Just when you thought we'd entered the age of literacy ...

[unixronin]

Wait, literacy was a long time ago, wasn't it?  So was the Age of Reason.  And science.

Apparently, none of these things has percolated through to Bob Jones University yet.

Relevant page scan reproduced here for the full horrific effect:

(click for full size)

"Creation Science" is one thing.  But Bob Jones University is outright flat lying here.  "Electricity is a mystery."  That might have been true in 1710, ninety years before Alessandro Volta invented the first battery.  By 1810, electricity was being widely studied all over the civilized world.  But in 2010?  Look, let me be straight with you here, I don't even believe that Bob Jones has been alive for two hundred years in order to have spent them all under a rock.  "Some scientists think the sun may be the source of most electricity.  Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it."  There is no lie so convincing and dastardly as that which knowingly contains a grain of truth placed there to mislead.

I'm not sure which is worse — the idea that there are people ignorant enough and gullible enough to swallow a piece of a-wizard-did-it crap like this, or the idea that there are people in positions of (at least within certain communities) trust who are mendacious enough to take advantage of the poor bastards by feeding them this kind of bullshit and presenting it as fact.  I can only conclude that Bob Jones "University" is actively, knowingly, and intentionally in the business of turning out people utterly unprepared to deal with the realities of the modern technological civilization on this planet.

(Speculation upon possible agendas behind such a venture is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Comments

[robhansen]

The thing I hate the most about this is that as contemptible as their gross misstatements of science are, they make a couple of useful points along the way. Proof positive that a stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.

It’s true. No one has ever seen electricity. The wavelength of an electron is orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Strangely we can see the carrier particle of electromagnetism — the photon — but we can’t see the fundamental unit of electric charge — the electron.

Likewise, we haven’t heard electricity. We hear electricity’s effects upon the world, but not electricity itself.

And, you know, that distinction between being able to directly perceive a carrier particle but not being able to directly perceive a fundamental unit of charge — that’s an interesting distinction. If you think about it, it’s really kind of strange. That makes it perfect material for inclusion in a science curricula.

But the idea that it’s a mystery?

I weep for Bob Jones’ graduates.