in massive coincidence because, well, doing otherwise is inconvenient.

But there are exceptions. It is with pleasure that I present one now.

Why are you not providing reliable sources of information on your website such as the Genome project? What you’re website is basically saying is that every field of science in every country on the planet is wrong. That’s quite an assessment on your part. Instead of attempting to prove evolution wrong, why not attempt to put your money where your mouth is. Here’s a recent challenge. Do this, and you’ll become quite wealthy: Challenging the Discovery Institute to Discover.

This is from a man who saw an anti-evolution billboard while driving. He visited the attached website. Naturally, he found egregious abuses of science. He exchanged a few emails with one of the people running the site, but couldn’t get any decent responses. He experienced one of the most common interactions with creationists. These people aren’t interested in the truth.

The rant made me feel better to get those things off my chest. It’s difficult to communicate with people that haven’t taken the time to simply read at least a portion of the information that’s available, when they sit there arguing against material that they haven’t taken the time to learn anything about, simply rejecting it prior to ever having spent any time even looking at it.

Importantly, it wasn’t simply the terrible responses from creationists that turned this man from a Christian to a non-believer. While he says his “eyes have been opened by the exposure of deception and misrepresentation the creationist movement exposes itself to time and time again”, he also shows that he actually gives a damn about truth.

I continued researching and reading and watching documentary films in an attempt to erode my lack of knowledge on the immensity of Evolution. I had known of the topic all of my life, but not to the depth that I was now pursuing. Up to that point, I hadn’t really paid attention to the debate that was going on around the country regarding this topic. I had no idea that people were so passionately against this. Not because I lived in a cave mind you, but just simply do to the fact that I focused my life on other areas of interest. I was also disappointed as to how we as Americans were perceived outside of the United States on the matter of Evolution. The shear immensity of the problem boggles the mind.

While researching, I was amazed to learn what we as a species have discovered through our research and efforts. I was also amazed to discover how the scientific field of Evolution affected other fields of science and even spawned new fields, and how all of these fields became interlaced and supported one another. It was incredible.

After a year and a half of self-imposed and self-paced learning, along with conversations with family and friends (a whole other story), the gnawing memory of my discussion with Julie finally got to me. At this point, I was too far gone with the knowledge of my discoveries to let it sit idly any further.

(“Julie” runs the aforementioned creationist website and is the person he originally emailed.)

I love this. The guy heard some information, looked into it, then made sure he actually had some background so he could decide accurately for himself. Naturally, evolution won out for him. Truth has a funny way of doing this.

But isn’t this always the story? I’ve read so many blog entries and forum posts where atheists/agnostics describe how they heard something absurd from a tick-in-the-skin creationist and decided to check things out for themselves. My story is similar. At a dinner with a friend, his mother (a creationist), and a few of his mother’s church friends (also creationists), I heard the church friends claim Earth was created 6,000 years ago. Well, to be fair, they actually questioned amongst each other if the number they heard was 6,000 or 7,000. I quickly looked into the issue. They were off by more than a smidge.

I suppose I have these inane folks to thank for spurring me toward the absolute beauty that is science. I just wish more people would actually look into the stupid claims of ignorant creationists who hate, disavow, avoid, dismember, and spurn science in favor of their ugly, ugly beliefs. Actual evidence is a far better tool for revealing truth, and that is beauty.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Creationism | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Questions

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Michael

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Theologians

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Michael

I’ve written in the past about theologians. I want to start calling out the idea of what these people do as what it actually is: literary criticism with a narrow focus.

Whereas most literary critics will have focuses on relatively broad topics – periods in time, styles of writing, etc – theologians focus merely on single books. Granted, the books are often relatively large, but so is War and Peace.

Now, theologians do deserve slightly more credit than I’ve given them. They do have some background on the history of the cultures and societies in which their texts originated. But if that’s what one wants, then why not turn to textual critics? These are people who actually understand what authors (and scribes) were intending while also having a grasp on the history of the cultures and societies.

Theologians enjoy an elevated status in our society. But do they deserve it any more than literary critics of Shakespeare? The answer must be ‘no’.

I’ve taken far too many English courses in my time. I have constantly found myself encountering papers that are wide-open to interpretation. Hell, I made an argument that Utopia was about setting up a true hellhole, not anything glorious. It got an “A”. The argument itself was probably wrong, but Sir Thomas More isn’t around to say otherwise, is he? Theologians take the same liberties. They are free to interpret meaning and intention as they see fit. Is it any surprise that theology moves in conjuction with cultures and societal movements (even if it usually lags)?

In short, theology is certainly nothing more than literary criticism. What’s more, literary criticism shouldn’t enjoy an elevated status, especially when it is so narrowly focused. We can all interpret passages. Theologians are just the literate among us with more (narrow) dedication.

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Now the Republicans are really reaching

Posted on June 11, 2009 by Michael

A Guantanamo inmate has been transferred to U.S. soil for trial.

The first terrorism suspect to be brought from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States for trial appeared Tuesday in federal court in New York, where he pleaded not guilty to 286 murder and conspiracy charges in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Okay, this all seems to be on the right track. The man is being given a trial because, despite probably being a terrorist, he is still a human being. He has rights that are not unique to Americans. But wait! That has nothing to do with why he’s here.

But conservative lawmakers opposed to closing Guantanamo lashed out at moving Ghailani into the U.S. justice system. “This is the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

Wow. Boehner apparently thinks the Obama administration is setting up terrorist training camps. I know there’s spin in politics, but this is just absurd. Beside that, aren’t U.S. prisons already terrorist training camps? We send non-violent and minorly violent offenders to prison where they learn how to be better – and more violent – criminals. And isn’t it the Republican stupidity of “HE IZ SOFTORZ ON CRIME!!1!” that got us in this mess?

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New Creationists

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Michael

The New Creationists Mission Statement

It is the objective of us, the New Creationists, to undermine not simply evolutionary theory, but science as a whole. It is this form of inquiry which has caused the greatest damage to our version of events. It must be destroyed at all costs.

The primary method for attaining our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground. This means that we are to seek, purely in the eye of the layman public, a position which appears on the surface to be a reasonable compromise. To be sure, we want to tell the world we embrace evolution. We also want to tell the world we embrace a Creator.

We want to hide Our Creator in the nearly impossible to understand gaps of reality. Quantum mechanics will often be our realm, but much more can work. As stated, our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground with the layman public. We need not answer to scientists. Indeed, they are the enemy. What we are to do is wrench the very fruits of these enemies from their empirical hands. We are to show gaps in the understanding of the cell. We are to discuss unknowns in molecular biology. We are to contort the flaws of physics, cosmology, and astronomy to assist our goals. It is in these places that Our Creator resides. If it’s science, it is imperfect. We shall exploit, even invent, imperfections. All is justified in our goal. Science deserves nothing but lip service; It is the enemy.

Our first step is to put forth an army of Christian scientists. They will not be the supporters of fringe creationism. They shall not espouse views which deny any modern science. However, they shall put atop all modern science a sense of confusion and remote possibility. That remote possibility shall be where Our Creator resides.

Our goals at this point will rely upon American idiosyncrasies. Tired of divisive politics, Americans seek a Middle Ground. They crave a sense of wishy-washy – it sounds fair. We shall marginalize the New Atheists with paint brushes of extremism. While they fully embrace science and all its evils, we shall embrace it only superficially – we shall not fall into the evil of the enemy. We shall appeal to the American sense of fair play. We are the New Creationists.

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , | 8 Comments »

Macro- and microevolution

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Michael

In a Facebook discussion, one friend described macroevolution as such.

Macroevolution is microevolution given enough time.

In response from a creationist friend (yes, I maintain them), he got this.

HA.

Here is a fuller explanation of the terms from yours truly. Enjoy.

[That person’s] explanation is apt. First, it addresses the terms to the extent that they probably deserve. No scientist uses them in any meaningful way, except when addressing the invalid issues of creationists. And that’s the truth: the terms are largely of creationist origin. They arose as a means to appear more reasonable to the public. Similarly, there is a strategy going around creationist organizations known as “strengths and weaknesses”. It seeks to make creationists seem more reasonable. In truth, we’re just seeing an extension of normal creationist coyness from the organized among the crowd (i.e., the Discovery Institute & friends).

But insofar as the terms mean anything, one is just a description of the other on another scale. Here’s why.

Evolution is a continuous process. At no single point in history can anyone point and say, yes, here is where species X began. Natural selection works gradually and cumulatively. It is simply a matter of convenience that we can separate species. All their ancestors are gone to say otherwise. In other words, a mother dinosaur only gives birth to daughter dinosaurs. But gradually, those dinosaurs change into something slightly different. Over wide expanses of time, those slight changes add up to big changes. This should be a hugely simple concept. Feathers, webbed feet, webbed arms, lighter frames. This all eventually add up to the evolution of birds. (Some scientists consider birds modern day dinosaurs, a somewhat trivial issue.) But at no point did a dinosaur lay an egg which hatched into an eagle. It took a huge number of small changes to lead that bird. That is what microevolution does over thousands and millions of years to produce macroevolutionary changes which can only be identified in hindsight, eons later.

Filed under: Creationism, Evolution | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

New Hampshire plays catch up

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Michael

New Hampshire has caught up with most of New England by passing a bill to allow same-sex marriage.

New Hampshire became the sixth state to legalize gay marriage after the Senate and House passed key language on religious rights and Gov. John Lynch — who personally opposes gay marriage — signed the legislation Wednesday afternoon.

I’ve had discussions with people who claim Lynch is acting out of political pressure. I don’t see evidence for that. It’s certainly a possibility, but the man is hugely popular and won by landslides in his last two elections. At the very least, it seems just as likely that he was caving to political pressure when he initially said he was against same-sex marriage. In fact, why not more? He had more to gain then than he stands to lose now.

Lynch, a Democrat, had promised a veto if the law didn’t clearly spell out that churches and religious groups would not be forced to officiate at gay marriages or provide other services. Legislators made the changes.

…

The revised bill added a sentence specifying that all religious organizations, associations or societies have exclusive control over their religious doctrines, policies, teachings and beliefs on marriage.

I believe this is correct. Morally, it isn’t, of course. It’s bankrupt in that sense. However, in a legal sense – and this is a legal issue – religions are protected by the First Amendment in this regard. Time may very well conclude that they are not, but it would appear that they are afforded these protections right now. Of course, the KKK is afforded First Amendment protections.

It also clarified that church-related organizations that serve charitable or educational purposes are exempt from having to provide insurance and other benefits to same-sex spouses of employees.

This, however, is not constitutional. This moves from the realm of protecting religious beliefs to harming people. If a religious organization hires a married homosexual, it is not germane to their beliefs to deny insurance. We’re talking about secular legal and tax issues, not religion at this point. New Hampshire went to far here. They are allowing religion to trump individual rights.

On the up side, discrimination has been significantly lessened in New England over the past few months.

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