Feedback archive → Feedback 2000 and before

Fake Feedback? Yet another false accusation from an Australian Skeptic

27 May 2000

Editor’s note:

No articles listed in this section have been edited in any way unless specifically requested by the sender (apart from removal of identifying material, as stated on the Web Feedback home page). You will notice some misspellings and grammatical errors even in our positive responses. We would also like to point out that the ratio of positive e-mails to negative e-mails is roughly 10 to 1. Due to the high volume of e-mail we receive, posting them all would not be feasible. We, therefore, plan to post one positive and one negative e-mail per week.

Further response from Dr Jonathan Sarfati, 7 July 2000:

In fact, most of the negative comments we receive are so poorly written, grammatically poor, and full of misspellings that publishing them would hardly show the evolutionist community in a good light, despite what ‘J.S.’ might say. Really, most of the negative comments are short two or three liners with four-letter words that would shock even the proverbial hardened sailor.

Other letters have been rejected because they refused to comply with our feedback rules, which are no different from those of many other websites and newspapers. For example, one person persistently refused to supply his real address as a sign of good faith, refused to document his claims, demanded an unreasonable deadline (which was a shorter time frame than it took for many articles I have formatted to be posted — presumably ‘J.S.’ won’t accuse CMI of censoring their own staff scientists!), and published on another site. And another correspondent wrote a long, rambling letter full of unsubstantiated personal attacks and village-atheist-style attacks on Christianity (attacks which are dealt with on our site!).

‘J.S.’ has since hyperlinked to this letter on his own website, so it’s ethical for us to reveal that he is one John Stear. And it’s in the interest of our readers to reveal exactly where he’s coming from. He is a self-described ‘retired bureaucrat’ with no qualifications in science, an ardent supporter of the Australian Skeptics, and we believe this quote by him is very revealing of the anti-Christian bigotry of most Skeptics/Atheists/Evolutionists:

John Stear, The Skeptic (Australia) 16(2):62, 1996.

Stear goes on to fulminate against monotheism, and to chide Skeptics that it ‘could be seen by some as less than honest’ not to attack religion directly. Also, when a fellow skeptic, John Snowden, an agnostic and ex Secular Humanist, pointed out the many shortcomings of organised humanism, Stear was quick to defend the humanistic faith. In the process he referred to something called the ‘Christian myth’ and ‘the hazards of religion’ and made this absurd statement: ‘Christianity has some deleterious effects on the well being of society’ (Skeptic 18(2):52–53, 1998). Never mind the deleterious effects of atheistic evolution-based Communist and Nazi régimes, which killed more people in the 20^th century than all the religious wars in history put together. [More recently, the Humanist values and ethics convention Australis2000 invited Vern Bullough, the Humanist pedophile advocate and an editor of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia, as a speaker, an absolutely horrifying example of how low organized humanism can stoop. Barry Williams, editor of the Australian Skeptic, was a ‘conversationalist’ on ‘Secular Sex’ at this conference, listed directly under the notorious euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke]

Recently, Stear, on his website, responded by actually claiming that Stalin and Hitler were Christians, a common assertion on many atheistic websites. But this is either incredibly deluded or simply dishonest. Certainly, Stalin trained in a seminary, but used Darwin as an excuse for apostasy. By becoming a Marxist, by definition he was an atheistic evolutionist (Marx wanted to dedicate his book to Darwin, and Marxist dogma is anti-theistic). And Stalin’s atrocities were committed as a staunch atheistic evolutionary communist.

The evolutionary and anti-Christian beliefs of the Nazi regime are documented in The Holocaust and evolution, and Was Hitler a Christian? shows what Hitler really thought of Christianity. That is, when Hitler wasn’t trying to curry favour with the evolutionized liberal clergy (note that it’s no accident that the Holocaust happened in the country where liberal theology was invented). More recently, the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion is publishing Donovan’s by one senior member of the US prosecution team at the Nuremberg Trials , General William Donovan, showing that the Nazis planned to exterminate Christianity. Similarly, many ardently atheistic evolutionists, like Stear’s hero, Ian Plimer, Australian Humanist of the Year (1995), pretend not to be anti-Christian, or even claim to be practising Christians, when trying to recruit compromising churchians to the anti-creationist cause.

We should also remember that atrocities committed by professing Christians were completely contrary to the teachings of Christ, while the atrocities of 20^th century Nazi and Communists were totally consistent with evolutionary teaching.

Actually, CMI is very grateful for Stear’s quote above, for being so up-front (unlike Plimer) about how diametrically opposed evolution is to Christianity, and how intimately evolution is connected to his own atheistic faith. We have quoted it many times, with effect, to wake up Christians who thought evolution was a ‘side issue’. Not surprisingly, some of his fellow skeptics seemed rather annoyed that Stear had given their game away!

Speaking of Plimer: on a University of Newcastle letterhead, he said of an American creationist scientist who was vising Australia: ‘ … you would surely have noticed an entourage of young people (principally boys) accompanying [him] and who continually touched him.’ (the creationist always travelled with his wife or the couple he was billeted with). It is interesting that the Skeptics have been publicly invited, from the podium at their tenth annual convention in Melbourne, to dissociate themselves from such gutter tactics, as well as the outright lies (and blatantly practising deception against creationists, which Plimer brags about in his book Telling Lies …) which Dr Carl Wieland documented on overhead at the time. They were put on notice that a refusal to do so would be a reason for CMI to refuse to debate them. Stear has also been confronted with this, but has also refused to repudiate such outrageous behaviour. So from now on, we will publish nothing from any known Australian Skeptic unless that person openly rejects such conduct. For a refusal indicates that they clearly think the end (combatting creationism) justifies the means (deception, lies and slander), so how can anyone be sure that anything else they write is not deception for the good of the ‘cause’?

Actually, I must wonder whether Stear’s accusation that ludicrous evolutionary feedback was actually written by CMI reflects a guilty conscience about the Skeptics’ own tactics. Plimer and other Skeptics frequently attack ‘creationist’ arguments that are often anonymous (made up?) or written by people we’ve never heard of. And of course, they are arguments with which we would disagree or have even openly rejected, for example the false claims of finding Noah’s Ark.

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