hell’s handmaiden

With friends like these you don’t people like me telling the world that ID is a front for religion.

Christian thinkmag wars over intelligent design?: I have cause for hope, the tiny knot of genuinely orthodox Christians who hope to rescue Darwinism as it actually is for Christ have no influence whatever.

Post-Darwinist: Christian thinkmag wars over intelligent design?: I have cause for hope

Brilliant, Denyse. She goes on to demonstrate how strongly ideology trumps substance.

Right then. The book was allegedly written to Southern Baptist “pastors”, and therein lies its primary usefulness. It is likely to prove an excellent crap detector: Any pastor who takes Wilson seriously should be defrocked.

Denyse O’Leary is on a rant about ‘Darwinian’ medicine, arguing that, well, it doesn’t really matter what the source of the problem is anyway, running through rather flippant treatments of alcoholism and obesity in the process.

…it hardly matters when they appeared or who - besides immediate ancestors and sibs, and people who live nearby - has them.

Consider, for example, an illness for which there is apparently a genetic predisposition: alcoholism. Fundamentally, the patient has decisions to make (Will I drink or not? Will I get drunk or not?) What if Alley Oop had the same problem? What if he didn’t?

Denyse O’Leary, “Toronto-based journalist, grandmother, Roman Catholic Christian”, and I add, “comedian, pinball wizard, rising ID star, big fish in Dembski’s very dirty pool” has raised another non-issue. Specifically, she asks:

Would genome mapper Francis Crick be permitted to suggest that intelligent aliens seeded the universe today?

Would Crick be allowed to suggest such a thing?

Well, of course he would. He could suggest anything he wants. He could suggest it then; he could suggest it now.

O’Leary… comedian, pinball wizard, rising ID star, big fish in Dembski’s very dirty pool, and now…

Imagine that. In nations where the public school systems are increasingly unable to find common ground among competing interest groups, these home schooling menaces want to provide religious and moral instruction to their own children.

Home schooling: A worry to materialists?

O’Leary knows damn well that the objection isn’t to parents providing religious and moral instruction to their kids. Perhaps, as the article says, this is the motivation for homeschooling, but certainly O’Leary knows that she is misdirecting. The problem is that religion and morals is only part of what the kids get taught. The rest of what they get is bad science– wretchedly bad voodoo snake oil garbage.

Or, how about another question entirely? What in the hell does this have to do with Intelligent Design?

The results of a fascinating experiment, in which some people deliberately ignored rational information in favor of emotional information in assessing probability.

The ID Report - When materialists think about religion: Are you a (a) religious robot or (b) religious freak?

The clipping does after all come from The ID Report, an arm of ARN– the Access Research Network, “providing accessible information on science, technology and society from an Intelligent Design perspective.” The article’s author is Denyse O’Leary, whose name is in the tagline of Dembki’s Uncommon Descent, and whose genius has been noted here before– most notably in A curious argument and Denyse O’Leary cracks a joke.