Bad Philip Johnson Quote.

There is a quote that I’ve seen all over the place, and I believe even used myself over the years, from the founder of the ID movement, Philip Johnson. Here is the quote as it is usually given:

“The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to ‘the truth’ of the Bible and then ‘the question of sin’ and finally ‘introduced to Jesus.’”

The quote appears on over 400 webpages according to Google, and the source cited is the April 1999 edition of Church and State magazine. That magazine is published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and this article was written by Rob Boston. The problem is that this is not a quote from Philip Johnson, it’s a quote about Philip Johnson, and as it has gotten passed around it has often been attributed to Johnson himself. For the full text of the article, go here. Given how often we have criticized the creationists about inaccurate and out of context quotations, it is imperative that we avoid using this quotation ourselves.

Update: This is a good example, I think, of how our side handles such situations compared to the other side. I emailed Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic, last night because he had recently used the quote in an article, and I informed him that it was a paraphrase, not a quote. His immediate response was to say thank you for the correction and to call his publisher because the quote also appears in his forthcoming book and he wanted to make sure it got taken out so it wouldn’t get disseminated any further. Kudos to Shermer.

[The Panda's Thumb]

How the rational handle inappropriate data mining. By stopping it. Irrational minds just ignore the facts. That is what makes them irrational amd hard to deal with.  1:49:15 PM    

From words to deeds: the real dangers of right-wing rhetoric. Every time I launch into a screed assailing violent, right-wing rhetoric, or warning of our nation's precipitous slide towards fascism, I do so with the full understanding that some will judge me melodramatic, hyperbolic... or even paranoid. So why do I do it?

Dave Neiwert answers that question well today ... [HorsesAss.Org]

A nice discussion of where eliminationist rhetoric can lead.  1:46:49 PM    

We need to improve our circulation in Serbia!.

Sully the Pooh (being a Bear of Very Little Brain) demonstrates the modern Right’s “big tent” approach to ethnic cleansing:

People keep talking about avoiding conflict. They are in denial. The conflict is already here. It is outrageous to be informed by a crowd of hundreds of thousands that the West must give up its freedoms in order to avoid violence. I’m relieved to see that this moment has forced some very hard thinking on the left.

He quotes a “liberal reader”:

I’m honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations — for elementary safety’s sake:
(1) Capitulate totally to them and become a Moslem continent.
(2) Intern all of them.
(3) Deport all of them
(4) Throw all of them into the sea.

You can hear it, too: sighed out like resignation, but with an unmistakable hint of glee. It’s really too bad that it has come to this, but we’ve been very patient and given you ample opportunity, and yet you persist. We really have no choice as a Nation but to mobilize the State Security Forces to imprison, banish, or kill each and every last man, woman, and child who bears the taint. Oh, well, can’t be helped! He continues:

The whole worldwide situation would be SO much easier to deal with if Pakistan didn’t already have the Bomb. Think how much more interesting it will be when Iran has it, too.

“The whole worldwide situation”, now. Finding a final solution to that will be SO much more difficult.

Time magazine, which pays “reporters” to lie to their readers, also hosts and pays for Sullivan to post eliminationist fantasies he describes as “some very hard thinking”. If you subscribe to Time, you might consider doing some hard thinking of your own. And let them know about it.

[The Poor Man Institute]

Once you start looking for eliminationist fantasies, it becomes really obvious how pervasisve they are. Almost anything Coulter says reflects this. O'Reilly pops off like this and so many of the pundits on the tube. When did it become okay to discuss killing or removing an entire group of people? This is never a joke that should be allowed in polite company. Maybe I just do not have a sense of humor today but particularly for people who are out there in full view of the court of public opinion, I wish they would be more thoughful. But then, if they were, they would never be able to be pundits. Silly me. As with sprots athletes, self-examination is not their strong suit.  10:55:32 AM    

Another volume of scandal. JET sent over Another volume of scandal from GuideLive where they take a look at the burgeoning credibility problem – in both fiction and nonfiction in the U.S. publishing industry. The latest scandal involves the revelation that JT LeRoy, a supposed twentysomething drug addict and male hustler who wrote the novel Sarah and the short-story collection The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things , is really a 40-year-old woman, Laura Albert. [LISNews.org]

Looks like you can't market a book today simply based on the words that are printed. It must include an appropriate author also. Atually, this reveals a continuing problem with so much of the creative arts today. They are manufactured and ditributed by large corporatons that do not really care about the quality. Because marketing a bad book is the same a marketing a good one. So why noot just market the most 'marketible' rather than the best. A lot easier than actually finding out if it is any good and it requires little creatie faculties to do this. As with records and movies, in books, marketing is everything. But, that will change as it become easier for the creative talent to directly find a market, without the huge overhead that current marketing campaigns need.   10:50:15 AM