... and then they lied some more.

My plan in the next few posts is to start demonstrating just how badly the BCSE has lied in its recent campaign against "BCSE Revealed". If you're just picking this story up, the earlier parts are here: one, two, three.

Basically, the story is this: "BCSE Revealed" began running a story that Roger Stanyard had fallen out with the rest of the BCSE committee, and walked out. The BCSE then made attempts at reconciliation - which, after a fortnight or so, were successful. As I posted this story, the BCSE committee, in particular Ian Lowe, Michael Brass, Stanyard him and Brian Jordan, decided that they didn't think I'd have the evidence to prove it: so they used the opportunity to rubbish me and the accuracy of "BCSE Revealed" in some particularly insulting ways. However, it turned out that I did have the evidence. As I've begun showing this evidence, the above named BCSE leaders have been exposed as telling the most astonishingly bare-faced lies.

Before I showed the evidence, the BCSE leaders were running away with a theme of "this set of lies from Anderson is so appalling - let us pyschoanalyze just how he could do this". Lowe started offering the BCSE forum readers his diagnosis - apparently I'm lazy, abuse my wife, and have a pathological inability to work with others - and then he condemned me in advance for not apologising.

So, Lowe appears to know that heinous misdeeds ought to, when exposed, be followed by an apology. The lack of any such apology (whether from Lowe or any others of the BCSE leaders who jumped in with the premature insults) simply gives us more data to go on when we're trying to evaluate if the BCSE are bona fide science educators, or liars and hypocrites. As yet Lowe has been strangely silent in offering us a pyschoanalysis of just why he has such problems in handling truth...

Here's More Of The Evidence

In fact, the fact that Stanyard had walked out on the BCSE was not only known by the BCSE committee. The below quotations are part of a discussion by Chris Hyland and Tim Hague, two BCSE members. They're discussing it over on the website of "Science, Just Science", which is presently in the process of merging into the BCSE. (As the two groups are very similar and have a considerable overlap in membership, I've considered this something of a non-event, so am not saying much about it at the present). I don't believe Mr. Hague's name has come up on "BCSE Revealed" before; you may remember Hyland from his involvement in the events when the BCSE began telling MPs that "Truth in Science" were distributing material "full of scientific errors" before the BCSE knew the contents of the material... (see here).

On the 19th of June, Hyland asked the following question:

Chris Hyland: "Roger no longer appears to be a user on this site, can we find out when he deleted himself. I've had a quick look through the admin pages with no luck. Any idea Tim?"

Notice that Hyland appears to know that Roger had been responsible for removing himself from the SJS forum - back in mid June. This contradicts the story spun by the BCSE that Lowe temporarily removed Roger because Roger was having problems with his ISP.

What was Hague's reply?

Tim Hague (2oth June): I deleted him at his request last week.

Note that - the reason why Stanyard wasn't posting on the SJS forum wasn't because he had Internet problems - it was actually because he asked the forum administrator to delete his account. He was leaving permanently. What happened?

Chris Hyland: When last week?

Tim Hague: Ian appears to have removed Roger's 'I quit' messages from the forum. It was just after Roger announced that he was going to quit, I've no idea exactly which day or time that was.

Notice that: Stanyard quit, and told everyone so. Hague doesn't know exactly when it was, because Ian (Lowe) removed the dated "I quit" messages which Stanyard had posted. This is presumably from the BCSE forum rather than the SJS one, as that is the form that Lowe is the administrator of (Hague is the administrator of the SJS one). So here we have the following facts:

• Roger quit, and posted "I quit" messages to announce it. Stanyard's endorsement of Lowe's "Roger hasn't been around for a while because he had ISP problems" upon his reconciliation and return was a massive lie.
  
  
  http://community.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?p=10517#10517
  
  http://community.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?p=10480#10480
  
  
  
• Lowe actually removed Stanyard's "I quit" messages. From the beginning, Lowe went into panic mode and tried to cover up what had happened. (I don't know why... the fall-out is evidence of childishness, but hardly more than that; "BCSE Revealed" cares about the BCSE's deceptions; its childishness is small beer). His campaign of lies and insults against "BCSE Revealed" is the continuation of a policy he decided on immediately. Remember again Lowe's words when he thought he would be able to get away with this:
  
  "Watch him now - he has stated that Roger has left, simply on the basis of a change to the website, when it is simply not true. Roger had a problem with his ISP for a week or so, and we changed the email address to make sure that people could still contact us. Roger remains part of the BCSE committee. Anderson will blow and huff and puff, but he won't apologise and correct his mistake. That's the measure of the man."
  http://community.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?p=10461#10461
  
  How many lies and slanders is that? Not just one or two. Well, rather than making our own comment, we'll leave Lowe facing his own verdict; does he agree with himself? Apparently, someone who behaves like this and then fails to apologise is a very small person indeed. Apparently, we should "watch him now" to see what his measure is.
  
  
  
• Stanyard's quitting was well-known. It was announced publicly by Stanyard, seen by members of the forum, and known by those outside of the committee. None of those individuals, though, stepped in when the BCSE began its campaign of lies and slanders against "BCSE Revealed"; some of them kept silent, some joined in. Hyland and Hague were complicit. If they have evidence otherwise of e-mails and forum posts in which they tried to persuade Lowe/Brass/Jordan/Stanyard not to go down the path they did, then I'd be more than willing to reproduce them in order to clear their reputations.
  
  

This is a disaster for the BCSE: its public representatives have been caught telling the most cynical and bare-faced of untruths and running a nasty slander campaign based on statements it knew were baseless. Who, knowing this, is going to believe any of their future pronouncements? The only people who are going to accord credibility to the BCSE in future are those who have made their minds up, evidence or not. The BCSE has the choice either to get rid of its committee and start over - which will be very hard to do because it is now such a small organisation that its committee are almost a majority of active members - or to cynically bet that it will be able to carry on with nobody noticing, hoping people aren't going to find out what kind of individuals those behind it are.

The BCSE's website alleges that one of the major issues in the Darwinism debate is that those who opposed Darwinism are systematic and cynical liars. Well, on this one I can't make the common criticism I've been making over the months... this time, the BCSE really do appear to be talking within their field of expertise.

You can find the web page with the posts extracted above at: http://www.justscience.org.uk/...omments_parentId=2159
You'll have to rush, though: the BCSE's response to these revelations so far has been to remove such evidence within minutes... whilst leaving all the lies and slanders against me up for you to read. Go figure what that tells you about how they operate! As ever, I have copies to supply to researchers - just e-mail me.

David Anderson



Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.

Red-handed: They lied and lied and lied

Earlier this week, I revealed that Roger Stanyard had had a fall-out with the BCSE, and walked out. What I didn't know at the time, was that the efforts made by the BCSE to effect a reconciliation were on the brink of success - and that Stanyard was almost back. (The walk-out was about a fortnight before).

Now, that's unremarkable enough in itself. The BCSE could have simply said "Yes - so what?" or chosen to ignore the story entirely.

What they did instead, though, has turned this story into a major event. The BCSE leaders Michael Brass and Ian Lowe decided that they were in a strong position to absolutely rubbish my story, and me - and they went ahead and did right that. Brass began personally e-mailing me, and Brass and Lowe together put together some extremely strong words on the BCSE forum. In short, they called me an utter liar who had made up a story with absolutely no basis in reality - and they kindly offered their readers some pyschoanalysis of me to boot to explain how I could do such a thing. According to Lowe, the only reason that Stanyard hasn't been on the BCSE forum lately and why his contact details were removed, was simply because he had Internet connection problems for a bit. A little later, Stanyard himself turned up, to confirm this alleged fact. According to Lowe, I owe them an apology.

http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=10480#10480

The problem for the BCSE though, is that I actually had far more evidence for Stanyard's walk-out than I showed in my original post. What this does is to turn this story from something of a non-event (Stanyard falling out, then making up) into something else entirely: prima facie evidence of an utterly cynical willingness to lie and slander openly and repeatedly - evidence of the sheer nastiness and deceitfulness of the BCSE's mode of operation.

I invite my readers to tour the thread on the BCSE forum on which this all plays out. Here are some things to look at (http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1116):

• Does this look like the response of an organisation which pretends that "BCSE Revealed" hasn't touched it? Or does it look like the response of individuals who are severely rattled?
  
  
• If the BCSE have nothing to worry about from "BCSE Revealed", why are they so angry? If on the other hand, I've shredded their credibility and they know it, then this response from them makes a lot of sense...
  
  
• Notice Brass and Lowe in particular rubbishing my claims particularly severely, and committee member Brian Jordan also describing them as "imaginary" - and Stanyard confirming that they had no truth in them ("It is wildly out, as, indeed, is nearly all what he says").
  
  
• Notice the various accusations against me - proven liar (Brass), wife-abuser (Lowe), impossible to work with (Lowe), dishonest, nasty (Stanyard), computer hacker (Brass), amoral (Jordan), "fragile ego ... control freak" (Lowe), litigous (Stanyard), lazy (Lowe), "spectacularly wrong" (Stanyard) etc. etc. Then compare those accusations with the verifiable evidence that the various people making them offer to back them up...
  
  One thing's clear: the BCSE haven't changed their basic approach to "BCSE Revealed": throw ten tonnes of mud, in the hope that some of it will stick. If they repeat the same things over and over again, then hopefully you'll end up believing some of it, however little evidence they trouble themselves to offer for it. Michael Brass calls me a "proven liar"; but forgets (again!) to tell us where to find the proof for this... the BCSE has tried really really hard over the last months to smear me in some of the nastiest ways possible... but until it actually troubles itself to accompany its allegations with some attempt at proof, there's simply nothing to respond to.
  
  
• Notice that Ian Lowe goes so far as to condemn me in advance for not apologising for my alleged crime. He's right that I won't be apologising... because I'm about to reveal the enormity of the deceit that he's tried to perpetrate.
  

So... have you got the picture here? At least four BCSE committee members have strongly affirmed that my story that they fell out with Roger Stanyard and that he, for a time, walked out, is absolute rubbish, and evidence of my wickedness. If I can prove the contrary - then the BCSE are about to look very bad.

And, I can... and they are.

So, here it is. Here is what really happened, which Ian Lowe strongly affirms is nothing more than Stanyard losing his Internet connection (and Stanyard confirms), and which Michael Brass calls "crapola":

Lowe said, in the forum post referred to above, "And what I will say is that it's blindlingly apparent that he doesn't have all of the information at his disposal... and he's not going to either". Really? Let's see...

Here's Ian Lowe talking to BCSE member Chris Hylands, writing in a website discussion on the 13th of June - a website discussion that he didn't realise was being indexed by Google. Compare the above with what Lowe said below, when he thought I wouldn't be listening, and really hoped I wasn't. The level of concern over "BCSE Revealed" is encouraging to me too: it shows that my revelations have really hurt them. This is worth reading twice to let it sink in. (Emphasis mine).

Chris Hyland: I wonder if Anderson is going to notice that the BCSE main page has been changed and no longer includes Roger as a comitee member.

Ian Lowe: Damn.

I wish he had not done that.

I got an email earlier in the day about Roger removing himself from an old committee mailing list that we have - it looks like about 5 minutes later, Roger edited the Homepage and Contacts page to remove all mention of himself.

I removed Roger's admin rights on the BCSE forum, but didn't change his access to the website - largely out of respect for Louis's desire for reconciliation.

This does however bring up the possibility fo scrutiny, which means that rather than BCSE announcing the merger and being fully positive about it, Roger's departure can easily be seen to pre-date the merger.

DAMN.

This is the same situation as we had with leeds - thinkfully, not legal this time, where Roger went off and edited every mention of "Leeds Uni" to say "Name witheld for legal reasons".

If we are *very* lucky, Anderson will not notice (not much chance, as the little weasel indexes our site every other day) and we can keep control of this.

a general question - if Roger is coming along with a thought of reconciliation, why is he removing all mention of himself today?

I'm concerned by this, and would really welcome some other (probably more rational and level headed) input!!

Ian.

http://www.justscience.org.uk/...rentId=2129. [Get it whilst you can - I'm sure they'll delete it from the web asap. As ever, I have copies available for verification for your research purposes. Update a few hours later: Yup, it's gone].

Did you get that? Lowe, Brass, etc., in public strongly affirmed that nothing happened with Stanyard, and that I made it all up as a wicked liar. This page from Google, though, records that two weeks ago Lowe was talking with his fellow BCSE members about Stanyard's departure, possibilities of reconciliation, and talked about how to "keep control of this". In public, Lowe and Brass pretend that my story was total nonsense and that they don't care what I write; in private, they are petrified about what I might know about what they're really up to.

They lied, and lied, and lied

According to Michael Brass, you shouldn't listen to a proven liar. Michael Brass is a proven liar.

According to Ian Lowe, I owe the BCSE an apology for making up a story about Roger Stanyard, which is evidence of my psychological flaws. Lowe is someone who nobody involved with the BCSE who in any way cares about truth will ever work with again.

According to Stanyard, he was away for those two weeks because he had a problem with his ISP. Stanyard lied through his teeth and has destroyed his own credibility.

According to Brian Jordan, my story was "imaginary" and evidence that I have no moral standards. Jordan, being on the committee, must have known that this was a deliberate deception and attempt to smear me; but he joined in anyway.

The BCSE could have just ignored my story, or said "yes - we fell out; so what?". Instead, they allowed Brass and Lowe to persuade them that I wouldn't be able to prove my allegation, and that it was a good chance to rubbish me. Brass and Lowe persuaded their fellow committee members that for the price of a few whopping lies, they could make some capital. Those fellow members bought into the strategy. That strategy is in tatters now, and so are the reputations of Michael Brass, Ian Lowe, Roger Stanyard, Brian Jordan and various other members of the BCSE.

David Anderson



Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.

Michael Brass, BCSE Chairman: "Published Archaeologist"? (Inflating Your Credentials - Part 6)

Introduction

Previous parts in this series:

Part one: Introduction
Part two: The BCSE's chairman, Mr. Michael Brass
Part three: Mr. Brass/the BCSE's misrepresentation of Mr. Brass's vocation
Part four: Mr. Brass/the BCSE's misleading description of Brass as "published"
Part five: Who "published" Michael Brass? Answer: Michael Brass did!

In our last article, we looked at Michael Brass (the BCSE's chairman)'s, book "The Antiquity of Man". This is the cornerstone of the description of Brass as "a published archaeologist". We revealed that in fact this book is self-published, through PublishAmerica, a notorious vanity publisher.

Since that time, the BCSE has altered its description of Brass... by making the word "published" a hyperlink to Brass's own website. I'm not sure what this is meant to achieve... possibly it's meant to rebut the idea that they're pulling the wool over your eyes by hiding from you just what "published" means.

And now...

As promised last time, the results of my investigation into the question: "How many copies of his book has 'published archaelogist' Michael Brass sold?"

PublishAmerica, as a print-on-demand self-publisher, doesn't have its books available in bookshops - unless the author personally persuades a bookshop to take them. Otherwise, you have to order them specially.

As such, the only places where you can get such books is either to ask for them by title, or to order them sellers which have a policy of trying to make available every book in existence, such as Amazon or equivalent. Brass's own website lists four sources:

1. Amazon.com
2. Amazon.co.uk
3. BarnesAndNoble.com
4. PublishAmerica (i.e., direct from the publisher)
   

(http://antiquityofman.com/book_overview.html)


Amazon and Barnes and Noble publish sales ranks for their titles So let's take a look at the page for Brass's book

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1591293855/ancientegyptandw

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,285,419

OK - so with a sales rank past 1 million it's not a best-seller. But just how many copies sold does that number translate to? How do we turn rank into copies? Well, it turns out that a number of researches have already done the hard work for us...

1. Witness 1 : Rampant Techpress

The gloriously named "Rampant Techpress" have authored an article titled "Inside the Amazon Sales Rank", available at http://www.rampant-books.com/mgt_amazon_sales_rank.htm. They tell us that a major publisher kept tabs on its Amazon ranking for 25 titles over a 6 month period, and came up with this table translating sales rank into weekly sales:

Amazon        Actual
Sale Rank     Books Sold per week
---------     -----------------
75-100         250-275/wk
100-200        225-249/wk
200-300        150-200/wk
450-750         75-100/wk
750-3,000        40-75/wk
3,000-9,000      15-20/wk
10,000+            1-5/wk

Well, that table doesn't go beyond "10,000+" - we need another couple of zeroes on the end! But it does tell us that we're not talking about the "sales every week" category. The article then points us to another source, researcher Morris Rosenthal...

2. Witness 2 : Morris Rosenthal

Rosenthal's article is online at http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm. Rosenthal tells us that a book that has sold a lifetime total of one copy will likely get a rank in the three-millions, and that Amazon probably has four million titles it can obtain in all. He then gives us a graph of sales rank against copies sold per week - going up to ranks of 1 million.

Some of the quotes from Rampant Techpress don't appear in Rosenthal's article, and appear to be based on an older version of that article, from 2001. The Rampant article goes on to say that a sales rank of 1,000,000 translates to about 3 copies every 500 days, whilst 2,000,000 means about 1 copy every 1,000 days. Another tit-bit from Rosenthal is that if your sales rank is in the 1,000,000 region, you only really need to check it twice a year to compute an average position.

3. Witness 3: fluff.info

I was pleased to come across this third witness, because it contains a clear, recent date at the top: August 2006. He gives us this useful tongue-in-cheek table which he compiled:

1-10          Oprah's latest picks
10-100        The NYT's picks
100-1,000     Books by editors of Wired Magazine, topical rants by pundits/journalists, `classics'
1,000-500,000 Everything else (still selling)
500,000-2mil  Everything else (technically in stock)

http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000188.htm

This puts Brass firmly in the "we can get it, but nobody at all is actually buying it" category.

4. Witness 4: Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has a freely available article, at http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117...21.html.
This article is low on data as far as sales ranks below 50,000 go - but supplies this tit-bit: "Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart. Morris Rosenthal, an author and publisher based in Springfield, Mass., who has studied the Amazon charts, says a day without a sale can send a book ranked 10,000 to as low as 50,000."

So, with a sales rank of 1.2 million, it seems fairly certain that Brass's book is in the category of "not selling any copies at all". And in recent days, I came across one blogger whose mention of his own book seemed to confirm this analysis:

The WSJ article also gives us this significant fact:

"One major quirk: Used and new book sales are counted equally. So an author anxious about his sales ranking could put a few dozen of his books for sale for a penny apiece and ask a friend to buy them all."

5. Witness 5: David Field

This blogger has authored a book on a particular English Puritan, John Howe, who lived from 1630 to 1705. To mark his "birthday", Field wrote this short post:

There's far more about him than you'd ever want to know HERE and at Amazon sales ranking 700,787 (!) this is a book which could do with another couple of people looking at it - thereby doubling its readership.

http://davidpfield.blogspot.com/2007/05/happy-birthday-john-howe.html

Note what Field says:

• His own book's sales rank was 700,787
• It could do with another couple of readers
• Another couple of readers would double its readership

I then kept an eye on the Amazon page linked, and saw the sales rank jump to around 50,000 before starting to drop down again - today it is at 271,214. It take this to mean that Field did indeed find another couple of readers!

Summing it up

Taking all the witnesses above together, we come up with the following: the book upon the back of which the BCSE present its chairman as a "published archaelogist" has likely sold 1 or 2 copies through Amazon.com in the past 2 years. We cannot be sure that this means new copies, though; according to the Wall Street Journal, this includes the trading of second hand copies too. So we may be talking about 2 copies; or about 1 copy, bought and then sold second hand... I guess it's probably not really worth investigating that one...

What About The Other Sites?

Amazon.com is the world's biggest book-seller; a sales figure there gives a pretty clear idea of how many copies a book is selling - especially when that book is only otherwise available by special order. But for completeness, I also consulted the sales ranks at amazon.co.uk and the Barnes and Noble website:

Amazon.co.uk : 840,288 (here)
BarnesAndNoble.com : 713,156 (here)

As the Amazon UK and Barnes and Noble sites sell less than the main Amazon.com site, those sales rankings will translate into even worse sales figures.

This now is all three sellers with a public listing for this book: the only other place to obtain it is to order it direct from the publisher (or get a book shop to do it for you).

Conclusion

The only debate over Brass's book's sales appears to be this: More than 1 copy in the last year, or not? As many as 5 copies in the last 2 years, or less than that?

The BCSE chose Brass to represent it as its chairman, because he was the most qualified guy they could find. And in order to describe his credentials, they name him as a "published archaelogist", and bring forward his book "The Antiquity of Man" as his main literary achievement. A little research from "BCSE Revealed" has shown this:

• Brass's profession is that of an IT worker, not a full-time archaeologist
  
  
• Brass, when questioned by me, confirmed that his publications record basically consists of his book, and one article - an article which is a version of his honours' dissertation and is freely downloadable.
  
  
• Brass's book is published by... Brass himself, using a rather notorious vanity publisher who various investigators have established do not even check manuscripts before publishing them.
  
  
• And now... we have revealed that Brass's sales figures are single digit.
  
  

The revelation of these sales figures reveals why, as we discussed in our last article, when accepting a book PublishAmerica strongly encourage its authors to buy 50 or 100 copies for his own friends and family - the authors that PA are getting it seems typically aren't going to sell any to anyone else.

As I toured the net, I found a few mentions of Michael's book by fellow campaigners against the allowing of criticisms of Darwinism - some of them had bought it and read it. In the light of the above research, it seems likely that these are the only people who have bought it and read it.

We are left, then, with the unavoidable conclusion: the book on the back of which Brass promotes himself, and the BCSE promote him, as a "published archaelogist", is a book whose only readers are - these people themselves.

And that's one more set of facts published for future researchers into the BCSE to know exactly what kind of group we're talking about. That's one more set of facts for readers of the BCSE's website to evaluate how honestly the BCSE can be trusted to present material, just how much fact-twisting they have to do in order to make themselves seem credible.

David Anderson


Update: Mr. Brass has been in touch to dispute the facts of this last post in the series; he wishes to inform me that since 2002 he has sold between 140 and 150 copies, currently at a rate of 19-25 a year. Brass's explanation for the discrepancy between these figures and those in the article above appears to be that bulk purchases only have a small effect on the sales rank; this appears to imply that many of those purchases were bulk, but Brass did not actually say so to me. As the major thrust of this series is about Brass's reasons for calling himself a "published archaeologist" and as the main point in this examination of Brass's book is that it is self-published, I won't be pursuing this point as it has very little relevance to the wider picture.

Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.

The BCSE's Chairman - "Published Archaeologist"? (Inflating Your Credentials - Part 4)

Previous parts in this series:

Part one: Introduction
Part two: The BCSE's chairman, Mr. Michael Brass
Part three: Mr. Brass/the BCSE's misrepresentation of Mr. Brass's vocation

As we've progressed in this investigation, we've seen that the BCSE's front page claims that its chairman, Mr. Michael Brass, is a "published archaeologist", whilst failing to mention that in fact he is an IT worker who pursues an interest in archaeology outside of his working hours. Put alongside the description of other BCSE committee members ("IT consultant... entrepreneur... retired.... management consultant"), the impression given is that Brass (who, we are told, lives in Cambridge), is probably a professional academic with a high standing in his field - rather than a young man of about 30 who is about to start working towards his doctorate (his Yahoo profile page, last updated 2 years ago today, states he is 28 and is slightly more honest than the BCSE's website, giving his occupation as "Archaeologist/IT" - http://profiles.yahoo.com/mikearchaeology).

And anyone who's had the briefest of tours of the BCSE website knows that if they got the opportunity to find a non-Darwinist indulging in this kind of double-speak, they'd have a party that went on for weeks.

What Does "Published" Mean?

As I mentioned last time, the misleading description of Mr. Brass's vocation is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the dishonesty in the description of the BCSE's chairman goes.

The basic statement on it is "Michael Brass is a published archaeologist". Interested in this, I began researching Mr. Brass's publications record. We've seen already (in part two) that Brass is not shy when it comes to self-publicity. Here's how Brass signs himself off on the BCSE forum:

"Chairman, British Centre for Science Education.
MA in Archaeology, University College London".

Given this, it shouldn't be too tricky to track down Mr. Brass's publications record. I went to his web-site to have a browse.

And The Results?

My research led me to believe as follows: that once you drop self-published material (whether by Mr. Brass on his own website, or self-published by print-on-demand), you have the following:

• One article in an electronic journal, freely available. "Tracing the Origins of the Ancient Egyptian Cattle Cult", freely available from http://www.antiquityofman.com/brass_EEF2002.pdf. This article appears to be based on Brass's Honours dissertation in 1998, when Brass would have been around 20.
  
  
• ... that's it.
  

(Brass's own book, "The Antiquity of Man", is something we will examine in a later article. Suffice to say for now that it is self-published, and hence not something that would "count" in the world of academic publications.)

I scratched my head. I googled. The BCSE have appointed this guy as their best candidate to be chairman. He is "a published archaeologist". This is the sum of their description of him. What was I missing? I googled some more. One article that is the write-up of his Bachelor's thesis... and that was all I could find.

Well, I thought that if this was all that it was, then this was a staggering deception even for the BCSE. So, I dropped Mr. Brass an e-mail:

Hello Michael,

I'd be interested in your comments on your mini-bio on the BCSE website,
as follows:

'Michael Brass is a published archaeologist, holding archaeology and
history degrees from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an
archaeology Masters degree from University College London. He has a web
site at http://www.antiquityofman.com, lives in Cambridge and is a
Christian who has written a book entitled "The Antiquity of Man:
Artifactual , Fossil and Gene Records Explored".'

I believe that this description is somewhat misleading, if not grossly
deceptive, as concerns your present job and your publications record. I
believe that if Roger Stanyard were to come across such a misleading
description for a non-Darwinist, he would have a field day writing up a
piece for your organisation's wiki...

What's your take on that? Why is the description so misleading?

Regards,
David

Brass's reply was to tell me that the description was he wrote it; that it was "completely and utterly factual". But what about the meat of it? What about those publications? In Brass's own words:

"I ... am published: my book, a paper in a peer-reviewed edited publication and have a forthcoming peer-reviewed journal paper coming out this June."

So there we have it - in Brass's own words, there only exists his (self-published) book, and the paper based on his Honours dissertation which you can obtain for free over the Internet. There is, however, one journal paper forthcoming later this year.

Now, I don't doubt Brass's hard work and deep interest in the study of archaeology. But I do doubt his integrity in using this as the basis to describe himself as a "published archaeologist". I wrote to Brass again as follows (note that the topic of Brass's self-published book is something I intend to examine in a later installment):

Michael, having seen the amount of detailed material on your website, I don't doubt your competency at all. I don't doubt that you hold those degrees either, and respect the amount of study you must have put in to gain them. I don't doubt too that your ability in your field goes beyond your mere degrees and that you have put in much work beyond them.

However anyone comparing the description of the other 6 committee members, which lists their present job, with yours, and the average reader will assume that "archaeologist" is describing your professional vocation. The lack of mention of any other job, compared with the other six, is clearly misleading. If Roger Stanyard caught a non-Darwinist doing this, we know what he'd say... Secondly, you appear to have one book published by a notorious vanity publisher, PublishAmerica. I note the glee which Roger Stanyard exhibits if he can link someone with whatever he can classify as a "diploma mill"... and yet the BCSE eeks to boost its credentials on the back of being self-published by a notorious author mill? Do you see why someone might suggest this is a double-standard? Thirdly, I note that your website appears only to list a single article in an electronic journal - though I confess I may have missed something. You say that you have one paper article forth-coming. Again, if such an absolutely minimal basis were used by a non-Darwinist organisation to describe its staff as "published", we know just what Mr. Stanyard would be saying as he wrote the wiki page for it - don't we?

In reply, Brass told me:

You are welcome to describe my research as minimal; those who count, and whose views I value, disagree.

...

The bio stands.

I noted the twist in Brass's words; I described his publications record as "minimal"; he replied to talk about his research. I wonder why he did that?

You Be The Judge

What would the BCSE be saying if it could find opponents of Darwinist who were indulging in this kind of thing? If the BCSE's leader/researcher/spokesman Roger Stanyard found out that, say, a creationist or ID supporter had set up an organisation called "The United Kingdom Science Forum" and that it was advertising its own chairman as a "published chemist"... and if Stanyard found out that in fact the fellow was a 30-year old with one self-published book and Internet article from his honours' dissertation... what do you think he'd say?

Having read the BCSE's output over the last year, I think I know what they'd say. It wouldn't be complementary. They'd be having a field day.

So... what about if we apply the same standard to the BCSE itself?

Well, what do you make of that? Is this gross hypocrisy? Are the BCSE qualified science educators? Are they pretending to be something they're not? Is their existence one long campaign of deceipt?

You be the judge.

David Anderson



Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.

Is This A Pork Pie I See Before Me?

Readers who've been with us for a month or so may remember our exposure of the "Rough Guide to Fundamentalism" page on the BCSE website. (Recall that the BCSE do not use "fundamentalism" in its proper sense to describe the movement which actually uses this label - it is their label for evangelical Christianity in general).

This page, now hidden behind a password, well and truly exploded the BCSE's claims that it was religiously neutral.

If you want to know what the BCSE's leaders really want to tell people about Bible Christianity (and were telling the public for some time), you should read our three articles:

1. http://bcse.../2007/01/were-not-anti-religion-but.html
2. http://bcse.../2007/01/were-not-anti-religion-but-part-2.html
3. http://bcse.../2007/01/were-not-anti-religion-but-part-3.html
   

This investigation also gave us some more data about the quality of BCSE's research. Instead of doing something reasonable like, say, purchasing and reading some of the books written by evangelical Christianity's most respected authors... they decided to trawl the Internet to quote-mine the absolute worst they could find - and then present that to the public as a fair picture. Way to go!

I'm glad they did this though - because it gives the discerning reader a hint as to how the rest of the BCSE's website is constructed.

Why They Took It Down

Why did the BCSE password-protect the offending web-page? (http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/RoughGuide)

It did so in response to an e-mail from a semi-anonymous member of the public who identified himself only as "Iain", which it received on the 13th of October. He had some comments about the BCSE's website in general. Here is Mr. Roger Stanyard introducing it.

I just got this through my private email. What does everyone think of it! (Grin)

I don't know much about Rushdoony, but I thought the web-site was truly appalling in its tone and disrespect.

I found particularly offensive the page "Rough guide" (to fundies), http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/RoughGuide where they have deliberately selected postings from the complete lunatic fringe of Christianity, some of them attacking atheists with bad spelling and in one case replete with F words. It also came across at the end as pretty arrogant and anti-American, given the following sentence at the end:

"If you ever want to see an advert to the effect that the average American is seriously stupid, this is it. This is a country at the bottom of the OECD pile when it comes to acceptance of evolution. The web site shows why – it's at the top when it comes to a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Most Americans we have met in life we like and respect. So what's gone wrong?"

One might well counter that if you met the average British yob who hangs around outside shopping precincts and if you look at then says "WOT CHOO F---IN' LOOKIN' AT?" that the average Brit was also seriously stupid. By contrast, most of the fundamentalists I've met have been gracious and humble & would never behave like the lunatics quoted on that page.

On other pages, creationists are described as "Creationuts" etc. This is just as bad as Answers In Genesis, who repeatedly use derogatory language like "Goo-to-you evolution".

If you want to oppose the growth of Young Earth Creationism (and I do), then you must take the moral high ground and behave with proper humility and respect. But if you just indulge in name calling, then you're just as bad as the other side.

Iain

http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=402#402

The thread goes on from there. At various points:

• Michael Brass, one of the BCSE committee, brushes aside the entire criticism as a mistake.
  
  
• Another poster (who like Iain disagrees isn't a young earth creationist) says that Iain, having received Mr. Stanyard's reply (which isn't recorded), had forwarded it on to him, that it was "rude and silly" and that Roger needed to "get real".
  
  
• The same poster sought to educate the BCSE on the fact that Rousas Rushdoony is actually dead (six years now!). (For the unitiated, the BCSE's whole premise of operation is that a) Rushdoony was a would-be mass-murderer and b) the bulk of anti-Darwinist activity is traceable back to him. At various times there have been attempts by various individuals in the BCSE forum to point out that a) the BCSE's interpretation of Rushdoony's theology is explicitly rebutted as a mis-construction on the websites which would be the primary sources for anyone making such an investigation and b) Rushdoony was such a fringe figure that the great bulk of evangelicals in the UK will never even have heard of him, let alone been influenced by him. Such attempts have turned out to be quite futile though. That's as we might expect... if this thesis is bunk, then the BCSE's whole raison d'etre falls apart - and that's a whole lot of pride that would have to be swallowed).
  
  
• Iain himself turns up, having been informed that Mr. Stanyard was publishing his private e-mails without permission (he describes himself as "incensed"). Here is a partial extract:
  
  "Then unfortunately I clicked on the "Rough Guide" link which displays examples of the most lunatic fringe of fundamentalist American society, and I sent back my impressions (displayed above) to ASA with a CC: to Roger's email, which Michael had put in his original post. I had genuinely (and I see now naively) believed that the BCSE were interested in feedback, and that negative feedback would be listened to. Instead, I got a silly and rude reply from Roger. Later Michael informed me that my feedback had been posted on this forum."
  
  and later on:
  
  "Suppose I pointed him at your website and he clicked on the "Rough Guide" link. How do you, as a Christian, think that would help our discussion? He's going to say "they're just a bunch of bigoted atheists". After the rude reply I got from Roger, I'm inclined to agree! (So does Michael)."
  
  Iain also makes the assertion, as "BCSE Revealed" has done many times, that the BCSE is guilty of "cherry-picking" its data - not a good practice if you want to present yourselves as scientists.
  
  
• Another BCSE committee member, Timothy Chase, also tries to justify the "Rough Guide" page as reasonable.
  
  
• Roger Stanyard says something that anyone who's read his various writings will know is too true - "I don't know much about Rushdoony".
  
  

Eventually, Mr. Stanyard ended the discussion of the page two days later, by saying:

In response to Iain's letter I have password protected the two pages "Enjoy Yourselves" and "Rough Guide" - that means the public can't read then - nor can group members unless they have the password.

I agree with Iain that they probably no longer help our cause.

http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=521#521

Summary

Notice, then that Iain criticised the BCSE's web-site in general for being "appalling in its tone and disrespect", and the "Rough Guide" page as being "particularly offensive", a "deliberate" misrepresentation, "arrogant and anti-American", utterly untrue to his experience of "fundamentalists" who have generally been "gracious and humble".

Notice, too, that Mr. Stanyard said that "in response to Iain's letter" he had removed public access to this page (and another), because he "[agreed] with Iain that they probably no longer help our cause".


Bringing This Up To Date

Wind forward a few months. In the mean-time, I have exposed the hidden page, showing the world what the BCSE are really about. This has been picked up across various big blogs on the Internet, and a whole load more people now know more about what the BCSE are about.

On February 11th, on his own blog, Mr. Stanyard put up a post justifying the contents of the page. My guess (and that of a correspondent in my mailbox) is that the material that goes on Mr. Stanyard's own blog is the stuff that the BCSE veto as too obviously extreme or indefensible - but you can read it and make up your own mind on that.

In this post, Mr. Stanyard tries to justify his article as being accurate, and if anything, not going far enough. Here's a sample:

When I put together the wiki list for BCSE I stated the following:

"Most of the information for this article has come from the web site Fundies Say the Darndest Things (http://www.fstdt.com). The site has a vast number of quotes from fundamentalists, nearly all of them in North America. It presents a picture of a movement of pig-ignorant inarticulate bigots, racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes, rape apologists, AIDS deniers, government haters, scientific illiterates, gun-lovers, murderous paramilitaries and others predisposed towards extreme violence, half-baked misfits and haters, all obsessed with their own religious and moral superiority."

I stick by my statement that this is what much of the American fundamentalist movement appears to be. ... In fact, though, the position is actually worse than this.

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-679QwMkib6enGIsUE2Z09ARZQczZ

The bit I'm really interested in, though, is further down the same article, where Stanyard seeks to explain why the BCSE pulled the page. Read it carefully:

For what it is worth, BCSE's wiki page of quotes was pulled for two main reasons. The first was that no one in the UK would believe that American fundamentalists are so extreme. Nor would they understand such things as Rapture Ready. Secondly, the quotes are so numerous and frequent that we couldn't find the time to select the best for our wiki.

Notice what Stanyard says. There were two main reasons why the page was pulled. They are as follows:

1. Though its contents were fair and true, they would be hard for UK readers to believe.
   
   
2. There were too many quotes to be able to find the time to select the best ones.

Can you believe your eyes? Mr. Stanyard really must think that the BCSE can say whatever it likes, and expect people to believe it. Even when the evidence proving the opposite is on the Internet for everyone to see. Truly, that takes some gumption...

I remind my readers again that the comments are open. If there is some way in which the above statements can be harmonised, then we're all ears! Seems like a bit of a task though... there's not much correspondence between saying that you have taken down the page "in response" to a critic who says that it's an obvious piece of extreme anti-religious bigotry, and saying that you have taken down the page because it didn't go far enough.

I think that it's pretty clear that the BCSE's leaders have once again been revealed telling pork pies... don't you?

The other point here is that the BCSE's main de facto leader and researcher has now stated on his blog that he completely stands behinds the contents of the page. Will the rest of the BCSE move a finger to contradict him? Can we, after all, take this anti-religion rant as being the BCSE's official position? I expect the silence to be deafening...

Conclusion

The BCSE's credibility is shot. It can only begin to think about recovering it if it dispenses with its entire leadership, issues a full and formal public apology for its many gross misdemeanors, and starts over again with a new website and wiki. (We note that the BCSE did nothing about Iain's larger complaint - the general obvious anti-Christian prejudice of its website). But the BCSE can't do that, because Mr. Roger Stanyard basically is the BCSE. Get rid of him, and the BCSE would not be.

David Anderson



Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.

You're Off-Message!

The BCSE has a page on Dr. David Tyler, a chartered physicist, member of the Institute of Physics and with a further qualification in education, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and centre manager at the "Hollings Faculty for food, clothing & hospitality management". Going from that description alone, Dr. Tyler is clearly a man with multi-disciplinary expertise. Of course, the BCSE "researcher" ignores these obvious multi-disciplinary skills, and merely announces ipse dixit that he is unqualified to discuss any subject outside of physics.... but we'll leave that aside.

What I want to point out is that the final line on the BCSE's page disappeared on the 10^th of February.

Presently, it looks like this:

http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/DavidTyler

(Yes, that last bit you can see is indeed a complaint from Mr. Roger Stanyard, management consultant, complaining that those involved in management education aren't qualified to speak about evolution...Yes, I know, I know... Mr. Kettle, the Pot is on line one - something about being black?)

Before the 10^th of February, it looked like this, with the extra line having been there for about five months:

"Welcome to the unreal fantasy world of protestant evangelical fundamentalism."

Oops! That's a bit off-message, isn't it? Aren't the BCSE meant to be a religiously neutral organisation? Whatever are they doing pronouncing a verdict on evangelicalism? They don't have religious opinions! Seems like Mr. Stanyard forgot his own propaganda when he wrote that bit...

The BCSE's home page. Oh really?
Why's there smoke coming out of your trousers?

The BCSE must think that we're pretty dim. Apparently they imagine that removing single lines like this makes it somehow less obvious that they loathe Bible Christianity and wish whenever possible to belittle it. As if that wasn't made pretty clear on nearly every page! The message isn't exactly subtle...

Or as we might say:

Welcome to the unreal fantasy world of unqualified campaigning Christ-haters masquerading as centres for science education...

David Anderson



Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.

More Deception From The BCSE

In The Beginning...

I started this blog because I felt offended at the deception which a small group of individuals were perpetrating on the public.

They were doing it in the Times...

(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/debate/letters/article657958.ece)

... in the Financial Times ...

(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/33e9de02-60a1-11db-a716-0000779e2340.html)

... and even persuading one (obviously predisposed) MP ...

(http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=31313)

... and in other places too (including BBC Radio Manchester and other newspapers).


It all sounded very authoritative. The nation's scientific experts had spoken! Note what Messrs Stanyard and Lowe wrote. Not "I am deeply concerned" but "The British Centre for Science Education is deeply concerned". What letters editor would refuse to publish an announcement from such an important body?


It Could All Have Been Different...

If they had written in their own names, I would probably never have started this blog. If Roger Stanyard had written to MPs as himself, explaining that he was neither a scientist nor an educator, but a management consultant with no qualifications or experience in science education but simply a grudge against those whom he calls "fundamentalists", then "BCSE Revealed" would probably never have existed.

But this small group of Internet activists, with no science educators and no practising scientists, who had only launched themselves but a few weeks earlier, decided to represent themselves to the public in all these places as experts - and on a national scale, no less! And they used this false claim to gain a platform to deride even professors at top universities - such as the infamous (to readers of this blog!) occasion when Roger Stanyard, with no relevant qualifications in physics since leaving school, accused a Fellow of the Institute of Physics on BBC Radio of being ignorant of the subject... Integrity? Whatever is that?

I, however, knew that the BCSE was really (and still is) mostly the work of a single unqualified individual, with a few encouragers to help out here and there. And I knew that almost all of them were atheist activists with a philosophical commitment to naturalism and to whom silencing criticisms of Darwinism was important on that account. And so I started blogging.

So What's New?

It appears that the BCSE have learnt very little over the last few months. Despite having been publicly exposed, and their infamy extending even to blogs which have several thousand readers a day, they carry on regardless. Here's what Michael Brass, chairman of the BCSE committee, posted to the BCSE's news forum just seven days ago:

On the 26th January 2007, the BCSE received a request by the National Learning Centre to comment on the short reports emanating from "four 24-hour stakeholder conferences to explore how the new A Level courses under development, in biology, chemistry, physics and psychology could meet the needs of the next generation of science students", held at the National Learning Centre at the end of October.

"...A high-level implementation group composed of the Royal Society, Wellcome Trust and other funders and supporters of the conference, will meet on the 21st February to help ensure that the recommendations of the report are considered in the writing of the courses and texts currently being drafted, and in the presentation of the curriculum in the classroom. The group is also keen that future curriculum development can benefit from the process undertaken. I would therefore welcome your comments on the short reports, accessed through the following link:
http://www.slcs.ac.uk/national/alevelconferencereports where hard copies can also be ordered."

(snip - the rest is further down)

(http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6490#6490)

The link given lists the funders and supporters of this discussion over the future of A-Levels as being "the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society ... QCA, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Institute of Physics, Nuffield Curriculum Centre, Salters’ Institute, the Institute of Biology, Biosciences Federation, the British Psychological Society and the ASE".

In other words, those are real scientists and educators. People with qualifications. And experience!

What did the BCSE do when receiving a communique from them? Did they say - "Look - you've made a mistake. We know what our name says - but not one of us has actually ever stood up in a science classroom. None of us is a practising scientist, and none of us have ever been a scientific educator of any kind. We're just a group of IT workers, consultants and businessmen. We can't really respond to your consultation papers, because we're completely unqualified to make statements about the future direction of A-Level science subjects." Did they just quietly ignore it?

The BCSE's Response

No, they didn't. Here's the remainder of Mr. Brass's note:

The BCSE has submitted a comments report as requested and welcomes this opportunity to have a positive input into the development of the above curricula.

http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6490#6490

That's right. The BCSE didn't put the National Learning Centre right. They didn't even quietly bin the request and have a chuckle that the fellow who used the Internet to gather a few names and addresses but didn't read enough of the BCSE website to spot what kind of organisation it was. No - they actually had the brass neck to reply(*). And then they put up a notice in their public forum to tell everyone!

If that's not a brass neck... just what is?

I have no way of knowing what the BCSE put in their response. It would surely make interesting reading!

One thing is now clear. The BCSE's reality blindness is not just a little thing. It's gone nuclear. They now believe their own propaganda, and act in accordance with it. Not only do they want you to believe that they are a voice of authority - they have begun believing it themselves. And they are apparently willing even to deceive a list of bodies that reads like the "Who's Who" of real science education in the UK, in the pursuit of their goals.

The BCSE. You couldn't make it up.

David Anderson


(*) I'm not sure if the pun was intended, or if the word was just floating around in my head...

Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.

We're Not Anti-Religion, But... (Part 3)

In the previous parts of this article (one, two), we began revealing a now-hidden page on the BCSE website which blows apart their present claim to be religiously neutral: the BCSE's own "Rough Guide To Fundamentalism". And then we briefly examined the BCSE's use of the term "fundamentalist".

http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/RoughGuide - now passworded

And Now...

Today we will begin looking at this page in a bit more detail. Just what does it say about the BCSE's leaders. Will they prove their reasonableness? Or not?

In previous investigations, we have commented on where the BCSE source their "research" from. In one particularly egregious example, we saw that the BCSE entirely overlooked all the primary sources which pointed in one direction in favour of a single source of another campaigner of their own ilk which said the opposite. Not a great way to prove your own adherence to the principles of science or rationalism.

"Fundamentalism" seems to be the BCSE's pejorative way of referring to Biblical Christianity. What would be the best sources to go for to investigate what Biblical Christians believe?

Well, I am in a different "theological camp" to the following men on some questions, but I have to recognise that they have been the major spokesman and authors in evangelical Christianity in the last fifty years. I would say that the primary sources for investigating what evangelicals in the United Kingdom believe today would be Dr. John Stott, Dr. Jim Packer and Dr. Martyn-Lloyd Jones. Between them these three have written over a hundred books and Bible commentaries, pastored some of the UK's largest evangelical churches, preached at the most popular conferences, and so on. They've even had published their own summaries of Christianity, including "Evangelical Truth" and "What is an Evangelical?", by Dr. Stott, "What is an Evangelical", by Dr. Lloyd-Jones and "Knowing God", by Dr. Packer. At a more academic level, the writings of Dr. David W. Bebbington are most widely recognised as carrying authority.



So, what kind of sources will the BCSE's author (Roger Stanyard) go to in order to inform his readers of the true nature of evangelical Christianity?

But First...

But before we get into that, I want to introduce a certain website.

Some of you may remember that many moons ago in Internet time (about three weeks), I published a parable concerning the arguments employed by Professor Richard Dawkins in his own anti-religious campaigning. (Incidentally, that parable now appears around 30th if you Google for "Dawkins" - if you'd like to see it rise even higher, please blog it or link it from whatever websites you have!).

This parable has been viewed around 1,200 times so far - and had all kinds of response over the Internet. There was one response, though, that made me laugh out loud.

That response came from a website called "Fundies Say The Darndest Things" (FSTDT). This was not a website I had visited before. The idea of this site seems to be that people submit silly quotations from "fundies", and then everybody else gets to post their own comments on them. I assume that the users of this kind of web-site have more spare time than I do!


Well, somebody picked up the first paragraph from my parable - and posted it to "FSTDT". And then the responses came in.

What kind of response did the parable get? This: The readers of "FSTDT" took it completely literally. What kind of idiot could really believe that Richard Dawkins doesn't exist, they wondered? Look, it's really easy to prove! And so some of the commenters started providing counter-arguments to refute me. Here are a few samples:

"A birth certificate and a number in the census is enough."

"Go to his website and see him in action."

"go see richard dawkins speak, or watch him on tv"

"What an idiotic comparison. For one, Richard Dawkins does not claim to be an invisible being in whom you have to have faith. There are ACTUAL pictures of him. There are recently published books written by him. There is no way of verifying that an ancient tome was written by someone nobody has ever seen or spoken to. Crazy people and people in myths don't count."

Most of the comments, though, are from people who are obviously seriously angry about any mention of God or religion - and presumably hang out at "FSTDT" in order to vent that anger at those darned "fundies". Most responses are simply rants. I don't recommend you visit the page, as it's full of foul or crude language - but if you want to verify my quotes, here it is: http://www.fstdt.com/comments.asp?id=19327

It wasn't until the twenty-second comment that somebody pointed out that FSTDT's readers weren't quite grasping how to interpret my piece:

He obviously isn't serious. His write up is a parable warning of hyper-sceptism.

My other two favourite responses were these.

"If there is a Dawkins, why hasn't he shown himself to me?"

Because you failed the entrance requirements for the university where he lectures.

I did? Bother. I hate entrance exams! Still, they let me in anyway and I enjoyed my time there enormously. (I never met Professor Dawkins though).

And finally this one:

The fact that the book exists should be proof that Richard Dawkins exists as someone had to write it.

Brilliant! This one made me laugh out loud. Now, please complete the following sentence:

The fact that the universe exists should be proof that ... ?

My overall impression of "FSTDT", based upon the inability to understand the concepts of metaphor, parody or parable, and the level of abuse, was that it is basically populated by angry adolescents. Teenagers who had trouble parsing non-literal language, and with a lot of dislike of Christianity that they want to express.

Which Brings Me To...

But what's the point, David, you say? Here it is. Guess what Roger Stanyard writes at the bottom of page of "research"? Guess what his major source for showing us just what evangelical Christianity is, was? Oh yes...

Most of the information for this article has come from the web site Fundies Say the Darndest Things (http://www.fstdt.com). The site has a vast number of quotes from fundamentalists, nearly all of them in North America. It presents a picture of a movement of pig-ignorant inarticulate bigots, racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes, rape apologists, AIDS deniers, government haters, scientific illiterates, gun-lovers, murderous paramilitaries and others predisposed towards extreme violence, half-baked misfits and haters, all obsessed with their own religious and moral superiority.

Much of it reads like something out of Germany in the 1930s. A lot of the stuff in it I couldn’t reproduce on my own blog because it is so extreme and offensive. With this evidence it is impossible for me to conclude otherwise than that the protestant evangelical fundamentalist movement is not a benign movement at all. Much of it is dangerous, obnoxious and vile.

Yes, my good readers. Mr. Stanyard's main source for his quality research is... a collection of angry adolescents.

My own personal library has over a thousand books by evangelical authors. And not one of them bears the slightest resemblance to anything that Mr. Stanyard writes above. But I suppose that you knew that.

And I suppose that Mr. Stanyard knew that too... which is why he doesn't go anywhere near them, lest they spoil the yarn he's trying to spin.

Frankly, I take the fact that Mr. Stanyard has to stoop to this level as a pretty good sign. After all, if that's how far you have to go to make evangelicalism look bad, then ... ?

Bringing This To A Conclusion

This isn't credible research, is it?

Rather, it is the same picture we've seen many times before - the BCSE cherry-picking the most unlikely sources, then distorting them, and then presenting them to the public as solid facts.

This isn't the way to make yourself seem credible. Isn't it rather the way to make yourself seem ignorant, prejudiced and bigotted?

In my opinion, this kind of thing is why present Darwinists of the campaigning atheist variety are on the road to losing the origins debate in the public mind. In the short term, you can create a lot of smoke and gather a raging mob of supporters by shouting about how some alternative theories are all promoted by "movement[s] of pig-ignorant inarticulate bigots, racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes, rape apologists (etc., etc., etc.)". But in the long term, this kind of extreme ad hominem just makes you look silly. Certainly those who call others "pig-ignorant" or "bigots" need to check just what kind of glass their own houses are constructed from. As supporters of intelligent design and other theories pile up more and more compelling arguments, shrill ad hominem becomes a less and less credible response.

But in my opinion, because of the BCSE's leaders' lack of actual science/educational experience, it was inevitable that this would be what was on offer.

David Anderson


Non-anonymous factual corrections welcomed by e-mail. Comments are moderated - please read my comments policy.