Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

fm wrote-



They were separate paragraphs for goodness sake.
Are you trying to say that I didn't know what was what? You're reading of my post was made to match your need to rant.

I'm not bothered whether you think I'm misogynistic. Everybody I know who is henpecked thinks that. Obviously-they have to. You sound like you know nothing of the realities of sexual politics and are going to stick to your rose-tinted specs.

Ask the ladies on the Trivia threads whether I patronise them or not. I notice none of you guys ever go on there.

"Sexual politics?" ROFLMAO That's the best combination of words put together by spendi, our man in England.

The ladies told me that without spendi's participation the game threads would be "meaningless escapism".

If sexual politics can't be classified as an oxymoron, just who elected who?

"There was a lot of controversy about how much religious expression could be allowed in public schools. Some school officials and teachers believed that the Constitution prohibited any of it. That was incorrect. Students were free to pray individually or together; religious clubs were entitled to be treated like any other extracurricular organizations; in their free time, students were free to read religious texts; they could include their religious views in their homework as long as they were relevant to the assignment; and they could wear T-shirts promoting their religion if they were allowed to wear those that promoted other causes."

My Life by Bill Clinton.

The questions that come first to mind relating to that are-

1-How can one square it with the sort of extreme language often seen on this thread which dismisses religious belief out of hand?

2-How can such a view sit easily just down the corridor from the science classroom, where the sort of views we see on here are likely to be held by some science teachers, without discrediting science in those states where religious views are widely held?

3-How can the views of science teachers sit easily next to the homes,churches and communities in those states without discrediting science?

"On the sixteenth,I signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,which was intended to protect a reasonable range of religious expression in public areas like schools and workplaces. The bill was designed to reverse a 1990 Supreme Court decision giving states more authority to regulate religious expression in such areas. America is full of people deeply committed to their very diverse faiths. I thought the bill struck the right balance between protecting their rights and the need for public order. It was sponsored in the Senate by Ted Kennedy and Republican Orrin Hatch and passed 97-3. The House adopted it on a voice vote. Though the Supreme Court later struck it down,I remain convinced it was a good and needed piece of legislation."

My Life by Bill Clinton.

An elected President,an elected Senate and an elected House struck down by the Supreme Court.

One thing these quoted passages should lay to rest for good is that there is no controversy.

I don't often use the word "stupid" but it seems to me that anybody who says that there is no controversy is as stupid as stupid gets.

I think everybody agrees that in some areas at least there has been a marked decline in religious feeling in the last 40 years and, accompanying this decline in those areas most affected, a marked increase in the number of ladies of all ages who have been happy to have their private parts photographed and filmed for distribution to a wide audience.

And why not one might ask if it is possible to make an easy living in that way in an amoral society.

Whether the two trends are connected I will leave fellow threaders to decide for themselves and whether a further decline in religious values will be accompanied by a further increase in the other trend.

There are, of course, other trends which have accompanied the decline in religious feeling which I gather you are familiar with.

Another problem with religious dogma:

Cardinal backs limited condom use
One of the Roman Catholic Church's most distinguished cardinals has publicly backed the use of condoms among married couples to prevent Aids transmission.
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said that in couples where one had HIV/Aids, which could pass to the partner, the use of condoms was "a lesser evil".

The Vatican says condoms should never be used, even to stop Aids spreading from one married partner to another.

The Church teaches that abstinence is the best way to tackle disease.

Growing issue

Cardinal Martini, who used to be Archbishop of Milan, made the comments in an interview with the Italian weekly magazine l'Espresso.

In it he says that the fight against Aids, which has caused more than three million deaths, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, must be pursued by all available means.

The Vatican has made no official comment on the article, in which the cardinal also raises the possibility of single mothers adopting abandoned children.

But the BBC's David Willey in Rome says that such matters are an increasingly important subject of discussion in Church circles.

According to insistent reports, Cardinal Martini was a close runner-up in last year's papal election.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4929962.stm

Published: 2006/04/21 11:15:16 GMT

spendogynist saidIve never heard anyone deny his nature as vehemently as you. Ive been called henpecked or pussy whipped by better than you. The common feature that you all bear, is a real fear of womens powers. Why is that spendi?

You realize that you have not the slightest idea about what youre talking.

fm wrote-



Because they are terrifying and I'm a bit of a wimp when it comes to subjecting myself to them.

I will restrain myself from going further on this occasion.

spendogynist said

Maybe if you lived a bit over here and didnt just catch snippets from books , youd have a feel for the issues. RFRA was a "well intentioned" piece of legislation that passed both house and Senate(Unanimous in House and 97-3 in Senate). After it was passed, a huge backlog of "controversial cases" came up. ohhh like:
1The Amish of Wisconsin didnt wanna use those orange triangles that keep their buggies from getting greased by semis at 11PM.

2AMerican Indians want to smoke Peyote in their religious ceremonies

3Jehovahs Witnesses didnt want to take loyalty oaths for government jobs

4Catholic Hospitals that refused to perform abortions were de accredited in Maryland

Under no circumstance was the issue of evolution in SCience or the newly developed second coming of Creationism (ID), ever part of a RFRA suite

The killer for the RFRA was when the Archdiocese of San Antonio tried to circumvent a "Historical preservation" ordinance that was long in effect in the city of Boerne Texas.(The case was brought up and adjudicated in 97 under (Beorne v Flores).
As wonders never cease, the same people that supported the Edwards v Aguillard decision , supported Boerne (that means that the judges teamed up, with the most Conservative voting with the most liberal to strike down RFRA) It simply violated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution. And, amicus briefs were filed by 17 states (including Pa) to support Boerne. The ASupreme Court recognized that "the wall of separation between church and state " was being torn down . So, it had nothing at all to do with evolution. It primarily had to do with the fact that, under RFRA, special rights were being afforded sectarian groups and religions that were clearly a "model support for those groups" and that there was no way that special favor could be made to allreligions and (also, atheists).

Maybe if your Amish or a Witness, or an RC hospital administration, or a peyote smoking Native American, but not an "IDer or Creationist"

Anyway, the controversy you wish to keep credible, is that theres some actual dispute based upon equal scientific footing, between science and ID. IN that matter youd just be dead wrong, as usual.

Woman are terrifying to straight men who have the sensitivity of my patio furniture.

UK UPDATE

498 pages and I have made no postings, it's been a thankless but deservedly important task!

we mut do something special for the 500th page. Ill volunteer to call John McKay and breathe heavily into the phone , and then hang-up.

Ive been in some "Face -time" encounters with mcKay and he is certainly convinced, but not very convincing. he ignores entire geo-processes as "irrelevant" (things like unconformities, or noncomformable surfaces, geomag data and worldwide evidence of polar reversals) Hes always tried to make cases for "evidence against" rad data by using the old "polonium birefringence" argument.
ALl of these arguments , originally served as QA to make the evidence even more robust. What he (and most all Creationists do) is continuously rehash the same stuff over and over and try to make their audiences at hand believe that the arguments are "freshly minted", even when theyve been successfully dismissed. They count on th fact that persons not in a particluar science will view ramblings by these "Creationist Authorities" without question, the Creationists count on the fact that one of their "creationists acquired a PhD at one time, and then they fully accept the "experts " crap.


Were only as good as our last paper.

Rather it is you fm who "rehash the same stuff over and over". What does all this fancy display of expertise have to do with the problem.

Which is,and I'll repeat,what do we do about it because tomorrow is coming and something will be done tomorrow in the nature of things. You and this McKay guy can bang your heads together from now till Kingdom Come and still be where you were years ago.

We,as a society,are trying to work out how,and whether,we do without God in whatever form. Some would say how we do without Love. True Love being the love of God. Well-you must admit fm humans are a bit tough to love to put it mildly though one does what one can.

IDers seem to me to be shifting God onto a higher and thus more remote plane and when He gets remote enough we can forget Him most of the time and bring him back as an excuse for a piss-up occasionally. A more and more remote designer who we lose sight of entirely when science has triumphed and our society can actually do without God. And Love of course. Most futuristic stuff portrays us as emotionless automata although Woody Allen is an exception in the launch pad scene.

You wish to go too fast and Mr McKay wants to slow down or you're impatient and he's anxious. As you fight each other into a punched-out draw we Faustians just zoom through the cloud with everything under control which is what the brass-band playing on the White House lawn at a Garden-Party signifies.

You're pretending that human beings are toy soldiers to be moved around at your own behest.That you can bang your fist on the desk and shout no religion in science classrooms (read also that classroom that school/that community/that church/that God/True Love) and that's it-Done and dusted.

At least Science won't be disturbed by a bit more of McKay. It will proceed on it's merry way because they all need it to,apart from a few headbangers who can be safely ignored except when they are paraded on TV to amuse us. The bang of your fist is a bit more sudden than the nebulous effect of his ideas which can be easily navigated by those with a mind to. So you get the best of both worlds. The stupid,as you call them, get their comforts and other benefits of their churches and temples and science gets billion dollar funding to beaver away thinking up new wonders such as the pull-top beer can and the microwave to ease the burdens of hard-pressed Mums.

What are you rocking the boat for?

Spendius is echoing William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was not concerned whether evolutionary theory was scientifically correct. Instead, Bryan feared that evolutionary theory would corrupt society.

Not quite right wande.

Only corrupting society as we know it which not only would it do but has already begun to do since the mid-19th century.

But society had been corrupted before. They are not the Dark Ages for nothing. They are called the Dark Ages because we don't shine much light on them not because the record is all that obscure.Rabelais,The Romance of the Rose and Chaucer being a part of the artistic links to it.

It depends on which society. When,or rather if,science corrupts society absolutely the resultant society won't know it's corrupt. That will be the "norm" then. There is no sense in Brave New World that anything else is even possible which is why I think it superior to 1984.

spendi 's logic contains twists than a bowl of turatellis.
However, he still doesnt even understand the issues.

Those are the kinds of audiences that Mackay loves, simple, uninformed about most sciences , and slick. He counts on things that just "sound good" and go over most of the audiences heads.

How comes he doesnt publish? His stuff reads like church tracts not science. Hes a disgrace to a perfectly honorable science.He mixes his beliefs with his evidence and tries to destroy the evidence. Does that curry favor with his deity? Ive always wondered how someone can get a PhD in a science directly in the line of evidence in evolution and "old earth" and then turn and deny everything theyve learned. Their data hasnt been proven wrong. In fact its been made more robust by the discovered mechanisms of sea floor spreading and mantle advection, and whol bunches of others that are "newly verified discoveries" made within the last 35 years.

People can be ignorant & educated, rational & irrational, wise & foolish, honest & deceitful all at the same time. People can convince themselves of anything for any reason.

At least I don't do arrays of solecisms fm.

I understand the issues pretty well. You don't seem to know what they are. You give the impressions of the observer rather that trying to interpret the psychical attitudes of the object under observation which is,of course,society and its orderly and successful governance.

It seems to have escaped your notice that most audiences are "simple" and "uniformed" about science. If your remark about the audience,leaving out the "slick",is designed to give threaders the idea that you are not simple and uninformed about science it is a waste of time because we already know and such things are all of a psychological piece with my previous observation.

Your general disregard for the psychology in these issues does not mean that some of us share it.

Also of a psychological piece with those two points is that you seem to think that asserting that I don't understand the issues means that I don't and perhaps this is the reason you feel that my post contains more (presumably)twists than a bowl of tortillas (presumably-turutellis being unknown to Google.)

I don't think Mr McKay has a monopoly on saying things that sound good and go over most of the audience's (presumably) heads which is itself another assertion and thus valueless.

Despite your third paragraph being difficult to follow I think I know what you're trying to say but it is made easier for me because you have said the same thing,with minor variations,on many occasions.

The trouble with it is that the sea floor spreading and the mantle advections (something to do with magnetohydrodynamic turbulence I gather-and which is over my head) is a very long way from the daily lives of the ordinary people whose hearts and minds are being assailed. I would imagine very few people are much interested in such things.

The issues are exclusively psychological the science having been conceded from the first.

fm wrote-



Yes but the Chinese are now accused of using the perfectly honourable science of organ transplantation to corner the market in supermarket provision by simply executing more criminals who can be tested and matched before being despatched and thus cutting out unneccessary waiting time and possibly with lower salaries than prevail in the USA or Europe. Perhaps if the demand is sufficient they might increase the number of offences deserving of the death penalty.

There used to be a joke about having a button on the fireplace which when pressed liquidated a Chinese person whilst delivering $10,000 in used notes. How often would you press it was the question. It looks like perfectly honourable science has made it possible.