Name callers are just stupid

I didn’t take in the presentation by American associate professor Paul “PZ” Myers, and I’m glad.

In reference to creationists, he said, among other things, “They’re ignorant and stupid and don’t know anything about history.”

He was in town to speak on the issue of evolutionism vs. creationism, a topic that raises hackles and emotions but not necessarily intelligent debate.

What it does raise is a lot of name calling, which is common to those who are insecure in their own beliefs and bereft of any powers of rational persuasion.

Ironically, Myers urged people to stand up for their beliefs, but, apparently, that doesn’t include those with beliefs different from his own.

He was brought in by the Kamloops Centre for Rational Thought, the brainchild of Bill Ligertwood, who also likes to use the “stupid” word from time to time when an idea doesn’t match his views.

Myers is obviously amused by his own cleverness. The day before his visit to the Tournament Capital, he wrote on his blog: “I’ll be descending from the skies like a wrathful angel, striding across the landscape with my eyes afire, crushing the pious with my righteous fury, while occasionally being mistaken for a cuddly waddling teddy bear, which will piss me off even more.”

Noting the controversy over the atheist bus signs here and in Kelowna, he continued: “Now I’m really angry, and I’m determined to wreak my vengeance on Kamloops when I arrive, just to teach them a lesson. I think I’ll do something ferocious, like stand in an auditorium and talk. That’ll learn the cowardly bastids.”

Such wit, or what passes for wit, runs throughout Myers’ blog as he ridicules his targets as “quacks” or “hate-mongering, ignorant bigots.”

To be fair, he is mildly humorous in small doses, and not totally devoid of worthwhile commentary, at least not always. In one post, he contends that “… church attendance has nothing to do with morality or ethical behaviour or goodness of any kind.”

Fair enough. But in the next sentence, he is compelled to revert to his old name-calling self: “So why do so many people consider a weekly session with a deranged delusional ranter in a pulpit to be a seal of approval?”

His disrespect for the beliefs of others probably reached its height when he asked people to send him a consecrated communion wafer so that he could “treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse.”

A lesser man than I might call such comments inconsiderate, bigoted, narrow-minded, arrogant, idiotic and stupid, but I shall not. I will, instead, suggest that Associate Prof. Myers re-examine, in a positive way, his sense of common decency, and perhaps seek out an accredited counselor with experience in sensitivity training and anger management.

No doubt, I would qualify, in his view, as ignorant and stupid because I wrote a few months ago the agnostic view that I don’t consider myself smart enough to figure out who, if anyone, runs the universe, and that atheists “possess a faith of their own, a belief in their own superior intelligence and knowledge that there is no God.”

I don’t believe in the theory of intelligent design, either, but just as believing in an all-powerful God doesn’t guarantee you’re a good person, neither does it mean you’re stupid or deserving of the kind of contempt in which Myers wallows.