More like your irrationality of using definitions unique to you to CORRECT me from using the commonly accepted definitions;
Accepted on what basis? And by whome? It isn't universally accepted as true. And if it were of what import is it? People can universally state that a Dodge Truck is a Volkswagon product. Don't let the fact that they'd be wrong bother you any. Afterall, it's belief that matters - right.. But don't let me rain on your parade. I mentioned a stark difference and you don't even bat an eye. You're an indoctrinate. You're stuck on your feelings. I'm stuck on practical facts. Until you get your head out of your feelings and start reviewing the facts, we've nothing to say to one another.
; then using the elaboration of your unique definition as an excuse to launch a barrage of hatred against a well respected faith shared by a billion of the inhabitants of this globe, Catholicism.
I don't care how well respected the group is. I really don't. God is no respector of persons, so why the heck should I be. Are Catholics nice people? Sure as heck are. My best friend growing up was one of them. Who cares. Isn't about them. It's about the religion - and more than that, it's about whether that religion is Christian. I could give a hang less that it even exists save that it pretends at something it isn't. If it didn't do that, I would not care a whit. I'd just evangelize heathens trapped in it like any other. Why, because heathen is a matter of belief - not a label on the person. God loves people, he just hates a lot of what they do - called sin.
I like positivity and good spirited exchange of ideas and information. All I've heard from you is the chaos indicative of your name and wildly lashing out at any target, real or perceived.
Oh bunk. You're all twisty and upset inside because someone challenged your worldview, you responded from your gut and now have to climb back up to some semblance of a high ground. I forgive the offense, that's a given, but I'm not stupid and neither is anyone else here.
Catholics are good people, leave them alone about their rites and practices and making unto graven images. It isn't anyone's business how they choose to do their "free exercise thereof".
I didn't bring Catholics into this. You did. I discussed the religion not the people. You're trying to confuse the two. And nobody is hampering their "free excercise" despite your dishonest attempt state otherwise. How they choose to worship is their prerogative and problem. That all has no bearing on whether they are Christian or not. That is another matter - one which you're doing your best to avoid in failing to address my prior points. If you're going to lay down a challenge as you did. It is proper to define terms. If you need to hide from that definition, you already understand you got problems. So, as I said, I thought you were through...
For the science room, no free speech
By Bill Murchison
Dec 28, 2005
Will the federal courts, and the people who rely on the federal courts to enforce secular ideals, ever get it? The anti-school-prayer decisions of the past 40 years -- not unlike the pro-choice-in-abortion decisions, starting with Roe vs. Wade -- haven't driven pro-school-prayer, anti-choice Americans from the marketplace of ideas and activity.
Neither will U.S. Dist. Judge John Jones' anti-intelligent-design ruling in Dover, Pa., just before Christmas choke off challenges to the public schools' Darwinian monopoly.
Jones' contempt for the "breathtaking inanity" of school-board members who wanted ninth-grade biology students to hear a brief statement regarding Darwinism's "gaps/problems" is unlikely to intimidate the millions who find evolution only partly persuasive -- at best.
Millions? Scores of millions might be more like it. A 2004 Gallup Poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in evolution unaided by God. A Kansas newspaper poll last summer found 55 percent support for exposing public-school students to critiques of Darwinism.
This accounts for the widespread desire that children be able to factor in some alternatives to the notion that "natural selection" has brought us, humanly speaking, where we are. Well, maybe it has. But what if it hasn't? The science classroom can't take cognizance of such a possibility? Under the Jones ruling, it can't. Jones discerns a plot to establish a religious view of the question, though the religion he worries about exists only in the possibility that God, per Genesis 1, might intrude celestially into the discussion. (Intelligent-designers, for the record, say the power of a Creator God is just one of various possible counter-explanations.)
Not that Darwinism, as Jones acknowledges, is perfect. Still, "the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent scientific propositions."
Ah. We see now: Federal judges are the final word on good science. Who gave them the power to exclude even whispers of divinity from the classroom? Supposedly, the First Amendment to the Constitution: the odd part here being the assumption that the "free speech" amendment shuts down discussion of alternatives to an establishment-approved concept of Truth.
With energy and undisguised contempt for the critics of Darwinism, Jones thrusts out the back door of his courthouse the very possibility that any sustained critique of Darwinism should be admitted to public classrooms.
However, the writ of almighty federal judges runs only so far, as witness their ongoing failure to convince Americans that the Constitution requires almost unobstructed access to abortion. Pro-life voters and activists, who number in the millions, clearly aren't buying it. We're to suppose efforts to smother intelligent design will bear larger, lusher fruit?
The meeting place of faith and reason is proverbially darkish and unstable -- a place to which the discussants bring sometimes violently different assumptions about truth and where to find it. Yet, the recent remarks of the philosopher-theologian Michael Novak make great sense: "I don't understand why in the public schools we cannot have a day or two of discussion about the relative roles of science and religion." A discussion isn't a sermon or an altar call, is it?
Equally to the point, what does secular intolerance achieve in terms of revitalizing public schools, rendering them intellectually catalytic? As many religious folk see it, witch-hunts for Christian influences are an engrained part of present public-school curricula. Is this where they want the kids? Might private schools -- not necessarily religious ones -- offer a better alternative? Might home schooling?
Alienating bright, energized, intellectually alert customers is normally accounted bad business, but that's the direction in which Darwinian dogmatists point. Thanks to them and other such foes of free speech in the science classroom -- federal judges included -- we seem likely to hear less and less about survival of the fittest and more and more about survival of the least curious, the least motivated, the most gullible.