why you should think before ranting

According to an anti-science demagogue, teaching evolution and being an atheist is banned by law.





I’m not sure why an American far right pundit wannabe, Timothy Birdnow, is writing in a Canadian conservative publication about how much he hates atheists, but apparently he is. And his thesis is not a lot saner than the story of a father threatening to report his daughter to the FBI for being an atheist. According to Birdnow, the Constitution doesn’t allow atheists to be atheists since it only specifies freedom of religion not freedom from religion. Clearly, the man is not exactly what you’d call the brightest legal mind in the nation, to put it mildly. He also isn’t good at editing his articles because after insisting that atheism and unbelief aren’t protected by law, he tries to turn atheism into a full blown religion with the following strained attempt at logic…

Atheism worships (they hate that word) the Cosmos, Evolution, and Reason. The Big Bang and Darwinian Evolution are the creation myths, and the Big Crunch the prophecied [sic] cataclysm.

You know, I’ve never encountered an atheist who prays to a picture of Darwin or a poster from a physics class with a graphic of the Big Bang. I’ve never seen an incantation over The Origin of the Species or a homily after the reading of A Brief History of Time. There’s also no building where atheists gather once a week to recite or memorize passages from the latest papers on astrophysics and evolutionary biology. So where’s the worship and the ritual? Oh and the whole thing about the Big Crunch as the doomsday cataclysm? At the rate that our universe is expanding, it seems very, very unlikely that it would actually happen. The current mainstream idea of how the universe will end involves the observable cosmos running out of fuel over trillions of years. If you’re going to make comparisons, at lest try to get your cataclysms right. But his argument gets even stranger…

Oh, I know; these are scientific concepts and not simply faith-based stories.

So then what’s your point? If you know these aren’t just tall tales, what are you complaining about and why are you comparing them to myths written sometime during the bronze age? The evidence for all those scientific concepts are repeatable, observable facts. The evidence for the Bible is people demanding that we accept it as a true account and an accurate transcription of conversations with a supernatural entity. Sorry but when the facts are in front of me, I’m temped to go by the facts. But that’s just what Birdnow expects and counters with…

Of course, this means that the ultimate questions of where this random, mechanistic universe came from cannot be answered. God is as good of an answer as any, but most atheists simply insist there can be none and believe in a mechanical universe that generated spontaneously with physical laws balanced just right for the evolution of life and human consciousness.

If you believe you can’t answer the question of where the universe came from and decide to invoke a creature for which we have no evidence in any way, shape or form other than philosophical musings of your fans, you are intellectually lazy. God is not as good an answer as any because we have no proof for an all knowing and omnipotent creature creating the cosmos. Hell, if we need to use magic to make a theory work, that theory is just wishful thinking. And the whole idea that the laws of physics are balanced just right for evolution and for human consciousness? Nonsense according to physicists.

There are plenty of other things I could mention in Birdnow’s long, tedious, grossly uninformed rant which has so much hatred and passion emptied into it, one can imagine him foaming at the mouth and barking while he pounded this fiery mini-screed into his keyboard. But it’s probably best that I leave it at this. Just because you write in a way that makes readers imagine you leaping out of the screen and trying to beat them over the head with something heavy, doesn’t give your arguments a single shred of validity.