Our tranquility was once again shattered by blaring sirens and lights flashing on the wall display of our Retard-o-tron™. The blinking letters on the wall said WorldNetDaily.
WorldNetDaily (WND) is the flamingly creationist, absolutely execrable, moronic, and incurably crazed journalistic organ that believes in and enthusiastically promotes every conspiracy theory that ever existed. WND was an early winner of the Curmudgeon’s Buffoon Award, thus that jolly logo displayed above this post.
We were directed to an essay by an author we haven’t run across before — Ben Kinchlow. We hunted around and found this Wikipedia article about him. The title of his wretched piece is Lex naturalis. It’s quite possibly the worst writing about evolution we’ve ever seen. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us. His opening paragraph is a recital of some of the sillier things in our society, and then he says:
It sort of lends a measure of credence to the credo of the evolutionists that man is the product of evolution and only the weak-minded and superstitious believe in some supra-being [sic] somewhere who created us and holds us to some standard of behavior. However, while intellectually this may make for stimulating cocktail or mind-numbing classroom discussions, few (if any) of its proponents truly desire the world to live by this rhetoric. Even a cursory examination of the natural selection process will prove this. As in the world of predators, insects and even plants, imagine the strongest among us literally living off of the weakest.
You’ll notice that he uses italics a lot. Where do these creationists get their ideas? Certainly not from biology texts. The rant continues:
No, even while these pseudo-intellectuals revel in the titillation of godlessness, they are all the while relying on the belief in God held by the masses to hold said masses in check. Understand this, absent an internal moral force, man is controlled only by external force; man is restrained either by the strong arm of morality or the strong arm of a stronger man. Ultimately, it could be said that Western civilization is based on the Bible, others on the bullet. Even the briefest glimpse into man’s history proves this.
In this man’s view of history, classical Greek civilization was based on the bible. The Roman republic too. In truth, we’ve never encountered anything this bad before. And it gets worse. Let’s read on:
While the argument for evolution may generate passionate discourse among the intelligentsia, even its strongest adherents require and anticipate the civilizing influence of the “Christian God” they so vehemently deny. Let us look at just a few examples:
The next third of the essay consists of his examples. We’ll give you only two of them:
In the wild all-natural state of African lions for example (unlike Disney’s “The Lion King”), when the reigning king is deposed, the new kings, in order to breed, must kill the offspring of the deposed king to bring the lionesses into season. Now imagine in our civilized world, rather than assume the burden of supporting the offspring of the deceased (or divorced) male, the new king simply kills off all the old offspring and starts afresh; and like the male “kids” in a lion pride, when his reach puberty, they are driven out.
Yes, that’s how Darwin’s theory teaches us to behave. Here’s another example:
In the jungle, a tribe of apes attacks and drives the hitherto dominant tribe out of their abundant feeding grounds and takes over. So why shouldn’t, in our “freedom-from-religion” society, gangs of blacks and Hispanics join forces and with guns drive the whites out of the nicer neighborhoods and take them over?
There’s no denying it. That’s the result of Darwin’s theory. We continue:
Actually, those are all true examples of “lex naturalis” – the law whose content is set by natural forces, Mother Nature, evolution. However, the intellectuals who contend vociferously against God and His morality and passionately for evolution, wail, “Such behavior among humans is uncivilized … wrong … immoral!” They apparently have forgotten that according to them, a “human” is only a higher form of animal and therefore subject to “lex naturalis,” so why should we expect different behavior from these particular animals?
Don’t deny it, dear reader. Deep withing your Darwinist brain, that’s how you really want to live. Here’s more:
Stripped of all nonsensical postulations, it boils down to this: Every “animal” (you) is a law unto himself, and that law is “survival of the fittest” (not the gym kind) – those best fitted to survive, those most suited to their environment.
That’s what the theory of evolution teaches us. Moving along:
Consequently, if we truly are the product of evolution, then there are no moral absolutes, as there is no author of moral absolutes. If evolution is the truth, we should all act in a manner consistent with our own view of self, whatever that may be.
And here’s the end:
Doesn’t that line up with the position of the “enlightened?” Do whatever you want, as long as you do it in a civilized fashion when interacting with us elite animals.
There’s not much to be said. That’s how creationists think.
Copyright © 2011. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Of course they promote conspiracy theories! It leaves everyone wondering what is; and some, perhaps, plausible avenues to explore, as they quietly (or not) go about the business of overthrowing public governance and instituting a theocratic state.
You mean just like how white Christians drove Native Americans from their abundant fields and took over? This man’s lack of irony is just stunning.
Rats, Reinard beat me to the punch with that quote. Only thing to add is that while he’d no doubt squeal at this suggestion, I found it sad that Mr. Kinchlow couldn’t resist playing the race card right after the “feeding grounds” comment. (And clumsily, at that.)
As he hates the law of the jungle in this context, I wonder how he (or the average WND reader) feels about competition laws, regulation of business and other measures that purport to moderate the impact of the savage competition we call “the market”? After all, if you’re afraid of that “red in tooth and nail” stuff in a social context, to be intellectually consistent you’d want a nice, orderly, regulated economy too, right?
Off to order a new irony meter. Reading the column seems to have broken mine.
Uh…not sure what to say about this drivel but I do fear your own article is giving this so-called creationist writer more juice than he deserves. Please don’t give him anymore backlinks in the future! Allow him to disappear in silence.
After all, if you’re afraid of that “red in tooth and nail” stuff in a social context, to be intellectually consistent you’d want a nice, orderly, regulated economy too, right?
Only if you confuse laws with morality (and making money with eating people–nothing that goes on in the market is “savage” or “red in tooth and claw” except metaphorically). If there is anything worse than theocracy–and I’d submit that there is plenty–it’s the attitude that if you believe something is right, you must also believe that the power of the State should be used to force other people to do what you think is right.
Jesus said, to one man, “give all that you have to the poor”. He did not say, “Form ye political action committees to lobby Caesar to give tax money to the poor.”
I don’t know why this is hard to grasp. As looney as the writer is, he is talking about morality, not legislation.
You mean just like how white Christians drove Native Americans from their abundant fields and took over?
Who had previously done the same to others, in many cases, and in many cases welcomed the assistance of whites against traditional enemies; much in the same way the Romans always got their footholds in tribal areas.
As the Bantu were doing to the native peoples of East Africa. As have humans done everywhere they have gone. “White Christians” are not different in that regard, as the conquest and colonization of the Chatham Islands by the Maori in 1835 may illustrate:
“The Maori came from two tribes, the Tama and Mutunga. They proceeded to massacre the Moriori, who are thought to have numbered about 2,000, cannibalise the dead and enslave the survivors. A Moriori survivor recalled: “[The Māori] commenced to kill us like sheep…. [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed – men, women and children indiscriminately”. A Māori conqueror justified their actions as follows: “We took possession… in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped…..”
After the invasion, Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori, nor to have children with each other. All became slaves of the invaders until the 1860s. Many died in despair. Many Moriori women had children by their Māori masters. A number of Moriori women eventually married either Māori or European men. Some were taken from the Chathams and never returned.”
Did Christianity succeed at all in moderating this very human behavior? I think the historical record clearly shows that if it did, it took a very long time, given 1800 years or so of expansionist wars by Christians. Certainly Christianity is not to blame for this, and the beliefs of Christians are against it even if those beliefs too rarely end up influencing their behavior.
The civilizing effect of religion? Let’s see, after destroying the world and starting over (rebooting), god exercised his civilizing influence with plagues, genocides, torturing of followers, goading leaders like Moses into killing his own followers for making a statue of one of god’s competitors, and on and on ad nauseum. Later, Christians embarked on their crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, and so on in the name of the civilizing god. Kinchlow’s Western Christianity sounds a lot like his weird version of natural law.
It’s interesting that Kinchlow leaves out the effect of government in his argument. It’s either christianity, or the jungle. Modern secular societies function quite well under a set of mutually agreed-upon laws, enforced as necessary by a government formed and supported by the same society. The intellectuals that he disdains abide by the same laws as he does – and they count on the civilizing influence of a society based on laws to keep Kinchlow and his ilk in check. It’s the secular government and it’s laws that keeps them from being burned at the stake.
When one hangs around next to Pat Robertson for decades, some of the crazy has to rub off.
Rev. Kinchlow: “…they are … relying on the belief in God held by the masses to hold said masses in check.”
The invention of heaven and hell is an ingenious means of controlling others’ behavior. If it works to keep my neighbors from stealing my stuff, I’m not going to tell them they’re silly for believing.
The problem comes when fundamentalists insist on a literal interpretation of every word of the KJV. They must then rail against science for discovering that reality is contrary to “The Word” in order to maintain the masses’ fear.
Curmudgeon: “It’s quite possibly the worst writing about evolution we’ve ever seen.”
Why is it that we use “worst” to descibe the ones so bad that they embarrass most evolution deniers? While we might use “best” to describe a Dembski masterpiece of slippery wordsmithing that takes 10 pages to correct every sentence? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Or should we rate them all on a “Klinghofferism” scale, which is how clearly they make it to the average person that their real objection to evolution has nothing to do with lack of evidence, and everything to do with their paranoia that accepting it leads to evil behavior?
@Erik John Bertel;
Not to worry about apparent backlinks to the WND article. It appears our Curmudgeon’s generosity at handing out Buffoon Awards does not extend to serving up a free gold star for WND’s search engine ratings.
If you peek at the code behind the web page, it says:
<a href="http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=374241" rel="nofollow">Lex naturalis</a>>The rel=”nofollow” tag tells the search engines the equivalent of ‘nothing to see here folks, move along please’.
Lex naturalis says that the predator gets to eat the prey, but isn’t obligated to give thanks to the prey for the meal it provides.
(nb Curmudgeon: I have no idea what wordpress might do to the code tags here, so please fix or delete the post as needed)
WND should begin and end every article with “Praise the Lord!” Sort of how Islamists begin and end all communication with “Allahu Akbar!”.
Interesting. These guys know little about science and seemingly less about their own religion. How does this moron explain the moralizing force of the Bible when slavery and selling one’s own children for a profit are both considered abhorrent, but are not only allowed in the Bible, but regulated. Giving full reign to these theocrats would have us remove the right to vote from women, repeal all of the spousal abuse laws, and reinstitute slavery. Amazing.
Kinchlow’s idea about “survival of the fittest” is outdated. He says in part:
“Every ‘animal’ (you) is a law unto himself, and that law is ‘survival of the fittest’ . . . Consequently, if we truly are the product of evolution, then there are no moral absolutes, as there is no author of moral absolutes. If evolution is the truth, we should all act in a manner consistent with our own view of self, whatever that may be.”
Ethologists since Konrad Lorenz have been pointing out that social animals (including humans) behave according to their role in the group, not as isolated agents. In each social species, evolution has produced something like an ethical system that promotes cooperation within the group to balance and channel competition. I particularly like Franz de Waal’s *Peacemaking Among Primates* for descriptions and explanations of such systems. Apparently the germ (at least) of morality has arisen without any author to dictate it and can function without the “civilizing” influence of police and soldiers.
Apparently the germ (at least) of morality has arisen without any author to dictate it and can function without the “civilizing” influence of police and soldiers.
Well, other animals have very little ability to make conscious decisions. Ants and bees don’t do what they do for the good of the hive or for any reason that they are aware of. They work for the hive because their DNA has been programmed by natural selection, and the survival of their DNA is tied to the good of the hive.
And herd animals push the weakest to the outside. A herd (or a school, if we’re talking about fish) works because if you are isolated you have a larger chance of being the only prey a predator encounters. So the low ranking animals live on the outside, the center is a dominant bull or mare surrounded by its children and breeding partners. Most of us think behaving that way would be profoundly immoral.
Gabe, notice I said “something like an ethical system,” not “a conscious intention to treat others well.” And I mentioned “the germ (at least) of morality,” not “a fully developed moral system incorporating human ideas of fairness.”
Your description of herd behavior is relevant; what it illustrates is that rules governing inter”personal” relationships differ among species. The behavior you describe might be paraphrased in the rule “Low-ranking animals must not get uppity and crowd in with the alphas and betas.” I didn’t mean to equate these rules with human morality except in the very general sense that they serve the same function: to govern behavior.
Since the advent of agriculture and settlements, with the beginnings of trade, larger and larger groups of people living together (not all of whom were related), and the possibility that not all people had to work to provide future, human social evolution diverged from that of other primate groups. This may have begun long before, as evidenced by art and burials, maybe even with the development of language.
It’s completely misleading to compare human social behavior to that of other animals. Some aspects of behavior have parallels, but if evolved human behavior was as unrestrained and brutal as Kinchlow describes, neither complex societies nor religions would exist.
Our Ranter-in Chief’s reference to “lex naturalis” is apparently a half-assed atttept to refer to natural law, (Latin: lex naturale.) This is taken by him to be the same as ‘survival of the fittest’ in the ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ creationist misinterpretation.
Quite the contrary. The philosophical concept of natural law has been central to our cultural history. From Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas, to the great philosophers of our Enlightenment, natural law “refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior.” [see wikipedia article on Natural Law]
No doubt this twit doesn’t even admit that morality is possible without his version of divine revelation.
At any rate, quite aside from the fact that he’s got his definition exactly backwards, he and his ilk ought to know that the Founding Fathers incorporated natural law into the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. (and of course they avoided using biblical or other theological references.)
At the end, his conflation of ‘enlightened’ with ‘elite’ says it all. He, like many creationists, clearly hates our system of justice and laws. By introducing examples where he thinks our system breaks down, and blaming it on us evil Darwinists, he is advocating the abandonment of our secular laws, and the replacement of them with the christian equivalent of sharia.
@Gabriel Hanna,
Only if you confuse laws with morality (and making money with eating people–nothing that goes on in the market is “savage” or “red in tooth and claw” except metaphorically).
Pointing out that there are negative side effects to something doesn’t negate the presence of the positives. The comparison I’d use is medicine. We have treatments and drugs that work wonders, but many of them still have serious side effects. Rational patients still consider both costs and benefits in weighing their options. Similarly, with the market you don’t get the “creative” with the “destruction” part, to borrow Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase. Admitting that the one exists doesn’t diminish the other.
I don’t doubt that the average WND reader, ironically, might agree with the Biblical quote you mention, although I’d suggest that’s just another piece of evidence as to why we might want to be selective about taking policy guidance from the Bible, or any other sacred text written thousands of years ago in vastly different societies than the one we live in.
–SJR
@Bob Carroll: You refer to “lex naturale”. I believe that “lex” is a feminine noun, and thus would have the feminine (rather than neuter) form of the adjective, “naturalis” (rather than “naturale”).
Whatever the human behavior/morality, religion is generally used to justify it, rather than impose it.
Yup, Tom, Lex is a feminine noun. Maybe the old Romans thought as little of lawyers as they did of farmers (agricola is feminine, as well.) I went with the Wikipedia construction, since any residual Latin in my brain is seen through a many-years’ filter. Now, however, this gives me a new light on the nasty personality of Lex Luthor. Maybe he is his planet’s version of a “boy named Sue?”
Maybe the old Romans thought as little of lawyers as they did of farmers (agricola is feminine, as well.)
Huh? That’s just grammar. You might as well say that Germans respect gardens more than doors because they call gardens “he” and doors “she”. The fact that a word for thing is grammatically feminine does not imply that the speakers of that language consider that thing to be actually female, or have less respect for it or something.
That’s the discredited Safir-Whorf hypothesis, which like herpes, won’t go away.
For example, in Irish cailin, “girl”, is a masculine-gendered noun and stail, “stallion”, is a feminine-gendered noun. Irish people, however, do not expect stallions to give birth to colts, nor girls to carry a Y chromosome.
As one who speaks no less than 4 languages that have “gendered” nouns (including my 2 mother tongues, German and Romanian), and reasonably understands other 2 or 3, I must confess I’m a little confused about the presumption that the gender of a noun has anything at all to do with holding in high or low esteem whatever it names.
As Gabriel said, “it’s just grammar.” Except for living beings (where English, too, often distinguishes between the male and the female of the species), the fact that a noun is feminine does not imply the thing it names is considered female; or male, for masculine nouns.
@Bob Carroll:
Agricola, -ae is actually a masculine noun. There may not be many masculine Latin nouns in the first declension (ending in -a in the nominative case, singular), but agricola is one of them.
And, incidentally, among the things ancient Romans, as most people, held indeed in high esteem, there are quite a few named with feminine nouns — lex, legis (the law); patria, -ae (the homeland); familia, -ae (family) and domus, -us (house or home, with all their connotations); virtus, -utis (virtue); dignitas, -atis and dignatio, -onis (worth, merit, dignity, reputation); fides, -ei and fidelitas, -atis (trust, faith(fulness), fidelity); honestas, -atis and probitas, -atis (honesty, probity); veritas, -atis (truth(fulness)); etc.
the thing I like best about this whole blog is that I feel more educated just reading the commentary even if it drifts way off the original topic.
@Armand K:I must confess I’m a little confused about the presumption that the gender of a noun has anything at all to do with holding in high or low esteem whatever it names.
Because in English we’ve lost the concept. And so we get in nasty arguments about whether it is sexist to say “he” or “man” to refer to an unnamed person, when it is just grammar.
We use the same word, “he”, for the impersonal pronoun that we use for the masculine 3rd person. Just like Germans use the same word, “sie”, for the third person feminine, the plural, and the formal 2nd person. Yet i know of know campaign to eradicate “sie” from German in the name of combatting sexism.
And so then we get into pointless arguments about words like “chairman” vs “chairperson” vs “chair”.