Creationist misinformation site Access Research Network has a brief blog entry called “‘Expelled’ Gaining Attention”. Although it was originally scheduled for a February release, their article indicates that this accidental mockumentary is now scheduled for April. They don’t tell us why. Maybe the producers needed to scrounge up additional funds to pay for all of the bribes they’re making to get people to see the film. They also write:

The blogs are starting to heat up over the film. Many of the comments are just ad hominem attacks on Ben Stein, or those rascally professors who think there actually may be more to Reality than material processes. Others don’t care for the tie-in with Hilter or the Berlin Wall.

That paragraph is loaded with laughs! Let’s take them in reverse order.

Let’s start with the Nazi tie-in. Fundies love to blame the Holocaust on Darwin. First of all, how is the fact that species evolved in any way to blame for Hitler’s gas chambers? There’s no connection. Period.

Second, eugenics predates Darwin. By a lot. Plato was one of its earliest advocates. Ancient Rome and Sparta actually put it into practice. In fact, Hitler praised Sparta’s eugenics program.

Eugenics had a resurgence after Darwin, but that would be blaming the man for the misuse of his discoveries. Isaac Newton figured out orbital mechanics, but we don’t blame him for ICBMs.

Eugenics was a misunderstanding and misapplication of what was then known of evolution. Don’t blame the natural scientists for the blunders of the social scientists. Your beef is with Sir Francis Galton and his cronies, not Darwin.

I also find it amusing that Access Research Network, of all people, would flaunt the Nazi connection. They threw a fit when I said they were using Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda techniques.

The second funny line in ARN’s paragraph is:

…those rascally professors who think there actually may be more to Reality than material processes.

ID creationists have yet to provide any plausible or credible evidence that their fairy stories have anything to do with reality. For them to claim that reality is on their side goes beyond laughable.

The third funny line in that paragraph is:

The blogs are starting to heat up over the film. Many of the comments are just ad hominem attacks on Ben Stein….

Is that true? I don’t know. ARN provides no evidence to back up that claim. That ought to be easy to do. Just go out to the blogosphere and grab a few quotes. (And if there is anything ARN loves, it’s quote mining!) But no! They can’t even do that! You’d think that an organization called “Access Research Network” would be capable of doing a tiny bit of research! Or at the very least know how to access some!

Researching the Blogosphere

I did get curious to see if the comments about this film are mostly just “ad hominem attacks on Ben Stein”. I shouldn’t have to do ARN’s work for them, but I decided to do a Google blog search on “Ben Stein”. Let’s look at the first page of results.

Of the 20 results returned, two were to unrelated spam sites. Of the 18 remaining:
5 were pro-Ben Stein (mostly creationist sites)
1 was neutral (and that was at Beliefnet!)
6 were financial or legal articles
6 were critical of Stein

That doesn’t exactly look to me like the blogosphere is “heating up” over Stein and his movie, but maybe quality is a better indicator of heat than is quantity. Let’s look at each of these categories in turn.

Full of B.S.

Among the articles supporting Ben Stein was a very short one by Jeff Doolittle. It contains this enlightening quote from Ben Stein himself:

In my experience, people who are confident in their ideas are not afraid of criticism.

I would agree with that statement, but that raises the fun question: Why was Access Research Network so upset about my article critiquing them?

Let’s skip the neutral article and move on to:

Financial or Legal Articles

Two articles in this category are very critical of Stein, but neither resorts to ad hominem attacks, as ARN alleges. Referring to one of Stein’s investment columns, Marek Fuchs of TheStreet.com writes:

I have seen a lot of bad business journalism in my day, but nothing as irresponsible and so wholly unsupported by facts. Actually, by even a single fact.

Wow. And economics is one of Stein’s specialties. Imagine how bad Expelled must be, since it’s on a topic Stein knows much less about.

The Big Picture specifically addresses the claims of ad hominem attacks:

I frequently mention that I loathe ad hominem attacks. They are a lazy way to avoid responding to a challenging argument. However, there comes a certain point in a pundit’s career arc where their credibility, intellectual honesty, and quite bluntly, their entire world view comes into question. Mr. Stein is at that point; he has jumped the shark, and it’s time for the rest of us to move on.

Stein, a former Nixon speechwriter, has made his opposition to Darwinian evolution public. He is ideologically committed to creationism and intelligent design, and is the star of the upcoming documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Once a commentator eschews logic and reason, once they deny science, then their readers are forced to question their entire analytical approach to ANYTHING — be it economics, markets, stocks, whatever. Ideology trumps facts, theory trumps data. For better or worse, this is the turf Stein has staked out as his own.

Ouch! They’re right. There is a threshold. Once you cross it, how can anybody believe anything you say?

The Critics Weigh In

Of the blog articles critical of Stein, “Ben Stein, Scientific Crusader” in particular caught my eye. It very effectively refutes, in a point-by-point manner, all of the lies Stein promotes. I can’t believe how good this article is. Hey wait! It’s mine! If the best that ARN can do is find my stuff, there must not be that many anti-Stein articles out there.

In a similar vein is an article from the Orlando Sentinel. It, too, rips apart Stein and his movie, point by point.

Travis Vocino calls Stein a “raving lunatic creationist”. The other articles in this category are similar. They refute Stein’s claims. Some of them also toss out the occasional characterization of Stein’s behavior. None of these articles was “just ad hominem attacks on Ben Stein” as ARN alleges.

We must conclude, therefore, that the blogosphere is (at most) running a slight fever, but it certainly isn’t “heating up” with “ad hominem attacks”. Not very many articles even mention the movie, and many that do mostly focus on debunking it. Poor ARN. Once again, we’ve caught them lying.

Appendix

Speaking of appendix, if humans were designed, why do we have one? Anyway, below is the list of 18 non-spam articles that Google blog search gave me this afternoon when I entered “Ben Stein”. I’m not recommending that you visit them. It’s just common practice in science to make your data available. This is another thing ARN knows nothing about.

Pro-Ben Stein (mostly creationist sites)

Ben Stein Expelled (Jeff Doolittle)
Ben Stein Civil Rights Activist (Darwinian Fundamentalism)
Ben Stein’s Expelled (In Light of the Gospel)
“Expelled”: A Ben Stein Documentary on Bias Against Intelligent Design (Children’s Ministry and Culture)
EXPELLED in Baptist Press (Uncommon Descent) (Given their practice of removing articles at will from their site, I’m not going to bother to try to link to it.)

Relatively Neutral

Ben Stein: The Michael Moore of Darwinism? (Beliefnet)

Financial or Legal

Ben Stein Must Be Stopped (Evolving in Kansas [Reprinted from The Street])
Farewell to Ben Stein (Big Picture)
The Ben Stein Pile-On (Portfolio)
Ben Stein Bats .500 (Skeptical Texas CPA)
Ben Stein on How Not to Ruin Your Life (Fora.tv)
Ben Stein is an Idiot (Silicon Alley Insider)

Critical of Stein

Ben Stein, Scientific Crusader (Bay of Fundie)
Is Ben Stein the New Face of Creationism? (Orlando Sentinel)
Is Ben Stein the New Face of Creationism? (Travis Vocino)
Orlando Sentinel: Is Ben Stein the new face of Creationism? (Panda’s Thumb)
Ben Stein’s Greatest Hit(ler)s (Amused Muse)
A Look Back in Time; Ben Stein was also an Idiot Back Then (Pro-Science)

Bill Maher’s recent comment reminded me of a thought experiment I came up with to try to determine what, if anything, Jesus really was. This isn’t an attempt to determine this with certainty. It’s just a “what if…” to see what different conditions would look like.

Who was Jesus? I came up with six distinct possibilities. What if Jesus:
(A) Didn’t exist
(B) Was an ordinary guy
(C) Was a magician
(D) Was an alien
(E) Was a time traveller
(F) Was a deity/spawn of deity

I’ve arranged this list in decreasing order of likelihood. You are welcome to propose and discuss other options that I’ve overlooked. The real answer may even be a variation of one of the above or some combination of more than one.

Let’s take this list and see where it gets us.

The first possibility is (A): Jesus never existed. This is quite likely. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life, only stories that came later. Furthermore, some of the things he is supposed to have done are so monumental that you’d think that somebody would have bothered to mention them when they were busy recording the other events of the day. (“Dear diary: Today the whore of Babylon raised her rates again. I’m going to have to cut back to just once a week. Lot’s wife is almost gone now, so I’m going to have to buy another salt lick for the cattle. Oh, BTW, I saw this crazy dude walking across the lake.”)

Despite the plausibility of this scenario, it’s the most pedestrian of the explanations. What if Jesus had been real, at least a little bit? What was the original story that got distorted into what we know today?

Option (B): Jesus was an ordinary guy. What if he was just some preacher guy? What if he was just some annoying twit like Ray Comfort, who stands on the street corner annoying passersby with his logical fallacies? No miracles, no prophecies. He really said the things that are attributed to him, but he never did any of the supernatural stuff.

This is a very real possibility. Then all of the miracles and fulfilled prophecies were added in later.

Option (C): Jesus was David Blaine. The miracles that people witnessed were just street magic. Then as these stories were retold, the size of the illusion was exaggerated and new miracles were added to round out his repertoire. The guy could have played Vegas!

This is another very real possibility. It would have been very easy to pass off stage or street magic as supernatural ability. Charlatans continue to do it to this day.

Option (D): Jesus was Alf. This is what Bill Maher suggested. It is worthwhile to remember Arthur C. Clarke’s third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

In this scenario, everything that Jesus is supposed to have done he very easily could have done. An alien landing in the middle of a simple society could very easily end up being worshipped, even if all he did was land for ten minutes so he could change a tire. There is still the problem of no contemporaneous accounts of his existence, so I would suggest that if this scenario has any merit, it would be that somebody appeared in the boondocks (the way the UFOs always seem to do even today) where there aren’t many people. The alien could have said a few things, done a few tricks, then left. The religion would have grown up around this. As in any oral tradition, embellishments would still occur, throw in a few unrelated stories that you can bend to fit the facts, and you have yourself a fully-realized religion.

Despite having just shown you how this scenario could have played out, I’d say the liklihood of it is remote. Existing UFO reports from today are shoddy at best, so we don’t have a good reason to believe that we’re being visited, either now or in the past.

Option (E): Jesus was Dr. Who. Just thinking about this turns my stomach. I mean, how stupid would our ancestors have to have been in order to be fooled by those cheesy special effects?

Maybe he was a more believable time traveller. Well this one would be almost identical to the alien hypothesis. It really wouldn’t matter if the super-advanced technology that the ancients saw was extra-terrestrial or not. I can imagine the traveller getting spanked big time when he returns to his own time for screwing over the timeline as bad as he did.

On a probability level, I’d have to assess this one as being even more unlikely than the extra-terrestrial. Life almost certainly exists elsewhere in the universe. The only question is whether they’ve gotten around to our remote outpost. The possibility of time travel is purely speculative at this point. There are lots of hypotheses, but they’re so far beyond our current ability to build that I cannot come up with a realistic probability figure. Until we have that, we have to keep this option in the near-fantasy category.

Finally, we come to option (F): Jesus was a god or god-spawn. This would account for everything attributed to him. It is important to realize that even if this scenario were true, we don’t know that the ancient scribes recorded the events and sayings properly. Modern newspapers can’t get their facts straight, so why would we assume that the ancients could, especially since they were writing decades after the events they chronicle? Even if the story is largely true, we probably have some of the major tenets wrong.

What about the probability of this option being the correct one? I’d say it is almost zero. There is no credible evidence that a god exists. Don’t waste your time on this scenario.

Conclusion

As I said above, I arranged these possibilities in the order of their likelihood. Option (A) is the most probable, even if it is the least fun. Some of the other options are quite plausible. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if any of the options except (F) turned out to be true.

There are a lot of choices on that list. Take you pick. Just make it a rational one.

The latest Carnival of the Godless has been posted at Mind on Fire. As usual, there are a lot of good posts. Here are a few that I especially liked, because they relate to things that have happened here recently.

If you read the comments on this blog, you’ll occasionally see a fundie drop Pascal’s Wager on us, like it’s some sort of divine revelation. They’re always so proud of themselves, like the cat who brings you the dead gopher. They’re both old dead things that have no current use, so stop dropping them on me. The kitty and the Christian are both eager to swallow their prizes whole. Daniel at The 327th Male isn’t. He has an excellent article about Pascal’s Wager. He explains it very clearly and then disposes of it easily. He won’t even vomit up the skin a day later.

I am frequently criticized for not respecting religion, as if it has some special protection that I’m violating. I respect the respectful parts of religion, and the respectful people. Everything else gets blasted. The Chaplain over at An Apostate’s Chapel addresses the question of respect in her article “What’s so Bad about Religion?” Here’s the part I agree with the most:

If believers want their beliefs to be considered as plausible foundations of social, economic, international, educational, or any other public policies, then I will critique those beliefs just as scrupulously as I would critique the beliefs of a Marxist, a Maoist, or a monarchist. Religious beliefs are simply one class of ideas among many that have the potential to do real damage to individuals, societies, and nations (though it seems self-evident to me that false beliefs will seldom pass muster as suitable foundations for good policy decisions). All ideas, religious and otherwise, should be scrutinized ruthlessly before one renders judgments regarding their soundness. Religious ideas are no more special than any others, they are simply more widespread and more deeply ingrained than most.

Another repeating theme, both in my articles and in the comments, is about offensiveness. At The Frame Problem, Ron Brown writes about a Dutch problem in “‘Freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend’; Dutch government bracing self for violent Muslim protest to anti-Muslim film”. Ron writes:

False. Freedom of expression does entail freedom to offend. In fact, in many ways freedom of expression is the right to offend. No one ever fought for the right to say nonoffensive things. No one ever censored nonoffensive statements.
…
Quick question: At what point will Westerners stop rewarding these theocratic dogmatic terrorists? At what point do we say “No, you are not going to tell us what ideas we can and cannot criticize. You are not the arbiters of what is and what is not okay to say.”

The last article I want to call special attention to is by vjack at Atheist Revolution. My own blog is about Christian fundamentalism in general, and Christian extremism in particular. What are these things? Vjack has some good definitions in “What Is Christian Extremism?”. He defines Christian fundamentalism as having these characteristics:

• Biblical Inerrancy/Literalism (at least with regard to creation)
• Evangelism
• Premillenialism (expectation of second coming, rapture, etc.)
• Separatism/Sense of Persecution

Next come the Christian extremists. Vjack gives us the additional characteristics of these people:

• Exclusivity (conviction that those who do not share their religious viewpoint are not “real” Christians)
• Other-Condemnation (intolerance and condemnation of the other)
• Anti-Intellectualism (especially with regard to science)
• Social Conservatism and Anti-Liberalism
• Theocratic Strivings (biblical law takes precedence over secular law)
• Opposition to Modernism

Finally come the Christian terrorists. Fortunately these are rare, but they’re the folks who blow up abortion clinics and engage in other acts of violence.

Those are the highlights of the latest Carnival of the Godless, but they are by no means the only good articles. Go on over and check them all out.

One argument that fundies keep trotting out in their opposition to gay marriage is that gays should not be given special rights. I’m as confused by that statement as you are. How is giving a group of people the same rights that the rest of us have giving them special rights? Somehow this twisted logic works in the Bizarro World of fundiedom.

Catholic fundies often cling to rantings of Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. Now Donohue is demanding special rights for his own religion. In a press release a couple of days ago, the Catholic League writes:

On his Friday night HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher was joined in a discussion about UFO’s with some of the panelists. Here is what Maher had to say:

“But I think it is much more likely that there could be space ships from outer space, than what a lot of things people believe. People still believe, you know, excuse me I know I may inject religion into every show but UFO’s are a lot more likely than a space god flew down bodily and you know who was the Son of God and you know had sex with a Palestinian woman….”

This actually touches on an article I’ve been meaning to write, where I advocate the exact same thing. Needless to say, I agree with Bill Maher. Let’s find out what Bill Donohue thinks!

Catholic League president Bill Donohue addressed Maher’s remark today:

“Last week, we registered a complaint with ESPN regarding the offensive comments made by anchorwoman Dana Jacobson at a celebrity roast; after I had a conversation with ESPN officials, the issue was satisfactorily settled by the end of the week. Moreover, Jacobson made another apology today, her first day back from her suspension. It is worth comparing Jacobson to Maher on several counts.

Yes, let’s look at the Dana Jacobson incident. From what I can tall, she got drunk at a private party and said something vulgar about Notre Dame. The Catholics got into a snit over it. According to this report, there’s a group calling itself the Christian Defense Coalition that wants her fired for hate speech!

These people seriously need to get over themselves.

For some perspective, here’s a parody piece from Serious Sports Network: Jacobson to Catholic group: “It’s not like I molested a little boy”

Let’s get back to Bill Donohue’s blabbering press release:

“Jacobson was drunk, made her first and only bigoted comment in public, apologized twice for her behavior and was punished by her station.

And Bill Donohue is sober. What’s his excuse?

By contrast, Maher was sober, made his umpteenth Christian-bashing remark, did not apologize—he never does—and suffered no consequences. In short, Jacobson’s outburst was an anomaly; Maher’s was not. She is a first-time offender and he is a recidivist.

“There is no bigger bigot in America today than Bill Maher. His serial insults are tolerated on HBO and on late-night television shows because the producers are not outraged by what he says. How else can we explain his ability to offend with impunity?”

Where in the Constitution is it written that Bill Donohue gets special protection? Since when has Christianity been off limits to criticism? It’s OK for Donohue to give his opinion on everybody else, but nobody else can give their opinions on his beleifs?

Bill Maher’s show is on HBO. People have to make a special decision and pay extra to get it. On top of that, they have to choose to watch his program. Maher’s show is aimed at a specific audience. If you aren’t part of that target demographic, then don’t watch!

Look at the Catholic League’s banner, which I reproduced above. Their slogan is “For religious and civil rights”. Our most fundamental civil right is freedom of speech. Apparently the Catholic League thinks that only applies to them.