About evolution denialism

I posted this on an Amazon.com Science forum anti-evolution thread started by one of those Bible-thumping fundamentalists who do this over and over and over, saying the same wrong things without any sign of self-awareness.


This thread was started by someone who is not a scientist himself, has nothing whatsoever to do with science, is in fact hostile not just to evolution but to all of science, since all of science is based on objective observation and experiment, with its concepts disprovable/provable by experiment/observation/mathematics. You can't use scientific method a la carte; denying any scientific method is denying ALL scientific method.

But that just defends our turf. While these Christianists are attacking our turf, they're leaving their own turf--uncritical belief in their religion's tenets and teachers--unguarded.

Unguarded because in attacking us they have refuted that from whence they cameth: Christianity.

Pew surveys on religion repeatedly prove that the people who know most about religion in general and Christianity in particular are Jews, Mormons, and atheists. Atheists a tad more actually. The ones who know some are members of what used to be the mainstream faiths--Episcopalians (the churth of my upbringing), Lutherans, Methodists etc. The ones who know the least by a long shot are fundamentalists.

Which attacks like this thread and its ilk here demonstrate.

You cannot get to "starting an anti-science thread on a public science forum" from the priorities Christ is claimed to have told us to have in the Gospels.

Instead, it's clear to anyone who studies religion objectively that the fundamentalist movement in Christianity is a perversion of Christianity that has little in common with actual Christianity except for the name.

The insistence on the Bible being just a factual record instead of moral instruction expressed metaphorically--as its creators intended--subverts the moral instruction.

If you read the Gospels you'll see that Christ saw himself as a reformer of Judaism; that he believed the Jews had become mired down in the minutiae of their religion, substituting punctilious observance of meaningless ritual for actually living the beliefs of their religion--so much so that they had completely lost touch with their spiritual roots.

Hence Christ's parable of the Good Samaritan, where he pounds home the point that some/many of the self-styled People of the Book had strayed so far as to lose touch with their most fundamental (so to speak) principles--and that if they were to regain respect for those principles, they's have to abandon the idea that the only good people were members of their tribe, which is what their religion had become.

These attacks on science, such as this thread, do not have a religious source. It's a tribal source. Anyone who starts a thread like is isn't just no kind of scientist; he's also no kind of Christian, who has kept the name of the religion but tossed out everything else, swapping in his reactionary tribal beliefs.

So we shouldn't be telling these people how the elaborate fictions they copy and paste from Discovery Institute web pages are scientifically incorrect.

We should be telling these people they are theologically incorrect. That such attacks prove they aren't Christians, and demand of them something that shows how Christ's injunctions to love thy neighbor as thyself, to feed the poor, to cast the first stone only if you yourself are without sin, to respect the despised Samaritan and reject the puffed-up, self-satisfied, all hat no cattle Pharisees--how you can get from Christ's injunctions to starting threads like this.

We don't need to defend our beliefs, which are entirely consistent with their sources. They need to defend theirs.