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Feb. 10, 2009
The nation's largest association of atheists and agnostics thinks evolution gets a "bad rap" in the United States, so is marking the Feb. 12 bicentennial of the birth of science giant Charles Darwin with handsome billboards saying "Praise Darwin: Evolve Beyond Belief," bearing Darwin's iconic image.
The Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, with 13,000 members nationwide, is a watchdog for the separation between church and state. The billboards, employing a stained-glass window background, playfully tweak religion.
The Foundation so far has placed five billboards bearing the "Praise Darwin" message. Sites include the towns where the 20th and 21st century's most historic classroom battles over evolution were fought: Dayton, Tenn., and Dover, Penn.
Dayton played host to the infamous 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial." The Foundation notably brought a lawsuit dubbed "Scopes II," challenging more than 60 years of classroom religious indoctrination in Rhea County schools taught by bible students from William Jennings Bryan College. A federal court ruled in favor of the Foundation's local plaintiffs, a decision upheld in 2004 by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The 12 x 25-foot Tennessee billboard is on U.S. Highway 27 at the Hamilton-Rhea County line between Dayton and Chattanooga. Two billboard owners with billboards within Dayton city limits refused to lease the Foundation billboards, so area members helped scout out the alternate location.
A "Praise Darwin" billboard was placed this month on Rt. 74, 1.4 miles north of the Pennsylvania hamlet where an attempt to promote "intelligent design" by the local school board turned into a national creationist campaign that was quashed by a federal judge in a historic 2005 decision. The Dover billboard was put up with the help of area members and donations from PA Unbelievers.
The 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species takes place in November, "making 2009 from beginning to end truly the Year of Darwin," says Foundation co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor.
"And," adds Foundation co-president Dan Barker, "the anniversaries make 2009 a blockbuster year for promoting science." Barker left his fundamentalist ministry more than 20 year ago and is author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists.
"It's an intellectual blot on our country that more than 50% of Americans reject evolution," said Gaylor. "The Darwin bicentennial is a chance to celebrate reality, to move our nation forward, to 'evolve beyond belief' and return to the Enlightenment."
The fundamentalist/religious war against science is retarding progress in this nation. Gaylor pointed to Bush's two vetoes on embryonic stem-cell research expansion, despite overwhelming support by the public, thus kowtowing to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Pres. Obama has yet to rescind the embargo.
The "Praise Darwin" message is also up in Madison, Wis., on Regent Street, near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The Foundation, its local members and members of the Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers placed a "Praise Darwin" billboard in Grand Junction, Colo., this week, where a proposal to honor Darwin by the city council had been rejected.
The Foundation today also placed a billboard in Whitehall, Ohio, where the mayor called America a "Christian nation," has refused to remove a nativity display from the city hall entrance in December, and opposed a "Darwin Day" resolution.
The Foundation launched a national billboard campaign in late 2007, which has visited more than 15 states so far. Other billboard messages include: "Imagine No Religion," "Beware of Dogma" and "Keep Religion OUT of Politics."
"We'd like to take our pro-Darwin message around the country, wherever the Darwin vs. Dogma debate still rages," said Gaylor.
For more info on the billboards that have gone up:
'Imagine no Religion' 'Praise Darwin' billboards countered by religious man
'Imagine No Religion' message billboard goes up in Sacramento
Whitehall Ohio won't 'Praise Darwin' so FFRF billboard will
Local officials won't 'Praise Darwin' so FFRF billboard does
'Praise Darwin Evolve Beyond Belief' billboards go up
FFRF to put up billboards honoring Darwin not Dogma
Comments
"playfully tweak religion." Is that a true statement? Nothing that you wrote indicates it was intended playfully. Nothing in it is playful. Creative, yes. Is it playful attacking people who believe by inferring that they are not as evolved as others. Not playful. You want truth, than be truthful.
I'd like to see some billboards devoted to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Touched_by_His_Noodly_Appendage.jpg
If atheism spread, it would become a religion as intolerable as the ancient ones. --Gustave le Bon
Thursday, February 12, marks the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of two of the greatest men in history, Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Darwin.
We honor Lincoln, because without him, we would not still have the United States, and more importantly, without him, the most evil institution of slavery might have lasted decades, if not generations longer.
In 1860 Lincoln was the abolitionist Republican Party candidate who promised to end the expansion of slavery into new states. When he took office in 1861, the southern slave states seceded, starting the Civil War. Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the union, but slavery was its central cause. In 1862 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making the goal of the war to end slavery. Lincoln also promoted the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery nationwide which passed Congress but was not ratified until after his assassination in 1865.
The Gettysburg Address is perhaps the greatest speech ever made by an American President. By declaring that our country was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”, Lincoln was declaring that the cause of liberty is the moral justification for this country, and that liberty and this country was - and are - worth fighting to preserve. Lincoln was also declaring that the true meaning of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration was that all people have an equal right to liberty, regardless of race.
We honor Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, because his 1859 “On the Origin of Species” started an intellectual revolution in biological sciences and humanities that remains at the core of our understanding of these sciences to this day.
So significant was Darwin’s discovery, that at the start of his 1976 “The Selfish Gene”, Richard Dawkins wrote: “If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.”
At the end of his masterpiece Darwin wrote: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
What most people don’t know is that Darwin was also an outspoken abolitionist who wrote to his friend, the American botanist Asa Gray in 1861 that if a million horrid deaths were lost in the crusade against slavery they would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.
Still more surprising - especially to some Republicans - is that Lincoln was deeply impressed with the ‘universal law’ of evolution. According to his legal partner William Herndon, Lincoln “seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine.”
Happy 200th Birthday to Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin!
I have mixed reactions to this billboard. I am very grateful to Darwin for his contributions to science (and providing such a logical alternative to gods magically creating humans in our current form by blowing air into mud or ribs or a blood clot, as the popular monotheisms of jews, christians, and muslims would try to have us believe).
I praise/respect Darwin for that. But I don't praise Darwin with a stained-glass-appearing billboard, since that looks a bit too much like we praise Darwin the way that christians praise Jesus, i.e. with blind faith and blind adoration.
While I know this billboard is just a parody, many fundamental christians actually believe that Darwinism is a competing religion (rather than what Darwinism is, which is a well-established, well-supported scientific explanation that is FAR more magnificent and wondrous than silly bronze-age stories of supernatural magic).
Dan: Abraham Lincoln was America's biggest racist who wanted to deport all blacks to liberia. The thirteenth amendment was not enacted by the house until after Lincolns death, so I would suggest re-educating yourself. Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation which only freed slaves in the southern states accompanied by a letter of condition that they become Union soldiers.
Your lack of education is systemic as is exactly the case with evolution. Evolutionists continue to alter their theory after each hypothesis has been proved wrong. Do I also need to school you on the fact that neanderthal is now a joke and removed from most museums?
Simply type in the words neanderthal hoax in Google.
hmmmm, I seem to recall the same thing happening with Lucy, that was almost as bad as the disaster when Piltdown Man was also discovered to be a hoax which you may concur after researching the net.
Evolution is a powerful movement because it is antichristian and therefore heavily funded by liberal donations. Evolution, Same sex marriage, abortion, living wills, assisted suicides - all the same supporters. Why is that?
JoeG – it would be nice if you turned to scientific literature for your understanding of the science of evolution rather than the same old tired lies perpetrated by the superstitious in an attempt to deny the obvious.
I have yet to run into anyone like you (i.e. a layperson) who could even properly define evolution. Yet you seem to think you know more about it than we dumb biologists do. The definition of evolution has not changed since the modern synthesis, many decades ago. Your inability or unwillingness to comprehend what evolution is does not invalidate it as the unifying concept of biology. Evolution is as much a fact as the earth going around the sun is – which was equally denied by the superstitious for a long time.
Thursday, February 12, marks the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of two of the greatest men in history, Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Darwin.
We honor Lincoln, because without him, we would not still have the United States, and more importantly, without him, the most evil institution of slavery might have lasted decades, if not generations longer.
In 1860 Lincoln was the abolitionist Republican Party candidate who promised to end the expansion of slavery into new states. When he took office in 1861, the southern slave states seceded, starting the Civil War. Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the union, but slavery was its central cause. In 1862 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making the goal of the war to end slavery. Lincoln also promoted the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery nationwide which passed Congress but was not ratified until after his assassination in 1865.
The Gettysburg Address is perhaps the greatest speech ever made by an American President. By declaring that our country was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”, Lincoln was declaring that the cause of liberty is the moral justification for this country, and that liberty and this country was - and are - worth fighting to preserve. Lincoln was also declaring that the true meaning of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration was that all people have an equal right to liberty, regardless of race.
We honor Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, because his 1859 “On the Origin of Species” started an intellectual revolution in biological sciences and humanities that remains at the core of our understanding of these sciences to this day.
So significant was Darwin’s discovery, that at the start of his 1976 “The Selfish Gene”, Richard Dawkins wrote: “If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.”
At the end of his masterpiece Darwin wrote: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
What most people don’t know is that Darwin was also an outspoken abolitionist who wrote to his friend, the American botanist Asa Gray in 1861 that if a million horrid deaths were lost in the crusade against slavery they would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity.
Still more surprising - especially to some Republicans - is that Lincoln was deeply impressed with the ‘universal law’ of evolution. According to his legal partner William Herndon, Lincoln “seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine.”
Happy 200th Birthday to Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin!
Dan Griffing:
Very well stated!
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