Monthly Archives: November 2005

other voices

This Week’s WTF

The following is from a real uniter, not a divider. Like all children, he

imitates the adults he hears, including the President and Vice President.

ABQjournal: Letters to the Editor

Ignore Enviros,

Drill ANWAR

NOW THAT Congress has shown that it is full of pansies and lily-livered cowards, instead of going

ahead and voting to drill in ANWAR, they drop it and guarantee higher prices for oil and our future dependence on other countries.

They should be voting for the drilling and for the restriction of environmentalists nuisance lawsuits whenever a nuclear power

plant is to be built, or a new refinery or the opening of a new oil field. These cause the price of construction to go way up to the

point it is not profitable to build or do any drilling. Then you have those that ignore new sources of energy or any lines of pursuit

that may allow independence from the Middle East.

Our government, instead of listening to the majority and using common sense,

listens to special interest groups. This includes the mealy-mouthed, two-faced liars that go by the name of Democrats.

RALPH E. ZECCO
Socorro

How is one supposed to take this viciousness? Turn the other cheek?

Respond in kind? Ultimately, it is up to other less boneheaded conservatives to talk some sense into idiots like Zecco. Good luck with

that.

peace, mjh

other voices

GOP Deserts Moderates, Ideals

ABQjournal: Letters to the Editor

GOP Deserts

Moderates, Ideals

DURING THE recent Albuquerque election, I received several fliers from the office of the chairman of the

Republican Party.

None of them promoted the Republican candidates or their records. None of them contributed to informing the

public about current political issues. All of them slammed the Democrats. They did not sit well with me. I think it was

just the final straw, and they caused me to vote for a Democrat, something I haven’t done for years.

Since the

takeover of the Republican Party by the conservatives, I have slowly realized that there is no room in the party for

moderate-thinking members [mjh: the Radical Right calls moderate Republicans RINOs]. The party has abandoned traditional Republican values such as small government and balanced budgets.

They have introduced new standards of government that are based not on public need but political payback. The image of that ignorant FEMA

chief still gives me heartburn. …

The Republicans have taken the U.S. to record trade deficits. … They have cut the

effectiveness or are attempting to cut the effectiveness of all major environmental laws including those that protect our water, our air

and our public lands. No consideration is given to protecting the public. …
J.W. TANNER
Albuquerque

NADA

The Ouch in Vouchers

[updated 11/22/05]

Dane Roberts, of UNM, speaks of “the impossibility of standardizing our

public schools” and believes “the state shouldn’t assume the task of defining how or what each kid should learn.” Roberts imagines an

ideal world in which “principals could choose teachers who match their educational beliefs. And teachers [could] focus on what is too

often forgotten: teaching kids.”

How can anyone believe teachers have forgotten that it’s all about teaching kids? How is it good

that principals could discriminate against teachers whose “educational beliefs” they disagree with?

I don’t want a teacher fired

for believing the world is only 4,000 years old. Nor do I want a school packed with such believers.

Throughout hundreds of years

of public education, many countries have not had so much trouble standardizing public schools. The trouble has grown in the last 30

years, coincidental with rise of the Radical Right.

If the state has no business at all in education (the ultimate extension of

this line of reasoning), who does? The church? Or, the parents, most of whom hope their children will achieve more education than they

could. Many caring parents participate in elections of local school boards; many know their kid’s teachers and principals. How are they

not represented in this process?

How does anyone reasonably conclude the Market can do no wrong? What have they been teaching

you?

One of the many things that has helped the United States to become a great nation is public education. That and a progressive

tax system, especially estate taxes, have helped delay the growth of an American Aristocracy. In schools we meet people and ideas we will

never meet at home or even in our own neighborhood or church. The melting pot of America is its public schools. Undermining that system

undermines everything. Public education serves the public good. mjh

[published in The Daily Lobo (11/17/05)]
—–

Column:

Vouching for vouchers by Dane Roberts, Daily Lobo columnist

The issue of evolution versus creationism in the science

curriculum perfectly illustrates the impossibility of standardizing our public schools. Some people will never accept public schools that

promote ideas that contradict their religious beliefs. Others will never allow religion to influence the curriculum.
—–

[11/22/05: response from James McClure …] Continue reading The Ouch in Vouchers →

ID, The Atheist's Pulpit

From The Atheist’s Pulpit

Somebody light a

candle because Krauthammer and I are on the same side of an issue. Holy cow! Even as I savor this moment of worlds-colliding, I marvel

that I could argue Krauthammer is being unfair to some IDers (this is a disturbing universe, indeed). Those very few IDers who

believe they are pursuing a “science of irreducible complexity” — a bold new way of looking at things — feel tarred by the “Jesus on a

dinosaur” brush. Sorry, but there are many more who believe evolution is the devil’s tool and the world is 4000 years old than believe

there are merely points in an otherwise clockwork system where god intercedes. Not that truth is a popularity contest.

Still, I

always enjoy the Clash of Conservatives. Krauthammer is one of the cardinals of the Radical Right — a ‘must read’ in the West Wing (or

have read to you). Here we see the arrogance and utterly unshakable certainty directed against — good god! — forces equally arrogant

and unshakable. ‘The Truth is Ours‘, both sides shout with equal ferocity, and ‘those who disagree are beneath contempt.’

The true gift from god here is not that the ranters can’t simply give up and shout “Commie! Hippie! Democrat!” No, no, sweeter still

is that somewhere deep inside each opponent has to realize, “damn, I just called another right-winger wrong.” The Monolith of Radical

Right Infallibility called into question by its own faithful?! Hosanna! mjh

PS: I believe Krauthammer

would join me — again! — in irritation at the Albuquerque Journal’s headline, “God and Science Made the Lemurs”. There isn’t

a person alive — whom you’d want to talk to — who would say ‘science made the lemurs’. Made? Are headline writers less

educated than real journalists or does years of straining for groan-inducing puns dull the wits as much as it seems to?

Two more

specimens:

Kansas wrong to see science as an enemy of God, just ask Einstein — Quad City Times

[mjh: so much for the pursuit of brevity]

Science isn’t religion’s foe: an idea that’s still evolving — Bothell Herald

[mjh: groan]
—–

Charles Krauthammer: Evolution by any other name is still . . .

BECAUSE every few years this country, in its

infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be

superfluous � that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both

religious.

Newton’s religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England.

Einstein’s was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.

Neither saw science

as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. “He believed he was doing God’s work,” wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton.

Einstein saw his entire vocation � understanding the workings of the universe � as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. … Newton’s God was not at all so crude. The laws

of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine. …

Let’s

be clear. “Intelligent design” may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud.

It is a self-enclosed, tautological

“theory” whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge � in this case, evolution � they are to

be filled by God. …

How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple,

more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet

interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give

us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education too.
—–

QOTD: “How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God.” Amen.

ID

a Newtonian God

My first thought on

hearing that the Vatican’s astronomer spoke out against ID as pseudo-science (it is, more

correctly, “anti-science”), I thought, ‘wow, the Vatican has an astronomer?!’

Before you know it, they’ll be dealing with this

guy as they did Galileo. mjh

Vatican official rejects intelligent design teaching By NICOLE WINFIELD, The Associated Press

The

Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in

school programs was “wrong” and was akin to mixing apples with oranges.

“Intelligent design isn’t science even though it pretends

to be,” the ANSA news agency quoted Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. “If you want to teach it in schools,

intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.” …

In a June article in the

British Catholic magazine The Tablet, Coyne reaffirmed God’s role in creation, but said science explains the history of the universe.

“If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research, religious believers must

move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a

watch that ticks along regularly.”

Rather, he argued, God should be seen more as an encouraging parent.

“God in

his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and

greater complexity,” he wrote. “He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.”

[mjh: as Jas. put it, ‘our god is a CEO, not some middle-manager bogged down in the daily details.’]

The Vatican

Observatory, which Coyne heads, is one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world. It is based in the papal summer

residence at Castel Gandolfo south of Rome.
—–

Evolution News & Views
News Analysis of Media Coverage of the Debate Over Evolution
(a

site that believes “scientists, teachers, and students are under attack for questioning evolution” — [mjh: the cult

of paranoid victimhood])

CSC – Challenging Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and promoting Intelligent Design [mjh: The Discovery Institute is the center of their universe]

ID

Creationism and intelligent design are two widely different things

The Daily Sundial – Keep classroom free of

intelligent design by Sean Paroski

[C]reationism and intelligent design are two widely different things. Creationism is based

solely in the text of the Bible, taking as literal the account in genesis of God creating the world in six days. While creationism

advocates will often try to cite scientific “facts” to back up their thesis, creationism specifically rejects evolution as a scientific

theory (except as a modern phenomenon) as well as discounting geological, astronomical and other physical evidence for the age of the

universe.

Intelligent design differs significantly from creationism in several key aspects. First, it has no basis in any specific

religious tradition, unlike creationism’s reliance on the Bible.

Second, it does not reject scientific findings about the origins

of species, the age of the universe or other discoveries of the natural sciences. Intelligent design is primarily a critique of the

interpretation of the evidence derived from those sciences.

Intelligent designers claim that missing evidence in the fossil record

and the natural complexity of living creatures cannot be accounted for by the theory of evolution alone. They claim that such complexity

and missing evidence implies that the universe must have some supernatural designer that directs the development of organisms. This

“designer” is non-denominational and its hands-off approach to directing the universe bears little resemblance to the God of the Bible,

who is always involving himself in human affairs in one way or another.

Thus, the claims of scientists and anti-religion types

that intelligent design is a violation of separation of church and state is inaccurate since intelligent design does not advocate a

specific religious creed.

However, the argument that intelligent design is not science does have significant weight.

ID

the company one keeps

3 Comments

Letter: Proof of

intelligent design exists – Friday, 11/18/05

Unfortunately, the idea that intelligent design is religious faith in disguise is

simply wrong. It appeals to those with such faith, because it assures them their faith is in fact independently supportable by science.

But when they intrude with their beliefs upon the scientific arguments for or against intelligent design, the faithful are as wrong as

the scientists who dogmatically oppose it …

Intelligent design is about the fact that one can today determine, scientifically,

that the world was largely designed.

The real news is that this is possible because there is not merely a single, one-time design

of everything in the world. Whatever you may believe about an original Creation of All, the fact is that there was, less than twenty

thousand years ago, a deliberate redesign. According to the scientific evidence–of which mainstream scientists like Dr. Cornell are

ignorant, and disdaining to learn–not only the Earth but the entire solar system was remade. …

[Scientists] complain that there

are no articles showing evidence for design in the peer-reviewed literature, but that is because such articles are not allowed, by

official fiat. Readers need to know that is simply an incompetent stand for a scientist to take: You may not be able to prove God, but

you can demonstrate design of the world. I know. I’ve done it. And I am being suppressed, denied the opportunity to contribute knowledge

that would stop the current war of words over design, and show how intelligent design can – and must (if you want students to learn the

truth)- be presented in science class.

Dale Huffman
Gallatin, TX
—–

The End of the Mystery: The Design of the Gods – Lulu.com

I am

a professional research scientist in physics and mathematics. I submitted this article to the magazine New Astronomy, only to have the

online submission unceremoniously “removed by the editor”, without explanation. (I have in the past also sent letters announcing my

discoveries to Science magazine, but they too were ignored.) Modern science is broken; it is not confronting the evidence, it is not

seeking the truth. …..

[from] Finding the Design of the gods
by Harry Dale Huffman

The first light shone on the

design in 1996, when I discovered the location of Hyperborea, which the Greek poet Pindar described, around the time of the seventh

century BC, with these words: Neither by ship nor yet by land shall one find the wondrous road to the gathering place of the

Hyperboreans.

Hyperborea was no ordinary land, you see. It was a “blessed” land, in Greek myth, where the inhabitants celebrated

always, and “the dances of the girls, the twanging of lyres and sound of flutes are continually circling.” (Pindar again.) Above all,

“Hyper-borea” means “beyond north”, so its location was said to be “beyond the north”.

It turns out there is such a place, and if

you happen to pass by it, and remember as you do the above quotes, you’ll very likely find it, as I did. It is in the starry sky, near

the celestial north pole (CNP)