Creationists and Critical Thinking

On January 21, 2011, In creationist, evolution, Expelled, fundamentalist, Intelligent Design, By Erik John Bertel

“If only we laymen could simply trust our scientists, without thinking critically for ourselves, as we once trusted priests and rabbis.” Or so goes one creationists.  You know the folks who think all scientists are liars for not placing their religious beliefs regarding creation on the same plane with scientific thought and reason regarding evolution.

Ah, if only our Mid-Eastern fundamentalists religions did not require such blind adherence to their faith then the world, never mind you know where I’m going with this.  Spirituality doesn’t have to be this way and to quote another great spiritual leader, the Buddha regarding critical thinking:

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” (Siddhartha Gautama – The Buddha), 563-483 B.C.

Can you imagine a priest, fundamentalist preacher or imam saying this to their flock? Not a chance in…

However; the original comment speaks volumes about critical thought among creationists. In fact that’s an oxymoron: critical thought and creationists. Science is very much about critical thinking and questioning the status quo.  And while adherence to dogma does exist among the scientific ranks, it doesn’t last long  when faced with the onslaught of new observations and facts.  It doesn’t matter who’s theory is being challenged as for example when Newtonian Physics became challenged by the Theory of Relativity and the Time Space Continuum.It’s all fair game and all subject to the same unrelenting peer review.  Years ago creationist beliefs were subjected to the same rigorous scientific review and rejected as being matters of faith and not belonging to science.

It’s so simple:  science is not faith and faith is not science.  The two shouldn’t play together despite the protestations of religious fundamentalists and their political sycophants.

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Gallup Poll: Most Americans are Creationists

On December 21, 2010, In creationist, evolution, Flores Girl, fundamentalist, gallup, Intelligent Design, neanderthal, By Erik John Bertel

Yep, a recent Gallup poll shows that 80% of all Americans believe that god has guided man’s evolution in one manner or another. Those Gallup Poll viewpoints run the gamut from the moronic strict interpretation of the bible all the way to the pseudo-scientific intelligent design movement.  I’m not quite sure how god works in his mysterious ways and or why he takes a step back in addressing some of man ‘s other issues but Americans do overwhelmingly believe he is guiding our evolution.

These creationist Gallup poll results are not surprising when you realize that many Americans come from strong fundamentalist roots and, in general abhor, learning science. And,yes I do believe laziness and blind religious beliefs go hand in hand. Come on be honest; isn’t it easier to say god did it rather than to say Deoxyribonucleic acid?  Also, evolution and science have come under political attack as humanist ploys that undermine religious faith as the United States teeters between conservative and liberal factions.

By the way I do not consider myself to be a humanist but find that label to be far too restrictive so I instead consider myself to be a Sentientist, i.e. having respect for all living creatures. That’s a natural extension of my belief in evolution;  after all some transient hominid species  had to straddle the animal-human boundary during the course of our evolution.

What Creationism has to do with science well your guess is as good as mine and asking the average American to reconcile science and faith is an exercise in bemused frustration.

Here’s the Gallup Poll report: Most Americans believe in God, and about 85% have a religious identity. It is not surprising as a result to find that about 8 in 10 Americans hold a view of human origins that involves actions by God — that he either created humans as depicted in the book of Genesis, or guided a process of evolution. What no doubt continues to surprise many scientists is that 4 out of 10 Americans believe in the first of these explanations.

These views have been generally stable over the last 28 years. Acceptance of the creationist viewpoint has decreased slightly over time, with a concomitant rise in acceptance of a secular evolution perspective. But these shifts have not been large, and the basic structure of beliefs about human beings’ origins is generally the same as it was in the early 1980s.

Americans’ attitudes about almost anything can and often do have political consequences. Views on the origins of humans are no exception. Debates and clashes over which explanations for human origins should be included in school textbooks have persisted for decades. With 40% of Americans continuing to hold to an anti-evolutionary belief about the origin of humans, it is highly likely that these types of debates will continue.

For further details from this creationst Gallup poll go here:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/Four-Americans-Believe-Strict-Creationism.aspx

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Christine O'Donnell, the Occult and Mastrubating Without Lust

On September 20, 2010, In fundamentalist, obama, politics, presidential election, By Erik John Bertel

Update: Conservative talk show host Sean Hannerty decided to defend Christine O’Donnell’s position on masturbation because it was consistent with her Roman Catholic faith. Unfortunately, an old 11 year old video from Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect Show indicates that while Christine has a problem with the auto-erogenous she also had a dalliance with the occult in her youth.  Wonder how Sean feels about defending Christine’s advocacy of witchcraft? Got hand it to her; she is quite the flake!

That’s the problem with the conservative freaks, their criticisms are far ranging except regarding their very own.  However Sean Hannerty does have a point that the left also has a nasty habit of defending Muslim fundamentalism under the guise of multiculturalism.   Frankly, I never had a problem with calling out the fundamentalist freaks.  Muslim extremist have hijacked their religion to push their own agenda of misogyny, anti-western and anti-Antisemitism lies all in the guise of their religion when in fact they have just hijacked the words of the prophets. What is scary is that moderate Muslims have chosen to remain silent which in turn signifies their tacit support of such extremists. Do they really want the world to become an entirely misogynistic, antisemitic and anti-christian burka shrouded existence?

From CNN:

Christine O’Donnell is the 41-year-old upset winner of Delaware’s GOP Senate primary. Christine O’Donnell, who is struggling to gain the support of GOP leaders, insists she will win the general election with or without the backing of the Republican establishment.  She does have the backing of Sarah Palin however.

Politically, O’Donnell is firmly aligned with Tea Party movement, which funneled more than $150,000 to her campaign shortly before Tuesday’s primary. Largely opposed to abortion rights and gun control, she has been endorsed by two conservative populists — former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

Among other things, O’Donnell, a Catholic, once headed a pro-abstinence group called Saviors Alliance for Lifting the Truth.

“We need to address sexuality with young people,” she said in an interview that aired on MTV in the 1990s. “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. [And] you can’t masturbate without lust.” Hardly seems worth the effort without the lust?

Soory but a true conservative leaves both your wallet and your soul alone. Do we really need the government to teach masturbation abstinence to our school kids? And that’s going to work? And really, isn’t masturbation preferable to some of the other alternatives for relieving sexual tension in young adults and it definitely qualifies for most people as safe sex, right? Even Tea baggers can’t argue with that logic or can they?

In keeping with the sexual nature of this post check out this definition of a tea bagger: white Republicans who lost their business/home in the great recession, blames Obama rather than Bush or someone who rests their testicles on another person face. Never realized why the Tea Party hates the term “tea bagger”.

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Insensitivity and Farce Abounds between Christians and Muslims

On September 10, 2010, In fundamentalist, By Erik John Bertel

The mosque near the old WTC site has always been a lightening rod for extremists but now it has become center stage for a new type of American farce. Should Muslims be allowed to build the mosque so close to the WTC?  The answer is of course yes, with the logic being you can’t pick your spots for religious and individual freedom.  Should they build near the old 9/11 site?  That’s an entirely different matter and clearly the Imam has his own agenda regarding this issue with his decision to go ahead with this controversial project.

Else where in the country enlightened souls led by the pastor Terry Jones have taken to burning copies of the Quran.  Or is it the Koran? Pretty backwards thinking huh, until you consider that in Iran they are actually debating whether or not to move ahead with a stoning sentence for an alleged female adulterer.

Oh, did I mention that the Florida pastor and a local Imam are coming to New York to work out some sort of deal?  Only the Imam in New York is having nothing to do with this folly. In the meantime the liberals attack the Florida pastor while the conservatives have their way with the Imam in New York.  You got to love the way religion brings us all together, right?  All of this nonsense feeds the atheist notion that religion is for quacks and fools especially when that paradigm of sensitivity, the Donald Trump, has decided to join the fracas. You know, the “You’re fired” guy who has the comb-over that defies both the gods and nature, wants in on the action. He offered to buy the proposed mosque site from the developer for 25% over the original selling price. The developer is not interested claiming Donald just wants the publicity.  Really, Donald seeking publicity?

All of this religious theater is absurdly laughable and entertaining, especially if you are a god or an atheist,  until you realize that some calculating and nefarious human handler is using this as fodder for recruiting the next human bomb. Yes, somebody will get hurt or die from all of this religious insensitivity and stupidity.  Then it won’t be so funny and it will all be done in the name of god. Yep, religious stupidity and ignorance abounds in the world enough so to cause all of the prophets to collectively shudder.  So do me a favor if any of you should have a prophecy or a moent of spiritual enlightenment in your lifetime please keep it to yourself!  The followers will only make a mess of your visions no matter how well intentioned!

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Sorry, Catholic Church says Male-Only Priesthood

On September 1, 2010, In fundamentalist, religion, By Erik John Bertel

From the CNN belief blog  CNN’s Richard Allen Greene and Melissa Gray contributed to this report: Catholic Church defends male-only priesthood

Barring women from being Catholic priests is not the result of sexism 2,000 years ago, it’s because women cannot fulfill a basic function of the priesthood, “standing in the place of Jesus,” a leading British Catholic thinker argued Monday.

“This teaching is not at all a judgment on women’s abilities or rights. It says something about the specific role of the priest in Catholic understanding – which is to represent Jesus, to stand in his place,” argued Father Stephen Wang in a statement sent out by the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales.

The bottom line is that Jesus chose 12 men – and no women – to be his apostles, Wang argues.

The choice was “deliberate and significant, not just for that first period of history, but for every age,” Wang says.

Men and women are equal in Christianity, he continues, but “this does not mean that our sexual identity as men and women is interchangeable. Gender is not just an accident.”

He compared the role of a priest to that of an actor playing King Arthur or British soccer star Wayne Rooney in a movie.

“No one would be surprised if I said I wanted a male actor to play the lead,” he said, admitting the analogy was “weak.”

But, he said, “it shouldn’t surprise us if we expect a man to stand ‘in the person of Christ’ as a priest, to represent Jesus in his humanity – a humanity that is not sexually neutral.”

Sorry Father Wang, it’s hard to believe that any god would be so personally vested in penises and testicles but apparently the Catholic Church clergy thinks so. Think it has anything to do with the fact that the Catholic clergy all sport penises?   Nothing like keeping the good old boy’s club alive, huh?  It’s one of those backwards-facing memes that have become so ingrained in the church culture that it’s hard to think otherwise if you are a member of the clergy.  You know sort of like the earth is at the center of the universe and is only 6,000 years old yet this bit of chauvinism is going to be harder to disprove.  Frankly, I don’t know how you can argue this nonsense with a straight face.

Upon reflection, this entire thought process does make sense because religion has always been about male domination and the control of other subordinate males.  Frankly, it was never about personal salvation spirituality but it was more important in defining the “us versus them” mentality.  Moreover; if you can control the males and the attached females come along for the ride and let’s face it, no man is into following a female religious leader.  Why?  Because regressive Mid-Eastern rationalizations, and I’m sorry but Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all cut from the same bolt of cloth, not only denies the validity of the women in our life but the universality of all life and its very existence in the cosmos.  Women are subservient to men, I mean come on it’s god’s will, right?

What’s so weird about all these mid-east religions is how firmly rooted they are in the first millennium.  And it’s not just the mid-east religions that are afflicted with is myopic male vision of the universe.  Even a religion as enlightened as Buddhism has the male firmly ensconced in the role of the priest and the women as their hand-maiden nuns. It’s as if we didn’t know that there are other worlds out there sporting unknown life forms living out an existence totally independent of our own for billions of years. Why would we? Because we know on those other planets all of the alien spiritual authorities sport penises and testicles; let’s face it, maleness rules the universe! You’re right, I automatically assume that there is other life in the universe, and I assume that some of it is intelligent; in fact, I only question  the presence of intelligent life here on earth.

Now don’t get me wrong I am fond of my own male genitalia and I really do enjoy the yin and yang of the male/female dynamic.  However; I don’t feel my male organs have been the driving force in my own evolving personal spirituality. Honestly, I would argue quite the opposite and the recent Catholic Church scandals bears witness to my wayward reasoning! Yeah, I’m going to hell for thinking aloud this blasphemy but fortunately for me I never believed in the fairy tale nonsense of heaven and hell.  Besides, the sexism of all major religions is a firm rejoinder to me that all religions are the province of earth-bound men and not necessarily that of the gods. Frankly, it would be more than fitting if we get the afterlife we envisioned during our lifetime; with penises or without!

Erik John Bertel

Authors of Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot

With over 200,000 downloads Flores Girl:The Children God Forgot is now available as a free ebook novel on the iPhone!

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Medal of Honor Now Features the Taliban

On August 27, 2010, In fundamentalist, politics, By Erik John Bertel
(Update: The good news is that EA changes their minds after receiving a tsunami of criticism and have opted to leave the Taliban out of the game. Good idea with this war still going on and with the bodies of our soldiers still returning from Afghanistan.)
This bit of annoyance is from the Digital Home :
Electronic Arts isn’t wavering in its support of game developer DICE’s decision to let gamers play as Taliban members in the upcoming Medal of Honor.
“At EA we passionately believe games are an artform, and I don’t know why films and books set in Afghanistan don’t get flack, yet [games] do,” EA Games President Frank Gibeau told game developer publication Develop Online this week. “Whether it’s ‘Red Badge of Courage’ or ‘The Hurt Locker,’ the media of its time can be a platform for the people who wish to tell their stories. Games are becoming that platform.”

(Credit: DICE)

Gibeau acknowledged that allowing gamers to play as a Taliban solider is a “creative risk,” but he won’t allow media outcry to “compromise our creative vision and what we want to do.”

I have a real problem with this and it goes to the heart of the Muslim support for the Taliban in the west.  Why?  Because this type of role playing  in Medal of Honor feeds directly into the existing pool of disaffected second-generation Muslim men in the west who are looking for any cause to believe in. Unlike their parents they don’t see the West as home because they feel so marginalized nor do they feel particularly lucky being here.  Instead, they back any Anti-Western Muslim movement even one that thinks it’s okay to gas young Muslim school girls because the girls have the audacity to ask for an education.  In their hateful minds collateral damage comes with the Anti-Western game.
I bet Medal of Honor is a hit with young wannabe suicide bombers recruits while at the same time the game makers are laughing all the way to the bank. If we can contemplate blocking  the building of a mosque we should definitely boycott this hateful Medal of Honor Taliban recruitment game!
More bizarre thinking and this one is unintentionally from NetFlix on a movie recommendation:  Fantastic Mr. Fox
because you enjoyed: Kill Bill: Vol. 2.  Yikes nothing like a little family fare after some samurai carnage, huh?
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Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed Bootlegs Revisited

On August 9, 2010, In Ben Stein, evolution, fundamentalist, Intelligent Design, obama, presidential election, By Erik John Bertel

I wrote this blog over two years ago and there was a small firestorm surrounding my simple blog observation about the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed not having any bootlegs in the market:

There is an easy way to measure the success of any studio movie and that is by measuring how many bootleg copies there are out there on the street. You know think Jerry Seinfeld and they range in quality from pre-studio release copies to poor copies taken by Kramer wannabes. In comparison, copies of Iron Man have already hit the street. Now, before some reader goes off on a rant, let me set the record straight about bootlegs. I actually go to the movies or rent from Blockbuster on a weekly basis and if it’s a visually stunning movie. buy a legit copy for my own personal use. Why? I am a video and audiophile with a home theater and enjoy the sights and sounds of a good movie. Bootleg copies of movies are often of wildly varying quality and in almost all cases they don’t meet my exacting standards. Yes, I am one of those weirdos that play with different brands of HDMI cables.

With that said, I have to be honest with you there was no way I was going to spend $20 and give that money to the ICR, Institute of Creation Research, to watch Expelled. Plus, I would never subject my wife to an hour and half of this drivel, her time is too precious and she would kill me if I did. Moreover, I don’t go to the movies alone, its has been a couples ritual for me during the entirety of my life and I am certainly not changing my ways for Expelled and Ben Stein.

So I have been looking for a bootleg copy to watch to make my comments on this blog but guess what? There are no bootlegs, the street vendors don’t have any copies nor is it available online as a valid torrent. I even noticed that most of the major movie critics have kept away from reviewing this masterpiece as well (no, your pastor doesn’t count!).

Why? Supply and demand baby, nobody wants to see Ben Stein drone on about the horrors of Darwinism save a handful of religious fundamentalists and conservative gadflies. The rest of the silent majority is too busy trying to figure how we can afford to fill our cars with a tankful of gas, thank you Mr. George Bush. The gross to date, a month after the release of Expelled, is just shy of $7.5 M, not exactly Michael Moore territory for a documentary. So much for a Creationist’s revolution in the United States and things will not fare much better for this crowd with the fall presidential election. You can already hear the yawns!

Well in two years two events have transpired.  First, I finally sat or should I say laid down to watch this this Ben Stein snore fest and while there may not be any bootlegs there are some Expelled torrents are currently available at your local pirate sites. So, score one for Ben but I didn’t pay for the privlege of watching this propaganda! Not I didn’t illegally download the movie but I used my Netflix account.  By the way, accompanying the torrents is usually some acerbic exchanges between true believers but frankly overall the movie  was a flop in galvanizing the Christian fundamentalists in the scientific community; moreover, the Obama election was a big blow to their movement.

And my final review of the movie?  Well, I feel asleep twice while watching this mess.  It was boring and ponderous and the quick cuts to some vintage movie outtakes was tedious at best and not very amusing.  Also, the movie’s argument about academic ostracism has long since been discredited and if Intelligent Design proponents feel like pariahs that is more a function of their poor science and not necessarily directed at their individual religious beliefs. Irreducible complexity,  that is the idea that biological systems are too complex to evolve from simpler predecessors,  is a poor argument no matter how many times it gets trotted out.   Why?  Basic genetic work has shown how the switching on and off of given genes can have myriad effects on biological systems, some good and some bad.  Turning on retro features such as teeth in chick embryos is now doable and demonstrates s the basic elements of how genetics can drive evolution via natural selection.

Furthermore, Ben Stein’s argument that the Nazis used Darwinism as an excuse to kill Jews is a stupid, specious argument.  There is little in Hitler’s past indicates that he was a big Darwin fan but rather he was an ardent anti-Semite  that used his hatred as a rallying point among his German constituency. The Nazi concept of the master race had more to do with some pagan notions of Arayat supremacy that it had to do with either the natural selection of Darwinism or, for that matter, Christianity. One could easily argue that Christianity was more to blame for the Holocaust than science, but neither would be an accurate interpretation of what actually transpired in Nazi Germany.

In any case, this all seems so long ago and the movie’s failure to become an Intelligent Design rallying point combined with it’s pitiful $8 million in total revenue speaks volumes about the present state of the Creationist movement.  Today the focus is on jobs and not religious fundamentalism in the US unless your Muslim and insistent on building a mosque near the WTC site. That will be the subject of another blog and you maybe surprised by my take on the issue.

Cheers,

Erik John Bertel

Author of Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot

Great News! Flores Girl:The Children God Forgot is now available as a free ebook novel on the iPhone!

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No Stoning, it's not in the Quran

On July 9, 2010, In creationist, fundamentalist, By Erik John Bertel

Well, the sexually inhibited religious freaks are stymied again but you got to give them credit for trying to bring back that ol’ time religious fervor. It’s even better news for alleged adulterers.  This is from CNN:

“International outcry – and the pleas of a devoted son – seem to have saved an Iranian woman from being stoned to death for adultery.

But while Sakineh Mohammedie Ashitani has been granted a reprieve, she is not the only woman sentenced to be stoned for adultery in Iran. There have been at least six sentences carried out since 2006, says Ann Harrison, an Iran expert at Amnesty International in London.

Adultery is the only crime that carries such a penalty in Iranian law, she said.

Only a handful of countries have laws calling for stoning, and Iran is the only one that carries out executions that way, Amnesty International records suggest.

That is because Islam doesn’t really want the punishment to be carried out, says Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an Iranian-born campaigner against the practice.

“Stoning is not a Quranic punishment, it is Islamic jurisprudence. It happened later,” says Mir-Hosseini, an expert on Iranian family law at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “The punishment for any kind of sexual relations (outside of marriage) in the Quran is 100 lashes,” she says.”

It’s interesting how the religious fundamentalists insist on imposing their weird perverted views of the world upon everyone else and that includes their own twisted misogyny.   Frankly, it doesn’t matter if they are Muslim or Christian fundamentalists, they are all cut from the same twisted bolt of cloth that insists on imposing their perverse views upon the rest of the world.  Moreover, dissent is not to be tolerated as the freaks takeover the words of the prophets and twist them into their own liking.

Marx made the comment about religion being “the opium of the masses.” I got news for you folks because Marx got it wrong, religion is more like crack for the masses.

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Weird: Human Sex with Neanderthals and Hobbits

On May 17, 2010, In creationist, ebu gogo, evolution, fundamentalist, homo floresiensis, By Erik John Bertel

From  New Scientist: Whether they are robust brutes or tiny midgets, it appears humans just can’t stop getting it on with each other and now apparently with other human species.

Our first bizarre tale of cross species dating comes from Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. It appears that the genome of humans today is roughly 1 to 4 per cent Neanderthal (Science, vol 328, p 710). This disturbing fact is true for all non-Africans with the implication that H. sapiens and Neanderthals interbred sometime between 100,000 and 45,000 years ago.  That means after the first humans left Africa but before they split into regional populations that inhabited Europe and Asia.

Jeffrey Long at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque presented results from nearly 100 modern human populations at a meeting of the American Association for Physical Anthropologists confirming this find. His work provided evidence that Eurasians obtained some of their genetic diversity from breeding with other Homo species (Neanderthals-Homo neanderthalensis?) after they left Africa. Interestingly, other genome work indicates that Neanderthals had some genes for red hair.  I’m not sure where this is going but I will leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks depending on their affinity for red hair.

Similarly, scientists also noticed an increase in genetic diversity among Indo-Pacific peoples, dating to around 40,000 years ago.  The timing of this genetic diversity makes it highly unlikely that it came from sexual romps of humans with Neanderthals simply because those northern brutes were not into warm weather, unless there was a prehistoric spring break that has yet to be discovered.  That leaves several likely suspects, including Homo erectus and perhaps the diminutive Homo floresiensis, the dwarf hobbits of Flores Island legends that were kicking around 18,000 years ago. The dwarf  hobbits were three feet tall, had pot bellies, sloping foreheads and big feet.  Oh well, as they say, at closing time all of the girls start to look like models.

Now the hobbits, or the Ebu Gogo as they are called by the natives on Flores Island, are always a bit more problematic, just as they are in my novel Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot. There are some real issues to be addressed particularly as to how the much larger humans got it on with the three foot tall hobbits or why the hobbits would even let the such giants near them.  However, keep in mind that ancient Asian humans were much smaller than they are today and it was probably common for them to be less than five feet tall forty thousand years ago.  That’s less of incongruous disconnect in size than imagining today’s six foot tall human specimens dating these three foot midgets.

Now if you are a creationists it’s all good, because according to the Young Earthers, the world is only six thousand years and all of these different species -Neanderthals, Homo erectus and homo floresiensis- are actually just individual variations on the same human species.  Whether they be big-footed midgets like Homo floresiensis or robust chinless Neanderthals that were built like Arnold Swarchenegger to the creationists they are all Homo sapiens.

However, if you are a rational person believing in evolution and an earth a little older than six thousand years, this bizarre dating scenario does stretch the imagination.  Really, how do those first dates go? However, it does address the vexing question as to how Homo floresiensis  or the Ebu Gogo got to Flores Island in the first place.  After all, there was no land bridge for them to trudge across in Indonesia.  Perhaps they were ritualistic sex toys for an early human priesthood that insisted on ferrying the hobbits from island to island on early boats, sort of a prehistoric religious singles cruise.  Sounds weird and bizarre, but hey they were human right and sometimes we do some kinky stuff.  Apparently let’s get it on was a common refrain tens of thousands of years ago but on second thought I don’t think I could ever get that drunk.

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Shimkus: More Global Warming and Fundamentalist Folly

On April 6, 2009, In creationist, evolution, fundamentalist, Intelligent Design, politics, Rush Limbaugh, sarah palin, By Erik John Bertel

Fundamentalists are not just a threat to the study of evolution and biology but their special brand of ignorance can lead us to extinction. A congressman named Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) shows us how science and Fundamental ignorance can combine for some bad science and unintentional entertainment.   Here’s a quote:

“The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood… God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.”

Reminds me of the  ignorance in Afghanistan where President Hamid Karzai on Thursday signed into law legislation that okayed the husband’s raping of  their wives.  These are the guys Obama wants us to protect?  Ignorance like this you can’t make up and to think everybody blames the atheists for the sorry state of mankind.

Okay,  so here’s the Shimkus performance:

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04/worst_persons_in_the_world.php

Last week at a House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Shimkus tried to argue that the United States doesn’t need a cap-and-trade system to limit CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. I’m not a fan of cap-and-trade system either but  I do think it was folly years ago to rig the CAFE standards to the benefit of trucks and SUVs. That bit of forward looking thinking worked out so well for our overall energy independence and our auto industry, didn’t it?  Still this particular argument borders on the brain dead and here is Shimkus’s newest take on rapid rise of CO2 in our atmosphere:

SHIMKUS: It’s plant food. … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

Plant food? Even a child knows too much of anything can be bad for you and this is from a member of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.  Want to know how screwed we really are? Take a gander at this satellite photo showing a chunk of the ice shelf the size of Jamaica separating from the Antarctic and heading out to sea:

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45636000

But don’t worry it’s part of God’s plan! Why?  Shimkus said so!

For those that care my first novel in the Trilogy, Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot, is now available on Amazon for the Kindle Reader at a very reasonable price:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UE6MDY

Or you can read the novel for free on your Blackberry RIM on Wattpad just go Wattcode 125445!

 
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