"darth_versive" <darth_versive@yahoo.com> wrote in message

How are we to account for the observation that so many creationists,
when repeatedly confronted with overwhelming evidence in support of
the theory of evolution, seem either to not comprehend this evidence,
or to discount it without serious thought, or with clearly specious
reasoning?

laugh about that evolution scam that keeps them in a job. I told my
creationist relative that the universe is obviously older than 7k years. I
can see stars and entire galaxies that are millions of light years away,
after all? How fast could that light have gotten here? He says in a mocking
voice "What if I drove the speed of light and turned my headlights on?"

Creationists firmly believe that this life is just a little show that god
puts on for us and nothing we see is what matters. It is just gods creation
for testing his subjects. Nothing more.

"darth_versive" <darth_versive@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:8e0e3045.0402081143.3cd4b563@posting.google.com...

How are we to account for the observation that so many creationists,
when repeatedly confronted with overwhelming evidence in support of
the theory of evolution, seem either to not comprehend this evidence,
or to discount it without serious thought, or with clearly specious
reasoning?

<snip>

Scary though it may seem, many people in the U.S. (including those in high
government positions, like "born agains" Bush and Ashcroft) cling to
similarly bizarre and dangerous beliefs:

"A Higher Power

Nevertheless, beyond all these more obvious anti-environmental motivations
there lies a more deep-seated inspiration. Difficult as it may be to
believe, many of the conservatives who have great influence in the Bush
administration and now in Congress are governed by a Higher Power.

In his book "The Carbon Wars," Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells

he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During the Kyoto climate change
negotiations, Leggett candidly asked Ford Motor Company executive John
Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with

world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on
the planet?" The executive asserted first that scientists get it wrong

they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The

he said, is just 10,000, not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely

by scientists.

Then Schiller confidently declared, "You know, the more I look, the more

is just as it says in the Bible." The Book of Daniel, he told Leggett,
predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the "End Time" and
return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see
dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction

as an urgent call to action, but as God's will. In the religious right
worldview, the wreck of the Earth can be seen as Good News!

Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be
saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They'll
be raptured: rescued from Earth by God, who will then rain down seven
ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. Jesus' return will mark

Millennium, when the Lord restores the Earth to its green pristine
condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and

American fundamentalists number in the tens of millions, but not all of

believe literally in this apocalyptic vision, cautions Joan Bokaer, an
expert on the religious right and formerly of the Center for Religion,
Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. Some, no doubt, don't

on environmental issues, but many do hold views antithetical to
environmental protection.

One powerful fringe group, the Reconstructionists, doesn't speak of the

Time" at all, Bokaer notes. They put the onus for the Lord's return on

own political activism. Reconstructionists say that Christ will return

when a righteous nation acts to purge unrepentant sinners and applies
biblical law to its populace. They want to spread the Gospel in a

context, making the Bible the foundation of U.S. jurisprudence. That
includes an end to environmental regulation.

Reconstructionists believe the Lord will provide, and their view is laid

in "America's Providential History," a religious right high school history
textbook: "The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and
views the world as a pie... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a
piece," write authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell. "In contrast, the
Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is

shortage of resources in God's Earth. The resources are waiting to be
tapped."

In another passage, the writers explain: "While many secularists view the
world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the Earth
sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the
people." Fossil fuels and forests are like the loaves and fishes,
Reconstructionists say, miraculously multiplying for true believers.

Such misinformed viewpoints would be of little import except that, in the
1980s, they began permeating the Republican Party. That's when Republican
strategists - eager to broaden the party's narrow base of wealthy

supporters - partnered with religious right leaders such as Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson, who agreed to politicize their followers and bring them
into the GOP, according to Bokaer.

Working through fundamentalist, Pentecostal and charismatic churches, the
Christian Coalition has promoted right-wing Republican candidates by

voter guides at election time - 30 million in 1994; another 45 million in
1996; and 70 million in 2000 to support candidate Bush, reports the

group People for the American Way.

As it turns out, politicians who ally themselves with the religious right
are also rabidly anti-environmental. Those who score high with the

Coalition almost invariably score low with LCV.

According to the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of
Church and State, 178 House members in the last Congress allied themselves
with the religious right, earning barely a 15 percent average approval
rating with LCV. Of 44 senators given an 80 to 100 percent approval rating
by the Christian Coalition, the average LCV approval rating fell below 10
percent.

In the 108th Congress, Republican leadership hails almost exclusively from
the religious right, scoring a perfect 100 percent with the Christian
Coalition, but getting barely a four percent average approval rating from
LCV.

Among the religiously motivated leaders are Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist and Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Majority Leader
Tom DeLay, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy

DeLay has bluntly said that The Almighty is using him to promote "a

worldview" in American politics, says the New York Times.

Also among those holding an extreme fundamentalist perspective is Inhofe,
reports Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "When we win
this revolution in November, you'll be doing the Lord's work, and He will
richly bless you for it!" Inhofe declared at the Christian Coalition's

to Victory Conference last October.

And George W. Bush? He and Attorney General John Ashcroft are both "born
again." According to The Nation, Bush's "walk with Jesus" began in 1985

Billy Graham visited him in Kennebunkport.

The Republican Party platform in Bush's home state warns of what to expect
from a federal government guided by religious right radicalism. The Texas
platform "reaffirms the United States of America as a Christian Nation,"

seeks to nullify the separation between church and state. It would abolish
the EPA, and the Departments of Energy and Education. It dismisses global
warming as "myth." And it promotes public school education "based upon
Biblical principles," not upon secular humanism, which teaches Darwinian
evolutionary theory and a scientific worldview.

Texans have paid the price for their leaders' anti-environmental stance.
During George W. Bush's time as governor, the state gained the honor of
having the dirtiest air in America. It also ranks 47th in water quality,

has the seventh-highest rate of release of toxic industrial byproducts.

Know-Nothing Science

In the early days of the current administration, the news was full of Bush
appointments of foxes to guard the hen house. Gale Norton, a mining

lobbyist, became Secretary of the Interior. Steven Griles, a lobbyist for
Big Coal, was appointed Norton's second-in-command. Now, the Washington

reports an even more disturbing trend: Bush "has begun a broad

of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy." These
largely anonymous committees of scientists, lawyers and academics make
recommendations vital to determining health and environmental risk.

Replaced, for example, were 15 members of a 17-person Department of Health
and Human Services committee that assesses the impacts of low-level

to environmental chemicals on human health. New Bush-imposed panel
appointees include chemical industry advocates and a California scientist
who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Company against the real-life
Erin Brockovich.

More troubling is the case of W. David Hager, one of Bush's nominees to

influential Food and Drug Administration panel on women's health policy.
Hager, says the New York Times, has a resume "more impressive for theology
than gynecology." Hager emphasizes the restorative power of Jesus Christ

one's life and recommends specific Scripture readings to treat headaches,
eating disorders and premenstrual syndrome.

The administration has repeatedly turned a blind eye toward good science.
When the National Academy of Sciences came to Bush in 2001 with a report
saying that global warming was real, serious and human-caused, he ignored
it. When the EPA sent a 2002 report to the United Nations saying that

warming will result in "rising seas, melting ice caps and glaciers,
ecological system disruption, floods, heat waves and more dangerous

Bush rejected it as a document "put out by the bureaucracy."

Marty Jezer, writing for the online Common Dreams News Center, notes that
"One has to go back to the Stalinist Era of the Soviet Union to find such

display of political arrogance and ignorance of science." That's when

Lysenko told Josef Stalin that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and
Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity were wrongheaded "bourgeois science"

suited to a communist state.

Lysenko's theories were practiced on collective farms on a massive scale,
displacing traditional agricultural knowledge, and killing millions in the
Russian famine of 1931 to 1933. His beliefs were exported to China, says
Joseph Becker, author of "Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine." Farmers

told that seeds of the same species act like "comrades," and wouldn't
compete with each other. Chinese farmers were ordered to plant up to 15
million seedlings per 2.5 acres, rather than the scientifically proven 1.5
million, helping bring on the 20th century's worst famine. An estimated 30
million people starved to death between 1958 and 1961.

In a move to blunt new U.S. global warming research, Bush has launched a
four-year study to ascertain "precisely how much climate change between

and now was human-caused." Prominent climate experts, including Princeton
University's Michael Oppenheimer, say the study may merely rehash issues
most scientists consider settled. "The danger is that while they're
continuing to do the research, the window of opportunity to avoid

global warming is closing," says Oppenheimer.

The anti-science movement has also extended itself into the classroom.

fall, the Texas Board of Education rejected several environmental science
textbooks, including one entitled "Environmental Science: Creating a
Sustainable Environment." Critics forced the book ban primarily on
ideological grounds, calling the text "vitriol against Western

and its primary belief systems." Another science book was approved only
after the publisher agreed to remove entire sections on climate change.

In 2000, the Kansas school board briefly removed Darwinian evolution from
the state's science standards and tests, while similar campaigns have been
pushed in over 20 states, says People for the American Way. Last spring,

Republican congressmen from Ohio, John Boehner and Steve Chabot, pressured
their state's school board unsuccessfully to introduce creationism

as "Intelligent Design" into school curricula.

Should efforts to de-emphasize the teaching of evolutionary theory

succeed, one wonders how we could hope to confront tough environmental
problems. How, for instance, could we train scientists to fight the

new strains of bacteria that have evolved resistance to potent

Or, another example: In his book "The Beak of the Finch," science

Jonathan Weiner tells how the U.S. cotton industry is threatened with
collapse because of Heliothis virescens, a moth that has evolved total
resistance to all pesticides.

Frustrated entomologist Martin Taylor notes the irony of the equivalence
between the Southern Cotton Belt and Bible Belt. "It's amazing," Taylor
notes, "that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the

states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution.

it is evolution itself they are struggling against in their fields every
season. These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while

own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a
creationist farmer anymore?"

For those who think the teaching of environmental science is safe in our
schools, or that evolution vs. creationism is a dead issue, listen to this
comment from Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful men in Congress. He
suggested that the Columbine, Colorado school shootings occurred "because
our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified
apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud."

DeLay agrees with Ford executive Schiller that, despite the fossil

the Earth is only thousands of years old. Such willful ignorance of

informs the religious right approach to the environment, and the embattled
Earth will bear the consequences."

http://tinyurl.com/2u9vc

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 09:09:45 +0000 (UTC), Michael Gray
<fleetg@newsguy.spam.com> wrote:

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 05:18:38 +0000 (UTC),

Yes. These are good observations, but what I'm getting at is that we
need to come up with better theoretical models of the mind in order to
explain such observations.

DV

I think it works through a scheme of threats and reward.
All animals respond to that.
The threats are both imaginary and very real.
The rewards are mostly imaginary.
The religious hierarchies have have millenia to perfect their methods.

Man is a social animal. He's genetically primed to find reasons to
group up. If he doesn't have exterior reasons, he makes them up.

darth_versive@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
news:8e0e3045.0402081143.3cd4b563@posting.google.com:

How are we to account for the observation that so many creationists,
when repeatedly confronted with overwhelming evidence in support of
the theory of evolution, seem either to not comprehend this evidence,
or to discount it without serious thought, or with clearly specious
reasoning?

Well, for one thing their preachers all seem to be trained in the same
schools of advanced sophistry. They are numb to it to the point where
they actually take it for good reasoning. And that sophistry can be
pretty powerful when it tugs at the emotions generated by religious
faith.

The anti-evolution preacher often starts out by arguing that the
whole concept of salvation in Jesus Christ is false if there is anything
to evolution. Of course this is really just a form of the argumentum ad
baculum fallacy and is based on some heretical doctrines to boot, but the
average North American Christian believer is seldom aware of real
Christian doctrine and often has little knowledge of Church history.

So, on the one hand, you have people who have experienced something in
their religious life and who are very reluctant to just give it up (which
is exactly what they are being told they will have to do if they accept
any of the evidence for an old earth or evolution). On the other hand,
you have a coterie of con men who are milking this situation for every
dollar they can get from it.

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004 05:18:38 +0000 (UTC),

Yes. These are good observations, but what I'm getting at is that we
need to come up with better theoretical models of the mind in order to
explain such observations.

DV

I think it works through a scheme of threats and reward.
All animals respond to that.
The threats are both imaginary and very real.
The rewards are mostly imaginary.

The religious hierarchies have have millenia to perfect their methods.

darth_versive@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in message news:<8e0e3045.0402081143.3cd4b563@posting.google.com>...

How are we to account for the observation that so many creationists,

Because arguing about creation and religious terminology is useless
and a waste of fucking time. Religion is a con game, and if you are
arguing about THEIR game, you are stupid.