Posted on 11/27/2005 1:29:26 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
"Would a "good teacher" present both the Jewish and Palestinian "differing ideas" on whether the Holocaust occurred?"
I thought there was a lot of evidence (living witnesses, pictures, documents) that showed the Holocaust happened. And of course it would be interesting to hear the different ideas of the Jews and Palestinians as to history. Would you not allow the American Indian viewpoint of US History? How about the viewpoint of American slaves? Or should we just let in the "white" view?
(link to a statistical probability showing that the odds against evolution happening are too large for it to happen).
Evolution does happen. Statistical proofs against the probability of something happening, when it is known to have happened, are utterly useless. It is like telling somebody who has been struck by lightning that the odds are so high against their being struck by lightning that they really weren't struck by lightening. Absurd.
Furthermore, the majority of the author's examples of complexity and order were inanimate objects. Irrelevant.
The stuff about numerology etc. was a joke.
I can't speak to whether a belief in creationism hurts careers. It probably does in subtle ways. I could see where it could make one "suspect," which is never good at high level science.
The effects of creationism enterting schools are not dramatic. It could be something as subtle as highly qualified teachers avoiding such places.
But, as I told radio astronomer, who is passionate about the issue -- it doesn't matter. Science will continue, it always has. Though the U.S. probably won't lead the pack anymore.
I agree and see no problem with this textbook.
True, it can, hypothetically, be taught without mentioning God at all. But both the old-school and ID creationist camps are so passionate about the subject because they're afraid that society will collapse into total nihilism if too many shapers of public opinion lose their belief that the world is governed by supernatural people.
These people, who are supposedly conservatives and therefore more rational than, say, leftist postmodernists, start the fight by agreeing with postmodernism! They think that we cannot figure out what the best moral codes are on our own by examining the real-world consequences of good behavior vs. bad behavior.
The DI is especially fond of quoting Dostoyevski: "If God is dead, then everything is permitted."
But that's basically the same message as postmodernism: Morality is just a social convention, there is no objective standard by which to judge behavior, and so all moral disuptes are waged by self-serving groups who have no real, objective claims to being on the "right" side of the issue. So all moral disuptes end up being won by whichever interest group was the most ruthless in pursuit of their own goals.
But while the traditional, leftist postmodernist accepts this (false) premise and concludes that you should take the side of whichever group has the least power, so that it becomes sort of a tense standoff between roughly equally powerful groups who are unable to ruthlessly crush the other, the conservative postmodernist simply wallows in the third stage of grief: Magical thinking.
The conservative postmodernist says, "Let's just get everyone to believe in the same conception of God: The God who declares for us what it means to be 'right' or 'wrong'. Then we'll all be on the same page again, and all the social pathologies we're worried about will end! Yippee!"
It's wrongheaded and doomed to failure. Why should the conservative movement possibly want to get behind this postmodernist movement?
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