Go read this post at Violent Acres. It’s hysterical!

Church services always started off quiet enough with the organ playing and parishioners quietly whispering greetings and shaking hands. But among the kids, there was a kind of electricity in the air. Half of the time, we could barely contain ourselves. We knew that if things went well, it was likely we’d see some crazy ass shit.

(via Pharyngula)

This week’s Cectic illustrates common fundie logic:

That’s not a literal quote, but it’s the logical extension of the latest wild claims of the Discovery Institute. In a recent hallucination on their propaganda website, the Discovery Institute screamed this headline:

Methodists Nail Darwinian Nazi Record, Repent U.S. Past, Warn About 21st Century Eugenics

That caught my attention. Have the Methodists succumbed to DI propaganda? Let’s take a look. The insane ramblings of the DI begin with:

The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler.

That sure sounds like the Methodists are laying some of the blame for the Holocaust on Darwin. We’ll check into that claim in a minute. Let’s see what else the DI says:

Yes, that would be the Nazi ideology that the Darwinists of today—and major media—pretend sprang on the world fresh from the head of Hitler…

No. That’s exactly the opposite of what we’ve been saying. I know the DI monitors all the major biology blogs, so they definitely know that we’ve said that what Hitler was doing was selective breeding. This is a technique that is almost as old as civilization. Since they’ve definitely read this fact in numerous blogs, the only conclusion we can come to is that the DI is deliberately lying. Making up facts is how the DI does “science”, so why should the way they argue be any different? Discovery Institute: No Facts Allowed!

The Methodists’ resolution—adopted by a vote of 836 to 28—apologizes for the denomination’s own failure to resist the eugenics movement in this country in the 20th century. They were not alone…. But no other mainline Protestant denomination has yet had the courage to admit to the racism of Darwinist eugenics and the supine attitude that leading American religious leaders, as well as the scientific establishment, adopted towards it.

It is true that many people bought into the eugenics movement in the early 20th century, and many scientists were among them. However, eugenics is not “Darwinism”. Darwin discovered how species evolve. He did not “discover” that killing six million Jews would produce a Master Race.

The Methodists’ Apology

Let’s turn now to what the Methodists have actually written in their resolution, “An Apology for Support of Eugenics”:

The study of eugenics did not begin with Hitler or his German scientists, but rather was first promoted by Sir Francis Galton, in England. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who expanded on Darwin’s theories and applied them to the human population.

That’s funny. This is the same document that the Discovery Institute read, but I don’t see anything about Charles Darwin creating eugenics. Sir Francis Galton took Darwin’s theories and misapplied them to human society. Darwin is not responsible for the actions of his cousin, and the Methodists are not claiming that he is.

Galton’s successor at the helm of the Eugenics Society was Major Leonard Darwin (1850- 1943), a son of Charles Darwin. Leonard Darwin, who ran the Eugenics Society until 1928, made the transition from positive to negative eugenics, and promoted plans for lowering the birthrate of the unfit.

Again, this is another one of Darwin’s relatives. That family was really into this stuff. But once again, don’t blame Chuck for his wayward son.

There’s a lot more to the Methodist document (and I encourage you to read it), but that’s pretty much all they had to say about Charles Darwin. Nowhere are they blaming Darwin for either eugenics or the Holocaust. Has the Discovery Institute no shame?

The Hindenberg caught fire and crashed 71 years ago today. That event has nothing to do with this blog. I just thought the above picture was funny.

We all know of the problems of the authenticity of the Bible. It was originally a loose conglomeration of fables by desert dwellers, passed down by oral tradition. These stories were a mishmash of original ideas, imported legends, fanciful embellishments, and gross exaggerations. Eventually, they started to get written down, by widely-scattered people. That left us with a lot of stories, many duplicates and variants, and even more contradictions. Eventually, somebody had to sit down and figure out which books belonged, which version of those books belonged, which didn’t, and what to do about all of those contradictions.

This process happened at least twice. The first time was by the Jews, to compile the Hebrew Bible (later called the “Old Testament” by the holier-than-thou Christians). The second time was by those snooty Christians, around 325 C.E., because Constantine ordered 50 copies of the Bible. At that time, there wasn’t one unified set of stories. Kind of hard to deliver to the emperor 50 copies of something that you don’t even have one copy of. The priests had to quickly get together and figure out what to include and what to throw away. Both scholarship and politics figured heavily in this process. Thus, the Bible is a book of tall tales written by committee. Divinely inspired, my ass.

It would be bad enough if the Bible had stopped mutating like a bad sci-fi movie monster by the time it was originally canonized in 325 C.E. But no. These were the days before the printing press, so every time you needed a Bible, you had to find some monk to hand-copy another one for you. Many errors, omissions, and deliberate insertions crept into the book as it progressed through the centuries, giving us today thousands of variants.

Along the way, various influential people with one particular ax or another to grind decided they wanted a different version, so they commissioned their own committees to create their own new versions.

Quite a mess.

Finding a Less-Error-Filled Version

If you’re going to read the Bible—either because you believe this crap, or because you just want to see what crap the credulous actually believe—you’re going to want to find a Bible that is as close as we can get to the original stories. You don’t want to be reading fantastic, incredible stories that were put in later. No. You want your fantastic, incredible stories to be pure, unadulterated fiction!

Paul Tobin has an extensive web site called The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager. He has dozens of pages about the Bible and its history. It’s all very heavily footnoted, so you can check up on his claims. The writing sometimes gets a little dense, so it’s not always a breezy read.

Among his many pages is one titled “Not All Versions Are Created Equal”. He starts by telling us that there are two major problems with Bible translations:

The source documents. As there is not a single extant original (or autograph) copy of any of the books in the Bible, the reliability of the translation is affected directly by the quality of the source documents. For instance, the King James Version…, which was first published in 1611, is no longer considered reliable since it was not based on ancient texts. Modern versions are based on newly discovered, more ancient texts [as] well as scientific textual studies. So in general, more modern versions are more reliable than older ones.

As fundamentalism grows, the second issue, that of theological preconception becomes very important.This is what we will be looking at in depth on this page.

So here’s Tobin’s list of techniques that fundie translators use to produce a Bible that says what they want:

• Removing Contradictions by Quoting or Using Less Authoritative Texts
• Removing Difficulties by Translating in “Soft Focus”
• Removing Reprehensible Passages by Mistranslation
• Leaving Errors in Translation Unchanged
• Adding Words into the Bible Text

He gives some strong examples of each of these on his site. Go check it out.

Examples of bad Bibles, with particular fundie agendas, are The Book, The Living Bible, and The New International Version (NIV). I know I’ve encountered the NIV.

If you want to get yourself a better Bible, Tobin says that the best version available today is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). It has the best scholarship behind it, and they tried to translate as bias-free as they could.

Of course, the NRSV is still a Bible. As the saying goes, that’s like putting lipstick on a pig. (No disrespect to pigs is intended!)

I don’t think we need to worry about Expelled. Ben Stein is doing a perfectly fine job of destroying its credibility all by himself.

Stein was on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson last Friday. This is what he said (minus the unfunny banter with Ferguson):

Darwinism doesn’t explain the laws of gravity. Darwinism doesn’t explain the laws of thermodynamics. …And we don’t want people to be fired if they say that the planets stay in their orbits maybe by something other than Darwinism. …His followers claim it explains everything including astronomy.

Update 4/29/08

It occurred to me that the above transcript is so absurd that many of you will doubt its veracity. Fortunately for us, we have YouTube! One quick look found the segment, which I have embedded here. You also might want to go by the actual YouTube page and read the comments. It’s about an eight-minute video, and I’ve given you the transcript of most of the relevant content. It’s amazing how little information is conveyed in a modern American entertainment program (if you can call Craig Ferguson entertaining). Anyway, enjoy! (The drug references add a surreal irony to this whole embarrassment.)

I found a good blog called Playing Chess with Pigeons, by Troy Britain. He mostly focusses on evolution and creationism. He has a lot of good articles. You should check it out.

What really caught my fancy was his explanation of the blog’s title. I’m going to reprint most of it here, with my comments:

The title comes (apparently) from a very amusing description of what it is like to debate creationists about evolution Scott D. Weitzenhoffer made in a comment on Amazon.com regarding Eugenie Scott’s book Evolution Vs. Creationism: An introduction (2004):

Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.

I love it! That’s a great description. My blog has received its share of creationists, and the metaphor is pretty accurate. Troy continues:

Man, have I been there. It’s not just that antievolutionists are often completely ignorant of evolutionary theory, the state of the evidence, and the history of science. There have also been numerous times where I have been debating an antievolutionist or responding to their claims that I would have to take time to explain their own arguments to them. [emphasis added]

“No, you meant to say ‘Piltdown Man’ was based on a human skull and an orangutan jaw, not on a pig’s tooth. That was ‘Nebraska Man’ and it was based on a peccary tooth.”

That sure sounds familiar! Not only do they get it wrong, but they all seem to get it wrong in the same way!

Troy finishes with:

Add to this their constantly moving goal-posts, their tendency towards scatter-shot (keep throwing stuff against the wall and hope that something sticks) mode of argument, their constant digressions to irrelevancies, non sequiturs and other logical fallacies, and it gets pretty breathtaking.

I was going to flag a few examples of that from my blog, but that pretty much covers every creationist who visits us.

The latest Skeptics’ Circle is up over at Andrea’s Buzzing About. There are a lot of good articles on a variety of topics.

One that I found enlightening was Seth Manapio’s analysis of Mein Kampf, in which he looks for evidence that Hitler was taking his marching orders directly from Darwin. Scandalous!