Mathis on talk radio

Mark Mathis, the guy who did the interviews for the creationist movie Expelled, has been doing the Christian talk radio circuit lately. He was on in the Twin Cities yesterday, although I missed it … but he’s about to go live on WAMT 1190 in Florida, at 11:05 ET. Listen in, or even call in…make him dance.

The call-in numbers are 407-273-1190 and 888-300-3776, by the way. And the KKMS interview in the Twin Cities might be accessible here, I haven’t tried it myself.

OK, all done. What an amusing show! Mathis is your classic, standard creationist, constantly claiming (falsely) that evolution is about nothing but pure chance. He made the usual bogus statement that we biologist teach evolution as a fact rather than as a theory, which is precisely the reverse: we consider theory to be a higher order description of a phenomenon than a mere collection of facts, so we teach it as a theory and thereby emphasize its importance. We’d be trivializing it if we taught it as just a fact.

He also played the equivocation game: these are just different “views” and we should let students learn about “views” and express their “views”. Science isn’t just about opinions. We build a story on a framework of hard evidence, every step of the way. We don’t just say that such-and-such is our opinion, we have to present observations and experiments in support. We cannot do that with ID. They have no experiments. They have no observations that can’t be explained in better ways by evolutionary biology.

Finally, he was rather frantic about trying to turn the audience against me by declaring me an atheist, even plugging Pharyngula and urging everyone to go look and see that, oooh, PZ Myers has an atheist blog!

That ploy doesn’t work on me. I proudly admit to being a militant atheist and own up to my beliefs, unlike the Intelligent Design creationists, who are clearly ashamed to be Christians.

Religion kills

So this young man, Dennis Lindberg, refused a blood transfusion and died. This was a completely useless, futile death; it wasn’t a sacrifice that helped someone, and it was avoidable by a routine medical procedure. So what could possibly have driven him to this behavior?

Earlier Wednesday, Skagit County Superior Court Judge John Meyer had denied a motion by the state to force the boy to have a blood transfusion. The judge said the eighth-grader knew “he’s basically giving himself a death sentence.”

“I don’t believe Dennis’ decision is the result of any coercion. He is mature and understands the consequences of his decision,” the judge said during the hearing.

“I don’t think Dennis is trying to commit suicide. This isn’t something Dennis just came upon, and he believes with the transfusion he would be unclean and unworthy.”

So he wasn’t coerced; he was mature and capable of rational thought; he wasn’t suicidal; this wasn’t an expensive treatment his family couldn’t afford; he did not make the world a better place by dying. He simply calmly decided on the basis of certain premises that were planted in his brain at an early age by an aunt who was a Jehovah’s Witness that he had to do something both lethal and stupid. His head was filled with garbage, and this is the end result.

Religion is child abuse. It strips kids of the critical reasoning abilities that can save their lives. His crazy aunt killed him as surely as if she had beat him to death with a baseball bat.

The real scoop on the Texas science curriculum director’s resignation

Texas Citizens for Science has posted a summary of the political pressures:

TEA has a new policy, one of neutrality between biological evolution and Intelligent Design Creationism. This new policy was put in place when Dr. Don McLeroy–an outspoken Creationist and activist for Intelligent Design Creationism and its marketing campaign–was appointed the new Chair of the State Board of Education (SBOE). By publicizing a lecture by a Louisiana State University professor of the philosophy of science that supported evolution–as required by the state’s science standards–and opposed Intelligent Design Creationism, Chris Comer ran afoul of the new policy and was asked to resign or be fired immediately. The memo to her from the TEA contained several other excuses, all of which were bogus, trumped-up, or common among employees. Amazingly, this memo is now available for the public to read thanks to the American-Statesman (see below), and it reveals the lengths to which the top administrators of our state’s public education agency will go to silence dissent from their new policy of not criticizing Creationism.

The real reason she was forced to resign is because the top TEA administrators and some SBOE members wanted her out of the picture before the state science standards–the science TEKS–were reviewed, revised, and rewritten next year. Plans are underway by some SBOE members and TEA administrators to diminish the requirement to teach about evolutionary biology in the Biology TEKS and to require instead that biology instructors “Teach the Controversy” about the “weaknesses” of evolution, that is, teach the Creationist-inspired and -created bogus controversy about evolution that doesn’t exist within legitimate science. There are no scientific weaknesses with biological evolution as the natural process is understood by scientists. At the level at which it is taught in high school, evolutionary biology has no weaknesses, gaps, or problems. Therefore, it is duplicitous to pretend such “weaknesses” and “controversy” exist.

I knew McLeroy was trouble from the very beginning.

Christians behaving badly

It’s ben a terrible couple of days for Christianity — I’ve gotten an awful lot of e-mail reporting indiscretions by those trusted members of the clergy.

I should clarify something, though. Many people assume I post these little tales of deplorable behavior by the religious in some misguided effort to show causality, that I’m trying to argue that they do these wicked things because they are Christian. This is not correct. It’s far, far from the truth — I know many good people are also Christian or Jewish.

The point is simpler: Christianity claims to be a force for morality which encourages good behavior on the part of its practitioners. It’s quite clear that it is not when even its clergy seem unable to find their religion to be a source of moral suasion. Religion doesn’t make you bad, necessarily, but it sure doesn’t make you good, either.

The Letter that frightened the Texas Education Agency

We now have a copy of the vile, biased e-mail that cost Chris Comer her job. It’s unbelievably one-sided and horrible — I swear, it’s like using your office network to harrass co-workers with explicit porn. It turns out that this offensive e-mail was from the NCSE, and referenced the Center for Inquiry; if only it had mentioned the ACLU, it would have achieved a hellish trifecta.

The mind-blowing e-mail is below the fold, to protect innocent eyes.

[Read more…]

Fear of Barbara Forrest

In the Dover trial, you got the palpable sense that the creationists were terrified of Barbara Forrest’s testimony. I did not know quite how deeply the dread was until today, though: the Texas director os science curriculum, Chris Comer, was pressured into resigning because she forwarded an e-mail announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest. One Lizzette Reynolds, Republican hack and senior advisor to the Texas Education Agency, was freaking horrified.

This is highly inappropriate. I believe this is an offense that calls for termination or, at the very least, reassignment of responsibilities.

Barbara Forrest is a philosopher of science with special expertise in creationism. Inappropriate? She’s exactly the kind of person boards of education ought to consult before going down the road of attempting to legislate religion into the public schools.

This is something that the State Board, the Governor’s Office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.

Well, that’s honest, at least. I did assume that the Texas Education Agency would support science education. I guess I was wrong. The situation is really bad, though, if learning about science is a subject that gets the Texas Legislature upset.

This is the word from Chris Comer’s boss:

the forwarding of this event announcement by Ms. Comer, as the Director of Science, from her TEA email account constitutes much more than just sharing information. Ms. Comer’s email implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral. Thus, sending this email compromises the agency’s role in the TEKS revision process by creating the perception that TEA has a biased position on a subject directly related to the science education TEKS.

Whoa. The Texas Education Agency is neutral on the subject of teaching good science? It’s bad if the TEA takes a position on the subject of science education?

Apparently, TEA members are supposed to close their eyes and maximize ignorance before making decisions. I really feel sorry for Texas.

Otherwise, though, someone unleash Barbara Forrest and set her to smiting the creationists. It’s impressive the way they have this knee-jerk terror of her soft-spoken words.

(You can get more commentary on this issue from
TfK
and the
Austringer.)