Creationism

Freedom In Tennessee For Teachers To Teach Hogwash To Our Children

Bill Haslam (Tennessee governor) will sign the new Tennessee bill that gives teachers the freedom to teach what they “believe” in science. If they don’t believe in evolution and do believe in the creation theory, they will be ok to spread that malarky to our children.

Beware the Monkey Bill

Remember that the narrative comes directly from the Jew Bible… The Torah. This is reason enough to ignore it and throw it into the dustbin of history. Yet, my home state will embrace it like the backwards fools we all seem to be.

h/t This Day – One Day

Murfreesboro — Smurfeezboro

knoxnews.com

Knoxville News Sentinel Editorial March 3 2011: regarding the article about the upcoming legislation regarding No Muslims allowed in Tennessee

A bill in the Tennessee Legislature that would basically outlaw Islam in Tennessee is obviously unconstitutional and an embarrassment to the entire state.
State Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, the legislation’s sponsor, should withdraw the odious bill and issue an apology to all state residents, Muslims in particular.
The bill ostensibly addresses terrorism but in reality outlaws a religion. That’s unacceptable, unsupportable and unconscionable. It’s also unconstitutional on a variety of fronts.
Ketron’s bill would require the state attorney general to label any organization that advocates adherence to Shariah, the Muslim religious and legal proscriptions, as a terrorist group. The organization’s finances would be frozen immediately and members could face felony charges that could result in as many as 15 years in prison. Employees, presumably including school teachers and administrative assistants, are specifically targeted for possible prosecution.
A disclaimer that the law doesn’t apply to peaceful followers of Islam is laughable.
Based on the Quran, examples drawn from the life of Muhammad and a long history of scholarly thought, Shariah is more than a set of laws. It also instructs Muslims how to practice their faith.
All Muslims follow Shariah – which, like Christian and Jewish traditions, has conservative, moderate, liberal and fundamentalist interpretations – to some degree. Every Muslim organization can be construed as a Shariah organization, so the bill simply would outlaw Islam.
The bill also would set up the state attorney general as a grand inquisitor, giving the office sole authority to designate an outlaw organization using secret evidence out of the scrutiny of the public. Organizations wouldn’t be able to appeal the designation for two years.
Jailing Tennessee residents for practicing a religion is terrible to contemplate. The bill is repugnant and runs counter to America’s tolerance of all religious faiths. The Constitution forbids the enactment of a law that would interfere with the free exercise of religion, and Islam is one of the world’s oldest faiths.
The bill didn’t originate in Tennessee. According to the Associated Press, the Tennessee Eagle Forum gave the bill’s text to Ketron and House Speaker Pro Tempore Judd Matheny, R-Tullahoma. Eagle Forum state President Bobbie Patray told the AP it was drafted by David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based attorney who runs the Society of Americans for National Existence, a nonprofit that claims following Shariahh is treasonous.
If the bill does become law, a court challenge is all but certain. Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was quoted in the Tennessean as saying at an interfaith protest rally in Nashville on Tuesday that his organization would file a lawsuit the instant the governor signs the bill.
Christians, Jews and followers of other religious faiths, plus those who follow no religion, should join in denouncing this bill. Legislators should condemn it, too. Gov. Bill Haslam should announce plans to veto the legislation should lawmakers pass it.
Religious liberty is at the core of American values. Ketron’s bill poses a threat to those values and must be defeated.
© 2011, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.

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B’Man’s Sabbath Watch: How An Exorcist Governor Doomed Louisiana

This Jindal guy is a piece of work. Creationist to the core, either by self or public demand, is going to cause Louisiana to lose in the long run. Any time you sacrifice a child’s education for bogus religious rationale, it causes nothing but trouble (that was the entire sense of “The Dark Ages”).

Religious people who refuse to acknowledge and evaluate scientific study, then use the Bible to base their entire relationship to life, are setting themselves and the rest around them up for trouble and turmoil. There are far too many irreconcilable issues. To allow blind “faith” in the Bible (fraught with inconsistencies, conflict, turmoil and hypocrisy) to be the basis for education of children simply means a total dumbing down of a population.

Believe me… I live in SW TN… I know what I’m talking about. The Bible Belt is full of literalists that cannot have a logical thought pattern available to them, at least it seems. Maybe its the engineer in me, but better yet, it is likely the simple common sense “God gave me” that tells me when two things don’t add up, trust my instinct… not the contradictions found in an ancient, re-re-re-translated document.

(For you so-called “Christians” out there: this is commonly referred to being “led by the Spirit”. You see, Mr “Christian”, that book isn’t “The Spirit”, for “The Spirit” is not found in pages of a book. If I trust that inner voice, then don’t tell me to listen to you or your perceived notion about your preferred translation being my guide. To me, that is idiotic.)

I, for one, do NOT want creationism taught in school. Nor do I want anything, whatsoever about the Bible (other than the historical fact that it exists) to be taught in school. If I did, I would send my child to a religiously affiliated school. Whatever belief system my child has is between she and I right now… a school or state has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

From Discover Magazine:

Jindal dooms Louisiana

I just received a distressing email from Barbara Forrest, a tireless fighter against creationism in Louisiana. It’s distressing because it shows that the actions of the increasingly antiscience government of Louisiana are having repercussions.

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), a scientific society with over 2000 members, has chosen to boycott Louisiana for their annual conference because, basically, their creationist governor and legislature want to make sure kids in their state grow up without a basic scientific education.

Last year, the Louisiana government overwhelmingly voted to allow creationist materials to be used in the classroom, a clear violation of the First Amendment and an incredibly foolish decision with regards to children’s education. I wrote about it quite a bit at the time (here is when it was signed into law, as well as here, here, and most recently here).

Well, their chickens are starting to come back to roost. At the time, Governor (and amateur exorcist) Jindal was warned that putting a jack-booted heel to the neck of science would not be without ramifications. And now the SICB won’t have their conference in New Orleans, and they have specifically cited the actions of Jindal and the Legislature as the key part of their decision. They have even gone as far as to say that the conference — with nearly 2000 attending — will be in Utah instead, where science is held in higher regard.

That can’t have been an easy decision for the society; New Orleans is a city that needs money, and holding a fair-sized conference there would help. But I understand their decision. Jindal and the creationists in the Louisiana government are essentially holding the educations of their students hostage, so scientists and everyone in the reality-based community need to take action. It’s one thing to make your voice heard, but it’s another to speak with your wallet. Holding the conference in Louisiana would be tacitly acquiescing to the fundamentalists running the state.

I think this was the right decision, and I urge anyone who is considering running a science-based event to seriously consider states that hold science in higher regard. I hope that Louisiana teachers, parents, and students rise up and let their representatives know how they feel about science. I would hate to see the students suffer because of this, but the politicians in that state have already guaranteed that will happen.

The LA Coalition for Science has released a statement to the press about this as well. It makes me physically ill that the science education of these children has been put into this position by the creationists, forcing the hand of the SICB. But the larger issue at stake here is the future of science itself in Louisiana as well as other states, a future Jindal and the other creationists are trying to choke out of existence.

B’Man’s Sabbath Watch: Jesus Walked With Dinosaurs

When I saw this picture, I knew that I had seen it before in some sort of children’s Bible book. And it brought back the image of Jesus on horsedinosaurback with a sword in hand, ready for the rapture. The Bible got the stuff about horses all wrong. It was dinosaurs. I also notice that this particular Jesus looks like I did when I was in my 20′s. This is something I didn’t realize, but makes a lot of sense, since I am treated as if I am a God.

But I also found out that He didn’t ride just the TRex in battle against the hordes of hell. He also rode some dinosaurs instead of camels, everywhere he went. When it was recorded that He came to town on a donkey, it was no donkey… it was a Barapasaurus and His side gig was a Barapasaurus baby sitter. All the throngs of leaves and branches thrown into the road were actually food for the baby dinosaur Jesus was carrying.

Unfortunately, this was the time that Jesus began riding side saddle causing all the other prophets to question if he was gay or not…

But then, we find an old picture of BeulahMan, before his most recent incarnation (and when I had lots of hair) and we realize that not only was I gay back then, I was a weird dinosaur pedophile. I’m sure glad that some of these traits aren’t passed along with each new life.

h/t Vintage Faith

And just so that we are all on the same page about the Sabbath (and watching over it), it is obvious to me that if you feel you must cut the tongue out of your daughter’s mouth BEFORE burning her to death due to her recent Christian conversion, that your child is too verbose and probably deserved it. God knows that if it weren’t for His followers, there would be no one to keep the faith in line. BuelahGirl, you better watch yourself…

Saudi man kills daughter for converting to Christianity

Riyadh: A Saudi man working with the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice recently killed his daughter for converting to Christianity.

According to sources close to the victim, the religious police member had cut the tongue of the girl and burned her to death following a heated debate on religion…

Then there is this arrest for the vile transformation from Islam to Christianity. In this story, religion proves, again, that it can repeat itself countless times throughout the history of the world and nothing changes. It wasn’t too long ago that the very same could be said about Christians converting to Islam and how barbaric those “Godly Men” could conduct themselves.

Granted, the Saudis would have my head for this blog. But so would have Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, if they could have gotten away with it.

h/t Jonathon Turley

Retro Essay– “…Under God…”

Retro Essay  from ‘Letters from America’

The pledge of allegiance

Monday mornings in almost every public elementary school in America the children rise and then they recite (or they could choose to listen to the class chanting) the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States. It’s a single sentence and this is how it goes:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Last week it was announced in Washington that next February 2004 the nine justices of the Supreme Court will meet one morning and begin to consider the complaint of an atheist parent who says it’s against the Constitution that he should have to make his daughter listen to “a ritual proclaiming that there is a god”.

When it does come up I imagine the young atheist will have a hard time restraining himself from a cry of shame as he stands and watches the nine justices bow their heads in prayer, as is their custom.

What clause in the Constitution does he believe is being violated? Why the very first amendment, the first item in the Bill of Rights.

It is written in the most guileless English: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

What could be simpler? What could be also vaguer? – The moment you reflect what the 18th Century meant by “establishment” for instance.

So many words have changed their meaning drastically since the 17th and 18th centuries – much of the Bible, much more of Shakespeare, is not understandable without explanatory footnotes.

To the Founding Fathers who wrote it “establishment” meant a religious sect.

What a pity they didn’t write the sentence the other way round: “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Oh but by the way, we’re not going as a nation to have a preferred sect, it’s too late for that, it would lead to endless dissension between the Congregationalists of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Catholics of Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania..

“So, to be clearly understood, gentlemen, let’s make it plain: we shall not have a national religion like the Church of England.

“That being so it must be made equally plain that no law of Congress can prohibit any man or woman practising his/her own religion freely, everywhere – in church, in the street, in Congress, at home, away – freely.”

For 150 years this reading was simply assumed by most people. As a learned history of the Supreme Court tells us: from the founding era at the end of the 18th Century, well into the 20th Century, religion was thought to be a significant and legitimate component of American public life.

By the 1940s, however, American public life had become largely secular.

One short, offhand sentence covers a tremendous fact: the decline of religious belief in the general population of the Western nations, deeper still in Europe.

In France in 1960 one family in three were weekly churchgoers. Today it’s one in eight.

In England today only six people in a hundred claim to be devoutly religious. In the United States the comparable devout figure is 65%.

But there’s been a dramatic increase in the Americans who don’t want religion to appear in any shape or form in public life.

Hence these continual appeals to the courts, from keeping religious symbols of any public building, all the way to banning the use of the word god in political speech.

To put it more formally, the atheists have gone bananas in the extent to which they misinterpret the first amendment – as you’ll see from the final appeal of this young father who wants “under God” taken out of the pledge of allegiance.

Well, let’s go back to the pledge and its invention.

It was composed by an ex-minister and published in a magazine called The Youth Companion.

When? That’s the point – 1892.

The Congress leapt at a happy idea. Since the upcoming 12th October marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, that would be the perfect day to introduce the chanting of the pledge as a daily ritual in the elementary schools.

And so it was. But no mention of under God. “One nation under God” did not appear until 1954.

Why 1954 I wondered? I never saw a story explaining why. I thought some digging was necessary and it’s turned out that a little digging produced a load of pay dirt.

In early 1954 at a conference of the four allied powers occupying Germany, the United States, Britain and France were all for reunifying Germany under one government.

The Soviets were absolutely opposed and had in Europe armies five times the size of the combined allied armies. So that was that.

Far away in French Indochina the French were collapsing against Vietnamese guerrillas fighting to be independent.

The French begged President Eisenhower to help with American troops. Eisenhower said no troops.

But he made an impassioned public assertion that the defeat of Communism in South East Asia was vital. That if one country went Communist the neighbours could fall too, like a row of dominoes.

This was a pressing fear in Washington at that time, fears for Malaysia, Indochina, for Burma and India.

Also 1954 was the heyday of a middle western senator who, after a high State Department official had been convicted of passing papers to the Soviet Union, launched an immensely popular campaign to root Communists out of American government.

He gave us alarming numbers but he never actually came up with a positive Communist who had not declared himself.

Nevertheless, such was the fear of the time that from Moscow to Asia “godless Communism” might prevail.

President Eisenhower, many public men and women, used that phrase over and over.

And it was by executive order on Flag Day 1954 that President Eisenhower ordered the pledge now to read “I pledge allegiance to the flag” and so on, “and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God indivisible.”

So far as the young protesting father’s concerned, the villain of the peace is not – as most people think – the Congress of the United States but the late, great Ike, supreme commander of the invading forces in Europe and later president of the United States.

If the young father wins surely somebody will then mount a crusade to have erased from all dollar bills of every denomination the sentence printed in brazen capital letters: “In God we trust”.

And if he wins that will entail destroying every bill and totally reprinting the United States currency.

It would cost the Treasury – the taxpayer, that is – well, it’s been figured maybe $7-8bn.

But what’s that to the average taxpayer? He’s already going to have to find 20 billions for tidying up Iraq.

A recent visitor from Europe remarked at some point how often in daily conversation here he had heard the passing phrase “just before 9/11″, or “about a month after September 11″, or “Oh, 11 September changed all that.”

I tried to explain to him how we felt personally outraged, what a traumatic event it was and perhaps one you could not feel if you saw it on television from 3,000 miles away.

To have had this feeling and find it still there deep inside, since we were never told that American intelligence agents had foiled plotted atrocities as large and murderous as the bombing of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

How I wish I had read two years ago a piece I came on the other night when I picked up one of my standby bedtime books, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

He’s writing about a recollection of life in the South where he’d spent so much time of his youth.

This passage, however, is about a sharp distinction between social conversation in the North and the South in the decade after the end of the Civil War. I imagine this piece must have been written about late 1870s or 1880.

“In the North one hears the war mentioned in social conversation once a month, sometimes once a week but as a distinct subject for talk it has long been relieved of duty.

“Given a company of six gentlemen, four possibly five were not in the field at all. Add six ladies and you will have added six people who saw little of the dread realities of the war and ran out of talk about it years ago.

“The case is very different in the South. There every man you meet was in the war and every lady you meet saw the war. The interest in the war is still vivid and constant, it’s what AD is, elsewhere they date from it.

“Things happened ‘since the war’ or ‘during the war’ or ‘about two years after the war’.

“You can’t talk pale, inconsequent matters when you’ve got a crimson fact in your head that you’re burning to fetch out. This gives the inexperienced stranger better than anything else the sense of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is.”

Invasion is the key word. We felt that the bombing of the Towers and the Pentagon was an invasion of this country.

We came, as perhaps Europeans could not, to feel that this was the beginning of a war, of the Third World War and an alarming novelty of war: one against a worldwide enemy who is invisible

… and that insane amount of funds was spent for?????????????

What exactly does this accomplish? … and for what cause was it done…? and really, what are they really thinking this will be used for???… and if they have no idea how it will effect the globe, i.e.: weather, water, quakes etc… or the ultimate fear some scientists have– what are they doing?? Just because ‘mankind’ CAN do something doesn’t mean ‘mankind’ should do it.

Landmark experiment to unlock secrets of Big Bang could cause end of the world, say scientists in court bid to halt it. It has cost 4.4billion+ and is designed to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang.
But rather than providing vital information about the beginning of life, the world’s biggest experiment could cause the end of the world, say scientists. They fear that the Large Hadron Collider – due to be switched on in nine days’ time – will create a black hole that could swallow the planet. By smashing sub-atomic particles together at close to the speed of light, the LHC aims to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe or Big Bang, shedding light on the building blocks of life.

But critics claim that the ‘time machine’, which has been built 300ft beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, could instead spawn a shower of mini-black holes.  Within four years, one of these ‘celestial vacuums’ could have swollen to such a size that it is capable of sucking the Earth inside-out, said Otto Rossler, one of a group of scientists mounting a last-minute court challenge to the project.

They claim the experiment violates the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights. However, the case at the European Court of Human Rights is not expected to delay the switch on, scheduled for Wednesday of next week. Professor Rossler, a German chemist, said the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has admitted its project will create black holes but doesn’t consider them to be a risk.
He warned: ‘My own calculations have shown it is quite plausible that these little black holes survive and will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside. I have been calling for CERN to hold a safety conference to prove my conclusions wrong but they have not been willing.’

Those involved in the project have dismissed the claims as ‘absurd’ and insist that extensive safety assessments have found the experiment, which is funded by 20 countries, including the UK, to be safe.  A report written earlier this year stated: ‘Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists.’  The lifespan of any mini-black holes would be ‘very short’, it added.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the arguments before the European Court of Human Rights had been answered in ‘extensive safety assessments’.
He told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The Large Hadron Collider will not be producing anything that does not happen routinely in nature due to cosmic rays. If they were dangerous we would know about it already.’

Scientists have used large particle colliders to smash atoms and pieces of atoms together for 30 years, but this machine has attracted so much attention because it is the most powerful ever built.  In the LHC beams of protons will be propelled through an 18-mile-long circular tunnel. More than 5,000 magnets lining the tunnel will accelerate the hundreds of billions of tiny particles to almost the speed of light, allowing them to complete one circuit in one-11,000th of a second.

There will be two beams going in opposite directions, each packing as much energy as a car traveling at 100mph.  When they reach almost the speed of light, they will be smashed head on into each other, breaking them into their constituent parts, including, perhaps, the building blocks of the universe

Evolution Observed

From IniquityX:

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

NewScientist is running a story on an exciting new development in evolutionary biology. In short, scientists have watched a new, complex evolutionary trait develop in the lab. This mutation occurred in a population of Escherichia coli bacteria that has been in isolated development for 20 years. The evolution of these bacteria has been observed for over 44,000 generations, and has suddenly acquired the ability metabolize citrate.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago notes: “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”