Libby Anne did a “Why I am an atheist” post a little while ago, and in it she mentioned how she’d been brought up to believe Ken Ham and his creationist nonsense, but when she actually started looking beyond the inbred, incestuous creationist literature, she discovered that the evidence actually rested with evolution. Ken Ham noticed that post, and complained about it. Libby Anne wasn’t a True Christian™, he said; if she’d been exposed to more AiG propaganda she wouldn’t have left the fold; she was lost when she went to an evil secular college. And, of course, the standard defense:
It’s not that “we know the Bible is true because young earth creationism is true,” but rather because the Bible is true we can believe what God said in Genesis about the time frame in which He created.
The evidence doesn’t matter. The bible says it, therefore they believe it.
Libby Anne does a fine job defending her position, and she sees right through the dogmatists at Answers in Genesis:
And the solution Ken Ham and Dr. Purdom make? Double down. That’s pretty much it. Teach the same things, just more. Oh, and isolate yourself and your children from other points of view – oh the dangers of the state college or “compromised” Christian college! Interestingly, I see the same thing happening with all too many homeschool families. They say their goal is to “teach god’s truth” and “shelter” their children from bad influences, but what they really mean is indoctrinate and isolate. And that, quite simply, is what Ken Ham and Dr. Purdom are advocating.
The funny thing is, I don’t plan to do any such thing with my daughter. I’m not afraid of her hearing other perspectives or arguments or evidence. I’m not afraid of her hearing and digesting different viewpoints. My goal is not to teach her to believe one specific thing, but to open her mind and teach her to think critically and come to her own conclusions. Ken Ham and Dr. Purdom, though, refuse to do that. Because, apparently, exposing children to a variety of viewpoints and teaching them to think critically and make their own decisions is dangerous.
That’s exactly right. How you educate your kids isn’t a matter of hiding them away from everything in the world you don’t like, because eventually they’ll grow up and look around (unless you’ve done a really good job of stunting their minds) and discover it all anyway. Expose them to it all, fearlessly. Teach them how to think, not what to think. And then what happens?
They discover that creationism is a lie, and science opens doors to the whole wide universe.
I hope he notices this post too because I want him to know I escaped his lies as well. My life has been an order of magnitude better without the involvement of the young earth creationist cult. I deeply regret that I didn’t have an opportunity to begin studying real, provable science at a younger age. Astronomy and biology are so much cooler and more amazing without the dreadful lens of creationism.
What happens next is completely out of your control.
Which is exactly how it is supposed to be, if it’s children and not slaves you’re trying to raise.
I was a YEC once. Lasted about a week. I had curiosity, honesty, and the whole Internet. All three of those are anathema to YEC (the latter because it’s literally impossible to censor fully.)
Even when I was a Christian, it was patent bullshit.
Ken Ham’s proposed solution is exactly what kept me from recognizing science and from being able to have more than my arbitrary high school education on things like evolution. Ham’s teaching (temporarily) killed my love of science.
Fortunately, it was that love of science that was buried in me that allowed me to make a jump from Bad Astronomy to here.
If God is truth, then why not send them to an unsaved learning institution? If God is all they say he is, and their position is as strong as they think it is, there can be no possible argument against them. Our evilutionists arguments should get slapped down with ease. If truth is on their side colleges should be cranking out YEC left and right. The fact that they are scared of such institutions only means that they know themselves that their arguments are bullshit.
No rest for the FSM
Related: “When Religious Leaders Lose Their Faith” on Talk of the nation a couple of days ago, transcript and audio at http://www.npr.org/2012/05/07/152197685/when-religious-leaders-lose-their-faith.
I was very pleasantly surprised on how positive they sounded, with lots of callers saying that they feel free without god. It’s always hopeful to hear how the brainwashed whose function was to brainwash more people as preachers start thinking and bam! They figure out it’s all BS and they are free and happy.
I ran into that Hammy thinking just yesterday. I posted it on the endless but it is short I think I’ll post it again here:
From over at OpenStudy.com
Start of Thread:
What came first, the chicken…or the egg?
kantalope: eggs definitely the eggs…chickens were too scared to come out first
P1: the omelet :)
P2: Chicken in the form of birds and then transformed into hen
P3: I think that due to mutations in the DNA of living things, the egg came first. If the “animal” that laid the egg can be considered to not be chicken but almost one, then the final mutation that occurred which resulted in an a chicken hatching from the egg laid by the “almost a chicken animal” would explain why the egg came first.
P4: The chicken, if you’re being serious. There would have to be a chicken to be an egg. @P2 You mean evolution from a bird type thing to a hen? (Not possible, but okay.)
…
kantalope: for your chicken knowledge enjoyment: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/chickens_eggs_this_is_no_way_t.php
there does not need to be a chicken for there to be an egg…dinosaurs laid eggs a mere 64million years before there were chickens
P4: @kantalope And how did the dinosaurs come to lay eggs? How did they appear?
kantalope: Off the top of my head, they had an ancestor that had some mutation that helped protect their reproductive cells – natural selection favored this change by passing it along to more offspring that those that did not have this mutation and souffle!…you get eggs.
more reading for your eggjoyment: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21557469
or if you like reading non-academic science but just as eggciting: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/story/2012-03-24/earliest-mesosaur-embryo/53750010/1
P4: I don’t agree with your view. Sorry.
kantalope: thats ok – but you should read the usatoday article anyway – it is pretty cool.
Are facts and evidence a “view”? I guess, I don’t know. I don’t think so.
P4: See, I’m a Christian, and in the Bible, it says God made all animals and humans. To me, there is no such thing as evolution. I’m not interested in reading that thing, because those are not facts, those are lies.
It’s strange that when they are trying to leverage their YEC into science classes they urge the “teaching the controversy side”. When it comes to exposing their brainwashed children to the evidence for evolution, they’re not so keen.
Oh, and I guess my point was – is there anything you can say after that last conversation stopper?
[meta]
ajbjasus, +1.
This is pretty much what I advocate in my posts about raising atheists.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/2011/08/27/raising-atheists-part-1/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/2011/11/01/raising-atheists-part-2/
Expose them to lots of points of view. Filter it as appropriate through discussions about your own beliefs and values, but don’t isolate your kids and don’t hide them from other people who might change their minds.
What Ken Ham fears? Reality.
Perfectly right and reasonable … and you just know the creationists will try to use this to insert their own “perspective” into science class so the kids can make up their minds for themselves. That’s why it’s so important that it’s emphasized why science is not just an open forum for faith, but has rigor and standards to it.
kantalope #9 wrote:
Well, in response to “I don’t agree with your view; sorry” you can ask “if you haven’t really explored the issue, are you sure you even have a viewpoint?” Unless he or she knows enough about your view to know why they disagree — then they don’t really disagree. They’ve just got a “feeling” they don’t want to pursue, and no actual interest in the subject one way or the other.
#7 kantalope says:
Last night I was talking on the phone to a very old friend in Ohio. I asked her if she was still a devout Catholic. Her answer, no, she kissed off the RCC when it fought against the Equal Rights Amendment years ago. This led to a more general discussion of religion and we eventually got around to Mittens and thence to Mormonism in general.
She described an interaction with Mormon missionaries one time and how they were not interested in looking something up, not even in the Book of Mormon. “If they have doubts, they pray to God for guidance instead of trying to resolve the issue(s) for themselves.” And then she used a remarkable, and slightly unusual, word to describe that attitude: “incurious”.
And right there we have revealed one of the defining characteristics of fundies, bible thumpers, holy rollers, snake handlers, eaters of dead tortured Jews, evangelists, and other brain dead religious types: they have had their innate human curiosity cauterized (or never had it in the first place).
What Ken Ham fears?
Piglets that fight back.
If you brainwash your kids too much, isolate them from the world, and teach them to fear science,….you risk having them being too ignorant to function in the wider modern Hi Tech society.
Which I’ve seen before.
Fundie xians score low in intelligence and education and that translates into lower socioeconomic status than the general population on average.
Oh well, we always need people to mow our lawns and do our laundry.
Utah is the scam capital of the USA or was anyway.
The US attorney general’s office set up a branch in SLC to clean it up. Most of them ran off to Utah and Nevada.
There are still a lot of criminals that prey on the Mormons because they are clueless. Many of them are Mormons themselves and they use that in “affinity group” scams.
Being a brainwashed meat robot dulls critical thinking and survival skills.
Not to forget how the fundies are always sending money to conpeople televangelists who spend much of it on themselves with mansions, private jets, lots of servants, and whatever else that lots of money can buy.
What does Ken Ham fear?
That his was the last generation that will fall wholesale for that bullshit.
Ah, but holytape, you’re forgetting about the vast conspiracy to keep creationism down.
RFW #14 wrote:
I think the characteristic of “incuriosity” applies to faith across the board, whether we’re dealing with fundamentalism or spirituality. Asking hard questions is interpreted as being ego-driven and insufficiently attuned to the appreciation of Mystery. And debate? Out of the question, for the same reasons.
Skepdoc Harriet Hall says that she has a rule of thumb for evaluating an unknown claim: ask who disagrees — and why? That involves investigation and the ability to pay attention to the other side. But the faithful don’t want to know WHY you disagree. They’re too in love with their belief as belief. It’s enough to know that they believe. Outsiders must be a different sort of person than they are.
3 things kill faith: curiosity;clarity; consistency. You will see believers of every belief system run away from these values as if their belief depended on it.
Um, why? I mean, surely the truth can hold up to scrutiny.
Aw, poor little Hammy can’t stand up to any rigorous analysis, so he insists that people be taught lies all of the time. Otherwise, they just might learn something worthwhile.
Glen Davidson
The Bible is a work of fiction, written down by human beings. You might as well take Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey as a factual record and worship Athena and the Greek gods. That’s a basic point, and is the chief vulnerability of religious authoritarianism, see Dirac:
Re#8:
You mean, taking them down to their local rotgut fast food outlet for a nice E.coli O157:H7 fecalburger with a side of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella?
How did those genes for antibiotic resistance get passed around, again? What accounts for the success of these antibiotic resistant critters in the U.S. agribusiness system as well as in hospitals around the world? Someone ask Ken Ham about that. (genetics and evolution, is the answer – plus reckless stupidity and a lack of science-based regulation at the Corporate Church of the FDA).
Dear Ken Ham, does your faith extend to eating this uncooked shitburger, then? If you don’t believe in evolution, than really, you have nothing to fear. Put your mouth where your mouth is, what?
Ham fears being diced, sauteed and then added to cheese, eggs, peppers, onions and mushrooms and folded into an omelet.
@Jonrockoford, #6:
Thanks for the post about the Talk of the Nation piece. I haven’t listened to Talk of the Nation for quite a while.
It’s good they have the odd, occasional show supporting the rejection of religious belief among clergy and religious leaders, and it’s encouraging to hear people calling in support.
I know they’ve had shows in the past with guests and callers supporting just the opposite as well. In light of the slowly growing movement rejecting theological belief, I feel they need to do more frequent shows presenting the rejection of religion.
@RFW (14)
“And right there we have revealed one of the defining characteristics of fundies, bible thumpers, holy rollers, snake handlers, eaters of dead tortured Jews, evangelists, and other brain dead religious types: they have had their innate human curiosity cauterized (or never had it in the first place).”
Thanks for this. I am going to use it in all future discussion on this subject, because I’ve never heard the problem put so succinctly.
That’s exactly what happened to my son. Since he was 6 he knew I’m an atheist. He went to a catholic school first and to an islam school then (both of the liberal kind). Still, interested as he always had been in natural sciences, at the age of 13 he declared himself an atheist too – all by himself, based on the information he found on the internet.
His mother is still religious.
Now just a minute,
You don’t really mean that as in “teach the controversy” do you? :-)
This is where one should be cautious of not making quote-mining too easy for creotards and make the distinction public schools vs. home explicit (as if it wasn’t obvious from the context), IMHO.
Ham brought his Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether medicine show in a suburb of the Twin Cities a couple of weekends ago and my partner Lynn and I went. We “missed” Ham and saw his sidekick, the disheveled and avuncular schlubb, Gary Parker. Parker made a strong case that to accept evolution is reject Christianity, which I said to Lynn was setting up a roomful of people for atheism. Which is fine by me.
Parker claims to have accepted and enthusiastically taught evolution earlier in his career, but it was obvious from his one description of how evolution works (most of his lecture centered on dating methods) that he had no idea what evolution is. He discussed the woodpecker. He essentially made the features of a woodpecker an “irreducibly complex” constellation of traits, from the specialized beak to the skull and tongue. In his fantasy caricature of how evolution works, some proto-pecker gets hit by cosmic rays which cause a mutation that results in a long, drilling beak. But when the bird tries to use the beak to get bugs out of bark, it bashes its poor brains in. And doesn’t have the long tongue needed to reach into the tree, even if his brains had NOT just gotten bashed in. That is, Parker had each trait evolving separately as the result of one massive mutation.
Anyone in that church (which was gorgeous and opulent beyond the dreams of even Alain de Botton, by the way) who bothered to Google “woodpecker evolution” could learn that they had been lied to. Or “taught” by a self-proclaimed expert who had literally no idea of what he was talking about.
As we drove out of Crazytown and back into Realityville, Lynn called it exactly right: The people in that church had no interest in science, or in facts or truth. What they wanted was a figurehead who fit their notion of what a scientist looks and sounds like–a cross between a rumpled Einstein and what they recall of Mr. Wizard, maybe–to say vaguely sciency things that would reassure them that are not backwards, unsophisticated, and ignorant, but were instead on the vanguard of Knowledge that benighted smarty-pantses will not accept. And the so-called “educated” people “believe in” evolution, not because there is undeniable evidence for it, but because they want to sin. Creationists are just as smart as anyone–see the scientist up there talking about decay rates and fossils and stuff! But unlike evolutionists, Parker does not want an abortion, or to have sex with men, or redistribute your wealth.
And that’s all the more QED they’ll ever need. But so help them if their curious middle-schooler stumbles on talkorigins.org. Because then the gig is good and truly up.
kantalope #7:
For a biblical literalist, the question would be: “which came first, the bat or the egg?”
“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
——————————– Twain, Mark
Ken Ham should be brought up on criminal charges for interfering with the intellectual development not only of individuals, but that of society as a whole. My sincerest wish is to see him behind bars where he belongs
@raven #16
You had me right up until you wrote:
“Oh well, we always need people to mow our lawns and do our laundry.”
Do you really believe that it is impossible for people who mow lawns and do laundry to be intelligent?
@kantalope:
Well, I’d be tempted to sneer. “I guess you’re just happy being ignorant and closed-minded.” But I try to suppress that sort of impulse, unless my interlocutor has been a lot nastier for a lot longer.
Perhaps a more fruitful line might be:
“When you say “lies” — do you really think that the scientists are being deliberately deceptive? Or do you think that they’re making a mistake?”
And maybe from there, opening up the possibility that your interlocutor is the one making the mistake.
[I suspect that even if the scientists are absolved of deliberate deception, your interlocutor is going invoke SATAN as the “original” liar.]
Seconded.
Well, there’s more evidence that Libby Anne had done the right thing. Ken Ham knows where he can stick that bible of his. I see people isolated and taught the same old christian propaganda and it never fails to horrify me – it’s like watching an extraordinarily bad B movie except that the stuff is really happening.
Isn’t this what the Mormons do as well? Try to keep the flock away from any sort of challenging material, and deluge them with make-work exercises in dogmatic literature. There’s a term for this…oh yeah, brainwashing.
If one’s dogma doesn’t have the capacity to stand up to scrutiny, debate and criticism, it isn’t worth more than what the dog left a pile of on the sidewalk. When Hamm, and others like him, advocate for this fortress of willful ignorance I feel a sense of disgust that they are making the more credulous and superstitious among us fall victim to never being able to enjoy a day attempting to understand just how amazing nature is as its own entity. Rather than worrying about people going to childishly silly, non-existent hell in an afterlife, they should consider why they let their own sanctimonious selfishness put people through an actual living hell of isolated ignorance in this lifetime.
I’m sure the implication wasn’t
it was
Which is a very different thing.
Truthspeaker, ednaz,
You’ve got your logic muddled.
Raven is saying that a YEC upbringing is going to limit people to menial jobs. Raven says nothing about the characteristics of people who are doing menial jobs but are not YEC.
I really should have refreshed before posting.
That is true. Good point.
It’s not a matter of intelligence alone but lack of education and low socioeconomic status. People are reading what they want into what I wrote, not…what I wrote.
In fact, there are a lot of very intelligent people doing jobs that don’t require most of their brainpower, especially these days.
What limits the fundie xians isn’t so much intelligence, it is voluntary ignorance. A lot of high paying and high value jobs require a good post secondary education, sometimes a graduate degree, and passing tests like the bar exam.
BTW, the fundies really do score lower than the general population. Dennett quotes a meta-analysis of 46 studies. That is a lot. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that fundies have a defective gene pool. Intelligence has a high hereditary component but it isn’t that high. It’s actually a lot more plastic than people considered based on old and outdated data.
I’m another atheist who started the journey to atheism as a direct result of Ken Ham’s work. I am grateful to him.
I was a lifelong young earth creationist, part of a church that took creationism very seriously. Over the course of several years, I took several Sunday-school classes that used Answers in Genesis materials, including reading several of Ham’s books quite closely. Curious and eager to learn more, I borrowed more books from AiG from the church library.
But there were some places where I had trouble understanding the points he was refuting, so I went to the public library to get a few books on evolution, in order to have a clearer idea of what the wrong ideas were, and better understand why, as Ham said, the evidence clearly supported young earth creationism.
I was stunned at the difference between real science books and Ken Ham’s books. Where Ham employed tortured logic and obscured information wherever possible, the science books laid out their evidence, carefully explaining what it showed and what was still unsure.
Where Ham retold from hearsay stories I was sure couldn’t be true (the Loch Ness Monster is real, and is a surviving dinosaur! Miners dug to Hell and heard the screams of the damned through the hole!), the science books were solidly based on research that was solidly verified by unimpeachable sources.
At first, evolution was hard for me to understand, because it was so different from my understanding of how the world works. But when I finally did understand it (thank you, Neil Shubin), it was astounding. I found myself re-thinking nearly everything I had been taught.
This wasn’t a one-moment conversion, like we had encouraged in my church. It was a slow process that took most of a decade of reading, thought, and, yes, a lot of prayer and reading of the Bible.
If you’re reading this, Ken Ham, thank you. If I hadn’t recognized how faulty your science was, I would never have taken the time to study and learn how evolution really works. And without that, I might still be a Christian today.
raven
As someone who would gladly mow lawns and wash laundry in order to pay rent GO FUCK YOURSELF. Classicist, privileged asshat.
Just_a_lurker:
I know an architect working as a hair dresser (not by choice), and a software engineer who is working as a gardener (by choice).
Raven’s point: if you limit your education, you limit your choices. It does not make the choice you are limited to in and of itself a bad one.
For example, many intelligent black people in the early part of the 20th Century were limited to being musicians. It led to an absolutely fantastic jazz scene, and doesn’t denigrate musicians in any way. But the lack of available opportunity for other high status jobs was limiting. It is the limitation that is the sad thing, it’s not a comment on the value of what you are limited to.
Does Ham really say those?
echidna,
I don’t buy that. Time and again I have called out raven on this bullshit. It’s a fucking pattern. Fuck raven.
In this case, Raven is right and you are wrong.
Maybe I’m biased from her past bullshit. I just read the other comments but
So if someone can’t accomplish more than mowing lawns and doing laundry they aren’t intelligent?
Every way I read this, it comes out badly and demeaning.
This reads like intelligence = degrees.
Whatever. I can’t find my links to her previous crap. I’m just killfiling and moving on since I can’t read her posts without a sneering “oh well”.
For the record, if I am wrong on this one. There will still be no apologies, nothing from me. Countless times I’ve called raven out on shit and have gotten jack shit but doubling down.
I cringe every time I see raven’s comment in expectation for bullshit regarding classicism and ablism. So raven doesn’t get a fucking cookie for not being an asshole once. If I’m bias and overreacting it’s because I’m so used to reading it from raven. I’m wrong once about raven? Finally, it’s about damn time.
I’m finally killfiling someone and this is the fucking last time I comment on raven.
Good fucking bye.
raven@ 41
Thank you for clarifying your point. I appreciate it.
I agree – “What limits the fundie xians isn’t so much intelligence, it is voluntary ignorance.”
No, you really are wrong in this one.
Education is a pre-requisite for certain jobs. Intelligence is a pre-requisite for, say, a PhD in physics.
Believing that the world is 4000 years old will act as quite a barrier to being a geologist, or biologist, or physicist. It does not mean that people who are not geologists, biologists or physicists are unintelligent. Even the belief that the world is 4000 years old doesn’t make one unintelligent, just ignorant.
I don’t expect you to apologise to anybody, Just_a_lurker. But I do expect you to respond to what is written, instead of flying off the handle. Unless there are some code words in there that I don’t see, Raven has said nothing objectionable.
I did fly off the handle because the oh well in raven’s original post read as a sneer. It read as a sneer because that’s the kind of shit raven posts. Raven has a long fucking history of being classist and ablist. I’m fucking tired of it. So I read the first post said fuck this and now raven’s decided to not be an ass this one time. Now, I literally cannot read anything from raven without the fucking sneering, even the subsequent posts. I’m so fucking used to being raven an ass I can’t actually believe they aren’t being an as now. I can only read the posts as sneering. And no, it the past it wasn’t just me flipping out, other people called it out too. I should have killfiled a long fucking time ago but oh well.
Not only fears mr. Ken Ham independent thinkers, he – and his collegue mr. Jason Lisle – also fear peer review, even from OEC. In an epic discussion among YEC & OEC mr. Jason Lisle was invited by mr. Hugh Ross to defend his views among ‘an audience of astronomers’ (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxXGCsZ5Ynk starting 18:50)
I contacted RtB some time ago and asked: did this event ever happen? I got a friendly reply stating that the event had not taken place, notwithstanding efforts to schedule it. Again, so much for YEC.
There is a new exhibit at Ken Ham’s Creation Museum.
Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) – depicted as an extinct, knuckle-walking, gorilla.