Posted on 02/24/2003 1:25:18 PM PST by Remedy
More than 200 evolutionists have issued a statement aimed at discrediting advocates of intelligent design and belittling school board resolutions that question the validity of Darwinism.
The National Center for Science Education has issued a statement that backs evolution instruction in public schools and pokes fun at those who favor teaching the controversy surrounding Darwinian evolution. According to the statement, "it is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible" for creation science to be introduced into public school science textbooks. [See Earlier Article]
Forrest Turpen, executive director of Christian Educators Association International, says it is obvious the evolution-only advocates feel their ideology and livelihood are being threatened.
"There is a tremendous grouping of individuals whose life and whose thought patterns are based on only an evolutionary point of view," Turpen says, "so to allow criticism of that would be to criticize who they are and what they're about. That's one of the issues."
Turpen says the evolution-only advocates also feel their base of financial rewards is being threatened.
"There's a financial issue here, too," he says. "When you have that kind of an establishment based on those kinds of thought patterns, to show that there may be some scientific evidence -- and there is -- that would refute that, undermines their ability to control the science education and the financial end of it."
Turpen says although evolutionists claim they support a diversity of viewpoints in the classroom, they are quick to stifle any criticism of Darwinism. In Ohio recently, the State Board of Education voted to allow criticism of Darwinism in its tenth-grade science classes.
01. Total-blankout boys: Those who simply go blank when the evidence is presented, and deny that any of it exists.
02. Conspiracy believers: Those who have heard about Piltdown Man, and who declare that all the evidence is fake (while refusing to admit that there are far more fraudulent clergymen than data-faking scientists).
03. All-or-nothing perfectionists: Those who point to one imprecisely classified fossil, and declare that it's all a confused mess.
04. Gap artists: Those who actually see the evidence, but who point to the inevitable gaps, and claim that until all gaps are closed (an obvious impossibility), they will refuse to accept any of the evidence that lies between the gaps.
05. Road-to-hell rejectionists: Those who see the evidence, but reject it because of an irrational belief that it leads to fascism, socialism, teen pregnancy, the heartbreak of psoriasis, etc.
06. Platonists: Those who can't accept evolution because they insist that there is a mystical dimension to the universe, and fear that evolution is some evil plot to deny this elusive domain of existence.
07. My-cult-is-better-than-your-cult fanatics: Those who insist that that what they call Darwinism is some kind of Satanic cult (revealing that they have no concept of the nature of science).
08. Certainty fetishists: Those who can't stand the way science grows in understanding, and revises its theories to accommodate new data, declaring: "The experts used to say that man is X years old, now they say he's X+Y years old; so they keep changing their minds and don't know anything!"
09. Jehovah's disrupters: Those who imagine that God wants them to spam, insult, act-up, flame, and otherwise disrupt these threads.
10. Battlestar Galactica buffs: Those who insist that aliens in UFOs are a better explanation than evolution.
11. DNA decoders: Those who believe the Deity has written a secret message in our DNA (which, although not yet decoded, provides proof that evolution is false).
12. Undistributed Middle Fallacists: Those who believe that (a) most atheists are Darwinists, therefore (b) disproving Darwin=proof of Christianity. What these folks don't realize is that (1) evolution is compatible with everything but the most hyper-literal fundamentalist reading of the Bible, and (2) even if evolution were disproved and Intelligent Design could be proven, that would not prove the truth of Christianity, as the intelligent designer could be the impersonal God of the Deists -- or Zeus or Vishnu or Ahura Mazda or Moloch.
13. Stealth-ies: Those who deny evolution as ardently as any creationist, and who endlessly demand that evolution be defended, yet who swear "I'm not a creationist," no matter how obvious it is that they are, and who refuse to explain their own beliefs (because they're creationists-in-the-closet).
14. Genesis uber alles: Self-explanatory category, and perhaps the most amazing of all. Flat-earthers in spirit, if not in fact.
15. Just-don't-get-it-gang Those who were intellectually abused as children, and who now demand: "Show me a dog that changes into a goldfish, and maybe then I'll accept evolution."
16. Subjunctive junkies: Those who leap upon standard phrases in scientific papers such as " ... the data would seem to indicate .." and exclaim: "See there! He admits he's just guessing!"
17. Ape Ancestry Revulsionists: "There ain't no ape in my family tree." or "I ain't no kin to no monkey nohow!"
I think the point being made is that evolution is inaccurately being portrayed as a complete and comprehensive explanation as to the diversity of life.
I am sanguine. I take the long view, and these things move in cycles - even if you "win", it won't last. Eventually, intellectually rigorous ID theorists will come to realize that "intellectually rigorous ID theory" is inherently self-contradictory, and then they will flee it faster than Rosie O'Donnell making for a buffet table. And the next time around, your children and grandchildren will find it that much harder to slip supernaturalism into science.
Is there more than one Hitler? Who in their right mind would deny that Hitler was a social darwinist? He compared Jews to Apes in Mein Kampf and compared modern man with ape men in Table Talk.
True, he used religious language to worm his way into power, but his words and deeds were as disconnected as Clinton's.
Skeptics, atheists and other history revisionists like to pretend that Hitler was a Christian and they yank quotes out of the context of reality. Recently- and you probably didn't know it because evolutionists already have the answers for everything so why watch the news- more documentation was discovered that supports my contention:
“A shocking story has been revealed.” He tells us an authoritative, scholarly, and thoroughly documented study out of Rutgers University School of Law at Camden reveals that Hitler’s plan was to destroy Christianity right after he dispensed with the Jews.
The main supporting documentation is from no less an unimpeachable source than the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan, originally prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg!
Announcing the recent release of the study’s findings, Rutgers project's editor, Julie Seltzer Mandel told the press that "When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against Jews ... but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity."
Shiflett says the new study “will unsettle those who have been taught that Hitler was a Christian of some stripe — and indeed, by some accountings, an enthusiastic Catholic.”
Shiflett goes on to tell that Hitler’s “rejection of the faith was profound. "My pedagogy is strict," he once explained. "I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth... There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... That is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication."
"That domestication, of course, was in large part due to the influence of Christianity. Hitler was blunter still on other occasions. "It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity," he said in 1933, "because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." His countrymen would have to choose: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both."
Shiflett continues, "Indeed, he understood all too well that Christianity, in the long run, was his enemy. "Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics." Switch a few words around and you'd think you were listening to Joseph Stalin. And like Stalin, Hitler believed history was on his side: "Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished... but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves."
It may be too late.
They will consistently call us evil, and that's the way it is.
You may be evil, but show me where I called you evil. Or have your powers of random reasoning concluded that since Hitler was an evolutionist and Hitler was evil you, being an evolutionist are evil as well? If your mind has led you there that is something you'll have to work out with your own conscience.
The difference between my belief in supernatual events and an evolutionist's belief in supernatural events is only the Cause of those events. Imagination is the source of the evolutionary supernatural events.
Poof! Rocks gave rise to life.
Poof! The universe created itself!
Poof! Dark matter!
Poof! Land whales!
Poof! Bombardier beetles!
Poof! Poof! Poof!
Ah, this brings up a question I've wanted to ask you creationists for some time: Why do you try so hard to twist the facts to fit your dogma? Why not simply assert that God blinked and poofed the Grand Canyon into existence? Why try so hard to relegate the miraculous to the deep, deep background? Why not simply posit the miracles up front?Was the "ancient lake" that carved out the grand canyon filled sulphuric acid? 'Cause that's about the only thing that could have done it in a few thousand years.
Your naturalist assumptions make sense only if you apply them to a naturalist worldview.
For example: This was brought home to me as I was reading a Watchtower tract about evolution. (I think it was the one with the Hubble photo on the cover.) At one point it tries to explain how God could have caused the waters to part to let the Israelites flee the Egyptians. Their solution was that God took a giant magnet that was so powerful it even magetized the water molecules in the Red Sea, and did this so forcefully that it pulled the water apart & made the dry channel for them to walk thru.
Now, I gotta ask you: Why would God need to bother with such a complex mechanism to carry out a miracle? Why not simply think about the waters parting? Isn't this, after all, how he supposedly thought the universe into existence? Why the extra baggage of having to bring down (or was it well up from the Earth's mantle?) a giant magnet to pull the water molecules apart? I mean, the obvious question here is how come the Israelites' bodies themselves didn't break apart?
So you, Dataman, having just asserted that believing in miracles makes for better science, please tell me where these miracles should be assumed to have taken place in the chain of causality.
For example, to bring us back to the Grand Canyon: Did God fill this lake with sulphuric acid directly? Or did he place a deposit of sulphur in the ground in such a way that it would get exposed to the Flood waters at the right time & dissolve into it in the right proportions? Or did he not use sulphur at all, but instead caused great big lightning strikes to zap the Grand Canyon into existence? Or did he simply speak "Grand Canyon" and it immediately poofed into existence, like he supposedly is able to do when creating universes?
Well, we can imagine Him doing so, anyway...
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