#661: Mary Fallin

Mary Fallin is the Governor of Oklahoma and a former representative for Oklahoma's 5th congressional district, and damn if she isn’t quite insane. Fallin is a staunch creationist and is on the record expressing a preference for religion over science (but so is her last Democratic opponent Jarl Askins). And of course you presumably see where this is going for education in Oklahoma.

In 2011 Fallin responded to a heat wave sweeping her state by asking citizens to seek divine intervention: “The power of prayer is a wonderful thing, and I would ask every Oklahoman to look to a greater power this weekend and ask for rain,” she said in a manner worthy of Rick Perry. It didn’t have any measurable effect, but does tell you quite a bit about a certain group of politician’s attempt to find solutions to the ordeals facing their constituencies. Indeed, one would think that the Oklahomans who believed this measure to be effective had already prayed for rain, making Fallin’s urge doubly idiotic.

Diagnosis: Another moronic godbot who has been given an irresponsible amount of power to wield, and sure enough uses it to cause as much damage as possible to civilization.

#601: Jack Cuozzo

Jack Cuozzo is a dentist and Young Earth Creationist whose main contribution to the lunacy movement is his belief that Neanderthals were ordinary humans who lived for hundreds of years (as in the Bible) causing their skulls to continue to grow and morph – despite, of course, the fact that the age of fossilized individuals can be determined (and has been determined not to be hundreds of years) by other means, for instance by examining tooth development (as in here), which suggests that Cuozzo missed some classes during his training as a dentist. Cuozzo spelled out his view in his book Buried Alive, and used it to argue for the ridiculous idea that creatures have undergone devolution since the Fall, i.e. “a gradual loss of genetic information due to mutation” (Adam and Eve were genetically perfect, and it is a standard creationist canard that mutation can only lead to poorer functioning, never mind that they don’t have a clue about what the technical term “information” means). Hence, Neanderthals were just superior human beings. It should be unnecessary to point out that the whole creationist notion of devolution, which is based on medievalistic teleological assumptions about directions of evolution, has nothing to do with science. You can find a rebuttal of some of the falsehoods and dishonesties of Cuozzo’s book here, and a general review here.

Interestingly, Cuozzo also spends some efforts refuting the claims of fellow creationists that Neanderthals were just ordinary humans that suffered from arthritis or rickets or similar diseases, since that would contradict his assumption that the Neanderthals must have been better than us.

Cuozzo classifies most older hominid specimens as “apes” (rather arbitrarily), which is another piece of evidence that the creationist classifications of these are entirely arbitrary and that the hominids in question are actually somewhere in between present humans and something else (this one is illuminating).

Diagnosis: Standard fare. Though Cuozzo is surely an intelligent guy, his lack of understanding of evidence, combined with an unhealthy dose of confirmation bias, is not going to lead him to anything resembling reality. Sorry.

#599: Constance Cumbey

Constance Cumbey is a legend among conspiracy theorists, but most famous, perhaps, for having repeatedly accused Texe Marrs and Pat Robertson of stealing from her. In 1983 Cumbey, then a lawyer, published the classic The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism, which pretty much launched the Taliban fundie scare of New Age bullshit, and simultaneously lost Cumbey all possible shreds of academic credibility due to its promotion of several marvelously incoherently insane conspiracy theories.

The main feature of the book is the attempt to blame the New Age movement on Benjamin Creme, theosophy, and Nazism, and attempting to portray said movement as an insidious (correct), highly organized (hardly) and unified conspiracy to overthrow the US and replace it with a Nazi regime. The New Age cult’s alleged tenets are ecumenism, holistic health, New Thought, humanistic psychology, Montessori schools, modernism, secular humanism, and zero population growth, and any advocate for any of these is obviously a member of a hierarchically organized cult. Unitarian churches and health food stores are the “New Age recruiting centers,” the Guardian Angels is the New Age movement’s paramilitary organization, and “the New Age Movement has complete identity with the programs of Hitler.” Indeed. (She has a blog where she expands on these issues, but I am not inclined to link to it.)

The prophets are Creme and Alice Bailey, who according to Cumbey founded New Age while awaiting the new “messiah” named Maitreya. Hence, all secular humanists are secretly awaiting Maitreya. According to Cumbey Maitreya is most likely the Antichrist. Others believe Maitreya is an imaginary piece of fluff nurtured in the largely incoherent minds of Benjamin Creme and others of his ilk, but Cumbey doesn’t really have the mental capacity to recognize that people can have false beliefs – New Age beliefs, for instance, aren’t really false on Cumbey’s view; instead they usher in Satan.

Some (random) examples of people who have been inspired by Cumbey and her identification of Maitreya and the Antichrist are

- one Harry Walther, who identifies the Antichrist/Maitreya here (not recommended; the color and font schemes are rather uncomfortable for eyes and mind).

- One Jeffrey K. Radt, who weighs in here.

 - Another one.

- Some people engaged in this rather … disturbing discussion (hey, it’s from Rense.com – what did you expect).

Cumbey has also claimed that the rainbow sticker (for gay rights) was a secret identifier used by New Agers to identify each other. Here’s Cumbey on other religions than her own:

“While there are certain superficial similarities among most religions, orthodox Judaism and Christianity stand in direct opposition to every other belief system. It is safe to say, however, that nearly all non-Judeo-Christian religions are extremely similar because, as the Bible indicates, they come from one source, the ‘god of this world’ – Satan himself.”

Diagnosis: Wailingly insane. She seems to have had a substantial impact on the reason-challenged parts of the fundie universe, though it is unclear whether her lasting influence is detrimental or actually sufficiently self-defeating to end up being overall positive.

#594: Daniel C. Criswell

Keep ‘em coming. Daniel C. Criswell is yet another creationist associated with the Institute for Creation Research, and just like the recently covered Charles Creager, he qualifies for an entry primarily through his contribution to the Answers Research Journal, the house journal of Answers in Genesis. To Vol. 2 Criswell contributed the bizarre article “A Review of Mitoribosome Structure and Function Does not Support the Serial Endosymbiotic Theory”, a review of the literature on the serial endosymbiotic theory (SET) (one that creationists have tried to criticize before), before suddenly pulling out irreducible complexity, therefore God, at the end. The justification for the latter move seems to be: see, I know the literature; therefore what I pull out of my ass must be taken seriously as well.

He has also written vol.3 of Science Education Essentials, a creationist curriculum supplement series that “covers” vital topics in the various science disciplines from a thoroughly biblical viewpoint (vol.3 is “Human heredity: teacher supplement”), which is directed at the homeschooling market, and which again illustrates the fact that creationists are most concerned with getting Jesus to children, not to engage in scientific research.

Diagnosis: Same as always. Really.

#589: Josh Craddock

Josh Craddock rose to fame when he, as a 19 year old student, got his first rant published in the WND. Unfortunately the rant didn’t really put Craddock in the best possible light. The contribution is discussed here. The screed in question was primarily a rant about how Focus on the Family and James Dobson have betrayed conservative Christian values and ”3,500 years of Judeo-Christian history” (over half the age of the earth!) by not being sufficiently anti-gay. I mean, officially Focus on the Family doesn’t want to throw gays in jail, and won’t deny them the right to hold public positions. Craddock’s article is also discussed here. Apart from that, Craddock is for the most part a rabid anti-abortionist who argues that Planned Parenthood and ”evolutionary racism” (i.e. eugenics) are two sides of the same coin.

Diagnosis: Full of youthful energy, and at the moment he is using it in the service of crazy. May still end up on the side of sanity, I suppose, but prospects seem currently rather bleak.