Brain Food (Amazingthing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed...)

The most amazing thing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed into its pages.

Godless: The Church of Liberalism
by Ann Coulter
(Crown Forum, 310 pages, $27.95)

What's most amazing about Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is the amount of intellectual meat she packs into 281 breezy, barb-filled pages. Among the topics the blonde bomb-thrower discusses in some depth are the following: liberal jurisprudence, privacy rights and abortion, Joe Wilson's modest career and inflated ego, and the solid record of failure in American public schools. The topics of Intelligent Design and Darwinism, to which the last eighty pages of text are devoted, are analyzed in even greater detail.

As one would expect from an author with a legal background, Supreme Court cases are high on Coulter's hit-list -- especially the idea of a "living Constitution." Citing various cases-in-point, Coulter shows that this popular doctrine is nothing more than a paralegal pretext for making the Constitution say whatever liberal judges want it to say. Though such a philosophy grants to the nation's founding document all the integrity of a bound and gagged assault victim, it at least has the virtue of mirroring liberals' self-referential view of morality.

Another dogma that Coulter skewers is the liberal commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Punish the Perp." This counterintuitive principle not only rejects the link between incarceration and lower crime rates, it also permits benevolent judges (like Clinton federal court nominee Frederica Massiah-Jackson) to shorten the sentence of child rapists so that other innocent children can pay the price for society's sins.

An unexpected bonus in this chapter is the author's extended sidebar on Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of Boston who, as his own correspondence shows, knew Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty but chose, for ideological and financial reasons, to portray them as innocent victims. In a related chapter, "The Martyr: Willie Horton," Coulter provides detailed information about Horton's crimes, Michael Dukakis' furlough program, and the precise nature of the Horton ads aired in the 1988 presidential campaign

CONTINUING THE RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, Coulter asserts in chapter five that abortion is the "holiest sacrament" of the "church of liberalism." For women this sacrament secures their "right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with." A corollary of this less-than-exalted principle is the right to suck the brains out of partially born infants. How far liberal politicians will go to safeguard this sacrament whose name must not be spoken (euphemisms are "choice," "reproductive freedom," and "family planning") is shown by an amendment offered by Senator Chuck Schumer that would exclude anti-abortion protestors from bankruptcy protection. How low these same pols will go is illustrated by the character assassination of Judge Charles Pickering -- a man honored by the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers but slimed by liberals at his confirmation hearing as racially insensitive. Coulter notes that the unspoken reason for this "Borking" of Pickering was the judge's prior criticism of Roe v. Wade.

The single chapter that Coulter's critics have honed in on is the one that exposes the liberal "Doctrine of Infallibility." This religiously resonant phrase applies to individuals who promote the Left's partisan agenda while immunizing themselves from criticism by touting their victim-status. In addition to the 9/11 "Jersey Girls," Coulter identifies Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and John Murtha as persons who possess, at least by Maureen Dowd's lights, "absolute moral authority." Curiously, this exalted status isn't accorded victims who don't push liberal agendas. Perhaps the fact that Republican veterans outnumber their Democrat counterparts in Congress, 87 to 62, has something to do with this inconsistency.

Coulter's next chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," focuses on the partisanship, compensation, and incompetence level of American teachers. A crucial statistic in these pages concerns the "correlation [that exists] between poor student achievement and time spent in U.S. public schools." In this regard, comments by Thomas Sowell and Al Shanker stand out. Sowell notes that college students with low SAT and ACT scores are more likely to major in education and that "teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession." From a different perspective, the late President of the American Federation of Teachers stated, with refreshing bluntness, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." The words of John Dewey, a founder of America's public education system, also fit nicely into Coulter's state-of-the-classroom address: "You can't make Socialists out of individualists -- children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." Coulter responds, "You also can't make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection."

The last third of Godless focuses on matters scientific. Chapter seven, "The Left's War on Science," serves as an appetizer for Coulter's evolutionary piece de resistance. Prior to that main course, Coulter provides a litany of examples that illustrate the left's contempt for scientific data that doesn't comport with its worldview. Exhibits include the mendacious marketing of AIDS as an equal opportunity disease, the hysterical use of anecdotal evidence to ban silicon breast implants, and the firestorm arising from Lawrence Summers's heretical speculation about male and female brain differences.

THE REMAINING CHAPTERS OF GODLESS all deal with Darwinism. Nowhere else can one find a tart-tongued compendium of information that not only presents a major argument for Intelligent Design but also exposes the blatant dishonesty of "Darwiniacs" who continue to employ evidence (such as the Miller-Urey experiment, Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, and the famous peppered moth experiment) that they know is outdated or fraudulent.

Within this bracing analysis, Coulter employs the observations of such biological and philosophical heavyweights as Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins, Michael Behe, and Karl Popper. The price of the whole book is worth the information contained in these chapters about the statistical improbability of random evolution, the embarrassing absence of "transitional" fossils, and the inquisitorial attitude that prevails among many scientists (and most liberals) when discussing these matters. Unlike biologist Richard Lewontin, who candidly admits that a prior commitment to materialism informs his allegiance to evolution, most of his colleagues (and certainly most of the liberal scribblers Coulter sets on the road to extinction) won't concede that Darwinism is a corollary, rather than a premise, of their godlessness.

Coulter's final chapter serves as a thought-provoking addendum to her searing cross-examination of evolution's star witnesses. "The Aped Crusader" displays the devastating social consequences that have thus far attended Darwinism. From German and American eugenicists (including Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger), to Aryan racists, to the infanticidal musings of Princeton's Peter Singer, Darwinian evolution boasts a political and philosophical heritage that could only be envied by the likes of Charles Manson. Yet it is a history ignored by liberals for whom Darwin's theory provides what they want above all else -- a creation myth that sanctifies their sexual urges, sanctions abortion, and disposes of God.

Coulter's book is clearly not a systematic argument for the idea that liberalism is a godless religion. Indeed, prior to the material on evolution, the concept is treated more as a clever theme for chapter headings than as a serious intellectual proposition. In those final chapters, however, Coulter manages to present a cogent, sustained argument that actually begins to link modern liberalism (or more specifically, leftism) to an atheistic perspective. At the very least Coulter succeeds in raising an important issue -- namely, that American courts currently ignore the religious or quasi-religious character of a philosophy that pervades public institutions and is propagated with public funds. This fact, if honestly recognized, would render contemporary church-state jurisprudence untenable. A Court taking these arguments seriously would have to recognize that all philosophies, including "liberalism," swim in the same intellectual current as religion.

THUS FAR, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA have focused almost all their attention on Coulter's take-no-prisoners rhetorical style -- and particularly on the "heartless" remarks about those 9/11 widows who seem to be "enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." Clearly, diplomatic language is not Coulter's forte, as one would also gather from this representative zinger: "I don't particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven."

What undercuts the liberals' case against Coulter on this score, however, is their own (not always tacit) endorsement of vile epithets that are regularly directed against President Bush and his supporters by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and a gaggle of celebrity politicos. Coulter employs the same linguistic standard against liberals (with a touch of humor) that they regularly use (with somber faces and dogmatic conviction) when they accuse conservatives of being racist homophobes who gladly send youngsters to war under false pretences to line the pockets of Halliburton executives. Hate-speech of this stripe is old-hat for leftists.

Until Air America, Helen Thomas, and most Democrat constituencies alter their rhetoric, I see no reason for conservatives to denounce Coulter for using, more truthfully, the same harsh language that leftists have employed, with no regard for accuracy, since the time of Lenin. When liberals denounce communist tyrants as fervently as they do real Nazis, then it will be time for Coulter to cool the rhetoric. Until that time her "verbal reprisals" serve a useful function within an intellectual marketplace that resembles a commodities pit more than a debating society.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, California. He is a regular columnist for San Diego's North County Times. His book reviews have also appeared in the American Enterprise Magazine, First Things, and Touchstone.

I do not want the Courts forbidding people from debating all of the positions.

The courts haven't issued any ruling about debating the issue of evolution or antievolution. They've only ruled on certain matters regarding how they're taught in the public school classroom, in introductory level science curricula.

And don't say that's not a difference. It's a huge difference. The scientific debate occurs in the scientific community: in the universe of those actually doing science and applying, and consequently testing, scientific theories and principles in the conduct of original and productive research.

With very rare exceptions, no such debate occurs in a high school biology classroom. That's just one of the places were the results of the debate are reported.

It's also a huge, and directly relevant, difference because if some antievolutionary view managed to find a place in public school curricula because it had first succeeded, on merit, in the scientific debate, then there could be no constitutional problem with that. Even if this view was held to have religious implications, that would be overridden by the "valid secular purpose" of teaching, in a science class, a theory that was objectively a part of science.

It's solely because you insist that a certain view be taught, in public schools, despite its failure to survive scientific debate (or even its failure to subjected thereto) that you have a problem with the courts.

Summary, from http://leftfieldperspectives.blogspot.com/2006/06/truth-about-evolution.html, of what Ann C's book shows us about evolution:

1. The truth about the entire fossil record, which shows a very non-Darwinian progression, noticeably lacking the vast number of transitional species we ought to see (if it were true)

This means that there are no fossils of things like a dog with antennae or a fish with hair. According to Darwin's supposed "survival of the fittest", if each one of the incremental mutations is more fit than what preceded it, which it has to be in order to survive, those transitional mutations should have stayed around long enough to appear in the fossil record, before mutating their way to something even better. But sadly, for the evolutionists, there are none.

2. The truth about the Cambrian explosion, in which virtually all the animal phyla suddenly appeared, with no Darwinian ancestors.

The Cambrian period was a relatively short period of time in which a vast quantity of plants and animals appeared on the scene in a blink of an evolutionary eye more than 500 million years ago. In a period of less than 10 million years, there is a sudden explosion of nearly all the animal phyla we have today. Leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins said, "It is as though they were just planted there, without evolutionary history."

3. The truth about the Galapagos Finch population changing not one bit since Darwin first observed them more than 170 years ago.

In a 1991 "Scientific American" article, Darwinist Peter Grant effused about the famous finches saying that if droughts came only once a decade, natural selection "would transform one species into another within 200 years." Well, it's been 170 years and we're still waiting.

4. The truth about the peppered moth experiment.

One of the major triumphs of the evolutionists was the "discovery" that peppered moths had the ability to change color according to their environment. They are photos of white peppered moths resting on black soot covered trees where they can easily be picked off by passing birds, and photos of them on white trees where they blend in, and likewise the black moths against white trees and black trees. The trouble is, Peppered moths are nocturnal (for the Liberals reading this, that means they only come out at night). Furthermore, they rest on the underside of branches, not on the outside of tree trunks. Subsequent studies showed that the moths that were supposed to have proven the "fact of evolution" had been dead, and pinned to the tree trunks by the "scientists" conducting the "study".

The Peppered moth "discovery" is still presented in biology textbooks as proof of evolution.

5. The truth about Haeckel's embryos being a fraud perpetrated by a leading German eugenicist.

Ernst Haeckel was a biologist and eugenicist who drew pictures of vertebrate embryos that purportedly demonstrated the amazing similarity of fish, chickens, and humans in the womb. Thus, proving that all vertebrates evolved from a similar looking organism 500 million years ago.

And then, in the 1990's British embryologist Michael Richardson was looking at vertebrate embryos through a microscope and noticed they look nothing like Haeckel's drawings. As it turns out, Haeckel was a fake. Richardson said, "It looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in Biology."

Today, Biology textbooks are still displaying Haeckel's doctored drawings to prove the "fact" of Evolution to impressionable young minds, like commenter Jim's.

6. The truth about the Miller-Urey experiment being based on premises no longer accepted.

This was a famous experiment in 1953, which seemed to re-create the beginnings of life in a test tube. Scientist Stanley Miller and Harold Urey reconstructed what was thought to be earth's early atmosphere. They sent a spark of electricity through the primordial soup, and a single amino acid appeared.

The first problem to arise was that for the next twenty years, scientists couldn't get close to the next step, which was to produce proteins. Simple amino acids aren't proteins, much less life, so the bridge between nonlife and life remained elusive.

But the real fly in the primordial soup arose in the early seventies, when geochemists realized that the Earth's early atmosphere was probably nothing like the gases used in the Miller-Urey experiment. Creation of even simple amino acids would have been impossible in Earth's real environment.

The Miller-Urey experiment is still being taught in biology textbooks as proof of evolution.

7. The truth about the non-existence of computer simulations of the evolution of the eye.

There have long been bald assertions by Darwinists of the existence of a computer simulation of the evolution of the eye. David Berlinski tracked down the scientists alleged to have performed this wondrous feat, and discovered it doesn't exist.

In the end, the only evolutionists' argument is contempt. They know that if people are allowed to hear the arguments against evolution all will be lost. So they go to extreme ends to prevent any other possibilities from being taught in schools. Like Intelligent Design. So they demonize the people making the arguments. They say things like, "You're just saying that because you believe in God! You probably believe in a flat earth, too!" That's the kind of argument they usually revert to.

What all this boils down to is simply this:

Evolutionist are willing to believe anything, assume anything, and even lie to promote their belief that there is no God. They look at things they can't explain and say, "We can't explain it, but the one thing we do know is that there is no intelligence in the universe".

At least, there is no intelligence in evolutionists."""

And even beyond these points, Ann points out that evolutionist don't offer a detailed summary of how the process worked, just a lot of speculation about how it "might" have worked. It's a theory, because nobody knows what species "decended" from a previous species, or how, precisely, DNA "evolved," or the cell for that matter, or why humans are the only species to "evolve" language and communication and reasoning skills that allow civilized interaction (why aren't there other species building and living in cities and philosophizing and building hospitals?), The underlying theme of Ann's devastating critique: Evolutionist ask us to believe, in essence, that Shakespeare's works really were written by the proverbial bunch of monkeys with typewriters - i.e., that all of humanity and life is a product of chance and time and incredible coincidence. And they ask us to believe this based on their hypotheses about how things happened - but no proven instance of one species actually evolving from another.

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