Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

There is no such thing as a anti-ID position on "lust." Your imagination is running away from you, spendi; get a hold...

Come off it c.i. You're not addressing the waifs and strays with a bunch of candies in your hands on here.

At least fm's evasion might have taken in the under 115s. With all your wide experience of the world you must have seen situations where there existed a distinct tendency towards the only logical anti-ID position on lust and thus been enabled to compare and contrast them with the Christian dispositions on the subject which affect every moment of your day and which are commonplace in very large parts of the USA.

BTW- the idea fm presented, intended to give an impression that because he had read about one or two "evangelicals" getting it on with a professional lady all the ministers of those religions engaged in similar activities is utterly unscientific. Any viewers who are hypnotised by such obvious drivel are most likely to be anti-IDers because they wish to be so hypnotised. It gives then a warm sense of self-satisfaction which fm is either teasing up or cynically exploiting.

What's he doing reading about such minor incidents anyway? One swallow does not make a summer. Even two.

And notice the male chauvinism implied by the term he used for the professional ladies in the alleged cases he evidently has pored over with unremitting attention and how it conveys a certain puritanical attitude to their occupations which he embraces.

as spendi is fully, and symmetrically full of ****, then he can be excused for not knowing how the world works.
It appears that the tight ass Evangelists, while still maintaining a cupboard full of lust, never acknowledge it to other phoney Evangelicals.They attempt a life of the "functional " addict until , in their clandestine sexcapades, they bring dishonor to their fraudulent worldview by "hooking up" .
Most of this is torn from DC newspapers.
Anyway, whats so damn bad about lust ? Your point makes no damn sense. So, are you some kind of trappist, or are you just trying to make a case against the 7 deadlies? .

Whatever happened to the Topic of this thread? When I peer in every day or so, shpendi appaears to be engaged in some glossolalia . Is he attempting to set up a case for a non-compus-mentis declaration, so he can get sent to a "rest home"?

I never said there is anything "damn bad" about lust.

I just asked what the anti-IDers policy was regarding it.

It looks like there is no answer forthcoming. Just the usual blather,insults and petty assertions which one hopes viewers are learning to take no notice of.

And why would slaked lust have anything to do with "dishonor"?

Lust is the topic of this thread. Have you not worked that out yet? What do you think the Footballer's Wives posts were all about. Did you really think they were off topic?

Sheesh!!

Underestimating others again eh?

The anti-IDers, much like the IDers are OBVIOUSLY a homogenous group who all have a single policy on lust.

That's ambiguous.

Actually, anti IDers (untouched by Christian morals) don't have a policy as such. Lust just happens as it does in the animal kingdom in the same way that eating does. Or breathing. It's a reflex. Generally it waits upon oestrus which the dictionary defines as-" a regularly occuring but restricted period of sexual receptivity that occurs in most female mammals apart from humans." (Chambers). It is further under the influence of the seasons and the presence of dependent offspring.

Christians have worked out a method of circumventing this obstacle which needs a certain amount of regulation and management. When that regulation and management breaks down it often results in lurid stories in media which fm is an expert on, it seems, although why he, as an anti-IDer, employs the pejoritive tone of



is anybody's guess. I would think he's a closet Christian.


I think most feminists would say that the Chambers definition is patriarchal and some of the more vociferous ones might call it an example of fundamentalist male chauvinst piggery having insinuated itself into the very language. I think they would excise the last three words.

Having felt that Chambers didn't do the word justice I consulted The Shorter Oxford and it derives from some combination of Latin and Greek for "gadfly", "breeze", "sting", and "frenzy". The definition it gives is- "Something that stings or goads one on, a stimulus; vehement impulse; frenzy. A vehement bodily appetite; spec. sexual orgasm; the rut of animals."

The use of the word "one" in the phrase "goads one on" suggest that the compliers of the Oxford are not anticipating any female readers unless lesbians are equally stimulated by the onset of oestrus which I gather lasts for only a short time and involves a struggle between the males and quite often some extravagant deployment of the lordosis reflex and what is known in certain circles in England as "bun buttering".

I feel it would be un-Christian to go into further detail on these matters but to suggest that anti-IDers don't need a policy on lust if they are serious about having an input into the educational system is patently ludicrous and a comprehensive demonstration that they have a dilettante attitude to the subject under discussion serving merely to draw attention to themselves and which, when applied to the education of 50,000,000 kids is totally irresponsible.

I assume that the "single policy on lust" to which Vengo refers is the one Henry Miller set forth many years ago.

PS- Usually in the printing of words beginning "OE" the two letters are joined. I think it is called a dipthong but I would be glad to learn of a more exact term if anyone knows one.

...made me laugh

Rabelais recommended Dr Merryman as a cure all.

That'll be £50 please.

Christian Anti-IDers represent!

spendi: Actually, anti IDers (untouched by Christian morals) don't have a policy as such. Lust just happens as it does in the animal kingdom in the same way that eating does. Or breathing. It's a reflex. Generally it waits upon oestrus which the dictionary defines as-" a regularly occuring but restricted period of sexual receptivity that occurs in most female mammals apart from humans." (Chambers). It is further under the influence of the seasons and the presence of dependent offspring.

I knew you would come to your senses sooner or later. LOL

I ought to have said that the oestrus in humans is also conditioned, besides the other factors I mentioned earlier, which mainly refer to animals, by shiny glass beads, trinkets, reassurance, cash, in the form of dollars, cheques and such like promissory notes, and tangible assets such as gold, titles to estates, titles in general, yachts and the vague hope of being abled to spend in a limitless manner without having to work.

It can arise, though this is rare, by simply being a very good boy.

So, if materialists are put in charge of education they could not help themselves inculcating a selfish and grabbing mindset and, with the above in mind, ushering in an era in which the male of the species, awaiting the onset of oestrus as he is wont to do, often with considerable impatience, begins to give the impression not unlike that of Tom when Jerry has plugged him into the electricity grid or had him sucked up the drainpipe.

Whether this is an improvment on the era when men decided when the oestrus had arrived I am not in a position to judge. We certainly have a lot of other conveniences to make up for our loss of that privilege such as blow-lamps, Black and Decker Workmates, Motor mowers and other instruments of pain and suffering like driving through heavy traffic in a hurry.

How anti-IDers, the men I mean, think that they needn't bother with a policy on lust beats me unless, obviously, they are fundamentalists and are happy to let nature take its course which would at least have the virtue of consistency. That's about the only virtue it would have I should imagine. Do we really need more Willendorf Venuses in our art classes?

But then again, a fundie anti-IDer has no view on such things as virtue in any sense disconnected from his personal well being.

Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World
Well, well, this ought to pour oil on burning embers.---BBB

July 17, 2007
Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World
By CORNELIA DEAN
New York Times

In the United States, opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools has largely been fueled by the religious right, particularly Protestant fundamentalism.

Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion.

It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the "deceit" inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, "Atlas of Creation," is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn.

At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, "Atlas of Creation" is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin's theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran.

In bowing to Scripture, Mr. Yahya resembles some fundamentalist creationists in the United States. But he is not among those who assert that Earth is only a few thousand years old. The principal argument of "Atlas of Creation," advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or "a theory in crisis."

In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth.

The book caused a stir earlier this year when a French translation materialized at high schools, universities and museums in France. Until then, creationist literature was relatively rare in France, according to Armand de Ricqles, a professor of historical biology and evolutionism at the College de France. Scientists spoke out against the book, he said in an e-mail message, and "thanks to the highly centralized public school system in France, it was possible to organize that the books sent to lycées would not be made available to children."

So far, no similar response is emerging in the United States. "In our country we are used to nonsense like this," said Kevin Padian, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who, like colleagues there, found a copy in his mailbox.

He said people who had received copies were "just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is.

"If he sees a picture of an old fossil crab or something, he says, ?'See, it looks just like a regular crab, there's no evolution,' " Dr. Padian said. "Extinction does not seem to bother him. He does not really have any sense of what we know about how things change through time."

Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, said he and his colleagues in the life sciences had all received copies. When he called friends at the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago, they had the books too, he said. Scientists at Brigham Young University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Georgia and others have also received them.

"I think he must have sent it to every full professor in the medical school," said Kathryn L. Calame, a microbiologist at the Columbia University medical school who received a copy. "The genetics department, the biochem department, micro ?- everybody I talked to had it."

While they said they were unimpressed with the book's content, recipients marveled at its apparent cost. "If you went into a bookstore and saw a book like this, it would be at least $100," said Dr. Miller, an author of conventional biology texts. "The production costs alone are astronomical. We are talking millions of dollars."

And then there's postage. Dr. Padian said his copy was shipped by a company called SDS Worldwide, which has an office in Illinois. Calls and e-mail messages to the company were not returned, but Dr. Padian said he spoke to someone there who told him SDS had received a cargo-container-size shipment of books, "with everything prepaid and labeled. It just went all over the country."

Fatih Sen, who heads the United States office of Global Impex, a company that markets Islamic books, gifts and other products, including "Atlas," would not comment on its distribution, except to describe the book as "great" and refer questions to the publisher, Global Publishing of Istanbul. Repeated attempts by telephone and e-mail to reach the concern, or Mr. Yahya, were unsuccessful.

In the book and on his Web site (www.harunyahya.com), Mr. Yahya says he was born in Ankara in 1956, and grew up and was educated in Turkey. He says he seeks to unmask what the book calls "the imposture of evolutionists" and the links between their scientific views and modern evils like fascism, communism and terrorism. He says he hopes to encourage readers "to open their minds and hearts and guide them to become more devoted servants of God."

He adds that he seeks "no material gain" from his publications, most of which are available free or at relatively low cost.

Who finances these efforts is "a big question that no one knows the answer to," said another recipient, Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University in Missouri who studies issues of science and religion, particularly Islam. Dr. Edis grew up in a secular household in Turkey and has lived in the United States since enrolling in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he earned his doctorate in 1994. He said Mr. Yahya's activities were usually described in the Turkish press as financed by donations. "But what that can mean is anybody's guess," he said.

The effort seems particularly odd given the mailing list. Both Dr. Padian and Dr. Miller testified for the plaintiffs in the Dover, Penn., lawsuit that successfully challenged the teaching of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, in schools there. Other recipients include Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University who has been active on behalf of school board candidates who support the teaching of evolution and science museums that accept evolution as the foundation for modern biology.

"I don't know what to make of it, quite honestly," said Laddie Elwell, the director of the Headwaters Science Center in Bemidji, Minn., which she said received a dozen copies. Chuck Deeter, a staff member, said he and his colleagues might use the books' fossil photographs in their programs on Darwin, which he said can be a hard sell in a region where many people are fundamentalist Christians with creationist beliefs.

Support for creationism is also widespread among Muslims, said Dr. Edis, whose book "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam" was published by Prometheus Books this spring.

"Taken at face value, the Koran is a creationist text," he said, adding that it would be difficult to find a scholar of Islam "who is going to be gung-ho about Darwin."

Perhaps as a result, he said, Mr. Yahya's books and other publications have won him attention in Islamic areas. "This is a guy with some influence," Dr. Edis said, "unfortunately for mainstream science."

Dr. Miller agreed. He said he regularly received e-mail messages from people questioning evolution, with an increasing number coming from Turkey, Lebanon and other areas in the Middle East, most citing Mr. Yahya's work.

That's troubling, he said, because Mr. Yahya's ideas "cast evolution as part of the corrupting influence of the West on Islamic culture, and that promotes a profound anti-science attitude that is certainly not going to help the Islamic world catch up to the West."

As the scientists ponder what to do with the book ?- for many, it is too beautiful for the trash bin but too erroneous for their shelves ?- they also speculate about the motives of its distributors.

"My hypothesis is, like all creationists, they believe that they have a startling truth that the public has been shielded from, and that if they present the facts, in quotation marks, that the scales will fall from the eyes and the charade of evolution will be revealed," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which fights the teaching of creationism in public schools. "These people are really serious about this."

That may be, Dr. Miller said, but it's also possible "that Harun Yahya and his people have decided that there are plenty of Muslim people in the United States who need to hear this message."

In his e-mail message, Dr. de Ricqles said some worried that the book was directed at the Muslim population of France as a strategy to "destabilize" poor, predominantly immigrant suburbs "where a large population of youngsters of Moslem faith would be an ideal target for propaganda."

But despite its wide distribution, Dr. Padian predicted that the book would have little impact in the United States. "We are used to books that are totally wrongheaded about science and confuse science and religion," he said. "That's politics."

Ive been sent a copy but its back in the geo department. Ken Miller said that it was really too beautiful to toss but was not worth being put up in ones bookshelf.

From the News Item Posted by BBB:


Taner Edis is probably the leading expert on Islamic Creationism. His role is equivalent to what Barbara Forrest did in exposing the intelligent design movement.

I am wondering what this uncalled for and somewhat overblown interruption concerning Creationism, which is not only off topic but takes the debate as it was proceeding nowhere it hasn't already been countless times, is in aid of.

I hope it is not an attempt to provide an intellectual hiatus so that anti-IDers can escape from answering a simple question concerning the social management of lust in the absence of Christian ideas and start up their boring and simplistic ,not to say irresponsible, cliche engine again.

BBB asks-



I don't accept that we do but the post BBB has just put up is certainly an example of us not challeging scientific authority despite that authority having no answers to questions relating to the policing of it or of how it would manage the powerful force of lust in a scientic world.



Did the public executioner burn the book?



And nobody is this debate is saying that there is. We are not discussing the complexity of life on earth. It is an irreducible complexity and thus pointless to do so apart from among those technologists who can put our knowledge of it to good use. We all know, and do we know, that some scientists say that and that they will say that the book is "nonsense" and "crap". Do we not question their authority and their power to enforce on children what they want them to have?



Perhaps if they shoved it up their arses it would solve their dilemma.

Do you mind BBB not being the brass band that marched in just when this debate was coming finally into focus and getting interesting.

Have you anything to say regarding either the muzzling of science or the scientific management of lust. If you haven't might I suggest you place posts of that nature on the threads where they belong.

Thanking you in anticipation of your co-operation.

spendi, These "creationism" posts are not meant for you. There are some others on this thread interested in learning about what's going on in the world on this issue.

Interesting lil article:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/07/professors-in-c.html



I'm not even sure what to say about it. Organized religion is evil.

How many times do you want to learn the same thing over and over again. Do you like reading things you already agree with? Does it comfort you when you see further evidence that someone agrees with you? Do you feel you have been patted on the back

I have already explained why media is a supporter of anti-ID. It has nothing to do with anything other than profits. Once you have that in your head everything they say on the subject is predictable. They just change the words around from the last time they covered it, get some new names to make it look original to dummies and go off to the flesh spots of New York with the easy money. It's no different from watching a dog chew a bone.

Anyone who has it in his head to pontificate about literature from that part of the world or, indeed, about Islam should have the good manners and decency to try to understand the religious sense of that world. They ought to have engaged their mind on the scholarship surrounding the notion of the Magian soul feeling in which such ideas as evolution theory look like a madness.

Here's a bit from Spengler on the matter-



Stuff in brackets mine for those who need telling.

One might think that the NYT might employ a few people who had tried to deal with that type of thing which was written, as far as I know, before the idea appeared in the world that America is the Great Satan.

After all, underestimating Islam is not exactly bringing home the bacon is it? The safest thing to underestimate is the NYT rather than the religious feeling of a whole area of the world lasting for centuries and which cannot be dismissed in that ignorant tone the article employed.

It won't put me off trying to get you anti-IDers to explain what we get if we buy into your half-baked, simpleton, mish-mash which seems to think of a successful social system of 300 million as if it consists of a bunch of toy matchstick people.

Perhaps you have WCS. (White coat syndrome). A lot of people exhibit the symptoms of that in the presence of anyone with letters behind their names irrespective of how those letters were gained.

The NCSE had sent around a note re'YahYah's book and the estimate was that close to 100000 volumes were sent to teachers, researchesrs and some secondary school s.

Our council of prof geologists is interested in "following the money" to see where it started out.


spendi, youll just have to tread water, this is much more interesting (IMHO), anyway, you need a rest , so maybe we should vote on cloture. I so move.

I second the motion.