#56128: — 01/03  at  10:46 PM
The letter-writer doesn't seem to know what antithetical means.

#56134: The Rev. Schmitt. — 01/03  at  11:40 PM
That would actually have struck me as fairly witty if he hadn't lost control early with 'poor ungodly blinded'. Such a shame.

-The Rev. Schmitt.

#56135: coturnix — 01/03  at  11:42 PM
The guy should check his pantry for rotten eggs...

#56139: Martin Wagner — 01/04  at  01:27 AM
Actually, I'm wondering if that letter isn't actually written by a guy on our side, in "heavy snark" mode.

#56147: Prince Roy — 01/04  at  02:25 AM
yeah, but it ain't over yet:

http://biz.yahoo.com/law/060103/7f7d61caca6a0d5dd85ab4f57ac54569.html?.v=1

#56148: — 01/04  at  02:58 AM
Perhaps the letter was written from someone from The Other Side, an advocate of Infernal Design. I can imagine Mr. Eames rubbing his hands and cackling with demoniacal glee, "Smell the brimstone!"

#56153: — 01/04  at  04:11 AM
In last night's webcast Dr. Miller broke it down better than anyone I have ever heard: The ID advocates have decided that if evolution is right then we are the result of an amazing accident that has continued to the present day. They fear that there is no moral ethic required for a creature that is the result of accident and alone in the universe.
If ID is right then we have the moral requirements imposed by that designer and society must behave accordingly and is safe in that knowledge and behavior.
The battle between ID and evolution is based totally on fear. It is sad to think that the ID advocates are afraid that society based on science and evolution will devolve into chaos because they will have no moral foundation in the absence of a belief in a god.
Raised a Christian, I must give credit to that upbringing for a basis of right and wrong. I would hope that societal pressures and reasonable concern for my fellow man continue to impact my behavior years after I left my faith behind.
I hope that I can continue to treat my fellow man with fairness and dignity even if I believe in evolution and do not hope for the promise of a reward in heaven.

#56156: — 01/04  at  04:39 AM
I have to go with Wagner's suggestion. That said, anyone who would live in a place called New Freedom ("Sometimes old freedom just won't cut it") is automatically suspect.

#56159: — 01/04  at  06:49 AM
If he's smelling the sulfur, he'd better check the water he's making his coffee with.

#56162: — 01/04  at  07:12 AM
I third the suggestion that he is a covert operative. Sounds far too much like Jesus's General for me to not be suspicious.

Trackback: HELL TO PAY Tracked on: Beaming Visionary (72.9.234.70) at 2006 01 04 07:15:13
The lunacy never ends. Having taken something of a break from this stuff over the past week or two, I've become re-sensitized to the fart-gulping stupidity of most of subhumankind. Some of you know how the Dover "Intelligent Design" trial ended......

#56163: — 01/04  at  07:20 AM
Nicely put, PZ! Bravo! Keep the heat on.

#56165: — 01/04  at  07:29 AM
Shyster,

I was raised non-denominational, and I don't think I missed the lesson of right and wrong.

In it's most basic form, once a person understands what pain is, they usually want to avoid causing it. It's not an absolute, sometimes the choice is between different levels of pain. But empathy, understanding that we share similar emotions, feelings and thoughts with others (including other animals), is the basis for our morality.

It is not based in religion, it does not require a god-father to teach us, and it is not unique to humanity.

-Flex

#56166: mark — 01/04  at  07:42 AM
I disagree with those who think the letter by Eames is a fake--I've read too many similar letters in the same paper over the years. there really is a large number of Bible-thumpin' knuckle-draggers in the hills of south-central Pennsylvania.

The good news is the margin of victory in the re-vote in Dover, where Bryan Rehm received 373 votes compared to James Cashman's 280. In the original vote, marred by a malfunctioning machine, 817 voters cast ballots at this polling station, and Rehm beat Cashman by 96 votes (Cashman claimed one machine only registered one half of a vote for him).

#56167: — 01/04  at  07:49 AM
Yo Flex, I did not say that those raised without religion were devoid of a sense of right and wrong. Nor did I say that religion was the only source of those feelings. What I did say is that, raised with the concept of sin, religion formed a basis for MY concepts of right and wrong and it would be disingenuous for Me not to acknowledge that contribution.
Recognizing some of the good things that a religious upbringing gave me does not make me a theist and it does not mean that when I lost the faith I lost the concepts of right and wrong; I just don’t base them on Odin, Thor or FSM anymore. Can I get a Ramen?

#56168: Adam Ierymenko — 01/04  at  07:53 AM

In last night's webcast Dr. Miller broke it down better than anyone I have ever heard: The ID advocates have decided that if evolution is right then we are the result of an amazing accident that has continued to the present day. They fear that there is no moral ethic required for a creature that is the result of accident and alone in the universe.

I am really sick of this misunderstanding.

I just don't see how evolution is an "accident" any more than gravity, or the fact that soap bubbles are spherical, or the fact that hydrogen has one proton.

Evolution seems to be a pretty logical, rational thing. It's something that happens whenever you have a system with a source of energy and the ability to sustain self-replication. The initial emergence *event* that kicks it off might indeed be a stochastic (chance) event, but from that point forward it's not a chance process. It proceeds according to natural laws and it *adapts* in a decidedly non-random fashion to it's environment.

I also don't get the moral relativism fear-mongering. It seems to me that there might indeed be some moral principles that are better than others for the same reason that our legs are the same length and we have two eyes. Given that humans are X, and have nature Y, there might be one or more *optimal* sets of rules under which they can live to achieve maximum overall prosperity. Some of those rules seem to be no-brainers that have been revealed by history: the reciprocal principle (do unto others...) and it's inverse (don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you), private property, the universal rule of law rather than despotism, etc. Societies that live using these principles are more prosperous. I don't see anything random about that. Like I said, we have a nature, and a nature dictates that some things that we do are going to work better than others.

So I wish people would stop saying that evolution is a random process. Doing so merely reveals that your mindset is too primitive to understand how natural law can give rise to ordered phenomena.

#56169: — 01/04  at  08:02 AM
"In it's most basic form, once a person understands what pain is, they usually want to avoid causing it. It's not an absolute, sometimes the choice is between different levels of pain."

I don't quite agree. I'd say, once a person understands what pain is, they usually know it's wrong to cause it. Anyone who observes children and teenagers will know they quite enjoy doing wrong.

#56170: — 01/04  at  08:11 AM
Thanks for the update, Adam. I’m not sure if I am too primitive or if the ID advocates are (or both), but I think I said that Dr. Miller was outlining why the ID (creationists) advocates are so concerned about this issue from a legal, moral and philosophical point of view. They are afraid and blame godless evolutionists for the world’s ills and fear that, in the absence of god, we will devolve into chaos.
THEY paint evolution as an accident. I, for one, know that the whole process was started and planned by FSM.

#56172: — 01/04  at  08:32 AM

No matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise, evolution is supported by the vast majority of this society's lawmakers, scientists, professors, religious leaders and other poor ungodly blinded individuals.

Onward, Christian soldiers, pretending as before....

#56176: — 01/04  at  08:59 AM
My apologies Shyster, I missunderstood your statement.

Ginger Yellow, thanks, that's probably a better way to state what I was getting at. Once empathy is developed, the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong is established. A person's choice to do right or wrong (which may be related to their personal pleasure) is a seperate concern.

-Flex

#56177: — 01/04  at  09:00 AM
Just deleted my original comment, when I realized I actually know a person (quite the Christian) who is perfectly capable of saying just this sort of thing. So I re-read the quotes in his voice, and, yup, it's entirely possible. Not that my friend wrote it; he's nowhere near PA, but there are certainly Christians who try to justify their religious biases with all sorts of psuedo-logical sounding quasi-philosophical gobbledygook. Trouble is, faith based "thought' doesn't ranslate into reality based language very well. This guy may think he knows exactly what he said. Unfortunately, we never will.

#56179: — 01/04  at  09:07 AM
Okay, I was almost certain that last bit was a pro-evolution letter in heavy snark mode, but this guy's definitely a True Believer.

From a June letter to the York Daily Record:

I read the Rev. Steven Thomas' column "No conflict between Bible and evolution" of June 5 and I was reminded of a scene in an old Marx brothers movie where Groucho, Chico and Harpo are reading a long and important contract. When they get to a sentence they don't like, they simply tear off the offending portion and throw it on the floor. Soon they are tearing off paragraph after paragraph and finally they are left with little more than a postage stamp size document.

The Rev. Thomas should realize that if he pooh-poohs the need for a literal Adam and Eve, he needs to tear up not just the entire book of Genesis but also first Chronicles [sic], Hosea, the Gospel of Luke, the book of Jude and many of Paul the apostle's [sic] letters. In all of these books Adam is mentioned as a real person.

The Rev. Thomas will then need to write his own sacred book and conjure up his own theology not only of God as our creator but also of sin, redemption, the person of Jesus Christ, the reality of the devil and our eternal state. All these doctrines — and others — have a firm foundation in the first three chapters of the book of Genesis.

So, to return to his latest missive: "Judge Jones was absolutely right when he concluded ... 'the teaching of evolution is not antithetical to ... to religion in general.'" (Emphasis added)

As the man said, "I don' think that word means what you think it means."

#56182: just john — 01/04  at  09:51 AM
In some online hollering in some other venue, I made the claim that "Intelligent Design" didn't exist as the name of a movement in the 1970s and it won't in the 2020s, either, because they'll have moved onto some other attempt to make creationism sound scientific. (And that's what bugged me about ID -- the creation of a "movement" just to get under the radar, rather than from any actual belief in the new formulaton.)

So I was wondering if anybody's floated ideas for what the next re-packaging will be named.

#56183: Beaming Visionary — 01/04  at  09:54 AM
I see religious people's anti-evolutionism as having an extremely basic (drumroll please) genesis. I don't think they're viscerally opposed to being descended from apelike creatures, and I'm not sure how much conscious thought they devote to the possible psychosocial and moral implications of sharing so much more than was once believed with animals. But to true believers (Bible literalists and semi-literalists), evolution spells the death of their faith. No Adam and Eve, no original sin, no need for Christ to die because I once masturbated a tapir under a full moon, no salvation, no Resurrection, no Christianity. Hardline religious folks are literally compelled to reject evolution, which is why they often say incomprehensibly stupid things when "debating."

The funny thing about this is that creationists, with erstaz smugness, are often wont to claim that scientists' primary investment is not in truth-gathering but in destroying God at all costs. Religious people are the world's unquestioned masters of projection and hence its leading destroyer of irony meters.

#56188: Paul Riddell — 01/04  at  10:10 AM
We should give that letter-writer the benefit of the doubt: after all, when the local hobbies consist of being able to count to 16, of course he's going to find extra fingers and gill slits to be signs of divine design instead of extensive inbreeding. (At work, I deal with people like this on a constant basis, and stating that most of them would scare the crap out of Wilbur Whateley is no understatement: far too many speak English as a second language, and the first is "labyrinthodont".)