The Unreasonable Faith blog has started a series on “An Evil God?”, documenting the horrible little stories and nasty tribal morality of the Bible.
He has already started with page 1. It’s a l o n g book, so he’s committing himself to a very long series, I think.
We have made Ken Ham very sad. Yay, bonus!
“We are disappointed with the zoo’s decision and its impact on the families and visitors to the region who would have enjoyed taking advantage of this opportunity to make this a truly memorable Christmas,” said Answers in Genesis and Creation Museum founder and president Ken Ham. “Both the Creation Museum and the Cincinnati Zoo have put together spectacular Christmas displays, and we were excited to partner with them to promote these events in a combination package that would have been of great value to the community.”
“My family and I have been Cincinnati Zoo members for more than 10 years now, so I am also personally saddened that this organization I esteem so highly would find it necessary to back out of this relationship. At the same time, I have learned that the zoo received hundreds of complaints from what appear to be some very intolerant people, and so I understand the zoo’s perspective. Frankly, we are used to this kind of criticism from our opponents, and so being ‘expelled’ like this is not a huge surprise,” Ham continued.
…
“Our museum will continue to promote this excellent zoo on our website and also in the printed material we pass out inside the museum. We are committed to promoting regional tourism. It’s a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith. Some of their comments on blogs reveal great intolerance for anything having to do with Christianity,” Ham added.
Awww, Ken just wanted to promote regional tourism. It wasn’t about trying to get validation from a legitimate research and educational institution, then. Right.
Let’s deal with some of his other claims.
They were not attacked for their Christian faith — that is one of the most common dodges of liars and con men and other scoundrels, to hide behind the petticoats of generic ‘faith’, when what they’re actually being criticized for is lying and cheating. Ken Ham’s Creation ‘Museum’ is despised because it is a temple to falsehood.
He keeps talking about expulsion and being expelled. Were we more successful than I could have imagined? Is the Creation ‘Museum’ closed? Are people hindered from visiting it? Have we blocked all ticket sales? No, unfortunately: all we’ve done is prevented a fraud from acquiring an entirely false veneer of authority by association. Save the martyr’s lament for a time when you haven’t been caught faking your credibility, Ken.
I haven’t been to the Cincinnati Zoo myself, but I’m willing to accept Ham’s claim that it is an excellent organization (I shouldn’t, really. Plaudits from Ken Ham is like a good restaurant review from Jeffrey Dahmer.) The zoo’s reputation is precisely what Ham was trying to trade on by linking his awful little collection of lies to them. We have successfully defending that good reputation by exposing a tie that would have undermined it.
The only intolerance here is an expectation of rigor, good science, and evidence-based reasoning from an educational institution. It’s what we’ll continue to promote, as long as hucksters like Ken Ham are out there trying to dilute our standards to allow biblical hogwash to stand on an equal footing with legitimate biology.
Speaking for this blog, I don’t have intolerance for Christianity — I simply lack any respect at all for that grand hodge-podge of delusions. We leave the intolerance to Christians, who are historically expert at practicing it.
There’s more! Ken Ham has a long whiny blog post up today, complaining about those intolerant evolutionists, and making the same tired complaints I dealt with above.
I can tell that Ham is bit peeved that we squelched his attempt to ride on the coattails of the zoo.
“While we are saddened”…”These people basically worship Darwin–they worship evolution and cannot tolerate anyone who doesn’t agree with them!”…”Sad that someone with an atheistic agenda can cause a business relationship to be dissolved”…”they resort to censorship and underhanded campaigns”…”we are used to such integrity bashing.”
But he can’t let it slide without trying to pretend it was all alright.
Thank you, P.Z. Myers, for thousands of dollars’ worth of media promotion for our Bible-upholding museum! Actually, this will benefit the Creation Museum much more in the long run.
For the right effect, you have to imagine Ken Ham blubbering that out through his tears. Sure, he got media attention — all of it pointing out that he failed, that he’d tried to sneak in a link to a legitimate educational institution, and that a few people with blogs were able to put a stop to him. He looks rather pathetic, don’t you think?
This is a depressing collection of short clips on the economy from Fox News. I know — why would anyone want to watch that?
Schadenfreude, baby.
These are from a year to two years ago. They’ve all got this fellow, Peter Schiff, who is explaining that our debt, our artificially inflated real estate market, and various other problems are going to throw us into a recession, the stock market is going to tank, and we’re going to face a financial crisis (he’s a real Cassandra, and like Cassandra, he was right). Fox News throws in a series of their pet analysts, including the odious Ben Stein and that awful Art Laffer who has been afflicting our country since Reagan, and they’re all laughing at him and promising a coming economic bonanza — like that the Dow will hit 16,000. It’s horrible and fascinating at the same time to see how bad the Fox talking heads are at their job.
These clowns, except for Schiff, have flopped spectacularly and clearly represent an invalid mode of thinking about the economy…but if you turn on Fox News now (not that I recommend it), you can still find these same incompetents populating their financial advice programming.
Seed Media has created a special offer: you can donate a subscription to Seed magazine to the school of your choice for only $14.95. It’s a good strategy in general: help out your local schools by giving their libraries good science resources.
It’s remarkable. Comfort gets something right.
The contention between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Bible’s account of creation is extremely significant. This is because if evolution is true, the Bible is a fallacy.
I know, it’s unbelievable. Comfort’s remarks usually set the bar for stupidity, so it’s astounding to find two sentences in his usual babble that actually make sense — yes, it is a significant conflict, and yes, the Bible is fallacious.
It would be nice if we could just stop there, allow the poor man a moment of glory, and leave him to bask self-contentendly in the belief that he is educable, but we can’t. That’s because his next paragraph departs from that brief high-water mark to plunge into the abyss of obtuse inanity.
If you have webcams, turn them on now. I’d like to record the multitudes sitting before my blog, jaws gaping like fish, followed by peals of laughter. This one is for the creationist record books.
Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half (“Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).” Ask A Scientist, Biology Archive, http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99927.htm.)
Wait, what? Darwin “theorized” no such thing. Humans reproduce sexually, as do all primates, as do all mammals, as do most vertebrates, as do a great many animals. There was no period where males and females evolved separately. The nice quote from Ask a Scientist refers to single-celled organisms — no human being has ever reproduced by splitting in half. We evolved from precursor populations containing both males and females.
This is often the most difficult thing about trying to argue with creationists. You get discombobulated by their most profound misconceptions, and you really do have to be prepared to start the discussion with the simplest, dumbest basics — it’s like trying to have a serious conversation about biology with a preschooler, although usually the preschoolers are far more open-minded and willing to learn. And these are the people who feel qualified to set the high school science curriculum.
How else could a naked clergyman get a potato in there?
Just a suggestion: if he’d been wearing two wetsuits while hanging his curtains, it would never have happened.
You all may recall the Holy Joe mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, who had a great plan to deal with urban crime: he bought 2,000 burlap bags so community leaders could dress in sackcloth and ashes and pray. Unfortunately, the federal authorities stuck to the old fashioned scheme of dressing sensibly and pursuing the evidence, and have now arrested Larry Langford on multiple counts of corruption. Curses! If only the Feds had gone with biblical policing scheme!
(via Techskeptic)
I just received a sampling of
Order of St. Nick’s Alternative Holiday Greeting Cards, so I have to give them a plug. If you’ve been looking for atheist Christmas cards, they’ve got ’em.
I was thinking of sending them to my family back in the Pacific Northwest, but I may have to get some more so I can send some to Bill Donohue and Bill O’Reilly, too.
Oh, my — they also have evil Christmas cards. Maybe those would be more appropriate for the Bills.
Last week’s Friday Cephalopod actually has an interesting story behind it. It was taken from a paper that describes the evolutionary radiation of deep-sea cephalopods.
First, a little background in geological history. Antarctica is a special case, in which a major shift in its climate occurred in the last 50 million years. If you look at a map, you’ll notice that Antarctica comes very close to the southern tip of South America; 50 million years ago, they were fully connected, and they only separated relatively recently due to continental drift.
We have a couple of comments from people who phoned the Cincinnati Zoo that suggest that the shameful pairing of the zoo with the Creation Museum is going to be revoked. I suspect that this was a case of an overzealous person in the marketing department grabbing an opportunity that sounded like good financial sense, without considering its implications to the educational and research mission of the zoo, and that the higher-ups with a bigger picture of their goals are a bit horrified, and are rapidly correcting the problem.
It has been verified: zap, the combo tickets on the zoo’s ticketing site have been eradicated. The Creation Museum is still promoting them, though…let’s hope they shamefacedly erase that page soon.
Any of you who wrote to the zoo — it might be nice if you send a follow-up commending them for their swift action.
Hah! The Creation Museum link has now gone dead. Our triumph is complete.
The story made the Cincinnati Enquirer:
A promotional deal between the Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum was scuttled Monday after the zoo received dozens of angry calls and emails about the partnership.
The promotion was billed as “Two Great Attractions, One Great Deal” and offered a package deal on tickets for the zoo’s annual Festival of Lights and a museum event called Bethlehem’s Blessings.
The deal appeared on web sites for both institutions Friday, but it was pulled by the zoo Monday morning after complaints about the partnership started pouring in.
Most of the protests echoed the same theme: the Creation Museum promotes a religious point of view that conflicts with the zoo’s scientific mission. The museum promotes a strict interpretation of the biblical version of how life began, and it suggests that dinosaurs and man once lived side by side.
