I am speaking of Representative John Shimkus, R-Ill, and the truly astonishing words he uttered before Congress demonstrated in a video that is constnatly being trolled off Google and YouTube by those who don’t want you to see it:
Source and more information here.
If God’s Word is infallible, unchanging, and perfect, then dinosaurs did not live in a different era than humans, and not in great antiquity, and what geologists and paleontologists say about the “age of dinosaurs” must be the word of Satan designed by the dark lord of the underworld to confuse us.
If God’s Word is infallible, unchanging, and perfect, then there can be no destructive climate change. There can only have been one “mass extinction” … the noachain flood.
The person who is reasonably likely to be the next US House of Representative Chair of the Energy Committee has stated that we live on a “Carbon Starved Planet” because the paleontological evidence suggests more carbon in the atmosphere hundreds of millions of years ago, yet he also claims that since God said in Genesis that there will be no more climate disasters after the Flood.
Unbelievable. This madness has got to stop.
John Shimkus has surpassed Michele Bachmann as the worlds most dangerous moron.
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Yeah, well, even if you want to believe Genesis as infallible, Climate Change does not mean that the earth will end…just, oh, the way humans live on earth…. God didn’t say nothin’ about not ending civilization!
This is easy to understand. You just need the translation:
“Hey Big Coal and Oil, please give me millions of dollars in campaign ads and contributions. Hey FOX News, please give me a national platform! Hey Sarah Palin I want to ride your coattails wherever you go! I want money, I want power, and I want to be famous!”
End of translation.
Religion is secondary here, just a means to a political end. Which it usually is anyway.
Sadly, I’m pretty sure this guy believes every word he said. I’m not sure if that makes him more or less dangerous than if he were a hypocrite.
It’s time to start demanding psychiatric testing of candidates for public office. And it’s time to start calling these people out for what they are: clinically insane.
Between now and then we can certainly pepper them with basic science questions: what’s a fact?, what’s a hypothesis?, is a hypothesis ever “proven”?, what’s a theory?, how do you operationalize a variable?, what’s the process of peer review?, and so on. Ask them questions about basic Newtonian physics, basic chemistry, basic biology, and even basic civil engineering.
The way to deal with these “Bible is literal inerrant truth” types is with overt ridicule: laugh in their faces. Ask them which version of creation they believe in, and how they deal with it conflicting with the other version. Ask them if they want to stone people to death for eating shellfish. Attack them as sinners for wearing suits made of mixed fibers. Tell them their God is a paranoiac for planting carbon 14 and the red shift to tempt us into sin.
Use Tea Party tactics when they appear at home for constituent events. Keep asking the questions and not letting up for one minute, even after the mics are shut down. Do it in a coordinated way with lots of people hidden throughout the audience.
The time for being nice is long since over, and where we are today is a result of trying to play nice with lunatics. There is no playing nice with lunatics. There is only defeating them. Ridiculing and shaming them into keeping their insane ramblings to themselves, is a start, as it may help prevent the nuttery from spreading.
And if you want to fight long-term, get off your ass and run for school board. That’s where the decisions are made that weaken science & math ed to the point where people grow up believing insane garbage such as YEC and anti-vaxism.
If there are nuts on the school board, fight them right out in the open: for example when they propose teaching creationism, ask if they also propose teaching astrology and unicorn hunting and palm reading, and then go on a rant about global competitiveness and how they expect their kids to get decent jobs after they’ve grown up ignorant.
Don’t give them a moment’s rest. Do whatever it takes.
I think he’d be less dangerous if he were a hypocrite. In that case, it might be possible to demonstrate his contempt for his fundiewhackazoid constituents, thereby depriving them of an agent in Congress. If he really believes that a compilation of Bronze Age fairy tales is literally true in every detail, he needs a psychiatric examination. After all, Genesis says that the sky is a solid dome (a “firmament”), with water on the outside, a view so blatantly contrary to observed reality that anyone who seriously proposes it as a guide to public policy needs to be put away where he can’t hurt anyone.
You have to understand that they are that way in part because they have totally compartmentalized mental processes: it’s not that cognitive dissonance doesn’t bother them, it’s that it never happens to them.
Put one in charge of the Agriculture Department and they’ll get along just fine with the farmers of like mind who would never in a million years try to use the animal husbandry methods that supposedly made Jacob a wealthy man.
Jacob = first recorded experiment in genetics.
Yup: the Bible supports Lysenkoism. As everyone knows, thanks to hundreds of generations of circumcision Jewish baby boys are now born without foreskins.
I am glad that are finally electing some normal people to serve to represent the rest of us who think this way. It’s about time we threw out the socialists, evolutionaries, and the Godophobes. It’s time to return to our foundations. This is a good start.
Recall vote! This person is not qualified to represent anyone in government nor to plan for anything past next weekend.
So, Mark, I guess you don’t think your grandchildren have a right to life.
Actually, Jacob’s breeding experiment doesn’t even support Lysenkoism, does it? More like sympathetic magic.
This man needs to be arrested before he can do any damage, and preferably committed post haste
US vs Ballard must be repealed to allow religion to be challenged in court. Prove it, or it’s jail on fraud charges. In this case, being a Congressman means that he is a clear and present danger to himself and to others, and therefore must be involuntarily committed to the nearest mental institution until such time as his skydaddy appears, or he’s off the Jesus sauce
We. are. doomed….
Stupidity is rampant, proudly displayed as a virtue.. 🙁
Little scientists make me laugh.
The Big Bang Theory speaks of a tiny piece of matter that came into existence through nothing more than a “POOF”.
Then somehow it exploded and that tiny piece of matter somehow became all of the matter in the universe.
So two events that have no causation, are our public schools’ best explanation at the creation of the universe.
Everytime I see it written down, it makes me laugh harder everytime. You empty souled cretins are too much!
Yikes. I would’ve preferred Minnesota to lose it’s title of “home of the religion-crazed loony legislator” by having Bachmann lose the election, not by having someone even nuttier get elected.
I have to take exception to the post title. I long since crossed the event horizon of political cynicism, and if you think that this is an example of something you think is much worse than I would have thought, then you can’t even begin to imagine what I’m actually thinking. This is routine stuff and entirely expected.
Just you wait ’til they use the “deficit crisis” to implement the sort of economic and social policies that the CIA made (in)famous in South and Central America back in the day… Then you’ll begin to see just how bad I think it is.
Re. DC Sessions #6:
I’m not talking about cognitive dissonance here, and I’m not concerned with their internal compartmentalization.
It’s very simple: embarrass them into not talking nonsense in public. Make it socially unacceptable. Start with ridicule, and then escalate to the kind of reaction someone might have if a total stranger started talking about their sex life in graphic detail.
There are all kinds of ways to escalate this if needed. Think “Evangelical Homosexuality,” and “Evangelical Atheism,” and start writing the scripts to use to come back at religious extremists when they try “recruiting” in public.
This can be dealt with at the level of pure behaviorism: black-box whatever might be happening in the minds of these extremists, and find the most effective ways to put a stop to their behaviors in public places. That in turn will make their positions just a bit less visible by degrees, until a tipping point is reached at which spouting religious extremism in public becomes as unacceptable as smoking in a crowded elevator.
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Re. Bickle re. Ballard:
The problem is, we don’t want to establish a precedent whereby any government authority has the power to rule on the truth or falsehood of religious claims. If that happens, then we end up with establishment of religion by the back door of investigations of truth/falsehood of claims. Consider also the present Catholic majority on the Supreme Court. We really really do not want to go there.
What we can do is establish under law that sectarian religious beliefs are not allowable in the processes of any branch of government. We can do this via “anti-Sharia” legislation that is drawn “broadly enough to pass 1st Amendment muster.” If this is done correctly, then _any_ legislation or executive act or court decision that is found to be substantially based on religious doctrine, for example discriminatory marriage laws, can be thrown out.
Realistically what will happen instead, is that certain megachurches will see it coming and will campaign against it, thereby forcing the issue of whether Sharia can be singled out from other forms of religious legal doctrine. That will be most entertaining to watch.
Someone should have stood up and reminded him about the separation of church and state – he wouldn’t have understood though – that would require a functioning neuron. America you are screwed