He’s already got the zombie vote and the fundiebot vote locked up, now he just needs to capture the teenaged male vote with a little violence in short-attention-span theater.
I’m over fifty. I can’t watch that without my head hurting.
It’s a wonder that these people know how to tie their own shoes. I was sent a link to Perry Marshall’s Intelligent Evolution Quick Guide, and it is certainly a fine example of the kind of reasoning that allows creationism to thrive. It’s a short guide, but it goes on for over a page, when the essential syllogism that defines ID is actually presented in three all-encompassing lines.
DNA is not just a molecule – it is a coding system with a language & alphabet, and contains a message
All languages, codes and messages come from a mind
Therefore DNA was designed by a Mind
As I’m sure all of you sensible readers can immediately detect, his first premise is a deeply flawed analogy and his second is simply undemonstrated and entirely false, so his “therefore” is unwarranted. Three lines, three errors: a perfect representation of creationist thought.
I give to you the cockroach. It contains DNA, and it copies it and propagates it to the next generation of cockroaches, yet is it even aware of its DNA? Does it use its tiny little cockroach mind to construct a complex molecule? No. Mindless chemistry does it. There is no thought behind the synthesis and modification of the DNA molecule at all, yet it is true that it carries out complex activities with the aid of other molecules in the cytoplasm…but without the assistance of any intelligent beings at all.
Similarly, I give you the creationist. They contain DNA, and a large brain as well, but they don’t use that brain at all in producing progeny. After a little embarrassed tickle and grunt, mindless chemistry takes over in fertilization and development, and 9 months later, another mind emerges from one of their unencephalized wombs. We can trace the origins of that DNA back and back and back, and at no point in its history does it seem to be produced by conscious design, and the farther back we look, the less available potential there was for intelligent intervention. Bacteria are even less clever than cockroaches, you know.
If you want to understand our history and our evolution, the first concept you have to be able to grasp is that natural processes produce all the complexity and diversity of extant life without the guiding hand of any external agents. Once you’ve realized that, it becomes apparent that we can work backwards through our ancestry without invoking magic or cosmic helpers — that Intelligent Design creationism is a superfluous hypothesis that can be dismissed in the absence of any corroborating evidence.
Right here: Skepticast #168.
I’m here in Springfield, Missouri as a guest of the local Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and now I’ve suddenly found Tarvu.
What is the etiquette in such a situation? Do I have to damn my hosts, and do they have to burn me at the stake in reply?
Oh, come now. Are they just taunting me, waving a bit of succulent red meat before and begging me to bite? Should topics such as creationism or intelligent design be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution? 85% say yes. I cannot believe that 85% of the population are that stupid, although it is being hosted on the American Patriarchy News Network, which would tend to bias the sample downward.
Gah. This came out garbled before, and you would not believe how long it took to get in and fix it. The scienceblogs server is rapidly becoming intolerable…which, of course, is exactly what the DOS bastards want.
I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can’t use them all — so here’s a quick dump of a few items from the let’s-laugh-at-religion file.
Yom Kippur is supposed to be such a solemn holiday in Israel that no one drives, no one works, no one eats, but apparently, there is no proscription against rioting. A non-Jewish man started his car (blasphemy!), which drove his Jewish neighbors insane with pious rage to the point that they ended up rampaging through the streets, requiring police force to end the violence. (via Obsessed with Reality)
A doll that babbles baby talk has Christians upset — it seems that they when they listen closely, they think it’s praising Islam. That’s funny — that’s what I hear when I hear Pentecostals speaking in tongues.
“The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it’s holiness.” Wait — I thought I was the opposite of holy. My wife is going to be so disappointed.
Peter Watts has an interesting analysis of how dumb-as-rocks fundie goons can thrive in modern society. The pared down explanation: holding ridiculous religious beliefs is costly, and therefore represents an expensive investment that testifies to the depth of commitment, and thereby promotes greater group cohesion.
Tim Tingelstad is running for the Minnesota Supreme court. Please don’t vote for him. He’s a far-right religious kook who wants to ‘return’ the country to godly rule.
Another day, another preacher caught collecting kiddie porn. At least he’s honest—he says he viewed it for the purpose of sexual arousal, but at the same time he’s all tangled up in guilt because he thinks Jesus is unhappy with him.
Richard Carrier and I will be speaking in Springfield on Saturday afternoon, in an event that has been blessed by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you’re in the neighborhood, you won’t want to miss it!
And now I get to spend my afternoon sitting in an airplane. Ho hum.
It sounds like Michael Shermer’s Origins conference was a great event in the morning, an amusing event in the evening, and an absurd sellout to theological thinking in the middle. What Templeton money touches is tainted, I’m afraid.
Today’s must-read article is by Dan Savage, whose mother recently died of pulmonary fibrosis. It’s personal and painful, and it also touches on the political. Washington state has a ballot measure coming up that would make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication for the terminally ill, and Savage’s mother, when her disease reached a crisis stage, had to choose what kind of painful death she wanted to face.
People must accept death at “the hour chosen by God,” according to Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring money into the campaign against I-1000.
The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man–and medical science–my mother would have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines? Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest, exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.
Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.
I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can’t manage to keep priests from raping children aren’t entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives.
If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them for religious reasons, but it’s somehow not enough for them to deny those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life and deny them to you, too–deny you control over your own reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.
The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake, don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one–each one–because it offends your God.
Somehow, putting on a silly clerical collar gives people the feeling that they can dictate how others will be allowed to live and die. They want to meddle, and worse, they want to make decisions based on the worst kind of reasoning — that the voices in their heads told them how it was so, that it was written down so in ancient books, that their myths tell them of codes of conduct necessary for an imaginary reward after death. That is no way to live a life, or end one.
