Saturday, January 19, 2008

I've got mail!

A few weeks back, I had a letter to the editor published in the Austin American-Statesman about the firing of the pro-evolution director of the science curriculum. While I was away over Christmas, I actually got a letter in the mail from someone that read it. (A postcard, anyway.) It wasn't exactly friendly. There was no return address, so I can't respond directly to the brave person that looked up my address. Here's the postcard:

Let's leave aside that this guy felt strongly enough to track me down and actually knows my street address. (Creepy.) It's interesting that he claims the creationists on the Texas Education Agency are fighting the idea of Darwin's "inerrancy". You find this notion all over when it comes to creationists. It was a major part of Ann Coulter's thesis in her last book, Godless. Here is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council claiming scientists "declaring Darwinism to be inerrant dogma." It's as if they think biologists get up in the morning and genuflect before an altar to Charles Darwin before heading off to work and a long day of harvesting embryonic stem cells.

The other thing you'll notice about this letter is that it has the attitude that the creationists are the stalwart defenders of skeptical inquiry against the forces of dogmatic "Darwinism", when nothing could be further from the truth. It's not as if a lot of cutting-edge scientific research happens in 5th grade science classrooms. I think the last paper I read from such an institution was Cootie Contagion: A Longitudinal Analysis of the 2007 Outbreak.

Sigh. It's just not easy being a candle of rationality in all this dark.

3 comments:

Fig said...

It is more than a little creepy that he or she looked up your home address.

do you think it is the same person who commented that you shouldn't go back to Texas or someone who read the comment and was inspired?

Narc said...

I've wondered if it was the same guy, too. There's just no real way to tell. In a weird way, I wish there had been a return address so I could send a reply back.

Anonymous said...

It's rather cowardly to track down someone's home address, fire off a postcard, and then not put a return address on it, IMHO.

I guess when you're a nutcase, you assume that everyone else is as creepy as you are?