6 Comments

1. Curt Cameron on January 28th, 2010 at 8:47 am (Link)
   

   Angus, you’re almost correct about everything, except the Intelligent Design. We Texans were able to mostly defeat the nuts on the Board of Education on that topic last year, although they were able to sneak in some language about “weaknesses” of theories.

   The science curriculum considerations were over last year. This year, it’s history, which the rest of your commentary correctly describes.

   I’m sorry, other 49 states! I’m doing what I can to keep this contained.

2. mynym on January 29th, 2010 at 11:43 am (Link)
   

   We did not become a superpower until the end of World War II, after the advent of the atomic bomb.

   I.e. we did not become a superpower until the defeat of Nazism, ironically a movement based on Darwinian creation myths. In contrast, American progress has generally been brought about by admitting to “intelligence in the design” as Thomas Jefferson put it. One important aspect of this is admitting to our capacity to recognize and detect the impact of intelligent agency in the physical world in patent law. Such laws treat the impact of intelligence in the physical world as the reality that it is, just as the Declaration of Independence refers to spiritual realities evident in the physical world. Despite the mythological view of evolution which just happens by happenstance to seamlessly comport with a progressive worldview actual history shows that it is likely that American civilization will regress and decline back into some form of nature based paganism if adherence to Darwinian creation myths becomes widespread.

3. Dave on January 29th, 2010 at 12:42 pm (Link)
   

   mynym:

   http://www.nobeliefs.com/mementoes/buckle.jpeg <– Nazi army belt buckle.

   Gott mit Uns translates to "God with us" in German. Movement based in "Darwinism" indeed.

4. mynym on January 29th, 2010 at 4:50 pm (Link)
   

   You may as well study your navel if you’re going to look to belt buckles for accurate history. Shirer notes some historical facts about the Nazis attitude towards God:
   

   …. the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.” What the Hitler government envisioned for Germany was clearly set out in a thirty-point program for the “National Reich Church” drawn up during the war by Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, who among his other offices held that of “the Fuehrer’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party.”
   A few of its thirty articles convey the essentials:
   …
   13. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany.
   (The Rise and Fall of
   the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
   by William L. Shirer
   (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :238)

   Many Darwinists and philosophic naturalists believed and continue to believe in God, although they put the creation before the Creator and therefore disagree totally with the Founders of America.

   An interesting contrast:
   

   A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district-all studied and appreciated as they merit-are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty.
   –Benjamin Franklin as cited in: (America’s God and Country
   by William Federer :246)

   Jefferson on ID:
   

   I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripedal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.
   We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order.
   ….So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.
   –Letter from Jefferson to John Adams on April 11, 1823
   the Theist pointing `to the heavens above, and to the earth beneath, and to the waters under the earth,’asked if these did not proclaim a first cause, possessing intelligence and power; power in the production, and intelligence in the design and constant preservation of the system; urged the palpable existence of final causes, that the eye was made to see, and the ear to hear, and not that we see because we have eyes, and hear because we have ears; an answer obvious to the senses, as that of walking across the room was to the philosopher demonstrating the nonexistence of motion. –Thomas Jefferson
   (The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s
   Founders Really Believed
   by Alf J. Mapp :14) (Emphasis added)

   ID philosophy is the way that America is constituted, yet we are supposed to believe that the Declaration of Independence is “unconstitutional” based on decisions which federal judges pull from their own penumbras? Have fun with your politics, it seems that those interested in the truth should look elsewhere.

5. mynym on January 29th, 2010 at 4:57 pm (Link)
   

   Movement based in “Darwinism” indeed.

   Indeed, that’s why they said:
   

   Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin…
   (Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
   Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People by Max Weinreich
   (New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :7)

   This is why a summary of Nazi “scholarship” applies with equal force to Darwinists like PZ Myers:
   

   The scholars whom we shall quote in such impressive numbers, like those others who were instrumental in any other part of the German pre-war and war efforts, were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad…
   If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.
   (Ib :7)

   This is also why critics of Nazism are critics of Darwinism, e.g.
   

   …the anthropological fable is a work of imagination, a historical scenario, yet offered as an explanation of one or another social phenomenon of either that time or our own. It is a kind of reverse science fiction, situated in the past rather than in the future. …

   What claim can this kind of historical fiction make to be scientific? It simply cannot, even in the loosest sense of science. It is just that the anthropological fable appeals to ideas of competition, struggle, selection, etc., ideas of Darwinian biology–or rather, socio-economic ideas that Darwinism borrowed and naturalized, thus giving them scientific backing. Returned to the sociology from whence they came, they are endowed with a kind of scientific aura, and their use in anthropological fables confers on the latter a dignity to which they have no right.

   The problem is that Darwinism, properly speaking, resorts to just this kind of historical scenario in its explanation of the origin of species. The simplest of these scenarios, in its modern form, sees a certain characteristic as appearing by chance mutation and, once shown to be favourable to its individual bearer, being preserved by natural selection. This basic model can be given added sophistication, mathematical for example, but the fact remains that the Darwinian explanation still consists in imagining a historical scenario… To criticize the explanatory principle that the anthropological model provides in social Darwinism [i.e. Nazism] is equally to criticize the Darwinian principle that explains the evolution of species by reconstructing historical scenarios. It thus amounts to an attack on science (since Darwinism is deemed scientific, at least among biologists)….
   (The Pure Society: from Darwin to Hitler by Andre Pichot :47-49)

   The irony is that those easily taken in by charlatans and overwhelmed (i.e. the ignorant and imbeciles) by the “mountains” of imaginary evidence typical to Darwinian creation myths are most susceptible to scientism. That is to say they often mistake pseudo-science for actual science and compound their unfathomable stupidity to extend science far beyond its myopic scope.

6. Buster on February 2nd, 2010 at 2:07 pm (Link)
   

   A letter I sent Mr Angus as a private letter, but did not want to respond to it.

   Mr Angus Martin,

   If this country still followed Lockean liberalism, there would not be any argument about teaching intelligent design. That would be because there would be no public schools, only private. And the owner of the school would choose which subjects to teach, and how to teach them. The parents would be able to choose to send their kid to a school that teaches evolution, or intelligent design, or all together not send their kid to school and teach the child themselves or not at all really.

   The free and compulsory public schools were started by the Protestant “extreme right-wing nuts” or also known as communists in my field of study. Public schools are not a place of freedom, the state controls what is taught in the school and you have no choice in the matter it is up to the Board of Education.

   Your other concerns are not valid. Yes, Texas prints a lot of textbooks; however they go off what the demand is for books. More likely you have to look toward California to see what is going to be taught in public schools. If they do not print the material that is wanted, then school programs do not buy them. That is the good thing about the free-market (which we don’t have) is that if the book doesn’t teach what you want it to, there is another place that will sell you a text book that does. Your other concern, the Board of Education is talking about splitting the talk of how the world was made between evolution and creation.

   Buster

   P.S. I am a Catholic and I do not believe creation to be correct, however people should have the freedom to choose what they are being taught by their teachers. Even though evolution is the Catholic Church’s and my belief of how the world started.

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