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Creationist Fan of VenomFangX Videos Kills Woman, Himself

Do people remember this exchange in the comments of my apparently most anguish-inducing post, "Ken Ham's Petting Zoo Opens to Shut Minds."

Kristine said...
Rene, here's the kind of ugly, smug, ignoramous mentality you and your Creation Museum are turning out: Satan Created Evolution.Proud of yourself?

[The link is now broken - for reasons I'll give below - but it was to a video by VenomFangX entitled "Satan Created Evolution."]

Rene' said...
All, If you had no vitriol in your heart for religion or Christianity in particular, you would have reported only that --in your opinion Mr. ham is wrong -- and not used such harsh terms that make you the intolerant crowd. You know the type, the ones who ridiculed Mr. Darwin for his theory. Apparently, Mr. Ham is in the same boat as Darwin, he has committed sacrilege against your god -- you. There is not and never will be any conclusive proof that would prove evolution it is nothing more than a theory, requiring faith. Conversely, I will never convince you that God is real and He sent His Son to die on the cross for our sins so that we may spend eternity with Him. God would never use categorical proof, for there would be no faith, God, for whatever reason, needs us to be faithful not convinced. I envy you --- in my opinion -- yours is the greater faith. To believe that life sprang from nothing -- without the help of the Creator, that requires more faith than I could ever possess. I know that your god, you, should be very pleased with yourselves. Rene

And blah, blah, blah. Well, good old VenomFangX has apparently yanked some of his videos because a fan of his named Anthony Powell - who also posted his anti-atheist, anti-evolution rants on You Tube, calling atheists "non-human" and such - recently killed a female student and himself. She reportedly was not his girlfriend and rebuffed his repeated sexual advances.

Her name was Asia McGowan and she was an aspiring dancer and actress.

Anthony Powell was a bully who posted videos on You Tube about how "evolution is a lie" and "women should be submissive to their man."

Then there is the Sunday School teacher who killed Sandra Cantu (her grandfather had the nerve to bitch about what the investigation was doing to the "image" of his church, and now she's up for a rape charge, too - yuck!).

The creationist who stabbed to death a man who argued for evolutionary theory, and the plethora of parents lately who either killed their kids through "exorcism" or by praying over them instead of taking them to a doctor.

Rene, anything to say? Michael Ruse, do you have something to add? Being ignorant is romantic - right? Salt of the earth. Kind of like how being poor is "exciting."

Ken Ham is not only wrong, he is dangerous. VenomFangX is not only wrong, he is dangerous. Anthony Powell was not only wrong - he was tragically dangerous, because he didn't have to take an innocent woman along with him - and he is also living proof that a belief in hell doesn't prevent anyone from committing evil.

That's why Jerry Falwell was dangerous. And why Pat Robertson is dangerous. And why Peter Popoff - who James Randi unmasked nearly three decades ago - is back (as Randi resignedly admitted in his speech at the CFI World Conference) on the BET Channel doing fake healings, causing people to avoid medical treatment en masse, and he is still dangerous. Michael Ruse, are you paying attention?

As for "me, my god, me," I simply don't believe in something that does not exist. So I don't believe in "my god, me," but just in me. The way that you should simply believe in yourself. Each person should.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper, Part 4

It's up at the Triumvirate.

Wherein Michael Ruse Avoids My Questions

Michael Ruse gave a presentation tonight at the CFI World Congress on “Darwinism [sic] and Christianity: Do They Conflict and Does It Matter?” that I mostly could accept. He made some good points that there are some simliarities in the claims of Dawkins and the claims of intelligent design theorists that science and religion are apparently irreconcilable, but then ended with this question:

If Darwinism [sic] implies atheism, does teaching it [evolution] in school become unconstitutional?

In other words, Ruse is saying that if a parent objects to what a child is being taught in science class, even if the teacher does not make a specific religious claim, that scientific claim thus becomes a religious claim and becomes unconstitutional.

I stood up and asked the following:

“If evolution implies atheism, or is being made to imply atheism by Dawkins as you claim, and is therefore unconstitutional to teach in school, 1) what about all the other sciences that underpin evolution, in particular geology, which caused great anguish among people that I knew, 2) isn’t science going to have implications for anyone who pre-emptively makes a cosmic claim without evidence, and 3) hasn’t Dawkins in particular repeatedly made the point that the essential conflict is between evidence versus credulity, or faith, rather than just evolution versus Christianity?”

That is a question. I asked him a question. Michael Ruse waved it off and said, “We’ll put that in the ‘comment’ section.” Then he went on to accuse Eddie Tabash of “lacking integrity” because Tabash pointed out that science in the public schools is not taught to attack anyone’s religion but to present knowledge backed by evidence that people need to have to be educated.

Then, Michael Ruse drew the analogy that a science teacher who taught evolution without mentioning the Bible or God, but nevertheless caused a conflict within a student who was indoctrinated by creationism, was attacking that student’s beliefs (actually that student’s parents’ beliefs) and therefore violating the Constitution!

Using this argument, Michael Ruse then compared the above science teacher to a teacher who taught the students that “some animals with certain genitals are inferior to other animals with different genitals,” and then claimed, “Oh, I said nothing about men and women! I didn’t teach one was inferior to another!” Now, I ask you, is that analogy apt? Considering I was the only woman who asked a question, and it didn’t get answered?

Well, a man asked him if a teacher taught that the value of pi was 3.14 but a parent believes that it is three (as it is in the Bible), if the teacher was, according to Ruse, violating the Constitution. Ruse said yes! (Then he attempted to spin it and accused Tabash again of being dishonest.)

Then he said, “I agree with Eddie Tabash! I don’t want The Flood taught in schools!” ignoring the obvious fact that, by what he claimed above, any teacher teaching geology would, according to Ruse, be attacking theology, rendering the teaching of geology “unconstitutional” and allowing that parent to block the subject or remove the child.

Wha—?

Michael Ruse then went on and on about how “basic Christianity doesn’t require people to literally believe in the Bible.” Hell, I’d like to know who these “basic Christians” are. As a teen-ager I had to explain to someone in my life that the earth was round and orbited the sun. I got into arguments with the other kids about how my agate, which I found when I was nine, was formed. I argued and argued against “creation science” in the 1980s. One coworker, when she learned that I was an atheist (I was nineteen and waitressing in Maplewood), gasped, flung herself across the room away from me, then recovered a bit and asked, “So you believe in evolution?” No DUH!

As we were walking out, Ruse opined, "Well, I suppose there still could be people who use the Bible to justify slavery," and I called out, "Yes, there are!" Geez, hello Ruse! In fact, the ID folks are arguing that Darwin's anti-slavery conscience enslaved people all the more!

How the hell can Michael Ruse compare a teacher teaching evolution in class and not adding “and this is why the Bible is not true” to a teacher teaching that females are inferior to males?

What is wrong with this man? Why does he pick this fight, when in fact the denizens of the Discovery Institute are taking all religious language out of their literature anyway, in their efforts to shoe-horn intelligent design in schools? (“Teach the controversy…” “Strengths and weaknesses…” “Critical analysis…”) Ruse must really be out of touch!

This is a class issue. This is about social class, and how can Ruse understand that? He probably never missed a spring break in Florida or Cancun. (I waitressed, or just stayed home, over my spring breaks.) Education is about providing greater class mobility, whether or not the graduate goes on to make gobs of money. People are not just geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're fundamentalists - they can also be Democrats, union workers, generally liberals, yet geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're uneducated.

Being hampered by unnecessary, superstitious fear, or guilt, or repulsion of certain ideas (such as being related to apes) limits a person’s ability to view evidence. As Orwell said, whoever controls the past controls the future. Creationism is a nice little pastime for those who are well off (and I would add that Ruse’s question is also a nice little elitist paradox for him to enjoy because he never had to waitron his way through college), but it has real consequences for people less fortunate.

Creationism doesn't make people feel "special," it scares them to death.

Yet what I'm hearing (because Ruse's "teaching" has implications too) is that it doesn't matter to him whether or not I was educated at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Discovery Institute actually took up his argument, and start using it as well.

Belated Anniversary

Why, how remiss of me. I've missed the anniversary. (Getting an education will do that to you.) Happy "Death of Evolution Day," William Dembski. How the years do fly by.

Seven years to make my own scholarly paper invalid.

Madonna on Toast? That's Nothing...

Chewbacca lives in this guy's cabinet!

Chewie's trying to send a message to the world: Please, my children! Please! No more Vader cakes! Eeeeaaaaggghhh!




The Vader-cake cult may seem like harmless fun, but it causes a great disturbance in the Force.

The next thing you know, the FAIL demon will take root in your life, causing epic FAILS even in the games you play to pass the time.



And causing you to think you can see, ahem, Russia (or someplace) from here:

Or causing all kinds of inappropriate Star Wars allusions...

(That's Jodee, not Yodee, right? Ha ha.)

...and causing a brave young ID Jedi to fall on his, er, lightsaber.

Nice job, Luke. Way to "battle the Emperor." By the way, what look are you going for? You look like the Emperor. I thought that intelligent design was "young and rebellious"?

Oh, dear. (Chuck Colson on the left; Jonathan Wells on the right.)

Well, anyway. Here's a photo of the Darwinist stormtroopers with their helmets off.

I was going somewhere with this, but now I have no idea. We'll just end it here, okay? ;-)

UPDATED: Well, even if your whimsical blog post is undirected, trust an intelligent design advocate to supply the closure. Dembski's traipsing toward another EPIC FAIL. Forward and dorkward, Mr. Isaac Newton of Information Theory. *Sheesh*.

But let’s grant that the evolutionary process, as governed by the Darwinian selection mechanism, is not goal directed, i.e., that it is not seeking targets (which, of course, leads to the question how a non-directed process is, nonetheless, finding targets in nature). In that case, it makes sense to think of Darwinian mechanism as a grammar-checker — living things must pass the grammar-checker if they get to survive and reproduce.

see more pwn and owned pictures

No. Dembski still thinks that natural selection is a centralized force, like gravity*. It's not. Natural selection is the term we use to describe the outcome that we see arising from billions of changes and interactions in the environment. I wrote about this in my paper:

To imagine an “animal in its environment” is to imagine a static environment and an objectified animal, and by analogy an inert record in a passive archives, and consequently a Platonic view in which “true knowledge must remain fixed” (Mortensen, 1999, 6). In contrast, Moore argues for the dynamic overlap of object and context. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued the same when he wrote that animals and insects do not merely live in, but effect, shape, and become their environment, which in turn shapes their descendents and competitors:

It is legitimate to speak of adaptations as being “for the benefit of” something, but that something is best not seen as the individual organism. It is a smaller unit which I call the active, germ-line replicator. The most important kind of replicator is the “gene” or small genetic fragment. Replicators are not, of course, selected directly, but by proxy; they are judged by their phenotypic effects. Although for some purposes it is convenient to think of these phenotypic effects as being packaged together in discrete “vehicles” such as individual organisms, this is not fundamentally necessary. Rather, the replicator should be thought of as having extended phenotypic effects, consisting of all its effects on the world at large, not just if effects on the individual body in which it happens to be sitting [emphasis mine] (1982, 4).

Dawkins is not saying that birds and nests do not have natures; he is saying that genes replicate themselves by living in birds which, in response to finding themselves in one environment, die or develop a new strategy by building nests, thus changing that environment, thereby improving their chances of reproduction, which increases the chance of the gene’s replication. Bird, nest, behavior, gene, and environment do not collide like billiard balls, but overlap and combine. They exist as objects in themselves and also as functions and relationships across these objects. Yet both preservationists and conservationists in ecology envision “a bird” that “builds” a “nest,” and in archives, “a creator” that “creates” a “collection.” This is not exactly incorrect—it is our experience—but it is naïve, mechanistic, Newtonian. This is where [Mark] Greene et al perhaps meant to place their condemnation of “absolutes,” because given sufficient time the nature of anything changes.

Because we as human beings are accustomed to viewing our creations as artificial (even destructive) and ourselves as uniquely technology-dependent, weak and silly beside our animal cousins, we ignore how animals also change and even pollute the environment for themselves and other animals through their own constructions. Dawkins is saying, and Moore is implying, that the bird’s nest or the archives is a behavior as well as a structure, and that successive generations of birds are no less dependent on their increasingly sophisticated nests than we are upon our structures. Birds too are silly and weak without evolution’s technologies—the nest, the hard-shell egg, the beak. Beavers cut down trees to build dens, flooding a field to create a pond, chasing away some animals and inviting others, drowning plants to be replaced by others. Who, then, is polluting? What, then, is “natural?” Is a beaver’s dam natural, therefore eternal, but an archives artificial and thus infinitely plastic, and Greene seems to claim? Building nests, dams, houses, and archives are all behaviors that recreate context—is it really impossible to say, without appealing to naïve neo-Platonism, that nests, dams, houses, and archives indeed each have a nature? This author argues that they do, and that the nature of archives evolves. Archives change, but archives remain distinct from, say, orchestras, or dance performances, as traffic noise is distinct from tubas (Herbert, 1985, 135). Is it not then reasonable to say that archives are what we archive, whatever that may be and however we may go about archiving it (Kaplan, 2000), and however that may change?

This is the tragedy, that the discussion of a comprehensive and universal archival theory gets bogged down in retrograde dualism: record versus archives, natural versus artificial, and eternal first principles or naïve postmodernist relativism. It is a trap. Dualities usually are, and are worthy of suspicion if not outright avoidance because the mind so readily falls into them. In theory, Eastwood and Duranti hope for a place of stasis, of security, a Promised Land, whereas Greene and his colleagues evidently fear a reissuing of the Ten Commandments that would forcibly unite distant tribes (Greene et al, 10). Neither path leads to a legitimate theory, and all of these brilliant thinkers who each have a part of the answer tragically miss the point.

*Which, of course, is really a curvature in space-time, anyway.

Don't Lose Weight! Because...

...you might rewrite the laws of gravity and make everything fly apart! Because, you see, William Dembski, still having a problem with a computer program that Richard Dawkins wrote back in the 1980s, in Apple BASIC no less, makes yet another claim that Dawkins is perpetuating a fraud *yawn* on the public (and naturally I had a problem with that).

*Gasp*

WilliamD: Gentlemen: If Dawkins is tuning the parameters differently for the program as described in the book and for it as exhibited in the BBC documentary, isn’t he in effect using a different program?

Me: Uh, duh, no! Great job, Mr. Isaac Newton of Information Theory.

This man is a mathematician? Would he like a secretary/quasi-librarian/archivist and belly dancer to explain programming principles to him? He and his followers still have a problem understanding how an algorithm in a program that was, yes, programmed by Dawkins is an analogy for natural selection?

Of course, Dr. Dr. "I'm not jealous of Dawkins at all" has been verrrry quiet since making that gaffe.

I have news for you Dr. Dr. Dembski - April is fast upon us. You can run but you can't hide (or add, it appears).

UPDATED: Wesley has a post up about how long it's taken Dembski to "reproduce" Dawkins' code, and so does Ian Musgrave. Of course PZ has weighed in. I don't have time for this - I'm writing a paper about how archival theory could be informed by anthropology, evolutionary theory, ecology, and information theory, and I've already wasted too much time trying to get Joe G. to answer me about what he really knows about information theory.

SECOND UPDATE: I love this sarcastic riposte by "CS." Remarks by wags like that convince me that even if intelligent design belonged in schools, only an anti-IDist would be qualified to teach it.

DaveScot Banned from Uncommon Descent (Again)

Oh, the irony (but not really): Stalinist Behavior at Creationist Blogs. Shimmies to Open Parachute.

We were having a good old time at AtBC - writing poetry to avoid writing our papers - when I remembered that I needed an article out of a book that was not available at my school's library, but was available at another library in the network. So I strapped on my earphones (oh, hush. Those little ear-things don't fit in my ears) and went for a walk.

And meanwhile, all hell breaks loose.

The news breaks here, about halfway down the page.

Barry, pram, toys, throws, out, there of:

Note to UD ContributorsBarry ArringtonThe moderation policy does not apply to you; you are held to a higher standard. I expect your posts to have at least some tangential relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each. The purpose of this site is not to provide a place for you to jump up and rant on one of your pet peeves.

Well. I must say I have mixed feelings. It looks like UD's original moderation policy (delete everything that you don't agree with/makes you look stupid) is being enforced by a new generation upon the old. Ungrateful little punks. (I'm being sarcastic.) But DaveScot was making a point about the racism of the Christian Identity Movement. That gets him banned? I wonder about UD's sympathy for Christian Identity, when they've been trashing Darwin as a "racist" during this entire episode.

(Because trashing the abolitionist Charles Darwin as a "racist" certain seems to have a "relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each" - but pointing out racism elsewhere, such as among creationists, doesn't, you see.)

As another commenter noted, there could be a(nother) resurrection of DaveScot after three days. A testable hypothesis, I'd say.

P.S. - I have been named AtBC Poet Laureate. ;-)

When I consider how his snark was spent,
Ere half his days, in this dark U and D,
And that one poster which is UD marquee
Lodged with them useless, though his pride misspent
To serve therewith their Maker, and present
no true account, lest Dembski chide,
"Doth Design exact day-labor, evidence denied?"
I fondly ask. But Pretense, to prevent
That comment, soon replies: "Designer doth not need
Either man's labs or his own brains; who trains
the credulous to the yoke, they serve him best. His logic
Is ringly: thousands at his fallacies speed,
And post o'er sanity and reason without rest;
They also serve who only bloviate.