Looniness a few clicks away...

I don't get around to Sadly, No! very much; a simple click here brings me to another portal into the lunacy of the religious right.

A click there reminds me to respond to some lunacy over at Carter's place on evolution.

On the first click, going "home" there's "Renew America," not to be confused with "http://www.reclaimamerica.org."
One of the er, uh, saving graces of the religious right is that they're running out of distinguishing brand names; like drugs and automobiles their advocacy groups are going to have to start using made up words, like the "Levitramerica" or something like that.



Anyway, on "Renew America," I'm greeted by Joseph Farah's visage, and an article that takes me to Wing Nut Daily. The reason there's no witch hunt for "which judges killed Terri" was because they're all in on it!. Maybe she was already basically, uh, dead, and it wasn't judges who killed her it was her eating disorder???

But wait, there's more at that first click!

On one hand, we have moderate Christians denying that Christians kill and torture innocent people. When they are forced to admit the truth, the argument switches to, "They are not following true Christianity." The problem is this: The terrorists are following true Christianity because Christianity is founded on fear and violence.

OK. I took a few mad-liberties with the text, but if this ain't projection on the part of ...



Barbara J. Stock...(?) then I don't know what is.

The rest of her column is so out in the ozone it's breathtaking.

There's more!



Now on to Carter's abortion...uh, post.

Stealth Naturalism -- Macht from Prosthesis notes that the proposed changes to the Kansas science teaching standards includes as part of the understanding of "major concepts of biological evolution":

"Biological evolution postulates an unpredictable and unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal. It also assumes that life arose from an unguided natural process." [emphasis added]

As Alvin Plantinga and Huston Smith already pointed out to the National Association of Biology Teachers,

Science presumably doesn't address such theological questions, and isn't equipped to deal with them. How could an empirical inquiry possibly show that God was not guiding and directing evolution?

The short answer is that the folks who wrote this were either fundamentalists in disguise or incompetent. Evolution does not necessarily imply abiogenesis, although that is increasingly looking likely. In addition, the prhase "no discernable direction or goal," is misleading nonsense. There is a direction or goal locally, that is, within one or a few generations: the preservation of a maximum amount of nucleic acid components for reproduction. That, combined with mutations and ecosystem give rise to evolution.

I suspect it's a fundamentalists in disguise thing; this doesn't look like text you'd find from the folks over at Panda's Thumb.