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Kansas Anti-Creationism Professor Resigns
An anonymous reader writes "A Professor of religion at University of Kansas has resigned from his position at the university because of his anti-creationism views." From the article: "Mirecki had planned to teach a course in the spring that examined creationism and intelligent design after the State Board of Education adopted science standards treating evolution as a flawed theory. Originally called 'Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies,' the course was canceled last week at Mirecki's request." The article goes on to explain that Mirecki evidently sent poorly worded email with anti-Christian sentiments around to people interested in the class, and was subsequently beaten for his troubles.
Then again, Im agnostic and havent attended church and base all my knowledge on written word and whatnot. Maybe in church they are saying to strike those evil doer anti-christians down like the wrath of god?
A recent e-mail from Mirecki to members of a student organization referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face." Mirecki apologized for those comments.
Me thinks "poorly worded" is an understatement. It's one thing when you're a troll on Slashdot using that language. It's a completely different thing to be in a respected teaching position and acting like a Slashdot troll. And he wonders why people are upset with him. *shakes head*
(P.S. I do hope they catch the assholes who beat him. That's not exactly acceptable behavior, either, no matter what he said.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Mirecki evidently sent poorly worded email with anti-Christian sentiments around to people interested in the class, and was subsequently beaten for his troubles.
All he had to do was stick to science and his ideas would have won. Instead, he played into the stereotype that 'scientists are anti-Christian' and has paid the price.
But there are really three sides to the issue:
1. Dogmatic Christians pushing their belief system as the anti-science.
2. Dogmatic Athiests pushing their belief system as the anti-religion.
3. The Rest Of Us.
resigned
That's the part that confused me enough to make me read it twice. The CHAIR of the Religous Studies Dept. was saying things like:
- referring to religious individuals as "fundies"
- "a nice slap in their big fat face"
- others described as "repugnant and vile"
That boggles the mind. No excuse for beating the man, for any reason.-theGreater.
Remember, there are a lot of Books in the Bible. Some of the older ones (Old Testament) have a lot of stuff about smiting and even killing or enslaving your enemies.
It all depends upon what part of the Bible the church you attend wants to focus on. There's as much legitimacy in focusing on God's Rightous Wrath as there is in focusing on Jesus Forgiving.
Someone else was beaten or killed in the name of religion! *gasp*
What's the total up to now? A few billion?
Question everything
The choices of prefix for this post... I'm curious, why is he anti-creationist rather than pro-evolutionist? Now, this may be innocuous, but choice of words can reveal bias.
Also, anti-fundamentalist is not the same as anti-christian. Being opposed to a specific, fanatical, often belligerent sect of a religious denomination is not the same as being opposed to the entire faith.
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
So what are you alleging? That he beat himself up? Do you think that "a conservative activist in Kansas" has more credibility with respect to the investigation than Lt. Kari Wempe of the Douglas County Sheriff's Office?
Does smear have no bounds in this country?
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
When a whole nation is dedicating itself to anti-Islamism, while Christianism is fucking it up the ass (how's that for "poorly-worded"?), it's only fair that in a state like Kansas, made infamous worldwide by that ludicrous anti-science christianism, scientists would have an anti-Christianism sentiment and it's only fair that they make it heard by all concerned. If they won't, who will?! Don't kid yourself, Science, and scientists are under attack by the deliberate liars and peddlers of self-serving nonsense.
But as head of a religious studies department, attacking a given faith is just unprofessional.
You can teach Greek Mythology without always speaking the name of "Zeus" with reverential awe.
You can even poke fun at your subject matter, depending on the focus of the course - I fondly remember my 1st semester physics professor ended practically every topic with something along the lines of "and of course in the days since Newton, we've discovered that most of this counts as complete rubbish, but I still expect you to know it for the test".
In the case of the topic under consideration, I (and any potential studend would) have every expectation this professor did not plan to merely present it as an objective overview of the tenets of ID (though students should of course have come away understanding those); but rather, a thorough debunking of a laughable-yet-popular ("popular" in the sheer-number-of-fools sense) topic, possibly broad enough to include a general overview of the roots of the dangerously antiintellectual attitude currently brewing in our culture.
I know, he had his friends beat him up! Or, err... He managed to convince a hospital to fake a report or something.. err... and the police department too! Yeah, that's it! Obviously anybody who's beaten up is going to remember the exact road it's on and everything. And you're going to remember exact details about your attackers too, even when it's at night. Nobody's confused, frightened or panicky after being physically assaulted, especially atheists!
Perhaps we ought to test out these theories on the stupid idiot who's trying to cast some sort of cloud over the guy's credibility without having any hard evidence to back it up.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
...would people be equally outraged if the Religious Studies Chair at a religious school, let's say BYU, were to badmouth atheism? My guess is that it probably happens all the time.
"attacking a given faith"
He attacked "faith run amok". The problem isn't that people have this faith. The problem is that some of them try to pass it off as science and to make laws out of it. Their zealotry goes against what this country stands for.
The only difference between religion and mythology is that mythology was the nonsense that people used to beleive, and religion is the nonsense they beleive today.
Keep your religion out of our science! You beleive what you want, but anyone that thinks they have a right to force what they beleive on someone else needs a swift kick in the ass (and yes, that includes other people's children, its tragic enough that parents are allowed to brainwash their own children)
Reverence wasn't what I expect. For that matter, there are lots of courses in college that exist specifically to question a subject.
The mistake was not the class, it was sending insulting email in a professional context, that's all.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
I would have downmodded the parent (yay! Mod points!) but sadly there isn't actually a moderation option for 'bollocks'. You'll note that, of the parent's links, one is just Mirecki refusing to speak to a fundamentalist journalist (this is what we call "following the lawyer's advice", and from the tone of the subsequent interview I can only say that I would have done the same). The second is a Conservative activist incisively pointing out that not all information on brutal beatings is immediately made available to the public (or it would be incisive if that's what he realised he was doing) and suggesting that the request for Mirecki's resignation (which iirc occurred before the beating) indicates he's a shifty sort of fellow.
This is complete trash. It barely even suggests that Mirecki lied, let alone naturally pointing towards that conclusion. There are no inconsistencies. There is no need for double-quotes round the word 'beating'. There is only a respected member of the academic community, who planned a controversial course (and then made a stupid comment about it on an obscure mailing list), getting beaten up by two punks and a heavy object for suggesting that their beloved Creationism might, just possibly, be classed as a 'myth' in Religious Studies circles (which happens to be factually accurate, and wouldn't even count as tactless if he hadn't made the aforesaid dumb remark). This is unjustifiable and I'm mildly shocked to see anyone other than the monosyllabic perpetrators fighting Mirecki over this.
More, I'm deeply worried by the chilling effect this will have on other courses similarly critical of Intelligent Design and Creationism. Evolutionary biologists critique evolution every day - why should ID and 'scientific creationism' be exempt merely by dint of being scientifically vacuous?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
People seem to confuse the very tiny number of people who attacked this professor and who maintain a non-scientific militaint anti evolusionist stance with the much larger group of people who call themselves "Christians".
People are extrapolating the actions of a small group of hateful idiots to an entire class of people who happen to have an overlapping characteristic and disparaging the entire group as stupid, backward, or violent.
I suspect those same people would be horrified if the actions of a single minority member were to be unfairly extrapolated to their entire race or culture.
What would Jesus do?
He'd lie on the ground bleeding, same as Mirecki did.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
What "oddities"? I read both articles you linked, as well as the badger herald article you linked above, and none of them cast doubt on the beating. There is one conservative activist whining that a guy who ran to the hospital after being assaulted can't remember what street he was on, but nothing suggesting he made anything up. The second article from the Kansan said the cops no longer consider it a hate crime, but that does not mean they don't think it occurred. My guess is that to be a "hate crime" in Kansas, like here in California, the target of an attack must be a member of a protected minority, and secular humanists don't fit the bill. But there is nothing suggesting he made up the attack except insinuation on the part of an activist.
College professors aren't supposed to be wishy-washy and neutral: the reason for tenure is to encourage them to have opinions, even strong ones. It's the interplay of multiple strong opinions, sometimes polar opposites, that makes the university experience useful.
That's why, for example, the University of California not only tolerated, but defended Angela Davis and her pro-Comummunist party views, despite the current "governator" being one Ronald Reagan.
So maybe he didn't say it very well. It's what he believes.
The problem is that evolution is not like a tool. Instead it is a self-propelled dynamic that needs no outside maker/creator etc. The prerequisites for evolution (differential reproduction of heritable variation) is both basic and abundant in all biological systems of all levels of complexity (it even applies to "nonliving" prebiotic chemical systems such as RNA soups and lipid mycelles). The point is that even the simplest bacteria has all the tools it needs to make itself a different species given enough time.
That is what upsets the religious. Evolution doesn't need any gods.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The attack on Professor Mirecki is heartbreaking. Violence in the name of God is disgusting. I think that the rift between members of academia and radcial Christians is growing. We are becoming the society that as a nation, we most actively despise: a society driven by radical religious fundamentalists who have misinterpreted the tenets of the locally dominant religion.
Kansas has always been a little weird. Nobody can debate that. However, Lawrence has been proud to stand out from the rest of the state and see things more thoughtfully. This most recent regression has hurt what Lawrence has always stood for: freedom. Freedom to live, freedom to express one's ideas, freedom to explore the unknown, and the freedom to stand up for those things.
Whatever your current thoughts are about Professor Mirecki, the criminals who attacked him, or the course he was trying to teach, you should probably get your news from sources a little closer to the action. The Lawrence Journal-World has covered this quite thoroughly and has some very interesting blog posts from a wide variety of bloggers (myself included) discussing the articles. I recommend it if you want to get a better view of the scenario.
Plenty of stupid things have taken place in Kansas this year. Let's work to fix the problems that we have caused here and try to move forward.
Nick M.
Research Assistant
Kansas NASA EPSCoR
Maybe you are looking for the abortion clinic bombers and doctor murderers, I believe they are fundementalists. And the Muslum world (By and large) condems terrorism as well, even though extremists still perpetrate violence. Very little difference.
This is an important point that I think people aren't paying enough attention to. He has resigned only an extra administrative position that he may not particularly have enjoyed anyhow. In American universities (outside of the medical schools) being Chair of the department is usually not that big a deal. It isn't like some European universities where the Chair is really the person who runs the show. Mirecki still has his job and his academic rank - all he's done is stepped out of the limelight a little, whether to make life easier for himself or to keep himself from being a lightning rod for anti-University sentiment.
Oh Hell yeah.
I happened to catch a book-signing talk by John Gibson about his new book "The War on Christmas," a few weeks back. In his talk he mentioned several incidents where people had removed references to Christianity or Christmas from a public place and subsequently received death threats. He even said that one of those men had to move his wife and kids out of town for the holidays because he feared for their safety. Let me reiterate, the ones getting threatened were the seculars and they were getting threatened by people who were presumably very much Christian.
My girlfriend raised her hand and asked why Gibson was claiming seculars were perpetuating a war when his own examples showed Christians doing all the threatening behavior and she pointed out that he had said several times how nice the seculars seemed to be when he interviewed them. Gibson gave a very watered down reply that there are two sides to any war while the crowd proceeded to turn around and try to shout down my girlfriend. They neither noticed the substance of what she said, nor the fact that the she was taking every part of her point directly from the rhetoric of the author they had come to see. They didn't seem upset in the least that Christians were engaged in threatening behavior.
I certainly don't have an agenda against Christianity, but I must say that in my mind Christians are doing very big damage to their reputations with these kind of antics. Death threats and beatings are so over-the-top wrong that it amazes me when I hear Christians give the contradictory proclamation that Christianity is about Love. That it's about turning the other cheek.
I'm not against Islam, but I'm very much against Muslims who fly planes into tall buildings. I'm not against Christianity, but I'm very much against Christians who beat college professors on country roads. I don't think there's anything remotely like a war on Christianity right now, but if Christians keep insisting on beating and threatening people who disagree, they shouldn't be surprised when we eventually fight back.
TW
Sorry, I am very concerned to see pseudo-science infiltrate the United States and when scientists are depicted as anti-Cristians because they support views which are commonly accepted among educated people I wonder what direction the US will go. What next?
Perhaps improvement in theological education is the first step. Enlightment reloaded. If uneducated preachers spread unenlighted views and therefore a kind of scum of public opinion undermines real science, it is time to think why people in other Christian countries in the world do not even talk about this bullshit. I mean, the US is not Iran...
Proper university education for preachers and scientific reflection on theological issues and "Christian" pseudoscience will fade away.
You're very right. And I've always wondered why Christians are so intent on getting ID taught. It very clearly contradicts the Bible. And if you're willing to accept that the Bible isn't literal truth, then what the hell is the problem with thinking God made the laws of physics, hit the on-switch, and sends a Jesus or two every once in a while? You don't need gaps in the fossil record for that.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There are so many things wrong with Intelligent Design, there aren't even words for it.
Lets just take two:
1) It leads to an infinite regression. If complex things cannot come to being by themselves, then the creator can't come to be out of nothing either. And so forth. Que the infinite regress of creators.
2) As a scientific theory, it lacks all predictive power. Apply the theory of evolution to, for example, Avian Flu, and you can imagine that, during the course of it's fluish mutations it will hit upon the combination that will make it contagious among the dominant species on the planet, thats natural selection among countless flu variations.
What do you get when you apply ID to Bird Flu? The Creator is a bastard? The Creator is annoyed with us because there's too much sex on television?
I sat in a coffeeshop listening to an ID advocate committing logical error after error. He was sitting there,and reasoning backwards from any number of existing things to their inevitable nature as created things. Hilariously bad science. I have in my hand a hairbrush, it is made of a substance I will call plastic. I cannot imagine making such a thing, it is not wood, nor stone. Therefore there must be a magician involved somewhere! Oooo, look a landbridge! Could something so useful have come about by accident? No!
I sat and tried not to listen, while eating my damn lunch, and trying to imagine how any Intelligent designer could design a creature as foolish and ignorant as man.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Do not vote for a politician who claims special communication with higher beings.
Here's the short version:
Most atheists have gone on to 2nd thought, and further. Seriously.
Now, if I say to you, "Yesterday, I had a ham on rye, and I got it from the deli", how likely are you to believe it? Let's look at it. First, ham on rye is a reasonable foodstuff. Second, delis sell this combo, and it's in the common experience of most people to have that confirmed as objective fact. Now, you don't know if I had it in fact, but inasmuch as it's a reasonable claim, you might be inclined to accept it unless it is shown that I have a habit of lying about my lunch, or it turns out that there is no deli later. ok?
But, if I say to you, "Yesterday, I had manna from heaven, which was given me by an angel", now how seriously are you going to take me? What is manna? How often has it been noted coming from heaven? How many people have been observed to have been fed by an angel? When was the last time anyone photographed or measured an angel? Even if you skip all of that, still, are you going to take me at my word?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you're going to agree that my story is unlikely. Most people would, and for good reason. Here it is: I'm making an extraordinary claim, one that is outside the realm of common (or even known) human experience, and so your instinct is going to be to want some pretty good evidence for my claim before you get all jolly and decide I'm telling you the truth.
The refined phrase is: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Finally, the problem here is that the bible(s) are full of extraordinary claims. People rising from the dead. People being turned into pillars of salt. The entire world being flooded, which would require more water than there is on the planet. Everyone having common ancestors in the persons of Adam and Eve. Geological formation of planets (this one, specifically) in non-geological time frames as well as creation of complex life in very, very short time frames. So, just as you probably found it in your heart to doubt my story of manna from heaven at the hands of an angel, atheists find good reason to doubt the stories told in the bible. These stories make extraordinary claims. Not only is there no extraordinary evidence, there appears to be no evidence at all for those stories, and quite a bit (like fossils, current amount of water on the planet, observed evolution and speciation time frames, various methods of dating geological formations, DNA comparisons between one human being and the next) which actively argue for disproof of some of the specific points made in those stories.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Religion is not the opposite of science. This is the biggest problem in the world today: that people do not understand this. There is not reason that I cannot belive in God and evolution. The two can go hand in hand. Religion is why (the philosophical why) things are they way they are and science is how (fact, figures, mechanisms ::shivers::) they became what they are.
Example:
Religion: People exist because God wanted there to be people
Science: People exist because random genetic change enabled there to be people.
What is contradictory in my example?
I have a friend who is agnostic. I get from him that since there is more than one religion he has no basis to say that one is correct and another is not. He also does not see any relgion that does what is says (i.e.: radical muslims and christians both contridict their values). He isn't agnostic simply because he feels science and religion contridic each other. In fact, he has helped me reconsile some of my beliefs and science.
Also, please do not judge all christians by the STUPID actions of a few. Why should some dumb ass in Kansas, who can't possibly belive that God wanted evolution to happen and made it and science cannot say "God willed it," so we can only comprehend random change and statistical patterens as left overs from God's will, should make me, who can reconsile belife and science, look like an idiot?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette