This article is a response to criticism (See here and here) from David Anderson of an image posted on my Black Shadow website some years ago. The focus of his malignant attention is this image:
About David Anderson
David Anderson is a Christian fundamentalist who runs various blogs and websites (such as those listed above) in which he expounds his views on subjects such as religion, evolution and the BCSE, much of which is either rubbish or worse still, mendacious drivel about myself and other members of the BCSE.
It isn't as if it's just the odd article. Instead there is page after bloody page of petty misrepresentation, innuendo (ukantic stands for UK anticreationist, not UK Antichrist - have you got that Anderson), distortion, exaggeration and just outright dishonest rubbish. Because of the sheer volume, it would take up a considerable amount of time and effort to respond to it all in detail. Not that it's really necessary to do so in the first place.
In fact, Anderson's ramblings are so pathological that I believe it's an education in itself to read them, if only for a good laugh or to acquire an insight into the diseased workings of the typical fundamentalist mind. Here, have a quick look at his views on homosexuality.
As an example, take his post on Alan Turing.
There is a lot I could say about this: for instance, the “teenager” Turing “sodomised” was in fact 19 years of age. Old enough to vote, drink alcohol and fight in the army, yet apparently not old enough to make his own mind up about who to have sexual relationships with. However, I will stick to just pointing out that Turing, like Anderson, studied mathematics at a prestigious English University and was a keen long distance runner. You would have thought that these common bonds would have at least softened Anderson's criticism. Yet nowhere in his spiteful account is there to be found even the tiniest shred of empathy for Turing (who helped save Britain from the Nazis) or the humiliation and distress he endured. To me it seems almost as if Anderson has had every last drop of humanity sucked out of him by his fundamentalist affliction.
Nevertheless, despite the obvious self-defeating nature of Anderson's demented ramblings, I have decided to issue a correction in this instance as I don't believe that his breath-taking distortion of a relatively straightforward story, should be allowed to go unchallenged. But in order for the reader to fully appreciate the intricacies involved in the real story (rather than the one fabricated by Anderson) it would help to fill in some background information.
Fundamentalists Exploit Calamity and Human Suffering
Firstly, fundamentalists have a nasty habit of blaming evolution for all the ills of the world. They know they cannot win the argument by force of reason alone, because that option had to be abandoned under an onslaught of new discoveries over the centuries in fields diverse as astronomy, geology, biology, genetics, archaeology and palaeontology. They are therefore forced to conduct their campaigns at a more dishonest and emotional level. They will attempt for example to link evolution to the Holocaust. This sort of mendacity is a highly effective way of influencing public opinion for the simple reason that the average person in the street is very unlikely to have the level of knowledge required to recognise the errors of such claims. They are therefore inclined to be influenced by them.
Moreover, fundamentalists are mentally lazy, they rarely seem bothered about establishing even a remote causal relationship between events (see, correlation does not prove causation). And they are quite happy to be told what to do by an old book that has its origins back in the Bronze Age. But then again, I suppose that is why we call them fundamentalists in the first place.
As I have previously pointed out:
The general strategy works like this: Think of something bad, be it an American high school shooting, family breakdown, drug problems, a war somewhere, or even the fact the your milkman forgot to deliver your milk this morning (anything will do) – then scream at the top of your voice, “LOOK WHAT THE EVIL EVOLUTIONISTS HAVE DONE!”
My Views on Firearms
Secondly, I was brought up with gun nuts whose attitudes and prejudices I consequently absorbed like blotting paper, including their hostility towards gun control, disapproving of it as authoritarian state interference. I got to fire lots of guns: twin barrel and pump action shotguns, semi-automatic pistols, revolvers and rifles of various calibres, and whilst not claiming to be any sort of expert on the subject, I can at least claim to have had some experience of it.
However, over the years, my views have slowly changed and I now believe it would be safer for everyone if private gun ownership was simply made illegal in all but the most exceptional circumstances. A farmer may need a shotgun for dealing with vermin, but the average person living in a town doesn't.
I cannot say with any certainty what triggered this reassessment, I think it was probably a combination of various factors. For example, I left home at a fairly young age and away from the influence of my father and his friends and stopped reading gun magazines with their pro-gun editorials. From that point on, I only ever seemed to hear about guns when they were being used to maim and kill innocent people. And it wasn't just the big stories like the Hungerford massacre or Dunblane massacre that caused this change, but a steady dribble of lesser incidents as well.
For example, I can remember reading about a boy who was simply sat on a fence watching a cricket match when he was shot in the head and killed by a bullet believed fired from over a mile away. It was a completely random event, a gun fired casually into the air, maybe at a passing crow or something, the bullet could have struck a tree or the ground, but instead it killed an innocent child.
A one in a million chance accident a critic might retort, yet over the years I have read many reports of this nature. Here's an incident that happened just recently: Boy killed by bullet 'fired three miles away'
And another: The grandfather with mystery 'stray' bullet in his brain whose family thought he'd suffered a stroke.
Depending on its velocity and size, a bullet can travel several miles or more in a matter of seconds. A one in a million. Now multiply that figure by all the guns that are fired every year into the air from every country on the planet. There are probably thousands and thousands of completely innocent people being injured and killed annually in this one fashion alone.
Just look at the situation in America, where the typical death toll regularly approaches 30,000 gun deaths per year. A typical cross section just of child deaths alone is highlighted in A day in the death of America:
A two-year-old shoots himself with a gun he finds behind the sofa, a shopper is killed by a security guard, one brother fires on another - so it goes. Nine dead in 24 hours
Yet anyone questioning this situation will be countered by a well funded pro-gun propaganda machine that is more intent on protecting the interests of gun owners and the gun manufacturing and retailing industries than it is of doing anything about the mayhem they are causing.
And look at the sort of argument they use to justify this slaughter. Guns don't kill people, the mantra goes, people do. Are they really incapable of comprehending that if someone has a murderous intent, the very last thing you should be doing is handing them a weapon designed specifically to kill with! Here's an idea: why not scrap the laws on owning poisons or explosives. After all, cyanide and Semtex don't kill people, people do.
Unfortunately, America seems too far gone to change. A 1 in 10,000 chance (300,000,000/30,000) EVERY YEAR of being sacrificed on the high alter of gun meism is probably slightly better odds than those faced by the Aztecs of becoming a sacrificial victim. However, it is hardly what I would call progress in the land of so called freedom (freedom to get your head blown off) and opportunity. But then let them get on with it, after all, how would their film industry survive if it wasn't daily spreading this deadly obsession into just about every home in the western hemisphere, because a large proportion of its output seems to involve gun related violence.
Anyway, this is going off track a bit. The main point is that I am anti-gun, critical of those advocating lax gun regulations and don't take very kindly to fundamentalists who attempt to shift the blame for gun violence onto evolution. More on my views on the subject can be found here for anyone who needs more convincing.
Answers in Genesis and the Amish school Massacre
On the second of October 2006, a gunman by the name of Charles Roberts walked into West Nickel Mines school in the village of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania and after taking hostages shot dead five schoolgirls. The details, as are the norm in these cases, absolutely horrific:
Inside the school, Ballenger said, "there was not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass. There were bullet holes everywhere, everywhere."
This story received considerable attention in the press, mostly reflecting on the horror of the incident and asking why this small, harmless community had been targeted in such a heinous fashion. However, they weren't the only ones to pick up on it. The thought had hardly finished crossing my mind that the fundamentalists would probably be looking to exploit these deaths to smear evolution, when true to form the fundamentalist organisation, Answers in Genesis went and did exactly that.
Alan Bellis Responds to Answers in Genesis
Just look at how AIG reported this back in October 2006. Here is the current web page that references the incident:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/features/you-matter-to-god
Does the large main logo look vaguely familiar?
Because it is actually a variation of the logo that appeared on the main front page of the AIG website back in October of 2006 very shortly after the Amish murders.
And this is the main logo shown in more detail:
Just take a good look, isn't that absolutely disgusting. The evolution hating fundamentalists at Answers in Genesis have cynically exploited the deaths of five schoolgirls in order to attack a scientific theory they disagree with. To compound matters they have also distracted attention away from the true causes of this massacre - the gross excesses of rampant, out of control gun culture, which is something they seem to believe is perfectly normal and wholesome.
It's self evident that my gun image, which caused the fundamentalists to start foaming at the mouth, is clearly a caricature of the AIG gun image. My gun image then, is a direct response to their one, using over the top hyperbole as employed in the original, along with a similar threatening design and a scaremongering message. It was produced in retaliation, because I'm sick and tired of this nonsense from them every time there is another one of these incidents, and wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine.
As I commented at the time when this issue was under the spotlight on the BCSE forum:
Well if they can’t take it, then they shouldn’t be so keen to dish it out (yawn). The Amish killings had nothing to do with evolution & everything to do with American gun culture & their lax gun laws. Although you can find support for gun ownership right across the political spectrum, my understanding is that the strongest support is coming from the same right-wing extreme that is fuelling the upsurge in creationism over there.
Roughly speaking, 30,000 Americans per annum are dying in gun related incidents; murders, accidents, suicides, etc. They seem obsessed with these weapons & you only have to turn on the TV to understand the extent of the problem, with incessant depictions of gun related violence, much of it American in origin.
If you saturate a country with guns (& the suppliers are even targeting women now the traditional male market is saturating), with everything up to & including assault rifles that have no other purpose than to kill people, hand them out like sweets, glorify gun violence in TV films & dramas - is it then any wonder that the end result is a human bone meal factory?
Anderson's BCSE Revealed Exposed
Yet nowhere in Anderson's tiresome account of this entire episode is there the tiniest hint of any of this. There is no mention of the Amish Massacre, the AIG response, my reason for producing my gun design (indicated in the above post) - nothing. The reader is simply left to conclude that I was attempting to frighten people with outlandish claims about a group of people I don't happen to like.
It is not as if Anderson was unaware of any of this background information because this issue was discussed on the BCSE website at the time, and he was clearly following every last thing we were doing like a hawk, so it's therefore utterly inconceivable that he didn't know of the relationship between my gun image and the AIG one.
For example, at the beginning of this thread, Roger Stanyard makes a clear reference to the AIG gun image, which was on their website's front page at the time. Further on, it is discussed some more and Ian Lowe even goes so far as to point out that we had captured a screen print of the offending AIG web page.
Yet Anderson has simply failed to report any of this, instead he has erected a massive straw man fallacy centred around the BCSE's alleged attempts to scare people, which, as if his initial dishonesty was not enough for him, he then proceeds to milk to the full.
The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position.
He also claims that my gun image linked to another image on the creationism.co.uk website depicting a child talking to her father about a war with the fundamentalists (it's supposed to be a joke). Although that particular image does exist on a page about the NSS, my gun image actually linked to the the creationism website home page, NOT the NSS web page. I can't think of any reason why Anderson would accidentally make such a silly mistake, but I'm guessing he was just rooting around the website for something incriminating to bolster his assertion that I was exaggerating the threat from fundamentalism (that seems to be the best he could come up with) and he probably thought his story - fairytale would have more impact if he strung the two images together.
If you have ever tried to grab a large eel, you will know the frustration involved in the process because it's literally impossible. The more you try to grip it, the more it wants to slip away. Likewise with Anderson no doubt, who rather than admitting that he has disgraced himself with this appalling deception, will instead attempt to wiggle, squirm and slime his way out with some steaming pile of pathetic bullshit. However, the facts speak for themselves; my original gun image was a swipe at the AIG Amish Massacre gun report and was never meant to be taken as serious evidence as to my opinion on the dangers of fundamentalism. Anderson's failure to report any of this, is deceitful and a clear moral failure on his part.
Not that any of this comes as any surprise, because this sort of dishonest and slimy behaviour appears to be fairly common trait amongst fundamentalist Christians. As I pointed out at the time in a post on the BCSE that has since been removed:
To people like Anderson, anything goes, they are completely without standards or consciences: they threaten little children with hellfire, tell lies to adults about science, tell lies about people they don’t like (gutlessly refusing to enter into open debate with people they defame), write misleading letters to the press & deliberately conceal their extremist religious beliefs. In one breath they attempt to beat down opposition with crude argument from authority & in the next deliberately misrepresent their qualifications & authority. In short they are the lowest of the low; the dirtiest little sewer rat, chomping away on a turd, has more morals.
Finally, take a look at the bottom of Anderson's webpage on me. Look who he is recommending to visitors:
That's right, Answers in Genesis! You couldn't make this shit up if you tried.
Alan Bellis - July 2010
More on David Anderson can be found over at Black Shadow