If you’re a long-time reader of the site, you might remember a guy by the name of John Freshwater. I wrote about him in 2009 after he was facing dismissal for 1) teaching creationism in his science class, 2) telling his students that gays are evil sinners, and 3) burning crosses in the arms of some of his students. A shittier science teacher, there is not.

Well, it finally looks like the lengthy process of firing him is almost over. After a bunch of appeals and sporadic hearings, a report issued by the state has recommended that Freshwater should be fired:

“(Freshwater) persisted in his attempts to make eighth grade science what he thought it should be – an examination of accepted scientific curriculum with the discerning eye of Christian doctrine,” Shepherd wrote. “He used his classroom as a means of sowing the seeds of doubt and confusion in the minds of impressionable students as they searched for meaning in the subject of science.”

Freshwater had for years asked the school board to consider allowing a curriculum that includes arguments against evolution. Shepherd wrote that after no changes were made, Freshwater took it upon himself to hand out Christian materials and push creationism.

I can see that removing shitty teachers who push their ridiculous dogma on others is going to be an uphill battle if each one takes almost 2 years to dismiss. What does a person need to do to get the boot right away if burning a cross with a electrical laboratory instrument doesn’t do it?

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Hey america, how do you know whether or not your public education system is failing? How about the fact that almost half of your adult population is convinced that the Earth is about as old as the Agrarian Revolution (when we went from hunters to farmers). Nice, huh? If you’re wondering what other Western country has such abysmally ignorant people, the answer is Turkey, a similarly religious country that also has a significant portion of its population swearing fealty to an anthropomorphic God.

The rest is divided into two categories: about 38% think that God directed evolution (proving only that these folks know slightly less than nothing about the process). The good news (yes, there’s a slight sliver of hope) is that the percentage of Americans who think Evolution has only a secular explanation went from 9% to 16%, demonstrating that the hard work of smart people is starting to pay off. While it would be impossible to shift that 40% anytime soon, if we can convince the remaining 38% that aren’t completely retarded that God is merely an invention of our deluded minds and has no business in science, we’d actually be a slight majority.

Until that fucking “miracle” happens, however, you can feel proud that no first world country boast this kind of pathetically low score when it comes to scientific awareness. So if you want to be #1 at something, America, you can always take the prize of “Most Ignorant Modern Country in the World”. Congrats, y’all!

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Man, credit to QualiaSoup for really dishing out the pain. I can’t imagine a more brutal and decisive strike against creationism and their junk science. Good way to wake up, am I right?

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I like Ken, and I appreciate the hard work he does to fight creationism, despite sharing many of their beliefs. The saddest thing about him, however, is that he still tries to reconcile his ludicris superstitious beliefs with science. By the end of his book, Finding Darwin’s God, I had to shake my head in disbelief as he tried to use quantum indeterminacy as a mechanism with which God influences evolution. Fucking embarrassing to say the least.

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The creation museum is apparently only the tip of the iceberg for Answers in Genesis, which is partnering with Ark Encounters LLC to create a gargantuan 500 foot “replica” of Noah’s Ark that will contain live aminals, as well as a Tower of Babel, and a Middle Eastern village.

The for-profit company wants to receive a tax incentive from the state, and it sounds to me like they have good changes of getting it. If they do, it means that taxpayers will be shelling out almost 40 million dollars worth of incentives to these morons.

They claim the theme park will generate roughly 250 million dollars worth of revenue, and create 900 jobs. Considering how well the Creation Museum has been doing, they might not actually be off the mark on this (ignorant rednecks still have a bit of money left it seems). Kentucky will have the distinction of having not one, but two ghastly locations where humans and animals are living in “Flintstones-like” harmony.

The folks behind this play-land of ignorance want to try and build the most authentic ark possible. I have to imagine once they actually start trying to fill it with live animals, it might be hard for people to ignore the fact that it’ll be significantly overcrowded with just a few species in there. Odds are if they try to make it authentic, it won’t be very well ventilated, and it’s sure to stink like shit after just a few hours.

So nicely done, Kentucky, and for working so diligently, I award you the title of “most embarrassing state in America”. Competition is fierce, I know, but you always manage to find some way to outshine them. Congratulations!

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I’m so sick and tired of the argument that because Earth sits in a “Goldilocks” zone, that this must somehow mean something significant. What are the odds, some like to speculate, that all of this could be the product of chance? The answer, I would argue, is the same as every single hand you’ve ever been dealt in poker. If you try and work backwards to calculate the odds of whatever arbitrary hand you have being dealt in the same order, you would discover that the odds are impossibly small. Does that mean that you were never playing poker to begin with?

There’s a tendency for human beings to believe that our existence means something special. We still think, for some fucking reason, that the Universe was tailor made for us, rather than the other way around. I expect this type of fallacy from self centered apes, and yet every time I hear some new crackpot idea about the origin of the Universe involving us in some way, I generally feel embarassed for humanity. If there is intelligent life out there in the Universe, I don’t want them thinking that we all think the Cosmos revolves around our existence.

A recent article in The Huffington Post had me fuming this morning. It was written by Robert Lanza, who pioneered a theory called Biocentrism. If you aren’t familiar with it, in a nutshell, the idea is that our consciousness creates the physical reality we see around us. Without someone to observe the Universe, it simply doesn’t exists. What’s used to prove this fucking nonsense? Why, it’s quantum mechanics, of course!

Here’s the deal: if your wacky theory is based on the strangeness of Quantum physics, you’ve already lost the debate. This is a metaphysical black hole where crackpot theories go to die in obscurity. In the tiny world of atoms, subatomic particles often act in surprising, and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. Electrons, for instance, don’t orbit around the nucleus of an atom the same way a planet orbits around a star (that’s just a model we use to visualize it); instead, it exists in a kind of “probability wave”, which collapses whenever it encounters an “observer” (when we try to measure its position and momentum we end up determining both).

This strange and wonderful quality of quantum physics makes the theory open to every would-be theorist. Enter Biocentrism: since we are technically observers, then it must mean that the simple act of being conscious “creates” the reality around us. The basic principles are as follows:

1. Reality is the product of our consciousness.
2. Time doesn’t exist outside our own perception
3. The structure of the universe can only be understood through “biocentrism”. The Universe is fine-tuned for our existence, ergo it must have been created through our perception.

Like any good bullshit theory, it offers nothing in the way of falsifiability. Why should it? According to it’s founder, Robert Lanza, it’s far more irrational to think that our existence, and that of the Universe, is due to simple “chance”.

A. africanus, A. garhi, A. sediba, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus, A. boisei, Homo habilis, H. georgicus, and H. erectus — among other hominid species — all went extinct. Even the Neanderthals went extinct. But alas, not us! Indeed, we happen to be the only species of Hominina that made it… The story of evolution reads just like “The Story of the Three Bears,” In the nursery tale, a little girl named Goldilocks enters a home occupied by three bears and tries different bowls of porridge; some are too hot, some are too cold. She also tries different chairs and beds, and every time, the third is “just right.” For 13.7 billion years we, too, have had chronic good luck. Virtually everything has been “just right.”

Well, I don’t think 99% of all the species who have ever existed and got bitch-slapped by evolution would agree with you there Robby. And sure, most other Hominid species have gone extinct, but what’s to say we won’t either? Will anyone care about your dumb ideas when this hairless ape eventually goes the way of the dodo? Will the Universe end because we aren’t in it anymore? I feel like a fucking moron even asking these pointless questions!

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Ah creationism; no matter how you dress it up, it’s still a steaming pile of horse shit. Every year it’s the same thing: a group of ignorant and highly religious parents become upset that their children are actually receiving an education as to how life adapts and changes over time, and their reaction is to try and insert their creationist materials (which they hilariously call “intelligent design”) into classrooms. Once they start doing that, it becomes necessary to get the courts involved, and school boards with small budgets spend huge sums of money in the ensuing legal battles (remember the Dover trial? It cost 2 million bucks, and I’m sure lots of schools would be dying for that kind of money).

Now while big states like Texas get all the attention, Louisiana has decided that it too wants to join in on all the fun. A number of citizens, backed by the Louisiana Family Forum (hey look, another conservative org with the word “family” in it), are attacking the state’s biology textbooks because they are teaching “too much evolution”.

Darrell White also told the Advocate that the textbooks don’t comply with the anti-evolution law known as the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” which the Family Forum helped write and successfully lobbied for in 2008. The LSEA instructs educators to promote “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” It also allows teachers and school districts to use “supplemental textbooks,” which are just code words for creationist and pro-intelligent design materials.

The losers in this whole thing are the kids, who as a consequence of all this nonsense end up having a shitty education. While Americans continue to wrestle with the incompatibility of their religion and objective reality, the rest of the world is passing them by at the speed of light. It’s hard to imagine what influence all of this “debate” will have on these students as they enter the global marketplace, but it’s not likely to be very good. How can you survive in a knowledge-based economy when your citizens keep filling their head with superstitious bullshit?

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