Evolution is a Jewish conspiracy

The essay starts off stupidly enough.

In 1867 Karl Marx dedicated DasKapital to Charles Darwin.

Actually, no, he didn’t. It’s a fairly common lie in creationist circles, though, just like the others sprinkled throughout the story.

Modern creation science is led by an array of top-flight Ph.D. scientists, including biochemists, paleontologists, astronomers and geologists. It presents a formidable battery of evidence now knocking hundreds of holes in traditional evolutionary arguments. As never before, scientific creationism debunks the contrived “evidence” that evolutionary theory has fed on since Darwin.

No, it isn’t. Creation science is led by a gang of ignorant clods who can’t read a paper without mangling it.

But OK, so far this is just your standard modus operandi for creationists. The really weird stuff is shouted out in the title: JEWISH SUPREMACISTS USE EVOLUTION TO CORRUPT MANKIND. Did you know that evolution is a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt Western civilization?

Why doesn’t the scientific community abandon Darwin’s failed hypotheses? Simple: The Jewish-dominated media and educational establishment are determined that, like unconditional support of Israel, Holocaust mythology, hate laws, and “civil rights” favoritism, there will be no end to the relentless force-feeding of evolution. Belief in evolution is a prerequisite for Jewish supremacism’s new-world order.

Yet anti-Zionist leadership on the right remains oblivious to the fact that evolution is the largest, ugliest, most aggressive tentacle of the Jewish revolutionary octopus. Anti-Zionists are often evolutionists, claiming that Jews evolved in a way that makes them inherently degenerate, subversive, and corruptive. They make the most Luciferian, dehumanizing fable ever invented by pseudo-science into a pillar of their thinking!

The Reverend Ted Pike is kind of obsessed with Jews. They’re behind everything.

You see, the degenerate Jews promote evolution, which led the Nazis to kill Jews, and we must organize resistance to the Jewish agenda and the Judaic threat, and we absolutely must support Israel without question. Every paragraph drips with anti-semitic bigotry, but at the same time he rants against the wicked anti-Zionists.

I’ve seen this often in fundamentalist Christians. Jews aren’t really people; they’re just props in the script of their eschatology. We have to keep them around because the True Final Solution is for Jesus to exterminate most of them and convert the survivors, and if we jump the gun and kill them all now, why, that would invalidate the Bible, which would be wicked.

The problem we face today originates in Jewish rebellion to Christ. It is primarily a moral issue which cannot be addressed by dehumanizing Jews or violence. It must be met with reason and persuasion, even love. The Bible presents Jewish apostasy as part of a long-range scenario that will ultimately result in anti-Christ world rule but also redemption of a remnant of Jews out of great tribulation at Christ’s second coming. The problem of Jewish supremacism ultimately is Christ’s problem, to be resolved by Him, not military or persecutive measures.

This is why Adolf Hitler and the Nazis must be damned. Not because they killed people, but because they lead us into “anti-biblical, evolutionary, racist errors”. We must support Israel because it’s a kind of holding pen for the Jews, where they will be annihilated in Armageddon, and you’re a bad, bad person if you begin the slaughter prematurely.

Despite the fact that I don’t have any evidence of any Jewish background in my lineage, I do have to cop to being an ugly evolutionary tentacle, and there are most certainly Jews in my readership. Does it make you feel all warm and happy and safe to peek into the minds of some of the most ardent Christian supporters of Israel?

Focus on the Fallacy

Oy, this will make your head hurt…mainly because you won’t be able to handle the degree of stupidity involved in this argument. This is a video from Focus on the Patriarchy that makes an analogy: gay marriage is as unnatural and impossible as gravity pushing objects upward, and trying to claim that trying to legislate equality is as silly as trying to legislate the behavior of objects in a gravitational field.

And this is from an organization that has tried to legislate creationism into truth.

(via Jen)

There goes the Florida tourism industry

The Florida legislature has just banned sex.

An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices; providing an effective date.

At least there are a few loopholes. “It’s alright, officer, she’s judging my conformation and I’m studying for the NAVLE!”

Also, Disneyworld won’t care. They suck the sex right out of everything, anyway.

For your end-of-the-world planning…

Salon has a tidy summary of the end-of-the-world claims of Harold Camping.

On May 21, “starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth,” he says. The true Christian believers — he hopes he’s one of them — will be “raptured”: They’ll fly upward to heaven. And for the rest?

“It’s just the horror of horror stories,” he says, “and on top of all that, there’s no more salvation at that point. And then the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and planet Earth will be destroyed forever.”

There you have it: plan your parties for next week at 6pm in your local time zone (how convenient!). You can all count down to the great big 6pm earthquake, and brace yourselves and your drinks just before it hits.

I’ll be hanging out with Jamie Kilstein just before our event at the Washington DC CFI. I’ll have the iPad with me, ready to blog about all the Republicans zooming up into the sky. I’ll be sure to mention any unusual signs and portents on Twitter (hashtag: #RAPTURE) as I stand in the heart of Babylon during the big show.

Obstinate and oblivious

This past weekend, I was feebly confronted by a Canadian creationist, David Buckna, with a list of his objections to evolution. I spent a fair amount of time trying to hammer him with the answers, and the most remarkable thing was that every time we’d start digging into a topic, he’d suddenly change subjects to another item on his list, and then, later, he’d switch back to the original topic at the very beginning of his harangue, as if I’d never said anything. And now he’s pestering me in email, sending me more quotes (that’s all he’s got — no thoughts, just quotes) and rehashing pointlessly the same things I explained to him before.

I thought of him when someone sent me a link to Dare2Share Ministries. It’s an evangelical site that supposedly teaches you how to argue with people of different beliefs. I believe I may have run into some of their zombies before.

Take, for instance, the section on how to convert Erin the Evolutionist. The first part is a section describing what Erin believes about evolution, god, the trinity, Jesus, the bible, the afterlife, and salvation — and oh, wondrous world, it actually gets it right. Erin thinks the Bible is a collection of myths, and doesn’t believe in any of those other things.

Then the second part is supposed to be about how a good Christian would handle each of those topics in a conversation, and there’s where it all goes wrong. Every entry on god, Jesus, etc. simply cites the Bible’s claims. That’s it. Somehow, they nominally recognize that we don’t accept the authority of the Bible, but their bot-like brains can only react with Bible verses. This isn’t a tactical guide to openly discussing ideas, it’s a regurgitation game that can only produce more mindless Bucknas.

And then they have suggestions for ideas to break through those Evolutionists sciencey minds.

For example, the earth is the perfect distance from the sun. If it were just a few miles closer, we’d all burn up. A few miles further out, and we’d all freeze to death!

They also suggest trying “Paschal’s [sic] Wager” on ’em. Or this:

If they ask questions like: “how do you know which God?” — focus on the claims of Christ as being the only way and his proving it by coming back from the dead.

I’m not impressed. Anyone following the suggestions at Dare2Share is simply going to flop there looking dead stupid. Is this a sneaky game by some clever atheist trying to sabotage evangelicals?

I guess fish don’t count

I do experiments on fish. I’ve killed tens of thousands of embryos, but, you know, I take care to minimize pain, and do it for a purpose that can’t be achieved any other way; I also have to answer to committees that enforce ethical conduct in animal care and use.

No such rules apply if you are a Christian priest.

Well, yesterday’s sermon was a big hit! We had a mass execution of 200 feeder fish that I pulled out of a fish tank and then threw all over the floor. The kids were in shock and then started to pic them up and put them back into the fish tank. Obviously, most of them died in the effort…the point however was made that they cared ore about .15 cent feeder fish then they do about their friends dying w/o Christ.

Damned straight. I certainly hope more people care about living creatures than they do about what weird religious sect their friends have adopted.

I am also not surprised that kids are shocked to discover their priest has such a callous disregard for life — I hope it was the first step in freeing some of their minds from the embrace of the Christian death cult.

There is no case for Hell

I cannot imagine being Ross Douthat. There’s just something so bizarre and twisted in his brain that I cannot empathize at all with his point of view — it’s a brain in which all the proteins have been crosslinked by the fixative of religion. Now he’s arguing that Hell must exist.

As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence with human anguish.

These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press.

Wait. There might be another factor here, you know. How many unearthly infernos have occurred, and how would we get news about them? Douthat is unhappy that all we hear about is mere “ordinary” infernos like the Holocaust and disasters in Haiti, and we’re all worked up about those, but hey, what about the Queekwan Rebellion on Fomalhaut VII, or the outcome of the theological debate on the nature of ectoplasmosis in Heaven’s sixth ward? Why aren’t the newspapers making a big deal about those catastrophes, huh?

This is just weird enough to discombobulate me already, but where he loses me is where he thinks the omission of supernatural news from beyond is a very bad thing.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

So we’re less human because we care far more about real human catastrophes than we do about lobstermen in outer space or archangel celebrity gossip? This does not follow. This does not make sense.

There’s also a peculiarly inverted perspective on the issue. Douthat argues that Hell must exist because we wish it to exist, to create a particular desirable environment to shape humanity’s moral development.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”

No, no, no. This is so backwards. That he wishes something to be so does not mean it must exist; it is so primitively theological to argue that “X exists because it should” rather than “X exists because there is evidence for it”. But worse, there it is again, the diminution of the real for the fantasies of his poor imagination.

The birth of my children was not an unimportant event to me. It is not humanism to look down on a wonderful, human event like two people joining together to produce a child and declare it meaningless unless we’re also dwelling on an existential horror invented by self-serving priestly parasites. I could see important choices on the horizon, real-world responsibilities and actions, that would make a huge difference in the lives of myself, my wife, and my kids, and I don’t need imaginary goads to motivate me.

So confused is Douthat about what is real and imaginary that he chooses to end his little essay with a ‘difficult’ theological question that is…well, you have to see it to believe it.

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

No. Not only does heaven not exist, but Tony Soprano is a fictional character who did not really exist in the first place.

Also, about Gandhi? He’s dead. He has ceased to exist. He’s not anywhere anymore.

These are not difficult questions, unless your brain has been addled by religious damage.

The Republican solution

Oh, my. The situation is dire. Texas is in big trouble.

TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME:

WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; and

WHEREAS, a combination of higher than normal temperatures, low precipitation and low relative humidity has caused an extreme fire danger over most of the State, sparking more than 8,000 wildfires which have cost several lives, engulfed more than 1.8 million acres of land and destroyed almost 400 homes, causing me to issue an ongoing disaster declaration since December of last year; and

WHEREAS, these dire conditions have caused agricultural crops to fail, lake and reservoir levels to fall and cattle and livestock to struggle under intense stress, imposing a tremendous financial and emotional toll on our land and our people; and

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

Texans, you have my sympathy. But don’t worry! You have a dynamic governor and a responsive legislature that will do everything it can to aid drought-stricken farmers and parched cities. They will provide the Republican solution.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto signed my name and have officially caused the Seal of State to be affixed at my Office in the City of Austin, Texas, this the 21st day of April, 2011.

Isn’t that helpful?

Feeding the fame whore a little more

Scott Adams once again demonstrates his pointy-headed stupidity with an appallingly irrational rationalization of his sock puppetry. He’s got some new excuses, I will give him that.

Guess what, he may have been naughty, but at least he’s not a mass murderer.

On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.

Great. So if ever I’m caught kicking a puppy or lying on the internet, all I need to do is explain that I didn’t kill six million Jews, so you can all forgive me. Of course, I don’t think anyone accused Adams of genocide or suggested that he needed to be locked up for life like a Hannibal Lecter, so that’s all rather irrelevant.

His other excuse is that he needed to create a sock puppet to correct misinformation about himself.

The messenger with a strong self-interest is automatically non-credible, and should be. There are some types of information that can only be communicated by an unbiased messenger. And the most unbiased messenger in the world is one that is imaginary, such as my invisible friend, PlannedChaos.

There is no such thing as an unbiased messenger, but we can still value independent input. The problem with a sock puppet is that it is an effort to create an illusion of independence and less bias, but we know it isn’t — that is, we know it if we’re a little smarter than Scott Adams. PlannedChaos, his pseudonym, is even less trustworthy and credible than Scott Adams himself because PlannedChaos has the same biases as Scott Adams, but is unconstrained by the consequences to his reputation.

Not that Adams seems particularly concerned about his reputation anyway—I think he has fully embraced his inner douchebag and is now simply happy to get people to look at him.

Why sockpuppetry is stupid

Because when you’re exposed, you look like an even more gargantuan idiot and pathetic narcissist. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has been discovered to have tried to pad his reputation with a fake ID … he’s used the pseudonym “PlannedChaos” to go around the web praising Scott Adams as a “certified genius”.

You know, it’s a good rule of thumb that if you have to announce that you’re a genius, you aren’t a genius.

I’ve been remarking on Adams’ stupidity for years. He’s a creationist apologist who doesn’t understand science, and the kind of insipid apologist for religion who thinks Pascal’s wager is a good argument. It’s no surprise that he had to cobble up imaginary sycophants to make himself look good.

And then, of course, there’s the classic, standard Adams riposte whenever he’s exposed as a fool. Sure, he said something stupid, he’ll say, but he did it because he’s funny and you are even dumber for taking him seriously. It’s no surprise that that is his response now.

I’m sorry I peed in your cesspool. For what it’s worth, the smart people were on to me after the first post. That made it funnier.

That schtick wore out ages ago.