Full Article: How to Report Atheists to the FBI

Science Daily: American Adults Flunk Basic Science
A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive® reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test.

Why am I not suprised? We’ve lost our curiosity for the natural world. And it’s unfortunate that passion for science have been depicted negatively in our culture, and often by derogatory connotations (geeks, nerds, etc) — reducing the survivability rate of their genes (lol). Add to that the phobia of some religious organizations against science — which is quite understandable, if you consider that most grew up believing that the “tree of knowledge” is a bad thing.

It’s funny, that about 4 in 5 adults think science education is “absolutely essential” or “very important” to the U.S. healthcare system (86%), the U.S. global reputation (79%), and the U.S. economy (77%). Now I’m confused… ignorance is a virtue, only in a personal scale? But when it comes to the society as a whole, it seems that we are proud to claim to the world that we have the most inquisitive minds. Minds that we use so damn well in creating consumer products, military weapons, and medical technology keeping us alive despite our collective suicidal behavior (i.e. junk/fast food).

However, it seems that the reverence declines when these inquisitive minds are used in favor of nature. And in some cases, offensive. But who am I to complain? I’m part of the sheeple. I belong to the 79%, who at most, scored 2 out of 3 from the following basic science questions:

• Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
• Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
• Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.

I missed the third question, I thought surface water comprised of 80%, but the correct answer is 70%. Sounds like it’s not a really big deal, right?

Despite the fact that access to fresh water is likely to be one of the most pressing environmental issues over the coming years, less than 1% of U.S. adults know what percent of the planet’s water is fresh (the correct answer is 3%). Nearly half didn’t even hazard a guess. Additionally, 40% of U.S. adults say they are “not at all knowledgeable” about sustainability.

I think it’s not enough that we respect science for its work in the economy, politics, and our vanity. I think it’s also important to recognize the scientists within our selves. Like when we were a child, as we test each action vs reaction to learn more about the environment we live in. We were told not to play with fire, but we do it anyway and that’s how we learn.

We are sending this mass emailing out around the country to inform people of the child abuse of having creationism put in kids’ science textbooks and to ask people to go to Austin, Texas, on March 25 to show their revulsion for religion taught as science in the schools as that completely screws up young children’s minds. What may come about without such a mass protest to the Texas State Board of Education is very ugly as textbook publishing efficiency will have these creationist adulterated science books for Texas used in school districts nationwide for the next ten years.
The American people are generally uninformed as regards fundamentalist conservatives and the way they do their best to exploit people when they can. I know the game from the inside because my father was a fundamental minister and many years ago, while in my twenties, I was married to a fundamentalist missionary whose game, like Ted Haggard’s, was more to pervert than convert the young males who wandered into our mission seeking the truth about God.
So take this seriously and make up your minds to come to Austin for this pivotal battle between the Ted Haggard two-faced creationists and those who see the importance of kids being taught science properly. For those who can look beyond the horizon, it is also part of a bigger battle against all the creepy, double talking, two-faced conservatives like Larry Craig and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Foley and the skunks at Fox News.

This is a necessary battle to fight independent of Obama’s efforts because as things get tough, he is just going to preach forbearance while the rest of us suffer. This well meaning but still standard young politician is not the lion his oratory skill makes him out to be but rather an inexperienced donkey just dressed up in a lion’s skin. He will not be able to come through for the people when the chips are down and Great Depression II takes hold and puts a knife in all our backs.

This watered down stimulus package, in the end, will be nothing but a token effort to show our populist president’s good will and cool off the fury of suffering people who would otherwise rise up to take down this conservative capitalist tyranny we are forced to live under and exchange it for a government truly of, by and for the people. The tip off to Obama’s limitations is his enthusiastic embrace of the faith based initiative, the left hand of his conservative enemies who will smash him with their right hand by frustrating everything good he tries and by ultimately blaming him for the economic and international mess that results that they created to begin with.

To get a microcosm look at the conservatives who are taking the country totally to hell, consider our attempt at intellectual debate here in rabidly fundamentalist Lubbock, Texas. We were banned from posting our ideas on the forum of the Avalanche-Journal, the city’s newspaper whose intolerance is manifest in its printing a Bible quote on its front page every day but not once mentioning the real news of our and others’ efforts to affect the children’s textbook debate in Austin by organizing a pro-evolution rally.
We are asking that media in Texas and around the country do a short article on the textbook issue and that readers forward this email to as many others as they can.

To get the news out about it locally in Lubbock, given the censorship from the city newspaper and its forum, we took to sending emails out directly to as many Lubbock Internet email addresses as we could find. These included a goodly number of the high school science teachers here. Their very revealing replies and our and other professionals’ emails on the matter follow. While many will be amused by what they read, for these people are ridiculous in the way they think and talk, we hope that people will also be aroused to the action needed to stop the fundamentalists from destroying the minds of our children and grandchildren.

* And this when the fun begins…

The very first reply we got to our science textbook email was from a high school math teacher, [name omitted for privacy].

From: [name omitted for privacy][email address omitted for privacy]
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 11:03 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS

Are you kidding me? How did you get my e-mail? Evolution is the single most unintelligent idea ever. The big bang? The stuff that blew up came from? That is never addressed in evolution because they don’t have an answer. The first cells magically came to life and survived on? But anti-science is superstitious. I am a mathematician and the idea of evolution is more statistically improbable than winning the lottery five times IN A ROW. Mathematical proof of evolution? How lost can you be? Religion is based on emotion? Just because some avoid what they know inside until they are forced to deal with it does not mean it is based on emotion. You do experience a great deal of emotion when you accept the TRUTH. I hope the text book allows students to make up their minds by presenting both sides.

From: “Peter Calabria” <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:42 AM
To: [email address omitted for privacy]
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS

I love to debate with mathematicians because we can both start with 2+3=5 and accept that as correct, though I once met an illiterate Jehovah’s Witness who insisted that God could make 2+3 be something other than 5 if He wished. You do agree with 2+3=5 as being absolutely correct whatever God might wish, no?
We got your email, not from some Satanic or communist conspiracy list but because it is publically posted on the Internet and available for anybody who might wish to contact an educator in their town they thought should be informed of the TRUTH. Yes, our words can be a bit sharp for our sense deep down is that all creationists, not just you, sir, are a little cuckoo in not being able to tell the difference between a wrestling match, a religious conversion and an intellectual debate. Most non-fundamentalists take the tack that fundamentalists are basically good people who just think a bit differently than they do. We don’t. Why? The hostility of your letter, extremely emotional as you might see if you read it again, indicates that creationists get very, very crazy when creationism is shot to pieces by any kind of sane argument.

Our website is stuffed with mathematics, www.matrix-evolution.com. Open on Internet Explorer to get all the equations. I don’t believe you are a smart enough mathematician to follow a simple algebraic derivation, one as clear as any proof in Euclidean Geometry. If you can understand how the matrix formulation of mathematical information derives from the Tsallis entropy with a=2, the first dozen equations or so and no problem for a REAL mathematician, my most profound and deep apologies. I mean that. If not, don’t ever write me again, loudmouth phony baloney puppet of your lying minister’s ridiculous sermons. You’re part of the school district? Pity the kids.
Dr. Peter V. Calabria, PhD, (Biophysics), Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Retired

Came back his reply:
From: [name omitted for privacy] [email address omitted for privacy]
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 12:45 AM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>, [name omitted for privacy]
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS

You blanket e-mail people with your nonsense and then when they are annoyed you assume that they think you got their e-mail from a Satanic list? Do you really have a PHD? Your little rants don’t seem typical of what I have become used to from PHD holders. I have been around a few growing up in a family of educators. Your comparing an interest formula to a population formula? The first problem with this is war, famine, etc. The population could be reduced or increased for many different reasons and is in no way a constant like the interest formula. It proves nothing. Oh, you still did not talk about how the big bang happened. If your population thing is right that disproves God exists how? And the hostility started in your letter that I never asked to receive. You talked about religion as superstitious, that we need to return to our senses as though all religious people are insane I guess. You get mad when you feel people make blanket assumption about you because you are an evolutionist but then you do that very thing to an extreme about creationists. Very hypocritical. I know you feel you are very intelligent. Maybe that is why you cannot accept God. You have a need to be at the top of the ladder. The thought of a higher being makes you angry. No need to pity my students. They are just fine. Many have even figured out something you have not. Jesus is Lord. I like how you list out all your degrees and that you were a professor as though that makes what you say carry more validity. Many wise people have no degrees and many with degrees are far from wise. Just for fun, I can even make 2 + 3 = something other than 5. It does not take God to do that. You just change to a base less than 5. 2+3 could = 101 in a different base. The illiterate Jehovah’s witness was right.

From: “Peter Calabria” <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2009 10:16 AM
To: [email address omitted for privacy]
Subject: fw: Intellegent Design
Creationists must respond to the bald fact that experiment after experiment and observation after observation has shown that evolution is correct. Further, idiot who calls himself a mathematician, changing the base does not change the fact that 2+3=5, which is universally taken to be to the base ten unless otherwise indicated, you utterly nutcase, word twisting, game player, aka, liar in any argument as fits your pre-ordained conclusions. You are the typical delusion peddling creationist who would go so far as to deny the truth of common counting to win in power games disguised by the morality and piety that the wolf of fundamentalism clothes itself in.

Back to evolution, the fellow who dropped this note, admittedly a friend of mine, is a lifetime Christian, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Breckenridge, Colorado. So Christianity is not part of the argument. Sanity is. Elmer Koneman is also Professor Emeritus of Pathology at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of the Textbook of Diagnostic Microbiology, another one of a half million medical professionals around the world, you know the people who save lives and such, who understand that you can’t think sideways and do humanity any good with Howdy Doody creationist prattle, let alone shove it down kids’ throats with the hell fire zealotry of Ted Haggard screaming about the evils of homosexuality before the truth popped up sixty times and made clear how completely full of two day old uneaten noodles he was. Him and you. What you do and your kind do, pedophile, in dominating trusting youngsters with your pushy lies is nothing but rape of little children. But beyond the inherent immorality of teaching creationism in the schools, it is illegal, dummy.

From: [email address omitted for privacy]
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:52 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: Intelligent Design
Hello Peter,
I have read through your long email on the ID/Creationist problem.  This may be synchronicity; however, last evening I viewed the two-hour NOVA program: “Judgment Day:  Intelligent Design on Trial”.  You may know that the town and township of Dover, Pennsylvania has been irreconcilably divided over the issue of evolution vs. ID.  I don’t know how much time you want to spend on this, but you can find a summary of the arguments both for ID and for Evolution that were put forth in a 6-week long trial that was held to determine if the Dover school board had the authority to insert ID into the school science curriculum (sounds like the same process going on in Texas). If you want to follow through you can access the summary of this legal action by going to pbs.org, then clicking on “Nova”, and then on the link “Intelligent Design on Trial”.  You will then have a number of hyperlinks to choose from to take you to arguments on both sides as presented by a variety of people.  Of particular note is a very long dissertation by Phillip Johnson, a lawyer, and who has been tagged as “the father of ID”.  The evolution counter argument is presented by a scientist, Ken Miller. The judge John Jones sat through this long trial process, after which he issued a 139-page report.  You can read through the full statement on the Board vs. Teachers link printed below; or, you can listen to some audio highlights, where Judge Jones reads a summary of his key findings.  I have listed these below.
Following is a brief summary of the events leading to and derived from this trial.  Bottom line according to Judge Jones’ ruling–ID and creationism are considered religion and therefore are in violation of the 1st amendment on separation of church and state and therefore insertion of ID into the science curriculum is disallowed.  Following the public announcement of his ruling, Judge Jones was swamped by an avalanche of hate mail from the ID fanatics, some with life-threats that for a period of time required police protection.  I hope this doesn’t happen in Austin. Anyway, you can read through the following brief summary and follow with accessing the web account if you want to take the time to learn more. Thanks for sharing your ideas with me.
[name omitted for privacy]

JUDGEMENT DAY:  INTELLEGENT DESIGN ON TRIAL
The 2005 trial of Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. was the latest major bout in a long-standing legal battle over the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools. The crux of the case was Dover’s newly implemented policy requiring biology teachers to read to students a disclaimer purporting that “gaps” exist in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and moreover, that there is an alternative scientific explanation called intelligent design (ID). The disclaimer suggested that students learn more about ID through a book called Of Pandas and People, 60 copies of which were available in the school library. (To read the statement in full, see Board vs. Teachers.)
Was Dover’s ID policy a covert way to introduce religion into a public school, and therefore in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? That is what Dover parent Tammy Kitzmiller and her co-plaintiffs claimed. Following six weeks of testimony from some of the country’s leading biologists, as well as arguments from the nation’s most ardent supporters of intelligent design, Judge John Jones issued a 139-page ruling on the case. In the following audio highlights, hear Judge Jones read some of his key findings.
Summary of Judge Jones’ ruling:

• ID is not Science
• ID is the progeny of creationism
• Evolutionary theory is not antithetical to religion
• The disclaimer Dover wanted read to students is flawed
• The goal of the ID movement is to foment a revolution
• It is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution

We were thoroughly upset by this person, [name omitted for privacy]’s, nonsense. Can you believe that anybody would dare say that about 2+3=5 and expect to be respected by other than the vulnerable kids this fundamentalist school district puts on his plate to eat every day? Pete replied to this next teacher with equal outrage.

From: “[name omitted for privacy]” [email address omitted for privacy]
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 12:19 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS

I will be thrilled if creationism is taught in schools.

[name omitted for privacy]

From: “Peter Calabria” <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:13 PM
To: [email address omitted for privacy]
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS

That’s because your type would be thrilled if 2+3=4 were taught in the schools if it glorified the unseen God who holds your hand when you get scared. You know, Darwin’s natural selection can be proven mathematically. We show how it is done on www.matrix-evolutions.com. (Open on Internet Explorer) This proof of natural selection is as tight as the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem and mathematically puts God in His Rightful Place, back in your imagination and out of the creation business. Since you might not be able to get permission from your pastor to log onto this heresy, I’ll spell it out for you in terms simple enough that your obviously cogent mind will see its correctness in two seconds.

Start with the exponential population growth differential equation. If God insists you argue this starting point to show your piety, you can begin more basically yet with the seventh grade daily compounded interest rate formula, which nobody argues except for kids who don’t want to be promoted, which is the same thing as the exponential with the interest rate as the population growth rate. Now solve the differential equation for size as a function for time.
Next write that solution out for two populations. Next take the sum of these population sizes as a constant as would be in a competitive niche of fixed carrying capacity. That boundary condition develops the Verhulst equation, (named after the noted 19th Century, Belgian mathematician, August Verhulst), with the rate constant term equal to the difference in the growth rates of the competing populations. This is a mathematical expression of Darwin’s differential birth and death definition of natural selection.

For good measure we empirically show on the website that selective evolution is neither a thing of God nor a thing not of God, but is a purely mathematical operation as applies to any system whose members come to be (or are born) and cease to be (or die), as in amorphous-crystalline phase transformations whose laboratory data perfectly fit the equations, thus proving natural selection generally mathematically.

But there’s no way you could accept or understand that because the belief in a God creator is an emotional thing, a thrill as you say, even if it is denied by mathematics as simple as 2+3=5. This was also the case when Newton expressed sun centered planetary motion mathematically but was yet denied by Bible believers wearing blinders for another 60 years until the Church finally realized its foolishness in telling its supplicants that black was white and took Galileo’s books off the banned list.

In time this mathematics will make the creationists look like the walking jokes they are, too. Sorry to be rude, but those who propound stupidity with that air of infallibility that only fundamentalists can manage can only and should be laughed at heartily. Especially when such stupidity is propounded by a school teacher whose authority so dominates vulnerable kids as to make it impossible for them to resist this destruction of their developing minds.
Dr. Peter V. Calabria

Trying to talk mathematics to this mathematics teacher got returned not mathematics but the following sermon from the jackass.

From: “[name omitted for privacy]” [email address omitted for privacy]
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:57 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: [BULK] Darwin SOS

Dr. Calabria-

Now, I did read your e-mail all the way through and would appreciate if you would read my response (don’t worry, I didn’t call you any names like you called me!).

What if you could predict that a major world event would take place five minutes from now? What if you could accurately describe what would happen? Would knowing the future give you unusual power? Would anyone believe you? Possibly some would, but how many would not?

Many people do not believe the Bible, yet it miraculously foretells hundreds of events, sometimes in minute detail, and usually hundreds – sometimes thousands – of years ahead. Some prophecies concern cities and countries, such as Tyre, Jericho, Samaria, Jerusalem, Palestine, Moab, and Babylon. Others relate to specific individuals. Many have already been fulfilled, but some are still in the future.

Jesus Christ is the subject of more than 300 Old Testament prophecies. His birth nearly 2,000 years ago, and events of His life had been foretold by many prophets during a period of 1,500 years. History confirms that even the smallest detail happened just as predicted. It confirms beyond a doubt that Jesus is the true Messiah, the Son of God and Savior of the world.

I will pray for you daily.

[name omitted for privacy]

To which Pete replied:
From: “Peter Calabria” <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:02 PM
To: [email address omitted for privacy]
Subject: RE: [BULK] Darwin SOS

The name calling is directed to the way of thinking, which deserves ridicule, along with the individual, thou mathematics memorizing jerk. Who the heck do you think you are talking to? This is not a child that believes your silly tales of pinpoint Biblical prophesies because he or she is stuck in your class and has no choice but to have his or her mind raped by your nonsense.

The Bible implies by genealogy that the world is 6000 years old. That literal interpretation of it, [name omitted for privacy], is wrong. If you think it is right, then you are denying very basic geological and chemical science so absurdly that any school district who cared about the education of the children entrusted to them would throw you out on your ear, one utterly deaf to scientific reasoning and truth.

You teach geometry. Presumably you respect Euclid. I had an odd experience of home teaching my oldest boy, now grown and a CPA, that subject. The text we used was a simplified one that left out the proofs. My son insisted on the proofs, so I had to do them all from scratch myself. On the one hand, I felt rather good that I had no trouble deriving them. But, more, what I came away with was the beauty of the material, the tight logical fit.

Evolution is not a twit different. It is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of sensible, logical, thinking. And when you chuck that out the window and replace it with what you heard on The God Learning Channel last Tuesday night, you are in major error, doubly ugly and cruel when such ways of pseudo-reasoning destroy a child’s mind and ability to think straight.

We also heard from a pious woman math teacher who felt a need to be flagellated verbally so that she, too, could revel in the fact of being persecuted for her pious beliefs.

From: “[name omitted for privacy]” [email address omitted for privacy]
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 9:26 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: How to Talk to a Creationist

I do sincerely hope that creationism is taught in the schools. If you now feel the need to criticize me, that is okay. Have a nice day.

[name omitted for privacy]
Pete obliged.

From: “Peter Calabria” <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:12 PM
To: [email address omitted for privacy]
Subject: How to Talk to a Creationist

It is the need to criticize people who think the earth is flat, and preach it to children, and who think 2+3 can be something other than 5, as I am sure you would say in agreement with your fellow nitwit, [name omitted for privacy]. All mechanisms suggested in the Bible for the creator’s means of creation violate every natural law and are as impossible as making a right triangle whose hypotenuse is other than the square root of the sum of the squares of its legs. Which I am sure you would also say God could also make be if He wished to. You would have no problem, Saint [name omitted for privacy], deceiver and abuser of children, in disagreeing with all professional mathematicians and with all professional biologists to save your mortal soul, of course, and keep the hump on the children’s minds as the creation spouting minister Ted Haggard did before he was caught at his nonsense.

And finally we got to hear from the big billygoat gruff, the head of the high school science department, who told the lies in the most educationally pious tones of all.

From: “[name omitted for privacy]” [email address omitted for privacy]
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 7:06 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: How to Talk to a Creationist

I will say only one thing, I will not be there because as teacher/educators we are to teach all our students to think critically about their world. If we only present one side, how can they think for themselves? I know I do not want other people to think for me.

[name omitted for privacy]

Pete tried his best to answer in kind.

From: “Peter Calabria” <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 9:25 PM
To: [email address omitted for privacy]
Subject: RE: How to Talk to a Creationist

In my extended career as student, teacher and researcher, the high school I attended being considered the best in the Boston area and the science and engineering university I attended being number four in the country, there was never any consideration for the students to question the science taught them until one reaches the PhD track level and is doing research. Why? It is because students are ill equipped to question the science subjects taught them. It is more than enough that they strive to grasp the scientific ideas taught them, let alone question them. I never heard of it. I never saw it. It would never have made any sense, for what is taught to students in these areas has been thoroughly vetted by tens of thousands of scientists crossing conceptual swords for countless years in the hundreds of scientific journals that fill university libraries.

You’re a chemist, by background, I take it. Though I am nominally a biologist, chemistry courses predominated in both my undergraduate and graduate matriculation. I cannot even imagine why I would question the organic, inorganic or physical chemistry taught me. Are you telling me that you did? If so, you’re a damn liar. I both learned and taught at the university level. What you and every other student in chemistry did was study hard to pass your exams.

At the lower levels, the notion of students in grade school and high school questioning scientific theory is so utterly ridiculous that your using it as an excuse to downgrade evolution as science and leave enough room for creationism to stick its superstitious nose in is transparent, word spinning liar. Of the tens of thousands of PhD biologists in this country, there are but one or two extremely stupid religious zealots from some second-rate universities who don’t accept evolution. Why? Because biology is incomprehensible without it. Evolution stands in relation to biology as the theory of the atom stands in relationship to chemistry. That is the scientific consensus of a hundred thousand scientists who have collectively studied and researched the theory for the last 150 years.

What joy to parents to have a head of science in their high school who can’t tell a science lecture from a Sunday sermon and supports the rape of kids entrusted to her by her underlings. A well spoken rationalization for creationism, madam, but nonetheless disgusting for the real harm it does children.

Dr. Peter V. Calabria

In the meantime, another Lubbock high school teacher, [name omitted for privacy], took the email we sent about the rally in Austin and posted some of it on the forum under his name. Some of the comments on it are noteworthy in indicating the extent of brain damage this stuff can inflict on people.  Don’t laugh. True, Lubbock is extreme enough to have as its unofficial motto be: Lubbock, Building Bridges to the 11th Century. But as goes Lubbock, so may go the rest of the country.

“That is more garbage from the Calabrias trying to dictate and control what is taught in life. They are doing what they are accusing others of doing – filling people’s minds with Darwinian hocus-pocus and selling it as science.  The emails are full of false statements – they were not banned because of their main discussion issues, they were banned because they attacked those who disagreed with them. Let’s get the story straight.”

I personally choose to forget anyone that will not allow the thought of creationism. One thing the Calabrias and their ilk have a total ignorance of is: The Power of Prayer.”

“Evolutionism is as much a religion as is creationism. Either ban them both or permit them both. Only narrow-minded, fearful, insecure people wish to ban the teaching of creationism. Benito Mussolini Calabria is attempting to pick up where the others left off.”

By the way, if anybody knows President Obama’s secret email address or White House phone number, they should clue him into the dreck that lies under the faith of faith based organizations and their members. Here is the thread of emails from various scientists, educators and legislators we originally mailed out that he should also be informed of.

We are a group of scientists, educators, legal representatives and grandmothers who are deeply concerned about the material about to be put in the science textbooks of the children of America. In March, Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) will vote to determine whether the superstitious anti-science ideas of creationism will be taught alongside evolution in science texts. This is not a trivial issue. It is imperative that those who understand the dangers of filling our kids’ and grandkids’ minds with medieval hocus-pocus and selling it as science should come en masse to Austin at 1701 N. Congress on Wednesday, March 25, on the day before the vote, armed with enthusiasm and signs indicating their feeling that there must be a return to sensibility and sanity in the teaching of our children. We ask that people from all around the country come because the nature of textbook publishing has what the Texas SBOE decides for the children of Texas also determining the science textbook and teaching used by school districts all around the country for the next ten years.

If the person receiving this is a journalist, we stress the fairness and need for this announcement of the rally to be made to the public as in a letter to the editor or in a short article. If you are an Internet blogger, please display this in a prominent place on your blog. If you are an individual who understands the dire need for science and evolution to be taught correctly, we ask that you use any influence you may have with your local media to have this announcement made public and to please forward copies of this email to professional colleagues and to all sensible people you know who understand the importance of having this Texas SBOE vote go the right way.

This rapidly growing movement came about spontaneously from my scientist husband trying to talk about his discovery of a mathematical proof of natural selection on the forum of the second rate newspaper of Lubbock, Texas, the Avalanche-Journal, which includes a Bible quote on its front page everyday and which eventually banned and censored my husband from talking because of his strong Darwinian views and his eventual realization, tongue in cheek, that the creationists commenting on evolution were little more than murdering rapists who got whatever meager sexual pleasure they had in life from causing hurt to others. His email to academics and legislators and their replies follows. If there are any questions as to the March 25 rally in Austin or anything else, please do not hesitate to ask.

Mrs. Ruth Calabria

A massive body of scientific evidence supports evolution. All working scientists agree that publication in top peer-reviewed journals is the scoreboard of modern science. A quick database search of scientific publications since 1975 shows 29,639 peer-reviewed scientific papers on evolution in twelve leading journals alone². To put this in perspective, if you read 5 papers a day, every day, it would take you 16 years to read this body of original research. These tens of thousands of research papers on evolution provide overwhelming support for the common ancestry of living organisms and for the mechanisms of evolution including natural selection. In contrast, a search of the same database for “Intelligent Design” finds a mere 24 articles, every one of which is critical of intelligent design³. Given that evolution currently has a score of 29,639–-while “intelligent design” has a score of exactly zero–-it is absurd to expect the TEA’s director of science curriculum to “remain neutral” on this subject. In recognition of the overwhelming scientific support for evolution, evolution is taught without qualification– and intelligent design is omitted– at every secular and most sectarian universities in this country, including Baylor (Baptist), Notre Dame (Catholic), Texas Christian (Disciples of Christ) and Brigham Young (Mormon).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

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YOU cannot overestimate,” thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about… how Darwin’s explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it… I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.”

His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN’s east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the “battle” between “maverick” scientists like himself and those who “believe the mind is what the brain does” is a “cultural war”.

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial – in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider’s Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement’s war on science be the brain?

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be “Darwinism’s grave”, as Denyse O’Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the “hard problem” of consciousness – how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons – is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute’s mission as outlined in its “wedge document”, which seeks “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies”, to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

Now the institute is funding research into “non-material neuroscience”. One recipient of its cash is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 “evolution hearings” in Kansas. Using a Discovery Institute grant, Menuge wrote Agents Under Fire, in which he argued that human cognitive capacities “require some non-natural explanation”.

In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness,” he writes, “and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism’s failure to provide a helpful explanation.” Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God “is” consciousness, “the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning.”

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.

But William Dembski, one of ID’s founding fathers and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, praised Schwartz’s work as providing “theoretical support for the irreducibility of mind to brain”. Dembski’s website shows that he is currently co-editing The End of Materialism with Schwartz and Beauregard.

Meanwhile, Schwartz has been working with Henry Stapp, a physicist at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who also spoke at the symposium. They have been developing non-standard interpretations of quantum mechanics to explain how the “non-material mind” affects the physical brain.

Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools. But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, emphasises: “This is real and dangerous and coming our way.”

He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons. “Progress in science is slow on many fronts,” says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. “We don’t yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn’t mean cancer has spiritual causes.”

And for Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, “it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn’t currently explained doesn’t mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics.”

The attack on materialism proposes to do just that, but it all turns on definitions. “At one time it looked like all physical causation was push/pull Newtonianism,” says Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina. “Now we have a new understanding of physics. What counts as material has changed. Some respectable philosophers think that we might have to posit sentience as a fundamental force of nature or use quantum gravity to understand consciousness. These stretch beyond the bounds of what we today call ‘material’, and we haven’t discovered everything about nature yet. But what we do discover will be natural, not supernatural.”

And as Clark observes: “This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as ‘Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,’ but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn’t follow at all. There’s nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that’s just brains changing brains.”

That is the voice of mainstream academia. Public perception, however, is a different story. If people can be swayed by ID, despite the vast amount of solid evidence for evolution, how hard will it be when the science appears fuzzier?

What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain – and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the “God of the gaps“.

Sodom, Gomorrah, and Homosexuality

Along with the link this audio clip was taken from

http://webulite.com/group/thebiblegeek

In what could be a first in the world, a fish species known as cichlids has been observed by scientists in the act of splitting into two distinct species in Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake and one of the world’s biggest fresh water bodies.

Full Article: EcoWorldy

Oh well, I guess I just have to wait for it on DVD or at bittorrent sites (lol).

Newsflash: Bill Maher Kicks Zucker’s Ass At The Box Office