Monday, April 7, 2008

a thorough debunking of a bad site shall be posted, but until then...

Here is a thorough debunking of a few small points on this site

Remember Lizard's test: Who has to lie in order to make their point?"

The first claim I shall tear apart until its biblical core shatters is this: Claim CA005.1: that Darwin was racist. The evolutionist and creationist responses
are listed below. Then, I shall demonstrate the creationist's lies

(The evolutionist claims are numbered and in blue boxes, the creationist's are not, and are frequently puncuated with numbers referencing my argument
for each sub-point

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1. Virtually all Englishmen in Darwin's time viewed blacks as culturally and intellectually inferior to Europeans. Some men of that time (such as Louis Agassiz, a staunch creationist) went so far as to say they were a different species. Charles Darwin was a product of his times and no doubt viewed non-Europeans as inferior in ways, but he was far more liberal than most: He vehemently opposed slavery (Darwin 1913, especially chap. 21), and he contributed to missionary work to better the condition of the native Tierra del Fuegans. He treated people of all races with compassion.


Talk.Origins is attempting a whitewash. It seeks to downplay what Darwinists themselves do not hesitate to use against anyone who opposes them (hence the Agassiz inclusion in their quote): the race card. But since they cannot deny that Darwin was a racist they earnestly attempt to rationalize it by saying "so was everyone else."

Talk.Origins has subtly confused two types of racism: "White man's burden" racism which sees blacks as inferior and to be cared for and supported by the stronger white races, and Darwinian racism, which sees blacks and inferior and fit only for extermination. While many creationists of Darwin's day held to the former view, Darwinists saw blacks as destined for extermination. Darwin wrote:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla (Darwin 1887:156). (1)

Charles Darwin (along with Thomas Huxley) was openly racist (Milton 1997:186,277). Human evolution had no evidence in support except observed "similarity" to living apes (Wells 2000:216). After rejecting God AS the Creator, Darwin and company THEN "saw" the "similarity" between Africans and apes, hence the idea of human evolution was conceived. (2)

The origin of the idea that humans evolved came about when the God of the Bible was rejected, THEN from this departure, Darwin and his cohorts "saw" the "similarity" and the theory was born - out of their racist minds. Notice AFTER God is rejected then racist human evolution theory developed.

Benjamin Wiker said that according to Darwin, the European race, following the inevitable laws of natural selection, will emerge as the distinct species, human being, and all the transitional forms—such as the gorilla, chimpanzee, Negro, Australian aborigine and so on—will be extinct (Wiker 2002:250). (

John C. Burhan:

Before 1859 (before Darwin's Origin), many scientists had questioned whether blacks were of the same species as whites, but they had no scientific basis for that notion. Things changed once Darwin presented his racist evolutionary schema. Darwin stated that African-Americans could not survive competition with their white near-relations, let alone being able to compete with the white race. According to Darwin, the African was inferior because he represented the missing-link" between ape and Teuton. (Burham 1972:506)."

Talk.Origins' characterization of Agassiz as a "staunch creationist" is misleading. While Agassiz rejected evolution, he did not hold to a Biblically literal creation. Firstly, he ignored the obvious indication in Genesis that black Africans (who he considered to be animals) are descended of Ham, son of Noah. Exodus reports that Moses himself married a Cushite woman, a cross-racial marriage, which Agassiz viewed as immoral and unnatural. However, in the Exodus account, Jehovah upholds Moses's marriage as fully moral and acceptable[1](3). Agassiz also rejected the Biblical chronology, believing instead that the Earth had suffered a number of consecutive universally destructive catastrophes, of which the Global flood was only one, and not the last. Explaining his rejection of many aspects of Biblical creationism, Agassiz wrote, "Naturalists have a right to consider the questions growing out of men's physical relations as merely scientific questions, and to investigate them without reference to either politics or religion." (p. 171, The Panda's Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould). In fact, the Biblical account leaves absolutely no room for Agassiz's bizarre belief that black Africans are not human.

2. The mention of "favoured races" in the subtitle of Origin of Species merely refers to variations within species which survive to leave more offspring. It does not imply racism.


A case can be made that this is not true. See CreationWiki's response to Darwin's work refers to "preservation of favoured races"


3. The views of Darwin, or of any person, are irrelevant to the fact of evolution. Evolution is based on evidence, not on people's opinions.


Whilst Charles Darwin's being racist does not prove that evolution itself is racist, the fact that many supporters of evolution were racist and justified their racism with evolution is instructive. (4)


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(1) This could be misquoted, and indeed sounds like it is. Let us see...

Wait a minute...I checked the book. It's not there! At least not on the page they mention. My god. They may have lied! I doubt it, they probably misquoted it.

(Actually, it turns out that this is true. But, Reason 3 of the evolutionist point makes this irrelevant) This may have even changed as Darwin aged, as he apparently seems to have campaigned for Tierra del Fuegan rights.

(2) Creationists: please explain this further.

(3) Just because the bible says something does not make it acceptable.

(4). Instructive of what? This is so vaguely stated as to be impossible to get a hint of what is supposedly implied here. This is a pathetic way to attack the core argument. You see, all the other arguments used by the evolutionists are logically fallacious, and are simply following the creationist example of using ad hominem attacks against evolution. Argument 3 is the most logical of these arguments, and the creationists so far have not even attacked it.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

On a movie

I saw several good movies recently. The most recent was "Horton Hears a Who".

It was funny, humorous, and best of all, I detected some parallels in my philosophy.

I saw it with my autistic younger sister, my older sister, and my girlfriend.

The first and main instance was the villian of the film, the kangaroo. She showed perfectly a person blinded by her own valuing of superstition and her lack of open thought. The arguments she used ("for the children", an argument used by the Christian Right; "he is corrupting the minds of our children", an argument that led to a certain man drinking hemlock; and "if one cannot see, hear or feel something..." a blatant reminder of her stupidity, for what does cause disease?) were perfect examples of common travesties of non thinking. Suess himself was a great thinker. A clear parody of arms races can be seen in "The Butter Battle Book" "The Lorax", a book blocked by the most malicious of forces, has a great environmental message, and that would probably be picketed and boycotted by all non-thinking lumberjack families worldwide, (as the book has been, and still is) if it ever became a movie. "The Sneetches" contains comments about racism, and it follow-up; tails contain even more assorted meanings. In some ways, Dr. Seuss is, as Ayn rand defined, a Romantic poet, in that his works have lived long and are now immortal. Unlike most writers, who write about the times, he writes about the ageless. His books will never die, so long as humanity exists.

The movie did have its flaws, however. The main flaw was the dance and pop music. Since pop music is, again, not Romantic as Ayn Rand defined, it is a serious flaw in any film. Instrumental music, like that used in The Lord Of The Rings, would have been better, and the stupid but somewhat funny parody of anime was needless

Well, my dog recently had a dewclaw problem, so she needed to have a bath More on that later...

Saturday, February 23, 2008

The horrible properties of "Please think of the children" , a phrase so commonly used as to be revolting

Why is "Please think of the children" such a bad phrase? Because of the fact that it has been used so many times to justify the most heinous acts in history. A long list follows of these crimes.


  • the Communications Decency Act, or, The Act that nearly killed the internet. Apparently, this act, whick survives as an act only in a few pieces and fragments, was passed to protect children from pornography (and no, I am referring to regular, non-juvenile pornography.) It was marketed by several groups, but mainly the Christian Right. Read more at this link

  • The banning of The Tin Drum in Oklahoma City by a judge on the behest of the Oklahoma Council for American Families (or fascists, as Lizard says, but anyway...) This group got it banned on charges of child pornography.

  • This horrible, horrible, very smelly site. It is called the "ChildCare Action Project", and it is comprised of easily offended Christian loons who are offended by everything. They find evil movies like Matilda, Harry Potter, and The Golden Compass.

  • The Comic Code Authority, created at the behest of Neo-Victorian prudish nitwits (or 1950's Americans) after outcry over the "large amount" of horror and gore in comic books. This killed several unique titles and many companies and turned the books entirely into moralistic propoganda.
More to come...

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

A review of "The Black hole" and other films. Plus, a review of the worst offences on freedom of speech of all time.

This movie (and I cannot detect cheesiness in movies very well, due to my Asperger's) was absolutely horrible. Though it had a certain quality about it at the end, which I shall call "sōgådün" in a language I am creating, which makes one almost want to be inside the film, it is filled with bad science, including meteor showers that glow bright electric red, a strange ending clearly ripping off on the 2001ASO ending, and an even stranger ability to breathe in the vicinity of a black hole while in open space! Let me nitpick this movie....

It starts in space, with a spaceship appearing from offscreen. (The models, I admit, are very well done, as are the scenes.) We hear several voices, all male, and a human-like, but partially altered, voice, talking. This progresses to scene inside a spaceship, where we see the source of the strange voice, a robot named V.I.N.C.E.N.T . The Robot is quite silly looking. It has human-like eyes.
They suddenly discover that they are near a black hole. They also discover a ship in orbit around it. They identify it as the Cygnus, a ship manufactured by the United States They go Near it, discover that there is no gravity from the black hole around it, and then move out of its range, encontering the Black holes gravity. After they come back, they discover that there is a person on board the ship (because the lights go on) and they enter it. On board, they are met by the ships captain, and his robot, Maximilian, along with other, sillier robots. Maximillian looks rather scary to some, but is for some reason normal to me. They get a grand tour of the ship, and a few of them go on "unescorted excursions" through the ship, During which they discover another robot, older and more beat-up than VINCENT, speaking in a southern drawl, and a limping robot, among o other things.

After Mr. Good Candidate for a New Singer for Little Children(a.k.a.VINCENT) (his real voice provided by some-old-spoiled-celebrity-jackass named Roddy Mcdowall, who is now, unfortunately (?), dead) says a few folk sayings, they leave him among other robots, and off they go to dinner. During dinner, the robots compete against the ship's robots in a sharpshooting match, saying many cheddary and marshmellowy lines during the duration of this excruciatingly slow Camembert-filled tent display (Camembert is a very good type of French cheese.) Our robots, of course, (since this is a Disney movie, and no one, apart from the villians and a few minor characters, must lose) win. And so on....

After several boring explanations, the ships captain makes his intentions clear: the visitors are to accompany the Cygnus into the black hole, through which he will try to enter a new universe, unexplored by man. The visitors, thinking him mad decide to leave on their ship. A complicated (but one dimensional) plot follows, which ends with the four visitors and the robots alive and the two other visitors dead and the cygnus sent to another dimension destroyed by the captain's weapons. A meteor shower ensues, damaging the Cygnus. After the meteor shower, the men enter the "probe ship" and leave, just as the Cygnus falls apart. They however, discover that the probe ship is programmed to follow the route of the captain, through the black hole They enter the black hole, and inside it they discover a scene so "strange" that it "defies explanation".

Why is it strange, you say? Because it is a corny rip-off of 2001's ending The ships captain goes to hell, and the heroes are led through heaven by a silhouette of a garland (supposedly an angel) and the crew come out in another universe. Sōgådün kicks in.

Other movies are:

I Am Legend-This was a good and scary movie, with a nice albeit religious ending. See it and be moved.

The Mist-Very scary It has a plot so scary that I shall not describe it. Go get it on DVD when it comes out

Now, the worst offenses on free speech.

1. The banning of new cybercafes in China, and the creation of new boot camps for computer addicts in China.

2. The prosecution of holocaust deniers in Germany. (Yes, absolutely everyone has a right to free speech, even those that society abhors or finds repugnant. I do not care how many people hate the Nazis, and I despise them, utterly and completely, but all viewpoints have a right to be spoken, criticized and supported.)

3. The banning of Falun Gong in China.

4. Tiananmen Square Massacre (link to Wikipedia link to Chinese wikipedia)

These are NOT in order of severity.

Well, the spyware on this computer was eliminated ages ago, so no more worrying about this window closing. Goodbye, and I hope to write soon.

(Update 5/21/08: I edited the posts for grammar and to increase sarcasm.)

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Hello

Well, I finally did it, I finally started a blog! At last, a place to record and share my thoughts and ideas... and I have so much to do! (with this blog, of course! Rare are the days where I feel those high levels of stress that most American suburbanite and exurbanite families face every day.) I shall first make a list of topics to discuss, and, when I learn more HTML, I will finally improve upon this blog's appearence so that it actually looks like a person designed it, instead of looking like a predesigned template or (ughh!) a cookie cutter web page. At least I don't have to inhabit a housing developement and live in a house that neither demonstrates individuality nor solid building.

I am currently writing this blog on a Dell with Windows XP. The computer is so filled with trojans, viruses, spyware, and adware, that the default Internet Explorer browser is no longer fit for Internet use. Pop-ups appear even when one is not surfing the web at all, and sometimes even when one is not connected to the Internet. Even Firefox sometimes (though much less often and with much less severity) is effected.

I will post more soon. Feel free to comment. (oh dear, a nasty peice of spyware just reared its ugly head)