Cody visited the creation science “museum” near Glenrose, Texas, and came back with a photo of the mural portraying Adam and Eve. Adam looks…familiar.
I knew he was old, but that old?
I’m not sure who Eve resembles. Anita Bryant? Skeletor?
This fairly typical scrap of creationist email made me smirk. Please, if you’re going to be sarcastic and tell me how stupid I am, don’t make the first word of your diatribe grammatically incorrect.
your soo smart… I wish I was as smart as you
Oh you are soo much smarter than everyone else. That’s odd being that your ancestors were monkeys. Too bad you are going to drown soon when mankind melts the polar ice caps. I guess you would have done just as well if we would have used your embryo for research and the rest of us would be much better off too. What a stupid arrogant know-it-all loser you are.
I do think it’s absolutely brilliant that in one short paragraph he managed to express his dull, uncomprehending irritation with four hot-button issues: evolution, global warming, abortion, and fetal research. If only six sentences hadn’t exceeded his attention span, maybe he could have worked in something about gay sex and the Iraq war, too.
Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week’s issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I’m late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn’t just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin research (but strangely, very little on echinoderm development). It was a good soaking in echinodermiana.
It’s a sign of the lowly state to which the DI is descending that their assaults on evolutionary ideas have lately been led by the pathetic Casey Luskin. Luskin is a guy who doesn’t understand biology, and whose usual line of attack is to whine about credentials—it isn’t a good combination. After all, isn’t it a bit sad to have a particularly ignorant lawyer and ideologue complaining about scientists’ (or science journalists’) understanding of science?
Anyway, while taking a break from the futilely but furiously spinning exercise wheel at the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin is now squeaking frantically at Carl Zimmer. Carl, of course, calmly and perhaps even bemusedly flicks him away. It’s great fun.
Mark your calendars—Cephalopodmas is on the 22nd day of December, and you need to start rehearsing those Cephalopodmas carols.
I have to say, though, that the continuing neglect of this important holiday by the media is another sign of the War on Cephalopodmas. Don’t believe me? Walk into your local Wal-Mart, and I promise you that the greeter won’t say “Merry Cephalopodmas!” to you. You won’t see any civic displays draped with tentacles. The school pageants won’t be full of songs about squid. The smell of kelp won’t be in the air, nor will you be hearing the mournful, melodious tones of the foghorn. Outrageous, isn’t it?
I want everyone this year to give their best Bill O’Reilly glare to anyone you meet who doesn’t affirm your personal beliefs with a verbal recognition of the validity of Cephalopodmas. Temper tantrums are good, too. Of course, it should go without saying that you shouldn’t have to explain why you’re walking around always looking so pissed-off; truth be told, when you have to explain that you’re upset because people aren’t reciting some ritualized formal greeting at you, you sound a bit like a pinhead. So don’t.
Here’s a useful tip: if ever you are attacked by giant monsters, you want to call a Minnesotan for help. I think it’s the summertime practice in fighting off insectoid swarms that helps.
Stephen Bates of the Guardian gets an advance tour of Ken Ham’s new creation science museum. It’s amusing and creepy at the same time.
When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world.
The Creation Museum — motto: “Prepare to Believe!” — will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story.
“Entirely fake” is right—the title is a misnomer, it’s not a museum, it’s a carnie show. A very serious, very expensive, very elaborate freak show exhibit.
[The workers], too, know they are doing the Lord’s Work, and each has signed a contract saying they believe in the Seven Days of Creation theory. Mornings on this construction site start with prayer meetings. Don’t think for a minute that this is some sort of crazy little hole-in-the-corner project. The museum is costing $25m (£13m) and all but $3m has already been raised from private donations. It is strategically placed, too — not in the middle of nowhere, but within six hours’ drive of two-thirds of the entire population of the US. And, as we know, up to 50 million of them do believe that the Bible’s account of Creation is literally true.
That 50 million is a very conservative estimate, I fear.
You know, I hate to give these guys any money, but I would like to propose that sometime after that “museum” opens, we should organize a mob of sciencebloggers (and others) to descend upon it, take the tour, and coordinate a massive storm of ridicule. I am, unfortunately, more than a six hour drive away, so I’d have to fly in to Cincinnati to do it, but I’d be willing. Is there anyone else who’d be up for a vivisection without anesthesia of Ken Ham’s Temple of Idiocy? Depending on when they actually finish the foolishness, maybe late summer 2007 or early summer 2008?
I heard good things about Dawkins’ talk at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, so I let my computer crank away at downloading the video overnight—it’s 113 megabytes! Then this morning Norm of onegoodmove lets me know that there are some shorter clips available from the Q&A: a reaction to the abuse of Quantum Theory,
a disparagment of blind faith, and best of all, his reaction to hearing that
Liberty University labels their dinosaur fossils as being a few thousand years old. The discussion with the audience is always the best thing about these talks, and this was a case where the audience had a number of mind abuse cases from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in attendance.
One thing not in the shorter clips that I thought was interesting was the young woman who asked Dawkins if he thought it was normal that deconversion was accompanied by anger, and he didn’t know…so he asked the audience. And they roar back that yes, it is.
I think Dawkins was being slightly disingenuous. I can believe his own loss of faith was easy and unaccompanied by stress, because my own was, as well. In my own case, my childhood belief was fairly shallow, so when I realized that I didn’t believe any of that baloney in adolescence, it wasn’t at all traumatic. But Dawkins knows as do I that that anger can come later, and you can sense it in Dawkins in the question about dinosaur fossils. I feel that, too. We’re both people whose lives are heavily invested in a university and in teaching and in science, and when you see the kinds of vile fraud institutions of bunkum like Liberty University commit against those three values, I can’t help but feel disgust and anger.
Many people, I suspect, are hit harder with those sensations. If you start with a deeper commitment to a religion, if you’ve been compelled by family to invest heavily in that belief (another horror I was spared), if your deconversion is prompted by learning that you’ve been betrayed and lied to—then I can understand how anger is an early and strong part of the process.
All I can say is that yes, you should be damned angry. I am glad that many people are beginning to feel that fury.
You have to applaud the courage of this history teacher in Kearny, New Jersey:
Among his remarks in open class were statements that a being must have created the universe, that the Christian Bible is the word of God, and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark. If you do not accept Jesus, he flatly proclaimed to his class, “you belong in hell.” Referring to a Muslim student who had been mentioned by name, he lamented what he saw as her inevitable fate should she not convert. In an attempt to promote biblical creationism, he also dismissed evolution and the Big Bang as non-scientific, arguing by contrast that the Bible is supported by what he calls confirmed biblical prophecies.
He’s just reciting standard fundagelical Christian doctrine, the same things a hundred million people believe, but usually keep quiet about, and now he’s going to be hounded and harassed for it. This teacher, David Paszkiewicz, is simply standing up for and representing good Christian values!
After taking the matter to the school administration, one of Paszkiewicz’s students, junior Matthew LaClair, requested a meeting with the teacher and the school principal. LaClair, a non-Christian, was requesting an apology and correction of false and anti-scientific statements. After two weeks, a meeting took place in the principal’s office, wherein Paszkiewicz denied making many of these comments, claiming that LaClair had taken his remarks out of context. Paszkiewicz specifically denied using the phrase, “you belong in hell.” He also asserted that he did nothing different in this class than he has been doing in fifteen years of teaching.
At the end of the meeting, LaClair revealed that he had recorded the remarks, and presented the principal with two compact discs. The teacher then declined to comment further without his union representative. However, he fired one last shot at the student, saying, “You got the big fish … you got the big Christian guy who is a teacher…!”
This is why good Christians must oppose science. If it hadn’t been for science, the devil-spawned technology of audio recording and CDs wouldn’t exist to entrap the devout. Although, actually…maybe Paszkiewicz should have confined his perfectly ordinary remarks to the four walls of his Baptist church, where they would have earned him applause rather than censure.
At least Mr Paszkiewicz can take comfort in the fact that he’s about to become a martyr. One of those living martyrs who will get to make the right-wing church circuit.
Julia Sweeney has audio samples from her new CD online—and gosh, she seems to have the same opinions of Intelligent Design and Deepak Chopra that I do! It must be something correlated with godlessness…like brains.
(Thanks to Hank Fox)
