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Casey Luskin: useful resources to have when debating intelligent design

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Casey Luskin replies to an e-mail at Evolution News from someone seeking help defending ID.

There are 6 questions asked:

1) Can you give me half a dozen (or more) examples of where ID or Creationists have been intimidated for their views? Whether they were fired, threat of firing, demoted, sued, threat of suit, or publicly humiliated by the Scientific Community and/or Atheist and/or ACLU. In cases of a firing, I would much appreciate examples where a lawsuit ensued because that tends to shows the serious nature of the offense…

2) Can you provide half a dozen (or more) examples where any scientists who publicly raised a challenge to evolution or evolution theory was also intimidated? I would appreciate it, if you could provide a few examples of people who actually supported evolution who then realized their research tended to disprove evolution. You can also provide a few examples where those in academia were intimidated.

3) Can you tell me how many states now have laws that protect teachers in allowing them to give both evidence supporting evolution as well as evidence disproving evolution? I would especially appreciate examples where the evolutionists or ACLU attempted to block those legislative attempts.

4) Can you give me examples of where evolutionists tried to deceive the public or scientific community?

5) *** As I’ve read and researched, there has never been an example of “evolution” actually occurring; yet Wikipedia makes the bold statement that implies there are examples and then lists bacteria as one…

“Typically, observable instances of evolution are examples of microevolution; for example, bacterial strains that have antibiotic resistance….”

I believe I recently read that in fact bacteria haven’t been observed “evolving” and that evolutionists themselves note this is a real challenge, because they should be able to make it change but it never does. It simply reverts back. Isn’t it true that bacteria, as referenced in Wikipedia, aren’t evolving but are simply developing an immunity to the antibiotics?

6) Lastly, can you give me four or five major things that disprove evolution….

Do those sound useful to you? If so, click through, and bookmark the page for later. You might also find this video lecture by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer an excellent introduction to intelligent design in the origin of life.

News

Public school teacher bans Bible reading in her class

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From CBS local news.

Excerpt:

A Broward County boy said he was banned from reading “The Good Book” during free-reading time in school. The boy and his father have hired an attorney, calling this a violation of the boy’s Constitutional rights. Meanwhile, the Broward County School District says this is all a big misunderstanding.

“I first started reading a little bit (of the Bible,)” says Rubeo. “Little by little, it started becoming my favorite book to read.

Giovanni Rubeo says the Bible was given to him as a gift from his church, Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, over Christmas.

The Park Lakes Elementary fifth grader said he started reading it during free-reading time in his first-period class. That’s when the boy’s attorney claims his teacher, Swornia Thomas, stepped in.

Rubeo’s attorney shared a voicemail the teacher left for Giovanni’s dad.

“Good morning, Mr. Rubeo,” says a woman. “Giovanni called you because I asked him to. I noticed that he had a book, a religious book, in the classroom. He’s not permitted to read those books in my classroom. He said if I told him to put it away, you said not to do that. So please give me a call. I need to have some understanding on direction to him about the book he’s reading opposed to the curriculum for public school. Ms. S. Thomas. Thank you. Have a wonderful day. Bye, bye.”

Giovanni and his lawyer claim Giovanni was told on multiple occasions that he couldn’t read the Bible during free-reading time.

[…]The district wouldn’t comment on what, if any, consequences the teacher might face. Giovanni says there has been no free-reading time, recently, so he hasn’t been reading his Bible at school.

CBS4′s Gaby Fleischman stopped by Mrs. Thomas’ home. Her husband told us she was not there and asked: “What the [expletive] do you want?”

Gaby responded that we want to speak to Mrs. Thomas’ to hear her side of the story.

“She ain’t got nothing to say to you, she ain’t got nothing to say,” responded her husband. “Get me on camera, get the [expletive] out of my yard.”

Note that this student’s parents (and all of you reading) pay taxes to fund these public schools. Public school teachers are unionized, and they support bigger government and higher taxes. We are funding a system that is hostile to our beliefs. The only way to fix this is to detach the money from the public school and put it in the hands of the parents, who can then decide which school they would like to partner with – or maybe no school at all, in the case of homeschooling. That’s the fastest way to end the bullying of Christians and conservatives that goes on in public schools. Attach the money to the parent, and suddenly these public school teachers will remember who their customers are.

News

First openly gay Episcopal bishop to divorce same-sex partner

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This is an Associated Press article, so it is extremely liberal and sympathetic to the gay bishop. (H/T Tom)

Excerpt:

The first openly gay Episcopal bishop, who became a symbol for gay rights far beyond the church while deeply dividing the world’s Anglicans, plans to divorce his husband.

[…]Robinson, 66, had been married to a woman and had two children before he and his wife divorced. He and Andrew had been partners for more than a decade when Robinson was elected to lead the New Hampshire Diocese. The two men were joined in a 2008 civil union in New Hampshire, which became a legal marriage when the state recognized gay marriage two years later.

[…]Robinson was… widely celebrated as a pioneer for gay rights, became an advocate for gay marriage and was the subject of several books and a documentary about Christianity, the Bible and same-sex relationships. He delivered the benediction at the opening 2009 inaugural event for President Barack Obama and, after retirement, became a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank with close ties to the White House.

The interesting thing about this is that although Americans have been fed a steady diet of propaganda from Hollywood to make us think that gay relationships are stable, the reality is that they are NOT stable.

Let’s take a look at the data

Consider this post from The Public Discourse which explains that there are few stable, long-lived gay relationships – even the ones with children.

Excerpt:

The [NFSS] study found that the children who were raised by a gay or lesbian parent as little as 15 years ago were usually conceived within a heterosexual marriage, which then underwent divorce or separation, leaving the child with a single parent. That parent then had at least one same-sex romantic relationship, sometimes outside of the child’s home, sometimes within it. To be more specific, among the respondents who said their mother had a same-sex romantic relationship, a minority, 23%, said they had spent at least three years living in the same household with both their mother and her romantic partner. Only 2 out of the 15,000 screened spent a span of 18 years with the same two mothers. Among those who said their father had had a same-sex relationship, 1.1% of children reported spending at least three years together with both men.

This strongly suggests that the parents’ same-sex relationships were often short-lived, a finding consistent with the broader research on elevated levels of instability among same-sex romantic partners. For example, a recent 2012 study of same-sex couples in Great Britain finds that gay and lesbian cohabiting couples are more likely to separate than heterosexual couples. A 2006 study of same sex marriages in Norway and Sweden found that “divorce risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages” such that Swedish lesbian couples are more than three times as likely to divorce as heterosexual couples, and Swedish gay couples are 1.35 times more likely to divorce (net of controls). Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, two of the most outspoken advocates for same-sex marriage in the U.S. academy, acknowledge that there is more instability among lesbian parents.

Therefore, while critics of the NFSS have faulted it for lacking comparisons between children of IBFs and the children of committed and intact gay or lesbian couples, this was attempted, but was not feasible. Despite drawing from a large, representative sample of the U.S. population, and despite using screening tactics designed to boost the number of respondents who reported having had a parent in a same-sex relationship, a very small segment reported having been parented by the same two women or two men for a minimum of three years. Although there is much speculation that today there are large numbers of same-sex couples in the U.S. who are providing a stable, long-term parenting relationship for their children, no studies based upon large, random samples of the U.S. population have been published that show this to be true, and the above-cited studies of different nations show that on average, same-sex couple relationships are more short-lived than those of opposite-sex couples.

I think this is an important point to make – and it’s consistent with the research from previous studies. The bottom line is that gay marriage is another step on the path towards making marriage about the needs and feelings of adults. In natural marriage, parents are concerned about how breaking up will affect their children – so thy have a reason to stay together and work conflicts out. The needs of the adults are secondary to the needs of the children. But in gay marriage, there is no such constraint. The children are not related biologically to both partners, and so that protection is not in place.