The good news: Cynthia Dunbar will not be heading the state board of education.
The bad news: the governor picked Gail Lowe, a Christianist sheep, who will probably do whatever Dunbar tells her to do, anyway.
Don’t bother cheering, a few faint moans and groans before you Texans buckle up and head back to the front lines to battle the forces of ignorance will do.
Dunbar is the creationist, anti-education kook that Governor Perry of Texas is considering putting in charge of the state board of education. Slacktivist explains the problem with this — putting someone who wants to destroy the public education system in charge of the public education system is like making an arsonist the fire chief.
And actually, it’s not as much a criticism of Dunbar — she’s an out lunatic — but of the system in general, that a leading politician would think this kind of appointment is at all appropriate.
And that’s not good. John Lynch rips into Dembski’s views on Alfred Russell Wallace, and Dembski’s mistakes are legion and major. Wallace is an interesting guy, and it’s always a shame when Discovery Institute propagandists start mangling yet another aspect of history, philosophy, and science.
Sure, you’re jealous that I won a prize off of all your back-breaking mouse clicking. So here’s your chance to win $100 for just clicking a few keys in the right order. It’s a creative writing contest, in which you have to come up with the most original and amusing creation myth. Just think — you could be the creator of the next Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Look what came in the mail today:
It’s an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind! It’s impossible to read in this photo, but it has a nice engraving on the back: the Creation Minute logo, and this message.
To PZ Myers
In hopes that your quest for TRUTH will end with God.
The CSE Team
Isn’t that nice? I’d been hoping they’d add some little distinguishing touch like that to it — it makes for a splendid victory trophy.
I’m going to be speaking at the Secular Student Alliance conference on 8 August, and before that, you may recall, I announced that we were going on a little field trip to Ken Ham’s bunco joint in Kentucky, on Friday, 7 August. We’re trying to organize a bit, so SSA sent me the notice below. Preregister and get a big discount on the entry fee, and SSA is also looking for more people to help with coordinating travel.
Register to get the $10 entry fee at https://secularstudents.wufoo.com/forms/creation-museum-with-pz-myers-registration/. You have to pay in advance but you get the $10 entrance rate, rather than the $22 that you’d have to pay at the door. People have to register by 7/23 to get this rate.
We’re arranging carpools through www.rideshare.us using lookup code PZ2Creation. Anyone coming to the Museum and/or heading up to Columbus afterwards for the conference is strongly encouraged to post their rides if they’d be willing to take a student along with them. Students can also post ads for rides if they need to get from one place to the other.
We also have some (free!) housing available in Columbus for Thurs night for any students from out of town who need a place to crash before heading down to the museum. Interested parties should contact Jon the Intern In Charge of Housing at jonathan.sussman@secularstudents.org.
Sign up now!
This is so stupid it hurts. Check out the Missing Universe Creation Museum: it’s got all the usual creationist jabber. No transitional fossils, all mutations are harmful, and my favorite, prominently quoted, “If you don’t believe God created all living things, male and female, in 6 days…How many millions of years was it between the first male and the first female?” How about no time at all, they coevolved? And you must take their evolution test — it will definitely make you laugh.
After you’ve browsed the site for a bit, they also have a poll. They want to know how effective they are at convincing you. Maybe you should tell them.
Evolution, and now only Evolution
46.1%
Evolution, and now only Creation
6.15%
Evolution, and now Both
3.07%
Creation, and now only Creation
29.2%
Creation, and now only Evolution
9.23%
Creation, and now Both
0%
Both, and now only Creation
0%
Both, and now only Evolution
1.53%
Both, and now Both
4.61%
All right, commenters, you aren’t doing your job. I get enough creationist nonsense in my private email, you are the ones who are supposed to smash the creationist lackwits who are babbling in the comments here. Now one of them, this fellow Grant, is apparently unsatisfied with the drubbing you were supposed to give him, and is now trying to pester me personally by email.
I’m also going to rebuke you Australians — he’s one of yours, running some kind of web design studio, where he claims 14 years of experience in “Science”. Come on, take this personally and rip into him.
You believe the world is older than 6000 years. I believe it is not. Do you want to call me a dingbat also? Or can you possibly raise your intelligence level a little higher to discuss things more maturely. (I actually believe we need some laws to protect the earth, unlike the senator)
If you know science, and I’m hoping you do, you will know that science CANNOT prove what happened at the beginning of the earth (whenever it was). All both sides can do is look at the evidence and analyse it to see if it fits their theory. So far, I can’t see how it disproves my belief in 6000 years, so my belief stays. You can insult my intelligence if you like (you probably do), but it doesn’t change the facts about what science can and can’t prove.
It would be nice if both sides could have sensible meaningful discussions over their beliefs and interpretations, but, unfortunately, many on the evolution/billions of years side aren’t interested in proper debate, only in insulting those opposing them – which suggests something about their intelligence, perhaps? One person once suggested that people who believe in an age of 6000 were worse than Islamic terrorists! That is absolutely ridiculous. When was the last time a young-earther killed 3000 people in a day?
I am not a scientist, but many scientists disagree on this (and indeed many other matters), and they are well-recognised, well-respected scientists. I have read much about this (from both sides), I have been presented one side of the argument by media and society, but I have decided that 6000 years actually makes sense to me based on the evidence.
Please refrain from the unintelligent, insulting, degrading name calling jus tbecause you disagree.
Yeah, he’s a dingbat, to put it mildly. The age of the earth is not a matter of personal belief, where you can just say “I have my facts and you have yours, and we draw different conclusions from them” — we actually have a huge body of mutually overlapping and supporting lines of evidence from physics, geology, astronomy, chemistry, and biology that all converge on the same answer: the earth is billions of years old. The only way Grant can claim that it makes sense to believe the earth is only 6000 years old is for him to completely ignore (or, more likely, be completely ignorant of) the evidence.
So how about turning this thread into a summary of the evidence for the age of the earth? Go to it, people, tear him apart with the science. Let’s see him respond here to the facts, and his lack of knowledge thereof.
Oh, and don’t insult him for just disagreeing. You’ll have to insult him for being a frakkin’ arrogant ignoramus.
It’s the Arizona electorate’s moment of shame. The earth has been here for 6000 years and we haven’t destroyed it yet, so we don’t need no stinkin’ laws to protect the environment!
Yes, Texas could. After ditching creationist dentist Don McLeroy as head of the state board of education, Governor Rick Perry is now considering Cynthia Dunbar for the job. Dunbar is the author of a book called One Nation Under God, and despises public education…just the person to put in charge of public education, right?
In a book published last year, Dunbar argued the country’s founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government” and that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test.” She endorses a belief system that requires “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”
Also in the book, she calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”
The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even “tyrannical,” she wrote, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.
The discussion in that article is bizarre. Crazy Dunbar is regarded as a likely choice because her selection would make far-right conservatives happy; they don’t even want a moderate Republican to be considered for the job. And Dunbar claims that she is just the person to bring together the various factions on the current board!
