For some reason or other I got on the email list of Ray Comfort’s mailing list. What can I say, I am a connoisseur of the weird. As I’ve learned a little bit about Comfort’s ministry, I have been beginning to wonder – is this whole “Darwin giveaway” thing actually going to happen? Or is it mostly imaginary – primarily a fundraising stunt? I have seen lots of evidence that Comfort et al. are good at publicity and producing videos – but no evidence that they are strong on the ground. If they were actually organized to distribute hundreds of thousands of books on hundreds of campuses, I kind of think there would be more evidence of that organization. But there is virtually no such evidence, despite there being plenty of fundamentalist student groups on campuses that might serve as the foot soldiers for this sort of thing.
Here’s the latest odd thing along these lines –
PRESS RELEASE - 5 of 7 - Militant Atheists Seek Details
Militant Atheists Seek Details of Darwin Book Giveaway
When 170,000 copies of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with Ray Comfort’s Introduction are given away at universities around the country, atheists plan to be waiting for them. But they don’t know the identity of the universities the books will be given out. Comfort said. “The reason atheists are finding nothing is because every school that is being visited is a closely guarded secret. We don’t want to cause a disturbance. We simply want to get books into the hands of students across the country.” Others advised those who see the books being handed out said, “Cut out the intro in front of them, leave it on the table and take the book.” Another said, “Get them to sign [the] book, thank them, and then make some devastating point that will shatter them forever.” See http://www.livingwaters.com/origin “Press kit” for textual, audio, and video sound bites.
What? The list of schools being visited is a closely-guarded secret? Then why what it on their website at one point (if I recall correctly – here’s a copy from September), and why did they proudly announce in the original video that the top 50 American universities would be targeted? In that video, they also said they were working with Campus Crusade, Answers in Genesis, and the Alliance Defense Fund – but I haven’t heard anything about the Origin-into-schools project from those groups.
Anyway, it doesn’t make much sense and I don’t have any firsthand information, but at the moment I’m wondering if this Origin-into-schools thing will poke above the background noise of random crazies who hand out stuff on the quads of college campuses every day. (You can be sure, though, that there will be one place with Ray Comfort and his camera crew, since in some arenas, a video is worth more than 1,000,000 words and 1,000 on-the-ground volunteers.)
A pity it couldn’t be countered by distributing copies of The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, perhaps with a 50-page Foreword by P Z Myers and a free wafer.
Ray Comfort refers to atheists who organized into “gangs” to try to stop the distribution of the books because of Comfort’s introduction. However, he does not provide any names. Who are these atheists? And why would they propose or even suggest book burning? Furthermore, why doesn’t provide names of universities and dates when the books will supposedly be distributed? Weird, if you ask me.
B. A. Rainey
Instead of keeping it secret from the atheists, aren’t they the ones he should be trying to reach out to? Unless he’s only interested in preaching to the choir.
It shouldn’t be hard to hand out 170,000 books. People do that constantly on college campuses.
I got a copy of The Gospel of John once that had print so small it was difficult to read. Also a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in English.
Probably just made it up. When nothing is going on, xians like to ramble on about how they are being persecuted. Of course, since they are 76% of the US population, that gets to be a little unbelievable. Being unbelievable never stops them though.
Let them distribute their books and then laugh and rhetorically dissect his undoubtedly lame introduction. Whatever happens, no one should make these people into martyrs. They would be ecstatic if that happened.
Par for the fundagelical modus operandi…
There are no groups of rabid atheists waiting to desecrate his pompous defiling of one of the greatest works of science.
All smoke and mirrors…and has been suggested a singular opportunity for a hand out of contamination… Probably in some backwood degree mill scam of a shack with grateful students claiming a truthful version at last.
The secret list nonsense is typical though. Started the bragging to soon methinks!
Run out of cash and instead of the top 50 Unis can only now afford the bottom 10 uncredited…
Totally pathetic attempt at discrediting Darwin that is all it is…they tried and tried everywhere else got nowhere…now the creationist is fulfilling a wish list gambit…if only they had written the damn thing in the first place… This nonsense is the nearest they can get to twisting the theory into knots!
Ain´t nuthin but a envy thang…the enemy have what they want…and they can´t have it…credibility is a hard won attribute…And Comfart has a fair way to goes methinks!
Hit the nail on the head. Preaching to the choir = $$$.
Damn it, they better show up to Rice. I’ve been practicing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” in anticipation of their arrival.
So he’s giving these away at universities, and university students are supposed to take them and read them and not think he’s stupid?
The list of universities was already published. I looked at it last week to see if this thing was coming to Canada. I know U of Toronto and U of British Columbia (both my old stomping grounds) were on the list.
The actual universities aren’t a secret so maybe it is the actual times the books will appear on campus?
It does sound like much ado about nothing though.
The phrase “all hat and no cattle” does convey the meaning, but in my opinion the English version is more apposite: “all mouth and no trousers”.
I’m curious, but have been unable to find anything about it, but has Comfort offered any opinions on the Discovery Institute, particuarly Michael Behe, who not only concedes common descent, but has said that reading the Bible as a science text is silly?
From what I’ve read (and that is a few months ago), the only definite (and first) campus will be Berkeley. The others all seemed dependent on finding someone else to distribute (and preferably buying the books to do so).
The truth is, the DI is too busy in their secret underground labs doing ID research.
I thought they liked to discount research because research is “intelligently designed” in the lab by scientists.
Intelligent Design cereal: It’s “irony deficient”, and magically delicious!!
I thought Intelligent Design cereal causes acute, fatal irony poisoning unless the antidote of a nice glass of warm milk, a little nap and a total frontal lobotomy.
I am a philosophy professor at California State University, Chico. A student of mine, who is a fundamentalist Christian, told me he’s irresponsible for distributing copies of this “special edition” of On the Origin of Species at my university. He refused to tell me that exact date he is going to do it, but promised to give me a copy. So think this thing is for real.
I’m currently a grad student at Boston University and we’re not on the list of schools. Now I find out that not only do I need to to another school to get a copy but I need to guess the date and even then it might not happen at all? This sucks.
Well, at 170,00 copies, we get the picture.
Ray Comfort and the ID/creationists are simply illustrating their secret motto: “Scientists do all the work; and we bastardize it on a mass production scale.”
I’m a grad student at the University of Tennessee and you’d think that Ray Comfort would send a few copies our way since he plagiarized one of our faculty for the introduction. Alas, to date there is no news that we will be graced with free copies of The Origin (which come with a free fire starter kit in the foreword). It’s a shame, really, because judging from the Knoxville News-Sentinel Letters to the Editor column, Banana Boy would have a warmly receptive audience.
You might do better by offering instead, Thomas Jefferson’s special “edition” of the Bible with all supernatural references expurgated from the original text:
Nick,
Heard about Comfort’s shenanigans from fellow Amazon.com customer calmly, who had alerted me to it almost a month ago, saying that Comfort was going to offer his “annotated” version of “On the Origin of Species” as his unique way of “celebrating” the 150th anniversary of its original publication. I sent word of it to both Glenn Branch and Matt Young. Apparently Branch had heard of it by then but wasn’t quite aware of all of Comfort’s nefarious duplicity.
Regards,
John
i am willing to guess that those who will be receiving it include the likes of Harvard historian Janet Browne, Harvard biologists E. O. Wilson and Richard Lewontin, and Brown biologist Ken Miller (Hopefully Ken will post some of it, if only for laughs, on his website.):
It’s hard to imagine that the distribution of several thousand copies of a 300 page book with a bright red cover would go unnoticed…
The Biologic Institute is supposed to be doing research, but given that Dembski admitted that ID doesn’t “connect dots”, we can all bet the ranch and the dog that, like Behe’s real research and Meyer’s vacuous “peer reviewed” argument from incredulity, none of it will challenge Darwinian evolution, common descent, or any of the ~4-billion year chronology, let alone support a better explanation on it own merits. IOW, it will provide zero comfort to Comfort, or any other YEC or OEC.
Speaking of Comfort, my question wss whether he (or his sock puppet) has commented on the DI, and their radically different strategy. Even if the answer is negative, I would appreciate those who have had the patience to read more than a little of his nonsense to save me the torture. I’m also interested in knowing if, among all those pages of regurgitated anti-“Darwinism” paranoia, there’s any acknowledgment of the other more “classic” creationist outfits like AIG or RTB.
Supposedly Henry Morris “figured it all out” 50 years ago, so why are all these other groups coming out of the woodwork pretending that they just now found the “smoking gun” against “Darwinism”? Why not just refer to Morris (or Ross if you’re an OEC) and be done with it?
I hope he dismantles it sentence-by-sentence, as he has with other similar nonsense. I don’t think Comfort deserves another book, though, because his “God the Charlatan” approach was already torn to shreds in one chapter of “Finding Darwin’s God.”
As you know, Miller’s other book, “Only a Theory” was written just before “Expelled” but correctly predicted the continuing “evolution” of the scam away from “we have this ‘scientific’ evidence against evolution” to “we hate evolution because it (or acceptance of it) leads to Nazism and other bad behavior.” It’s fascinating how the radically different approaches, YEC, OEC and ID, are nevertheless all “converging” on Godwin’s law.
Speaking of Miller, he is probably the “Darwinist” that the scam artists are most afraid of. Other than the Behe, who is forced to respond in detail to Miller’s point-by-point refutation, most of these people prefer to pretend that Miller doesn’t exist (note how he was “expelled” from “Expelled”). At best they dismiss him with “he’s just a compatibilist” then move on to safer turf (like Dawkins).
Of course this project of Comfort is all about making money. He is a religious entrepreneur. I have often thought of starting a church myself. Where else can you get such great support for avoiding reporting income, avoid realty and income tax? These entrepreneurs rarely get audited. The basic skill involved is the ability to dream up a new scheme ever so often to get the faithful to donate. Of course, like any successful scam artist, it helps if you have no principles or morals. Similar to a sociopath. Canadians can purchase 40 of these books at a time according to the site below, for a mere $65 Candian. http://www.livingwaterscanada.net/c[…]ools_Project
I suggest that there be a redacted version of Paley’s “Natural Theology”. There is more there than the analogy of the watch on the heath, and there is plenty that begs for commentary.
These CC, AiG, ADF etc all have an established revenue stream from the credulous fundies. They may not be so willing to cooperate and create a new competitor.
It is almost like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Rush spent some 20 years in Radio preparing the field and cultivating and raising a bountiful crop of “Angry Americans”. And Fox News moves in and rakes in several times Rush’s harvest in ad revenue and in just one year Glenn Beck has reaped in 25 million dollars. Though they all present a united front to the public, I am sure internally there is a lot of bickering, resentment and recriminations. “I should have called him racist first”. “You called him Hitler first, but fat lot of good did for your revenue stream”. “Guys, we are over fishing and we need to give a break for the breeding stock to recover”. “Says you buddy. I am taking all can and I’m outa’ here”.
The established players in the arena are not going to let Banana Boy in so easily into their private turf.
Right. Instead of earning credibility by doing research and creating a body of work, you try to steal credibility by associating yourself (by hook or by crook) with someone who actually HAS earned it.
That might be slightly better than a Bible “foreword” by an atheist, but if Ken Miller and several others are correct, Paley himself would object to how today’s ID/creationism have used his ideas.
What might be a novel approach is to combine a YEC book with an OEC/ID book by living authors, and add a foreword to show how, as a minimum, they can’t both be right. The YEC and OEC/ID authors would be compelled to respond, but they’d have to confront their irreconcilable differences. Something they both, especially the IDer, would do anything to avoid.
Certainly creationist seem to have trouble with basic logic. And evidence.
If you actually cared to understand the science you claim to be refuting with your screeds, you could google that question and find yet another solid piece of evidence for the common descent of chimps and humans. But of course you already know goddidit, so why bother with the facts when you’re just here to lie for jesus? Why should anyone here waste time trying to educate someone who’s so arrogantly proud of their own ignorance?
Are you seriously disputing the anatomical observation that some anmial eyes have the rods and cones positioned right-side-up instead of backwards like human eyes?
Yes. In contrast the entire time since the dinosaurs is 60 million years - same order of magnitude. You might justifiably call this period the “the mammalian explosion,” but using the word ‘explosion’ does not create a problem for evolution either way.
Close, but not quite. C-14 is not a daughter of U or Th decay (the direct decay chains end at lead). But the decay process creates alphas, betas and neutrons which can react with other stuff to form C-14, making it a ‘decay product’ in a loose sense of the term. Decay chain reaction product would, IMO, be a much better term. What is correct about the proportion is that the amount of C-14 found in coal/oil appears to correlate to the amount of U/Th in the rock surrounding the deposits. Which shouldn’t be the case if the C-14 was produced atmospherically, but it makes perfect sense if the C-14 is a product of some nuclear reaction with some part of the U/Th decay chain.
But lets dig down a little (pardon the pun). A “living” C-14 abundance is about 1E-10% (of total Carbon). If a sample of coal was 6000 years old, it would have 5E-11%. The abundances found in some coals - which creationists cite for a young earth - can be as high as 1E-15 or 1E-16%. So even if you assumed that this C-14 was produced atmospherically instead of via interaction with U/Th decay products, it would give an age for those coals of ~92,000 years.
In other words, not even granting their assumptions leads to a biblically young earth. The detectable amounts of C-14 found in some coal and oil deposits is about 10,000 times lower than what the YEC model would predict we’d find consistently in all coal and oil on the planet.
Wow… all I can say is wow.
What is it we were taught in Sunday School? You have two ears and one mouth, so listen twice as much as you talk… you might learn something.
Or my personal favorite: It is better to be silent and be thought of as an idiot, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Salient and sad: Never argue with an idiot, bystanders may not be able to tell the difference. Although, I think anyone who knows anything about Biology can see that this guy is just stupid.
Not if you postulate coal and oil deposits were formed during the flood, and most of the carbon came from either the biomass of the original creation, or growth before the fall, i.e. when all carbon must have been perfect C-12. Nothing is impossible when God is allow into the explanation.
If you would stick to one or two topics and stop constantly introducing new subjects rather than answering the old ones, you wouldn’t have that problem. But then that’s the idea, isn’t it? You’re like a kid who punches 5 people and then complains that he was beaten up by a gang. Funny how the vast majority of the people who argue thusly are loyal to the political party that is always spouting off about personal responsibility. Guesss that’s just one more moral principle you guys only apply to others.
Actually I think its more appropriate to say that nothing is impossible when creationists use mutually contradictory defenses at the same time. “Radiometric dating is unreliable…and there is C-14 in coal” is a lot like the old lawyer joke “my client never killed anyone…moreover, it was self-defense.”
Translation: “I’m just a poor beleaguered hero with only one sword trying to slay thousands of you demons; please give me some slack. (sniff, sniff, waaaa)”
One has to wonder why his posts contain tons of crap and that he responds with another ton of crap without comprehending anything.
He is drawing from a file of “arguments” that have been prepared for his Gish Gallop. There is no learning taking place on his part, he is here just to annoy us and practice his shtick.
The Ray Comfort sign-off is interesting. The level of comprehension is about right.
But its hard to tell, because they all drink and memorize from the same cesspool.
The comment about complexity is bullshit anyway. If we look at human designs, what we find is that using our intelligence frequently makes things simpler, not more complex. The mark of intelligence is a straight line.
These characters demonstrate they have come from the worst of all possible learning environments, both with regard to concepts and with regard to other people.
As you look over all of anonymouse’s “arguments”, they are almost entirely “arguments” that dispute facts. There are rarely any attempts to deal with concepts, especially scientific concepts.
I suspect there is a reason for this; it is far easier to bomb people with a barrage of misinformation and then mud-wrestle over whether or not the “facts” are correct and how they are to be interpreted.
This is almost always the shtick.
It is interesting how anonymouse, FL, and most of the others who show up here will dump garbage while systematically avoiding dealing with concepts.
And I think there is a reason for this also. There are far fewer concepts to be discussed, and their ignorance would be far more obvious if they are forced to explain concepts that are crucial in science. They wouldn’t be able to overwhelm the “discussion” with a ton of garbage that then has to be cleaned up even as these trolls continue to scatter more garbage before the previous mess is taken care of.
Anonymouse clearly has grotesque misconceptions, but he only briefly alludes to anything that reveals this. One can infer by the way he deals with facts that he doesn’t understand anything about concepts, but you always have to clear away a pile of garbage facts to get at concepts.
In the interim, sectarian followers are peeing their pants with delight because they got you hopping all over the place correcting misinformation and cleaning up garbage while they claim it is simply a matter of opinion or “philosophical perspective”.
These trolls should be forced to answer for concepts, not facts.
As I have mentioned before, there are only a few fundamental misconceptions that seem to underlie everything else in their beliefs and incredulity. Their constructed misinformation about facts is simply to confirm these misconceptions and place them on a “rational” foundation. The misconceptions were constructed to agree with sectarian dogma.
So the sequence is, dogma first, misconceptions constructed so as not to conflict with dogma, and then a ton of garbage facts piled on top to justify the misconceptions and therefore dogma. In essence, a manure pile on top of a manure pile on top of a manure pile.
I hope this does not constitute “hijacking” a thread, but I just read something over at a forum on Amazon that I had not heard of before (that I recall). A paper by Dr Dave Abel (http://mdpi.com/1422-0067/10/1/247) about DNA that says in its conclusion: “The fundamental contention inherent in our three subsets of sequence complexity proposed in this paper is this: without volitional agency assigning meaning to each configurable-switch-position symbol, algorithmic function and language will not occur. The same would be true in assigning meaning to each combinatorial syntax segment (programming module or word). Source and destination on either end of the channel must agree to these assigned meanings in a shared operational context. Chance and necessity cannot establish such a cybernetic coding/decoding scheme [71].”
I am not a scientist nor am I a creationist, I’m trying to understand as best I can the issues here. In nearly all other cases I see the scientific argument demolish creationist and ID arguments.
Am I correct in reading the above conclusion of Dr Abel to say that some entity that can make decisions must have intentionally arranged a portion of DNA to function as it does? Could anyone explain this to me (if anyone cares to).
It’s a 45 page paper, and I have downloaded it.
The abstract appears to already introduce a series of misconceptions, but without having read the paper, it is difficult to guess right off the top of my head why these questions are there.
I’ll look at the paper within the next few hours.
David Abel is a creationist. AFAIK, he is a computer programmer of some sort, not a biologist.
His paper is bafflegab, which I figured out in about 5 seconds. It is also just one big Fallacy of Incredulity and Ignorance.
The usual BS, nothing to see here, move along.
That’s evident from the abstract.
But I thought I might go through it like I did with the Dembski and Marks paper to see if I can put my finger on the fundamental misconceptions. I think I know what I will find just from reading the abstract.
It won’t be hard, LOL. Good luck.
1. They treat the genome as a computer program. There are similarities but they aren’t computer programs.
2. The question they want to answer is who wrote the program? The question assumes the answer already. It is either goddidit or RM + NS. Of course, they come down with goddidit. Because they know evolution couldn’t have done it. Because, well they just know it.
Argument from Ignorance and Incredulity.
Plus a stawperson. They imply that humans couldn’t have synthesized a mycloplasma genome. So what? We can almost do that now and who knows what we will be able to do a century from now. But evolution doesn’t say the mycoplasma genome was synthesized. It evolved over 3.6 billion years.
Really, how many times can they dress up up a 5 word fallacy that is 2 millenia old? 45 pages of bafflegab? Get a life.
How did this get through peer review?
Channeling…channeling…The reviewers are all drunken Liars for Jesus planning to blow up a biology building. How should I know? Maybe there weren’t any.
Jerry drop the act. The sincere seeker of knowledge who will turn into a fundie Death Cult xian in about 30 more seconds. We’ve seen it a million times and it is boring and sort of sick.
If it makes you feel better, tell us we are all going to hell, threaten to kill us, and don’t foreget to add, “I’ll pray for you”. Cthulhu, you guys are predictable.
Progress report.
OMG! I’m not even past the fourth page and my sides are splitting! What a set-up!
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