Fundamentalist Deceit: An American Tradition

WWW.Weirdcrap.com still Lives!

2011-05-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder to all those who still like my old website, www.weirdcrap.com... The site is still up. For a few weeks, I had not visited it, and then I got an email from someone asking me if it was the end. I went to the site, and found PORN! This was no surprise, as my Brother-in-law runs a porn site off of the server that he hosts from. I had a free space on it, and several times, when he upgraded the software or the hardware, my site went kablooey, because he moved folders around, or settings had been set back to defaults.

So I decided to just move over to my own domain, and well, after delay after delay, I did it. It's back up, and well -- it was never gone, really. The files are still on my brother-in-law's server. I re-pointed the www.weirdcrap.com domain to a new host, and now the site is back, and nobody can screw it up but me.

Have fun!

After a long, long pause...

2009-06-23T11:53:00.001-07:00

Sorry I haven't added anything for a while.

I've been excessively busy both at work and home, as well as socially, and simply haven't had much time to write. I'll try to get some regular posting done in the future. For now, though... Back to work!

Six Simple Questions for Creationists

2009-01-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

Here are questions that creationists have never really given answers to. Several of them are pretty important, and without giving any answer to them, Intelligent Design and Creationism can't be considered scientific. I refer of course to the questions about the theoretical and peer reviewed background of Intelligent Design. Let the answering begin. I have posted this on several Christian groups to see if anyone tries.

List at least one scientific acievement by any member of the Intelligent design community, which contributed scientific support of the concept of Intelligent design.
What peer-reviewed articles have given support to intelligent Design?
Name one discovery or paper made by a supporter of Intelligent Design that has been useful in furthering our knowledge of science via Intelligent Design.
A scientific theory is understood to be "A testable model capable of predicting future occurrences or observations and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise verified through empirical observation." Where has someone published a theory of Intelligent Design?
What scientific evidence is there for Intelligent Design? Note: Evidence cannot simply be a criticism of the Theory Of evolution.
Michael Medved, a Research Fellow at the Discovery Institute (the main promoter of Intelligent Design) Said:
"The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It's a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else."
In light of this comment, is he correct or incorrect?

C.S. Lewis on thought...

2008-12-19T11:08:00.001-08:00

Many Christians like to quote C.S. Lewis in various discussions, and I recently came across this one, which I have seen before:

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen for certain physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, that gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But if it is so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way the splash arranges will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought; so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity"

Let's examine C.S. Lewis's above comments, and see what a miserable wreck of tortured logical fallacies, it is.

Of course, this is a common fallacious argument, known as "Denying the antecedent". Lewis essentially implies that the only alternative to the notion that our brains were designed by a creative, intelligent God is that our brains are just a random collection of matter. He denies or ignores any other possibility. Of course, his argument doesn't work, because in the world of science, (you know, the REAL WORLD) nothing is simply "random chance", especially when we talk of biological matters. In science, everything happens as a matter of cause and effect.

Lewis then tries to explain what many people who never bother to read any science texts, or get their facts straightened out before trying to explain science to others do. He completely makes up how science allegedly explains the workings of the brain. Scientists, from Neurophysiologists, to biologists, to those who specialize in evolution, do not describe any biological processes as random, nor would they explain the workings of the brain in the simplistic way that Lewis does. Like many of the Christians who try to make arguments against established science, Lewis is putting his money in the ignorance of believers, or at least he is as ignorant as people who think that he gave an accurate explanation of how science describes brain functions.

He then says something so astonishingly irrational and logically fallacious that it's hard to believe that someone of his apparent intelligence and stature would make such a conclusion. He claims that "Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought..." Yes, apparently, belief in thought is dependant on one believing on God. We apparently are supposed to just take his word for it. After all, he's C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia stories. Being famous and popular gives him the authority to be right about whatever subject he writes about! Next thing you know, these Christians will tell us that we can't piss unless we believe in God, first.

Lewis states that we cannot trust our thoughts, UNLESS we believe in God. Apaprently, Lewis never got wind of concepts like objectivity, logical thinking, and rationality. of course, Lewis doesn't define what thought is. After all, he may be playing the word-redefinition game, and using his own personalized definition of thought, which he assumes is the same definition that everyone else uses. Of course, Lewis did not have access to information on Neurophysiology before 1963, because the field is highly specialized, highly technical, and prior his death in 1963, there was no actual field of Neuroscience, or international organizations of scientists to get information from, and of couse, no internet. So in this sense, we can't really blame Lewis, because he died before neuroscience was an accessible topic for most people.

Thought, by definition, is simply a process that brains perform. At it's basis is the interaction of neurons, and the sending of signals from sensory organs. "Thought" is what happens when the neurons in the brain are stimulated and various parts of the brain process that information. I doubt that Mr. Lewis was even aware of the concept of thought as a biological function when he wrote his oft-quoted comment. But it is very well documented what thought is, and even as early as Ancient Greece, philosophers at least understood that thinking was an action, and they even offered prescribed methods for performing it, which we call the principles of logic. Even an Oxford grad like Lewis should have been familiar with that information, because the classic Greek philosophers are part of the standard curriculum there.

In the real world, to validate thoughts, we compare them to data that we receive from our senses. It is reasonable to say that when you can measure and record data, and several independant people set forth to measure and record the same data, comparing each others' data is a reliable way of determining the validity of it.

The difference between rational thinkers and the irrational religious people who push C.S. Lewis's outdated and uninformed philosophy, is that the irrationally religious never seem to be open to the possibility that they might be wrong about anything; everything they think is truth. Their faith is used as a way of validating their own thoughts, however erroneous they may be. Rational people do not innately trust thoughts. They know that their opinions and perceptions are not neccesarily the truth, and the use the tools of research, logic, and rational thinking to determine which thoughts are valid and which are not.

Many religions, Fundamentalist Christianity included, are nothing more than thought systems that let lazy people proclaim themselves to be wise and informed on any topic, without actually going through all that annoying work of reading, researching, comparing data, and actually learning anything about it. This is why we get loads of uneducated, non-science-trained, non-scientists confidently telling educated, degreed, seasoned, professional scientists that everything they know is wrong. This religious mindset lets these people be self-proclaimed experts on anything, and they never feel the need to verify any of the facts that they seem to make up on the fly.

Does Science point to God? Dinesh D'Souza gets it all wrong again!

2008-11-26T13:40:00.000-08:00

Dinesh D'Souza recently wrote:

Contemporary atheism marches behind the banner of science. It is perhaps no surprise that several leading atheists—from biologist Richard Dawkins to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker to physicist Victor Stenger—are also leading scientists. The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator.

Gee, maybe if Mr. D'Souza actually read what these leading scientists have to say, he'd realize that they say no such thing. Of course, since Mr. D'Souza is not known at all for well-documented research into any of the topics he pontificates about, and he doesn't bother to provide footnotes to back up his claims, we are at a loss to determine how he reached this conclusion. Perhaps he reached it because he's simply got a much bigger brain than you do, and that you should not bother asking him any questions.

The central argument of all of these scientists, and indeed, all of the scientists of the world, is not that science has disproven God, but rather that science is a far better tool for finding the truth than faith is. Wherever traditional religion has intersected science, by asserting certain truths about the physical universe, traditional religion has lost to science. The choice of these scientists to be atheists is a secondary thought. The primary argument of these scientists is simply that the scientific method will always prove to be superior to faith-based methods.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Humanist groups in America have launched a similar campaign in the nation’s capital. “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” And in Colorado atheists are sporting billboards apparently inspired by John Lennon: “Imagine…no religion.”

Hold on a second. If paying for a public advertisement for your beliefs is a sign of a lack of confidence on the part of the believer, then we have to conclude that Christians as a group are seriously lacking confidence in their own faith, as well, since they fund a lot more advertising campaigns to promote Christianity. Remember the God Billboards? Every day, across America, thousands of Christian radio and television channels broadcast advertising for Christian ideas, among which is the paranoid notion that atheists are creeping around every corner, out to get Christians. If the ammount of effort spent on advertising for a specific philosophical belief is indicative of a lack of confidence on the part of the believers, then trully, Christians have a veritable Mount Everest of confidence issues than atheists do.

What is striking about these slogans is the philosophy behind them. There is no claim here that God fails to satisfy some criterion of scientific validation. We hear nothing about how evolution has undermined the traditional “argument from design.” There’s not even a whisper about how science is based on reason while Christianity is based on faith.

Maybe that's because that wasn't the point of the message. I mean, if the message was about how science is better than religion, you'd have a point, but the message was not about science. The message was simply "There's probably no God. Why believe in a god? Imagine no Religion."

Instead, we are given the simple assertion that there is probably no God, followed by the counsel to go ahead and enjoy life.

How horrifying! Those evil atheists are telling people to enjoy life. what a shameful message of utter hatred!

In other words, let’s not let God and his commandments spoil all the fun. “Be good for goodness sake” is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. The question remains: what is the source of these standards of goodness that seem to be shared by religious and non-religious people alike? Finally John Lennon knew how to compose a tune but he could hardly be considered a reliable authority on fundamental questions. His “imagine there’s no heaven” sounds visionary but is, from an intellectual point of view, a complete nullity.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe instead of asking people to pick up a book of fairy tales, and just beleive everything in it, unquestioningly, because it was allegedly written by a supreme being, who will send you to be tortured for eternity if you do not believe it, atheists wanted to be succinct and to the point.

If you want to know why atheists seem to have given up the scientific card,

When did atheists give up on science? As far as I can tell, Dawkins is still a scientist and an atheist. So aren't the others. The fact that they were willing to put money into an ad campaign that promoted their beliefs doesn't negate their confidence in science at all. D'Souza is clearly grasping at straws here to find fault in Americans who are exercising their freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. This is a classic double-standard. Nobody thinks there's anything wrong with a group of religious people spending money on mass-marketing to promote their beleifs. We see dozens of different sects of Christianity peddled on television, the radio, on billboards, and on soap-boxes in public squares every day, but if an atheist comes out and does it once, somehow it's shameful or a sign of weakness. Did Mr. D'Souza ever condemn the lack of confidence that the people behind the God Billboards had in their beliefs? Nope. Not a word. Does he ever condemn all the "War on Christmas" rhetoric and advertising this time of year? Nope. One atheist group pays to put a godless message on buses, and suddenly D'Souza is all over it like it's a new plague.

It amuses me to see Christians and Conservative pundits condemn Americans exercising their free speech and freedom of conscience, merely because they disagree with them. Somehow, advertising that people "get on with their lives... be good for goodness sake... and imagine..." has to be made to look bad, despite the positive messages being conveyed.

I would suggest that the person whose faith is threatened here is your humble conservative attack-weasel, Dinesh D'Souza. Why is Dinesh, and other Christians, afraid or upset at these atheists, who only did on a tiny scale, what Christians have been doing for decades with advertising and mass-media? Is he afraid that the campaign might work, and make a few Christians turn away from the faith? I mean, what's a few casualties when there are literally billions of Christians in the world... well... if Mr. D'Souza doesn't discount all the Christians who follow sects that he considers heretical, that is.

the current issue of Discover magazine provides part of the answer. The magazine has an interesting story by Tim Folger which is titled “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator.” The article begins by noting “an extraordinary fact about the universe: its basic properties are uncannily suited for life.” As physicist Andrei Linde puts it, “We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible.”

Oh, yes, the argument from "Fine Tuning", or the Anthropic Principle. The argument from "Fine Tuning" is essentially an argument from ignorance or personal incredulity. Essentially, the problem with the fine tuning argument is that the actual upper and lower limits of the various fine-tuned factors are not known, and also that the process of evolution has actually tailored life to fit whatever the other forces acting upon the world have made it become. In other words, when the world became colder, life evolved to live in colder conditions. When it became warmer, life adapted to live in warmer conditions, and so on. The biggest flaw with the fine-tuning argument is that nobody has been able to show that a world which turned out differently would be any better or worse. It ends up being a big "what if" speculation, at best.

Too many “coincidences,” however, imply a plot. Folger’s article shows that if the numerical values of the universe, from the speed of light to the strength of gravity, were even slightly different, there would be no universe and no life.

Actually, Mr. D'Souza is misrepresenting Folger's Discover Magazine article. The universe, and life, would merely have developed Differently than what we see. Folger doesn't claim that "The universe and life would be impossible" if certain limits were not just-right -- that is a distortion of what the article says. If you read the article, the fourth paragraph starts out by saying “For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility." The article actually goes on to say that String Theory and the Multiverse concept are well supported by experimental physics, and that the Anthropic principle, which Mr. D'Sousa and people from the psuedoscientific conservative propaganda factory, The Discovery Institute, doesn't want to let go of, has essentially been discredited, because it's based on flawed assumptions. The article says that "using the anthropic principle to explain the properties of the universe is like saying that ships were created so that barnacles could stick to them."

Recently scientists have discovered that most of the matter and energy in the universe is made up of so-called “dark” matter and “dark” energy. It turns out that the quantity of dark energy seems precisely calibrated to make possible not only our universe but observers like us who can comprehend that universe.

That is a highly unorthodox interpretation of what Dark Matter is all about, and what recent discoveries have determined about it. Of course, since Mr. D'Souza is presenting his unqualified, uneducated polemical opinion on the subject of Dark Matter, and not quoting a specific source, or footnoting it, so we can't determine which recent developments he's referring to. Of course, Dark Matter may be explained by a recent discovery about Einstein's theory of Relativity. Though the discovery confirms that the missing mass of gluons is accounted for by the Einstein's calculation, I doubt that D'Souza was even aware of it.

Even Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics and an outspoken atheist, remarks that “this is fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident.”

Of course, Mr. D'Souza isn't really quoting Weinberg, here. Weinberg was re-iterating what ID supporters claim about Fine Tuning. D'Souza cuts off the rest of what Winberg actually said, where he concludes "Looked at more closely, the fine-tuning of the constants of nature here does not seem so fine." Indeed, if you browse through the literature from practicing physicists on just how fine tuned they consider everything to be, they will not echo what the Creationists claim at all.

And physicist Freeman Dyson draws the appropriate conclusion from the scientific evidence to date: “The universe in some sense knew we were coming.”

Yes, but Freeman Dyson is at odds with Weinberg and most other physicists on that topic. It is highly disingenuous of D'Souza to try to misrepresent these two people as agreeing with each other when they clearly do not. This is just one of many examples of how Conservative pundits, and creationists quote-mine to make it appear that experts agree with their position, when they clearly write the opposite.

Folger then admits that this line of reasoning makes a number of scientists very uncomfortable. “Physicists don’t like coincidences.” “They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea.”

As stated above, the idea that the universe seems fine-tuned for life is discredited, and based on a flawed assumption amounts to saying that ships were invented so that barnacles could stick to them. The fine tuning notion is based on a number of flawed assumptions, namely:

That the Theory of Evolution proposes a random process
That the Big Bang Theory proposes that the universe evolved from random processes.
That life or humanity is somehow the ultimate goal or purpose of the universe.
That the only alternative to a divine intelligent creator is "random processes"

Creationists and their conservative bretheren constantly misrepresent current science as a series of proposals that everything that exists is all the result of accidental, random, or chance occurences. This is nowhere near what modern science says about the development of the universe or of how evolution works. For years, creationists, "intelligent design" proponents, and the fools who believe them, have been told by actual scientists that their descriptions of "random" evolution and "random" cosmology are not what secular science claims, and yet, they continue to repeat the claims about "randomness" no matter how often scientists correct them.

There are two hurdles here, one historical and the other methodological. The historical hurdle is that science has for three centuries been showing that man does not occupy a privileged position in the cosmos, and now it seems like he does.

That's interesting, because that is not what the Discover magazine article he is referring to says.

The methodological hurdle is what physicist Stephen Hawking once called “the problem of Genesis.” Science is the search for natural explanations for natural phenomena, and what could be more embarrassing than the finding that a supernatural intelligence transcending all natural laws is behind it all?

Here, D'Souza invokes the name of Stephen Hawking, identifying Hawking as claiming there is a problem with the beginning of the universe. Of course, how D'Souza describes it is not quite what Hawking meant. In his 2007 lecture tour, Hawking said:

one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning, in a similar way in which we got rid of the edge of the world. Suppose the beginning of the universe, was like the south pole of the Earth , with degrees of latitude, playing the role of time. The universe would start as a point at the South Pole. As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. To ask what happened before the beginning of the universe, would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the South Pole.

Time, as measured in degrees of latitude, would have a beginning at the South Pole, but the South Pole is much like any other point, at least so I have been told. I have been to Antarctica, but not to the South Pole.

The same laws of Nature hold at the South Pole, as in other places. This would remove the age-old objection to the universe having a beginning, that it would be a place where the normal laws broke down. The beginning of the universe, would be governed by the laws of science.

-- Stephen Hawking, from the J. Robert Oppenheimer Lecture in Physics, delivered March 13, 2007, at Zellerbach Hall on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.

See, Dinesh D'Souza may have read some quotes about Hawking, but it doesn't appear that he actually read Hawking, or even understood what Hawking's views are. This is a constant theme in creationist literature -- they consistantly quote famous secular scientists, and show a complete lack of comprehension for what those scientists actually say.

Consequently many physicists are exploring an alternative possibility: multiple universes. This is summed up as follows: “Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse.” Folger says that “short of invoking a benevolent creator” this is the best that modern science can do. For contemporary physicists, he writes, this “may well be the only viable nonreligious explanation” for our fine-tuned universe.

Well, that's only if:

The concept of fine tuning is based on valid premises (which I showed earlier, is not)
Whether modern physicists agree that this fine tuning issue, as presented by creationists, even resembles science.
If you completely ignore what Stephen Hawking said about the topic of the beginning of the universe.

In short, unless it can be shown that it's absolutely neccesary for the universe to have a finite ex-nihilo beginning, then the question of how the universe began is irrelevent.

The appeal of multiple universes—perhaps even an infinity of universes—is that when there are billions and billions of possibilities, then even very unlikely outcomes are going to be realized somewhere. Consequently if there was an infinite number of universes, something like our universe is certain to appear at some point. What at first glance seems like incredible coincidence can be explained as the result of a mathematical inevitability.

Yeah, and that proabably irks people like Dinesh D'Souza, because if true, it removes God from the picture once again, as it did with the Flat Earth, The Geogentric Model Of the Universe, and mind-brain duality.

The only difficulty, as Folger makes clear, is that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of any universes other than our own. Moreover, there may never be such evidence. That’s because if there are other universes, they will operate according to different laws of physics than the ones in our universe, and consequently they are permanently and inescapably inaccessible to us. The article in Discover concludes on a somber note. While some physicists are hoping the multiverse will produce empirical predictions that can be tested, “for many physicists, however, the multiverse remains a desperate measure ruled out by the impossibility of confirmation.”

Right, just as there is no empirical evidence for the existence of Supreme being.

No wonder atheists are sporting billboards asking us to “imagine…no religion.” When science, far from disproving God, seems to be pointing with ever-greater precision toward transcendence, imagination and wishful thinking seem all that is left for the atheists to count on.

But as I showed here, modern science is not showing more evidence of transcendence, towards a god, or towards supernatural explanations. The trend for the last 3000 years, which continues to today, is that scientific evidence has consistantly led away from the ideas of the supernatural, away from religion, and away from the divine. The classic misrepresentation of science, which we see all the time from Creationists, and from their conservative allies, is what we are getting from Dinesh D'Souza -- not real science, but a layperson's hack-interpretation of it, full of mined quotes, misunderstood terms and concepts, and misrepresented ideas.

Questions Atheists allegedly can't answer...

2008-11-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

Okay, I know, I know... Ray Comfort is a retard, and I shouldn't bother answering his bullshit posts, because doing so just legitimizes his idiocy in his own mind. We shouldn't encourage people who are proud of their own stupidity and ignorance, by taking them seriously. So after this, I promise not to use him for material... well maybe... I don't know. When there's nothing better to do, and I need a good laugh, it's so easy to peek at his blog again...

So I saw this post, and felt I should answer it, since it's allegedly a bunch of questions atheists can't answer.

What was in the beginning?

[Atheists have a dilemma when they say that there was nothing in the beginning. This is because nothing cannot create something. If they say that there were gases (or something) in the beginning, then it’s not the "beginning," because the gases or the “something” already existed. Who or what made them? This is why reasonable atheists admit that they just don’t know, humbling though it may be].

Most, if not all atheists will answer "We don't know". Christians do not know any better answer to this than atheists do; Christians and other religionists assert an answer that people made up in the past, and wrote into their respective holy books. These "answers" are not answers based on fact of scientific research, and are usually nonsensical.

We do not know what was in the beginning, because we don't even know exactly what, where, or when the beginning was. We don't know why matter exists as opposed to nothing. Nobody can answer that, not even Christians.
Do human beings have more intrinsic value than animals?

[If your pet dog and your neighbor are drowning, and you can only save one of them, who would you save? If it’s your neighbor, why? To an atheist, both the dog and the human being are both a mere species of animal, so their value is completely subjective. Most, if pressed, would say that they would save the human being, but they have no real explanation as to why he has more worth, other than to say that there is moral pressure from the social order to value a person more than a dog].

Humans, like any other species, tend to value their own kind higher than other animals. It is instinctual for group survival. Christians like to proclaim that atheists MUST believe that a human has no more intrinsic value than a dog, because of some strange logic that seems to be unique to the Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian misconception of evolution and atheism. Values are determined by people, and by society. Humans value each other more than they value other animals, and they are usually conscious of the perception that society has of them as individuals. But I would argue that even a Christian might choose to save their pet dog if the person drowning were someone they didn't like. If the Christian was asked "suppose your dog, and a known vicious serial rapist/killer were drowning...", do you think they'd rescue the serial killer? If that's the choice, I'd go for the dog.
What happens after death?

[The only way any of us can speak with any authority about the subject of death, is to have reliable information from someone who has been there. God has been there. He transcends death. He is both on this side and on "the other side." When we remove God from the equation, we are left with mere conjecture].

This is a trully idiotic statement. What happens after death, after you remove all of the superstitions like God and the supernatural, is not mere conjecture. It is well studied and understood by science, as well as fairly well documented. All of the myths about light at the end of the tunnel, life-review, and all the other myths associated with dying and near-death experiences, have very down-to-earth scientific explanations.

As the brain loses it's blood supply, when the heart stops pumping blood, it begins to shut down. Lack of blood to the eyes results in the tunnel vision, because the blood vessels in the retina radiate from the center, meaning the last functioning parts of it will be close to the center, since that's where the blood is.

During a near-death experience, people feel light, like they are floating, or "light headed", just like when people are drunk or have a fever, only the feeling is more intense. This is caused by a drop in blood pressure. As the reason, logic, language, and other non-essential parts of the brain shut down, the last parts to remain active include Broca's area, which is associated with fantasy and dreaming. So many people have vivid dreams during a near-death experience because that is the part of the brain responsible for our dreams. Once the brain is stopped, and the individual is not revived, cell death starts, and within hours, enough of the brain's cells die to make revival impossible.

Now Christians claim that there is life after death, however, this has never been observed, and it trully is speculation on their part. In the world of Neurophysiology, it is almost universally agreed that the brain is what causes consciousness. Once the brain dies, consciousness dies with it.
What is the purpose of life?

[Without reference to a Creator who made us with the purpose of eternal fellowship, life has no real rhyme or reason. We are just tiny specs on a big ball of dirt, flying through space, striving to be happy, but with no purpose for existence].

Which is why we tend to make up our own meaning of life. The Christian meaning of life is no more valid than that of a painter or musician, whose "meaning of life" will involve doing what is meaningful to them.
Why there is order in all of creation?

[If we believe that creation came into being through a big bang, it is important to understand that all explosions cause chaos. Order can only come through an in intelligent designer. Why then is there order from the tiny atom through to the massive universe? Why do summer, fall, winter and spring come around each year, at different times of the year, in different parts of the world--always in the same order? Why can we predict the sun’s rising to the second a 100 years into the future? Why is there order in the makeup of the eye, the ear, the brain, the blood, the heart, liver, kidneys, hands and feet? Every part of creation screams (to a thinking mind) that there is a Creator].

Even explosions have order to them. Anyone who has ever studied ballistics and explosive debris fields knows that there are patterns to every explosion. People perceive chaos, because that is what it looks like on a superficial level. However, in an explosion, debris always radiates out from a central point, and it's usually in a fairly regular pattern. Craters left by explosions are almost always round.

The statement that "order can only come from an intelligent designer" is nothing but an ignorant assertion. Atoms, and the subatomic particles that make them up, all have predictable properties, that, when mixed in specific ways, cause specific, predictable, and regular patterns, which happen automatically, without any intelligent agent acting upon them. All matter is made from predictable, specific arrangements of atoms, and each atom and grouping of atoms has very predictable properties. Religious people will insist that those properties of matter were put there by an intelligent force, but they have no way of demonstrating this; they merely assert it.

Furthermore, the answers to why the seasons occur has been well understood by science for centuries. It is an admission of incredible ignroance for a grown adult person in a western nation to proclaim that seasons, the rising of the sun, the phases of the moon, and other astronomical and meteorlogical phenomena are a mysteries. They are not. Science has studied them, and documented why all of these things happen, and in the west, these basic facts get taught to small children in grammar school.
Why is there a sense of morality in every civilization?

[How do we instinctively know that it’s wrong to kill, to lie, to steal, etc. Where did this universal morality come from? The only reasonable explanation is the one given by the Bible--that "the work of the Law is written in their hearts" (Romans 2:15), and that God Himself has given light to every man (see Romans 1:18-20)].

The Bible's explanation is not the only one, nor is it very reasonable. I can think of a much easier explanation. All humans have the same basic DNA -- the DNA that makes a human a human. DNA dictates both the shape and the basic behaviors of all life on earth. Because all humans have the same basic human DNA, they all have the same basic human behaviors in common, and that includes our basic sense of social ethics. Societies of humans will tend to reflect the basic behavior and social ethics that are part of the human mind. Though every culture has variations on what is acceptable, they all agree that killing one another is bad, that violence against a non-threatening or helpless individual is bad, and that stealing is bad. There are pretty simple evolutionary reasons why these behaviors evolved.
Why does every civilization believe in a Creator?

[While an atheist may be quick to point out that some religions within certain cultures (such as Buddhism) are atheistic, mankind has never found any civilization (no matter how primitive) that didn’t worship some sort of Creator, whether it be the sun, or an idol].

Because uneducated humans are superstitious, and casually make up myths and fables in the abscence of knowledge.
Why does every sane person have a conscience, even when it is not dictated by society?

[If we didn’t accept that the conscience is inherent within every human being, we could never rightly administer civil justice. Morality is shaped by, but does not originate from society].

The assertion here is that morality cannot be the product of society. I believe that this assertion is false. It's pretty obvious that societies create morality, because morality differs from group to group. Though there are a few universal values in different human cultures, morality differs greatly from culture to culture. Christians like to assert that their morality is the absolute basis for all other moral and ethical systems, but this is nothing more than a baseless assertion. The universal moral values that different cultures have in common can be seen in the writings of cultures that predate biblical ones.
Which came first--the chicken or the egg?

[Without "the book of beginnings" (the Book of Genesis) to tell us that God made the chicken first (see Genesis 1:20), we are merely guessing as to its genesis. If an atheist believes it was a chicken, where did it come from, and how was it given life when there was no egg from which to hatch? If it evolved without an egg, why did evolution change its mind and introduce eggs, if it was doing okay without them. Also, why and when did a rooster become necessary to fertilize the egg so that a chicken would form within it, and which came first, that rooster or its egg? If the atheist maintains that the egg came first, who then made it, (and again) who fertilized it, and who sat on it so that it would hatch? And that’s just the beginning of the beginnings dilemma. Which came first--the eagle or its egg? How about the duck? The owl, the kiwi, the tiny humming bird, and the big old albatross? There is no end to it, if you reject “In the Beginning God created..."].

This question is based on the assumptions that evolution is false, and that chickens have always existed in their current form, and never evolved from other birds, or pre-bird therapods. Since dinosaurs pre-date birds, and were known to be egg-layers, then the egg clearly came before the chicken.

The egg developed even before there were any fish. Creatures were laying eggs in the cambrian era. Eggs were a natural evolutionary development which allowed reproduction to continue without a large scale mitosis (where an organism divides itself into two separate entities). An egg contains the genetic information to create a new individual, but it grows on it's own, allowing the parent to be unencumbered and weakened by a large scale division of itself.

Chickens are a relatively recent animal -- all the chickens that mankind keeps were created via humans domesticating and cross-breeding different game fowl to achieve desired traits. So before there were chickens as we know them, primitive humans were keeping other birds which eventually were replaced by modern chickens.
10. How did nothing create everything?

[It is primary science to understand that it is impossible for nothing to create anything, let alone everything. Material creation cannot be made by nothing. Something had to create it, and the Creator of all things was and is the non-material Spirit of the eternal God, who dwells outside the dimension of time (see Titus 1:2), and is infinitely beyond the comprehension of human understanding].

I never met an atheist who proposed that nothing created everything. However, I've met plenty of superstitious theists who proclaim that their God created everything out of nothing. Of course, this leads to the question of how god came to be in the first place, and we are left with the same question -- where did everything come from?

Of course, the theists insist that there had to be nothing at some point, but we do not know that. For all we know, the energy that makes up all matter has simply always existed. That answer is no less plausible than an intelligent being just willing everything into existence 6000 years ago. In fact, It's more plausible because it's more in the spirit of Ockham's Razor, since it removes the unknown factor of God from the equation, leaving only that which can be examined. We do not know when the begining of the universe was. We do not know what existed before the universe as we know it did. We don't know if the universe simply always existed or if it was created. These questions simply cannot be answered, and the answers of the world's religions, including Christianity, are not adequate.

Historical Revisionism from Dinesh D'Souza, Part 2

2008-10-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

D'Sousa also fails U.S. history. He'd like to say what most of the Christian Right has been trying to peddle on the American public -- that the United States Constitution which outlines our government, our rights, and American Values -- would not be possible had it not been for all the good Christian influences. Unfortunately, in order to promote this myth, D'Souza has to ignore well-established historical facts, which he counts on most of his readers being ignroant of.

"If modern science has Christian roots, so do our most basic political institutions and values. Consider Thomas Jefferson's famous assertion in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." He claimed this was "self-evident," but one only has to look to history and to other cultures to see that it is not evident at all. Everywhere we see dramatic evidence of human inequality. Jefferson's point, however, was that human beings are moral equals. Every life has a worth no greater and no less than any other."

Sounds reasonable, if you have a memory lapse, or never really retained much from your High School history lessons. First of all, we need to realize that people like John Locke(Deist), Voltaire (Deist), Dennis Diderot(Deist), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau(agnostic), are not mentioned. These men were named by Jefferson and Madison, who wrote the principle works outlining and explaining the Constitution, as their influences. Some of the men who inspired the Founding Fathers were not Christian. Indeed, some of the founding fathers, such as Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Jefferson, were not Christian, but Deists. Thomas Jefferson famously Published his own version of the Bible, where he selectively removed parts that he didn't agree with, most notably, supernatural elements.

Perhaps most notably absent in D'Sousa's understanding of American history is the role that religion played in colonial British thinking. The Founding Fathers were not simply rebelling against taxes and an unfair King. They were rebelling against the established religious paradigm of the day, The Divine Right Of Kings, which declared that the authority of Kings over their subjects comes from the will of God, and was a standard promoted not just by the Catholic Church, but by Protestant nations as well. In essence, the founding fathers were committing blasphemy in the eyes of many.

More importantly, The Declaration of Independance does not proclaim that our rights come from God. In fact, no mention is made of Christianity. The references to "Nature's God," "Creator," and "Divine Providence" in the Declaration do not endorse Christianity. Thomas Jefferson, its author, was a Deist, opposed to orthodox Christianity and the supernatural. The Declaration of Independance makes it clear what the Founding Fathers believed, when they wrote "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,". In other words, the Founding Fathers clearly believed that Government power was based solely on consent from the people, not from any Gods or divine power. D'Sousa's point would only be valid, had the Declaration stated "Governments...deriving their just powers from God."

"The preciousness and equal worth of every human life is a Christian idea. We are equal because we have been created equal in the eyes of God. This is an idea with momentous consequences. In ancient Greece and Rome, human life had very little value. The Spartans, for example, left weak children to die on the hillside. Greek and Roman culture was built on slavery."

Though true, this statement ignores the fact that Christianity continued the slavery practices of the ancient Romans. Though they stopped the practice in the Middle Ages, they revived it again during the Renaissance, and these same Western Christian nations continued to use slaves right on up to the 18th century. In America, The Baptist church schizmed into the Northern and Southern Baptist churches, with the Southern Baptists maintaining that the Bible sanctioned slavery (which it certainly does).

"Christianity banned infanticide and the killing of the weak and "dispensable," and even today Christian values are responsible for the moral horror we feel when we hear of such practices. Christianity initially tolerated slavery — a universal institution at the time — but gradually mobilized the moral and political resources to end it. From the beginning, Christianity discouraged the enslavement of fellow Christians. Slavery, the foundation of Greek and Roman civilization, withered and largely disappeared throughout medieval Christendom in the Middle Ages."

I don't think that Christianity is responsible for the horror we feel when children are killed. I believe that any person from any culture with any religious belief would find a child's killing equally as horrifying. D'Souza is playing on the idea that "Western Family Values" are exclusively Christian. Unfortunately, the same family values can be found in nearly every culture on earth, Christian and non-Christian alike. The Bible certainly does encourage slavery. In the book of Acts, for example, The Apostle Paul convinces a slave to return to his master, rather than escape to freedom, and then writes a letter to the master asking him, as a Christian, to be lenient with him:

"For you are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ, have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Gal., iii, 26-28; cf. Col., iii, 10- 11)

But even more relevent, are the old testament's laws about slavery. More on the actual history of Christianity and slavery can be found here.

"The first movements to abolish slavery completely occurred only in the West, and were led by Christians. In the modern era, first the Quakers and then the evangelical Christians demanded that since we are all equal in God's eyes, no man has the right to rule another man without his consent. This religious doctrine not only supplies the moral justification for anti-slavery but also for democracy. Yes, the idea of self-government is also rooted in the Christian assumption of human equality. One reason the atheist philosopher Nietzsche hated democracy is because he understood its religious foundation."

The first movements to abolish slavery may have been Western Christians, but as I've already pointed out above, the proponents of slavery were also Christian.

The idea that all men are created equal does not come from anything in the Bible. It comes from a Deist named John Locke, as I pointed out earlier.

His statement about Neitzsche is absolutely false. Neitzsche made his views on democracy quite clear in his book Human, All Too Human in Volume Two: The Wanderer and His Shadow, when he wrote:

"End and means of democracy.— Democracy wants to create and guarantee as much independence as possible: independence of opinion, of mode of life and of employment. To that end it needs to deprive of the right to vote both those who possess no property and the genuinely rich: for these are the two impermissible classes of men at whose abolition it must work continually, since they continually call its task into question. It must likewise prevent everything that seems to have for its objective the organization of parties. For the three great enemies of independence in the above-named threefold sense are the indigent, the rich and the parties.

I am speaking of democracy as of something yet to come. That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.—Have things really got less perilous because the wellbeing of the nations now rides in this vehicle?" -- (Friederich Neitzsche, Human, All Too Human in Volume Two: The Wanderer and His Shadow, Page 293)

Clearly, Neitzsche was in favor of real democracy, Not opposed to it, as D'Souza claims. Neitzsche criticized what he considered to be a phoney democracy that did not really guarantee individual independence for all, because of interference from the rich, advocates of the poor, and political parties, all using manipulation to give themselves an advantage over other citizens, which ends up making the system unequal. He said nothing about hating democracy because it was a product of religion. To this extent, D'Souza likely knows that the average Christian conservative knows nothing about Neitzsche, and would never bother to actually read his books, so few of his audience would bother to see if this factoid he presented was even moderately accurate.

"Rights and Christianity --
Consider finally modern notions of human rights — the right to freedom of conscience, or to property, or to marry and form a family, or to be treated equally before the law — as enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The universalism of this declaration is based on the particular teachings of Christianity. The premise is that all human lives have equal dignity and worth, but this is not the teaching of all the world's cultures and religions. Even so, it's appropriate that a doctrine Christian in origin should be universal in application. Christianity from the start promulgated its message as one for the whole world."

So much is wrong with this that it would be difficult to respond to it briefly. Though Thomas Aquinas favored the concept of "Natural Law" that was clearly taken from Aristotle, The Catholic Church, and indeed many Protestant denominations have historically not really favored it at all. The Catholic Church's Canon Law clearly states that all men are not born equal, and that certain people, such as the Pope and various agents of the Church, clearly have special powers over the common man. The very concept of an illigitimate birth (being born out of wedlock) is a Christian one, and for centuries, most Christian Churches looked down on people who were born out of wedlock, and even convinced governments to deny them inheritance rights. Even the Church of England, during colonial times, promoted the idea that Nobility were of higher birth, and thus, had more rights than common men.

Let's not forget the official Church view of Women. The Old Testament clearly says that Women are the property of their fathers or husbands. Christianity, Historically, has always set women apart from men, and given them less rights. Protestant England, especially the Puritans and their successors, Restricted Women's rights. The Women's Rights movement owes itself to Enlightenment people, such as Mary Wollstonecraft , John Stuart Mill, and Voltaire who were all influential in advocating women's equality. Unfortunately, even in the United States, women didn't even have the right to vote until 1921. Women's rights have never been championed by Churches -- not the Catholic Church, not any of the major protestant churches, in America. Sadly, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) which simply prohibits discrimination against sex, has never been passed, and it's still legal for employers to pay women lower wages than men for the same jobs.

One thing that is true that D'Souza can claim -- Christianity has profoundly influenced the creation of most of the human rights treaties and laws of the world, but not in the way that D'Souza would have us believe. Instead of championing Human Rights, Christian Churches have promoted laws and rules which human rights advocates objected to, and crafted their documents against. That's the reality of Christianity's influence on the concept of human rights.

"There are some atheists and even some Christians who admit that theism and Christianity have shaped the core institutions and values of America and the West. But now that we have these values, they say, why do we still need God and Christianity? Oddly enough, the answer is supplied by Nietzsche."

This is simply a straw man argument. I have never read atheists making such a claim. Since D'Souza doesn't provide us with any examples of atheist authors who have said such a thing, we can't take his word for granted.

"Oddly enough, the answer is supplied by Nietzsche. Nietzsche argued that since the Christian God is the foundation of Western values, the death of God must necessarily mean the erosion and ultimate collapse of those values. Remove the base and the whole building will slowly crumble. For a while, Nietzsche conceded, people would out of custom or habit continue to respect human life and treat people with equal dignity, but eventually there would be ferocious assaults on these values, and practices once unthinkable such as the killing of people deemed inferior or undesirable would once again occur. This is precisely what we have seen in our time, and Nietzsche predicted that it will only get worse."

D'Souza is mangling and misrepresenting what Neitzsche wrote, first, by paraphrasing what Neitzsche allegedly wrote, and secondly , by not identifying the actual quotes on which his interpretation was based.

What Neitzsche said, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was that the Christian values that the west used to inform people what meaning there is in their lives, eventually will come to be questioned, then be discarded, and people will eventually come up with new values upon which to derive life's meaning. Then, the day will come, when people realize that they don't need to get their life's meaning from someone else, and they will determine their own meaning and destiny for themselves. The symbolism of the "Übermensch", or "superman" is of a man who creates his own destiny, and who creates his own meaning in life.

"If we cherish the distinctive ideals of Western civilization, and believe as I do that they have enormously benefited our civilization and our world, then whatever our religious convictions, we will not rashly try to hack at the religious roots from which they spring. On the contrary, we will not hesitate to acknowledge, not only privately but also publicly, the central role that Christianity has played and still plays in the things that matter most to us."

Unfortunately, as I've shown, Christianity's role in forming Western Democracy and our concept of human rights, as well as our modern values, has actually been the object against which human rights, equal rights, and democracy were a response to -- not their inspiration. If you value Democracy, equality, and the preservation of human rights, and women's equality, don't thank Christianity for it, thank the people who dared to speak out against the Christian values that made the creation of these things neccesary. Thanking Christianity for democracy, human rights, and equality of all people, would be like thanking King George the third for making it neccesary to rebel against him and create the United States.

Historical Revisionism from Dinesh D'Souza

2008-10-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like my favorite "highly praised" Ultraconservative lunatic intellectual, Dinesh D'Souza, recently added another diatribe to be filed under "Conservative Christian historical revisionism". He's decrying what the scientific world and America owe to their Christian Foundations. As I pointed out in my last article on Mr. D'Souza, he's not exactly known for his honesty or objectivity. After years of writing hateful diatribes against Women, African Americans, and just plain offensive articles in the Dartmouth Review, Conservative whack-jobs count him as one of their best intellectual attack dogs.

So let me correct the gross historical errors of his latest article.

"Popular efforts to tuck Christianity neatly aside as a footnote to this country’s history and to deliver a secular society will fail. Why? Because the faith is inextricably tied to our values, our institutions and even modern science."

Okay, this perception that he's leading with here, is the perception that many Evangelicals and conservative extremists have been harping on for ages -- the notion that secularists and atheists are trying to erase "Christian heritage" out of history books and in public discourse. It's echoed over at Conservapedia, which is literally the laughing stock of bias and revisionism on the Internet. Basically, the more extremist Christians and conservatives believe that any efforts by non-conservatives and non-Christians to express themselves and explain their groups contributions to society, amounts to an attempt to destroy Christianity and trivialize it's contribution to making the world better, and America "The greatest nation". In fact, even when the extremist Christian and conservative claims of history are disproven with objective factual evidence, they use their conspiracy theory about "evil atheist revisionists", rather than actually deal with the facts. So now that we know where D'Souza is going, let's follow.

"We seem to be witnessing an aggressive attempt by leading atheists to portray religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as the bane of civilization. Finding the idea of God incompatible with science and reason, these atheists also fault Christianity with fostering a breed of fanaticism comparable to Islamic radicalism. The proposed solution: a completely secular society, liberated from Christian symbols and beliefs."

Okay, No doubt D'Souza is referring to recent books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who were identifying, exploring and critiquing the popular mythology about how religion, and Christianity in particular, only contributes goodness to society. Two books in two years is hardly what I'd call aggressive, especially when you compare it to the sheer volume of hate-filled conservative and religious books, television programs, radio broadcasts, magazines and newspapers that respond to a single atheist book with hysteria and conspiracy claims. How often have we even seen Atheists on television and in the media being given a free ride to promote their views? When you read the books of Dawkins and Hitchens, they are criticizing so politely, too -- unlike American Patriot and author Thomas Paine, whose book The Age Of Reason, was one of the most scathing intellectual attacks on Christianity, and that was written in 1794, and considered by many at the time to be seditious. When you read Paine's book, and compare the style of his criticism to Dawkins and Hitchens, it doesn't seem proper to call them "agressive". However, in that both Dawkins and Hitchens both criticize Religion, and Christianity for hampering Science and fostering fanaticism, these criticisms are merely historical facts, facts which people like D'Souza would like to minimalize or ignore altogether.

Is it inaccurate or unreasonable to say that Christianity, traditionally, has slowed the progress of science, or fostered anti-scientific attitides? I think it is very reasonable and spot-on accurate. Take the following examples:

For decades, the Catholic Church banned any mention or writing of Nicolaus Copernicus's theory of Heliocentrism.
Galileo, one of the world's greatest scientists, wrote a book discussing Coppernicus's Heliocentism theory, and was put on trial for suspicion of Heresy. Did D'Souza forget this incident?
The Church also banned the dissection of cadavers, which seriously held back our knowledge of human anatomy. It was actually decreed that human internal organs were identical to that of a cow.
Of course, we wouldn't have had the dark ages, or lost thousands of years of scientific knowledge had it not been for the early efforts of the Christian Roman Empire. Though Aquinas and Buridan are often credited with reviving science in the thirteenth century, there was over 1000 years of relative ignorance and scientific stagnation thanks to some of the Laws and policies of Justinian, Leo III, and others. Latin was favored over Greek, thus making a lot of science inaccessible, but also by dismantling some of the vestiges of the Ancient Roman systems, such as public education, generations of people were unable to read.
In modern times, we have opposition to stem cell research, which is is showing great potential for medicine. The Religious groups opposed to it have forced the government to ban it.
There is also mostly religious opposition to Human Cloning, because of fears that doing so would be playing God, that too many embryos are destroyed int he process, and other reasons.
Let's not forget the ever-present movement of Christians promoting Creation Science, which has been exposed time and time again as an anti-science movement that uses deception and irrational logic to promote itself. Essentially, in America, anyway, the movement is literally trying to inject it's anti-science into Public schools.

These examples and others all show a clear pattern of Christianity not just being against scientific progress, but mobilizing against it. Therefore, Dawkins and Hitchens are merely reporting the facts as they are.

"This critique, which comes from best-selling atheist books, academic tracts and a sophisticated network of atheist organizations and media, can be disputed on its own terms. What it misses, however, is the larger story of how Christianity has shaped the core institutions and values of the USA and the West. Christianity is responsible even for secular institutions such as democracy and science. It has fostered in our civilization values such as respect for human dignity, human rights and human equality that even secular people cherish."

A "Sohphisticated network of atheist organizations"? D'Souza is trying to drum up the notion that there is some kind of gigantic atheist conspiracy, and that this alleged conspiracy is somehow organized and perhaps monolithic. The other myth here is that Christians are people with simple beliefs, and that they are all merely individuals who do not march to the beat of just one drum. Of course, he doesn't provide any proof of this sophisticated network of atheists, so It's difficult to tell exactly what he considers to be so sophisticated that it comprises any threat. As for Christians not having, or having less sophisticated networks, let's just smash that myth with some rality.

There are a number of atheist organizations in the USA, for sure, but are they organized and networked with each other?

How do they even compare to the organized, well-established, sohphisticated networks of Christian groups? Just take the The Fellowship, for example. The Fellowship is a sophisticated network of Evangelical conservative Christians who have ties to the White House, to many leaders in America's military, and to many of our politicians. What about the Catholic Church? Surely this worldwide Christian organization doesn't lack any sophistication. In fact, pretty much all of the major denominations have sophisticated networks to make sure their members are all following the correctly prescribed theology. Then we have The Assemblies of God Church, the world's largest Pentecostal denomination, with over 283,413 churches and outstations in over 200 countries (including 12,311 churches in the U.S.) and approximately 60 million adherents, worldwide. They have a sophisticated network keeping their churches organized, and within it, are a host of Television stations, radio stations, and private schools. Can any atheist organizations even compare to this one Christian organization? Can the Assemblies of God or the Catholic Church even function without a sophisticated network? I would be very interested to see any information if someone can offer it, about how sophisticated and well-connected atheist organizations are, because as I've shown, Mr. D'Souza is completely side-stepping his own side's sophisticated networks to peddle paranoia.

"Consider science. Although there have been many civilizations in history, modern science developed in only one: Western civilization. And why? Because science is based on an assumption that is, at root, faith-based and theological. That is the assumption that the universe is rational and follows laws that are discoverable through human reason."

Once again, here is Mr. D'Souza ignoring reality and re-writing history based on what he'd like to be true. It's a popular myth that Western civilization (and to some extent the English speaking part of it), and Christianity, is responsible for all of history's great scientific advancements. Only to a small extent is this myth really true. Science did not just happen in the west, and it wasn't just Christians who made it what it is today. Science has always been more or less global in nature, with scientists from various countries contributing, sharing discoveries with one another, and combining knowledge.

For example, The Ancient Greeks, who were not Christian at all laid most of the groundwork for western science millenia before Christianity existed. Western Astronomy, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine, and Physics all originated and were given their names by the Greeks, and in fact, many of the later scientists of the Christian era actually either re-discovered things that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew, or used their discoveries as the basis for their own theories.

Also, Chinese, Indian and Islamic countries, while being non-Christian and non-western, made many of their own contributions to our scientific knowledge. The Numbering system that western civilization has used since the middle ages, for example, is a product of the Islamic world, as well as a great deal of the mathematics that we use. Medieval Iraqi scientist, Ibn al-Haytham, pretty much invented the field of Optics as we know it.

The ancient Chinese, in addition to inventing Gunpowder, also invented The Compass, Movable Type, Cast Iron, and The Suspension Bridge.

India pioneered a lot of medicine in ancient times, including the first practical Cataract Surgery in the 6th Century BCE, Dentistry, and The Decimal System.

Though D'Souza is correct that the modern scientific method, and the formal institutions of western science owe a lot to developments in Europe during the Renaissance and later, it was not exclusively Christian, and not exclusively in the west that modern science has it's roots.

"Christians were the first ones who envisioned the universe as following laws that reflected the rationality of God the creator. These laws were believed to be accessible to man because man is created in the image of God and shares a spark of the divine reason. No wonder, then, that the first universities and observatories were sponsored by the church and run by priests."

Once again, D'Souza is displaying a gross ignorance of history and the history of science. As I pointed out, The Ancient Greeks developed much of what western science became early on, before Christianity. Plato and Aristotle actually had much more influence over Jewish and Christian thinking on science and logic. The Greek conquest of the middle east, and hundreds of years of occupation in the ancient world, left indellible marks upon Jewish and later Christian thinkers, as Greek education, language, science, technology, architecture, and literature became available to Hebrews. The Roman Empire, which inherited the middle east from the Greeks, continued to import Greek and Roman learning to all parts of the Empire. It was actually Aristotle, who wasn't merely a philosopher, but a scientist as well, whose philosophy of science is what the western world used from his day until the 19th century. It was Christians like Aquinas who actually credited Aristotle for a lot of what he adopted in his philosophy and studies. The Ancient Romans were also heavily influenced by the ancient Greek philosophers and scientists, as well. In fact, Aristotle's methods were in use all over the empire, and as a result, all of Europe was familiarized with Greek thinking. Right through the decline of the ancient Romans, and into the emergence of the Christian Roman Empire, Greek Thinking on science and logic was pretty much common all over the western world, and it stayed with it right through to the revival with Aquinas. It was also spread and adopted by the Islamic world, too. In fact, it was the Islamic world which retained and kept Greek science and Philosophy alive while Europe festered during the dark ages.

To Claim that Western Science is the product of Christianity, or of the Church, is essentially like an art collector taking credit for the items in his collection, even though other people created them, and he simply bought them.

"No wonder also that the greatest scientists of the West — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Gassendi, Pascal, Mersenne, Cuvier, Harvey, Dalton, Faraday, Joule, Lyell, Lavoisier, Priestley, Kelvin, Ampere, Steno, Pasteur, Maxwell, Planck, Mendel, and Lemaitre — were Christians. Gassendi, Mersenne and Lamaitre were priests. Several of them viewed their research as demonstrating God's creative genius as manifested in his creation."

No mention of great scientists like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Aristotle (The one scientist whose philosophy and application of science was the standard of the western world for over 1000 years), Charles Darwin (the scientist who revolutionized modern biology), Thomas Edison (he invented many of the technologies that made the modern world what it is -- electric lighting, movies, phonographs, the first practical electricity grid in a city, and over 1000 patents), Jagdish Chandra Bose (Indian scientist credited with forming the foundation of the study and practical use of radio waves), James Watson & Francis Crick (co-discoverers of DNA), Richard Leakey, Sir Hermann Bondi, Thomas Huxley, Robert Jastrow, or other scientists who do not fit into Mr. D'Souza's claim that "the greatest" scientists are all Christian. Most of the scientists I mention are just as great as Mr. D'Souza's list, and many have shaped the modern world or developed technology and knowledge that the modern world depends on.

D'Souza's selective history is very typical of the extreme right wing and of Christian Fundamentalists. Like others on the right, he has his opinionated ideal of the world and it's history, and he simply spits it out, not expecting anyone to challenge him on his facts. All you have to do is look at the factoids that he presents, and just do simple, rudamentary research, and you can easily debunk him.

Dinesh D'Souza Is D'efinitely D'Looney

2008-09-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

Well, to anyone who isn't familiar with Dinesh D'Souza, here's a brief intro. He's a Catholic from India who moved to America, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English from Dartmouth University in 1983. He was a real prig, even at Dartmouth, because he thought he was doing everyone a favor, by publishing the names and personal correspondences of members of the Gay Student Aliance in The Dartmouth Review, which was editor of. The controversy was not that he outed gays who were in the closet, or that he frequently referred to gays as "Sodomites", but that he or people close to him spied on these students, and stole some of their notes to each other, some from their dorm rooms. D'Souza denied allegations that the notes were stolen. When The Nation published an article claiming that D'Souza had stolen the correspondence, D'Souza wrote asking for a retraction, calling the piece "lies from the loony left", and sending articles which he said would clear his name. But bizarrely, the articles he included showed that the claim was true - they included a piece written under his byline that featured excerpts from gay students' correspondence.

Though he probably thought that he was doing the community a favor by showing that these gay students were planing on doing something shockingly offensive and monstrous -- such as organizing to stand up for gay rights (oh, how terrible!) -- he was the one who was perceived by the Dartmouth Community as the shockingly offensive and monstrous one. What a dumbass!

If that wasn't bad enough, under his editorship, the Dartmouth Review also featured attacks on feminists and Women's Studies. One article, written by Keeney Jones, which D'Souza allowed to be published, said:

"The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth, but whether they should be educated at all."

I guess D'Souza and his friends likes they women barefoot, pregnant, and illiterate. Give the man a white sheet and some corn-pone!

D'Souza criticized the minority admissions policy of the school, as well as printed racist cartoons and articles that were pretty much what one would expect from a KKK newspaper. They once published an article "for black students" that was written in "ebonics", and suggested that black students were illiterate. In another article, William S. Cole, a black music teacher at Dartmouth, was described as "looking like a used brillo pad". The school's vice president of public affairs, at the time, said of the paper, that it had become "outwardly destructive and irresponsible."

With a resume like that, he found his way into another right-wing rant-rag, The Prospect. Under his editorship of that publication, he was frequently criticized for making sexist comments about feminists and the field of Women's Studies, but his coup de grace came when he published an expose of a female student's sex life, who was identified in the article, without even asking her permission. Apparently, the world just had to know the identity of this one student who was practicing adultery, since everyone knows how rare adultery is among college students.

More on D'Souza at Campus Progress.

Even more on Dinesh D'Souza at Sourcewatch.

Still more on Dinesh D'Souza at Media Transparency.

The Creep's own website...

A detailed history of The Dartmouth Review's controversies that I touch on above...

But I digress...

D'Souza has written a new insane rant against the left, one of the many he has written. This time, D'Souza is being blasted by his own ultra-right-wing compatriots. Oddly enough, he's saying what many right-wing whackjobs have already tried to say or have alluded to --that the left in America is responsible for the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

Despite the fact that people, such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, have already gone on the records as blaming the terrorist attcks on the "Liberals, Feminists, abortionists, and the ACLU", and were immediately criticized by the both left and the right for their idiotic comments, D'Souza seems to ignore this history, and pretty much repeat exactly the same thing, going as far as to write a whole book that elaborates on the notion. This is what this moron has to say:

The left is responsible for 9/11 in the following ways.First, the cultural left has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world, that are being overwhelmed with this culture.

Hmmm... So let me see. American TV shows and movies, as well as our internet, and some commercial products, are being forced on "traditional societies" in the Islamic world, and overwealming them. You mean those dictatorships and kingdoms, where the media is largely controlled by the government, are allowing "decadent" American shows and commercialism to infect their people? Is that the fault of the left? I mean, who owns most of Hollywood and American mass-media? I believe if you do simple research, you will find that America's media and movie studios are largely owned by billionaires who are conservative.

In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures. This campaign has provoked a violent reaction from Muslims who believe that their most cherished beliefs and institutions are under assault."

Oh, so the promotion of democracy and free enterprise, as well as giving people equal rights under the law is enraging the Islamic world, huh?

Gee, that's really funny, because I thought that incidents like the 1953 U.S. planned and financed coup of Iran, and the ousting of it's democratically elected government, in which the USA, under the conservative Eisenhower administration, placed the dictator, Shah Pahlavi, into power. I thought that the Shah had spent nearly 30 years opressing conservative Muslims in Iran, particularly the Wahabi sect, which is the sect that spawned both Ayatohlah Khomeni and Osama Bin Laden.

You mean there's no chance that America's financial and military support of Israel, who went to war with several Islamic nations, including Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, couldn't possibly have left some bad feelings towards America in Islamic nations?

I suppose that when Ronald Reagan decided that we should support Iraq in their war with Iran, then play both sides of the coin by selling arms to the Iranians in exchange for hostages, that it didn't create any sour feelings or animocity among Islamics, either.

So D'Souza is saying that despite all the military actions that conservative US administrations have engaged in or supported against various Islamic nations, despite supporting Israel and it's wars against Islamic states, and it's internal opression of Islamic people, and despite having a sort of two-faced policy like we had with the Iran-Iraq war, that what conservative Islamics really hate about America are the liberals and their filthy culture of free-wheeling, free-love, women's lib, abortion, wanton blasphemy. That may not be his exact words, but that's what it seems like he's saying!

D'souza continues:

Further, the cultural left has routinely affirmed the most vicious prejudices about American foreign policy held by radical factions in the Muslim world,

Huh? Did I read correctly? Various Bush administration officials calling terrorists "Islamofascists" is not a vicious prejudice against muslims? Our military and other conservatives routinely calling them "rag-heads" is not a prejudice? Various people on the religious right, making critical comments about Islam, doesn't count as a vicious prejudice? Pat Robertson, claiming that "Islam, at its core, teaches violence" isn't something that should bother Islamic people? If I said that about Christianity (that it teaches violence), Christians would scream bloody murder. What planet is D'Souza living on?

D'Souza continues:

and then it has emboldened those factions to attack the United States with the firm conviction that “America deserves it” and that they can do so with relative impunity.

Hold on a second -- Didn't Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell proclaim that the 9-11 destruction of the world trade center was God's judgement against America, for having The ACLU, liberals, pagans, and gays in our country?

Really? They thought they could do it with impunity, which is why they were in hiding, I suppose. Since they thought they could just attack with impunity, I suppose that's why they acted in secret, and why it took so long for them to plan, finance, and carry it out -- they were so secretive and always on the run, always hiding from us, because they thought they could just walk into the country and just get away with it. And this is allegedly the fault of liberals who criticized US Foreign policy that led to previous events like the 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in which Ronald Reagan's response was to pull out of Lebanon altogether. I suppose it never occured to D'Sousa that pulling out all of our forces after getting bombed doesn't count as something that might embolden terrorists into thinking that they had us on the run, and that we'd run away again if attacked in a similar way.

So he continues:

Absent these conditions, Osama Bin Laden would never have contemplated the 9/11 attacks, nor would the United States today be the target of Islamic radicals throughout the world. Thus when leading figures on the left say, “We made them do this to us,” in a sense they are correct. They are not correct that “America” is to blame. But their statement is true in that their actions and their America are responsible for fostering Islamic anti-Americanism in general and 9/11 in particular.

Can you believe this guy? In spite of US Government actions against Islamic countries, in spite of supporting Iraq's war against Iran, and then selling weapons to Iran, in spite of supporting dictators who opressed Islamic people, in spite of supporting Israel in it's wars against Islamic countries, and opression of Palestinians, in spite of having conservative religious nut-jobs on television condemning Islam, and 50 years of foreign policy that has been two-faced and seemingly caring more about money than anything else, the people to blame are not the conservative administrations, military generals, policy makers, or those directly involved in those things. We have to blame the ACLU, Feminists, Abortionists, Atheists, and Liberals for promoting our "culture of secularism and free love"!

In spite of all the dead Muslims, including about 1.2 Million Iraqis, who owe their deaths to American-made weapons or governments financed by American administrations, the fault is allegedly hippies, pinkos, atheists, secularists, and the ACLU. I guess I missed something...

Dear Mr. D'Souza, if you ever read this, please seek professional psychiatric help before it's too late. This childish irrational rhetoric of yours, and your entire history since college, suggests to me that you're seriously delusional, and possibly chemically imbalanced.

Seek professional help, please....

Evangelicals at the Pentagon -- scary thoughts...

2008-06-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

Just in case anyone forgot about it, since the Bush regime took over, the Pentagon and armed forces have been harboring a growing evangelical-dominionist movement which not only has been harrassing non-Evangelicals in the military, but they have been using the military, and thus, your tax dollars, to openly promote Evangelical Biblical- literalist dominionist Christianity.

For those not in the know, Dominionists are people who believe in actively working towards making the country one that is governed and controlled exclusively by Christians who would impose Biblical Law over all sectors of society, according to Fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionist views. This is a dangerous idea, because dominionism is specifically anti-democratic. These people would not subject any power they get to a popular vote. They believe that they are mandated by God to take control of America and the world, and that America should be ruled over by a king who is specifically Christian.

In other words, these people are Freaking WHACK-JOBS!

Since 2004, reports had been coming from West Point, the Air Force Academy, and other military schools, from atheist, Jewish, Islamic, and non-Christian soldiers, that there was a growing intolerant community that was responsible for creating an atmosphere of antisemitism, religious harrassment, and blatant sexism within the military. This is nothing like the Tail-hook scandal, but it's worse for different reasons. Basically, Jewish people in the military, especially at the academies, were harrassed on a daily basis by Evangelical Christian officers and command. The Pentagon has become increasingly Evangelical over the last few years, and complaints from Jewish and atheist military personnel who claimed they were being harrassed by Evangelical officers and groups, were being ignored.

Soldiers have complained that they were forced to attend exclusively Evangelical services, and subjected to disceplinary threats if they refused to go or did not participate in prayer-related activities. Jewish soldiers complained that fellow soldiers and officers subjected them antisemitic verbal abuse as well as social ostracism. When they went to superior officers, to complain about it, they either received further abuse from those superiors, were told that the complaint was not serious enough to investigate further, or that nothing was done.

Eventually, Michael Weinstein, a former JAG (Judge Advocate General) who is now a civilian Lawyer, got wind of this, and founded The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which lobbied for an investigation. There was an investigation, and the results confirmed a lot of what Weinstein has said.

Currently, there is still a Prayer breakfast held at the Pentagon each week, and various Christian Evangelical extremists, such as Ken Ham, have been guest speakers at them. This is kind of scary, because if there is enough support for Evangelical whack-job Christian beliefs in our military, these beliefs of dominionism and prophecy fullfillment could shape our foreign policy -- our soldiers could be asked to go to war and risk their lives to support the crazy religious beliefs of fundamentalist whackos.

See these articles for more expansion on this issue...

As early as December, 2006, there were issues with Evangelicals in the Pentagon
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6610025

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation's report on an internal Military conspiract of Evangelicals:
http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/six-month-report-2007/six_month_report2.html

US Air Force Academy investigated over allegations of Antisemitism:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/03/national/main692779.shtml

Kill or Convert, Brought to you by the Pentagon:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=220960

"These people should be Court Martialed:
http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2006/12/13/weinstein/

Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity:
http://www.truthout.org/article/pentagon-sued-over-mandatory-christianity

Soldier sues Defense Department over Religious Discrimination:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/08/atheist.soldier/index.html

Ray Comfort's new book

2008-04-17T07:19:00.001-07:00

Ray's new book says:
“I don’t claim to be a great expert on the subject of evolution, but I have quoted well-known evolutionists, who reveal in their own words, the unscientific nature of that in which they have so blindly placed their faith."

Not only is Ray not a great expert on Evolution, but he is also not a great expert on conducting simply high-school level research. As others have already shown, the quotes provided are not taken from their sources, but rather, filtered through several layers of Creationist editors, who removed the context of the quotes, removed words or phrases, or cut the sentence off before it concluded. Such quote-mining and editing is poor journalism, dishonest, and well, flat out LAZY. But hey, Ray has a ministry with it's own publicity department, and he will get followers of his ministry and other people who are already true believers to buy it, and that's what's really important to people running a ministry -- cash flow.

Ray continues:
"So it’s now up to you to make a choice as to whether you are a believer or not, and then to follow the implications. When you read this book, keep in mind the wise words of Richard Dawkins: ‘And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.’”

As we shall see, Ray hasn't even followed the advice of Dawkins, which he is endorsing by quoting him and asking us to follow the advice. See, Ray doesn't know what a good answer is with respect to scientific issues -- remember, he's an admitted non-expert, and not only doesn't provide any technical documentation to back up any claims of creationism, but he simply accepted that these people he quotes actually said what they said without actually researching the quotes in their original context.

Now the quotes!

“I would rather believe in fairy tales than in such wild speculation.” —Ernst Chain, Nobel Prize winner

Interesting. But the guy was not even talking about evolution. He was talking about abiogenesis, which, at the time, was just a speculation. Here is the entire quote:

"I have said for years that speculations about the origins of life lead to no purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago. God cannot explained away by such naive thoughts" - Ernst Chain"

Chain made this quote in 1945, before Stanley Miller's 1956 experiments which synthesized amino acids from basic elements.

“The Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.” — Michael Denton, Molecular Biologist

This is a true quote from Denton, but guess what? He no longer believes it. This quote comes from his book "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986)". It was used by the Discovery Institute and other creationist organizations for years, until Denton had a serious reversal of opinion. After accepting microevolution as a fact, and carefully examining the evidence in the field of biology in support of evolution, he later accepted evolution. He also sent a letter to the Discovery Institute asking them to please stop using the quotes from his older book, and to remove references of him from their website.

His later book, "Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology reveal Purpose in the Universe", reveals that he fully accepts the Theory of Evolution, and he even goes on to explain it in terms of "fine tuning -- that the universe was fine tuned for life, and that life evolved because the universe was designed for it. He never has advocated biblical literalism, and is not a Christian. He is more of a Diest.

“Darwin’s evolutionary explanation of the origins of man has been transformed into a modern myth, to the detriment of scientific and social progress.” —Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist of the British Museum Of Natural History

Here is the whole quote:
"There have been an awful lot of stories, some more imaginative than others, about what the nature of that history [of life] really is. The most famous example, still on exhibit downstairs, is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps fifty years ago. That has been presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly when the people who propose those kinds of stories may themselves be aware of the speculative nature of some of that stuff." "The Horse Story", Harper's, p. 60, 1984.

Patterson is not an advocate of Intelligent Design or Creationism. His quote was specifically about the horse evolution exhibit, which he said is out of order, and needs revision, because it's now inaccurate in light of new evidence. The exhibit is popular, and the museum decided to keep it as is, in spite of his protests. But he does not discredit evolution at all.

Next comes perhaps the biggest joke I've seen from Ray yet. He refers to gonzo journalist Malcolm Muggeridge as a "philosopher", which I find Hilarious!

"Philosopher Malcolm Muggeridge warned that evolution will be “one of the great jokes in the history books of the future.” Millions are convinced that the theory of evolution is a proven scientific fact, which is a sad testimony to human ignorance and naivety. Hopefully, you will “think very carefully” after hearing evidence from leading evolutionists and scientists, as they reveal the baseless and unscientific nature of the theory of evolution. "

Well, not only is Muggeridge not a scientist, or qualified to comment on science, he is kind of insane, actually. To call him a "philosopher" would be akin to calling George W. Bush a "war hero".

When he was writing about Mother Theresa, he was accompanied by a photographer, who was armed with some new Kodak 1000 speed film, which was, at the time, a major breakthough for Kodak. It was a film that was designed to get brighter pictures in low light conditions. When pictures were taken with it, Muggeridge saw the developed photos, and concluded that since they were filmed in low light, that Mother Teresa was "bathed in divine light", and concluded that he witnessed a miracle! The Photographer said that it was no miracle. He just used the right film for low light conditions, and Muggeridge was unaware of the film's existence. Nonetheless, even after being told about the film, Muggeridge kept claiming that the miracle of Heaven's light illuminating Mother Teresa was real.

So once again, we have sloppy research, mined and carefully edited quotes, and the assertion of questionable titles to people. Ray Comfort's book is nothing that will convince anyone but the true believers.

Is Ray Comfort Lying for Jesus?

2008-04-14T05:16:00.000-07:00

I am totally of the opinion that the Christian Fundamentalists who are responsible for the lies and distortions of the creationist movement are of the opinion that lying for Jesus is totally acceptable, because if you tell a lie that "leads someone to the truth", then it's a good thing.

For the rest of Christians, including Ray Comfort and his peanut gallery, however, the answer is far less flattering -- the explanation that they are not really lying, but are simply that ignorant of science.

I mean, I honestly do not believe that Ray was lying when he made up the bananna argument. He was just completely ignorant of the history of human agriculture as it relates to how mankind has deliberately cross-bred bannana plants.

I do not believe that the vast majority of people who make the "second Law Of Thermodynamics" argument against evolution are deliberately lying -- they are simply quoting other creationists blindly, and are totally ignorant of the rest of thermodynamics, and science in general.

But the producers of Expelled, the Discovery Institute, Phillip Johnson, and others who invent the chameleonic and pretzel-like explanations of Creationism, are deliberately lying for the cause of evangelism. They are so concerned that people accept the literal meaning of the King James English Bible, as the ultimate truth, that they are willing to invent lies to get the lesser-educated Christians to have nonsensical arguments to throw around and constantly get into the news, and into Public school PTA meetings, and to generally waste the Public's government actions on.

The problem is that pretty much everyone on Ray's blog, Ray included, are just not well educated enough on science, logic, and reason to know the difference between science and junk that is made to resemble science. So far, The quotes that Ray has used -- like the ones from non-creationist biologists, are all quote-mined and cleverly trimmed out of context to say the opposite of what their authors actually wrote -- and others have pointed that out and shown the original quotes to prove it.

The problem I see is that when we show these things, and prove the lies and deceptions -- Ray and his peanut-gallery just ignore it -- because that is the standard reaction to being owned by the facts. Just ignore those who "persecute" you with "inconvenient truths" and dreaded documentation...

Expelled's "Martyrs"

2008-04-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

Three people are profiled in "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", the creationist propaganda film that is currently being shown to almost exclusively Christian Fundamentalist audiences. Many things are said about their cases, most of which is clearly misleading, and this article will set some facts straight.

Carolyn Crocker

Crocker's case is possibly the most distorted and factually-challeneged one in the film. The woman is a substitute science teacher at Northern Virginia Community College, whose contract ran out, and the school decided not to renew it. There was no obligation for the school to renew her contract. So Here comes "Expelled" literally claiming that she was fired just because she believed in Creationism. Well, it is true that she's a creationist, but here is the rest of the story, which doesn't get told in the film.

Guess what Ms. Crocker taught in her Biology 101 class? She showed a slide show that was literally an attack on science and evolution, and which was pretty overtly pushing biblical literalism. There was virtually no science in her presentation, and when asked if she would later present the evidence for evolution, she said "No, there isn't any, really." This presentation pretty much broke all of the rules that were laid out for the science curriculum, and most of the "facts" that she presented were overtly only half-truths at best, and at worst, outright lies.

Slides shown to her classroom:
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=5152;st=210#entry97227

What's worse is that she tried to use the classroom as a pulpit, and railed on about how Darwinism was responsible for the Nazis. This turned the class from a science course into a course on extremist politics. Because she decided to throw out the course that she was being payed to teach, and preach Christian Evangelical Fundamentalist dogma, instead, she should have been fired on the spot, but they didn't do that. They let her continue teaching, and when her contract expired, they simply did not renew it -- and they had a very good reason to do so.

The washington Post Exposes Crocker
Http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/AR2006020300822_pf.html

Richard Sternberg

Sternberg's case is old news. Expelled claims he was fired from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. for his belief in creationism, when in fact, he still works there. He wasn't even an employee of the Smithsonian to begin with -- he was an intern. In his job as editor of a journal, he failed to follow the posted procedures for submitting articles into the journal, and as a result, he was simply given a talking to, and several colleagues expressed disappointment. He was never fired, nor officially reprimanded. He claimed that he lost his access, but by all accounts, he still has the same access.

He claims that he was discriminated against, but dirty looks of disapproval somehow do not sound like discrimination. So the Discovery Institute, who championed his case, had to make it sound like he was fired or that his life was negatively impacted. They lied on his behalf.

Article on Richard Sternberg from Scienceblogs.com:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/12/creating_a_martyr_the_sternber.php

Richard Sternberg on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sternberg

Guillermo Gonzales

The Gonzales case is another distorted mess. Expelled was truthful in that he was denied tenure (They did not claim that he was fired, like they said about Sternberg and Crocker), but they made it sound like not getting tenure meant something almost as bad. Tenure is a lifetime appointment at a job. It costs money. So schools use it sparingly.

Gonzales may be just as qualified in some ways as his colleagues with tenure, but one fact is a problem -- He hasn't really published much since his post-doctoral work, and that is a big problem. Tenured professors tend to be people who publish a great deal of work, and get a lot of things done as far as research goes. Gonzales did a lot of publishing and research during his post doctoral years, but hardly anything since he has been employed by Iowa State. Most colleges would deny tenure for that reason, and though other professors may have less qualification than he in terms of experience, they publish and perform more work, which is why he was passed over for someone else.

He still has his job. He still teaches at the same University. He lost nothing except a perk. He claims it's because he's a creationist, but the guidelines of the university were followed to the letter, by all accounts.

Guillermo Gonzales on Science Blogs.com:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/05/post_2.php

Guillermo Gonzales on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_Gonzalez_(astronomer)

Expelled got all of these people's stories wrong, and distorted the facts so badly that it bears no resemblence to reality. In essence, it's just example of deceit by Christian Fundamentalists.

Christian Deciet goes back a long way...

2008-03-14T04:57:00.000-07:00

The following are quotes from various Christian luminaries throughout the last 2000 years, all expressing the belief that it's okay to lie and deceive in the name of the Lord, or to accomplish the Church's goals.

"It is an act of virtue to deceive and lie, when by such means the interests of the church might be promoted."
-- Bishop Eusebius (260 - 339), early Christian Scribe and historian.

"How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us."
-- Pope Leo X (1513 - 1521)

"[Those who assert that] the earth moves and turns ... [are motivated by] a spirit of bitterness, contradiction, and faultfinding; [possessed by the devil, they aimed] to pervert the order of nature."
-- John Calvin, sermon no. 8 on 1st Corinthians, cited in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (1988),

"Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?"
-- John Calvin, pointing to Psalm 93:1 in his Commentary on Genesis

"Woman is a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill."
Saint John Chrysostom (354?-407)

"Every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman."
Clement of Alexandria (150?-220?) Greek Christian theologian

"Use against heretics the spiritual sword of excommunication, and if this does not prove effective, use the material sword."
-- Pope Innocent III, (C.E. 1161-1216) reiterating the death sentence which the Christian Church had meted out to all heretics and unbelievers for many centuries and which would continue to be endorsed by Christian denominations for centuries to come, even in the twentieth century by Pope Leo XIII (source unknown)

"If it shall be necessary, through sentences of excommunication against their persons and of interdict against their lands, all backsliding being put an end to, they compel them to fulfil their vows."
-- Pope Innocent III, (C.E. 1161-1216) explaining where much of the land that formerly belonged to our philosophical forebears went to: land was confiscated from any person suspected of heresy, "Bullariulii Romanum, editio Taurinensis," the Bull summoning the Crusades (December 14, 1215)

"We believe that the Greeks have been punished through [the Crusades] by the just judgement of God: these Greeks who have striven to rend the Seamless Robe of Jesus Christ ... Those who would not join Noah in his ark perished justly in the deluge; and these have justly suffered famine and hunger who would not receive as their shepherd the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles."
-- Pope Innocent III, (C.E. 1161-1216) to the Greek (Byzantine) Emperor, after sending a group of crusaders to Constantinople in 1204 in humble obedience to the edict of Christ in Luke 19:27: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me" (the chronicler Geoffrey Villehardouin said that never since the creation of the world had so much booty been taken from a city), in G. G. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty (1969), p. 164-5

Philosophical Bullshit questions

2008-03-04T12:23:00.000-08:00

So you're having an on-line discussion with some religious people, Christian
or otherwise, and they his you with one or more of the following questions (the below questions were copied from one of many sources of identical Christian arguments):

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
2. How do you know that you exist (without being circular)?
3. Where does human self-consciousness come from?
4. How do you know that your senses are reliable (without being circular)?
5. What is truth?
6. What is the cause of everything?

These are what we, in the world of debate, refer to as "Bullshit Questions". They are designed to distract from the subject being argued, and make you ponder imponderable questions, so that you get lost in endless and pointless philosophical discussion.

Let's take these questions, and look at each of them, and give them answers that will make the person asking the questions think twice.

(1) Why is there something rather than nothing?
If the person seems to think that they're an expert on philosophy and logic, you may want to explain to them that putting the word "IS" with reference to something PRESUMES something's existence, and nothing is merely a null concept. Just tell them that obviously, something exists, and there is no point in debating why. For all we know, something has always been around, and we may never know why.

(2) How do you know that you exist (without being circular)?
When asked this question, simply tell them what Renee Descartes said -- "I think, therefore, I am." If that doesn't work, simply turn it around and ask them "How do you know that I exist, without being circular?" In fact, you might want to point out that this is just a Bullshit question, and ask them how they can possibly know anything at all without using their senses, logic, and reason. The answer, of course is that they can't. Nobody can explain how they know anything without referencing their senses; our senses are how we gain all of our knowledge. It's just an impossible task, like asking someone to prove that bigfoot doesn't exist.

(3) Where does human self-consciousness come from?
Obviously, the answer to this is that human consciousness comes from the brain and nervous system of a human being -- next! Human Consciousness is the result of our brains working with our sensory organs. Self-awareness is more of a biological function than anything. All the great apes and some other animals have self-consciousness, though arguably, in a less complex form than ours.

(4) How do you know that your senses are reliable (without being circular)?
This is the biggest bullshit question in the group. Essentially, you need to tell them that it is impossible to prove one way or the other if your senses are reliable, without being circular, since it requires you to use your senses to even start any kind of test or investigation. You then need to ask them how they can prove that their senses are reliable without making reference to their senses. They may want to say "because The bible says... Jesus said..." or whatever. In any case, if they reference the Bible, or theology, they've failed, because they would have had to use their senses to read, hear, or otherwise have the bible passage pointed out.

Nobody can accomplish the task -- just get over it. I actually talked to one guy, who used this argument, claim that he gets his knowledge from direct revelations from God. He "knows" that this is the way, "because God made it perfectly clear to him it was real." If true, it would mean that God literally has to personally reveal knowledge to everyone, rather than let us discover things using the senses and intelligence that we were given. Of course, there is no way for anyone to question such a claim, because how can we talk to God and ask if that's what he told the guy?

(5) What is truth?
Truth is (according to www.dictionary.com):
1. the true or actual state of a matter.
2. conformity with fact or reality; verity
3. a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle.
4. the state or character of being true.
5. actuality or actual existence.
6. an obvious or accepted fact; truism; platitude.
NEXT!

(6) What is the cause of everything?
This is yet another imponderable. Tell them that your answer is no better than theirs, because nobody has the answer -- all there are for this question, are hypotheticals and guesses. Freely copy and paste my answers whenever you see the questions posed in an atheist-Christian debate. The people using these arguments aren't even aware half the time, that Renee Descartes came up with them about four hundred years ago, and that after examining them, he rejected them. The arguments are just total bullshit, and you will not get anywhere if you pay any attention to them beyond telling the person you're talking to that they are bullshit. These questions are perhaps the biggest waste of time you will ever spend.

Creationism and Holocaust Denial: Closer to each other than you may think!

2008-02-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

Please Note: I am in no way saying that ALL CREATIONISTS or ALL EVANGELICALS are anti-semitic. I am simply stating that SOME are, and that by definition, anti-semitism is expressed as suspicion of Jews at the least, or outright hatred of them at the worst. Not all evangelicals are automatically suspicious of anyone who is Jewish, but many are, and they often try to hide it. Even Billy Graham got caught expressing his views on tape with Richard Nixon. His views about Jews were typical --he clearly stated that he believed that Jews controlled the media, and were ruining the nation. This sentiment is not unusual to find, especially in America's more rural areas. Nothing more should be read into this article.

Many people have criticized me for making comparisons between holocuast deniers and Creationists, saying that I go too far, or that the comparison is highly inappropriate. I disagree. Not only are my views on the connection between creationism and Holocaust denial appropriate, but I believe they are accurate and justified.

Holocaust denial and Creationism don't just share common tactics and methodology in how they publicise and spread their message, They also share Antisemitism. Many evangelicals who support creationism deny any charges of antisemitism strongly, but there is a lot of documentary evidence to support the idea that at least some Evangelicals who are involved with the creationist movement, are, in fact, anti-semitic.

Before I get into that, let me restate what I have previously claimed about the similarities between holocaust deniers and Creationists.

(1) Both use conspiracy theories to support their claims. Holocaust Deniers frequently claim that "History is written by the victors", or that "History is controlled by the establishment." When reading Holocaust denial literature, they frequently claim that there is a secret conspiracy of Jews who have influence over governments, and who pressure people into accepting their "official version" of what happened in World War 2 with respect to the Nazi Attrocities against Jews. they claim that the establishment crushes all who go against this official version of history.

Likewise, Creationist literature is full of the same conspiracy claims. They claim that the scientific establishment crushes all alternative viewpoints, and that evolution is promoted as the official word by a politically powerful organized movement within the establishment.

(2) Both say that it's important for children to be taught alternative views (their views, in particular) in school, and decide the truth for themselves. Of course, when it comes to other simlar topics in history and science, both holocaust deniers and creationists have nothing to say about presenting alternative views and letting kids decide for themselves.

(3) Both use deceptive and fraudulent research to promote their agendas. In the case of Holocaust deniers, They often misquote research or blow it off entirely. IN "the Hoax of the 20th Century", for example, Holocaust Denier Aurhur Butz simply casts aside all testimonies of victims as "lies for publicity and personal gain", and all admissions and confessions of former Nazis who participated in attrocities as "coerced by the allies". In other words, despite the fact that plenty of eyewitnesses corroborated thousands of specific stories and facts, they all have to be ignored because the allied victors in World War 2 invented the facts and made sure everyone told the official version of events. David Irving, another Holocaust revisionist and historian, despite ample documentation of Hitler's speeches, minutes from staff meetings, and other material, misrepresented all of it by stating that Hitler had no idea what his generals were doing.

Creationists aren't just similar, They're worse! In case after case, various scientific facts and articles cited in creationist publications, where famous and respected scientists appear to be making the case against evolution, the quotes are often doctored or quote-mined out of context to say the exact opposite of what the original author intended. Creatioists do not simply blow off research and evidence, they actually attempt to redefine science terms and facts, and even tell outright lies about the facts. The use of the second law of thermodynamics is a perfect example of how they attempt to redefine scientific laws to suit their needs. They claim that there are no transitional fossils, which ignores the body of evidence that scientists have collected concerning this. the Discovery Institute claims that more and more respected scientists are coming over to the creationist side, when the reality is that more and more Christian diploma mills are giving fraudulent degrees to people who never were practicing scientists in the first place, and who do not go on to work as scientsts after they get their degrees.

(4) Both have people among them who are blantantly antisemitic. Holocaust deniers are practically unquestionably antisemitic by and large, as most of their appearances and support comes from the Neonazi movement. Arthur Butz and David Irving, two of the most prominant revisionists, speak almost exclusively in front of neonazi audiences.

With Creationism, few of the books, literature, and websites of creationists show direct evidence of antisemitism, but rather, support of their ideas often comes from individuals and groups in the Evangelical community who are undoubtedly antisemitic or racist. For example, Kent Hovind, a prolific Creationist and current Felon (for tax evasion), sold neonazi and antisemitic literature on his website. "The Fourth Reich of the rich" is one such book that he sold, which is a typial conspiracy theory book linking Bilderburgers, Illuminati, and powerful Jews. He also wrote "I love the Jews. But The Protocols of Zion [sic] was written to explain how to control the world, I mean, it lays it all out. But it’s really carefully done so that if it is ever discovered the Jews take the blame for it." (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a classic Antisemitic book that purports to show how the Jews control the world, but it was uncovered as a hoax many times).

Racism and Antisemitism are the dark underbelly of the Evangelical movement, and one which evangelicals guard carefully, but occaisionally, they let it slip out of their mouth or into their literature. People like Pat Robertson, Don Wildmon, and Gary North, promote conspiracy theories focusing on how Jews, Masons, and the Illuminati are all working to control the world. Don Wildmon, of the American Family Association, claimed that Hollywood is "run by jews who are hostile to Christianity". Wildmon also has recruited known Neonazis work for him. If you go through lists of antisemitic quotes by Christian leaders in America, you will note that most of the same people support Creationism, and sell creationist literature.

The Creationist movement itself doesn't specify any anti-semitic tennants, but far too many of the people giving money to the movement and promoting it clearly have made statements that suggest suspicion of Jews, or which clearly indicate Jewish Conspiracy beliefs, based in ignorance and anti-Jewish bias.

------------------------
Links to back up many of the claims in this article:

Quotations from Contemporary and historical Christian leaders
www.weirdcrap.com/recreational/chrsquot.htm

Answers In Genesis Racist support
http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/aig_and_racism_response.htm

Presbyterians promote antisemitism at peace conference:
http://atheism.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/2004/02/05/news/local/bhate0206.txt

Bush White House checked with Rapture Christians before latest israel Move
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0420,perlstein,53582,1.html

Kent Hovind's antisemitic comments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind#From_mainstream_critics

Don Wildmon's Antisemitism:
http://www.seekgod.ca/cnp.wi-z.htm

The Demonizing of Margaret Sanger

2008-01-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

As I have shown in previous articles in web newsgroups, the Christian Evangelical Fundamentalist movement is full of liars, who pump out misquotes to support Creationism and Intelligent Design. The lies of the Christian Right in America are not restricted to Science, however. Demonizing, slandering, and libeling people with whom they disagree, especially if that person is perceived as a hero figure of movements they oppose. Their demonizing of the gay/lesbian/bisexual movement, which they also refer to as the "sodomite political establishment", has also been well docmented.

The most egregious example of how dishonestly and malignantly Christian Fundamantalists in America lie and engage in hypocritical deceit is how they have demonized Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and one of the people responsible for the creation of the birth control pill. There is a series of claims made about Sanger, on hundreds of websites, and in a couple of widely-promoted books, which makes Sanger out to be a monster on the level of Adolph Hitler, with possibly a dash of Dracula and a little Caligula thrown in for good measure. According to the usual littany of claims, Sanger allegedly believed the following:

* She wanted to exterminate blacks
* She believed in white supremacy
* She thought that we should exterminate the poor
* She believed we should forceably sterilize people with undesired genetic traits
* She believed that the poor were weeds that needed to be pulled from society.
* She wanted to use abortion and forced sterilization to eliminate undesired races.

This is quite a contrast to the idea of Sanger as a champion of women's rights, promoter of birth control, and medical pioneer. In fact, the Christian lies about Sanger are so pervaisive that many people who are not even involved with the Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist movement believe them. This is because of a very-well financed campaign by Evangelical Fundamentalist groups to spread these lies about Sanger, through the promotion of books, websites, and other media. All of these lies stem from a series of books written by anti-abortion activist George Grant. Grant wrote several books about Sanger and Planned parenthood that are full of invented facts, misquotes from books, articles, and letters by Sanger, and falseley-attributed quotes. The books are literally a colleection of clever lies that have numerous footnotes, to make them appear to be legitimate.

As with the creationist movement, footnotes are often put into their books with the two beliefs that (a) nobody will ever bother to follow up on them, and (b) people are impressed by lots of footnotes, and if you provide enough of them, nobody will question what you assert when you use them.

What I have here is a collection of a series of conversations I had with online Evangelicals about Margaret Sanger. They entered into the conversations excessively confident that they had all the answers, and not expecting me to actually check their facts. In the course of these dialogs, I ended up reading several books by Sanger, and came away with a much better impression of her than I previously had. I read one book by George Grant, and fortunately, his footnotes are very well done, and if you look up just one of them, and find the source of it, you can instantly uncover his deception -- which people almost never do themselves.

This all started with a message thread I was part of on the Brother Jed message board. Brother Jed is a traveling street-preacher, who goes around the country screaming fire and brimstone on College Campuses.

Just like the alleged "homosexual agenda" propaganda that extreme-hate organizations produce, which alleges that homosexuals are attempting to "invade schools" and "turn kids gay", and "rape our children", the allegations that Sanger was racist and was a eugenicist, are a fabrication designed solely for the purpose of slander. One telling fact is that this allegation (that Sanger was a racist Eugenicist) originated only after her death. He books and writings completely refute the notion that she was a racist who wanted to "use abortion to control non-whites and other minorities". There are collections of her writings on the web, and most interesting is that the people who accuse her of being racist almost never have quotes from her at all. All they do is look at brief associations with other people -- associations which she even wrote about, and which refute the ideas of collusion. I will attempt to cover all the allegations made by critics, and back it up with the actual text that can be found if you actually look it up.

(1) The Claim: "Margaret Sanger called the poor, blacks, Jews and Catholics "human weeds" and referred to blacks and hispanics as the "mud races". She set up her "clinics" in inner city neighborhoods for the express purpose of significantly reducing or even eliminating the black race in particular." -- Evangelist Bruce Evan Murch

The alleged proof: Sanger's book "The Pivot Of Civilization"

The facts:

Very clearly the "human weeds" reference was an outgrowth (pun intended) of Sanger calling these people "human undergrowth" on page 265 of the ORIGINAL Brentano's (New York, NY) publication of Pivot of Civilization. It seems clear that some speaker, using the original language added to it something like, "meaning human weeds" and people took that to be in the original language.

Why don't we just look at the paragraph in question:

"At the present time, civilized nations are penalizing talent and genius, the bearers of the torch of civilization, to coddle and perpetuate the choking human undergrowth, which, as all authorities tell us, is escaping control and threatens to overrun the whole garden of humanity. Yet men continue to drug themselves with the opiate of optimism, or sink back upon the cushions of Christian resignation, their intellectual powers anaesthetized by cheerful platitudes. Or else, even those, who are fully cognizant of the chaos and conflict, seek an escape in those pretentious but fundamentally fallacious social philosophies which place the blame for contemporary world misery upon anybody or anything except the indomitable but uncontrolled instincts of living organisms. These men fight with shadows and forget the realities of existence. Too many centuries have we sought to hide from the inevitable, which confronts us at every step throughout life.

Let us conceive for the moment at least, a world not burdened by the weight of dependent and delinquent classes, a total population of mature, intelligent, critical and expressive men and women. Instead of the inert, exploitable, mentally passive class which now forms the barren substratum of our civilization, try to imagine a population active, resistant, passing individual and social lives of the most contented and healthy sort. Would such men and women, liberated from our endless, unceasing struggle against mass prejudice and inertia, be deprived in any way of the stimulating zest of life? Would they sink into a slough of complacency and fatuity?" -- CHAPTER 12

So as we see here, from the original book, She was using a metaphor. Essentially, if you can read English, you should see that Sanger was saying that governments and charities ignore the real problems of overpopulation. She was concerned that in overpopulated regions, the poorest people are the ones who suffer the most from overpopulation problems, they are the least educated, and most crime-prone.

Governments focus on hand-outs and creating dependant social programs, instead of educating the masses, and actively trying to help them help themselves. Governments encourage huge families, which hurts the poor even more. When you read this whole chapter, you see what Sanger is really concerned about -- that children suffer from high mortality rates in overpopulated, poverty ridden places. Her solution was not abortion or sterilization -- but birth control and education.

Sanger clearly states that she wanted to educate people on the use of birth control, to keep families from getting too large for poor parents to feed, and to make sure that overpopulation didn't outgrow the avalable resources. She was trying to PRESERVE LIFE by controlling growth, and not once did she mention anything about racial inferiority.

If you read the entire book as I have, it is impossible to reconcile what it says with the outrageous assertions of tose who lie for Christ.

The phrase "human weed" does not appear anywhere in the book at all -- in fact, the word "weed" only appears in the following parts:

"Reports on child labor published by the National Child Labor Committee only incidentally reveal the correlation of this evil with that of large families. Yet this is evident throughout. The investigators are more bent upon regarding child labor as a cause of illiteracy.

But it is no less a consequence of irresponsibility in breeding. A sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan.[2] As one weeder put it: ``Poor man make no money, make plenty children--plenty children good for sugar-beet business.'' Further illuminating details are given by Miss Wolfson" -- CHAPTER III: ``Children Troop Down From Heaven....''

"But so long as Bishops and well meaning philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage `the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings.'' (quoting J. O. P. Bland on the plight of Chinese)" -- CHAPTER V: The Cruelty of Charity

As you can see, from these two, and only appearances of the word "weed" in her book, Sanger speaks out AGAINST CHILD LABOR, CHILD MARRIAGE, and missionaries encouraging people to have more children without increasing their food supply to make up for the new mouths to feed.

Bottom line: Nowhere in any of Sanger's writings does she use the phrase "Human weeds", and the original context of the cited passage clearly shows that "the choking human undergrowth" is not referring to any racial group, or group of racial groups, but rather "overpopulation" in general.

As is usually the case with the EXTREME RIGHT, a few myths and rumors form an urban legend. The Legend becomes Gospel, and the Gospel against Margaret Sanger, just like the Gospel against "the homosexual agenda", gains it's strength not from actual facts, but by being repeated by so many activists (who never bother to question the validity of the claims), that it becomes accepted as truth, merely because it is shouted loud and frequently. When you actually look to the sources cited by the extremist antiabortion crowd, you see, as usual and predictable, that they are not above lying to promote their cause. In the minds of many Christian Fundamentalist Evangelicals, what is important is WHAT YOU BELIEVE, not what the facts are.

I uncovered a similar series of lies about "the homosexual agenda" years ago. A certain article called "gay revolutionary" is always cited as being "The gay agenda", and it was "read before Congress", as though the text was an official announcement by gays for the government to hear. this was the famous text where gays allegedly declare "we will rape your children..." and other horrifying stuff. When I looked up the original text, I found that in EVERY CASE, the homophobes failed to include the first paragraph of the article, where it's author claimed that it was an Outre' -- it was fiction, designed to be outrageous, designed to be perceived as the ranting of a madman. It was read before congress -- a conservative senator read it before congress because he wanted to "prove" that gay people were dangerous. He, of course, also left out the introduction.

(2) The Claim: Margaret Sanger was out to exterminate the negro race.
The alleged proof:

"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population," she said, "if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon, quoting Sanger's book, "The pivot Of Civilization"

The Facts:

This is another lie that the extremist anti-abortion commuity tells about Margaret Sanger.

This quote is repeated in HUNDREDS of anti-Sanger websites, all of which use the exact same quote. The goal is to make it seem as though Sanger was a Nazi of some kind secretly using abortion and birth control to stop black people from reproducing.

Well, I found the WHOLE paragraph, and in the original context. it is a simple case of someone (Presumably George Grant) CLEVERLY EDITING THE TEXT to change it's meaning.

The original quote is:

"It seems to me from my experience . . . in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table. . . . They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results. . . . His work, in my opinion, should be entirely with the Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County's white doctors. His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us. The minister's work is also important, and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs (1939)."

As we can see, Sanger is actually saying the OPPOSITE of what Anti-abortion LIARS are trying to claim she said. She was concerned that black people would think that birth control was a white plot to exterminate them, when in fact, it was a means of enhancing their lives by lessening the effects that larger families have on poverty and food supplies. She advocated schooling and training black doctors to give black people more confidence and comfort in their own communities.

In the game of extremist hatemongering, lies are not sins; they are holy sacraments.

(3) The Claim: Sanger was a Nazi, and corresponded with Nazi Eugenicists
The alleged proof: April 1933 Birth Control Review (BCR) magazine, Published the Birth Control League, which Sanger was a founder of.

The Facts:

Even more than her links with American eugenicists, Sanger's so-called association with Ernst Rudin, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, who helped align prevalent eugenic theories with Nazi race policy, has been featured in nearly every right-wing assault on Sanger’s legacy. The grounds for charges that she knew, corresponded with, or influenced Rudin stem from the April 1933 Birth Control Review (BCR), a special "sterilization number." Rudin did contribute an article to this issue, as did Harry Laughlin and Leon Whitney and other eugenicists. The issue also included excerpts from the works of Havelock Ellis and influential gynecologist Robert Dickinson. Taken as a whole, the issue presents a clear, if not always comfortable, debate on compulsory sterilization, with forceful arguments for and against, and calls for further research on sterilization as a eugenic measure. The magazine presented many opposing views on the subject, because it was a formal debate!

Worst of all for this lie is the fact that Sanger had resigned as editor of the BCR in 1929 and no longer had any affiliation with the publication. Nevertheless the Birth Control Review issue has been held out like a smoking gun in the campaign to brand Sanger a sterilization missionary and Nazi sympathizer. What is never noted is that the one voice absent in the issue is Margaret Sanger’s.

I narrowed down the sources of 99% of all anti-Sanger claims to two books:

(1) George Grant’s 1995 book, Killer Angel
(2) Elasah Drogin's 1979 book, Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society

These two books are the source of most of the current anti-Sanger urban legends, including all of the arguments you used thus far. All go right back to these two books, which are footnoted on nearly every anti-choice/Anti-Sanger site. The more I look into the claims of these books, the more I see how clever manipulation of quotes (as I showed earlier) distorts the facts. Grant and Drogin are great at propaganda, and lousy at research. They both had the full texts of Sanger's books available to them, as well as Lexis-Nexis databases with all the articles from Family Planing Magazine, yet still managed to get their facts wrong. I believe that they really did use the appropriate sources to get the quotes, and even may have read the books and articles that they quote, but that they chose to deliberately ignore them, because they had an agenda that took precidence over facts.

Grant and Drogin knew what Margaret Sanger wrote, and knew that she wasn't a Nazi, and that she didn't want to exterminate people. They knew it, but had a more important mission -- to crusade againt abortion, and to do so by attacking it's leaders. Since Sanger is the heroic figure who founded Planned parenthood, which, after her death, championed for the availability of abortions, what better way to attack them than to attack it's dead founder, and tie her to nazis and cruel exterminationists? You can't hurt the dead, so it must okay with Jesus if you malign dead people, especially dead people associated with the enemies of Christ.

(4) The Claim: Margaret Sanger promoted the elimination of people born with defects.
The alleged proof: Sanger's book "The pivot Of civilization", Page 115

"On the other hand, we should not minimize the importance of the Socialist movement in so valiantly and so courageously battling against the stagnating complacency of our conservatives and reactionaries, under whose benign imbecility the defective and diseased elements of humanity are encouraged ``full speed ahead'' in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning." (Sanger in The pivot Of Civilization, chapter entitles "The Cruelty of Charity")

"Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the ``failure'' of philanthropy, but rather at its success."(Sanger in The pivot Of Civilization, chapter entitles "The Cruelty of Charity")

"But there is a special type of philanthropy or benevolence, now widely advertised and advocated, both as a federal program and as worthy of private endowment, which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than any other. This concerns itself directly with the function of maternity, and aims to supply GRATIS medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers...The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it." (Sanger in The pivot Of Civilization, chapter entitles "The Cruelty of Charity")

The facts:

The quotes are Most often taken from George Grant's books, which are improperly edited and unreliable. Grant often quotes the above passages from Sanger's book as evidence of her racism and cruelty:

Of course, like most of the quotes that George Grant provides, the above quotes have been cleverly doctored by Grant to say exactly the opposite of what Sanger actually meant. This is the purest form of propaganda -- the improperly cut quote.

Here are the complete paragraphs that the doctored quotes are taken from before Grant mutilates them:

"Parallel with the awakening of woman's interest in her own fundamental nature, in her realization that her greatest duty to society lies in self-realization, will come a greater and deeper love for all of humanity. For in attaining a true individuality of her own she will understand that we are all individuals, that each human being is essentially implicated in every question or problem which involves the well-being of the humblest of us. So to-day we are not to meet the great problems of defect and delinquency in any merely sentimental or superficial manner, but with the firmest and most unflinching attitude toward the true interest of our fellow beings. It is from no mere feeling of brotherly love or sentimental philanthropy that we women must insist upon enhancing the value of child life. It is because we know that, if our children are to develop to their full capabilities, all children must be assured a similar opportunity. Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes. We look forward in our vision of the future to children brought into the world because they are desired, called from the unknown by a fearless and conscious passion, because women and men need children to complete the symmetry of their own development, no less than to perpetuate the race. They shall be called into a world enhanced and made beautiful by the spirit of freedom and romance--into a world wherein the creatures of our new day, unhampered and unbound by the sinister forces of prejudice and immovable habit, may work out their own destinies. Perhaps we may catch fragmentary glimpses of this new life in certain societies of the past, in Greece perhaps; but in all of these past civilizations these happy groups formed but a small exclusive section of the population. To-day our task is greater; for we realize that no section of humanity can be reclaimed without the regeneration of the whole.

I look, therefore, into a Future when men and women will not dissipate their energy in the vain and fruitless search for content outside of themselves, in far-away places or people. Perfect masters of their own inherent powers, controlled with a fine understanding of the art of life and of love, adapting themselves with pliancy and intelligence to the milieu in which they find themselves, they will unafraid enjoy life to the utmost. Women will for the first time in the unhappy history of this globe establish a true equilibrium and ``balance of power'' in the relation of the sexes. The old antagonism will have disappeared, the old ill-concealed warfare between men and women. For the men themselves will comprehend that in this cultivation of the human garden they will be rewarded a thousand times. Interest in the vague sentimental fantasies of extra-mundane existence, in pathological or hysterical flights from the realities of our earthliness, will have through atrophy disappeared, for in that dawn men and women will have come to the realization, already suggested, that here close at hand is our paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity. Not by leaving it and our essential humanity behind us, nor by sighing to be anything but what we are, shall we ever become ennobled or immortal. Not for woman only, but for all of humanity is this the field where we must seek the secret of eternal life."

So as you can see, what critics claim she said is simply not what she meant.

(5) The Claim: Sanger Endorsed forced sterilization and abortion.
The alleged evidence: More quotes edited by George Grant, from The Pivot Of Civilization.

"This, I say, is an emergency measure. But how are we to prevent the
repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the
recurrence of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical
and inevitable consequence of the universal application of the
traditional and widely approved command to increase and multiply?"

"At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less
mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect
itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of
imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the
necessity for Birth control education without a complete comprehension
of the dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present
attempts at control, or the proposed programs for social
reconstruction and racial regeneration."

The facts:

Abortion and forced Sterilization were actually things that Sanger wrote AGAINST! She did not endorse abortion. She only advocated birth control and education. If she endorsed abortion at any time, she would have been arrested, because abortion, was illegal until 1972, and advocacy of it was illegal until the 1950s.

The above quote sounds like Sanger is advocating the cleansing of "the race" of "defectives" and "mentally ill", and advocating a nazi-version of racial supremacy. When you put the paragraph in context, with it's surrounding paragraphs, Sanger is actually saying the opposite -- the paragraph is part of an intro where she CRITICIZES various remedies offered by government.

When The Pivot Of Civilization was written, in 1922, the USA, indeed the world, was getting over the ravages of the worst Influenza epidemic in history! Millions of Americans died -- we lost a whole generation of people between 1918 and 1920. The idea of "racial regenration" was not used in the context of "white racial regenration". It literally meant "human" regenration.

But that's just a sidenote. Let's see what the whole page says, and what the liars for Christ always leave out.

"At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity for Birth control education without a complete comprehension of the dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly summarized as follows:

* Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic.

* Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction, emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e. capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in its basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary reconstruction.

* Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the ``unfit'' and the feeble-minded establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate among the ``fit.'' But in its so-called ``constructive'' aspect, in seeking to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a ``cradle competition'' between the fit and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community.

FOOTNOTES:

1. United States Public Health Service: Psychiatric Studies of Delinquents. Reprint No. 598: pp. 64-65.
2. The Problem of the Feeble-Minded: An Abstract of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Cure and Control of the Feeble-Minded, London: P. S. King & Son.
3. Cf. Feeble-Minded in Ontario: Fourteenth Report for the year ending October 31st, 1919.
4. Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 339 et seq.
5. Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem: A True Story of the Social Aspect of Feeble-mindedness. By A. C. Rogers and Maud A. Merrill; Boston (1919). "

If Sanger was in favor of the kind of Eugenics that Christian liars claim she was, why on earth would she explain "The flaws of the Eugenics movement" (along with "the flaws of Marxist Socialism") are "the Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a ``cradle competition'' between the fit and the unfit."

She is here, quite obviously, only EXPLAINING what the 3 mutually exclusive social programs (for dealing with poverty, birth defects, and insanity) governments were proposing at the time, and CRITISIZING THEM! If she was in favor of Marxist Socialism and Eugenics (which she says are mutually exclusive in many ways), why would she criticize them? Again, the Christian tactic is to cut Sanger off in mid-sentence and make her writing appear to say the opposite of what she actually wrote.

For those who wish to see this for themselves, there are an Online sources of Sanger's complete Texts:

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~rauch/abortion_eugenics/sanger/sanger_05.html

You can read her works for yourselves. I have heard from many Evangelicals that I have argued with over the years that "The original books", no longer exist because Planned Parenthood allegedly destroyed the original copies where George Grant got his quotes from, and replaced them all with the new, doctored versions. This conspiracy theory is never substantiated, and Evangelical liars will always tell you that friends of their friends have copies of the originals, which of course you will never get a chance to see.

Conspiracy theories are very important to radical religious ideologies, especially ones that are under attack from things like FACTS. Yes, apparently, FACTS are dangerous notions that interfere with more important things like Beliefs and faith.

Introduction

2008-01-17T07:40:00.001-08:00

Introduction: please read this first

This series of articles is only intended to be about the people whom I specifically name. It is very easy for people to read articles that are critical of people, organizaions, and groups that they admire, agree with, or follow, and think that the criticism is about themselves, personally, since there is a shared belief. Be aware that criticism of people and organizations do not always neccesarily apply to everyone. Be aware that when I name a person, and criticize them, I am only talking about them -- not to anyone who has a belief or two in common with them.

For example, if I criticize a certain person (whom you may admire) for having said or written something that I believe is racist or reflects badly on them, do not assume that the same thing applies to you, simply because you admire them or may have a lot of beliefs in common with them. If I criticize a specific person for what is clearly written in one of their books or which they are recorded to have said, and you disagree with it, then you have no reason to be upset with my criticism. When I criticize a person or group of persons, I am only talking about those people, not about everyone who happens to follow or admire them. I try not to be so general as to say things like "All Christians are bad because of this..." or "Anyone who likes this person is just as bad as they are..."

Clearly we all admire certain people, especially if we feel that their influence has been very positive in our lives. Sometimes, we hear unsettling news about those people whom we admire, and our first reaction is to either to be skeptical of the news, or assume that whoever is bringing the news is attacking everyone who admires this person. Human beings are flawed and some of the most admirable people have a darker side that they try to hide from everyone. Sometimes, their secrets get out. It doesn't mean that all of their teachings are invalid, or that all of their followers are stupid or blind, or that everything you learned from them is wrong. It simply means that they are flawed; are we not all flawed? Do we not all say or write things that we later come to regret?

So please keep that in mind, and if you are the least bit skeptical of what I write here, by all means, check out the footenotes and links, and see for yourself if what I am saying is true or not. I will attempt to document as much as I can, and I encourage you -- whether you agree with me or not, to comment on what I write, and suggest corrections. If anything I write is shown to be in error, I will change it.

Introduction 2: What this is about

I am an atheist. I came to this belief after decades of being a Christian, and experiencing close personal interactions with religious people who I learned a lot from. Ironically, it was my reading the Bible from cover to cover, when I was in High School, that convinced me that atheism was the rational choice. When I read it, attending a Christian Bible-study group, it became clear to me that the people who wrote the Bible believed a lot of trully irrational things -- things which we know aren't true. Ancient Hebrews were afraid of menstruation, making women go through a series of ritual cleansings, and performing purification ceremonies on anything that they touched while having their periods. They believed that spraying animal blood around was a way to cleanse or purify; I found this no different from many pagan customs. I also wondered why as Christians, we knew that slavery was wrong, but the Bible clearly promotes it. On top of that, scandal after scandal in the Religious community, from Catholic priests molesting children to Jerry Falwell's sleazy takeover of the PTL club, caused me to wonder if these people were as honest as they claimed to be.

It was during the 1980s that I first noticed a lot of clear signs that the Christian Evangelical Fundamentalist movement, which we now refer to as the religious right, was saying a lot of things that were clearly either untrue, or which seemed disingenuous or deceptive. From Creationist authors deliberately misquoting scientists whose books I actually read, to Televangelists deliberately slandering liberal politicians with outrigt lies (Such as Jerry Falwell's broadcast and selling of a videotape that proclaimed that then President, Bill Clinton had over 60 people murdered -- an allegation which has been thoroughly debunked), and strange reversals of opinion (Many Evcangelicals were against the civil rights act back in the 50's and 60's, then strangely changed their opinions, even claimed that they always were in favor of black civil rights, in spite of their former statements.

It became clear through decades of incidents like that, and by reading much of their literature, watching their TV shows, and confronting them live in person that I was convinced that there was a serious problem with the leadership in the Evangelical community -- they either believed that the end justifies the means (That it's okay to lie and trick people, as long as the end result is that they get saved), or they were terrible hypocrites, or worse. So this blog will attempt to provide support for my opinions, and expose these "liars for Christ" for what they are.

Again, if you are simply a curious Christian, this is not about you. This is about people whom you may know about from their media appearances, or from their fame, or whose books you may have read. That these people are liars, cheaters, thieves, and propaganda artists, doesn't, in any way shape or form imply that Christianity, or Evangelical Fundamentalism is wrong or bad. It simply is saying that the individuals being criticized are. I invite your opinions and ojections, because I expect to get some. They are helpful, because they help me better write in a way that is less likely to be misconstrued. Sensitive topics are always difficult to write about, without someone getting offended by something that was not written clearly or precisely enough.

Thanks!

David W. Irish