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Books are one of our greatest resources, but many times in history books have been written which are misleading or untrue. In some cases this has lead to widescale death and destruction and evil governmental regimes.
This is a list of ten of the worst books of this type – books that have done more harm than good. The common thread in all of these books is deception – invariably not intentional, but the consequences are the same regardless.
I have intentionally left off some of the more obvious choices – as they will almost certainly come up in the comments. This list is in no particular order.
On the list because: It inflamed witch hunts across Europe
Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witchraft) was a manual for witch hunters and judges to catch witches and stamp them out. It came out just prior to the protestant reformation and it was one of the most popular books amongst the reformers who were wanting to smash “evil” out of their countries. Between 1487 and 1520, twenty editions of the Malleus were published, and another sixteen editions were published between 1574 to 1669. This book single-handedly launched centuries of witch hunts.
On the list because: it turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who traveled to Samoa to answer the questions on sexuality posed in America in the 1920s (particularly with reference to women). Unfortunately for Mead, the youths she interviewed in Samoa told her wild tales of sexual promiscuity and Mead reported it all as fact. One of the girls later said: “She must have taken it seriously, but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true.” If challenged by Mead, the girls would not have hesitated to tell the truth, but Mead never questioned their stories. According to Wikipedia: “The use of cross-cultural comparison to highlight issues within Western society was highly influential, and contributed greatly to the heightened awareness of Anthropology and Ethnographic study in the USA.” Interestingly, Mead was a highly regarded academic and had a large part in the formulation of the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer (Church of England).
On the list because: it was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
The Prince is a treatise meant for rulers who had shed all scruples – to a point that they might see evil as potentially more beneficial to society than good. Machiavelli hoped to start a revolution in the hearts of his readers, and he certainly achieved that. He proudly stated things that others before him had only dared to whisper, and he whispered things that had not even been considered. According to Machiavelli “it is not necessary for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities [merciful, faithful, humane, honest, and religious], but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them. Nay, I dare say this, that by having them and always observing them, they are harmful; and by appearing to have them they are useful.” Some of the people inspired by this book are Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Napoleon I of France.
On the list because: it helped spread Hitler’s genocidal anti-Semitism
In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined his racist plan for a new Germany which included mass murder of Jews, and a war against France and Russia to make living space for Germans. At the time of publication the book was largely ignored, but once Hitler rose to power that changed. It is believed that over 10 million copies were in circulation in 1945. The book is largely influenced by The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon (1895) which suggested propaganda as a means to controlling the irrational behavior of crowds. In addition, Hitler drew on the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion to give support for the need for his anti-semitic plans. Hitler speaks of “The Jewish Peril” which he believed was a conspiracy by Jews to take over the world. The book outlines the racial worldview in which people are classified by race as superior or inferior. In 2003 the sequel to Mein Kampf, Zweites Buch, was published in English for the first time. Zweites Buch (Second Book) expands on the original ideas of Mein Kampf and outlines further plans for a war with the United States and the British Empire for entire world domination by Germany.
On the list because: it preaches eugenics
Margaret Sanger is the mother of modern contraception and the founder of Planned Parenthood. In her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization, she outlined her theories of eugenics (control of the human race by selective breeding) and racial purity (3 years before Hitler did the same in Mein Kampf). The basis of her support of contraception was entirely due to her belief that inferior humans should be killed to enable a superior race to appear over time. Sanger did not just entertain popular ideas of her time – she was the champion of the cause. In her book she says: “the most urgent problem of to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” She goes on to say: “possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.” Birth control was, in her mind, “the greatest and most truly eugenic method.” Needless to say, Planned Parenthood today have tried very hard to distance themselves from their founder.
On the list because: it convinced the world that education is not about facts
In Democracy and Education, Dewey disparages schooling that focuses on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encourages the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views have had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools. This book could be considered to be the anti-classical education manifesto. And the consequence? A generation of youths with an inferior education which lacks a founding in solid facts and knowledge. Dewey was one of the three founders of the philosophical school of Pragmatism – a school of thought which proposes that “truth” is made and can change. The current curriculum in New Zealand is one which would please Dewey immensely as it is largely founded on his principles.
On the list because: it caused deaths through bad advice
Regardless of whether you agree with the methodology of Spock, no one can deny that many children probably died of cot death as a result of his advice to put babies to sleep on their stomachs. This advice was extremely influential on health-care providers, with nearly unanimous support through to the 1990s. Spock believed that babies on their back can choke on their own vomit – leading to death. Scientists eventually found that Spock’s advice actually lead to more deaths by suffocation. Estimates of the number of deaths caused by this bad advice are as many as 50,000. Spock also advocated a method of child raring that moved away from discipline based methods. Previously, experts had told parents that babies needed to learn to sleep on a regular schedule, and that picking them up and holding them whenever they cried would only teach them to cry more and not to sleep through the night. Spock taught the exact opposite.
On the list because: it was a propaganda book designed to incite racial hatred
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a booklet that purports to describe a plot by world Jewry and Masonry to take over the world. Despite the fact that the booklet is a hoax, it was spread wide and far and believed by most Europeans to be true. Many people today still consider it be factual. It was instrumental to Hitler’s anti-Jewish efforts in Germany and it was used after the Russian Revolution to perpetrate hatred and violence against Jews. The booklet continues to be published and disseminated in many Middle Eastern states which are political enemies of Israel.
On the list because: it could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
This book has inspired some of the most brutal regimes in man’s history. Regardless of whether there has been a state which is a true Marxist state, this book has inspired so many evil actions that it can not be left off a list of this nature. Some of the principles found in the manifesto are the abolition of private ownership of land, confiscation of property of emigrants, heavy taxes, and the abolition of inheritance.
On the list because: It fuels fundamentalist attacks on Science
By arguing against aspects of Darwin’s theories, this book has given fuel to the fundamentalists who argue that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is the only possible manner in which the earth was created. Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true. The book itself was not peer reviewed as Behe claimed under oath, and the Science community has overwhelming rejected it. It should be noted that Behe himself is not a fundamentalist and does not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Great list. Mead’s book really is funny. When reading it, the stories about sex from the locals seem far-fetched. Despite being refuted as bad anthropology practices, this book is still taught in many Cultural Anthropology classes.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Interesting list. I rather enjoyed it. Some of these sound rather interesting. I kind of would like to read them.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Nice list. It’s a good thing I haven’t read any of these books, right?
Also, this list is SO asking for a war in the comments.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:45 am
I take it you deliberately left off religious texts then
Quite an interesting list. I might have a read of ‘Darwin’s Black Box’, it always amuses me how people can take science, deform it out of all recognition, then spout it as truth.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:47 am
JwJwBean: you should – they have their merit historically
May 14th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Great list.One book that has spawned some deaths is The Turner Diaries,the book that Tomothy Mcviegh had in his car when he was caught after the OK. bombing.And I guess one could argue that The Bible could be on this list as well.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:53 am
This is really interesting, there’s bound to be hell in the comments, but controversial lists are always the most interesting. I’ll try to have a look at some of these if I can.
And good call leaving off the religious lists!
May 14th, 2008 at 7:56 am
This is a good list! I’ve never heard of the first one, suprisingly…
May 14th, 2008 at 7:57 am
Best list in a long time! I really mean that.
I like the inclusion of Sanger’s book. Feminist and radical leftists have succeed in making her out to be some kind of defender of a woman’s right to chose. Far too few people know enough about her true nature and what she was really trying to do.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:58 am
#4
“Previously, experts had told parents that babies needed to learn to sleep on a regular schedule, and that picking them up and holding them whenever they cried would only teach them to cry more and not to sleep through the night. Spock taught the exact opposite.”
He was right for this one.
The common belief up until recently was that you will “spoil” your child if you pick them up and comfort them.
There is a new movement, one in which the health care field is starting to become fairly fond of called “Attachment parenting.”
There has been no evidence the children who are picked up and comforted do not attain a regular sleep pattern or become needy. Infact, they are more secure and confident.
Now I’m running out of steam, I’m gonna stop writing
May 14th, 2008 at 7:59 am
you should dishonorable mention all books like the bible, koran, etc.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Kreachure: yep
dangorironhide: yep
May 14th, 2008 at 8:24 am
jfrater: I’m not sure whether you’ve read Darwin’s Black Box, but Behe is a noted biochemist who believes in evolution and common descent. He completely disassociates himself from the creationist movement. While he is entirely wrong, and culpable for the wave of anti-science in the US, he actually argues for evolution, and his argumets have to do solely with irreducible complexity i.e the theory that some organisms are too complex to have evolved incrimentally. He’s wrong, but not a Creationist. They mainly use stuff like Duane Gish’s ‘The Fossils Say No’ or ‘Darwin on Trial’.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Longtime reader, first-time poster.
Including Machiavelli on the list is certainly an interesting choice. I just finished taking a class on the text, and while you definitely touched on the most difficult aspect of Machiavelli’s treatise (The “Appearing to be noble being superior to true nobility” part), Machiavelli also spoke of the need to treat the common people with respect. In Chapter XX, “On the Various forms of Defensive Structures and Their Uses,” he states that “The strongest fortress is built upon the love and loyalty of one’s own people.” Machiavelli himself was not a proponent of genocide or overwhelming cruelty. Rather, he was pragmatic, saying that morality takes a backseat to security. Italy int he 1500s was hiring Swiss mercenaries and constantly falling victim to incoming invasions, primarily because the influence of the Papacy was promoting “moral” leadership, which at the time included a lack of military build-up, the notion that the ruling classes were entirely superior to the peasant classes, and promoted an opulent lifestyle for the Nobles.
But you’re point definitely still stands. I personally like Machiavelli extensively, almost as much as listverse.
By the way, came across Machiavelli when he read about Otto von Bismark, who kept a copy on his nightstand as well.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:26 am
What’s wrong with Democracy and Education?
sounds fine to me
May 14th, 2008 at 8:26 am
I’ve never heard of #1. I guess I’m confused why a book about Darwinism that’s been mostly rejected would screw up the world more than Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto, which seemed to play large roles in some pretty major events in history (ie WW2, the Soviet Union).
May 14th, 2008 at 8:26 am
I love how people will seize upon any chance to attack religion.
The reason that books like the Bible and Koran are not on this list is because these books (and truly, the Bible is not a “book”, it is several books) were not writen with the sole intent to promote evil. Indeed, the Bible (“do unto others…”, “turn the other cheek…”) the Koran (“the Jews and the Christians will have their places in Heaven”) present very good directives to live your life well.
Of course, that matters little to those whose hobby it is to disparage the beliefs of others due to their own egocentrism and belief in self-superiority. If you need evidence of this, just ask yourselves how you would respond when some other ignorant soul suggests that “On the Origin of the Species” be included on this list.
They could claim (falsely) that it has led to genocide, ethnocentrism, and any number of ills, because they do not understand the work. The same is true for the anti-religion crowd. I have met very few people who can argue against religion from a strictly logical standpoint. It always devolves into emotion. Of course, the ultimate irony to the anti-religion crowd is that they claim to dislike religion on the grounds that they do not want someone dictating their lives and actions, and yet they will allow me to do so by baiting them into a conversation that I can pretty accurately predict on a forum board.
Free will indeed.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:27 am
My question is what do you burn apart from witches?
May 14th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Great List! I haven’t read many of these and I never even heard of a few of them. But, it’s always interesting to me how people are just as inspired by words of hate as they are by the words of love.
I would definitely mention the Turner Diaries as a very recent example, but I don’t think it could replace any of these on the list.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:28 am
With “The Prince” and “The Communist Manifesto” it’s all about how you interpret them. I had to read both of them for a political science class, and I can see how they can be used for evil, but also, perhaps for good. Maybe I’m just a ridiculous optimist, but I think that Marx honestly felt that his book could not be taken in the way that Stalin took it.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:29 am
While the disbelief in Evolution is scientifically weak I wouldn’t say it’s the worst propaganda on the list, in fact, I’d say it’s the least harmful out of the ten.
Eugenics, racism and tyranny cause more problems than someone believing the world is only 6000 years old
May 14th, 2008 at 8:30 am
you forgot the bible, no joke…I havnt met a single person that has had their life actually made “better” by the bible..but millions of people for hundreds of years have been killed because of stuff written in the bible
May 14th, 2008 at 8:31 am
bucslim: easy question! The answer is, of course, books!
Thewalkindude: you are probably right – but the manifesto principles are anti-freedom and I think that regardless of Marx’s intentions, he had to have a flawed perspective to think that it is better for people to have their freedom taken from them – who benefits from that? Despots.
ChrisM: let us not forget that the rejection of evolution as a possibility based solely on a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible has lead many people to try to have discussion of it removed from school curricula – it is pretty bad when any group tries to suppress open debate.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:34 am
I like the list. It might be helpful to you to do a quick revision of a few sections. There are some mixed phrases and mispellings.
The Dewey book seems a little out of place here especially since many of the theories and practices he advocates are still being debated. You pointed to New Zealand as a place that applies his theories. I suppose it goes to refute the fact that the book has negative effects when you highlight a place in which it is doing some amazing things (i.e. highest literacy rate). I think the list in general was well done.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Cre: There are a few books on this list that were not written with the “sole intent to promote evil” as you say. The criteria states that these books were misleading and/or untrue. Knowing that, I think the Bible along with other religious texts, could certainly fit the bill.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Hey what about Mao’s Little Red book? Thats DEFINITELY a book that screwed up the lives of 1 out of 6 people on earth in the 20th century.
And what about the Bible, Koran, the Hadith, Torah, and other religious texts? Its not so much the texts themselves, but people’s interpretations, but yeah. They definitely could be understood as screwing up the world.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Nicowarrior: the problem is rejecting fact based education – some things are objectively true and to deny that is seriously wrong. The results in New Zealand from 10 years of this type of education system (where there are no tests because everyone passes) has given rise to a generation of uneducated people. Even reading abilities are dropping massively.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:44 am
CRE – well said
bucslim – wood, which floats, but what else floats?
Notable ommission – Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. There were things in that book that definately screwed up my little boy world. You cannot unread.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Nice list, but the Bible has to top the list. No book has completely FU humanity like it has. Science has showed that when a believer thinks about his faith, the reason part of his brain gets inhibited. The more “practice” a believer gets in thinking about faith, the more likely the reason center becomes inhibited in all matters, not just religion. In fact, there’s a great series of experiments at Standford that shows that you can literally take a believer, inject this part of the brain with the appropriate neurotransmitter, and he stops believing. Belief is a form of mental illness. It is the single greatest threat to the human species.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Ya noticed that there were no religious texts listed here. Understandably because what that would’ve touched off.
But seriously, more deaths/murders/etc were conducted in the name of religion/pickyourgod than anything else.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:46 am
I don’t think the books were evil. Some of the writers might have been. I also think that what happens because of the book depends on who reads it and the way they interpret it and what they do with it. The same goes for all the religious books being refrenced in the comments. I wonder if anyone has been evilly influenced by Green Eggs and Ham yet. Hmm it is telling me to relentlessly bother someone until they try what I like because it will make them like it (regardless is they actually do or not). Yeah, Yeah. I will have to follow that book now.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:49 am
I thought the answer was more witches.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:53 am
I have to read most of these. I hope they aren’t too hard to find.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Blaming the Bible, or any book for the actions of someone who mis-reads or mis-interprets it is like accusing David Berkowitz’s neighbor’s dog of murder.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
You are incorrect in your synopsis of “Darwin’s Black Box” and its author, Michael Behe. He does not believe in a literal 7-day creation story. I have read it. I take it you haven’t. But to say that it claims “a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is the only possible manner in which the earth was created” is a misrepresentation. Behe seems to be an old-earth, pseudo-creationist.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
ive never read any of these. =/
May 14th, 2008 at 9:03 am
This is the kind of list that keeps coming back to the list universe. Very educational and is very different from a book with the same title. Although some of the obvious books are the same.
I know someone suggested this in a previous comment but when the list is in no particular order maybe they should be numbered 1-10. This would be a sign for everyone that it is a random list.
Just a suggestion. Thanks for another interesting list.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:06 am
I have to defend the prince here. If anything, you’re shooting the messenger.
It’s more a treatise on political cynicism and yes, tyranny (It was written in the middle ages, remember), and I think it’s a really healthy read for any person interested in politics. If anything, this book, in the hand of the people, should teach them to see the tyrants where they are and not to trust the political “showbusiness”.
In the end, the Prince just provides a very clean and cold-blooded analysis of how to rule efficiently. Well, it’s Machiavelli’s interpretation based on his own, medieval knowledge. It’s political science – observation – and not a moral standpoint. Machiavelli didn’t create tyrants, tyrants just used his book for their own ends. If you look deep enough, you’ll probably find that many “good” politicians also read the book, and that a lot of them think it’s a great book too.
In the end, if you wanna blame the actions of some people on books, you always can, but on that level, I think many holy books would need to be placed on the list too.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:06 am
It would certainly be more effective to put up The Bible than any auxillary text used by the YECists [Young-Earth Creationists]. Despite some messages of good, most of it is filled with xenophobia.
The Koran presents its own problems: According to my Myth & Folklore professor, Ayatollah Khomeini was “very close” to what the Koran actually said.
If you’re going to include The Communist Manifesto, The Bible and Koran are guilty on the same basis.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:14 am
JF-site isn’t letting me go to this list when i log in????\
ALL- Darwin’s Black Box, eh, I will have to read it. Sounds interesting. Is it categorized as fiction or Nonfiction?
Mark – Where can i find access to this Stanford Experiment results? I am curious if thats complete bullshit like any religious person who *actually believes* would say or if there is some bit of truth to it somewhere. I think the whole idea that you can change a persons beliefs is crap and if they weere a true believer and follower it would not be possible.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Everything You’ve Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask by Dr. David Rueben. Its mega-phobic and hateful chapter on homosexuality where gay people are described sick doomed perverts kept me in the closet an extra 5 years.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:18 am
TBone: I didn’t say he believed in it – I said his book fuels the belief in it due to refuting aspects of Darwin’s theories.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:18 am
longball: what do you mean?
May 14th, 2008 at 10:13 am
to all the guys out there blasting religious books:
i think that blaming all the evils on the world on religious texts is lazy and inaccurate. Whilst you might focus on the topics or passages which you perceive as hate speech or war mongering, you ignore all the good humanly advice in these texts.
Poverty is challenged by encouraging charity, Demoralization is challenged by chastity, greed is challenged by helping less fortunate and the list of solutions to evils is endless.
I challenge you to read any of the three major holy books (Bible, Torah and Quraan)pondering over its meaning and implementing the good advises in it and then tell me if those books really screwed up the world or made a positive effect on the removal of evil.
Mr Charles Darwin’s influence and Karl Marx and on tyrants such as Hitler, Staling and Mussolini cannot even come close to any fundamentalist who killed in the name of his religion.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Yeah Sangers book was definately, definately evil. I think that and “Mein Kamph” should of definately surpassed “Darwin’s Black Box”.
There is no way to justify eugenics and racial hatred, not at all. DBB is just a belief in the ever-changing world of paradigms. What was the “truth” in 1800 is no longer the truth today, just as what was considered to be the truth in 1600 was all but dismissed by 1800.
Sanger and Hitler, on the other hand, championed eliminating or stifling entire races or types of people.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Hey, you missed a very important one:
THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS!
Thanks to those, we got our kids running around with brooms pretending to be witches and wizards, and calling people muggles and calling out spells, and believing in magic, and wanting to go to that wizard school, and the dragons and the unicorns and the Quidditch and the Dark Arts and the plot twists and the boom-boom and the hoobie-dobbie-blagahblah– WORK OF THE DEVIL, I TELLS YA!
May 14th, 2008 at 10:37 am
The Bible has as much right or more the the Manifesto to be on the list.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:38 am
I’ll admit I have not read “Democracy and Education” but honestly, it doesn’t appear to be all that bad. I agree with the spirit of the book: critical thinking skills are more useful and more conducive to providing a proper working education than hard facts. I think the problem comes when the emphasis on fact is removed *completely*, which sounds like what happened. Of course facts have a place in education, and a big one at that. But if you think that memorizing a bunch of facts about something makes you somehow smarter or more educated, you are sorely mistaken. The thought processes of education and learning are infinitely more valuable than the information itself. That’s why one goes to college or university: it’s not to learn the information so much as its to gain the knowledge and skills on how to find the information if and when you need it, and how to interpret it in a way that is useful. That being said, I certainly don’t think including “Democracy and Education” in this list and excluding “The Turner Diaries” was a good move.
Secondly, while I wholeheartedly agree with Behe’s book being an annoying source of fuel for creationists, I doubt it deserves the #1 spot on a list of books that have screwed up the world. The problem with the “Black Box” is that it a book that finally gives what creationists feel is some sort of scientific rebuttal against evolution in the face of detractors that criticize creationism for it’s non-scientific approach. They feel it offers them some degree of legitimancy. The biggest problem is, to this day, you have creationists citing Behe’s book in their arguments, even though whole TOMES have been written systematically breaking down each and every one of Behe’s arguments and proven them false or misleading. Yes, it’s bothersome and silly, but has it screwed up the world? That’s up for debate.
Also…while some might find the idea of eugenics abhorrant, I find it logical, if it is applied with the proper intent (that is, strengthening the gene pool by filtering out inheritable genetic discrepancies). I certainly don’t take the idea seriously, and I don’t believe anyone should have to die because of it. However, I don’t think “The Pivot of Civilization” was such an evil book just because it states in blunt terms what many have speculated and whispered about for generations. It’s interesting in conjecture and theory, rather like the Communist Manifesto, and also like the Manifesto, would be likely to fail in practice for no other reason than our own corruptibilty. This might be an unpopular opinion around here.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:39 am
The Bible has as much right, or perhaps more than the Manifesto to be on the list.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:39 am
“My question is what do you burn apart from witches?”
More witches!!!
Ehh: You’re an idiot. More people killed in the last century in the name of secularism than killed in the name of Christ in all of history.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:41 am
And also…please…please people, give up the whole religious text thing. It’s not clever or smart, and those books have done as or more good than harm. Much like others on this list, the book itself is not what screwed up the world…it was the falacious interpretations of unscrupulous people that screwed up the world.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Of course, wars are often fought with the motto being raised by all sides that ” we will win, we must win, as we have secularism on our side”. Also, the thing about commentary is it should be kept impersonal and respectful, as it is being done after all electronically and facelessly, eh Bob? Otherwise you come off as being a bit of an internet tough guy, you know what I mean?
May 14th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Bob: I’d be interested to see your sources on that statement.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Note to Joel – these are not in any particular order, as outlined in bold at the top.
Excellent list, I’ve never heard of some of these so I will have to look into it.
One question on “Coming of Age in Samoa.” The description says that the stories are from girls who exaggerated their wild tales but it also says that they are Mead’s own sexual confusions and aspirations. I haven’t read the book yet so I’m not sure which it is. Did Mead make up the stories or did she report the Samoans’ exaggerated stories and add her own thoughts in there? I’m confused.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:01 am
No Bible or Quran???
May 14th, 2008 at 11:02 am
here’s one that may get some folk’s panties in a bunch.
THE KORAN. that rag has inspired centuries of bloodshed by the most evil cult in all of history.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:03 am
padraig: i agree with being respectful, but ehh’s comment was pretty idiotic.
bob: you beat me to it!! i was reading all the comments and couldn’t believe that nobody was finishing that line correctly. “ohhhh. who are you that are so wise in the ways of sciencec”
jayfray: i would agree with whoever said that you should have “in no particular order” in really big letters. i was all set to get going about black box being number 1 when i was reminded of the intro.
ehh: never met ONE person positively effected by the Bible. either you are living under a rock or you are seriously blinded by your bias.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:06 am
oh yeah…(how did i forget to address this one?)
mark: (#29) do you realize that you just said that anyone with religous beliefs is mentally handicapped? please provide some sort of reference to this over the top accusation.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I’d tend to disagree with his statement as well. My point is that I have noticed that people , especially dudes for some reason, tend to comport themselves differently online than they would in real life, throw around alot of language they would not use otherwise. Strikes me as bad debate technique at best, cowardly at worst.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
I just knew it wouldn’t take long for folks to bring up the bible. I’m sure jfrater knew the same thing which makes this site so entertaining!
When I hear people talk about the evils of the bible and how dangerous the bible is I sometimes ask this question: If you were in a dark alley and you saw several large men heading toward you, would you be a little relieved to know that they were just leaving from their weekly bible study? I know that the some moral relativism people out there are thinking hey, those bible study people could be trying to give me poison cool aid or drown my kids in a bathtub because God told them to do so. I hear this all the time from some friends of mine. They will point out the crusades, or hypocritical TV evangelists etc. So they choose to throw the baby out with the bathwater and are convinced that all bible reading or religious people are crazy gullible people. Can’t we take in consideration the imperfection of man himself and not blame it all on religion or a holy book? Most religions & religious books teach peace and look to improve the world in positive ways. Mans belief and faith in his or her religion has been the inspiration of so many wonderful and beautiful things such as music, literature, architecture and has helped to build hospitals, schools and countless other things we just take for granted. I know the anti religious the agnostics the atheists want the same things as religious people and that’s a peaceful world. Believers and non believers can both take credit for many atrocities throughout history but when I think about living in a world with no religion and no faith I just think what a drab drab world that would be.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
BishopWhiteT: ducks float therefore if she weighs the same as a duck….SHE’S A WITCH!!!!
May 14th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Slick (and others):
DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION.
Okay, here’s why it’s bad.
We are still living, in large part, in an educational world influenced by and cut from the cloth of Dewey. Not as much as when I was a kid, but still… and if you take a minute and look around, you find wherever you look an education system that is nowhere near as efficient or productive as it once was. When my parents went to school, in the 30s/40s, they could graduate (from high school) and would have the equivalent of a college education today, at any decent quality college. Now granted, we have more to learn today–science has advanced, and computers have entered the scene. We also don’t limit ourselves to only the thoughts and viewpoints of dead white males (though sometimes we do discard them too readily in favor of less interesting substitutes). Nevertheless, what our parents were exposed to was far more deep (if not always quite as broad) than what we were exposed to in school.
Dewey laid the groundwork for this watering down of education. The point he had was that it IS the job of educators to teach people how to THINK, primarily… not to teach them “stuff.” (which is secondary, but necessary). But it quickly became forgotten that these two aims need to mesh together, and that the teaching of “stuff” can affect one’s ability to learn and think just as much as direct instruction in the processes of thinking.
And so, today, my children receive a very rudimentary and uninspiring education. It’s up to me, as a parent, to supplement that, if I want them to advance. Not a bad thing, surely–but not every parent is equipped as I am to educate their children in all the broad categories which are imperatives for them. Before Dewey, it could be expected that schools and teachers would not only introduce kids to learning things they would not otherwise encounter—but to offer actual instruction in these topics. The introductions were much more than peripheral and the instruction was far more than superficial. Yet today the best they can hope for is the very peripheral and the highly superficial… at best.
The telling issue here is this: I am 43 years old, and thus was in school from 1970 – 1983. I have three siblings who are considerably older than me… from 10 years to 15 years older. I had occasion, once, to gain access to some textbooks which my brothers had used in the 50s – mid 60s. (In fact, I still have a few of them). Now, while these textbooks were, by our standards today, rather Eurocentric and narrow in viewpoint, they nevertheless read like college textbooks, and not at all like upper-elementary and high school books. I was shocked to discover what my siblings were being exposed to and actually *learning* when they were, oh… 10-18 years old.
By the time I got to school, however, Dewey had had his influence, and we instead got a watered down “Social Studies” instead of History, and the “new math” instead of traditional mathematics. The old English curriculum had almost completely been discarded and we read (and kids today read even worse stuff) very rudimentary and blah texts. Where my brothers and sister had read classics, the closest thing WE got to a “classic” was John Steinbeck (I, by the way, detest Steinbeck and feel he’s a very inferior writer—but the point is, THEY were reading things that I wasn’t compelled to read until college, if then).
Now, yes…. education was perhaps too regimental and rigid then. Perhaps. But what we can clearly see is that more and more kids, over the years, have gotten a short shrift compared to what their parents and grandparents got. We learn a wider variety of things, today…. but kids only get their toes in, at best.
We have Dewey to thank for the discarding of substance in favor of process. And the result? Our kids are far behind Europeans and Asians in math and science, watch Hollywood movies in class in lieu of actual instruction, and security is a greater concern in our schools than education.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:23 am
@Slickwilly
This is the first time that I post, but I have to point out that although Eugenetics seems logical, it is not. I’ve taken applied genetics as a course this semester and it is complex but it is almost impossible to select a disease out of a population. This is because of the fact that there are for more people who bear mutated genes but don’t have the disease. So the bad genes stay in the population.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:36 am
First off, the list is in no particular order.
Secondly, religous texts, regardless of the good that have come from them, have spawned more evil than ANY other book, essay, poem, collection of books etc…I’m not going to debate anyone’s belief system or how others have applied these texts to their everyday lives which have had positive outcomes. I am simply stating that throughout history countless atrocities have been committed based on what was interpreted from these texts. That is an indisputable fact!
May 14th, 2008 at 11:39 am
While Machiavelli may have given potential dictators a how-to guide for staying in power, he was actually in favor of republics, believing them to be the best governments in terms of long-term stability. I’d recommend reading Machiavelli’s “Discourses on Livy” (sometimes published as just “The Discourses”) along with The Prince if you want to get a good feel for Machiavelli’s way of thinking.
Darwin’s Black Box doesn’t seem to merit inclusion in this list. Its impact was nowhere near that of the other entries on the list, and the ideas it contains are not even that groundbreaking. Furthermore, since it has been to a large extent discredited, proponents of intelligent design have moved on.
As for the Communist Manifesto, while I agree that it ought to be on the list, saying that it might be “the most malicious book ever written” sounds more like a case of personal disagreement with its message than a sober view of the facts.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:40 am
to be honest, I was pretty sure, that Bible would end up on 1st place, but unfortunately, it didn’t happen… :/
May 14th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Great list overall; but, the number one book shouldn’t even be compared to the Communism Manifesto and mein kampf,these two books have destroyed hundred of millions of lives in the past century. If you’re going to put Black Box and Pivot of Civilization on the list you need to put The Origin of the Species on the list, Darwin’s work spawn these to misleading documents. Also many people have commited hate crimes with the misinterpretation of Darwin’s book. I also agree that the Bible and Quraan should be on the list but why are all these people just mentioning the bible.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
LordCalvert have u ever read the quraan or did u just hear that from Bill O Reilly/Fox news?
May 14th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I can’t believe no one has mentioned the Dianetics/Scientology book(s). If it weren’t this garbage Tom Cruise and John Travolta would have been done making movies long ago and for that alone L Ron’s garbage should be listed
May 14th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Someone already said it, but don’t you people realize that the Bible is a collection of books, not a book.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Do a search on Snopes for “Harry Potter” and you’ll be reminded of a famous quote from PT Barnum. The article from “The Onion” to which they refer is a riot as it is, but it’s even more hilarious that people forward it as “fact.”
May 14th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
I agree, Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book brought many troubles to the societry of China, but I guess the book of communism by Karl Marx counts.
P.S. LOL!! Funny Mein Kampf Spoof
http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/mein-kampfy-chair.jpg
May 14th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Everybody knows that witches equal the weight of ducks, and ducks float! (Dang, Playyahplay beats me to-da-punch-bowl!)
the mere mention of ‘religion’ raises the hackles on nearly everyone who hears it… the text itself (or original intent – which we rarely ever get from the writer) may not be a problem – it’s most often the interpretation and/or practice thereof which fouls things up for humanity.
By the way… more people have been killed by other people throughout all of human history because of “beliefs” (religion as primary – not just ‘bible’) than for any other cause/reason. Don’t believe me? Look it up.
Curses…gotta get back to work!
May 14th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
i agree with most of the books mentioned… but i thinking communist manifesto and prince are wrongly labled. it’s understandable that the books in question decipt and encorage dictorial rule. however, it is necesary to look at the enviroment the books were written in, Prince for instance was wrote to unite italy so it would escape constant threats from france and other major monarchies. as for communist manifesto, it was written after marx exprienced the working conditions the laborers were forced to work and live in during the europeon industrial revolution. i think it is unreasonable to call these books evil because the writers on their part had not intended any harm, most of the works today are up for judgement. it is up to veiwer how he/she follows the book and if he/she does do an evil deed, well the author shouldn’t be blamed for, it is err on readers’ part.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Y’know great list and all but im disgruntled by the communist manifesto its not all that bad.. we are all equal no one better then the next… its cause of fools like stalin communism is seen as a bad thing… best part of the manifesto no religion.. religion ruins us
May 14th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Interesting list.
I’ve only read Mein Kampf out of these (and not entirely.. kind of boring).
May 14th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I think you are being harsh on John Dewey. In simplistic terms, he was against the old-school learn-by-rote, and propounded the development of intellectual skills. Which I, for one, have no problem with as a philosophy. Nonetheless, it does certainly seem that the quality of education has deteriorated over recent decades (a similar argument could, though, be made over preceding generations).
Similarly, Dr Spock. If you follow the links on wikipedia and read the International Journal of Epidemiology article cited, you will find some interesting points; Let me quote, for example:
The front sleeping position was recommended from 1943 to 1988 although the first text to advise against front sleeping was not published until 1992.
It wasn’t just Spock giving this advice; far from it…he was just the most well-known.
Also, those horrendous infant mortality figures appear somewhat conjectural; simple example…some infants could have died of cot-death whether or not they slept on their fronts (to use a simple example).
Ok, while I’m on a roll, I think the description of the Communist Manifesto is a little misleading.
This book has inspired some of the most brutal regimes in man’s history
It might be more accurate to say that various repressive regimes have used this book as a means of justifying/legitimising their evil social and political oppressions.
My advice to people regarding the Manifesto would be to recognise the social and historical contexts within which it was written (and, to actually read it, of course).
Finally, my nomination for a major omission from this list is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Adherence to some of the acts promoted in this book are likely to have contributed to the deaths of, perhaps, millions of people.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Candide by Voltaire had a profound effect on the French revolution. Great book. Nice list by the way.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Awesome list, just find it ridiculous that people think its in order
May 14th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
though it is an essay not a book, Das Judenthum in der Musik by Richard Wagner (yes the composer) should be on this list. It was a huge inspiration to Hitler and his claim that jews were lesser people. He used, arguably the best GERMAN composer in history, essay to say “look at what this great german said, it must be true”. So i belive that should have a special spot as an essay on this list
May 14th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Some think The Prince was satire. . .
May 14th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
zubair kaka:
You’re kidding right? Any sensible person, like Lord Calvert and I just need to look at current situations to see that the Bible and the Quran have caused bloodshed and violence all over the world.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Randall: So was it Dewey’s ideas themselves that led to the problem of degrading education or was the application of his ideas? Of course the American education system is in decline, but I never really thought about why. I guess what I’m asking is: was Dewey completely off-base with his theory or was it the misinterpretation of his theory that is causing the problems we see today? (Once again, I’ve never read the book, so I’m completely in the dark here.)
Elvorfin: That’s a really good point. How would you feel about it if recent genetic advancements are taken into consideration? For instance, we now know which combination of genes can provide for a potential to develop certain mental and physical disorders. If potential parents were mandated by the government to be screened for an array of these disorders, and they found that if they were to have a child, there is a greater possibilty than not of that child developing a crippling disorder, they decided not to have a child, or (hypothetically) to engineer a child to be free of this disorder, would this not have some sort of effect in the long term by filtering out the recessive genes for the disorder? Of course, we are talking in hypotheticals, because such a system would be needlessly complicated and inefficient. Disposing of the phenotype will of course not have any effect in the long term, so long as the genotype continues to be passed on. But if we could intercept the genotype on a large enough scale, could this, in theory, effectively remove the disorder from the gene pool? A larger question might be that, given that natural selection for human beings (barring a massive global environment shift) has essentially come to a standstill, could genetic mutations ever be countered to a degree that would make such eugenics even beneficial, or is human eugenics (even with the technology we have/will have) an exercise in futility?
May 14th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
kiwiboi: I think we had a previous conversation about this before. I wholeheartedly agree that Silent Spring should have been included on this list. I meant to mention that earlier but caught up in one my diatribes. That book caused a chain reaction that led to the deaths of millions upon millions of people. I would have included that before Darwin’s Black Box.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
you forgot the bible
May 14th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
ANYTHING on SCIENTOLOGY should be on the list.
Since I don’t know any of the books, help from anyone?
May 14th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Kiwiboi:
‘k…. so you wanna give Marx a bit of a pass and say we’re too hard on the Spock and the Dewey (little remembered sitcom in the 70s… “Spock and Dewey.” They, you know… solved crimes… while running a furniture store as cover. Something like that) but you want Rachel Carson included because you think her war against DDT was unjustified. Uh huh.
So often, we agree, Kiwi… but I remind you of the story I told you before. My family (and doctors we’ve spoken to about this) are convinced that DDT killed my father. The man was healthy and a non-smoker, and didn’t drink (well, not to excess)… but he was a pilot and a flight trainer, and among the many things he did, he was a cropduster… in the late 50s/early 60s. Breathing in DDT every time he went up to dust crops.
Somehow, inexplicably, this otherwise healthy and vigorous man (bomber pilot in WWII, sportscar enthusiast–he had a collection of ‘em–athlete, etc. etc.) contracted *pancreatic cancer,* and died within months of his 42nd birthday… thankfully after having helped to conceive yours truly.
Such things happen for a reason. And the only theories anyone ever had was, he spent years around that stuff (DDT), breathing it in, handling it, getting it all over him…
Granted, pancreatic cancer can be caused by other factors. But interestingly, the pancreas is where you’d expect the stuff to end up and collect, if it got into his system in a sufficient quantity.
I don’t want to argue with you… neither of us knows the truth really. For all I know it was just a random thing, that bad luck gene that plagues some people. But let’s not be so quick to assume that Rachel Carson was dead wrong. We at least have some scientific support for the idea that DDT was causing harm to bird populations (the thinning of eggs hatched by bald eagles was the classic example). I remain suspicious of the part it may have played in my father’s death. Maybe–MAYBE–if the stuff had been outlawed years before–he might have lived.
In the meantime, insect populations mutate and evolve defenses against insecticides… so that we’ve had to switch from one material to another. (Malathion, et al). How many truly did die, because we switched from DDT to something else?
May 14th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
From the Communist manifesto: Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with ’social’ religion”.
Is outlawing religion better than religious freedom?
May 14th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Where’s Uncle’s Tom Cabin?
May 14th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
warningdontreadthis: examples please?
May 14th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Amazing list! I actually have a very old copy of Mein Kamph, I’m hanging onto it for the historical value and it’s worth a good chunk of cash now. I’ve read most the book on the list and it’s amazing how things thing that were written with good intentions ( at least for the good of humanity) ended up destroying entire societies.
Of course most religious text belong here too. Regardless of what you believe, it’s probably caused death and damage at some point in history.
May 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
How about “The Gun Digest Book of Trap and Skeet Shooting” by Larry Sterett…it specifically shows persons with guns how to shoot at moving targets. I’m pretty sure that most of the killings in the world have been done with guns. Oh, wait…human beings worth their salt know the difference between right and wrong, and don’t need to blame a book for the evils of society. People do terrible things for their own selfish motives…not because some book told them too. A lot of these books may have given people a starting point, but the evils committed were done by evil people.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I don’t want to argue with you… neither of us knows the truth really.
Randall – Yes, of course, I remember you mentioning your father; it’s a tragic story, and it would be callous and ungracious – at best – for me to want to argue this one with you.
Which is why I won’t.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I would love to hear responces from this:
Now, Im not an ultra religious superfreak or anything, but what has the Bible PERSONALLY done to you?? Sure, people have read too much into the Bible and did some crazy things, but come on. Its not like every Christian is a mass murderer of all Jews and Communists!
May 14th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
ANYTHING on SCIENTOLOGY should be on the list.
I know where you are coming from, but Dianetics ? In the overall scheme of things it’s a relatively minor matter. Screwed up half of Hollywood, I guess, but aside from that…?
May 14th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Christine – Thanks for pointing that out in the intro! I guess I was thrown off by the 10-to-1 countdown of the list.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Slickwilly:
I’ll answer those questions tomorrow. It’s late (23:40) and I still need to finish a paper about stem cells (difficult stuff).
May 14th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Great List! As usual, haven’t heard of any of them.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
What the hell? Jfrater, the comment count is 1 comment higher than the actual number on the list. Glitch?
May 14th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
The Bible preaches quite clearly some of the most widely accepted moral standards…
Not Killing, or Stealing.
But LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR and even your ENEMIES (even though thats not so widely accpeted).
How about the Qur’an?
Which tells believers in Islam to KILL THE NON-BELIEVERS?
I believe that there are radicals in all religions, but considering the current state of things. Well, draw your own conclusion I suppose.
Just tossing in my two cents.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
yes Blogball i do think outlawing religion is a good thing.. at least in politics, i am not a christian and it annoys me when i get funny looks when people find that out, i live in the United states were we are supposed to have religious freedom, the way i see it religion is a bad thing, well i should rephrase that statement. I’m fine with religion its the church i have problems with.. be it the bible or the qur’an they are mighty fine books indeed, its how people interpret them that causes problems, and especially if religious figure back them. i wont get much more into here.. this is not the time nor place for a religious argument.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Candice- does the Qur’an actually say that or is it more something fanatics read out of it?
May 14th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Arkz_Archduke_of_Geeks , My point was that the Communist manifesto is mixing religion with politics by trying to abolish religion. I guess we will have to agree to disagree. Thank you giving me your take on it.
Arkz_Archduke_of_Geeks , My point was that the Communist manifesto is mixing religion with politics by trying to abolish it. I guess we will have to agree to disagree. Thank you giving me your take on it.
By the way I have many non-Christian friends and I get funny looks from them too.
Come to think of it my friends that happened to be Christians give me funny looks as well.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Sorry for the double statement. No wonder why everybody gives me funny looks
May 14th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
(sigh) everythings already been stated. The dumb and ingnorant have commented. The intelligent and socially aware have commented. What else is there to say. good list. message board has left me amused. Liked the part about burning more witches.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Id’ like to add a book called From Time Immemorial (Joan Peters, 1984), regarding Israel-Palestine. It is virtually a complete hoax, but the underlying premise is that the Palestinians are also recent immigrants to the ‘Holy Land’. The book was a best-seller in the US and received hundreds of positive reviews there. I figure any book that makes a justification – on totally fabricated grounds – for expelling an indigenous population (because they are recent immigrants) qualifies as screwing up at least that part of the world.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
So… why is “The Bible” missing?
May 14th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The Bible is missing because it didn’t screw up the world. There are many moral truths in the book, how can that screw people over?
May 14th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Did you base this article from this book?
10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help (Hardcover)
by Benjamin Wiker (Author)
From the Inside Flap
You’ve heard of the “Great Books”?
These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli’s The Prince to Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these “influential” books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors’ bad ideas are still popular and pervasive–in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn’t Help), he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. In this witty, learned, and provocative exposé, you’ll learn:
* Why Machiavelli’s The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
* How Descartes’ Discourse on Method “proved” God’s existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
* How Hobbes’ Leviathan led to the belief that we have a “right” to whatever we want
* Why Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
* How Darwin’s The Descent of Man proves he intended “survival of the fittest” to be applied to human society
* How Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the “will to power”
* How Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a kind of “spiritualized Darwinism” that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
* How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
* Why Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science
Witty, shocking, and instructive, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World offers a quick education on the worst ideas in human history–and how we can avoid them in the future.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Books don’t screw up the world. People screw up the world.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
T.H.E. B.I.B.L.E
Number 1 book most screwed up book of all time. Caused the most wars and contains propaganda that people refuse to see.
I’m not against people who believe in the Bible but you can’t deny the destructive force those texts possess.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Sorry for the double post, just have to respond to CRE.
CRE: You say “The reason that books like the Bible and Koran are not on this list is because these books (and truly, the Bible is not a “book”, it is several books) were not writen with the sole intent to promote evil.” but if you notice the title and intro of the list, the list is not about evil books or intent of authors. It is about books that screwed up the world and I would say religious texts HAVE done that. The Crusades, Holy Wars, Genocides, Some terrorist attacks, these are all examples of world-changing atrocities commited in the name of Individual Gods preached through those books.
They are perfect candidates for this list.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
astraya:Books don’t screw up the world. People screw up the world. THANK YOU
May 14th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Astraya: But screwed up books can give screwed up people the necessary tools to screw up the world.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I don’t think that the last book has had as big of an impact as you think. People who believe the book of Genesis is fact will do so whether or not they read books supporting what is written. They have faith that what the Bible says is true, no matter what.
I think as honorable mention, or instead of the last book, as long as I’m suggesting what I would change, you should include Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. This book outlines the beliefs and goals of Al-qaeda, which is obviously no good. It may have not caused as many deaths as some other books on the list yet, but that apparently isn’t what you based the list off of. I think it will have wide ranging effects on the world. Not only will it turn large amounts of Muslims against the West, it could also make a generation of Westerners scared of Muslims, through the acts of Al-qaeda.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Great list! Good job leaving off the obvious. Historically an argument can be made that most of the excesses blamed on religion were in fact for secular gain. That is power and money/land/resources.
Randall, Slick; I was in grade 4 before the great experimentation with Dewey began here in Canada. I was lucky that there were enough hold-overs from the old system – teachers and administrators – that the classics were not altogether ignored. Good teachers teach a combination of both systems. Some things are best learned by rote, some by discovery.
My kids on the other hand; Crap. They are actually taught to recognize words by drawing shapes made of little boxes. On end rectangular box for h, k, l, tall letters, square boxes for e, a, o, short letters. I had a fit! What is wrong with letters having sounds that link up into words. And math, actually encouraged to guess. What the hell is with close enough? Another fit. My eldest, the brainwave, never had any Shakespeare. Except in grade 11 French. Nevermind. I will say that his high school math was ahead of ours. He was taking Discrete Mathematics (something I don’t understand, statiticians use it) in high school, not available until University when I was a student. Even that was because of the teacher at that particular school, none of the other high schools in the county offered it. Not because of policy.
It makes being a parent harder, I don’t get paid mega-bucks for remediation. (I do it anyway)
May 14th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
While not as significant as the ones on this list, I think The Catcher in the Rye has screwed up many people, including Mark David Chapman who was influenced by the book in his murder of John Lennon.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
DIANETICS! DIA-FUCKING-NETICS! it gave us scientology damnit!
or the Bible, either one
May 14th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Its down each individual perception and intrepretation of the said books, Holy or otherwise. Holy Books are sort of Forests of Knowledge, you go in search for what you need and you get it. Search for a sword and you will find it, search to help or heal others or yourself , you will find it. i apologise if this has already been said.
I agree with astraya. We screw the world and ourselves over all the time.
Have a lovely day ahead.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Fark the bible………
id rather read mein kampf to see what hitler ACTUALLY carried out……
books on peoples theories are useless unless its been done
if a simple book can affect a humans mind to go and commit atrocities, then they have the brain of a monkey…..
although, ive read the heroin diaries and it makes me want to be a rockstar!
May 14th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
To all those ‘geniuses’ pointing out for the umpteenth time that the Bible or the Quran is missing on this list, please read what Jamie put on the intro to the list:
“I have intentionally left off some of the more obvious choices – as they will almost certainly come up in the comments.”
In other words, HE KNOWS. He knew you would ramble on and on about the Bible and the Quran long before he posted this list. That’s why he decided to not be as obvious and predictable as his lists’ commenters, and instead provide new insights on some OTHER reasons why the world is screwed up. For that we should all be thankful.
Pardon the interruption. You may now continue your otiose and numbingly tedious religious comment war.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Kreachure – Agreed, the comments are always full of geniuses pointing out the obvious
religion this, quaran that…….get a life…….
if the bible is responsible for killing YOU – then take it up with god when you meet him…….
ill be sure to say gday to satan for you all
May 14th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I do not get why Darwin’s Black Box is on the first list. I understand why it’s there by stating that creationlism is how the world was made and it rejects evolution, however, isn’t evolution just a theory like creationlism?
May 14th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
What about the Anarchist Cookbook? I guess there’s a reason that it’s illegal…
May 14th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
how about “Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie, it insighted hate and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put out a fatwa for Rushdie to be killed.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Theres no such thing as religion versus science. Theres religion versus atheism. Theres nothing more ignorant than saying religion attacks science or vice versa. Nowhere in the bible, koran, whatever does it say “FORSAKE ALL SCIENCE AND LIVE IN A HUT TECHNOLOGY IS EVIL BURN SOME WITCHES”.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
110. Alejandro
Actually plagarised in places.
Check out the background of the author and you’ll see there’s a bit of agenda behind the list.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
RE The influence of Dewey on Education, James, I’m with your brother.
You do New Zealand a huge disservice in your grossly sentimentalized assessment of the education system. Perhaps you are out of touch or too blinded with a Classicist education to see how the world must move on!
____________________________________________________________
“Nicowarrior: the problem is rejecting fact based education – some things are objectively true and to deny that is seriously wrong. The results in New Zealand from 10 years of this type of education system (where there are no tests because everyone passes) has given rise to a generation of uneducated people. Even reading abilities are dropping massively.”
______________________________________________________
The FACTS are these: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=329&objectid=10482412
http://stats.oecd.org/wbos/viewhtml.aspx?queryname=475&querytype=view&lang=en
From the OECD PISA 2006 Study across 57 countries and 20 million students:
* science third equal.
* reading we’re fourth equal (much the same as in PISA 2000)
* maths sixth equal.
Of course this buys into the anti Dewey notion that tests and scores are the best determinate of success in an education system.
Surely the best indicator is what people DO with that education. New Zealand is well represented in all endeavours of knowledge and ability application. We hit way above our weight as a very small out-of-the-way nation in sports, business, science and the arts. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world in spite of exporting our talented workers and losing thousands of jobs a year to exporting our manufacturing facilities overseas. Even Oxford University England is run by a New Zealander (who struggles to drag it out of debt and into the 21C). Many other countries including the USA use our text books to teach reading. Our methodology was recently voted best by a visiting country’s teachers.
Because we can do educating the masses on our head, we a developed enough country to wonder what we can do for those who can not/will not pass tests. We have many for whom English is a second language. We have many Polynesian and Maori who need different teaching. One in 5 kids are supposedly attention deficient! The measure of a country is how it caters for everyone (democracy).
May 14th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
science and atheism doesn’t really pay attention to religion any way fo the reaon that is fairytales and fiction. sometimes us athiests (vainly) try and help religious people see that beleiving in something that doesn’t exist is silly.
“isn’t evolution just a theory like creationlism?” FYI creationism isn’t a theory it’s a story. But really think about it people. say for example creationsim and evolution was placed on trial to evidence used to prove/disprove either one, which would win. “OTHER reasons why the world is screwed up.” unfortunately religion has done the most damage.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Oh, people. The list ain’t budging: he’s not including The Bible, the Koran, OR any scientology books. Just stop, it’s entirely too silly. And now for something completely different: (not really though)
I agree with Jamie keeping the above-mentioned off the list. The Bible does not cause people to do evil things, it’s the belief that it is the word of God that makes them do wrong (or right, you know, depending on your perspective). People read Mein Kampf and said, after some time and political upheaval later, “Oh, you know, maybe he is right”, not, “Hey! God wrote this and that’s what the Big Guy in the Sky wants, so, yeah…tithe my fields and sell my sister for donkeys”. Besides the fact that, while the Bible, the Koran, and …ugh, dare I say it, I already feel filthy…scientology books are filled with evil, they also give people faith, which in turn makes them happy.
Ew, I just supported Scientology. Can someone give me my thetans back?
May 14th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
129. Rusty
Well said
May 14th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Admitting that many atrocities committed in the supposed spirit of communism are horrid and unconscionable, I still can’t agree with the argument that you levy against it. I do believe that it is a very flawed system and that the unilateral abolition of personal wealth will only tip the scale more greatly. But aside from the confiscation of an immigrant’s property over that of national citizens, I don’t see how any of your criticisms couldn’t be redirected as a potential positive. Private ownership of land, especially related to the contemporaneous legislation for enclosures in parliament, was an issue which caused great strife for the working class and literally split them into squabbling gangs. The perpetuation of inheritance is what kept aristocratic control from ever succumbing to the consequences of personal agency (or lack thereof). And as for heavy taxes, it is precisely when a populous recognizes itself as a group worth supporting that it earns its place as such. That being said, I don’t support communism or its tenets and only ask for a more rigorous argument against it from an author I’ve come to respect. That’d be you. Keep on fighting and, please, for the sake of basic rigor, build your opponents out of bricks not straw.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
trojan_man:
Israel.
The situation with the Danish drawings.
Almost any war we’ve had, has had a bace in religion.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
fart breath:
No it isn’t ID (intelligent design) is considered as a failed attempt by creationists to make a theory that is equal to the theory of evolution.
The theory of evolution is the most complete and reasonable explanation we have.
And besides, creationist don’t claim that ID is a theory they state that it is the only way the world could have been made, making it not valid as a scientific theory. Because though the theory of evolution has been worked at it is only a theory that could be proven wrong, but that’s most unlikely because scientists constantly find proof to back it up. They don’t claim to have all the answers only religion does.
Kris: I don’t know if the Quran does but I read that the Bible does so I have no doubt the Quran does too.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Davo- Congratulations…you’re an ass. The only reason we have any form of society (or humanity, for that matter) is because of religion.
With that said, can a poorly written book about evolution really be the most detrimental book EVER? Does that suggest that the acceptance of evolution is is the most substantial issue in the world? I would have probably moved it from #1 down to…off the list in the first place. Thats like putting Dave Chappelle at the top of the Most Evil People list because his show led to the creation of Mind of Mencia. To some…bad. To others, really bad. In the end, does it really matter to anyone?
jfrater-Great list…until #1
May 14th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Ok hold up…..
2 concerns
first, why isint “The anarchist cookbook” ever mentioned, it has been cited in numerous school shootings in American Highschools. Along with having ties to the O.C. Bombings.
second, was whoever wrote this list aware of a popular publication called “the bible”….nothing in history has screwed up societies more than religious differences..
May 14th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
the bible > religious differences have a history of causing problems…….
the anarchist cookbook > school shootings
May 14th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
interesting list, they have been getting a little dry lately so I’m happy to see this one.
I do enjoy the controversy brought up in the comments, people bringing up the bible, some one saying the quran tells it’s followers to kills infidels (which is an unbelievably uninformed comment brought on by recent issues).
In my opinion I don’t think democracy and education should have made it on. It isn’t really a true statement to say anymore that there are solid facts. The same school of thought said that the world was flat once. We say it’s round now, I think to say that might change as we come to understand more in the world and more about metaphysics and the state of nature, that may change as well, I’m not terrible informed on the issue to be honest but that came to mind, I’ll admit that I too might be wrong about the topic. I was happy to see the first book. I think that it is a serious threat to undermine science in the name of any religion. Belief structures have had many benefits in the past but they no longer in our contemporary society hold much ground and only serve as retroactive and anti-productive activity. I have a feeling that dianetics is not on the list because you did not want to deal with the possible politics that would arise out of the situation, I’ve heard many times that that particular community is not very friendly with any commentary about their society (which only makes the book more belonging on the list).
May 14th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
the bible > religious differences have never produced a good situation
the anarchist cookbook > O.K. City bombings, numerous school shootings, curruption of youth.
come on
May 14th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Jay – read the intro – I even put it in bold for those who would eventually complain without reading
May 15th, 2008 at 12:00 am
The Da Vinci Code.
Saying that Christ was just a special person, and not the son of God. Anti-Christianity.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Alejandro (#110): I didn’t base it on the book – which I have not read – but I did use some of the single line blurbs from the editorial bit you posted.
Matt (#128): are you saying I have plagiarised this list and have an agenda or are you saying the author of the book mentioned by Alejandro has an agenda? I certainly don’t, I can assure you.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:30 am
I don’t really agree with #5. America’s education system isn’t weak because it isn’t based on facts and data. In fact, the entire system is based on facts and data, hence standardized testing, which in turn reduces the necessity for students to actually try to think for themselves. Most public schools are teaching facts, and very few are teaching otherwise. That doesn’t mean that all the facts are true though, but with the facts changing all the time it’s really hard for every teacher to keep up with it. The introduction of creationism in school science classes is not a widespread thing, nor is a lot of other attempts to misrepresent the truth through means that are not based in fact.
,
I think, if anything, the author was right that our education system doesn’t work. Teaching them about the data and not encouraging them to have “thinking skills” has resulted in an entire generation that calls tech support instead of fixing things on their own.
But that’s my take on it, seeing how I’m a part of that youth culture…we have an entire nation filled with people that don’t think anymore. Just look at the last two elections
May 15th, 2008 at 12:36 am
Whenever I read a list like this, out of nowhere and Very well researched, I think to myself. How the Hell do you think of these lists?
The best I can do when it comes to some sort of off-the-wall-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-and-what-other-social-ramifications-are-there-to-this-subject-Eureka moment is when I’m standing there staring at the picture above my toilet! You never cease to amaze.
Seriously how do you think of these things!?
May 15th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Rusty: from the article you linked: ” In science we came seventh, in reading fifth and mathematics 11th out of 57 countries” 5th place, 7th place, and 11th is not exactly brilliant
What is most interesting is that the country that comes out on top (Finland) has a very different educational system to New Zealand (which was beaten by 6, 4, and 10 other countries). In Finland children don’t start school until they are 7. In the first nine years of school they get “Basic School”.
The article also says: “The Ministry refused to supply a list of what schools participated in the Pisa. Nor could it tell us how many schools that offer Cambridge examinations as well as NCEA were in the survey.” That doesn’t give me much hope in the quality of the scores to show how the new system is working (NCEA).
Having said that – thanks for giving the links – they were certainly an interesting read (though the numbers on the OECD site are extremely poorly presented!)
May 15th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Put the bible and the koran in shared first place and you will have a true list! Or maybe the bible first, because this book has had the longest and worst influence on the world.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:11 am
Wow… Reading through the comments, i’m sure i counted upwards of 30 people demanding the Quran or bible get placed on the list. Even after the disclaimer at the top, and numerous posts throughout calling for it to stop. Really, don’t people read the comments before they post?
For the record, I Believe in God, but not religion. Religion is essentially a man made ideal, and thus, is imperfect.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:29 am
mklong – the Anarchists’ Cookbook ? You are, in my view, totally mistaken to imply that it could have any meaningful influence on the crimes you mention (let alone “screw up the world”).
Does it not strike you that somebody who has the mindset to commit these atrocities might be likely to own a copy due to his very nature/personality? Not to mention any normal, curious, 16 year old boy; anybody with an internet connection can download themselves a free copy. I used to have a copy myself…but that didn’t make me an actual or potential terrorist.
Anyhow…that book is so lame (as is the easily available downloadable version).
May 15th, 2008 at 1:48 am
jfrater – actually, I found the educational study quite compelling. And consensus as to the success determinant seems to be the quality of the teachers as opposed to the system.
Methinks you might be a diehard traditionalist
May 15th, 2008 at 2:01 am
@buclism: the answer is, of course: “More witches.”
@BishopWhiteT: “Bread! Apples! Very small rocks!…Churches!”
@Bob: were not Monty Python lessons included in your school curricilum? or you skipped the classes where they taught them…
May 15th, 2008 at 2:40 am
kiwiboi: methinks you might be right
I even did a top 10 list on how to give yourself a classical education!
May 15th, 2008 at 2:48 am
even before i read the list, i have to say absolutely brilliant title. now that’s the kind of thing that makes you want to read the list even if your boss is standing behind you
May 15th, 2008 at 3:04 am
I don’t think either the Bible nor the Quran had anything to do with “screwing”. I believe the people who wrote both did not mean to screw the world. The people who read it screwed themselves and religious difference could very well be their fault anyways.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:36 am
SlickWilly: A try to answer some questions
First off, I know that there in Belgium a hospital where parents that are both bearers of the disease could let embryo’s from IVF screen for genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis. So on a small scale for parents with a high risk it is certainly possible. But a doubt it is a good method for filtering out those bad genes. This is because there are always new mutations that will happen, a normal mutation frequency is 1 in a million genes. There will be always people with the disease. In my opinion, a better solution is to find a good treatment based on gene therapy or stem cell therapy that counter effects the symptoms of the disease, so that we can help people with disorders coming forth of new mutations. Another method is to mix races a human population. Lots of genetic disorders come forth from inbreeding. The mutation frequency stays of course the same but in isolated communities the chance is much bigger that two recessive genes come together in a child. Therefore mixing of populations will not change the amount of mutated alleles but there will be less homozygotic genes and therefore the number of disorders will decline. It is always better to have a heterozygotic population, I think. There will be less recessive diseases and a greater number of individuals will be adapted to a changed environment (like a new virus or so). Therefore I think that human eugenics is not only almost impossible but maybe also counter effective.
P.S. I hope this makes any sense, my native language is dutch and I had a hard time finding the right English words.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:05 am
You forgot to list “Under the Bleachers” by Seymour Butts.
I can’t think of a more malicious book, people have killed, maimed, tortured, pillaged, wedgied, sucker punched, pointed to a stain on your shirt and when you look they jam their finger in your face, licked their finger and put it in peoples ears, and squirted water in the face of Tom Cruise during an interview, all in the name of Mr. Butts’ book.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:16 am
Kiwiboi:
Thanks pal. I know you think I’m wrong. But that’s okay. I appreciate your gentlemanly manner in handling my argument, such as it was.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:21 am
bucslim… the site’s resident expert on all humor adolescent and/or scatological in nature.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:32 am
Jfrater: Are not going to answear the question?
I should think you have a good reason for not putting the Bible (or the Quran here).
May 15th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Wow, this is a really interesting list! To be honest, for a while I haven’t been interested in the lists as much, but I really liked this one!
May 15th, 2008 at 5:35 am
you forgot to include the bible
May 15th, 2008 at 5:41 am
warningdontreadthis: see my closing paragraph at the top of the list – I said I was intentionally leaving some books off because I knew that people would raise them in the comments – the Bible was one of those books
And you all didn’t disappoint.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:48 am
Stop notifying me of followup comments
May 15th, 2008 at 5:48 am
Thanks pal. I know you think I’m wrong.
Randall – think nothing of it.
But it wasn’t easy…this is soooo me :
http://www.excel.me.uk/cartoon.html
May 15th, 2008 at 5:52 am
warningdontreadthis: you say the Bible, Quran, and other religious books have CAUSED bloodshed and violence all over the world, therefore:
Gun manufacturers have caused all of the gun deaths;
Knife manufacturers have caused all of the knifing deaths;
Car manufacturers have caused all of the vehicle accident deaths;
Alcohol manufacturers have caused all of the DUI manslaughter deaths;
Cow farmers caused all the the obesity issues;
Sugar producers caused all of the dental problems.
The books do not screw up the world, the humans screw up the world.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:54 am
jfrater: maybe “10 Books that People can use as an Excuse to Screw up the World” would have been a better title. Then you could have included religous texts and the whiners would be happy.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:19 am
Kiwiboi:
HA HA. Me too, man. That’s me too.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:36 am
HA HA. Me too, man. That’s me too
LOL…ain’t it a killer being like that
May 15th, 2008 at 6:41 am
None of Scientologist’s text? Really?
May 15th, 2008 at 6:51 am
I just do not understand some people’s obsession with typing out the phrase:
“You forgot to include the Bible”
I haven’t gone back to count it out, but it’s as if the person gets a cookie every time they repeat that sentence. I think it’s been established that – whether you agree with it or not – that Jamie didn’t include the Bible. He sort of said that in the introductory comments. Screw that, I’m going to make sure that everyone who read this thinks I’m a smarty pants know it all by repeating it over and over again that the Bible is evil and I’m saving the human race despite it being mentioned 500 times here and on other lists.
Is your computer equipped with some sort of pleasure device that delivers you a dose of heroin every time you repeat something some other jagov has pointed out ad nauseum?
Will you people please leave and go back to your coloring books or Bob the Builder cartoons or at least make your moronic notations at some place like e-baums?
May 15th, 2008 at 6:53 am
trojan_man:
I have never said that humans aren’t at fault!
So in that way we dont disagree cause humans wrote the Bible.
The Bible screwed us up in the same ways these books have, if not more.
Sorry Jfrater I must have missed that
May 15th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Wow bucslim. I don’t tihnk by them saying the Bible makes them ebaums fodder. I do wish someone would back it up with why they feel the Bible screwed up the world and not just keep saying the Bible. It is funny that when it comes to those that we don’t agree with we start name calling. I keep seeing people get very offended by people who say the Bible and defend it by saying it is full of good things. There are some other things that can be interpreted to mean some not so good things. And when certain people have gotten a hold of it some not so good things have happened. But there is the thing, it is about the person and what they do with the knowledge.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:16 am
I used to be a big fan of Hitler’s work. Now you’re telling me that he called his second book; Second Book? Bah, I wash my hands of him!
May 15th, 2008 at 7:19 am
warningdontreadthis: I don’t want to offend anyone, but Christians believe that the Bible was ispired by God. So, yes, it was written by humans, but not inpired by humans. I don’t think Adolph Hitler would have said the same thing.
By the way, you gave the examples of the Bible causing bloodshed by saying: Israel and The Danish Drawings. I guess you are talking about Israel vs. Palestine and the Mohammed cartoons? If that is the case, do you think that these “fights” would still be going on if there had been no Bible or Quran? What if they were just spoken stories passed down for generations? My point: people use these books on the list (and others) as an excuse to commit heinous acts. The book itself does not cause the act. If it were that easy, you and I could co-author a book that tells everyone in the world to send us a $1 bill (or its’ equivalent) and we would end up with $6 billion.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Since there’s Bible slagging and Koran slagging, how about that wacky ol’ Book of Mormon? I’ve seen plenty of lives screwed up by that one.
Brian: Please, please, please listen! I’ve got one or two things to say.
Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!
Brian: Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t NEED to follow ME, You don’t NEED to follow ANYBODY! You’ve got to think for your selves! You’re ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We’re all individuals!
–
I asked my high school English teacher to autograph my “Life of Brian” script. He wrote: “To QDV…you are an intelligent reader. Now, you just have to find something intelligent to read.”
May 15th, 2008 at 7:22 am
sorry, inspired should have been the word…both times
May 15th, 2008 at 8:41 am
JwJwBean – just tired of the brain-dead one trick rubberneckers showing up, scratching their ass, picking their nose and proceeding to repeat the same tired horse potato lines. They can’t be funny or original, so they barf up something someone already wrote 10 times.
I don’t give a shit if you’re Anton LaVey and you want to burn Christians at the stake, at the very least write something that makes me laugh or moves the conversation along.
I get so angry it makes me want to take my family on a vacation to South Dakota.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:42 am
I strongly disagree with the communist manifest thing. This manifest has inspired thousand of organizations to fight for the rights of the workers all over the world. The ideas have been corrupted and exploited by way too powerful men, but i still think the manifest was needed to start a left wing movement in the world.
I also find inspiration in many of the books by Stalin, Lenin and Mao, even tho they did horrible things that i don’t support at all.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:55 am
In reply to:
“ChrisM: let us not forget that the rejection of evolution as a possibility based solely on a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible has lead many people to try to have discussion of it removed from school curricula – it is pretty bad when any group tries to suppress open debate.”
I honestly don’t see why either side cares so deeply about trivial facts such as how old the earth is. If someone wants to believe that Evolution is bullocks why does it matter?
If it angers people from both sides and neither wants the others point of view discussed in public schools than get rid of the discussion all together.
There are more than enough subjects and discussions that actually will apply to a persons day to day life than that of the theories of creation anyways.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:05 am
trojan_man:
I don’t quite understand you. I mean what are you saying that differs from me?
We’re both saying that humans are at fault. You say that they use these books (and the bible) as an excuse for violence and bloodshed. And I agree that they do.
And as an atheist I don’t believe that the Bible is the word of God. Correct me if I am wrong but the gospels were written a long time after Jesus lived. But as we have the Bible, people are able to constantly bring up stories from it and claim that it is the word of God and because some really evil people got their hands on it and forced others to believe in it, we haven’t managed to get rid of it. Even though it’s a book full of contradictions:
it says don’t kill but I believe I read somewhere on listverse that it encourages parents to kill their disobedient children.
We would have thought just as little of people believing in Jesus and Marie as we do people who believe in Aphrodite and Zeus if the bible didn’t exist and the stories of their lives where just that.
So are we actually disagreeing or articulating our opinion that is basically the same thing in different ways?
QDV: I agree I did a presentation about Mormonism and they are pretty fucked up as well.
Magic underwear much?
May 15th, 2008 at 9:10 am
bucslim:I don’t know if that comment was directed at people like me. But not all of us have the gift of comedy like you do
May 15th, 2008 at 9:25 am
warningdontreadthis: Yes, we do agree that these books and others have given some radicals a jumping-off point. However, we disagree that the Bible and other religious books are the cause of most of the bloodshed going on. My main point is that a lot of people in this world blame books, speeches, tv shows, music, ect. on the evils of the world instead of taking responsibility for their actions. The true measure of a human is not whether or not he/she makes a mistake (everyone does); it’s whether they learn from the mistake and don’t make it again. My father taught a course in college about Civil War Preaching. He wrote his own textbook (with a small amount of research help from me) and showed how some pastors justified slavery as biblically correct. That is not my view and I don’t remember reading any such passage. However, this does not mean that the bible is responsible for slavery or civil rights violations in the 20th century. It means some people read (or listen) to others without thinking for themselves. That is ignorance.
Also, I think the bible (and other religious texts) has been a basis for countless acts of kindness. Wouldn’t you agree? Not many of these other books can say that.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:27 am
warningdontreadthis- certainly not. It’s the troglodytic single shot morons who are the listverse’s answer to Rain Man.
Definitely, definitely the Bible, definitely definitely.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Chris M; “discussed in public schools than get rid of the discussion all together.” What? not teach the origins of our planet? not teach science? not teach natural history? because some yahoos don’t agree?
I sincerely hope you never run for school trustee. And if you do, you better not win. I can’t believe you said that.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:36 am
warningdontreadthis
If you and lord calvert have common sense i fear for mankind…
do the math man, the last century how many people were killed by communism and holocaust? you cant even compare the amounts killed in the named of establishment of secular states.
Or is world war II something you’ve never heard of? do they not show it on Fox news?
May 15th, 2008 at 9:42 am
august grey…you are a legend!
May 15th, 2008 at 9:46 am
ChrisM:
Sorry, but this little thing you posted was one of the dumbest things I’ve read all day.
To begin with, the age of the Earth is NOT a “trivial fact.” Scientific questions about the origin of the Earth and life on the Earth (including us) are basic to what we are. If all you’re concerned about is your day-to-day life, Chris, then turn in your human brain at the soonest opportunity so someone else can use it. Our ancestors spent a shitload of time evolving the damn things, and not just so you can go and waste yours by limiting its power to questions of whether to have fish or chicken for dinner, and what’s on “Top Gear” tonight.
This attitude (of yours) appalls me. It’s the same attitude that asks “why do we bother with exploring space? What does it mean to me and my day-to-day life?” Well why not stop ALL questioning and exploration then? Why not just stop science altogether and go back to living in ignorance? Don’t you think for a MOMENT that maybe you’ve benefited from people asking and arguing about these big questions—no matter what they are? You may not see the benefit directly on your puny little mortal life, but it’s there.
Don’t you ever have thoughts and questions beyond the day-to-day, Chris? Haven’t you ever *wondered* anything? Don’t you CARE about anything beyond what you can touch and consume?
Our lives here on this globe mean more than just being born, existing, dying, and returning to the biomass. If the big questions bother you so much, then I’m quite sure you’d be happier as a snail or a sponge. If I were you, I’d hope for reincarnation and then ask to be reassigned to the lower orders. You’ll be happier.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Randall: ouch!
May 15th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Owned!
May 15th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Sheit, son.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:38 am
I knew the communist manifesto would be on here and rated high up. technically, its lead to the death of millions.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Slick – having a “Senator Clay Davis” moment?
May 15th, 2008 at 10:48 am
This is why I love Randall- so long as he’s not calling me a sponge.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Buc: If I’d held it out a little longer, yes.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I have never said that communism or anti-Semitism is better than religion. But as Jfrater has written the books that inspired the holocaust and communim on the list I didn’t feel it was necessary to bring that up.
Besides anti- Semitism first came from religion, after all did the Christians not blame the Jews for Jesus dying?
First of all I don’t live in America so I have never seen Fox News.
Secondly yes I’ve heard about the Second World War, I’ve been obsessed with the subject since I first learnt about at school.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:04 am
I think you misprinted the title of #10, Jamie: it clearly reads “Mallevs Maleficarvm”. I mean, come on…duh! ;P
May 15th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I didn’t know that Jamie wrote the books that inspired the holocaust and communism. All this time, I thought he was a harmless ex-opera-singing internet overlord.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Personally I wouldn’t care about people believing in the shit written in the Bible if I hadn’t found out that schools in the US are considering teaching intelligent design. What the hell?
Why would they even consider that?
I wish I had a memory like Rainman, I’m the most forgetful person there is!
May 15th, 2008 at 11:31 am
SlickWilly:
Really? then you have been wrong. Jamie is evil.
Accept it!
May 15th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Randall; Now no dissing of Top Gear. Pick on Pinks instead!
May 15th, 2008 at 11:38 am
edit to post #90 above:
sheit, son.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:39 am
thats freedom baby!
what do you care what we do in the USA? Huh?
May 15th, 2008 at 11:39 am
edit to post #201:
“edit to post #190 above”
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Slick-
don’t make me spank you! cool it w/ the multiple letters. it messes w/ the comment flow. ’sides it just does not look pretty.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Yeah.
I’ve learned my lesson.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:44 am
the commandment “thou shall not kill” was written in aramaic and it translates to thou shall not murder
big difference
May 15th, 2008 at 11:45 am
warningdontreadthis: I believe they are considering teaching it because about 75% of the US believes in some sort of itelligent design.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:46 am
spank or bitch slap………j/k
May 15th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Cyn, will you spank me after you’re done with Slick?
May 15th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Trojan_man:
i am from the USA and i would tend to believe that 75% is an awful lot
whats your source?
May 15th, 2008 at 11:49 am
buc-
sure. we can discuss rates later.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:50 am
do you guys want to be takin’ out back to the woodshed for a godd ol’ fashioned ass whoopin’
May 15th, 2008 at 11:51 am
212: Good not godd
May 15th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Ok I shall have my quick say about education in NZ, I feel semi qualified to as I have a son who is in his last year of schooling, and three preschoolers, two who start school in January.
The education has failed dismally here and I am appalled at the lack of general knowledge as well as maths, English and science.
But there has been a huge change around since the oldest boy has been at school and seeing what is being achieved with the small children now gives me hope that it is the right thing.
The younger children are learning sounds of letters at preschool. I visited the catholic primary where two of my children will start next year, and the children who had been at school for only two to three weeks, were already doing simple maths sums, like minus and plus.
That in itself gives me hope for our education system now. Its very sad for the ones the older lads age who have missed out on a bit.
oh and great list
May 15th, 2008 at 11:58 am
MPW: several websites will give the religious stats for the US. It is accepted that between 70% and 75% of the US claims to be Christian of some sort. Then another 2% to 3% are Jewish, Muslim, etc. and about 15% to 20% are atheist or agnostic. Therefore, my theory is that 80% of the persons in the US claim some sort of personal religion. It can be inferred that religions normally believe in a higher power of some sort. This would mean that most of those religious persons believe that the origin of the earth had some intelligent design or at least some help (some religious people believe God created evolution). I threw in a 10% error factor and said “about” to get it to a round number. However, if only 50% of Americans believe in the theory of intelligent design, doesn’t that make it relevant to discussion?
http://www.teachingaboutreligion.org/Demographics/map_demographics.htm
May 15th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I just read some of chrisM’s posts… WOW!
get off our planet
May 15th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
trojan: thanks, you are right
i should have known that sometimes i kinda retarded
May 15th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
i just proved my point
“i kinda retarded”
i am kind retarded
May 15th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
AH HA! “otiose” – idle, functionless, futile… way cool! I just learned another .37 cent word for the day… can I go home now?
By the way… the only really ‘intelligent design’ was toilet paper – I hated using the old Sears-n-Roebuck pages when I was a kid!!!
May 15th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Jfrater: My first listverse “fight.” I enjoyed it, didn’t you:D?
Oh and whats all this talk about spanking?
May 15th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
MPW: My only concern with teaching is when do you start giving information, to children or teenagers, that they have to formulate some opinion about? If you tell a 3rd grader that God made the world, they will probably believe it. But they also believe that a fat man brings them presents in December. When is the appropriate time to give them the info on intelligent design and evolution and let them conclude for themselves?
May 15th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
after all did the Christians not blame the Jews for Jesus dying?
Yes…though technically it was the Romans that did it. A bit harsh, too…after all, strictly speaking, he was only dead for 3 days
May 15th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Cyn: Awww, come on. It doesn’t have the same effect when you shorten it to just 5 letters. It doesn’t make any phonetic sense that way. Spoil sport.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
JayArr: For some reason, that reminds me of an old episode of Seinfeld, where George goes off on why toilet paper technology hasn’t changed a bit over the years. He gets real proud of himself as if he has finally uncovered some lost wisdom, only to be crushed as Jerry reminds him of two-ply and a general increase in softness and absorption capacity. Classic…
Back to our regularly scheduled program.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
JayArr, Slick: funny stuff…it leads me to another good list idea – top 10 or 20 best inventions of the 20th century. Computers, internet, air conditioning, cruise control (unfortunately not Tom Cruise), and (my favorite) the spork, etc.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Funny story about a spork (that is true):
The ninth and tenth grade history classes went on a field trip to a Renaissance fair. One ninth grader in particular was known as the class clown, and thought it would be highly amusing to buy a spork (this spork was a blacksmithed contraption consisting of a spoon on one end and a fork on the other). When he proudly displayed the spork for all to see, the tenth graders told him his $20 spork was being given away at a different part of the fair. Needless to say, he flipped out and started swearing until someone clued him in to the shennanigans.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
kiwiboi:
Well said xD
May 15th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
i learned about mein kampf in english when we were learning about the holocaust. its weird that hitler calls the book my struggle. what about the jews struggle?
May 15th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Whoever wrote the blurb on Mike Behe’s book has not read it. It nowhere gives support to the Bible. It is not against evolution. It has not been “refuted by science”. Be sure you don’t read it or it may disturb you.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Trojan man;
By your logic if 50% of a population believes that aids is caused by evil spirits it would merit discussion and debate. Because 1/2 the people are ignorant does not give us the go-ahead to perpetuate said ignorance.
Evil spirits and Intelligent Design are equally baseless.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Mom424:
!
May 15th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I don’t like the book I referenced (post 110), I was just intrigued, specially because of the line accompanying the Communist Manifesto: “it could win the award for the most malicious book ever written”.
I think the Bible should be number one, with the Koran being number two and other religious books being dis”honorable mentions”. Not only because of the issue of misinterpretation. If you know the history of the Bible, you will know that it has been tampered with, mistranslated and put to different interpretations according to the times. There is no such thing as biblical divine inspiration.
Indeed, there are some good moral advices in those books, but there are too good moral advices in Batman or Archie comics.
To the guys arguing for the great thing that religion is:
The only reason there exists something of a Western civilization is because there’s separation of Church and State in most countries or because the influence of the Church (specially the Catholic Church) has been greatly reduced. Most people have no problem with people having faith, but when religion tries to introduce itself in every aspect of life (from political to private life) you get homophobia, racism, genocide, slavery, etc.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Mom424: No, intelligent design is a theory which many people belive. And one definition of a theory is “an assumption based on limited information…” (Answers.com). You said, “if 50% of a pop believes that aids is caused by evil spirits…”, and I don’t think that that holds any water. However, billions of people in the world believe in intelligent design so I think that it would be idiotic to not tell school children that it is an accepted (not excepted) theory of the origins of the universe. Your comparison makes huge leaps that hold no merit.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Alejandro: There is homophobia, racism, genocide, slavery, etc. with AND without religious ideals attached to them. And you say that there is no such thing as biblical divine inspiration…that is an opinion that has no basis in fact so by saying that statement you have to accept that someone else believes the exact opposite with equal fervor.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Codman:
Hitler was pretty egocentric. I doubt he really cared about the jews being happy if you know what I mean.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Now, I don’t know the Bible or Koran are “evil” books. Certainly they are full of acts that most of us will consider evil today, but we have the advantage of time. But it is time we consider them as products of their time, extract the good things in them (things that we can find in many other books, before and after these two were written) and discard the many bad things. Because it is stupid for people to kill each other in the name of God, as it would be stupid for people to be killing in the name of Zeus, Mithras, Wotan or the IPU (Invisible Pink Unicorn).
May 15th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Troyfamu: Intelligent design is a theory according to the colloquial definition you noted above. It is not, however, a *scientific* theory, which is a whole other definition entirely. A scientific theory is a hypothesis that has been put forth that has a large amount of testable, observable evidence that supports it. A scientific theory also goes on to make other hypotheses that can likewise be tested and either supported or not supported by the prevailing empirical evidence. Intelligent design fails to meet both of these criteria, and as such, does not qualify as science. Because it is not science, and because the fundamental tenant of intelligent design is that there is a supernatural, intelligent entity that is outside of our realm of comprehension, it falls under the heading of religion. The separation of church and state dictates that religion cannot be taught as part of a public school’s regular curriculum, and thus intelligent design has no place in the classroom.
Furthermore, when Mom was referring to the “accepted theory” of origins, she was referring to evolution being the scientifically accepted theory of speciation, not the “generally” accepted theory, which I assure intelligent design is not.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
143. jfrater
Na sorry mate, I meant the author the book ‘10 Books that screwed up the world’ has an agenda. Pro ID, conservative christian.
Oh and for the record I don’t think you can write a list like your one without having some kind of political agenda. Certainly someone who had more left wing liberal views wouldn’t have included The Communist Manifesto. Calling it the “most malicious book ever written” is just a bit over the top.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Alejandro: one thing, the Nazis took what books they wanted people to read and burned the rest. Taking the bad things out of any book leads to censorship (one of the worst things in US society).
SlickWilly: I totally agree with the first few sentences. However, since ID is accepted (by some non-scientists and amazingly some scientists) by billions, maybe it should be mentioned.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Someone said it very early on and I would agree. The Bible would have to be on here if you were to include religious texts. Think about Western society. The dominant religion is Christianity and every moral obligation we hold in our society can be linked to The Doctrine of Original Sin (though there are many different definitions of what it actually means to ’sin’). One could also argue that without the Bible, there would be no social order (similar to the way that Thomas Hobbes describes why government came to exist in his work, Social Contract, in which we come out of a state of nature into a litigious society for the sake of mankind. The dumbest can still kill the brightest and the strongest, etc. I suggest reading it.). I haven’t read through everyone’s comments but I felt my 2 cents could spark some interest!
May 15th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
troyfamu: If a parent wishes to expose his or her child to the “theory” of intelligent design, it should be done at home or in the church. It should not be done in the classroom. And I would not go so far as to say that ID is accepted by billions. Among developed nations, evolution is by far the prevailing theory. Evolution and intelligent design are incompatible with each other; you either believe in evolution or you believe in intelligent design, there is no middle ground. That being said, even the vast majority of christians the world over accept evolution as scientific fact. It is only really in the United States that christian fundamentalists have pushed their agenda onto the public school system time and time again. It gives the appearance of a wide acceptance of intelligent design, but really it is only the loudest minority that purposely creates that illusion.
It has no place in school, and it has no place being offered in education as an alternative theory to the scientifically validated evolutionary theory.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Slick: The trouble is, there is much middle ground. Some Christians believe that evolution is ID from a god or gods. Some believe that the big bang was ID. Some believe the earth is only 6000 years old and it was created by an ID. My point: Imagine your a teacher, teaching the origins of man. A student asks you where humans came from and you, correctly, answer with the theory of evolution (I believe in that, too). You say that it all started with hot gases and liquid and scientific, latin terms and the students’ young mind absorbs it a now it is fact to him. Then the same student asks where the gases and liquid and Latin terms came from and you say big bang. You tell the student about huge expansion in the blink of an eye and how the universe is still expanding today and always will. Again, the student loves it. Then he/she asks where the big bang came from and all you can say is…pause…pause…i don’t know because there are no scientific facts about what went on before that. So, you could say it was luck or one in a 10^123456789 chance or this or that. Or…you could say, we don’t know but here is what billions of people in the world believe.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
troyfamu: You are incorrect. The theory of evolution posits that all animals and plants that are alive today share a common ancestory with a single, single-celled life form. Intelligent design posits that the species as we know them were created separately and distinctly from one another by a designer (god) and allowed to flourish from their initial conception. The two theories are incompatible. Either common ancestory exists or it does not. Those christians that are able to satsify their belief in evolution and their belief in god believe in god-directed evolution, not intelligent design. It is an entirely separate concept.
Further, if I were a teacher, I would tell the truth in that situation. “There is not much we know about what existed just prior to the Big Bang, as science has shown that at the level of a quantum singularity, physics as we know it breaks down and the information-gathering system we have is lost. If you would like to hear theories regarding pre-existence prior to the Big Bang, I encourage you to ask your parents and do your own research.”
The problem with your “billions of people in the world believe” statement is that billions of people believe thousands of different things. If none are science, why should credence be lent to one particular view over any of the others? Science is grounded in fact and a search for the truth. Intelligent design is grounded in faith and belief in one particular truth. As such, it is inherently biased and again, has no business being present in the public educational atmosphere.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
troyfamu; No you couldn’t because 1st – its wrong and not based in science. 2nd – Billions don’t believe it.
I am old. At least in cyberspace years. I live in Canada, we have 2 publicly funded school systems. Public (secular) and private (Roman Catholic). Both teach evolution, when asked what caused the Big Bang, they answer either I don’t know or the scientists are working on it. Or if they’re really on the ball, they explain about alternate dimensions and the current hypothesis of a collision. They don’t say GOD. Even the RC schools have a separate class for religion. It does not enter the science class. I would wager that every other western country excluding the USA is the same.
Belief is not science. Science requires proof.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
regarding the bible:
i have known lots of people that had life altering experiences from reading it and they were all positive
as unbelievable as some of the stories in the bible are it definitely has had a positive effect on millions of people.
not to discount the negatives though.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I think Origin of the species should be #1 particularly if the prince is included. The ideas in the book fueled more genocide than any other book.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
WOULDN’T IT BE NICE,
if those of like minds,
lived peacefully within their own borders.
Doing what they whole-heartedly believe,
to be the one right way to live.
The ONE right way for THEM to live.
While over the hills, and not too far away,
all around them, but not amongst them,
Lived other TRIBES.
Who lived peacefully within their own borders.
Doing what the whole-heartedly believe,
to be the one right way to live.
The ONE right way for THEM to live.
What works for them.
Fuck Mass Culture, Fuck this world wide Mono-Cultural Melting Pot Bullshit, that’s what I say.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Another regarding the Bible-
I think it’s amazingly narrow-minded to say that the Bible “caused” the Crusades, persecution of the Jews, the Klan, Chick-Fil-A, etc…the Bible didn’t cause any of these things. What caused these things was a MISREADING of the Bible and a misapplication of what’s in there. I think the most avowed atheist would have a hard time reading the Gospel and the words of Jesus and concluding that he advocated violence and persecution in any form. Go read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7, in case you’re wondering) and come back and say that dipwads like Jerry Falwell or Oral Roberts or Ralph Reed actually believe and follow any of that stuff. Baloney! What they follow is some narrow interpretation of the Bible that they can use as a cudgel to foist their “morality” on narrow/weak-minded followers.
Don’t believe me? Then explain how “resist not evil,” “turn the other cheek,” the Golden Rule (“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you”), and “judge not lest ye be judged” could lead to wholesale slaughter of Muslims, witch burnings, the Inquisition, or any of the other horrors so-called “christians” have laid on the world. It’s impossible to draw that connection! Whether you want to believe Jesus was an historical figure or not, those words are attributed to him and so-called “followers” of Jesus say that they’re following his words. Heck, when asked what the greatest commandment was his response was “to love others as much as you love yourself.” I don’t think that kind of thinking leads to violence, death, and destruction.
It’s sad to me that so much of what Jesus taught has been corrupted, co-opted, mis-quoted, and otherwise munged up over the years to serve very selfish agendas. If you’re a Christian the teachings of Jesus are what really matter, not the witch-stoning, food-restricting stuff that came before. The Old Testament “fire n’ brimstone” crapola (as well as the other homophobic, misogynistic, and ridiculously-restrictive “laws” found there) was completely superseded by the teachings of Jesus.
If you haven’t read it yet, go check out “My Year of Living Biblically” by A.J. Jacobs to read one of the most amazing meditations on the absurdity of true “fundamentalism.” Not only is it impossible (there are too many contradictions, etc.) but unless you’re a scholar of ancient languages its patently stupid to think that you’re taking the (English or other language translation) of the Bible “literally.” It’s morally and intellectually bankrupt and it’s high time that people finally just laughed off those idiots and moved on.
Sorry for the long-winded response, but I thought it was important to point some of this stuff out to those of you bashing the Bible (or the Koran for that matter, but that’s an entirely different post). Go read the New Testament (or just go find a compendium of the words of Jesus) and THEN come back and tell us all how destructive those words are.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
“Alejandro: one thing, the Nazis took what books they wanted people to read and burned the rest. Taking the bad things out of any book leads to censorship (one of the worst things in US society).”
troyfamu, I am not suggesting that we should burn any books, including the Bible or the Koran (by the way, in Nazi Germany, the Origin of the Species, was burnt). I didn’t mean it in the spirit of censoring Leviticus or Deuteronomy or the rape, genocide, slavery condoning that is within the pages of the Bible. They should be there. Read the Bible, appropiate the good things and discard the rest. Same with the Koran and other religious books. Same with any other book. Same with Batman and Archie comics. For example, take Jefferson’s Bible.
“And you say that there is no such thing as biblical divine inspiration…that is an opinion that has no basis in fact so by saying that statement you have to accept that someone else believes the exact opposite with equal fervor.”
What do you think the characteristics of a divinely-inspired book would be? I think it should have no contradictions, be historically accurate as much as possible and have an absolute moral. The Bible has many contradictions, is historically inaccurate and we have rejected many of its morals (If stoning people was good in those times, why is it not now?). We can’t even say for sure that the most important persona in Christianity actually existed. So the Bible was either divinely-inspired or it wasn’t. If the origin of the Bible is divine, God must be joking with us.
“Alejandro: There is homophobia, racism, genocide, slavery, etc. with AND without religious ideals attached to them.”
I agree with this to an extent. To be homophobic, racist, etc. you only need dogmatic thinking. And many times, religious thinking is dogmatic.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
To Elrod:
The Golden Rule is not a christian invention. It is found in many religions and cultures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity
It has been argued by Biblical sholars that there is no idea of hell in the OT. The idea of Hell was most certainly introduced in the NT.
“The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.
– Robert Green Ingersoll, “Crumbling Creeds”
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”
- Jesus most probably didn’t exist, but he was right with this.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Mark and others – please re-read the blurb for Behe’s book – it does not say that the book claims fundamentalism as fact – it says that the book has FUELED fundamentalists who quote it to support anti-evolutionary ideas. This is true. You are reading something in to the blurb that is not there. The book – by disputing some “accepted” scientific ideas – has given fuel to fundamentalists even though the book itself does not agree with fundamentalist ideas. Please don’t argue against something which is not there – read carefully what is written and debate that if you don’t agree.
The blurb says:
1) The book has FUELED (not stated or supported) fundamentalists
2) The scientific community has rejected its arguments
This does not mean it is supporting creationism, it means that fundamentalists use some of its content to argue that Darwin was wrong and that evolution is false. This has nothing to do with what Behe intended – it has to do with its misuse by fundamentalists.
May 15th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
You didn’t put the Bible, this list sucks.
And 10 books are too few for such list!
May 15th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
I’m a Christian… Big time. Yet I still read the lists on this site everyday…
May 15th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Jamie: I can’t remember the comment but I think someone said “I saw it somewhere else on listverse”. Does it weird you out that LV is being used to reference LV, or that Listverse may become the new Wiki?
Creepy!
May 15th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Slick-
May 15th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Kreachure: I did read that and I realized that’s why it was on the list. I however wanted to discuss some ways in which the bible would be perfect on the list rather than just yell out that Jamie didn’t put it on there.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Books are not evil…. they are simply mis-informed authors or misunderstood readers.
It’s all about perception, and how you interpret what your reading.
To say that The Communist Manifesto (for example) is evil is incorrect. It was used BY humans for evil, but Marx did not intend to create oppressive societies, he was a believer in pure equality and classlessness and that is not evil. The book was misinterpreted… simple as that.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Kfrater: I thought that was a movie.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:49 am
Hmm… Very interesting list!
May 16th, 2008 at 1:50 am
kfarter – What Part of an Inconvenient truth can be considered harmful?
May 16th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Nejikun: A lot of people consider it to be enviormentalist propoganda.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:13 am
Forget the book think about the award that should’ve gone to someone Actually important. Al Gore and the IPCC can go fuck themselves. All they have done is scare people into thinking the world will end Before the rapture. I’ve been meaning to get a tan anyway.
Question; What is the Carbon footprint of a mail bomb?
May 16th, 2008 at 2:15 am
In reply to: “Chris M; “discussed in public schools than get rid of the discussion all together.” What? not teach the origins of our planet? not teach science? not teach natural history? because some yahoos don’t agree?
I sincerely hope you never run for school trustee. And if you do, you better not win. I can’t believe you said that.”
Is natural history a necessity for high school students, if so, why?
I said nothing about not teaching science. General science is necessary to understanding how the world works; it’s applicable to all types of fields ranging from medicine to technology.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Maybe it would be better if you explained why it shouldn’t be taught? Enough people have called you out on it maybe you are wrong, if not explain why you are right. It is wise to defend what you said.
On the up side I think most of us Really want to hear this.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Randall,
You’re putting words in my mouth.
My argument is not that Evolution is pointless, my point is that is it a necessity for grade school children and teenagers to be taught it? Grade school is the base for the fields we choose to be in post-secondary. Universities and colleges are where we expand our philosophies in those fields.
I was taught about the origins of species in high school and to be quite honest I just don’t see why it’s a necessity for grade school curriculum. The way I see it is that it’s what we evolved into, the civilizations and philosophies that shaped our world, that hold the most importance to people and the general future of humanity.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:44 am
I loved this post very informative and well written.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:58 am
Chris M;
It’s a very good thing that you are not in charge of our education system. Our kids would leave school being able to read and write and thats about it. And not very well read if you’re going to avoid natural history and origin theory.
One of the first questions to spring up during a discussion of dinosaurs (kindergarten, Grade 1?) is where did they go? Natural curiosity next asks; What came after the dinosaurs? When did we get here? You provide no answer because it is not part of the curriculum? And it’s not part of the curriculum because it contradicts religion?
You would also have to forgo teaching physics. Once you start learning about gravity and orbiting bodies and our expanding universe, natural curiosity is going to ask all the questions you are trying to avoid.
Better skip biology too, learning about DNA/RNA, cell reproduction, adaptation of living systems, all provoke questions with uncomfortable answers for the fundamentalist crowd.
We better be careful with chemistry too. Can’t have folks wondering about the fundamental building blocks of life. Get down to the atom, you just gotta wonder what the atoms are made of and where these parts came from.
There is a natural progression learning; You can’t leave out massive chunks of knowledge because that knowledge is offensive to a few.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:55 am
“The only reason there exists something of a Western civilization is because there’s separation of Church and State” – Alejandro # 232
Uh, dude, I think you’re more than just a little bit wrong here. Much of the foundation of Western Civilization is because of the Catholic Church after Constantine. There wasn’t much of a separation of church and state. Much of that idea was brought about by the American Revolution.
And I see that none of the semi-literate trolls out there bothered to read my earlier scripts on posting the ubiquitous one-liner “You forgot the Bible” Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess if you can still catch re-runs of the Dukes of Hazzard then I should of expected it.
May 16th, 2008 at 6:36 am
ChrisM:
I put *words* in your mouth? What?
No, Chris… I’m too smart to *make up* the dumb shit you spouted here. I QUOTE:
“I honestly don’t see why either side cares so deeply about trivial facts such as how old the earth is.” YOU said that. Incredibly dumb.
“If someone wants to believe that Evolution is bullocks why does it matter?” YOU said that. Once again, incredibly dumb, and blindly ignorant as well.
“If it angers people from both sides and neither wants the others point of view discussed in public schools than get rid of the discussion all together.” YOU said that. The things wrong with that statement are so legion I can’t begin to cover them. But I already did anyway, in my previous post.
Mom’s answer to you is excellent. Clearly you know absolutely ZIP about education and seem to have gotten little, if anything, out of your own. This isn’t always the fault of teachers and schools. Some minds, such as yours, are simply anathema to knowledge and refuse to accept it.
Evolution is the BASIS of modern biology. To not teach it would be to not teach biology, pure and simple.
Again though, Mom has made the argument for me (bless you Mom, I have no patience this morning). I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation.
YOUR LITTLE LIFE IS BUILT UPON the knowledge and learning of centuries of your brother and sister humans, Chris. And that knowledge, as any idiot can tell you, is best passed down when one is YOUNG, because as the mind grows older it closes doors within itself, both conscious and unconscious. This is why someone who has been totally uneducated can’t simply, upon reaching the age of 22, enter graduate school to study Quantum Mechanics or Economics or what have you. It isn’t simply that they haven’t gone through the motions of attending any school *before* that—but it’s because they would be, by that time, totally unequipped and unable to grasp and learn the concepts they’d be exposed to.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Virtually everything this guy (frater?) said in his caustic evaluation of Behe’s book is totally false (my reply in BOLD):
“This book has helped to fuel (through pseudo-science and untruths COLLEGE & HIGH SCH TEXTS HAVE MANY UNTRUTHS IN THE EVOLUTION SECTION – E.G. ‘GILL SLITS’ ‘MISSING LINK’ CITATIONS, ALLEGED TREE OF LIFE, DESCENT WITH MODIFICATION, ETC.) the idea that evolution is false (THE AUTHOR DOES NOT DEFINE WHAT KIND OF EVOLUTION – MACROEVOLUTION IS ABSURD AND QUITE FALSE) and that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis (NOT ONCE DOES BEHE – AN EVOLUTIONIST, YES, HE’S AN EVOLUTIONIST! – APPEAL TO THE B. OF GENESIS. NOT ONCE IN HIS BOOK) is the only possible manner in which the earth was created (dARWINISTS ARE DOGMATIC IN STATING THAT dARWINISM IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE MANNER IN WHICH THE EARTH EVOLVED). Despite much refutation from the Scientific community (THERE HAS BEEN MUCH SCREAMING & KICKING FROM THE SECULAR, SECULAR ‘SCIENTIFIC’ COMMUNITY I’M DELIGHTED TO SAY – BUT VIRTUALLY NO ‘REFUTATION’), many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true (THOSE WHO BELIEVE THE BIBLE IS HISTORICALLY ACCURATE USE BEHE’S BK – BUT UNDERSTAND WE CANNOT ‘PROOVE’ MACROEVOLUTION TO BE FALSE. SCIENCE HAS SHOWN, HOWEVER, THAT MACROEVOLUTION CANNOT AND DID NOT HAPPEN). The book itself was not peer reviewed as Behe claimed under oath (CITATION, PLEASE), and the Science community has overwhelming rejected it (NOTICE HOW THIS GUY CAPITALIZES ‘SCIENCE’ – ALL BOW BEFORE THE ALTAR OF SCIENCE – YOU OVER THERE – BOW LOWER BEFORE dARWIN! BTW – IT’S SECULAR sCIENCE – NOT SCIENCE).”
One last comment from evolutionist/paleontologist A.G. Fisher, “Both the origin of life and the origin of the major groups of animals remain unknown” (2003)
Hey frater – please list 3 facts of macroevolution for darwinian skeptics such as myself.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Note to randall -
Biology (I have an advanced zoology degree from a secular university) and MACROevolution have nothing at all to do with each other. The research I did (published in a peer-reviewed journal) said nothing about evolutionism – nor did I find myself having to genuflect before darwin’s altar.
I have a copy of Levinton’s 2nd edition before me – it has macroevolution in the title. Please list for me page numbers where Levinton addresses the ‘fact’ of macroevolution.
I’m waiting.
While you’re looking for citations for macroevolution, remember what PETER FOREY said in his review of Levinton’s book (J. of Paleontology77(1)): “Do not expect answers” – p. 200. What a riot! Forey’s phrase should be carved in stone above all ‘evolutionary biology’ (an oxymoron – like rap music) departments.
Macroevolution & biology go together like honesty and politics.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:22 am
windarr:
Okay, let’s cut the bullshit.
A) Science has NOT shown that “macroevolution” is false and did not happen. This is simply a flat-out lie and distortion. Typical of creationist assholes, such as yourself, who attack this well-established model of biology the way politicians attack each other–with untruths, half-truths, and warped citings. That isn’t scientific, windarr, and clearly you are no scientist. You’re just a windbag with a bias and too little knowledge of the subject (enough to satisfy your bias but not enough to truly educate you–but then your mind is shut off to education anyway, no doubt). I detest using internet links, but screw it, here’s a link for you, windarr: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA202.html
B) No one “bows” to science or Darwin, pinhead. I PERSONALLY know several highly-credentialed and even internationally known biologists. (Can you say the same thing? I doubt it). NOT ONE of them is dogmatic about evolution; they simply view it as a well-supported model that fits the facts MUCH better than any other. This is the way scientists think and behave. Not like priestly acolytes to some idol. People such as yourself continue to lie about this, though, because it serves your small-minded purpose—and also probably because you cannot conceive of others taking views based solely on intellectual reasoning. And why? Because…
C) Your description of yourself as a “darwinian skeptic” is a shallow and transparent cover for the truth–which is that you are a creationist.
And by the way, the lower-case “d” for “Darwinists” and so on is the kind of cutesy trick employed by people of sophomoric minds. It says, “ooo, ooo, look at me! I disrespect Darwin!” I’d advise you to grow up, but I’m convinced from your rhetoric that you’re at the highest state of maturity you’ll ever reach.
Time limits me going further with this at present.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Hey Jfrater;
Seems all that yelling pretty much proves your point. Exactly why it is included on the list.
Randall; You don’t need a PHD to know that macro-evolution is just micro-evolution added up. With a few giant leaps due to catastrophe and naturally occuring mutation.
Interesting that you can get a more reasoned argument out of a house wife/mother than a scholar.
By the way a blessing by me is likely to get you closer to Beelzebub than the other guy.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:39 am
windarr:
(COLLEGE & HIGH SCH TEXTS HAVE MANY UNTRUTHS IN THE EVOLUTION SECTION – E.G. ‘GILL SLITS’ ‘MISSING LINK’ CITATIONS, ALLEGED TREE OF LIFE, DESCENT WITH MODIFICATION, ETC.)
The facts of evolution may be untruths to you, but by and large concepts like the phylogenetic tree and “descent with modification” are accepted as truth by the overwhelming majority of the biological science community. Just because you may not agree does not mean that these concepts do not hold validity, being well-researched and derived from supporting empirical evidence.
(THE AUTHOR DOES NOT DEFINE WHAT KIND OF EVOLUTION – MACROEVOLUTION IS ABSURD AND QUITE FALSE)
The blanket term evolution includes both and macro- and microevolution, and though you may find the idea of macroevolution “absurd and quite false” does not make it so. The modern evolutionary synthesis has provided many predictions concerning macroevolution that have proven true, providing support for the idea that macroevolution is scientific reality. As far as science is concerned, macroevolution is a proven fact.
(NOT ONCE DOES BEHE – AN EVOLUTIONIST, YES, HE’S AN EVOLUTIONIST! – APPEAL TO THE B. OF GENESIS. NOT ONCE IN HIS BOOK)
This is correct, Behe is a microevolutionist, and does not appeal to any biblical references in his book, Darwin’s Black Box. However, if you had read the description under the book carefully, you would see that nowhere does Jfrater state that Behe’s makes such an appeal. Rather, he claims the book is used by christian fundamentalists as fuel for their belief, which often originate from a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis.
(dARWINISTS ARE DOGMATIC IN STATING THAT dARWINISM IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE MANNER IN WHICH THE EARTH EVOLVED).
This is also true, because all available scientific evidence has shown that evolution is the most likely mechanism to be able to explain the diversity of life on earth, and no other competing theory has provided any empirical support to offer itself as a viable alternative. If there were support for other theories, such theories would be mainstream in the scientific community. As such, the only evidence we have supports evolution, and it is such a vast body of evidence that scientists the world over have agreed that evolution is the only theory that can explain global biodiversity.
(THERE HAS BEEN MUCH SCREAMING & KICKING FROM THE SECULAR, SECULAR ‘SCIENTIFIC’ COMMUNITY I’M DELIGHTED TO SAY – BUT VIRTUALLY NO ‘REFUTATION’),
This is incorrect. There have been many biological scientists that have refuted the central claims of Behe’s book, particularly those concerning Behe’s “most damning” evidence, the concept of irreducible complexity. A couple of online versions of legtimate, peer-reviewed journal articles, just for a taste:
http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/Behe.html
http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Catalano/box/nature.shtml
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/behe.htm
And a veritable library of information from well-respected biological scientists about the topics that Behe uses to try to make his case for ID: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/publish.html
I invite you to study these sources closely, and you will see that Behe’s concepts, particularly his central, fundamental concept, irreducible complexity, have time and time proven to fail under scrutiny.
(THOSE WHO BELIEVE THE BIBLE IS HISTORICALLY ACCURATE USE BEHE’S BK – BUT UNDERSTAND WE CANNOT ‘PROOVE’ MACROEVOLUTION TO BE FALSE. SCIENCE HAS SHOWN, HOWEVER, THAT MACROEVOLUTION CANNOT AND DID NOT HAPPEN).
Interesting you say this. “We cannot prove macroevolution to be false,” followed closely by “Science has shown that macroevolution cannot and did not happen.” Please explain to me how, if we cannot somehow prove that macroevolution is false, that science has shwon that it cannot and did not happen? This is a logical inconsistency and it damages your credibility. You cannot prove something did not happen if its unfalsifiable, rather like creationism. This theory is indeed unfalsifiable, and as such, no evidence can be produced to refute it, because any such evidence is interpreted by creationists to be in support of their original argument. In any case, this does not matter, as macroevolution is certainly falsifiable. Many predictions about macroevolution have been made, the negation of which would have detracted support from it. However, the hypotheses have proven true across the board and instead lent considerable support to the idea. I invite you to thoroughly read the following page:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/default.html#common_descent “29+ evidences for macroevolution”
“The book itself was not peer reviewed as Behe claimed under oath” (CITATION, PLEASE)
This, I cannot say one way or the other. The original online citations for this have disappeared. Either way, it does not mean that Behe’s book was above criticism.
(NOTICE HOW THIS GUY CAPITALIZES ‘SCIENCE’ – ALL BOW BEFORE THE ALTAR OF SCIENCE – YOU OVER THERE – BOW LOWER BEFORE dARWIN! BTW – IT’S SECULAR sCIENCE – NOT SCIENCE).”
Cute. You’re intentions have been revealed. There is nothing more on this that I can do to damage your credibility more than you have already done to yourself.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Windarr:
Further:
1) an “advanced” zoology degree, eh? Zoology is a VERY broad field. It does not guarantee by ANY means that you had to do the same kind of hard science work that a Micrrobiologist has to do, for example, in order to earn a PhD. And I think if you’d earned a PhD, you would have said so, by the way. “Advanced degree” is exaggerated-speak for “earned an MS, probably in the broadest category of Zoology that was available.” And…
2) a “secular university,” huh? Well I won’t ask you to name it, which I think would be prying (I never name my own university, for privacy reasons). But we can guess it wasn’t a highly-accredited institution… or at least, *I* can guess that, because I frankly don’t doubt said guess, given your attitude and rhetoric. OR at the least, we can say that you have failed your institution as a former student and graduate. Because instead of coming out with the mind of a scholar, you’re nothing but a biased mouthpiece for an unscientific worldview.
And the reason I can say this? Because A) if you were truly a well-established and highly-educated scientist, who had been educated at a truly well-established and highly-accredited institution, you would not be on a little List website trying to refute people’s beliefs in Darwin. Or, B) if you chose to do so, for fun (as I do) then you wouldn’t have opened with a shallow attack (as you did) with a lot of cant and wildly distorted statements, but would have written a thoughtful piece in an effort to educate us poor know-nothings.
And I love the ol’ shallow trick of demanding refutations of texts of your own choosing, and then the cutesy “I’m waiting.” It’s an old rhetorical sleight-of-hand used by those who only know how to argue from authority and to overwhelm by emotion.
If you were right and had proof, windarr, the entire science of biology would be brought down. It isn’t, and you aren’t right, and haven’t got your proof.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:53 am
This is really quite amusing.
Look what happens when someone stands to say the darwinian emperor has no clothes!
randall resorts to profanity and name-calling, always a clear indication that his darwinian position is tenuous. I’ll not respond in kind, but simply offer a recent quote from atheist John Chaikowsky in Geotimes, v 50, Apr 2005, pg. 6, “They tell the public that the science behind [macro]evolution is the same science that sent people to the moon and cures diseases. It’s not. The science behind evolution is not empirical, but forensic … no testing, no observations, no repeatability, no falsification …I think this is what the public discerns — that evolution is just a bunch of just-so stories disguised as legitimate science.”
How many times must it be said? Creationists (randall, all Creationists are ‘darwinian skeptics’!) love biology. I’m proof with undergrad & graduate degrees in biology/zoology. I just don’t stomach the darwinian religion that is shoe-horned into otherwise good science.
“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory—is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation—both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.” -L. Harrison-Matthews, Introduction to the ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, 1971, ed.
Faith? darwinists have a truckload, believing that a tasteless, odorless, colorless gas (hydrogen) allegedly formed at the big bang (which is unscientific: Eric Lerner, New Scientist, May 22, ‘04) – through time – became people.
“We think we understand the universe, but we only understand four percent of everything,” said James Watson Cronin, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize for physics. Physorg.com, Sept., 27, 2007 ‘In the dark: science still mystified by stuff of universe’
Speaking of origins, paleontologist A.G. Fisher said in 2003, “Both the origin of life and the origin of the major groups of animals remain unknown.”
So much for the fact of macroevolution.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Of all the times for the site to fuck me over, it has to be now. Thanks, internet gods. I set out a rather lengthy missive in response to windarr’s post, but unfortunately, the post must have gotten lost in translation. *Sigh*
For now, I’ll say this:
Windarr: How did you manage to get through school with an advanced degree in zoology while maintaining the idea that evolution is false? Pay lip service to Darwin while striving for your degree? I mean, you can’t honestly expect us to believe you somehow have an advanced (and by advanced I assume you mean a graduate or post-graduate degree) degree in biological science by rejecting the very phylogenetic tree that zoology bases its classification system on. That’s simply absurd. Furthermore, you’re lack of knowledge about evolution leads me to believe that you are not who you say you are. Even if you reject Darwinism, I doubt you could have gotten through graduate school in zoology without a thorough understanding of how evolution is supposed to work. It’s a major part of the curriculum in any biological science, particulary zoology. This statement particularly troubles me: “BUT UNDERSTAND WE CANNOT ‘PROOVE’ MACROEVOLUTION TO BE FALSE. SCIENCE HAS SHOWN, HOWEVER, THAT MACROEVOLUTION CANNOT AND DID NOT HAPPEN” So you go from attacking evolution with a scientific criticism – unfalsifiabilty – and in the same breath turn around and say that it has been proven false. This is a logical contradiction, and, even if you disagree with macroevolution, you cannot be a legitimate professional zoologist and disagree with the scientific fallibility of macroevolution. This is a blatant falsehood, and is cited as one of the most well-parroted but misunderstood conceptions of macroevolution, something that applies to the average joe-schmo creationists but not to legitimate professional zoologists as you claim to be. Macroevolutionary theory posits hypotheses and makes predictions. Such hypotheses are easily falsifiable, if the predictions are found to be inaccurate. To this date, the predictions postulated by macroevolutionary theory have not been falsified. This does not mean they are unfalsifiable. It means that macroevolution has never encounted a serious, credible damaging attack based on the scientific method of prediction and outcome.
Even the most credible ID-ists are scientists that work within the system, and acknowledge its fundamental tenants. You, however, seem to have the liberty of enjoying your position while rejecting the fundamentals of the scientific theory. This is incompatible. I would venture to say that, unless you can produce legitimate credentials explaining your position and the credibility of your degrees, you are nothing but a lying charlatan.
In any case, you ask for 3 facts of microevolution. I offer you 30: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/default.html#common_descent
May 16th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Randall, Slickwilly; Can either of you two explain to me the alternate to evolution? and Common origin? Does it involve magic wands?
I believe in both of the above, not because I’m brainwashed, befuddled or stupid, but because is makes sense. No?
I require an explanation, and in not quite phd speak, OK?
May 16th, 2008 at 10:52 am
edit:
“In any case, you ask for 3 facts of *macroevolution*…”
May 16th, 2008 at 10:56 am
So short on time just now… maddening.
But to respond quickly:
windarr:
No, I use profanity and name-calling when dealing with *assholes*—such as yourself—not because my “Darwinian position is tenuous.”
I don’t mind clarifying that sort of thing.
And now you’re calling into question the very foundations of physics and chemistry, I see, with this nonsense about hydrogen.
windarr, you’re obviously nothing but a crank. If you really did earn a degree (which I doubt even more now) than it had to be from some god-forsaken place where the students’ SAT scores are lower than my credit rating after my divorce.
Now, if you don’t mind, I’m compelled to get back to the work calling me, in a world of truly intelligent and open-minded students whom I respect and cherish not because their families had the money to pay for an education at this wonderful and prestigious university in the northeast, but because they are all bright young scholars who would laugh at you in the face for your nonsense, if they had the opportunity. The faculty, of course, would merely shake their head in disgust. As I do.
We aren’t the dogmatists, here, clown. That’s you and your fellows in spades.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Mom424: Simply put, there is no major, scientifically-viable alternative to the theory of evolution. I can’t explain the alternative to you in anything other than religious, pseudo-scientific terms. An intelligent, sentient, purposeful entity that exists beyond the laws of time and space, indeed beyond the visible, testable universe, actively created the world and everything in it, and affected active change in the world through the use of unexplainable supernatural powers. This entity created each distinct species unique from one another, and then allowed the process of microevolution to allow each distinct species to adapt to its environment, but not to the point where sexual reproductive isolation occured, effectively producing a new species. No, as stated, each species was created distinct from each other species.
That’s the best I can do, Mom. But, I mean, we’ve had this conversation before and you already know all of this.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Slick;
So, I was right. It does involve magic wands. I thought by the tone of windarr that there was some other non-diety involved alternative. That is whats so scary about pseudo-science; it sounds reasonable. That is why I requested the clarification. Casual readers may have been left with the impression that there was some sort of scientific basis for denial.
Thank-you.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:27 am
windar:
“The science behind evolution is not empirical, but forensic … no testing, no observations, no repeatability, no falsification …I think this is what the public discerns — that evolution is just a bunch of just-so stories disguised as legitimate science.”
I know this wasn’t what you said and that you quoted someone. However I am confused by this statement considering there have been PLENTY of experiments and observations that prove evolution happens. I learned about most of them in college even just in my biology textbooks including experiments as “micro” as bacteria and as “macro” as finches.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Not sure why everyone keeps asking wheres the Bible. Before the list begins JF says that he is not going to state the obvious. The Bible, The Quaraan etc… would defiantly be the obvious.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Whoops I just wanted to clarify something I said
I meant as “micro” as bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics and as “macro” as finches who have diverged and developed into seperate species.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
C’mon guys. Books don’t kill people. People kill people!
May 16th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
but, unstable people get ideas from books
May 16th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
MPW; Yes, and they get ideas from Xenu, and aliens, and don’t forget microwave rays from power lines. Unstable people will always find something to either latch on to or blame.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I think the idea that Behe’s book is on this list is pretty absurd. You write that “This book has helped to fuel (through pseudo-science and untruths) the idea that evolution is false and that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is the only possible manner in which the earth was created.”
The idea that God created is a pervasive belief in the U.S. that existed long before Behe wrote anything and persists to this day, even though only a tiny portion of the U.S. public has heard of Behe or his book.
A CBS poll indicates that 51% of the U.S. public believes that God created human beings in their present form. Another 30% believe that humans evolved, but that God guided the process (this belief is a variant of intelligent design, not Darwanism). Only 15% believe what Darwin proposes(i.e.that humans evolved, and God did not guide the process) see “http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/main965223.shtml
To be clear, I am not at all trying to say that scientifics facts are established by public opinion. I am saying that it is a little foolish to think that Behe’s book has significantly effected public opinion on this topic. The extent to which naturalistic evolution is rejected by the general public is far too great to attribute to Behe.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
mom424: Are you getting wise:>
May 16th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Paul D;
I hope your statistics are somehow skewed. Otherwise 85% of Americans are friggin’ idiots. I don’t personally know one person who doesn’t believe in evolution/common origin. Not 1.
Holy crap you guys have a long way to go.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
where the hell is the bible, and Darwain and Communism are great
May 16th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I’d like to add the coments on this list to the list.
May 16th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
COMMENTS LOL
May 16th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Mom424: He doesn’t speak for most of us. “Don’t look at me, he’s not my friend.”
May 16th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I laughed dryly when I saw this in the archive. My first thought was that I had a pretty good guess. “Mein Kampf.” And lookie here, I’m not the only one who thinks so.
Number six, “The Pivot of Civilization,” surprised me. In fact, I am completely amazed that anyone would take it seriously, considering the time frame. She’s female and it was written around Hitler’s time. (Although I will never look at the term “feminazi” the same way again.)
And don’t get me wrong. I’m a woman, too.
That number one there is amusing as well. But I do not think it belongs on the list. Because…it is pretty much the only one that does not cause deaths. (Besides 9, but that one is funny.)
May 16th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
So yeah… I know a lot of folks here in the good ol’ US of A that DO believe in evolution. A LOT more than 15% of people. I’d actually say it’s closer to… oh, I don’t know… a good 90%. But that’s just where I live, and I’m in the freakin Bible Belt, where people look at you funny if you say you aren’t a Christian (I’m not, sorry). Means a lot of Chrtistian folk agree that evolution was how it happened, and everyone who isn’t religious is of the same mindset. We’re not as backward as it would appear, Mom. (Mind if I call you Mom? I’s be an internet orphan.) I’m somewhat appalled at the statistics mentioned above. And shocked. And slightly skeptic. Scratch that, VERY skeptic.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Randall,
How exactly is eliminating the discussion on the origin of species, in grade school, going to prevent the ability of children and teenagers from being able to grasp theories and philosophies in post-secondary school?
Your turning this one point into an entire attack on education from my behalf, and that was never my point.
““I honestly don’t see why either side cares so deeply about trivial facts such as how old the earth is.” YOU said that. Incredibly dumb.”
It’s a trivial fact in the grand scheme of things. It’s not a necessity to teach grade schoolers the subject.
““If someone wants to believe that Evolution is bullocks why does it matter?” YOU said that. Once again, incredibly dumb, and blindly ignorant as well.”
Yes, I did post that and I stand by it. The sky isn’t going to fall because someone doesn’t accept Evolution, so why is there such a need to force the topic on children when there are so many parents unhappy with its teachings? Why not leave the topic to post-secondary teachings, when a person is old enough to make their own choices, and to parents who chose to teach their children about the subject?
May 16th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
ChrisM – I don’t want you to feel like I’m singling you out, but I read your last post and felt I had to respond.
I partially agree with you. Evolution is not something that will make a life or death difference in most people’s lives. However, I do feel strongly that it should remain part of grade school curriculum. My reason is that evolution is an important basis for the study of biology. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to teach the similarities and differences between biological entities without first basing your explanations on the keystone of evolution.
Besides that, every aspect of school science curriculum strictly adheres to the scientific method just like the theory of evolution does. We can not teach creationism as science because, to put it simply, it isn’t. There is no way to test creationism, and creationism is not objective. Note that terms such as objective and theory have very specific definitions within the scientific community and they are not used loosely by any means. Creationism should be taught in theology studies.
I know this upsets alot of people, but I see it as no different from sex ed classes. The ultra-conservative factions want abstinence, and only abstinence taught, while the more liberal factions want an open discussion all all aspects. I tend to fall in to the liberal group on both issues. Talking about sex doesn’t make you a whore any more than talking about evolution makes you an atheist. People will always have the option to form their own beliefs, and many notable christians have managed to reconcile the differences between science and theology in their own minds.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
i laughed at both mein kampf and the protocals of the elders of zion on the list. talk about bias.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
ChrisM #299: We don’t leave it out of grade school because science shows that, as we get older, our minds slowly lose their ability to learn at the fast rate that seven and eight year olds do. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”? It’s true in more ways than one. He’s not just set in his ways, his brain is set like that for the long run, and it takes a lot to change it. It’s the same way with people. The older we get, the harder it is for us to accept new ideas, no matter how imbedded with fact they are. If you put off introducing anything controversial until they can think for themselves, it might be too late to actually get it in them enough to stick with them.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
ChrisM: Post-Secondary school??? This gives me Two Ideas as to your education; Some ass backwards private school Or You’re not even American.
Either way, how can your opinions of the American education system be representative of most of America? Pubic schooling is the staple of upbringing, Our baby sitter, our sometimes first and second meals of the day, the next best thing to parental figures.
Private schools are Very well known for teaching Opinions and not Authentic Fact.
If you were educated Outside of the Us, Why would you try to use outright skewed statistics? Do you really think us that Ignorant?
___
“I want to be an astronaut when I grow up!” Commonly heard among CHILDREN!!! Why would they get that Idea and if they did follow their heart, wouldn’t education in the Sciences be needed. The Computer you are using has Direct historical significance to all things Space. What makes you think that the minerals, alloys, and electricity coursing through your machine right now would have come about? God Created them!!!! HA! We created them, We thought of them, We educated ourselves since the start!
Education, the Exact opposite if Ignorance. You go ahead and Not educate Your children. And I’ll educate My Children well enough to take care of their new pets.
May 17th, 2008 at 4:47 am
I apologize for referring to continuing education as post-secondary, as I’m Canadian and that’s what we refer to it as.
I’m personally not against the teaching of Evolution, but I do understand that it upsets enough people that perhaps some guidelines should be applied. Perhaps if they allowed students to opt-out of the sessions, on the teaching, with parental support that would please both sides…?
I just don’t like the idea of forcing it on people if it’s going to upset them so much
May 17th, 2008 at 6:58 am
The Bible isn’t a screwed up book of books, it had been badly mistranslated, mistated and misunderstood over the centuries.
The King James Bible was a bad version, since it would give the ruler the excuse to say, “All is good under my reign, that mean God is blessed with you people, peace and prosperity be upon you people,” OR “All is not well under my reign, that mean God is disappointed in you people and I’m going to have to punish you all as God entrusts me to do so,”.
The Qu’ran, on the other hand, should be on the list of 10 worst books. It is never misunderstood or mistranslated, all of the words and sayings were printed in Arabic of the 8th century A.D. and remains so to this day. It is responsible for more violence, conquests, forcible submission, slavery and oppression than any other holy book/books, including the Bible.
May 17th, 2008 at 8:11 am
You have to be kidding me. You do not understand John Dewey or pragmatism AT ALL.
You state that John Dewey thought that, “it IS the job of educators to teach people how to THINK, primarily… not to teach them “stuff.” (which is secondary, but necessary). But it quickly became forgotten that these two aims need to mesh together, and that the teaching of “stuff” can affect one’s ability to learn and think just as much as direct instruction in the processes of thinking.”
Yet you fail to recognize the fact that Dewey was an instrumentalist–he AGREED with what you are saying about the learning of facts and stuff being separate. His point was that teaching for tests (like the failed no child left behind is doing) is a mistake, yet he was not so foolish as to advocate rote memorized learning of his system. Rather, he was advocating a hands on approach to learning a discipline.
Want to learn science? You CAN NOT just sit in a class and hear facts that science has come up with to this date. You MUST get out there and DO science to understand it and its goals in any meaningful context.
I find the way that you’ve straw-manned his position utterly regrettable, as (if anything) we need to Deweyize our system a great deal more. To give you an example of how Dewey’s views were taken piecemeal rather than actually considered: Dewey came up with the ’scientific method’ simplification that you often find in science classrooms from the middle school level on up. Yet, he came up with it NOT as something to be memorized out of a context so much as for a tool in his arguments that the processes of thinking and acting should be emphasized (again, not to be memorized AS processes so much as actually DONE).
Most pragmatists do not accept anything like the claim that we ‘create’ truth–Dewey for damn sure didn’t.
You also unfairly criticize The Prince. Machiavelli was writing a descriptive manual which many have used normatively, how is that his fault?
May 17th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Chris M;
I explained in comment #268 why evolution/origin theory cannot wait until the post secondary years.It is the basis of all biology. It would be like moving directly to long-division without learning addition and subtraction first.
The questions must be answered as natural curiosity demands. Also curriculum is geared towards interest. Who isn’t interested in Dinosaurs in Grade 1. It is a traditional introduction to many subjects where I live. I and each of my children did dino stuff in grade 1. An introduction to Biology, Natural History, Reading, Spelling, Climate. All the while keeping the kids enthralled; they don’t even know they’re learning. Evolution of man is a natural extension of this. I remember that famous poster of the evolution of man being decoration in many classrooms. Since grade school.
I’m right, your wrong; carefully re-read the comment and if you still don’t agree, explain how my logic is flawed.
Mortivore;
You are more than welcome to call me “Mom”. Other than Cyn the Admin, I’m the oldest chicky (awright mother hen) around these parts. (I’m 46).
I too am very skeptical about the statistics quoted by Paul D. Too many people forget that the answer depends entirely on the question. Subtle cues will lead to the response you require. Even the order of questions will end-up with predetermined results. Do you believe in God?, Do you go to church?, etc., etc.,. Basically you trap the respondent into the answer you want. Folks don’t like to contradict themselves, they’d agree rather than appear foolish.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Mom424,randall,slickwilly:
Can’t you make a list of top ten evidence for why evolution by natural selection is the most valid theory on the origin of life?
You guys seem to know a thing or two about it
And if you can’t would someone by able to give it a try?
May 17th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Mom424-
i’d resisted using that..now i know i must.
and yeah, i’m older than Mom. *sigh*
May 17th, 2008 at 10:47 am
You had me until I saw the number one choice. Then I lost all respect for the judgement of the writer.
Darwins theories are not sacred, they should be open to scepticism and scientific evaluation. That Behe has inspired Creationists…well, so what? I would rather see Creationists inspired than, say, communists.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Cyn; sorry for blowing your cover. And you’re not very much older than me. We are of an age. And I’m not really too old for anything. Well maybe magic mushrooms.
Warningdon’treadthis; I’m not a scientist, so the things I am going to list will be generalizations. You need Slick (he’s a biologist I think) or Randall (astronomer, scholar, and resident know-it-all. This is not an insult, just a fact) for specifics.
1. DNA/RNA – All living things on earth encode their information the same way. They either use their own or hi-jack the host’s DNA for reproduction. Prions (cause of mad-cow disease) may be the exception; I’m not entirely up to date on the research in this field.
2. Proteins – All living things use proteins in the same ways. They are integral in all biological cells on earth. Specific proteins serve the same function in all living things. Either acting as catalysts or enzymes or specific structures. For example, Hair, finger nails, horns, scales same protein, different configuration.
3. Fossil evidence – No other process explains the preponderance of fossil evidence. No possible way all those creatures were alive together at one point in time. Explain archeopteryx any other way. Or homo-habilis for that matter.
4. Biological evidence – The cave animals whose eyes have atrophied and finally disappeared, have lost the ability to produce melanin (pigment), developed giant feelers etc.
5. Common-sense – There is no such thing as magic. Something can’t come from nothing. Ever.
That’s all I can think of right now, (it’s Saturday of a long week-end, I need to get to my garden), but I’m sure the scholars among us will fill out my list. Likely way more than the 10 points you requested.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Atlas Shrugged and Dianetics.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Regardless of how one feels about the Christian view of creation, I heartily disagree that is is somehow more damaging than works like Mein Kampf or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While both those book promote hate based upon race, creed, religion etc, Darwin’s Black Box seeks to expose what the author feels is a falsehood that continues to be promoted by secular science. I don’t care if someone believes in evolution or not, that doesn’t factor into how I value that person. But whether they hate people without cause, that certainly does.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
“Silent Spring” should head the list. Responsible for more deaths, especially of children, in Africa and south Asia then the head count of Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
What’s remotely ‘evil’ about The Communist Manifesto?
May 17th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
ChrisM,
Please stop making us Canadians look like idiots…
Thanks,
TheCap
Budding Anthropologist
P.S. Thanks Mom424, Randall, and slickwilly. There is hope for the human Race yet!
May 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
So, I counted 7 books out of #2-9 that advocated or directly contributed to actual death, yet Darwin’s Black Box is #1?
Really????? Wow.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
“The Tasty Treats From Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream” is missing from the list.
F**k Häagen-Dazs and it’s fat giving, sex repellant!
May 17th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
mom424:
Thanks mom. I hope someone does make the list that I requested.
Slickwilly are you a biologist? I’m really interested in becoming one, is it very difficult?
May 17th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Eric: the list is in no particular order, read the whole thing.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Including Machiavelli is an interesting choice, I’m not sure it meets the technical requirement of being lies. But it certainly was influential.
I also have to question how Dr. Spocks book gets on there. Yes 20/20 hindsite had some bad information, but for the most part it did have a positive influence on parenting for several generations, while one of the greatest works of genocide of teh 20th Century, Rachel Carsons Silent Spring gets ignored? Spocks book may have had some bad info that may or may not have contributed to crib deaths. Carsons book used bogus science and outright lies to get everyone to mourn for the poor little birdies. The end result being MILLIONS dead or crippled of Malaria and Mosquito born dissease in the developing world. The effects of that one book are still being felt in health care systems throughout the world to this day.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I’m callin’ shenanigans on The Communist Manifesto.
It was a pamphlet, designed for the mid-1800s, and forced Western Europe to pay some respect to qualities beyond quantifiable greed. Marx believed in inevitable revolution; Lenin hijacked that, and every subsequent cruelty was based on similar warpings of the subject matter.
Seriously, it’s no worse than John Locke saying that a government that abuses its citizens doesn’t deserve to govern: a society that abuses its citizens doesn’t deserve to exist, either.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
What about The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray? It has encouraged all kinds of racist and policy and has been used to ‘legitimate’ many cruel policies. This may be one of the obvious books left out on purpose but, I thought I’d check.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I feel like the list-writer has an anti-liberal agenda, and is essentially trying to compare ideas like Nazism, racism, and creationism, with modern child-rearing, subjectivism, culturally sensitive education, and socialism.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
WHAT ABOUT..IT”S THE GREAT PUMPKIN CHARLIE BROWN..?
May 17th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
To classify things as evil is silly. Read the Lucifer Principle.
That said, religious texts are created to indoctrinate, control, and provide a viewpoint and lifestyle that separates and elevates one group over another. Whether it is couched in doing ‘moral’ things, genocide and holy wars, or circumcision. If anything is evil, it is that.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Entertaining, but too slanted to be taken seriously (at least by us in the academic world) If criterion includes deaths as result of publication or negative influence, as implied by the baby book, where are the Bible and Koran? If it is based in the creation of tyranny, where’s Smith’s Wealth of Nations; and again, the Bible? Oh, and by the way Machiavelli wrote the Prince as a less than veiled attack against the Medici family who ruined his life.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
has anyone here seen the movie “idocracy?” that right there is a pretty strong argument for eugenics… not in the racist sense that sanger means it, but in a more… intelligence-based sense.
i’m not going to whip out facts or anything like that, just talk from personal life experience:
i used to work for a company that provided services for mostly mentally handicapped people. just so you know, i loved those people, they were a joy to work with and i really enjoyed my job. however, their quality of life was abhorrent, and the toll they took on their parents and
caregivers (i’m talking about the people with severe disabilities) was almost unjustifiable. it’s great that modern medicine can save the lives of children who are born without a chance in hell… but you gotta think… there’s a reason babies like that died back in our savannah-roaming days. i’m not saying we should round up the ‘tards and kill ‘em, but maybe we should let nature take its course. i think it’d be better to not live than to not be able to participate the full mental extent of the human experience.
i know it’s controversial, but what are ya gonna do? most opinions are.
back to the idocracy thing: think about what a better world this would be if trash like britney spears and paris hilton weren’t allowed to procreate!
May 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
What authority does this article call on to so summarily criticize these works? While some of them are indeed controversial, none of them have “screwed up the world.” Some of the “facts” stated are actually falsehoods. It is interesting that the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran didn’t make the list. They are the seeds of the suffering and death of millions, which continues to this day.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Notice what all 326 posts so far have in common? This book did this, that book did that. Books are pieces of paper with squiggles on them. People DECIDE to make a book influential. People DECIDE to misuse the contents of a book to rationalize their impulses.
We’re surrounded by this mentality on every hand. The world will be a perfect place if only we can get rid of all the externalities that cause people to be mean. Because people never decide on their own to be mean. It’s guns, or spanking, or food additives, or poverty, or inequality, or pornography, or evolution or religion. So if we can eliminate all the evil externalities, everyone will be happy happy and there will be unicorns and rainbows and we can all go out and play forevermore.
The idyllic world John Lennon pictures in “Imagine” will last precisely up to the moment when two people want the same thing and neither is willing to back down. That’s a scary idea because it means there will always be conflict, there will always be a need for police and armies. Because even after you eliminate all the guns and spanking and poverty and violent cartoons, people will soon discover they can get power, privilege, and gratification from dominating others.
Ironically, trying to remove all the things that might cause people to choose evil ends up creating the worst tyrannies. Because it’s never enough. Regardless of how little inequality or poverty there is, people will still be discontented, and the causes of the discontent must be ferreted out ever more ruthlessly. Regardless of how much everyone subscribes to the same ideology or religion, there are always tiny differences that cause people to argue, so those will have to be stamped out.
It’s not the books that screwed up the world, it’s the people who read them. They could have chosen to draw other lessons from the books. They chose not to.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Your views of Machiavelli are asinine at best.
May 17th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Wait, wait, what? What world do I live in when the guys defending Machiavelli get to call OTHER people asinine?
May 17th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Add any book, speech or other utterance on Noam Chomsky. His untested, useless theories have destroyed American education. His concepts are the gateway drugs that have led to eubonics and many other nonsense efforts that are choking America’s attempt to educate its young. No single person has made America dumber than this idiot.
May 17th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
327. Erik J.D.
“Entertaining, but too slanted to be taken seriously”
Haha…yeah you could say that about a lot of lists on this site
May 17th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
All of the books on this list try to report an observation or a truth–warped, wrong, or evil as it may be to us now. Maybe the big problem has been in the inability of readers to take these books with a grain of salt. Funny how books which are patently fictional (‘cept for Harry Potter, of course) haven’t made the list here.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Having Darwin’s Black Box on the list is intellectually dishonest. Especially having it as #1. The book has not been responsible for any death or destruction. It has not prompted a sea change in public policy or law. As near as I can tell, it’s just prompted some public debate. HOW HORRIBLE!
I’d say the same thing about any book from the current crop of atheists. I might vehemently disagree with what they say, but their books have not had a major impact on the world.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
“Add any book, speech or other utterance on Noam Chomsky. His untested, useless theories have destroyed American education. His concepts are the gateway drugs that have led to eubonics and many other nonsense efforts that are choking America’s attempt to educate its young. No single person has made America dumber than this idiot.”
The fact that you just claimed “eubonics” is a word, somehow combining “eugenics” and “ebonics”, alone casts far more aspersions on your argument than logic alone. I do wonder, though, why you think hundreds of pages with books of citations make “America” (as if that’s the only important nation) makes people dumber than, say, asinine news reports or American Idol.
Gotta say, despite being completely in agreement with Darwin’s Black Box being STUPID, it in no way beats out Mein Kampf. And putting the Communist Manifesto past, y’know, Mein Kampf is also ridiculous. Ditto for putting Dewey (whether or not one agrees with him – I happen to) after Mein Kampf. Apparently people being “uneducated” is worse for the author than millions of people dying and the most devastating war in history, as well as the idea of banning inheritance. Hyperbole does not become the OP.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
It is interesting that 4 of the writers on this list were admirers of Darwins theories. A book that has done no damage to anyone, and questions the theories behind so many atrocities of the last century gets on the list?
May 17th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
“Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witchraft) was a manual for witch hunters and judges to catch witches and stamp them out. It came out just prior to the protestant reformation and it was one of the most popular books amongst the reformers who were wanting to smash “evil” out of their countries.”
Considering that this book was published “just prior to the protestant reformation” (twenty editions were published between 1487 and 1520…Martin Luther was born in 1483 and published his 95 Theses in 1517), it’s interesting that it’s not referenced even one time in the foundational Lutheran (protestant) documents which defined the new movement: the Book of Concord, which was published in 1580. Luther himself died in 1546, and his most accomplished biographer, Roland Bainton, makes not a single reference to the Malleus Maleficarum in his book “Here I Stand” (which was published in 1950).
Could you please provide some substantiation for your charge that it was “one of the most popular books amongst the reformers”?
Thank you.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I have a response to those who are saying that the Bible belongs on this list.
If you consider all the absolute evil in the world a book has caused as a measure of whether it belongs on this list or not, the Bible actually WOULD be on this list, though below Hitler’s and Marx’s. And maybe Plato’s Republic as well. (Part of this is a consequence of being arguably the most read and nearly the oldest of all books).
However, if you consider NET evil rather than GROSS evil, the Bible is actually the least evil, most good text available. The overwhelming majority of all the good, charitable, kind acts that have gone on in the world and are going on in the world since Christ walk this earth is a direct result of his teachings which are largely contained in that book.
Those who are moved to act by the Bible and it’s ethics is the ultimate counter to the evil caused by the acts of Stalin and Marx and Hitler.
Wherever there is hunger or strife in this world or in this country, there are Christians who have led the way to ease the suffering of the poor, the downtrodden, the victims who are otherwise forgotten by the secular and non-Christian world.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I’d have included “The Population Bomb”, though it might be a bit redundant since you have Sanger there. And “Silent Spring” not only killed more people (via malaria by taking away DDT) than Spock, it created the dangerous trend of using basing draconian and deady public policy on what makes you feel Good About The Earth.
May 17th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
I have to agree with The Skin that Darwin belongs on the list. Margarget Sanger or Adolph Hitler probably never would have gotten off the ground without Darwin laying the groundwork for the idea that people are just animals to be bred and manipulated.
May 17th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
You forgot the bible and the koran
May 17th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I tried to read Mein Kampf a couple of times, never to succeed in getting all the way through it. It was written in a rambling stream-of-thought literary style, and like many books of this nature, such as The Turner Diaries, or The Anarchist’s Cookbook, it might have benefited from competent editing, which authors like the 1925 Adolf Hitler could not possibly hope to convince to touch this kind of garbage. Word to the wise; if somebody pushes a cheaply-produced paperback that reads like it was written by a demented twelve year old child, with more typographical errors per page than your church newsletter, beware the movement that would produce it. That was Hitler’s state of mind in a nutshell.
May 17th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Actually, no one really knows whether or not Margaret Mead’s book was based on truth or not. Most people in the anthropological community think she was probably not as stringent as she should have been, but I don’t know any cultural anthropologists who believe outright that the book is based on lies. The man who started the controversy, Derek Freeman, is well known for being totally mentally unstable, and he has very publicly made known his puritanical ideas about sexuality. When he re-interviewed the girls that Mead had originally worked with, it was over fifty years later, and they had all converted to Christianity. He waited until Mead died to publish his findings so she wouldn’t be able to reply. Obviously his books caused huge ripples in anthropology, but most people agree that he isn’t the most credible person, and based on Mead’s fieldnotes, it really isn’t possible to tell whether or not the book is accurate. Furthermore, it’s not as if it is such a crazy notion that youths in a society would engage in promiscuity openly. There are many societies, like the Trobrianders, who are known for this. People have just blindly accepted that it was a hoax because it is a good story, without even looking at the full picture. And the thing about the book being about her own sexual confusions was originally written by the National Catholic Register… not exactly the most unbiased source ever.
May 17th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
“It’s number One! It’s number One.” Asshats, It’s in no particular Order! I feel a rant about people being too lazy to read coming on.
This list has taught me one thing. We all have opinions, right and wrong, left and right, and some that left long ago.
____
‘Choices in life are rarely pure, but to understand the middle ground it is helpful to imagine the extremes.’ Peter Berger, I like that quote and I think is pretty relevant.
May 17th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
No one mentioned Ayn Rand? Or is she too obvious of a choice?
May 17th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Mom424-
np
alright for folks to know there’s an admin around. damn sure have no issues w/ my age…totally freaks me out i’m still around after all this time…lol. as for partaking…i would if i could.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
“I love how people will seize upon any chance to attack religion.”
I love how people will seize upon any moment where religion comes into question as an opportunity to paint religion as being under attack or somehow a victim.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
As a witch, I’d like to thank you for having Malleus Maleficarum on the list. While the ignorant masses keep yelling about real religious texts being omitted from the list, they seem to forget that pseudo-religious texts, like Malleus, exist and do even more harm. The Bible did not induce The Burning Times, which was basically a 300 year Holocaust that hit more innocents than anything else, including Christians that were accused of “black magic” for the sake of land grabbing (in most US provinces/states during the 1800s, discovery of a witch and subsequent slaying [or the slaying of an individual and subsequent "discovery" of witchcraft] entitled the discoverer to the decease individual’s property).
The authors of Malleus asked the Pope at the time for his blessing on the publication of the book. Not only did he deny them, he forbade them from printing it. They ignored him and put the endorsement in the book anyway. Every superstition, myth, and fear that anyone has about Witchcraft comes from this horrid book, which was written with no regard to fact and completely from some demented fantasies. Near single-handedly, Malleus altered the course of Paganism for over one-half of a millennium, causing Witchcraft to become the second most slandered religion in the history of the world (Voudoun, more commonly spelled as Voodoo, is the reigning champion for that, with a significantly greater unmerited prejudice against it).
Say what you will of philosophy and science, but neither of them have caused 500 years of suppression, suffering, lynchings, fear, and hatred in any fashion that compares to Malleus Maleficarum.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
No one mentioned Ayn Rand?
How have her books messed anything up unless you consider exposing the socialist elite agenda a BAD thing?!
May 17th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Says Randall:
We have Dewey to thank for the discarding of substance in favor of process. And the result? Our kids are far behind Europeans and Asians in math and science, watch Hollywood movies in class in lieu of actual instruction, and security is a greater concern in our schools than education.
Says me:
Umm… Contrary to the popular opinion that Asian education is all facts and drill, Japanese educators use Dewey far more than Americans do. See Stigler & Hiebert, (1999) The Teaching Gap, or Becker & Shimada (1997) The open ended approach, for examples of how Dewey has influenced Japanese mathematics education.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
You should’ve included, “Silent Spring.” Carson’s book has caused the deaths of thousands due to preventable disease.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:32 am
warningtreadonthis (#319):
Actually, I’m not a biologist, though a large part of what I do involves biological science. If you want to be a biologist though, if it really interests you, take up biology as a major in college and work hard so you can eventually make it to graduate and post-graduate degrees. Most professional biologists are phDs.
I’m actually a graduate student in the philosophy of science department at my university. My specific field is evolutionary psychology. I consider myself a psychologist, but the nature of the field requires a firm background in biology, particularly evolutionary theory. I probably could make a list on top 15 or 20 evidences for why evolution is the valid theory for explaining the diversity of life. The theory of evolution actually doesn’t deal with the origins of life, though the concepts of evolution are applied in the field that does (abiogenesis). It would take me a little while, though. I’ve been very busy this past week.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Slick: Dude, I thought you were retired. I guess I should’ve paid more attention.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Crimanon: Whoa, where the blue hell did you get that idea? LOL
May 18th, 2008 at 1:07 am
I think it came up in conversation, but really I have no clue, Failing memory. If Only i’d listened in DARE. What can you do? oh.. you going to smoke that?
Strange question, Snow Crash; Radikal Kourier Systems; Does any one know where I can find a Bionic Radish decal?
May 18th, 2008 at 1:15 am
Alright, call it devils advocate or horrible facist, I think some things need to be said, since, this entire article is written on the presumption it can dictate cause and effect. Not everything is all bad.
I am unfamiliar with Mead’s works.
Malleus Maleficarum – the Witch Hunts were bad, but like all bad things they were a catalyst for something more. In America, they started the Massachusetts Bay colony down the road to due process, directly because of the Salem witch trials (specifically, the mandate that spectral evidence is bunk).
The Prince – The Prince is simply a manual on how to be a tyrant, it didn’t create it. Nor would not being familiar with it prevent one from becoming one, much in the same way that not reading “First Grade Basic Math 7th Edition” prevents someone from realizing that five is more than three. Machiavelli also said many things in his book, such as “The Greatest shield [a Prince] can have is the love of his people”. Funny how people overlook those passages.
Mein Kampf – Hitler didn’t create Jewish hatred. He simply tapped into a pool of resentment that hadn’t been tried before in a real national scale. Also, the word they like to teach us these days is that 1 in 10 Germans was a Nazi, they were a tiny minority. Right? So it wasn’t really all that effective. Further: Mein Kampf is what alerted the outside world to what Nazism was really all about. It’s what made Winston Churchill such a Cassandra during the course of the 1930s. If Mein Kampf wasn’t there, would -anyone- have been prepared for the coming war?
Pivot of Civilization: Maybe. But we’re only a couple decades away from designer babies. It will come, brave new world that it is, it will come.
Democracy and Education – Hard to disagree on any point therein, when 14% of adult Americans can’t find their own country on a globe (might be higher now).
Spock’s works influenced the baby boomers, the bane of all civilization. Good riddance to him too.
Protocols: I don’t believe the some one half of westerners who believe in some form of the Zionist conspiracy (you know, the ones who think Israel (some 5 million people) are holding the Arab middle east hostage (some 500 million) even though they are still technically in a state of war with almost all of them). Though this book definitely had a role to play. But it does not count for the fact that Iran’s government schooling teaches gorillas descended from Jews.
Manifesto of the Communist Party – I have not read Marx, I’ve been far too lazy, being of the post-cold war generation. But from what anecdotal information I’ve read in other sources, it simply seems like a rallying point. If Marx hadn’t been published, the Russian Reds would have used a different name for the same rooster.
Darwin’s Black Box – I have not read it. But this slot could be put to better use. If you honestly believe the REAL fundamentalists need more than the King James Bible to argue with science, you’re either very optimistic, or misinformed At least, I hope it was only fundamentalists you were targetting. Science in general has plenty to be beat on from an academic’s point of view (like the term “statistical anomaly” and everything you can associate to that).
May 18th, 2008 at 3:53 am
Slickwilly: I look forward to it
May 18th, 2008 at 6:25 am
I am not surprised that the publishers of this list have no idea of the sutras and bhashyas of ancient times. Machiavelli’s Prince is a very mild mannered treatise compared to the much older and vastly superior Arthashastra attributed to Kautilya aka Vishnugupta aka Chanakya, who is undoubtedly the foremost political philosopher of all time. As a professor from Occidental College puts it, Machiavelli was a genial poodle before the rottweiler Chanakya. The Arthashastra (possibly a compilation of the knowledge of a 1000 years documented around 500 BCE) alongwith the ancien Tamizh classic Tirukkural of Tiruvalluvar are among arguably the most important ethical treatises of all times. The Indian view of ethics is highly empirical, although it sounds paradoxical, and coming as I do from that tradition I find this harrumphing, hemming and hawing by ill-read ignoramuses like the creationist fundamentalist Benjamin Wiker, puerile and even stupid. The world isn’t what we want it to be. Just get used to it. Btw Michael Behe’s book is th emost apt selection for this list
May 18th, 2008 at 7:39 am
@62
Being a recent product of the Education system of America I would have to say that the majority of your claims are false in this posting. I was lucky enough to attend a private High School where a large focus was “how to think.” The majority of our exams consisted of multi-tiered questions that required a well-thought out and well-written answer that fit into the framework of what we were taught in the classes. Everything except our Math classes used at least some of this format.
After graduating and heading to college I was shocked at what passed for examination. Roughly 80% of the tests I ever took to earn my Bachelors were multiple choice. Granted this may have been an isolated event at my particular school but I can’t help but think that it reflects the broader attitude of the American School system.
Sadly, that attitude isn’t about getting the students excited about learning new things, it’s about grades. Grades are the driving factor in today’s school system because grades are important for teacher reviews as well as school funding. If certain criteria isn’t met in the form of a standardized test then the school loses money. I know this because my mother has been a teacher for upwards of the last 20 years.
I still tell people that my High School education (Jesuit just like my college) was leaps and bounds far more valuable than my degree due to its overall impact on how I think. The only reason I didn’t drop out of college to save money was to prove I could do it to my future employers and to be able to say “I have a degree”.
Keep in mind I’m not saying facts are irrelevant, but the ability to find and understand the facts, seeing how those independent nuggets of knowledge fit into the whole of history, biology or whatever, that is truly the difference maker between being a corporate drone or having a vision and pursuing it on your own terms.
May 18th, 2008 at 8:15 am
SlickWilly; When you get a moment could you explain what disciplines your field covers. Evolutionary psychology sounds fascinating. It covers the whys and wherefores for the development of empathy, love, etc. etc.? Does it deal with the specific hormones, ie; physical/chemical reactions that cause/result from those feelings and how they developed? or is it more general than that, about how society has changed since cave-man days?
Could you spill the details please. Also could you provide a good introductory piece for me to read. And its ok if its in PHD speak, that really isn’t an issue for me. (My asking for clarification on the last debate was not for my benefit; sometimes you scholars get bogged down in minutae; lose the forest for the trees)
May 18th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Landrii; you went to a private school. You had the best teachers – the best teachers teach both ways – some things are best learned by rote, others by discovery. Public schools do not always get the best teachers. Entirely chucking standards allowed the crappy teachers to sail through without educating their students properly. The standardized testing is a back-lash from this. We have the same thing in Ontario now; literacy exams that must be passed in order to graduate, standardized testing in Grs. 3, 6, 9, as well as the above mentioned literacy test in Gr. 10.
Personally, I think education would be better served by testing the teachers. Here, once you get your ticket, its yours for life. You pretty much have to assault a student, have sex with a student, or otherwise misbehave to lose your license. New schools have it a little better; the principal gets to choose, via interviews, who they hire. Of course providing he/she is a good administrator and doesn’t just pick the folks he/she likes.
Always the best students are the product of the best teachers.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Interesting list and like many others that have commented on it’s content, I take it that religion was not included. There are a couple of books I would have included since in the recorded history of mankind more people have died in the name of god than for any other reason.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
This list was almost total and utter rubbish.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
’someone’ got dropped on their head as a child
May 18th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Here’s one I think people may have overlooked: Dianetics. A religious cult in which it is espoused that doctors, who study the human form for the better part of a decade or more, don’t know what’s best for you physically and psychologically, is preposterous. The book has led several people to eschew any kind of medical help, in hopes that they can attain what amount to fantasy story superpowers.
May 18th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Someone: it would be more beneficial if you elaborated on why you felt it was “almost total and utter rubbish”. It is fine to disagree with the lists. It is even better to explain your view on it.
May 18th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Wot the hell??? None of these books have any pictures. Howz a Texan supposed to read ‘em?
May 18th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Mom:
I’d be glad to when I get a few minutes to sit down and do it. I understand about why you asked for the clarification, sorry if it came off as condescending, that was not my intention.
May 18th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
like you all haven’t cast a stone.
or are you all whores?
May 18th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
was expecting more religious books, good to see a list like this.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Great and really interesting list. The Bible should be #1 in my opinion, maybe followed by the Koran (?)
May 18th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Eric J.D. #327. To what part of the academic world do you belong & who are the us you refer to ?
May 18th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
No sir, I don’t like it.
May 18th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
If you’re gonna blame religion and say that the religious books are also the source of all the worlds ills and as one said “killed millions of people over the past few hundred years” you might want to you know, actually do some research on the topic? How bout some real numbers?
If you take the total number casualties of religious actions for example the crusades, witch burning, the inquisition, etc. pre-dating the 20th century, all the way back to 30 B.C all the way to 1899 you get a grand total of 1,650,000 (obviously not a precise number but backed up by the best in historical research). If you take only the number of casualties caused by atheist regimes in the 20th century, just from the year 1900 to the year 2000 you get 107,047,000.
So with the lions share of recorded history religious killings don’t even make 2% of the deaths that can be for certain attributed to atheist regimes. Blaming the Koran and the Bible for all the worlds ills is probably really comforting but the reality is that even in strictly godless countries there are still wars and genocide. Beyond that the originality of this list is amazing. Reminds me of a book I read titled “10 books that screwed up the world:And five that probably didn’t help.” By Benjamin Wiker. Weird thing too is that it’s practically the same list in the book and crazy enough even the reasons are the same word for word. That’s one hell of a coincidence.
*Statistics taken from the “Encyclopedia of War”
May 19th, 2008 at 12:22 am
The writer of this list has plagiarised the concept, title and half of the ideas from a real book entitled “10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help” by Benjamin Wiker. You can find the scholarly work by this name on Amazon. Needless to say this list is not there. What a loser! But then, originality is not required when you write a list for the sole purpose of putting down one recent book you disagree with (and evidenced by your comment have not read, either).
May 19th, 2008 at 1:04 am
I found the last bit about spock the most interesting… “Previously, experts had told parents that babies needed to learn to sleep on a regular schedule, and that picking them up and holding them whenever they cried would only teach them to cry more and not to sleep through the night. Spock taught the exact opposite.” The thought that babies need to learn to sleep through the night is a bit ridiculous. As babies we form attachments to our caregivers and these attachments can have a profound effect on our socialization later in life. When a mother answers her child’s cries she is letting him or her know that she will be there when the child needs it. Consistent and loving attention given to babies when they cry builds secure attachment and a secure attachment to a caregiver generally leads to greater autonomy and better adaptation skills in the future.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:08 am
oh, how i wish people would stop using CAPS! would be even better if people would read not only the text of the list in its entirety but the comments before commenting, especially when accusing anyone of plagarism. ..an issue previously covered in earlier comments.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:12 am
It should not surprise anyone if the list reflects the bises of its authors. Bringing the Malleus without demonstrated good reason in connection with the church reformers points to a catholic’s desire to feel better about his faith. After all, it was the catholic church’s widespread but diverging practice of hunting witches and heretics that made the standardization of the practice and, thus, the book necessary and consequently a bestseller.
What the short description of the Malleus also fails to mention is the fact that it is based on and justified by christian teachings. Rather than listing the real culprit of medieval and late medieval religious atrocities, namely the bible proper, the authors chose the Malleus, from which he hoped to disassociate himself by the flimsy reference to the reformation.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not defending the reformers. There is hardly any nastier antisemitsm and racial hatred than in Martin Luther treatise “On The Jews And Their Lies”. The list author probably didn’t know about this xian jewel which Hitler, although himself a lifelong catholic, used to stir up anti-Jewish sentiments. For that reason alone at least that particular Luther work should have made the list.
But then we would have to admit that Hitler in his persecution of the Jews was motivated by his christian beliefs. In keeping, the article about “Mein Kampf” makes no mention of Hitler’s frequent appeals to christian tenets.
Mere accidental omissions?
May 19th, 2008 at 2:10 am
Addendum to comment #380
The authors of Malleus Maleficarum, Sprenger and Kramer, were both Dominican friars and Inquisitors. See, among other places
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_maleficarum
In case somebody has doubts about the nazi-christian connection, please enjoy the photographs at
http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm
To check up on the father of all protestants Martin Luther’s vitriol against Jews incl. the connection to the nazis go to
http://www.nobeliefs.com/luther.htm
Walter H.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:07 am
Walter: I have not omitted things intentionally – in fact if there is an agenda, it seems you are the one with it – I described the books as much as was needed – it was less a list on the motivation of the writers than a list of the consequences. I am certainly not intentionally leaving things out. You will find Luther’s “against the Jews” mentioned on another list.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:21 am
To say something as ignorant as Behe promoting a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis in Darwin’s Black Box only tells me that the book was never read by the lister. They run the track well with the first nine books then misses the curve and runs off through the woods.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:38 am
It’s a list trying not to offend.
“The Koran” and “The Bible” would have to be the top 2 by a country mile. By a billion country miles. Followed distantly in third by Darwin’s “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Walter, are you arguing that this list has a Christian bias? It appears to me that nothing could be further from the truth.
For one thing (among many), jfrater has admitted that he deliberately copied from the publicity materials for Benjamin Wiker’s book with the same title, yet gave Dr. Wiker and his publisher no credit. If he (jfrater) went out of his way to avoid promoting a Christian book, does it seem likely that he’s trying to promote any kind of Christian agenda?
Frankly, if jfrater is truly trying to stand against dishonesty — and argue that intelligent design advocates have a monopoly on that vice nowadays — he has a most peculiar way of doing it.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Ben Wiker scholarly? Ok the moon is made of green cheese. The horrors of the 15th-19th centuries, slavery, extermination of native peoples, and the Victrorian Holocausts were all religiously inspired. The 2oth century holocausts too are all religious – as in the sense of being doctrinal. This is apart from the fact that the Nazis, Italian Fascists, and not to forget the world’s most popular and socially acceptable post WW2 Fascist Franco, were all religiously inspired. Behe’s of course is a creationist, just of a different variety.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:10 am
One little issue. Planned Prenthood does not try to distance themselves from Sanger. In very Orwellian fashion they just pretend tht all of that horrific stuff Sanger promoted and the fact she palled around and gave speeches at Klan raliies just never happened. So much do they not distance themselves from her, they in fact honor someone every year with an awared bearing her name. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2001_March_30/ai_72528153
May 19th, 2008 at 9:37 am
DaRook: You are incorrect and have obviously failed to read either the description under the list or the following comments. The description plainly says that the book has been used by christian fundamentalists to *fuel* creationist ideology that derives itself from a literal interpretation of Genesis, not because Behe himself ascribes to a literal interpretation of genesis. By the way, you are also about the 20th person to point this out – and be corrected – in the course of the comments on this list, meaning you obviously didn’t bother to follow the conversation either. Let’s get with the program, huh?
May 19th, 2008 at 10:10 am
A book against evolution screws up the world more than Mein Kampf? Seriously? I think that people being confused about evolution/creation is hardly earth-shaking.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I would not include Mead’s “Coming of Age In Samoa”, because the book was simply not a huge influence, much less a harmful influence, unless you hold to the idea that any promotion of cross-cultural comparison is always bad.
Sanger’s book, “The pivot of civilization”, is often maligned by the terrorists of the religious right, who never actually quote from it without altering the original text. The book says nothing about euthenasia of the feeble among us. It advocates only birth control — preventing pregancies in populations who can’t afford to have large families. If you actually read this book, which most people haven’t (I have), you will see that clearly, Sanger advocates the idea that there are too many extremely poor people who have very large families, which they cannot afford to provide adequate care for, and this lack of resources to feed, cloth, and provide healthcare, leads to conditions that breed disease and birth defects.
Sanger did not advocate the type of Eugenics that the Nazis came up with. IN fact, she opposed it fiercely. Her form of Eugenics did not target any group of people based on ethnicity. She argued that poor families should have fewer children, and should use birth control, so that the few children they have would actually be healthy ones. There are thousands of Christian Fundamentalist web sites which have anti-Sanger propaganda on them, and they drown out the actual facts about her and her book.
Behe’s book, “Darwin’s Black Box” has had almost no effect on the world compared to Mein Kempf or The Communist Manifesto. It’s a laughable book, and generally reguarded as a the work of a crackpot. Sure — fundamentalists hold it in high reguard, but it’s only one out of hundreds of pathetic creationist books that preach the same littany of complaints. It has so far not had much influence at all over American society. It’s merely given people something to laugh at.
The rest of the list is pretty good, th
May 19th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
You forgot one: The Bible.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Though referenced a few times in the comments, I feel compelled to challenge your justification for including “The Communist Manifesto” on the list—claiming: “it could win the award for the most malicious book ever written.”
While I certainly agree the book deserves inclusion, on what grounds can you possibly assert it as the most malicious book ever written? The term “malicious” *exclusively* evaluates one’s intentionality—denoting an intention to harm. While you may disagree with their idealistic political philosophy (or the potential for Communism, in practice, to lead to positive social consequences), the intentions of Marx and Engels in writing the manifesto were unequivocally to improve society by eliminating class distinctions.
If “The Communist Manifesto” is one of the most malicious books ever written, then you’ve implied that Marx and Engels *deliberately* posited spurious arguments (that would appear valid and compelling in theory) with the surreptitious intent to cause societal harm when enacted. And, obviously, there’s no evidence to suggest that their intentions were anything but, perhaps, naively idealistic.
Michael
May 19th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
” If you were in a dark alley and you saw several large men heading toward you, would you be a little relieved to know that they were just leaving from their weekly bible study?”
To paraphrase Hitchens: I would in Belfast. Or Serbia.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Grrrr. ..wouldn’t be relieved…
May 19th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Mom424 and anyone else who is interested:
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach to psychology that presupposes that there are universal, cross-cultural thought processes and behavioral patterns among humans, and that the only sufficient mechanism to explain the development and proliferation of these processes and patterns is evolution. The science of evolutionary psychology requires interdiscliplinary training in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, paleoarcheaology, geology, ecology, zoology, statistics, and computer science. (There has a bit of controversy in the past as to how much hard science is actually involved in evolutionary psychology, which I will address shortly.) It is an offshoot of a branch of biology called “sociobiology,” a field that was first truly explored by a very big name in the modern evolutionary synthesis (no longer called Darwinism, which is a misleading term to many non-evolutionists, now functionally referred to as “Neo-darwinism”), E. O. Wilson. Sociobiology is essentially the precursor to modern evolutionary psychology, with one fundamental difference that I will address in just a moment.
There are essentially five main postulates that serve as the basis for evolutionary psychology, attributed to eminent evolutionary psychologist David Buss.
1. Observable behavior results from underlying psychological mechanisms (characterized as process-specific cognitive devices hardwired into the brain) and their interaction with sensational input (incoming information acquired through the five main senses) and cognitive input (incoming information acquired through internal references; i.e. self-initiated ideas).
2. Evolution is the only natural process that account for the diversity and complexity of life.
3. Evolved psychological mechanisms are functionally specific in nature; that is, they evolved to deal with specific adaptive challenges. (This is the rift between evolutionary psychology and sociobiology – EP places an emphasis on specific adaptive problems as the motivator for the rise of these psychological characteristics, while sociobiology places an emphasis on general adaptive problems; essentially, evolutionary psychologists believe that psychological adaptations evolved distinctly to deal with specific problems in day-to-day survival of early humans, while sociobiologists believe psychological adaptations evolved as broad, sweeping heuristics that allow flexibility of adaptation.)
4. Evolution, via natural selection, designed these psychological adaptations to respond to specific stimuli in the environment (further outlining the rift above).
5. Human psychology is essentially comprised of a large number of these process-specific, context-specific psychological mechanisms that are accessed in conjunction with one another on a subconscious level, and interact with sensational and cognitive input, leading to observable behavior.
The short version of this is: Human behavior can be thought of as the result of a bunch of different, subconscious learning and response patterns as they are constantly pitted against conscious thoughts and ideas, and the only physical explanation for the presence of these learning and response patterns is evolution.
Unlike sociobiology, evolutionary psychology tends to place a direct emphasis on the evolution of the organism rather than the evolution of society, though the role of society – via the effect interpersonal relationships and reciprocal altruism has on relative reproductive fitness – does have a place in EP studies. By its very nature, EP is considered a reductionist science. It approaches human behavior in a manner more to similar to psychiatry than psychology, by presupposing that human behaviors are potentialized by genetic influences. This, however, has led to the problem about hard science I mentioned before. On a macro-level, evolutionary science is largely untestable directly. For instance, there is no way to effectively see a new species of animal emerge naturally (that is, in a non-laboratory setting; the reason for this is obvious: natural selection takes place on geological time, meaning it can take thousands of generations before a significant reproductive isolation occurs). This means a lot of the direct experimental evidence of macroevolution we have comes from observation of plants and micro-life (viruses, bacteria, etc.). Compounded by the fact that psychology is itself considered a soft science (it is virtually impossible to measure the activities of the human brain in of themselves), evolutionary psychology is considered a theoretical field rather than an experimental field. Of course, this has led to the field catching a lot of criticism on both sides, from within the field of evolution and from outside of it (and also why it is included in the *philosophy* of science department at my school). However, it it directly influenced, and strictly adheres to the scientific method based on, hard science acquired from other fields. This is why evolutionary psychology is considered an interdisciplinary field. I will elaborate.
It is widely acknowledged by anthropology that the homo genus arose approximately 1.8 to 2.5 million years ago, and that modern homo sapiens came on the scene about 250,000 years ago. This is an era known as the Pleistocene era. In order to gauge what adaptive pressures early humans may have faced that influenced these psychological adaptations, it is quite necessary to know as much as possible about the landscape, flora, and fauna of Pleistocene Earth. This requires an understanding of geology, ecology and zoology. Further more, it is also extremely useful to know as much about human communal living from that era as possible, an area that is informed largely by anthropology and paleoarcheology (studying cave paintings, excavating ancient artifacts, studying skeletons for evidence of particular use and abuse, etc.) Going beyond that, in an effort to minimize scientific error and increase understanding of the process of evolution, computer simulations are now used extensively in experiments directly studying the nature of natural selection, meaning that an evolutionary psychologist is expected to understand how such computer simulations work, and the inherent problems that exist therein. A grounding in computer science and statistics is necessary for this work. As you can see, while theoretical in nature, evolutionary psychology takes its cues from the hard sciences to make the most reasoned and well-informed conjectures possible.
In direct answer to your questions, emotion and anxiety (things like empathy, love, etc.) are studied extensively in the role they play in group and kin selection. In order to understand the physiological reaction that occurs when these things are experienced (as it is wisely speculated that the physiological actions and reactions developed before the brain reached a capacity for self-awareness and higher cognitive function), the neurotransmitters and bodily hormones involved in the nervous system are also widely studied. The role of how society itself has changed is downplayed in evolutionary psychology, and is more akin to sociobiology. Generally, evolutionary psychology explores how to delineate an evolved psychological adaptation from socially-influenced psychological exaptations, and makes an inquiry into how these adaptations might have evolved. This is all in an effort to maximize understanding of the bredth of evolutionary influence and explain human nature at its most basic, instinctual level. An emerging subbranch of EP attempts to apply this knowledge to the current state of human individuals in the context of a rapidly changing social environment, also known as “mismatch theory.” I’m a bit skeptical of this field, myself, as it tends to explain things like mental illness and psychological disorder in terms of modern human living reacting against ingrained, evolutionarily “deep” behaviors (which, honestly, to me sounds like a bunch of new-wave holistic hooey).
A good introductory piece on evolutionary psychology is:
“Evolutionary Psychology: a primer” http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html
This piece is most importantly free, as most of the other references I have would require you to go buy a book or three, but also is authored by two of the pioneers of the field, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, and is a great, in-depth introduction to the field for those with a healthy attention span.
Hope that helps. I’ll be glad to answer any questions you have.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
It’s also worth mentioning that Cosmides and Tooby revised the five principles of EP attributed to Buss, approaching them with an even more reductionist model based on the similarities between the human brain and computers.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Books don’t screw up the world. People do.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
BTW, @SlickWilly: Cf. Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences. Science, 213(4507), 501-504.
Abstract: Selection by consequences is a causal mode found only in living things, or in machines made by living things. It was first recognized in natural selection, but it also accounts for the shaping and maintenance of the behavior of the individual and the evolution of cultures. In al three of these fields, it replaces explanations based on the causal modes of classical mechanics. The replacement is strongly resisted. Natural selection has now made its case, but similar delays in recognizing the role of selection in the other fields could deprive us of valuable help in solving the problems which confront us.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
397. Books don’t screw up the world. People do.
Correct. With maybe two possible borderline cases: bible and koran.
But the concept of books screwing up anything is rather cretinous. But maybe only to be expected for someone promoting learning hebrew to reads the ultimate filth, the jews’ bible!
May 19th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Slickwilly;
Excellent article, excellent description on your end as well. I even see why there is controversy related to this particular field of expertise. Socio-biology is a result of EP, not an evolutionary factor in and of itself. Socio-biology concerns itself more with how we use the adaptations that evolution has given us. Not what they are. People are resistant to anything that appears to take rationality out of the equation. Of course it doesn’t, rational thought is in itself an adaptation.
Your field certainly gives a new twist to the nature/nurture debate. Without the nature, the nurture doesn’t matter. A better question is how nature copes with the differences in nurture. They really are inseparable; nurture effects the development of all things. A tree doesn’t grow as tall in poor soil as it does in rich soil. Same starting point, different outcome.
Those who believe in Eugenics must hate EP. It actively seeks the things common to all humans, and the evolutionary basis for those similarities. There are many more of them than there are differences. We really are the same under the skin.
I love the “wet computer” analogy, as well as the engineering parable. This field must be a growing one. Brain mapping is helpful, no? How we all respond with the same brain activity to the same stimulus. Or in brain-damaged individuals, how they differ from the norm?
How do you extrapolate the evidence from micro-biology to apply to EP. I’m having trouble seeing how to make the connection. Could you give me an example. I can only see the similarities on a basic scale. Like how cells respond to light, heat, threat etc. Sort of like how amphibian eggs have developed a dark side for protection against UV? And are getting darker.
The concept of instinct is interesting; it appears that our ability to learn is instinctive, as is our ability to quantifying things. (counting has been observed in other primates, they want their fare share of the bananas, and protest when another chimp gets more). In fact, I wager that by the time you’re an old man, we will have found that instinct colours all things. In fact, our ability to reason itself is instinctual. We just don’t realize it. The whole President analogy is particularly apt.
Now, could you tell me what I’ve misunderstood? And could you suggest the next lesson.
I have a good general working knowledge of biology, geology, ecology and zoology; I’m afraid computer simulations and analyzing statistics are beyond my scope.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Sanger didn’t advocate nazi like eugenics?
http://members.aol.com/registered/private/freep/sanger.jpg
Sanger’s work was very influential among the Nazis. Especially early on when some of them were busy writing for her magazine.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Add Dawkin’s “God Delusion” to the list.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
And I DARE, DOUBLE DARE you to add the Quran to the list!
May 19th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Man, there sure are a lot of people afraid of religious texts. I wonder where that fear came from. For those who want to know what has caused more wars than religion, here’s a few things. Most of these predate religion and are still the cause of conflict today.
1. Scarcity of resources / hunger
2. Climate change
3. Racism / Tribalism
4. Sexual reproduction
5. Economic greed
6. Powerful men desiring more power
7. Fear of other people
Most wars people associate as being caused by religion are usually caused by something from the above list (this includes the Crusades). More often than not, religion is used to justify and hide the true cause.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
while the communist manifesto has imspired a couple of notably corrupt dictators, das kapital is the more influential marx work, and that book has inspired millions of harmless intellectuals for every corrupt dictator, and is largely responsible for the intellectual rejection of colonialism in the mid twentieth century. a non-american list would not have that book on it. then again, you could say the inaccurate dialectical mode of philosophy has screwed up things like literature, etc…
…which leads me to the education book. what is called truth is actually a subjective construct of dominant regimes. einstein would agree with that book! that’s just postmodernism. that’s not screwing up people’s lives, it’s just making them all write forty page papers of nothing but endless equivocation to get unprofitable liberal arts degrees. less income, yes, but not exactly putting them in the crapper. if you want to talk about delaying intellectual progress, well, start with the ancients and go right on down the line.
finally, CRE’s comment about anti-religion people. they don’t hate the bible. they read it for intellectual purposes, they politely ignore the historical fallacies, they interpret revelations as the hope for the overthrow of rome, they try to follow its ethical principles. they hate the institution of religion. they hate the fact that organized religion entails the believer consign his or her ethics to an overarching bureaucracy, in most cases an overarching bureaucracy with a catastrophically corrupt and nefarious history; in other words, a denial of their own humanity, their own authenticity, with hopes of a future benefice of higher being from an oppressive institutional source that should not be trusted. and anyone that does something that stupid belongs in the seventh circle of hell.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
#403
3 and 7 are mostly because of religion
May 19th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
it changed on me… 404
May 19th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
yes, wars are often fought for temporal gain under cover of religion, but religious hatred is the gateway to these wars
May 19th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
jason: You can’t say #3 and #7 are mostly because of religion when both of these predate religion. Furthermore for a more concrete example, the very recent racial genocides in Rwanda have very little to do with religion.
Most racial conflicts in the world today have very little to do with religion.
In some areas of racial conflict (Kashmir for example) religion plays a large part, but at it’s root, it still boils down to one tribe of people claiming ownership of valuable land over another.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
well i will read up on some anthro and check on whether the notions of authenticity and difference that underlie racism are divorced from religion or not, you could be right
May 19th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
jason: I think it predates humanity. One of the horrifying realizations I had about warfare came from Jane Goodall as she documented an open war between two rival tribes of gorillas. Warfare isn’t something humans created…
Hell, just watch a few episodes of Meercat Manor as one tribe of rodents perpetrates genocide on another. This assumes of course that evolution is fact. If we didn’t evolve from meercats and apes, well then we have only ourselves to blame for the atrocities we commit.
But back to the list….some things that we should be concerned about this century:
a. Food supplies are buckling under the weight of a growing world population, especially in regions that must import food to sustain their population.
b. The country with the largest military in the world has a giant imbalance of males in their population
c. At least one country ruled by religious authority not only believes in perpetrating genocide on another race of people, but that they will achieve salvation in doing so.
d. I won’t claim that man is causing global warming, but there is climate change going on around us
e. The youth and working class in most western countries will soon be spending a majority of their income supporting the retired class, who also own a majority of the tangible assets in those countries
There’s plenty to be worried about
May 19th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Here’s one book that surprisingly has not come up in the comments here: “Arming America” by Michael Bellesiles.
Quick summary: Bellesiles claimed to prove in this book that the American love of guns was purely a modern phenomenon, and that the colonists of the 18th century rarely kept guns around. His book made many claims of fact relying on (what he claimed to be) documentary evidence, and his book soon became a best seller and popular source to quote from for those who supported gun control laws and opposed gun ownership in general.
And then it came out that his “documentary evidence” was completely fraudulent and that most of the factual claims made in the book were deliberate misrepresentations of the historical record by the author. His publishing company withdrew the book (and he lost his university position as a result of this), and yet every now and then, someone opposed to gun control in the US will cite one of his claims as proof of the “correctness” of their position.
So while it is probably too narrow of a subject manner to have “screwed up the world”, this book certainly should get an honorable mention as a book that has done far more harm than good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Bellesiles
May 19th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Including Behe’s book is bizarre. If someone wrote a book questioning aspects of some other scientific theory, no one would bat an eye. This proves to me that the theory of evolution has left the arena of science to a large degree. Criticism is what makes science work, not backslapping, mindless sheep-like agreement. You might want to educate yourself on how the scientific method actually works.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
limbo: valid point
May 20th, 2008 at 1:11 am
i dont see how the bible has caused much good. most of the morality it preaches is basically common sense, or wasn’t followed very much even in the christian nations, or doesn’t actually improve society
May 20th, 2008 at 4:34 am
Including Behe’s book is bizarre. If someone wrote a book questioning aspects of some other scientific theory, no one would bat an eye. This proves to me that the theory of evolution has left the arena of science to a large degree.
Limbo – perhaps the book does not qualify as one that has “screwed up the world”, but this book is hardly robust science.
Bethe is unorthodox in his adherence to Intelligent Design and is generally held by the scientific community at large to propound pseudo-science. Of course, there is also the small matter of the peer-review controversy that came up at the Dover trial.
Moreover..here’s the disclaimer on his own bio page at Lehigh University (where he teaches) :
“My ideas about irreducible complexity and intelligent design are entirely my own. They certainly are not in any sense endorsed by either Lehigh University in general or the Department of Biological Sciences in particular. In fact, most of my colleagues in the Department strongly disagree with them.”
Note, too, that I am not saying that Behe’s views are “wrong” nor that Intelligent Design and Evolution are necessarily mutually exclusive. But the facts are that Behe challenges prevailing and widely-held views on evolutionary theory and has been widely rebuffed by his peers. What’s the problem with that ?
Actually, I wonder where the guy gets the time to write this stuff…he has nine children
May 20th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Here are my top 10
1. Dick and Jane
It made people think seesaws were safe costing the State of New York millions of dollars by the time we came to our senses and removed them from every school playground. Fucking Death Traps!
2. Are You There God, Its Me Margaret- By Judy Blume
This stupid book made prepubescent boys everywhere start wondering when they were going to get their periods. On a personal note, I’d still like to write the musical version for Broadway. I think it’d take the Tonys.
3. The Sneeches and other Stories- By Dr. Suess
Inspired people to go pay lots of money to alter their looks so they could all be more special than the next person. Fox does a loosely based version in the form of a reality show called the SWAN, where ugly people get tons of plastic surgery to win a beauty contest. The shows producer, Sylvester Mc Monkey Mc Bean makes off with a fortune.
4. The Joy of Cooking,1st edition- By Irma S. Rombauer
Filled with misnomers. There is no joy in skinning an opposom, plus its a well known fact that the recipe for Brains, Kindeys and other body parts inspired Jeffery Dahmer and therefore were removed from later editions.
5. Great Expectations- by Charles Dickens
Thanks Chuck, now the world believes that all the poor children will be fine once Angelina Jolie adopts them. After all, kids are cuter when they’re dirty.
6. Romeo and Juliet- William Shakespeare
Single-handly inspired both teen-agnst, an trashy tabloids, amidst making incest seem cool.
7. The Teachings of Don Juan- by By Carlos Castinada
Because it wasn’t particularly non-fiction and no- you can’t actually fly after taking mescalin.
8. Wuthering Heights- by Emily Bronte
Because it vindicated the beliefs of stalkers everywhere that that’s just what it feels like to be REALLY in love.
9. The Devil’s Notebook- by Anton LeVey
Because nobody takes a Satanist seriously when he tells you TV and robot sex women will be the two great evils of the future, allowing the manufacture of both to reach unprecidented levels.
10. The Dungeon Master’s Guide, 1st edition- E.Gary Gygax
Seriously, who knew there were so many different types of whores.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:56 am
Hitch: haha I like your list a LOT. You should submit a list for publication!
May 20th, 2008 at 5:14 am
“jason – college student”:
“what is called truth is actually a subjective construct of dominant regimes. einstein would agree with that book! that’s just postmodernism.”
No, Jason… that’s just MODERNISM, not postmodernism. You need to go back to class and study harder.
Oh, and by the way… you DO realize that the first sentence in the above statement you made isn’t true, right? I do hope you were speaking ironically. So hard to tell with you imprecise kids these days.
May 20th, 2008 at 6:46 am
Margaret Sanger had no friends among the Nazis, and opposed their form of eugenics because it targeted ethnicity, and Nazis were not about helping the underclasses — they were about eliminating them. Sangers form of Eugenics was totally different — it was people voluntarily choosing to have healthier families by having smaller families that they were able to provide for. Sanger did not target people for death, and did not advocate involuntary sterilization.
Nazis did not write for her magazine. The reality is that one issue of her magazine, a review of a book by a Nazi named Lothrop Stoddard appears. The reviewer was not Sanger, as Sanger had left the magazine years earlier. The review actually criticizes Stoddard’s book, and condemns it for it’s racist and cruel views.
Christian Fundamentalists, who seem to have no reguard for fact-checking, accuracy, or have any skills in researching facts, have been running a campaign to demonize Sanger for the last 20 years. They have hundreds of websites spreading lies, half-truths, and misconceptions about Sanger, mainly as an avenue to attack Planned Parenthood. They make all sorts of claims about Sanger being a Racist, a Nazi, and an advocate of extermination and forced sterilization, and they use a clever series of misquotes, doctored-quotes, and quotes from other people that they attribute to her falsely.
I have documented all of this and more on my own blog, Fundamentalist Deceit: An American Tradition. My blog contains my research into the Christian Fundamentalist propaganda machine. These people (Christian Fundamentalist Evangelicals) quite literally believe that it’s okay to lie, as long as you’re lying to God’s enemies, and as long as your lie helps bring people to [their] God.
See my blog on Sanger here:
http://fundamentalistdeceit.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
May 20th, 2008 at 6:48 am
What about Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”? That pack of lies is still killing people worldwide.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:09 am
what about…
“the tiger attacks” by claude balls
“yellow river” by i.p. freely
“supporting athletes” by jacques strappe
“songs for children” by barbara blacksheep
May 20th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Disc: Good call, but you forgot about (Insert Title Here) by (Insert Author Here). Really, comparing apple to oranges, How could He/She! The nerve of some people.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Whoever wrote this list has clearly not read any of the books. A better list would be: Top 10 Ways in which Laziness Can Cause You to Display Your Ignorance on the Internet.
Dewey, Marx and Macchiavelli should not be anywhere near this list.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:32 am
I also suggest people read Silent Spring, The Bible and The Koran before mouthing off about them.
If you haven’t actually read it, STFU. Ignorance has killed way more people than any of these excellent books.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:40 am
DaveHem: Really, The God Delusion?
Could you give some examples of when people killed in the name of the god delusion?
Oh wait there are none.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Slickwilly: I just heard of something interesting: Panspermia. Could you explain that?
May 20th, 2008 at 8:00 am
peter:
“Dewey, Marx and Macchiavelli should not be anywhere near this list.”
Why not? Explain.
Do you not understand, peter, that just because books are “classics,” that doesn’t mean that, taken as social influences, such books can also have caused great harm, great injustices?
I’m skeptical myself, of Macchiavelli’s place on this list. But I’m also a modern man, living in a modern democracy. I’d prefer my world any day over the one Macchiavelli recommends–though there’s no denying that his thoughts on power are, sadly, still as relevant as ever.
But even with Dewey and Marx–you must understand that just because men are intellectual and philosophical–and therefore seemingly benign and above the petty failings of men of power and politics–this doesn’t mean they can’t make grave errors in judgement and cause great harm to issue from these errors. Some systems of thoughts–ideologies–are harmful; they seem to issue from decent minds and decent, sincere desires to do good. But they often don’t work out that way. I am a believer in liberal democracy, and therefore do not believe that truth is relativistic or that a dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary for ultimate justice to be found. I believe there is a better way. And the evidence backs me up that when systems were tried that used certain ideological tomes as a starting point–those systems ended up doing immense injustice, and killing thousands, perhaps millions of people.
It is not ignorance to say, therefore, that certain books have done great harm. The fact is, they have. Certain ideas are wrong, the best intentions aside.
And Jamie Frater is certainly not an ignorant soul. I am fully confident he *has* read these books… as I have… and found them no less odious than I do. You may not. But then I would ask you just where you stand in this world. Do you stand for anything?
May 20th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Warning:
Panspermia is basically the theory that the early Earth was seeded with life from space–most likely via comets which brought, if not actual living organisms (microscopic and simple, of course) then at least the essential building blocks of life. The idea is that life is endemic throughout the universe, easily made and easily transported from planet to planet, self-seeding and self-fulfilling. In other words, that the Earth is not unique and that life here is not solely a product of our planet’s solitary (seemingly solitary) circumstances and nature. Hence, “panspermia.”
Sorry to step on your toes, Slick.. I was just here.
Oh, and you (warningdon’treadthis) suggested a list on proofs of evolution. A damn good idea. Unfortunately, for me, it’ll have to get in line. I have a half dozen other lists I’ve been trying to finish for Jamie first. But if someone else beats me to that one, I wouldn’t mind.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Kiwiboi wrote
“Note, too, that I am not saying that Behe’s views are “wrong” nor that Intelligent Design and Evolution are necessarily mutually exclusive. But the facts are that Behe challenges prevailing and widely-held views on evolutionary theory and has been widely rebuffed by his peers. What’s the problem with that ?”
I have no problem with that at all. That’s what science is all about. He questions how complex systems arise by random chance through random mutations. That’s a very good question that has been answered mostly by wild guesses and hand-waving. Asking such questions forces researchers in the area to fine tune and improve their explanations of evolutionary theory. We need to thank him for that.
Science is NOT a religion. Science is NOT based on consensus. No theory is above being questioned. Putting Behe’s book at number one says a lot more about the lists author than about Behe or science.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Limbo:
The fact is that, unlike with other theories in science, many people who are NOT scientists themselves attack evolution on ideological grounds. And the ideological battleground existing in regards to evolution is open to many individuals–some of whom are of some learning themselves, but are NOT above distortion and untruths in order to further their ideological bias *against* evolution. This further muddies the waters and makes it more possible to deceive and mislead the public in regards to questions about evolution which in fact are invalid, already disproven and/or addressed, or are just plain wrong.
Science is not a religion, no. But creationists and other anti-evolutionists often treat it as a competing one to their one. THAT too is wrong. Very, very wrong.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Randall: That’s okay…”panspermia” sounds like something you might be more familiar with than I am anyway. I’ve got the lock down on the evolution list, I just started it yesterday, so don’t worry bout that one. I’m not sure but I think there is already some kind of list on evolution on this site already, but if it pleases Jamie, I’d just as soon do another one, a bit more in depth.
Mom424: You’re pretty much right on the money. Brain mapping, traditionally, has had narrow applications in the field of EP. We all have similar cortical modules to control things like vision, hearing, touch, movement, pain, pleasure, etc. However, in the past, evidence in favor of universal psychological structures has been scant. There have been literally tens of thousands of trials in neuropsychological brain mapping, with less than significant overarching results. There are a vast array of human emotional reactions to any given situation, each finely nuanced and highly idiosyncratic (though generally given blanket terms, like jealousy, happiness, hopelessness, misery, love, etc.), and the interplay of neural circuitry in the brain in response to these reactions is equally idiosyncratic, representing the difficulty in mapping out specific neurological activity associated with such reactions. Things like spatial acquity, memory, pattern recognition, time sensation, perceptual reasoning, etc. are on more solid neurological ground, but such brain structures only become important after the fact. The important thing to EP is that humans have the capacity for such perceptions. The capacity for these perceptions is representative a priori that the structures – or some conglomeration of structures acting uniformly – exist, and exist universally, since an average healthy human being has a set of fully developed perceptual devices, cross-culturally. How these structures physically developed is not quite as important as how they combine functionally to create greater relative reproductive fitness. However…don’t get me wrong. Great insight can be gained through studying such brain structures, as it is clear that the structures have evolved in reaction to specific environmental selective pressures. Recent evidence has even given credence to the theory that even such complex perceptual interactions as social exchange, mathematics, physical causality, and a number of others in fact, *do* correlate with specific structures in the brain.
Looking at skull casings from transitional human fossils also provides insight into how the psychological mechanisms might have developed, since we now know that specific perceptional influences can actually change the chemistry of the brain and, over time, it’s physical structure. Of particular importance is the time frame in which the pre-frontal and frontal cortexes evolved, particularly in the context of the environment of Earth at the time and the spread of human proliferation. Such structures are almost universally agreed to represent at last the capacity for self-concious, abstract, sentient thought. This becomes incredibly important in its ability to alter itself chemically, changing the psychological landscape and altering the scope of reproductive fitness.
As far as micro-biological influences in EP, that’s tough for me to say. Other than the role they play in helping to explain the mechanisms of evolution, there is not much to be gleaned psychologically from study of micro-life. EP focuses primarly on humans, though study of how the other higher primates have co-evolved alongside us can provide substantial corroborating evidence for how perceptual mechanisms may have evolved in our ancestors. This is not exceedingly common, though, as it is recognized that at the moment our higher cognitive facultires came into play, we were a much different track physically than our primate relatives.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:32 am
I believe that the impact of Behe’s book has been pretty much nothing. It was quickly and thoroughly debunked when it came out, and has never been the kind of rallying cry that the anti-science movement wanted. That is how the books need to be judged — by their actual impact.
Behe’s book did not spark a sudden growth of anti-science people. It is more the work of Phillip Johnson and the discovery Institute and their legal wranglings, along with the help of thousands of brain-dead Evangelicals who blind-copy everything that these people publish without actually examining it’s validity.
It is good to have people like Behe to challenge science by posing mostly ignorant questions that show a fundamental lack of subject knowledge. Behe is not a novice at biology, but his questions about evolution show a fundamental lack of general science knowledge that does not jive well with his position as a biology researcher. What Behe did for science was teach scientists that they need to make answers easy enough for a child to understand — because that’s the level of scientific understanding that most Americans have, unfortunately. But Behe pretty much debunked himself during the Dover trial, and totally invalidated his arguments under cross examination.
The bottom line is that his book did not spawn a rash of anti-science, and it not really “THE BOOK” that defines the anti-science movement. I don’t think that there is a book that can be said to have solidified anti-science sentiment, except of course, the Bible itself — but plenty of Christians are no anti-science, so we can’t pin that book down. It is the Evangelical movement itself that is to blame for anti-science. Without Evangelical Biblical literalists, anti-science would have no force behind it at all. I still don’t know what book “invented” American-style Evangelical Fundamentalism, as it’s mostly a media-phenomenon that had it’s origins in tent-revivals from the 19th century. There have been a lot of books on creationism and other anti-science, but I can’t think of a single one that had a large impact.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Randall: Thanks for the explanation
Slickwilly: As I’ve said before I really look forward to reading it, thanks for taking the time to do it.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:49 am
David W. Irish;
Excellent blog on Sanger. After reading her actual passages I am in agreement; She has been vilified unfairly.
Her book’s inclusion on this list is still appropriate. Her words, taken out of context, have been widely used as fuel for the pro-life terrorists. Which of course are hand in fist with the Fundamentalist Christian Movement.
I think maybe the tone of the description on this list should be modified.
Again – Good Job!
May 20th, 2008 at 10:27 am
What Randall and others are saying just shows how evolution has become politicized by those who are threatened by religion, or who have some political ax to grind (namely liberals).
Science is being constantly fine tuned by examining new facts as they come in and seeing how they affect current theories. When Darwin proposed the ToE, he had no clue about genes and the information they contained. Behe does not question evolution per se, or even common descent. He gives no comfort to young earth creationists whatsoever, contrary to what the author of this list suggests.
Since no one has any clue how life started in the first place, Behe is free to suggest how the information contained in the genes points to it’s creation as a product of design and to question the improbability of this information arising from random mutations.Mutations and natural selection explain how the information is rearranged into new forms, but not how it came into being in the first place. No need for you religion haters to get your knickers in a knot here.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:30 am
DiscHuker (#422): LOL, Claude Balls.
I’ve got another:
“Fifty-yard Dash to the Outhouse” by Willy Maykit.
Illustrated by Betty Dohnt.
Published by Andy Dident.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:08 am
limbo:
Oh come off it.
“evolution has become politicized by those who are threatened by religion” huh? That is the single biggest hunk of bullshit I’ve heard in ages… or at least since Bush claimed his statements about “those who would appease terrorists” was really about Jimmy Carter, not Barack Obama.
Puh-leeeze.
And how, pray tell, do you “know” that I’m a “religion hater,” limbo? Hmmmmmm? For someone claiming scientific objectivism over us poor, deluded, hate-ridden “liberals,” you toss out some pretty shallow and transparent generalities and accusations. You know nothing of MY opinions on religion–and yet feel free to label me thusly. AND to opine that I have some political axe to grind.
Nice try, but YOU are the one whose colors are showing, “limbo.” Bright and clear. Dodgy rhetorical tricks won’t cover up the bias you’re harboring.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Well, you fall into my generalization quite nicely, so you’ve kind of proven my point. Thanks for your assistance!
NOTE TO EVERYONE:
Don’t question scientific theories that liberals REALLY like, such as global warming or the creation of life by blind luck! Just shut up and accept them.
I notice you didn’t question anything else I said, so I will assume that you accept my other statements, and just wanted to get into mud-slinging.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:54 am
limbo:
*I* fall into generalizations, limbo? You’ve indirectly called me a “religion-hater” and a “liberal” more than once without even KNOWING me or knowing thing one about my politics or beliefs.
Uh uh, limbo. I’m not falling for it, and neither is anyone else around here. Nice try, with the smearing tactic. But it won’t work.
Oh… and it’s evolutionists who’ve politicized all this, eh? Yet you’ve taken another opportunity to fling the “liberal” tag around—and even bring up global warming–a totally unrelated and irrelevant topic. Yet, WE are the ones politicizing all this.
You’d be funny, limbo, if you weren’t such a goddamned tool.
And just what statements of yours would you like me to question? I questioned your entire premise.
You’ve shown yourself for what you are. Why not just step up to the plate and admit it.
YOU are proving WHY that book belongs on this list–and the more you open your mouth, the more you prove why it belongs in the number one spot.
May 20th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Science is not a question of conservative versus liberal politics. Science is about evidence, and the methodoloy that finds the best answer that fits.
If scientific methodology is followed properly, we get to the truth. The problem with creationists is not their politics, or liberals, or atheists. It is the fact that they insist on NOT DOING SCIENCE, and just accepting a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis.
If creationists were actually interested in scientifically justifying their position, they would perform science according to the scientific method — (a) Gather evidence and document it, (b) test it to see how it works, (c) formulate a hypothesis to explain the results, (d) Publish your findings, (e) Let other scientists conduct experiments to test your hypothesis.
Creationists have not done this at all. They have sat there for about 40 years or more, and just complained about evolution. They want all the attention that real scientists get, without actually performing the work of a scientist.
For comparison, this would be like some guy entering a high school, and demanding that history classes teach that the Nazis never engaged in extermination of Jews, and that his side deserves equal time in history classes, because according to his side, history is “dictated by the winners”, and the truth was covered up by a conspiracy.
That is essentially how creationists argue their case — they claim a conspiracy of “evolutionists” blocking them, when the reality is that they just don’t perform the science work needed to have their claims evaluated. Despite the fact that they never do peer review and they never participate in the scientific method with other scientists, their work has not existed in a vacuum — every one of their books has been examined by scientists, and thoroughly debunked. The problem with creationists is that they are not above lying to promote their cause, and that is what gets them every time. Ever last book I’ve read of theirs is full of mis-quotes, doctored quotes, and references to books that they claim agrees with them, which in reality, do not say what they claim at all.
POlitics and liberal bias are not part of the equation. It’s all about properly conducting science work.
May 20th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Well, I don’t think I’m gonna waste any more time with Randal.
“Science is not a question of conservative versus liberal politics. Science is about evidence, and the methodoloy that finds the best answer that fits.”
Yes! That is exactly my point. I am a computer scientist myself and a lover of science. However, science is conducted by humans, and humans are subject to bias, so bias is something we have to be on guard for at all times. I brought up global warming because it is a perfect example of how the scientific method can break down due to political pressures. Predictions of climate change are based solely on computer models. Computer models that predict hundreds of years into the future cannot be verified empirically, this makes the predictions unfalsifiable, yet many argue the science of global warming is settled! This is absurd. Science is NEVER settled, it is in constant flux and subject to revision at any time.
Getting back to evolution, let me just ask you this question then. How did life begin?
May 20th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
limbo:
Your statement about not wasting any more time with me is cute, when you have said nothing of substance, except to assert that scientific theories are always open to questioning, which is proper for science. Which is, in itself, true. But if that’s all you were saying, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. You have proceeded to fling around loose accusations and ill-fitting labels, and then hide behind the bald-faced lie of your own objectivity.
And you have the GALL to offer the quote in your above comment… AND THEN assert that it is “exactly” your point!
It’s exactly OPPOSITE to your point, limbo. In making your various statements here, you have referred to “religion-haters” and “liberals,” which are clear generalizations and is a clear example of unsupported label-tagging… and yet you want to go on maintaining that YOU are the reasonable and scientific one here, the one standing for “true” science. Again, it would be laughable, except for the fact that you really expect people to buy this.
Your loose-with-the-facts and unsupported statements about global warming STILL do not mitigate your bringing it up in the first place—in a manner which was HIGHLY political and HIGHLY subjective–working in cracks about “liberals” as though the whole thing was at all relevant to the question of Evolution.
Science is, yes, a living thing–ever ready for questioning and examination. But this DOES NOT mean that all well-supported, well-documented, and well-proven theories and ideas can simply be hauled back into the court of opinion every time someone like you has some politically-based or religious-based bias and wants to challenge said theory on this or that small point or points, in hopes of eroding it. By your logic we should be dragging the idea that the earth is round instead of flat into debate circles every time a flat-earther were to open his or her mouth. No, in science no questions are ever “settled” as in a court of law, but well-established ideas and theories aren’t open to ridiculous challenges by those with clear biases, either. You want to challenge such a theory, you need overwhelmingly powerful and firm evidence and facts to do it, limbo. That’s all. Yup, you have a right to question matters all you wish–but the fact is that every question raised by creationists already HAS an answer within the context of the theory of evolution–but the questions persist because they are based on deceptive distortions. Or there are questions which aren’t covered by the theory in the first place, either because they don’t really fall within its purview, or, as in this case with the question YOU asked, because we don’t yet have all the facts with which we can make a judgement.
So you ask, “how did life begin.” And of course you already know that we don’t yet fully know the answer to that question. Will you tell me now, then, that this disproves evolution, or even calls it into question? It does neither. We know that organic matter is common in the universe. We know that it was present on the early earth. We know that at some point this material was able to form molecules that, in turn, were able to copy themselves, and that in time, these molecules improved their arrangements and ability to copy, and that natural selection began to work on them.
We do not yet know the specifics. We have some ideas, some guesses, some bits of evidence. What of it, limbo? This says nothing about evolution. It does nothing to challenge it in the least. Neither does it support the idea of an intelligent designer. It offers NOTHING except the realization that we still have work to do to find the answers.
You make grand statements about how humans are biased and need to guard against their biases. And yet you have been hypocritically writing on this site all day, tossing out blind assumption after another about my character and my beliefs, without a shred of supporting evidence. And you have been writing about challenging a theory (evolution) without a single good reason to challenge it, and without a single question that does so. As I said, YOUR bias is showing.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Randall: this is an honest question for you (I’m not picking on you, don’t hurt me) – Which statement has a better argument? Or are they both equally dumb?
1) I believe in aliens because no proof has been presented that they do not exist.
2) I don’t believe in aliens because no proof has been presented that they do exist.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
trojan_man:
Well, I’d say that logically they’re both *invalid.* But it kind of depends on what one means by “believe”–if, for instance, the second statement said, “I say that there is no other life in the universe other than on the earth, because no proof has been presented for it”… then you could more easily see the fallacy. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
So anyway, both statements are invalid, and “wrong.” Equally so, I suppose you could say.
On face value maybe the first appears more absurd–we generally acknowledge that believing in things simply because someone can’t prove they DON’T exist is kind of silly. But really both statements are absurd.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
trojan_man; ooo ooo can I have a vote? Equally dumb. An appropriate statement in either instance is – I don’t know. (not what I believe by the way – just the logic of either statement)
Limbo; I too disapprove of your blanket statements. I am not threatened by Religion; I even believe it to provide comfort for some. I also don’t blame Religion for most of the evils that have befallen society. Generally secularism, or pure human avarice if you prefer, is to blame. You must know; covet thy neighbour’s wife, mule, land. etc.
Sure Behe is welcome to posit some sort of creator, intelligent designer. Just as long as he does it in Church. Not dress it up as science.
I’m not even sure if you’ve got the ToE theory down pat, at least today’s as I understand it.
You said “complex systems arise by random chance through random mutations”.
In the beginning maybe, but as an organism becomes more complex, and more specialized, it is not random at all. I may not be expressing myself well; what I mean is it is like loaded dice. Not random, but favoring a specific outcome.
Now I may be wrong, and I’m sure Slick or Randall will either support me or dash me to pieces on this one. But of one thing I’m sure; You asked before about the origins of life. One thing I’m absolutely positive about, is that it didn’t involve a magic wand.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Mom424: Yes, you can have a…oh wait, it was rhetorical. On you last sentence, though, if the origins of life did appear out of nothing, wouldn’t that be magic (plus or minus the wand)?
Randall: Thanks. But you see how easy it is to have a differing opinion about origins of life if, as you say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
First of all, Global warming is not solely based on computer modeling. It is based on a century of research into climate patterns around the globe, and the analysis of trends. It is also based on what we have measured in current times with various situations, such as city auto emissions. Computer models are just a predictive part of the equation. The numbers put into the models are based on real collected data.
How did life begin is not a question about evolution. I know what you’re thinking when you ask that. Evolution is not a model of how life originated. It is only concerned with the adaptation of species over time. The origin of life is found with a totally different set of theories, one of which is abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is not quite a full-blown theory yet, but some interesting work has come out of explorations into it. It is very likely that life has a non-organic origin, because the laws of physics and chemistry guide everything. We know that protiens and amino acids occur naturally, and we know of the existence of several self-replicating protiens. What we don’t know is the precise method that created life on earth.
This is the only “scientific” work that has been done on the origin of life question. Creationism is not scientific — it’s totally religious, and so isn’t ID (we know this because ID proponents admit it). We don’t currently have a definitive answer on the question, but that doesn’t invalidate the theory of evolution. In fact, nothing written by creationists or ID proponents has really threatened to do any harm to the theory of evolution, because so far, as I’ve said, they don’t do science. Creationists simply whine and come up with bogus psuedoscience.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
401. zach
The pic is a joke right?
David W. Irish – nice comments and cool blog…will definitely being checking more of it out.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
great list,but come on,darwin’s black box is more evil than mine kampf?!granted i believe DBB to be incredibly ignorant & helps promote the narrow-minded veiws of the catholic church, but mine kampf was written by one of the most(if not the most)sadistic & evil human being to EVER live
May 20th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Randal,
Let me education you about some simple facts in regards to the scientific method. Too many people seem to have a slanted, naive view of what makes science tick.
1) A scientific theory or hypothesis often tries to explain the mechanism for how or why some phenomenon occurs.
2) It IS a critical part of science to look at these explanations with a critical eye to see if they hold up under close examination. This is especially true in immature sciences, such as evolution where our knowledge is changing rapidly.
Now, the ToE says that the information in DNA was produced in a random, undirected process through a process of random mutations and natural selection.
Genes contain blueprints for proteins, instructions on how to make these proteins, as well as information about every detail of the cells function, including reproduction.
Now, some simple questions for you.
Now if Behe wants to argue that new knowledge about the nature of DNA encoding makes it extremely unlikely that DNA came about through random mutations and natural selection, why is that not science (see 2 above)?
Why does Behe have to supply an alternative explanation in order for his criticism to be valid?
Lets stick the the science here please and not go off on some rant about creationists or whatever. thx.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
oops, sorry about the spelling errors.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Trojan_man; Since I’ve started hanging out in these parts I have learned about alternate dimensions, (I can conceptualize 10 with a little help, 4 was my previous stopping point), vibrating strings or alternately oscillating donut shaped affairs at the beginning of all things. I’ve read about the possibility of the aforementioned alternate dimension precipitating the Big Bang. I’ve learned of the futility of choice (there is no choice – life is The Matrix) and the all encompassing importance of ego.
This is all fantastic stuff, and the quantum theories are possible; people are actually working on the math, doing experiments (the new Hadron reactor, maybe the end of all things?
) This is magic enough for me. Why would nature need a creator? She is plenty complex at the sub-atomic level, why would it be any different at the other end of the spectrum?
May 20th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Mom424: There are things in this universe that I don’t understand. I don’t read enough scientific journals or papers to understand string theory or why women are mad one day and happy the next with seemingly no outside force acting upon them. However, the one thing I do know for certain is that if there was no life after this one (in my mind), the greatest tragedy would be that we only have an average of 75 years to live. I choose to believe that death is not the end. Finality is very depressing in my mind. It does not mean that I will force any beliefs on anyone. On the contrary, I will offer to explain my beliefs to anyone who is interested. And, I hope I foster a good enough environment to allow others to express their beliefs. I do think that there is no proof that there is a higher being except for some stories that were told and written down long ago and my faith that it is so. I also understand that it is not enough for some people to believe that. But, I don’t trample on other persons (or their beliefs) because I feel that they are different than mine – not saying you do either. However, the internet has given blowhards the capacity to jump in and out of conversations – with anonymity – and act like fools to try to get a point across.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Mom424: A side-note…we are in the same conundrum…what started it all. Do we believe that infinity goes both ways or do we believe that we started at zero and we are moving towards infinity? Even with the idea of alternate dimensions, that is the ultimate question.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Randall,
1) books and the ideologies need to be taken with a grain of salt and in the context from which they came.
2) which leads me to my second point: Dewey’s emphasis on thinking skills has actually not been taken far enough. I am our age and what I notice most among young people today is actually a lack of intellectual rigor and/or zeal. A student with curiosity and thinking skills will acquire knowledge easily on his or her own, and it will be a lifelong process. A student who has merely been drilled in facts may be completely turned off to education and/or think there is no need to learn more. That said, the dichotomy between learning thinking skills and learning facts is as someone above pointed out a false one. I think the decline of our educational system is multifactorial and perhaps the biggest problem is that we as a society are not willing to make the proper investment in it.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:42 am
First of all, Global warming is not solely based on computer modeling. It is based on a century of research into climate patterns around the globe, and the analysis of trends. It is also based on what we have measured in current times with various situations, such as city auto emissions. Computer models are just a predictive part of the equation. The numbers put into the models are based on real collected data.
David W. Irish : I think this viewpoint is a little simplistic.
Some considerations :
- the j-curve (cif. Inconvenient Truth et al) in particular has been largely undermined, not least by a study commissioned by the US Senate, which deemed the j-curve invalid, having studied its assumptions. For one thing, the IPCC model produced a j-curve even when fed random white noise data. There were also relevant segments of data not input into the model which would apparently have presented a much different picture.
- the IPCC used computer models to determine heat-energy factors with respect to global warming when they could have simply calculated these by using a law of physics (Stefan-Boltzman Law); notwithstanding this, their own calculation of this factor exaggerated the warming effect of greenhouse gases by 600% as compared to the result that the Boltzman law would have easily provided had they chosen to use it.
- regarding the “warming” bit, there is no reliable and consistent “measure” being applied. eg. what, exactly, is the “global mean temperature” (or similar description that is applied)? How is it measured ? etc. Our scientists are even arguing over this fairly fundamental factor.
- the Nasa/Columbia Earth Institute Study. Well, you remember the somewhat discredited UN-IPCC studies discussed above? The NASA/Colombia Earth Institute organisations were/are a part of this process.
- the “collected data” that you refer to; have you seen the published photos of some of the temperature gathering points ? Some of these would be questioned by High School students as being liable to produce flawed observations.
- on a more general note, I am sure that the public recalls being unduly scared or misled to varying degrees by “experts” over issues such as DDT being cancerous, the Y2K bug’s ability to rip the face off of your network, Atkins is bad, Atkins is good, recommended daily salt allowance, drink a gazillion liters of water a day; the list goes on.
As I have stated before, my own take on all of this is possibly akin to that of the physicist Freeman Dyson : I have no problem in accepting that global climate is changing, but I have a healthy skepticism towards the models used to extrapolate the extent of the outcome.
And from personal experience in designing complex financial risk models I am well aware of the sensitivities of such models or algorithms to changes in underlying assumptions.
Bottom line – IMHO, whilst it would be foolish to deny that climate change is a potentially catastrophic issue for mankind, it is wholly understandable that there are many who feel skeptical about the “predicted” consequences of global warming. Neither the scientific community nor the politicians have covered themselves in glory over all of this.
(Apologies to those experiencing deja-vu; I have resorted to cutting/pasting/paraphrasing comments on this topic I have made on other lists).
May 21st, 2008 at 3:51 am
this lists comments are quickly turning too complicated for me. Actually it did a long time ago
May 21st, 2008 at 5:29 am
warningdontreadthis: just do like i do…follow the instruction from the list “10 ways to seem smarter than you are”.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:36 am
limbo:
I don’t need lectures on the scientific method from the likes of you. I was schooled in it. You, as a self-confessed computer science person, were almost certainly not.
AND don’t presume to lecture ME about “going off on rants,” limbo, and sticking to the subject. YOU are the one who brought up global warming–an utterly unrelated and irrelevant topic to the one at hand. YOU are the one who ranted about “liberals” and “religion haters.” It’s VERY convenient for you to repeatedly ignore this (I’ve pointed it out to you several times now and you haven’t answered) and persist in pretending that you’re the reasonable one here. No one’s falling for it.
You’re dishonest in the extreme, and I find debates with such people to be pointless and a colossal waste of my valuable time.
You want answers to your “simple” questions? Fine.
Behe can argue whatever he pleases. It isn’t SCIENCE if he doesn’t have the evidence to back it up, however… and he DOESN’T. There IS NOTHING currently known or even presumed about DNA encoding that makes it “extremely unlikely” that DNA arose through random mutations and natural selection—THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED MODEL OF HOW DNA CAME ABOUT. Behe makes a *supposition,* he has NO PROOF for it whatsoever.
NO, science does not yet have all the answers in regards to how DNA arose, but it doesn’t therefore follow that intelligent design is suggested. Period.
“Why does Behe have to supply an alternative explanation in order for his criticism to be valid?”
No one said he did, to my knowledge. BUT if he is aware of alternatives, and those alternatives have scientific merit, then it’s only honesty to present them.
Again–bias has no place in science. I can’t speak to Behe’s bias, but I can speak to YOURS. You have already ranted about “liberals” and “religion-haters” and how global warming is a liberal fantasy. YOUR biases are therefore plain for all to see. You have discredited yourself. Moreover by your own admission you’re not a trained scientist, but you come on here and presume to lecture others who HAVE BEEN TRAINED in the sciences on the scientific method.
Obviously you have an agenda, and like many creationists and their ilk, you’re trying to smoke-and-mirror us away from seeing it, because you know it prejudices your case. But you don’t fool me and you don’t fool anyone else around here with a brain, limbo.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:04 am
Trojan_man: But of course! Why didn’t I think of that
?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:13 am
Randal,
Thanks for the rant. As I expected, you sidestepped my questions and just hurled one ad hominem insult after an other. Big surprise.
My point is that you don’t have to agree with Behe, but to say his book is number one on the list of books that have screwed up the world is absurd. You say “It isn’t SCIENCE if he doesn’t have the evidence to back it up, however”. Another simple question for you before you go off on another rant, have you actually read the book and made an honest effort to understand what he is saying? Obviously not, so I suspect you are speaking out of ignorance.
You don’t seem to be intelligent or intellectually honest enough to understand the issues behind the problem of how life began. Even Dawkins, who I’m sure is your hero, admits the difficulties here. You just run to the old defense, that “one day science will understand”. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. How can you say otherwise?
Personally, I don’t think creationism should be taught in science class, because one of the most important assumptions of science is that there is a natural explanation for everything, and once we get away from that, we leave the realm of science. On the other hand, legitimate criticisms of current aspects of the theory of evolution should be encouraged and taught in the classroom. The current intolerant orthodoxy surrounding evolution is unacceptable.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:44 am
Limbo,
Evolution is not an “immature” science, any more than atomic theory is immature. Our knowledge with respect to evolution is “changing rapidly” only in the sense that we are learning more details of the process, but so far, none of the new facts discovered about biology or DNA has called the theory of evolution into question, or forced major revisions of it. If anything, the more we learn, the more solid the theory stands.
What has changed with respect to evolution is DNA. DNA forced a lot of biology to be adjusted, especially in cladistics and taxonomy, which is our “tree of life” that shows how different species are related. For example, DNA shows us that Pandas are more closely related to racoons and possums than to bears. It also shows us that birds are more closely related to reptiles.
No discovery in recent years has made the scientific community question Evolution. The only people questioning it are Biblical literalists, period. It is important to biblical literalists that genesis be 100% scientific and historically accurate, and they are at war with science because many scientific facts contradict Genesis’s account of the earth and human origins. To an evangelical biblical literalist, if there is one single mistake in the Bible, then the whole Bible becomes useless, and the whole foundation of their faith becomes a lie — and they will do anything to preserve their belief, rather than simply acknowledge that the Bible isn’t perfect.
You need to learn one thing before you can discuss evolution. The Theory of Evolution simply states that a species change over time due to inherited traits and mutation. That’s it.
The Theory does not state that “DNA was produced at random, in an undirected process”. That is a completely ignorant misrepresentation of the Theory of Evolution. If you claim that “evolution is a random process”, then you are repeating a common misconception about Evolution. Evolution is not a random process. Evolution is a very orderly process that works by mixing DNA from different parents with different traits, and the only “random” elements are a combination of random selection and mutation. Natural selection and mutation are UNPREDICTABLE, because we do not know in advance which individuals within each population will live and pass it’s genes on, and which offspring will contain a mutation that may be useful.
No biologist or chemist would ever argue that DNA originated randomly. The laws of chemistry are not random. They are pretty predictable and orderly. If a series of chemical reactions led to the first life, and then to the first proto-RNA and proto-DNA, then it was an inevitable chain of events that merely followed chemistry and physics. Life is essentially a 100% chemical process. Every biological process can be reduced down to a series of chemical reactions.
As for Behe, he has been thoroughly debunked. His principle of “irreducible complexity” has been debunked, and when interviewed, he was forced to admit that his criteria for judging something to be irreducibly complex” was essentially whatever he said it was — in other words, his criteria were so arbitrary that antything he personally could not explain was his criteria for irreducible complexity. That is hardly a scientific way of doing anything. Behe made his case, and he failed. He failed to do the science, he failed to do peer review, and he showed contempt for the scientific method by admitting that his idea of what science is would include alchemy and astrology.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:45 am
Hey Kiwiboi,
Excellent summary on global warming!
It appears that you have experience with computer modeling as I do. It is absolutely clear that the IPCC is relying on computer models for it’s catastrophic predictions. The problem with climate based computer models are numerous and severe. For one thing, the mathematical models of climate on which they are based are both highly complex, and very controversial. The climate system is incredibly complex. Also, from a software engineering point of view, it is impossible to test software that makes predictions about things that will happen well into the future. Sure, you can test against historical data, but two problems, no one knows how accurate the historical data is (as you mentioned, the j-curve or hockey stick have been largely discredited), and even if it was accurate, if the software matches up well to historical data, there is no guarantee that it will do a good job looking forward.
Actually, Al Gore’s book “an inconvenient truth” would have been a good one for the list as it is full of self serving propaganda.
As for me, I think modest global warming is occurring, but I doubt the catastrophic predictions of the IPCC. I think the man-made portion is small.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:07 am
David Irish,
Thanks for your well thought out response.
Just to be clear, I am NOT a young earth creationist. I don’t take the creation story to be a literal six days, or that God waived a magic wand and poofed people into existence. I believe God created all the laws of the universe and set in motion a natural process.
If, as you say, “The Theory of Evolution simply states that a species change over time due to inherited traits and mutation. That’s it.”, then there would be no controversy. Virtually no one would have a problem with that.
The truth is, every single textbook on evolution talks about the Miller-Urey experiments, or the primordial soup or some other explanation about the origin of life. In practice, the theory of evolution as it is taught in schools goes well beyond your definition of it.
I look at things from the perspective of “information”, since that is my expertise. All I really want to know is the “undirected” process that evolutionists think happened that caused the DNA code to write itself, creating code for such things as eyes, wings, etc. I don’t want hand waving or flowery “overviews” (series of gradual changes, blah, blah, blah). I want to know the nuts and bolts process of how they say this happened. I have looked at Dawkin’s weasel program and found it to be a joke.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:05 am
limbo:
Scientists don’t *know* the process that caused the first proto-RNA/DNA chains. They have some ideas, a few scant pieces of evidence like the Miller-Urey experiment (which, most scientists now freely admit, was fundamentally flawed from the beginning) and the proven laws of evolution to base their findings on. You misunderstand: evolution does not necessitate abiogenesis – abiogenesis necessitates evolution. I myself have read dozens of books and journals concerning evolution and have only come across reference to abiogenesis a handful of times, and even less the mention of the Miller-Urey experiment, and then it only discussed how the experiment was poorly designed. Most evolutionary scientists will admit that they believe in abiogenesis, simply because the natural, reductivist order of the world logically points to natural, reductivist origins. However, the theory of evolution in and of itself does not concern itself with the origins of life. Evolution is a proven theory, abiogenesis is not. A lot of anti-evolutionists find it difficult to separate the concepts but the fact remains that evolution does not deal with the origins of life. Some researchers have taken it upon themselves to apply the lessons of evolution to the complex problem of the origins of life, with little success so far, but they are two distinct fields of study. And from my experience with the teaching of evolution is schools (which is relatively extensive), the theory of evolution is taught, in practice, more or less how David described it above, and rightfully so. It is such a hotly contested issue now that most teachers stick to what we know about evolution without giving a lot of speculation concerning its peripheral areas of study.
I do have this to say, though: do you require the nuts and bolts answer to every scientific question you have, or only the ones you find convenient for you to prove your point?
May 21st, 2008 at 9:18 am
Slick: be careful saying “laws of evolution”…that denotes proven fact, beyond doubt. As of now, evolution is like Lucy – still got some splainin’ to do.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:25 am
trojan_man: No scientific fact is beyond doubt, but evolution is indeed a scientific fact, just as gravity is a scientific fact. It happens. It has been shown to happen, has even been observed happening in nature. There are certain mechanisms that allow evolution to proceed; these are the “laws” of evolution.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:38 am
slick: as far as i know (and i could be wrong) evolution has been observed through experiments and observations of different species – not from one class, family, order, etc. to another. We think we know the reason we have life as it is now, but we don’t know how it got here from 4.5 billion years ago. There is nothing to observe, 4.5 billion years ago is forever gone. Remember, we have been conducting research for about a one-millionth of a milli-second of time. We still don’t know it all. Evolution is not a law, it is a theory that is actually still far-reaching to explain all life (not origins of) as we know it. It just happens to be the explanation that fits best with the facts given us at the present.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:39 am
“I do have this to say, though: do you require the nuts and bolts answer to every scientific question you have”
yes. If I preferred flowery high level conceptual explanations of things, I would have gone into the arts.
Here is my bottom line. It appears to me that the evidence points to the fact that the original life that appeared on earth contained almost all the same genetic code that modern life does. I see no evidence that DNA became more complex over time. For example, when they looked at the DNA of the lowly sea anemone, which has been around virtually unchanged since the Cambrian explosion 500,000,000 years ago, they found it to be very similar to the DNA of “modern” creatures.
What do we see when we look at the fossil record? We see rapid changes over short periods of time, and then relative stability. We also see strange mosaic creatures, like the
archaeoptryx, but not true transitional forms.
Basically I’ve been looking for some evidence that contradicts my belief that the original life contained all the necessary genetic code for all modern life. It just took some times for the certain traits and structures to be expressed in the genetic code. That’s my take on evolution. So far I haven’t run across any contrary evidence.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:03 am
trojan_man: The reason we haven’t seen observed instances of one taxonomic level becoming another is because that is simply not how evolution works. It works on the level of the organism, which influences speciation, or the separation of the species based on reproductive isolation (that being that a particular organism or group of organisms from one species have changed so much genetically that they can no longer produce viable, sexually-potent offspring).
And yes, we don’t have time machines, we can’t go back to the dawn of the earth to observe the first common ancestory emerge from the primordial soup. However, we can make very reasonable hypotheses about what happened in the past based on convergent evidence that all points in the same direction. Furthermore, the mechanisms of evolution *can* be observed now, right this minute. The fact that organisms change genetically in ways that either facilitate or hinder their ability to survive, and occasionally change enough to cause reproductive isolation, is an observable fact about the world. This is the core of what evolution represents, and it happens. Evolution is a fact. The exact methods through which evolution proceeds are what is under scrutiny; the theoretical framework is debatable, the fact that evolution occurs is not.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:18 am
Limbo,
you spat out a couple more misconceptions, which tell me more and more that you have a lot to learn about science.
First of all, you referred to Archaeopteryx as “a mosaic” creature. An archaeopteryx is an animal that has both the features of a reptile combined with the features of a bird. A “mosaic” creature **IS** a transitional. Do you have different meanings for the two? Since I’ve never hear a scientist refer to fossils as “mosaics” before, I’ll wait for you to define “transitional” and “mosaic” to clarify what you mean.
You are probably unaware of all the other bird-like therapod dinosaurs, which have been discovered more recently than archaeopteryx.
Secondly, you said something that only creationists believe. You claimed that “there are no clear transitional fossils”. This is not true at all. There are whole GROUPINGS of transitional fossils. You name it, there are transitionals of everything. Possibly the most dramatic lineage of fossils is our own. The transitionals between Australopithicus and modern humans show a very clear, gradual progression.
But there are transitional categories like therapsids, seymoromorphs, and ichtyosetigids. Therapsids have features that are only found in reptiles mixed with features that are only found in mammals, and there are hundreds of different species in the category of therapsids. There are a lot of fossil sequences of similar species which show a clear transitional trend over millions of years. Cygnanthus looks almost identical to a similar reptile species, except that it was warm blooded, and had different dental structure. They also look a lot like actual mammals, except they have the skull features of a reptile.
Here’s a hint — you never find a reptile with a one-piece jawbone, blood canals in it’s bones, or several types of teeth in it’s skull. Likewise, you never find a mammal with just one type of tooth, without blood canals in it’s bones, or with a jaw made of several bones. There are other features to point out, but these are the most notable.
If anyone tells you that there are no transitional fossils or no “clear” transitional fossils, they are either uneducated on the subject, lying, or reading too many creationist rants.
Check out:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossils
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
One of the problems with creationism is that their target audience is people who are ignorant of science. Once they present their material to people who have high-school level biology or above, their arguments fall apart, because they depend on the ignorance of the masses to get their ideas accepted. Every test of their ideas by people who actually research their claims reveals that their primary method is essentially lying.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:18 am
slick: you are correct. My point is that we study evolution in a vaccuum – the vaccuum is now. We think that this is what has happened over time but we don’t know. You used the words “laws of evolution” and i’m telling you that it is not correct. Evolution is a valid theory based on testing of (your correct words) “reasonable hypotheses”. But it is still theoretical until we can verify that a mud puddle became an ameoba, which became a lizard, which became a human.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:36 am
limbo:
If that is your take on evolution, it is largely correct. However, this doesn’t seem to jive well with your previous comments, this one in particular: “Don’t question scientific theories that liberals REALLY like, such as global warming or the creation of life by blind luck!” Forgive me if I seem a bit skeptical of your motives here.
I’d also like to point out that the punctuated equilibrium (or puntuated gradualism) theory has a very strong following among evolutionary scientists, and is one of the prevailing theories in the modern evolutionary synthesis. This theory explains the large gaps of relative stability that has been observed in the fossil record. And there is logical, verifiable genetic evidence to support this claim. Furthermore, while it is acknowledged that the archeopteryx is not considered a true transitional fossil, many true transitional fossils have been discovered, detailing the transition between fish and reptiles, and reptiles to birds and mammals. The transitional record of cetacean evolution is particularly well-documented.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:41 am
David: While I completely emphathize with your spirit and I completely agree with almost everything you said, it *has* actually been acknowledged that archaeopteryx is not a true transitional form, but rather represents a relative of the true transitional genii “avialae” and “aves.” However, it is a glimpse into how this transformation took place, and is considered a type of transitional form.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:48 am
trojan_man: Despite whatever semantical argument you are trying to make here (it’s not very clear), evolution is a fact. It occurs, there is no doubt of that. It progresses according to specific mechanisms, which have also been proven to be true. You are misunderstanding the way I use the word “law.” The *theory* of evolution is theoretical (in a scientific sense of the word, not the colloquial sense you seem to be fond of) but the fact remains that there are mechanistic laws by which evolution occurs.
Lastly,: “But it is still theoretical until we can verify that a mud puddle became an ameoba, which became a lizard, which became a human.” – You
*sigh* That’s not how it works, guy. Read this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html
May 21st, 2008 at 10:59 am
Trojan_man,
(1) Arguing that Evolution is “just a theory” is a bullshit argument. Atomic theory is “just a theory”, Gravity is “just a theory”. This is a typical creationist crap-argument that essentially tries to redefine “theory” as “a wild guess”. There is actually a large difference between a valid scientific theory and a guess. In reality, a theory is usually based on a large amount of research data, evidence, testing, and work. A Hypothesis is just an educated guess. A Theory is what a hypothesis turns into once all the work and testing is done, and by the time a hypothesis graduates to a theory, it’s usually heavily modified from it’s original draft, and pretty much confirmed to the point that there is little question of it’s accuracy to describe and predict.
Secondly, your comment about “a mud puddle became an ameoba” is a retardedly over-simplistic misrepresentation of Evolutionary theory, as well as what Abiogenesis is about.
If you think that “a mud puddle turning into amoeba” is dumb (which it oudoubtedly is), how is it supposed to be more dumb than “God formed man from dust”. Since mud puddles are made of dust and dirt, the Creationist claim is no less silly than the idea that life came froma mud puddle — but the mud puddle idea is not what current science states by a long shot, any more than “a bunch of metal turned into a car” describes the autmobile manufacturing process.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:06 am
David and Slick:
Thank you for taking up the cause on this one. I simply haven’t the time to deal with another one of these creationist assholes masquerading behind a “I’m just a skeptic with questions” facade. I’m growing less and less patient in my old age.
Besides, I have some OTHER idiot calling me names over on another thread, and that creep came first.
Also, if I don’t get through the stack of work on my desk, some kids ain’t makin’ it to commencement.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:08 am
Slick,
The Archaeopteryx has all the features required to be a transitional, but it’s only the start — There are literally dozens of different avian transitionals, similar to Archaeopteryx, and quite amazing, in that they represent a whole group of creatures that have reptilian and modern bird features. Some of them resemble flightless birds like Kiwis and penguins, but have dinosaur-like claws instead of wings.
I know that the Archaeoptryx is hotly contested between bird people and dinosaur people, and that there is still a lot of conjecture — but you cannot deny it’s close similarity to several dino-raptor species.
Take a look at some of the fossils here:
http://www.dinosauria.com
It’s a very useful tool that has every dino you’ve ever heard of, categorized any way you want to view them.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:11 pm
David: just to clarify… you said “It is important to biblical literalists that genesis be 100% scientific and historically accurate, and they are at war with science because many scientific facts contradict Genesis’s account of the earth and human origins”
this isn’t true. i accept the Bible literally and realize that it isn’t a scientific text. your statement is a generalizing stereotype. the same type of comment as saying ALL evolutionists believe a mud puddle turned into an amoeba.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:14 pm
David:
Oh, no doubt. I was only referring specifically to the archeopteryx, who shares a vast amount of transitional similarites with a host of other ancestral species. It turned out I was technically incorrect on that one anyway, Archeopteryx is officially considered the first member of the aves class (not genus), though as you said this is still a controvesial issue. Taxonomy was never one of my strong suits.
Nice link, btw, that is quite handy.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:18 pm
slick: thanks for the link…it actually does clear some things up for me (i will admit that). Also, thanks for not lowering yourself to sophomoric levels and name-call. I thought as intellectuals, we would have “evolved” from that by now. However, i need some info from this statement put in layman’s terms:
“The process of evolution can be summarized in three sentences: Genes mutate. [gene: a hereditary unit] Individuals are selected. Populations evolve.”
Where did all of the different species come from? Did they all come from separate genes or did they evolve from one?
Evolution in my mind can be summed up as follows:
“I took a trip to California.” That is the only statement given and I have to find all of the clues to find out how I travelled, when I travelled, why I travelled, where the trip started, ect. These clues are found at random times and may change my theory but it doesn’t ever disprove that I took a trip to California. Could that be correct?
Randall and David: evolution does not disprove creationism. You have over-analyzed my original point. There is still a lot of conjecture to get from then (4.5 billion years ago) to now. It ain’t all clear to all us dummies who go to meetin’ on Sunday. By the way Randall, is your real name Ward Churchill?
May 21st, 2008 at 12:30 pm
David W. Irish said
“Since I’ve never hear a scientist refer to fossils as “mosaics” before, I’ll wait for you to define “transitional” and “mosaic” to clarify what you mean.”
Are you kidding me? Apparently you need to brush up on your science bud. Have you never read anything from Gould or Eldridge? Are they not scientists? Check out this quote:
“Smooth intermediates between Bauplane [body plans] are almost impossible to construct, even in thought experiments: there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx do not count)” – Gould, S.J. and N. Eldredge. “Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered.” Paleobiology, 3 (1977): 115-151. (p. 147)
You see the statement below is what makes me demand evidence or an explanation for how new genetic information gets created by mutations and natural selection:
“Secondly, you said something that only creationists believe. You claimed that “there are no clear transitional fossils”. This is not true at all. There are whole GROUPINGS of transitional fossils. You name it, there are transitionals of everything. Possibly the most dramatic lineage of fossils is our own. The transitionals between Australopithicus and modern humans show a very clear, gradual progression.”
Looking as some teeth or a tiny piece of bone and then piecing this together as proof of a slow transition when you already assume there is a gradual transition is proof of nothing. Now that we understand how genes work, I want an explanation that shows how new genetic information is created by mutations and natural selection, or any other method for that matter that makes sense now that we understand more about genetics. Why do guess work with bones and teeth when we have the genetic code to look at?
If all evolution does is slice and dice existing genetic information, big deal. That would explain why we have dinosaur with feathers and such. Now if you want to argue that evolution creates new genetic code, please explain how this happens (yeah I’ve read Dawkins explanation, and it’s pure crap – wishful thinking).I guess my theory that all the genetic code was in the first life lives on.
As for the liberal baiting, sorry… that was just a way to flush out the truly biased in the debate, and Randal took the bait. Really I meant the Dawkins, Meyers crowd. They exaggerate the significance of the science surrounding evolution to try and bash religious people. That is a problem for science, no?
May 21st, 2008 at 1:00 pm
trojan_man:
I’m glad you took the time to look that over. If we can’t debate these things peacefully, why debate them at all?
“The process of evolution can be summarized in three sentences: Genes mutate. [gene: a hereditary unit] Individuals are selected. Populations evolve.”
Genes are strands of DNA that carry the blueprints for all the physical and mental structures in our body (including hormones, chemicals, etc.). During conception, sometimes genes get shuffled around, and sometimes they mutate, or change randomly. When the genes are switched around or mutated, they cause the blueprints to change and different structures in the body to develop differently. That means that certain animals are better equipped to do the things that animals do (an animal that borrows in the ground to find food, for instance, will be able to dig deeper and find more food if its born with paws that are elongated like a scoop, as in the case of moles) and some are less well-equipped. The ones that are better equipped to do what they need to do to survive tend to be healthier and stronger than those that are less equipped, and so they have a better chance of surviving predator attacks, resisting disease, becoming physically bigger, etc. This typically means they will best their competition for mating and go on to have more offspring. The offspring carry the genes of both parents, and whichever ones get the better genes will go to to start the cycle over again. This is natural selection, and those animals that go on to have more and healthier offspring are selected for. Over enough time and enough generations, mutations and gene-swapping mount at the level of the individual and a group of animals will begin to change physically. When they have changed enough, their genes no longer allow them to successfully mate with members of the other group of animals, and they have evolved into a new species.
That’s a bit of a simplistic assessment, but it’s the bare bones of evolutionary theory.
According to the evolutionary theory, all species of plants and animals are descendent from a single type of ancient lifeform. We share a significant majority of our DNA sequence with all forms of life on earth, and given that we *know* how DNA is transferred and how it behaves, this is among the most significant pieces of evidence we have for common descent. However, understand that this process took billions and billions of years to happen, and trillions upon trillions of generations. It is not something that can happen overnight.
As far as your analogy is concerned, that is essentially right. I find a helpful analogy to be the force of gravity. You pick up a ball and drop it. It falls to the ground. You know it did because you watched it, and you’ve seen it happen over and over again. But you don’t know *why* the ball falls, it just does. You may have to conduct experiments and measurements to try to deduce what mechanism is that drives it, how it acts, etc, and people may argue over how and why it happens, but that doesn’t change the fact that everytime you drop the ball it falls right to the ground.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Randall and David: evolution does not disprove creationism.
Not only does it not disprove it, but if the original living cells were packed with information that would only express itself after an extremely long period of time, this makes the concept of life arising by chance virtually impossible. Remember that the first life on earth arose at virtually the first geological moment if could once the earth became inhabitable. Unless you want to retreat to the old “someday science will explain this” cop out like randal, it seems pretty likely there was some intelligent cause that started life, i.e., God.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:16 pm
limbo:
I see, so now you were “baiting” me. Right. Sure.
I took no “bait” from you, so stop flattering yourself. I repeatedly pointed OUT to you that you were using the very kinds of tactics and rhetoric that you pretend to abhor. If anyone snatched at bait here, it was you, limbo. You lost your cool and started ranting about liberals and “religious-haters.” You showed your hand and now you’re trying to backpedal and get back to pretending to sound rational and reasonable.
I challenge you to present ONE statement of mine that “bashes religious people.”
Again, your tactics are transparent, and your disingenuousness is, frankly, becoming repellant.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:19 pm
So, has anybody changed their minds after this gentlemanly debate? Do you still think Behe should be #1 on the list?
After all, Behe believes in common descent. Behe believes that evolution can lead to new species. He asks the same question I have been asking here to which no answer has been forthcoming.
Any clear thinking person (eh hemmm, randal, I think you may be excluded) would have to say he does not belong on that list. Most of the attacks on Behe are ad hominem and/or strawman arguments made by people who have either not read the book, or not made an honest effort to grasp what he is saying.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
slick: Thanks. Question: would you consider life as it is now more a result of chance over structure?
limbo: I don’t know why people can’t admit that they don’t know everything – some of it is guesswork.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:21 pm
A paper, picked at random, describing how the genetic code works (to the best of our knowledge):
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/24
May 21st, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Randall: here’s your statement – “Thank you for taking up the cause on this one. I simply haven’t the time to deal with another one of these creationist assholes masquerading behind a “I’m just a skeptic with questions” facade. I’m growing less and less patient in my old age.”
Sounds like you really love religious people. Unless you would like to backtrack…er…say that is was out of context.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Randal,
Anyone who thinks Behe should be on this list at all has to be an extremist in my opinion. Since you do think he should be on the list, apparently you are of the shut up and don’t ask any questions, especially ones I don’t like crowd. I just find that mindset very frightening, especially as it relates to science. I am happy to read stuff off the answers in genesis website, or talk origins or any other website. I find I learn more by being open minded.
If you are comfortable with religious people and free and open inquiry in science, why don’t you just say so rather than beating around the bush (or beating up Bush should I say).
May 21st, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Randall: good link. With this quote “It should be noticed, however, that this choice of a small part of the overall, vast code space for further analysis is far from being arbitrary”, it is hard to imagine that we are only in the infant stages of understanding our origins. It would be cool to see how another 1000 or 1 million years advances this study. However, it is not a lite read for me. I have to put on my blinders to read something like this or sit in a soundproof room.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:53 pm
“After all, Behe believes in common descent. Behe believes that evolution can lead to new species. He asks the same question I have been asking here to which no answer has been forthcoming.
Any clear thinking person (eh hemmm, randal, I think you may be excluded) would have to say he does not belong on that list. Most of the attacks on Behe are ad hominem and/or strawman arguments made by people who have either not read the book, or not made an honest effort to grasp what he is saying.”
No, he doesn’t belong at #1 on the list, but the anti-evolution screed is independently dangerous AND part of a broader anti-science agenda that’s dangerous. It could be #10, though Crick’s garbage is far worse.
“It is interesting that 4 of the writers on this list were admirers of Darwins theories. A book that has done no damage to anyone, and questions the theories behind so many atrocities of the last century gets on the list?”
None of these books have done “damage” to anyone per se, the consequences of their publishing did, arguably. The anti-science agenda is serious because it reduces critical thinking and thus increases support for government atrocities, as well as makes people more vulnerable to flim-flams and conmen, not to mention impedes research into things like life-saving drugs.
The association of Darwin’s theory with Hitler is laughable. By your reasoning, anyone who’s ever used a rock to bash someone’s brains in must be channeling Isaac Newton, and therefore the Principia and the principles of classical mechanics must be the worst atrocities ever. Scientific discovery can be taken out of context into ideology, but that’s hardly science’s fault. (Science doesn’t get a free pass on everything, of course, not even close, but this one isn’t its fault.)
“However, if you consider NET evil rather than GROSS evil, the Bible is actually the least evil, most good text available. The overwhelming majority of all the good, charitable, kind acts that have gone on in the world and are going on in the world since Christ walk this earth is a direct result of his teachings which are largely contained in that book.”
The problem with this analysis is manifold.
A) If we take into account good consequences of these books, then all of them are mixed. Sure, Mein Kampf established the Third Reich, but the resulting World War reinvigorated the world’s economy after capitalist disaster. The Communist Manifesto may have inspired the Soviet dungeons, but it also inspired Communists resisting American segregation and beneficial social programs the world over. And so forth.
B) A lot of the supposed “good” the Bible does isn’t unique to the Bible. Lessons like “Don’t murder”, “Forgive”, “Turn the other cheek” and “Help the poor” are ubiquitous from Buddhism to traditional tribal societies. So one can’t argue that the positive consequences of those elements of the Bible are unique. The things that ARE unique are generally the wars and destruction (not that other religions haven’t had them, even Buddhism has, but Christianity seems to be at this point in history the worst.)
C) The “good” is inspired by the bad. Sure, missionary work is pretty cool, but it also undermines the native cultures of the regions. Further, the missionaries were only able to do what they did based on the forward power projection of destructive Christian empires.
D) To argue seriously that almost all the good done in the world has been done by at most 1/6th of its population is racist in its implication, not to mention blatantly false. Considering the crimes committed by the Christian British, French and American empires, one has to wonder where exactly the good is. Yes, Christian people do plenty of good, as do plenty of others.
“Those who are moved to act by the Bible and it’s ethics is the ultimate counter to the evil caused by the acts of Stalin and Marx and Hitler.”
Really? Because Marx, arguing for classlessness and charity, is entirely in line with Jesus, while the Bible also includes admonitions to murder the infidels.
“And “Silent Spring” not only killed more people (via malaria by taking away DDT) than Spock, it created the dangerous trend of using basing draconian and deady public policy on what makes you feel Good About The Earth.”
That’s odd. See, the real reason disease spreads, as epidemiological studies show (dozens of them), isn’t due to Western technological or scientific intervention. It’s basic social standards. If social standards are low and inequity is high, disease is rampant. This is why only the declines in the rates of smallpox and polio can be positively connected to things like vaccines. All other diseases were going down before then. It’s possible to deal with malaria without dumping toxins into our water, and the systemic choices that cause us to dump toxins into our water rather than build the immune systems and basic health standards is exactly what’s CAUSING the growth of malaria. How can we know this? Most of the countries that have high malaria incidents have banned DDT. Yet without DDT, American malaria rates are non-existent. Try not making empirically denied arguments.
Spock may have made some errors in child-raising in his scientific proposals. So what? Are we going to blame scientists when they put out a drug that testing showed was promising but didn’t work?
I’m amazed that Milton Friedman or other capitalist idiocies didn’t make this list. Even Amartya Sen, hardly an anti-capitalist revolutionary, has pointed out that capitalist social relations and economic policies killed more than 100 million people in India alone from one policy.
“How have her books messed anything up unless you consider exposing the socialist elite agenda a BAD thing?!”
Even if you like that she ostensibly did and believe there is a socialist elite agenda to expose when capitalism reigns supreme and when no revolution against capitalism creating a stateless society has came, all ridiculous assertions, that’s not all she did. She advocated social science positions that are commonly refuted as simply being objectively false, was homophobic, and argued honestly that Marxism is no different from nihilism in “denying reason”.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:53 pm
limbo:
1. Genetic information actually *does* increase, during cell division. When the DNA strands are being duplicated, point mutations in the proteins can alter either the original copy, the new copy, or both. This creates variability in the DNA strand and increases the divisity of information that is spread to the new cells. When the new cell is formed, the differing mutations in the cells cause in increase in gross DNA information. This is compounded by a process known as chromosomal “crossing-over,” which also occurs during cell division. Two portions of a chromosome will swap pairs of DNA. Sometimes, a mutation occurs that causes the pair-swapping to become unequal and certain parts of a chain on one of the particular chromosomes will contain more DNA pairs and consequently, more information, which is then transferred to the new cell once the chromosomes have been unraveled and the DNA chain duplicated. A landmark experiment demonstrating this principle can be found here: http://www.genetics.org/cgi/reprint/115/1/207.pdf
2. Genetic information is activated and deactivated all the time. Why is it impossible for life to have evolved just because ancient, primitive life had dormant genes? They held no more or less physical DNA material than the cells on our bodies. They certainly weren’t inhibited by an overabundance of genetic material, if that’s what you are implying.
3. Life did not develop by chance alone. Chance plays a big part in genetic mutation, absolutely, but the mechanism of natural selection is far from chance. Natural selection is a directed process. Organisms will live to pass on their genes if the genes they possess cause them to develop in a way that best allows them to adapt and survive in a particular environment. This is not random; it means that only the most successful combinations of genes will dictate which animals will live to contribute their genes back to the gene pool.
Lastly, I’m sorry limbo, but there is no physical evidence that any sort of intelligent designer played any part in the process of evolution. Further, your position in arguing that is based on your misconceptions about evolutionary theory. If you want to believe that God had a hand in influencing evolution, far be it for me to try to convince you otherwise, but please understand that the arguments you are producing are fallacious.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I doubt that Behe’s book clearly deserves a spot on the list. I think there is good argument why it could be, but considering the far-reaching effects of others on this list, it seems a little tame in comparison, and a bit of an arbitrary inclusion. Perhaps it should have been closer to #10, even though the list is *not* in order of emphasis, just to allay some confusion. Being at the number 1 spot, even though it’s not number 1, has probably caused the greatest amount of controversy here.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Arekexcelcior,
you say ” while the Bible also includes admonitions to murder the infidels.”
Why don’t you supply us with the verse that includes these admonitions.
The bible does say that if a JEWISH prophet makes a prediction that turns out to be false, that he should be put to death. Moral of the story, if you wanna be a Jewish prophet, you better be right.
You are equivocating my friend. What you say, when taken at face value, is bullshit.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:12 pm
“I doubt that Behe’s book clearly deserves a spot on the list. I think there is good argument why it could be, but considering the far-reaching effects of others on this list, it seems a little tame in comparison, and a bit of an arbitrary inclusion. Perhaps it should have been closer to #10, even though the list is *not* in order of emphasis, just to allay some confusion. Being at the number 1 spot, even though it’s not number 1, has probably caused the greatest amount of controversy here.”
True, it is in no particular order, but I think some people are saying that there are books that should be here instead of it.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
ArekExcelsior: Yes. Exactly the same as I just implied.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Slickwilly,
“1. Genetic information actually *does* increase, during cell division. ”
So what? If I make a copy of a computer program, and random new information is included in the copy, the chance of it being useful is virtually zero. Now we are getting into an infinite number of monkeys at a keyboard will eventually produce Shakespeare kind of an argument. By information, I mean USEFUL information. Why should science have to resort to random a random luck and plenty of time argument?
“2. Genetic information is activated and deactivated all the time. Why is it impossible for life to have evolved just because ancient, primitive life had dormant genes? They held no more or less physical DNA material than the cells on our bodies. They certainly weren’t inhibited by an overabundance of genetic material, if that’s what you are implying.”
Darwinism, in it’s original form, states that organisms became gradually more complex over time through descent with modification. I am just looking for an explanation about how new useful information comes into existence. If random luck and plenty of time is your argument, then that’s pretty lame, lets face it.
“3. Life did not develop by chance alone. Chance plays a big part in genetic mutation, absolutely, but the mechanism of natural selection is far from chance.”
I never said natural selection was random, so that’s a strawman. I said mutations are random. Random trials is actually a legitimate part of the field of artificial intelligence, but it only works then the number of alternatives is a reasonable finite number.
“Lastly, I’m sorry limbo, but there is no physical evidence that any sort of intelligent designer played any part in the process of evolution. Further, your position in arguing that is based on your misconceptions about evolutionary theory. If you want to believe that God had a hand in influencing evolution, far be it for me to try to convince you otherwise, but please understand that the arguments you are producing are fallacious.”
I am saying we see the designer’s handiwork in the fact that life arose in the first place. What you said is ANOTHER strawman, sheesh, can’t you get anything straight.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
“So what? If I make a copy of a computer program, and random new information is included in the copy, the chance of it being useful is virtually zero. Now we are getting into an infinite number of monkeys at a keyboard will eventually produce Shakespeare kind of an argument. By information, I mean USEFUL information. Why should science have to resort to random a random luck and plenty of time argument?”
Why is that argument so hard to accept? Genetic information is only considered useful by how its corresponding phenotypic expression benefits the organism. By its very nature, the vast majority of genetic mutation will be either harmful to the organism, or at the very least neutral. This is a basic premise of genetic drift, but it is natural selection that determines whether or not the genetic code is useful. Those with detrimental genetic mutations will die and those particular mutations will be eliminated from the gene pool. Of course this means that a vast number of organisms will die out and fail to contribute to the genetic population, but those that survive will continue to pass on their functional genes to their offspring, and so on and so forth. The thing is, it takes place on such a long timeline that the organisms that survive will change dramatically based on how their genes have changed. It is, simplistically, a bit like the monkey at the typewriter argument, but given that we know the mechanics involved, why does this invalidate that sort of argument?
“Darwinism, in it’s original form, states that organisms became gradually more complex over time through descent with modification. I am just looking for an explanation about how new useful information comes into existence. If random luck and plenty of time is your argument, then that’s pretty lame, lets face it.”
That’s true. However, Darwinism, in it’s original form, is no longer practiced, as it has since been realized that evolution is *not* progressive, and that, although life has progressed towards more complex lifeforms, it is not because the mechanisms strive for complexity. Complexity of life is a side-effect of the effect of the mechanisms. I’ve given you answers to how new genetic information is created, and how it is considered useful. My argument is not random luck and plenty of time. It’s random genetic changes directed by non-random selection over plenty of time. There is nothing scientifically “lame” about that, though your agenda may dictate otherwise.
“I never said natural selection was random, so that’s a strawman. I said mutations are random. Random trials is actually a legitimate part of the field of artificial intelligence, but it only works then the number of alternatives is a reasonable finite number. ”
I’m sorry if you thought I was mischaracterizing your argument, but it’s difficult to discern specifics when you make broad, sweeping generalizations like,
“this makes the concept of life arising by chance virtually impossible.”
without bothering to clarify your statements. Please be more clear next time so we can avoid this problem.
“I am saying we see the designer’s handiwork in the fact that life arose in the first place. What you said is ANOTHER strawman, sheesh, can’t you get anything straight.”
*You* might see the designer’s handiwork (simply based on the fact that scientific evidence is scant, and the whole business seems so far removed from what you see as possible that you necessitate a “god of the gaps” argument), but that is an individual belief. Not everyone else shares it, and certainly not most evolutionary scientists. I was simply pointing out the lack of evidence in favor of your argument. That is not a strawman, as I did not misrepresent your argument. I like that little emotional rebuke at the end there, very classy.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:48 pm
“Why is that argument so hard to accept? why does this invalidate that sort of argument?”
Simple mathematics. They should get you natural science guys to do a little more math in your undergraduate course work. In computer science, we often deal with algorithms that get out of hand processing time wise as the number of items processed gets larger, so we are acutely aware of how large search spaces become unwieldy very rapidly.
“That’s true. However, Darwinism, in it’s original form, is no longer practiced, My argument is not random luck and plenty of time. It’s random genetic changes directed by non-random selection over plenty of time. There is nothing scientifically “lame” about that, though your agenda may dictate otherwise.”
You can only select a mutation that you have. Therefore the luck part is preeminent. I absolutely agree that natural selection is very valuable if a latent “trait” becomes expressed, if that trait is helpful, but the encoding has to be there already. Natural selection of mutation errors leading to new and complex traits just seems like a pipe dream.
“*You* might see the designer’s handiwork (simply based on the fact that scientific evidence is scant, and the whole business seems so far removed from what you see as possible that you necessitate a “god of the gaps” argument)”
You can call it god of the gaps if you like. I call it inference to the best explanation as I don’t see any other explanation being possible given the complexity of life and the very short window of opportunity. You might want to brush up on your math a bit as you seem to not comprehend the enormity of the unlikelyhood of life arising by pure luck (could we call that blind luck of the gaps maybe?). Even that old bugger Antony Flew has finally understood this. If you think luck and time or parallel universes or whatever are a more rational explanation, so be it, you have every right to believe that.
We are getting off topic however. My whole argument here is only a biased fool would put Behe on this list, and you think squelching dissent is protecting science? Scary. In the list it says it has emboldened young earth fundamentalists or some such thing. It has done nothing of the sort. Ridiculous.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:17 pm
“Simple mathematics. They should get you natural science guys to do a little more math in your undergraduate course work. In computer science, we often deal with algorithms that get out of hand processing time wise as the number of items processed gets larger, so we are acutely aware of how large search spaces become unwieldy very rapidly.”
Feel free to explain the mathematics to me in depth. Just becomes something is mathematically improbable does not make it impossible. There is a 1 in 300 million chance that you will be attacked and eaten by a shark, but it does occasionally happen. Furthermore, even though the odds may be astronomically against it, the scale of time and the breadth of exposure that allowed life to develop virtually assures that it will happen at least once. Lastly, there are restraints on computing systems that cause fundamental differences between computing time for algorithms and the geological time of evolution. I don’t see how the computer analogy is relevent here. It certainly doesn’t invalidate my argument.
“You can only select a mutation that you have. Therefore the luck part is preeminent. I absolutely agree that natural selection is very valuable if a latent “trait” becomes expressed, if that trait is helpful, but the encoding has to be there already. Natural selection of mutation errors leading to new and complex traits just seems like a pipe dream.”
Yes, the pieces for the coding already exist. Random genetic mutation and gene-swapping account for the functional alleles that manifest as phenotypic expression. The pieces of the code exist, and it is mixed around through these processess to produce randomly effective DNA strands, many of which necessitate the phenotypic expression that natural selection affects upon. How is this a pipe dream? Especially when we have scientific evidence to validate it?
I was never a math prodigy, but I understand enough about the statistics involved to comprehend that, though mathematically unlikely, it is not impossible for life to progressed the way it has. Only 1 in 18 million can win the California state lotto, but every year 12 or more people walk away millionaires. The math involved is only one side of the story; the other side is the timeline it is placed against, which changes the scope of the probability considerably, and the directed process of natural selection that dramatically reduces the role that “luck” has to play in the matter. Your argument about the math involved is an old one, and one that has already been dismissed by science.
We have been off-topic for some time now, but it would have been irresponsible of me to allow you to assert with such confidence the falsehoods and misconceptions that create the dissonance of the evolution/creation debate.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:01 pm
“We have been off-topic for some time now, but it would have been irresponsible of me to allow you to assert with such confidence the falsehoods and misconceptions that create the dissonance of the evolution/creation debate.”
There are no falsehoods here, just the same old wagon circling from hardcore Darwinists.
Do you understand that for the first several billions years the surface of the earth was uninhabitable and completely hostile to life? Do you understand that life started just when the earth became inhabitable, just under 4 billion years ago? Where is this large expanse of time you speak of?
Do you understand that if you break down one improbable event into two less improbable events with the second dependent on the first, the overall probabilities don’t change? And therefore do you understand all these intermediate steps in the formation of life you read about on talk origins don’t make it any more probable overall? It seems even Dawkins doesn’t fall back on any of this nonsense anymore, he just sweeps the whole thing under the rug.
But go ahead and buy that lottery ticket, you’d have much better odds than of even one left-handed amino acid forming by chance. Thats about 1 in 1[followed by LOTS of 0s]
And the simplest life form known has about 500 amino acids, and about 20 of them need to be of a specific type.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Anyway, slick, randal, or anyone else, I think I have made my point and will give you all the last word if you want it. For those of you who are interested in the issues we have raised, go here and check out the debate among real experts:
http://www.trueorigin.org/spetner2.asp
Kudos to Dr. Spetner and Dr. Max from talk origins for taking part in this debate about how new genetic information may be created by mutations and selection. Make up your own minds on who you think puts forward a better argument.
Cheers, and sorry if I was rude. It’s easy to flame people you don’t know. All the best.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Randall, Slick: Kudos! That was just too much fun to watch!
May 21st, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Several hundred posts ago, I made the mistake of clicking on “Notify me of followup comments,” below.
Aarggh!!
How do I shut this off?!? Pleeeez!
A sentence below says “Stop notifying me of followup comments.” But it’s not “live;” clicking on it does NOTHING!
Can someone help me stop this nonsense?? Anyone??
What do I need to do?
Please!
May 21st, 2008 at 6:40 pm
the guinness book of records: got every body trying to set new records and shit
May 21st, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Lutepisc: Check the bottom of your emails, there’s a link there.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:07 pm
How can you eat that stuff anyway? Creepy caustic fish, I think my tongue would fall out.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:23 pm
“There are no falsehoods here, just the same old wagon circling from hardcore Darwinists.
Do you understand that for the first several billions years the surface of the earth was uninhabitable and completely hostile to life? Do you understand that life started just when the earth became inhabitable, just under 4 billion years ago? Where is this large expanse of time you speak of?
Do you understand that if you break down one improbable event into two less improbable events with the second dependent on the first, the overall probabilities don’t change? And therefore do you understand all these intermediate steps in the formation of life you read about on talk origins don’t make it any more probable overall? It seems even Dawkins doesn’t fall back on any of this nonsense anymore, he just sweeps the whole thing under the rug.”
Actually, his argument is that you’re getting the probabilities totally wrong.
Yes, “random” formation of life would have a low, yet discernable probability. Considering the number of planets that we’re aware of with life, this could just make Earth a cosmic coincidence, one of a rare category. In any respect, it’s still infinitely more likely than an omnipotent creator with no preceding creator of His or Her own.
But that’s not what occurs. Rather, after amino acids spontaneously form (a process that is not only rare but actually easily replicatable in lab conditions) and once those amino acids form primitive life, it doesn’t take very long from a cosmic sense to get to DNA and bacteria. From there, natural selection takes over.
In any respect, all this argument asks is, “When did life begin?” That’s a COMPLETELY different question from whether or not natural selection operates after life has been created. That’s the only question Darwin answered and one has to ignore animal husbandry, the breeding of plants, observed mutations, observed traits, and genetic evidence to think natural selection is not the method by which life emerges. In short, one has to abandon rationality.
The only thing you’ve correctly identified is that we have yet to discover exactly how life formed. It’s the God of the gaps fallacy. It’s failed you with gravity, relativity, quantum physics and every scientific development. Give up.
“Darwinism, in it’s original form, states that organisms became gradually more complex over time through descent with modification.”
No, it doesn’t. This is a common misconception. Yes, forms actually DO end up selecting for complexity, at least from what we’ve seen. But Darwinism ONLY talks about the process of natural selection. In fact, contemporaries of Darwin began theorizing as to why it seems that complexity is chosen. This was so much OUTSIDE of the bounds of the theory that many people turned to religious explanations or “lifeforces” to explain it. The irony that religiously-minded people use the exact OPPOSITE argument now is not lost on a student of history, and shows the irrationality of the anti-evolution viewpoint.
“you say ” while the Bible also includes admonitions to murder the infidels.”
Why don’t you supply us with the verse that includes these admonitions.”
Take the Old Testament, when Saul chose to spare a tribe that had offered tribute. Samuel yelled at him to murder them instead, for that was what was demanded. Indeed, the fact that you have to ASK indicates that you are sticking entirely to the New Testament. The Old Testament is filled with stories of conquest and violence supposedly justified by God.
“The bible does say that if a JEWISH prophet makes a prediction that turns out to be false, that he should be put to death. Moral of the story, if you wanna be a Jewish prophet, you better be right.”
So you think that’s okay?
God declares that if you make an inaccurate prediction, you should die?
Or how about the beautiful requirements to marry victims of rape off, or stone people, all throughout Deutoronomy and Leviticus?
Read your text before you start accusing people of “equivocating”.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:10 pm
so why isn’t the bible on this list? It’s caused tons of pain and suffering worldwide.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:04 pm
“so why isn’t the bible on this list? It’s caused tons of pain and suffering worldwide.”
Hey, why don’t you pinheads take the bible knowledge quiz. I’m sure you will pass with flying colors! After all, didn’t you graduate from the Dawkins School of Old Testament Studies?
http://www.tektonics.org/parody/whowants.html
May 21st, 2008 at 9:27 pm
The Bible shouldn’t be here because its caused tons of pain and suffering. It should be on the list because it has severly stunted our advancement of knowledge and encouraged ignorance. You have to be wary of any book that people claim has all the answers.
Religion should stay the f*** out of any scientific arguments.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:19 pm
You state that John Dewey thought that, “it IS the job of educators to teach people how to THINK, primarily… not to teach them “stuff.” (which is secondary, but necessary). But it quickly became forgotten that these two aims need to mesh together, and that the teaching of “stuff” can affect one’s ability to learn and think just as much as direct instruction in the processes of thinking.”
So you think that vocational and contemplative studies should not be separated, huh?
Let me show you a little passage FROM THE BACK OF DEWEY’S BOOK: “In this classic work Dewey calls for the complete renewal of public education, arguing for the fusion of vocational and contemplative studies in education…”
Protip: Actually read the books you call dangerous, you insignificant moron. Dewey’s book argues for almost NOTHING that you claim it does.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:37 am
you forgot the bible and the koran. countless lives were lost in the spanish inquisition, crusades, and jihad.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 am
“The Bible shouldn’t be here because its caused tons of pain and suffering. It should be on the list because it has severly stunted our advancement of knowledge and encouraged ignorance. You have to be wary of any book that people claim has all the answers.
Religion should stay the f*** out of any scientific arguments.”
But can one causally connect that to the Bible? It strikes me that that’s just superstition, stubbornness and ignorance, not religion.
“Hey, why don’t you pinheads take the bible knowledge quiz. I’m sure you will pass with flying colors! After all, didn’t you graduate from the Dawkins School of Old Testament Studies?
http://www.tektonics.org/parody/whowants.html”
Cherry picking nice parts in the Bible does not behoove you. Tell me if you follow a fraction of the demands “God” has placed upon you in Leviticus alone.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:49 am
Crimanon: thanks. I’m now out of this hell-hole!
Your second post reminded me of this essay on “The Power of Lutefisk”:
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~atman/ic/lutefisk.html
Enjoy!
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:53 am
“Do you understand that for the first several billions years the surface of the earth was uninhabitable and completely hostile to life? Do you understand that life started just when the earth became inhabitable, just under 4 billion years ago? Where is this large expanse of time you speak of?”
The formation of Earth is placed at approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The earliset microbic fossils we have date back to about 3.4 billions years ago, and the first evidence we have of simple photosynthetic organisms is approximately 3.7 billion years ago. You are talking an expanse of *at least* 900,000,000 years, close to 1 billion, in which the first life had time to form and emerge as self-sustaining, self-replicating simple organisms. To put that in contrast, the era of Dinosaurs lasted only 165 million years, and it has been only 65 million since then, when the earliest mammals were the small, shrew and weasel-like creatures that later developed into all the mammals you now see on earth. If you don’t call 1,000,000,000 a large expanse of geological time (almost one quarter the entire *age* of earth), then I don’t know what to tell you anymore.
“Do you understand that if you break down one improbable event into two less improbable events with the second dependent on the first, the overall probabilities don’t change? And therefore do you understand all these intermediate steps in the formation of life you read about on talk origins don’t make it any more probable overall? It seems even Dawkins doesn’t fall back on any of this nonsense anymore, he just sweeps the whole thing under the rug.”
I understand the principles of how probabilities work. I freely admit that the math is, theoretically, against the possibility. But no one knows how life arose in the first place, (let alone the actual probability) so you can’t place stipulations on it like that at your leisure. And you seem to keep coming back to Dawkins for some reason. Dawkins is considered in his own field to be something of a crackpot and an outsider. He gives atheists and evolutionists everywhere a bad name.
And I assure you that, except for a few specific details, I don’t need talk origins to help me win this debate. As long as we are on the subject of talk origins, though, here is a handy little page that discusses why your 1×10^(142) statistics (which I’m sure you pulled out of your ass) is fallacious, and exactly what you are ignoring about the debate that invalidates your argument.
I, unlike you, am trained in the position I’m arguing. You seem to be repeating all the old arguments raised on the messageboards at answersingenesis.com. Good luck with that, limbo.
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:56 am
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html#Con
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:09 am
Also, in the interest of fairness, here is the same argument between Spetner and Max, from Max’s perspective.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness/spetner.html
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:48 am
actual question here (honestly no baiting, just seeking the answer)
where are the living transitional species? i.e. if one species progresses to another, eventually, shouldn’t we see the timeline living in front of us?
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:57 am
DiscHuker wrote:
“this isn’t true. i accept the Bible literally and realize that it isn’t a scientific text. your statement is a generalizing stereotype. the same type of comment as saying ALL evolutionists believe a mud puddle turned into an amoeba.”
Do you accept that Genesis is literally the 100% accurate and truthful history of the beginning of the world, or do you accept that it’s more alligorical in nature?
If Genesis is 100% literal, factual history, then most of science, and especially evolution, contradicts that view.
If you accept that Genesis is allegory, and you have no problem with evolution, or what science says is the age of the universe, earth, etc, then you are not really a Biblical Literalist.
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:58 am
Disc: In reality, “transitional” species are only transitional in retrospect, when we have both a beginning point and an ending point with which to gauge the slow transition of traits. Functionally, all species are in transition; that’s the point of evolution. However, a “transitional species” is only referred to thusly when it is clear what two states the transition happens between. In 10 million years, assuming the human race is still around, we will be better able to judge how the animals living today serve as transitional species, but in the present it is impossible to determine. We can make predictions based on changing environmental projections, but given the inherent chaos in environmental prediction, such predictions are relatively impotent.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:03 am
SlickWilly; I’ve been keeping up with the debate, read all the posts and the correspondence link you provided. (It took all morning, too many terms I had to look up). I have a question.
Why does everybody assume NDT was/is a linear progression. It isn’t really is it?
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:11 am
Okay, first off:
Slick, congratulations, my friend, on having the patience and tenacity to deal with this and stick with it, and I personally thank you, as I simply haven’t had the time to make much of an appearance on the site the last couple days… it’s just the worst time of the year right now, though thankfully it’s all over soon. So here I am with five minutes free, and I offer you my praise.
Unfortunately I also feel totally out of the loop now. I don’t even have time to read what’s new on this thread (or any of the others). Though I did look back and saw something directed my way several comments up. So just quickly:
trojan_man: You quoted me thusly:
“Thank you for taking up the cause on this one. I simply haven’t the time to deal with another one of these creationist assholes masquerading behind a “I’m just a skeptic with questions” facade. I’m growing less and less patient in my old age.”
And then chose to go wiseacre with me (always a mistake) by asking:
“Sounds like you really love religious people. Unless you would like to backtrack…er…say that is was out of context.”
trojan, nowhere in my statement did I mention “religious people.” I denigrated *creationists.* Not all who are religious are creationists; in fact, creationists are a tiny minority of those who consider themselves (and whom I consider to be) religious. As just one example in millions, my ex-wife and one of my ex-girlfriends are both very religious, very serious Catholics. Neither of them is a creationist, and in fact both of them scoff at creationism and creationists. (Randall marries and dates only intelligent women of scholarly mien). So your cutesy criticism is invalid, and I suggest instead that YOU backtrack before my bad mood returns and I truly smite you, worm.
So typical of creationists to think of *only themselves* as truly religious, so that you (assuming you *are* a creationist–I can’t think otherwise why you’d make such a glaring error) would have jumped on my statement to accuse me of being “anti-religious.”
I see no reason why I should deign to justify myself on this, but I’ll do it anyway–as anyone here knows, I am a spiritual individual. I have my own (private) beliefs and in fact wasted a great deal of time several weeks back defending belief in god (and MY belief in god) against a self-important asshole on another thread here, who apparently scoffed at such things.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:13 am
Limbo wrote:
“Looking as some teeth or a tiny piece of bone and then piecing this together as proof of a slow transition when you already assume there is a gradual transition is proof of nothing.”
That show a great ignorance of how we acquired fossils of human ancestors, how complete the skeletons are, what it was buried with (tools, etc), the age of the fossils, and what the history of these fossil finds is. We have multiple nearly-complete skeletons for about a dozen different hominid species. It’s not jsut a tooth here, and a tiny piece of bone there. We’ve found whole skeletons that were 70%, 80%, and 90% complete. It just so happened that when dating methods became more precise, the dates on the more ape-like fossils were older, and the more human looking ones were younger — this was not determined ahead of time, but it was a prediction of TOE. The fossil relationships were not simply asserted because of “evolutionary doctrine”. They went through hundreds of different tests by hundreds of different scientists.
LImbo wrote:
“Now that we understand how genes work, I want an explanation that shows how new genetic information is created by mutations and natural selection, or any other method for that matter that makes sense now that we understand more about genetics. Why do guess work with bones and teeth when we have the genetic code to look at?”
Again, you’re trying to assert that paleontology is just a bunch of bone-digging college students taking pot-shots at guessing things. You are operating on a set of assumptions about science that is so overly simplistic, and full of misconceptions that I wonder why you don’t just pick up a damn science text and look up answers. Have you ever been to http://www.talkorigins.org ??
I’m not going to argue science with someone who obviously hasn’t studied it, and operates from a series of incorrect preconceived notions. I’d practicaly have to write a book, or send you a few hundred links to get you updated on current science.
You write like you get all your material from the Discovery Institute or from creationist websites, which promote the same invalid view that science is all guesswork and working under a dogmatic view of evolution. Such a position suggests that whatever we write you, you will automatically either ignore or reject automatically without justification.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:21 am
Limbo wrote: “evolution does not disprove creationism.”
That is the only valid argument that creationists ever made. All other arguments are based on weaseling and misconceptions. I agree that evolution does not disprove creation — You can believe in creation, and believe that after creation, life evolved accordingly. Unfortunately, most creationists are Biblical literalist creationists, and they think that Adam and Eve is 100% scientific fact, and anything that contradicts the Biblical Literalist interpretation of Genesis is wrong.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
Behe should not be on the list simply because his book has not had much impact on the world. Most of the world doesn’t know of it’s existence. Only Christian Fundamentalists seem to hold it in any reguard, and it has not really done anything in the way of changing opinion — essentially people who read the book who are creationists remain creationists, and people who understand evolution remain supporters of evolution.
The real movers and shakers behind the anti-science movement are the televangelists and Phillip Johnson, the lawyer who constantly publicises creationist issues. Behe is a side-note, rather than a major influence. After the Dover trial, I doubt they will ever ask Behe to testify about anything — because he made an idiot of himself.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:46 am
Randall: No problem. I’m not nearly as well-educated in as many things as you are, but evolutionary theory, psychology, and philosophy I consider my strong points, so I welcome an opportunity to throw *my* knowledge around for once. Nice to know that if I can’t be captain of this ship, I at least qualify for first mate.
Mom: I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that. Could you clarify?
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
Slick, you’ve handled the helm nicely.
I’m even sparing you my usual wisecrack, tempted as I am. Well done.
David Irish… kudos to you as well. People have to stand up and take the time to do what you two have been doing.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:30 am
Randall: you are an angry shell of a person (my own personal belief). You craft many (and by many, I mean MANY) of your posts with language that does two things:
1) you present your points clearly and efficiently (A+)
2) you belittle persons who disagree sometimes with no provocation (F)
The first (1) is an intellectualy stimulating learning process by which I do other research (whether is is by reading your links or looking up your points) and I never have disputed what has been fact. The second (2) is a backward move on your part because all it seems to do is verify a childish person with at least a 110 I.Q. You cannot insult me enough (asshole, worm, etc.) to push me off the site or change my mind or make me retract anything I said unless I want to do it.
Hooray for your spiritualiy. It is more important that religion anyway. I have spirituality and faith in the Christian God. I have never disputed evolution…if you would have read the post you would know that. I disputed calling evolution “law” because we cannot know what went on 4.5 billion years ago. We can only speculate and experiment with what we have now. If you feel that you might need to smite me because I have different opinions, feel free to smite away. Eventually, a list will come around (or maybe I’ll submit one) where my specialities in the sciences will offer me the chance to enlighten your 1000 to 2000cc brain and your 50,000cc ego.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:02 am
Randall:
“Slick, you’ve handled the helm nicely.
I’m even sparing you my usual wisecrack, tempted as I am”
Something about me wanting to “man your poopdeck,” no doubt. LOL
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:19 am
Slick:
“Something about me wanting to “man your poopdeck,” no doubt. LOL”
Oh, you just *had* to push me, didn’t you? You *know* I don’t swing that way. I don’t want you anywhere NEAR my “poopdeck.”
What I was GONNA say was, now back to your cabin boy duties, and look smart about it….and fetch me another mimosa.
See, I try to be nice….
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:41 am
trojan_man:
I suggest you hop in your car, run down to JC Penney’s (or whatever the local retailer is that’s closest to your trailer park) and purchase yourself a sense of humor. And don’t skimp on it this time. Clearly the last one isn’t working anymore. I suspect shoddy workmanship with no hope of getting it serviced.
It’s quite amazing, trojan, that you feel you can (presumably sincerely) pass judgement on a person you don’t even know, whom you’ve encountered strictly via the internet–and thus call me an “angry shell of a person.” My first inclination is to say “fuck you.” My second is to correct your misapprehension and assure you that I am no angry shell, though I’ll cop to a certain amount of anger (and lack of patience) with the willfully ignorant and intellectually dishonest amongst us. But a shell? No. Hardly.
BUT… seeing as you only have my word for that, I guess I’ll stick with my first inclination and simply say, “fuck you.”
Frankly, if you acknowledge that your point (A) is true for me, then you’d think any reasonable person (which I assume you count yourself as) would realize that (B) is an amusing persona that one might adopt to entertain the masses (as well as oneself). I’ve been doing this internet/science/education/commentary thing for a LONG time, trojan… ever since I was a correspondent/contributor on a now-defunct site run by the NSF in the early-to-mid 90s. Which is no boast, but I am merely saying that if I didn’t spice this up for myself now and then I’d be bored to tears and just wouldn’t be here.
You don’t like being insulted and such, then don’t say stupid shit. That’s my answer to you. I frankly don’t care if you stay or go, here. This isn’t my web site and this ain’t my internet, last I checked. So I don’t consider it my mission to drive you off, despite what you think. To be honest you mean nothing to me and if I didn’t hear another word out of you, I’d forget your moniker in a week and forget we ever had this conversation. My non-ethereal life is just way too freakin’ busy.
And I’ll take my apology now, thanks, for your rude presumption.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 am
randall: i apologize…you’re not an angry shell of a man…a prick, maybe…but not an angry shell of a man. But don’t think that you’re the only one on this site or any other that uses an “amusing persona”. You assume much when you call persons, that you do not know, assholes and worms, ect. I may be wrong, but you act as if you can dish it out but not take it.
By the way…I am much classier that just living in the trailer park…I am the owner/operator. “Your mother smells of elderberries!”
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:46 pm
It left out perhaps the most damaging book in the history of humankind: The Holy Bible. This is highly controversial and lots of people will knock me for saying this. Furthermore, I know millions of people find great comfort in the words written in this book. But it is undeniable that the bible has provided the justification for countless wars, widespread massacres, slavery, homophobia,chauvinism,religious persecutions and the list of atrocities and abuses goes on and on and on. The 10 books listed here do not even come close to the tremendous damage the bible has wrought on humanity. And it is not just my opinion. It is all in the history of humankind.
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:52 pm
anelli: The last horse finally crosses the finish line. Way to keep up with the conversation. Even a brief *skim* of the comments will show you that you are only about the 75th person to say that.
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Slickwilly I kind of guessed that. But I decided to “contribute” my 2 cents anyway. I hope that’s ok with you.
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:59 pm
why are people always trying to “one up” everybody on this site?
is it possible to just diagree with someone’s opinion and not try to make them look stupid or to disrespect them.
can’t we all just get along?
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
yes, let’s play nice now!
course it does help to contribute something more original too.
and yes, its well over 500 comments but still worth a quick scan. only so many times people can bash something before it becomes rather tiresome to reread again.
and again.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
“randall: i apologize…you’re not an angry shell of a man…a prick, maybe”
Yeah, prick, that’s about right.
When I read his comments, I see a new kind of McCarthyism. Instead of seeing a commie under every bed, he sees a creationist.
I wasn’t even arguing for creationism in any traditional sense, but everything was twisted around in his responses to make it seem like I was.
BTW, if the argument is that Behe’s book is being used by these diabolical creationists, and that’s why it “screws up the world”, shouldn’t Dawrwin’s origin of species be on the list? After all, his book was used by Hitler to justify getting rid of what he considered genetically inferior races. Seems fair if “being used for a purpose we don’t like” is the standard.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
1. Who wrote this and what gives you any right to decide these are the books that screwed up the world.
2. I’m pretty sure The Bible was screwed up way more people than every other book in the list. Example: THE CRUSADES!!!! Most unjust war ever. Sexual abuse within the church, brain washing of the church. Although the Western world remains predominately Christian, the western world is not the entire world.
3. Books don’t “screw up the world” sick and twisted people such as Stalin, Hitler, and Medieval Popes screw up the world in the name of noble causes. The Communist Manifesto is about living in peace. He argues against the ownership of land because no one has a right to say this piece of earth is mine, no one elses. Mother nature is far more powerful than Man. Marx also apposes inheritance and taxing because the governments of his time were incredibly corrupt and exploiting of the lower classes. Above all Marx sought to join together human kind, not drive it apart. The western world has attached so much hate to such a noble theory for the terrible things that Soviet Russia did.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:08 pm
John-
the questions you’ve asked are covered in the list itself or explained in comments. you’ll find your comments repeated numerous times in previous comments.
you might want to read the list in its entirety and at least scan comments before commenting. as there have been far too numerous comments like yours from folks who have also not read the list or comments.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 pm
…Why isn’t the Bible on this list? No, I’m just playing.
Honestly, I haven’t even heard of most of these books, so I’m in no position to argue. I have to say, though, I’d like to read some of them. They sound pretty interesting, if somewhat fallacious, for lack of a better term. (Yay big words!)
But really, as long as we’re in a (somewhat) civilized world, is there really any reason to call the listmaker an idiotic moron, or stuff like that. We’re all mature, here. Right? Make love, not war!
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:05 pm
John, comrade, you might want to sign up for some kind of course in elementary logic and/or argumentation before you put your foot firmly in your mouth.
Do you know what a logical contradiction is?
Here is a good example of one:
Assertion 1: Books don’t “screw up the world” sick and twisted people such as Stalin, Hitler, and Medieval Popes screw up the world in the name of noble causes.
Assertion 2:I’m pretty sure The Bible was screwed up way more people than every other book in the list.
Do you see how one may take those two assertions as being completely contradictory?
Maybe the way out is to say that books (except for the bible) don’t screw up the world.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Mortivore -
a sense of humor is a good thing.
as is calm and reason. welcome to LV.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Randall ranted:
“Again, you’re trying to assert that paleontology is just a bunch of bone-digging college students taking pot-shots at guessing things. You are operating on a set of assumptions about science that is so overly simplistic, and full of misconceptions that I wonder why you don’t just pick up a damn science text and look up answers. Have you ever been to http://www.talkorigins.org ??”
Sure I’ve been to talkorigins lots of times. Some of the stuff is good, some of it is crap. They are on the left fringe of science where science and politics meet, in the same way that realclimate.com is.
And as for paleontology, it is true that some of the more recent finds are complete, but as you go further back in time, the bone fragments tend to get very small and incomplete. I prefer to rely on hard science where it is available.
That reminded me of this joke about evolution, which I’m sure you will appreciate since you were lecturing someone else about humour.
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:17 am
Limbo:
I didn’t say that last bit, and neither did I rant it. I believe David Irish did.
Another example, limbo, of you just not getting your facts straight, when it would take barely a modicum of work to do so.
Sloppy thinking evinces itself in oh so many ways, limbo.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:06 am
Limbo wrote:
“Sure I’ve been to talkorigins lots of times. Some of the stuff is good, some of it is crap. They are on the left fringe of science where science and politics meet, in the same way that realclimate.com is.”
I would love to hear how you conclude which science is on the political left, and which is on the political right, and how talk.origins qualifies as being “on the left fringe”. Please explain yourself.
Do you consider science to be “on the left” if it doesn’t directly support the Bible?
If anything, talk.origins is pretty honest and straightforward, and the facts are determined not by politics, but by actually looking at the footnotes and sources often cited by creationists, and seeing if what they claim about their sources is actually true. LIke I found out nearly 20 years ago myself, when I bought 5 of the best-selling creationist books, including “Scientific Creationism” by Henry Morris, “The Twilight of Evolution”, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”, and others. What I discovered is that when you do the simple research of actually looking up the journals in the footnotes of creationists, you discover several key facts that repeat themselves throughout all the different authors:
(1) when quoting evolutionary biologists, they nearly always doctor the quotes to make them appear to support what they claim. Often times, the quotes from evolutionary biologists, as they appear in the original sources, say the exact opposite of what creationists claim, because the creationists chose to either edit words out inappropriately to change the sentence meaning, or they remove a sentence fragment from the rest of the sentence, or from a paragraph, taking the quoted text totally out of context.
(2) Science resources and journals cited are so old that the information being referenced has been superceded by more recent discoveries. Morris, for example, often quotes from books that are 20, 30, and 50 years out of date.
(3) They will summarize an article from a science journal, and claim that the article supports creationism, when the article doesn’t say antything remotelty supporting creationism.
I discovered that on my own before there was w world wide web to help with research. Now, with the web, you can actually find out almost instantly who is lying. Look up “creationist quote mining” on talk.origins, and follow the footnotes. You will see that talk.origins is always right on the money when it comes to representing the facts, and that creationists nearly never have the facts on their side.
Limbo wrote:
“And as for paleontology, it is true that some of the more recent finds are complete, but as you go further back in time, the bone fragments tend to get very small and incomplete. I prefer to rely on hard science where it is available.”
That is a misrepresentation. I challenge you to justify that comment with some facts that illustrate that older fossil finds were more fragmentary. I am willing to bet that you’re shooting from the hip, here, and making up your own facts as you go along. Fossils did not “appear in fragments early on” and then progressively were found more complete. The finding of fossils is a mostly random event. One day, a complete fossil will be found, and another day, just a few bones will be found, and then later on, another complete one, and so on. Fossils of varying completeness have no pattern like you describe. Just looking at the hominid database, you will see:
1848: neanderthal (nearly complete skull)
1856: Neanderthal (skull upper section)
1891: Homo Erectus skull and femur
1908: neanderthal (complete skeleton)
1913: neanderthal (complete skeleton)
1924: Australopithicus (skull)
1928: Homo Erectus (nearly 40 complete and partial skeletons)
1928: Neanderthals (several partial)
1933: Neanderthals (several partial)
1936: australopiticus (complete skull)
1938: australopithicus Robustus (several complete and partial skeletons)
1947: A. Africanus (Skull and Pelvis)
1948: A. Robustus (skull, several years later, several complete skeletons)
1954: A. Boisei (skull and partial skeleton)
1957: Neanderthal funeral sites (several complete specimens)
1959: A. Boisei (partial skull)
1960: H Habilus (partial skeleton, skull fragments)
Summarized from:
http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/discoveries/timeline.swf
As you can see, it was only in the “early days” before there was even a formal methodology for archaeology — most of the early skulls were found by construction workers and railroad workers, and they had no idea how to conduct a dig. The vast majority of hominid fossils do not follow any special pattern.
So what is your problem with evolution?
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:57 am
anelli: You don’t need my permission to throw your 2 cents into anything. It’d be nice if you weren’t lazy about it, though.
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:19 am
Irish, Slick, or Randall: I read somewhere that it is actually hard for fossils to form. Is this true? What gives? Does it have to do with the type of soil or rock that the dead organism ends up in?
And, yes, I really don’t know this one.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:03 am
trojan:
Strictly speaking, a fossil is any remains of a once-living animal, plant or microbe found on or in the earth’s crust. Recognizing this, we can see that certain types of “fossils” aren’t terribly hard to “make”–for instance, frozen or mummified specimens. What matters in both instances is simply that the body or body parts be protected from decay (i.e., microbial critters) and those elements of nature which are likely to destroy the specimen in question. Under certain conditions, therefore, we can see that it isn’t too terribly difficult for a body to freeze naturally (of course, it must stay frozen, lest it begin to decay upon thawing) given the proper conditions, nor is too terribly hard for a body to become mummified, though this requires somewhat more rarified circumstances. (We all know about Egyptian and Peruvian mummies for instance–though these were the works of man—but also the mummified bodies found in the peat bogs of Northern Europe). Of course, due to changing climatic conditions over long periods of time, we can’t expect frozen or even mummified specimens to last forever… the oldest ice on the earth is only a few million years old, for instance. So of course no specimen that was once frozen can be any older than that. No frozen dinos, therefore.
But I assume when you mean “fossil,” you refer to the *lithified* kind. This is where soft parts have largely decayed, but bones have slowly had their mineral composition replaced with… well, other minerals, so that they literally turn to stone. This DOES require pretty specific conditions, and is thus rather rare. Basically what’s required is that the body in question be buried rapidly in sediment, said sediment having a modest amount of groundwater running through it which allows calcium carbonate and silicas, etc., to mix with the body slowly. This process can take years of course–more likely decades. Eventually what you wind up with is stones that were once bones… to be dug out of the ground by waiting paleontologists, thousands or millions of years later.
As you can see, this is a difficult process requiring fairly specific conditions. So the answer is, yes–it is rather hard (though far from impossible) for fossils to form.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:09 am
Trojan Man wrote:
“Irish, Slick, or Randall: I read somewhere that it is actually hard for fossils to form. Is this true? What gives? Does it have to do with the type of soil or rock that the dead organism ends up in? And, yes, I really don’t know this one.”
Okay, what the facts are is that fossilization is a “rare” process, in that certain conditions have to be met in order for the process to complete. The remains of most dead things in nature get eaten, and then decay before fossilization can occur. This is why you generally don’t walk through a forest and keep tripping over bones. Flesh is generally consumed by bugs and micro-organisms in a matter of hours or days, depending on the size of whatever is rotting. Bones can last a lot longer, but decay at rates according to the individual bone. For example, a thick femur or skull will take longer to decay than ear-bones or ribs.
With fossilization, the material to be fossilized needs to be buried before significant decay has occurred. There are dozens of different ways this can happen — land-slides, floods, tar pits (Labrea Tar Pits should ring a bell), quicksands, sinking into a bog or marsh, being covered by silt that is deposited in a river, etc… The other factor is moisture. Fossilization works by water leeching minerals into organic material, where the minerals replace organic matter, but the basic structure is preserved.
So fossilization is a rare process in nature — but there needs to be a context established here to understand why we have so many fossils. To put this into perspective, consider that getting 4 aces in poker is a rare event. There is a 1:52 chance of getting an ace in you hand. 1:52^2 chance of getting 2 aces, 1:52^3 chance of getting 3, and so on. Yet, all the time, people around the world playing poker or other card games get 4 aces. The odds of getting a royal flush is even more astronomical, yet people get them all the time.
Why is this? The sheer volume of poker games being played on a daily basis (in private homes and in casinos worldwide) numbers in the millions. This is why the odds get beaten so often — there are simply billions and billions of poker games being played ever week, and that means it’s just a matter of time until the odds are beaten.
Such as it is with fossilization. The odds of a single creature getting fossilized in one in a million, but there are millions of things (plants and animals) dying every day around the world, under many different circumstances. If the odds are one in a million, that means that at least one thing out of every million things that dies will get fossilized. So the sheer number of things dying over the years breaks the odds, and we have billions of years, and hence millions of fossils.
Now finding a fossil is also rare, but I think you get the idea.
In summary — fossilization is rare, but the sheer number of dead things piling up around the world every day means that statistically, some of them will end up fossils. MIllions of years of things dying means millions upon millions of potential fossils to be found.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:31 am
hey, how come there’s no links to buy these books on amazon.com?
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:47 am
David W. Irish wrote:
“So what is your problem with evolution?”
For one thing, I am not an expert in paleontology or biology or genetics, and I tend to try to stay out of debates about evolution for that reason. I am a layperson in the field and make no claims otherwise. I only chimed in to the debate here because I thought it was ridiculous to put Behe’s book in the list. Further, I am not defending young earth creationists, or their tactics, so no need to go on and on about them for my sake.
A key part of what software engineers do, and that is my specialty, is algorithm analysis. It involves abstracting the key mathematical properties of a process to see how the algorithm performs as the number of items being processed increases. For example, a certain type of sort algorithm may require n^2 steps to sort n items. In this case, the time taken to sort the items obviously increases exponentially with the number sorted. The goal of any good software engineer is to avoid algorithms that increase exponentially like that.
The reason that Behe’s arguments made some sense to me is that almost all processes that combine components in a random way are exponential in the number of ways they can be combined. As a simplistic example, if we combine letters in a random way, we have 26^n possible combinations for n letters.
When I hear about new,useful genetic code coming into existence by copying errors making new combinations and sequences, my experience with algorithm analysis immediately sets off a red flag. I understand natural selection can help somewhat, but the situation is made worse IN TERMS OF PROBABILITIES when many complex,separate components need to work together to perform some specific and necessary task.
The questions brought up by Behe are therefore legitimate in my opinion. If young earth creationists latch onto these questions to try and completely discredit evolution, so be it. For me, it just seems more likely that the genetic code of the original life was more or less complete already and evolution took over from there to slice and dice it, with the “fittest” recombinations eventually winning out. I am not an expert in the field, so I don’t have to justify my ideas in peer-reviewed journals or anything. To me they are just common sense.
To say that all the problems Behe brought up have been dealt with I think just isn’t true. I will be interested to see what comes out of Altenberg this summer:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0803/S00051.htm
As for talk origins being biased, that is a subjective thing I suppose. Many of the contributors seem to write in such a way where it appears they are advocating for a particular point of view, rather than impartially providing evidence for it which to me is the hallmark of real science.
Secularists do have a leg up in science since science assumes everything has a natural explanation. The origin of the universe and the origin of life seem like the hardest nuts for science to crack, and maybe there isn’t any other better explanation other than lots of luck and lots of time.
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:24 am
randall and irish: OK, i’m taking from your responses that it is a very rare find. Has anyone read or researched the populations of organisms from different periods? For example (and this may be wrong), i read that only 4 or 5 full T-Rex skeletons have been discovered. Is there a formula or some other way to tell how many there were in the first place (a logical guess?). I know that it is “easier” on anthropologists and such when they discover an area that has had a catastrophic event. Many times things are preserved exactly as they were at the time of the devastation just covered in mud, ash, rock, etc. I just find it interesting to see stats on how many or much stuff was around in a particular period. Like how many (forgive me) “cavemen” were around 50,000 years ago. And how many ancestors of crocodiles and alligators were roaming the seas and marshes 1 million years ago. That is the stuff (being in the mathematics world) that interests me.
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:27 am
Okay, Limbo,
I see where you’re coming from. I think that part of the problem is your communication of your ideas — as I computer geek myself, I know a lot of other computer geeks who often express opinions in ways that aren’t quite as clear as I would do it. So I think that partially, the issue is your writing style. If you were more clear and concise (which you were in this last post, by the way), I think a lot less criticism would have taken place.
I said I was a fellow computer geek. I started out as a programmer, then got into operating systems, networking, hardware, and then HTML came out, and PDA’s and all sorts of other things that get hooked up to PCs that need support, so I’m sort of a jack of all trades. I also have had a keen interest in science which goes back about 35 years. On top of that, ancient history, world literature, music, and electronics have been my hobbies and passions.
One thing I can tell you about genes is that when DNA replicates, new information can easily be created, (and it happens all the time) by one of several circumstances.
There is a birth defect called “Downs Syndrome” where people are born with an extra chromosome. Where does this chromosome come from? How come these people aren’t superior to us, since they have extra code?
DNA is not digital. When it duplicates, the protiens can make mistakes under various circumstances. It usually makes a perfect copy of itself, but enough errors occur that we have people born with extra limbs, both male and female sex organs, extra eyes, noses, fingers, webbed hands and toes, and a whole host of other mutations. DNA is extremely redundant. One nucleotide in the chain can actuall have a cascading effect on thousands of others — in other words, you change one gene, and automatically, genes all over the genome get affected. There is one gene that controls the amount of limbs. if it’s altered, extra arms and legs can occur. Where does the DNA come from for the extra legs (and yes, some people have passed this down to next generations)? The Gene used to control the amount of legs or arms literally tells the replicating part of DNA to put 2 iterations of a certain group of genes. If changed to give 4 iterations, we get 2 pairs of limbs, and the extra genes show up in the DNA — The extra DNA comes from having that one gene tell the replication part to copy a section.
So extra information, albeit, sometimes useless information, is actually something that is explained by what we know of DNA. I am oversimplifying it all here, and I know that people will point that out to me, but I’m trying to explain this in layperson’s terms, so I don’t have to write a book
There is a huge difference between science like biology, chemistry, and physics, and the science of computers. As a programmer, your “experiments” are largely confined to your PC’s platform and software, and are “virtual” (you write a program and can alter the code on the fly at any time, through trial and error — you’re not actually re-organizing electornic connections, wires, and components). Comparing what you do to what biologists, physicists, and chemists do is a long stretch. You cannot apply computer information theory to DNA. The two disceplines, though full of cross-over analogies, are not enough like each other to apply information science to DNA. Comparing DNA to the PROGRAMMER is more likely — the programmer can copy a section of code, and replicate it in another subroutine, which I’m sure you’ve done before. You make the program longer by doing this shortcut, but you did not need more information — you merely took existing code and put a copy of it somewhere else in the program.
I hope these analogies answer your questions.
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:44 am
Trojan Man wrote:
“randall and irish: OK, i’m taking from your responses that it is a very rare find.”
No. You got us wrong. Fossils are not a very rare find. They are statistically rare, but like I said, no more rare than getting a straight flush in poker.
“Has anyone read or researched the populations of organisms from different periods? For example (and this may be wrong), i read that only 4 or 5 full T-Rex skeletons have been discovered.”
Not true. There are several distinct species of Tyranosaur. T-rex is one of several subspecies (just the most famous). In the year 2000 alone, over 5 complete Tyranosaur skeletons were found in Montana. There are at least 30 finds, worldwide. Though many of them are only 50% complete, that’s all you really need, since they, like nearly all creatures on earth, have symetry — the bones on the left side of the skeleton are identical to their coutnerparts on the right side.
“Is there a formula or some other way to tell how many there were in the first place (a logical guess?).”
I’m not sure. What would that prove?
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:45 am
“There is a huge difference between science like biology, chemistry, and physics, and the science of computers. As a programmer, your “experiments” are largely confined to your PC’s platform and software, and are “virtual” (you write a program and can alter the code on the fly at any time, through trial and error — you’re not actually re-organizing electornic connections, wires, and components). Comparing what you do to what biologists, physicists, and chemists do is a long stretch. You cannot apply computer information theory to DNA. The two disceplines, though full of cross-over analogies, are not enough like each other to apply information science to DNA.”
Math is math, and probabilities are probabilities no matter what scientific discipline you are talking about. Random mutations and natural selection can’t perform friggen miracles. They are bound by the same laws of logic and reason that all phenomenon are. If you can’t make a mathematical model of how information can and does change in DNA, then you are just pissing in the wind.
I’m just curious what makes you an authority on such matters in any case if your training is not in a related field?
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Limbo wrote:
“Math is math, and probabilities are probabilities no matter what scientific discipline you are talking about.”
Correct.
“Random mutations and natural selection can’t perform friggen miracles.”
What exactly, are you calling a “miracle”? You were operating under the assumption that there is no way for DNA to “gain information” from random mutations and natural selection.
I explained that mutations often cause cascading replication of certain genes, in which a single change in one piece of DNA automatically effects a whole chain of other pieces, and if the specific piece of DNA is one that tells the cell to create x number of limbs (or other structures), then increasing x will actually code more iterations for those parts. This is basic DNA 101.
Scientists, experimenting with DNA, discovered which specific gene coded the number of body segments for an insect. By changing that gene, they were able to make insects with more, or fewer legs. Where did the extra information come from? It came from that one gene being altered. It caused a cascade of duplicate DNA to make the code for extra body segments. You don’t need a miracle to “get more information”. DNA has the ability built into it. It’s not a big mystery. The problem is that creationists play strange games using inaccurate and inappropriate analogies.
“They are bound by the same laws of logic and reason that all phenomenon are.”
Correct.
“If you can’t make a mathematical model of how information can and does change in DNA, then you are just pissing in the wind.”
Something that is IMPROBABLE is not something that is IMPOSSIBLE. Too many creationists like to play math games, where they say that X is very improbable, and therefore, it’s impossible. IMprobable doesn’t mean impossible. As I said, the odds of getting a straight flush in poker is astronomical — youhave a 1:243,000,000 chance of getting one — but people get them all the time. If it’s that improbable to get a straight flush, why do people get them all the time (without cheating)? I already gave you the answer to that. Didn’t you get it?
“I’m just curious what makes you an authority on such matters in any case if your training is not in a related field?”
I’ve been trained in many fields. I’m no “authority” by any stretch of the imagination — BUT I CAN READ, and I KNOW HOW TO PROPERLY CONDUCT RESEARCH to find answers. Your belly-aching over probabilities tells me that you don’t understand how so-called “improbable” things happen all the time. Virtually every argument you have made against evolution thus far comes out of standard creationist arguments 101, and have pretty much already been debunked.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:06 pm
“I explained that mutations often cause cascading replication of certain genes, in which a single change in one piece of DNA automatically effects a whole chain of other pieces, and if the specific piece of DNA is one that tells the cell to create x number of limbs (or other structures), then increasing x will actually code more iterations for those parts. This is basic DNA 101.”
Yes of course, I fully understand that, but this proves MY point. The genetic encoding for the limbs has to be there in the first place.
“Something that is IMPROBABLE is not something that is IMPOSSIBLE. Too many creationists like to play math games, where they say that X is very improbable, and therefore, it’s impossible. IMprobable doesn’t mean impossible. As I said, the odds of getting a straight flush in poker is astronomical — youhave a 1:243,000,000 chance of getting one — but people get them all the time. If it’s that improbable to get a straight flush, why do people get them all the time (without cheating)? I already gave you the answer to that. Didn’t you get it?”
Don’t quit your day job dude. I am not arguing against evolution you nitwit. I am arguing against evolution’s ability to defy reason, but nice job resorting to ad hominem when all else fails. And what the heck are you talking about, the odds of a straight flush are 1 in 64,974. You might wanna check your research methods. Besides that’s a crap analogy, because the card player is an intelligent agent, and increases the odds of getting a flush by selecting the cards to discard.
May 24th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Hi…
Great List.
I think you missed “Anand Math” a novel propagating religious hatred in the Indian Subcontinent. It had direct impact in form of rioting & massacres in early 20th century, and it still unfluences the hatred based Vishwa Hindu in India. It has direct impact on millions of massacres
May 24th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
–cyn the admin
you still havent answered my question, What justifies your (or if it isnt yours, than whoever’s) judgment of these books and their authors?
–limbo,
thank you for the lesson in rudimentary logic, but there are two words missing that i forgot to type because i got ahead of myself while typing. I meant to write: I’m pretty sure The Bible was USED TO screwed up way more people than every other book in the list. i forgot to add the used to, thats why there was a “was” that didnt make sense in the sentance.
May 24th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
John: Chill, Cyn is just the Admin. Since you are clearly not a regular here I’ll explain.
These list are created by visitors to this site. All Lists have authors, Exceptions being anything written by Jamie, The Site Creator, Hallowed Be Thy Name. As it is written by Jamie he doesn’t bother to put his name on it. It is a Very safe assumption that it is his.
Since these are user created lists, they are subject to the authors opinions. Often very different from your own opinions. If you can’t cope with some ones particular subject or how they represent it, then by all means, Write your own list and submit it.
If you enjoy debate, stick around, amusing things happen. If you don’t enjoy debate, don’t come in screaming for answers and taking out on the guys who Didn’t piss in your cheerios. Banging on the bar will do no more than get you kicked out of it. And really, Do you like getting kicked out of bars?
This particular post is Jamies. He can’t get back at the moment, he happens to be doing something more important than listening to you scream and go on about whatever you problem is at the moment. Please do us a favor and Bugger off for awhile, You’re killing my buzz.
May 24th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
And quit Spamming, you’re worse than a Monty Python skit.
May 24th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
John Wrote:
“What justifies your (or if it isnt yours, than whoever’s) judgment of these books and their authors?”
How ’bout free speech being a justification? In fact, free speech is the best way to defend against hateful, ugly ideas and ideaologies that one may find in books.
Actually the list is pretty good overall. Just the Behe inclusion, as I have humbly pointed out, seems out of place.
May 24th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
“You’re killing my buzz.”
quote of the day!
comments have been edited due to repetition. FYI ..repeating the same comment over and over does not get a faster response. does make you come off as a spammer. so stop that. comment. and then get on w/ your life. geesh…
and i think other LV regulars have sufficiently covered this ground in their comments. so i’m done.
May 24th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
limbo: thanks
While I disagree with your disagreement about my inclusion of Behe, I agree with the rest of your comment 
May 24th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Jfrater: How did the move go
?
May 25th, 2008 at 6:23 am
limbo: Humbly pointed out? There wasn’t/isn’t anything humble about it. Funny, but not humble.
May 25th, 2008 at 8:19 am
The author wrote in the original article:
“Needless to say, Planned Parenthood today have tried very hard to distance themselves from their founder.”
This statement is patently false.
Not only has planned parenthood not, in any way, shape, or form, tried to distance themselves from Sanger, but they have actually done the opposite. If you simply look at any of their literature, or go to their website, you will clearly see that there is a section on Margaret Sanger, and it actually CELEBRATES her life and accomplishments. They also have a lot of material that dispells the lies that David Grant and Chrsitan anti-abortionists have spread about her.
They have a library dedicated to her, and she is in now way pushed into the background of their official literature.
So the premise that you put the book on the list for is based on a fundamental untruth, which is why it should not be on the list. Not only did Sanger’s Eugenics not resemble Nazi Eugenics at all, but the idea that Planned parenthood is embarrassed by her and trying to distance themselves from her history is simply wrong.
Conservative Christians who oppose abortion cannot promote their ideas simply based on the merits of those ideas alone. They are against Planned Parenthood not because it represents abortions (which it really doesn’t), but because it’s recommended means of birth control doesn’t include abstinance. Basically, Planned parenthood advocates THE PILL and COMDOMS as the primary means of birth control. Abortion is always considered a last resort, and historically, they (and Sanger) have discouraged it as ameans of birth control. IN fact, Sanger referred to abortion as an “abominable act” in her books.
Essentially, Christians feel that Planned Parenthood PROMOTES permiscuous sex and abortion, because they do not actively promote abstinance or condemn abortion. IN the twisted logic of Extreme Christians, NOT promoting something automatically means you promote the OPPOSITE of it. Also, Sanger was an atheist, and that doesn’t float well with the conservative Christians. They feel that Planned Parenthood promotes free, wild, careless sex.
Rather than simply promoting absitinance under it’s own merits, they have to DEMONIZE people and organizations, and warn people how bad these people are, rather than actually offering compelling arguments for their own ideas. They know that most SANE and RATIONAL people would never buy into their ideas, and rather than admit it, they have to attack other people by propaganda that turns them into monsters that we have to destroy.
May 25th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Crimanon: I’ll try to chill, it just bugs me when people say that the communist manifesto screwed up the world. It was a very noble book for a very noble cause that no one seems to understand because they either judge it based on soviet russia.
limbo: free speech is a good justification, but it would help if people did some research before accusing Communism for the terrible things people have done in its name. Having free speech doesnt mean you should say what ever you feel like. But if you dont think that working to promote human kind rather than oneself is a noble cause, than i dont know what to say to you. I will never say that capitalism is just because it promotes egoism. I believe in communism and socialism because it makes one think altruistically rather than egotistically. there are so many men and women in this world that work incredible hard, harder than business men in their lofty offices, to provide for their family. most of these men and women do not choose to work this hard, they are victims of circumstance. so many people are born with out the opportunity of ever going to college, ever getting a degree, ever moving up in the capitalist state. Communism recognizes that both a waitress and a businessman work hard and both their jobs are essential parts of society. therefore they should both be recognized equally for their work. Of course if the world didnt have a monetary system, and if we lived out lives providing for the betterment of humanity rather than the betterment of our selves. That is why i believe the communist manifesto should not be on this list.
Cyn the admin: Sorry.
May 25th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
“1. Who wrote this and what gives you any right to decide these are the books that screwed up the world.”
He made an argument. Unless the PATRIOT Act has decided that that’s not okay any more either, that IS his right
.
“2. I’m pretty sure The Bible was screwed up way more people than every other book in the list. Example: THE CRUSADES!!!! Most unjust war ever. Sexual abuse within the church, brain washing of the church. Although the Western world remains predominately Christian, the western world is not the entire world.”
By your reasoning, sexual abuse in Buddhist monastaries must implicate the Buddha’s teachings. The bad decisions of an institution created by a religious tome is not the same thing as the tome itself. Frankly, the Holocaust strikes me as worse than the Crusades, but let’s say you’re right. First of all, wouldn’t that also implicate the Koran? Second, those weren’t religious wars. Yes, we like to pretend they were because that was the propaganda, but then we have to accept that the Japanese empire was fighting for the freedom of Manchuria. The Islamic empires were the rivals to the European powers, particularly Byzantium. That’s it, that’s all. Religion was the pretext, not the cause. Were it the cause, Christian Byzantium wouldn’t have been sacked.
“3. Books don’t “screw up the world” sick and twisted people such as Stalin, Hitler, and Medieval Popes screw up the world in the name of noble causes.”
Medieval popes also created things like the God’s peace that protected the peasants from the nobles’ senseless war. The Catholic Church gets a uniformly bad rap when the situation is more complex.
Aside from that, the OP points out that, sure, movements have to emerge around concepts to do damage, but particular books become integral in doing so and thus do help screw up the world.
“The Communist Manifesto is about living in peace. He argues against the ownership of land because no one has a right to say this piece of earth is mine, no one elses.”
You’re imputing a Native American or ecological sensibility to Marx that simply isn’t there, or rather is a passing sentiment not a key philosophy. For Marx, ownership of productive property and inequity generates classes and the statist impositions that retain those classes. He also explicitly advocates revolution, violent if necessary. Yes, the goal is peaceful and arguably positive, and the philosophy expressed has a lot good within it, but there is that element. Of course, Stalin, Lenin, etc. represent the SUBVERSION of the sentiments in the Marxist doctrine.
” Mother nature is far more powerful than Man. Marx also apposes inheritance and taxing because the governments of his time were incredibly corrupt and exploiting of the lower classes. Above all Marx sought to join together human kind, not drive it apart. The western world has attached so much hate to such a noble theory for the terrible things that Soviet Russia did.”
At his time?
But that’s not the point. Marx is arguing that it’s not the GOVERNMENTS. In fact, political systems are window dressing in Marxist dogma, part of the superstructure determined by the economic substructure. It’s the true rulers of the society, the capitalists. (Which is still true today).
There are a variety of cogent left critiques of both Marx and the Communist Manifesto, by the way. Chomsky and Albert air them.
“Not only did Sanger’s Eugenics not resemble Nazi Eugenics at all, but the idea that Planned parenthood is embarrassed by her and trying to distance themselves from her history is simply wrong. ”
They have actual quotes from her in the OP, though. Yes, concepts eugenics vary, but I can’t think of an iteration of eugenics that is something 100% laudable. Calling for the supposedly stupid and weak not to breed by your own arbitrary definition is wrong.
“Rather than simply promoting absitinance under it’s own merits, they have to DEMONIZE people and organizations, and warn people how bad these people are, rather than actually offering compelling arguments for their own ideas. They know that most SANE and RATIONAL people would never buy into their ideas, and rather than admit it, they have to attack other people by propaganda that turns them into monsters that we have to destroy.”
It sounds like the kettle might just be calling the pot black, maybe just a LITTLE bit? There are real moral concerns regarding contraception and abortion. I am against abstinence-only education, of course, and for the right to abortion, and so on, but there are valid concerns. Not to underestimate the audacity of some far-right Christian groups…
” Don’t quit your day job dude. I am not arguing against evolution you nitwit. I am arguing against evolution’s ability to defy reason, but nice job resorting to ad hominem when all else fails. And what the heck are you talking about, the odds of a straight flush are 1 in 64,974. You might wanna check your research methods. Besides that’s a crap analogy, because the card player is an intelligent agent, and increases the odds of getting a flush by selecting the cards to discard.”
Ad hominems back do not behoove you in return. Royal flushes can still occur in any game with five cards that has no discarding whatsoever and therefore no control, with roughly that probability. People have thrown massive probabilities at you that we accept as granted. Now, given the trillions of planets in the universe, given billions of years to grow life, even the massive probabilities you list soon pare down to virtually nothing.
But, again, you get the probabilities wrong. The only mechanism we don’t understand is the leap from amino acid formation to the complex genetic and biological apparatus in any bacterium. Good work is being done, hypotheses are being tested, but suffice it to say that no ACTUAL EVOLUTIONARY OR BIOLOGICAL SCIENTIST would say that your math is even within the ballpark of right.
“The reason that Behe’s arguments made some sense to me is that almost all processes that combine components in a random way are exponential in the number of ways they can be combined. As a simplistic example, if we combine letters in a random way, we have 26^n possible combinations for n letters.”
But they’re not random. The process of amino acid formation can only form a certain set of molecules. And the process of evolution is NOT RANDOM. Those processes are strong, non-random, programmer-like limits on the outside.
In any respect, all Behe can prove is that it’s cosmically unlikely for life to have formed. Proving God’s existence from this leap is a terrible argument with numerous false or questionable premises. And it does not disprove evolution’s actual function. So Behe’s book, which has the effect of and intent of trying to disprove things like humans being primates, is still total garbage. Yes, he makes arguments that, if you don’t know the science, make some sense. But the arguments have a context, and where he’s trying to go with them is spuriously false.
“Hooray for your spiritualiy. It is more important that religion anyway. I have spirituality and faith in the Christian God. I have never disputed evolution…if you would have read the post you would know that. I disputed calling evolution “law” because we cannot know what went on 4.5 billion years ago. ”
Your basic science fails you.
“Laws” in science are nothing of the kind. They are the best theories crafted to fit the best evidence. We don’t know how life started. But we know that the best available evidence for how it progressed does NOT support the Bible’s account, not close, but supports an account of creatures evolving through natural selection using the power of DNA. There is no better theory on the table, period. If your concern is only that we need to discover exactly how life forms and grows at the primeval stages, you are 100% in line with scientists. Turn to religious explanations and you’ve revealed yourself as a charlatan. Because no matter how unlikely it is that life spontaneously forms without a creator’s guiding hand, it is INFINITELY less complex than the omnipotent Creator having no previous creator of His own.
I have no problem with faith. I personally believe in a deist God. But science provides us the answers for how things ACTUALLY work, not how our myths prefer they do.
May 25th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Crimanon: I’ll try to chill, it just bugs me when people say that the communist manifesto screwed up the world. It was a very noble book for a very noble cause that no one seems to understand because they judge it based on soviet russia.
limbo: free speech is a good justification, but it would help if people did some research before accusing Communism for the terrible things people have done in its name. Having free speech doesnt mean you should say what ever you feel like. But if you dont think that working to promote human kind rather than oneself is a noble cause, than i dont know what to say to you. I will never say that capitalism is just because it promotes egoism. I believe in communism and socialism because it makes one think altruistically rather than egotistically. there are so many men and women in this world that work incredible hard, harder than business men in their lofty offices, to provide for their family. most of these men and women do not choose to work this hard, they are victims of circumstance. so many people are born with out the opportunity of ever going to college, ever getting a degree, ever moving up in the capitalist state. Communism recognizes that both a waitress and a businessman work hard and both their jobs are essential parts of society. therefore they should both be recognized equally for their work. Of course if the world didnt have a monetary system, and if we lived out lives providing for the betterment of humanity rather than the betterment of our selves. That is why i believe the communist manifesto should not be on this list.
Cyn the admin: Sorry.
May 25th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
572. John – May 25th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
574. John – May 25th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
if i’m not mistaken these are the same comment. i would suggest you wait at least 5 minutes to see if the comment posted before attempting to repost. also..since you’ve had this problem before…maybe check your browser?
May 25th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
“Here is my bottom line. It appears to me that the evidence points to the fact that the original life that appeared on earth contained almost all the same genetic code that modern life does. I see no evidence that DNA became more complex over time. For example, when they looked at the DNA of the lowly sea anemone, which has been around virtually unchanged since the Cambrian explosion 500,000,000 years ago, they found it to be very similar to the DNA of “modern” creatures.”
You don’t understand DNA.
DNA is a molecule. It preserves information. Of course it doesn’t become more complex over kind. That’s absurd.
The DNA coding also doesn’t become substantially more complex. There’s some interesting reasons for that.
But what the DNA CODES FOR, larger creatures, are “more complex”. The organisms that DNA produces, this simple yet ingenious piece of biological computing, ranges from… well, all life on the planet.
Regarding global warming: I am simply embarassed at the revival of completely debunked arguments regarding everything from the IPCC to other studies. Suffice it to say that there are dozens of models, sophisticated, that show what common sense and accepted scientific data would point to: We are substantially changing the composition of the atmosphere. The IPCC’s conclusions are not only generally accepted, though yes with the standard problems that are in any study even about things 1/10th as contentious and complex, but there are so many other models that indicate otherwise. The NOAA, for example, is fairly unequivocal with its data: Global warming is real, it is a continuing trend.
Yes, second-order questions like positive or negative feedbacks matter and vary from model to model. The horrible thing is that the models are actually far more conservative than the observed data. The Inconvenient Truth’s conclusions were in fact, as they should have been, taken from the most conservative of all the information. There are entirely mainstream scientists who point to global warming making the globe inhabitable for all but a few hundred million people. So, if anything, your argument would actually necessitate MORE drastic social change.
Yes, we could behave as if global warming will magically reverse or stop at a convenient temperature. Or we could assume that the pattern that we’ve observed will at least continue if not intensify and do what we have to do anyways: Find alternatives to carbon, reduce global population, reduce humanity’s ecological footprint, conserve existing carbon resources, use mass transportation and alternative transportation, develop better technologies, etc. etc.
Suffice it to say that it is an accepted scientific fact that we are changing the atmosphere and thus causing the earth’s temperature to rise.
May 25th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
“” limbo: free speech is a good justification, but it would help if people did some research before accusing Communism for the terrible things people have done in its name.”
But there are some arguments that Marxism (not Communism, the two are not the same) actually produces those outcomes predictably, even among the Left.
We hear soaring rhetoric about transcending class, achieving equity and liberty, in the Communist Manifesto. So what? The American Revolution had such rhetoric, yet the Communists would point to structural elements that would predictably produce certain outcomes.
Anarchism has long made reasonable criticisms of Marxism. For example, the Communist Manifesto’s revolutionary proposals are statist.
What Michael Albert, among others, has pointed out about Marxism is that it as a theoretical corpus denies the existence of classes based on anything but ownership of productive property. In advanced capitalist societies, there is a class of people, what Albert calls the coordinator class but which Ehrenreich and other scholars have also discussed, who while not having substantial ownership of the means of production nonetheless exert power over both conventional workers and capitalists. These are people like doctors, lawyers, etc. What one finds when one surveys them, as Ehrenreich did, is that they have markedly different interests than conventional workers.
Of course, just having a theoretical blind spot is fine. But Marxist proposals inevitably are the types of things that would entrench coordinators, NOT workers, and in fact lead to COORDINATOR domination, not classlessness or worker’s rule. For example: Vanguard parties. These will invariably put educated people at the leadership, as they did in Soviet Russia.
So, yeah, Communism has been used as propaganda, but the picture is a little more complex. Marxists have to do some work to turn their ideology fully into an ideology of freedom, even considering many wonderful achievements made by Marxists.
I otherwise agree with your sentiments, though I would point you to http://www.parecon.org to see if maybe you might like that particular anti-capitalist institutional alternative.
May 25th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Cyn: i think my browser may be screwed up because i couldnt see the post before mine when i wrote mine. i also cant even read what you wrote because my internet is glitching. i can read that you wrote to check my browser because ive had the same problem of repeating comments. i didnt mean to. sorry…again
ArekExcelsior: thats interesting, and true. I guess its been a while since i actually read the manifesto. Parecon is a very interesting theory, and i think it is actually the right political theory for me. thanks alot.
May 26th, 2008 at 4:59 am
I don’t get it. Where’s The Holy Bible and Kur’an?
I know, the ten commandments are pretty cool, and the messages Jesus sent in his preaching are absolutely fantastic.
But oh boy, where’s the Spanish inquisition? (which nobody expects) Conquistadors anyone? Crusades?
btw. IMHO Evolution is all about falsifiability, and also IMHO, is as falsifiable as God.
And it’s not really true that scientists are not dogmatic. Two words: Richard Dawkins.
May 26th, 2008 at 5:47 am
@John:
“It was a very noble book for a very noble cause that no one seems to understand because they judge it based on soviet russia.
limbo: free speech is a good justification, but it would help if people did some research before accusing Communism for the terrible things people have done in its name. Having free speech doesnt mean you should say what ever you feel like.”
While I do agree with you on the manifesto being a noble book, it got used for a wrong purpose, same as The Holy Bible and many others.
Although, now when I think of it, it _is_ rather silly to put the manifesto here together with Mein Kampf and Malleus Maleficarum and *not* put oh I don’t know, Patriot Act or similar. Definitely not the same class as Mein Kampf.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
although there are some good titles on this list, I would have to disagree with the Communist Manifesto. It is not the ideas themselves that are evil, but that those that employ them and twist them to gain their own personal power.
Also, to those who ask why books the Bible, the Koran, Bhagavad Gita, and other religious texts aren’t up there, stop spewing hatred and learn to accept that some people are religious in the world, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that those who find solace in religion are ignorant nay sayers of science whose only goal in life is to kill and oppress those who do not share their views. Those who cite instances of genocides and murders done in the name of religion, remember that doesn’t make the book evil, it makes the people who perpetrated those acts evil.
May 26th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Lacking the Bible and the Quran, this list is crap. Both books explicitly promote collectivism, sectarianism, racism and the subjugation of women. They are evil works that deserve nothing but scorn.
May 27th, 2008 at 1:27 am
@slightlydisturbed:
Man, what you’re saying is not really consistent. Normally, I wouldn’t mind, I’m not consistent myself and that’s just fine, personalities are like that..
But; what we’re saying is that if the communist manifesto is here, the The Bible and Kur’an should be here too. They were both misused (still are in fact, both on the so-called “terrorist” side and pretty much the whole western world), same as the manifesto. It has nothing to do with the book itself.
It’s a shame those two types of books got mixed up in here, some have obvious evil tendencies while other were just misused. Shame.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
“btw. IMHO Evolution is all about falsifiability, and also IMHO, is as falsifiable as God.”
In theory or in practice? Since evolution has evidence for it and God has none.
Putting that aside, it’s not only falsifiability but predictability and testability that we care about in science. “God did it” is not falsifiable, and it gives no interesting predictions.
“Lacking the Bible and the Quran, this list is crap. Both books explicitly promote collectivism, sectarianism, racism and the subjugation of women. They are evil works that deserve nothing but scorn.”
T
May 27th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
(Hate premature posts).
“Lacking the Bible and the Quran, this list is crap. Both books explicitly promote collectivism, sectarianism, racism and the subjugation of women. They are evil works that deserve nothing but scorn.”
The problem is that isn’t all they teach, assuming collectivism is bad. They’re much more culturally sensitive: Their interpretation is culturally determined.
“although there are some good titles on this list, I would have to disagree with the Communist Manifesto. It is not the ideas themselves that are evil, but that those that employ them and twist them to gain their own personal power.”
That still qualifies it for the list. The way that the list works, from what I understand, isn’t to say that these books are 100% routinely bad or don’t have anything interesting. It’s simply to say that their publication caused some serious harm.
“Also, to those who ask why books the Bible, the Koran, Bhagavad Gita, and other religious texts aren’t up there, stop spewing hatred and learn to accept that some people are religious in the world, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that those who find solace in religion are ignorant nay sayers of science whose only goal in life is to kill and oppress those who do not share their views.”
But the religions do clearly have those tendencies in non-trivial ways. Yes, probably not enough to override other positive influences and as part of a corpus, but the point is that the books were connected to and justify quite a lot of horrible atrocities.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:51 am
“premature posts”
So that’s how to they call it nowadays
Just kidding 
“In theory or in practice? Since evolution has evidence for it and God has none.”
Well, it depends. For evolution you have a batch of individual parts, which are interpreted by humans as evolution. We all know that evolution has many flaws though. Regardless of that, the evidence of God’s existence may also be composed from a batch of individual parts, starting from the creation of the universe (which is still a complete mystery no matter what people say about “big bang”), to the existence of a mind which is capable of asking questions such as “why is there something rather than nothing?”. Self awareness is a big problem here. Also, it very _very_ difficult to prove any event which occurred in the past, even if you’ve been there, you remember it and there *is* so-called physical evidence.
I may have read too many philosophy books though.
“Putting that aside, it’s not only falsifiability but predictability and testability that we care about in science. “God did it” is not falsifiable, and it gives no interesting predictions.”
I’m just curious here, what interesting predictions does evolution give? It seems fairly unpredictable and untestable (unless we plan on living for quite some time:)). Microevolution _is_ observable, but macro..I don’t know. Tough subject, and I’m not an expert on it.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5527
NUFFSED!!!
The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?
Gregory Koukl
Is it legitimate to condemn religion for historical atrocities? First we had better examine the facts.
I got a call from a gentleman from San Francisco who was exercised about Christian missionaries going into foreign lands. Then he started talking about not only the destruction of indigenous beliefs, but also the destruction of missionaries. That’s what he wanted to see happen. He also said that Christians and religious groups are responsible for the greatest massacres of history. It turns out he was quite supportive of Wicca and indigenous religions which worship the Mother Earth force, Gaia. This is essentially the basic foundation for witchcraft.
The assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them.
But a couple of the things that he said were a challenge to me. Not only did he assert that historically missionaries have destroyed cultures and indigenous religions at the point of a gun, but also Christians and religion were responsible for most of the bloodshed in the world, or the great majority of it. I’ve heard this claim before. I wanted to respond with more detail because I’m sure you’ve heard these things as well.
I have a tactic that I employ in situations like this that is called “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” In other words, there are times when you’re faced with objections to Christianity or your point of view that really fail with an accurate assessment of the facts. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them.
The assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. The greatest atrocities committed against man were done in the name of God.
Before I get to the particular facts, there is more than just a factual problem here. There is a theoretical problem as well and I tried to make the point that we must distinguish between what an individual or group of people do and what the code that they allegedly follow actually asserts. The fact is that there are people who do things consistently that are inconsistent with the code that they allegedly follow. But often times when that happens, especially where religion is concerned, the finger is pointed not at the individual who is choosing to do something barbaric, but at the code he claims to represent. The only time it’s legitimate to point to the code as the source of barbarism is if the code is, in fact, the source of barbarism. People object to a religion that used barbaric means to spread the faith. But one can only use that as an objection against the religion if it’s the religion itself that asserts that one must do it this way, as opposed to people who try to promote the spread of the religion in a forceful fashion in contradiction to what the religion actually teaches.
It’s my understanding that much of Islam has been spread by the edge of the sword. That isn’t because Muslim advocates were particularly violent. It’s because their religion actually advocates this kind of thing. The difference between that and Christianity is that when Christianity was spread by the edge of the sword it was done so in contradistinction to the actually teachings of Christianity. This is when individual people who claim to be Christians actually did things that were inconsistent with their faith.
I’ve had some people that have told me when I’ve brought this up, “That’s not a fair defense. You can’t simply say that those people who committed the Crusades or the Inquisition or the witch burnings weren’t real Christians. That’s illegitimate.” My response is, why? We know what a real Christian is. A real Christian is someone who believes particular things and lives a particular kind of lifestyle. John makes it clear that those who consistently live unrighteously are ipso facto by definition not part of the faith. So why is it illegitimate for me to look at people who claim to be Christians, yet live unrighteous lives, and promote genocide to say that these people aren’t living consistently with the text, therefore you can’t really call them Christians. I think that’s legitimate.
It’s not fair or reasonable to fault the Bible when the person who’s waving the sword is doing things that are contradictory to what the Bible teaches.
For example, no one would fault the Hippocratic Oath, which is a very rigid standard of conduct for physicians, just because there are doctors who don’t keep it. We wouldn’t say there’s something wrong with the oath, the code that they allegedly follow. We’d say there was something wrong with the individuals who don’t live up to the ideals of that code. That is the case frequently where people waving the Bible in one hand are also waving a bloody sword in the other. The two are inconsistent. So it’s not fair or reasonable to fault the Bible when the person who’s waving the sword is doing things that are contradictory to what the Bible teaches ought to be done.
So that’s the first important thing to remember when you face an objection like this. Distinguish between what a person does and what the code they claim to follow actually asserts. Christianity is one thing, and if we’re going to fault Christianity we must fault its teachings and not fault it because there are people who say they are Christians but then live a life that is totally morally divergent from what Christianity actually teaches.
As I said earlier, this kind of objection falls when you employ a tactic I call “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” and I’d like to give you some of those facts. My assertion as I responded to the gentleman who called last week was simply this: it is true that there are Christians who do evil things. Even take people’s lives. This is an indication that these people aren’t truly Christians, but it may be true also that people with the right heart, but the wrong head do things that are inappropriate, like I think might have been the case in the Salem Witch Trials.
My basic case is that religion doesn’t promote this kind of thing; it’s the exception to the rule. The rule actually is that when we remove God from the equation, when we act and live as if we have no one to answer to but ourselves, and if there is no God, then the rule of law is social Darwinism– the strong rule the weak. We’ll find that, quite to the contrary, it is not Christianity and the belief in the God of the Bible that results in carnage and genocide. But it’s when people reject the God of the Bible that we are most vulnerable to those kinds of things that we see in history that are the radical and gross destruction of human lives.
Now for the facts.
Let’s take the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Apparently, between June and September of 1692 five men and fourteen women were eventually convicted and hanged because English law called for the death penalty for witchcraft (which, incidentally, was the same as the Old Testament). During this time there were over 150 others that were imprisoned. Things finally ended in September 1692 when Governor William Phipps dissolved the court because his wife had been accused. He said enough of this insanity. It was the colony’s leading minister, by the way, who finally ended the witch hunt in 1693 and those that remained in prison were released. The judge that was presiding over the trials publicly confessed his guilt in 1697. By the way , it’s interesting to note that this particular judge was very concerned about the plight of the American Indian and was opposed to slavery. These are views that don’t sit well with the common caricature of the radical Puritans in the witch hunt. In 1711 the colony’s legislatures made reparation to the heirs of the victims. They annulled the convictions.
I guess the point is that there was a witch hunt. It was based on theological reasons, but it wasn’t to the extent that is usually claimed. I think last week the caller said it was millions and millions that were burned at the stake as witches. That certainly wasn’t the case in this country. It seemed that the witch hunt was a result of theological misapplication and the people who were involved were penitent. The whole witch hunt lasted only a year. Sixteen people were hanged in New England for witchcraft prior to 1692. In the 1692 witch hunt nineteen were executed. So you’ve got thirty-five people. One hundred fifty imprisoned. This is not at all to diminish or minimize the impact of the American witch hunts which resulted in thirty-five deaths. But thirty-five is not millions. It is not hundreds of thousands. It’s not even hundreds. It’s thirty-five. This was not genocide.
Now in Europe it was a little different. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft in 1431. Over a period of 300 years, from 1484 to 1782, the Christian church put to death 300,000 women accused of witchcraft, about 1000 per year. Again, I don’t want to minimize the impact of 1000 lives lost a year, but here we’re talking about a much, much smaller number over a long period of time than what has been claimed in the past.
In America we’re talking thirty-five people. In Europe over 300 years, we’re talking about 300,000. Not millions. The sources here are World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana . You can also read in Newsweek , August 31, 1992. I was accused of being a liar last week. I’m trying to give you the facts from reputable sources that show that the accusations from last week aren’t accurate.
There were two Inquisitions. One of them began right around the end of the first millennium in 1017. It began as an attempt to root out heretics and occurred chiefly in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The Spanish Inquisition followed in the fourteenth century and was much bloodier. It began as a feudal aristocracy which forced religious values on society. Jews were caught in the middle of this and many of them were killed. About 2000 executions took place. The Inquisition that took place at the turn of the millennium, less than that. So we’re talking about thousands of people, not millions.
There were actually seven different Crusades and tens of thousands died in them. Most of them were a misdirected attempt to free the Holy Land. Some weren’t quite like that. There were some positive aspects to them, but they were basically an atrocity over a couple hundred years. The worst was the Children’s Crusade. All of the children who went to fight died along the way. Some were shipwrecked and the rest were taken into slavery in Egypt.
The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination.
A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religion criminals have committed.
My point is not that Christians or religious people aren’t vulnerable to committing terrible crimes. Certainly they are. But it is not religion that produces these things; it is the denial of Biblical religion that generally leads to these kinds of things. The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination.
My source is The Guinness Book of World Records . Look up the category “Judicial” and under the subject of “Crimes: Mass Killings,” the greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against the government of another is 26.3 million Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse Tung between the years of 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32 and 61.7 million people. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Figaro magazine on November 5, 1978.
In the U.S.S.R. the Nobel Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimates the loss of life from state repression and terrorism from October 1917 to December 1959 under Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev at 66.7 million.
Finally, in Cambodia (and this was close to me because I lived in Thailand in 1982 working with the broken pieces of the Cambodian holocaust from 1975 to 1979) “as a percentage of a nation’s total population, the worst genocide appears to be that in Cambodia, formerly Kampuchea. According to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, more than one third of the eight million Khmer were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979. One third of the entire country was put to death under the rule of Pol Pot, the founder of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. During that time towns, money and property were abolished. Economic execution by bayonet and club was introduced for such offenses as falling asleep during the day, asking too many questions, playing non-communist music, being old and feeble, being the offspring of an undesirable, or being too well educated. In fact, deaths in the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in Phnom Penh, which is the capitol of Kampuchea, reached 582 in a day.”
Then in Chinese history of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries there were three periods of wholesale massacre. The numbers of victims attributed to these events are assertions rather than reliable estimates. The figures put on the Mongolian invasion of northern China form 1210 to 1219 and from 1311 to 1340 are both on the order of 35 million people. While the number of victims of bandit leader Chang Hsien-Chung, known as the Yellow Tiger, from 1643 to 1647 in the Szechwan province has been put at 40 million people.
China under Mao Tse Tung, 26.3 million Chinese. According the Walker Report, 63.7 million over the whole period of time of the Communist revolution in China. Solzhenitsyn says the Soviet Union put to death 66.7 million people. Kampuchea destroyed one third of their entire population of eight million Cambodians. The Chinese at two different times in medieval history, somewhere in the vicinity of 35 million and 40 million people. Ladies and gentlemen, make note that these deaths were the result of organizations or points of view or ideologies that had left God out of the equation. None of these involve religion. And all but the very last actually assert atheism.
Religion, and Biblical religion in particular, is a mitigator of evil in the world.
It seems to me that my colleague Dennis Prager’s illustration cannot be improved upon to show the self-evident capability of Biblical religion to restrain evil. He asks this in this illustration. If you were walking down a dark street at night in the center of Los Angeles and you saw ten young men walking towards you, would you feel more comfortable if you knew that they had just come from a Bible class? Of course, the answer is certainly you would. That demonstrates that religion, and Biblical religion in particular, is a mitigator of evil in the world.
It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail it produces evil because the individual people are actually living in a rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it can produce it, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
GoneFishing-
personally i think if you’re going to post a copy and paste of an entire and rather lengthy article preceded by the link…it would be just as well to comment w/ the link only.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Hell, I was just going to mention the rampant use of comment space. As usual, Cyn, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
thanx Crimanon-
lengthy original commenting is one thing but copy/paste of entire articles is something else.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
I’m a man of few words, If I can’t say it in two paragraphs, then I need to think more about it. Some times the Original comments get too longwinded.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
well, i can be a bit wordy at times and we all know a few regulars here who are known for their long comments.
i have no issue w/ any of that because it is part of what makes LV, LV. 
still copy/paste of either whole articles or long passages just does not seem necessary when a link will suffice. i do not want to discourage commenting. or lengthy original commenting. i would rather encourage people to consider simply posting a link or critical quotes and a link to the longer article. and now this have become too long… 
May 29th, 2008 at 1:53 am
@GoneFishing:
I think you’re mixing religion and faith here.
The “good” people you’re talking about are people who have faith and believe in God. The “bad” are those who have religion, whether it’s roman catholic or some other.
Now, as far as the middle ages go, I don’t think you really know how the crusades started. They were inspired by the pope himself. And, as a European ruler, if you didn’t want to go to a crusade, you were most likely to get attacked by other European countries, as guaranteed by The Church(TM).
Church = Religion = Politics. That is all.
If you really want to separate “true believers” from “those who just claim they are” then you need to forget about organized crime – sorry – religion, entirely.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I agree completely that Behe should be listed right along with Hitler and Machiavelli–what he’s done is reprehensible.
It is both intellectually misguided and morally wrong to harbor doubts about Darwinian Orthodoxy. And if this level of personal heresy weren’t bad enough, to then allow such non-canonical ideas to be published and fall into the hands of the unwashed masses where they can “fuel fundamentalist attacks on Science!” All good supporters of science everywhere need to be united in their opposition to Behe’s unscientific tactics: things like asking for evidence, questioning the model, or–heaven forbid–suggesting an alternative.
So then you will certainly join me in supporting JFrater as he seeks to stamp out “arguing against aspects of Darwin’s theories.” I mean, really: making an argument against a theory–can you imagine something that would hurt the scientific enterprise more than that?
May 30th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Damn! Dianetics didnt make it!
May 31st, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Jfrater: Would you say this is your most controversial list
?
May 31st, 2008 at 3:41 pm
“Well, it depends. For evolution you have a batch of individual parts, which are interpreted by humans as evolution. We all know that evolution has many flaws though. Regardless of that, the evidence of God’s existence may also be composed from a batch of individual parts, starting from the creation of the universe (which is still a complete mystery no matter what people say about “big bang”), to the existence of a mind which is capable of asking questions such as “why is there something rather than nothing?”. Self awareness is a big problem here. Also, it very _very_ difficult to prove any event which occurred in the past, even if you’ve been there, you remember it and there *is* so-called physical evidence.”
The problem is that the parts with evolution refer to in theory and in practice things of finite complexity whereas traditional notions of God are MORE complex than the universe. That’s the irrevocable gap.
Does this mean God doesn’t exist? No. But to say that a particular explanation has a low probability and use THAT to posit the existence of God is a deeply unsatisfactory claim.
“I’m just curious here, what interesting predictions does evolution give? It seems fairly unpredictable and untestable (unless we plan on living for quite some time:)). Microevolution _is_ observable, but macro..I don’t know. Tough subject, and I’m not an expert on it.”
First of all, microevolution and macroevolution are the same thing. It’s the same processes. So what evolution can predict, not only a interesting and non-trivial outcome but one of DEVASTATING importance (which is why Behe’s book deserves to be on the list), is the evolution or emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Without evolution, one would have no idea why something that kills one generation of bacteria doesn’t faze another. With evolution, however, we know that the anti-bacterials function as a selecting agent that seeks out only those individuals with the resistant gene. Without the antibiotic, those genes will die off or at least not take over the bacterial population because they have no utility. With the antibiotic, they do.
Second, we HAVE seen macro-level mutations. For example, the famous case of the white moth turning black in England after the Industrial Revolution colored all the trees it hid on black. The same thing applies to fruit flies.
Third, Darwin’s original BOOK helped explain what was previously a mystery: Why closely related birds and species had such radically different traits in some areas, such as beak shape.
Fourth, we have long-term historical validation: Animal husbandry and indeed the entire science of genetics is based on evolution.
So, actually, there’s mountains of evidence. Indeed, the reason the theory has been so embraced by the scientific community is because it elegantly and simply explains observed phenomena for millenia while giving testable future predictions.
“I got a call from a gentleman from San Francisco who was exercised about Christian missionaries going into foreign lands. Then he started talking about not only the destruction of indigenous beliefs, but also the destruction of missionaries. That’s what he wanted to see happen. He also said that Christians and religious groups are responsible for the greatest massacres of history. It turns out he was quite supportive of Wicca and indigenous religions which worship the Mother Earth force, Gaia. This is essentially the basic foundation for witchcraft.”
What your friend should have ADDED is that the very reason those missionaries can even go is due to colonial power arrangements by these supposedly Christian nations.
I’ll at the outset say that your rosy look at history will ignore not only the Crusades but the entirety of European colonialism. Since European colonialism in all its forms can easily be said to have killed a billion people, let’s just admit that Christians can be murderers and be done with it, shall we? Doesn’t mean that Christianity’s bad per se, but to say that religion routinely and unproblematically stops violence is bizarre.
“Now in Europe it was a little different. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft in 1431. Over a period of 300 years, from 1484 to 1782, the Christian church put to death 300,000 women accused of witchcraft, about 1000 per year. Again, I don’t want to minimize the impact of 1000 lives lost a year, but here we’re talking about a much, much smaller number over a long period of time than what has been claimed in the past.
In America we’re talking thirty-five people. In Europe over 300 years, we’re talking about 300,000. Not millions. The sources here are World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana . You can also read in Newsweek , August 31, 1992. I was accused of being a liar last week. I’m trying to give you the facts from reputable sources that show that the accusations from last week aren’t accurate. ”
Okay, let’s note that. 300,000 people vis-a-vis the population of Europe? Innocent people murdered year after year while the population did not protest and did not end the practices? State brutality against innocent for centuries? Why is this not a serious problem? But that’s far from the Catholic Church’s only atrocity. It’s just the witchcraft trials alone. The Spanish Inquisition did a lot more harm than that.
“There were actually seven different Crusades and tens of thousands died in them. Most of them were a misdirected attempt to free the Holy Land. Some weren’t quite like that. There were some positive aspects to them, but they were basically an atrocity over a couple hundred years. The worst was the Children’s Crusade. All of the children who went to fight died along the way. Some were shipwrecked and the rest were taken into slavery in Egypt.
The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination.
A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religion criminals have committed.
My point is not that Christians or religious people aren’t vulnerable to committing terrible crimes. Certainly they are. But it is not religion that produces these things; it is the denial of Biblical religion that generally leads to these kinds of things. The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination. ”
Abusive statistics do not your claim ennoble. The deaths, looting and destruction wrought by the Crusades against Muslims who had not attacked the nations in question have to be weighed against the populations of the time. Given how much smaller they were, these were serious war crimes. Worse, it wasn’t just death, but looting, destruction of culture, injuries and casualties, starvation, and slavery.
What is hilarious is that you seem to believe that millions of people, daily worshipping, going to church, studying the Bible in intricate detail, can so drastically get the word of God wrong. It’s like Marxists who try to claim that Soviet Russia says NOTHING about Marxism, not one iota. Yes, the ideology does not HAVE to go that direction. But to imply that the ideology of Christianity and Islam don’t have the CAPACITY to be transmuted that way is ridiculous.
Incidentally, despite not being Christian, I’m actually pretty close to your side here. The Crusades were not about religion. That was the propaganda and the motivating drive. It was geo-political clashes, as always throughout history. If people want peace, they change the geo-political circumstances, the economic and political institutions, and so forth. But the problem is that you are arguing that RELIGION prevents atrocities. It just plainly doesn’t.
EVEN if you can prove that “non-religion” has some massively higher or more significant violent trend, through whatever ridiculous definition, that doesn’t make RELIGION good or even better.
“My source is The Guinness Book of World Records . Look up the category “Judicial” and under the subject of “Crimes: Mass Killings,” the greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against the government of another is 26.3 million Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse Tung between the years of 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32 and 61.7 million people. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Figaro magazine on November 5, 1978.”
True. Yet proportional to the population, it was very similar to things that the US, a “Christian” nation, was doing around the same time in Indonesia and across the globe.
Take the entire “Black Book of Communism”. They attribute 100 million deaths to it in total. The biggest atrocity they cite is the Chinese famine, under which around 30 million people died.
The researchers who established that famine’s impact and its tie to the Communist regime? Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze had some similar things to say about India at the time with its capitalist health care system. See, China had a social health care system put into place by Mao that saved tens of millions of lives. Had India done the same, Sen argues that 100+ million people wouldn’t have died.
Now, given India’s religious nature, and more importantly the religious nature of the European colonial system (first run by Britain then America) that kept India in such a state, religion comes out WORSE.
Then let’s add the Nazis into the equation. The Holocaust was a horrendous crime against innocent people. Christians sat silently by and even supported it, and Hitler himself did NOT embrace atheism but rather Teutonic revival.
Then add in the destruction in Africa, India, South America, etc. by “religious” conquistadors and colonialists and already the picture’s not so rosy.
“Religion, and Biblical religion in particular, is a mitigator of evil in the world.”
How?
You’ve given us some statistics. That’s all. You haven’t proven that it was due to atheism. Yes, Mao’s ideology was atheist, but did that mean the foot soldiers carrying it out had abandoned Taoist or traditional religions? And was it due to its ATHEIST nature or to the particular tyranny of Maoism? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Nor have you proven HOW “religion” OR “Biblical” religion gravitates against these factors. You’ve just noted correlation, no causation. Perhaps if “Christian” America or “Muslim” Iran or “Jewish” Israel or “Islamic” terrorists start a nuclear war it’ll swing back against religion.
“Finally, in Cambodia (and this was close to me because I lived in Thailand in 1982 working with the broken pieces of the Cambodian holocaust from 1975 to 1979) “as a percentage of a nation’s total population, the worst genocide appears to be that in Cambodia, formerly Kampuchea. According to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, more than one third of the eight million Khmer were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979. One third of the entire country was put to death under the rule of Pol Pot, the founder of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. During that time towns, money and property were abolished. Economic execution by bayonet and club was introduced for such offenses as falling asleep during the day, asking too many questions, playing non-communist music, being old and feeble, being the offspring of an undesirable, or being too well educated. In fact, deaths in the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in Phnom Penh, which is the capitol of Kampuchea, reached 582 in a day.””
Very funny that you picked Cambodia.
For one thing, there still remains serious questions how many of those are Khmer Rouge atrocities. But that’s not an important point for now.
The big point is that it’s not just that the Khmer Rouge arose out of this wonderful religious society and with their evil atheism murdered everyone. You have to be an idealogue to believe that.
Rather, US bombing ALSO killed millions of people. The damage to the society caused the rise of the Khmer Rouge. When the Vietnamese invaded, to protect themselves primarily but also to stop the atrocities, the US called them “Prussians” and moved against them. And, in fact, the US supported Khmer Rouge and its front “Democratic Kampuchea” extensively! So Christian nations did horrible things to Cambodia too, and in fact CANNOT BE SEPARATED from the history of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.
Add to that what “Christian” America did to Vietnam and Laos and already your position seems to be rather unviable.
“It seems to me that my colleague Dennis Prager’s illustration cannot be improved upon to show the self-evident capability of Biblical religion to restrain evil. He asks this in this illustration. If you were walking down a dark street at night in the center of Los Angeles and you saw ten young men walking towards you, would you feel more comfortable if you knew that they had just come from a Bible class? Of course, the answer is certainly you would. That demonstrates that religion, and Biblical religion in particular, is a mitigator of evil in the world.”
Uh, no, not really. I’ve been threatened and nearly beaten up by “Christians” who didn’t like the way I thought. And all those homophobes threatening gays thanks to their “Christian” interpretations certainly aren’t pleasant people.
But let’s ask similar questions. Let’s say they had just come from a college class about religion with a strong atheist background. Would you feel safer? Yes.
How about if ten Buddhist monks came? Frankly, I’d feel MUCH, MUCH safer. And so would most people, incidentally.
What you’re ignoring is that when you ask that question certain racial, class and other issues become mixed in. When one says “Ten people from a Bible studies class”, people automatically are statistically more likely to think middle-class and white. But what if you ask “Ten people from an anti-abortion group?” “Ten men from a Bible class in Spanish?” Especially when you preface the phrase with “Los Angeles”, which implies to a large extent black and Latino in many people’s mind’s eye.
So this subjective argument says a lot about people’s prejudices and stereotypes, but nothing serious about history.
The fact remains that you have failed to prove your burden. Christian nations have been responsible for a vast amount of the atrocities of the last several hundred years.
“It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail it produces evil because the individual people are actually living in a rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it can produce it, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God.”
This is hand-waving. On your side, if people who read the books and go to Church and follow everything still preach messages of hate or support the bombing of Iraqis or lynch black folks (as thousands of “Christian” Southerners did throughout the South for at least a century) or enslave or have empires of world conquest, they’re not REALLY Christian. But if I were to argue that Maoism isn’t “really” atheism (which it just isn’t; yes, Maoism is by coincidence atheist, but that’s not the core or relevant part of the ideology that CAUSES the atrocities), you would balk. Either we argue that ideologies are part and parcel and anyone who has a serious claim to believing that ideology speaks ill about the others who share it, in which case Christianity as you’ve rightly identified comes off INCREDIBLY poorly; or we recognize that there’s many elements of philosophies, in which case both atheism and Christianity are spared. Either way, your hypothesis is verifiably false, without support, without merit and indeed offensive.
“It is both intellectually misguided and morally wrong to harbor doubts about Darwinian Orthodoxy. And if this level of personal heresy weren’t bad enough, to then allow such non-canonical ideas to be published and fall into the hands of the unwashed masses where they can “fuel fundamentalist attacks on Science!” All good supporters of science everywhere need to be united in their opposition to Behe’s unscientific tactics: things like asking for evidence, questioning the model, or–heaven forbid–suggesting an alternative.”
Yes, there’s this massive Darwinian conspiracy out there. Never mind that Gould substantially changed our idea of how it worked, as has genetics, so NO ONE IS A DARWINIST ANYMORE. Nope.
Evidence has been provided. Behe is abusively picking on things that are not key to the model because he cannot mount a rational assault on evolution itself. That is because there is no such rational assault to make. Questions about HOW life formed are NOT what evolution answers. RATHER, evolution says that once DNA and life has formed, it WILL behave in that fashion. In that sense, Behe has not written one relevant word about evolution. Any pretenses to the contrary are intellectually dishonest.
The model is not what Behe questions. Rather, as we’ve gone over ad nauseum here, he’s actually attacking elements the model has yet to explain, different questions than what the model of natural selection answers.
What alternative has he suggested? He has denied intelligent design, so the only hypothesis I’m aware he’s offered is the null hypothesis. That’s not an alternative.
“So then you will certainly join me in supporting JFrater as he seeks to stamp out “arguing against aspects of Darwin’s theories.” I mean, really: making an argument against a theory–can you imagine something that would hurt the scientific enterprise more than that?”
It can be if the questions aren’t serious, fuel those who aren’t proceeding rationally or with serious questions about the model, generally waste our time and in fact simply cannot be honest because when the questions are answered they are still raised. He’s not even arguing against Darwin! He’s arguing against modern evolutionary theory, which is FAR, FAR past Origin of the Species. It’s like someone saying, “Yes, how DARE they question the existence of gravity?” To even ask the question is idiotic. Science doesn’t mean question obvious, established truths. Once those truths have been supported, it is the burden of those with ALTERNATIVE hypotheses to present them and provide the extraordinary proof it should take to replace a good theory. Einstein had to do so with relativity vis-a-vis Newtonian thought. Anti-evolutionary thinkers don’t even try.
May 31st, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Arek: Dude, Breathe!
May 31st, 2008 at 8:36 pm
WarningDontReadThis: not even close! The Bible stories list has over 1,000 comments
June 1st, 2008 at 4:26 am
Jfrater: I was about to say you can’t go wrong with a bible list but this one doesnt even mention it.
By the way correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t there over 600 comments on this list
?
June 1st, 2008 at 10:58 am
“Arek: Dude, Breathe!”
Yes, sometimes you need to take time out from the strenuous task of typing text to take a nice deep breath of digital air
.
June 1st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Or at least to go outside and get some sunlight.
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:08 pm
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson caused the banning of DDT which has directly resulted in tens of millions of third world deaths by malaria. It also spawned today’s liberal/socialist global warming hoax. Thanks a lot liberals.
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:14 pm
““Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson caused the banning of DDT which has directly resulted in tens of millions of third world deaths by malaria. It also spawned today’s liberal/socialist global warming hoax. Thanks a lot liberals.”
As I’ve covered before: DDT is still used, morons. Only in 2001 did the Stockholm Convention ban its use among signatories (including the Third World nations that the anti-environmentalists like to “protect” patronizingly). Before then, the ban was largely restricted to First World nations. Yet malaria rose anyways. This should indicate something: The problem isn’t disease control.
We’ve banned DDT in the First World, after all. Why aren’t WE getting sick en masse with malaria? Because we’re rich, powerful, privileged nations that can invest in health education, medical access, basic sanitation, etc. THAT’S the sort of thing that actually controls disease, as numerous epidemiological studies have shown, not interventions like DDT. We know this because cases across the board of malaria were going down far before DDT insecticidal properties were discovered in 1939. It was nearly eradicated in Panama.
Meanwhile, DDT’s toxic effects are unquestioned, to humans and otherwise. Yes, there’s some wonder about INTENSITY, but not that it is a dangerous chemical.
So, how about this: We ban DDT and poisons from our water, air and food, while ALSO compensating for centuries of European colonialism and American neo-colonialism? Have our cake and eat it too?
Frankly, though, the above was unessential. Anyone who thinks that global warming is a “liberal/socialist hoax” despite the astoundingly conservative character of innumerable scientists who provide the data and nations that have signed Kyoto has clearly abandoned the basic ability to interpret evidence.
June 6th, 2008 at 5:52 am
What about the Bible og the Coran? Didn’t thet seriously fuck up this little planet more than any other books?
June 7th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Nicowarrior: the problem is rejecting fact based education – some things are objectively true and to deny that is seriously wrong. The results in New Zealand from 10 years of this type of education system (where there are no tests because everyone passes) has given rise to a generation of uneducated people. Even reading abilities are dropping massively.
You clearly have no understanding of the New Zealand education system. My parents both teach in it and I have just finished going through it and there are tests and not everybody passes. Yes I’ll agree it has been made easier to pass (due to the nature of internal examinations) but it all depends on your skills and don’t say we have a low literacy rate when 99% of our adult population is suffeciantly literat http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/results/new-zealand/2008/
June 8th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
“Nicowarrior: the problem is rejecting fact based education – some things are objectively true and to deny that is seriously wrong. The results in New Zealand from 10 years of this type of education system (where there are no tests because everyone passes) has given rise to a generation of uneducated people. Even reading abilities are dropping massively.”
Putting his fact-free drivel aside, he must clearly love strawmen. When someone says they’re against “fact-based education”, they’re NOT saying they’re AGAINST FACTS. That is a logical fallacy to conclude. Rather, their argument is that instead of forcing memorization of facts, the lowest form of mental engagement and education, that education teach not just important facts but far more importantly methodologies to engage with the facts, theories about the facts, etc. Not only is this not irrational or even controversial, it is the ONLY way good teaching is done. Scientists routinely point out that the most important thing they ever learn is the scientific method. They pick up the complex science later; the first thing is to know how to design experiments, preserve data, etc. And a science class that taught Newton and Darwin but didn’t teach how to design an proper experiment without distortions would be teaching essentially nothing. And political science and history in academia has very little to do with memorizing facts and much more with trying to find theories that EXPLAIN the facts, offer predictability, etc. Fact-based education has one intent: To shut down learning and encourage dronish behavior.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
One of the worste peices of tripe I ever read was Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. I’m sure it has inspired and will continue to inspire socialists everywhere.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
“One of the worste peices of tripe I ever read was Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. I’m sure it has inspired and will continue to inspire socialists everywhere.”
Well, that still isn’t a case for having “screwed up the world” . I have some disagreements with Bellamy, but he paints an interesting picture with some forward-thinking institutional mechanisms to redress inequity, suffering and domination. How terrible.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Good list. Needs one adjustment though. Move all books up one space and place the Bible as number one.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Great list; the last one was an eyeroller, though. By all means, include Darwin’s Black Box, but you’re going to sail spreading superstitions and misinformation over 50,000 dead babies & 10 million dead jews (not to mention the 20 million dead from Stalin’s regime alone)? Considering the other’s lasting effects, and the relative newness of Black Box, I think we’re flying off the handle just a little, aren’t we?
Props for including Dewey, though.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Books can not screw up the world. People who put ideas into action can do a lot of damage.
———————–
As for your off choice of Spock’s baby care book…
The connection between “sids” and stomach sleeping is VERY recent and Dr. Spock’s advice certainly wasn’t off kilter for the times. By the way.. putting baby on the back now means mom and dad have to make sure baby gets “tummy time” to encourage them to hold that head up and decide to crawl… it’s interesting how many products have been marketed to help parents keep their kids on their backs while they sleep and entertain them during tummy time, picking up newborns every time they cry and letting them set their own schedule initially actually reduces the crying later on. Of course if you’re a fan of the stuff like no greater joy or ezzo with rigid schedules and discipline so that your kids respond like pavlovian dogs to whistles like the vontrapp children then I guess spock seems like a nut.
June 22nd, 2008 at 5:06 pm
‘Darwins Black Box’ is number one for a good reason, and not the reason that was presented in the OP.
If ‘Darwins Black Box’ screwed up the world, then Darwin must have had one hell of a positive impact on WW2.
June 22nd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
“‘Darwins Black Box’ is number one for a good reason, and not the reason that was presented in the OP.
If ‘Darwins Black Box’ screwed up the world, then Darwin must have had one hell of a positive impact on WW2.”
I assume the implication is that Darwin’s ideology impacted the Nazis or the Communists or whichever side one doesn’t like?
If that’s the argument, it’s bullocks. Ascribing negative impact to the effects of ideologies that borrowed from a man who had been dead for decades and openly despised similar ideologies is even worse than blaming general relativity for the bomb.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Well, let’s see. Dewey is on the list because he de-emphasized facts and emphasized thinking. Apparently, you must have gone to this mythical Dewey school, because you got your facts wrong. The problem with Dewey is that he has had little influence on schools in the US. Dewey did not de-emphasize facts; he simply recognized that you can’t separate knowing facts from being able to think critically about them. You don’t learn facts (remember them) separate from thinking deeply about them, contemplating implications, applications, recognizing arguments and their constituent parts, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating. Unfortunately, such ideas have never found their way into the mainstream of many American schools. Instead, facts are often taught in isolation. Look at the way students are tested if you don’t believe me. Most students in the United States get a steady diet of multiple choice examinations in which the recall of isolated pieces of information–no, worse, the ability merely to recognize isolated pieces of information–becomes prized. We may pay lip service to Dewey, but we have a hidden curriculum that springs from the way students are assessed and that assessment is based largely on the ability to parrot information given. And as that other great 20th century American educational philosopher, Father Guido Sarduci, noted, it’s all quickly forgotten.
June 30th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
I think it’s a stupid list.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:49 am
You mean.. the bible isn’t number one?
Lets see, which fictional book has caused two thousand years of war?
What got carried out in gods name because of those texts?
July 13th, 2008 at 8:44 am
ArekExcelsior said
“you say ” while the Bible also includes admonitions to murder the infidels.”
Why don’t you supply us with the verse that includes these admonitions.”
2Chronicles 15:13
Deuteronomy 2:31-35
Deuteronomy 13:8-10
Candice said (way back at post 101)
The Bible preaches quite clearly some of the most widely accepted moral standards…
Not Killing, or Stealing.
But LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR and even your ENEMIES (even though thats not so widely accpeted).
You might also care to read
Matthew 10:34
Matthew 15:4
Luke 19:27
Or do these sayings of Christ’s not matter? Do we only take and believe the bits that suit us.
That’s like only accepting Stop at Red lights in the Road Code but ignoring Give Way because it does not suit.
Cheers
Lee
July 15th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Anybody who puts Darwin’s Black Box as the number 1 book that screwed up the world has an agenda. Even the most dishonest idiot in the world (well, maybe that’s the guy that wrote this list) can see that these other books have left more idiological casualties in it’s wake than a book barely ten years old and that most people have never even heard of. It your gonna do a list, at least pretend to be honest and put it as number 10. This type of foolishness makes me think that the list was created FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE
July 15th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
“Anybody who puts Darwin’s Black Box as the number 1 book that screwed up the world has an agenda. Even the most dishonest idiot in the world (well, maybe that’s the guy that wrote this list) can see that these other books have left more idiological casualties in it’s wake than a book barely ten years old and that most people have never even heard of. It your gonna do a list, at least pretend to be honest and put it as number 10. This type of foolishness makes me think that the list was created FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE”
Read the introduction carefully. “I have intentionally left off some of the more obvious choices – as they will almost certainly come up in the comments. This list is in no particular order.” I thought the same thing until I reviewed the intro.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Anyone who puts Darwin’s Black Box at the top of a list like this obviously has an agenda. If your gonna make a list like this at least pretend to be unbiased…put DBB at #10 or something…don’t telegraph your personal hatred for Behe or his ideas because it threatens your “hope” in “science”. This type of foolishness makes me believe that this list was created for the sole purpose of trying to tear Behe’s book down…can anyone else see this, or am I the idiot? Maybe I am, but this guy seems to have the worst bias or the worst judgement I’ve ever seen (probably both!).
July 15th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
sorry so many posts. The first two were a mistake. Looks like I was wrong about number one. Still though, that book, even if you think its horrible, shouldn’t be on a top ten EVER list…give me a break…
July 15th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Oh yeah, for all the people who say that the Bible has messed up the world…I’m amazed that people always seem to criticize the very thing that gives them the freedom to criticize it. The very fact that you live in a country that allows you to say these things is a testament to the Bible’s far reaching influence on our framers and forefather’s. The Bible and it’s principles have given way to the most prosperous nation the world have ever seen. Read the federalist papers written by the constitutions framers…it reads like something out of Biblical theology school. Please don’t tell me that you don’t know these facts…or is it just convenient to pretend it’s not true? Suit yourself…
July 15th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Again, Sheezy: Read the introduction carefully. The list is in no particular order. “#1″ is not the worst book, “#10″ not the least heinous. He also wanted to make a selection of different ideas and types of “screwing up” the world, not pick on the most obvious books.
One can make an argument that Behe, in representing the kind of deliberate embracing of ignorance, represents the negative spirit of all these books and their impact. Behe is certainly WRONG, and the anti-Darwinist agenda has real impacts, though obviously much less than, say, fascism.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
“sorry so many posts. The first two were a mistake. Looks like I was wrong about number one. Still though, that book, even if you think its horrible, shouldn’t be on a top ten EVER list…give me a break…”
I made that same argument, but again, remember that the OP chose books from a wide variety of backgrounds that are bad for a variety of reasons. It certainly inspired controversy and discussion.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
“Oh yeah, for all the people who say that the Bible has messed up the world…I’m amazed that people always seem to criticize the very thing that gives them the freedom to criticize it. The very fact that you live in a country that allows you to say these things is a testament to the Bible’s far reaching influence on our framers and forefather’s.”
That is, frankly, a misreading of history at best and idiotic at worst.
The Founding Fathers were generally far more liberal than the average American now. Benjamin Franklin was deist and denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, arguing that the belief in that divinity is acceptable if it propels greater attention to teachings of love. Christianity for millenia was associated with monarchies. Even the British monarchy from which the Americans seceded was an Anglican monarchy. What distinguished America was not how Christian it was, but rather, how Christian IT WASN’T: How diverse, how many different sects co-existed and interacted, how it explicitly refused (eventually) to have any state-sponsored church or any limits on freedom of expression. To credit Christianity with that is a stretch.
But so what? Our Founders WANTED us to use our freedom cantankerously. To challenge everything, EVEN the foundation upon which our government rested. You say that questioning the Bible is an insult to the Enlightenment thought that made America? I say NOT questioning it would be an insult.
“The Bible and it’s principles have given way to the most prosperous nation the world have ever seen.”
Why is America prosperous?
By and large, thanks in no small part to the slaughter of Native Americans, slavery and more than a century of colonial interference first with Latin America then the globe.
Please excuse me if I don’t thank that.
We are as free and prosperous as we are now precisely because of people who have TRIED to get past this crap that “We” are a “Christian nation”. That is the nationalist, fascist stuff that brings out the worst in people. Not the best. I’m not saying Christianity is bad, far from it.
“Read the federalist papers written by the constitutions framers…it reads like something out of Biblical theology school”
Does it?
There are mentions to God, yes, frequent ones, but most of those arise in the context of general human rights or of answering theological arguments. Not advancing them.
The Framers also believed that the men who own the country ought to rule it and that slavery was acceptable, that the black man and women were inferior. Be glad that we are not as unenlightened as our framers.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
ArekExcelsior:
My friend,
You seem like an intelligent person, however, I believe you are misinformed as you are criticizing something that you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are if you don’t have the facts, so let me clarify a few things for you…
“Christianity for millenia was associated with monarchies. Even the British monarchy from which the Americans seceded was an Anglican monarchy”
This quote lets me know without question that you don’t really know the Bible. You seem to be suggesting that the Bible advocates or is the basic framework for monarchies. Truthfully, the Bible says that God rejected the idea of a monarchy in Israel and it was definately not His idea. The people in Israel wanted a king because they wanted to be like the “heathen” nations. God was grieved about this, but he allowed it to show them that they really didn’t want what they asked for, and they paid for it in the end.
In any case, I believe that you do what most people do: take what can barely be considered a cursory look at the Bible and Christianity and then start blaming it for things that it has nothing to do with…blaming the Bible for peoples misrepresentations. Its just like saying that guns kill people instead of saying that people kill people. It’s just wrong. And what really kills me is that the sharpest criticizm comes from people who don’t have a working knowledge of the scriptures.
Also, I think you are rebutting a point that I never made. I never said that our framers were Christians or that the constitution was a Christian document. What I said was the it is based on Biblical PRINCIPLES. Just as Gospel music principles are the basis for blues, but blues is still distinct from Gospel, so our constitution has it basis in biblical principles yet the constitution is seperate and distinct from the essential claims of the Christian faith (e.g. the diety of Christ). So when you say that we are not a Christian nation, you are rebutting a point that I never made. That being said, the predominant religious influence WAS and STILL IS Christianity in the USA. People believed in the Bible in PRINCIPLE, but many didn’t have the integrity to walk it out. That’s why it took so long for our actions to catch up with what we claimed to believe as a nation. This happended without any real fundamental changes to the constitution itself. If you think that the predominant religious belief system of the time didn’t effect the way they thought, you are deceiving yourself. There is nothing I can say to you.
I could say many other things, but I will stop here…have other things to do. My friend, I hope you take that high powered perception and use it to find out the real truth…it will make you free!
July 16th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
“This quote lets me know without question that you don’t really know the Bible. You seem to be suggesting that the Bible advocates or is the basic framework for monarchies. Truthfully, the Bible says that God rejected the idea of a monarchy in Israel and it was definately not His idea.”
Except when it didn’t. Like with Saul, David and Solomon. Yes, there is a Torah/Judaic tradition as well as a Christian anti-monarchist, even anti-statist tradition. But Deuteronomy and Leviticus are also filled with the most statist, oppressive, sexist garbage imaginable. Like the idea of stoning rape victims.
But this is hand-waving. Cherry-picking what you like from Christian history doesn’t change the fact that millions of people professing to believe in Christ, worshipping and praying daily, deeply devout, also accepted the idea of divine right of kings.
“The people in Israel wanted a king because they wanted to be like the “heathen” nations. God was grieved about this, but he allowed it to show them that they really didn’t want what they asked for, and they paid for it in the end.”
That’s true, but even this is questionable. So God let them have kings to show them a lesson? What the hell kind of crap is that? That’d be considered deceptive from a human being.
In any respect, it didn’t stop Israel from being a monarchy. And it was hardly a pretty society before being monarchist: Tribalist, violent, expansionist.
“In any case, I believe that you do what most people do: take what can barely be considered a cursory look at the Bible and Christianity and then start blaming it for things that it has nothing to do with…blaming the Bible for peoples misrepresentations.”
First of all, the text of the Bible is not uniformly pretty. People don’t have to apologize about this. It’s a complex book.
But more importantly, you do what most apologists do: Pretend it’s unimportant that somehow BILLIONS of people over time have misread what you think is the ostensible real story. It’s like sectarian Marxists: Everyone else misread the master, only they got it right.
“Also, I think you are rebutting a point that I never made. I never said that our framers were Christians or that the constitution was a Christian document. What I said was the it is based on Biblical PRINCIPLES.”
Which ones?
The principle that one should only worship God?
But it doesn’t say that.
That one shouldn’t commit murder?
But other cultures say that.
Our society is based on ENLIGHTENMENT values. Yes, some Biblical values are mixed in there as an accident of history. But that’s unimportant to the real Enlightenment lessons. See David Hume’s forthright rejection of any proof for God.
“People believed in the Bible in PRINCIPLE, but many didn’t have the integrity to walk it out.”
How impressive is a document no one is willing to try?
“If you think that the predominant religious belief system of the time didn’t effect the way they thought, you are deceiving yourself. There is nothing I can say to you.”
Of course it did. What I’m denying is that this is something to be thankful for. Like I argued, to no reply from you, the Framers gave us many things that were horrible aberrations: Slavery, denial of the franchise to anyone but white male landowners, etc. Maybe Christianity is one of those things. Or maybe Christianity is good, a good belief system, but not NECESSARY for people to be good, well-functioning people.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
ArekExcelsior:
OK.
As much as I would like to address the points that you have made, I must return to a point that I had previously made because it hasn’t been resolved yet, partly because you have not acknowledged it: You don’t really know what the Bible does or does not say.
Your quotes:
“But Deuteronomy and Leviticus are also filled with the most statist, oppressive, sexist garbage imaginable. Like the idea of stoning rape victims”
“But more importantly, you do what most apologists do: Pretend it’s unimportant that somehow BILLIONS of people over time have misread what you think is the ostensible real story. It’s like sectarian Marxists: Everyone else misread the master, only they got it right”
I don’t really know what to say about these accept…where do you get your information from?
Rape victims being stoned? I don’t understand? That just isn’t anywhere in the scriptures.
If you are going to criticize my opinion, that’s your prerogative. But at least my opinion is informed. I am a minister of the Gospel. I am a 29 year old who has given myself to the study of scripture since the age of 17 when I gave my life to Jesus Christ. Even if you said that my interpretation is wrong, I am at least misinterpreting the FACTS. As much as I would like to continue this dialogue with you, as feel as though I can’t. We can’t have a credible dialogue when you presume to understand something that you don’t.
The Bible is a lot like math: each principle builds upon the previous one. You can’t add until you understand integers. You can’t multiply until you can add. You can’t do algebra until you can multiply. And you certainly can’t do complex problems unless you understand the “order or operations”.
I say this as gently as I can: humble yourself and learn what the Bible really says before you assume that people with whom you agree have “interpreted” correctly.
“Billions” of people believing something doesn’t make it right.
Just because the Bible records what was, that doesn’t mean God intended things to be that way.
The scriptures are full of paradoxes that take great wisdom to comprehend, but it requires that you humble yourself in order to understand: no one can learn if they already assume that they know.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
tsheezy: I have removed your email address due to the potential for spam etc.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
JayNu The Powerful: Have you thought that maybe you need to revise the comment abilities. I know you are all about letting anyone post, member or no, but this is getting Nuts!
July 17th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Crimanon: the problem is that if it was registered users only to comment – the same problems would occur. If anything needs to change it will have to be the commenting policy and my vigilance – I will have to put more time in to monitoring – or maybe add a “report this comment” function. In fact, I might just do that.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
I tossed some Ideas around in the forums. I can’t remember which thread it was. If you’d like I can go and find it. It’s a pretty good system from way back in my chatting days.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Someone doesn’t know their Old Testament. See Deuteronomy 22:23-24, “If, while in a town, a man happens to meet a woman who is engaged to be married, and he has sex with her, Take them both to the gate of the town and stone them to death: the girl, for not having cried for help in the town; the man, for having violated another man’s wife. You must banish this evil from among you.” The Brick Testament is filled with wonderful tidbits that practitioners nowadays routinely revile, like selling your daughter into slavery or not eating shellfish. Read the whole thing and tell me why any of that stuff is okay.
“If you are going to criticize my opinion, that’s your prerogative. But at least my opinion is informed. I am a minister of the Gospel. I am a 29 year old who has given myself to the study of scripture since the age of 17 when I gave my life to Jesus Christ.”
Then your study has been very intermittent, cherry-picking the good parts. Because if you don’t know the bizarre, draconian restrictions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you simply have not read those chapters carefully, perhaps thanks to your predisposed desire to see those chapters not contain anything morally repugnant.
On one level, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are wonderful parts of the Bible too. The Good Samaritan parable tells us that what matters is how we treat our fellow man, not what faith they observe. Buddhism has similar lessons, which is why I personally observe that faith.
“The Bible is a lot like math: each principle builds upon the previous one. You can’t add until you understand integers. You can’t multiply until you can add. You can’t do algebra until you can multiply. And you certainly can’t do complex problems unless you understand the “order or operations”.”
Then which parts build off the idea that God will smite people with horrible punishments on a bet? Or the idea that other tribes should be destroyed (see Samuel’s famous speech to Saul)? There’s plenty of genocide. Love to see what principles come out of that.
““Billions” of people believing something doesn’t make it right.
Just because the Bible records what was, that doesn’t mean God intended things to be that way. ”
Except that the Bible says God did.
Do we ignore that part?
I suppose so. But then don’t turn around and tell me the Bible is a shining path to truth. If we have to read it like we read everything else, critically and with an eye towards the good, then that’s great but it’s not the one book that reveals all truths.
“We can’t have a credible dialogue when you presume to understand something that you don’t.”
This seems like a copout. I and others here have pointed to numerous problematic passages. All you do is wave your arms and tell us we don’t understand. Then explain, unless this is some cryptic knowledge that cannot be explained to laymen. Which would be odd since even science can be somewhat condensed and explained.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
This is not a personal pulpit – please keep the comments to the topic of the list – not to the bible.
July 19th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I have read enough comments referring to the atrocities ‘committed by Christians’. I am tired of reading it. First of all, these events, such as the crusades, the inquisition,the witch hunts, and whatever others you may include, were not perpetrated by Christians, but rather by evil and misguided people who called themselves Christians.
This goes back to the idea that all the books in this list were not written with the purpose of evil in mind. However, sick, twisted and evil people in some instances misunderstood or even outright twisted what they read into deviant behavior.
I am a Christian and I will tell you here and now if you hold up those individuals, who, throughout history,in the name of God and church have committed atrocities, against what the Bible teaches that being a Christian is, the conduct, the thoughts and deeds of a Christian, those men would be seen as horrible liars of who they represent.
In fact, if you want to speak of atrocities, why did the early Catholic Church have a Bible written in Latin save for the suppression of truth. They wanted to control the minds, beliefs and wills of the people by making keeping the Bible in Latin only ’scholars’ were able to read it, and their interpretation was Lorded over the masses regardless of whether it was truth.
Michael Behe’s book on this list at all is laughable. It has inspired no atrocities, but rather it has inspired further examination of the science and evidence behind evolution. The only people that need fear this kind of thing are Atheists and people who believe there is no intelligent design.
I tell you this, and whatever argument you can come up with will ultimately fail, because there is no other truth, without intelligent design(ID) there is NO intelligence. Without ID there is no worth to any living organism, much less you or I. Without ID there is no right or wrong. It cannot be any other way.
July 19th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Let me just quickly add, before it is said, I do believe in evolution (adaptation within the species) however, I disagree with Neo-Darwinists on the origin of man and the universe. So don’t bring that I am some anti-scientist. I believe science proves ID, and I am not just speaking of Michael Behe, but of other science include the 5th law of Thermodynamics, etc.
July 19th, 2008 at 11:13 am
“I have read enough comments referring to the atrocities ‘committed by Christians’. I am tired of reading it. First of all, these events, such as the crusades, the inquisition,the witch hunts, and whatever others you may include, were not perpetrated by Christians, but rather by evil and misguided people who called themselves Christians.”
And the Soviet Union’s crimes weren’t committed by Marxists but evil and misguided people who called themselves Marxists, and Islamist terrorism is committed by evil and dangerous people who…
The problem with this argument isn’t that there’s not a grain of truth to it, it’s that everyone from every ideology disassociates themselves form the fanatics and only highlights the good. These people read the Bible. The Catholic Church, people whose job it was to FULL-TIME engage with the words of Christ, spread these ideologies of hate (not the only thing they did, but one thing they did). Further, their logic was derived either from the Bible directly or from Christian ideology more broadly. For example: Charlemagne’s argument that it was okay to kill those who didn’t convert was that they were going to Hell anyways, so what did it matter when? That’s Christian dogma.
The reason why this matters is that it’s possible to either be Christian or read the Bible and nonetheless endorse atrocities. You can call them misguided if you’d like, but they’ve accepted Christ as their personal savior and worship God as the only God, so they meet the common definition of Christian.
“I am a Christian and I will tell you here and now if you hold up those individuals, who, throughout history,in the name of God and church have committed atrocities, against what the Bible teaches that being a Christian is, the conduct, the thoughts and deeds of a Christian, those men would be seen as horrible liars of who they represent.”
Eh, it’s only so-so.
Revelations implies that God will clean the Earth in fire and death, letting millions die just because of what they believe.
As noted above by many, Deuteronomy and Leviticus accept that it’s okay to sell your daughter into slavery, or that a virgin who is raped must marry her rapist.
Plenty of the early history parts of the Bible are filled with war, genocide and expansionism.
“In fact, if you want to speak of atrocities, why did the early Catholic Church have a Bible written in Latin save for the suppression of truth. They wanted to control the minds, beliefs and wills of the people by making keeping the Bible in Latin only ’scholars’ were able to read it, and their interpretation was Lorded over the masses regardless of whether it was truth.”
Okay, this is a very fair argument.
The problem is that those people ALSO read the Bible, and accepted Christ as their savior, yet they wanted to do all those things.
The other problem is that such atrocities and crusading mentality has not died down with the advent of a Bible available in vulgate languages.
Protestants committed atrocities even after the printing press. The Catholic Church to some degree condoned the Nazis, and Christians for centuries persecuted Jews, blacks and other racial minorities even when the Bible was in almost every home. And George W. Bush still uses crusading rhetoric now.
“Michael Behe’s book on this list at all is laughable. It has inspired no atrocities, but rather it has inspired further examination of the science and evidence behind evolution. The only people that need fear this kind of thing are Atheists and people who believe there is no intelligent design.”
This is like saying that a Flat Earth manual has inspired interest and discussion with science. The problem is when people use erroneous, silly and downright misleading arguments to cast aspersions on commonly accepted, richly supported theories that form the basis of entire sciences and technologies that are used to provide life-saving interventions. That’s what Behe is clearly doing. There is no argument against evolution that holds water among reasonable human beings. Evidence that is flat out wrong and distorted is not commendable, it is either laughable or condemnable.
“I tell you this, and whatever argument you can come up with will ultimately fail, because there is no other truth, without intelligent design(ID) there is NO intelligence. Without ID there is no worth to any living organism, much less you or I. Without ID there is no right or wrong. It cannot be any other way.”
The actual SCIENCE indicates otherwise. Where does your intelligent designer have to appear? All life forms show some degree of intelligence. Bacteria respond to stimuli in non-trivial manners. We can’t even predict the motion of a flatworm with a few hundred neurons. Non-human creatures have sensations, emotions, loyalty and even boredom. Why is it that all of THAT must emerge naturally but humans are so special that there has to be a supernatural intervention? In fact, if there’s an intelligent designer, humans are designed fairly poorly. But if you look at humans as logical extensions of previous primates, a lot of things make sense, including both human potentials and human limits.
“Let me just quickly add, before it is said, I do believe in evolution (adaptation within the species) however, I disagree with Neo-Darwinists on the origin of man and the universe.”
Let’s note what this means.
You believe that God created the universe. Whether through natural means or not, he has an active hand in the creation of the universe.
You believe that God then sat back for billions of years and did nothing until a few million years ago, when he started to force human evolution.
Why? Why does this make any sense? There’s a great Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic on this topic that goes something like, “We’ve just designed this amazing universe of inerrant simplicity and awe-inspiring vast wonder!” “Great. Now let’s sit around for a few billion years and then tell some desert people what to do.”
“I believe science proves ID, and I am not just speaking of Michael Behe, but of other science include the 5th law of Thermodynamics, etc.”
The fact that the universe seems to have easily accessible rules that explain wide swaths of data might mean that there’s an intelligent designer, or alternatively that creatures through the process of evolution are designed with at least an intuitive understanding of the rules. Humans have the capacity to perform math and geometry precisely BECAUSE it’s good to know physics, in order to construct a bow or complex hunting arrangements.
What’d make the latter hypothesis plausible? Well, “holes” in the data or human ability to perceive it, so to speak, would be odd for a creator but make sense from a natural evolution standpoint. And so we find that in fact our true understanding of science is fairly limited. We don’t have an elegant model for anything beyond two bodies in gravity despite centuries of Newtonian mechanics. Chaos theory and quantum physics indicates that even in PRINCIPLE our understanding of the universe is fairly limited. And it turns out that most scientists accept the hypothesis that the only model that can model the universe is the universe itself.
Now, why would a designer create some rules that are perfectly accessible and simple, then throw in other rules that are bizarrely complex and invalidate the very idea of intelligent collection of data, and then despite having designed such an elegant universe make it nonetheless so complex you have to know everything about it to model it?
You can just say “God works in mysterious ways”, but then you’ve proven your hypothesis is un-scientific. The problem with ID from the standpoint of assessing it as a true or false argument is that no matter what network of events transpire or what the science brings up, God can be said to have done it. Make some PREDICTIONS with your ID hypothesise (like the many predictions Christians have erroneously made about the limits of the science thanks to God – though to be fair scientists routinely underestimate how far they go) and we’ll let you play with the big boys.
July 19th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
ArekExcelsior:
Sorry I haven’t responded to your post until now, but I’ve been busy.
But anyway , I’ve figured it out…You are either dishonest, lazy or both. I’ve told you many times that you don’t know the Bible. This is a classic case of this if I have ever seen one.
You said,
“Someone doesn’t know their Old Testament. See Deuteronomy 22:23-24, “If, while in a town, a man happens to meet a woman who is engaged to be married, and he has sex with her, Take them both to the gate of the town and stone them to death: the girl, for not having cried for help in the town; the man, for having violated another man’s wife. You must banish this evil from among you.”
IF you had any kind of integrity and were committed to due diligence, YOU WOULD HAVE READ THE VERY NEXT VERSE! This scripture does NOT describe a rape victim, which even if you didn’t read the next verse you would have known by understanding the phrase, “the girl, for not having cried out for help.” This indicates the sex was consensual. This is about ADULTERY, not rape. The very next verse says,
“But if out in the country a man happens to meet a girl pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die.” Deuteronomy 22:25
You see Arek, This is what happened to the church…people like YOU got involved, and instead of reading the Bible for what is was, they read it in light of their own agendas. For them, it was usually power or money. I don’t know what your agenda is…maybe you feel more comfortable about your sin when you think the Bible is “full of errors and atrocities”. You want to quote scripture out of context (as if you know anything about it) while you read OTHER PEOPLE’S CRITIQUES, having no personal knowledge of what you are reading. You are like the person reading the tabloid who says, “Well, if it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t have written it”, having no intentions of testing the info to see if it was credible.
How embarrasing for you. I’ve said it before and I will say it again…YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT! STOP PRETENDING TO KNOW THE BIBLE. ALL YOU KNOW IS WHAT PEOPLE WHO OPPOSE IT THINK OF IT! And that couldn’t be more evident than by what you have written here.
You also said,
“And the Soviet Union’s crimes weren’t committed by Marxists but evil and misguided people who called themselves Marxists, and Islamist terrorism is committed by evil and dangerous people who…The problem with this argument isn’t that there’s not a grain of truth to it, it’s that everyone from every ideology disassociates themselves form the fanatics and only highlights the good. These people read the Bible.”
You also said, “The problem is that those people ALSO read the Bible, and accepted Christ as their savior, yet they wanted to do all those things”
This is hypocritical. You say that this argument is false because those people are supposedly just as Christian as we are. They read the Bible just like we did…
How ironic it is that you hold this position while you simultaneously call Michael Behe a quack!
The truth of the matter is that Dr. Behe is as well credentialed a scientist as anyone who opposes him. He is tenured at an accredited university that is well respected for rigorous study. You have no problem dismissing his claims as being propaganda and pseudo-science, yet you don’t believe that people in the church could have used false pretenses to advance false, pseudo-christian practices and values?
How do you explain this inequity? According to you, there CAN be false scientists, but there CANNOT be false Christians? Everything being advanced under the guise of Christianity “must” be fundamental to it, but oh by the way, everything that is purported to be science must be examined and compared to conventional wisdom? WHAT DO YOU THINK WE ARE SAYING WHEN WE SAY THESE PEOPLE WERE WRONG AND MAYBE THEY WERE NOT REAL CHRISTIANS? We do so because we are given to the scriptures, we actually KNOW what it says and have found men who suggest false ideas to be false teachers.
I simply don’t have to time or the inclination to go through all the so-called “proofs” that you offer to suggest that the Bible is a false truth, but you seem to be fixated on the fact that the Old Testament rendered many harsh judgments that seemed negative. Let he who has wisdom hear this…
If an infectious disease invades a person’s hand or foot, the disease must be cured in order to stop it from spreading. If no cure is available, the infected part of the body must be REMOVED to prevent the disease from overtaking the entire body. If Israel was the body, sin was the disease. According to the scriptures, judgment was the AMPUTATION of sin, but Jesus Christ was the antidote. That’s why Jesus does not judge the woman in the New Testament CAUGHT in the act of adultery, because His death would be the cure for her sinful tendencies.
Scoffers and opponents of God will not get this, and they shouldn’t. But you have and ear to hear, hear the truth.
Arek, this is my final post. My tone is harsh, but you left me no choice. I urged you not to speak about that which you don’t understand, but you would not listen. I pray that someone who might have been swayed by your false arguments will find comfort in these words.
July 19th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
This list is not about the Bible – please STICK TO THE TOPIC. I don’t want to see any more biblical debates here.
July 19th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
jfrater:
I have the ultimate respect for the fact that this is your area to police and I will not speak about the Bible again. I just have one question: what should we do when we come here just to read the list and person after person after person keeps attacking the Bible? Just pretend that they didn’t say it? Especially when they say things that we KNOW to be false. I’m just saying, I didn’t see anyone suggesting that people should stop attacking the Bible when it wasn’t even on the list. Those people should “stick to the list” as well, don’t you think?
July 19th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
tsheezy: I have no problem with that – I just don’t want to see this list become a debate over the veracity of the Bible – we all believe different things and shouldn’t try to convert people here.
July 19th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
ArekExcelsior: “Charlemagne’s argument that it was okay to kill those who didn’t convert was that they were going to Hell anyways, so what did it matter when? That’s Christian dogma.”
In fact that is not the case at all – first off Charlemagne was an emperor who did not convert to Christianity until his death – he had no dogmatic position in the Church. Secondly, what you say can’t be true at all because Catholics believe that a person may be saved at any time right up to their death – so it would be gross unCatholic to kill a person even if you saw them sin – the person should be given every opportunity to repent – and killing them “because they are going to hell anyway” is definitely not a Catholic view. Furthermore, the Catholic Church forbids forced conversions because it considers them invalid – a person can not convert without free will to do so – just as a shotgun marriage is considered invalid by the Church. There was a King who was forcing conversions of the Jews – the Pope excommunicated him for it and made it very clear that it is not okay. Wikipedia says this:
July 19th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
you forgot the Bible.
lol.
July 19th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
you do a gross injustice to Dewey. Learning how to think is monumentally more important, and incomparably harder, than memorizing lists of facts (a skill every three year old has mastered and practices as a matter of course).
if you want to go go after someone on the “teaching that fantasy matters and reality doesn’t”, then start with Plato.
i would also nominate “atlas shrugged”, although it may fall under your blanket protection of religious tracts. certainly many religions have a greater number of arrogant know-nothings than the Randists, but nowhere else is the incidence rate even remotely so high.
July 19th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
misanthropope: I feel that your vitriol might suggest that you are not especially confident in your views. You would be better served by telling us why Rand should be here and Dewey not. I think statistics show that fact based learning always provides better results than “learning to think” – which, at least it seems to me, is about as useful as “learning to breathe.”
July 20th, 2008 at 1:45 am
jfrater: The comparison of “learning to think” as being comparable to “learning to breathe” is a bit much. Memorizing facts and numbers, at least from what I’ve seen, only creates a sea of similarity. By teaching children how to critically think, we give them the opportunity to come up with things that we could only have dreamed of. Perhaps I’m too much of a dreamer, but I firmly believe that learning how to think outside of the box and/or critically, or by using the gray matter for something other than storage space, only then can a person learn.
July 20th, 2008 at 6:03 am
The (Un)Holy Bible should be #1 on that list.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
“misanthropope: I feel that your vitriol might suggest that you are not especially confident in your views. You would be better served by telling us why Rand should be here and Dewey not. I think statistics show that fact based learning always provides better results than “learning to think” – which, at least it seems to me, is about as useful as “learning to breathe.””
How could statistics alone show that argument? It’s bizarre to allege that there’s some clear-cut numerical guideline with one clear vector. The different approaches talk about innumerable different social variables, most of which can’t be measured.
Learning to breathe properly is actually an essential part of martial arts, lamaze, meditation, and exercise, so I think you’ve illustrated exactly the point: The process of thinking properly may SEEM trivial, but it actually isn’t.
If you force people through a rote set of facts that they don’t care about or engage with, they’ll remember virtually zero. If you have people engage with the material, retention is much higher. There’s no piece of evidence that indicates otherwise. The question is, what DOES get people engaged?
“Also many movements against Jews (such as forced conversions by King Robert the Pious of France, Richard II, Duke of Normandy, and Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor around 1007-12) had been quashed by either Roman Catholicism’s Papacy or its Bishop”
Where does it say this? The pogrom article does not include this. Might be the result of an edit war. In any respect, notice what it says. MANY, not all. Counter-examples include the Pogrom of Limerick, extensively backed by the church.
“In fact that is not the case at all – first off Charlemagne was an emperor who did not convert to Christianity until his death”
This is a poor reading of history. Charlemagne had converted in all but name, embracing every element of the dogma. He only postponed BAPTISM itself because he believed the actions he would commit would shame God. This did not stop him, and numerous Christian soldiers, from engaging in forced conversions and murder.
“Secondly, what you say can’t be true at all because Catholics believe that a person may be saved at any time right up to their death – so it would be gross unCatholic to kill a person even if you saw them sin”
The argument hinges on the notion that the person resists conversion and thus is lost. Further, Protestant justifications involving predestination led to some heinous outcomes as well.
Do I have to go into the Christian justifications for colonialism, slaughter of Native Americans and Indians, etc.? Is that really necessary to make the point that Christianity has been used as a justification for racialized atrocities?
“Furthermore, the Catholic Church forbids forced conversions because it considers them invalid – a person can not convert without free will to do so – just as a shotgun marriage is considered invalid by the Church.”
Which did not stop them from accepting numerous forced converts throughout their history. I believe that is a relatively new policy. Christianity expanded through kings who imposed the will on the populace: See the state churches of Anglicanism, for example, and the religious persecution experienced. To deny that all this occurred is to be historically dishonest.
“IF you had any kind of integrity and were committed to due diligence, YOU WOULD HAVE READ THE VERY NEXT VERSE! This scripture does NOT describe a rape victim, which even if you didn’t read the next verse you would have known by understanding the phrase, “the girl, for not having cried out for help.” This indicates the sex was consensual. This is about ADULTERY, not rape. The very next verse says,”
THIS reading is dishonest.
First of all, the context clearly establishes rape. Alternative translations indicate so.
But secondly, so what?
If it applies to a woman having consensual sex, it implies that they should be MURDERED for this.
You didn’t bat an eyelash at this despite reading it.
Doesn’t that show the power of the dogma?
Further, the NEXT scenario after the rape in the countryside is the rape of a virgin. In that case, the rapist must pay the father and the victim IS FORCED TO MARRY THE RAPIST.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
(Sorry for the double-post, size limits). Or, as Kent Ashcroft indicated in an open letter to Dr. Laura: ()
“h) Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev 19:27. How should they die?”
“If an infectious disease invades a person’s hand or foot, the disease must be cured in order to stop it from spreading. If no cure is available, the infected part of the body must be REMOVED to prevent the disease from overtaking the entire body…”
This is apologia for the fact that your Bible, the book that you claim is a clear path to truth, has half of its content riddled with sexist, racist, statist passages that involve stoning people for having done nothing wrong and allowing daughters to be sold into slavery (Exodus 21:7).
But let’s say you’re correct. Let’s also assume that Jesus and his primarily Jewish followers did not embrace at least some of these elements.
Is the New Testament clean?
You simply refused to respond to the notion that Revelations is a horrible tract implying that God will allow torment and pain of billions of people.
Or these brilliant passages, not only contradictory but offensive:
“MT 5:22 Anger by itself is a sin.
EP 4:26 Anger is not necessarily a sin.
MT 5:22 Anger by itself is a sin.
MT 11:22-24, LK 10:13-15 Jesus curses the inhabitants of several cities who are not sufficiently impressed with his mighty works.
MT 21:19, MK 11:12-14 Jesus curses a fig tree when it fails to bear fruit out of season.
MK 3:5 Jesus looks around “angrily.”
MT 5:39, MT 5:44 Jesus says: “Do not resist evil. Love your enemies.”
MT 6:15, 12:34, 16:3, 22:18, 23:13-15, 17, 19, 27, 29, 33, MK 7:6, LK 11:40, 44, 12:56 Jesus repeatedly hurls epithets at his opponents.”
The reason why the Bible can be used for such apologia is because it is riddled with contradictions. This makes sense, it is a massive book incorporating thousands of years of disparate cultural traditions written by different authors. Values change. This doesn’t mean that Christian thought, either in the Bible or out, has no value. But there ARE quotes attributed to Jesus where he claims to be a sword spread upon the Earth.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
The reason why the Bible can be used for such apologia is because it is riddled with contradictions. This makes sense, it is a massive book incorporating thousands of years of disparate cultural traditions written by different authors. Values change. This doesn’t mean that Christian thought, either in the Bible or out, has no value. But there ARE quotes attributed to Jesus where he claims to be a sword spread upon the Earth.
“How ironic it is that you hold this position while you simultaneously call Michael Behe a quack!
The truth of the matter is that Dr. Behe is as well credentialed a scientist as anyone who opposes him. He is tenured at an accredited university that is well respected for rigorous study. You have no problem dismissing his claims as being propaganda and pseudo-science, yet you don’t believe that people in the church could have used false pretenses to advance false, pseudo-christian practices and values?”
Here’s the difference.
To be a scientist, you have to have a basic respect for the scientific method and have done research. I believe most of Behe’s work is scientific. Darwin’s Black Box simply isn’t, even though it contains science used in bad arguments. Nonetheless, Behe IS a scientist. I have never said otherwise, and it was dishonest of you to say so. I only engaged with his ARGUMENTS, instead of ad hominems upon the capacity of my opponent to “understand” as you seem so enamored of doing.
More importantly, and what indicates that I hold no contradiction: Wehnrer von Braun, scientists who tried to prove tobacco wasn’t dangerous, chemical scientists that produce poisons, etc. are all scientists even though I revile what they do.
But Behe has been called out by the scientific community. There, the safeguards work: Everyone disagrees with him.
To be a Christian, one has to accept Christ as their savior.
Now, not only have kings, Presidents and Prime Ministers who have done that endorsed massive atrocities, but their populations complied. The Crusades were quite popular with the peasantry, so much so that they had just TOO MANY unprofessional recruits! And a substantial portion of the American population now desires to spread a crusade to the Middle East again or to bring nuclear hellfire to the infidels (Ann Coulter had a great comment about nuking people just for fun).
It can be argued that science has intrinsic methods institutionally to hedge against some of its worst outcomes. Christianity simply doesn’t.
“You want to quote scripture out of context (as if you know anything about it) while you read OTHER PEOPLE’S CRITIQUES, having no personal knowledge of what you are reading. You are like the person reading the tabloid who says, “Well, if it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t have written it”, having no intentions of testing the info to see if it was credible.”
I gave you a quote you did not deny the veracity of. Instead of looking inward and honestly asking, “Wait a second, is it really okay that they’d stone someone to death for the crime of martial infidelity?”, you decided to simply say that I had taken the quote out of context. Further, you didn’t read any of the other supplementary material I provided, which is taken from DOZENS of passages in the Bible. If you want to argue for a literal interpretation of every word in the Bible, you have to defend every word. You’ve simply refused to.
Let me be clear: I don’t have a problem with Christianity or Christians. The Quakers I have had the pleasure of working with have been people with honest commitments to peace and love, humbling me in many great ways even with my Buddhist commitments. But if you’re going to not let Marxists off the hook for Stalinism because he didn’t REALLY understand the dogma, it’s hypocritical for you to do so for your own faith. Worse, if you dismiss every person who professes Christ’s love but retains racism, or militarism, or crusading desires, or fundamentalist insanity, as not REALLY Christian, then all you’ve done is semantically reduce the population of Christians to a few thousand people that you personally agree with. Which is fantastic for you, but the rest of us still have to deal with the “not Christians” who have the Bible, can quote passages from it ad nauseum, and yet espouse monstrosities.
“tsheezy: I have no problem with that – I just don’t want to see this list become a debate over the veracity of the Bible – we all believe different things and shouldn’t try to convert people here.”
The irony is that I’ve said these exact things to others previously. But if someone is going to come in and pretend that Christianity and the Bible have never been responsible for any atrocities, I’m going to call them on that apologia.
July 20th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
ArekExcelsior:
You are impossible my man.
You think I didn’t answer you because I don’t have answers. I didn’t answer because:
1. I was asked to limit my comments to that which is concerning the list. I respect this from the moderator, so I decided to address the main issues. If I address your every issue, MY POSTS WOULD BE EQUIVALENT TO A DISSERTATION! Simply don’t have time…
2. I don’t really believe this would be a productive use of my time. I don’t think an argument exists that would cause you to change your mind, true or not. I have illustrated what I intended. Your critique of the Bible is not credible. Even if the Bible could be proven to be rubbish, you certainly would not be qualified to do so.
I actually offered my email so that we could toss it up on another platform, but it was removed for my safety by the moderator. Probably a good thing. Anyway, I’m off…nothing more to say here. Happy debating!
July 20th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
“1. I was asked to limit my comments to that which is concerning the list. I respect this from the moderator, so I decided to address the main issues. If I address your every issue, MY POSTS WOULD BE EQUIVALENT TO A DISSERTATION! Simply don’t have time…”
I understand both issues. I replied primarily to the list at first, then to subsidiary comments. Incidentally, I was commenting mostly AGAINST those who thought the Bible deserved to be on the list, as I think a) the good in a book is important too, with the Bible and similar religious texts having enough good to balance the bad and b) because I feel the Crusades used religion as a MOTIVATOR to appeal to the masses but were fundamentally political and economic conflicts between competing empires.
Nonetheless, were the Bible unequivocal and Christianity truly always an ideology of peace, we would see much less atrocities associated with its name and using it as a justification.
Let me give an analog from my own experience. I had long argued that there were no Buddhist atrocities or empires. Now, I still would argue that the Buddhist history here is quite good, but it’s not unmitigated. Ashoka incorporated a lot of Buddhism into his work, which did help to make his kingdom much more prosperous, but by modern standards he was hardly a saint. Empires whose primary political affiliation was Buddhist did exist: For example, Mongka the Khan said that Buddhism was the palm to other religions as the finger, yet was like other Khans brutal and expansionistic. And Tibet itself before the Chinese invasion was hardly a pretty place. So while I would argue that Buddhism’s net contribution has been positive, I cannot deny that Buddhism has not failed to mitigate against atrocities done in its name. Christianity has the same failure, except the atrocities tend to be much grander in scale, thanks to the European conquest of the world.
The problem with your allegation that you would have to write dissertations? Your short replies simply missed the point. Even the fact that you characterized my argument as saying the Bible is rubbish shows that you are responding from kneejerk defensiveness instead of seriously considering the issues. I have never once used that phrase or even argued that implication. Rather, there IS bad in the Bible that the Bible as a book argues for. The insane, draconian, tyrannical, sexist, racist, homophobic elements of Deuteronomy and Leviticus are ARGUED FOR and said to be God’s just law. If we accept those passages literally, we should stone people for infidelity, force rape victims to marry their rapist (Deuteronomy 22:29, “She must marry the rapist, because he has violated her. And so long as he lives, he may not divorce her”, especially monstrous because it denies even the POSSIBILITY of divorce), and execute disobedient children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). Note that it’s not all bad. There’s also prescriptions to spend a year, uninterrupted by military service, after marriage for man and wife to get to know each other.
In short: If your position is that the Bible, taken in its totality, is every piece of it just and true, then we must accept barbarism and slavery. If your position is that it must be read carefully, with an eye toward what is simply anachronistic or primitive and what is true, then you may have an argument.
That is my reply to you on this topic. I wish you had decided to discuss Behe instead of the Bible, of course.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:54 pm
The list are not meant to be facts or truth. It just one guy’s perspective manner. Communist Manifesto? It argued for the government controls by the workers, unfortunately, capitalist disguised themselves as “communist” to convince the masses to follow them. We still screwed without commies.
July 22nd, 2008 at 12:39 am
“It argued for the government controls by the workers, unfortunately, capitalist disguised themselves as “communist” to convince the masses to follow them. We still screwed without commies.”
This is something I don’t understand about a lot of fellow leftists. They want to characterize the Soviet Union, a society with very limited markets, central planning as the primary means of allocation, and no corporations as a capitalist society. Everything bad is equated to capitalism. It’s an error Marx explicitly WARNED against. It’s ironic given how much time he spent mentioning exactly what was UNIQUE about capitalism structurally and mentioning how it was possible for non-capitalist institutions, like feudalism, to be oppressive.
Was the Soviet Union what Marx and Engels envisioned? Absolutely not. Basic elements of the program mentioned in the Communist Manifesto were never reached, let alone anything resembling worker’s liberty. But Jefferson clearly didn’t intend for his freedom to become bourgeois capitalism, yet that was the clear outcome of the proposed institutions. Marxists identified this strongly, pointing to the structural outcomes of Enlightenment liberalism. Why do Marxists now get to claim that all those Leninists and Trotskyists and Stalinists weren’t REAL Marxists? What is the difference between that claim and the claim of a modern Enlightenment sympathizer that American freedom really wasn’t INTENDED to produce capitalism?
Yes, the Soviet Union didn’t produce the outcomes of socialist dreamers. And yes, that’s not the only thing Marx inspired. American Communists did great things. So did Communists and anarchists in Spain. So did a lot of Communist Parties in Europe, creating the modern safety net that Europe has and America woefully lacks. But that doesn’t mean that Marxism as an ideology doesn’t have problems. Michael Albert has I think made a compelling case that Marxism is an ideology that is the means for the coordinator class, doctors and managers and lawyers and so forth, to get rid of capitalists while seizing control of the means of production themselves and depriving workers of their rights, just as the Enlightment ideology PREACHED freedom but ended up really being the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie. Which means we need to move past Marxism, or at least traditional forms of it, if we want to really start thinking about alternative social structures.
Of course we’re still screwed without Commies. The response to the Soviet Union going down should be, “One down, one to go.”
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:16 am
if the jews did plan to ‘run the worl’ and in fact did… then wouldnt it be easy for them to claim that the ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was a hoax concocted by ‘jew hating’ gentiles?…
im surprised at how easily you claim it as being a ‘hoax’ are you an expert in the matter?
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:11 am
I’m shocked after reading the first 9 that these people think Michael Behe’s book “Darwin’s Black Box” is comparable to the others and deserves to be on the same list.
Apparently it would be inexcusable to allow ANYONE to question whether the current scientific theories are correct.
Excuse me, but that’s an overstatement. It’s acceptable to question most scientific theories, but definitely not evolution.
NO ONE, not even fellow a scientists like Michael Behe, is allowed to scrutinize the evidence concerning evolution!
At the same time though, I’m very pleased that Michael Behe’s book “Darwin’s Black Box” has caused such a stir. After all, history is filled with people who dared to question the current predominant theory only to be ostracized by the scientific community and later found to be correct!
Don’t be surprised when Michael Behe is vindicated.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:32 am
Hardy: Behe will not be vindicated. His book was based on ambiguous evidence, a penchant for editorialization, and a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. “Irreducible complexity” has been shown, both theoretically and empirically, to be perfectly capable of arising via the standard evolutionary mechanisms. Behe – and anyone else, for that matter – is allowed, and in fact encouraged to challenge the status quo in science, so long as they have the evidence to back up their claim and do their research beforehand. Behe, unfortunately, does neither and thus he does not have a leg to stand on. That being said, I don’t agree that the book should have been included in this list because it is, at best, forgetable. Creationists will pound their pulpits with or without the pseudoscientific justification to do so.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:37 am
“if the jews did plan to ‘run the worl’ and in fact did… then wouldnt it be easy for them to claim that the ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was a hoax concocted by ‘jew hating’ gentiles?…”
It’d be massively easy for them to CLAIM that whether they ruled the world or not. Claims are easy to make. But it’s not Jews that make this claim, but everyone who seriously evaluates the evidence.
“Excuse me, but that’s an overstatement. It’s acceptable to question most scientific theories, but definitely not evolution.”
If you publish a book trying to disprove Newtonian mechanics and postulate that gravity follows an inverse cube, you will be roundly mocked even more than Behe.
Yes, science is about questioning. INFORMED questioning. Questioning through the process of peer review (which Behe refused to go through) and through experimentation and evidence. Once a theory has evidence behind it, it has weight. You must PROVE an alternate theory or provide evidence for your null hypothesis, in direct proportion with the degree of proof that the theory has. To even mitigate against strict Newtonian mechanics, Einstein had to publish and have his theories objectively tested. Quantum physics and chaos theory each went through similar processes before being accepted as legitimate science. Creation science just tries to get in the easy way.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:46 am
It’s interesting to me that a book that influences the way people view science is seen as worse than a book like Mein Kampf that directly led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
You state that Behe is driven by an agenda, which is likely true, but you’re being hypocritical if you don’t think you have an agenda by putting him at the top of the list.
To me this is a classic example of secular humanist hypocrisy. For anyone who disagrees with me, I’d love to hear it, but please use logic instead of name-calling.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:50 am
SlickWilly, Thank you for the courteous reply, where can I get a look at the theoretical and empirical evidence that have shown Irreducible complexity to be perfectly capable of arising via the standard evolutionary mechanisms. And in your opinion, what is the three best evidences that the big bang and evolution are the cause of everything we see. Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you