There was one in Indianopolis, and snarky people attended. I would think that at best they’d have a succession of people standing up at a lectern, looking shamefaced and confused before shrugging and sitting down with nothing to say, but apparently it went on for days.
This description of one speaker illuminates the process.
I have to say he did not disappoint. It really seemed to be two halves of non-related speeches spliced together. The first half of the speech was talking about how terrible American Society has become since 1963 when the Supreme Court ruled to take God out of schools. He began rambling statistics like unwed pregnancy in 10-14 year olds has gone up 553% since 1963 and violent crime up 998% or something like that. My jaw was on the floor and he didn’t bother to cite a source. The next half of his speech was about the Great Flood and how Pangaea split with the tower of Babel. He went on about how God gave all nations some sort of specialty and that’s why great scientist and geniuses come out of Europe. He was tracking the lineage of Peleg and Ham. Turns out Peleg isn’t related to Pele nor did he have a peg leg. Also, Ham’s offspring were not called bacon. He did let us know that AIDS came from having sex with monkeys and baboons. At least this year he didn’t blame AIDS on the gays.
Now I understand. When you don’t have evidence, make some up.
I do like the image of plate tectonics explained by god smiting a tower in Mesopotamia and sending North America skittering westward to create the Atlantic Ocean. And the idea that Pangaea could be found on earth roughly, according to YEC chronology, in 600BCE is hilarious.
(Also on Sb)
Even if you ignore the insane percentages, note how he makes it sound like the unwed part is the only thing wrong with 10-14 year olds getting pregnant.
I think this speaker was confusing Earth with Azeroth.
Pregnancy rates are up because Christians refuse to allow birth control in schools. It sure as heck isn’t because of atheism.
If unwed pregnancy in the 10-14 age bracket has gone up (still waiting for a source that isn’t “~some Jesus freak’s ass”), I’d venture a guess that married pregnancy in the same age range has gone down by the same amount. You know, what with it not legal to marry 10 year olds and all (at least in most places). Also, should a group of Christians be bringing up pedophilia? It seems like the irony is so think that even a bunch of godbots would pick it up. I guess I underestimate the stupid.
Irony is so thick*. Ugh.
If teachers could go back to leading prayers, then teenagers would stop having sex, just like it used to be!
If teenage pregnancy went up because God was taken out of schools does that means he was never at home?
Somebody explain to me how a omnipresent deity can be taken out of anything…
And what fraction of those teen parents-to-be are Christian? And how does that compare to the level of religiosity among those kids who manage to reach adulthood without the same mishap?
Here’s a Washington Post story from from 2007:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/05/AR2007120501208.html
Note the following:
Damn that notoriously godless Reagan!
One thing I thought a bit amusing about this whole thing was the part about people having sex with monkeys was the cause of AIDS.
Now, granted, when I was a kid that’s exactly what I thought when I first learned we got AIDS from other primates. But I’ve since learned there’s a much more obvious, much more reasonable explanation: people hunt monkeys. It’s called bushmeat. And sometimes the hunters get injured, and sometimes the blood of their victims would get in their wounds. Even though [i]sometimes[/i] people may have sex with monkeys, the hunting of bushmeat was obviously far more common a practice (ape sex seems difficult if you ask me…our penises are much larger than theirs, and the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans with whom it might be possible to have sex are much stronger than we are).
The Azeroth comment made me think of how much energy would be required to move the continents that far, and what would happen if that amount of energy hit the earth in one spot in one instant. I don’t think the result would be the in the “continents move, life goes on.” It would be more along the lines of “planet is destroyed.” This guy needs to stop thinking Warcraft and start thinking Death Star.
If you have Magic Satan Cooties then they create a negative god field which pushes out the Jesus.
I’d explain more, but it’s complicated and there’s maths, which tiny tiny atheist brains cannot understand.
Louis
Perhaps this is where the data come from:
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/prayer_and_bible_removed_schools.htm
Note that in almost every case, the cites are weasel-worded (“basic data from … “) and graphs truncated to make them appear more dramatic.
I’m curious. Was the speaker Walt Brown? The description sounds like his “Hydroplate theory”, which is good for a laugh if you Google it.
The Pangaea idea is particularly funny, since the parts that would eventually make up Mesopotamia were way out on one edge. That must have been a heck of a smiting by old Jehovah to get a super-continent to split by whacking it on the edge.
After reading the article more closely, I found the speaker to be one Dr. Willie Dye Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Th.D., D.M., D.D., D.D.
I’m not making this up — see http://nciba.us/home.htm.
Uh, right. the continents drifted in a couple days after the tower of babel fell. . . Hey, as long as we’re throwing biology under a bus, might as well toss geology and physics as well!
Now, PZ, whenever you get the urge to say the E-Word, just think “God did it” and “I wasn’t There!” until you get over the urge.
Oh, and a pre-frontal lobotomy would probably help. Or, barring that, a serious dose of Thorazine every morning.
Well, since the footnotes in the Book of Mormon have Lehi and his family leaving Jerusalem c. 600 BC, it would definitely make the LDS narrative more plausible…
Willie Dye? Yes, but he will live again!
I swear, they only came to Indianapolis for the excessive conference space. We’re not really all like that.
It specificially implies that the distance between New York and Rabat has grown by an average of 1.4 miles (2.2 km) each year.
@Antiochus Epiphanes: Obviously, that would be silly. The continental movement happened all at once. Much more sensible!
Yeah, you just need something to make it stop real fast too.
A wonderful debunk of NehpyFree’s take on Walt Brown’s “Hydroplate Theory(gag!!)” is on WildewoodClaire1’s Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/WildwoodClaire1#p/u
She’s a retired coal geologist with a brutal wit who takes on Creotard flood geology (plus she makes videos on REAL geology, which is really neat).
If you value your neural synapses, DO NOT immerse yourself directly in NephyFree’s channel.
“After reading the article more closely, I found the speaker to be one Dr. Willie Dye Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Th.D., D.M., D.D., D.D.
I’m not making this up — see http://nciba.us/home.htm.”
Holy! Scanning the site desperately trying to figure out what institution awarded all of those Ph.D’s!
I mean, I could use a Ph.D myself. I’ve got a couple of weekends to kill.
Fundie xians have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the general population.
They also have higher rates of abortion than the general population.
Ask Bristol Palin how and why that works.
Well, if you assume the North American plate on it’s own is 75000000 km^2 in size, and 20 km thick, with an average density of 3 g / cc. So each cubic kilometre weighs 3 000 000 000 tons, making a total mass of 4.5e10^18 tons.
And if you allow the distance from New York to Telaviv is 9,200km, so we’ll round up the distance to 10,000km
And since Etemenanki was destroyed in in 600BCE, we’ll be generous and say the biblical tower of Babel was in 1000BCE.
Also, the first accurate maps of the Pacific Basin were from Erik the Red around 1000AD, so we’ll say that the time it took Pangea to splinter to present day locations was 2000 years, then movement magically stopped
So therefore the speed required is (10000 kilometers) / (2000 years) = 0.000158443823 m/s, and you have the mass of 4.5e10^21 kilograms.
That momentum is, well, 7.129972035x 10^17 newton seconds. now to figure out how much friction that would cause, and if it would boil the Pacific ocean…
See, that’s the advantage of creationism, it makes you creative.
OK, unfortunately none of it is exactly…impressive.
Glen Davidson
Nick:
Tsk, tsk. You can’t refute Christian thinking with mere numbers. Get with it! You gotta have faith.
Color me shocked. Two minutes of googling “teen pregnancy rates” reveals that the rate of teen pregnancy was at its highest in 1957, that rates dropped to a 30 year low in 2005, when there was a small increase in rates from 2005-2006.
They got the direction wrong, and they got the magnitude wrong. In fact, their only redeeming quality seems to be that they are consistently wrong, and if they say a thing it is almost certainly wrong.
I’d cite sources, but it’s such an easy google dig I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader.
Well as a fundamentalist neighbor of Emerson’s once said, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, therefore God.
What’s this about smacking the Tower? I don’t think the Bibbely-Babble book says anything about smacking the tower, just that “confusing the tongues” business. Perhaps there’s a little extra-Biblical information being added to the hodgepodge by these so-called Biblical literalists.
Nick @ # 26: … the first accurate maps of the Pacific Basin were from Erik the Red around 1000AD…
Vikings vs Polynesians, with samurais, Incas, Maoris, and Eskimos! Get me a scriptwriter, stat!
FORTY GRILLION PERCENT
I don’t know percent of what or what the increase means or what it’s about or anything at all, I just like the number.
Was the US’s specialty the death penalty, letting uninsured people die, or just something to do with death?
And this was Indianapolis, Iowa, right? Right?
Take-home message: creationists believe plate tectonics started with Pangaea.
Good point. IIRC, god the nice guy Sky Monster, confused their language because he was afraid of humans who cooperate. So they all just walked away.
As usual with the old genocidal clown, it also didn’t work. We’ve done a lot more than pile mud bricks on top of each other these days.
They do with the bible what they do with science. Just make stuff up and hope nobody bothers to look. Henry Morris did that with his claim that the Theory of Evolution was handed down from satan to Nimrod at Babel. He cites a bunch of bible verses that have nothing to do with his lie.
Naked Bunny with a Whip @ 2;
Now, let’s not jump to conlusions. Given what he said, he could just as easily have been referring to this sundering.
We have to give him the benefit of the doubt on that, don’t we…
;-)
Naked Bunny with a Whip @2:
I believe you got the wrong Azeroth. Of course, the gate-mismanagement-makes-the-world-drown was actually the previous world, Shiuan.
Unoriginal ideas, who would have thought it?
ogremk5:
Wrong. The birth rates are up because… Actually, wait.
No they’re not
Before attempting to come up with a more reasonable explanation for something you’ve heard an asshat babble at you, always make sure there’s actually something to explain.
Students were causing trouble for teachers in the 1950’s. Blackboard Jungle came out in 1955. What happened in the 1950’s… Under God was put in the Pledge of Allegiance and In God We Trust was put on the money the rest of the money that it wasn’t on before….
@Tim DeLaney
Well it seems that at least one Mormon doesn’t like Dr Dr Dr Dr Dye esq, PhD or whatever he’s called. He seems to have some dodgy friends too.
And Mr Dye’s CV would look a lot better if he spelled “Hadrian” correctly. Haydrian? Fucktard.
Dr Wile’s CV seems more sound, but he did appear to stop doing science and start doing god in 1996…
To be fair (not that they deserve it), the big number from the ’50s is mostly due to 18-19 year olds, and was probably due to people getting married and having children much earlier (though of course it’s impossible to know how many of those were shotgun weddings). If you look at the original source (p. 2), the rate for 15-17 year olds hasn’t shown nearly as dramatic a change, though it was still about as high in 1960 as it was in 1991!
Dr. Willie Dye Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Th.D., D.M., D.D., D.D
looks like he used this report as a temp-let
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13982917/chicken.pdf
uncle frogy
Thanks for the original shout-out PZ. Glad to get the word spread around about the absurdity of the Creation Evidence Expo. I just finished writing up my thoughts on the “debate” they hosted later in the week and I’m dropping it here in the hopes that, if anyone is still reading this thread, they’ll check out how lame the rest of the Expo was.