That’s a fallacy.

But I heard John Baumgardner say that from his very own lips! If you can’t believe a creationist, who can you believe?

Darwin gave us eugenics, which gave us Hitler, which gave us abortion

That’s a fallacy.

@breakerslion, the 1st amendment protections of freedom of religion kind of cover ‘insanity and fraud’ by default, since that’s more or less the definition of religion. As long as a religion behaves religiously enough, it gets to be all the crazy it wants to be, and tax exempt status too! (sigh)

Of course, there are plenty of fundies to fill a worship service –er– scientific seminar like that, but I often think, wouldn’t it be funny if a good bulk of them were undercover atheists?

At one point, one of the speakers mentioned that he knew there were a few “Darwinists” in the audience. I don’t know if he meant in person or just watching on the internet. It would have been great to have known about any who were there in person. I’m curious how they reacted.

When I was scanning the audience, just about everybody looked like they belonged there.

It’s easy to rationalize YEC when you are only studying, say, lava flow patterns or something else that doesn’t immediately require millions of years to produce.

True, but they’re finding increasingly creative ways to get around this. As I mentioned the other day, Marcus Ross “earned” a doctorate in Earth Science at URI two years ago, and is now teaching his students at Liberty about the “gaping holes” in evolutionary and cosmological theories. His thesis was on the Cretaceous era, but he claims to regard it as an “alternate paradigm”. I’m furious that his professors allowed him to squeak by on this flimsy pretext. It’s absolutely inexcusable. I only hope they did it because the administration feared a lawsuit, and not because they felt he deserved to be there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/science/12geologist.html

As far as religious discrimination is concerned, if we were to implement my idea of mandatory testing of intelligence, sanity and level of emotional development as a prerequisite for voting, that would take care of the problem.

This is what I keep saying. There are more of them than we realized, and it’s starting to become a serious problem. When I’ve advocated for disallowing their admission into graduate-level science programs, the Pharyngulites have taken offense, going on about the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, we have public school teachers in blue states who are scared to teach evolution for fear of inciting any Christian parents who may be lurking. This is the climate of fear they’re creating. It’s a hop and a skip from there to banning the teaching of evolution altogether – which is precisely their agenda.

One of the few times, as you know, that I agree with your militant atheist position (tongue firmly in cheek). Of course, discriminating based on religion alone violates any number of federal, state, and local laws. But the solution is probably a lot simpler than that. Have the program force them to directly confront their views and do research in contradiction with them. I can almost promise you this fucker’s “geophysics” thesis was about some obscure subtopic that only grazed against his young earth views. It’s easy to rationalize YEC when you are only studying, say, lava flow patterns or something else that doesn’t immediately require millions of years to produce.

I’m guessing somewhere around 800 seats. Of those, about 2/3 were occupied. (By the end of the evening, this number had climbed to about 80%. That puts the evening’s toll at about 640 people right there who were lost from science.)

Of course, there are plenty of fundies to fill a worship service –er– scientific seminar like that, but I often think, wouldn’t it be funny if a good bulk of them were undercover atheists?