Uh-oh. The word is out. Being an atheist evolutionist means all the porn you could want and being surrounded by big bags of money.
Good thing he left off the orgies. If people know about the orgies, we’d never get any peace.
When I decide to take a break from the mad scramble of organizing my classes, I really shouldn’t follow a whim and take a peek at Uncommon Descent. The lead article has this astonishing opening paragraph.
Remember the dark days of vestigal organs? You know, back when there was a list of 180 vestigal organs? Or remember the days of junk DNA – when repetitive DNA, large regions of non-protein-coding DNA, and all sorts of mobile DNA were assumed to be non-functional simply because the investigators had assumed Darwinism rather than design?
I’m half a century old. I remember a lot of things, but I don’t remember those.
Compare and contrast: science vs. creationism.
… try Denyse O’Leary sometime. She’s now written a list of predictions from ID, and I don’t think she understands the meaning of the word “prediction” in a scientific context. Eight of the nine are variants on the theme, “there will be no natural explanations for X,” which, try as we might, reveals that our demands for positive, productive explanations from the ID crowd go unheard, and they’d rather just whine that they don’t understand something, so we must not, either.
The one exception: she doesn’t believe the eco-doomsayers who predict that we will destroy all life on the planet. She seems entirely unaware that a) no one claims that — what’s predicted is economic discomfort, displacement of human populations, some species going extinct and others thriving, etc. — and b) this doesn’t represent a prediction of intelligent design, either.
If your brain hasn’t recovered from the ablation it suffered from the laser-like stupidity of Comfort, though, I don’t recommend reading O’Leary — two such traumas on top of one another can be permanently damaging (I can only do it because years of reading this crap has turned my cortex tough as leather.)
Ray Comfort has a blog, and one of his entries claims that the Bible is a science text, and that it is better than science. His style of argument is to first list a “fact” from the Bible (usually something that is completely open to interpretation, and he chooses to interpret it as being in conformity with modern science); then he mentions a corresponding fact derived from modern science, that always agrees with the Bible; then he lists something from “science then,” which is dead wrong.
It’s so clueless it hurts to read it.
Minnesota is going to be revising their science standards this year. Last time we went through this, it was a circus, with our education commissioner (the notorious Cheri Pearson Yecke) trying to pack the review committees with creationists and doing last minute swaps of committee-approved drafts with drafts edited by creationists. We had John Calvert show up at hearings, along with a few other home-grown kooks, including a guy with a replica of a giant leg bone that he claimed proved there were giants in the earth in those days.
This time around, though, we have guidelines that will limit the nonsense, we hope.
In its call for volunteers, the department offered a list of assumptions that will guide the committee. The assumptions deal with topics ranging from increased science rigor to new graduation requirements.
One assumption stands out. Assumption number seven: “Science standards will reflect the scientific facts, laws, and theories of the natural and engineered world and will not include supernatural, occult or religious ideas.”
Of course, I can hear the ID crowd right now: “ID isn’t about the supernatural — teach the alternative theories! Teach the controversy!” In that article, we already have Dave Eaton (another infamous local creationist) saying he he has no problem with the restriction. You know he’s already planning to try and subvert the process.
The video clip below is from a game called Noah’s Adventures. It’s awful—Noah sounds like a drunk with brain damage, the graphics look like a preschooler tried fingerpainting with his feces, and the whole plot is ridiculous.
Now here’s the question: is this the work of a sincere creationist, or is this the product of the evil atheist conspiracy, made with the intent of making creationists look like talentless, tasteless hacks? I can’t tell.
Greg Laden, that romantic evolutionary gastronome has several good posts on the mess in Florida (and, by the way, here’s a map if you’re having trouble keeping track of all those counties). These are documents produced by the activist creationists down there, and they really reveal how inept and uneducated these wankers are.
The Center for Inquiry in Austin hosted a meeting that asked the question, Will Texas Support 21st Century Science Education? The good news is that the place was packed, and there are a lot of rational, intelligent people in Texas who are fed up with the lunatics running the show and are motivated to do something about it. That’s kind of the theme here; we’re having a rising grassroots revolution here that’s going to throw these rascals out.
But here’s the bad news: we’ve been slacking off, and the raving fundie nitwits have taken a lot of political power.
Here’s why the situation for science is so dire right now. Science standards are coming up for review later this year, and right now, the State Board of Education is not only run by a YEC, but out of the SBOE’s fifteen members, seven of them are YEC’s.
And it gets worse…there’s a chance that the Texas board will gain a creationist majority, and the Democratic party is absolutely spineless and worthless.
Now this part is important: Right now the fundies are running some fundie wingnut against Patricia Hardy, a non-fundamentalist, non-creationist Republican. If Hardy loses to this person, then the YEC’s will flip to a majority on the SBOE and every schoolchild in Texas will be assured of a 19th century education. In other words, they’ll be fuct, and Texas will become as bad a laughingstock as Kansas was a few years back.
What about the Democrats, you ask? Who are they running? Well, no one. Apparently the Democratic party in Texas doesn’t care about the SBOE, preferring to devote its efforts toward the legislature. So that means there’s no outright progressive, solidly pro-science candidate to vote for. The best we have is a moderate Republican. But that’s better than nothing, I imagine.
Now if you think Texas is bad, take a look at Florida. The school boards there are an amazing collection of the most ignorant and obtuse members of society — in Clay County, the board members went on and on, openly discussing the fact that they didn’t know the meaning of “theory” or “concept”, and then went ahead and voted to reject the theory of evolution. They had an overwhelming majority of the community members in attendance argue against their resolution and favoring teaching evolution (again, demonstrating that community members are not as stupid as their school boards), and the board ignored them to vote for the resolution (demonstrating that they are not representative, as well as ignorant.)
I can imagine how the residents of Texas and Florida feel. They’re trusting that their schools are well run, that smart, educated people are in charge of making curriculum decisions, and then one day they wake up and notice that a gang of dumb-as-rocks yahoos with a bizarre religious agenda are calling the shots … and just maybe, after Dover, they’re realizing that these gomers are going to cost the school district a million dollars, as well as crippling the science education of a whole cohort of students.
Wake up NOW. Look at your local school board, and realize that those races are important. Run for office yourself. Start a local group to promote better science education, and recruit candidates from your ranks. Get out and vote. Those counties where the fools have taken hold are facing a few years where the curriculum is going to be wrecked for the students — and those are years that are going to be simply lost to those students. Don’t let it happen to your schools.
Those wacky fellas behind the movie Expelled are at it again. First, we have an
interview with Ben Stein. You can tell that the interviewer has drunk deep of the Discovery Institute spring.
