You’ve missed your chance

I told you that Answers in Genesis was trying to hire a geologist. You’ve blown it now, they’ve gone and hired a real pro.

The addition of Dr. Snelling confirms AiG’s continued efforts to meet the highest standards in its research in creation studies, according to AiG President Ken Ham. “Dr. Snelling’s stature among the scientific community should be an unequivocal sign to the academic world and the media that serious research is being conducted at AiG and its museum,” Ham said.

Oh, sure: “Snelling’s stature among the scientific community” is a significant indicator. Let’s see…

Oh, my gosh—Ken Ham was telling us the truth! This is a sign to the academic world and the media about what kind of serious research they’re doing!

Skeptic pitied

Oh, no—this article about Craig Schaffer in America’s Finest News Source reminds me of me.

Eddy said he has tried repeatedly to pull Schaffner back from the precipice of lucidity.

“I admit, science might be great for curing diseases, exploring space, cataloguing the natural phenomena of our world, saving endangered species, extending the human lifespan, and enriching the quality of that life,” Eddy said. “But at the end of the day, science has nothing to tell us about the human soul, and that’s a critical thing Craig is missing. I would hate for his soul to be lost forever because of a stubborn doubt over the actual existence and nature of that soul.”

Snip

There are two subjects that I know stir up a few dedicated commenters here: abortion and circumcision. Most articles, when they fall off the front page, fade away from continued discussion fairly rapidly. Abortion and circumcision proponents and opponents have endurance, though, and comments will continue dribbling along for months. So I hesitate to bring this up, but…

An infant died, slowly and unpleasantly, of an infection and septic shock after an ordinary circumcision.

I know this is a rare occurrence, but it’s the pointlessness of the death that jars. This poor kid died for a silly cosmetic procedure, and the poor parents … think how awful they must feel. Why are people doing this to their babies again?

Chris is visiting the Cambrian

Wish I could be there.

It’s a day of writing, of car repair, of trips to the airport (we’re shipping Skatje off to a work camp…shhhh, don’t tell her, she thinks she’s going ‘camping’), and little low level aggravations, like being locked out of my office because they’re waxing the floors. So, sure, I wouldn’t mind a little African geology trip right now.

Jesus made him do it

It wasn’t that long ago that we got to hear lots of wailing about how secular/liberal values led to the Virginia Tech massacre (although, to be fair, most of the wailing was of the “god works in mysterious ways” sort). We had Chuck Norris blaming the “secular progressive agenda”.

Though one can point to Cho’s own psychotic behavior and our graphic slasher media as potential contributors to his deplorable murder spree, we must also hesitate to consider how we as a society are possibly contributing to the growth of these academic killing fields. I believe those who wield the baton of the secular progressive agenda bear significant responsibility for the escalation of school shootings. Even conservatives who refuse to speak when evil flourishes must acknowledge some culpability.

We had church groups claiming that restoring prayer to the schools would fix everything.

American Family Radio has raised a similar battle cry, claiming in a video that events leading to recent years’ school shootings in places like Jonesboro, Ark., Springfield, Ore., Littleton Colo., and Blacksburg, Va., “started when Madalyn Murray O’Hair complained she didn’t want any prayer in our schools, and we said ‘O.K.'” That is an apparent reference to Supreme Court decisions that have outlawed government-sanctioned prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools.

Now we have a federal agency releasing a profile of the killer.

Cho, 23, of Centreville, whose family was religious and had sought help for him from a Woodbridge church, repeatedly made religious references. He said that he had been “crucified” and that, as with Jesus, his actions would set people free. He called himself a “martyr” who would “sacrifice” his life. He wrote that he would go down in history as the “Jesus Christ of the Weak and Defenseless.” He thought his actions would inspire others to fight back and get even.

Ooops. I predict that, just like Tim McVeigh is conveniently forgotten when it’s time to characterize terrorists as brown and muslim, Cho will be forgotten when it’s expedient to pretend Christianity is a religion of peace and love.

An almost biblical curse

There are a couple of small towns on the border between Utah and Arizona that are basically feudal theocracies, ruled by a particularly nasty splinter sect of polygamist Mormons. It’s got some truly ugly social consequences — daughters are prizes given away to church leaders, while sons are competitors who are driven away — but now it turns out that there also some biological consequences. The community is deeply inbred, and their prize is the possession of the highest rate of fumarase deficiency in the world, with at least 20 afflicted children in the last 15 years. Fumarase is an enzyme in the Krebs cycle; deleterious mutations in these genes cause a metabolic disorder called fumarase deficiency.

It’s not a nice innocuous disease. It’s variable in its severity, but bad cases lead to debilitating mental retardation, frequent seizures, characteristic appearance (a large head, coarse features), and death. With care, affected individuals can live for many years, but they’ll never be self-sufficient and they do require near-constant attention.

And because it is widespread in a small isolated community, that for various reasons (including religion) is neither a desirable destination for new residents nor will its population try to integrate with the outside world, it’s going to get worse. Half the children born to a pair of carriers will be carriers of the disease themselves, and those nice big Mormon families produce lots of children. Not only are the young girls in this community forced to marry and start spawning baby after baby, but compound the horror with the idea that some will be having children who will need to have their diapers changed for 20 years…