Archive for the 'Creationism'

That’s right: a mob of snarling, vicious atheists on PCP descended on an innocent, pious group of reverent Christians, on their knees and heads bowed in prayer, and brutally clubbed and stabbed them. Just ask Ken Ham. Oh, wait, no…what actually happened is that the Answers-in-Genesis inspired exam given at this one school came to light, and thousands of people expressed their dismay at the miseducation being delivered in the name of Jesus Christ. You’ve probably seen it. It’s so, so dumb. It’s got everything: the earth is only thousands of years old, dinosaurs and people coexisted, “Were you there?” Ken Ham is shocked that people all around the country saw that abominable collection of lies and were appalled, and immediately curled up into the traditional persecuted Christian ball of martyrdom. Now, this Christian academy is not a large school. Yet the atheists went after it with incredible fervor. The school administrator informed us she knew that the school would be involved in a spiritual battle after the quiz went public, but she was not expecting such ferocity. She told us she was shocked at the level of hate that the atheists poured down upon her, the teacher, and the school in general. This is clearly a sign that the atheists are taking over the world and opposing good Christian morality. Ham even has a list of all the evil things atheists are doing. How Are Atheists Becoming More Aggressive in America? Billboards promoting atheism and attacking Christianity have popped up across the country. The American Humanist Association has launched a special website for children to indoctrinate them in atheism. An atheist rally in Washington DC last year had a special promotion to encourage kids to attend their atheist camps. Atheists have been increasingly using terms like “child abuse” to describe the efforts of Christians who seek to teach their children about creation, heaven, and hell. ...
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Literally. A number of intelligent people have been trying to get the Louisiana Science Education Act repealed, a law that opens the door to teaching creationism in the public schools. The efforts have been stymied, though, and the Louisiana Creation Science Miseducation Act is still in effect. One of the people who acted to kill the efforts offered an, ahem, interesting rationale. Sen. Elbert Guillory, D-Opelousas, said he had reservations with repealing the act after a spiritual healer correctly diagnosed a specific medical ailment he had. He said he thought repealing the act could "lock the door on being able to view ideas from many places, concepts from many cultures." "Yet if I closed my mind when I saw this man — in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed — if I had closed him off and just said, ‘That’s not science. I’m not going to see this doctor,’ I would have shut off a very good experience for myself," Guillory said. “in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed”…that’s how I’m going to picture Louisiana legislators from now on. I do wonder about one thing in Mr Guillory’s story, though. How does he know his witch doctor “correctly diagnosed” his ailment? Did he, perhaps, see a real doctor?

People are always sending me links — sometimes it’s to a cogent rebuttal of lunacy, sometimes it’s something advocating lunacy, and sometimes…it takes me a while to tell. For instance, here’s this site called “The Truth of Genesis”. I read this and thought for a moment that it was a site debunking creationism. The biggest laugh comes from the “young Earth” teachers, who try to convince others that the Earth is only 6 000 to 10,000 years old. This is in direct conflict with scientific reality, and the true reading of Genesis. It’s embarrassing to see them try to add up the years from Adam (who they think only lived 930 years), on down to Jesus, who was born in 7 BC. They deny the existence of humanity before Adam and Eve, which were formed from the dust of the Earth. So where do they put Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthals? They claim that there was “no death before Adam”, but that is not found in scripture. Those fools at Answers in Genesis who think the earth is only 6,000 years old! How ridicuolus! All those inconsistencies and their absurd methodology of toting up the ages of the patriarchs…but then I read on. Adam was formed in about 7200 BC. The modern animals, along with the birds, were made in about 7100 BC, and Eve came along in about 7000 BC. I’m guessing that the animals lived in and out of the Garden, and Adam probably took Eve out on sight-seeing trips to lands surrounding the Garden. They did this for 2,733 years., until Eve ate of the evil tree in 4267 BC. It is then that the years of Adam’s age begins to be counted, because that is when he “began to die”. So from 7200 BC, till 3337 BC, when Adam died, Adam had lived for 3,863 years. The reason the sequence of events in Genesis chapter one, do not agree with those in Genesis chapter two, is because Moses was writing about two different time periods. So actually, Genesis is declaring the...
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Hey, boys and girls, does anyone remember the IDEA clubs? IDEA was short for Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness, and the plan was that they’d form all these advocacy groups at universities all over the country, and from there, take over the world! It was going to be a REVOLUTION…one driven by dishonest, conservative Christians who wanted to roll back the progressive agenda and install a devout theocracy in its place. The IDEA club is where Casey Luskin got his reputation as a diligent little gerbil for the cause. He was one of the founders of the model organization at UC San Diego, which is highlighted on the main IDEA Center club page. Amusingly, it’s a dead link now. Likewise, if you read the various blurbs on that site, there are ever-shifting numbers of these clubs around: they claim a high of 35 worldwide, and have a pull-down menu listing them all, but you will click in vain — it doesn’t work, and the links go nowhere. Elsewhere, they say they’ve got 25 active clubs, but at the bottom of the page there are a collection of links to them…they’ve got 10. All of them lead to empty placeholder pages on the IDEA center site, except one, which futilely tries to take you to a defunct Geocities site. It’s a dismal and empty virtual ghost town. Visit it and listen carefully and you might hear the sad sighs of creationists long gone, and maybe occasionally the cackling, triumphant laughter of a rational human being passing by to gaze on the fading works of intelligent design, and gloat. Meanwhile, the Secular Student Alliance has been booming, with 378 groups. The links actually work on their page. Make the comparison. It’s clear where the momentum lies.

Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn’t the slightest smattering of background, and he keeps falling flat on his face. It’s hilarious! The Discovery Institute is so hard up for competent talent, though, that they keep letting him make a spectacle of his ignorance. I really, really hope Luskin lives a long time and keeps his job as a frontman for Intelligent Design creationism. He just makes me so happy. His latest tirade is inspired by the New York Times, which ran an article on highlights from the coelacanth genome. Luskin doesn’t think very deeply, so he keeps making these arguments that he thinks are terribly damaging to evolution because he doesn’t comprehend the significance of what he’s saying. For instance, he sneers at the fact that we keep finding conserved elements in the genome, because as we all know, there are lots of conserved elements. Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was found between Hox-gene-associated DNA across these organisms isn’t very surprising. Read more