Posted on 03/30/2009 12:58:22 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
The New York Times got the preview story wrong, and the Washington Post editorial writer probably was too rushed to question the charges of "creationism" coming from the National Center for Science Education, the Darwin-only lobby. So this week's important decisions by the Texas Board of Education (TBOE) on how to teach evolution were predicated in the media by the big question of whether teachers should provide both "strengths and weaknesses" of Darwin's theory. Those words might sound benign, readers were told, but they really are "code words" (take the press' word for it) for creationism and religion.
To the media left, any questioning of Darwin is reserved for denizens of Dogpatch.
So, what did the TBOE do? Well, it turns out that they are fairly adroit politicians. They did remove language providing for "strengths and weaknesses" and then added new language--quite a lot of it--providing that students will learn, for example, to "analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations…including examining all sides of scientific evidence… so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Perfect! A policy distinction without a difference! In fact, the new standards are just fine, an improvement, in fact. Now teachers can tell the kids about the scientific evidence in a variety of fields that seems to contradict the Darwinian account as well as the supposed evidence in support.
Once again the NCSE was too-smart-by-half. It ran blogs making fun of religion, while organizing public speakers who gave fulsome testimony to their Christian faith and how compatible it is with "evolution" (meaning Darwinian evolution). To the purists like Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers it probably makes them look like toadies.
In the end, the rhetoric meant to evoke fundamentalist cranks was mixed with pious statements doing the very kind of religious posturing the Darwinists project onto their foes, and reminding me of the church scenes from Blazing Saddles. It all backfired.
By demonizing specific words--and making the elimination of them the test of "science"--the NCSE and its state distributor, the Orwellian-named Texas Freedom Network, simply allowed the Board to do the obvious word shuffle. Okay, no "strengths and weakness, " but instead, we'll pass similar ideas in different words, and everyone will be happy. Except, of course, the NCSE and the TFN.
Don't expect the media to figure this out from the NCSE Talking Points memo, but the insiders get the picture. Dawkins must be enjoying a caustic chuckle at the expense of the NCSE.
Radical Islam is in fact comprised of western scientific rationalists besotted by atheistic communism who are only disguised as Islamic fundamentalists.
Beneath their fake beards, these materialist atheists actually dream of existential oblivion when they blow themselves up, not 72 virgins in paradise. They preach the theory of evolution in their madrassas and mosques, and secretly keep away from prying eyes their holy statutes of Darwin, Wallace, Gould, Marx, and Lenin.
Indeed, if you look carefully, you can see that beneath the exterior of what appear to be Korans, they are actually carrying copies of evil western textbooks on evolutionary biology, geology, paleontology, etc., as well as an occasional copy of Das Kapital.
And GGG and Harun Yahya have hit upon the precise solution. What is needed to cure radical Islam of its terroristic endeavors is a thick layer of creationist supernaturalism, which will dull the senses of these cleverly disguised scientific rationalists and force them to rethink their lust for materialism, communism, atheism, and existential French novels by Camus and Simone de Beauvoir.
As odd as it might sound, only by introducing into Islamic fundamentalism the missing element of religious fundamentalism will the faux theocrats of the middle east be defanged.
This hidden "truth" can be discerned in the penumbras of the article Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques, but only with a pair of special "creation-truth" goggles (which can be purchased at CreationMart for $5.99, buy two get one free).
If you put on your goggles and read the following excerpt very carefully, you'll see that what radical Islam really needs most is more religion:
Saudi state education teaches children from an early age the virtues of jihad. State elementary and high school curricula have been replete with examples of jihad indoctrination and many of these same writings are now available to an expanding Muslim audience in America. One example is a book for third-year high school students published by the Saudi Ministry of Education that was collected from the Islamic Center of Oakland in California. The text, written with the approval of the Saudi Ministry of Education, teaches students to prepare for jihad in the sense of war against Islam’s enemies, and to strive to attain military self-sufficiency:
“To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government. The military education is glued to faith and its meaning, and the duty to follow it.”Strength is defined in this textbook in physical, spiritual, and material terms, namely men, beliefs, and the latest advances in military technology:
“Preparing the weapons for war and possessing them; even better than that is building special factories for manufacturing military vehicles, tanks, rockets, planes, and other things needed in modern warfare.”The text then assures students that the Kingdom does not concentrate only on defensive capabilities, but also on building an offensive arsenal to face,
“the dangers of communism and the Crusades from the East and the West, and in the first cause for all the Arabs, the Palestinian cause and the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque; the cause of Muslim Afghanistan and the causes of persecuted Muslim minorities around the world.”
Wahhabi writings emphasize the obligatory nature of the purification that jihad produces, whether it be in overcoming external enemies, or perfecting the inner self. To Be a Muslim, published by Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic Publishing House and gathered from the Al-Farouq Mosque in Houston, Texas, exhorts Muslims to work for the establishment of “functionally Islamic governments” in all nations:
“[Muslims should work] to form a society that is committed to the Islamic way of thinking and Islamic way of life, which means to form a government that implements principles of justice embodied in the shari’a….Until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.”The Houston mosque-goers are then instructed that change – including political change – is connected directly with jihad:
“These responsibilities to change both oneself and the world are binding in principle, in law, in self-defense, in community, and as a sacred obligation of jihad….”Quoting from the writings of some of the leading militant ideologues of modern Islamic extremism, the tract instructs Houston mosque-goers to form Islamic opposition groups to face “attacks from every materialistic ideology and system that threatens the existence of Islam as a global paradigm of thought and system of life.” Because, it asserts, many Muslim countries are suffering either under “the oppression of non-believing occupiers,” or under the “brutality of an evil minority, which governs through the iron fist” and serves as the infidels’ local puppets, self-defense has become an imperative duty for all Muslims. To underscore the hardships involved in defending and spreading Islam, the Saudi text cites Muslim Brotherhood radical leader Sayyid Qutb, advocating the building of an organized movement “of sufficient size and quality to carry on every level of Islamic work and also to handle unexpected situations and needs.” The Saudi document quotes Qutb urging Muslims to join such movements,
“[Believers] should realize that their self-value derives only from Islam, without which they are like animals or worse. They must know, however, that true honor can never be achieved unless they continue actively to involve themselves in the Islamic Movement. Those who remain in isolation will be in the Hellfire. Those who join in the Islamic Movement are joining themselves with honorable people.”According to the text, the path of Islamic activism—sometimes a euphemism for jihad—“purifies and liberates a person and teaches one to be strong. It is a path of blessings and honor.”
Successful Islamic movements should liberate oppressed peoples, including of course Muslims, and the Saudi tract uses the term “taghut,” familiar among Islamists, to describe any power or system responsible for such oppression. Usually taghut is comprised of “those who worship the false gods of modernist and postmodernist cultures,” or those who adopt capitalist, socialist, communist, and other manmade systems, in whole or in part. Again, the tract appeals to an authoritative voice, the fiery Hasan al-Banna, the extremist founder of the Muslim Brotherhood:
“Our task in general is to stand against the flood of modernist civilization overflowing from the swamp of materialistic and sinful desires. This flood has swept the Muslim nation away from the Prophet’s leadership and Koranic guidance and deprived the world of its guiding light. Western secularism moved into a Muslim world already estranged from its Koranic roots, and delayed its advancement for centuries, and will continue to do so until we drive it from our lands. Moreover, we will not stop at this point, but will pursue this evil force to its own lands, invade its Western heartland, and struggle to overcome it until all the world shouts by the name of the Prophet and the teachings of Islam spread throughout the world. Only then will Muslims achieve their fundamental goal, and there will be no more ‘persecution’ and all religion will be exclusively for Allah….”This passage is a distillation of Islamist extremism: an adversarial posture fueled by a conspiratorial outlook, the candid call to jihad against the West, and a recipe for open-ended struggle practiced beyond the borders of Dar Al-Islam in the heart of enemy territory.
Well, who really believes what those guys say anyway.
While we backed Israel. The Soviets backed the Arabs. That doesn't inandofitself mean that the soviet backed Arabs were necessarily communist/socialist, and certainly doesn't mean that they abandoned Islam.
Islam is the motivation of Islamic terrorists. They say so. They follow religious leaders, not science teachers.
Osama Bin Lauden is an Islamic cleric, not a Biology professor. Your claim that they were motivated by the “Temple of Darwin” is just further evidence of how delusional your position is.
Here’s a little more on Arafat “the Muslim”:
Griffin: The existence of an interlocking terrorist network, supported directly and indirectly by the Soviet Union, is well-documented, and that leads to the second obvious pattern of terrorism. It’s the fact that the leaders of these groups, almost without exception, claim to be acting in the name of Marx and Lenin. Further analysis reveals that these people are not the product of the working class, which they claim to represent, but come from the privileged middle class and upper class. They’re intellectuals with college educations, and, in fact, it’s within the university environment that they become steeped in the theories of Marx and Lenin. Yassir Arafat, leader of the PLO, had entered the University of Cairo in 1951. He was the son of a wealthy merchant from Gassa.
In 1956, he was president of the leftist Palestine Student Union and was its delegate that year to the Communist World Festival of Youth in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In November of 1974, Arafat traveled to Moscow where he placed a wreath at the tomb of Lenin and was the personal guest of Leonid Brezhnev.12
http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pdf/noplacetohide.pdf
What religious tradition did Arafat come from?
What religious text did Arafat quote from?
Islamic.
Islamic.
The Quran.
Again, your accusation was that GGG was mentored by Harun(or whatever) and that "radical Islam is creationist to the core. ". So citing a paper on Saudi Arabian terrorists is not relevant to supporting your audacious assertions. Here is evidence of how Wahhabi is viewed by other Muslims. Why Extremism Always Fails: Spanish Muslim Perspectives Abd el-Wahid Miranda
Two weeks after the World Trade Center disaster, a Black Muslim of my acquaintance visited a news store situated a few blocks from the site of the catastrophe. The store, which had reopened that day, was run by five Senegalese immigrants. Their Muslim background was clearly known to the lady who walked in, who came straight up to them and said: ‘We’re so sorry about what happened. Don’t worry. We know it wasn’t Muslims who did it. It was the Wahhabis!’
The Western world is now beginning to understand why Wahhabism is so unpopular among Muslims. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, not usually given to subtle understandings of Muslim aqida issues, has said that ‘the Saudis are having to essentially buy off their extreme groups in order to maintain themselves … They are essentially funding a significant portion of what we are now dealing with -- Islam gone awry.’
According to the Muslim journalist Stephen Schwartz, writing in the English journal The Spectator, ‘Bin Laden is a Wahhabi extremist. So are his Egyptian allies, who exulted as they stabbed foreign tourists to death at Luxor not many years ago, bathing in blood up to their elbows and emitting blasphemous cries of ecstasy. So are the Algerian Islamist terrorists whose contribution to the purification of the world consisted of murdering people for such sins as running a movie projector or reading secular newspapers. … The vast majority of Muslims in the world … loathe Wahhabism because it is a violent break with tradition. … To expose the extent of Saudi and Wahhabi extremist influence on American Muslims would deeply compromise many Islamic clerics in the US.'
Academic analysis has also concluded that Saudi Islam is at the core of the current crisis. Many studies cite the 1998 Harvard thesis of the Saudi dissident Nawaf Obeid, who writes: 'According to a high-ranking official in the [Saudi] Ministry of Justice, Sheikh Mohamed bin Jubeir [current chairman of the Saudi Consultative Council], who has been called the 'exporter' of the Wahhabi creed in the Muslim world, was a strong advocate of aiding the Taleban'.
Nonetheless, American daisy-cutter bombs are not landing on the Saudi universities in Madinah and Riyadh, in whose laboratories the new and hate-filled strains of Wahhabism are being designed. Neither is Saudi Arabia anywhere on the notoriously clumsy American list of states supporting terrorism. The Saudis, as usual, are exempted from any serious criticism, even when experts agree that while they may not themselves be the root of the problem, they are certainly watering it.
...
(courtesy ping to L1970)
I’m not saying that all Islamist terrorists are communist. I am simply pointing out that the vast majority of Islamist terrorist organizations are revolutionary materialists (to the core). To try to pretend this element doesn’t exist re: the Terror Network is to put your head in the sand and ignore the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
PS Let me know when you and atlaw are willing to rigorously participate in the proposed debate thread FROM START TO FINISH. I don’t want an “I’ll drop in from time to time” commitment. I want you both there until it becomes clear that your one-dimensional understanding of the enemy we face is SORELY lacking.
Call me crazy, Andrew (and I’m sure you will), but what you just posted actually supports my point. Or to put it in Andrew-speak — I don’t think what you posted means what you think it means, whatever it is you think it means.
I have given my conditions. Start the thread, invite me, and I will participate from start to finish.
I doubt you will follow through though, you have a rather sordid history of saying your going to set up a debate, not doing so, and then accusing people of backing out.
Are you playing that game again, or are you actually going to start a debate thread and invite me to it this time?
These Darwinist zealots want to hijack the war on terror and turn it into a war on Christianity and on all religion. They are the enemy within and their allies are the Godless Democrat Party.
==I doubt you will follow through though, you have a rather sordid history of saying your going to set up a debate, not doing so, and then accusing people of backing out.
Not this again! Do I have to go back and find the link where you backed out AGAIN??? Sheesh!
Back to the debate. Is atlaw in or out?
==These Darwinist zealots want to hijack the war on terror and turn it into a war on Christianity and on all religion. They are the enemy within and their allies are the Godless Democrat Party.
It’s nothing less than stunning to me that so-called conservatives, on the premier conservative website on the internet, absolutely refuse to acknowledge that many of the terrorist organizations around the world (to include the Middle East) are motivated by revolutionary materialism. Did they learn absolutely nothing from the Cold War?!?!
You never set up a debate. My last comment on the subject was that I was ready to debate as soon as you had your “pedigreed” Scientists signed on to Free Republic, but that there was no point if their entire debate tactic would be to say that scientists are all in on a conspiracy.
You never set up the debate, and then months later accused me of backing out of a debate that you never set up with a scientist who never signed on to Free Republic.
I agreed to debate, and now your throwing conditions. Will you take any objection to your conditions as “backing out”? I guess any excuse will do when you don't know science, and don't actually know any scientists willing to sign on to FR and debate.
And just so you don't try to quote mine a “backing out” of anything I have said.......
Post the thread, ping me to it, and I will participate “from beginning to end”.
They try not to ever think about the Cold War because they don’t want to acknowledge that atheist communism murdered more innocent people in the last century than all the religions have in the whole history of the world.
==Again, your accusation was that GGG was mentored by Harun(or whatever) and that “radical Islam is creationist to the core. “
Notice he has yet to supply any proof that Yahya is my “mentor”, that radical Islam is “creationist” to the core, or disprove my contention that many Middle Eastern terrorist organizations are revolutionary materialists bent on world revolution. I’m not holding my breath.
Just like a typical Darwinist, every piece of data supports your point, even contradictory data. Your claim was that Harun(or whatever) was GGG's mentor. Another claim was that "radical Islam is creationist to the core." Neither of those claims is supported by your post or my post. Since you have introduced another red herring that Wahabis are terrorists you may claim that my citation supports that red herring, but that still does not address your frivolous assertions which my citation does not support especially with respect to radical Islam and creationists. The radicals are simply Wahabist(or fomented by them).
Allmendream, don’t you remember?...I went back and found the reply where you backed out and posted it for all to see. I had Duesberg all set up. I showed you the email were he agreed to come on and debate you. I told Duesberg it was off because YOU backed out. Do you think Duesberg was afraid to debate you? I mean c’mon, you only have a M.S., and you’re not even a specialist in the field of AIDS. He would have torn you to shreds. No, the reason why the debate didn’t go forward is because at the last minute you said you had no interest in debating “conspiracy” theorists (or some such) on AIDS, so I told Duesberg the debate was off.
As for the debate thread re: the Soviet roots of Islamist terror, all I ask is that you get your fellow evo, Mr. Lawyer, to man-up and sign on the dotted line. After all, he was the one who got this whole thing started. Are you up for the debate, Mr. Lawyer?
BTW, if we have this debate thread, I hope you will consider participating. I want these so-called conservative materialists to know beyond a shadow of a doubt just how much modern terrorism has been influenced by the ideology of revolutionary communism.
The only “backing out” I did was to say that there would be little point to “debating” someone who; when I say Dr. X says this that and the other; they respond “Dr. X is faking his results, because he is part of the conspiracy.”.
If you take that as “backing out” it is a tacit admission on your part that my criteria could not be met, and conspiracy mongering is all your “pedigreed scientist” was going to engage in.
Moreover the debate that you were supposed to set up was with js####, who complained about the forum. I figured my last “yes, invite me” was sufficient, only to hear from you a couple months later that I “backed out” of a debate that you never actually set up, and were attempting to set up with a different debate partner.
I can see though that your once again trying to play the “nobody will debate me” game, and are evidently not interested in actually debating.
But I repeat. Post the thread, ping me to it, and I will participate “from beginning to end”.
You crack me up, Allmendream. I had forgotten that JS#### backed out of the debate, just like you. In the mean time, could you use your evo-influence to convince atlaw to participate in said debate. After all, this entire debate emerged because of his phony accusations. And remember Mr. Lawyer, this is from start to finish.
How many chances has Mr. Lawyer had to back up his assertions now? Let’s see, Mr. Lawyer came barging in with his false and slanderous accusations back in #24, and we are now close to 200 replies. What’s he waiting for do you suppose???
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