Friday, September 25, 2009

Kirk Cameron and Preaching Hate on Campus

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort are continuing to build on their legacy of hate-mongering and bigotry. Their next act, which they are bragging in interviews by groups and individuals who share their bigotry, is the moral equivalent of a Neo-Nazi group going onto campus and handing out copies of the Old Testament with a 50-page Neo-Nazi introduction. Or the equivalent to a KKK organization handing out copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin with an introduction promoting their racist agenda.

See, MSNBC, Kirk Cameron defends anti-Darwin stance

Specifically, Cameron and Comfort have decided to invest their time and their labor to handing out copies of Darwin's "Origin of Species" on college campuses with a 50 page introduction. This introduction will tell students the alleged weaknesses of evolution – namely the way that evolution says that nothing can create something, and how evolution is the intellectual ancestor of the Holocaust.

However, I have argued in this blog that you can tell a lot about what is in a man’s heart by the mistakes that he makes. With each mistake, we can ask, "Why did he make that mistake and not some other?" If their beliefs cannot be explained by an appeal to reason and evidence, then the next most likely explanation is to be found in the desires of the person making the mistake.

I do not need to tell any reader with a smidge of intelligence that evolution is not a theory about how something can come from nothing. It is a theory that explains how one type of biological entity can change into another type of biological entity over time by natural selection acting on random mutations.

I also do not need to tell any reader with a smidge of intelligence that theories of natural selection are not the intellectual foundation of the holocaust. The holocaust was wholly grounded on the long-standing practice of artificial selection. It does not take much intelligence to grasp the fact that the holocaust was not natural at all – it was clearly man-made.

In fact, this practice of artificial selection is precisely what inspired Darwin to come up with his theory of natural selection. He looked, for example, at the way that animal breeders selected for specific traits and came up with the idea that, in times of stress, nature can do exactly what the breeders are doing. In times of stress, nature will select for those qualities that will make it easier for animals to find food and, over time, the whole population will have that trait.

There are a lot of people who do not understand these facts, in spite of how simple they are to understand. These are people for whom hatred and bigotry has such a blinding effect that they cannot even see what is most obvious.

If you want to preach hatred, there are few methods more popular today than to make false accusations that those you hate and want others to hate are responsible for the most despicable acts of the 20th century.

Cameron and Comfort feel no particular need to hate farmers, ranchers, and others who have practiced the art of artificial selection for millennia. They want to hate atheists – and they want others to hate atheists as they do. So, they want to believe a lie – that the Holocaust can be blamed on a theory of natural selection instead of a theory of artificial selection. And they are desperate to spread their lies and their hate as far as they are able.

And, in fact, even if Hitler had drawn his ideas from a theory of natural selection, blaming those who developed the theory for the Holocaust would still be as absurd as blaming the true originators of the ideas of the Holocaust – farmers, ranchers, and the like.

Cameron and Comfort are into feeding a persisting form of the same type of hatred. While their actions should be treated just like the analogous actions described above – they should be seen in the same light as Neo-Nazis handing out hate-mongering propaganda appended to the Old Testament, unfortunately we live in a society where the public attitude towards atheists is more like the attitude towards Jews in the 1920s, then the attitude towards blacks today.

These are truly two despicable human beings.

As are any who praise their work.

As are any who will not respond to their efforts the way they would respond to any other hate-group coming onto campus to spread their hatred, bigotry, and lies among the student population.

6 comments:

  1. I wonder what Cameron and Comfort think about Genesis 30:31-43, where, as the story goes, Jacob did how own bit of "eugenics" with goats?

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  2. I wonder how one can differentiate between artificial and natural selection? Seems like a handy contortion. If the laws of nature are universally applicable, they should apply to human behavior just a surely they apply to other interactions of matter and energy.

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  3. That's a good point, technically all selection is "natural", since humans are a part of nature. However that would also mean that we'd have to get rid of the word artificial completely. We couldn't have artificial rocks, or sweetners, or waterfalls, etc etc. Because technically everything is part of nature or made by natural beings (humans).

    I think the whole point of the word "artificial" is to draw a line between "that which is created by humans" and "everything else". So in this case it very clearly IS artificial selection.

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  4. artificial and natural selection the same way that one can differentiate between artificial and natural sweateners - by whether there is human involvement.

    However one wants to make the distinction, Darwin did not invent artificial selection. Humans had known about it for thousands of years. So, blaming Darwin for the Holocaust is still the act of a person who seeks to make a living (or to make a life) selling hate.

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  5. So students will learn evolution from real scientists with PhD. Yet their gonna believe two closet homosexuals handing out propaganda on campus. I dont think so. Whats bein done to ban these idiots from stepping on to campuses.

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  6. I'm not really much of a fan of banning anybody from campus.

    I would rather see them on campus with a vocal demonstration against the hate-mongering bigotry contained in their effort to blame atheists for the Holocaust.

    I think society is better off with a useful lesson against this type of immorality (with examples to point to and say, "Do not be like them - they are not good people") than by forced silence

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