Kirk Cameron has gone too far! But we can stop him.

It's imperative that we all gather up as many of these books and destroy those first 50 pages! We cannot allow this information to get out to the public! It could be dangerous - very, very dangerous.

Get your bayonets, your muskets, your scythes, your machetes ready, people! Start the bonfires! Hide your women and children! Let's march on the local campuses and show them that no one, but NO ONE is allowed to think for themselves! My way or the highway, right? Am I right? I'm right!

When I think of people getting in their hands the information that knocks Darwin off his shaky pedestal and shows the fallacy of evolution, it just makes my blood boil. (And, I admit, it frightens me a bit as well. I shudder to think of the implications.) It's time we suppress freedom of the press NOW!

So let's show the world our best face, our most mature behavior, our usual scared, hateful attitude towards those who think for themselves and SHOVE OUR BRAINWASHING DOWN THEIR THROATS! Join me now in showing the world what Atheists are made of! Destroy those books! We can't let people know the truth! We don't want to know it, so they can't.

I'm ready to march today!

Let's suppose for a moment that these guys were passing out copies of the Origin of Species with an introduction by a theologian who proposed that evolution was compatible with religion and that it represented a perfectly logical and scientifically valid process that matched the metaphors used in scripture.

Let us further suppose that a group of creationists then decided to gather up as many copies as they could and remove pages of the OOS and introduction that they felt necessary to keep young minds form being brainwashed by materialistic misinformation.

Would you not decry this behavior as being typical of those closed-minded fundamentalists? Trying to stop the dissemination of any viewpoint that does not match their own?

My son is in college and if I have raised him right and taught him to use that amazing mind of his to analyze the information, it should become quickly apparent what is reasonable and what is not. What Cameron is doing mostly is preaching to the choir. If young minds are swayed by his polemic then we have problems far deeper than what you apparently see as an abuse of first amendment rights.

Even if you consider Cameron a whack-job, he still has a right to his opinion and a right to make himself look silly in the eyes of a campus full of (it is to be hoped) intelligent students.

Destroying his work is no more an answer now than it has ever been and it wears no better on a group of alleged intellectuals than it did on the Catholic Church. As my husband is wont to tell our kids, "Be smarter than the Banana Guy and don't play into his game."

Quark said: "It's imperative that we all gather up as many of these books and destroy those first 50 pages! We cannot allow this information to get out to the public! It could be dangerous - very, very dangerous."

Calling it "information" is only valid when using the most general, Shannon definition of the term. "Pure garbage" would be a more fitting term.

Quark said: "Get your bayonets, your muskets, your scythes, your machetes ready, people! Start the bonfires!"

NLN made no suggestion of violence, so you are now misrepresenting him.

Quark said: "Hide your women and children! Let's march on the local campuses and show them that no one, but NO ONE is allowed to think for themselves! My way or the highway, right? Am I right? I'm right!"

There was no suggestion made that people are not allowed to think for themselves. There was no suggestion made that anyone should violate laws entitling people to free speech.

Quark said: "When I think of people getting in their hands the information that knocks Darwin off his shaky pedestal and shows the fallacy of evolution, it just makes my blood boil."

You are now projecting your ignorance about evolution onto other people in a rather absurd way. Also, nobody puts Darwin on a pedestal. The idea of stupidly elevating people to positions of authority tends to be one that religious people have. The man's ideas are assessed independently of the man, which creationists never seem to understand when they claim that Darwin “recanted” on his deathbed, etc.

Quark said: "(And, I admit, it frightens me a bit as well. I shudder to think of the implications.) It's time we suppress freedom of the press NOW!"

No suggestion was made by NLN that the freedom of the press should be suppressed, making this yet another addition to the toxic list of fallacies and misrepresentations in your quote. How far is this going to go? Will you be accusing NLN of eating babies and gassing people in the name of Darwin?

Quark said: "So let's show the world our best face, our most mature behavior, our usual scared, hateful attitude towards those who think for themselves and SHOVE OUR BRAINWASHING DOWN THEIR THROATS!"

How much maturity have you been exhibiting here with your deliberate misrepresentation of other people? You are now accusing people of hate, purely for objecting to someone else's views and advocating use of legally accessible ways of arguing against it. You seem very emotional too. Any discussion with you about evolution is almost certainly pointless. You have managed to show in a few paragraphs that you aren't worth listening to - which will no doubt cause me to be called a Nazi or something, or cause me to get some spurious accusation that I want to suppress free speech, that, somehow, making a value judgement on the idiocy of your views is an attack on free speech itself.

Methinks the Nut lacks a sense of humor.

Agitator extraordinaire

So you didn't mean what was said in the post? It sounded to me like a sarcastic rant from a creationist, and it was pretty much what a creationist would say if he/she were having a sarcastic rant. In fact, creationists often seem to say things like this.

If it wasn't your intention to be understood that way, how were we supposed to know the difference, exactly?

"Agitator extraordinaire" - I think that means "troll who is here to disrupt," so we won't be conversing further. :)

I read the 50 page lead in. It looks right on to me.