From the Archives: For Thanksgiving, the Mayflower Compact

November 22, 2006

It is the day before Thanksgiving, a holiday generally associated with the English colonists of New England. What better time to re-run a piece on the Mayflower Compact and its religious implications? Originally, this desultory ran here, on July 26, 2006.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars features a set of comments on an interview right-right-wing pundit John Lofton did with Roy Moore, the former chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court who lost his job when he illegally tried to force his religion on the court and on Alabama. This year Moore ran for governor of Alabama, losing in the primary election.

One of the grandest canards in current thought about U.S. history is that the Mayflower Compact set up a theocracy in Massachusetts. Lofton and Moore banter about it as if it were well established fact — or as if, as I suspect, neither of them has looked at the thing in a long time, and that neither of them has ever diagrammed the operative sentence in the thing.

The Mayflower Compact was an agreement between the people in two religiously disparate groups, that among them they would fairly establish a governing body to fairly make laws, and that they would abide by those laws. Quite the opposite of a theocracy, this was the first time Europeans set up in the New World a government by consent of the governed.

That is something quite different from a theocracy. Read the rest of this entry »

10 Comments | America's founding, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Good Quotes, History, History Revisionism, Religious Freedom, Thanksgiving, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

But, did George really say it?

November 19, 2006

I have nothing new or enlightening to add to the discussion about whether George Washington actually added “so help me, God” to his oath of office when he assumed the presidency of the United States. So let me merely point you to History is Elementary, where the issue is covered very well.

Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, America's founding, Good Quotes, History, History Revisionism, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Intelligent design – a pig that doesn’t fly

October 9, 2006

We’re talking past each other now over at Right Reason[*], on a thread that started out lamenting Baylor’s initial decision to deny Dr. Francis Beckwith tenure last year, but quickly changed once news got out that Beckwith’s appeal of the decision was successful.

I noted that Beckwith’s getting tenure denies ID advocates of an argument that Beckwith is being persecuted for his ID views (wholly apart from the fact that there is zero indication his views on this issue had anything to do with his tenure discussions). Of course, I was wrong there — ID advocates have since continued to claim persecution where none exists. Never let the facts get in the way of a creationism rant, is the first rule of creationism.

Steve Sack cartoon in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Steve Sack cartoon in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Discussion has since turned to the legality of teaching intelligent design in a public school science class. This is well settled law — it’s not legal, not so long as there remains no undisproven science to back ID or any other form of creationism.

Read the rest of this entry »

10 Comments | Accuracy, Charles Darwin, Creationism, denialism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Junk science, Law, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Mermelstein: Holocaust remembrance hero

August 28, 2006

In early August 1985, Melvin Mermelstein struck a powerful blow against bogus history and historical hoaxes. Mel won a decision in a California court, in a contract case.

A group of Holocaust deniers had offered a $50,000 reward for anyone who could prove that the Holocaust actually happened. Mermelstein had watched his family marched to the gas chambers, and could testify. He offered his evidence. The Holocaust deniers, of course, had no intention of paying up. They dismissed any evidence offered as inadequate, and continued to claim no one could prove that the Holocaust actually occurred.

Mermelstein, however, was a businessman. He knew that the offer of the reward was a sweepstakes, a form of contract. He knew it was enforceable in court. And he sued to collect. The issue in court would be, was Mermelstein’s evidence sufficient?

Mermelstein’s lawyer had a brilliant idea. He petitioned the court to take “judicial note” of the fact of the Holocaust. Judicial note means that a fact is so well established that it doesn’t need to be evidenced when it is introduced in court — such as, 2+2=4, the freezing point of water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 0 degrees Celsius, etc.

The court ruled that the evidence presented overwhelmingly established that the Holocaust had occurred — the court made judicial note of the Holocaust. That ruling meant that, by operation of law, Mermelstein won the case. The only thing for the judge to do beyond that was award the money, and expenses and damages.

You can read the case and other materials at the Nizkor Holocaust remembrance site.

Appalachian State University takes the Holocaust seriously — there is a program of study on the issue, recently reported by the Mountain Times (the school is in Boone, North Carolina — not sure where the newspaper is).

Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations

Mountain Times, August 17, 2006

As co-directors of Appalachian State University’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Rennie Brantz and Zohara Boyd are always eager to expand and improve the center’s methods of education. Seldom, though, does this involve airfare.

Brantz and Boyd recently visited Israel to participate in the Fifth International Conference for Education: Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations. The four-day conference was held in late June at Yad Vashem, an institute and museum in Jerusalem that specializes in the Nazi Holocaust.

“Yad Vashem is an incredible institute,” Brantz said. “It was founded in the ’50s to remember and commemorate those who perished in the Holocaust, and has been the premier international research institute dealing with the Holocaust.”

As Santayana advises, we remember the past in order to prevent its recurring. Clearly, this is a past we need to work harder at remembering.

28 Comments | Bogus history, Education, Freedom - Political, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Law, School discipline, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

D. James Kennedy’s killer legacy

August 27, 2006

This might be a better topic for another blog I have in early creation stages — except that the difficulties with the anti-science program broadcast this weekend by D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries are exactly the same difficulties the same group has with history, and the concerns about revising history textbooks and history classes — to make them inaccurate and militantly polemic — also come from the same groups. The history errors alone in Kennedy’s program justify discussing it here. Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments | Bogus history, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Education, Evolution, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Intelligent Design, Science, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Darwin-to-Hitler claims rebutted

August 24, 2006

Controversy still simmers over the pending broadcast from Coral Ridge Ministries (CRM) of a program that claims links from evolution theory to the Holocaust.  Apart from being incredibly simplistic historically, the claims raise the ire of scientists and biologists who say CRM gets most of the science and the history of the science wrong.

Rev. D. James Kennedy’s program is titled “Fatal Fruit.”  Alas, it appears to contain many fatal flaws of history. 

Several bloggers raised issues of accuracy in the past week, and especially after Dr. Francis Collins complained about the use of an interview he granted on such a cause (which he claims to be specious), Coral Ridge Ministries changed its promotional material, deleting references to Collins and to Ann Coulter, whose recent book deals in anti-Darwin disinformation.  In response, CRM trotted out historian Richard Weikart, a fellow at the anti-Darwin Discovery Institute in Seattle, whose recent book was titled From Darwin to Hitler.

Ed Brayton notes difficulties with Weikart’s thesis, and the fact that most historians disagree with Weikart and CRM, in a post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

I am struck by the irony of CRM’s demonization of science and Darwin, in a program complaining about the effects of Hitler’s rise to power and his use of such demonization tactics against Jews, Gypsies, Africans, Arabs and others. 

You may wish to look at my earlier post, with links to other stories.

4 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Creationism, History Revisionism, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Intelligent Design, Science, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Twisting history still: D. James Kennedy

August 23, 2006

Voodoo history just will not die.

Several years ago I caught the tail end of a television program featuring the Rev. D. James Kennedy railing against evolution and especially Charles Darwin.  What caught my aural attention was a rant claiming that Darwin somehow bore responsibility for Stalin’s manifold evils perpetrated in the old Soviet Union.

That is bogus history of the first order, of course.  Stalin banned the teaching of evolution, and he banned research even based on evolution. 

Soviet genetics, top of the world in the early 1920s, was set back decades (and still has not recovered).  Some top scientists were fired; some were imprisoned; some were sent to Siberia in hopes they would die (and some did); a few disappeared, perhaps after being shot.  Soviet anti-Darwinian science contributed to the massive crop failures of the 1950s that led to the starvation of more than 4 million people.  Claiming that Stalin loved Darwinian theory is bad history revisionism of first order.  (If you’re Googling, look for the story of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s henchman against biology.)

Kennedy is at it again.  The past couple of weeks have featured new rants against Darwin, leading up to a promised climax this weekend in which Kennedy will claim Darwin was responsible for Hitler and Nazi atrocities — again a fantastic claim, since Hitler directly repudiated Darwin, never expressed support for the idea of evolution, and since anti-Darwin quackery led to any number of stupid science moves in Nazi Germany, such as a ban on blood banks for fear that soldiers would get Jewish blood and turn Jewish (no, you can’t make that stuff up — see Ashley Montague’s essay in his 1959 book, Human Genetics).

Unfortunately for Kennedy and his Coral Ridge Ministries (CRM), his advance flackery got the attention of biologists like P. Z. Myers and others, like the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.

There is much bogus history to deal with there, and so little time.  Check out the links.  More to come from here, I hope.

2 Comments | Bogus history, Creationism, Evolution, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Intelligent Design, Plagiarism, Religious Freedom, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Recognizing bogus history, 2

August 2, 2006

Bogus history infects political discussions more than others, though there are some areas where bogus history strays into the realm of science (false claims that Darwin and Pasteur recanted, for example).

1. The author pitches the claim directly to the media or to organizations of non-historians, for pay.

Historians are detectives, and they like to share what they find. One historian working in the papers of one figure from history will find a letter from another figure, and pass that information on to the historian working on the second figure. Historians teach history, write it up for scholarly work, and often spin it in more fascinating tales for popular work. Most years there are several good works competing for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Academic historians, those tied to universities and other teaching institutions, join societies, attend meetings, and write their material in journals — all pitched to sharing what they have learned.

Bogus historians tend to show up at conferences of non-historians. Douglas Stringfellow’s tales of World War II derring do were pitched to civic clubs, places where other historians or anyone else likely to know better would not appear (Stringfellow’s stories of action behind enemy lines in World War II won him several speaking awards, and based on his war record, he was nominated to a seat in Congress for Utah, in 1952, which he won; a soldier who knew Stringfellow during the war happened through Salt Lake City during the 1954 re-election campaign, and revealed that Stringfellow’s exploits were contrived; he was forced to resign the nomination). David Barton speaks more often to gun collectors than to history groups. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Voodoo history, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Recognizing bogus history, 1

August 1, 2006

Robert Park provides a short e-mail newsletter every Friday, covering news in the world of physics. It’s called “What’s New.” Park makes an art of smoking out bogus science and frauds people try to perpetrate in the name of science, or for money. He wrote an opinion column for the Chronicle of Higher Education published January 31, 2003, in which he listed the “7 warning signs of bogus science.”

Please go read Park’s entire essay, it’s good.

And it got me thinking about whether there are similar warning signs for bogus history? Are there clues that a biography of Howard Hughes is false that should pop out at any disinterested observer? Are there clues that the claimed quote from James Madison saying the U.S. government is founded on the Ten Commandments is pure buncombe? Should Oliver Stone have been able to to more readily separate fact from fantasy about the Kennedy assassination (assuming he wasn’t just going for the dramatic elements)? Can we generalize for such hoaxes, to inoculate ourselves and our history texts against error?

Perhaps some of the detection methods Park suggests would work for history. He wrote his opinion piece after the Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., in which the Court laid out some rules lower courts should use to smoke out and eliminate false science. As Park described it, “The case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.” The Court said lower courts must act as gatekeepers against science buncombe — a difficult task for some judges who, in their training as attorneys, often spent little time studying science.

Some of the Daubert reasoning surfaced in another case recently, the opinion in Pennsylvania district federal court in which Federal District Judge John Jones struck down a school board’s order that intelligent design be introduced to high school biology students, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.

Can we generalize to history, too? I’m going to try, below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, History Revisionism, Religious Freedom, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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