Meanwhile, back in Muncie. . .

August 28, 2014 • 12:36 pm

Home of Ball State University (BSU), the Midwest’s outpost of the Discovery Institute, Muncie, Indiana also harbors a newspaper, the Muncie Star Press. That paper always refused to take a stand on the controversy about BSU’s intelligent-design (ID) Astronomy and Physics course of Professor Eric Hedin, a course that was finally deep-sixed when the Freedom from Religion Foundation complained and the BSU President, Jo Ann Gora (a woman of remarkable astuteness), publicly announced that ID was “not science” and would not be taught as such at her school. She’s gone now, but the Muncie Star Press continues to cater to the religious populace of its region.

Here’s a letter just published in the paper. The author, Kevin Wingate, had previously written another letter arguing that ID should be taught in science classes. I’ve put in bold every statement that is wrong.

LETTER: SAGAN WAS WRONG

Kevin Wingate, Muncie

The late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan once famously said, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” That’s wishful thinking, not a scientifically established fact.

Many have made science their god, declaring it to be the sole source of truth or the only way we have of understanding the world. Science can help us understand God’s creation, but it cannot fully describe or explain all of reality.

The material universe is one part of reality, and the invisible world, which we do not normally perceive, is another part. Just because science is unable to detect the supernatural world doesn’t mean that it is not real.

Demons are real. People have heard them, seen them and been possessed by them. Angels are real. People have heard them, seen them and even entertained them unknowingly. Satan is real. Some have seen him face to face, and all of us have seen the results of his influence.

Jehovah God is real. Millions of people have experienced his power and presence in their lives. Many have been miraculously healed of some incurable disease. Some have had a missing body part instantly replaced.

Skeptics claim that Christianity is nothing more than superstition, a religion of blind faith. In my view, atheism is the real superstition, with no evidential basis whatsoever.

Lord, lord! Where is the evidential basis for demons, Satan, Angels, and Jehovah God (as opposed to Allah God)? More important, why did the Star Press even print this? Is it trying to show how bull-goose delusional some of its citizens are? Or are they presenting this as an honest opinion worth considering. I wish I knew. One thing’s for sure: you’d never see a letter like this in any decent big-city paper in the U.S.

73 thoughts on “Meanwhile, back in Muncie. . .”

  1. Jerry, you just tempted The Fates. Someone’s going to turn up an example of such idiocy in a big-city paper!

    1. Someone’s going to turn up an example of such idiocy in a big-city paper!

      But if they did, it would no longer be a “decent” one! 🙂

  2. Where is the evidential basis for demons, Satan, Angels, and Jehovah God

    //sarcasm
    People have seen/heard/been possessed by them. That’s exactly like science because the plural of anecdote is data!
    //sarcasm

    1. No, Simon, of course we can’t. The removal and replacement of the body part in question occurred much too quickly for the coarse tools of science to detect and measure. The person(s) this happened to observed it on the spiritual plane, which is only accessible to those who believe and humble themselves before Jehovah God (isn’t this redundant?).

      1. “… Jehovah God (isn’t this redundant?).”

        He should just use the deity’s self-proclaimed name: Jealous (Exodus 34:14)

        1. There’s a woman in the US who’s been going around saying God re-grew her finger. Not fully – just partially she says (because that makes a difference). She recently turned up on my Twi**er feed attacking atheists. I called her a fraud, a liar, and asked her for evidence. She immediately blocked me.

  5. I find the replacing body parts claim unusually bold. Most of the time, believers shy away from that one, no?

    1. Zing!

      When editors publish letters like this, it makes me think they want to embarrass the people on that side of the argument.

    3. No, no. There are many (I say many…) cases of miraculous limb regeneration.

      For example, St. Anthony of Padua restored a man’s foot after the chap managed to cut it off – a story re-counted in “Lives of The Saints” a mere 500 years after it most definitely, actually, happened.

      Not quite so current, but only a measly 1500 years ago, St. Augustine definitely restored the amputated leg of a Carthaginian deputy lieutenant.

      Doesn’t seem to be much movement on the limb regrowth miracle front since then – but I suppose if Mr. Invisible was doing it every time some amputee prayed for their arm back, it wouldn’t be quite so miraculous.

  6. “People have heard them, seen them and even entertained them unknowingly.”

    I wonder what kind of entertainment angels enjoy? I bet they’re suckers for the worst reality TV pap. I’m sure they’re huge Kardashian fans. I mean, they seem to love dancing on the heads of pins, surely pinheads would be equally as entertaining.

    1. As a extreme metal fan, I shudder at the thought what kind of elevator music they play in heaven. Well, maybe atleas from the olden says there will be material… there’s possibly some Bach, but much of the good stuff will ne downstairs. Brahms – atheist, Tchaikowski – gay, Mozart – made too many dirty jokes, Beethoven certainly is doubtful. Schoenberg – his people killed Jesus. It doesn’t look good.

        1. Usually, you sit on clouds. I’m not sure whether everyone has wings to change clounds. In any case it was more meant as a description of the music than the locus musici

    2. Entertain them? Heck, I cater to them! If they ever needed a place to stay, my door is always open.

        1. Oops, I didn’t expect that the links will appear as pictures. Apologies for this inappropriate content.

          1. In case you do not know, links are posted with this format: Y.
            Replace the X with the full url. Replace the Y with whatever name you want to give the link.

    3. According to Christopher Moore, angels enjoy WWF…and they think it’s real.

      Which, frankly, is a step up from Kadashians.

  7. Good to know that some people still live in the world of 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. Why didn’t he quote from “sinners in the hands of an angry god,” at least it would have been more eloquent.

  8. He does sorta have a point about the evidential basis of atheism. There is none. It’s religion that is searching for a basis for the mumbo-jumbo, for an afterlife, for miracles, etc. Atheism has better things to do, like mixing a martini or reading a good book.

    I thought the News-Gazette of Champaign, Illinois published some mind-bogglingly bad letters, particularly when one considered there is a major research institution in town with thousands of sharp minds that one could draw from for opinion. Good to know they have competition across the border.

    1. There isn’t supposed to be an evidential basis for atheism: its basis is the ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE FOR GOD, even when that evidence is supposed to be there. What’s the evidential basis for not believing in Santa Claus?

      2. If we want to be tricky, we should argue something like this: empirical evidence suggests that the null hypothesis is right more often than it’s wrong, and attributing events to unknown causes or entities is more often wrong than right. So there is “evidence for atheism,” in that empirical studies of lots of purported connections between events or causal agents support being “atheistic” about unknown causes for serendipitous or unusual events in general.

        Put another way, we have no direct evidence that Atheism is the horse that’s going to win the race (i.e., be the philosophically correct position in the end). But we have lots of evidence that Atheism is bookie’s favorite to win.

  9. It’s hard to believe this isn’t a joke…and a sick one at that. “Some have seen (Satan) face to face…” Ahhhh, okey dokey. How would one even begin a dialogue with a person like this?

    1. …take him to a sketch artist & get him to explain what this Satan fellow looks like. 😀

        1. No, sir. He’s white, as white as you folks, with empty eyes and a big hollow voice. He loves to travel around with a mean old hound. That’s right.

          And I believe he’s a guitar teacher of some ability.

      2. Yes, the goatee a bit darker… And make the horns a bit pointier and bent more inwards, and we’re almost… Yes, that’s him!

      1. Ha ha! Miroslav is all, “but it wasn’t me – look how could I skate with goat feet?!”

    3. Calm down. This is obviously a typo for Santa whom I definitely saw in my younger days.

  11. I live in Muncie. The appearance of a letter such as this is not unusual. Mr. Wingate should be familiar to all readers of the StarPress.
    Relative to Eric Hedin’s experience at Ball State University, Indianapolis Monthly has an article about that dustup in the September issue, page 50, “Worlds Collide.”

    1. Ah, so it isn’t the Indianapolis Monthly article entitled “The Boy with Half a Brain”?

  12. FYI: “Jehovah God” is, I believe, a phrasing peculiar to Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s his name, even though it appears to have resulted from attaching the vowel markers for “Adonai” (or was it “Elohim”?) to the unspeakable YHWH. Please don’t stone me.

    1. Since Jehovah refers to the God of Israel, and since that God is the one and only God, then ‘Jehovah God’ seems redundant to me. Or a tad polytheistic.

          1. Yes, from my perusal of Christian literature over the years, using the moniker “Jehovah God” is a peculiarity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses among the major Christian subspecies(although I guess there could be obscure minor sects that use it too).

            If I remember correctly, the JWs regard the idea of the Trinity as a pagan contamination of Christianity, but see “Jehovah God” as a separate being from Jesus (the Arian heresy of early Christianity), so their attitude towards polytheism is a little confused to say the least. Any former-JWs may be able to put me right on this if I’ve misinterpreted their stance.

    1. And more people were killed on road accidents going to Lourdes than miraculously cured in lourdes.

      Desnes

  14. I am always saying ‘this reminds me of something..’.
    Well, this reminds me of the following story, and it was posted here in WEIT some time ago.

    “When I was at Lourdes in August, I visited the grotto where innumerable crutches had been put on display as a sign of miraculous healing. My companion pointed out these trophies of illness and whispered in my ear:

    “One single wooden leg would have been much more convincing.””

    1. Yes, that’s from this post; the quote is from Zola’s Le Jardin d’Epicure, and I’m quite proud of my translation. It’s in the Albatross, too.

      But there’s more interesting stuff after that bit of the quote.

  15. People have “even entertained [angels] unknowingly”? Um . . . if people didn’t know about this, how can anyone claim to have knowledge that it happened?

      1. Oh, that’s right. Thanks. I’d forgotten about that reading of Lot’s tale. For my part, I think the text is ambiguous with regard to his state of mind. It’s entirely possible Lot realized from the start that the guests were angels/Yahweh in people suits. Abraham knew as much when he first saw them in the preceding chapter, and he welcomed them almost exactly as Lot did.

        In any event, I would agree that a foot-washing falls under entertainment if it’s done right. 🙂

        1. Lot was also happy to entertain the crowd outside. Not a nice fictional character at all.

  16. You’re bolding “In my view…”? On what basis are you claiming that’s not really his view?

  17. Your comments in the final paragraph are very interested. I ask myself the same question at least twice a week when my (small-town) paper prints the exact same type of fundie tripe. “Why do they print that crap?”, I’ve often wondered Are they using the letter to prove that many of their readers are batshit crazy?

    I doubt it. They print it, I believe, because many on their own staff think exactly the same batshit crazy way. I look at the proof – quoting scripture, two-page religious exposes every Saturday, front page headlines of catlick shaman offering up wafers in solemn reverence, headline pages of local church socials, etc.

    Editors of local newspapers that see no problem w/ this kind of insanity are simply batshit crazy themselves. All they’re doing is wasting their time and embarrassing themselves in the eyes of reality-based readers. Granted, their numbers are on a steady decline in my neck of the woods but there’s still more than a handful loitering about.

  18. I’m surprised you didn’t bold his description of Carl Sagan’s “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be”.

    My understanding is that Sagan was defining his subject, so that he could then go on to talk about it. Since Sagan was offering a definition for a term of art, he can’t be wrong; and this certainly can’t be described as “wishful thinking”.

    1. It is a stipulative definition, and in context (of the whole series) it would include any gods, if there were any. The episode which includes the bit about the Hindu cyclical “creation story” would make that clear, I think.

  19. I guess the point of the letter is that since Sagan can have “wishful thinking, not a scientifically established fact” then all bets are off? It’s a “wishful thinking, not a scientifically established fact” free-for-all!

    1. EDIT: That should be…

      since Sagan can supposedly have “wishful thinking, not a scientifically established fact”

      (In light of having read Henry Fitzgerald’s comment above.)

  20. Apparently the Censor of the Year wasn’t as successful as the DI claimed! People are still spouting crap in Muncie. The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one. No doubt his entire life has been defined by his belief, so it must be true!

  21. “Millions”…”many”…”some”… Wingate’s figures are getting less each time I note!

  22. I live in south central Illinois (moved down here from Chicago 9 years ago to start a small retirement hobby farm) and letters to the editor like the one Jerry posts above are commonplace in the Mattoon Journal Gazette/Charleston Times Courier. The letters contain everything from climate change denial to thinly veiled expressions of racism. Their website for replying to letters to the editor is especially appalling. Mind you Charleston is home to Eastern Illinois University.

  23. Well, The Starpress, owned by Gannett, also publishes letters written by the Indiana Policy Review, as facts, without noting their conflict of interest with the Koch brothers.

    Ball State receives a donation from the Koch’s who insist on Cecil Bohannon teaching free market economics to all his students, and then sends letters to the newspaper for printing.

    It’s a wonderful scam, but Gannett owns 6-7 newspapers throughout Indiana, including the IndyStar, which published the same nonsense without disclosing conflicts of interest. They recently did it with a Tax Policy proposition by State Budget Solutions, another Koch fronted astroturf organization.

    Unfortunately, the Muncie StarPress is owned by one of the largest newspaper entities in the country, but if you look at where they are located in this country, you’ll understand what demographic they cater to.

    Kevin Wingate is published regularly and so are the letters inked by Tea Party members and other evangelical groups. The paper caters to the far right movements. They’ll never say a bad word against Ball State’s management, because the Muncie community exists because of the Ball Family Foundation.

    So, you’re partially incorrect, but mostly accurate! 🙂

  24. I love lines like this…

    “Just because science is unable to detect the supernatural world doesn’t mean that it is not real.”

    Arguably, if it’s “detectable” even through non-scientific means, i.e., unreliable “witnesses”, then it isn’t supernatural.

    I’m 10 feet tall, but no-one else can actually see or feel the top 4 feet of my head. It just looks like it’s not there, but I can see and feel it!

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