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Excellent video on YouTube, with a title like “Fundamentalism is a Mental Disease” you know it will be entertaining:

Tags: Evolution, Fundamentalism, Creationism, Mental Disease, Intelligent Design, Science,Philosophy

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I can be as illogical and superstitious as the next person – though I like to justify it as thinking metaphorically…. – but I hope this isn’t the case if the next person happens to be a fundamentalist of any stripe. Looking through TW’s posts here (e.g Bad bad Medicine ) and some of the sites we’ve linked to, such as Pharyngula, I detect some bizarre themes that have been challenged by these blogs.

1. evolution (obviously)
2. vaccination
3. AIDS therapies

No matter how hard I try, I can’t really find any coherent connections between the major works of the God-of-Abraham religions and these topics. Not least because the theory of evolution and the medical science behind development of vaccines and anti-virals DID NOT EXIST at the time that the infallible books were dictated straight from the mind of God onto paper.

Evolution is the easiest topic for following the fundamentalist logic. The Bible says the world was created in 6 days, in a specific order. Obviously, if the Bible is always infallible and not metaphorical, this must be what fundamentalists believe. But it’s a Jewish book. I’ve not heard of any major Jewish movements against evolutionary theory. However, I believe that orthodox Jews do actually attempt to keep up with a fair number of the multiple prohibitions in Leviticus. So how is it that fundamentalist Christians can treat the Bible as literally true in every word and avoid doing all these observances? As pointed out repeatedly on the blogsite God is imaginary, many of these rules and the penalties for breaking them are genuinely repulsive to most people’s thinking. You can see why there would be problems putting them in practice today – not to mention pretty severe opposition. So the Christian fundamentalists have already dispensed with huge chunks of the Bible.

Did Jesus say “Follow everything in the Old Testament word for word, except for the million instructions for living in Leviticus”? I’m not too familiar with the New Testament but I’m pretty certain this instruction doesn’t appear anywhere. in fact, I doubt that Jesus is ever actually reported as having said “The Old Testament is true, word for word” but I am happy to be corrected on this.

Even if we were to accept that the world was created in a week and “the exact length of time for all the begats in the Bible to have a generation each” ago, then why does this stop evolutionary processes being true? Ah ha, because, man is supposed to be set apart from the animals. Good job we don’t need to breathe and communicate amd move and grow and eat and excrete and reproduce then, because, otherwise, we would be like animals.

Evolution is one thing. It requires some level of logical thought to grasp its principles. It could be replaced at anytime by some other theory of the natural world. However, it seems to have proved itself by the very fact that advances in biology – based on the theory – are already developed to the point that our knowledge is giving us enough control over nature to threaten our survival of the planet in new and exotic ways. (Just as our mastery of physics and chemistry and engineering prove themselves daily – nuclear weapons and poisons and transport machinery – they all work. :-))

But vaccinations? Treating AIDS with effective medicines on the basis that it’s caused by HIV infection? How can these possibly conflict with any Biblical teachings? I just don’t get this one. Medical science has made its fair share of mistakes, OK. All the same, being a science, medicine is obliged to test the effectiveness of its cures and develop new ones if the old ones aren’t working. Vaccinations are the best way to prevent suffering and death on plague scales. Does the fact that the Bible is full of plagues suggest that vaccinations are irreligious because they stop these Biblical events happening? Does God really want to see the people who live in countries that are too poor to provide effective vaccinations wiped out? Because that seems to be the Intelligent Design going on at the moment.

The AIDs-denying stuff is just demented. It has been associated with unneccesary deaths in South Africa, with spurious “natural” treatments being advanced in a country that has a desperate need for working and affordable anti-virals.

In both these cases, lack of access to vaccines and medicines don’t seem to be leading to better health.

Not being a theist myself, I probably don’t have a right to say this, but the fundamentalist position assumes the existence of a God who is is just pure evil. He sends illnesses on the basis of his moral judgements of people’s ways of life, and these illnesses somehow attack the most blameless. His aim is really poor if he’s trying to strike at wickedness and his arrow of destruction hits a year-old baby living in a shanty-town. Now, worshipping a Supreme Being like that, out of fear of what He might do if he’s not treated to a constant sycophantic chorus, seems to be both sacrilegious and craven.

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Well, even a new month does little to stem the reams of anti-evolutionary nonsense that some websites produce. This current example (which was, as is often the case, found from Pharyngula) ticks lots of the boxes for the nonsense woo-worshippers who want to disprove evolution by any means possible. Sadly they rarely seem to care how idiotic their attempts are, and I suspect they work on the principle of if each attempt convinces one person, as long as they do lots of attempts it will work. (Bit like spam mail really)

Anyway, via the wonders of modern technology (what looks like a server side PHP script) the “Random Mutation Generator” website claims to demonstrate what it views as a flaw in the theory. When you visit the site (and really, css was common place on the internet years ago, there is NO excuse for that web design), you get a text box in which you can write words then press the “mutate” button and see what happens.

Now, as an example of server side scripting this is fine (although it could just have easily been done with JS on the client – then it would at least have been AJAX-Cool). It is certainly not an example of how evolution takes place, nor is it an example of how random mutations in DNA occur. This is a script. It is arbitrary and constrained by the code used, the concepts behind that code and the skills of the programmer. Calling the “submit” button “Mutate!” does not make it evolutionary.

I am not sure if the person behind this site is a creationist / ID proponent but it seems that their attempt to disprove evolution by actually disproving intelligent design. Now, laying all the woo and sheer nonsense to one side, if we can for one minute accept the generator as an example of evolution (urgh, but stick with me), it shows that the oft used ploy of “directed evolution” is false. The generator takes a recognisable English word (the “creators” start point) and through random mutation (which certainly happens, even IDers agree to that) tries to show it can not become a different recognisable English word.

Now, correct me if I am wrong but I dont recall anything in Evolution which that applies to. There is plenty in ID which it does though.

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Well, here is one which intrigues me sometimes: Is Atheism a religion? Personally, it is an easy one. “No” is the only answer I would ever come up with.

Things get a bit more complicated when Theist X says things like “the dictionary defines Atheist as some one who does not believe in God, this is in itself a belief, therefore Atheism is a religion.” On lots of questionnaires which ask for religion “Atheist” is included as an option, some don’t even have “none” as a choice.

Now, to me this is nonsense but I can (grudgingly) see some reasoning in the chain of logic and wondered what others think. Personally, I like the variations on the quote “Saying Atheism is a religion is like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby.”