Our old buddy, crackpot creatard Kevin Wirth is publishing a book! But don’t worry. He didn’t write it. He’s only the publisher. I don’t need the type of book Kevin could write. I already have several books of quotations.

The book that Kevin is bringing to market is written by some clown named Dr. Jerry Bergman, and it’s called Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth about Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters. I’m sure it’s a good book. We can rely on Kevin to bring us nothing but the highest caliber of ideas. Kevin is, after all, the guy who told us that Ben Stein is the modern Rosa Parks.

Before checking out Kevin’s book, let’s find out some more about the clown who wrote it. Jerry Bergman’s Wikipedia entry says:

Dr. Bergman is an adjunct associate professor at Medical University of Ohio and also teaches biochemistry, biology, chemistry and physics at Northwest State Community College in Ohio. He has taught at the college level for 35 years including seven years at Bowling Green State University, 6 years at the University of Toledo, and 20 years at Northwest State.

It then goes on to list a buttload of legitimate degrees this guy has. The one blemish is that his Ph.D. comes from the (now defunct) unaccredited Columbia Pacific University. This is the same esteemed pillar of higher learning that gave a Ph.D. to pop-quack John Gray (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, his Degree is from Neptune). In Bergman’s case, it really doesn’t matter how good the Ph.D. is. He has enough other credentials that we can agree that the guy is a good scholar, even if we disagree with his opinions. In fact, he apparently has a good track record of getting published. Wikipedia says:

He now has over 700 publications in a variety of scientific and popular journals….

That statement doesn’t tell us which publications, the subject matter, and how many were peer-reviewed, but I’m happy to concede that a large chunk of that 700 could be real science.

OK then. The guy seems legitimate. He’s not some drooling ignoramus that Kevin Wirth pulled out of the audience at The 700 Club. Let’s see what else Wikipedia says:

Bergman’s opinions on creationism are often published by Answers In Genesis.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Otherwise-intelligent people are blinded by their religion. Well, if you’re going to be a creationist, you might as well go whole hog. Don’t be one of those wimpy Discovery Institute (“OK, we’ll give you microevolution but not macro!”) Old-Earth Creationists! No siree! You want to be the worst of the worst: An Answers in Genesis (“T-Rex ate coconuts in the Garden of Eden!”) Young-Earth Creationist! Accept no substitutes! (Except for logic. You’ll need to use substitute logic. And evidence. You’ll need to substitute fake evidence for real evidence. And persecution. You won’t really get persecuted, so you’ll just have to pretend you are.)

In the 1990s he was also known for his Usenet postings to the talk.origins newsgroup. Many of his views are highly controversial, such as implying a causal relationship between Darwinism, Nazism, and the Holocaust.

Oh. He’s a Steinist.

Bergman was involved in a tenure controversy early in his career. Wikipedia says that he was originally hired by Bowling Green State University. He did not receive his Ph.D. on the expected timetable, so his employment at BGSU became tenuous. Ultimately:

In 1978 Bergman was denied tenure. Bergman believed this was due to his involvement in the creation movement and his religious beliefs and subsequently filed with both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Ohio Civil Rights Commission on the grounds that he had been discriminated against on the basis of religion, with both agencies ultimately ruling that he was not let go due to his religious beliefs, but because his peers voted to terminate him.

Like the typical creationist who won’t let go of his beliefs even when presented with clear evidence to the contrary, he wouldn’t accept the ruling:

Bergman filed suit against Bowling Green State University in federal district court in 1980, alleging that his due process rights had been violated and that he had been denied tenure on the basis of his religious views.… The case was dismissed in 1985. Bergman appealed but the appeal was turned down in 1987. The court ruled that the reason he was let go was because of ethics, namely that he claimed to have credentials in psychology when, in fact, he “had no psychological credentials.”

Bergman apparently is still convinced that he was discriminated against, or else he wouldn’t have written this book that Kevin Wirth is shilling. Isn’t it interesting that somebody with over 700 publications to his credit couldn’t find a legitimate publisher for his book? The fact that he had to stoop to using the services of somebody as unqualified in logic as Kevin Wirth suggests that Bergman’s book is, like his discrimination lawsuits, wholly without merit.

Tomorrow: Kevin Wirth tries to sell us some tripe.

Sane Blog says it best:

As reported in this CNN article, the pope has reaffirmed the catholic position on birth control. It is difficult to imagine a single policy which has been responsible for ensuring more poverty of women, disease and the blocking of development in Africa and other impoverished nations of the world. The catholic church does not love preventing suffering - the catholic church actually loves suffering.

Douglas Adams died seven years ago today. I thought it would be fitting to direct you to Richard Dawkin’s eulogy of Adams.

Go read this post at Violent Acres. It’s hysterical!

Church services always started off quiet enough with the organ playing and parishioners quietly whispering greetings and shaking hands. But among the kids, there was a kind of electricity in the air. Half of the time, we could barely contain ourselves. We knew that if things went well, it was likely we’d see some crazy ass shit.

(via Pharyngula)

This week’s Cectic illustrates common fundie logic:

That’s not a literal quote, but it’s the logical extension of the latest wild claims of the Discovery Institute. In a recent hallucination on their propaganda website, the Discovery Institute screamed this headline:

Methodists Nail Darwinian Nazi Record, Repent U.S. Past, Warn About 21st Century Eugenics

That caught my attention. Have the Methodists succumbed to DI propaganda? Let’s take a look. The insane ramblings of the DI begin with:

The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler.

That sure sounds like the Methodists are laying some of the blame for the Holocaust on Darwin. We’ll check into that claim in a minute. Let’s see what else the DI says:

Yes, that would be the Nazi ideology that the Darwinists of today—and major media—pretend sprang on the world fresh from the head of Hitler…

No. That’s exactly the opposite of what we’ve been saying. I know the DI monitors all the major biology blogs, so they definitely know that we’ve said that what Hitler was doing was selective breeding. This is a technique that is almost as old as civilization. Since they’ve definitely read this fact in numerous blogs, the only conclusion we can come to is that the DI is deliberately lying. Making up facts is how the DI does “science”, so why should the way they argue be any different? Discovery Institute: No Facts Allowed!

The Methodists’ resolution—adopted by a vote of 836 to 28—apologizes for the denomination’s own failure to resist the eugenics movement in this country in the 20th century. They were not alone…. But no other mainline Protestant denomination has yet had the courage to admit to the racism of Darwinist eugenics and the supine attitude that leading American religious leaders, as well as the scientific establishment, adopted towards it.

It is true that many people bought into the eugenics movement in the early 20th century, and many scientists were among them. However, eugenics is not “Darwinism”. Darwin discovered how species evolve. He did not “discover” that killing six million Jews would produce a Master Race.

The Methodists’ Apology

Let’s turn now to what the Methodists have actually written in their resolution, “An Apology for Support of Eugenics”:

The study of eugenics did not begin with Hitler or his German scientists, but rather was first promoted by Sir Francis Galton, in England. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who expanded on Darwin’s theories and applied them to the human population.

That’s funny. This is the same document that the Discovery Institute read, but I don’t see anything about Charles Darwin creating eugenics. Sir Francis Galton took Darwin’s theories and misapplied them to human society. Darwin is not responsible for the actions of his cousin, and the Methodists are not claiming that he is.

Galton’s successor at the helm of the Eugenics Society was Major Leonard Darwin (1850- 1943), a son of Charles Darwin. Leonard Darwin, who ran the Eugenics Society until 1928, made the transition from positive to negative eugenics, and promoted plans for lowering the birthrate of the unfit.

Again, this is another one of Darwin’s relatives. That family was really into this stuff. But once again, don’t blame Chuck for his wayward son.

There’s a lot more to the Methodist document (and I encourage you to read it), but that’s pretty much all they had to say about Charles Darwin. Nowhere are they blaming Darwin for either eugenics or the Holocaust. Has the Discovery Institute no shame?

The Hindenberg caught fire and crashed 71 years ago today. That event has nothing to do with this blog. I just thought the above picture was funny.

We all know of the problems of the authenticity of the Bible. It was originally a loose conglomeration of fables by desert dwellers, passed down by oral tradition. These stories were a mishmash of original ideas, imported legends, fanciful embellishments, and gross exaggerations. Eventually, they started to get written down, by widely-scattered people. That left us with a lot of stories, many duplicates and variants, and even more contradictions. Eventually, somebody had to sit down and figure out which books belonged, which version of those books belonged, which didn’t, and what to do about all of those contradictions.

This process happened at least twice. The first time was by the Jews, to compile the Hebrew Bible (later called the “Old Testament” by the holier-than-thou Christians). The second time was by those snooty Christians, around 325 C.E., because Constantine ordered 50 copies of the Bible. At that time, there wasn’t one unified set of stories. Kind of hard to deliver to the emperor 50 copies of something that you don’t even have one copy of. The priests had to quickly get together and figure out what to include and what to throw away. Both scholarship and politics figured heavily in this process. Thus, the Bible is a book of tall tales written by committee. Divinely inspired, my ass.

It would be bad enough if the Bible had stopped mutating like a bad sci-fi movie monster by the time it was originally canonized in 325 C.E. But no. These were the days before the printing press, so every time you needed a Bible, you had to find some monk to hand-copy another one for you. Many errors, omissions, and deliberate insertions crept into the book as it progressed through the centuries, giving us today thousands of variants.

Along the way, various influential people with one particular ax or another to grind decided they wanted a different version, so they commissioned their own committees to create their own new versions.

Quite a mess.

Finding a Less-Error-Filled Version

If you’re going to read the Bible—either because you believe this crap, or because you just want to see what crap the credulous actually believe—you’re going to want to find a Bible that is as close as we can get to the original stories. You don’t want to be reading fantastic, incredible stories that were put in later. No. You want your fantastic, incredible stories to be pure, unadulterated fiction!

Paul Tobin has an extensive web site called The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager. He has dozens of pages about the Bible and its history. It’s all very heavily footnoted, so you can check up on his claims. The writing sometimes gets a little dense, so it’s not always a breezy read.

Among his many pages is one titled “Not All Versions Are Created Equal”. He starts by telling us that there are two major problems with Bible translations:

The source documents. As there is not a single extant original (or autograph) copy of any of the books in the Bible, the reliability of the translation is affected directly by the quality of the source documents. For instance, the King James Version…, which was first published in 1611, is no longer considered reliable since it was not based on ancient texts. Modern versions are based on newly discovered, more ancient texts [as] well as scientific textual studies. So in general, more modern versions are more reliable than older ones.

As fundamentalism grows, the second issue, that of theological preconception becomes very important.This is what we will be looking at in depth on this page.

So here’s Tobin’s list of techniques that fundie translators use to produce a Bible that says what they want:

• Removing Contradictions by Quoting or Using Less Authoritative Texts
• Removing Difficulties by Translating in “Soft Focus”
• Removing Reprehensible Passages by Mistranslation
• Leaving Errors in Translation Unchanged
• Adding Words into the Bible Text

He gives some strong examples of each of these on his site. Go check it out.

Examples of bad Bibles, with particular fundie agendas, are The Book, The Living Bible, and The New International Version (NIV). I know I’ve encountered the NIV.

If you want to get yourself a better Bible, Tobin says that the best version available today is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). It has the best scholarship behind it, and they tried to translate as bias-free as they could.

Of course, the NRSV is still a Bible. As the saying goes, that’s like putting lipstick on a pig. (No disrespect to pigs is intended!)