Recently, I have noted Marci McDonald’s best-selling anti-Canadian Christian hatefest known as The Armageddon Factor. Read it if you want, but I would recommend that you do not rely on it for factual information. Here is a paragraph from p. 201, addressing my Post-Darwinist blog, that gives a sense of why: Nonsense about biophysics graduate Kirk Durston: She writes,
One of her most frequently quoted experts is Kirk Durston, a doctoral candidate in biophysics at the University of Guelph, who has trumpeted the merits of intelligent design in seminars on more than thirty Canadian campuses as head of the New Scholars Society. What O’Leary fails to mention is that the New Scholars Society is a ministry of the U.S.-based evangelical powerhouse, Campus Crusade for Christ.
It is hard to cram this many errors into a couple of sentences, but let me address the key ones:
– Durston is not one of my most frequently quoted experts. Stephen Jay Gould gets a lot more ink from me, and so does Richard Dawkins. So do lots of people, as you will discover if you use the blog search tool.
– I spoke to Durston on Saturday, and he was not able to identify more than six campuses on which he spoke on ID-related issues, as opposed to “more than thirty Canadian campuses” (McDonald, p. 201). One of them was the adult night school course I taught years ago at University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s University.
– Durston’s New Scholars Society is completely independent of U.S. Campus Crusade.
McDonald’s work belongs to a growing library of fact-free books featuring angst about people who are not really doing anything very unusual. This angst conveniently distracts attention from those who are really doing something unusual (like trying to blow up their underwear on airliners). It is a way of avoiding the need for a credible approach to issues of the day.
Here’s my theory: It is tough to combat people who will gladly kill themselves in order to kill you. It is much easier for a typical left wing journalist to identify as the enemy people who do not pose a social threat, whose reasons for disagreeing with some tax-funded consensus are reasonable, non-violent, and academically or scientifically based.
I have decided to coin the term “marci” to refer to an error that could have been avoided by fact checking, but no one bothered. I wish Marci McDonald a better legacy.
For a flat-out “marci”about ID “father” Phillip E. Johnson (that he became a Catholic), go here.
(Note: ) In Canada, where I live, this political correctness has gotten so crazy that feminists actually allied with Islamists to try to get the use of the term “honour killing” banned from media, on the grounds that domestic violence occurs in every culture.
Yes, true, but what follows? We use the term “assassination” to refer to the murder of a person who was elected, appointed, or born to an office in government. We use the term “infanticide” for the murder of babies, specifically. We do this because some murders have predictable ranges of causes and consequences. Assassination leads to civil disorder. A pattern of female infanticide leads to an absence of wives – sure, there are some situations where the guy wishes his wife weren’t around, but what happens if he cannot get married because there are no live girls … ? Fortunately, and no surprise, the public is NOT buying this revision of the language.