I know it’s a respectable field; kinesiology is the study of human movement, and I’ve known some who are sensible and well-trained (applied kinesiology, on the other hand, is total bunk). But it’s becoming a bit like engineers and the Salem hypothesis — I also run into creationists who proclaim their kinesiology degrees, like the frothing mad Joseph Mastropaolo. I’m beginning to think there must be some deep conceptual hole in the formal educational background of kinesiologists.
Anyway, here’s another example: a professor of kinesiology, Phil Bishop has written the most wonderfully condescending and wrong letter to the Crimson White at the University of Alabama. I have to marvel at the ignorance of an individual so handicapped by stupidity and religion (whoops, pardon my redundancy), yet who still managed to flop his crippled way upwards to achieve a position with some intellectual authority.
Show compassion for atheist friends
Evolution has been a hot topic in the CW as of late. I understand the emotion that evolutionary theory carries for my atheist friends, but I can’t figure why my theist, deist and agnostic friends feel so much passion against Darwinism.
For Muslims, Jews and Christians, whether or not evolution happened is irrelevant. For these people, God created, but how He did so is not specified in detail.
However, for my atheist friends, Darwinism is essential. A Christian can believe in evolution or not, but an atheist must contrive some natural means for life and speciation that must, for philosophical consistency, exclude any Divine intervention.
An attack on evolution threatens the very foundations of atheism, so it is a “life and death” issue, and consequently an emotional one. Darwinism may have some serious problems, but hey, it’s the best they can do for now. So, Christians, show a little compassion for our atheist friends.
Ah, such a lovely illustration of the backwardness of religious thinking. Evolution is not a philosophical rationalization; it is not a desperate exercise in weird, wild apologetics that exists solely to justify an ideology. It’s the hard rock of reality in the path of your philosophical peregrinations. You can look like an idiot and try to butt heads against reality, or you incorporate it into your understanding. Creationists do the former. Rational people do the latter.
Get it? For atheists, evolution and other aspects of reality and the natural world come first, and the atheism comes second as a consequence, not a cause, of our understanding of the universe. For the fanatical Christian, apparently, their delusions come first, and any natural, real phenomena must be warped in their imaginations to fit their weird and unsupportable interpretation of how the universe ought to be. And they seem to think other people’s minds are distorted in the same way.
It’s like looking at a dancer and arguing that she must have invented the concept of a floor in order to carry out her heathenish gyrations, and oh, fortunate Christian that he is, Phil Bishop gets to pretend that his dance is free of the constraints of gravity and frames of reference and the stage and the music. Which is probably why he looks like a spastic klutz with no rhythm when he trips onto the dance floor.
