It's high time that scientists and the educated organize against attempts by the dogmatically ignorant to undermine education in America. AiG's deceptive junk-tank monument to stupidity, aka the Creation Museum, has squandered $27 million in order to promote their LIES against scientific fact.
YECs appear not to be a particularly bright group, so it seems unlikely that many budding geniuses are being misled into ignorance. However, this is no reason not to decry the damage done to average children by causing deliberate confusion about science and reality.
The Founding Fathers were wise to separate Religion and the State, though not necessarily for prescient reasons. Whether or not they foresaw the likelihood that organized stupidity would attempt to undermine education, the Constitution should be used to protect education from superstition and ignorance. The mere fact of "scientists'" having signed a document against Darwinism demonstrates the desecration of science, critical thinking, and logic wrought by religious dogmatists. Polls indicate that far too high a percentage of Americans are so ignorant of the facts on which scientific theories are based that they hold a strict creationist view of origins.
Modern politicians, concerned more for their political ambitions than for truth, are all too aware of the vocal agitators who sway religious dogmatists on voting day, so they abrogate their responsibility to uphold the Constitution. To make matters worse, the most stupid president ever not-to-actually-be-elected resorts to claims of communication with God. It's intriguing to ponder how America came to be a nation that largely reviles knowledge while protecting organized stupidity. America has not come very far since 1925!
Statement of Concern
"We, the undersigned scientists at universities and colleges in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, are concerned about scientifically inaccurate materials at the Answers in Genesis museum. Students who accept this material as scientifically valid are unlikely to succeed in science courses at the college level. These students will need remedial instruction in the nature of science, as well as in the specific areas of science misrepresented by Answers in Genesis."
National Center for Science Education petition: http://www.sciohost.org/states
"One of the petitions, started by the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a Washington, D.C., group that focuses on church and state issues, says the museum is part of a "campaign by the religious right to inject creationist teachings into science education."'
Campaign to Defend the Constitution: http://www.defconamerica.org/
Elsewhere: Gallup Poll on Evolution, which reveals that the overwhelming majority of religious fundamentalists are ignorant of the fact of biological evolution : comment on Pharyngula : Religion—our maelstrom of ignorance: "Maybe we need to start picketing fundamentalist churches. Maybe it's about time that we recognize religious miseducation as child abuse."
Furor over Stupidity
Error Filled Belief Systems
It is quite extraordinary to me that some people hold collections of unfounded beliefs while denying fact-based realities. I suppose that these alternative "thinkers" believe that it is better to hold as true that which they wish to believe, and as untrue any fact-distorted information that they choose, for whatever misguided reason, not to believe.
Here are some ridiculous world-views that I have encountered in some illogical and personally unpleasant (for many reasons beyond ridiculous beliefs) individuals:
B (for Bible Biased Bigot): God, also pretentiously called the "Intelligent [sick] Designer", dictated Absolute Moral Truths. All liberal and compassionate views, including tolerance of others' behaviors, and any behaviors that differ from the straight and narrow will lead to inevitable moral mayhem. B's knowledge of sociology ranks with B's level of empathy and compassion somewhere close to zero.
W: Global warming is a myth. W's "reasoning" runs that because the planet has previously had ice ages, then global warming must be attributable only to normal fluctuations. Knowledge of the existence of prior ice ages is the sum total of W's knowledge of paleoclimates and climatology. W finds scientists dull because they say the same things as one another. (I think that the planet would be a very scary place if all scientists concocted ideas based on a personal need for variety!) W knows virtually nothing about medical science, but firmly believes that most disease is a creation of the mind. The Nazi holocaust, according to W, either did not happen or is greatly exaggerated (the latter being a concession to the horrifying film footage). W believes that Jews have exaggerated the holocaust because they suffer a persecution complex. It does not seem to have occurred to W that the Jews have indeed been scapegoated and persecuted repeatedly during European history. W doesn't believe in God (so far, so good) and so does not believe that Jesus was the son of God (fine, since a man cannot be the son of something that does not exist). However, W considers that Jesus the man is a myth and that Jesus never lived (apparently, the Gospels are utter lies rather than exaggerations). Does W the-fact-buster believe in anything? Yes, W believes in the sort of mythical creatures that exist only in fantasy novels .....
There seems, as evidenced by these two, to be an association between truly silly or nasty belief systems and more generalized personality defects. This makes some sense in view of the fact that our personalities are the outward manifestation of our general belief system, and further, that what we choose to believe, when we diverge from evidence-logic-based beliefs, will be greatly influenced by our temperament and general attitudes to the world and others.
Bible Bumping
Bible Thumping combined with Bible Bashing ... get it? Corny, corny, corny.
The Bible is filled with internal consistencies that are critiqued on other sites. It is the position of the authors that the Bible is an allegory with minimal historical accuracy. It cannot be the word of God, since it is the only "evidence" for the existence of a God for which their is no incontrovertible evidence.
All opinions expressed here are those of the authors – all Devout Atheists.
ɷ In God, Distrust
ɷ Agnostic vs Atheist
ɷ Apologists make Apologies for God
ɷ Furor over Stupidity
ɷ Inverse Correlations
ɷ Moral Absolutism
ɷ One Evolution, Many Creationisms
ɷ Spirituality, Religiosity, and Madness
ɷ Statistics on Stupidity
ɷ un-designed intelligences = intelligent [sick] design
ɷ YEC yack
Silly religiously-motivated ideas:
ɷ Creationism only flourishes amidst Ignorance
ɷ Myths Revered and Myths Exposed
ɷ Judge Jones Rules
ɷ The Wedge Document
Agnostic vs Atheist
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”
~ W. K. Clifford (1879)
Those of religious bent and the fantasy prone choose to believe what they choose to believe. Such individuals seem to select whatever opinion provides most emotional appeal without regard to logic or empirical evidence.
Religious types come in various levels of dogmatism and subscribe to different human-invented creeds. Most are theists, whereas others believe in equally nutty nonsense like the so-called "Science of Mind" that has zip to do with science.
Creationists of various ilks deny our close relationship (more than 98% shared DNA) with the chimpanzee in order to protect their illusion of Special Creation.
Technically, an agnostic holds that the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural deity is unknowable. While this is philosophically rigorous, what is the point of copping out by leaving room for the indeterminable supernatural?
As soon as a supposed supernatural entity has interacted with the physical, then that purported supernatural agent has entered the realm of the physical and has abandoned supernatural status. Those religions that include creation myths necessarily make a claim that the formerly-supernatural has interfered with the physical. This creation-interaction must, by definition, reduce, or elevate, the supernatural to the physical. Goodbye special supernatural status.
Agnosticism can take the position that the possibility that whatever claimed teapot or deity actually exists is vanishingly small, but agnosticism allows some wiggle room for the vanishingly remote possibility that any particular candidate-claim has validity.
Whereas agnosticism carefully perches on the fence, atheism expresses more certainty than to say, "we just can't know". The small "a" atheist simply says, "I don't believe that God exists", wheras a capital "A" Atheist is certain that, "God does not exist." Philosophical purism aside, all the evidence indicates that the God of the Bible does not exist.
Christians, my prime targets in this expose-stupidity campaign, hold that their supposed Creator did indeed interfere in the physical up until 2,000 years ago, since which time God appears to have understandably grown bored with Christians. Of course, Christians keep this conditionally-loving God on hand for their supposed afterlife, aka death.
Bertrand Russell was a famous debunker of religious nonsense and said in Is There a God?, “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
Russell, as ever, makes a good point. Any fantasist can concoct any fanciful story, padded with a layer of non-falsifiable protection, and can insist that the story is accurate by virtue of the glitch that it cannot be disproven. Such a claim, of course, commits the logical error of argumentum ad ignorantiam. If the claim was first made in antiquity, it is imbued with an undeserved veneer of credibility.
The invention of supposed prophecies did not, of course, end with Jesus. Supposed prophets have been popping up with dismaying regularity since Jesus' preachings.
The problem for creationists, particularly for YECs, is that Genesis does make falsifiable physical claims that do stand disproven by science. Somewhere along the way, some creationist has comprehended enough science to realize this major problem and the era of Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies was ushered in. The fact is, creationists promulgate ignorance and falsehoods in support of what they mistakenly call "Truth". YECs lie about the actual age of the Earth, while believers in pseudointellectual intelligent [sick] design theory accept the actual age of the Earth, but lie about the identity of the supposed-designer, and distort science ranging from cosmology to evolutionary biology.
Considering the ubiquity of invented religions, evolution clearly has not expanded our intellectual capacities to a sufficient degree for humans to justifiably designate our species as "sapiens".