Piling up on an easy target

From The Questionable Authority comes another article on the exchange going on between Timothy Birdnow and P.Z. Myers.

In his article, Birdnow posted this:

...Consider the Permian Triassic Extinction, the so called "Great Dying", 250 million years ago,in which 9 out of 10 marine creatures and 7 out of 10 land creatures died. Before the Great Dying five phylla walked the Earth; insects, mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. After the Great Dying we had the same 5.

...to which Professor Myers answered:

You should be aware that in those 3 sentences, you made 4 immense errors.

1. There are many more than 5 phyla; about 30.
2. Mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and insects are not separate phyla. The first four all belong to one phylum (Chordata) and the last belongs to another (Arthropoda).
3. There were no mammals or birds in the Permian.
4. There were no mammals or birds in the Triassic.

...to which Birdnow answered:

You are correct in that there are 30 total animal phyla; I was writing a piece to explain this concept to a general audience, and I included the chordates plus insects. You, as a revered Professor of Biology, may find my pique with my carelessness. Fine(after all, I`m not a biologist). Nonetheless, it does not matter to the argument wether there are 2, 8, 15, 30, or 2000 phila (ouch! my knuckles!); the point is that we there was no real crossovers between creatures. I suspect you understood my point, but quibble over it because you think you`ve got me. If it salves your ego to gloat, go right ahead! The fact is, the great point you think you scored was wide of the argument.

Reread Birdnow's response. Can you believe this? After being blatantly shown the errors of his writing he refuses to address them in any rational way. His answer pretty much amounts to "So what if I'm wrong? I'm still right, so nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!"

Sad.

Even now, after years of perversely following the Intelligent Design/Creationism movement, I'm still completely baffled by the extent to which people cling to their willful ignorance and refuse to expand their knowledge in any way shape or form. God forbid they be ever proven wrong. Why let something insignificant as "the facts" get in the way of their right to spew nonsense?

And yet, even more baffling is the fact that these people are so resistant to any attempt to try to get them to expand their minds to be aware of the problems with their arguments. They'll still repeat the same arguments over and over, regardless of the fact that they're been debunked.

One of the lessons I learned from Christianity was that humility was a virtue truly worth its weight in Gold -- reading the chronicles of Christ's life and deeds underscored that for me. An important and crucial aspect of humility is admitting when you're wrong. Evolutionary Biologists are wrong about a lot of things many times -- it comes with the territory of being a scientist.

Supporters of Intelligent Design refused to acknowledge any problem with their statements. In their mind, they are never wrong -- only their opponents are. How is that scientific? Moreover, how can that ever be Christian?

"Crusade" is the new "Jihad"

At the spearhead to get Intelligent Design (ID) Creationism into high school classrooms and university lecture halls was the Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture -- the CRSC. A subset of the Discovery Institute (DI), it was a right-winged conservative Christian think tank closely linked to Philip Johnson, the prominent lawyer who for debatable reasons thought that his degree in law automatically made him an authority on evolutionary biology.

I say "was" because the CRSC is now known as the CSC: the Centre for Science and Culture. Notice something missing? In short, the reason why they dropped the "R" was because of the rather negative reaction that the ID movement was getting due to things like the Wedge Strategy, an uncompromising statement of what the aims of the CRSC and the DI were: to remove the secular influence of "materialism" in culture and science and replace with a theocracy, where both science and culture would begin and end with a conservative/evangelical version of Christianity, coupled with a unflinchingly literal view of scripture. Hence the "R" for "Renewal" in CRSC.

Not something you'd be quick to accept if you were an average American with only a cursory knowledge of biology, but with enough religious sense to say "NO" to self-righteous preaching and conversions.

So of course, they tone down their rhetoric, remove the "R" from the name, and go on pretending that ID is just as secular and as scientific as that evil materialist/atheistic un-scientific evolution. Of course, the ultimate goals and aims haven't changed -- is it any wonder then that cynics often refer to the CSC as the Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture?

So then we come to one of the "big three" Christian organizations at U of T: Campus Crusade for Christ, or as I used to playfully call them, the 'Crusaders. No? Oh wait, I'm sorry. That's Campus for Christ. Notice anything missing? Katherine told me about how she found out about the name change, which prompted me to do a little Googling...which led me to this:

Published Tuesday, October 13, 1998
Campus Crusade for Christ seeks new name

BEN TRACHTENBERG
YDN Staff Reporter

Christian students may soon stop "crusading" at Yale.

Concerned that the word "crusade" inaccurately represents the goals and activities of the Campus Crusade for Christ, members are now considering new names for the religious group. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.

Although the CCC has not yet chosen a specific new name, President Brian Kang '99 said the new name will omit the word "crusade."

This should sound familiar to you, right?

"There are negative connotations associated with the word 'crusade,'" Kang said.

Kang said that despite the name change, the group's religious activities will remain unchanged.

"We're not trying to compromise our purpose," he said. "It's just that some people find [the name] offensive."

David Myung '00, who leads a CCC Bible study group, said some of CCC's 50 to 60 members worry that the word "crusade" scares off students otherwise interested in CCC's events.

"negative connotations"? Are you kidding me? We're talking about the bloody Crusades here...an unfathomably inhumane period of Christian history where Christians were slaughtered alongside Jews, Muslims, and anyone else unfortunate enough to get into the army's path. Rape, murder, robbery, pillage, cannibalism...these were all elements of accounts of what the Crusaders did on their journeys.

As Raymond d'Aguiliers, chaplain to Raymond de Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse observed:

"Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious ceremonies were ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle-reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood."

- Edward Peters, The First Crusade: The chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and other source materials, p. 214

"The name itself is a little antiquated," Myung said. He added, "I don't think the word 'crusade' exactly reflects what the fellowship is there for."

Heh.

Historically, the term "crusade" refers to attempts by Christian armies during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to conquer Jerusalem and reclaim the city from its Islamic inhabitants. The attacking armies often slaughtered Jerusalem's non-Christian residents, and medieval crusaders' religious rhetoric can jar modern sensibilities.

As I pointed out, it wasn't just Muslims who were the only victims, though they were ostensibly the main targets: pretty much anyone who was non-Christian suffered and died. And in many cases, Christians suffered too.

Recalling a meeting for CCC that I went to a year or so ago, there was much talk of "raising the banner of Christ higher over U of T", even talk of "claiming" the university for Christ...as if somehow, there was some sort of hidden, implicit goal, concealed in their rhetoric, of turning U of T into the Canadian version of Bryan College. It made the use of the term "crusade" in their name all too apt.

Is it fair to really equate "C4C" to the CRSC? Well, the motives are similar: a desire to present a more superficially pleasing and acceptable face to non-believers with the intent on raising their status in a larger secular society. But does C4C's name change come with the same intention of malice and dishonesty that the CSC has? We'll have to see about that. I have my suspicions though.

I think though, that perhaps the direction of the name change should have gone in the other direction, instilling a greater sense of honesty to their name...

Wow.

Check out some of the latest posts up on I Am A Christian Too about the religious right's response to Hurrican Katrina, with some good old fashioned racist hypocrisy thrown in for good measure.

from Tim Wise
...She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have done so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest that theft would not be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus for your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot. Praise the Lord.

Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.

Just shows you what kind of a Christian I am. I generally don’t say grace before a meal in a restaurant, and I’m against shooting people without a trial for petty theft.

God, Suffering, and P.Z. Myers

For the past little while, I've been gelling (to borrow a God-awful meme from a Dr. Scholls ad) pretty well with Professor P. Z. Myers' consistent verbal poundings of Intelligent Design and Creationism. God knows he does a better job of that that I (but then again, he's got the Ph.D and I'm just a lowly worm of an undergrad). And I think I mentioned this in the past, but I even got around to sending him some gushing fan mail while trying to sound smart and pensive at the same time (which probably ended up being dropped into his Spam folder. Heh).

However, on occasion he does say things to which I take serious offense, and which I have to say, are really illustrative of the problem with religious people with Progressives and Liberals in general that I've been talking about earlier.

God offers you nothing, and accomplishes nothing, and his 'grace' is the squalor of a shattered city. This is the religion of the ineffectual. It's the language we've seen a lot of lately: Pray for New Orleans. Thank you, God, for only destroying my home and not killing me. The dead are in a better place now. God protect the members of my sect. Smite the unbelievers.

Is such a witheringly negative tone truly necessary? I understand his negative feelings towards Christianity, but I don't think there's any need at all for needless stereotyping of Christians as some sort of spiritual mafia.

No, Katrina was a natural disaster that killed thousands and has caused suffering to hundreds of thousands more. It was not the sword of your fictitious lord, and this kind of justification of people's pain as the righteous action of an angry god just leads to the sanctimonious hatred we see below.

I am in full agreement with Professor Myers that this idiotic spinning of recent events to support some foolish right-winged arrogant school of self-righteous thought is completely reprehensible. But that makes me think of Renee's similar sentiments that I've talked about earlier. Does the hate and scorn shown by those people justify your own hatred? And how much of a better person are you if you meet their hatred with your own?

I wish those were only rare and hateful kooks, but religion is the breeding ground of this nonsense, and far too many people wallow in lesser delusions that they will use to justify absurdities.

It's sentiments like this which both really sadden me and anger me. I wonder how many Christians (or other people of faith) he has talked to to give him a sensation of religion as a "breeding ground of nonsense". And who in those faiths has he talked to? People in the mainstream, or the marginalized, yet vocal few?

I'll readily admit that religion can very well breed a lot of evilness, but it can also be a source of wonderful things as well. Nothing is ever black and white, and to simply denigrate religion -- and I mean any religion, not just Christianity -- as just a source of utter nonsense is to really denigrate a potential source of much of humanity's most wonderful qualities. If you just ignored all of that, then all people of faith at the very least just misguided, blind fools, and at the very worst dishonest crooks -- that a Mother Teresa is on par with a Jerry Falwell, and that anything good done in the name of religion is to be regarded with the same scorn and mistrust as any similarly comitted sin. Personally, I don't think that even Myers is that jaded in his view of humanity.

And lest we forget, nationalism, racism, sexism...there are many other human "-isms" that can all too easily bring out some of the worst in humanity. Human beings don't need religion to be delusional or evil -- we can manage that just fine on our own, thankyouverymuch.

Secularism won't protect us from natural disasters, but it also won't encourage us to savor other people's suffering as a vindication of our own beliefs, and it will provoke more rational responses than begging for help from nonexistent deities.

Stop praying. Get out of the churches. Go do something constructive.

In a time like this, moral and spiritual support is just as important as material support. I saw Oprah Winfrey's special episode of her daytime talk show where she toured the New Orleans Superdome and later met up with the crowd of survivors that had been relocated to Texas. She may not have given away iPods, cars, or houses to each and everyone of those people, but she was there. She could have been in other places, doing other things with other people, but she was there.

For reasons known only to ourselves, we may not be able to donate tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars to help the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, and we may not be able to go out and collect canned food or assemble aid packages, but at the very least, what we can do is to take at least some time out of our own lives and think about the horrible tragedy which occured, and to integrate those thoughts into our daily living; to be appreciative of what we have, instead of longing for things we don't. To try to be a little more kinder to those around you, because someday, you may be needing their help.

Katherine told me in a phone conversation we had about the people at her church...they weren't doing anything to help the survivors in a material sense, but they were praying for them. It's true that a prayer won't feed or house a hungry family, and I totally think that spiritual aid always has to be followed up by material aid. But in someway, they are making a difference. They have at least motivated me to get off of my lazy ass and do something. That, I think, is something they've done.




*And just to cover my ass, I want to make it expressively clear to anyone who may be have come to this by way of a direct or indirect link to Pharyngula that I'm in no way attacking Myers for his views. He's got a right to his attitudes and I have a right to disagree with them.