Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

I am shocked to hear that global warming has reached New York City. I hope our politicians work hard to make November days cold, rainy, and depressing again, as they are supposed to be. Please accept my condolences for the warmth and the sunshine that are rearing their ugly heads in your otherwise beautiful city.

thomas

Condolences accepted. Thankyou. Are you still holding those shares in the Aspen Ski Corp?

Isn't that a fancy species of brothel keeping?

Jacques Barsun quotes
Jacques Barsun quotes:

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Jacques Barzun

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
Jacques Barzun

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.
Jacques Barzun

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
Jacques Barzun

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
Jacques Barzun

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Jacques Barzun

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Jacques Barzun

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
Jacques Barzun

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
Jacques Barzun

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Barzun

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.
Jacques Barzun
-----------------------------------------------
Jacques Barzun
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jacques BarzunJacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907) continues to be a leading voice in the fields of literature, education, and cultural history. A native of France, he moved to the United States of America in 1920 and was a graduate of Columbia University in 1927 (B.A.) and 1932 (Ph.D.), where he was a prize-winning member of the Philolexian Society. Barzun became one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history during his long tenure as Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia from 1928 until 1955. From 1955 to 1958 he served as dean of the graduate school at Columbia, and then as dean of faculties and provost until 1968. He also famously co-taught Columbia's Great Books course with literary critic and fellow faculty member Lionel Trilling.

His most influential works include Darwin, Marx, and Wagner (1941), Teacher in America (1945), The House of Intellect (1959), Classic, Romantic, and Modern (1961), and Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964). He has continued to write on education and cultural history since his retirement from Columbia, and his most recent work, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), was a New York Times bestseller, lauded by historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers alike as a sweeping and powerful survey of the recent history of Western culture. In addition to these works, he has published many other books (30 to date), articles, and reviews, and is considered one of the world's leading experts on the work of Hector Berlioz.

Barzun is recognized by the American Philosophical Society with The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, an award presented to cultural historians in honor of newly published work since 1993. Barzun retired to San Antonio, Texas, where he continues to write.

Barzun was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. He also received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president.

BBB-

We've done all that.



What do you suggest to deal with that?

If Mr Bush's actions are "illegal" as you say how is it he hasn't been arrested?Surely if you know most police officers will do as well.

The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
Jacques Barzun -1991

Forget EDUCATION. Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and Learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it. The blame falls on the public schools, of course, but they deserve only half the blame. The other half belongs to the people at large, us, -- our attitudes, our choices, our thought-cliches.

Take one familiar fact: everybody keeps calling for Excellence -- excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic.

CONTINUE TO COMPREHENSIVE QUOTES BY JACQUES BARZUN
http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/dreamweaver/quotes/qtwriters3.html

That's just moaning.And very poorly composed too.
Modern knowledge is elitist.

What is to be done about the "menace of the untaught"?

And if nothing can be done had we not better come to terms with it.?Maybe we can abolish the public schools or the people even or maybe we can employ preachers to control it and direct it's undoubted energies in socially useful directions.

How do you "demonstrate" that something "can" have certain consequences.Doesn't that "can" allow other "cans"?

Why would bird flu,or any other illness,kill only "some"?Is it to do with immune systems.And wouldn't a scientific design not be in favour of the destruction of weak immune systems?Isn't evolution the survival of the fittest.And suppose that praying improved immune systems?And,again,"could" is used.

Isn't the reason why we mitigate nature's methods in ourselves because we think of man as having a divine spark.This may well be foolish but we do it.
Where in nature would a group of any species donate an element of its resources to help far away members of the species after an earthquake or a flood.

In this-


What does "ineffective" mean?We are here.

Suppose our war on viruses eventually causes them to evolve beyond our understanding and control and they wipe us all out.Science would then turn out to be ineffective.And science may turn out to be ineffective in other ways too.Materialism,the comfort of the non-believer,coupled with weapons systems of unimaginable ferocity may do for us all.

There is a tangled ball of assertions in the "very significant quote" interlarded with a few qualifiers.

My guess is that Ms Judson is fishing for a government grant and some media exposure.But it's only a guess.That's the best one can do with the ladies.

In Surrey, British Columbia, an outlying suburban area about 45 minutes from Vancouver, the evangelical majority on the school board has spent almost two million dollars in legal fees to have a book removed from one teacher's reading list because it portrayed a family with two same sex parents.

And you took offence when I once referred to "simple colonials" shortly after I hatched.

That coming from a memebr of a nation that has a pet mouse pedigree and lineage certification program.

As usual, the real winners in any of these idiotic forays of the reactionaries are the lawyers . . .

Spendius : "may"? "suppose"? In other words, you're proposing something with absolutely no evidence it will ever happen. I can "Suppose" you "may" be able to fly if you flap your arms really really hard. Doesn't mean you'll ever get off the ground.

And re the efficacy of prayer in plagues. The Black Death killed a third of Europe (just the first time around). They prayed with a fervor that puts the 700 Club to shame. One death in three doesn't impress me with the power of prayer. And the plague kept coming back.

They prayed when smallpox swept America beofre and during the Revolution. George Washington inoculated his troops (not the same as vaccination, but the best they had then). The survival rate was much higher.

Smallpox was wiped out as a naturally occurring threat by science, not by prayer.

If I were given a choice in a new epidemic between a prayer and a vaccine, I'd go with the vaccine. That's what I mean by "effective"versus "ineffective". If you would prefer to rely on prayer instead, feel free to do so.

Thanks UN.That's very gracious of you.

Do you usually expend effort,i.e.energy from food which you have had to pay for,misinterpreting what other people say.

I can easily suppose that if I flapped my arms fast enough to fly I would impress the ladies much more than if I went round misinterpreting what people say in order to get my half-witted ideas off the ground.

It is just as easy to suppose that the Black Death would have killed two thirds of Europe had not praying been a socially accepted way of attempting to gratify one's wishes.

And the facility to suppose that the smallpox virus is lurking in it's lair,with its tail between its legs and gnashing its teeth and dreaming up a way to gobble you all up that you haven't thought of is a piece of cake.

And how do you know whether the third who it knocked down prayed or not.The assertion that "they" prayed with the "fervour that puts the 700 club to shame" is hardly evidence especially when we don't even know why the 700 club prayed so fervently as you claim.Suppose it was God's way of elimating those who didn't pray who were a third of the population.Have you any evidence to the contrary.

Bernie wrote-



And pray,what happened to the $2m?Was that spent as well.Golf clubs,restaurants,gas,ornaments.Dare one say costume jewelry.I wonder if the two same sex parents got any of it.

I'll bet the Gov't got a cut every time it shifted position.

Spendius, again you "suppose"--the point being that you have absolutely NO evidence for such a supposition. You can "suppose" any kind of counterfactual you want--some evidence of its plausibility would be nice. You have none. That is hardly misinterpreting what you say. And I have in fact read accounts of what went on surrounding the Black Death. Have you? They prayed. They died.