While watching this video, try counting Kirk Cameron’s lies. Just incredible. What does it tell you when someone is so utterly insecure about his own arguments that he lies about his opponent’s positions?
Richard Dawkins has a post on this new wacko edition of Darwin’s Origin, and a suggestion that concerned citizens go pick one up and chop out and throw away the 50-page intro.
I think a better alternative would be to one-up them. Get a grassroots-funded print run of an unmolested Origin of Species, without any editorializing. Have (perhaps via Dawkins' site) materials for campus groups to distribute with the book pointing them to not only evidence for evolution (books, websites, etc), but also to creationist arguments and rebuttals of them (such as Talk Origins).
Completely open, completely honest. And with an unadulterated Origin for recipients.
That way we're not in any way censoring the creationists, and so we're not giving them any fuel for their paranoid delusions. And at the same time, we're celebrating one of the greatest moments in science. Win-win.
I can't help but laugh at Cameron's moronic argument: at the top 50 universities, 61% of psychologists and biologists self-identify as either atheist or agnostic. Ergo, they must be brainwashing the children, which explains the recent rise in atheism. It couldn't possibly be that a scientific mind rejects the idea of god(s) for lack of evidence.
I'm also reminded of Frank Schaeffer (former fundamentalist Christian) who appeared on Rachel Maddow's show. I saw part of the transcript at the Friendly Atheist:
And that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America.
We have a big slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back, they look forward to Armageddon, good news is bad news to them.
When we talk about the Left Behind series of books that I talk about in my book Crazy for God, what we’re really talking about is a group of people who are resentful because they know they’ve been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature.
The rest of us our getting on with our lives; these people are standing on a hilltop waiting for the end. And this is a dangerous group of people to have as neighbors and they’re our national neighbors and this is the source of all these insanities that we see leveled at the president.
One way or another they go back to this little evangelical subculture… it’s a disaster.
Maddow: … How do you work to move people off of that position? It doesn’t seem like facts are relevant in trying to move people away from these beliefs.
Schaeffer: You don’t work to move them off this position. You move past them.
Look, a village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot. It’s as simple as that, and we have to understand: we have a village idiot in this country. It’s called fundamentalist Christianity.
And, until we move past these people, and let me add as a former life-long Republican, until the Republican leadership has the guts to stand up and say it would be better not to have a Republican party than to have a party that caters to the village idiot, uh, there’s gonna be no end in sight.
The next thing they’ll do is accuse Obama of being the anti-Christ and then who knows what comes next? On and on it goes.
There is no end to this stuff. Why? Because this subculture has as it’s fundamentalist faith, that they distrust facts per se.
They believe in a young earth, six-thousand-years-old, with dinosaurs cavorting with human beings. They think that whether it’s economic news or news from the Middle East, it all has to do with the end of time and Christ’s return.
Sorry, I forgot to include the html codes. The transcript can be found here:
http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/09/17/frank-schae…
Geez Louise. I love how prefacing a book with 50 pages of outright lies somehow counts as spreading the truth. I don't know how many of these Comfort hopes to distribute, but I'd love to see rational campus crusades getting as many as they can, ripping out all of Comfort's pages, and distributing only the unadulterated portions (if there are any left! Do we know if Ray has added comments and footnotes throughout?)
One would think that someone may have written a better book on the subject in the last 150 years. Arguing about adulterated copies of The Origin reinforces the Creationists claim that Darwin is revered and worshiped by his blind Followers. The Origin appeared about 100 years after the idea of speciation was first published, and modern biology has gone enormously further than Darwin could have with the idea.
Let's try to make sure that these dumbed down Darwin tomes are balanced by Coyne's Why Evolution Is True. Or pick another modern explanation of how much we now know that Darwin didn't, and why his basic theory is so much stronger, now.
Cameron and Comfort can't possibly be as ignorant as they appear in their videos and on Comfort's website.
Or perhaps I am mistaken, and they really are that dumb – fundamentalist thinking may well damage the neuronal structure of the brain ….
[Just found your site and a wonderful place to visit !]
Ray Comfort has been busy handing out his special edition of "Origin of Species" (an edition missing four chapters, and including a somewhat plagiarized introduction). http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/11/23/ori…
The Onion features Kirk Cameron on this hypothetical magazine cover: http://www.theonion.com/content/magazine/three_em…