Ed Brayton reports on Conservapedia, set up by Creationist Andrew Schlafly because he didn't like the "anti-Christian" bias of Wikipedia. Andrew Schlafly is the son of Phyllis Schlafly and legal counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which publishes bad science promoting a thimerosal autism link, as well as Rachel Carson was worse than Hitler stuff.
Commenter doctorgoo found this entry on the origins of the kangaroo:
Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined whether kangaroos form a holobarmin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.
After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land -- as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart -- or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.
I thought that it was a parody, but Creationists really believe this stuff.
Update: Oops, Objective Ministries is a parody, but they are parodying genuine Creationists who think that kangaroos migrated to Australia from the Middle East after the flood. (Just follow the links to Ken Ham and the like from the Objective Ministries page.) So maybe the entry was created as a parody, but Schlafly, who seems to monitor changes quite closely, has accepted it.
Pretty dumb, but all you've really done is found the Lyndon Larouche branch of Christianity, with layers and layers of phony jargon as a substitute for deep thinking.
Argh, I failed to make my point... which is that I could just as easily fisk the bunk put out by the Larouche movement, and paint that as "look how dumb the democrats/liberals are" , but they don't represent the bulk of liberalism any more than these idiots represent conservatives or Christians.
So... uh...Pangea has broken apart in only the last 4000 years? How is that possible? This is just weird creationist stuff. Not well written or researched or even thought out for that matter.
Sigh. See what we have to put up with?
z.
z, why do you have to put up with it? I get flyers from the Larouche nitwits more often than I like in my UNIVERSITY mail, along with everyone else. I've never received anything from these other nitwits. And in either case, there's nothing to put up with. They have very little sway and are simply a bit irritating, but not much more.
Do you live in America? Have you ever been beseeched by a Larouche follower? It's mind boggling. They come to our lab and try to tell us some BS about how awful Newton was for mathematics and science (I'm not kidding).
There are idiots everywhere, so what?
From the link in the original post :
"Dinosaurs are large, reptilian land animals that lived in great abundance over 4000 years ago ("There were giants in the earth in those days" [Gen 6:4]), and were mostly wiped out during the Flood. Contrary to the depictions of them from Hollywood, dinosaurs were herbivorous ("he eateth grass as an ox." [Job 40:15]) and lived concurrently and in peace with man. They did not live 65 million years ago, as evolutionists claim, since nothing but God existed then."
http://objectiveministries.org/creation/dinosaurs.html
I could possibly NOT understand how any sane, adult person would claim dinosaurs lived a) 4000 years ago b) were herbivorous and c) lived in peace with man.
Thank god we don't have this fruitcake debate evolutions VS creationism in my country.
Ah, but this explains everything re: dinosaurs :
"They did not live 65 million years ago, as evolutionists claim, since nothing but God existed then."
It's obvious. They didn't live 65 million years ago since there was nothing but God.
Praise the Lord - vote conservative !
ben - no, I have not ever met a Larouche "nitwit". If they are responsible for stuff like Conservapedia then I would say they are a little off their rocker on some things.
Yeah, there are idiots everywhere. I am sure there are people out there who think I am one. So... eh, what to do? Heh.
z.
The LaRouchians are indeed nitwits, but I haven't noticed that them rewriting any state school standards to reflect their loony views.
"After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia."
I read this as meaning that Noah had sex with Kangaroos!
Bad philosophy, Bad religion, Bad imagery, and Bad writing.
I think I just summed up your Stupidopedia!
Uh ... holobarbin, apobaraminic, polybaraminic ...? Okay, I think I know magic incantations when I see them.
I can just picture pirate kangaroos on a raft sailing for the promised land down under. Arghh! Ahoy, me hearties! Grrrr!
Thinking more about this, I don't think Conservapedia will last too long. For one, the faithful are lazy and wikis take a lot of discipline and real work -- and fact checking.
For another, there will be internal squabbles. Although they are always in agreement at the slogan level, when they get down to the fine details there will be very little agreement on anything.
Actually, it will be much like the bible, in that those who swear by it have read very little of it. This will come back to bite them in the ass when Conservapedia is used as a source to contradict them in other venues.
True Andy, but do these other nitwits exactly rewrite any school standards? I don't think they do. Sure other "intelligent design" types try to, but these guys are even further out than that.
Manboy, there are plenty of liberal Christians.
Of course there are liberal Christians, I'm one of 'em!
To be specific, I'm an environmentalist, radical feminist, pro-choice, pro-diversity, liberal Episcopalian who actually DOSEN'T TAKE ALL OF THE BIBLE LITERALLY! Seriously, I think KJV-Onlyists are *this* close to a cult, if they aren't one already. ~shudder~
Laser Potato, you're obviously a heretic and you're gonna burn!
"Noah had sex with Kangaroos!"
Hey, could you blame the guy?
His wife was older than the hills and he was on that boat for 40 days and nights. Who knows, Perhaps Kangaroos start looking good under those conditions (better than lizards, I would guess, at any rate).
"That kangaroos are not mentioned in the Genesis account of the Flood, either by name or description, is unsurprising due to the great number of kinds of animals that were in the Ararat area at the time. What's a kangaroo or two among a great throng of pandas, mastodons, velociraptors, and giraffes?"
Given the choice of sex with a velociraptor or with a kangaroo, it would be understandable that Noah might choose the latter.
Sex with a velociraptor? Ouch.
Perhapps this explains the ancestry of Rick Santorum?
No, wait, I take that back, that's a terrible thing to say about kangaroos.
I hit the random page button several times and got the entry for Ecuador:
"Ecuador is a country in northern South Africa."
Wow that's pretty fine parody! "It's still debated whether these groups are monobaraminic or holobaraminic, and it is one of Project Pterosaur's science goals to answer this question (if we find specimens of both groups, we can determine baraminicity by using Intelligent Design Theory to measure their specified complexity and apply the Dembski-Shannon equation to extrapolate the amount of relative informational loss due to genetic degradation from their perfect Creation." from objectiveministries.org's page on modern day pterosaurs
LOL - rock on!
OT - C'mon Tim, the suspense in killing me. Surely you're going to respond to Bolta's latest idiocy?
The random page button is addictive.
"Cytolysis:
The rapturing of a cell due to excess internal pressure."
Sounds like end times for that cell.
Andrew Schlafly, who is reportedly gay is another example of the fact that there are incredibly dumb gay people. First, working for his gay-hating mother, and now this. It's embarrassing for us gay people to have him as a member of the tribe.
Thanks Steve, I didn't pick Objective Ministries as a parody because they link to real Creationists who say similar things. I added an update.
they define complex numbers to be of the form "a+bi" where i is "a square root of unity". I`m not willing to credit that as a proper definition. Also their entry on pi does include mention that the real value of pi may be 3 (because the bible says so).
Let`s hope their home-schooled engineers aren`t going to get too much of their bridge-building technology from this page!!!
Conservapedia on [sex](http://www.conservapedia.com/Sex):
>1. The process by which offspring are conceived. Some religions, including Christianity, regard it as sinful outside of marriage.
>2. Another term for gender.
>3. A way to pass the time.
http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Sex&action=history
Some heavy editing going on over at the site.
Yeah, the reason goven for that last revert is classic. The words "Some religions, including Christianity, regard it [sex] as sinful outside of marriage" were just removed because they were "unexplained silliness and over-the-top satiric mockery of conservative opinion".
If that's their standing definition of over-the-top mockery, this thing's going to fall to the wiki-trolls in, oh, about a week and a half. The simple fact is trolls have more time than the faithful... less witnessing required.
From the entry on Charlemagne:
"His fault lay in the way he persecuted non-Christians. His most important contribution was definitely the way he spread Christianity."
"The site you link to is a parody"
Yeh, and the way that you tell is that some of the stuff is actually more believable than what you find on most creationist sites.
raj, I think you have may confused Andy Schlafly with his brother John, who is openly gay.
There is a third brother, Roger, who has a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley and teaches (or used to teach) computer science at one of the smaller U.C. campuses. Roger has a blog at http://www.spinstop.com/buzz/ Occasionally Andy and John show up there.
Andy is far and away the craziest of the three. Roger is a pretty smart guy who actually knows a fair amount about science, but his perspective tends to get warped by his far-right-wing views (I notice that on his current blog, he defends relativity - which Andy thinks is bad science - but attributes it to Lorentz and Poincare rather than Einstein, an idiosyncratic view which IME tends to be correlated with a strong dislike for Einstein's political stance.) John seems to be pretty reasonable, but I've read much less of his stuff. Roger and Andy used to spend quite a lot of time stirring up trouble on talk.origins.
Let's see if they how long the recent edits to the entry on global warming will last:
There is a CreationWiki for creationist-loonies at:
http://creationwiki.org/Main_Page
According to Roger Schlaffly "Relativity was invented by Lorentz and Poincare" .
This is a popular claim among those out to discredit Einstein.
But the reality is different. To borrow from -- and slightly modify -- a Poem by Robert Frost [The Secret Sits],
"Poincare' and Lorentz danced round in a ring and supposed, but Einstein sat in the middle and knowed."
Einstein put it all together and for that reason is rightfully credited with special relativity theory by the vast majority of historians of science.
Poincare' and Lorentz relied on ad hoc assumptions to explain relativistic effects while Einstein swept all of these away and based his theory on two pillars: the constancy of the speed of light regardless of the motion of the source (an observed fact) and the assumption (also supported by experiment) that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames.
Where Lorentz and Poincare' assumed the Lorentz transformation correct, Einstein derived it based on his two pillars.
The evolution one is amusing.. apparently evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I have a new favourite website.
"picture pirate kangaroos on a raft sailing for the promised land down under."
So that's what they mean by "over the bounding main "