Author Archives: Bobby Henderson

Mr Henderson-

While I found your “open letter” interesting in a sort of adolescent, college sophomore kind of way that I would have found entertaining 25 years ago, I also found it tiresome, conceited, and immature.

Stipulated:

-I majored in biology in college and I am a working scientist.

-I believe that life evolved on Earth pretty much the way Darwin and his philosophical descendants say it did.

-I do NOT believe that the Bible (or any other religious tome) is a scientific text regarding the mechanics of how life became as complex as we see it today

-I do not want the book of Genesis to be taught as the mechanics of how life came to be on our planet.

All of these things stipulated – I was offended as an American and a human being by the sneering, self-important, and condescending tone, tenor, and implications of your web site. Grownups don’t find humor this way.

I guess I must have missed all the other college-sophomore sarcasm infested websites you created mocking creation mythos of American Indians, African tribes, etc., and bemoaning the way that secular humanism has become the de facto established religion throughout much of the public education industry in the U.S., in defiance of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. You did make those sites, didn’t you? No?

Your statement that you have nothing against Christians is patently deceitful and dishonest. I’m trying to imagine your type finding huge humor in mocking creation mythology of Indian or African tribes in some similar context, but I’m guessing that you would be aghast, offended, and firing off accusations of “xenophobe”, “racist”, “Western exceptionalist”, “antidiversity”, etc. OK to have a snide and insensitive laugh at the expense of your cherished Christian bogeyman, but do the same thing to anyone else, and you’d be horrified, right? “Piss Christ” is cutting edge, funny, and a deep social commentary but “Piss Buddha” would be a hatecrime in your circles, no doubt. Not much intellectual consistency or progressiveness there.

As I stated above, I don’t agree with any of these creation mythologies – Abrahamic or otherwise. However, there are light-years of difference between my attitude towards them and yours. In you mind, you have made these fundamentalists into the ultimate evil and stupidity ever produced in the universe. I do not presume that they are either evil or stupid for their beliefs, but respectfully disagree. That’s what “diversity” really means – or perhaps you feel, in an Orwellian way, that some forms of diversity are more equal than others?

I fail to see the problem with being open-minded about the POSSIBILITY that the evolution which produced today’s plethora of life was the result of some entity or force instead of a completely random process. That this possibility frightens you to the degree apparent in your web site, or that you lack the philosophical or intellectual ability to be able to give it fair and even-handed consideration, says a great deal more about your own (ahem) intelligence, personal deficiencies, and insecurities than it does about those you attempt to lampoon.

Nonetheless, I think that it’s important that you and your type continue to publish as much superior-minded, look-down-you-nose stuff like this as possible, in as many places and as publicly and frequently as you can. While you’re at it, don’t forget to post maps of “Jesusland” and other graphics and words denigrating anyone who is stupid and ignorant enough to have devout religious belief, Christian being of course the worst of the lot.

See how it advances you and your agenda at the ballot box.

Cheers

Rob Thompson – Removed per his later request –

………..

Rob changes his mind. And I am highly skeptical about the “threats”.

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Mr Henderson-

I challenged you to post my letter to you and you did. Thank you.

However, I have been deluged with people who are frequenters of your site loading my e-mail box with all sorts of things, including solicitations and, unfortunately, threats.

I will therefore request that you remove any mention of my e-mail address from your website immediately, before something terrible happens to me or my family.

I thank you in advance.

Rob Thompson

Bobby,

Grow up. You are behaving like an idiot. It is people like you that give your side no credibility at all.

Take your spaghetti monster and stick it.

Kelly J. Coppola, RN

Dear Bobby,

With all due respect, FSM is nothing more than God disguised as a pasta dinner. The issue here is not the Creator, but the Designer of the complex functions that defy the probability of mindless evolution. While God (aka FSM), is a pretty good candidate, I’d like to nominate my late Great Uncle Morris, may he rest in peace. He was quite a remarkable man who invented and designed many useful household objects for my late Great Aunt Becky. He even submitted a patent application for a multifunctional foot operated salad spinner that with attachments could be used to peel apples or potatoes and even artistically carve radishes. Furthermore, his supernatural talents weren’t limited to design. I personally saw him on four separate occasions shuffle a deck of cards so that all four aces appeared on top. Now what’s the probability of that!

I know it’s not likely that Great Uncle Morris is responsible for all intelligent design, but who says there has to be just one designer? Think about clothes for example.

Mike Spitulnik

Mr Bobby,

You are too narrow minded despite your comic genius. You claim to have received no emails offering a “reason” to allow Intelligent Design theory into the high school curriculum. OK! How about academic freedom? No good science course disc uses only proven facts. The desire to remove any taint of religiosity from the public schools is as convincing an argument for the abolishing of public schools and the establishing of voucher supported private schools as I have ever heard.

Science was invented in medieval religious schools ( culminating at the cathedral school at Chartres) precisely because free theorizing and disputation of radical ideas was welcomed and bitterly(thus thoroughly) fought.

In the 1960s the Biology classes I taught in three different high schools. I was liberally allowed to discuss proposed theories, and not just ‘proven‘ theories, since informed theorizing and disputation are the twin spring freshets of science. In my classes we chewed over many incompletely researched theories, Continental Drift(In those days not a credible theory) , the SETI project in Puerto Rico, Climate Variability and its causes and cures, possible pesticide effects on avian fertility, core sample evidence for the advent of sudden ice ages and glaciations, etc.

We considered the unproven theories of the now out-of-fashion Baxter effect in plants, and the articles in the now discredited “Worm Runners Digest”, published by reputable scientists studying the possible passing of learned knowledge to flatworms regenerated from pieces of a parent worm. All this was beneficial to the students understanding of the methodical sifting, assembling, and discarding of knowledge through science.

“Where is science headed???” we asked.

Being an inveterate reader of technical journals in 1960 I was almost alone in correctly informing my student concerning the falseness of the “fact” that humans have 48 pairs of chromosomes, despite most college faculty’s and textbook’s presentation as fact through 1965. Actually there were and are 46 pairs. The fact was disproven.

There IS actually a rational case for “intelligent design” if that term means that all processes like evolution are nested within a creation process. Parallel and convergent evolution evokes implications of design tendencies that seem prewritten to many veteran scientists after a lifetime of consideration. These implication ARE worth discussing, especially in science class. A few years back “OMNI”, a layman’s science journal, published a collection of their monthly interviews with the acclaimed scientists of the day. Over 95% of them these scientist “saw” the presence of a godlike designing hand in the physical world. Being a proud atheist at the time I found their sentimentality disgusting. Now as an old man, still reading and observing the natural world, I full of suspicion that I was the fool.

How do you do it? Haven’t you , in your personal Weltanschauung, found that such fool-doom is easier to maintain in today’s indoor society We live a CRT-fixated life, shut off from the distraction of actual stars and moths, manufacturing bloodless music and mechanistic theories that will someday be thought to have originated from renegade robots. Down with the hermetically sealed Public School System. Charles Coughlin