Mark Mathis, one of the people behind Expelled, must be doing the radio tour again. I heard he was on the Minneapolis Christian talk radio station today (I missed it, unfortunately—anyone else catch it?), and you can also hear him lying on the Coral Ridge Ministries podcast. Apparently, you can’t question neo-Darwinism in the classroom or in science; Mathis doesn’t know much about the arguments going on right now, does he? (He probably doesn’t care, since the alternatives being debated don’t involve Jesus). The rest of the show has some clueless git repeating the claim that Darwin led straight to Hitler.
Don’t bother listening unless you really want to be complete in following the nonsense they’re espousing…same ol’ same ol’.
Not to be a nag or anything, but have you tallied up the votes for December’s Molly yet, PZ?
It’s that fundamentalist psyche at work:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2008/01/fundamentalist-psyche.html
Wow, what about the part where this guy just realised that the Bible talks about homosexuality and abortion, but not global warming (how strange ?)
That’s a problem. How come the Bible is supposed to be the moral code for humanity given by God, and it doesn’t provide any advice on what to do about what is seen by a growing majority of younger evangelicals as a clear moral imperative and who are less concerned with sexual morality.
That’s a problem for the Theist Evolutionists : how does God change the “moral law” without sending us a new Book or a new Mesiah ?
That’s a problem for the Theist Evolutionists : how does God change the “moral law” without sending us a new Book or a new Mesiah ?
I thought that’s what the Mormons were all about.
I don’t think J.Smith said anything in the Book of Mormons about Global Warming…
…What does evolution have to do with moral relativism, anyways?
GDwarf sez:
I thought evolution pointed out that every living thing is related and, to be moral, we should take our relatives into account when deciding upon a course of behaviour.
Watch Mark Mathis lie
Lie, Mark Mathis, Lie!
PZ said: “But then I noticed in the credits for the movie that a certain familiar name is the associate producer, or ass-prod, as I’ll henceforth consider him.”
That’s right folks: The Ass-Prod(tm) rears his ugly head again.
A lot of Christians seem to have a child’s view of ethics: being good is doing what your parent tells you. Morals have to do with obedience. Therefore, without a central authority who “made” us and “made” good, there is no way to see anything as better than anything else. Thus, without God, anything goes.
The odd thing, of course, is that a morality and ethics anchored to principles like human flourishing and mutual respect is actually better grounded than obedience to the commands of a supernatural authority whose sense of right and wrong is grounded in whatever pleases it. Which turns out to be anything goes.
PZ et el, OT headsup:
An atheist writer at A Tiny Revolution is arguing that secularists are wasting their time fighting school board creationists because Christianist-driven military policy is far more lethal and damaging than is bad education.
I’d call the guy half right but the other half of the argument is a little daft.
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001989.html
I don’t think J.Smith said anything in the Book of Mormons about Global Warming…
no(?), but the book of mormon and Smith certainly did deal with the issue of “new moral law”, a new book, and a “new messiah”.
my point being that it’s easy when you can just MSU in order to satisfy any particular “requirement”.
no doubt the CC will also MSU in order to somehow shoehorn dogma to fit.
not like they haven’t done it before.
I initially misread and thought the post was titled “Watch Mark Mathis die.”
Just after the ID section of that video, they talked about making contraceptives available to children in Maine. Amazing that they didn’t mention any of the pertinent facts that *might* work against their no-contraceptives position:
“After an outbreak of pregnancies among middle school girls, education officials in this city have decided to allow a school health center to make birth control pills available to girls as young as 11… Portland’s three middle schools reported 17 pregnancies during the last four years, not counting miscarriages or terminated pregnancies that weren’t reported to the school nurse.”
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/10/18/middleschool.contraception.ap/index.html
MarkDH @ #7:
“I thought evolution pointed out that every living thing is related and, to be moral, we should take our relatives into account when deciding upon a course of behaviour.”
Common descent does point out that every living thing is related. Neither it nor anything else in evolutionary theory makes any prescriptions for morality, though. Science describes and models the world; it doesn’t tell us what to do with it.
Saying the Catholic Church led to Hitler is factually more accurate than saying Darwin led to Hitler. Why doesn’t any creationist see this obvious point?
One of Hitler’s stated heroes was Martin Luther (1483-1546), the founder of Protestantism. Luther’s plans for the Jews included burning their synagogues and destroying their houses.
Now that’s what I call a link.
Creationists like to use the term “neo-Darwinism” a lot while making arguments that clearly have nothing to do with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis or even anything more current than the 1860s. I think most of them are utterly oblivious where the term “neo-Darwinism” came from (these are, after all, the same sort of people who conflate cosmology and biological evolution) and only use it as a pejorative because it resonates with the familiar and thoroughly demonized terms “neo-conservative” and “neo-Nazi”.
We may be witnessing an interesting bit of language evolution in the process where “neo-” comes to mean sinister/super-extra-evil (much like how “-gate” came to mean a covered-up conspiracy.)
As a side effect of all the riffs on “Darwinism,” I noticed in one discussion elsewhere a commenter asking rather plaintively, “Surely science has discovered something since Darwin?” She was apparently wondering why science didn’t bring any new evidence to the table. Obviously she was getting her info from Creationist sources.
Yes, and the irony is mind-blowing – what evidence has creationism brought to the table, ever? – and having ones mind blown dozens of time each week does get a bit old. (I’m preaching to the choir here, but for those of you who have just joined us…) One cannot fault those scientists who may get a bit snippy about it after decades of refuting the same malformed talking points over and over.
James Burke did a TV series back in the early 80s called “The Day the Universe Changed.” I recommend Episode 8 (“Fit to Rule;” it’s on YouTube) in which Burke suggests that people grasped upon key concepts of Darwin’s theory in order to buttress their own political, social and racial ideas.
He covered three of those ideas: American capitalism, circa 1880-1910; Marxism and Nazism. Although he makes a good case, there’s a reason he subtitles the series “A Personal View.”
Kseniya, I could hardly believe what I was reading. I had no idea the Creationist half-truths and lies were so effective. Doesn’t that woman listen to a radio, even? Or open a newspaper? It might have been a Creationist Web site link Uncommon Descent, tho’ I try to avoid it. (Sometimes I get sucked into clicking a link from scienceblogs.) But there was some reason I could not respond and had little hope of her ever seeing my reply had I made one.
I’m still working on a contrary press kit for the movie’s arrival, but I’ve had a really hard time finding out more about Dawkins’ interview in the film. I STILL don’t know the full context of Dawkins’ quote in the preview clip about being “hostile to a rival doctrine” and I still don’t feel like I know the whole story on how and why Dawkins agreed to an interview with Ben Stein personally, as now seems to be the case.
Is anyone aware of any venue in which Dawkins has commented on these two things?
Is anyone aware of any venue in which Dawkins has commented on these two things?
did you try dawkins.net to see if any info. is forthcoming there?