Of course, posts like this were always coming. Whenever some tragedy happens, the fundamentalists always point at the teaching of evolution, or the 'banning' of prayer.
They're wrong.
From the speech quoted in the blog post:
The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field.
Errrr, no. The Bible is about as literally true as the Lord of the Rings, and contains substantially less internal consistency. There is no corroborating evidence for most of the old AND new testaments, even the events that would show up in the archaeological record. Surely there would be some evidence of the Exodus? Surely even one person contemporary with Jesus would have written about him?
There isn't any of that. Any. There's a long-held urban myth that there's a dead army stuck at the bottom of the Red Sea, but it's wrong. Josephus was almost certainly an interpolation - your best historical evidence for Jesus consists of something written by Tacitus - roughly 300 years after Jesus was supposed to have shaken up the entire region of Judea. Even bits of the bible suggest that he didn't actually exist - bits of Paul imply a 'heavenly' Jesus, whose crucifixion and resurrection occurred in some spiritual plane, rather then on Earth.
Really, until there's a shred of evidence for the biblical accounts, I'd trust them about as far as I'd trust Kent Hovind.
In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA.
I'd point the finger at a lack of gun control. If the NRA contributes to that (which it does) then there's some extent to which they are partially to blame. They're not completely to blame, of course. Someone sold those kids guns. And someone pulled the triggers. And those who let the Columbine kids be bullied day in and day out are partially to blame, as well.
Gun control is at least one factor in the prevention of this sort of thing - it's not the only factor, of course, as there are countries without significant gun control that very rarely have this sort of thing happen. But it's certainly significant - there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia in the past decade. There are other factors at play here - Australia has roughly a fifteenth of the American population, a much lower population density, a smaller gap between rich and poor, and less poverty in general. But what's another significant change? You can't legally buy semiautomatic pistols or rifles in Australia. Nor can you buy pump-action shotguns. You can get guns - farmers often have them, but not many other people do.
In America, where closing the divide between rich and poor, raising the standard of living, and reducing the population density is difficult, gun control is a relatively easy way to try and combat this sort of activity. It should be applied.
I am here today to declare that Columbine! was not just a tragedy -- it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies! Much of the blame lies here in this room. Much of the blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves.
And some conservatives accuse people like me of laying blame at the wrong point.
You've stripped away our heritage, You've outlawed simple prayer
Heh. No.
It's a common thread among fundamentalists that they should be allowed to be the cultural default. They cry havoc when they're prevented from essentially forcing their religion on people. This is another example of this.
What is outlawed in America - rightfully so - is teacher-led required school prayer. Basically, you can't have an official, school-sponsored prayer session. Students are perfectly allowed to pray in their own time. They can form groups that get together to pray if they wish. They can even tell other students that they should join in praying with them. And that's okay too.
Note that prayer isn't outlawed. It's forcing people to pray that's outlawed.
Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation's history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact. What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence.
No no no no no, a thousand times, NO!
All religion does is confirm your in-built prejudices. If you're a well-rounded moral individual, like IainPeregrine, you use the parts of your religion that justify being good and moral. If you're Hitler, you use parts of religion to justify killing six million Jews. If you're Fred Phelps, you use your religion to justify discrimination against people on the basis of who they like.
Religion does not, in any way, shape, or form make a person more moral. Evidence? Well, lessee here.
How much do you know about the demographics of prison populations in America? For starters, roughly 0.4% or so of inmates would describe themselves as atheists. Roughly 10% of America is irreligious, and I've heard 2.3% as the figure for atheism.
Christianity, however, is represented in proportion to its population. The US is roughly 70-80% Christian, and the percentage of the US prison population that identifies as Christian? Roughly 70-80%.
What's my point? Atheism is under-represented in prisons, relative to their proportion of the population.
In other words, less atheists are criminals.
That doesn't imply that atheists are any more moral then religious people - there are some other demographic factors to take into account. For one, atheism is correlated with wealth and level of education. That is, atheists are, in general, better educated and wealthier then average (I don't think atheism causes better education and more wealth, however. :P). Wealth and level of education are inversely proportional to criminality - that is, the population of criminals, on the whole, is less wealthy then average and is less educated then average. That can skew the results significantly. It's still a startling statistic.
Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by me tal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre.
I actually agree with this sentiment, but don't quite follow through in the same way. Gun control can certainly contain the damage to some extent, but it's absolutely impossible to stop the lone lunatic without turning society into 1984.
Of course, if you start treating the social causes of events like this - i.e., large gap between rich and poor, low standard of living for the majority, high population density, bullying - you can start to reduce their occurrence.
The real villain lies within our own hearts. "As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes, he did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right!
Once again - he was perfectly allowed to pray under that table. I would be shocked at any law or politician that tried to deny students the right to pray. The ACLU would be more then shocked, they'd take legal action.
But note the straw man - this person thinks that stopping teachers from forcing students to pray, preventing an official endorsement of one religion over another is the same as preventing students praying at all. That's clearly false.
Do what the media did not - - let the < FONT color=black> nation hear this man's speech. Please send this out to everyone you can.
Interestingly enough, I couldn't find this speech anywhere. I browsed through wikipedia a bit, and I found the man fingered as the speaker. His views as presented on the Wiki seemed a lot less stupid and fundy - although there were some disturbing elements where he insisted his daughter was 'martyred' - as far as I'm aware, there wasn't a religious motivation to Columbine. There was a link to his website with a speech he gave to Congress in November 2006, but it was dead. There was a link to a white house page with a transcript of a special meeting on school safety which had the son of the man in question giving a similar speech, but I couldn't find the original version of this one.
Maybe I should note something - The Virginia Tech shooting compared himself to Jesus in one of the videos he sent off. Sounds like it was inspired by secularism to me!
And dare I point out that scoring cheap political points off of such a tragedy is, well, not very nice? Can't you just mourn so many deaths without needing to throw blame at this politician's policies and so forth?
NIN-Bruce_Almighty then proceeded to demonstrate his ignorance of evolution in the comments, and then disabled commenting on the blog post (Which would be why I'm blogging about it rather then using the comments). Popisfizzy did an admirable job arguing with him. Here's my take:
also just takeing a good look around shows that there is atleast some form of supreme being(s) as there are some (too many) animals that evolution simply cannot account for, thus the creation model holds more water
That's N-B_A's first mention of evolution - Pop had just pointed out that there are lots of different versions of God, and lots of different beliefs regarding him/her/it/they. As well as lacks of belief. And then stated that due to this, he refused to send it out to anyone. N-B_A alleged that Pop's atheism is wrong using the 'design' argument, as above.
Design went out with Paley, dear Bruce. Evolution has a wealth of evidence for it, and no credible alternative. Natural selection has a few credible competitors, but they all operate within the frame of evolution. Scientists didn't just make up evolution on the spot. Darwin came up with it after decades of study and investigation into various things. Scientists took it and ran with it because it made sense, and they've since refined it well beyond what Darwin had. And in the process, they've demonstrated time and time again that it is the best explanation of the diversity of species we have.
oh? there exists a clam like creature who has an optic nerve as a human.
I couldn't actually find this one on the index of creationist claims, but I'd have to ask N-B_A to provide a suitable reference for it. I've never heard that particular claim before, and it sounds like the sort of urban legend that gets passed around by creationists selectively quoting some reference, and the claim getting passed around as common knowledge.
Note that Answers in Genesis, Kent Hovind, or the Discovery Institute are about as far from a valid reference as you can get without getting a typewriter and a chimpanzee. They would, however, be useful for trying to trace the claim.
a beatle who uses explosions to drive away predators (something that couldnt have evolved because the bug would have blown itself to death before evolution could have taken over)
This is a common claim. It's wrong. See here and here. Note the many references to scientific papers, allowing you to follow this up, if you wish.
the monkey, need i explain this one?
...I don't know what he's getting at here. I see no problem with the splitting-off of monkeys from apes. (Or, as I think he's getting at, the latter splitting off of humans and apes. Not that we got very far).
If so, it should be noted that humans did not, in fact, evolve from monkeys. No, what happened is that a species of ape-like humans (or human-like apes?) split off into two different lines in the tree of life - forming apes and humans. This is a common misunderstanding of evolution - that x 'turns into' y, rather then them having a common ancestor - and would be the reason you often get arguments like "If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?"
pig, the flesh, and basic bone densities, some of which are different from humans but closer then that of a monkey/ape/whatever
I have no idea what N-B_A is getting at here. If he clarified, I could possibly attempt an answer. Otherwise, I just don't know what he's claiming.
If he's claiming that the density of pig flesh and bone is close to that of monkeys and apes - that it's more similar to that of monkeys and apes then human flesh and bone - then what he's saying isn't actually a problem for evolution. Bone and flesh densities change, and aren't really all that stationary over different species. And pigs are surprisingly close to apes/monkeys/humans in the evolutionary tree.
This claim is also startlingly general. I would suggest that it comes from an urban myth, once again.
also, if we had infact evolved from another simpler life form we would have found evidence of it in geologic record... there isnt one btw (this i checked several times) however there are a few animals that closly resemble humans but have been identified as neither a missing link nor a pre-evolution stage to... well ANYTHING
The final nail in the coffin for N-B_A.
The fossil record is full of evidence for evolution. If N-B_A doubts me, he can consider the list at Talk.Origins. I mean, seriously, there are whales with vestigial legs. If that's not evidence for evolution, what is?
NIN-Bruce_Almighty?
You're wrong.
