Eating Machines in SUVs

Three days after Thanksgiving and I can still feel the food. (I can also open my refrigerator and touch the food.) My family had piles of food. There was the dinner table with all the standard Thanksgiving items. There was a coffee table in the living room covered with assorted sweets and treats, including many, many items covered in chocolate. There was a buffet at the breakfast bar with expensive hors d’oeuvres–nuts and crackers and cheeses and dips and sauces and marinated mushrooms and enough food to make a whole meal for a large family. For desert there were pies and lemon cake and baklava, with cans of pressurized whipped cream to splatter over the top of everything. The morning after, at breakfast, there was a pile of bacon, a pile of sausage, and a pile of waffles, bananas and pecans, jugs of maple syrup, and more whipped cream. When I left to come home, I was laden with leftovers in zippered bags and plastic bowls and a foiled over half of pumpkin pie.

This for the guy who eats a high-fiber, low-fat diet of rice, cereal, vegetables, beans, legumes, and the like every other day of the year. All this rich food is something of a shock to my system; it’s dragging me down, making me lethargic. It makes me ashamed of my culture, too. This is the land where, after stuffing ourselves with mounds of fattening food, we plop down in front of the television and watch commercials where gravelly voiced announcers beg us to go out and purchase expensive, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (on credit, I should add). Then we go out shopping, fighting over parking spaces that are close to the store so we can minimize the distance our fat bodies will need to walk. Once inside, we stuff our carts and bags with ugly, crappy merchandise to give to our children and train them up in The Way of Consumption. (Oh, but the “reason for the season” is some Ancient Near Eastern cat named Jesus.)

Don’t get me wrong. I like a good family meal. I like buying, giving, and receiving gifts. But I like these things in moderation. Humans in every time and place have had festivals and celebrations, moments of temporary extravagance. We need those times. When the days are painfully short and the sun is setting at quitting time, we need the comfort of coming home to neighborhoods aglow with Christmas lights. But we also need restraint and a broader consciousness. We need to remember that in all the consumption, we are not just consuming machines. We think and feel, and our acquisitiveness transcends the need for mere stuff to include a need, perhaps even more desperate, for the thoughts and feelings of other people. Use the holiday season to cultivate that part of your humanity. The stuff will always be there, but you and the people you love will all wither and die someday. Get out of your SUV, put down your fork, stop consuming, and start communicating.

Science and Religion in History

According to this CBS poll, 65% of Americans want children to be taught evolution and creationism.

But how? Should we put creationism in the biology textbooks? Make it part of the official science curriculum? No, because creationism is not a scientific theory; creationism is an untestable hypothesis.

However, I am all for teaching creationism if we make it a part of the “social studies” curriculum. In fact, I would favor the creation of a whole new subject in public schools: religious studies. Kids should be exposed to the Bible and its place in Western history. They should be exposed to creationism. But they should also be exposed to Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism, Native American religions, African religions, and all the different colors of the religious rainbow. We should teach our students about the history of religions, how they are born and why. Students should know that the major familiar religions, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are all comprised of various competing sects. They should not be taught that all religions are the same, or that all paths lead to the same god. Anyone with half a brain knows that’s nonsense. But students should be presented with the diversity of religious thought within the human experience and allowed to see these phenomena as they are.

Students should be asked to think critically about why people think religiously, about why we have creation stories, if and how those creation stories conflict with scientific knowledge, and what that means for personal belief. Students should also be exposed to the history of science. They should be taught more about the lives and times of the scientists who set forth all those theories they have to learn in their science classes. They should learn about the questions those scientists asked, and about how they experienced difficulty after finding that their observations of the natural world did not quite line up with what they believed in their religions.

If we taught science and religion in their historical contexts, we would not be able to feed students pre-digested views from either direction. Let them see the roiling turmoil behind the history of science, as well as that behind the history of religion. Maybe they will come to their own decision that way.

[insert witty title here]

Funky Dung “just can’t wait” to hear what I have to say about this. I guess I shouldn’t disappoint him by saying nothing at all. Basically, the story on the other end of that link is about an atheist (philosopher Jürgen Habermas) who claims that “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilisation.” Good for him. So how exactly does his theory work? Did he forget that the Greeks invented democracy? How come the ideal of liberty didn’t start showing up until the 17th and 18th centuries, and didn’t really hit it big until the 19th and 20th? And I haven’t seen documentation of anybody talking about “human rights” before the 20th century (you know, the one that was supposed to be more violent and bloody than all the previous ones, even though statistics on the matter are sketchy and shady, and we always seem to forget to take into account the geometrical increase in population…but I digress, within a parenthetical no less!).

Sure, Christianity is an integral part of Western history, but “the ultimate foundation of . . . the benchmarks of Western civilization”? Anybody can see (and should see) that Christianity is the most important institution of Western civilization. But if you’re going to credit Christianity with “liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy,” you have some tough hurdles to overcome if you want to prove it.

First, you have to specify what you mean by “Christianity.” If you mean an institution, you need to choose which one. Catholic? Protestant? You also need to explain why Western civilization grew up around the Catholic church and not the Orthodox one. Also, I suspect that most Protestants are going to argue that those four values (liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy) only flowered fully after the hegemony of the Catholic church was challenged. (Full disclosure: I would probably agree with those Protestants.) If by “Christianity” you don’t mean an institution but some set of basic tenets or creeds (or some kind of Lewisian “mere Christianity” for the Protestants), however you would identify that, by whatever name, then you have a rather sticky task of demonstrating causality. Lots of people can come up with examples for this kind of Christianity supporting liberty, conscience, human rights, democracy and their opposites. When Christianity has been used to play both sides, how do you show that the rise of the one side is “ultimately” the fault of Christianity, and not some other factor? Then, how do you pin the other side on something else? Why does the church never fail to claim things like liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, but consistently shies away from things like the Inquisition and the Crusades? This is no different, I think, than Americans conveniently forgetting or de-emphasizing how many Indians were slaughtered in the forging of their nation. There is no important force in history that is not a mixed bag.

Furthermore, even if you could demonstrate historical causality and show that “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilisation,” you have yet to prove that Christianity could only be the ultimate foundation for such a civilization. You’re also going to have to answer to the growing chorus of dissent (both inside and out of the Western world) that questions whether Western civilization, despite those four values, is not also riddled with fatal problems, and whether those problems are also the product of Christianity. I am thinking, for example, of the famous paper by Lynn White, Jr., in which he argued that our “ecological crisis” is a product of Christianity. How about capitalism? Socialism? Marxism? These are all products of Western civilization, too. Do we lay those at the feet of Christianity as well? Here is the mixed bag problem again.

I have three big problems with claiming various credits for Christianity. First, nothing is so simple that it can be led back to one source. Even Christianity is a blend of Hellenism and Hebraism, among other things. Second, the task of deciding what effects “belong” to Christianity and what does not is very likely beyond our abilities as historians of our own past. How can we maintain a reasonable division between the effects of Christianity and the effects of other factors when any decent historian knows full well that few things, if any, have only one cause?

Habermas has, in my opinion, committed the classic error of the philosopher (from the historian’s perspective) of oversimplifying a vast subject. And this one is about as vast as they get in the humanities: What is Western civilization and how did it get where it is? Christians might get excited about Habermas’ pronouncement, but they need to step back and ask themselves whether their excitement is due to the reasonableness of his assessment, or to the fact that he’s saying what they most like to hear.

Habermas does have a good point, however, if he is observing that Christianity comes with a built-in moral code. That is, Christianity is functional as an automatic cultural stabilizer (so long as people can swallow the metaphysics). Secularism, on the other hand, comes with no built-in moral code (arguments of Paul Kurtz aside). In a secular world, morality must be completely rebuilt by rational means, and it does not always come out looking the same as Christian morality. (For instance, there is a slight divergence regarding abortion and homosexuality, one that makes a lot of people really mad.) Most people, I think, would prefer to live in a system of established morality that does not require deep rationalization, but which is expressed via ritual structures that are designed to appeal to the senses and give them a sense of solidity and continuity. Christianity provides a simple, somewhat intuitive interface (depending on your personal proclivities) to the difficult and extremely complex realm of human behavior and ethics. (E.g., the Christian says “Lying is a sin,” the secularist says “Lying destabilizes your social network.” They both mean the same thing, they both prohibit the same behavior, and they both do so on the basis of a relationship–the former with a metaphysical deity, the latter with a human community. For some reason, though, people prefer to behave “because God said so” than because it promotes a stable environment for the living of their own lives.) But then, most religions do that. Secularism comes with no built-in morality, no built-in rituals, and no built-in social network. (I can’t just go to another city and find a local atheist meetinghouse where they’re saying the same things my friends back home are saying.) From that perspective, Habermas has a case for Christianity as a stabilizer in these difficult times. However, his contention that all the great moral values of Western civilization are founded only on Christianity seems about as meaningful as C.S. Lewis’ assertion that, “Well, since most cultures have the same basic moral rules, Christianity must be the correct one” (my paraphrase–see the first chapter of Mere Christianity to read it in his own words).

I did look around on the web to see if Habermas’ essay “A Time of Transition” was available online, but had no luck. If anyone finds it, or knows where I can read it in physical print, let me know.

Spongebob Squarepants

Yes, I actually went to see The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. It’s Kenneth Turan’s fault. I heard his review on NPR and he said there was this line in the movie, “You can’t fool me, I listen to public radio!” Yes, a character actually says that. So who is the butt of the joke? Is it the character, who thinks listening to public radio who makes him smarter? Or is it public radio, which does not actually make anyone smarter? I don’t really care. The movie was cute.

I had never seen anything with SpongeBob before this movie. (I briefly dated a girl whose son was a big fan, and she encouraged me to rent some videos, but I never did.) My introduction to this bizarre character was in a special education classroom where one little boy drew pictures of SpongeBob every day. “Oh, he’s drawing SpongeBob again,” said one of the aides with a tired sigh. Not that drawing the same cartoon character over and over has anything to do with being a special education student. I was a “gifted and talented” student and I must have drawn the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Scrooge McDuck hundreds of times each. Also, let’s not forget Lion-O, of the Thundercats, and Voltron. Kids are weird.

Anyway, the movie. It’s actually quite fun. Of course, it’s also totally stupid, with a brainless Saturday morning plot. Why do we let this kind of tripe pass for entertainment when we’re kids? Then kids grow up and turn into adults who get bizarre ideas like, “Let’s buy the Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and a couple other Ben Affleck movies on DVD and watch them over and over!” Which is about as intelligent as, “Let’s get a bunch of money and burn it while inhaling the fumes as deeply as we can!” What would happen if we insisted that children’s entertainment need not also be childish? Why not ask for plots without holes and at least an inkling of logic? Why not train kids to think imaginatively and critically?

Oh, never mind. Besides, I clearly can’t start a paragraph on this post without getting sidetracked, anyway. Just remember the wisdom of SpongeBob: “You don’t need a license to drive a sandwich.”

Morality, Legality, and Abortion

Since the evangelical Christians are flexing their political might these days, I suspect that we have some big legal battles ahead of us. Should homosexuals be allowed to get married in the eyes of the law? Should abortion and embryonic stem cell research be legal? Should church and state remain separated? Of these three issues, a triumph over abortion (by overturning Roe v. Wade) would probably give the most fuel to the evangelical fire. They have been fighting this one for more than thirty years and success at this stage would make them feel even more confident than the recent election did.

Since Bush has managed to secure a second term in office, he will probably have the opportunity to appoint several new justices to the Supreme Court. Most people expect him to appoint hardline anti-abortioners. I expect to see more Justices like Antonin Scalia, who is against abortion and also does not believe in the separation of church and state. (He at least had the good sense to recuse himself from the Newdow case after making his bias explicit in a speech, but I doubt that a Court with a cluster of Scalia-like justices would hand down unbiased rulings in similar cases.) This means I also expect to see some brazen challenges to the church and state doctrine, and a major effort to get Roe v. Wade overturned. Neither of those possibilities makes me happy.

Before I explain why, here is my philosophy of law. It goes something like this:

Every act, from murder to sexual intercourse, is legal until we make it illegal. (In other words, we do not create the “right” to perform an act; we can only restrict the “right” to perform it.) Furthermore, an act should only be made illegal because performing it would bring unwanted and unnecessary harm to another citizen or another citizen’s property.

By that rather libertarian standard, homosexual marriage should be legal because, despite some of the gloom-and-doom rhetoric out there, no one can prove that homosexual marriage is a cause of our declining culture, a symptom, or something completely unrelated. That is, it harms no one, except perhaps the consensual participants of the marriage, but only so much as any marriage harms anyone. (I.e., if you want to play with fire, expect to get burned. It’s not my job to tell you not to play with fire.)

However, when applied to abortion, my homely little philosophy of law finds a snag. If laws are made to protect people, the whole thing depends on we define a fetus with respect to personhood and humanity. From my perspective, a fetus is clearly not a person, clearly not a human being, and clearly not an entity upon which we should bestow the full rights an privileges of personhood and citizenship. Hence, there is no need to criminalize abortion. But from the Christian perspective, a fetus clearly is a person and an entity deserving of the full rights and privileges of humanity and citizenship. Hence, abortion is one of those harmful acts that needs to be criminalized.

How do we arbitrate between these two perspectives? It is a problem of defining humanity, which always makes people uncomfortable, especially when it ends up before the Supreme Court. For instance, the Court decided in the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 that no blacks could claim citizenship and that the federal government could not prohibit slavery, thus robbing blacks of their humanity. This did not sit well with the nation, and nine years later the 14th Amendment overturned the Court’s ruling. During the interim, of course, was the Civil War, in which disputes regarding slavery and the power of the federal government to mandate northern support for slavery (e.g., via the Fugitive Slave Act) played no small part.

The differing perspectives regarding abortion are moral perspectives. Some people think abortion is immoral, other people do not. However, according to my homely little philosophy of law, we cannot create a right to abortion, but only restrict its practice. This means that leaving abortion legal does not constitute an imposition upon any unwilling parties the moral perspective that abortion is not immoral. (No one who opposes abortion is forced to participate.) On the other hand, criminalizing abortion does constitute an imposition upon unwilling parties the moral perspective that abortion is immoral. (People who want to acquire or provide abortions are restricted from doing so.) Hence, regardless of the absolute morality of abortion (which either cannot be known or does not exist, from what I can see), the position of the anti-abortion crowd regarding the criminalization of abortion is the untenable one because it abuses the power of government by legislating a moral solution to problem controversial enough to have persistent arguments on either side.

However, in the recent discussion, Funky Dung has insisted, contrary to my argument, that all laws impose morality on unwilling parties, so it is hypocritical to object to laws against abortion because they impose morality on unwilling parties. For instance, Funky Dung would probably argue that laws against murder, theft, and assault impose a certain morality on people whose private morality does not preclude such behaviors. Does this complicate the problem?

Many people have argued that we make laws against acts like murder, theft, and assault because we have no choice if we want to maintain a stable society. We have even created psychological definitions of “normal” behavior that label as antisocial and mentally ill the people who are prone to these acts. Hence, while there may be some people who privately have no moral qualms with murder, theft, or assault, the rest of us have no problem with imposing our “morality” on them, because any arguments they might make in favor of their morality would be labeled as not just irrational, but pathological.

However, most people do not consider the desire to obtain an abortion as irrational or pathological. In fact, there are many rational arguments that favor the use of abortion. My personal favorite is that abortion provides a balance for women against the unfair advantage of men as regards the relationship between sex and reproduction. Men can always deposit their sperm and slink away, thus avoiding all responsibility and investment; women are stuck with the pregnancy and cannot slough the responsibility or investment in any way, except by getting an abortion.

The difference between abortion and murder might simply be that enough people want to have abortions and enough people are willing to let them that it falls within that range on the bell curve where we are willing to consider it “normal,” and not irrational or pathological. But that raises the question of why abortion is more acceptable than murder, simply in terms of how many people want to allow it. If both of them are equally wrong, morally, then why are they not equally rejected by our society? Is it because abortion seems “victimless”? What is a victim, anyway? Does a victim need to be human? Is a fetus human? How does one decide? Is humanity bestowed according to potential or according to function? Who decides how humanity is bestowed?

Also, Steve has recently commented that the libertarian view such as my own “sidesteps” the moral component of the law. The fact that the “morality” of abortion is so variable in our society is a good reason to take the libertarian view, at least in this case. Here especially morality is subjective, and making laws according to subjective reasoning is a bad idea. Can the issue of abortion be moved outside the subjective realm of “morality” and set on a firmer, more rational ground? If it cannot, if abortion remains purely a morality battle, would it be a violation of the separation of church and state for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade according to “Judeo-Christian” beliefs?

(Personally, I would answer those last two questions as No and Yes, respectively.)

Contentions Legal and Philosophical

Funky Dung “can’t help but wonder in what sense [I] intended to provoke.” Fair enough. I don’t know the answer to that one either. Fires flare up, fuel runs out, life goes on. Give me a brain and body not subject to the harsh caprice of neurochemistry and maybe I’ll make more sense. (Or maybe I won’t.) This is exactly the kind of thing that makes the humanities and “social sciences” so infuriatingly complex. People behave in strange ways, myself included. We get happy, we get sad, we get annoyed, we get unpredictable, we get inconsistent.

Anyway, by far the most interesting part (in my opinion) of Funky’s response to my Quickie Rebuttal was this section:

I’m also getting rather tired of people playing the “legislating morals” card. We legislate morals all the time. Revisionists can claim murder’s illegality is merely a convenience of social order all they want. It won’t change the fact that it’s illegal because people think it’s morally wrong. So is theft. So is assault. So are many other acts. [my emphasis - theomorph]

I have a different view of the law than Funky Dung. Here’s my view: Laws are not about what’s “morally wrong,” but about protecting citizens from each other, or from a common foe (you might say “enemies foreign and domestic”). Laws against murder, theft, assault, and “many other acts” are laws that protect people from violence committed by others.

But what if you make a law against homosexual marriage? Who are you protecting? In my opinion, when you do that, you are abusing the power of the government not to protect anyone, but to salve the fears of people who apparently don’t want to recognize that homosexuals exist. Other than that, I’m not sure what a law against homosexual marriage is supposed to be for, except to express the morality of one particular group over another one. Nobody is protected, and lots of people are enraged. Abuse of government. That’s the one thing that really gets my dander up these days. It’s just a bad precedent to set when you start making laws against behaviors that have no discernible effects on people who do not participate in them.

Then there’s abortion. This is where the Christians think they get the upper hand, because I couched law in terms of “protection.” We’re protecting the unborn, they insist. But why should a fetus have the status of a living, thinking, acting, contributing, communicating human person?

This is going to be debated from now until the end of time, I think. Some people, like me, look at the fetus, think about the historically and geographically changing standards of what it means to be a human member of a society, and can’t see any reason why a fetus has any “right to life.” Other people, like Funky Dung, look at the fetus and think that it’s unquestionably a member of the community whose existence should be defended by others because it cannot defend itself. The problem is not who has a more rational argument, but how people subjectively perceive the situation. So long as some people believe a fertilized egg has the same rights and privileges as a 30-year-old human, there will be contention. Meanwhile there will always be women who want abortions, doctors who are willing to perform them, and people like me who do not see any intrinsic human value in something that merely has the potential to become human.

We have these disputes all around the edges of our society. Is a mentally retarded person fully human? An invalid on life support? A deranged murderer who shows no remorse or sympathy? Why do we not allow people under a certain age from voting, even though we make laws that affect them? These things get argued in courts all over the place. (Some people also push around at the issue from the other direction using science fiction: Could a manufactured robot ever be considered “human,” or have comparable value? There are even disagreements in that hypothetical realm.) Very rarely (if at all) do we come down with a solid decision either way, one that makes everybody happy. You can say that human life is always valuable, but then you have to define what human life is, and people have always had fuzzy definitions for that. All too often it comes down to moral decisions.

In the Catholic Church, so far as I understand it, they say that abortion is wrong, that euthanasia is wrong, and that capital punishment is wrong. Fine, there’s something of a definition. But not everyone agrees with it because it doesn’t come from any watertight rational definition for what makes a “human,” probably because there isn’t one. In my opinion, though, just the fact that this is not clear to anyone who cares to look is reason enough for all of us to look harder, think harder, and talk more about it. What I rarely, if ever, hear from anti-abortion Christians is an argument that does not involve decrees from within their religion, either from scripture or from an authority figure. That’s a problem because those of us outside that religion have no reason to accept those authorities.

People have different standards for their definitions. I think being human requires thinking and communicating. Other people think being human just means having a material existence and being part of the developmental cycle of the species. How do you arbitrate between those standards? The Christians have a method, and that involves their religion. If they could have their way, they would legislate that method, which is essentially a moral decision, over the rest of us who still think differently, and vehemently so. Here, anti-abortion Christians are attempting to force an answer to a philosophical dilemma, an answer that does not convince the rest of us. Maybe they will succeed. Maybe they will take over the power of the government and make everyone conform to their behavior (at least so far as the law can see), but that won’t take away the unease and thoughtful dissent.

I would rather see people keep arguing and thinking. If a faction in our society is making laws that criminalize behaviors for which there are lots of good arguments to keep legal, that faction is using the power of government, if not to silence their opponents, then at least to make sure their arguments are disregarded. That is why I think laws against abortion are an abuse of government.

Comments

Somebody over at Ales Rarus complained that only registered users are allowed to comment at my blog. There was a reason I had chosen that setting (I think), eons ago when Blogger first allowed comments, but now I can’t remember what it was. Or maybe that was just the default setting. I don’t remember. Anyway, I changed the setting so that “Anyone” can comment.

Quickie Rebuttal

Funky Dung says he doesn’t like my “eisegesis.” Color me shocked. I wrote a provocative post and–wonder of wonders–provoked a response.

And, yup, “foaming at the mouth” and “losing his cool” are good ways to describe the way I feel right now. Call it a confluence of annoying things, from conservative Christians all across America seeming to think that the November 2 election handed them a blank check to impose their morality via legislation to the fact that for three nights now I have not slept except when I drug myself, which is, to say the least, disconcerting. So yeah, I’m in a bad mood.

Since I’m pretty busy and don’t have a lot of time, I’ll just whack through a few high points of his disapproval.

First, regarding II Corinthians 4:4, he’s right. I misread that one.

Second, regarding I Timothy 5:8, when Christians are told that failing in their Christian duties makes them “worse than an unbeliever,” I fail to see how the unbeliever comes out of that looking very good. Think about what other kinds of things you could put in that kind of comparison– “worse than a dog,” “worse than filth,” “worse than something bad.” Try putting something good in there and the comparison loses all its weight– “worse than a summer day,” “worse than ice cream,” “worse than raindrops on roses,” etc. The idea is that “Hey, Christian, you don’t want to be as bad as an unbeliever, do you? Didn’t think so.” Personally, being an unbeliever, I find that slanderous.

Third, regarding II Corinthians 2:6, it’s pretty much the same situation. If it’s “not good for a person’s confidence or self-esteem, let alone their soul, to be married to a nonbeliever,” what exactly does that say about the nonbeliever? Hi, I’m poison to your soul. Thanks. Yeah, I’m just lovin’ that one.

Fourth, Funky wants to know “Who’s casting people into a lake of fire?” This is in Revelation 20:15:

If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Which means that, according to Christian cosmology, at the end of the world, when my name is not “found written in the book of life,” I will be “thrown into the lake of fire.” Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Fifth, no, I don’t like the “God as parent analogy.” Parents don’t kill their children when they misbehave. The God of the Bible is a murderous tyrant who demands lots and lots of blood, including his own, simply because some people don’t want to do his bidding.

Sixth, regarding the fallacy of “mocking someone’s argument before it is given,” sure, maybe that’s fallacious, but I can’t say it was particularly wrong in this case. Nothing Funky says surprises me.

Ah, well, look, six things on my list. Number of Satan. Perfect for me, the evil unbeliever, horrible person that Christians don’t want to be worse than, shouldn’t marry, and whom God, if he exists, will one day hurl into a lake of fire. Lovely.

(However, on the bright side, I should point out that my original argument was that Christians are all but required to treat atheists like low, unholy, kindling, and Funky’s contention is that Christians should treat atheists much more nicely. I’m glad he thinks so. He is a pretty nice guy, even if we disagree rather, um, intensely.)

Iraqi Bloggers

Every now and then, for the benefit of the Left and the anti-war crowd, I like to provide links to a few blogs by real Iraqis in Iraq. Maybe the news media make that country sound like a never ending bloodbath, but these Iraqis provide an alternative voice (i.e., that of real people):

• Iraq & Iraqis
• Iraq the Model
• Healing Iraq

Good reading in there.

Ideological Parasites

Ah, Pennsylvania. Beautiful state. Where the Amish live in the 17th century, and so do the school boards.

The Dover Area School District in central southern Pennsylvania has decided that the theory of evolution has “gaps/problems” that students need to know about.

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered.  The Theory is not a fact.  Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence.  A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Well, yes, and electricity is a theory, too, but nobody is suggesting that we teach Medieval alternatives to that one. So I am curious. What, in science, for “intelligent design” proponents, is better than a theory? Is there any scientific knowledge of any kind that exceeds the definition of “a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations”? You ever seen an electron? A photon? A magnetic field? You ever seen gravity? Are you aware that scientists have not found a mechanism, particle, or carrier wave for gravity? Yes, it’s true, we can see gravity working everywhere, but nobody knows how it works. We can describe it with amazing accuracy, but we can’t say how it happens. Nobody knows what transmits between the earth and the moon, or between the sun and the earth, and causes them to behave as though a tether were stretched between them. All we have are evil materialist theories that say something must be doing that job. Is it the fabled graviton? Perhaps. But nobody has found any. So why aren’t school districts all across America changing physics standards? Why are no Christians out there declaring that gravity is no mystery at all, but an act of some “intelligent gravity inducer”? Why are schools allowed to teach that the universe is held together by a physical force whose mechanism has not been discovered?

Speaking of things that have not yet been discovered, how about this “intelligent designer”? If “a theory is defined as a well-tested explanation,” where are the tests revealing an intelligent designer? These I would like to see. Too bad they don’t exist. Which is why “intelligent design” is not so much “an explanation of the origin of life” as it is an impetuous denial without evidence of an actual theory–one which has a greater preponderance of supporting data than most theories will ever have.

The “intelligent design” movement has a rival “explanation” that does not stand up to professional scrutiny by real, working scientists. But instead of trying to meet that challenge, they want to give the task of evaluation to high school students. This is both shockingly stupid and stunningly slick. Rather than presenting “intelligent design” to students in its proper social and historical context–as a relatively small movement led by conservative Christians, an ideological descendent of “creationism,” and not a field of legitimate scientific study–the henchmen (henchpersons?) of “intelligent design” present their argument as though it were a branch of science unjustly suppressed by the rest. Then they expect high school students to sort through the difference between natural selection and “intelligent design” and take the place of professional scientific review. (That’s the stupid part.) All they have to do is make high school kids believe that they have a real theory (which they do not) and they have gained a greater foothold in the next generation. (At least until those kids grow up, start thinking for themselves, read a few books, and find out that they were duped.) That is, they are attempting to hijack the educational system and make it a carrier for their pseudo-scientific ideology that the professional scientific community (because it knows better) will not spread. (That’s the slick part.)

If we’re going to teach science in schools, we need to teach the science that scientists have established. If ideologically motivated alterations of a subject can be written into curriculum standards for science, why not for other subjects? Why not let political parties re-write the history standards in their districts? Maybe Bill Gates should be allowed to insist that handwriting be de-emphasized in favor of training with Microsoft Word. How about we let the growing Muslim population insist that if there is an “intelligent designer,” there is also only one god, named Allah? Where does it stop?

Professional scientists are the ones who practice the scientific method to establish scientific knowledge, which is the only thing that should be taught under the auspices of “science.” If the “intelligent design” people really want to get into the schools, they should rally for the addition of another core subject: comparative religion. If they are really into examining all the alternatives, why aren’t they out there pushing for high schools to require a class where all the alternatives of religious thought are spread out before students like the smorgasbord that they are? But they really don’t care about alternative viewpoints. What they really want to do is get their talons into the educational system, hijack it, and turn it into one big parochial school.