Creatard Nephilimfree
The video I’ve posted below one of the more hilarious YouTube videos to have sprung from the never-ending evolution vs. creation battle.
For those who don’t recognize who is being spoofed…look at the photo above, click on it and check out his channel. It’s Nephilimfree, a young earth creationist who is known for his outrageous lies, bizarre behavior, litigious posturing and overall asshattery.
Courtesy of TruthSurge
Dawkins gives a presentation during Adelaide Writers’ Week in Australia, on March 1st, 2010. The topic of his presentation is his book, ‘the Greatest Show on Earth’. In this clip, Dawkins discusses whether or not religion served (or serves) an evolutionary purpose.
DISCLAIMER: Okay, reddit is going nuts over this posting’s title. Listen, I’m not out to get anyone or hurt anyone’s feelings, unless you’re a creationist. The term “Hillbilly Science” is in no way intended to reflect poorly on inhabitants of the American South. If you take the title as a specific attack against Caucasians originating from Appalachia, you are seriously mistaken.
A July 16th 2010 article on the NCSE website discusses the findings of a recent Angus Reid Poll on evolution and creationism.
Respondents were from the United States, Great Britain and Canada. The results of the poll are predictable:
“Acceptance of evolution in the United States was lowest in the South (27%, as opposed to 51% accepting creationism) and highest in the Northeast (43%, as opposed to 38% accepting creationism). In Canada, acceptance of creationism was highest in Manitoba/Saskatchewan (39%, as opposed to 50% accepting evolution) and Alberta (31%, as opposed to 51% accepting evolution). In Great Britain, acceptance of creationism was highest in London (25%, as opposed to 58% accepting evolution).”
Nearly 3/4ths of the population in the southern United States rejects evolution. We shouldn’t be concerned about numbers like this, we should be alarmed.
Remember the short-lived The Flash television series of 1990? No? You’re not alone, not many folks watched it past the 3rd episode. Why? The villains sucked, that’s why. Crappy villains make for a crappy show.
The video I’m posting today is the latest challenge from YouTube’s Thundef00t to asshat creatard Nephilimfree. In regards to the whole atheist vs creationist thing on YouTube, this is starting to get lame.
Seriously, don’t creationists have anyone better than Nephilimfree to put forward as their champion? It’s common knowledge that a good (as in really bad, smart, capable, etc.) villain makes for a good film, comic or novel. The same goes for these YouTube “showdowns”.
Without a good bad guy, there’s no real threat, no challenge. Without a threat or real challenge, it becomes nothing more than shooting fish in a barrel. Still, like when passing a car wreck, I can’t help but slow down and check out the carnage…
New state science standards are up for a vote by the Nebraska Board of Education this summer…and they’re actually – gasp!!! – pro-science!
The Omaha World-Herald did an editorial on the subject on June 15, 2010 and one particular paragraph caught my attention as it mirrors something I’ve been saying for years:
“Children who lack a solid background in the fundamentals of modern science can be at a considerable disadvantage. In a hyper-competitive world economy, our country depends on a continuing supply of well-educated, knowledgeable and science-literate young people.”
Creationism isn’t just a bad idea. It really is anti-American to its very core. If you remember that two of the most influential of the Founding Fathers (Jefferson and Franklin) were scientists in their own right, my position on this becomes all the more clear. Science is an American birthright.
You can read the NBOE science standards in PDF format HERE.
There must be something about the combination of Christianity, dentistry and public education.
First we have the asshat Don McLeroy of the Texas School Board of Education and now we have a retired dental hygienist from Florida trying to get elected to a school board so she can wreak even worse havoc.
Without further ado, let me introduce Judith Bruinius.
Judith Bruinius, retired dental hygienist, is running for the District 6 Pinellas School Board seat currently held by Linda Lerner.
Judith loves Jesus and Judith is going to kick some ass and take names once she gets into office.
Among the things she supports is the placing of the 10 Commandments on the walls of school classrooms and the teaching of the 10 Commandments to schoolchildren.
She goes one step further than the typical creationist and instead of pushing for equal time for creationism and evolution in the classroom (“teach the controversy”), she says we should just dispense with evolution altogether as “junk science.”
Judith is concerned about schools “pushing all the gay agenda.”
When asked by a reporter from The Gradebook for examples, Bruinius said, “I don’t know that this is happening here. I know it’s happening in some places.”
What’s her take on budget cuts and finance? Let’s see:
“My philosophy is really, if you get down to the basics and teach truth and honesty and godliness, the money will follow.”
Sounds like a plan to me. I haven’t run this by my CPA wife yet, but I’m sure God and Judith have a handle on things. Who the fuck needs accounting?
So, who or what launched Judith on her hopefully short-lived stint in political activism? Judith states the Tea Party put her up to it.
Wow. Shocking. Who’d have thunk it?
Read the entire article from The Gradebook HERE.
Read some more about Judith in her own words on her own nifty website. If you’ve got Firefox, it may not work, however as Firefox is just too liberal or gay of a browser to work with her content. Enjoy the grammatical and spelling errors!
The latest offering from Thunderf00t covers a wide range of idiocy, including the creationist claim that the craters of the moon were caused by the Noachian Flood. Enjoy!!!
Check HERE for info on the NCSE’s latest videos to be uploaded to YouTube.
In late 2009, the National Center for Science Education started offering free evolution book excerpts on their web site as well as on their Facebook page. Some of these excerpts are complete chapters. This is a great opportunity for anyone who is into evolution and wants to “try before you buy.”
Many thanks to Robert Luhn, Director of Communications for the National Center for Science Education.
Click on the images to link directly to the excerpts.
Evolution vs. Creationism, 2nd edition (Greenwood) by Eugenie C. Scott
Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be (Kids Can Press) by Daniel Loxton
Evolution: The story of life (UC Press) by Douglas Palmer
Evolution, Second Edition (Sinauer Associates) By Douglas J. Futuyma
Evidence of Evolution (Abrams Books) by Susan Middleton and Mary Ellen Hannibal
The Tangled Bank (Roberts and Company) by Carl Zimmer
Rapture Ready! (Scribner) by Daniel Radosh
Charles Darwin's On the Origin Of Species: A Graphic Adaptation (Rodale) by Michael Keller
If you haven’t yet donated to the NCSE, please considering making a small donation via PayPal right now using the link in the right sidebar. Even a dollar will make a difference. It’s fast, it’s easy and you will be doing a good thing for yourself and your country.
NCSE received the go-ahead to excerpt a chapter from Daniel Radosh’s “Rapture Ready!”.
To those who don’t already know, Radosh is a staff writer for “The Daily Show”. The excerpted chapter is Chapter 16, “The opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge”.
This particular chapter deals with creationists and I must say, if reading this doesn’t make you fear for the future of our nation, then nothing will.
A free download can be found at:
http://ncse.com/files/pub/evolution/Excerpt–formatted–footnotes.pdf
My thanks to Robert Luhn, Director of Communications for the National Center for Science Education, Inc.
P.S. One of my readers says it’s out on Kindle…thanks Candace!!!
Anti-evolution legislation (introduced by a Missouri Republican, of course) died before it ever got to committee on May 14th. Good thing, or I’d now be calling Missouri the “Blow Me” state instead of the “Show Me” state.
The man who introduced this piece of garbage legislation is one Robert Wayne Cooper, R-District 155.
Make that Dr. Robert Wayne Cooper. Living proof that higher education doesn’t necessarily make you smarter. And what the hell is with that middle name? I mean, why is it that every guy I’ve ever heard of with the middle name of Wayne is a creep of some sort?
Apparently, the good doctor is a very stubborn (if not very smart) man. He’s introduced anti-evolution bills 5 times since 2004 and failed to get any of them passed. Read more about it here.
Many thanks to Robert Luhn, the Director of Communications for the National Center for Science Education!
Déjà vu all over again. NCSE’s Eugenie Scott is racking up ANOTHER honorary degree this month, this time from Colorado College. This chick is outta control…
As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, Eugenie Scott is one of a very small group of people who influenced and inspired me at the beginning of my long and tortured journey towards rationalism. Few people have done more to promote and defend the American way of life by defending science education. In my book she qualifies as a National Treasure.
If you‘d like to help Ms. Scott and her crew defend the teaching of evolution in this country (and I know you do), then please visit the NCSE Membership page here. The process is fast and easy and you can give as little or as much as you want.
Get the whole story on NCSE’s website here.
Guess which one comes out on top in this great video from The Thinking Atheist?
That “God of the Gaps” keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
According to researchers from the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, at least 1,700 genes from the African clawed frog genome are similar to human genes.
The study is detailed in the April 30th issue of Science.
Read about it here.
The executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Eugenie Scott, was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from The National Academy of Sciences.
Eugenie Scott has been one of the (if not THE) most influential personalities in the ongoing struggle to keep creationism out of public school science classes. She is a personal hero of mine as she was helpful to me in a time of need when I was debating members of my (former) church on the topic of creationism back in the late 1990’s. She took the time to talk with me and her words were both informative and inspirational. She was key in my eventual deconversion.
Congrats!!! The award is well deserved.
Read the NAS press release about it here.
I’ve been waiting for an “official” creationist response to the recent consensus by an international team of scientists that the impact of an extraterrestrial object approximately 65 million years ago resulted in the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction. Somewhere between 50%-70% of all existing species died out in a very short time.
After over a week of waiting, I started to give up hope, but Mr. Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research came through for me in an article entitled, “Case Closed On Dinosaur Extinction. Or Is It?”
As I gave the article a brief once over, my eyes fell on a particular sentence. I stopped, went back to the beginning of the article and read up to the same sentence again to make sure I hadn’t taken the phrase out of context.
What was the phrase? It was this (emphasis mine):
“One scientific model can account for both the rapid deposition of the layers in question and the massive loss of life. If there was an impact during the later stages of the Flood year, as the K-T boundary placement within the creation-Flood model suggests, then its effects on living things would be difficult to separate from the overall effects of the flood runoff from continents. In this case, extinctions attributed to the impact could actually have been caused by the Flood and the impact together.”
Did you catch that? In one sentence, Mr. Thomas has undermined the Biblical basis for the mass extinction (actually, kill-off*) that creationists claim was caused by the Great Flood. If indeed, this is the only such claim by a major creationist on record, this is huge.
Now, knowing full well that much creationist literature consists of other creationist’s ideas which have been reheated and served up again, I am hesitant to claim to have stumbled upon a major shift in flood geology and creationism as it has been peddled by young earth creationists since the 1960’s. That being said, I would appreciate it if someone in the know would direct me to any similar pronouncements from influential creationists in the last 30 years.
UPDATE: A reader has pointed out that Answers in Genesis actually responded before ICR did. However, they did not make the claim that ICR did. It seems that AiG is sticking with a strict biblical interpretation of events. Here’s the article.
* Most YEC’s claim that dinosaurs were on the ark and survived the flood, but died out afterward.
I just finished reading this article about science textbooks for home schooled children being religious in nature and slanted against evolution. Of the more than 1.5 million children that are being home-schooled, over 80 percent have parents that ventured into this with the intention of providing their children with a religious (Christian) based curriculum.
I’m not surprised, of course, but what is disturbing is the dearth of real science textbooks and material for home-schooling parents who aren’t morons and/or religious fanatics.
While I was somewhat encouraged to see that 69% of readers in an attached poll favored the teaching of evolution over creationism, I realize that the numbers are probably skewed as those that are creationists are less likely to be informed, and therefore, less likely to be reading news articles in the first place.
ID/Creationists have repeatedly failed at attempts to force their idiocy down the public’s throat by infiltrating school boards and other underhanded tricks. Offering up religious, anti-science textbooks to parents who home-school is merely another back-door scheme by which creationists may implement their Wedge strategy quietly and with little to no obstacles in their way.
This is a tragedy on many levels. It’s immoral, it’s a threat to our national economy and it needs to be stopped.
The God-of-the-Gaps received another bitch slap this week with the declaration by an international team of more than three dozen scientists which confirmed that the dinosaurs were, indeed, killed off by an asteroid impact around 65 million years ago. The team’s findings were reported in the March 5th, 2010 issue of the journal Science.
Creationists, however, have never let the facts get in the way and I thought it would be interesting to see what their reaction would be to this most recent and rather momentous development. So far, there has been no response. Not a peep from the ICR, AIG or the Discovery Institute.
Is that crickets I hear? Hello? Anyone home?
I guess they need some time to cook up a fresh batch of bullshit.
