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KU prof's e-mail irks fundamentalists (Christian Bashing OK)
Wichita Eagle ^ | 25 Nov 2005 | Associated Press

Posted on 11/25/2005 8:34:07 AM PST by Exton1

KU prof's e-mail irks fundamentalists

http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/living/religion/13252419.htm

Associated Press

LAWRENCE - Critics of a new course that equates creationism and intelligent design with mythology say an e-mail sent by the chairman of the University of Kansas religious studies department proves the course is designed to mock fundamentalist Christians.

In a recent message on a Yahoo listserv, Paul Mirecki said of the course "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and Other Religious Mythologies":

"The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category mythology."

He signed the note "Doing my part (to upset) the religious right, Evil Dr. P."

Kansas Provost David Shulenburger said Wednesday that he regretted the words Mirecki used but that he supported the professor and thought the course would be taught in a professional manner.

"My understanding was that was a private e-mail communication that somehow was moved out of those channels and has become a public document," Shulenburger said.

The course was added to next semester's curriculum after the Kansas State Board of Education adopted new school science standards that question evolution.

The course will explore intelligent design, which contends that life is too complex to have evolved without a "designer." It also will cover the origins of creationism, why creationism is an American phenomenon and creationism's role in politics and education.

State Sen. Karin Brownlee, R-Olathe, said she was concerned by Mirecki's comments in the e-mail.

"His intent to make a mockery of Christian beliefs is inappropriate," she said.

Mirecki said the private e-mail was accessed by an outsider.

"They had been reading my e-mails all along," he said. "Where are the ethics in that, I ask."

When asked about conservative anger directed at him and the new course, Mirecki said: "A lot of people are mad about what's going on in Kansas, and I'm one of them."

Mirecki has been taking criticism since the course was announced.

"This man is a hateful man," said state Sen. Kay O'Connor, R-Olathe. "Are we supposed to be using tax dollars to promote hatred?"

But others support Mirecki.

Tim Miller, a fellow professor in the department of religious studies, said intelligent design proponents are showing that they don't like having their beliefs scrutinized.

"They want their religion taught as fact," Miller said. "That's simply something you can't do in a state university."

Hume Feldman, associate professor of physics and astronomy, said he planned to be a guest lecturer in the course. He said the department of religious studies was a good place for intelligent design.

"I think that is exactly the appropriate place to put these kinds of ideas," he said.

John Altevogt, a conservative columnist and activist in Kansas City, said the latest controversy was sparked by the e-mail.

"He says he's trying to offend us," Altevogt said. "The entire tenor of this thing just reeks of religious bigotry."

Brownlee said she was watching to see how the university responded to the e-mail.

"We have to set a standard that it's not culturally acceptable to mock Christianity in America," she said.

University Senate Executive Committee Governance Office - 33 Strong Hall, 4-5169

Faculty

SenEx Chair

Joe Heppert, jheppert@ku.edu , Chemistry, 864-2270 Ruth Ann Atchley, ratchley@ku.edu , Psychology, 864-9816 Richard Hale, rhale@ku.edu ,Aerospace Engineering, 864-2949 Bob Basow, basow@ku.edu , Journalism, 864-7633 Susan Craig, scraig@ku.edu , Art & Architecture, 864-3020 Margaret Severson, mseverson@Ku.edu , Social Welfare, 864-8952
University Council President Jim Carothers, jbc@ku.edu , English 864-3426 (Ex-officio on SenEx)

Paul Mirecki, Chair The Department of Religious Studies, 1300 Oread Avenue, 102 Smith Hall, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Kansas,Lawrence, KS 66045-7615 (785) 864-4663 Voice (785) 864-5205 FAX rstudies@ku.edu


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: Kansas
KEYWORDS: bigot; christian; crevolist; goddoodit; ku; lefty; leftybigot; mirecki; muslim; religion
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To: Right Wing Professor
Being rude and antagonistic is protected speech.

Yes, but that doesn't mean it is seemly, or tasteful, or becoming.

221 posted on 11/25/2005 9:19:27 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Quark2005
Why don't you prepare an alternative scientific model of the Creation of the universe that explains the observed cosmic redshift, 3 degree Kelvin isotropic background radiation, universal H/He/Li element ratios and increasing presence of quasars & bluer stars with greater astronomical distances; then get back to us with your findings.

How many years of funding will you provide ? :-)

222 posted on 11/25/2005 9:20:52 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Coyoteman
There is a tree-ring sequence, but I am not as failiar with that one.

Hmmm, Wagner's Ring Cycle, One Ring to Rule them All, The Postman Always Rings Twice, but no tree-ring sequence...

Cheers!

223 posted on 11/25/2005 9:25:51 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: AndrewC
So you equate "mocking" and "criticism"?

RWP often gets too irritated, too quickly, to engage in substantive discourse, or intellectual criticism, though he is generally capable of it. So he resorts to "mocking" as a first resort.

:-)

224 posted on 11/25/2005 9:27:34 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Virginia-American
I wonder what the percentage of corrupt preachers is compared to the percentage of corrupt scientists.

"Actually corrupt, but nobody has found out yet" or "Corrupted AND exposed" ??

Cheers!

225 posted on 11/25/2005 9:29:46 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Virginia-American
They [scientists] can be as corrupt as a prophet who claims God tells him to collect money and women from amongst his flock.

IIRC, Leon Lederman, Nobelist in physics and director of Fermilab, was quoted as saying (more or less) "Science is not a religion. If it were we'd have a lot easier time raising money."

But you know, it gets more complicated than that--most of the funding at places like Fermilab is appropriated by Congress, and since the ACLU places walls of separation between church and state, then if science were a religion, they'd have to get their funding somewhere else... :-)

Cheers!

226 posted on 11/25/2005 9:32:36 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: PatrickHenry
In discussions like this, we should be careful about our terminology, so that we're all using words in the same way. One can "believe" in the existence of the tooth fairy, but one does not -- in the same sense of the word -- "believe" in the existence of his own mother. Belief in the first proposition (tooth fairy) requires faith, which is the belief in something for which there is no evidence or logical proof. The second proposition (mother) is the kind of knowledge which follows from sensory evidence. There is also that kind of knowledge (like the Pythagorean theorem) which follows from logical proof. In either case -- that is, belief in things evidenced by sensory evidence or demonstrated by logical proof -- there is no need for faith.

In between mother and the Pythagorean theorem are those propositions we provisionally accept (or in common usage "believe"), like relativity and evolution, because they are scientific theories -- logical, testable, and therefore falsifiable explanations of the available, verifiable data (which data is knowledge obtained via sensory evidence).

There are also other usages of the word "belief". For example, that of general reputation--"You're never going to believe what those cretins at Air America said now !"
Or, belief of an individual person: "He said he was studying in his dorm room all night and didn't go near the party." "I don't believe it for an instant!"

Then again, you have "scientific" belief, in which you strongly suspect something based upon preliminary physical evidence, but you haven't double-checked: "I believe this man was POISONED!" (After the autopsy, the belief is ratified, and you say the man WAS poisoned; or you shamefacedly explained why you jumped to the wrong conclusion.) This differs from your Pythagorean theorem above in that it is a specific concrete instance and not a general proposition.

And of course there is religious belief.

Cheers!

227 posted on 11/25/2005 9:38:43 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Doctor Stochastic
I had no idea a mathematician would have such difficulty with common English words.

From this website about Norber Weiner, John Von Neumann, and other mathematicians...

Apparently many mathematicians have difficulties with common English words.

Weiner was in fact very absent minded. The following story is told about him: When they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied, "Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget."

The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened...

Cheers!

228 posted on 11/25/2005 9:43:15 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Right Wing Professor
We're happy to have mathematicians work out the gory details of algorithmic computability, on the admittedly over optimistic hope they might come up with something useful.

'Twere not for the pure mathematicians and theorists, a lot of applied folks would still be trying to invent perpetual motion machines. A lot of the mathematicians' best work is in heading people off from dead ends, too.

Cheers!

229 posted on 11/25/2005 9:49:39 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: AmishDude
You guys remind me of a caveman. The mathematician is sitting around at his wheel store, and you walk by saying, "No thanks, I'll just invent it all over again. This hexagonal idea looks really promising."

That reminds me of another one about the rich man entering thoroughbred racing.

He commissions three technical types--a biologist, an engineer, and a physicist--to assist him.

He gives them each a bundle of money and asks them to report on their progress in a year.

The biologist reports first. "Well, sir, we have gone through extensive geneaologies, DNA studies, and after everything is done, we have found brown horses run the fastest, nothing else matters as much."

The engineer steps up. "We have done biomechanical studies, high-speed photography of the animals' stride, and we have found horses with thin, spindly legs run the fastest."

The physicist reports. "Well, we're not quite close enough for definite conclusions, so if you don't mind, we'd like to get funding for another year. But the case of the spherical horse has proved really interesting."

Cheers!

230 posted on 11/25/2005 9:55:39 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: grey_whiskers

Thank you. The mathematician would just dig up the corpse of Secretariat and reduce it to a previously-solved problem.


231 posted on 11/25/2005 9:57:47 PM PST by AmishDude (Your corporate slogan could be here! FReepmail me for my confiscatory rates.)
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To: Right Wing Professor
Just so you know where Sen. O'Connor is coming from, she also believes women should not have been given the right to vote, because it damages family values.

Actually, if you consider that the so-called "gender gap" (or as Rush Limbaugh called it, the "arousal gap") is what got Bill Clinton elected, she's right. :-)

Cheers!

Full Disclosure: G.K. Chesterton argued against female suffrage in England because he felt that women making their views known through the body politic diluted their power by subsituting voting power for the power to persuade the man in their life :-)

232 posted on 11/25/2005 9:58:44 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: PatrickHenry

Thanks for the ping!


233 posted on 11/25/2005 9:59:52 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: AmishDude
EXACTLY! That's what makes mathematicians the only ones who actually know what they're doing. We prove it. Period. It's always right or always wrong.

What about Gödel's theorem ? ;-)

234 posted on 11/25/2005 10:02:18 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: grey_whiskers

But you see "unprovability" can be proven true.


235 posted on 11/25/2005 10:05:13 PM PST by AmishDude (Your corporate slogan could be here! FReepmail me for my confiscatory rates.)
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To: longshadow
"Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view."

Do you mean some peoples' minds work like a Dirac delta function, or that their mind is a singularity?

Full Disclosure: And if the latter, what passes for their personal Hawking radiation?

Cheers!

236 posted on 11/25/2005 10:05:17 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: Right Wing Professor

"Aw, poor baby! Now mockery is persecution!"

Nope. The sort of mockery under discussion here has always been persecution. Your attempt to deny that obvious fact merely shows your utter lack of moral compass.

"You, in reference to academics, said"

Nope. As I explained at quite some length the first time you mischaracterized my reply, I said those things in reference to the effort to drive religion from the public square.

There was some slim possibility that your first misreading of my remarks was an honest mistake. This time there is none.

"You're a troll, posting under multiple identities.
Liar. But hey, ask the mods to check."

Hey, one account from one provider at home, another from a computer at the university...there are simple ways to throw up smokescreens.

Thing is, though, you're just too crooked not to be cheating.


237 posted on 11/25/2005 10:06:54 PM PST by dsc
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To: AmishDude

Secretariat was a triple-crown winner too :-)


238 posted on 11/25/2005 10:07:03 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: AmishDude
'Twas a joke.

If you hang around the threads longer you will see I am an inveterate punster and pot-stirrer.

239 posted on 11/25/2005 10:08:06 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: grey_whiskers

Oh, I caught on.


240 posted on 11/25/2005 10:09:22 PM PST by AmishDude (Your corporate slogan could be here! FReepmail me for my confiscatory rates.)
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