I’m a glutton for punishment.

I’ve been reading our creationist friend’s blog and I saw this.
It actually sounded nice until the last couple paragraphs, but then I realized that there were some really bad misconceptions (imagine that?!?). First off, why should only San Francisco proper join this great new country? Is the rest of the Bay Area not liberal enough for inclusion? Secondly, and more egregiously, liberals don’t work?

I’d like to see Radar actually cite examples here, which I know will be a huge challenge for him, considering the tenuous relationship he has with actual facts. I challenge him to find a red state that can match the output of California or New York. Texas has money literally coming out of the ground, and they can’t touch us. According to the The bureau of Economic Analysis our GSP is 1.8 times that of Texas ($1.5 trillion to $885 billion). We might not get to work until 10:00, but we work damn hard, and get shit done. Heard of Google? Yahoo? Apple? Fuck, you heard of the Computer Industry? All from California. That blog contraption you’re posting on? California. All of the food that goes into your right-wing young-earth creationist mouth is paid for with money which is a direct result of some dirty hippies from the Bay area who just sat around 30 years ago smoking weed and accidentally created an entire new economic ecosystem. I’m sure if California didn’t create the whole damn computer industry, Indiana would have stepped up and done so –except it’d be corn based.

I also really admire his anecdote from San Francisco. First off, the ‘gay section’ is called The Castro, you ignorant troglodyte, and I’ve walked down it many a time with nary a word said. I’m going to wager that you weren’t exactly ‘minding your own business either’. I’m so sure a right wing nut job would just be wandering around the Castro ‘minding his own business’. Admit it, you were looking for a leather daddy and couldn’t find any takers, then you got pissed. That’s always the story with homophobes like you.

Now, I’ve read Radar’s blog, and I’m familiar with his style of argument, but I’ve anticipated it. So let me retort before he even starts the rusty cogs that pass for a brain in that monstrously over sized drool-box he calls a head.
First, you’ll say that I’m not fit to judge the Midwest because I don’t understand it. Radar, I can judge the Midwest because I’ve lived there almost all of my life, and you know something? It really sucks. First off, your state –hell, pretty much every state west of Pennsylvania– is flat and boring. Ansel Adams did not travel to Indiana to take life-affirming pictures of your landscape. He did, however take some quite lovely pictures of my adopted state. Hell, he even took a photo of the city you love to hate. That is, of course, before he was killed and eaten by the indigenous hippy population in a tragic case of the munchies. The other problem with the Midwest is that people like you are driving away all the smart people. There’s a reason they call it the rust belt and why the population has been declining these past 20 years. It’s no fun at all to be called into your boss’s office and have to debate evolution ad nauseum. If you don’t believe in it, that’s great. Believe that the world was created by God or Vishnu or Allah or even Rifle Jesus, but keep quiet about it. You work as a computer security expert, which means you have absolutely no qualifications to debate evolution with any lucidity or insight. Your arguments are not compelling, they’re not insightful, and they’re not even original. At the very least, be original; claim evolution is incorrect because humans don’t retain the poop-flinging gene that chimpanzees obviously posses. Everyone knows how useful poop-flinging can be in today’s society.

Let me relate a story to you: There was a cryptographer who had a friend that fancied himself to be a cryptographer, and was always coming up with encryption algorithms. Every time he came up with a new one, he’d give it to his friend, who would come back with a reason why it was not secure. Invariably, the Cryptographer got tired of this, and when his friend came to him with yet another algorithm, he told him why it wouldn’t work, and gave him an envelope. “Inside the envelope are three additional reasons why your algorithm isn’t secure.” said the Cryptographer, “Don’t open open it until you have figured out what they are.”. His friend never returned.

So it is with you and evolution. You have stated in your blog that while in college you “read voraciously on evolution and fossil-related subjects”, yet you fail to understand evolution in even the most trivial way. You don’t even know the difference between evolution, cosmology and bio-genesis, which are totally separate fields. Cosmology, for instance isn’t even a biological science –it straddles Physics and Astronomy. You post daily about evolution and repeat the same tired misconceptions that are pervasive in the creationist community. So, in that spirit, I’m going to name five things wrong with your young earth creationist hypothesis. I’m not going to give you an envelope, but just know that it would be so large, I’d probably have to use one of those envelopes that Publisher’s Clearing House leaves their giant checks in if you’re not home.

1. Given that the speed of light is constant, explain why we can see galaxies that are billions of light-years away. This means that the light we are seeing is billions of years old. As of this post, the furthest galaxy is 13.2 BILLION light-years away.
   In effect, looking at this light is like looking back in time, and we can see the universe forming. Did God create all this light just to deceive us? Note, “God works in mysterious ways” is not an answer that is valid.
2. Hindu culture and religion have texts that date back 10,000 years, easily old enough to document the biblical flood, yet they mention no such event. Did they just not notice that they were buried under a deluge for a year, or were they the first culture to develop SCUBA technology?
3. The sun has consumed about 50% of its fuel. This used to be a win for young earth creationists like yourself –when we thought the sun was on fire. Back then, doing the simple equation for combustion would fix the sun’s age at 5000 years. However, since fusion is much more efficient than combustion, the sun’s age is now estimated at 4.5 billion years. Do you believe the sun is on fire, or that modern physics is wrong?
4. Most of the DNA in our bodies doesn’t code for anything. It’s junk left over from millions of years of evolution. If we were all created by god, why do we have all this junk? Is god a sloppy engineer? Why does the theory of evolution predict this junk DNA even though it was created before DNA was even discovered? Why does your idea of creation give no insight in to this matter?
5. Explain exactly how a worldwide deluge could possibly carve the grand canyon in under a year.

I know that you will never actually try to answer any of these questions in an honest manner, because frankly, the only conclusion you could possibly reach is that we live in an incredibly old universe and that the theory of evolution has many stunning insights into modern genetics and creation is merely a belief that gives us no additional information. Instead, you’ll probably harp on a small error I have made in the above post, or accuse me of ad hominem attacks, when in fact none have been made. Astute readers note that while I have called Radar a troglodyte, I did not say his arguments were wrong because he was a troglodyte . You’ll probably retreat back to your comfort zone of parroting arguments that have been made over and over by intellectually dishonest people that are trying to remove your ability to critically analyze your religion’s dogma. These people have a vested interest in keeping you fat and dumb. But maybe, just maybe you’ll see how your ideas are really childish and don’t help our society progress. You’ll see that creationism does nothing to further our understanding of ourselves or the universe, and is morally bankrupt, and you’ll come around and see that this country was made great by our quest for knowledge. Maybe you’ll give up on your quest to force religion down our throats and instead work to further science education in this country. Maybe you will.

But then again, I am a Liberal.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 9:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.