Lots of people have been sending me email to let me know that Coral Ridge Ministry is airing a program linking Darwin to Hitler. In case you missed it, this show, Darwin's Deadly Legacy, was first aired last year, and I reviewed it then, Wilkins eviscerated its premises, and even the Anti-Defamation League got in the act. It's a horrible piece of dishonest dreck, and now I guess it's going to be a yearly television event, like a demented evil version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
This has me thinking — the Christianists will re-air their lies and stinking garbage over and over again, but have you ever noticed that the great science programs, the ones that inspired many of us, seem to be allowed one appearance and then … nevermore. Why doesn't PBS have a yearly rebroadcast of, say, Carl Sagan's Cosmos or Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man? Those were great programs; I've seen bits and pieces of both now and then, and I think they've also aged reasonably well.
But no, we can find that droning mackerel's lies for Jesus on a regular basis, but the beautiful and honest science shows get to rot in storage somewhere, with occasional fragmentary bits appearing on youtube.
Don't miss Hector Avalos' contribution to the debate on the relative morality of atheists and Christians!
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A fair point. I'm going to add Bill Nye's show to the ones you mentioned as being worthy of rebroadcast. I loved that show. My wife and I bought a couple of them for our nephews. They love em.
One can download all the Cosmos and Ascent of Man videos off the internet.
Cosmos:
Parts 1 - 13, except for part 4 can be downloaded from
http://joox.net/cat/392
Part 4 can bd downloaded from
http://www.guba.com/watch/3000083262?duration_step=0&fields=23&filter_t…
Ascent of Man:
Parts 1-12 can be downloaded from
http://www.guba.com/general/search?query=ascent&set=5&x=24&y=6
Ascent of Man Part 13 can be downloaded from (requires software to access bittorrent; NetTransport and, I am informed, Flashget can be used but it will be slow!)
bt://G:/Media Downloads/Net Transport Downloads/BBC.torrent
It can always get worse. How often will Ben Stein and the movie, Expelled, be on Xian broadcasting TV?
It looks like it will go straight to movie heaven. Utube and endless reruns on religious programming stations.
One of the "experts" cited in Darwin's Deadly Legacy is Ann Coulter. That tells you all you need to know about its level of honesty, even if you weren't aware of the anti-scientific bias of D. James Kennedy and his Coral Ridge Ministries. [Link]
Hey! What have you got against Mackerel?
What was German rational for eliminating all the Jews if it was not to purify the German race of an inferior race?
Well, yes, motivated people with some technical competence can find these things. Compare using bittorrent to download digital media with flicking on your TV, though -- we need to make these programs accessible to the family with an old tube TV with an antenna. The way I saw them.
I think they were showing Uncle Carl on the Science channel a little while back.
I watched Cosmos all the way through last spring; I'd read the book years before, but hadn't seen the show till then. It's held up pretty darn well! A few things would be updated, now:
1. We've found more than twenty times more planets outside our solar system than in.
2. Dark matter has been confirmed and, even more incredibly, its distribution mapped out.
3. We've learned that the expansion of the Universe is not slowing down or even holding steady, but accelerating.
Those are the big points which spring to my mind, anyway.
Oops, I forgot to mention that Hector Avalos has a great, lengthy essay on the whole "Darwin to Hitler" nonsense, recently posted at Talk Reason.
locally in my area (Boston) the coral ridge hour runs just before an hour and a half of the three stooges.....
oh the irony!
Re PZ Myers
I was not disagreeing with Prof. Myers that it would be useful to rebroadcast the Sagan and Bronowski episodes. I was merely providing links so that interested parties could download the video files without waiting for PBS or the Discovery Channel to get off their asses. By the way, using NetTransport to download bittorrent files doesn't require any more computer expertise then downloading a file from a web site or file sharing system such as megaupload. The only problem is that it is slow as one is assigned the lowest priority in the bittorrent peer to peer system.
BTW,i am watching the stooges now, love those boys.
nyuk nyuk nyuk
Well, as Blake Stacey points out in his post, there is a difference; Science changes year by year, religion just repeats he same tired old lies.
Hitler and Martin Luther said that the Jews were the Devil's people, and were out to get the nice Germans, and it would make God very, very, very happy to have the Germans annihilate the Jews, and obliterate all traces of the Jews' existence.
sailor:
What impresses me more is how well TV series like Cosmos and Connections have aged. In the latter case, part of the reason is that it made good predictions which have since been borne out, but on top of that, the explanations still hold true. Science expands at the edges: if you get the core right today, that core is still good and useful twenty or thirty years later!
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The German Nazi motivation was an old story. Xian religious prejudice against other religions in general and Judaism in particular. Martin Luther was a notorious antisemite who advocated destroying the Jews. He did this 250 years before Darwin even wrote his first book on evolution. Some Nazis at Nurenberg claimed they were just carrying out Luther's plan. Hitler, a Catholic, himself invoked god and christianity often as support for his plans.
If you flick on your old rabbit-eared tube TV any Sunday morning, you will find all sorts of Xtian propaganda going out, completely unrefuted (unless you count self-refutation). If you have cable, there's even more, with most systems offering several dedicated god-channels. OTOH you can't even find a single atheist program, much less a dedicated channel.
I think it's a measure of how uncompelling a collection of fairy tales Xtianity is that it needs such constant support, and even so is still losing adherents.
Perhaps the TV networks are reluctant to air shows like Cosmos because people can easily pirate them off the Internet. This is one of the perils of stealing intellectual property.
I think the unceasing airing of religious propaganda is an example of the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you don't air it, some people make a huge stink and of course get huge press coverage.
I really don't know why they don't air Cosmos every year. It was certainly a highlight of my childhood.
I watched some of this tripe this morning.
Methinks they kept forgetting to separate the concept of Intelligent Design from Christianity. Oops! Cat's out of the bag! Again...
The one teacher had to pack up his books and transfer to a different school after mentioning ID in the classroom despite the fact that "many Christian parents were pleased he was teaching it."
And then there's the ACLU. Darwin's Deadly Legacy makes it seem like the ACLU is everywhere. There's an agent-student in every class. They're there just waiting to pounce on the poor, victimized creationists. Just try and teach an alternate view and see what happens!
The main reason is because the marketing and trend-watching experts who make decisions on programming decided a long time ago that Union citizens are too stupid to be interested in science shows. Its for this reason alone that this kinds if series have always found themselves on public broadcasting or specialty networks like discovery. It should be no surprise then that, over the last two decades as we've seen a conglomeration-frenzy in the television world and the adoption by the fundamentalists of nuisance tactics focusing on local pbs stations, we've seen the quality of science programming go down. The same people that bring us fluffy pablum like friends gutted the learning channel's programming and reduced discovery, a channel created to be a venue for science broadcasting, to shows about fishing, construction, and wallowing in filth. In a similar vein, its why the history channel now has a show about snow truckers in Alaska (I mean, wtf?).
Studio execs have very specific ideas about what all us plebs like and what they want us to like. They arrogantly believe themselves the arbiters of our opinions, and the lack of quality programming on U.S. television is a clear expression of their disdain. Thats why everyone below the age of 30 is fleeing television for the internet and DVRs :).
Humph. Perhaps all this at least partly explains why it's been weeks since my TV has even been plugged in . . . Anymore the Stooges are pretty much that media's intellectual zenith.
The American Public keeps getting stupider. Inject trash directly into the brains using media, and collect big on advertising.
Even channels like Discovery and Animal Planet, which I used to be HAPPY knowing my kids were watching, are airing more and more crap to up viewership.
Re Blake Stacey
I watched Episode 8 of Cosmos last night which includes a discussion of special relativity. Unfortunately, although Dr. Sagans' discussion was technically correct, he missed the entire point of Einsteins' contribution. Almost all of his discussion concerned the independence of the speed of light relative to the speed of the source. This is true but irrelevant (the speed of sound is also independent of the speed of the source). Einsteins' postulate that the speed of light was also independent of the speed of the observer was what was important and this was almost entirely missed by Dr. Sagan. In fact, only someone with a fair knowledge of special relativity would have cottoned on to this omission.
About Dr. Kennedy, "A.B., M.Div., M.Th., D.D., D.Sac.Lit., Ph.D., Litt.D., D.Sac.Theol., D.Humane Let." His Ph.D. is in religious education, and his dissertation is as follows (via ProQuest):
THE GENESIS, DEVELOPMENT, AND EXPANSION OF EVANGELISM EXPLOSION INTERNATIONAL, 1960-1976 by KENNEDY, D. JAMES, Ph.D., New York University, 1979, 249 pages; AAT 7918850
("Evangelism explosion" is a conversion organization Kennedy founded.)
Some of the other degrees are honorary.
Who lists honorary degrees after their name? Someone with that kind of Ph.D.
PZ,
What is this "old tube TV with an antenna" thing of which you speak?
I watched Darwin's Legacy on TV. It was very enlightening. The foundational justification of genocide against the Jews was to "purify the German of inferior genes". At the meeting planning the "final solution of the Jewish problem" one of the architects of the plan stated "Darwin would be astounded at what we are going to accomplish in just one year"
Many claim a moral foundation in materialism, Yet if materialism is strictly adhered to it produces moral blindness. Whereas for a theist, such as Luther, to justify such a morally reprehensible position as genocide he would have to somehow ignore and cloud over the Judeo-Christian foundation of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
You can tell the truth of your claims of morality for materialism by the fruit it has produced in civilization! It has produced far worse fruit than any blind Christians ever could!
To be fair, Julian, the History Channel is running "The Universe."
They advertise it with the wonderful slogan "Introducing absolutely everything"
I'm watching this show right now. All your favorite characters wrapped up in one show: Ann Coulter, Behe, Wells, etc. Most of it is outright lies, the rest is content-free.
As pointed out above, the number of religious shows on broadcast TV is amazing. At lease three UHF channels in my area are full-time evangelism. There are not many other channels left. Twenty years ago in my area, there were no religious channels on broadcast TV. What's going on here?
Just a slight quibble re PZ's put down of classic science programming on the tube. As some posts have said Cosmos has recently been revived and many other, albeit relatively recent, shows of high quality (i.e Attenburough's Life of Mammals, etc.)have been repeated time and time again. So I wouldn't say there is a lack of quality science programming available, although we would all like to see more. Ascent of Man is a great series but, in that it is more than 30 years old, it's a stretch to think it would get much air time in this day and age. As regards "James Bond" little minds deserve little comment.
Just a follow up to my previous comment. I do live in the Bay area so my experience may be totally skewed relative to what many others experience.
SLC (#25):
Fair enough. The idea that the speed of light is independent of the source becomes more challenging once one considers that light isn't traveling in a medium, like sound does, and to get into that would require a detour through the luminiferous aether. And, as noted physics student Hunter S. Thompson reminds us, there is nothing so helpless and depraved as a man in the depths of a luminiferous aether binge.
However, the segment which follows the horse-and-cart bit is, to be best of my knowledge, accurate. Sagan brings up the subtle point that the Lorentz contraction is further complicated by the non-zero time it takes light to travel from source to observer, a complication which took a few decades to get fully unraveled.
In case you're not aware of it, Coral Ridge Ministries is eager to share Darwin's Deadly Legacy with you. They specifically state that they'll mail you a copy of the DVD for "a contribution of any amount." So stick a dollar bill in an envelope addressed to
Coral Ridge Ministries
Post Office Box 40
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33302
You'll get the anti-Darwin DVD and a booklet on scientific evidence against creation.
Yes, Coral Ridge will spend additional money sending you solicitations for contributions, but that's what recycling bins are for. Besides, the DVD will let you know what lies the creationists are spreading and at least that copy of the video won't be poisoning a vulnerable mind somewhere. (Unless, of course, you find the "documentary" so compelling that you under a conversion experience. Yeah, right.)
I watched Cosmos all the way through last spring; I'd read the book years before, but hadn't seen the show till then. It's held up pretty darn well! A few things would be updated, now:
The new Cosmos edition has some of the changes you alluded to, either through judicious editing or by adding an 'update' to the end of the program. These are poignant, in that Carl is older and quite a bit weaker in appearance. I still use Cosmos in my classroom, and if there's anything I need to tweak, I just draw my student's attention to it during the showing.
That reminds me of something I was wondering recently. Back in the late 90's (I think) here in the US, they used to have several human sexuality programs on TLC that I thought were fascinating (me being in my teens). They were usually produced in England, and were pretty explicit by US standards. Recently I was trying to find out the names of some of them. However, looking at the TV Guide for that channel was a no-go; now there's just cheap 30 minute shows that talk about pheromones and evo-psych (!) instead of the real thing. I wondered where all those shows went- and I knew a second later.
Conservatives ruin everything.:(
Maybe we ought to conspire for an uncensored science channel. Bill Nye in the morning, Cosmos at primetime, and British human sexuality specials by night.
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Wrong again James. The roots of German antisemitism were in German Xianity. Read what Adolph said above about the Jews and why. One can find pages and pages of similar quotes.
BTW, James. The German slant on Xianity left some decendants behind. In particular your brand of Death cultists in the USA. So, who is on your To Kill list?
Most Death cultists have simplified theirs to virtually all of humanity. They are just hoping and waiting on the rapture and apocalypse. Then their miserable, empty, meaningless lives of lies and hatred will be ended. As a bonus, god will also kill the entire rest of the world's population of 6.7 billion people.
Must be a weird feeling to wake up every morning hoping this will be the day when the entire human race is murdered. What a great perversion of a religion.
This doesn't make any sense. Cosmos is already on the tubes - airing it again won't make it any more available.
Doesn't this argument sound a little like Andrew Keen? "Allowing just anyone to pass around and create music and video without getting approval to enter into our culture from the elite will destroy my job!"
But do we really need more Mr Bean reruns?
Re Bronowski
In commenting on Bronowskis' episodes, it should also be pointed out that in Part 1, he mentions the hypothesis that homo sapians evolved from neanderthals in the Middle East. That hypothesis was much in vogue in the early '70s but more recent finds in Africa and molecular biology results appear to have discredited it (unless one listens to Prof. Milton Wolpoff).
Re Blake Stacey
The Lorentz contraction was first proposed by Lorentz several years before Einsteins' 1905 paper to explain the results of the Michaelson-Morley experiments. The beauty of Einsteins hypothesis is that it predicts such a contraction, in addition to time dilation which was first directly observed in the decay of muons in the early '50s.
*thinks of Rowan Atkinson and sex*
*vomits*
Isn't religion the quintessential example of this truism? "If a lie is big enough and is repeated often enough, people will believe it." And, of course, the "repeating" part keeps feeding the "money-sucking" machine.
Isn't religion the quintessential example of this truism? "If a lie is big enough and is repeated often enough, people will believe it." And, of course, the "repeating" part keeps people feeding the "money-sucking" machine.
No Darwin, no Hitler.
No Hitler, no World War II.
No World War II, no Baby Boom.
No Baby Boom, no me!
Oh, dear!
They could not appeal to natural selection, for they were not allowing nature to work.
And it happened during the era when the productivity of natural selection was largely in doubt. Among non-scientists, ideas like Bergson's "elan vital" were popular (Nobel Prize in literature, 1927). Among scientists, Lamarck and Mendel were more favored than Darwin. So it is not only logically unlikely that there was an appeal to natural selection, it was also historically unlikely.
They could have appealed to the concept that microevolution would inevitably lead to devolution, without an intelligent designer to direct it.
That is, specifically creationist concepts could have been appealed to.
Today's creationists, after all, accept micro-evolution and the need for intervention to stop deterioration.
I don't know how today's creationists distance themselves from such consequences. Of course, they do, for they are not moral monsters. The only way that I can think of for them to distance themselves is by being inconsistent, and, of course, creationists are not particularly fastidious about consistency.
Of course, there were appeals to other concepts from the sciences, such as the germ theory of disease. Not that anybody takes that seriously today. To be sure, nobody suggests that "Pasteurism" is to blame for the Shoah.
In retrospect, the "justification" for those activities was a hodge-podge of incoherent, inconsistent, and pseudo-scientific social/political/religious rhetoric.
Not that I am suggesting that all hodge-podges of incoherent, inconsistent, and pseudo-scientific social/political/religious rhetoric bear any responsibility.
SLC:
Yes, yes — my point is that Sagan actually mentioned the issue which leads to the Penrose-Terrell rotation, a point which gets skipped quite often.
Scott Hatfield, OM:
The edition I have is the one with the "updates". However, Carl died in 1996, and the observations which revealed the accelerating cosmic expansion didn't come out until two years later. I'm sure such a discovery would have thrilled him deeply, and I'm pretty confident he could have explained it well — but alas, no man is exempt from the carbon cycle.
Ah?
What should a materialist find wrong with "do unto others like you want them to do unto you"?
Why shouldn't a materialist think of their own long-term self-interest?
Not even consciousness is necessary. Reciprocal altruism has not only evolved in apes, but also in vampire bats, for example. That's right: it can be selected for by natural selection.
If you can't think for more than 10 seconds without interruption, Her Majesty's Secret Service is likely going to fire you.
Post 23: "Thats why everyone below the age of 30 is fleeing television for the internet and DVRs :)." Julian
I hate gratuitous insults like this: where do you get the idea no one over thirty is intelligent or educated or involved enough to explore new media and technology? Do you expect, when you yourself hit thirty, that you will instantly sink into the couch cushions and sprout a beer gut, simultaneously losing fifty or so IQ points?
And I appreciate PZed's reference to basic television: there are still many places where that's all you can get. I'm lucky enough to have access to, and can afford, unlike some of my neighbours, satellite television. I don't have access to any kind of affordable high speed internet: all that's available here is cranky dialup. In the evening my connection fails every ten minutes, more often if it's raining.
So yes, more science on TV, please. Some of us can't download a single jpeg, let alone an entire program.
My TV quit a while ago and was never replaced. That was 20 years ago.
Between newspapers, books, journals, movies, and the internet there wasn't either interest or time to watch anything anyway. This is about a whole 1-3% of the US population.
sailor writes (#14)
This is a gross over-generalization. It doesn't take much research to see how every religion has changed over time. Perhaps by "religion" it is meant fundamentalist or orthodox.
The phrase "tired old lies" also doesn't seem to fit most religions that I have seen. I interpret lying as making intentionally false statements. A true believer is generally not lying, just profoundly mistaken.
PBS stations are too busy running and rerunning Wayne Dyer specials. That guy gets more airtime here in Detroit than Elmo and Big Bird. There's simply not time in the day to run Cosmos or anything else that has anything to do with science.
After spending some time looking at the bizarre claims that Soviet communism is somehow descended from Darwinian ideas, and while pondering why that idea could gain traction among any group since there is so little evidence of any such links (zero evidence, really), it occurred to me that it's philosophically bizarre as well.
Think about it for a moment. Evolution depends on competition between individuals -- a free market-style competition for survival. It is a misunderstanding of this competition that the religionists complain of; they think evolution encourages non-altruistic behavior and violence towards other members of our species.
But does communism encourage or endorse competition in any guise? No.
How looney would it be to believe that naturopathic healing lunacies grew out of research at the National Institutes of Health, or out of Pasteur's research? That's how looney is the claim that communism grew out of evolution. I believe they are diametrically opposed at every point.
Scott Hatfield's debates with Vox Day were what got me thinking about this departure from reality (and, you know, some of the commenters here ought to get to Scott's blog and lend him some support, not to mention dropping a few comments to try to coax Vox himself back to reality).
K. James Kennedy not only doesn't understand evolution. He also doesn't understand what communism is, or how it works.
In fact I wonder: Is there any area in which Kennedy is not certifiably an ignoramus?
Re Ed Darrell
Apparently, the good reverend is ignorant of Lysenkoism. Evolutionary biologists in the former Soviet Union were sent en mass to labor camps for having the temerity to have an unLysenko thought in their heads. As may be recalled, Lysenko was a believer in Lamarkian evolution.
James Bond is clearly ignorant of world history, also, with his proclamation that "Darwinism" was what allowed Hitler into power.
If he actually bothered to study world history, he would realize that the punishments levied on Germany by the victors of World War I, coupled with the economic cataclysm that was the Great Depression created were vastly more important factors in allowing Hitler to come to power.
Oh wait, no. Reading books is something an evil materialist would do.
Nevermind.
I've not had time to read all the comments, forgive me if I'm cluttering the board.
Cosmos can be found here:
http://tv-links.co.uk/listings/1/2542
Ah?
What should a materialist find wrong with "do unto others like you want them to do unto you"?
Why shouldn't a materialist think of their own long-term self-interest?
Not even consciousness is necessary. Reciprocal altruism has not only evolved in apes, but also in vampire bats, for example. That's right: it can be selected for by natural selection.
If you can't think for more than 10 seconds without interruption, Her Majesty's Secret Service is likely going to fire you.