Censorship | Playing Chess with Pigeons

So I’ve been blocked by the Answers in Genesis Facebook page. They’ve deleted my comments and those of the people who had responded to my comments (their fans), without warning or explanation. Not that I don’t know why they did it; censorship is the go-to tool of those who don’t have an argument, so they use what power they have to try and make the inconvenient questions—or answers—go away.

In this case they had posted a link to an article on their website with the tagline:

Atheists believe that religion should be kept out of public places. But what if atheistic humanism is a religion, too?

Now I generally don’t get involved in theist vs. atheist debates online and I had no intent in doing so in my response to this tagline. All I did was state that I thought most atheists did not believe “that religion should be kept out of public places”, just out of governmental institutions like public schools and courtrooms etc.

There was a little back and forth with some of the faithful, however I participated in no name calling or insult slinging. My harshest comment was probably when I suggested—after essentially being told that if I didn’t like their interpretation of church/state separation that I should move to a communist country, which is funny given that I am an anticommunist—that if they didn’t like living in a pluralistic liberal (small L) constitutional democratic republic where the rights of everyone were protected, they were free to leave.

There was that and I believe I referred to one of my interlocutors caricature of evolution as “ludicrous” or something similar. That was about it, that is all it took for the ban hammer to come down.

Pathetic really.

Ah well another feather in the cap to go along with my banning from the Institute for Creation Research’s Facebook page.

boy-that-escalated-quickly

So, the Institute for Creation Research put up a link on their Facebook page to one of their latest Acts & Facts articles on the whole Ernst Haeckel/vertebrate embryos thing and since the sort of stuff creationists write about this subject is a pet peeve of mine (as readers of this blog will no doubt have gathered) I decided to post a quick comment on the following quote from the article:

Guliuzza: Shouldn’t students be skeptical when they’re told that evolutionists can simply look at folds in embryos and see gill slits? The truth is that these are only folds of tissue in the pharynx region of vertebrates during the pharyngula stage of development. For mammals, birds, and reptiles, they never develop into a structure that is in any way like fish gills.

I wrote that this statement was not true as would be known to anyone who had cracked an embryology textbook and asked if Dr. Guliuzza (the author of the article) was therefore incompetent in this area or if he was being deliberately misleading. Further I provided a link to my blog post on the subject of “gill slits” so that anyone interested could look at the evidence for themselves.

I also corrected one of their other commenters on what Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell’s professions and religious perspectives were. I also noted to the commenter that all science, not just evolutionary biology, leaves God and other supernatural agents out of its explanations.

I used no harsh language, I did not call anyone any names and I engaged in no mockery (unless you count my pointed question about Guliuzza competency/honesty) and yet the end result was that my link and all my comments have been deleted and I am apparently now blocked from commenting on ICR’s FB page.

I’ll leave the reader to decide what this says about ICR and the robustness of their scholarship.

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