Replies

It does seem the ID is a progressive cause.
Wait a minute. I thought that ID'rs were all Wild-EyedTM Fundamentalist Christian, Creationist, Bible-thumping ignoramuses. Which is it?

Why, bless you, they can be both.

Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort. - Lazarus Long

Or "conservatives" and "progressives"

Conservatives recognize, in the words of Edmund Burke, that no generation has a monopoly on wisdom, and any radical change you made is likely to be to the worse. And rather that working on to an idealized imagined future, you should see what worked in the past. The American Rebellion was one in a long line of English revolts aimed at maintaining traditional rights against new impositions of State power, all the way back to when the peasants were demanding restoration of the Laws of Good King Edward the Confessor.
There was no vision of an prefect utopia that could be created now, whatever the less enlightened wanted.

Revolutionaries really believe that they are more intelligent than past generations, and wiser than future ones.
Therefore they see no need to limit the change they are imposing on society now - why delay utopia?

Therefore - be they Cromwell's Major Generals, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Socialists, Fascists, Nazis, Islamists, or Christian Reconstuctionists (your "Wild-EyedTM Fundamentalist Christian, Creationist, Bible-thumping ignoramuses") - they are progressives.

There is wisdom in your remarks.

Therefore - be they Cromwell's Major Generals, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Socialists, Fascists, Nazis, Islamists, or Christian Reconstuctionists (your "Wild-EyedTM Fundamentalist Christian, Creationist, Bible-thumping ignoramuses") - they are progressives.

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number.

And in which group would you classify the 124 faculty members of Iowa State University referred to in the article at the top of this thread who felt compelled to endorse a petition in August denouncing "efforts to portray intelligent design as science." "Unnamed in the petition, but the obvious target, was Guillermo Gonzalez, an assistant professor of astronomy." "Gonzalez has never taught intelligent design in his courses, according to the university." His crime? Co-authoring a book, "The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery".

I heard someone say on PBS, of all places, a couple of months ago that some day doctrinaire evolutionists will be viewed the way we view doctrinaire Marxists today.

Cordially,