Creationism

Richard Dawkins celebrates a victory over creationists

UK government bans creationist schools

Twenty Years After 'Darwin on Trial', Intelligent Design is Dead

I've added quite a few divinations to the Prediction Watch page, courtesy of Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism. It's a wonderful compilation of Creationist entrail readings that yields several trackable predictions with dates. 

So head to Prediction Watch and fill out your apocalyptic social calendar. Why, in the coming decade alone we have some humdingers to look forward to: the Rapture and the end of the world in 2011, followed by the collapse of Darwinism in the 2014 to 2016 time frame. (Evolutionary theory hangs around for a few years after the end of the world? My, the Marxist/Fascist Darwinist conspirators are more powerful than we thought!) 

Now here's a guy quick with the FinalCut Pro (or whatever the tool may be). The movie meister behind "God's Wonderful World" spun viewer suggestions into a Part II, featuring more of the horrors that take place under the holy nose of a "God" who just sits up there nodding and drooling, not lifting a finger to help his suffering creations.

(Warning to viewers: "God's" disasters, diseases, predation, and other cruelties make for some upsetting grue.)

The important thing to note in "God's Wonderful Circle Of Life!" is that none of the scenes (except, perhaps, the poor chicken on fire?) depict suffering caused by humans who have "forgotten God" and are thus caught up in "sin". The tornadoes, pestilences, floods, and animal-on-animal slaughter depicted are all part of God's holy and perfect and intentional creation – or at least, so say the religionists.

The great irony in all this? It's religionists' beloved claim that Charles Darwin was some amoral proponent of tooth-and-claw struggling for survival as a blueprint for society. When any reading of that proper Victorian gentleman's words shows that he advocated nothing of the sort.

Let me see if I've got the claims straight: Darwin observed the reality in which most living things suffer and die horribly from causes including drought, disaster, disease, and just plain being ripped to shreds by predators. Holy God, meanwhile, created and maintains that vicious reality. Therefore, Darwin was immoral and God is all-merciful loving sweetness.

Human brains with the logic circuits of a kumquat: More human "sin" or more of God's perfect creation? You tell me, believers.

The situation: A school wants to take 6th and 7th graders to a Fossil Discovery Center to attend a Rocks and Mineral Festival.

The problem: Those awful people are going to tell little Johnny – oh heavens! – that rocks are old!

From I bet that kid is popular in class at the Fail Blog: It's a simple field trip permission slip defaced by a barely-literate parent who thinks a Mineral Festival needs to begin and end with Jesus. The scrawl reads:

Note: Just to let you it is not that we don’t believe in things like that, it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving(?), ours has a start and an end. God created the world. He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay 'Rock and Minerals' but it might not be 5 pages long, and about billions of years, it will be according to the Bible.

(Hmm, is this from the United States? Hmm, do we even need to ask?)

We can laugh at the idiot parent, but what's being done to the poor kid is just sad.

It's not just the exploding human appendix. "Intelligent design" is full of idiot engineering when it comes to biology (to say nothing of the broader stage of world-destroying asteroids and supervolcanos and all that).

See an excellent catalog of in excelsis 'Doh!' at Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes. You'll find all your old favorites – Useless cave dweller eyes! Defective human retinas! Male nipples! – along with new reasons to be wonder whether the Seven Days of Creation were in fact a week-long bender.

If Adolf Hitler was an atheist, as some argumentative religious loons keep insisting, he was the oddest atheist ever: a member of the Roman Catholic church who wouldn't shut up about his self-proclaimed role in doing God's holy work.

Hitler was a Christian (if one of a particularly warped nature) and a man of faith even beyond the borders of religion. That's so obvious and well-known that you have to wonder why True Believers keep bringing up "Hitler the atheist" when the claim backfires on them every time. Yet what's pointed out far less frequently (although it's not the least surprising) is that Hitler the Christian was also Hitler the flaming Creationist. Readeth thou more

Don't laugh – it's every bit as good as the rest of the evidence for Young Earth Creationism.

Via Eat Liver.