A creationist randomly stopped by my tree planting camp this summer and dropped off a bunch of pamphlets. This was the best/worst one.

I want to start out by saying how much I appreciate comments. They are one of the things that keeps me blogging and almost all of them are good.

Lately, however, I have been getting quite a few poorly thought out comments. These are normally from creationists. I really do not understand why they keep on exposing themselves like this, as people are just going to make fun of them even more (like this).

Etienne has been kind enough to provide me with some fodder for this post, and I have kindly graded her comments below.

I hope this does not put too many people off commenting here, but maybe it will make people a bit more cautious.

These comments were from a post I wrote a while ago about losing respect for Ben Stein. Check out the graded version below:

(click the image to enlarge to fullsize)

Yesterday, PLoS Biology published an alarming study about creationist belief demographics among high school biology teachers. It showed that 16% of high school biology teachers are young earth creationists (that’s the worst kind). This means that 16% of these teachers believe that the world is under 10,000 years old. This is just too ridiculous. I can’t imagine anyone actually believing it, let alone biology teachers. It’s scary to think that these people are teaching kids. I believe that these teachers should be fired and have their degrees revoked by their respective universities.

Actually, they shouldn’t have gotten their degrees in the first place. Before getting a science degree, students should be asked: “Are you a creationist?” If they give the wrong answer, they shouldn’t get their degree.

PZ Meyers summed up this morning’s news the best.

Here’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen all week (and I’m grading genetics exams): it’s the result of a national survey of high school biology teachers.

Below is the main figure from the study:

If you have the guts, go read the full study [via Pharyngula]

Here is a video of a tour group giving biblically correct museum tours. It makes me sick how little they know about the methods of science and how they are ‘teaching’ this to innocent children. Dawkins has referred to scaring children about hellfire as child abuse. I consider these tours to be child abuse as well; they are possibly even worse than giving children nightmares about hell.

I was really surprised how passive the museum employees were. If I was an employee, I would have physically removed the ‘teachers’ from the premises.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of creationist bashing recently, and have have created a new category: “Creationist Bashing.” I don’t think that it really fits into the atheism category. Even though creationists are highly aligned with religion, I don’t consider them to be part of the argument on the existence of a divine being. Even if evolution were to be shown to be wrong, there is still no evidence for a god. This is why I don’t consider creationists to be part of the argument. They are just an easy target for a bit of occasional comedy.

Do you guys think that this is child abuse? If so, should it be punishable? I think so.

[via The Atheist Jew]