A Fun Project
I linked a few days ago to an excellent article by Chris Mooney about a long article promoting ‘Intelligent Design’ in the Harvard Law Review. It’s worrisome stuff.
Still, you can understand why a rave review in the Harvard Law Review would get the ID crowd excited. Such a publication represents intellectual legitimization of a sort that traditional creationists never achieved. “The whole game plan here is to credential the movement,” observes Florida State University law professor Steven Gey, a specialist in legal issues surrounding the teaching of evolution. Gey calls the Harvard Law Review piece “very weak” in its assessment of the legal case for teaching ID in public schools. But he adds, “I suspect this Harvard note is going to cause problems. I suspect they’re going to make reprints and scatter it here and yon, as if this were really some valid legal approach.”
Great. More ammunition for the ‘let’s take buzzwords like “evolution” out of the curriculum’ crowd. And the Harvard Law Review article even misdescribes what Intelligent Design is.
Even more astonishingly, the Harvard Law Review piece paints the ID movement as entirely divorced from religion, citing its “exclusive focus on empirical evidence and philosophical argument.” This statement is extremely misleading. As Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross document in their new book Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford: 2004), there’s virtually nothing to Intelligent Design but religion.
An enterprising B&W reader emailed me yesterday to tell me (with permission to quote him) that he’d done some searching and found an email address for a member of the editorial board of the Review, and then wrote to said board member to alert him to the situation and urge him to read Mooney’s article. He suggested I should include the link to the list of Review board members. An excellent idea, so there it is. If you have an idle moment, why not warn someone from the Harvard Law Review.
This is not my own thought, though it tickles me; in fact I may have read it here on B&W. But it was somewhere in the blogosphere a few days ago.
The idea is simple: If the proponents of “intelligent design” are really serious about a free-flowing debate, and they want their thing studied in schools alongside “Darwinism”…Then why not also study “Atheism”? It’s not the same thing as “Darwisnism” at all and if you are going to be broad-minded — and hey! that’s the IDs guys big selling point — why not include Atheism and for that matter every othe religion.
This is my own thought, and it does not tickle me.
While it seems vitally important and necessary that specious ignorant nonsense be kept back, as it attempts to flood the chambers of instruction and legislation, it’s equally important that people not engaged directly in the specific contests remember that it is at least possible that what really drives creationists and ID-ists and all the other mindless cultists, has very little to do with fact versus fact, and very much to do with population versus population.
A surplus of willing volunteers, virtual slaves by election, with no curiosity and an overabundance of artificially created and maintained insecurity, means anything that threatens them will be attacked.
The principles of life itself are threatening to them. Their engagement with biological reality is masked, entirely. Unmasking is what science does best.
The actual world, the tangible world, the landscape in which they move daily is almost completely artificial now.
I’m talking about a group of animals who are in total dependence on something they can’t quite see or understand. They’re being told it’s God, but the people that are telling them this are obviously lying about many other things besides the existence of God.
Too much of the dialog, the rational point-by-point, is taken up with nonsense and its refutation. The purpose for the nonsense is never addressed.
Most of even the most perceptive critics of creationism and its descendents are content to think of it as an absurd malfunction of logic, a superstitious fairytale that appeals to immature personalities.
My point is yes, on the part of the “believers” – who are child-like in many ways – but their masters are not.
What difference will it have made if the minority of sound-thinking rationalists were correct about mutation and selection, if they’re pushed out of the food chain themselves, by a superior though-mistaken-about-evolution force?
Nature does not respect the truth any more than it respects muscular strength or beauty. Each, in its place and time, may be perfectly suited to its conditions, but there’s no guarantee how long that time will last, nor how permanent that place will be.
We can be right, and too weak to do anything about it, against an opposition that’s wrong, or we can be right and tough enough to make it stick.
I’m voting for toughness first. It’s time to get angry and stay angry.
Not that OB needs that advice herself, particularly.
No, I don’t, much, do I. No one’s ever felt a need to urge me to get more riled up about things.
Still. Even among the ‘masters’ there are plenty who don’t find a deluded populace particularly useful. Or at least there’s a tension. Delusion is useful in some ways but highly obstructive in others. So there’s room to work, at least until the Guardians take over.
That’s what makes chaotic weather such an apt outcome.
Control freaks dominating everything from the womb to the woods and reaching for more, but they can’t quite get their hands on the sky.
Not that they didn’t try, bless their little hearts. But making it rain isn’t the same as ensuring stability in a wheel that large.
The tower of Babel gets rained out, sort of.
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Just so you know, it’s not a scuttling worry of mine, that masters rule the corner of the universe we live in; but in the context of why fundamentalism exists, why circumcision exists, why 100 years ago (I have photographic evidence!) the county sheriff was at the beach, measuring the hemlines of women’s bathing suits.
Control. Which implies controll-ers. “Masters” is rhetorical.
“Guardians” is what?
Msg:
Huh?
::Puzzled Expression::
Same here, I don’t even think those metaphors are relevant.