Monday, February 19, 2007
You Can Take the Creationist Out of Dogpatch, But You Can't Take the Dogpatch Out of Creationists
"At this point," wrote the Discovery Institute's Seth Cooper in 2005, "the only thing clear about this is that it is very unclear where Rep. Bridges is coming from on this."
Where Rep. Ben "The Georgia Peach" Bridges is coming from is now considerably clearer.
Bridges made national news the other day when he sent a memo to like-minded legislators in several states -- including Texas Rep. Warren Chisum -- saying that the theory of evolution, which some stuffy intellectuals attribute to Charles Darwin, is really the product of millennia old "rabbinic writings" and other ancient Jewish texts.
The planet where Rep. Bridges is coming from is not like the good Earth you and I inhabit. His planet is fixed and stationary. It doesn't move. Is it flat, too? That's an open question.
The Bridges' memo refers readers to The Fair Education Foundation website which is in possession of “indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone" that the earth is fixed and unmoving in the heavens, just as the Bible says.
"The Earth is not rotating," insists the Fixed Earth site, "nor is it going around the sun." People have been fooled into thinking otherwise by an insidious anti-Bible religious plot disguised as science by Jewish thinkers like the “Kabbalist physicist Albert Einstein.”
Cooper's Evolution News and Views piece calls attention to Bridges' sponsorship of HB 179 which, according to Cooper's reading, wouldn't ban evolution from Georgia schools. (You can read HB 179 for yourself on the Fixed Earth website.)
You see, Cooper and other intelligent design theorists such as Stephen Meyer and John Angus Campbell don't want to ban evolution, they just want teachers to teach about the scientific controversy that now exists. They want to provide more information, not less. Teachers, they say, should describe competing views to students and explain the arguments for and against these views as made by their chief proponents. When experts disagree about a controversial subject, students should learn about the competing perspectives.
Wonder how they feel about Bridges now that we really know where he's coming from? Well, you can read all you want at Evolution News and Views about Randy Olson's film "Flock of Dodos" being a hoax, or Ed Humes being a "partisan," but you'll find nothing about Bridges. Remember, Bridges has a home under ID's big tent.
Where Rep. Ben "The Georgia Peach" Bridges is coming from is now considerably clearer.
Bridges made national news the other day when he sent a memo to like-minded legislators in several states -- including Texas Rep. Warren Chisum -- saying that the theory of evolution, which some stuffy intellectuals attribute to Charles Darwin, is really the product of millennia old "rabbinic writings" and other ancient Jewish texts.
The planet where Rep. Bridges is coming from is not like the good Earth you and I inhabit. His planet is fixed and stationary. It doesn't move. Is it flat, too? That's an open question.
The Bridges' memo refers readers to The Fair Education Foundation website which is in possession of “indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone" that the earth is fixed and unmoving in the heavens, just as the Bible says.
"The Earth is not rotating," insists the Fixed Earth site, "nor is it going around the sun." People have been fooled into thinking otherwise by an insidious anti-Bible religious plot disguised as science by Jewish thinkers like the “Kabbalist physicist Albert Einstein.”
Cooper's Evolution News and Views piece calls attention to Bridges' sponsorship of HB 179 which, according to Cooper's reading, wouldn't ban evolution from Georgia schools. (You can read HB 179 for yourself on the Fixed Earth website.)
You see, Cooper and other intelligent design theorists such as Stephen Meyer and John Angus Campbell don't want to ban evolution, they just want teachers to teach about the scientific controversy that now exists. They want to provide more information, not less. Teachers, they say, should describe competing views to students and explain the arguments for and against these views as made by their chief proponents. When experts disagree about a controversial subject, students should learn about the competing perspectives.
Wonder how they feel about Bridges now that we really know where he's coming from? Well, you can read all you want at Evolution News and Views about Randy Olson's film "Flock of Dodos" being a hoax, or Ed Humes being a "partisan," but you'll find nothing about Bridges. Remember, Bridges has a home under ID's big tent.
