Thanksgiving

In the United States, Thanksgiving is celebrated in November by cooking much more good food than anyone can possibly eat, resulting in lots of delicious leftovers. Each month, secular science provides us with more evidence against evolution than we can cram into our “six-page newsletter” (which is 10 pages long this month), resulting in lots of delicious leftovers. What do we do with it all?

This is a NEWS letter. That means it is driven by current events and pop culture. Current events get stale quickly. We don’t want all our delicious leftovers to go to waste, so we do what any economical American would do—we keep them in storage, freshen them up by adding a little bit of new stuff, and serve them in future months.

Abundance

Thanksgiving is a time to reflect upon all the wonderful things we have. As we look back over all the good material we did not have space to print, several things come to mind.

When we started, I wondered if we could come up with enough material to fill a six-page newsletter every month. Well, this is the 123^rd newsletter, and we have such a backlog of material, we don’t know what to do with it all. We are thankful for that.

Thanks for Giving

In recent years, we have been getting emails from members telling us about new evidence against evolution. We can only use a small fraction of their suggestions.

We hope that the people sending the suggestions don’t think we don’t appreciate what they have given us. If we don’t use your material, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. It doesn’t mean we won’t ever use it. It just means that we didn’t have room for it because there was something else more pertinent to current events. Please keep sending us email links and articles. We really are thankful for it.

International Audience

When we first started this newsletter, and mailed them only to people living in Ridgecrest, we could make certain cultural assumptions about our readers. For example, they would all know about Thanksgiving. But we currently get about 600 hits on our home page every week. Our page counter doesn’t tell us who is reading our web page, or where they live; but the fact that we get email and donations from all over the world tells us that most of the people reading our web page don’t live in Ridgecrest! We are thankful for that, but now we have to make certain cultural adjustments.

We have dues-paying members in New Zealand, Canada, Africa, and England who are unlikely to have seen the series of American TV commercials about GEICO car insurance, in which a Neanderthal is offended by the phrase, “It’s so easy a caveman can do it.” They’ve never seen the Neanderthal make fools of the therapist and TV talk show host. They aren’t going to get caveman jokes—but it isn’t because they aren’t as smart as a Neanderthal! They just haven’t seen American TV.

One could argue that we should not include pop culture references that won’t make sense to our international readers. But hopefully, our American readers will get the jokes. The jokes keep the tone of the newsletter light, and help make our points memorable. It would be a shame to leave them out. So, we are now more careful to tell the jokes in such a way that everyone will get the point, even if they don’t get the punch line.

Our Time Machine

We also are aware that we are building a time machine. Stuff on the Internet lives forever. Today someone may read our first newsletter, written more than eleven years ago. Eleven years from now, some 16-year-old American kid may be reading this newsletter. He isn’t going to remember a GEICO commercial that was on TV when he was five years old. GEICO caveman jokes probably won’t make sense to him. We are more aware of that now.

As we look back over past newsletters, we see they have stood the test of time pretty well. Certainly they have stood the test of time better than the evolutionary nonsense that has come and gone since then.

Remember the Martian Meteorite that evolutionists claimed showed signs of life on Mars? We wrote about it in our second newsletter. ¹ Our analysis was heretical then, but is in the mainstream now. Scientists no longer believe the meteorite shows any evidence of life, just as we said back then.

In 1997, we wrote about Neanderthal DNA ². This month’s article about Cavemen confirms what we said about their DNA analysis ten years ago.

Real truth doesn’t change. Evolutionary “truth” does. That’s why our articles generally stand the test of time well.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

In retrospect, some of our material was too dependent on popular personalities and current events. In April, 2003, every American knew who Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf was. They had seen him on TV claiming that American forces were committing suicide, and weren’t even 100 miles from Baghdad, when in fact the Americans had already captured the Baghdad airport. He was the ultimate example of a delusional person living in a fantasy world. Therefore, he was the perfect parody of a modern evolutionist, denying that all he believed in was crumbling around him, refusing to see the truth.

Now, four and a half years later, few people would recognize the name Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. In the future, even fewer people will know who he was. Perhaps they will look at our April 2003 newsletter ³, see a funny picture of an Arab dude talking nonsense, and mistake it for a racial stereotype. They won’t realize that the quote was almost word-for-word, substituting “creationists” for “Americans.” They won’t know what he had to do with Peter Arnett, either. It doesn’t make much sense now, but it was really funny at the time. Evolutionists are still delusional, but we don’t have a recognizable poster boy for delusion any more.

You can’t please everyone in every part of the world, in every decade. We just do the best we can, and hope, at least, that O.J. Simpson will keep getting into trouble every few years, making the O.J. jokes timeless. We need that cultural consciousness of expert courtroom testimony to remind our readers of how rapidly DNA decomposes, and how easy it is to contaminate DNA, when considering claims about DNA evidence for evolution. We need to put science in a context that the general public can relate to.

So, we apologize to our American readers if we seem to be patronizing by explaining such obvious Thanksgiving references. We apologize to our international readers if we seem to be bragging that we Americans are so rich that we can celebrate gluttony every November. We are simply mindful that we need to try to establish the common understanding necessary to make our analogies understandable.

Quick links to
Science Against Evolution Home Page	Back issues of Disclosure (our newsletter)
Web Site of the Month	Topical Index

Footnotes:

¹ Disclosure, November 1996, “That's One Small Step for a Rock—One Giant Leap of Faith”
² Disclosure, September 1997, “Neanderthal DNA Soup”
³ Disclosure, April 2003, “New Gig for al-Sahhaf”