And God Created Man In His Own Image!
Riiiiight. I think I see where this is going already. Notice the monkey in the background, and the professor's resemblance thereto. What the hell..? Aren't you trying to prove that we aren't related to monkeys? On a side note, do you know any college professors who keep pictures of monkeys up with the caption of "Our father"?
Oh, now I get it. He's doubly evil because he's worshipping a false god. Ha-ha, Jack Chick. Your attempts at multi-level meaning are not lost on this heathen soul.
Ah... so it progresses. The "ignorant" masses speaking out against the one individual with the guts to stand up. Where have we seen this before?
Note the combover flying madly about. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one pissed off ignoramus.
I'm noticing a serious similarity here... ever read "Goofus and Gallant", back in "Highlights"? One was the shining example of human kindness, the other liked to kick walkers out from under the elderly. Together, they taught children valuable lessons. You'll note the subtle allegory here; the professor is of darker complexion, leading us to believe the presence of Evil in him. Meanwhile, our unnamed protagonist has light hair and blue eyes. Except in the second panel, where Jack's complete lack of knowledge of light and shadow makes him look like a crack addict with sunken eyes.
Speaking of blue eyes and blond hair... did y'all know Hitler thought he was doing God's work? True story. I think Mr. Chick here might just be onto something...
All right... now we'll make fun of the practice of keeping the Bible out of schools. Because, hell, we all know that the solution to all of our social ills would be to reintroduce religion into schools. Not just religion, but Religion: God's work. None of this crazy Judaism/Hinduism/Islam; those are pseudo-religions, and their followers are damned to an eternity of fire and brimstone.
But I digress. To return to the point, it's blatantly obvious to even the most ignorantly atheistic heathens out there that religion would fix every ill of society. Just like temperance fixed every ill of society 80 years ago, right, Jack?
No, not all schools teach it. Kansas upheld last year that it's illegal to teach evolution in schools. Well done, guys. Wouldn't want our kids learning science now, would we? Not with God's work to be done.
I can't make out the minutae of all six points, but what I can see has me a little concerned. Look at point number 4, "Organic evolution - life from rocks." Now, I don't know about you, but the life I learned about didn't come from rocks; it came from methane and ammonia creating amino acids from long carbon strands. These conditions were replicated in a laboratory a hundred years ago; hell, you can go out and build your own, if you feel so inclined.
And where do you get "faith" out of "chemical evolution" (whatever that is)? "Higher elements evolve"? Not in the chemistry taught for the last 300 years... elements naturally decay into more stable states. Unless you mean fusion, the process from which nearly all known energy derives... neither point have the slightest thing to do with evolutionary theory, of course, but your points are still completely off.
Is that monkey doing the Charleston? My god, man, where are you coming up with these pictures?
I did my research on this one, children. Richard Leakey is a renowned anthropologist, best known for a 1977 find of an entire skeleton some 1.8 million years old. He mislabelled it at the time, and rushed to publish his findings, claiming the remains to be 2.9 million years old--still within the accepted epoch in which these Australopithecus africanus lived. Lord only knows where Jack's getting his facts, but they ain't from science.
Amazing findings, are they? And not made public? Why, could this be because they have no credence whatsoever outside the realm of right-wing religious fanatics?
I can't help but notice that Jack has yet to name a single scientist making all these claims, outside of Leakey. His "nearly all experts" are evidently a silent majority, because this is the first I've heard of it, and I had an earth science teacher who was in love with this stuff.
Also, you don't build skeletons from a tooth or a jawbone, you build them from skeletons. No self-respecting scientist would ever try to prove something based on one tooth; we're not all as gullible as Catholics, Jack.
The only point here that isn't completely heresay is the first one. I'll give Jack credit, he's done his homework. It's true; there was a misdiagnosis made 95 years ago. One Marcellin Boule found the remains of a skeleton in southern France, and named it a new subspecies of man. Unfortunately, Boule was a bit slow-witted, and ignored the arthritis of this particular specimen. Fortunately, the skeleton from La Chapelle was re-examined by William Strauss and A.J.E. Cave during the 1950s. These two anatomists properly diagnosed the skeleton's arthritis and showed how the deformations that resulted from the diseases had skewed Boule's interpretation of the skeleton. As a result of this, the Neandertals were welcomed with open arms into the human lineage as a subspecies of of humans. However, as time passed, a growing consensus emerged that the Neanderthals were a separate, highly successful species of humans that went extinct. There was simply not enough time for Neandertals to have evolved into modern humans in Europe, thus there is no way that they could be our immediate ancestors.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Circular reasoning? Did you chew on windowsills when you were a kid, or what? You use radioactive dating to determine the age of the rocks or the fossils, then use those a guidelines. Ergo, a fossil found one place that is dated to be 15 million years old will be 15 million years old 100 miles away, too, giving us an accurate reading of rock layers. Failing that, sediment deposits at a reasonably constant rate, so even if you only know the age of one fossil 20 feet up, you just measure the distance down and multiply by that constant.
Why... could it be that rock hasn't always been rock? Y'know, that sediment (i.e., sedimentary rock) forms from layers of fine particles settling over thousands of years? It doesn't harden into rock until subjected to heat and pressure (usually from rock forming thousands of feets over it), so a tree falling into it would do what most trees do: sink in the mud. When it gets covered over, the rock forms as normal. QED, Jack.
As for the second point... Google doesn't have much to offer on the subject, apart from other fundamentalist propoganda sites. So, sure, we'll let you have this one, Jack. Someone made up some info 130 years ago to prove a point. Good thing no one from the Church ever did that! It's not like the Pope ever sanctioned some mass genocide against humanity, then tried to pass it off a hundred years later as an innocent understanding! And it's certainly not like the entire institution of Christianity spent two millenia trying to rid the world of the "evil Jews"!
At least our lies don't kill people, Jack.
From MotherNature.com's take on the subject:
'Evolution is a messy artist. Left behind from her paint box are an appendix, wisdom teeth--and sometimes tiny tails. Rarely, but occasionally, a baby greets this brave new world with a tail peeping up from her tailbone.
"It's a pretty rudimentary tail--a funny little appendage of skin and fat and occasionally, some bone. It's just a disorganized hunk of tissue on the bottom of the butt," says John D. Loeser, M.D., professor of neurologic surgery and director of the pain center at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.
Dr. Loeser snips off about one tail a year--"a trivial operation." That's probably the only case in the state of Washington, he says. "They really are quite rare."
Even if you weren't born with a tail, you were born with a vestigial tailbone.'
So. Wisdom teeth and appendixes. I guess those have proven function, too, right? The appendix being God's way of talking to his prophets? (When we all know that the pineal gland is reponsible for all communication with a higher power) And I guess that occasional freak baby with a tail is just a fluke. Right, Jack?
I... I'm sorry, did you just say what I think you just said? Perhaps someone wasn't paying attention during biology class. Evolution is the process of changing a species' appearance and/or function to better suit the environment. This transpires through natural selection: a random mutation (actually created in Drosophilia experiments in the late 19th century) in a single creature causes that individual to be better able to outrun enemies/reach more food/outlive its buddies. This, in turn, makes that individual more likely to pass on his or her genes to subsequent generations, continuing the trend. This can either cause the species to gradually gain an appendage, lose a tail, or move from four legs to two. Micro-evolutions have actually been observed in the last century, and the theory is further backed by DNA evidence. Unless you're discounting DNA..? I guess that whole "genome project" is just another governmental conspiracy, like the moon landing and aspartame.
And this, boys and girls, is why I wrote this here article.
I lack the physics background to give you a play-by-play of what exactly gluons are and do. I'd suggest you let our good friends over at Discover explain it a bit more completely than I can. TO make a long story short... every proton is comprised of three different quarks, which come in 8 "flavors", whose behavior is characterized by an arbitrary title. However, these three quarks comprise less than .01% of the mass and volume of the proton. Where's your missing link? A system designed to hold the whole mess together--glue, for lack of a better word. Gluons are completely intangible; they're effectively energy, and can only be measured by speeding half a billion iron atoms up to .999C (99.9% the speed of light), and smashing them into an aluminum plate a millionth of a centimeter wide. The ensuing explosion creates a mess of plasma and gluons which exists stably for roughly 2 * 10-22 seconds--long enough to be measured, but not long enough for detailed analysis. The really fun part about gluons is the energy system holding them together-- a force which varies inversely with distance, not directly. Picture a refrigerator magnet which is useless when next to the refrigerator; instead, it goes for the stove top across the room, accelerating like mad until it hits the speed of light. However, halfway there, its forces attract it toward the refrigerator again, and inertia makes it move almost immeasurably fast in a tiny spherical area representing 1 * 10-38 cm3. The proton is literally stuck together for all eternity; the further a gluon moves from its counterparts, the stronger its pull to return toward equilibrium. A nice bunch of grad students proved this back in 1974, and the 19-mile long particle accelerator being planned now should solidify our understanding thereof by creating conditions reticent of the Big Bang. This critter takes as much power to use as the city of Pasadena, but isn't it worth it to see Jack Chick eat crow?
And, assuming for a moment that this wasn't the case... isn't it delightfully convenient for Mr. Chick that gluons don't exist because no one has ever seen or measured them? Good thing that same statement couldn't be made on a broader level, about something a little nearer and dearer to Jack's heart. Now, this God character of yours... where is he? I don't mean that in my normal, biting manner... really, where is he? The Old Testament is full of this guy raining hell down on nonbelievers, and generally making an ass of himself whenever the need arose. Where is he now? Besides a dirty windowpane in South America, where's this infinite power of his? I hereby offer a challenge to whomever might be listening: find me ONE PIECE of COMPLETELY INCONTROVERTIBLE scientific evidence to prove the existence of this so-called Trinity, and I'll become the new spokesman for whatever faith you represent. You have my word. When I say incontrovertible, I don't mean photographs; any idiot can doctor a photograph to show Jesus milking a cow or Jenna Bush sitting spread-eagle in Hustler. I mean the accepted scientific standard: reproducable. Find me an experiment I can do from this chair that'll summon Jeebus, and I'll never say another bad thing about him. Lord knows I've tried whatever I can; I make requests to be struck by lightning bolts once or twice a month, and to date, the worst I've had hit me was a 9 volt Christmas light bulb current (ooh, the irony). I'll gladly make any other concessions you want, too.
Oh, but I digress. Back to the story... it's just getting interesting.
Riiiight.... so, you're accepting this particular scientific axiom, and no other ones because..? Oh, wait, I know... this one has been proven by so many separate sources that if you were to question it, you might come across looking like a naive, ignorant fool. Woo, dodged a bullet there, didn't you, Jack? I suppose there's just no proof whatsoever of internuclear force? Like, maybe the light above your head coming from a nuclear power plant? Or those atomic bombs that can level a city from less than a kilogram of plutonium?
Wait... so it's actually Christ holding all those purdy little molecules together? Sweet! Though... I don't know, I think I'd get tired, holding half a vigintillion hydrogen atoms together to make an individual star. And boy, a whole universe? Personally, if I were Jesus, I'd just say "screw it", and let those punkass quarks handle their own damned structural integrity.
"Then man killed the Creator, if Jesus is God in the flesh" Am I the only one who thinks you could sing that to the tune of "Video killed the radio star"? Also... the system has been feeding them THE BIG LIE? Not just a big lie, but the big lie? Impressive. I always thought the big lie was the one all those godless non-Catholic folks were preaching to the choir.
On another note... back to that capitalization thing. I notice that "Creator" is capitalized here, indicating that the rules state that any noun or pronoun being used to refer to God, Jeebus, or any other major deity automatically gets a capital letter. But what about adjectives? Would it be the Great Creator, or just the great Creator? Savior gets the go-ahead with the capital S, but the scripture in the left panel refers to God as little-h he. I don't get it. Heaven is left lowercase, while Hell gets preferential uppercase treatment. Seems like you have some ambiguity in your grammatical standards, Jack. Better shape up for your next release.
Apparently it just... ends here. There's the obligatory "Accept Christ as your Savior!" panel, but that's over at the other comic we examined, and I don't particularly feel like wasting the bandwidth when y'all have just downloaded 3 megs of Chick tract .jpg's. So, I, too, will end here, with the metaphorical middle finger cordially extended to Jack Chick.
--Erik, who actually had the time to Google search the finer points of this, 7/10/01