Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Intelligent What?

A discussion is happening over at Prairie Weather I thought I'd share with you on Intelligent Design. You can read PW's post over there, link on the side bar.

I view it as people trying to hang on to the myths of their childhood. There is a similar tragedy playing out in Gaza, with Jews holding up their holy book claiming god gave them that there land... Arabs can't find that particular tract in their own particular holy book and beg to differ. Neither of those holy books contains the New Testament, in which Jesus quite often contradicts both of those books, by the way, even though the FundXtians claim infallibility of the "Word" thereby justifying their stand as creationists.

While waving these various holy books containing the words of gods at each other, Jews, Arabs, Christians, Budhists, and the rest of us are standing on the one storehouse of information we all, everyone of us, agree was produced by "god", though that word means different things to each of us.

That storehouse of information, that book which I personally consider holy, is...

The Earth.

The theory of evolution arises out of trying to make sense of the infallible words, written by the forces of time and geology, for us to see on the very planet we must save in order to survive. It is the geological record that cannot lie. If the other "books" are contradicted by our very planet itself...Then we must find ourselves with the same choice facing Galileo.

Are we to be honest people, or will we lie to support the myths of fallible men from long ago that still hang oppressively over our very ability to make rational decisions?


This comment is posted at Prairie Weather:



I find all this interesting...I live about 25 miles from the Courthouse where the Scopes trial was held, and have come across myth after myth concerning that event. The bottom line is this:

Creationists believe the bible says god "created" all things roughly 6000 years ago. If evolution is factual, there is a contradiction of some magnitude.

Now we have this Intelligent design thing which frankly contradicts creationism but somehow seems acceptable to the FundXtians.

OK, that wasn't the bottom line...this is:

Fundamentalist religion in America has a vested interest in destroying critical thinking, and one of the many byproducts of that is science education.

The question to be answered is this:

"Will America throw its future to those who have raised the study of functional ignorance to the level of art?"

Steve

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