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Creationists Silence Critics with DMCA
Gothmog of A writes "As Richard Dawkins' offcial site reports, an organization called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries has been submitting DMCA copyright requests to YouTube. This has resulted in the Rational Response Squad (RRS) being banned after they protested against videos being taken down and accounts being closed. The RRS videoes attack creationism (AKA intelligent design) and promote the atheist viewpoint. According to the RRS, the copyright requests are without merit since the material in question is covered by fair use or has been declared to be in the public domain. Behind Creation Science Evangelism Ministries is the infamous Kent Hovind (AKA Dr. Dino) who is currently serving jail time for tax evasion."
1) I am not aware of any known observations of macroevolution (new species created via mutation).
Well then you might learn something today. The mice of Madeira:
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/04_00/island_mice.shtml
And this is 7 years old now, so it does seem your facts may not be up to date.
2) To date, no direct ancestral chains have been established. That is, where one species can be definitively proven to have descended from another.
You mean like Hyracotherium, which evolved into modern horses and all the documented transitory species in between them?
If you need living examples and a DNA chain to follow, the mice above work as an example here as well.
Please do not let this color your opinion of the evidence for the creationist position.
What evidence would this be? I have never seen any. Only religious rhetoric. Surely you're not talking about scripture?
You're obviously not well-versed on the tactics of proponents of creationism, because if you were, their actions here would come as absolutely no surprise. Intellectual dishonesty and sleazy tactics are par for the course because their argument is so much incredibly weaker than the argument for evolution. One of their most common tactics is "quote mining," where they take a quote from a prominent scientist or scientific paper completely out of context, sometimes to create an impression that the scientist is saying the exact opposite of the point they're making. Or they will totally misapply other scientific concepts
At best, being a creationist means you're simply ignorant or uneducated on biology. If you actually seek to spread or reinforce that ignorance among the general public, you're either a jackass or an idiot and one shouldn't be surprised when you use the methods of a jackass or idiot.
'Thou shalt not bear false witness'?
Technoli
As far as I am concerned, the various religions are a subset of cases within superstition; I would not class astrology as religion, but I do think it slots perfectly into superstition. The same goes for ghosts, all classes of magic that are not simply misunderstood natural events, homeopathy, anthropocentric views in general (religion is that in specific), and a host of others from phrenology to past lives. Creationism itself is a subset of religion.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And why does a religion have to be anthropocentric? When I was on my mathematical christology kick, 'the saviour of elm trees' was one of my standard test constructs. "Can trees be 'saved'? Might they benefit from it? What the f*** would that mean to a human Christian? And what would Jesus of Nazareth signify to a tree?" I would ask myself. But if your religion hands you avatars (as opposed to the standard Christian trinitarian incarnation structure, which is clearly species-indexed), your god can quite easily be a tree, I should think, even if you aren't a tree yourself.
I have no problem with areligious atheists (after all, a creator-god is unobservable by construction, so intellectually honest deism [perhaps even metatemporal theism] and areligious atheism are the same, up to isomorphism), but devout atheists who turn off their imaginations and disallow thought experiments when discussion religion hurt my head. How they think they can have certain knowledge (as opposed to a personal, but not persuasively communicable, belief) about the unobservable is beyond me. They're nuts in exactly the same way as the intelligent design crowd.
Let me put it this way: why would one suppose that Occam's razor is the right tool for answering the question 'what's your favourite story?' How can someone be wrong about their own imaginary friend?
Of course, when people start saying 'God told me to kill you,' it's time to lock them up. Weird thing is, organised religions - being, whether you hold to them or not, evolved social structures as well as metaphilosophical frameworks - will even agree with you on this. Of course there are plenty of homicidal maniacs who pretend otherwise - but they are, for the most part, consciously lying, and should no more be laid at the door of the religions in question than people who get their instructions from their gerbils.