Posted on 11/01/2005 6:27:26 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
A president who consults religious lunatics about who should be on the Supreme Court... Judges who want prayer in school and the "ten commandments" in the courtroom… Born-Again fanatics who bomb abortion clinics… bible thumpers who condemn homosexuality as "sin"... and all the other Christian fascists who want a U.S. theocracy….
This is the force behind the assault on evolution going on right now in a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Last year, the Dover city school board instituted a policy that requires high school biology teachers to read a statement to students that says Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact" and then notes that intelligent design offers an alternative theory for the origin and evolution of life--namely, that life in all of its complexity could not have arisen without the help of an "intelligent hand." Some teachers refused to read the statement, citing the Pennsylvania teacher code of ethics, which says, "I will never knowingly present false information to a student." Eleven parents who brought this case to court contend that the directive amounted to an attempt to inject religion into the curriculum in violation of the First Amendment. Their case has been joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The school board is being defended pro bono by the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich. The case is being heard without a jury in Harrisburg by U.S. District Judge John Jones III, whom George W. Bush appointed to the bench in 2002.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not teach the biblical account of creation instead of evolution, because doing so would violate the constitutional ban on establishment of an official religion. Since then Intelligent Design has been promoted by Christian fundamentalists as the way to get the Bible and creationism into the schools.
"This clever tactical repackaging of creationism does not merit consideration," Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer for the parents, told U.S. District Judge John E. Jones in opening arguments. "Intelligent design admits that it is not science unless science is redefined to include the supernatural." This is, he added, "a 21st-century version of creationism."
This is the first time a federal court has been asked to rule on the question of whether Intelligent Design is religion or science. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which opposes challenges to the standard model of teaching evolution in the schools, said the Pennsylvania case "is probably the most important legal situation of creation and evolution in the last 18 years," and that "it will have quite a significant impact on what happens in American public school education."
Proponents of Intelligent Design don’t say in the courtroom that they want to replace science with religion. But their strategy papers, speeches, and discussions with each other make it clear this is their agenda.
Intelligent Design (ID) is basically a re-packaged version of creationism--the view that the world can be explained, not by science, but by a strict, literal reading of the Bible. ID doesn’t bring up ridiculous biblical claims like the earth is only a few thousand years old or that the world was created in seven days. Instead it claims to be scientific--it acknowledges the complexity and diversity of life, but then says this all comes from some "intelligent" force. ID advocates don’t always openly argue this "intelligent force" is GOD--they even say it could be some alien from outer space! But Christian fundamentalists are the driving force behind the whole Intelligent Design movement and it’s clear… these people aren’t praying every night to little green men from another planet.
Phillip Johnson, considered the father and guiding light behind Intelligent Design, is the architect of the "wedge strategy" which focuses on attacking evolution and promoting intelligent design to ultimately, as Johnson says, "affirm the reality of God." Johnson has made it clear that the whole point of "shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God" is to get people "introduced to the truth of the Bible," then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus."
Intelligent Design and its theocratic program has been openly endorsed by George W. Bush. Earlier this year W stated that Intelligent Design should be taught in the schools. When he was governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution. And he has made the incredibly unscientific, untrue statement that "the jury is still out" on evolution.
For the Christian fascists, the fight around evolution and teaching Intelligent Design is part of a whole agenda that encompasses reconfiguring all kinds of cultural, social, and political "norms" in society. This is a movement that is fueled by a religious vision which varies among its members but is predicated on the shared conviction that the United States is in need of drastic changes--which can only be accomplished by instituting religion as its cultural foundation.
The Christian fascists really do want--and are working for--a society where everything is run according to the Bible. They have been working for decades to infiltrate school boards to be in a position to mandate things like school prayer. Now, in the schools, they might not be able to impose a literal reading of the Bible’s explanation for how the universe was created. But Intelligent Design, thinly disguised as some kind of "science," is getting a lot more than just a foot in the door.
The strategy for promoting intelligent design includes an aggressive and systematic agenda of promoting the whole religious worldview that is the basis for ID. And this assault on evolution is linked up with other questions in how society should be run.
Marc Looy of the creationist group Answers in Genesis has said that evolution being taught in the schools,
"creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder, and suicide."
Ken Cumming, dean of the Institute for Creation Research's (ICR) graduate school, who believes the earth is only thousands of years old, attacked a PBS special seven-part series on evolution, suggesting that the series had "much in common" with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. He said,
"[W]hile the public now understands from President Bush that 'we're at war' with religious fanatics around the world, they don't have a clue that America is being attacked from within through its public schools by a militant religious movement called Darwinists...."
After the 1999 school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, Tom DeLay, Christian fascist representative from Texas, gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, blaming the incident in part on the teaching of evolution. He said,
"Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud."
The ID movement attacks the very notion of science itself and the philosophical concept of materialism--the very idea that there is a material world that human beings can examine, learn about, and change.
Johnson says in his "The Wedge Strategy" paper,
"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating…we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, points out:
"Evolution is a concept that applies to all sciences, from astronomy to chemistry to geology to biology to anthropology. Attacking evolution means attacking much of what we know of the natural world, that we have amassed through the application of scientific principles and methods. Second, creationist attacks on evolution are attacks on science itself, because the creationist approach does violence to how we conduct science: science as a way of knowing."
The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (another Christian think tank) says that it "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."
Teaching Intelligent Design in the schools is part of a whole Christian Fascist movement in the United States that has power and prominence in the government, from the Bush regime on down. And if anyone isn’t clear about what "cultural legacies" the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture wants to overthrow--take a look at the larger Christian fascist agenda that the intelligent design movement is part of: asserting patriarchy in the home, condemning homosexuality, taking away the right to abortion, banning sex education, enforcing the death penalty with the biblical vengeance of an "eye for an eye," and launching a war because "God told me [Bush] to invade Iraq."
Elvis has left the building.
Yep, it's all gone to crickets. :^)
Time for the benediction, Alamo-Girl?
Drama queen much?
And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all [men], apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; And [that] they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will. - 2 Timothy 2:23-26
What a thoroughly dishonest attempt at guilt by association.
Elvis is lurking.
you: What a thoroughly dishonest attempt at guilt by association.
Concerning “guilt by association”, I raised the point that Lewontin, Singer, Pinker and Dawkins all live in a “second reality". I hold to that assertion of their association.
The “guilt” I presume you mean concerns Singer’s attitude about babies. It was offered as an example of a potential public policy consequence of a "second reality". I don't know if the others share his view on infanticide, though they all appear to be metaphysical naturalists. And it is evident that "equal rights as animals" is a political consequence of that ideology.
Human Rights and Second Realities
The [grotesqueness of Second Realities]… must not be confused with the comic or humorous. The seriousness of the matter will be best understood, if one visions the concentration camps of totalitarian regimes and the gas chambers of Auschwitz in which the grotesqueness of opinion becomes the murderous reality of action. – ibid.
Richard Lewonton of MIT (evolution biology, genetics, social commentary) is a Marxist. He famously said:
Richard Dawkins of Oxford (ethologist) is an atheist on a mission to convert others using his own interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
I couldn't read Clinton's mind either. I still think he committed perjury. YMMV.
You made a list of four people you don't like, connected only by their atheism or agnosticism; took a particularly controversial, and IMO, offensive opinion of one of them, and tried to associate it with the others.
For shame!
Information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver or molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. It is however offset by dispersing heat in the local surrounding thus paying the thermodynamic tab.
You ask which of the below is the most (1) correlated (2) ordered (3) complex (4) random (5) entropied using which definition of complexity. The complexity measures from post 205 are: (a) Kolmogorov (b) Cellular Automata (c) Self-organizing Complexity (d) Functional complexity (e) Time complexity or the algorithmic complexity of a discrete function (f) Specified Complexity (g) Metatransition:
Previously you chose Kolmogorov complexity and on this reply post you choose c). I am presuming you are choosing c) as the most complex, not the most random, correlated, ordered or entropied.
Regardless of complexity measure, for most correlated, I would choose a) and e) has potential for a second though I do not have the time or inclination to determine a minimum program to arrive at the binary string.
For most ordered, I would choose d) because of the encoding/decoding (semiosis) and because the phrase has meaning.
For most random, I would only make a choice if we agreed that physical reality consisted solely of printable characters. In that case, I would choose b).
For most entropied, I would choose a) if we agreed physical reality consisted only of ‘A’s. In Shannon entropy, the most uncertain would be b).
Concerning complexity measures, I would choose as follows:
(b) Cellular Automata – b because of the number of cells, size of the string
(c) Self-Organizing Complexity - d because of emergent properties required to give meaning of the phrase
(d) Functional Complexity -d because of the encoding/decoding (semiosis)
(e) Time Complexity – b because of the length of the string, time to build it
(f) Specified Complexity – d because of the semiosis
(g) Metatransition – d because of the semiosis
hmmm. In certainty where none exists...
How are you certain that or where none exists?
Cordially,
I do however judge their ideology as a "second reality" which could have real consequences for all of us and our children if they were to gain political power. We Christians have both the right and the duty to judge such matters as opposed to judging the people themselves (I Cor 6:1-8, Matthew 7, etc.)
For instance, if society makes no distinction between man and beast then infanticide is "on the table". So we speak up against that "second reality".
Likewise, if public policy is that reality is materialistic happenstance then there is no absolute morality, and such issues as pedophilia must also be "on the table".
Likewise, if public policy is that the mind is an illusion which can cause nothing to happen then all legal consequences for personal conduct must be "on the table".
I'm not impressed by sanctimonious protestations. I'm impressed by actions. Protesting you love Dawkins and Pinker while smearing them with the taint of infanticide is nothing less than sinister.
If that's honestly what you think Alamo-Girl wrote, RWP you didn't understand what she wrote. Alamo-Girl was speaking to examples of persons who have constructed Second Realities. She came up with four names, and I happen to agree with her that they are well-qualified examples.
The term "Second Reality" was coined by Robert Musil and Hermeito von Doderer to designate the revolt against the divinely-ordained natural order of things, which constitutes a flight from reality and reason itself; for the operations of reason are ultimately premised on that order. The ancients thinkers from Heraclitus forward considered it a pneumopathological disease. Plato called it nosos, Aristotle nosemos; Cicero's word for it was aspernatio rationis, or "rejection of" or "contempt for" reason.
Such a person has deliberately chosen to inhabit a “dream world” designed to be hermetically sealed against any impressions or experiences that come from “outside.” His system is relentlessly self-referring and self-contained. Nonconforming data are simply screened out as illusory or nonexistent. The self-selected dream world that enfolds him is, of course, the “second reality.” It was adopted precisely because his existence in “first reality” had somehow become unbearable for him.
It will be argued: "So what? If someone wants to live in a dream world, that doesn’t have anything to do with me!"
But it does involve you, and me and every one else — whether a person creates a dream world for himself, or gets drawn into some other person’s dream world.
If history tells us anything it is that many constructors of Second Realities cannot be satisfied unless or until the rest of humanity accepts and approves their construction. And to this end, they are willing to employ certain means that, on first-reality grounds, would be excluded as illegitimate. Such means cover the ground from polemical propaganda, through outright censorship, through coercion, up to outright, mass-scale violence.
Karl Marx, for instance, absolutely forbade all questioning of his "system"; e.g., “dialectical materialism,” originally suggested to him by Hegel’s “scientific materialism.” You either had to accept it uncritically, “whole-cloth,” as “received doctrine” as it were; or you were identified as its “enemy.”
Perhaps you will object: "That’s ridiculous! How do you get from a 'dream' to 'mass-scale violence?' Dreams are of no consequence!"
As “epiphenomena,” and thus incapable of being causative factors, you would think the dreamer's dream is harmless. But "dreams" of this kind tend to become very real. To give the names of some dreamers: Lenin, Stalin; Hitler; Mao; others you can supply for yourself…. If you want to add Bill Clinton, that's OK with me. He clearly is a full-blown narcissist whose has transformed the entire world into a playground for his ambitions and desires....
The extraordinarily perceptive Eric Voegelin noted the spiritual implications involved in flights from first reality: “...a lack of seriousness in spiritual matters is by no means harmless. For a society cannot renounce the order of the spirit without destroying itself, and when the institutions which are to serve the life of the spirit ... cease to be serious, then their function will be taken over by men and institutions who do take their work seriously.... Indeed, one cannot realize a Second Reality, but the spiritual closure within it is a real phenomenon and has an actual effect on reality. In this regard the structure of the pneumopathological case [i.e., the case of a diseased spirit] doesn’t differ from that of the psychopathological [i.e., the case of the diseased mind]: the delusions of a paranoid person ... correspond to no reality, but the delusions are real and the actions of the paranoid enter into reality.... [The constructors of Second Realities have] overlaid the reality of [human] existence with another mode [in which] the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared....”
In so many words, it seems to me that what Voegelin is describing here boils down to the dreamer’s complete denial and refusal of the human condition. This is the source of the condition of “alienation,” which (it seems to me) arises from a sense of profound anxiety about the terms of human existence.
We could describe the anxiety this way: A human being is never consulted about the terms of his coming into the world, nor of his departure from it. In between birth and death, there is a litany of evils to which mortal human nature is subject. “The life of man is really burdened,” as Voegelin put it, “with the well-known miseries enumerated by Hesoid. We remember his list of hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the fear of the injustices to be suffered by the weaker man at the hands of the more powerful — not to mention the problem of Pandora.”
Notwithstanding, Voegelin continued, “as long as our existence is undeformed by phantasies, these miseries are not experienced as senseless. We understand them as the lot of man, mysterious it is true, but as the lot he has to cope with in the organization and conduct of his life, in the fight for survival, the protection of his dependents, and the resistance to injustice, and in his spiritual and intellectual response to the mystery of existence.”
Now the “lot of man” as just given is a description of the condicio humana, the human condition. It is the very basis for the idea of a common humanity, or of a brotherhood of mankind. It is my conjecture that it is possible for a person to take great umbrage at this condicio humana, to deplore and reject it, to see it as a grievous insult to one’s own assumed personal autonomy; and so to take flight in an alternative reality that can be structured more according to one’s own wishes and desires. And thus, a Second Reality is born.
So all things considered, I’ll take First Reality, the Great Hierarchy of Being — God – Man – World (nature, universe) – Society — any day, any time. I believe that human beings were put in this world to be creative actors, even if they never get to design the stage on which the acting (and observing) is being done, nor to control the writing of the script by which the play unfolds. And meanwhile they not only act, but suffer the actions of other actors or forces — personal or natural — from outside themselves.
Yet to recognize all this is to recognize the very basis of one’s own existential humanity. And to realize that the lot of any other man is no different. To go hole up in a Second Reality, to me, would be to lose one’s reason and probably one’s soul as well….
If you're wondering about the "relevance" of this topic to a science thread, let me give you an example of how "science" can contribute to the construction of an alternative reality: If a person were to say to me that science will some day find a cure for the human condition, I would think that I'm hearing from a denizen of a second reality.... My two-cents worth, FWIW RWP.
That's all this whole thread is about.
Excellent selection for the benediction, dear A-G! Thank you!!!
Agnostics and atheists, in other words. I'll let alone the bizarre idea that an entirely hypothetical ' divinely-ordained natural order of things', in your topsy turvy world, is designated as the 'first reality', and point out that this is nothing more than a religiously bigoted attempt to associate with infanticide failure to accept one particular set of values. And yours is simply an account of the history of this pathological fantasy, which interests me not in the least.
Events of last week in Europe have rather convinced me of what I have long suspected, that Islam is simply incompatible with Western Civilization. The intolerant tone of even the thoughtful religious types here on FR makes me wonder if I shouldn't replace 'Islam' with monotheism. If you think we're babykillers, then there's very little you should forgo in trying to stop us; conversely, if we perceive that we're regarded with this level of hatred, we should act accordingly.
I used these four in particular because they comment heavily in the public domain and thus could have a serious effect on public policy and hence, all of us.
One of them appears to hold views particularly offensive to you, RWP. But I'm sure there are Lurkers who are offended by the views of one of the other four and might conclude that I had smeared Singer by associating him with the one whose views they loathe.
But to me, and the point of my post and betty boop’s eloquent essay, is that the danger is in the "second reality" itself. It is indeed aspernatio rationis - a rejection of reason.
I would add that the tendency of some investigators in various disciplines to seek autonomy from all other disciplines is an early symptom of the pneumopathological disease. It should raise a “red flag” to us when the investigator refuses to look.
Also, how fascinating that you seem to equate Western Civilization with atheism/agnosticism. In my view – and I’m sure many others here – Western civilization is rooted in Judeo/Christian moral values. Jeepers, even the Supreme Court sees this and allows the Ten Commandments and Moses to be displayed for historical content.
It isn't "hypothetical," RWP. Until 150 years or so ago, most people in the West simply took it for granted that there is a Great Hierarchy of Being, which constitutes the dynamic relations that obtain among the participants, God, man, world, and society. This world view began to cystalize with the pre-Socratic Greeks, and was more fully articulated by both Plato and Aristotle; it is fully consonant with both Israelite and Christian understandings. One might say it is the signature "cosmology" or worldview of Western culture. It has been under attack by all manner of "rationalists" over the past 150 years, and has been targeted for outright destruction by every Left progressive since Marx.
You may not be a Marxist or Left progressive, RWP; but you should know the company you keep. For in this matter at least, it is readily apparent that you agree with them.
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