Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
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There<strong>for</strong>e it becomes painfully necessary to organize a <strong>National</strong> Anti-Evolution Society as a defensive<br />
organization to combat the erroneous doctrines and theories which are being taught, and which false<br />
doctrines are being driven into unsettled minds, through a campaign of misleading assertions and<br />
vituperative insinuations and epithets never be<strong>for</strong>e equalled in the history of the country. [Quoted in<br />
Shipley 1927:380]<br />
Gerald Winrod, author of <strong>Science</strong>, Christ and the Bible (1929), founded the<br />
Defenders of the Christian Faith in order to combat modernism and evolution, and was<br />
editor of Defender magazine, which published articles by W.B. Riley and other antievolutionists.<br />
Besides being fiercely opposed to evolution, Winrod was an outspoken<br />
anti-communist and anti-Semite, and was decidedly pro-Nazi.<br />
Shipley quotes Billy Sunday, the <strong>for</strong>mer baseball player who became a star<br />
evangelist, as saying (in Los Angeles) that “if a minister believes and teaches evolution,<br />
he is a stinking skunk and a liar” (1927:251; see also quote in Bull. Tychonian Soc. 1988:<br />
(48):43 by Sunday describing evolution as “poppycock”). Aimee Semple McPherson,<br />
the sensational, flamboyant (and alluring) Pentecostalist preacher of Angelus Temple in<br />
Los Angeles, conducted ritual hangings of “monkey teachers.” In 1926 McPherson<br />
disappeared from a local beach, re-emerging later with a wild tale of having been<br />
abducted by agents of her deadly enemies: dope dealers, gamblers, and evolutionists. She<br />
hinted that her abductors “might be found among the evolutionists connected with…<br />
Stan<strong>for</strong>d and the University of Cali<strong>for</strong>nia” (Shipley 1927:252; de Camp 1969:21). It<br />
soon became apparent that she had actually enjoyed a clandestine and amorous liason<br />
with her radio technician. 8<br />
Alexander Hardie wrote Evolution: Is It Philosophical, Scientific or Scriptural?,<br />
published by Times-Mirror Press of Los Angeles, to “save our dear school children and<br />
students from the mental and moral defilements of the “Mud Philosophy” (1924:v-vi).<br />
Evolution, said Hardie, which deifies mud and monkeys, is “proof of the mental and<br />
moral insanity of man,” and of “the unregenerate wish to avoid the Divine Presence...”<br />
(1924:232).<br />
Thus, it is seen that this disgraceful craze <strong>for</strong> an animal ancestry is built upon nothing but suppositions.<br />
Consequently, it requires very little learning or courage to defy the animalizing evolutionists—these<br />
agnostics, infidels and atheists; these benighted materialists—to give philosophical data <strong>for</strong> evolution... It<br />
is amazing that this intellectual inanity has had such a rage in our country and has so sorely afflicted our<br />
schools. All unbelievers are making frantic ef<strong>for</strong>ts to propagate this man-dishonoring and God-denying,<br />
Satanic explanation of the Cosmos, to the mental and moral debasement of the rising generation.<br />
Slanderers of our divine humanity! [1924:41]<br />
When we consider that evolution has always had its origin among agnostics and the more benighted<br />
heathen; that it is utterly without any philosophical foundation; that it is absolutely unscientific, and<br />
infernally unscriptural; and that its influence not only upon the rising generation, but also upon its<br />
propagators, is degrading and demoralizing, it becomes the imperative duty of all good citizens to renounce<br />
and denounce this crying abomination, and as Christ drove clean animals out of the temple, how much<br />
more should Satan’s unclean hairy beasts be driven out of our Christian Churches and schools!<br />
8 I jog along the stretch of beach from which McPherson claims to have been kidnapped. Bhaktivedanta<br />
Swami Prabhupada, head of the International Society <strong>for</strong> Krishna Consciousness (the “Hare Krishnas”)<br />
used to go <strong>for</strong> long walks along this same stretch of beach in the 1970s. On these walks he dictated many<br />
of his anti-evolution teachings to disciples, such as contained in Life Comes from Life (1979) and Origins—<br />
Higher Dimensions in <strong>Science</strong> (Bhaktivedanta Institute, 1984).