I’ve decided to make a serious post about a controversial topic. I’ve done that before in my Why Led Zeppelin Sucks thread. This one’s a bit more serious than that one.
Intelligent Design is anything but. I want to state that as my opinion clearly and for the record. There is absolutely, unequivocally no intelligence in it whatsoever. It’s shit passing itself off as science. It is, simply put, the Bible-Thumpers passing off their beliefs as science. Before all you bible-thumpers jump in, and I’m sure you will, let me say I am not against the Bible — it’s a very important book. I am also not against God. I think everyone needs to have something in their life to believe in. If God is your thing, that’s great. I mean that. So spare me the e-mails saying how much I hate God, because I don’t. This post is not an attack on God or the Bible. There’s plenty of other people who can do that in their blogs but it won’t be me.
However, what most of the Bible-Thumpers fail to understand is that they create deep resentment when they try to ram their beliefs down other people’s throats. And it’s worse because they’re wrong. I even support their right to teach their kids whatever they want — including this total sham of a concept called Intelligent Design. However they shouldn’t and can’t force it onto other people as much as they feel it’s their right to do so.
What happens when they do? This: UC Berkeley Makes War On Religious Zealots — That’s right, their kids don’t get into school because they have been turned into mis-educated morons. But that, as a parent, is their right. If they want their kids to be morons, they can. Hell, even our President is a moron so that’s not so bad, right? I don’t know why a person would want their child to be an idiot, to grow up learning something that simply isn’t true. However, there are people who grow up believing it’s okay to discriminate against someone because their skin is the wrong colour, their sexual preferences are different, or they practice the wrong form of religion, so obviously there are some pretty screwed up parents in the world. Yes, people want their kids to grow up to be Nazis and Klansmen.
It all starts innocently enough with a book. The book called Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a textbook. Yes, a textbook. There’s a big fuss being made about this book and what it does and doesn’t contain. I had the (mis)fortune of actually reading selections from it. It moved me enough to write an Amazon review of it. And do you know why I trashed the book? If you answered “because you don’t agree with it” you’d be totally wrong.
It’s because this festering pile of bound pages, doesn’t bother to defend its own position with facts. If you want to take the position Intelligent Design is valid, that is certainly your prerogative. If you want to write about it, you are certainly entitled. If you want to write a textbook about it, you have to find some way of proving your points or, if you can’t, clearly label them as conjecture. This book does neither.
What this book does is try to defend itself and straddle the fence. Neither side is served by this for when you straddle the fence, you tend to fall off. My review is called “Idiocy becomes Science” and to sum it up: I t is disturbing anyone would actually consider something so full of tripe, illogical leaps from ‘facts’ to ‘conclusion’ as worth buying much less believing.
Whatever your beliefs, this book sells them short. If you’re in the Darwin camp, it’s just plain wrong. If you’re a creationist* it has the same problem — it doesn’t make the case. In short, this book fails to serve ANYONE anything of any value. You HAVE to take a position and defend it one way or the other. If you cruise by my review, give it a helpful rating, please. In fact, rate all the reviews. It’s fun unlike this ignorant excuse of a book.
So it’s the start down a slippery slope. It’s okay to teach kids right from wrong, isn’t it? So when we teach them lies and things that are untrue, how can we expect them to determine which ones are ‘wrong’ and which ones are ‘right’? You can’t because it doesn’t make sense. It is no coincidence that many of these self-same Bible-Thumpers proclaim a love of God and preach hate at the same time. It’s people like this who will go to the Hell they so firmly believe they are avoiding. A very specific example: one Bible-Thumping group is picketing Ms. Corretta Scott King’s funeral because she believed in equal rights! Sadly, I am not making this up as you can see for yourself. Yes, their God apparently is a hateful God and all that bit in the Bible doesn’t really apply. Reminds me of Orwell’s masterpiece Animal Farm: All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
A long time ago I had posted some similar comments on AOL in a message board and I got some rather nasty e-mails informing I was going to Hell and they were going to Heaven. I got news for those closed-minded, evil bastards. If heaven is full of people like that, I don’t want
to go there.
But you know what, I don’t think that’s true. I know a lot of church-going people and most of ’em are pretty normal. Just like everyone else. They’re not bigoted morons. I think they’ll all go to their vision of Heaven. All those nut-cases will be really surprised to find themselves in Hell. Hopefully I won’t be seeing them. It’s sad but a few people ruin it for everyone.
*that’s Intelligent Design no matter what anyone’s claims
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