Wheat from Tares

Tip o' the hat to Mom, who turned me onto this article about Ken Ham, racism, and Darwin.

I'm sure that many more intelligent people can make plenty of use of this book, but I wanted to start with this particular quote of a quote:

Ham said he came to the topic because he was upset by the unfair treatment of aboriginal tribes in his native Australia and the racism he saw in the United States when he arrived here in the 1970s. He said he experienced a backlash from some church groups after he wrote an article critical of biblical-based arguments against interracial marriage, which made him even more determined to tackle the issue.

"I got more what I would call hate mail from people, supposedly Christians in the church, than for any other article I've ever written," Ham said. "So to me I just had a real burden that I wanted to educate the church on this matter."

The first thing he's doing wrong here is separating the wheat from the tares, to use biblical language. It's not his place to say who's a Christian and who isn't, it's not my place to say who's a liberal and who isn't, and responding to arguments against your thesis by saying your opponents aren't qualified is not the nuclear bomb of discourse and won't win you the argument.

His larger argument, that "Darwinists" are racist, is just an attempt to discredit them with guilt by association. Lucianne Goldberg's darling baby boy just tried that with liberals and Nazis, and this pap from Ham is just more of the same.

Unfortunately, his argument is going to be widely spread and recommended from pulpits across the country, because in this largest Christian country in the world, Christians Are Thrown to Lions for the amusement of we godless liberals. That's right, we who are concerned with social injustice are actually just interested in seeing Christian blood spilled, because everything is an example Great Divide and a battlefield for! Our! Very! Survival!

Oy.

So Ken Ham doesn't actually have any good arguments to support his contention that the world was created (last Thursday?) so he's reduced to trying to discredit and silence the folks who argue that the world formed slowly over time. That isn't to say he's got no arguments. He's got plenty, from the misconception of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to "why are there still monkeys?" but if he doesn't have to use them because no one is listening to us anymore, that's all the better for him.