State of Protest

This week in lieu of a Book Review, I’m going to share some other kinds of readings…

I live in Ann Arbor, a nice quiet college town where liberals are outspoken and reasonable people can comfortably discuss any and all controversial thoughts in public without fear of retribution. Bush supporters might disagree with me, but I think they like to feel persecuted when their mindless rotted brains see anything but highest praise for their fearful leader. I digress. I was quite pleased, though not surprised, to see one of our local events rags, Current, do a fun story for the December Issue on the pagan origins of Christmas. The free publication also highlighted several non-Christian events surrounding the Solstice.

The January edition, not surprisingly, had one of those hilariously over-the-top letters to the editor in outraged reaction. It must be rough for someone with a martyr complex and a remote stuck on Fox news to find a reason to freak out. I like to imagine the steam coming out of their ears and the one thought rattling around in those vacant heads of theirs as they wrote the following:

“BRING JESUS BACK!

We have seen in your advertising that you do not use the word “Christmas” and instead refer to some non-descript “Holiday”, even though 96 percent of all U.S. adults celebrate Christmas, and even 84 percent of those who claim to be non-Christians celebrate this religious holiday (Gallup Poll, December 2005). You use the word “Holiday” but superimpose images of Christmastime with it; you’re not fooling anyone into thinking that you’re not actually referring to Christmas. Your taking of a sacred holiday and ripping Christ’s name out of it, turning it into nothing more than a secular, pagan, materialistic occasion where the almighty dollar reigns supreme, is highly offensive. Your hatred of Christ and Christians is evident in your refusal to use His name, and we clearly see your bigotry.

We have not yet been a customer of yours, however due to your prejudicial, anti-Christian business practices, we refuse to patronize your business until you reverse your decision to discriminate against Christians.

-Allan and Jodi Fredrickson, Adrian Michigan.”

Oh, my how I laughed. That is so cute! I love it when they get all furious and illogical. I don’t know what’s funnier, their ignorance of the obvious etymology of the word “Holiday” (Holy Day, duh), the robotic obedience to sputtering windbag Bill O’Reilly, or their hyperbolic characterization of this cute lil’ townie mag as “Christ-hating”.

The editor’s response was fabulous, by the way:

“EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks for your comments, Mr. and Mrs. Fredrickson. Hope you had a happy holiday.”

The only thing that surprises me is that a quick internet search didn’t turn up a word-for-word template of this idiotic screed. Something about the vagueness of the letter tells me that Allan And Jodi sent this letter to everyone on this list, too.

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Next, here’s a nice post I ran across on LiberalAtheist: [reposted with permission] ¹ The other day I came across this page with a HUGE list of reasons a person may be a “fundy atheist”. I found it to be humorously ignorant starting with “fundy atheist”. An atheist simply lacks a belief in a god or gods. We have no set of principles we deem necessary to follow.Anyway I picked some of them from the Origins section which argues science and responded below in bold…You may be a fundy atheist if….

# You believe that planes, computers, calculators, compasses, etc, were “all obviously designed,” yet the human body, being intricately more complex was “obviously a product of biological evolution.” It seems the more complex the apparatus, the more obvious the “fact” that it was not designed.

You’re kidding right? Man-made non-living objects like the ones you mention here are incapable of cellular replication and incapable of sexual reproduction and therefore incapable of evolving. There’s no basis of comparison. You know how when someone makes an ignorant argument and you say “You’re comparing apples to oranges”? Well you’re not even doing that…you’re comparing apples to tennis balls.

# You claim that evolution and the big bang are two entirely separate theories that explain different aspects of the universe, yet, in what school of learning can you find any real separation or distinction between the two?

They ARE separate theories. The “Big Bang” is what is known as abiogenesis. That involves the study of cosmology and chemistry. Evolution involves the study of biology. You guys mistake that because you assume that chicken came before the egg and therefore you can’t understand the concept of the egg without the chicken.

# As a member of the Skeptic’s Society you pride yourself on being skeptical of extraordinary claims. You also pride yourself on silencing everyone who is skeptical of the extraordinary claims of evolution.

We don’t try to silence you. You can shout your ignorance from rooftops for all we care. You’re the one that looks foolish. Evolution isn’t an “extraordinary claim”. It’s an accepted scientific theory and fact. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.” No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution–or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter–they are not expressing reservations about its truth.

In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.’” The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling.

# Isaac Newton does not count as an example of a great scientist who believed in the Bible since he died before the Origin of Species was published.

Why should we care if he believed in ancient fairytales of a supernatural power or not? He’s a great scientist simply because he is credited with the discovering the theory of gravity. We don’t make any claims that he had anything to do with the theory of evolution or abiogenesis although gravity itself is related to abiogenesis. Newton just wasn’t aware of that because those theories weren’t presented til after his death.

# When you watch a punt returner run a 93 yard touchdown, you marvel at what evolution has done for the human race. But when someone gets cancer, you blame God for it.

Go look up “atheist” in a dictionary. Atheists do NOT believe in any god or gods. We can’t blame something on a supernatural being that we don’t even believe exists in the first place. We know that cancers are caused by such things as chemical carcinogens, ionizing radiation, infectious diseases, hormonal imbalances, immune system dysfunction, and hereditary.

# You descended from apes.(Think about it.)

For someone who criticizes evolution you sure don’t know much about it. I’ll have the Scientific American field this one for me: “This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor.

The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, “If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?” New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.”

If you research the subject from respected scientific sources you’d know this stuff. We share genetic markers in our DNA with every living organism on the planet. Apes and other primates are simply our closest “cousins”.

# You think that humans are products of chance but when it comes to human reason we can believe in logic! (Think about it !)

More ignorance about evolution. Humans are not products of “chance”… it’s Natural Selection. No scientist would claim we are products of chance.

# You love to castigate Christians for being “anti-science” if they deny evolution from goo to you via the zoo, and to preach that they should adapt their thinking to the “science” of our day. But you also castigate the Church of 400 years ago for being anti-science, when it DID adapt its thinking to the science of ITS day, i.e. Ptolemaic cosmology, then joined with the Aristotelian scientists of the universities in rejecting Galileo!

Wow you sure like wearing your ignorance as a badge of honor don’t you? Ptolemy and Aristotle were mainly philosophers who liked to dabble in science. Galileo who actually WAS a scientist was condemned by the church and imprisoned because he believed the earth is round and it revolved around the sun. Science has proven his theory correct. Now over 300 years later you are trying to hinder scientific advancement by denying the evidence of evolution. Why is it the church is always dragged kicking and screaming into scientific advancement?

# You think that some guy named “Dr Dino” with no scientific credentials represents mainstream Evangelical thinking and scholarship about evolution and creation, and thus by spending inordinate amounts of time attacking him you are somehow dismantling the arguments of scholarly dissenters from evolution, creationists with earned Ph. D.s in science, and of advocates of intelligent design.

Who cares if he’s your front runner or just another ignorant moron? No creationist regardless of their scientific background or education will ever be taken seriously in the scientific community because their outrageous claims based on ancient texts disagree with modern scientific facts. You may as well be arguing that the world is flat.

# You claim poker-faced that “social Darwinism” and its spawn of eugenics have absolutely no connection to the biological theories propounded by Charles Darwin in “On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”

Eugenics is not related to natural selection. To think otherwise is just another example of ignorance. Forced breeding isn’t natural and even if it creates a stronger offspring than natural breeding there’s no telling what the ethical consequences of the practice would do in the future of the evolutionary process. It could very well be similar to inbreeding which is known to cause weaker offspring. Hitler tried to enforce this very practice with the support of the church during the Holocaust and create a “Master Race”. Such practices hinder evolutionary progress.

# You have recently stuck a Darwin fish on your car in the hopes the people with the Jesus fish on theirs will be offended.

We couldn’t care less if you are offended by us making our own statements, but if you are it’s actually funny because we aren’t offended by your Jesus fish… we just pity your ignorance.

# You also claim that not only is there no connection between Darwin’s theories and the doctrines of social Darwinism and eugenics (despite the fact that the term eugenics was coined and advocated by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, who acknowledged his debt to Origin), but that none of these philosophical positions have any connection to the modern fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

So someone’s cousin cashing in on his notoriety is evidence of a connection? Comparing eugenics to natural selection is like comparing rape to consensual sex. That’s about the only connection it shares.

# You can claim with as straight face on sites like Talk Origins that “Evolution does not have moral consequences” despite the fact that prominent evolutionary advocates like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett vehemently assert that evolution does transcend biology in a way that has a profound effects upon ethics.

Evolution itself doesn’t have moral consequences, but scientific advancements in genetics and biology could have scientists themselves doing research that has ethical concerns and also governments using scientific knowledge to do things that have ethical concerns with such ideas like eugenics for example. Those situations would have moral and ethical concerns, but not natural evolution left on it’s own.

# When the Pope says that God may have used evolution, he is an enlightened religious leader whom Christians should listen to. When the Pope preaches on the sanctity of human life from conception, and thus denounces abortion, he’s just a senile religious bigot who should keep his opinions to himself.

While I wouldn’t personally word it the way you just did here are you suggesting that we’re supposed to agree with everything the pope says? You’ve never disagreed with someone on one issue but agreed with them on another?

# Concerning the origins of life, you feel that though the chances of life forming without an intelligent creator are small it DID indeed happen that way. And yet you don’t believe me when a rock, coming from my direction, hits you in the back of the head and I tell you, “I didn’t throw it. There was a sudden shift in the earth’s gravitational pull and the rock levitated into your head…Sure the chances are small but it DID happen that way.”

Wow your ignorance knows no bounds does it? First of all there is absolutely NO scientific evidence supporting Intelligent Design… there’s PLENTY of scientific evidence supporting evolution. Your little rock example further shows your ignorance because such a gravitational shift could only be caused by something like the earth being knocked out of orbit or the speed of the earth’s rotation on it’s own axis changed. If the rock was affected every other living and non-living thing on the planet would also be affected and move it the same way.

# When you’re shown that your view of origins is silly, you can only respond, “Well…at least it’s better than believing in some invisible SKY DADDY!”

No one has shown me my views are silly. Evolution has been proven. Abiogenesis on the other hand is still a mystery although science has some ideas. Giving up on scientific research just to assume that a supernatural “God” was responsible would be scientifically irresponsible and would hinder scientific progress.

# When a Christian points out the impossibility of a biological system (or feature) forming by pure chance you accuse them of invoking a “God of the gaps”. YET, when you are asked how a particular feature could come about solely by chance you invoke “Evolution of the gaps” (i.e., we don’t know HOW but we do know that Evolution MUST have done it!)

And your point is??? Evolution has been scientifically proven. While we may not have found the “B” that links “A” and “C” together we DO know that the link is evolutionary and we aren’t giving up til we find the link. You creationists want to label it with “God” and forget about it without any further research or investigation. If you could prove it to be God without pointing to a 2000 year old bible and back it up with scientific evidence that would be different.

# You claim antibiotic-resistant bacteria is proof protozoa evolved into a person.

Science has discovered that some bacteria has evolved from a strain that isn’t resistant to a new strain that is. This is proof of microevolution. There’s a huge evolutionary gap between a protozoa and a human being, but it’s simply millions if not billions of years of microevolutionary changes creating a more complex and environmentally adaptable species and that species evolving and adapting into another and so on until a human being evolved. Because the process took millions or billions of years it would be impossible to recreate it in a laboratory environment within one human lifetime, but we can observe the evidence in biology and in studying fossils… among other things. While we are unable to show the exact evolutionary path of a protozoa evolving into a human we can reach that conclusion based on the facts we already know about evolution.

# You insist that science is completely partial to all ideas, is not dogmatic and researches all possibilities — except creationism and/or intelligent design.

As Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace said to Napoléon Bonaparte when asked about where God fit into his equations of celestial mechanics, “Sire I have no need of that hypothesis.”

I’ll have the Scientific American field this one for me, too.

In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?)

Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life’s history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion–that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain.

Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas.

Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.

# You claim Creationists don’t research on evolution websites before debating against it. Luckily you caught this useful weapon against Christians at the evolution site you learned all about creation doctrine from.

I’ve been to creationist websites. They’re really good for when you need a good laugh. Like for instance the creationist claim that dinosaurs lived among humans and were plant eaters… Yet T-Rex had 6 inch razor sharp teeth. I’m sure he really needed those for eating grass and leaves. Modern plant eating animals don’t have the teeth of predator. Every animal that preys on another for food does have sharp teeth. Another silly creationist idea is that the earth is only about 10,000 years old which disagrees with modern science. But the toughest thing to swallow is that everything can be explained by a supernatural “God”, yet failing to explain where the god itself came from. Creationism will never be taken seriously as science by the scientific community because it hinders scientific advancement. You may as well be claiming the earth is flat.

# You think that every scientist who believes in Creationism and doesn’t mindlessly accept evolution as a fact is a “kook,” but you believe that Francis Crick (Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA), who reached into his nether regions and pulled out the “theory” of Directed Panspermia (which states with absolutely no support that aliens seeded the earth with life – see the movie “Mission to Mars”), is a great evolutionist scientist.

He’s a great evolutionary scientist because he is credited with the discovery of DNA. Directed Panspermia is not a widely accepted scientific theory, but it IS more logical than the idea of a supernatural god creating life. If there is life on this planet it’s logically possible that there is life on another planet. Scientists aren’t actively pursuing that hypothesis of Directed Panspermia for the same reasons they aren’t pursuing your creationist theory, because there is currently no evidence of alien life just like there’s no evidence of your god.

# When a creationist points out problems with the evolutionist model you claim that the whole point of science is to answer problems like these. But if you can point out even one problem in the creationist model it should instantly be abandoned as absurd.

Because unlike creationism, evolution actually has evidence to back it up that isn’t found in an ancient text. Modern science can’t take it seriously because during the time period your bible was written humans lacked the modern technology and scientific knowledge that humans have today. Studying creationism would be like asking your great-grandfather who has been blind from birth how to search for and download music onto an MP3 player or set up and run a DVD player. Creationism is about as satisfying as a starving child would be if you handed him a plate with a sheet of paper on it that has the word “food” written on it.

# You won’t bet $10 on the football game because a 50/50 chance isn’t good enough, but you have no problem gambling with your life on the nearly impossible odds of a cell randomly generating from nothing.²

More creationist ignorance. Science doesn’t think that cells randomly generated from nothing. Science believes that life started by a chemical reaction.

# Engaging the “slippery slope” fallacy, you think you can invalidate the whole bible by discrediting Genesis, since ‘the whole bible either stands together or falls apart’. However, when a Creationist tries to invalidate the whole doctrine of naturalistic evolution by exposing the sheer improbability and lack of evidence of abiogenesis, you note this point as ‘irrelevant’.

This is because even tho we don’t know all the answers we desire to find them rather than give up and assume that God is the answer. Theology hinders the advancement of science. Beyond that you believe your bible to be the infallible omniscient word of your god. It’s a little frightening to have modern science shake the foundations of your indoctrinated religious beliefs isn’t it? If science proves their hypothesis of abiogenesis and macroevolution it would completely render your beliefs and theology obsolete. Pushing your creationist agenda isn’t about science and progress… it’s about fear. So you are all trying to discredit science to save your religion.

# You ignore “Time Magazine’s” poll, which states that only 28% of Americans believe in evolution. But of course, “Time Magazine” must been run by creationists.

The collective ignorance of the American public is hardly scientific proof of creationism. 75% of Americans are Christians and were indoctrinated from birth about the creationist fantasy. The poll doesn’t reflect the opinions of the educated scientific community. That poll would have much drastically different numbers. 99% of earth and life scientists agree with the theory of evolution.

# You think that if schools teach the Intelligent Design theory of creation,they should also teach the “stork theory” of where babies come from.

That’s called sarcasm.

# You demand that Christians study advanced evolutionary biology before making claims about natural selection. You then claim that their theological ideas, which you have never examined before, are pure nonsense.

Theology isn’t science.

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And finally, have some peer pressure with cheese:Holy Crap

1. StOP made minor grammatical and layout edits [<]
2. Ed’s note: Since when is a football game ever a 50/50 chance? Here, try an experiment: record a football game. Say, the Super Bowl. Find out which team won. Then review your recording of the game and try to spot all the “chances.” In other words, find every substantial, verifiable instance in which there was an exact 50/50 chance of something happening or not happening. If you approach it scientifically, you’ll probably find none. The reason? Factors. A field goal kick equation may start off looking like Kicker (K) plus Ball (B) equals (or does not equal) Goal (G). However, it’s easy to start adding to that equation with variables, or factors that influence the outcome. Wind direction and speed, moisture/condensation, turf/grass grip, brand of Kicker’s shoes, what Kicker had to drink the night before, whether Kicker had a cold, and the condition of the holder and the ball. Those are only a handful of the variables in a field goal kick, which is only a small part of a football game. How could anyone possibly believe there’s a 50/50 chance? Heck, even the flip of a coin, how simple it may appear, is never exactly 50/50 (especially in the hands of an expert). -Procrustes [<]