Saturday, February 18, 2006

Intelligently Designed pillows



Yes, this lovely ID Mount Rushmore Throw Pillow can now be yours for only $22.99. "Stylish fun" and "easily laundered" pretty well covers the whole ID experiment, wouldn't you say?

A link from Canadian Cynic leads to The Intelligent Design weblog of Bill Dembski who provides this blurb to go with your new pillow :

“Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? ...What if humans went extinct and aliens, visiting the earth, discovered Mount Rushmore in substantially the same condition as it is now? "

What would the aliens think of us carving our human likenesses onto Mt Rushmore? I'm guessing it would be something along the lines of : " Now here's a species who projects and imposes its own image onto nature and then worships it."

But that's just my inner alien. Dembski's inner alien is probably quite different.

Further down the Intelligently Designed Apparel and Merchandise Page we come to this unexplained figure:

Is he:

  1. an atheist mole signalling us from inside the ID site?
  2. on step#1 of the 12 Step ID Anonymous Program?
  3. enacting some sort of intelligently designed religious auto-eroticism?

You be the judge.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Alison,

What dumbfuckery is this, I ask?

ID claims to be about science and not religion but they state in their own literature that the reason for pushing ID is because science effects religion. It is a theory so poorly designed that it refutes itself. The evidentiary basis for ID is the claim that they can "detect" design using certain criteria; that a rock is certainly not designed because it is obviously the result of random processes; a pocket watch is designed because it is complex and has purpose. A living organism is complex and has purpose (none of which are explained). Therefore god "designed" living creatures but from this logic it follows that god did not create matter itself. Why is it then, that god could not design a universe that could give rise to life and evolution? Because the other reason for ID is to refute Darwinism, not merely to include god as one of the possible reasons for life. ID relies on cognitive dissonance (which they call faith) and legalistic argument (which we call bullshit) rather than logic and reason. They want to change science so that life becomes the proof of god's existence.

I think what they really have is a persecution complex or rather that they are trying to develop one in their followers. They see how well this has worked for Israel in stifling dissent. They believe that science is out to get them, that science excludes all other possible causes of nature etc. etc. It really stems from fear. They believe that people will realize that because nature was an "accident" that life has no meaning and therefore no purpose. Obviously the purpose of life is to cut taxes! Just as God designed rain to fall less on the brown people and more on the Jesus people, so money should flow upwards to the privileged people uninhibited by other people.

So when do they unveil God's sketch book? Do they even know the meaning and origins of the word design? Do they realize that design is the step before creation? Why the fuck would god have to design something? Does Mr. Omnipotent use an eraser when he fucks up?

Answers to these and many other questions in my new book: God, he's so incredible obviously someone even more intelligent must have designed him. I was going to call it "What's love got to do with it" but that title was already taken.

Alison said...

Great rant!
Will your book have pictures?

There is the argument by ID scourge Eugenie Scott that we should knock off using the term "Darwinism" and replace it in public discourse with the more accurate and less dogmatic sounding "evolutionary biology".
But you're right that hearing the word Darwin flushes them out faster.

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