Evolution? Not in OUR School!

Not too long ago, a High School in Sedalia, Missouri, prevented its band students from wearing a T-shirt with an evolutionary motif.  The shirt said “Brass Evolutions 2009″ and depicted the popular image of a long line of evolving hominids, with a monkey all the way to the left gradually evolving into modern homo sapiens, except that the hominids were also holding various brass instruments that evolved along with them.

Why is this so offensive?  Apparently, the good people of Sedalia, Missouri, are offended by evolution!  One of the teachers in the district went so far as to say, “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”  Well, I hate to say it, but if the school has hired a moron of this lady’s caliber, then she is entirely correct that this school should not be associated with evolution.  Why, after all, should we sully evolution’s good name by associating it with a school filled with incompetent goons?  If the shirts could have talked, they likely would have been complaining more than the idiotic parents were.  “Get me off the torsos of these creationist fucks!”

The assistant superintendent, believe it or not, is an even bigger idiot:

Pollitt said the district is required by law to remain neutral where religion is concerned.

“If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” he said.

First of all, this is simply retarded.  Everyone knows that if Jesus were on the cross, he wouldn’t be able to play a brass instrument.  His fucking hands are nailed down.  Second of all, brass instruments can’t be resurrected, most notably because they aren’t alive, but also because you can’t resurrect anything.  Third, Jesus would have totally been a bass player.

But the question remains:  Is evolution a religion?  Only if you redefine religion in such a way that it applies to virtually anything.  In an effort to prevent future offense, I can imagine the shirts will say nothing about the religions of physics, chemistry, animal husbandry, biology, textiles, or psychology.  I recommend a picture of a bunny rabbit—an unevolved bunny rabbit, mind you—to help quench the insatiable and retarded anger of the residents of Sedalia.

And yes, the residents of Sedalia are retarded.  A recent letter to the editor confirmed this fact further.  The letter says:

Recent events regarding certain contraband T-shirts have brought me to a realization. Sedalia has not had a good book burning in many years.

Right on, buddy.  Sedalia hasn’t had a good witch-burning in years, either!  This surely explains the proliferation of witches in modern times!

…other kinds of blasphemous material plagues the bookshelves of our schools. Pages and pages of literature that pollute the minds of our children with theories such as evolution and those that discuss unholy acts such as abortion and homosexuality. On top of that, kids can now access the Internet and all of its “wholesome” content.

I think this man was born out of his mother’s ass.  How dare kids learn things in school!  What the school needs is to fill the library with books that don’t talk about men lying with other men (Lev. 18:22), or dashing infants’ heads on rocks (Psalm 137:9), or daughters getting their father drunk to fuck him (Gen. 19:32).  The library needs books like the Bible, that don’t have unholy content like that!

It could be the first step in a final solution to removing Satan’s “grasp” from our “throats.”

This is perhaps the most bothering sentence in the whole letter.  Why on Earth does he have inscrutably random scare quotes around the words grasp and throats, but not Satan?  Apparently he’s using grasp and throats as figurative (is he mentally grasping our spiritual throats?), but takes the existence of Satan quite literally.  No, of all the words in that sentence, surely grasp and throats are the least literal and most figurative!  Personally, I don’t think this guy has a “grasp” on “reality” and I wish someone would grasp his “throat.”

Illogical Answers in Genesis (Introduction)

The creationist organization Answers in Genesis (AiG) is perhaps best known as the group that brought us the creation museum, an impending sense of doom for the future of humanity, and the world’s largest bucket of cognitive dissonance (only slightly smaller than the world’s largest ball of twine).  However, I was delighted to learn that AiG is apparently branching out from its expertise in stupidity; one of their authors has been writing a series of articles about logical fallacies!  Even better, the article will focus specifically on logical fallacies made by “evolutionists” (i.e., scientists).  Of course, creationists have been unintentionally writing about logical fallacies for ages, as their arguments are typically nothing more than lengthy strings of incomprehensible jibberish and invalid reasoning.  But now, after years of such indirect tutelage and so much direct experience in the art of idiotic arguments, the AiG now considers itself an expert in this field.  And if the old elementary school adage is correct—It takes one to know one!—then the creationists certainly have the advantage when it comes to logical fallacies.

Normally, one would think that watching a creationist explain logical fallacies would be like watching an old woman with osteoporosis explain powerlifting: both can explain the subject in the abstract, but as soon as they attempt to actually do it, they fall crumpled to the ground in helpless, quivering lumps after giving themselves a hernia and shitting their pants.  In reality, though, reading an AiG creationist’s thoughts about logic isn’t quite that bad.

It’s worse.  Reading AiG’s series of articles on logic is literally worse than an old lady herniating and shitting herself while sustaining a serious, life-threatening injury.  If the ethical theory of utilitarianism holds any merit whatsoever, then it would take at least 43 nearly-dead old ladies with shit-stained pants for their suffering to outweigh the untold horrors released upon the world by this ghastly and grossly incompetent treatment of logical fallacies.  Such is the unimaginable stupidity of these articles.

Now, of all the grease-painted mimes scrambling out of the clown car that is AiG, a young-Earth creationist astrophysicist named Jason Lisle has been given the daunting task of explaining logic.  He seems to be the perfect man for the job, as even his own credentials appear to be logically contradictory.  The guy studied astronomical objects that are measured in distances far exceeding a few thousand light years, in which case it took light from some of these objects millions and billions of years to reach us, and in spite of this believes the universe is a few thousand years old.  Either this guy thinks the speed of light is significantly faster than its currently accepted value, or else he thinks the universe is the size of a fucking shoebox.  Being a creationist astrophysicist is almost like being a historian who thinks the world was created just a few seconds ago.  (Incidentally, even getting a doctoral degree in the history of a few seconds ago is slightly more difficult than getting one for creation science, which generally requires little more than holding a Bible, refraining from drooling excessively, and paying $10,000 to Kent Hovind.)

According to his biography page, Lisle is interested in developing models of stellar aging and cosmology—that is, he wants to ignore current models of stellar aging because they contradict a literal reading of Genesis!  But the biography page continues by saying, “Creationist thinking in these areas is still very preliminary.”  If by “preliminary” you mean outlandish, idiotic, totally incompatible with the evidence, and bordering on insane, then I agree.

Needless to say, Jason Lisle is probably an expert in logical fallacies and contradiction, given his abundant personal experience and capacity to resolve a PhD in astrophysics with young-Earth creationism.  However, his introduction to the logical fallacy series is just a puff piece going over the basics of logic, so I won’t bother discussing it here, as this is no doubt familiar territory for those of you who have mastered the ability to use a toilet.  I will, however, briefly mock it.

To lead off, Lisle says:

I have often thought it would be fun to carry a little buzzer that I could push when someone makes a fundamental mistake in reasoning. Of course, that would be impolite. However, we should all become familiar with logical fallacies so that our mental buzzer goes off whenever we hear a mistake in reasoning.

Yes, and I have often thought it would be fun to throw my bloody feces in peoples’ faces whenever they make a fundamental mistake in reasoning.  Because this is impolite, though, I will refrain from doing so and will only throw mental feces covered in blood.  In fact, I will throw the greatest conceivable mental bloody feces, which will no doubt immediately pop into existence as soon as I mentally unleash it, owing to the validity of the ontological argument.  As such, I ask you, dear reader, to envision Jason Lisle’s face covered in the greatest conceivable bloody feces each time I rebut one of his horrid arguments.  Throughout the coming months, there will be many occasions for imagining his bloody, shit-faced visage, as I will regularly dissect and eviscerate each article in his series about logical fallacies.  Be on the lookout!  Coming up soon: the argument from reification.