Posted on 12/27/2004 2:34:25 PM PST by Ed Current
The most censored speech in the United States today is not flag-burning, pornography or the press. The worst censors are those who prohibit classroom criticism of the theory of evolution.
A Chinese scholar observed, "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin."
Polls show that the vast majority of Americans reject the theory of evolution, as have great scientists such as William Thomas Kelvin and Louis Pasteur. But that does not stop an intolerant minority from trying to impose a belief in the ape-to-man theory on everyone else.
Local school boards have finally had enough of this tyranny. From Georgia to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Wisconsin to Kansas, school boards are finally moving toward allowing criticism of Darwin's theory.
The Darwinists have propped up their classroom dominance by the persistent use of frauds and flacks. The fraudulent pro-evolution embryo drawings of Ernst Haeckel littered schoolbooks for 100 years, and it took specific action by the Texas Board of Education to keep them out of current textbooks even after the New York Times exposed Haeckel's deception.
Many textbooks feature pictures of giraffes stretching their necks to feed high off of trees, but genetics and observed feeding habits disprove that as a basis for evolution of their long necks. Moreover, the striking beauty of the colored pattern on the giraffes illustrates that design, not merely usefulness, is what animates our world.
Continued censorship of criticism invites additional fraud, so evolution has suffered more embarrassments than any other scientific theory. The Piltdown man was a lie taught to schoolchildren for decades, even featured in the John Scopes Monkey Trial textbook, and only five years ago a dinosaur-bird fossil hoax was presented as true on the glossy pages of National Geographic.
If Darwinists want to teach that whales, which are mammals, evolved from black bears swimming with their mouths open, we should surely be entitled to criticize that. Yet school libraries have refused to accept books critical of evolution, even when written by college professors.
Responding to the majority of their constituents, Georgia's Cobb County recently authorized a textbook disclaimer saying "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
The American Civil Liberties Union claims this is unconstitutional and is seeking out supremacist judges to order classroom curricula to continue the censorship and forbid an open mind about evolution. If the theory of evolution were well supported, there would be no reason to oppose open debate about scientific claims.
In December 2004, a world-famous champion of atheism, Antony Flew, announced his conversion to acceptance of intelligent design underlying our world. The Dallas Morning News observed, "If the scientific data are compelling enough to cause an atheist academic of Flew's reputation to recant most of his life's work, why shouldn't Texas schoolchildren be taught the controversy?"
At 81, Flew can speak out because he is now free from the peer pressure that silences younger colleagues who fear loss of jobs, funding, or even dreams of winning a Nobel Prize. Evolution critics Fred Hoyle and Raymond Damadian were unjustly denied Nobel Prizes and their work was instead recognized by awards to less-deserving others.
Darwinists know they cannot persuade skeptical adults, so they try to capture impressionable schoolchildren. At our expense and against our wishes, children are taught that the world exists only for what is useful, not by design.
To typical schoolchildren full of wonder, we live in a world best described as a marvelous work of art. The snowflakes that grace us at Christmastime typify the artistic beauty that bestows joy on all ages but, like an acid, evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beauty and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals no more worthy than dogs or cats.
There is a strong correlation between belief in natural selection and liberal views on government control, pornography, prayer in schools, abortion, gun control, economic freedom, and even animal rights. For the most part, the schools in the blue states carried in the 2004 presidential election by U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., are strongly pro-evolution, while the red states carried by President George W. Bush allow debate and dissent.
It should surprise no one that the United States, land of the free and home of the brave, has the lowest percentage of evolution believers in the world. The highest percentage lived in the former East Germany.
The U.S. Senate of former Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., quietly slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires, by the 2007-2008 school year, science testing by grade 5. That gives censors the authority to force 10-year-olds to believe and defend evolution.
It is long past time for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect their children from the intolerant evolutionists. Hooray for courageous school boards that are finally rejecting censorship and allowing debate.
*Fossils are always found exactly where we expect.*
http://www.bible.ca/tracks/taylor-trail.htm
Reason tells me evolution is wrong, for it does not pass the evidence test, nor did it ever.
Oh, bother, said Pooh.
The scientific evidence published by the IPCC said that no man-made global warming was ocurring.
The excutive summary published by the IPCC politicians said otherwise.
Which do think was supported by climatologists?
A few flaws? So how life could start from non-life in inconsequential? The tree of life is not important to Darwin's theory? The lack of fossil record supporting the transitional stages doesn't matter?
Perhaps you should first ask yourself if Intelligent Design theorists really ARE victims.
(From The Case for a Creator, this is from an interview with Jonathan Wells, PHD, PHD) The Archaeopteryx is a bird with modern feathers, and birds are very different from reptiles in many important ways -- their breeding system, their bone structure, their lungs, their distribution of weight and muscles. It's a bird, that's clear -- not part bird and part reptile. Then there is the problem from cladistics. Cladists define homology, or physical similarities as being due to common ancestry. Then they saw, well, the main way we can group animals in the evolutionary tree is through homologies, which is already a bit of a circular argument. When they go back into the fossil record, they assume birds came from reptiles by descent, and they look for reptiles that are more bird-like in their skeletal structure. Know where they find them? It turns out they find them millions of years after archaeopteryx! So here is archaeopteryx, undeniably a bird, and yet the fossils that look most like the reptilian ancestors of birds occur tens of millions of years later in the fossil record. So the missing link is still missing.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA!
Good one. Here's one for you: Onyate Man!
Correct. I am old enough to remember that. Apparently alacarte is either a youngster or just showing typical FR evolutionist disregard for fact.
"If the theory 30 years ago was wrong, why do you think the theory today is correct? Maybe I'm missing something?"
Argh, I see part of the problem now. That 'thing' 30 years ago was NOT a theory. It was a paper published in a very respected science journal. A 'paper' and a 'theory' in science are two very important but different things and you should look them up on wikipedia (my suggestion, good site).
30 years ago there was no theory on climate change, just hypotheses. Today global warming research has concluded that global warming happens. This 'theory' is likely based on hundred if not thousands of papers like the one you mention 30 years ago.
The rest of your post I won't comment on sicne it is all opinion. It was good though. Well, i do have one comment.
"Evolution means we are randomly created and accountable to only ourselves, of no more value than a fruit bat or a grey whale."
Evolution does not say we are 'randomly' created. This is an unfortunate misconception that comes from the term 'random mutation.' There is in fact nothing 'random' about evolution.
"That may not be the robust scientific truth you're looking for, but if you do some fair research, you'll find that science is not an infallible source, nor as simple as you seem to believe. "
Oh I know science is not infallible, I'm an engineer. But it is the ONLY tool we have for explaining the natural world, and given that we've cured polio and gone to the moon I'd say it has served us well so far, and that some things can be trusted. When a new unproven idea comes along in science it is called an hypothesis, once that hypothesis has been sufficiently proven that the community feels it is as close to fact as we can get, it is then called a theory (for an explanatory model, otherwise it is called a law). Evolution is a scientific theory, on par for acceptance in the scientific community with every other theory.
BTW, how did we get talking about global warming? I don't know that much about it, and I really don't care either. I do know evolution, and I do care about it.
ALso, I liked your post, you are very polite, thankyou. ;)
"Although Darwin got the particulars wrong, his swimming-bear scenario was not far off the mark. Modern molecular biologists say that they now have the unassailable evidence to track whales' origins among four-legged mammals."
Regardless, using darwin to attack evolution is the height of dishonesty. It is like pointing to a flaw in the kitty-hawk to argue against the theory of flight.
Oh Joy. Phyllis Schlafley?
This stuff is just getting crazier and crazier.
Yo, Phyllis? Put a sock in it, dear. You're out of your league.
Not that she'll listen. She's one of those people who already knows everything.
Since you brought up logic,
How did the singularity explode without a cause?
How did initial temperatures become infinitely high in a finite universe?
How did infinite energy become available to propel particles faster than the speed of light?
How did dirt come to life?
How did invertebrates all of a sudden (poof) grow a backbone yet leave no transitional forms?
Why is something that is supposedly happening every moment never observed?
Another swipe at Bush? You evos just don't like him, do you?
"http://www.bible.ca/tracks/taylor-trail.htm"
Do you really think I'm going to visit a site called bible.ca to read about science? Come on people! There are thousands of actual science websites! If it were true, then you'd be able to link to a website with a bit of credibility.
Look-see method?
A great Republican lady, and almost always on the right side of issues. But alas, she's not quite ready to be the White House science advisor. Like a lot of very good people around here, she's using as her talking points the Jack Chick version of evolution. Big Daddy? Very sad.
Back to the bear, no one here even knew it was part of Darwin's original theory. I do not think the collective knowledge on this thread justifies the emotion and vitriol.
"It was one part of her opinion column."
Sorry I have no idea what this is about, please paste refernce text from now on. I'm too lazy to find it in the older posts :)
"Back to the bear, no one here even knew it was part of Darwin's original theory. I do not think the collective knowledge on this thread justifies the emotion and vitriol."
I work on jets, but I've never seen the kitty-hawk. Does that make me under-qualified?
What on earth does reading darwin have to do with understanding evolution? Pretty much everything darwin said has either been modified or expounded upon.
The bear wasn't "part of Darwin's original theory." He was tossing ideas out. This is something that real scientists do, they toss ideas around. It's called "brainstorming."
People who were never allowed to have original ideas because they are only allowed to believe that magic books have all the answers probably don't never learned how to brainstorm. Which is a shame.
Well, I never much cared for her to begin with. Always thought she was a narrow-minded, close-minded, hateful old harridan, and now see that she's also abysmally ignorant.
There's something about a woman with a career making her living by sneering at other women with careers that puts my teeth on edge.
"God does not play dice with the universe" - ALbert Einstein in a debate with Neils Bohr. He also did not believe in quantum mechanics.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.