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."
Indeed, this thread is like music and every thread has a tone. Personally, I don't much enjoy the monotone threads.
This thread is like improv jazz - each musician is bringing something different, lots of harmony punctuated with exciting phrases.
It is no big deal if the subsidiary systems of coherence (such as in a system of values) never conflict. If they do, all you need to do is see rule number one: all systems cohere. This means that the expressed hope in "why can't we all just get along" is is easily answered with "we get along by not getting along and by not getting along we get along." Our identification with one choice or another is indeed a fulfillment of being, but this being is Janus-faced. And it never minds that the world, as it is, is justifiably cruel, whenever. You can blame someone or something for this, but that's just because its an odd day.
The other view holds that there is a criterion of justice that underlies the statement "Tortue is not consistent with American values." And this criterion should underlie Hopi values.
And likewise, there are choices both consistent and inconsistent with Nature's values that are justifiable at all times and all places. --- unless you allow Nature a privileged status of being.
Kind of squishy, he was, in the end..
The sizzle of Humpty cooking in the noonday bright..
echoed like a dirge in the morning Wind..
and draped like a pall over a delicious sight..
It's not jazz without dissonance.
Sometimes you would like to think that Someone's Mind planned this universe but with all the lack of logic from evolutionists, I might be forced to believe that animals are smarter than humans.
Dissonance is only dissonance to the disassociated..
Other than that its a harmonious link to highlight the harmony in another key..
Just as someone who has always liked jazz, the word "dissonance" suggests the jazz would be unpleasant at points, but perhaps what you are calling dissonance - I am characterizing as excitement?
and Freeper threads (oops...)
Dissonance in jazz is like garlic to the Lamb chop.. added correctly you don't even its there.. but you like it.. and didn't even know it happened.. Some jazz is garlic with a chop passed over it.. You didn't even know the lamb chop happened.. And thats the difference between a meal and a headache.. Some people like pain..
Music begins with a note - personal, intimate, and illusive. As we seek to express that one note and join with others in the same effort, a symphony ensues. The symphony is a chaldron of our individual selves merging and flowing together not always in harmony, sometimes in conflict. At times, such as here and now, so harmonious as to make it clear to each participant that something ineffably divine is occuring.
I wonder what instrument and theme each of us considers we are playing. It may not be illustrative but certainly should be amusing.
I fancy myself a french horn playing those dulcet themes that are heard only occasionally yet reverbrate long after they are sounded. Sometimes my theme seems to have no bearing on the direction of the symphony. But always it drops deeply into the depth of the music and moves the work by a volition unseen and unheeded.
To be aware of the symphony and to listen to it is to achieve that spontaneity I spoke about many posts ago. Jesus knew the music, knew His part in it and played with a clarity and determination that moved the song of songs to wondrous melody.
Can we be conscious of the instrument we play and understand the music with such clarity that we are at one with the music of the spheres, the song of God?
The post is almost prose.. No it is prose.. The last line above.. ending on a high note.. Hmmm.. the instruments we play.. Quite deep.. Thanks.. Quite deep indeed..
The instruments we play and the music we make, an orchestration of Awe in a conversation of the spirit even allowing for the dissonance of a monologue to two.. Now thats what I call Free republic JAZZ..
Very deep.. Not all threads make it all the way to jazz but shucks practice makes perfect.. Good work Amos.. Jazz is based in Blues.. Free Republic Jazz is based in blues, reds, yellows, browns, greens and Purples.. even trolls are used to great effect.. The Song Of God is sung best in the Cyber Chapel, but thats just my preference.. Yes, Free Republic has a Cyber Chapel.. bring something or not you won't leave poor.. Better BRING someone POOR in spirit..
The final defense wrapup of the Dover case is posted at: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1523371/posts?page=8
Lengthy but important. Our conversation here resonates with much said in the defense's summation.
I have tried to steer clear of ID arguments.. When it dawned on me that ID is Agnostic Creativism by mostly agnostic activists with some creativist help or even mostly creativist help.. i.e. the enemy of your enemy is your friend..
Unless there is a topic that intigues me within the discussion.. that link you gave is to one of those threads.. Like every thread that Patrick Henry and some of the "minions"(ping list) infect.. I'm a stone fanatic creationist.. not worth Pat's time.. He appears, to me, to be trolling for RINOs.. who are even more confused democrats.. Free republic is a big place.. theres room for agnostics atheists and god believers.. Agreeing to disagree is not a step backwards its more like a side step.. so another can pass by..
If I'm a rock that has evolved to eat pizza.. according to my qualia.. and Pat is right.. whats the harm. I'm happier NOW than an extremely extreme right winger on the day 75% of the federal gov't is defunded and those effected employees are told to go get a reaL job.. AND if I'm right and Pat is wrong, I have prayed for Pat and am covered we are all responsible for our choices.. I'm GOLDEN.. Whats not to like.. We all see what we see, and Pat don't see what I see.. I'm quite sure.. I don't expect him to see anymore than he sees.. I expect honesty and he appears to be honest.. Everything is beautiful the best it can be.. Goats should not dwell with sheep but with goats..
Just had to go straight for the good stuff, Bouilhet. :^)
I’m glad you find the idea of “second reality” intriguing. IMO, Voegelin does an excellent job explicating this subject, pointing to evidentiary sources that are ancient yet made topical again, in the twentieth century, by Musil and von Doderer. Voegelin finds the “shorthand” description of the problem of second realities in Elias Canetti’s novel, Auto da fe, which is a work in three parts, under three titles, understood to be in successive or “progressive” order. These are the titles:
“A Head Without a World – Headless World – The World in One’s Head”Hegel had a field day with this construction, citing Aristotle’s Metaphysics along the way…. (Book XII, Part 7.) But I digress.
You wrote: “If there is a first Reality, then to some degree we all inhabit second realities; our access to the infinite (and I believe that at times, fleetingly, we do have access) is necessarily limited by our own finitude.”
Absolutely agreed, Bouilhet.
Alamo-Girl raises another quite pertinent question: “What are we to understand when you say reality is an illusion? What is the subject reality, and what do you mean when you [say] it is illusion? Do you … mean that it (whatever it is) deceives? How does it compare to Kant who thinks space is a category of rational intelligence and doesn't belong in empirical phenomena. Are we fair to say that whatever is not in our mind is illusory?”
Great questions, A-G! For Kant, apparently both space and time are “categories” of the human mind that subsist in a manner that is not at all the way “natural phenomena” subsist. Jeepers, but I cannot say whether I think he’s right or wrong about this. Honestly I just don’t know.
Here’s the problem: I have been trying to update my knowledge base in recent times to incorporate the insights coming from contemporary quantum field theory based on Standard Model physics.
The world that quantum field theory describes is not at all the world that you and I are accustomed to living and thinking in. If the theory is correct, then all our human perceptions of “concrete bodies” in nature is subject to reconsideration.
To put this into perspective, as a young person, somehow I got this idea into my head that my physical body was just a “robot” carrying around and executing the “program” that was me. (It seems I understood this “program” to be what theists call soul.) Clearly such thoughts expose the fact that cognitively I was operating in the Newtonian universe at the time.
But now we find we live in a “quantum universe.” Everything that exists is made up of exactly the same “stuff.” It has also been suggested that even “matter” is up for grabs, as not being a physical existent in its own right, but as being an epiphenomenon of force- and field-mediated energy relationships. As Voegelin put it, matter – in the Newtonian sense -- is on the verge of “disappearing altogether.”
And yet I have this sense of myself as being somehow “concrete,” with "firm borders" or "boundaries" that define and demark me from everything else around me – even though my existence is moving through, in the flux of, an unknown number of universal fields in a yet-unspecified number of dimensions, and there is absolutely nothing about me in terms of physical nature that is all that much different than a rock’s: Both I and rock equally depend on physics and chemistry, it seems. And the fields in which we mutually swim, so to speak. Why I am myself and not a rock, swimming through these common fields, I continue to explain to myself in terms of soul….
So, confronted by this problem, perhaps Kant had an epiphany: Space and time are categories of the human mind because one needs “categories” in order to sift the apparently random so to make it into a “something” that the mind can grasp and understand. Perhaps this propensity is “loaded into human nature” somehow. And perhaps it might change, evolve over time, as the articles in September 2005’s Science cited above indicate may be the case.
cornelis wrote: “When Einstein said ‘reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one’ he was speaking of local realism. In his view, behavior at the quantum level should be like it is at the classical level. It is not however the same…. Certainly we can’t continue to call illusion the realization that our view of reality is partial.” All views of reality are partial. Or so it seems to me…. That doesn’t make our partial view “illusion.” Meanwhile we try to open up our view of things by additions of new knowledge….
In Einstein’s case, perhaps he made the arguments he made in his extended debates with Bohr (e.g., in favor of local realism and contra “spooky action at a distance”) in defense of classical science -- even though he did as much as Bohr to unsettle that paradigm. Yet there are writings and statements from Einstein that suggest a mystical bent to his nature, an openness to the divine....
Bouilhet, I am delighted that you find Plato’s myth of the cave so interesting. A couple of further thoughts on that subject. (1) We want to question the reality of the Light as something philosophically necessary. I don’t have a problem with that; but frankly, I’m not done with the prisoners yet. The shadows cast on the cave wall are the shadows of the prisoners themselves: the light source is at their back. That is a stunningly profound statement, IMO. (2) The myth is about “ascent and descent” – the one prisoner who escapes his chains, turns around (the periagoge), and climbs up out of the cave towards the Light. What does Plato mean by this? And then the prisoner descends back into the cave, to relate his experiences of the Light to his fellow prisoners – who wish to beat and kill him as the expression of their thanks for his “interventions” into their happy dream world.
This “ascent” and “descent” business seems to me to be the great myth Plato told to explicate his experiences in the Metaxy, his model of psyche (human and, I suspect, cosmic as well). I drew a picture of that once. I’d post it, but I’d need to ask a friend to host the graphic for me. I find this a most fascinating issue – and wondered if you'd be inclined to look at it in greater detail.
Anyhoot, I’ve run on too long as usual. Couldn’t help myself, the conversation is just so stimulating – and so much appreciated. Sorry to have not responded sooner – I’m on drop-dead deadline at work and have had little time to think, let alone write, these past several days. But I did get a chance to read, at lunch.
And so, thank you so very much, Alamo-Girl, Bouilhet, cornelis, for your excellent essay/posts.
p.s.: I do agree with your statement, Bouilhet: "it is not our reason which perceives reality but which processes the reality we perceive; deficiencies of reason may imply deficiencies of perception, but the inverse does not hold: reason is not reality. Rather it is a means by which we keep reality coherent for ourselves [e.g., Kant's categories qualify here?]. The gaps (often chasms) only indicate, for me, a cracked surface; they are not erasable, to my mind, and I don't see why they should necessarily be unwelcome." (Notwithstanding, still it seems one has to deal with "the observer problem"....)
Been studying this stuff for awhile too.. Seems like a lot of if'n to me.. Kantian and Hegelian figments long ago bored me.. but string theory as much I can grasp seemed interesting.. for awhile.. You know what I did, I developed a theory of my own.. Scientific?.. LoL.. not hardly.. And until something concrete is proven (to me) I'm gonna go with it..
I propose that this Universe is composed of designated matter and un-designed matter.. Any matter is energy in one form or the other.. and human spirit is un-designated matter.. all the solids we know about are designated matter.. basically everything "I' know about in the Universe as this Universe is designated.. thats where I get the Universe is three dimensional but the spirit is 4th dimensional.. Because I cannot justify the 1st and 2nd dimensions.. anything I know of deemed 1st or 2nd dimensional is still 3 dimensional always.. actually I know of nothing not 3rd dimensional and no way to prove any other dimensions exist except in our heads.. Like we are limited to this dimension.. for NOW.. that is my point.. i.e. the 4th dimension being the spiritual dimension..
Is it TRUE.?. who knows.. If there is a God and God can manipulate "matter" at will.. Why not.. Mathematics can conceive of infinity but that don't mean it can access infinity accurately or at all. There could be a Cypher Ceiling to math.. i.e. so far and no farther.. For sure there is with me a Cypher Cieling..
Designated matter and un-designated matter.. has possibilities and some string theory might even support it too.. Jesus walking on water etc.. might not be mythical visions of a fanatical moonbat.. What IF "we" with a new conduit(BODY) could designate or un-designate matter in this Universe, in the "future".. Kinda gives "heaven" a whole new scope and a range of possibles.. Anyway maybe I'M the Moonbat.. I'm o.k wid dat... been one for a long time.. I'm used to it..
Course YOU conversing with a Moonbat might effect your good name.. d;-) LoL..
And I agree with hosepipe, there is no music on this forum which compares with the "Cyber Chapel" - where there is single minded Christian worship. Unspoken things, beautiful things.
Boy... my mind wants to expand the metaphor to other animals.. I'm fightin it though.. LoL..
But, er, you have attributed cornelis' questions to me. I take that as a huge compliment, by the way.
Also, if you need a host for your chart please let me know.
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