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 'Left Behind' video game imageThe Shaming Project

does the violence of "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" bother you ? If so, what can you do ? Well, to begin with you can email Jonathan Hutson's stories to people you know. That will help to bring more public scrutiny of the game. Public shaming really works ! Just click on the "email" icon and link at the top or bottom of the story and you'll be taken to a form that will allow you email the first story, The Purpose Driven Life Takers or the latest installment without leaving this site. Thanks. 'Left Behind' video game image




US News & World Report Showcases Creationist Ray Comfort
By Bruce Wilson Mon Nov 02, 2009 at 09:21:47 PM EST printable version print story
US News and World Report's Dan Gilgoff has charitably provided evangelist Ray Comfort a media platform in the form of a US News & World "exclusive" through which Comfort defends his efforts to distribute, on college campuses, up to 175,000 copies of Darwin's Origin of Species that include a creationist "special introduction" to the book.

How serious of a thinker is Ray Comfort ? Readers can decide for themselves. In the video on the right, Ray Comfort explains that bananas, which he suggests are divinely ordained, are optimally formed to fit the human hand, support creationist ideas, and rebut the Theory of Evolution. In the lefthand video short, evangelist Chuck Missler explains how Darwin's theory is disproved by a jar of peanut butter.

These video shorts have proved popular to both creationists and adherents to Evolutionary Theory, perhaps for different reasons. As a side note, peanut butter and banana sandwiches were one of Elvis Presley's favorite foods.

While Ray Comfort, in the the video below, suggests that the dominant banana of world commerce, the Cavendish banana, is the result of divine design, that's incorrect. Cavendish bananas are the product of human botanical tinkering. The Cavendish is a sterile hybrid developed several decades ago after the former banana of world commerce, the Gros Michel variety, fell to a ravening banana fungus. In the world of Comfort evangelism, there are layers of absurdity within layers of ignorance, like nested Russian dolls.


As Dan Gilgoff wrote in his post,
When I blogged recently about a new, pro-creationism edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species—complete with a rebuttal to the theory of evolution—the responses poured in. "I'm a little concerned," the communications director for the National Center for Science Education wrote me in an E-mail, "that some stuff—such as Ray Comfort's version of On the Origin of Species—gets coverage but no critical commentary." So I invited the head of the National Center for Science Education, the leading organization promoting and defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, to debate Ray Comfort the communications director for the National Center for Science Education..."
But by acknowledging equivalence, Gilgoff seems to be validating a tactic that's been extremely effective at moving public opinion away from empirical explanations of the natural world. Dan Gilgoff appears to have fallen into the Moon is 50% Camembert trap so common today in mainstream journalism. As I wrote in the piece linked above,
If one side of an alleged "controversy" asserts the Moon is made of cheese, and another side (scientists) say it is made mostly of rock, does that mean, according to the best journalistic practices of our thoroughly modern, or perhaps postmodern, age that the Moon is therefore 50% Camembert and 50% of the stuff scientists say it is composed of, anorthositic rock, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, aluminum, and so on ?

If people simply make assertions without proof, even if those are contra-indicated by a vast body of scientific research built up over decades or even centuries, does this mean that such assertions are nonetheless 50% correct ? Current journalistic convention would seem to suggest so.




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Left Behind: Eternal Forces: Installments of Jonathan Hutson's Talk To Action expose series on the "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game have been viewed by up to 1/2 million people. See our site section featuring Over 35 original articles covering the controversial "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game that has provoked a boycott by a coalition of religious groups and a letter writing campaign urging Walmart to stop selling the game. Media inquiries click here
(image: detail from Francoise Dubois' rendition of the Bartholomew's Day Massacre reveals the actual nature of religious warfare)