The real face of evil, and it’s not a cartoon
The cartoon controversy has demonstrated one thing clearly, if we needed any reminders: there is a vast ocean of ignorance on both sides of the divide.
I lost track of the number of Muslims who posted on my blog to explain that Islam absolutely prohibits any depiction of Mohammed. Wrong. Certain strains of Islam have had this prohibition at certain periods in history, but it’s far from universal.
On the other side, I lost track of the number of Christian commenters who argued that the whole controversy just proves how much more tolerant and enlightened Christians are than Muslims. And that the West should demonstrate this by wiping all the Muslims off the face of the earth.
A pox on both your houses.
The problem, as ever, is that an overwhelming number of human beings are dumber than a sack of rocks. A post today in Pharyngula describes how Christian godbag Ken Ham is on a mission to rot the mind of every child he meets. It’s the metaphorical equivalent of opening the kid’s skull, removing the grey matter, and stuffing it full of rags and corn mush.
Of course I’m not going to comment on the fact that arch anti-evolutionist Ken Ham is, ironically enough, one of the most simian-looking people I’ve ever seen.
10 Responses to “The real face of evil, and it’s not a cartoon”
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Greywolf says:
Thanks Dr. Socks for that link to a rather depressing subject. This may sound prejudiced coming from a European, but America provides such fertile soil for this kind of exploitation that it comes as no surprise.
As I see it, Ham is making obscene use of lies tied to relegion to make himself obscene amounts money without regard to the damage his business does to others—in this case children. And in the process, what he’s doing to these kids is turning a fair percentage of them into the next generation of cash cows for the rest of the evangelist parasites and other unscrupulous scumbags to milk in decades to come.
Take a bath with your own infant children in America and you are in danger of a visit from the police or the taboid media. But mess up the minds of children by preaching at them that they should reject science in favor of mumbo jumbo, and nobody in authority bats an eyelid. The authorities are powerless to do anything about it, since with the parents’ consent it is perfectly legal.
Of course, once the business model has been perfected it will be attempted overseas too. So I hope the Americans can collectively get their act together, recognize this evil for what it is, and put an end to it.
This man is a vile child abuser, groping the minds of innocent youngsters and jeopardizing their mental development, not to mention further damaging the future national science base. If a viral or a bacterial infection was stalking kids throughout the land and turning a fair number of those exposed to it into life-long simpletons, I’m sure a national campaign of erradication would be launched. Whether he’s mad, bad or just sick, Ham is actively spreading the mental equivalent of an infection that can pollute and impoverish the minds of children.
Any decent Patriot Act would have a clause in it to allow such people to be rendered off somewhere on account of all the collaeral damage they are doing. I can’t wait until scientists finally recreate some dinosaurs so that people like Ham can be fed to them. In the mean time, these dangerous perverts should be kept well away from children.
I know I’m sounding like a bad newspaper editorial, but I’ve written this now so I might as well post it.February 12th, 2006 at 9:55 am EST -
Violet Socks says:
Believe me, I share your frustration. What part of Europe are you from? I’ve read that there’s a nascent creationist movement in the U.K., but it’s hard for me to imagine the sensible, secular Brits going for that stuff in a big way.
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Eric Paulsen says:
Simian LOOKING? I thought you had taken a picture of Dr. Zaius form a Planet of the Apes screen cap and put Ham’s name under it. I guess the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree at all, and in his case, might still be up in it throwing feces at passers by.
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Violet Socks says:
I’m so glad someone else sees that. I saw a picture of this guy and could not believe that this is the dude preaching the utter ridiculousness of the human-ape connection. Is he subconsciously motivated by horror at his own reflection?
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Hypatia's Father says:
Have you ever seen Ham or Hovind in action? Panda’s Thumb used to have some links to avi files where you could actually see Ken Ham in front of his audience, more or less working them into a frenzy.
Never have I seen the classic elements of tragedy and comedy so thorougly blended in one scene.
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Violet Socks says:
Oh lordy, I don’t think I could stand that. I can hardly bear to read the transcripts.
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belledame222 says:
O Christ, so it’s *that* guy!! I remember seeing his photo on some website advertising some fun! fun! fun! sort of vacation/conference for fundies where they could hear all the godbags they could eat, crammed over a few days. Forget the name, but the images, they stuck hard. NICE beard there, dude.
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misha marinsky says:
Violet:
Have you noticed that Ken Ham looks like Charlie, the australopicithine in “Tom The Dancing Bug”?
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Violet Socks says:
You’re right, he does. I don’t think he’s as smart as Charley, though.
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Greywolf says:
I am from the UK, where there are quite a few creationists about, but I’ve spent the last 25 years in Japan, where niether the Buddhists nor Shintoists (and most Japanese profess to be both) have any trouble accepting evolution.
My family are Catholics, lapsed ones for the most part, but they still love church weddings, funerals and christenings. About 20 years ago when my neice’s christening was coming up in London, my brother told me that the local parish priest had insisted that he and his wife view some documentary films that cast doubt on the currently accepted scientific explanations of life having evolved through natural selection and the Earth being a good deal more than 6,000 years old.
He was puzzled by “evidence” of a fossilized treetrunk “discovered ” slicing through several layers of rock strata that “scientists had said were formed millions of years apart”. For said treetrunk to have been buried in those layers, they must have been formed almost instantaneously, perhaps in the biblical flood. Ergo, Genesis trumps geology.
These days the Vatican’s official stance is a lot more realistic. The doctrines of Copernicus and even Darwin are no longer considered heretical. I’m not sure about Freud. And the last Pope famously had an audience with Steven Hawking and pronnouced him to be “very nice, just like an ordinary person.” But for quite a few Catholics in Britain, human descent from non-human ancestors remains something that’s it’s best not to think too much about.
Still, Dr. Socks, I hope you are right about the good sense of the British people. It’s true we are rather proud of Darwin, and it maybe that makes us a little warmer to the idea of evolution. Had it been first fought up by a German or a Frenchman, the situation may have been very different.
Incidentally, if you haven’t seen it, I would recommend anybody to watch the 1960 movie Elmer Gantry, starring Bert Lancaster in the title role, or to read the 1927 novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis. It’s a satire on the evangelical movement in the rural US in the 1920s that is still relevant to the successor movement of today. There’s also a wonderful scene in which Elmer preaches with a Chimpanzee on hand, declaring “He may be Charles Darwin’s grandfather….”
Coming back to Ken Ham, when I look at that face I see a smug, shameless, egocentric, conceited pig-ignorant, cocksure, totally unscrupulous huckster who is literally drunk on his own self-adoration. (Of course, appearances can be deceptive.) How he evolved into into whatever it is he is would be a fascinating story in itself. But a more important question is how and why he is allowed to perform in front of children. Aren’t there any responsible adults around?
