Guess what! Michael Edmonson, who worked on the Expelled movie, has taken credit for the creation of the hilarious Beware the Believers video. Bloggasm has the scoop.
And for those who haven’t yet seen the video, here you go:
Whether you side with science or Intelligent Design, I think we can all agree that I really like this video.
Casey Luskin did return my email. He said he’d been travelling, hence the delay. I won’t post it, since I haven’t asked for permission and he is quite polite and gentle. In a nutshell, he claims I misunderstood him. He was only trying to rebut Dawkins’ claim that ID proponents only (Luskin’s word) mention God as the Designer in private. Now, maybe, since I apparently have a history of misunderstanding, I’m also misunderstanding Dawkins, because I can’t find where his article says that.
But, oh well. At the moment I am quite tired and am in no form to reply, so I will put that off for a while, if I feel like continuing. I just wanted, in the interest of full disclosure, to make sure everyone knows that Casey did not ignore my email, but that his response was still not convincing to me.
After Casey responded to my email on Monday, I sent him a response which outlined why I thought he was being dishonest.
Casey,
Thank you for forgiving me. I was admittedly a jerk, and have no way of knowing what your motives really are. Also, thank you for responding to my email.
Here is what is happening as I see it:
1. Stein asks Dawkins if there’s any way ID could be correct.
2. Dawkins says that it could only be true if aliens seeded earth with the first life.
3. Stein ridicules Dawkins.
4. Dawkins explains that ID proponents often mention that aliens could well have been responsible for the design they see in life.
5. You write a post significantly downplaying the fact that they (especially Dembski) say this.If Dawkins is ridiculed for bringing up aliens, why shouldn’t Dembski be ridiculed?
I think it’s wrong to say that Dawkins “gives away the store”. I don’t see how anyone could get that from what Dawkins said. If aliens seeded the first life on earth, the theory of evolution would still hold true.
Also, you cite your Google search as if that’s evidence that ID proponents rarely if ever say that aliens could have been the Designer. But your search was for a phrase in quotes. That’s the only way that Dawkins’ article could have been the only result. Dawkins wasn’t trying to quote anyone directly, he was simply saying that this is the kind of thing ID proponents have been known to say. I don’t see the point of searching for the phrase in quotes, except to dishonestly misrepresent the search results. Please explain this to me.
The links I sent show the kinds of things you would have found if you had searched in earnest for evidence of ID proponents citing the possibility of alien designers.
On an unrelated note, I work in SODO, not far from you guys. Isn’t it nice how the weather turned around today?
Jason
That was two days ago. I have yet to recieve a reply. He was pretty quick to answer my email when for all he knew I was just some raving lunatic. What’s going on now? Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that I work in SODO? Could that be construed as creepy? I was trying to be genteel. Maybe he got very busy after I sent my reply? I don’t know.
This actually makes me angry.
Today I read a blog post by Casey Luskins in which he lies his creationist titty ass off. As I’ve said before, Win Ben Stein’s Integrity makes fun of Richard Dawkins for saying that the only way Intelligent Design could be true is if space aliens, who themselves had evolved, had seeded earth with the first life.
Dawkins responded to this ridicule with an op-ed, saying basically what I said before, only better.
Now that the truth is out there, Luskin tries to deny, or at least de-emphasize, the the things his colleagues have said. How does he try to prove that Dawkins is wrong? He googles a phrase from Dawkins’ op-ed, “For all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space.” With quotes around it. Let me repeat that. WITH QUOTES AROUND IT!!!!
I can’t include a picture of Luskin in this post, because I am at work, and Luskin is A GIANT EMEFFING TIT.
Luskin thinks it’s telling that he only gets one search result for his query. But Dawkins wasn’t quoting anyone specifically. He was merely showing the kind of thing ID proponents say!
The truth is that ID proponents often say things like that. Especially William Dembski. They have to, otherwise they’d be confused for creationists (they are). What can I do when I catch someone is such an outright blatant lie? All I can do is tell you people. And email Casey.
Casey,
In the blog post [in the subject line], you clearly misrepresent the truth, or you just don’t know how to use Google. In any case, you should probably watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=6j_SD1EgcUI Or read this: http://www.discovery.org/a/1283
Or read Dembski’s The Design Inference.
Or stop lying.
–
Jason J Brunet
There was another option I didn’t suggest because I didn’t want to be considered part of the The Machine. And that option is to shut the hell up.
Edit: Casey responded to my email, and actually called me out for accusing him of lying, as it is a serious thing. And he’s right. I apologized to him by email, and even though I don’t think he’s read this post, I am apologizing here for the things I said about him in this post and in the comments. I don’t think it would be right to take it down, since I said it and have to own up to it. But from now on I will be endeavoring NOT to make fun of him. But I still do think he’s wrong and have more than an inkling that he’s not being completely honest.
In the new documentary Win Ben Stein’s Integrity, Stein asks biologist Richard Dawkins if it’s at all possible that intelligent design could be true. Dawkins said that the only way ID could be right is if extraterrestrials, who themselves had evolved via natural selection, had seeded the early Earth with simple organisms.
“Aliens??? ALIENS?????” Stein scoffed. The rubes in the theater I was in cracked the eff up. That silly Richard Dawkins! What a poon!
I, however, turned to my wife and said, “If only these people knew.” The Discovery Institute, always quick to deny that they are creationists, have been forthcoming with the fact that the Designer may have been aliens, and not God. In fact, William Dembski, a Discovery Institute fellow featured prominently in the movie, has this to say about it:
“But consider a related thought experiment. Tomorrow space travelers show up loaded with unbelievably advanced technology. They tell us (in English) that they’ve had this technology for hundreds of millions of years and give us solid evidence of it (perhaps by pointing to some star cluster hundreds of millions of light years away whose arrangement signifies a message that confirms the aliens’ claim). Moreover, they demonstrate to us that with this technology they can atom by atom and molecule by molecule assemble the most complex organisms.”
Aliens??? ALIENS???? Yet again, the makers of Win Ben Stein’s Integrity show themselves to be dishonest douchebags, and the average creationist has shown himself to be an ignorant credulant with an inordinate fear of Google.
I recently read this post on David W. Irish’s blog. Basically, David tried to comment on an article about evolution written by Ray Comfort on Worldview Weekend, an ultra-fundamentalist crazy conservative Christian (they claim) website. Ray’s article claimed that there are no transitional fossils, which, if evolution were true, there should be plenty. Unfortunately for Ray, the truth (not that he cares) is that there most certainly are tons of transitional fossils.
David’s comment, which you can read on his blog, was thoughtful and talked about several specific transitional fossils. To his surprise and dismay, a few hours after submitting his comment, David recieved this email:
Brannon@worldviewweekend.com”
1:20 pm (15 minutes ago)
to priscus.forem@gmail.com
date Apr 15, 2008 1:20 PM
subject your feedbackyour feedback was rejected because it was soooo lame.
If you really think there is even one transitional fossil then you should go find it and put it on E-bay because the leading evolutionist have admitted they do not have even one. I could send you their quotes and the books in which they wrote this if you really wanted to be educated…but I don’t think you are interested in being educated but in repeating lies so you can keep believing lies.
Very sad.
Next time you offer feedback try not to write fairy tales and it might get accepted.
Thank you.
Well holy cow. Sounds like someone is afraid of facts.
More than a little angered by this, I went to the same article and tried to leave a comment along the lines of, “I would gladly list some transitional fossils here, but we’ve already seen that the administrators of this website are afraid of the truth. I’m looking at you, Brannon!” A little acerbic, I admit.
Today, I got this email:
from Brannon@worldviewweekend.com
to jason@jeffthefish.com,
date Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 9:50 AM
subject your feedbackhide details 9:50 AM (5 hours ago)
Reply
your feedback was rejected because it was soooo lame.
If you really think there is even one transitional fossil then you should go find it and put it on E-bay because the leading evolutionist have admitted they do not have even one. I could send you their quotes and the books in which they wrote this if you really wanted to be educated…but I don’t think you are interested in being educated but in repeating lies so you can keep believing lies.
Very sad.
Next time you offer feedback try not to write fairy tales and it might get accepted.
Thank you.
Huh. Interesting. A little miffed, I sent this reply:
Brannon, you should be ashamed of yourself. I will be praying for you. You need to grow up. I was always under the impression that Christians had an obligation to the truth. You, apparently, have the opposite obligation.
And if this is your official rejection email, your organization also has a lot of growing up to do. I know I am not the first person to get this exact same email response from you:
http://priscusforem.blogspot.com/2008/04/email-reply-from-christian-worldview.html
I also went to the Worldview Weekend homepage to look for a general contact address. I thought, as David W. Irish did, that perhaps Brannon was some punk kid stepping out of his bounds and being a poor representation of his organization, not to mention poor Jesus! The email address I found was info@worldviewweekend.
Then I got this email from Brannon:
to Jason J Brunet jason@jeffthefish.com,
date Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 10:20 AM
subject Re: your feedbackReply
tough…deal with it…it is my site, I built it, I run it and I will do whatever I please with it. Don’t like it then don’t come to my site, start your own site for the 2 people that would come to read it.
I don’t have to print your fairy tales about anything if I don’t want to. If you want to confuse people with your lies about transitional fossils then do it on your own site.
BTW, I like how you still have not answered the question. Tell me where there is even one transitional fossil? Who holds it, where is it kept, where is a picture of it? In what publication is this transitional fossil written about? Remember a transitional fossil is one kind changing into another. Not mico-evolution. (Are you keeping up with me here on the terms? I don’t want to go over your head. Here is a little information for you from one of my books.
Dr. Colin Patterson, an evolutionist with the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book but did not include a single picture of a transitional fossil. When someone wrote him to ask why this was the case, Dr. Patterson responded:
I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? . . . As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.40
Stephen Jay Gould is perhaps one of the most well-known evolutionists, and he, too, recognizes the problem: “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”41 Gould also states, “I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.”42
Wah wah wee wah! What a prick! This is how I found out he owns the website and the company. I think he may be a one man operation. His ego is certainly big enough.
To this I replied:
Yeah, don’t worry. This will all be going on my website where both people can see the kind of people Creationists are.
To answer your question: Pakicetus, Ambulocetus, Rhodocetus. That’s three. Also, every therapsid. That’s hundreds.
The rest of the email exchange went as follows:
Brannon: great..thanks for the promotion.
Jason: Don’t mention it. You have one of the most entertaining sites on the web
Brannon: dude, I own the company…who do you think is going to stop me?
Jason: I didn’t know you owned the company until you responded to my complaint to the info address. I don’t think anyone is going to stop you. I’m certainly not trying to. I’m just trying to educate people.
Brannon: nothing wrong with that..it is a free country.
So there you have it. Brannon Howse is a tremendous jerk. His website claims to teach people to think and live like a Christian. How would he know where to start? I think it’s more likely that Brannon is a huckster and a fraud who just wants to make some money on the backs of the true believers. And now there are two more people in the world who have seen him for what he is. Not to mention poor Jesus.
EDIT: I forgot to point out that Brannon ignored the fact that I provided examples of transitional fossils.
The National Center for Science Education pushed live its new website today, called Expelled Exposed, which exposes the lies in the upcoming “documentary” Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed “starring” Ben Stein.
Avoid science museums at all cost! You might learn science and that would be bad for our lil theory!
They write stuff like this and then claim they’re doing science. Babies! They’re babies!
via Something Awful. Thanks, Kevin!
Verandoug, wdjhfdhdj4dh, if you are reading this, I hope this clears things up for you:
If you’ve got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs — rethinking the world isn’t an option. - PZ Myers
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