Posted on 06/16/2007 3:05:47 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
The first work, by Katharine O'Keefe, is a brilliantly simple, but momentous, alphabetical compilation, [10] with curricula vitae, of the members of the British and American eugenics societies, groups dedicated to genetic hygiene based on evolutionary biology. O'Keefe's work reveals that, throughout the twentieth century, eugenic philosophers held vast institutional influence over public policy, education, economics, science, medicine and law. [11] Significant too, she documents the groups' explicit strategy, after Nazism had exposed the deadly consequences of "applied biology," to conduct eugenic activities by using the names of other organizations. [12]
The second work, Unifying Biology: Evolutionary Biology and the Evolutionary Synthesis, [13] by Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, identifies Darwinians who worked feverishly in the 1940's, allegedly to prevent the theory of natural selection from being extinguished by the fast-developing hard sciences of physics and chemistry, [14] but does not mention contemporaneous decisions to pursue eugenics under other names.
The leaders of the effort to "unify" biology and other sciences around natural selection were in fact, as revealed by O'Keefe's research, some of the century's leading eugenicists. According to Smocovitis, the key man who founded the unification, or "synthesis," effort was Sir Julian Huxley, whose life "was devoted to leading a crusade . . . to ground a humanistic philosophy in evolution." [15] Julian Huxley was a central figure in the twentieth-century history of eugenics. He was a leader of the British Eugenics Society, the first president of UNESCO, a charter member of the Society for the Study of Evolution [SSE], [16] discussed later, and the SSE's vice-president in 1948. [17]
Huxley wrote, "Evolution - or to spell it out, the idea of evolutionary process - is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth. Above all, it unifies our knowledge and our thought . . . Thus the evolutionary idea must provide the main unifying approach for a humanist educational system, and evolutionary biology could and should become a central or key subject in its curriculum." [18] Huxley had been alarmed about a decline in evolutionary studies, "in part because it undermined his evolutionary humanism and his progressive worldview."[19]
To eugenicists, "progressive" means "evolutionary progress." Huxley's "unification" effort was "to help extend and legitimate both evolution and biology." [20] To Huxley, that meant even replacing religion:
I believe that an equally drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary - from a God-centered to an evolution-centered pattern. [21]Today the God hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable, has lost its explanatory value and is becoming an intellectual and moral burden on our thought. It no longer convinces or comforts, and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief . . . once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, we must construct something to take its place. [22]
Huxley's 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, [23] emphasizing evolutionary progress, "offered an inquiry . . . into an ethical system, an ethos, grounded in evolution . . . with its fundamental principle of natural selection." [24] Referring to evolutionary humanism, Smocovitis observed that it bore "special signification for religious systems of thought . . ." and "represented an end to conventional Judeo-Christian thought . . ." [25]
Besides Charles Darwin, his cousin Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's son Major Leonard Darwin, [26] and grandson, Sir Charles Galton Darwin [27] all carried the family's dynastic ideology long into the twentieth century - the idea that Malthusian scarcity in nature randomly determines genetic supremacy. Darwin's followers continued the general argument that superior traits are naturally selected when another gene dies in a life and death competition over "inadequate resources." [28]
On how natural selection applied to humans, evolutionists seemingly ignored evidence of man's survival as being due to his purposeful, intelligent efforts to design habitats and develop resources favorable to human survival. Instead, as in the Descent of Man, eminent Darwinians continued to insist that human intelligence interferes with man's evolutionary progress. [29] Some evolutionists like Margaret Sanger denounced religious tenets of equality, compassion and charity, contending they cause genetic deterioration in the human race, [30] leading eventually to man's extinction: i.e., people vaguely deemed "unfit" and "unwanted" should die off instead of being helped to survive and possibly reproduce their kind.
It wasn't Darwin, but rather his cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who invented the name and the "science" of eugenics, [31] endowing an academic chair for it in London in 1904. [32] University recognition bestowed prestige upon eugenics, attracting the world's most highly educated and wealthiest bigots who were eager both to study eugenics and to support it financially. By 1922, scientists and blue-bloods had organized politely-named Eugenic Societies around the world. The global leadership was located in the United States, Germany and Great Britain. [33]
The 1925 Scopes Trial in Tennessee supposedly commemorates the triumph of Darwin over religion. Perhaps it was chance that the case arose in the Deep South, where bigotry had been particularly institutional. In fact, the trial commemorated the legality of teaching the biological inferiority of certain races and classes of people. [34] The textbook on trial in that famous case, Hunter's A Civic Biology, [35] espoused white supremacy and the "science" of eugenics, thus bolstering through education the sterilization campaigns going on at that time by the "scientific" communities in the United States. The 1930's campaigns in Germany, fashioned after American laws, are credited as the psycho-social beginning of the Holocaust. [36]
Historical scholars in the 1990's published the connections between the American Eugenics Society, current family planning and population control systems and - the Third Reich. Members of the American Eugenics Society received thankful correspondence from Adolf Hitler, accepted honors from Nazi universities, applauded the Nazi regime, served as legislative inspiration for sterilization and anti-immigration laws, and rehabilitated German scientist Dr. Otmar Von Verscheur, collaborator with Josef Mengele, the Terror of Auschwitz. Researchers meticulously documented how, after World War II, members of the eugenics societies reinvented themselves to the public, under disciplines like family planning, demography, population studies, and others. Household names who advocated a government birth-control system, like Margaret Sanger, Alan Guttmacher, even two Rockefellers, were all members of the American Eugenics Society. [37]
Not only does the toxic spill of eugenics poison federal family planning and population control systems, even federally funded genetic research, but now a Huxleyan eugenic vision forms the theoretical model of the National Science Education Standards. [38] Both the national and a modified Kansas version approach science as "unified concepts" - unified by natural selection, while emphasizing scarcity, heredity and population genetics. [39]
The outline of the NSES' "unified concepts," teaches a point-of-view, a philosophy of science developed by groups, some of which have long histories of leadership by and affiliation with members of the American Eugenics Society. In fact, the standards expressly state that they de-emphasize facts, and instead stress abstract concepts. [40] The philosophy contained in the standards, even as modified by the state of Kansas, is incompatible with Christian beliefs - according to the admissions made, before there was a controversy, by the men who developed the standards.
Moreover, the science standards are corrupt ab initio; deleting a word or a phrase cannot salvage them. If the standards were likened to an unsafe building, then it would have to be completely rebuilt with a new foundation, stronger beams and new walls - not just more windows, ventilation and fire escapes. The boundary, the framework, the outline of the science standards which purports to define what constitutes scientific thought is fundamentally contemptible because it is
While the controversy in Kansas surrounded the book entitled National Science Education Standards (NSES), this book was actually compiled by the cooperation of two powerful, out-of-state private groups, aided by the federal government and wealthy, private foundations.
The key groups drafting the science standards include: [41]
The American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. (AAAS), which operates with annual revenues of $44 million. The AAAS initiative relating directly to the publication of the NSES book is known as Project 2061: Science Literacy for a Changing Future. [42]
The National Research Council in Washington D.C. (NRC), which operates with annual revenue of $180 million. [43] The NRC is a subsidiary of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a private, non-profit organization chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific matters.
Funding for the National Research Council's work on the NSES project was from private, non-profit foundations and public tax dollars from federal agencies including the National Science Foundation; the U.S. Department of Education; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and the National Institutes of Health. [44]
Funding for the AAAS' Project 2061 was by foundations including Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Hewlett-Packard Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [45]
Clued by the phraseology of the science standards that they were attempting to define an "approved scientific thought," I investigated a curious catch-phrase peppering the content of the science standards, "science is a way of knowing." The phrase turned up in the "for further reading" section of the national standards as the title of a book by John A. Moore.
Moore is a California biologist who is officially acknowledged for his contributions to the NSES. [46] In his book, Science as a Way of Knowing: the Foundations of Modern Biology, [47] he expresses personal admiration for the work of German biologist, Ernst Haeckel, whose work he analyzes in some detail. [48]
Moore fails to mention, however, a critical piece of information about Haeckel, who was "a towering figure in German biology and an early Darwinian." [49] Haeckel was also "a racist, a believer in a mystical Volk, and a strong advocate of eugenics" [50] who "can be claimed as a direct ancestor" of the Nazi "euthanasia" project." Haeckel believed "wooly-haired Negroes" were not only incapable of higher mental development, but that they were "psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans . . . [and therefore] we must . . . assign a totally different value to their lives." [51]
Despite such a glaring historical lapse in a Harvard-published book purporting to be a history of biology, Science as a Way of Knowing is incorporated by reference into the NSES, at least twice for further reading, and the phrase is used and highlighted in the NSES text. [52]
I was alarmed that the NSES relied heavily on Moore's book as a reference and even incorporated its title throughout the text. But it concerned me more that, on its dust jacket, his 1993 [53] book bears official endorsements by, among others, the highest-ranking men in the groups overseeing the national standards and two other men with decidedly bio-philosophical points of view:
Out of seven endorsers listed on Moore's book cover, four are contributors to the NSES. [54] Moore and at least four endorsers appear to have been colleagues in Huxley and Mayr's Society for the Study of Evolution, a group for which Moore is himself a past-president. [55]
According to documentation in Smocovitis' Unifying Biology, it was Huxley and his contemporary, Ernst Mayr who formed the Society for the Study of Evolution as part of their move to "synthesize" or "unify" (some might say contaminate) all concepts of science with Darwin's doctrine of natural selection. Appearing to cap long-time career goals, Mayr is the lead endorser of Moore's book, while a Mayr essay appears in materials published by a textbook group, the Biological Science Curriculum Studies, whose president chaired the content committee of the national standards.
In fact, the NSES book and the Kansas Science Standards, as modified, do seem to promulgate the SSE's "unified concepts," as Mayr, Huxley and fellow SSE founders and members may have envisioned.
A quick review of three early members of the SSE reveals fatal flaws in placing reliance upon these men's vision of science. One charter member of the SSE was the infamous Alfred C. Kinsey, [56] "sex-researcher," now exposed for committing wholesale fraud in publishing his conclusions in 1948 and 1953, and for soliciting pedophiles to share with the Kinsey Institute their "research" on their child-victims. [57] Moreover, Kinsey was a self-avowed eugenicist.
Hermann J. Muller, a member of the American Eugenics Society, was a 1946 "Council Member" of the SSE, who became the SSE's vice-president in 1952 and president in 1957. [58] After Muller had worked in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia on "genetics," [59] he was a Kinsey colleague at the Kinsey Institute.
For many people, simply knowing that the fathers of the theory of "unified concepts" are eugenicists is enough reason to reject the science standards. In 1931, Huxley put his eugenic vision this way:
Man has become what he is by a process of evolution which has taken perhaps a thousand million years; there is no reason why that evolution should not continue . . . If the past with its crude methods has taken life from single cell, or whatever simpler units it at first inhabited, to man, what may not man do in the future with the aid of conscious reason and deliberate planning. On its negative side it becomes racial preventative medicine; on its positive side, racial hope . . . And once this is so, the pressure of public opinion to get something done will become so great that something will be done . . . We cannot yet see what those discoveries will be, or envisage the organization of a eugenic society. But knowledge will slowly grow, and ways and means can surely be found. And so man may take up his birthright, which is to become the first organism exercising conscious control over its own evolutionary destiny [60] [emphasis added].
Even though Hitler had been defeated, Huxley was more blunt in 1947 about the politics of his vision:
[E]ven though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable [61] [emphasis added].
Moore's failure to identify the relationship between the "foundations of modern biology" and the Holocaust is evidence of why education, when it is "standardized" or monopolized by any single publisher or government, can quickly be made a tool of despots. Historians' assessment of Ernst Haeckel is available in bookstores in a still-published book, Nazi Doctors, by Robert J. Lifton (Basic Books 1986). Moore, purporting to write Science as a Way of Knowing about the historical foundations of modern biology, could not have avoided seeing racism in Haeckel's The History of Creation. Moore's book actually duplicates an illustration from Haeckel's book, [62] a book in which Haeckel stated:
The Caucasian, or Mediterranean man . . . has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect . . . If we are to draw a sharp boundary between them, it must be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.[63]
Science as a Way of Knowing not only fails to identify Haeckel's significance to the rise of Nazi eugenics, but Moore fails in the same way in writing about Sir Francis Galton. Moore does discuss Galton, [64] but fails to mention that Galton is the father of the eugenics movement. In England, as a matter of fact, the eugenics group is now called the Galton Institute.
It strains credulity to believe that Moore does not know Galton's and Haeckel's primary significance in the history of biology. Moore's omissions of material information should be viewed as fatal, whether it was done negligently, or intentionally. However, as will be explained, these are not the only "scientists" whom Moore references in his book, without disclosing their identities as eugenicists.
Moore's book, moreover, exudes anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant Fundamentalist bigotry. Moore, a biologist, spends nearly half of his book in poor explanation of different philosophies, with an entire chapter titled "The Judeo Christian World-View." In contrast to his admiration for Haeckel, and his nonchalant reference to Galton, Moore expresses stereotypes and disdain for Christians and the history of the Catholic Church. Throughout Science as a Way of Knowing, Moore regards his scientific worldview as distinct from, and incompatible with, his distorted definition of a "Judeo-Christian worldview."
For example, he says: "The Judeo-Christian worldview had been accepted as adequate for centuries - and remains so for many individuals today - but it leads to a very different view of nature than the one provided by modern science." [65] Rather than reconciling science and religion, Moore repeatedly goes out of his way to polarize them, saying for example, the discovery of fossils was to "involve science and the Judeo-Christian worldview in yet another confrontation - one that lingers to this day." [66]
In his book, Moore calls biology a "conceptual science." [67] He states, "True belief requires the acceptance of some things and not the other." [68] Moore claims "the statements of science are derived ultimately from the data of observation and experimentation." [69] In contrast, he claims religious dogma "is interpreted by a caste of priests and is accepted by the multitudes on faith or under duress [emphasis added]." [70]
Moore misrepresents the foundations of Christianity by singling out St. Augustine, whom Moore ridicules in the course of five pages. [71] He also ridicules scripture and reports of miracles. [72]
He says, "One might seek to blame the Judeo-Christian dogma of special creation for inhibiting thought about descent with change, and to some extent this blame is valid." [73] Moore asserts: "It is true that the attitudes of the Church prevented the development of science for more than a thousand years and inhibited it for centuries . . . the Church never was a supporter of open minds." [74]
What kind of men does Moore view as open-minded? "Open mindedness" has a different meaning to Moore than to most people. Against his backdrop of religious bigotry, he elevates two men as being "eminent biologists," Hermann J. Muller and Theodosius Dobzhansky. [75] He does not disclose that both Muller and Dobzhansky were avid eugenicists.
Hermann J. Muller trained under Hitler's high-ranking Nazi scientist, Dr. Ernst Rudin, author of the 1933 Nazi sterilization laws. ". . . I acquainted myself with the genetic work of the Zoological Institute, and of the Institut fur Psychiatrie, under Dr. Rudin, whose very comprehensive material offers a nice field for the study of mutations in man, and of their inheritance." [76]
Rudin was director of the Research Institute for Psychiatry of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Munich. [77] In 1939, Hitler honored Rudin with a medal and a written statement celebrating him as the "meritorious pioneer of the racial-hygiene measures of the Third Reich." Honored again in 1944, Rudin received a "bronze medal bearing the Nazi eagle from Adolph Hitler, who lauded him as the 'pathfinder in the field of hereditary hygiene.'" [78]
Serving as an advisor to the American Eugenics Society at least as late as 1938, Dr. Ernst Rudin, a psychiatrist, was chief architect for the "Law for the Prevention of Heredity Disease in Posterity," which had taken effect in 1934. [79] According to one historian, Rudin demonstrates "in an extreme form, the attraction of the Nazi biomedical vision for a certain kind of biologically and genetically oriented scientist." [80]
The AAAS published an article by Muller in 1961, "Human Evolution by Voluntary Choice of Germ Plasm." [81] Writing then as a zoology professor with the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, Muller criticized a few colleagues in the American Eugenics Society as well as Germany's Eugen Fischer, because they "brought such odium upon the whole concept of eugenics as to run it into the ground." [82]
It is noticeable, however, that Muller's 1961 article does not renounce eugenics at all. Even though he criticized "racists and Hitlerites," he also criticized scientists who viewed all eugenics as dangerous and who "held that genetics in man could be left to care of itself" [83] [emphasis added].
Like Alfred Kinsey, Muller called for an end to sexual boundaries:
". . . adequate implementation of eugenic policies also required a clearing away of the ancient heritage of superstition and taboos that had so obstinately enshackled human usages and preconceptions in matters of sex and reproduction [84] [emphasis added].
E. G. Conklin is another eugenicist esteemed in Moore's Science as a Way of Knowing for his "careful and capable" work. [85] Conklin was a pre-war Advisory Board member of the American Eugenics Society. [86] Recently the website for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, another group drafting the NSES, applauded Conklin who, as AAAS president in 1936, founded an international committee on "intellectual freedom." [87]
Conklin's position on the advisory board of the American Eugenics Society is a point omitted by the AAAS website as well as by Moore's book. In a possible chilling irony, Conklin's "intellectual freedom" may have been intended for the "science" of eugenics. Listed in the eugenic society's March-April 1936 journal, alongside Conklin's name, are other Advisory Board members: rabid racists and anti-Semites, like Americans C. G. Campbell and Madison Grant, and three German advisors who were among the highest-ranking Nazi scientists in the Hitler regime: Eugen Fischer, Ernst Rudin, and Falk Ruttke. [88]
In 1935, C. G. Campbell had publicly applauded Hitler in Berlin, at an International Congress for Population Science. His statements amounted to a public-relations favor for the Nazis, favorably reported by the New York Times [89] and Time [90] magazine. The Berlin Congress was "the apex of international support of Nazi race policies and represented a great success for the Nazi race propaganda machine." [91] Campbell served as the "senior representative of the American eugenics movement in Berlin," delivering a glowing assessment of Hitler's efforts:
It is from a synthesis of the work of all such men that the leader of the German nation, Adolf Hitler, ably supported by the Minister of Interior, Dr. Frick, and guided by the nation's anthropologists,its eugenicists, and its social philosophers, has been able to construct a comprehensive race policy of population development and improvement that promises to be epochal in racial history. It sets the pattern which other nations and other racial groups must follow, if they do not wish to fall behind in their racial quality, in their racial accomplishment, and in their prospect of survival [emphasis added]. [92]
When I read Campbell's words praising German population development and improvement, as a ". . . synthesis of the work . . . by . . . anthropologists . . . eugenicists and social philosophers. . . ," I shuddered. In my dictionary, the words "unify" and "synthesize" are synonymous. Both Huxley and Campbell, staunchly committed to eugenics, used the same description of an evolution-based synthesis; Campbell's 1935 language in Berlin about "synthesis" was echoed by Huxley in 1942, and appears to be the same evolution-based worldview, merely renamed in the NSES, as "unified concepts."
In the preface to his Science as a Way of Knowing, Moore disclosed that the book's name and the material for it came from a lecture series of the same name. The project resulted in a series of essays published in a zoology journal between 1984 and 1990. According to one participant in the "science as a way of knowing" project, "John Moore is the originator and guiding effort behind the entire (SAAWOK) effort." [93]
Also in the preface to Science As a Way of Knowing, Moore says the earlier project was stimulated by "the widespread feeling that human beings have become so numerous and are consuming resources so avidly that the earth cannot long continue to support our way of life." [94] The SAAWOK project "sought to help remedy these problems by providing materials to assist in understanding." [95]
As a practical matter, the materials do "assist in understanding" what "remedies" Moore and his endorsers envision. For example, Moore recommended in the SAAWOK project that children be schooled in the work of Garrett Hardin. [96]
Garrett Hardin was yet another member of the American Eugenics Society. In 1981, Newsweek magazine devoted an entire page to Hardin's essay entitled "Toughlove Solution." Hardin wrote: "The responsibility of each poor country is to keep the excess population from being produced."
Then, possibly referring to instrument-rapes of women to forcefully abort their children, he said: "China's methods may not be acceptable everywhere, but the goal should be universal. Each country must choose the means that meshes with its culture." [97]
On another occasion, Hardin was even more ominous:
Coercion is a dirty word to liberals now. As with other four letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. [98]
Moore is on record stating that the schools are a vehicle for teaching his world-view. Moore believes ". . . we have to change the ways we live and breed. . . .These matters . . . must direct the teaching of science." [99] In carrying his world-view into politics, Moore stated: "Examples of scientific concepts are directly transferable to public policy and should be taught to students at the elementary, high school and college levels" [100] [emphasis added].
In 1958, Moore joined with H. Bentley Glass, a Director of the American Eugenics Society, [101] and others in founding a group which today claims to have unilaterally re-introduced evolution into classrooms after World War II, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Studies (BSCS), [102] discussed below.
Glass, besides being Moore's colleague at the BSCS, became president of the AAAS in 1970. He believed there should be an end to the right to marry and have a family, writing in 1970: "The once sacred rights of man must alter in many ways . . . It can no longer be affirmed that the right of the man and woman to reproduce as they see fit is inviolate." Parents, he said, "must voluntarily limit their children or be compelled to do so" [103] [emphasis added]. Glass also argued, "no parents will in that future time have a right to burden society with a malformed or a mentally incompetent child." [104] In the same article, Glass envisioned compulsory eugenic selection through hereditary counseling clinics:
Unlimited access to state-regulated abortion will combine with now perfected techniques of determining chromosome abnormalities in the development of the fetus to rid us of . . . uncontrollable defects such as mongolism (Down's syndrome) and sex deviants such as the XYY type. Genetic clinics will be constructed in which before long, as many as 100 different recessive hereditary defects can be detected in carriers, who may be warned against, or prohibited from having offspring.
. . . [I]f every couple were permitted to have only two children . . . a mild eugenic practice would be introduced that is [sic] probably all mankind is prepared to accept at this time [emphasis added]. [105]
Glass summed up the social practice of eugenics:
As long as our brave new world presents an abundance of choices and as long as we have freedom to choose, so long will human intelligence based on genetic diversity remain a primary requirement . . . As he acquires more fully the power to control his own genotype and to direct the course of his own evolution, he must produce a Man who can transcend his present nature. [106]
The BSCS, founded by Moore, Glass, and others, was part of the effort to establish an evolution-centered "synthesis" of the sciences in the United States. [107] Moreover, the BSCS is a key player in writing the national science standards, its current Executive Director, Rodger Bybee, having chaired the Content Committee for drafting the national standards. [108] Bybee is acknowledged in the NSES Appendix with two other BSCS staff members, and he is quoted as a spokesman for the BSCS in a Kansas City Star article dated September 25, 1999.
The BSCS developed textbooks, teaching and curriculum guides that expressed the "unified concepts" long before "unified concepts" became mandatory by states adopting the NSES. According to Smocovitis, the BSCS drew on a number of biologists, but especially on . . . some of the unifiers: G. Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. and G. G. Simpson, as well as Hermann J. Muller. Three colorful textbooks launched in 1960-61 (the "Green," the "Blue," and the "Yellow") were to discipline an entire generation of emerging new professional biologists to the belief in biology as unified science [emphasis added]. [109]
The outline of one BSCS textbook, the "Blue Version, 7th edition" closely compares to the outline of the "unified concepts" of the national science standards (and therefore the Kansas Science Standards). The BSCS' Green Version, and the Blue Version, in non-didactic terms, introduce students to consider eugenics-related practices favorably, such as contraception, genetic counseling, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization. [110]
It should be noted that government-mandated curricula would dramatically increase textbook sales for any company meeting the mandate. A company like the BSCS, with power to draft a state-mandated course outline, has the opportunity to draft the outline in a way favorable to its existing products, giving its own sales an advantage over other publishers. By itself, this unexplored appearance of a conflict of interest deserves investigation, notwithstanding the other egregious objections to the NSES.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the two primary groups responsible for the National Science Education Standards, has a century-long history of leadership by and promotion of members of the American Eugenics Society.
In fact, the AAAS today, unbelievably, maintains an official affiliation [111] with the renamed eugenics society. Since 1973 the AES has called itself The Society for the Study of Social Biology, becoming an official affiliate of the AAAS in 1975. [112] An expose of the pre-war American Eugenics Society, The Nazi Connection, by Stefan Kuhl (Oxford University Press 1994), identifies five members of the eugenics society who were also presidents of the AAAS. [113] Additional checking has revealed at least nine more AAAS presidents who at some point were advisors or members of various eugenic groups.
By itself, the idea of national science standards is repugnant to ideas of democracy and academic freedom. A curriculum produced by a single, wealthy group like AAAS, however, is a case-in-point for Constitutional separation of powers between state and federal jurisdictions. By reason of the AAAS affiliation with, and historic open-door policy for a destructive, racist, misogynist, anti-religious field of pseudo-science like eugenics, the scientific credibility of the AAAS, if not wholly destroyed, is subject to deep skepticism, while its political motivations are exposed to the light of day.
The outrageousness of the current AAAS affiliation with the re-named American Eugenics Society is illustrated by an example of the AES' hideous post-war radicalism: its willingness to admit as a member, Dr. Otmar Von Verschuer [114], the scientist who supervised the work of the terror of Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele. [115]
Josef Mengele (Verschuer's former graduate student) served as his assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics. Mengele helped supply the institute with some of the "scientific materials" he had acquired at Auschwitz. Verschuer described the project:
My assistant, Dr. [Josef] Mengele (M.D., PhD.) has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmfuhrer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsfuhrer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis. [116]
After World War II, Verschuer contacted Hermann J. Muller, apparently already at Indiana University's zoology department, seeking help. He told Muller he was committed to restoring the reputation of "our science," and he asked Muller "to support him with a letter of recommendation for the United States . . ." [117]
Post-war members of the American Eugenics Society, such as H. Bentley Glass, who served as president of the AAAS, are not identified in Kuhl's Nazi Connection, mentioned earlier, nor are other eugenicists [118] who became lower officers of the AAAS (like Garrett Hardin, President of the AAAS Pacific Division) or who acted in editorial capacities for the AAAS journal. One officer of the AAAS was Kingsley Davis, [119] who was also a board member of the American Eugenics Society. [120] The AAAS, besides elevating eugenicists to powerful positions in the organization, also published articles for members of the American Eugenics Society, such as for Glass, Muller and Davis, below, and newsy items about individual eugenicists without naming the eugenics society.
For example, in a 1967 issue of the AAAS journal, Science, Davis urged that schools be targeted to promote what he called population policy:
[A] government has two powerful instruments - its command over economic planning and its authority . . . over education. The first determines . . . the economic conditions and circumstances affecting the lives of all citizens; the second provides the knowledge and attitudes necessary to implement the plans. The economic system largely determines who shall work, what can be bought, what rearing children will cost, how much individuals can spend. The schools define family roles and develop vocational and recreational interests; they could, if it were desired, redefine the sex roles, develop interests that transcend the home, and transmit realistic (as opposed to moralistic) knowledge concerning marriage, sexual behavior, and population problems. When the problem is viewed in this light, it is clear that the ministries of economics and education, not the ministry of health, should be the source of population policy [emphasis added]. [121]
There are other good reasons to oppose the National Science Education Standards. The grandiose "unified concepts" outlined in the NSES are in fact an anti-God worldview, according to statements made by John A. Moore and his fellow architects of the post-war scientific effort to "unify" biology around Darwin's natural selection.
In a 1995 BSCS publication called Developing Biological Literacy, A Guide to Developing Secondary and Post-secondary Biology Curricula, John A. Moore again emphasized his position that science and religion are incompatible:
This brings us to a comparison of science as a way of knowing with another dominant way of knowing - that provided by religion. . . . One account of creation, the so-called Priestly version, has a god creating the world and all its inhabitants in six days. That evidence has to be accepted, if it is, on faith alone . . . a scientist cannot accept unproveable statements . . . [122]
Another essayist in this book is Huxley contemporary and SSE organizer, Ernst Mayr, who is also an endorser of Moore's Science as a Way of Knowing. Mayr was featured in a 1997 New York Times story, with a headline entitled: "Long Evolution of 'Darwin of 20th Century.'" Mayr's photo caption described him as at "the forefront of evolutionary biology thought at 92." [123]
The Times story acclaims Mayr as "one of the pivotal scientists who shaped the intellectual watershed known as the evolutionary synthesis." The same story reported that Mayr was:
one of the founders of the study of the history and philosophy of biology. As late as the 1960's, historians and philosophers, as well as physicists, viewed the only true sciences as being the physical sciences: physics, astronomy, chemistry . . . [Mayr] argues in his latest book that biology, distinct from the physical sciences offers unique insights into what science can be and what it means to be human [emphasis added]. [124]
Two weeks earlier, theologian John F. Haught had reviewed Mayr's 1997 book in the Washington Times:
Mayr unwittingly and unnecessarily places theology and evolutionary biology in a competitive relationship . . . It is clear that he considers theological explanation to be pre-scientific and anti-scientific rather than nonscientific . . . Mayr considers purposive discourse as completely contrary to science, rather than simply beyond the arena of its competence [emphasis added]. [125]
In Unifying Biology, dedicated to Ernst Mayr, the author describes the "unification of evolution and biology" as "positivism," which seeks a "unified theory of knowledge," as a "mentalit้ and also as a "worldview, framework, discursive mentalit้, cosmologies narrative worlds, or weltanschauung." [126]
Unifying Biology is an insider's account, a "contextual history" giving voice to the actors, [127] of how eugenics came to be renamed "evolutionary biology," undoubtedly to disassociate itself from the Aryanism Hermann J. Muller denounced and to focus on the population control Muller, Huxley and other eugenicists demanded in the Geneticists' Manifesto of 1939. [128]
While Smocovitis identifies Julian Huxley as the leader who did the most to create "unity in the ideological sciences," [129] she does not disclose that he was a member of the British eugenics society. She writes: "For Huxley, a grounding in evolution and the construction of an evolutionary humanism became an imperative for the future of 'modern man' [130] [emphasis added]. Both Huxley and Muller were signers of the Humanist Manifesto, stating "We can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. . . . Science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces." [131]
At an AAAS meeting in 1939, Huxley, Dobzhansky, Mayr and another man suggested the creation of a new organization, which after the war became the Society for the Study of Evolution. Smocovitis writes:
Nor was Huxley the only evolutionist to uphold a view of evolutionary progress in the 1940's. Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson and Stebbins all came to subscribe to versions of evolutionary progress at the same time that they made natural selection a mechanism [emphasis added]. [132]
According to Smocovitis, Huxley called for recognition of a modern "synthesis of evolution" shortly after 1937, when "the first synthetic account of evolution had been written by Theodosius Dobzhansky in Genetics and the Origins of the Species." [133]
Dobzhansky, writes Smocovitis, synthesized "theoretical studies of evolution" from the "mathematical models" by Sewall Wright in the United States (member of the American Eugenics Society), R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane (members of the British eugenics society) and Dobzhansky's own natural, population studies. [134]
In 1946 Huxley was to take his modern synthesis of evolution to a still wider audience: the "United Nations" of earth. Becoming director-general of UNESCO, an emerging global political force, Huxley believed his drive to unify biology within an evolutionary worldview would aid the process of unifying a fragmented world in search of a common ground for political unity. By the 1950's the "modern" synthesis of evolution had thus reached an international audience of the "modern" unified nation states. [135]
Writing in 1961 in the AAAS journal, Science, eugenicist Hermann J. Muller, a past-president of the SSE, lamented that by 1936, the word "eugenics" had become associated with "everything vile." [136]
Yet, in 1939 Muller had joined with Huxley and other members of the British Eugenics Society such as J.B.S. Haldane, to sign a document entitled the "Geneticists' Manifesto." They called for a global system of birth control in order to increase the quality of the race. "All Could be Geniuses," the headline read. Their Manifesto was re-published by the American Eugenics Society in 1946.
That leaders of the eugenics movement, by shifting into systematic birth control systems, still continued their aims of racial hygiene is illustrated by the headline claiming "all could be geniuses." The dangers of such systems are illustrated by a statement Hitler made, threatening to eliminate the Slavs by damming "their great natural fertility," [137] and by the United States Code Title 18, section 1091, prohibiting genocide by the use of birth control against targeted groups. The post-war eugenicists shifted aim against women and the unborn, lying about the humanity of the unborn the way they had previously lied about the humanity of non-whites and Jews.
Smocovitis does not identify Muller as a member of the American Eugenics Society, nor mention that eugenics had become associated with "everything vile" by the time Huxley, Dobzhansky and Mayr met in 1939 to discuss organizing a new group. Smocovitis, however, does confirm in another way that evolutionary biology is not a science, but a philosophy. Writing an "approved" history of evolutionary biology, she repeatedly states that the Society for the Study of Evolution was only born out of growing threats by the fields of chemistry and physics to overwhelm "classical biology" with contradictory, hard proof. [138]
Founded in 1946, the Society for the Study of Evolution included members of the American and British eugenics societies who also became SSE officers such as Ernst Mayr, J. T. Patterson, L. R. Dice, Julian Huxley, Sewall Wright, Theodosius Dobzhansky, J. B. S. Haldane, R. C. Lewontin, I. M. Lerner and T. M. Songbird. [139]
Moore's group, the SSE, gives an annual award in honor of Ernst Mayr's contemporary, Theodosius Dobzhansky, [140] a former Director of the American Eugenics Society. In the July/August 1999 issue of Archeology, Dobzhansky was identified with Ernst Mayr as a principal architect of "evolutionary synthesis." [141]
Dobzhansky, in his 1967 book, The Biology of Ultimate Concern, credits his views of synthesis to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "a prophet and a metaphysician." [142] He wrote: "What [Teilhard] tried to do was something entirely different, namely to create a coherent weltanschauung, including his mystical Christianity as well as his scientific knowledge." [143]
Dobzhansky professes that his own Weltanschauung arose when he became enraptured with "evolutionary biology" as a teenager. [144] "The German word Weltanschauung . . . [has] . . . no precise English equivalent. The usual translation, 'world view,' subtly betrays the meaning . . . There is a greater urgency about a Weltanschauung . . . It is most closely related to the 'ultimate concern' which [is considered] to be the essence of religion in the broadest and most inclusive sense." [145]
It is therefore not only John Moore's statements that indicate the NSES incorporates a philosophical worldview. Smocovitis' approved history defines the "synthesis" or "unified concepts" as a Weltangschauung, developed by men who other sources identify as leading eugenicists. Moreover, the careers of the men who created and endorsed the NSES, at the AAAS, the BSCS and especially at the Society for the Study of Evolution, and who each year honor the name of Dobzhansky - eugenicist and author of the concept of evolutionary biology as an "ultimate concern" or Weltanschauung - these are the men who demonstrate that the standards are intended to teach children a philosophy of science, not just science.
Moore made other disturbing statements in the 1980's "science as a way of knowing" project:
It is very important that we discuss these different modes of thought with students who often come to us believing that creationists and scientists have equally valid explanations for the origins of life and its changes over time. That being so, the students often assume that one or other modes of thought may be selected with impunity. In many instances, that can be a dangerous conclusion [emphasis added]. [146]
Also from Moore, "The concern is the development of ideas, not to present a balanced history, so the emphasis will be on key individuals and key concepts" [emphasis added]. [147]
For pro-life people and people who oppose eugenics, it is important to know that eugenics is the heart of evolutionary biology, and therefore influences the national science standards. Moore himself warned us when he said: "Most of these problems such as abortion, genetic engineering, right to life, environmental pollution, and overuse of natural resources, have no single solution . . . science can be invaluable in helping human beings make informed choices . . ." [148]
Moore, having spent over fifteen years with the textbook and publishing group, the BSCS, was in a position to carry out his world-view there, as well as in his capacities at the National Research Council's "Coordinating Council on Education," the "Committee on Undergraduate Education," the "Committee on Science Education," and on the AAAS committee for Project 2061. [149]
He therefore served in influential capacities relating to the national science standards in three of the promulgating organizations (the AAAS, the NRC and the BSCS), besides having his book officially endorsed by heads of the two lead groups.
According to the 1959 president of the American Eugenics Society, Harry L. Shapiro, three essentials of eugenics are Darwin's natural selection, Malthus' idea of scarcity, and Mendel's analysis of heredity. [150] These are the elements of eugenics, whether or not it is re-named "unified concepts" or "evolutionary biology," or "synthesis." In fact the themes reinforced by the NSES' thirteen year long curriculum are population genetics, natural selection and Malthusian scarcity. Scarcity is taught as early as fourth grade.
Given Moore's and Kingsley Davis' statements about reaching into classrooms with propaganda and given Moore's work with Bentley Glass at the BSCS to actually reach the classrooms with textbooks and curriculum guides, given the activities of the AAAS in writing the science standards as well as the AAAS' longstanding influence by the pseudo-science of eugenics, and given the BSCS' direct involvement in the National Science Education Standards, the "standardization" effort can safely be characterized as an outrageous attempt to revive some of what everyone had hoped was buried in the rubble of World War II:
Racial hygiene works in the same way, namely, the education of the student in a national sense . . . It should be repeatedly emphasized that the biological laws operative in animals and plants apply also to man; for example, that the knowledge acquired from studying the genetics of these organisms can, in a general way, be applied to man. Thus, the teaching of animal breeding and plant cultivation can effectively prepare the way for conceptions of racial biology." [151]
Secondary schools [under the Nazi's] were required to teach heredity, racial science, family as well as population policies. Intrinsic to each of these was an ideological instruction in biology [emphasis added]. [152]
We should remember the statement by the Deputy Nazi Party Chief, Rudolf Hess: "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology." [153]
It is chilling that Ernst Mayr, in his endorsement on the back cover of Moore's book, invokes both the urgency of Weltangschauung, and biological solutions in the same comment:
At no previous time in history has an understanding of biology been more crucial than it is today. All our major current problems are ultimately biological: the population explosion, the greenhouse effect, the depletion of resources, unsolved medical problems, famines. Solutions will have to be biological as well as sociological. No one is better qualified to provide citizens with an understanding of the essential principles and concepts of biology than John A. Moore . . . [emphasis added]. [154]
* * * * *
To say it is time to end the eugenics means revolution. It is time to demand that evolutionists stop promoting a eugenics mindset. It is time to dismantle the population control system, first by ending federal funding, and then by redefining charity in terms of concrete items like food, clothing and shelter for purposes of charitable tax status, not to include birth control, abortion or other tools of eugenicists.
Then, ending eugenics means remedies against the federal government and private entities who have lied in order to disguise the purposes behind eugenics measures. It means rejecting any "unified" theory of scientific knowledge created by eugenicists. It means limiting the longevity of trusts and breaking up interlocking relationships between for-profit corporations and foundations. It means accountability to survivors of abortion - siblings, mothers and fathers.
It means ending corporate dreams of making money from manufacturing human beings in the laboratory, and ending experimentation on and trade in unborn babies killed by abortion. It means re-establishing equal protection of the law for the unborn, the disabled and the sick. It means a new commitment of resources to help the weak, not to line the pockets of insiders. On and on it will go, until the last vestige of eugenics is stamped out.
The Congress, at the least, should pass a resolution apologizing to the Kansas State Board of Education for the political upheaval, time and expense that the Board suffered in fending off a scandalous, federally-backed initiative.
Other Congressional efforts to "colonize" the states' education systems should be "unstrung" (meaning that either the puppet-strings attached to the money are removed, or the program is repealed) in order to return the education of children to local democracy.
The AAAS should require publication of a list of members of its affiliate, the Society for the Study of Social Biology, and then publicly sever all affiliation and activities with the SSSB.
The AAAS should either restrict itself to serving the science community, or if it ventures into domains outside its expertise, it should refrain from eugenics-based political indoctrination. The AAAS should make significant funding available to objective historians so that honest, arms-length research and writing (not an inside white-wash) can be conducted on the history of the AAAS membership during the twentieth century's wars on "population." Like the Congress and the NAS, the AAAS owes apologies to the Kansas State Board of Education, to minorities, and to women who have been irreparably harmed in the name of "science."
Churches need to be far more skeptical of the "scientific" proof of Darwinism and Malthusianism, and not yield to intimidation. Science teaching in religious and public schools must include the bloody results of "survival of the fittest" politics and economics. Christians should stop assuming that a belief in Darwinism and Malthusianism is somehow mandatory as part of scientific discussions. Instead, we should put ideas to the test, and do so with true scientific rigor. People of faith should plead for God's forgiveness to the extent that they have mixed Darwinism with religion in this just-ended eugenic century, using the excuse of "scientifically-proven necessity" to kill God's people.
Read the complete article with references here.
Well, the attack on Augustine was well-directed.
Augie didn’t have much use for the Pelagians, of which this critter is certainly a member.
See!! Some things DO descend from ancient generations.
Death culture ping.
Thanks for the ping!
In 1930 Pope Pius IX condemned eugenics in an encyclical. The reaction in Eugenical News was the usual, predictable kind of reaction we witness on FR from the Dem Central anti-Freepers: the Pope is a science-denier and his encyclical is an "attack on the whole texture of science and the liberty of thought" and so on. The encyclical was criticized in Time, Monday, Jan 19, 1931 and this bit is noteworthy:
"But one of the most compelling rebuttals was not a direct one. It came from Professor Julian Sorell Huxley. Brother of Novelist Aldous Leonard (Point Counterpoint) Huxley, and grandson of the late great Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian Huxley is himself a most distinguished biologist and eloquent member of the scientific vanguard. Speaking to the Philadelphia Forum, he said: "In the long run we must envisage the control of population in the same manner we now control contagious disease. Birth control is by no means perfect, but it is one of the major events in the world's history! . . . In one or two centuries ... we shall tell the man who can't provide for himself and his family that he cannot have State aid unless he agrees not to have any more children. If he refuses, State aid shall also be refused him or else he shall be locked up. ... In our society a man with a small family finds that he gets ahead quicker and that his smaller number of children can have greater advantages. All of this may seem very undemocratic, but heredity and biology are very undemocratic."
Yes, let's look at some educational material from the first half of the 20th century. John R. Baker was an Oxford cytologist. His 1974 book Race, Foundation for Human Understanding (Oxford Press) was endorsed by Peter Medawar, the Nobel laureate. Baker wrote the section on biology in An outline for Boys and Girls (1932). Here is the last part:
EUGENICSAll the hundreds of thousands of kinds of animals have evolved from very simple forms of life, and presumably from inorganic matter originally, without the existence of any mind to plan them. Mind itself is one of the products of evolution, and now at last one kind of living thing only has got the ability to control and plan the course of evolution. That one kind of living thing is the human kind. For centuries men have selected certain types of domestic animals for breeding, and have thus created all the variety of horses and cattle and sheep and pigs and dogs that exist to-day. They have improved all these animals for the purposes for which they require them, but they have not improved themselves. There is no reason at all to suppose that the inborn mental capacity of man has increased since prehistoric times.
When men were just evolving from ape-like ancestors, they evolved because the best individuals survived and had young ones, whilst the worst died oft and had none. That does not happen in civilisation. With us the weakly are looked after by the strong. If the weakliness is an inherited character, it is unfortunate that the people who have it should have children, because they will pass it on, generation after generation. On the average, the most successful people have the fewest children in most civilised countries to-day, and the least successful the most. It is possible nowadays for ordinary people to arrange whether they will have many or few children, or none at all. It would certainly be better if the most successful people had most children, because success in life is partly due to inherited qualities. Many people with excellent inherited qualities never get an opportunity to show them, from lack of a sufficiently good education. If we wanted to improve our race, we should give everyone an equal chance in life as far as possible. We should then encourage the most successful to have a lot of children. Many people are what is called feeble-minded. Their brain never develops beyond that of a child of six. Often this is a character which is inherited in the same way as blue eyes. If two such feeble-minded people marry, all their children will be feeble-minded. If a feeble-minded person marries a normal person, the children will be normal, but some of their descendants will be feeble-minded. It would be a good plan to prevent people who have inherited feeble-mindedness from having children, because feeble-minded people are not happy themselves, and they are not useful to other people, and they cost other people a lot of money. Unfortunately, they are increasing rapidly in numbers in Great Britain. Before long they will form quite a large proportion of our population, unless we decide not to allow them to have children. Members of Parliament, who decide these things, think it best to let them go on multiplying. When they were young, Members of Parliament did not have An Outline for Boys and Girls.
Eugenics ping...
Fat chance. Huxley is living in a World Of Make Believe.
Thanks for this informative post, ECO!
Freepmail wagglebee or little jeremiah to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
TRUE... Man evolved from the animals (some say) evolved to the point they believe in GOD.. Man evolved to believe in God.. Because no animal ever did that..
1) MAN EVOLVED TO BELIEVE IN GOD!...
-or-
2) He was just MADE that way.. You know, to believe in God..
Amazingly... Both concepts arrive at the same answer..
Atheists then must be under evolved..
Above all, it unifies our knowledge and our thought . . .
Sounds like certain Freepers.
But what good is it to unify our knowledge and our thought according to an erroneous model? It just serves to sink one deeper in untruth.
I always find it curious that in denying, or remaining willfully blind to human nature, the deniers end up denying themselves without seeming to notice it.
Man is primed for God. As you say, God made him that way. The whole history of mankind attests to this fact, except for the history of the past two centuries, which evidences the trend of the intelligentsia towards the establishment of a totally man-centered universe. But you cannot establish that by fiat, especially if it completely cuts against the grain of what it is to be human.
The Huxleys of this world in effect proudly declare themselves to have "evolved" into a higher state of humanity. I tend to think they have devolved into a state that is less-than-human. For one of the supposed benefits of being more evolved than the other guy is that one has an excuse to devalue the dignity and humanity of the other guy. The eugenics movement, in arrogating to itself the judgment of which humans are greater or less "fit," enables them to tyrannize the "less fit." The historical record speaks plainly enough on this matter.
LOL, so I guess you may be right, dear 'pipe: "Atheists then must be under evolved."
No news there but I’ll read this later, when I have some time.
That's simply replacing on religion with another, but those who are doing so refuse to acknowledge what they're doing and have managed to convince (brainwash) a great many people somehow, that trusting in *science* is somehow better; more sane, more rational, more reasonable that believing in a god.
Actually, all men have faith, it's just a matter of what they put it in. Those who wish to reject God have simply replaced Him with science and/or *reason*. It takes faith in the system, that it will always work as it has, even though they have no reason to expect it except precedent- *it always has before*. And it takes trust that the practitioners are reliable and the system set up by those practitioners is accurate and reliable.
It is simply another system of beliefs; a religion or philosophy.
So very true, metmom.
Which basically puts them in the identical position as that of the ancient Greeks, who thought that the birth of "the grey-eyed Athena" -- the goddess of reason and intellect and cultic deity of Athens -- consisted in springing forth "fully formed from the brow of Zeus." Don't ask any questions about that! That's just the way "it happened."
Such men as think this way reject the Christian God as the foundation of truth; but Zeus would probably be okay for that purpose. :^) Any foundation at all for some sort of ersatz truth will do in the end, so long as it is not the God of the Christian Bible.
However, Zeus, like all the Olympian gods, is a created being. That is to say, all the Olympian gods (according to Plato) have a divine origin beyond themselves. They are intramundane gods. Yet it is to the extramundane, to the "Beyond" (i.e., beyond the Cosmos) or Unknown God that one must look for the Source of truth and reason, not to Zeus, who himself derives his existence from it.
Somehow I continue to find Greek mythology relevant to our own disordered times....
Thanks so much for writing, metmom!
Or from a different species... (they are of their father the De...)
Good thinking HP!
I was a primate myself before I was "re-born" or "born again"..
This is from February 2001. Its not really news.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/medical_ethics/me0018.html
"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'
"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stonean image made by man's design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." At that, Paul left the Council.
Nothing more to be said; neither to be added, nor subtracted. "In Him [the Logos of God, the Son, Alpha and Omega] we live and move and have our being" says it all.
May God bless you, dear metmom, for posting these excerpts from Acts.
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.