Religion & Law

I Knew Him When

Posted on May 26, 2009
Woo Hoo!Brian Switek of Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking has hit the big(ger) time ... specifically, the London Times!A little more than 55 million years ago there was a split in primate evolution. One branch contained the early relatives of lemurs and lorises, while the other was composed of the ancestors of tarsiers, monkeys, and apes (including us)...

The Stinker

Posted on May 25, 2009
I just saw "The Link" and, like most such exercises, there was a lot of repetition, trying to stretch the material that can be understood by lay audiences into a show of over an hour and a half. I can forgive breathlessness and "gee whiz" gushing but there were some truly execrable things floated, such as Ida being the "earliest ancestor" of humans (which I think would have to be some protocell, if one could be identified at all)...

Doublethink Double Redux

Posted on May 25, 2009
Okay, Donald James Parker is not Willaim Dembski. Heck, he's not even Casey Luskin. But as an advocate for Intelligent Design Creationism not steeped in the misdirection so meticulously crafted by the Discovery Institute, his arguments are, in many ways, more revealing than what we get from those stalwarts of ID...

Doublethink II.1

Posted on May 24, 2009
Donald James Parker didn't like my pointing out his confusion of science and religion and dropped by to complain. He then disliked my reply to him here so much that he posted another article about it but without the courtesy of a link or even a mention of my name...

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Doublethink II

Posted on May 23, 2009
It seems examiner.com is becoming a hotbed of creationism. Here is another example by one Donald James Parker. He is complaining about a talk by Ken Miller he saw on YouTube (for reasons which will become obvious, I doubt he heard a word said). Here is the amusing bit:How the ID movement featuring a total focus on scientific arguments and a total exclusion of specific mention of religion from the agenda is confused with the Creationism movement is a real fascinating area of study...

Doublethink

Posted on May 23, 2009
There is a fascinating (as in rubbernecking a car wreck) insight into creationist thinking at examiner.com in the person of one Clyde Middleton, including a truly lunatic "summation" of the theory of evolution that reveals an absolute absence of any knowledge of science...

Here We Go Again!

Posted on May 22, 2009
Sigh!Are they just dumb or are they duplicitous?That's always the question with quote miners.Of course, they throw these quotes around with the pretense of understanding what they mean when, in fact, most of the miners have never read the source of the quote and few would understand it if they had...

A Family Affair

Posted on May 20, 2009
A down and dirty bit of quote-mineontology:A certain John Herbst, in a Letter to the Editor in the Glenwood Spings (Colorado) Post Independent offers the usual "evidence" for Intelligent Design Creationism, amounting to "Golly gee, the world sure looks designed to me!" capped by this:All I can summarize with is, how much more evidence for intelligent design does one need? There is indeed more, for those honestly seeking truth...

Still Crazy After All These Years

Posted on May 20, 2009
Our old friend, Yomin Postelnik, who said he had simple proofs of the existence of God that no atheist has ever been able to counter effectively, is back boasting that he, a business planner, is "far more familiar with evolutionary theory ... [and] the intricacies and rationale behind the theory ...

Fish Out Of Water

Posted on May 19, 2009
Stanley Fish is not beloved of the science-oriented blogosphere.He may not be all that beloved of the readers of his own blog in the New York Times if, as he reports, 95 percent of the reaction to his article on Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution was negative...

Vestigial Minds, Junk Arguments

Posted on May 18, 2009
You don't have to agree with Jerry Coyne's take on "accommodationism" to wonder about this:To the illuminati, a believer lumbers to the edge of every frontier of knowledge, poised to retire his investigations with "God did it!" contentment. Meanwhile, dead ends caused by their own faith in scientific materialism remain unexamined?the premature designation of "vestigial" organs and "junk" DNA being two examples...

Turtles All the Way

Posted on May 17, 2009
The Billings, Montana Gazette has a write-up of David Quammen and, given this "Year of Darwin" and his self-described stint as "a tinpot Darwin expert," a nice thumbnail sketch of Darwin and his work.I particularly liked Quammen's take on Intelligent Design Creationism:We should teach it where it belongs ...

The Words "Ray Comfort" Mean ...

Posted on May 16, 2009
... nothing more than "moron."The evidence:One in four professors in U.S. colleges and universities is either atheist or agnostic, and they are corrupting our youth. When Richard Dawkins visited an Oklahoma University earlier this year, he told adoring students, 'Evolution is a scientific fact, as secularly established as any fact known in science...

Thomist Talk

Posted on May 16, 2009
Thomas Jackson, author of Darwin's Error: The Poet Who Died and who apparently thinks that Darwin was a better poet than scientist, has an interesting article in the Guardian, entitled "Thomas Aquinas would have loved genetics," about why Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, was wrong about Aquinas...

Multiplex Evangelism

Posted on May 15, 2009
I can't say I thought much of the movie version of The Da Vinci Code (I don't think anything of the book, which I have steadfastly failed to read). I won't be shelling out ~ $10 to see Angels & Demons. But how can I not like something that gives The Catholic League and William Donohue such exquisite apoplexy?This also amuses:Father James Martin, the culture editor of America, a Jesuit magazine, said Mr...

Political Scholars

Posted on May 15, 2009
Cambridge University dons are in a snit.The university recently amended its equal opportunities policy to stress respectfor religious or philosophical beliefs of all kinds and its opposition to discrimination. The policy now reads:The university's core values are freedom of thought and expression and freedom from discrimination...

Good Books

Posted on May 13, 2009
The Chaplain has the text of the resolution of Rep. Paul Broun (R- GA), seeking to have President Obama declare 2010 the "Year of the Bible," over at An Apostate's Chapel. Some highlights:Whereas deep religious beliefs stemming from the Old and New Testament of the Bible have inspired Americans from all walks of life ...

Accommodationists: Enemies of Religion

Posted on May 12, 2009
Given the recent flap over "accommodationist" statements, including by the National Academy of Sciences, to the effect that "[a]cceptance of the evidence for evolution can be compatible with religious faith," the following is amusing:It is compromisers like [Michael Francis] Collins who cause people to doubt and disbelieve the Bible?causing them to walk away from the church...

Intelligent Bull

Posted on May 11, 2009
Barbara Forrest is in The Panda's Thumb demolishing Francis Beckwith's claim that he is not an Intelligent Design supporter:Beckwith wants to have his cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, over a period of almost ten years (given the February 2009 talk in Baton Rouge, it's fair to include the present), he wants (sic) to articles and a book and make public appearances that any reasonable person would interpret as pro-ID, while on the other hand, he wants to deny that he is an ID supporter...

Tracking Down His Whereabouts

Posted on May 11, 2009
Hmmm ....Larry Moran announced that he was off to New York City to attend a conference on The Two Cultures in the 21st Century to commemorate the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous lecture, entitled "The Two Cultures," on the divide he perceived between the sciences and the humanities...

Moron Liberty Commencement

Posted on May 09, 2009
This from Ben Stein about Expelled is just wonderful ... if you like facepalms:"The name calling was beyond anything I had ever seen. And I worked for Richard Nixon. I have been called a lot of names." ..."But why were these people so angry. We basically wanted to have a dialogue...

Cons of Creationism

Posted on May 09, 2009
Those are the "fraudulent" drawings of Ernst Haeckel that creationists expend such high dudgeon on. Doesn't look much like the familiar images of the embryos of fish, salamanders, turtles, chickens, pigs, cows, rabbits, and humans that they complain are still being used in biology textbooks, do they? The second set of drawings are simplified for pedagogical reasons, to highlight the similarities, but were not the drawings that were discovered to be a single woodcut nonetheless attributed to a dog, a chicken, and a turtle, that creationists claim somehow invalidates modern evolutionary theory...

No Degrees in Waste Management?

Posted on May 09, 2009
Here are some scary statistics:Liberty University welcomed its largest-ever graduating class ? 6,350 students ? at 2009 Commencement exercises on Saturday, May 9. ...Of this year's graduates, 32 percent are residential students, and 68 percent received degrees from Liberty University Online...

We're Number 1!

Posted on May 08, 2009
Where has American pride gone?We can't handle these piddly punks from Guantanamo? I'll put a good, old fashioned, USA born and raised, brain-eater against any of those motherf***ers. Any of them. USA! USA!.

Latin, From Dictare

Posted on May 08, 2009
Angela Fletcher, for some reason, wants to advertise her ignorance of and disagreement with the American form of government. I find this confusing because, I'm fairly sure, Ms. Fletcher would be appalled to be labeled "un-American." But, nonetheless, that is precisely what she is...

Crusade

Posted on May 07, 2009
There is a long and troubling article in the Santa Barbara Independent by Katherine Stewart on the methods of the "Good News Clubs," that openly seek to proselytize very young children in after-school meetings in public schools and to encourage those same children to proselytize theirs schoolmates...

Biological Competitive Capitalism

Posted on May 07, 2009
A thought:While the nineteenth-century theory that some rose and some fell in society depending on their personal strengths and weaknesses is often referred to as "social Darwinism," we would be much more in agreement with historical causation were we to call Darwinism "Biological Competitive Capitalism...

PZ Myearshertz & World Domination

Posted on May 06, 2009
Somewhere in a secret laboratory in Minnesota, nefarious plans are ... um ... afoot ...

Another Way to Foil Texas

Posted on May 05, 2009
Here is an interesting possibility:An effort is gaining momentum to establish common academic standards for the nation's elementary, middle, junior high and high schools.If events occur as planned by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices, the states could see by the end of this summer a common set of standards for math and English/language arts in kindergarten through 12th grades...

Torquemada's Mistress

Posted on May 04, 2009
Melanie Phillips won't let consistency stop her. Having made a fool of herself already, she proceeds to show that she can't keep an idea in her head all the way from the beginning to the end of her piece. Consider these statements she makes:ID is not in itself a scientific discovery...

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