I don’t read the Intelligent Design (ID) websites, but alert—and masochistic—reader Richard called my attention to a comment (or rather a moderated comment) on a post at the ID site Uncommon Descent.
Here’s what appeared in the comments:
Blasphemy!!!!
As Richard noted in his email: “All Science all the time, not at all religious, no sireee.”
See my post on this at http://www.loathinglincoln.com on how the Sons of Confederate Veterans endorse creationism.
They really are devoted to Lost Causes, aren’t they?
Not only are they dedicated to lost causes but to ignorance and hatred as well.
Commenter william spearshake posted the text of the comment that apparently got Graham2 banned. Here it is:
👀
“Look, I had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was that that piece of halibut was good enough for an intelligent designer who might or might not be Jehovah. (It’s totally Jehovah.)”
“All right, no-one is to throw a stone until I blow this whistle.”
“well I don’t want to be all alone, everybody must get stoned!”
“Graham2 is no longer with us” … Was he executed for blasphemy?
Speaking of blasphemy, the Religion of Peace has murdered a man for blasphemy in Iran. I’m always reminded of MAD’s take on that awful movie “Gunslinger” (I think that was the name of the movie – but it was all so long ago) – one character was a peace-loving guy who killed everyone he encountered because there was just no one more peaceful than a dead man.
Recently I got into an argument with a friend of mine who, despite being an atheist, a former Catholic born and raised in the U.S., insisted that the Koran does not direct the execuation of atheists. When I came up with a translation of a sura (8.12)that calls for beheading unbeleivers, he countered that it only applied during battle. Maybe that’s true — I’m hardly enough of a scholar on Islam to say for certain one way or another. However, I told him he should be trying to convince the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, or the Islamic State, etc., not me or anyone else in the U.S. And of course, militant Muslims could claim on their own interpretation of the Koran that by the mere act of identifying myself as an atheist, I have declared war on Allah and thus Islam and they therefore have a god-given right to behead me as well as my friend even if we never take up arms against them.
That reply only pushes the problem back to defining what constitutes a “battle”. I would bet a considerable sum that your average jihadi has a pretty broad definition.
That reminds me of the one time I got suspended in junior high: we had to write a paper on how to achieve world peace. At the age of 13 it was already pretty obvious to me how much nonsense the assignment was, so I wrote a satirical paper about how to achieve world peace via using nuclear war to render the planet uninhabitable- once everyone was dead there would be peace.
Since this was before the various school shootings that occurred in the 90s, I wasn’t reported to the police but the teacher didn’t have a very high opinion of me after that.
I used to write long, bloody stories about cannibalism and giant monsters sacking cities. The stories always included detailed drawings that I would spend hours on. I really just wanted attention, I suppose.
Anyway, only once did a teacher take me aside and ask if everything was ok. This was obviously a long time ago.
Mark, is everything okay?
Which reminds me of a Barrington J. Bailey (?) sf story in which robots were given instructions to make sure that the enemy didn’t kill this particular person — so they killed him themselves …
/@
Which in turn became the plot to Mass Effect.
No sense of humor, I guess. I seem to remember that satire was still a legitimate genre in literature when I was in junior high. Of course the stand by example we had to study was the rather stale Gulliver’s Travels. Never liked any of Swift’s writing.
I couldn’t get past the pages of description of the content of Gulliver’s pockets – or at least it seemed interminable to me then.
Oh, my junior high lit teacher loved me. But the above paper was for social studies.
For some reason that really cracks me up. Doubly ironic while also making perfect sense.
All this thread at Uncommon descent (awkward reading) is the clearest demonstration that ID tenants ground themselves on religion. They are digging their grave themselves.
I hope the lawyers save that nugget for some future legal circus.
The process of hauling it out in whaddyacallit “discovery” is, I am told, deeply traumatic for many organisations, particularly those with not terribly well organised IT departments. If this sort of thing is happening regularly, then this preserved snippet may be enough to force them to dump all of their “dirty laundry” back into public. Along with the details of the people who did the censoring, the site’s administrators grounds for selecting their censors … basket upon basket of dirty laundry.
Plus, of course, being warned about the expected need for such discovery should make failure to comply evidence of intent to commit contempt. Which would be a big, big no-no in Britain.
They’re going to have to offshore their websites. Good all-American bigots that they are.
I wonder how that will work?
Speaking as someone who has had to 1) go digging through obsolete backup tapes for legal crap 2) go digging through the mail logs of a multinational for legal crap because 3) from corporate experience the US courts send people to prison for “legal crap”.
The point is that relatively simple sounding demands can be calculated to make life miserable and/ or expensive for the people running the website, in order to soak up their time.
So they’ll have to find some out-of-country service to outsource their backup management to, so that when the attempted discovery fails, people outside the country (and therefore immune to US legal action) take the blame, and at worst the US people get blamed for a poor choice of service provider.
Needless to say, all discussion of this sort of thing takes place off-email and the email trail is kept clean. For discovery.
Just disturbing. It’s 20-effing-14. Seriously? How in the world are we still having these base discussions? Maybe we have to get back to Roman practices to make clear who gets to have an opinion.
P.S. blasphemy as according to who? Anna Nicole Smith? The Kardashians? Duck Dynastians? COME-ON. At some point we have to say no, thank you. That’s not good enough for public consumption.
According to Bugs Bunny would be the way to go, if you just had to have a blasphemy boss.
Hey, isn’t tomorrow International Blasphemy Rights Day?
God Damn, you’re right!!!!
Whoa, I just made the big mistake of reading some of the comments at the link in PCC’s first paragraph. Jaw-dropping.
I so glad those people have their very own website to play in.
Oh yes. Refer people to that when they say that ID is about science, not about religion. It was all religion, steaming piles of it, and apparently all unself-conscious. It’s not at all clear that the main commentators there even know what they are doing.
The syntax over there reminds me of what
they used to say about articles in the
old Time magazine:
Backwards run sentences until
boggles the mind.
Intelligent Design: Bats are a problem for evolution, and then that’s it. They don’t say why it would support ID. (Presumably they think bats got built from scratch or something.) Or maybe they do say. I never actually read any of their stupid books. I don’t even remember what book it was from. Possibly more than one book since they like rehashed creationism so much.
Presumably they think that because bats aren’t birds, it means that they didn’t evolve flight but were instead designed that way.
And in other news, chemists confirm that water is wet…
What I think gets lost in the debate over ID is that ID is not an exclusively religious concept. While there are certainly religious apologists who use ID as a means to beat down evolution, what some of the leading proponents of ID are doing is trying to engage in scientifically-informed argument. In other words, there’s a big gap between a Ken Ham or a Kent Hovind and a Michael Behe or Bill Dembski. There’s still a gap between Behe and Dembski and doing actual science, but I could see why proponents of ID would see it as unfair to say it’s simply a religious matter. Teleology goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and the illusion of design is a powerful one (albeit a misleading one).
Depends on what you mean by “scientifically informed.” Behe and Dembksi have published practically no research (on ID) in the past 20+ years. They have also never really adequately addressed the comments of their critics. So they clearly have no interest in doing ID science or making a research-based scientific case for ID. During this same time they have published several trade books with scientific-sounding arguments.
So it seems to me that they want the public to think their arguments are scientifically informed, but they do not actually use science to inform their arguments. Or if they do, they use 20+ year-old science that has come under criticism without bothering to try and update it.
Yeah, I don’t think what any of them are doing actually counts as science simply because it’s not engaging in the ideas scientifically. In that sense, ID seems no more science than cold fusion.
What I meant by scientifically-informed is that the arguments stems from observations in nature rather than from a biblical text. If we take the notion of irreducible complexity, the argument itself is an attempt in engaging in an argument from nature. Yes, as it turned out, Behe stumbled upon nothing new and his prediction of what couldn’t evolve was something that had been conceptually solved back in 1918, and Behe’s failure to address critics puts him into crank territory. But the point is for the proponents, to take Behe’s argument as a religious one would be to miss the point of what Behe’s argument was trying to say.
Don’t get me wrong, Intelligent Design is nonsense on stilts. It’s proponents aren’t being scientific, and what they are doing is not science. As best I can tell, their arguments are more philosophical in nature – modern day rehashes of the teleological argument. And that’s different enough from what the likes of Ham or Hovind are doing not to paint them with the same brush.