Fundamentally Flawed

Ken Ham Thinks Pat Robertson Is Hurting Christianity

Ken Ham has taken to the blogosphere fretting that The Atheists are going after the children. (Please! Won’t someone think of the children?! *clutches pearls*)

In recent weeks I’ve been writing blogs and Facebook posts about a new atheist website that is targeting children. Interestingly, the launch of a new anti-God website that’s seeking to capture kids for atheism coincided with the release of AiG’s new ministry theme for the next two years: “Standing Our Ground, Rescuing Our Kids” (Galatians 1:4).

As a former child myself, I am vaguely offended by the term “capture.” I mean, the “atheist site” (which launched back in November) isn’t playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with kids. It’s just presenting some ideas about science and morality without a religious slant. If I remember correctly, and I’m pretty sure I do, it is certain church groups that are physically kidnapping kids.

Anyway, Ham thinks The Atheists are ruining the pure little children! What else is new?

Oh, yeah. He thinks that fellow knob weasel Pat Robertson is also destroying kids’ souls. Which is probably the first time the 700 Club host and I have ever been lumped into the same category about anything.

Ken Ham (left) and Pat Robertson. (via brightsblog.wordpress.com)

Ham takes issue with Robertson over the age of the earth because a woman once emailed Robertson for advice when her kids started to ask how the age of dinosaurs was compatible with the Bible’s assertion of an Earth that’s only a few thousand years old:

They tell me if the Bible is truth, then I should be able to reasonably explain the existence of dinosaurs. This is just one of the many things they question. Even my husband is agreeing with them. How do I explain things to them that the Bible doesn’t cover? I am so afraid that they are walking away from God. My biggest fear is not to have my children and husband next to me in God’s Kingdom.

Wow. What a wonderful religion this woman has that leaves her afraid that the people she loves most are going to burn forever in hellfire.

Anyway, it’s a fair question. Even if you believe the Bible offers literal truth, there is a lot of stuff it misses. Like the Internet and Pluto and platypuses.

In this woman’s case, it’s dinosaurs.

Anyway, if you don’t believe the Bible is the direct word of God and you don’t believe it holds all of the information you ever wanted to know about everything, it’s easy to point out why those things were missing: People didn’t know about those things at the time the Bible was written.

To Robertson’s credit (as much as I hate saying that), this was his response:

Look, I know people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop Ussher, God bless him, wasn’t inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years. It just didn’t. And you go back in time, you’ve got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you’ve got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas… They’re out there and so, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don’t try to cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That’s not the Bible… If you fight real science, you’re going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was.

My goodness, Ham was not happy with this response.

He pretty much blames Robertson for the mass exodus from Christianity that has been apparent over the last few decades. He also accuses of Robertson of mocking Young Earth Creationists and, amusingly, of not understanding the science of carbon dating.

I mean, he is correct that radiocarbon dating only can date things back for tens of thousands of years, but hearing him accusing someone of bad science views is like a Scientologist accusing me of being in a cult. (Or a dog teaching me how to use thumbs. Or a KKK member teaching me tolerance. The possibilities are endless here, guys!)

One of the major reasons for the exodus we discovered in our research was that young people saw such biblical compromise (the kind seen with Pat Robertson) as hypocrisy. On the one hand this shepherd tells people to believe the Bible, but on the other he tells them they shouldn’t believe Genesis as written. Instead, he argues that our children should believe what the atheists and other anti-God secularists say about earth history.

Well, you know the secularists are more likely to be correct about things like history and science than those who believe the Bible is literally true. I would argue that teaching young people that the Bible is compatible with the actual physical world around them might keep them on your team longer.

So yes, Ken Ham, by all means, keep on doing what you’re doing.

via Ken Ham Thinks Pat Robertson Is Hurting Christianity.

As quick side not, “capturing” children is fine… if you’re Answers In Genesis, see Kids Answers.

Fundamentally Flawed #60: B to the Ack

After an eight month break, we’re back and not much has changed style wise.

We cover the events in our absence like :

US elections and Joe Cienkowski’s Twitter breakdown
Sandy Hook massacre
Mat Hunt explains the physics behind the meteor in Russia
Facebook and echo chambers
Bob “Cowboy” Sorensen and DMCA requests

I think that covers everything.

Fundamentally Flawed #60: B to the Ack [ 1:25:12 | 39 MB ] Play in Popup | Download

Megan Phelps-Roper Breaks Free From the WBC | Belief Blower

It’s always great to hear the stories of those who were bound up tightly in religious beliefs breaking free of those bonds and living a god-free life. We see these stories all the time. What’s even better? Reading how a member of the Westboro Baptist Church/Phelps family has managed to break free.

For 27 years, Megan Phelps-Roper “lived, breathed, studied, believed, preached” the word of WBC – this word being nothing but hate toward their fellow humans. Last year she struck up a Twitter-based conversation with David Abitol, and Israeli web developer and team member of Jewlicious. This was the beginning of Megan’s exodus from her family. December of last year, she went to a Lawrence, Kansas public library and spent time perusing books on philosophy and religion. It was at this point she realized that the “idea that only the WBC had the right answer” was something both impossible and crazy.

Megan didn’t depart from the WBC alone. Her sister Grace has accompanied her. Where they both are going from here is up in the air. They’re still trying out new things, reading a lot, and contemplating about religion, God, the Bible, and the future. One thing is certain, there is a lot of regret. Ms. Phelps-Roper recalls an interview from her WBC days where she was asked what she would like her legacy to be. She answered “That I treated people right.”

Here’s to Megan and Grace. Taking that giant step was not easy and I can’t imagine what it’s like to be completely isolated from one’s family. My thoughts are with them and I hope to see more of an exodus from that hate-filled family.

via Megan Phelps-Roper Breaks Free From the WBC | Belief Blower.

Fundamentally Flawed #59: Discussion with Rob Hughes

Alex discusses presuppositionals with Rob Hughes.

Fundamentally Flawed #59: Discussion with Rob Hughes [ 1:20:00 | 36.62 MB ] Play in Popup | Download

Don’t say “Darwin” when you mean “evolution” (part 1)

Don’t say “Darwin” when you mean “evolution”. Don’t say “theory of evolution” when you mean the established historical facts of change over time and common descent. And above all, don’t say “Darwin’s theory of evolution” except in the historical context of the evolution of ideas. If you do, you are guilty of scientific, logical, historical, and pedagogical errors, and playing into the hands of our Creationist opponents.

Dalton is to the modern atomic theory, and the modern atomic theory is to chemistry, as Darwin(not to forget Wallace) is to evolution, and as evolution is to biology. But we don’t call our present perspective on atoms “Dalton’s theory”, and indeed, unless we are speaking historically, it sounds odd to even talk about “atomic theory” when we discuss atoms. So why should we refer to “Darwin’s theory”, and indeed why should we talk about the “theory of evolution” when we really mean the fact that evolution has taken place? I argue here that we shouldn’t, and that, given the ongoing opposition to the central facts of biology, it is actively damaging to do so.

via Don’t say “Darwin” when you mean “evolution” (part 1).

The founders of Modern Physics

Think of the brain power represented in this one image. Imagine being a fly on the wall! Image taken at the 1927 Solvay Conference.

Back row:

Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin,

Middle row row:

Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr,

Front row:

Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Sklodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson

Fundamentally Flawed #58: The latest scoop from Jonny on Christian Accelerated Education

Jonny, Marc, Mat and Jim look at this weeks headlines, including more on Jonny’s investigation into creationism in the UK classroom.

EDIT: Towards the end of the podcast, Mat starts talking about infinities in maths and, at the time, he somewhat lost us all because a) he’s a mathematician and b) we’re all incredibly not mathematicians. Thanks to the magic of the internets, here’s an explanation of what he was referring to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvOZm0d4H0

Fundamentally Flawed #58: The latest scoop from Jonny on Christian Accelerated Education [ 2:14:13 | 79.04 MB ] Play in Popup | Download

Fundamentally Flawed #57: Bosons, Elvis, Calculus ünt Glockenspiels

We’re back! And we’ve got a full house. Susan, Peter, Marc, Kat, Jim, Mat and Alex talk about The Large Hardon Collider, Susan needing a wee, the fucking Pope hiring an ex-Fox News spin doctor and Opus Dei spook, and Mat talks us through the fascinating and utterly baffling world of Muons, Quarks and Bosons. Say cheese!

Fundamentally Flawed #57: Bosons, Elvis, Calculus ünt Glockenspiels [ 2:22:06 | 67.55 MB ] Play in Popup | Download

Are we gonna do Stonehenge tomorrow night?

Hey, it’s Jim here. Just a quick update on what’s happening with the podcast.

Kat and Alex have been unable to join us as they normally would for quite a few weeks now. Tonight Alex came to realise that he doesn’t need the hassle of banging his head against a brick wall with some of the religious nut-jobs whose “ideas” you have to at least try and understand if you’re going to blog and podcast about this stuff on a regular basis, as he does. So he’s no longer a regular member of the line-up and frankly I can’t blame him. The lad is, as they say in the UK, a diamond geezer. But there’s only so many hours in the day you can put into “debating” with people who ultimately aren’t interested in understanding your point of view, before it starts to negatively affect your life.

I too have grown tired of listening to the usual religious loon-bags whine on about the same shite they’ve been whining on about for the past few thousand years. If they can’t look at pictures taken from the Hubble Space Telescope and join the dots which inexorably lead to a universe which doesn’t have or need any gods, they’ve said more than we ever could about their actual interest in the truth.

So with that in mind, and while we thank Alex and Kat for their contribution over our first year of the podcast, we look forward to a new direction over the coming 12 months, as myself and Marc with help from Peter, Susan, Mat and others, eagerly move into year two of our little experiment.

I’m sure there will be plenty of religion news to cover as we go along, especially as we head into the American Presidential debates, but there’s also a lot we’ve already covered in the archives to dip into, as far as various Christian apologetics go, and there’s simply no use in going over old ground.

No-one involved in FF ever had a master plan. We’re just a bunch of Twitter and Facebook friends who accidentally started a reasonably popular podcast. So as we develop the site and the show format further, we hope you’ll continue to tune in and get in-touch via the usual channels.

It’s been fun so far! Let’s keep it that way! Jim.

We’re one year old!

It’s hard to believe that Fundamentally Flawed has been podcasting for exactly a year now.

Founded on a Twitter chat between Alex and Jim, it was soon joined by Kat, Peter and myself, and a few months in Susan joined.

In a year, we’ve recorded an astonishing 92 podcasts, which altogether comes almost 89 hours of us talking nonsense.

When we started, we didn’t have any goals about how to measure our progress or how many listeners we’d have, but Jim’s stated he’d love to be able to get 100 listeners to each podcast. It might make Jim smile a little to know we’ve managed that on every podcast apart from one, which only managed 26 listens, but that was about @Godswordislaw (R.I.P), so it’s understandable.

The most popular postcast was Fundamentally Flawed Podcast #13: Sye and Eric Special in September 2011 which had 796 listens, while the most data streamed for a single podcast was Fundamentally Flawed Podcast #15 – Dustin Segers and Sye Ten Bruggencate podcast from October 2011 which has streamed just over 38gb of data alone.

Speaking of data pumped out of Fundamentally Flawed, in the 12 months, we’ve streamed a grand total of 703gb of podcasts from our site. Based on a size divided time calculation on all 92 podcasts, we get an average stream rate of 10.4k/ps. This means that we’ve streamed 820 days, 14 hours, 7 minutes and 41 seconds worth of podcasts, or 2.25 years.

In those 12 months, we’ve had many guests, most with whom we’ve not exactly agreed with 100%, but to everyone who has appeared, thank you very much.

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