I offer two short items I came across on the Internet yesterday. One is a positive item and the other is an example of the issue facing this country. Posted on the Charlotte Observer website on 10/31 in the op/ed section was a book review and commentary on “The Godless Constitution” by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore and a letter to the editor of The Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi, on 10/31, takes “Secularists” to task for mixing microevolution and macroevolution.
Tag: church and state
Friday night I was surfing TV and came across the end of a special program on NBC hosted by Tom Brokaw called “In God they trust: NBC’s Tom Brokaw goes inside the world of Christian Evangelicals”.
Even though I missed most of the show they do have a transcript of the show on MSNBC.
In the discussion that followed the film and continued on our member’s e-mail list, it was suggested that Flemming and many non-believers go too far in “attacking” people with religious beliefs. It was said that we need to acknowledge that religion plays an important role in most believers lives and by “attacking” their beliefs we have crossed the line of decency.
As expected the charge was made that we non-believers who “attack” religious beliefs are hostile to religion and the religious and how this hostility undermines our credibility as a group to better the human condition. The assumption is made that we must not question people’s deeply held beliefs lest we hurt their feelings.
On October 21st, the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a forum on the issue of teaching Intelligent Design in the public schools. C-Span has Real Media videos of all three sessions available to view online at least through the first or second week of November. I haven’t watched them all yet as they total about 5 hours of video but I have heard it was a good event for supporters of Evolution.
The cross examination of Behe highlights what is so wrong about Intelligent Design and the zeal of its supporters to get it wedged into school curriculums. They simply dismiss anything that doesn’t support their conclusions or they cry about being victims of politics.
Further on in testimony the discussion talked about one of the main charges ID’ers make against Evolution – that Evolution can’t be observed. ID’ers point out you can observe the “design”.
Michael Behe was asked if intelligent design is observable. Behe said it is. But when asked if he had witnessed newly designed structures appearing in the past five years. Behe said the designed structures that he’s written about are much older.
If you have listened to people like Parsley, or James Dobson, or Jerry Falwell, or Bishop Sheen and on and on it would seem that this country’s morals have been in decline for decades yet religious conservatives control the White House, the Congress, many state legislatures and state offices, as well as have friendly city and county councils, and school boards – all pushing their agenda. What is left to “reform” or “reclaim”?