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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.
Could've used a bit of intelligent design.
He resigned as department chair, but as of that article, hasn't quit entirely. Just in case you don't want to RTFA (not that that happens here).
I read this story earlier today on HNN. He resigned as department chair, not as a professor. He's still doing all the same stuff, but with less paperwork. I know that in many departments, chair is a generally detested position because although it carries some prestige it often carries little real authority and ALWAYS comes with scads of paperwork that prevent academics from spending time on their first love (research or teaching, as the case may be). So the guy isn't out of a job or anything; the move is largely symbolic.
Make cheese not war 8:)
'I actually did that act one night in the south, then after the show these three rednecks came up to me. "Hey buddy, we're Christians and we didn't like what you said." I said "Then forgive me." Later on, when I was hanging from the tree...'
--Bill Hicks
"Dear Auntie Em: Hate your Intleligent Design, Hate Kansas> Took the dog" -Dorthy
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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
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"
I can't wait for the F Games on ESPN. Sports to the Fundament.
After all, I am strangely colored.
"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)
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.
Exactly right. Altevogt is the fellow who was lurking on the email list to which Mirecki sent the note about "fundies", and who then shared the email publicly in order to discredit Mirecki. Whether or not that tactic is ethical, he's hardly an objective observer.
And I can't believe that the townhall.com column is the transcript of an actual interview; it's obviously satire. We're supposed to believe that Mirecki listened patiently to a couple dozen questions and replied "no comment" to each one, rather than simply cutting short the conversation at the outset?
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.
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.
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
If you look at Mirecki's areas of expertise his irritation with fundamentalists becomes all the more understandable. His areas areas are Ancient Mediterranean Religion, Early Christianity, and Coptic Papyrology. That means that he knows a lot about about religion in the area in which Christianity developed about the origins of Christianity, and about branches of Christianity that either died out (e.g. gnosticism) or have followed a rather different course from the one that led to fundamentalism (e.g. Coptic Christianity). For someone with this background, the belief of fundamentalists that their interpretation of the particular compilation of texts that they consider holy is God's Truth must seem particularly crazy. I can't speak for him, but I bet that to him fundamentalists seem ignorant, naive, and arrogant even if one looks just at the religious texts and their interpretation, without concerning oneself with the conflict between fundamentalist beliefs and science.
As someone who is both interested in dismissing the conspiracy theories and was enrolled in the cancelled class, I think it is time to post some real information.
First, Paul Mirecki is a well-respected scholar in the field of Christianity. He is regularly chosen as the lecturer for the week that covers the Old Testament of the Bible in an Honors Western Civilization I course. Mirecki's personal beliefs regarding religion never came up in that lecture - he stuck to the facts. My experiences echo those of nearly every student who has taken a course taught by him. In his 20+ years as head of the Religious Studies department, Mirecki's scholarship and teaching have been praised by scholars and students alike.
Second, the email in question was sent via a Yahoo listserv to members of the KU Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics (SOMAA). While the group may be a part of KU, it is about as disconnected from the everyday processes of the University as can be. Student groups are funded through the KU Student Senate, which means the University's own democratic processes (which include plenty of Christians as voters) elected a body of individuals who sanctioned funding of SOMAA. The Christian individual who released the one paragraph of the email had no business doing so. The released text was taken out of any context (the vast majority of the message had nothing to do with the class in question). In addition, complaining about SOMAA being anti-Christian is akin to me joining the listserv for any of the multiple Christian student groups and then whining when they mention God or Jesus in their emails.
Third, the Kansas legislature has a history of trying to destroy the University of Kansas. Several years ago, a state legislator claimed a student came to her and accused the professor of a popular Human Sexuality course of promoting pedofilia among other things. After much hubub and threats from the state, it came out that the 'student' was actually an aide of the legislator in question, had been encouraged to falsify her claims, and an investigation by the University found zero evidence to back the claims. Keep in mind here folks that we have more than one legislator without so much as a high school diploma. A prominent representative from wealthy Johnson County has vocally voiced her opposition to the 19th Amendment and women's suffrage. The conservative majority in our state legislature is uneducated, inept, and scary - only our governer is keeping things from getting too out of control.
And finally, the beating is real. I notice one of the sources often cited for inconsitencies in stories is www.kansan.com . That is the online version of our student newspaper, and I would shudder to think that The Kansan would be used as a serious resource. The journalists on our newspaper staff have difficulties differentiating between their/there/they're, much less getting their facts straight on a criminal investigation. Please, if you're going to cite a Lawrence paper, at least go with something more reputable like the Journal World. After visiting with several faculty members of the Religious Studies department, they all gave similar accounts of Mirecki's injuries. Sorry to say, but I trust the accounts of professors with whom I have developed personal friendships over CNN journalists who probably did not even know where Lawrence was before this whole incident occurred.
"A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him." The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Uh, he wasn't saying to look for an answer besides God. He was saying that he doesn't understand why you need organised religion to worship a God. Organised religion hardly has the best track record so its a pretty valid point.