Why Pope tried to stop Dylan knockin’ on heaven’s door
Richard Owen in Rome.
Bob Dylan and the Pope were an unlikely double act for a rendition of the 1970s anthem Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
But even the crowd of pop fans who were brought to their knees by the appearance of Pope John Paul II alongside Dylan could scarcely have imagined the rift that it caused.
The Pope’s chief aide, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was so appalled at the prospect of the pontiff sharing a platform with the “self-styled prophet of pop” that he tried his utmost to stop the spectacle. The Pope overruled him.
The cardinal, now Pope Benedict XVI, says in a book to be published next week that while he agreed with his predecessor on most matters, he did not share his liking for pop music. “There was reason to be sceptical, and I was,” Pope Benedict writes in the book, John Paul II, My Beloved Predecessor. “Indeed, in a certain sense I still am today.”
At the concert in Bologna, attended by 300,000 people in 1997, Dylan " who was born into a Jewish family in Minnesota but later flirted with Christianity " sang Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, his antiwar classic, with Forever Young as an encore.
He did not sing his 1963 hit Blowin’ in the Wind, but John Paul II " who was known for his showmanship and media skills " showed his familiarity with the song and based his homily on it in an effort to connect with the audience.
“You say the answer is blowing in the wind, my friend,” he said. “So it is: but it is not the wind that blows things away, it is the breath and life of the Holy Spirit, the voice that calls and says, Come!” This brought the house down. The Pope added: “You ask me how many roads a man must walk down before he becomes a man. I answer: there is only one road for man, and it is the road of Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I am the Way and the Life’.”
Pope Benedict says that he “doubts to this day whether it was right to let this kind of so-called prophet take the stage” in front of the Pope. He admits that John Paul did get across a spiritual message that was otherwise largely “ignored by the entertainment industry”.
Pope Benedict has said that rock music is the work of Satan and last year he cancelled the fundraising Christmas pop concert at the Vatican, which under John Paul II had run for 13 years. He may have been wary of a repeat of the 2003 concert, when Lauryn Hill called on Church leaders to “repent” over sexual abuse by clergy, or 2005, when Daniela Mercury, the Brazilian singer, was dropped from the show in case she promoted the use of condoms to prevent Aids.
Pope Benedict is known to favour Mozart and Bach, and was always unlikely to enjoy chatting " as Pope John Paul II did " with singers. He opposes the use of guitars during Mass, telling priests that “the liturgy is not a theatrical text, and the altar is not a stage . . . It is important not to become merely actors in a spectacle.”
This news item is of vital importance to this thread. Bob Dylan is constantly being quoted.
I recall that The Cathoholic church in Cordoba Argentina , in its infinite wisdom, has declared that CAPYBARA is an honorary "fish" and can, therefore be eaten during Lent with spiritual impunity.
Texas voters to referee school 'culture war'
(By Gary Scharrer, San Antonio Express-News, February 20, 2010)
AUSTIN " Texas voters are about to get a say over how to teach evolution in public schools or what historical figures to put into new textbooks.
Call it a proxy vote. By choosing representatives on the State Board of Education this year " beginning with the March 2 primary " they will shape the debate over public education for the next four years.
The 15-member board has been narrowly divided. Seven so-called “social conservatives” routinely vote as a bloc when it comes to questioning evolution, adding snippets of history to textbooks " or deleting them " and emphasizing a “back to basics” reading curriculum.
With one more reliable ally, the social conservatives would gain control of the board, which develops curriculum standards and chooses textbooks for the state's 4.7 million public school children and oversees the $22 billion Permanent School Fund.
But they also could lose up to three seats, depending on how challengers fare against Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, and Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, and the outcome of jousting for the open seat of retiring Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richardson, whose district stretches from Austin to the Houston suburbs.
The sprawling SBOE districts are twice as big as congressional or state senate districts. Candidates generally can't raise lots of money to lift name ID or amplify their message. So endorsements matter, as do the testimonials of their supporters and the objections of their critics.
Plenty of liberal and conservative groups are encouraging supporters to get active in the key SBOE races.
“The elections this year could mark a watershed moment for public education in Texas. We might finally get a board that really respects and listens to classroom teachers and scholars instead of treating them as some sort of enemy,” said Dan Quinn, spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal leaning group that monitors the board.
A New York Times Magazine cover story last week chronicled the state board's fight over curriculum standards. Critics of the social conservatives said it was an example of the nationwide embarrassment they have brought to Texas, but the article is a good reason to keep them on the board, said Jonathan Saenz, legislative director for the Texas Free Market Foundation, which advocates for limited government and Judeo-Christian beliefs.
“I don't think anyone in Texas should take their cues for how they should vote on the State Board of Education based on what the New York Times says,” he said. “If you like science classes to have room for discussion and questions, then you vote for people who have helped make that happen.”
The social conservatives will get a board majority if they keep their current seats and former Ector County school board president Randy Rives defeats GOP incumbent Bob Craig of Lubbock, who often breaks with the social conservatives to support teachers and educators. Rives touts the Bible course offered as an elective in Ector schools while he served on the school board.
The sometimes contentious SBOE debates over science and history curriculum standards have increased public attention on the issues, “and you will see more of an informed voter regardless of political party or who leans which way,” Saenz predicted.
In San Antonio, Mercer wants a second term on the board to help keep the back-to-basics focus.
“That's been our battle cry,” he said. “The education lobby opposes those things.”
While he does not reject the “social conservative” label, Mercer prefers to describe himself as “conservative to the second power " fiscally and socially conservative.”
Tim Tuggey also calls himself a conservative and emphasizes frugal management. He does not directly criticize the social conservatives.
“My campaign is not designed to attack a bloc because I feel that sometimes we are arguing over the family heirlooms and the house is burning down,” Tuggey, an attorney and lobbyist, said.
The board's action last year to abruptly fire its manager of the $22 billion Permanent School Fund, which provides free textbooks to students and helps school districts earn lower bond ratings, irritated Tuggey, who has 25 years of experience advising law clients over billions of dollars worth of investments.
“I am extremely upset with what I view as a breach of fiduciary duty,” he said. “And I personally have overseen billions of dollars as chairman of the board of VIA Metropolitan transit (San Antonio's public transit agency) " all without a glitch.”
Mercer's District 5 seat includes northern Bexar County, southern Travis County and 11 central Texas counties.
Mercer promotes himself as the true conservative and criticizes Tuggey for giving $41,000 to 22 Democrats in recent years.
Tuggey says the contributions were the result of his clients' wishes and that he has given about $120,000 to Republicans and GOP causes. He has represented the Bexar GOP for years without pay.
The Mercer-Tuggey winner will face the Democratic nominee in the November general election. Four Democrats are running in what generally is considered a GOP-friendly district.
There is no Democrat running for McLeroy's District 9 seat, which covers College Station and goes north to the Oklahoma border " 28 counties and part of Collin County. McLeroy, of Bryan, is a dentist.
What some see as a “cultural war,” McLeroy views as a focus on the basics, including a strong grammar section in reading, informing students about Christian religious influences on the Founding Fathers and equipping children with the ability to think for themselves.
“We've been winning the debate, and that's why there's been so much attention,” said McLeroy, the SBOE chairman until Senate Democrats blocked his confirmation last year on the grounds that his strong religious beliefs interfered with the appropriate development of curriculum. He describes himself as a “young earth” creationist who believes dinosaurs once co-existed with people on a planet less than 10,000 years old.
His GOP primary challenger is Thomas Ratliff of Mt. Pleasant, son of retired GOP state senator and former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff.
“Don McLeroy is the most well-intentioned guy up there, but his beliefs are a little bit frightening,” said Ratliff, a lobbyist. “What the real battle is over is people who think that they know education better than the education community saying, ‘We want people who will listen to us.'” When the social conservatives failed last year in their effort to ensure students were exposed to the “weaknesses” of the theory of evolution, they rallied successfully around several amendments that largely accomplished the same result: Students will be asked to analyze and evaluate two of evolution's key tenets: natural selection and common ancestry.
“We did not put any religion in those standards,” McLeroy said.
The social conservatives have drawn fire for rejecting a popular third grade math textbook on grounds that it's “too fuzzy;” and for disregarding teacher and educator advice on new curriculum standards for English language arts and reading, science and social studies.
Critics complain that the social conservatives invoke ideology and reject experts' advice. Their rejection of Bill Martin Jr., author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” and hundreds of other children's books because they confused him with academic Bill Martin, author of “Ethical Marxism,” drew some publicity.
They also yanked a recommendation that United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta be required reading in third-grade textbooks as an example of good citizenship. She once served on the University of California System Board of Regents, but the social conservatives removed her because of her past membership in the Democratic Socialists of America Party.
Departing board member Dunbar, whose 2008 book, “One Nation Under God” advocated for more religion in the public square, encouraged Austin patents attorney Brian Russell to run for her seat.
Russell calls himself a pro-life, pro-family conservative Republican who supports a rigorous, knowledge-based education that teaches an unashamedly patriotic view of American history, emphasizing God-given individual rights and limited government enshrined in the Constitution.
He faces Rebecca Osborne, a high school teacher from Round Rock, and Marsha Farney, a former educator and stay-at-home parent in Georgetown, in the GOP primary.
Osborne said she's running because of a disconnect she sees between the state board of education and the classroom.
“We need a voice of an educator there on the board and that's a voice that I have to bring,” Osborne said. “It's not about taking sides. It's about starting to focus on what we need to do for kids.”
Osborne has been running for the past year, campaigning after school and on weekends. She has been endorsed by former Sen. Ratliff and by the Texas Parent PAC.
Farney calls herself a common sense conservative who says students must graduate with the necessary skills to either enter college, technical training or competitively enter the workplace.
Austin educator Judy Jennings is the lone Democrat running in District 10.
students must graduate with the necessary skills to either enter college, technical training or competitively enter the workplace.
Amazing gibberish
(by PZ Myers, ScienceBlogs.com, February 21, 2010)
Renew America, the bizarrely, deeply, weirdly conservative web site founded by Alan Keyes, really had to struggle to find someone crazier than Pastor Grant Swank and Fred Hutchison and Bryan Fischer and Wes Vernon (let alone Alan Keyes himself), but they have succeeded. They have Linda Kimball writing for them. She has written the strangest history of evolutionary biology ever " I think she was stoned out of her mind and hallucinating when she made this one up. It's called "Evolutionism: the dying West's science of magic and madness". The title alone is enough to hint at the weirdness within, but just wait until you read where evolution comes from:
"Though taught under the guise of empirical science, naturalistic evolution is really a spiritual concept whose taproot stretches back to the dawn of history. It was then, reports ancient Jewish historian Josephus, that Nimrod (Amraphel in the Old Testament) used terror and force to turn the people away from God and toward the worship of irrational nature. Moving forward in time to the Greco-Roman world, evolution serves as the mechanism of soul-transference in metempsychosis and transmigration of souls. In the ancient East, the mystical Upanishads refine evolution and it becomes the mechanism of soul-movement in involutions, emergences, incarnations, and reincarnation. In that both rationalist/materialist/secularism and its' counterpart Eastern/occult pantheism are modernized nature pseudo-religions, it comes as no surprise that evolution serves as their 'creation mythos'."
It's a little surprising that Josephus isn't regarded as a member of the Greco-Roman world, but I had no idea that I was teaching about metempsychosis and reincarnation. The students are going to be really shocked when I put that on the exam next year.
Kimball's grip on the history of the last century is no better than her understanding of prior millennia, either:
"Today, in addition to original Darwinism -- which many scientists have already rejected as useless -- there are three other versions of Naturalist evolutionism: neo-Darwinism, punctuated equilibrium, and panspermia, the notion that life was seeded on Earth by highly evolved beings either from another planet, or from another dimension. The latter two versions are favored by powerful Transnational Progressive New Age occult insiders such as Marilyn Ferguson, Robert Muller and Barbara Marx Hubbard as well as by channeling cults who are excitedly 'receiving revelations' from discarnate entities calling themselves the Space Brothers, the Council of Nine, Transcended Masters, and more recently, the ancient Ennead of Egypt."
Uh, neo-Darwinism is Darwinism with genetics and population genetics; it's an evolution of the original theory proposed by Darwin. Punctuated equilibrium is a much narrower subset of evolutionary theory that describes the distribution of observable change in a fossil lineage. It's nowhere near the same footing or the same scope as neo-Darwinism.
Panspermia isn't even on the radar.
How come the Space Brothers, the Council of Nine, Transcended Masters, and the ancient Ennead of Egypt never show up at any of the biology conferences I attend (is anyone else confused by the conjunction of "recently" with the ancient Ennead)? And they never publish!
Then there are the conspiracy theories. You knew there had to be conspiracy theories:
"Whereas occult pantheism quietly flowed beneath 'red-colored' atheist-materialist-communism and Nazism during the twentieth century, that order is quickly reversing. Today, 'green-colored' occult pantheist-socialism is brazenly striding onto the world-stage in full public view while materialist-secularism slowly fades to black. Already, zealous High Priests and Priestesses of the occult arts are calling the U.N. the world church and the world mind, while other madmen such as David Spangler, demand that everyone submit to a satanic-initiation to qualify for entry to the coming green New World Order."
Back away slowly, everyone. This one needs the tranq gun and the rubber room.
She seems to have confused us godless atheistic materialist evilutionists for a bunch of New Age wackaloons. And her bottom-line message is that we have to prop up good old Christianity, because otherwise the tree-worshipping Satanists are going to take over.
Social conservative faces tough battle for state ed board seat
(By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News / February 23, 2010)
The battle for control of the State Board of Education will largely be determined by Republican primary voters in four key races " and nowhere is the competition more fierce than for the seat that represents part of Collin County and much of East Texas.
Critical board decisions loom, including how new science textbooks cover evolution and which political figures are included in new history books. The two GOP candidates are slugging it out in a primary contest that will signal what those decisions might be. No Democrat filed, so the GOP winner is expected to cruise to election in November.
Don McLeroy of College Station, one of the most outspoken social conservatives on the panel, is facing perhaps his toughest challenger since he was first elected in 1998.
His opponent is Thomas Ratliff, a legislative consultant and lobbyist who has won the support of mainstream public education groups as he tries to shake up the increasingly powerful social conservative bloc on the board.
"I want to take politics out of our public schools," Ratliff said during a candidate forum in Richardson last week. The Mount Pleasant resident said Texans are tired of political posturing on the board as the social conservative bloc " led by McLeroy " tries to impose its views in history, science and other areas of the curriculum.
"Our kids don't go to red schools. They don't go to blue schools. They go to local schools," he said, also criticizing attempts by some board members to inject their religious beliefs into what children are taught.
McLeroy, a former board chairman, was unapologetic about the actions of the social conservatives over the last three years, when they have held seven of the 15 seats on the board. Frequently " but not always " they were able to gain a majority by picking up an eighth vote from one of the other three Republicans on the board or one of the five Democrats.
"While my opponent says these last few years have been distractions, I look at them as being incredible accomplishments that will help our children," he told the Richardson audience.
Among the board's duties are reviewing and adopting textbooks, setting curriculum standards and graduation requirements, determining passing standards for achievement tests and overseeing the $22 billion Permanent School Fund.
Decisions about the curriculum are often politically charged. And the rest of the nation pays attention to what the board does because Texas, by its sheer size, influences what publishers put in textbooks nationwide.
In recent years, the social conservative bloc has shaped new curriculum standards for English and science " including much debated language that requires students to examine "all sides" of scientific evidence for evolution in biology classes.
The group also pushed through its vision for an elective Bible studies course in high school and united to reject an elementary school math textbook, used in Dallas and Highland Park, that its members considered too soft.
Last month, McLeroy won tentative approval of new U.S. history standards that would require high school students to learn about key conservative individuals and groups from the 1980s and 1990s " but not about liberal or minority rights groups.
McLeroy said he offered the proposal because history standards developed by writing teams of teachers and academics were already "rife with leftist political periods and events " the populists, the progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society."
Ratliff used the board meeting in January to illustrate his argument that the social conservative bloc has increasingly ignored the advice of mainstream education groups and the general public.
With about 150 people signed up to testify at a public hearing on new social studies standards, Ratliff said, the board cut off testimony, leaving dozens unable to express their views.
"They sent a strong message to the public: 'We don't want to hear from you,' " he said. "They just turned off the microphones and left."
McLeroy, 63, a dentist, has not been bothered by lack of support from leading groups representing teachers, school administrators and local school boards, which he dismissed as the "educational political lobby." The groups are more interested in preserving their influence over public schools than in helping schoolchildren, and Ratliff would push their agenda, he argued.
Ratliff, 42, said tapping Texas educators to advise the board is far better than what the current board has done in drafting curriculum standards for social studies " using out-of-state "experts" who included an evangelical minister from Massachusetts.
"I just don't believe it's a good idea to have people from all corners of the country come to help us write our curriculum," said Ratliff, whose father, Bill Ratliff, was lieutenant governor and an influential state senator on education matters.
Neither candidate has raised a large sum of money to run for the office. With one week to go before the primary election, Ratliff has raised about $39,000, to McLeroy's $16,000.
Both have campaigned frequently in the 29-county District 9, which runs from College Station up through northeast Texas to the Red River and includes much of Collin County and areas just east of Dallas County.
Social conservatives are fighting in the primary to keep McLeroy's seat and two Central Texas seats they now hold. In a fourth race, in the Texas Panhandle, Republican incumbent Bob Craig of Lubbock is being challenged by an opponent from Odessa with social conservative leanings. Craig has often been at odds with the social conservative bloc.
McLeroy said he views the election as a "referendum on what we've done the last few years" " including his two years at the helm of the board, which ended when Senate Democrats managed to block his reappointment by Gov. Rick Perry.
Ratliff, on the other hand, said voters have a chance "to return the state board to a place where world-class education can be crafted with the cooperation of the Legislature, parents, educators and students."
From The Sunday Times February 21, 2010
What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-PalmariniThe Sunday Times review by Philip Ball
Around 1.6m years ago, our hairy ancestors began roaming afar in search of food, and all that trekking got them hot and bothered. So they shed most of their hair and evolved into us, the naked ape. Thus runs one of the countless stories of how evolution is driven by genetic adaptation to the environment: the conventional narrative of neo-Darwinism. But according to the cognitive scientists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, they are all mistaken.
Despite their book’s title (of course there were things that Darwin got wrong), the authors don’t simply think he missed a few details. Although they recognise that today’s flora and fauna all evolved from earlier species, they don’t believe that Darwin’s idea of natural selection from a pool of random mutations explains it.
Their arguments warrant serious consideration, but first let’s be clear about one thing: this book offers not a shred of comfort to creationists, intelligent designers and other anti-evolutionary fantasists. That, though, as the authors must know, won’t prevent their book being misappropriated, nor will it save them from the disapproval of their peers (Fodor has already had a spat with the arch-Darwinist Daniel Dennett).
In neo-Darwinian theory, genes mutate at random across generations, and those that bestow an advantageous trait spread through a population because they boost reproductive success. But, the authors point out, there is often no simple connection between genes and these traits. A single gene may have several roles, and genes tend to work in networks that are so tightly knit that evolution can’t tinker with them independently of one another
Naive accounts of evolution often see natural selection as almost mystically omnipotent, able to effect just about any change. But our biology is surely constrained by other factors: perhaps the reason why we don’t have three arms or eyes, say, is not because they are non-adaptive but because they are not within the repertoire of body-forming gene networks. And “evidence” for Darwinism is often conflated with evidence for evolution (“just look at the fossil record”). Meanwhile, after-the-fact adaptationist accounts of evolutionary change (such as the naked ape above) risk being merely that: plausible but untestable Just So Stories. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini think that’s all they can ever be, because Darwinism is a tautology: organisms are “adapted” to their environment because that’s where they live.
All this is good stuff, and convincingly calls time on simplistic neo-Darwinism. But as the authors admit, many biologists today will say, “Oh, I’m not that kind of Darwinist”: they know that evolution is much more complicated. They agree that there is more to life than Darwin.
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, however, seem to want to banish Darwin entirely, claiming that natural selection is logically flawed. But their argument is opaque, centring on the problem of knowing precisely which trait is being selected. Have frogs adapted to catch flies, or to catch small flying black things that invariably happen to be flies? This ambiguity is compounded by the way some genetic traits can “free-ride” " they don’t improve fitness, but get passed on alongside ones that do. Which trait, then, is adaptive and which opportunistic? When pigeon-fanciers breed selectively (a practice Darwin used as an analogy for natural selection), they have an intentional goal. That, say the authors, is a different process from evolution.
But this surely poses a problem only for our ability to decode Darwinian evolution, not for it to happen in the first place. Blind natural selection does work in principle, as computer models show. So why wouldn’t the same thing happen in real populations? The biological complications that Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini adduce may indeed hinder or restrict it, but their philosophical objections seem to add little to that.
In any event, the authors admit that some of the many textbook explanations of adaptation might be correct. Some certainly are: superbugs have acquired antibiotic-busting genes, which is about as direct an adaptation as you can get. The authors don’t wholly exclude natural selection, then, but say it may simply carry out fine-tuning. They think there is probably no overarching mechanism of evolutionary change, and individual adaptations may be historical accidents rather than examples of a general law. In the same way, there may be good explanations for why your bus was late this morning, and also last Thursday, but those explanations don’t in themselves amount to a natural law that buses are late. Fair enough; but in order to say whether adaptation is the exception or the default we then need statistics. The authors are silent on this.
So they don’t quite achieve a coherent story, and neither are they able (or perhaps willing) to convey it at a nonspecialist level. Even so, they make a persuasive case that the role of natural selection in evolution is ripe for reassessment. To say so should not be seen as scientific heresy or capitulation to the forces of unreason " it is a brave and welcome challenge.
So--if two "cognitive scientists" can't agree with the received wisdom what on earth are thousands of biology teachers, who can't be that bright on the evidence of their wages and the number of them, and rafts of school board members who probably never gave the matter a second thought until they found they could get themselves in the papers with the subject presented in so generalised a fashion as to be meaningless,
My point was that I didnt see anything worthy of print re: the reported "theory" of messrs Fodor and Palmarini.
