Evolution Sunday(liberal churches attack fundamentalism)

I'm writing to provide an update on The Clergy Letter and on Evolution Sunday. Although we've not been aggressively recruiting new signatures for The Clergy Letter since we reached our goal of 10,000, signatures continue to arrive daily. We are now up to 10,236 (http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/religion_science_collaboration.htm).

Similarly, the number of congregations participating in Evolution Sunday continues to grow nicely. As of this afternoon, 366 congregations representing 48 states and the District of Columbia have signed on. The events are very exciting. Some congregations will be hearing sermons while others will be having lunch discussions. Some will be holding adult education classes while still others will be hosting Sunday school classes for children. It certainly is not too late to have your congregation listed - simply drop me a note telling me that you want to be listed. And please remember that not all events must be on 12 February 2006 -- the bottom of the participant's list includes the following sentence: "Due to scheduling difficulties, some participating churches will be holding their events close to 12 February 2006 but not on that day." Go to http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/rel_evol_sun.htm to see our growing list.

Our resource page (http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/rel_resources.htm) is also expanding due to the efforts of many of you. We now have more than 30 sermons listed as well as more than 25 articles and letters.

I'm very pleased to say that there appears to be growing interest in our activities by the media. I have a number of radio interviews scheduled, including one to be recorded tomorrow with NPR's Interfaith Voices. And the Religion News Service is scheduled to run a story soon. So your efforts are beginning to pay off. Every day more people are hearing the message that religion and science can comfortably coexist. And they are learning that the loud voices of strident fundamentalists are not speaking for all Christian leaders.

Finally, William Brandes, the spouse of a signer of The Clergy Letter, has created banners advertising The Clergy Letter Project that can easily be inserted on web pages. Please take a look at the web site for the First Congregational UCC in Mount Vernon, Ohio (http://www.mvucc.org/index.php) to see what one of his banners looks like. If you like what you see and would like to add a banner to your web site (they cost nothing!), go to http://www.www321.com/CLP/ for simple instructions on how to do so.

Thank you so very much for your support and energy. Please continue to mention The Clergy Letter Project to colleagues and to media contacts. Our impact grows as our number of participants grows!

p.s. In case anyone wants to see it again, I'm pasting in a press release that you can distribute to local media outlets.

CONTACT: from th, 920.424.1210, Office of the Dean, College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

The Clergy Letter Project Michael Zimmerman, Founder mz@uwosh.edu Office of the Dean College of Letters and Science University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Oshkosh, WI 54901 920.424.1210

On 12 February 2006 hundreds of Christian churches from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science.

Now, on the 197th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, many of these leaders will bring this message to their congregations through sermons and/or discussion groups. Together, participating religious leaders will be making the statement that religion and science are not adversaries. And, together, they will be elevating the quality of the national debate on this topic.

"For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science," said Dr. Michael Zimmerman, founder of the project. "As of today we have 366 congregations planning to give talks to disprove this false dichotomy."

The list of participating congregations can be found on the Evolution Sunday (http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/rel_evol_sun.htm) web page. That site also lists more than 30 sermons already delivered by members of The Clergy Letter Project on the topic of the compatibility of religion and science.

As The Clergy Letter (http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/religion_science_collaboration.htm) has demonstrated, Christianity can comfortably embrace evolution. The letter, addressing school boards across the country, concludes by stating: "We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth."

"Evolution Sunday and The Clergy Letter represent a new kind of grassroots effort by members of the Christian leadership in America to reclaim Christianity from those using it for their narrow sectarian advantage," Zimmerman said.

That's a lot of seriously deluded people. There is no such thing as being a Christian and an evolutionist at the same time; you have to pick one.

Newt Gingrich once stated the problem of evolutionism and morality about as succinctly as is possible in noting that the question of whether a man views his neighbor as a fellow child of God or as a meat byproduct of random processes simply has to affect human relationships.

Basically, every halfway honest person with any brains and talent who has taken any sort of a hard look at evolution in the past 60 years has given up on it and many have denounced it. A listing of fifty or sixty such statements makes for an overwhelming indictment of that part of the scientific community which goes on trying to defend evolution and evolutionists have a favorite term ("quote mining") which they use to describe that sort of argument.

A reasonable response to that is to note what may be the ultimate evolution quote by the noted evolutionist (actually, FORMER evolutionist) Jeffrey Dahmer:

"If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…"
Jeffrey Dahmer, in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, Nov. 29, 1994.

Dahmer converted to Christianity before he died. The basic tenets of true religion appear to be inprinted upon most of us biologically which is the only reason that Islammic societies and "secular humanist" societies like Britain and Canada function at all. A psychopath like Dahmer is basically somebody on whom that imprint did not take. For those guys, it has to be written down somewhere, and it has to be written down accurately; the bible does that. Telling somebody like Dahmer that we all evolved from "lucky dust" is a formula for getting people killed.

Evolution was the basic philosophical cornerstone of communism, naziism, the various eugenics programs, the out of control arms races which led to WW-I and WW-II, and all of the grief of the last 150 years. Starting from 1913, Europe had gone for a hundred years without a major war. They didn't even have to think. All they needed to do was act cool, go to church, have parades, formal balls, attend board meetings, and they'd still be running the world today; they'd be so fat and happy they'd not know what to do with themselves. Instead, they all got to reading about Darwinism, fang and claw, survival of the fittest and all the rest of that nonsense, and the rest as they say is history.

The most interesting analysis of that sad tale is probably Sir Arthur Keith's "Evolution and Ethics"

Keith apparently viewed belief in evolution as some sort of duty of the English educated classes, nonetheless he had a very clear vision of the problems inherent in it and laid it out in no uncertain terms:

From Sir Srthur Keith's "Evolution and Ethics:

Chapter 3

The Behavior of Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942

....It is worth noting that Hitler uses a double designation for his tribal doctrine National Socialism: Socialism standing for the good side of the tribal spirit (that which works within the Reich); aud Nationalism for the ethically vicious part, which dominates policy at and outside the German frontiers.

The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. For him the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front"; he regards himself, and is regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary destiny of its people....

... "Humanitarianism is an evil . . . a creeping poison." "The most cruel methods are humane if they give a speedy victory" is Hitler's echo of a maxim attributed to Moltke. Such are the ways of evolution when applied to human affairs.

...I have said nothing about the methods employed by the Nazi leaders to secure tribal unity in Germany methods of brutal compulsion, bloody force, and the concentration camp. Such methods cannot be brought within even a Machiavellian system of ethics, and yet may be justified by their evolutionary result.

12.

....No aspect of Hitler's policy proclaims the antagonism between evolution and ethics so forcibly as his treatment of the Jewish people in Germany.... ...Hitler is an uncompromising evolutionist, and we must seek for an evolutionary explanation if we are to understand his actions....

It must not be thought that in seeking to explain Hitler's actions I am seeking to justify them. The opposite is the case. I have made this brief survey of public policy in modern Germany with a definite object: to show that Dr. Waddington is in error when he seeks to place ethics on a scientific basis by a knowledge of evolutionary tendencies and practice.

Chapter 4

Human Life: Its Purpose or Ultimate End

IN THE COURSE OF GATHERING INFORMATION concerning man's morality and the part it has played and is playing in his evolution, I found it necessary to provide space for slips which were labeled "Life: Its Ultimate and Proximate Purposes." Only those who have devoted some special attention to this matter are aware of the multitude of reasons given for the appearance of man on earth. Here I shall touch on only a few of them; to deal with all would require a big book. The reader may exclaim: Why deal with any of them! What has ultimate purpose got to do with ethics and evolution! Let a man with a clearer head and a nimbler pen than mine reply. He is Edward Carpenter, who wrote Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889).

14.

It is from the sixteenth edition (1923) I am to quote, p. 249:

If we have decided what the final purpose or Life of Man is, then we may say that what is good for that purpose i

s finally "good" and what is bad for that purpose is finally "evil."

...If the final purpose of our existence is that which has been and is being worked out under the discipline of evolutionary law, then, although we are quite unconscious of the end result, we ought, as Dr. Waddington has urged, to help on "that which tends to promote the ultimate course of evolution." If we do so, then we have to abandon the hope of ever attaining a universal system of ethics; for, as we have just seen, the ways of national evolution, both in the past and in the present, are cruel, brutal, ruthless, and without mercy. Dr. Waddington has not grasped the implications of Nature's method of evolution, for in his summing up (Nature, 1941, 150, p. 535) he writes "that the ethical principles formulated by Christ . . . are those which have tended towards the further evolution of mankind, and that they will continue to do so." Here a question of the highest interest is raised: the relationship which exists between evolution and Christianity; so important, it seems to me, that I shall devote to it a separate chapter. Meantime let me say that the conclusion I have come to is this:

the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.

All of that, of course, deals only with the question of ethics and the logical consequences of evolutionism. The fact that evolution is junk science argues against it as well.

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