A Blood Libel on Our Civilization. Can I expell Expelled?

I don’t know how esteemed Richard Weikart is a historian. It seems as if he’s made the focus of his short academic career writing about “Darwinism” and the Nazis.

I guess you're a history buff. Who are all the "eminent" historians with respect to the origins of the Nazis' desire to create a super race and what are all the papers, books etc. they've written about it? And what makes those particular ones eminent?

It seems as if he’s made the focus of his short academic career writing about “Darwinism” and the Nazis.

What's that got to do with anything? You keep making these completely irrelevant points. Have any "eminent" historians refuted what he wrote? You're grasping at straws. "His career is short, so his research doesn't count."

Let’s say some of the freaks in the Nazi Party were intent on creating the Super Race. They wouldn’t look to Darwin. They would look to Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. And perhaps they did.

Now you're just creating your own theory unsupported by any facts whatsoever. The very thing you accused Stein, and apparently also Weikart and all the other historians who recommend his book, of doing, without having read his book of course. Is there any evidence of any advocates of eugenics of the first half of the 20th century mentioning Mendel? In fact by your "logic" you're now smearing genetics. I guess smearing genetics is okay, it's just smearing Darwin that's verboten.

The Nazis were not trying to craft the Super Race through random mutations and natural selection of the effects of that.

Another irrelevant point. They believed certain races already were superior. So they had to get rid of inferior races. You don't need to use random mutations to get rid of inferior races. You just get rid of them. Eugenics is artificial selection.

”. . . the point is, Congress was empowered to promote science.”

The point is, Congress is empowered by the Constitution to issue copyrights and patents. The issue is the protection of property rights, that being how Congress is to “promote” science and the useful arts. Apparently, your hubris won’t permit you to admit that your contrary assertion is contextually absurd. If your misbegotten logic were pursued, we would have to conclude that Congress is forbidden to grant copyrights for the materials of religious authors or associations because that would “promote” religion.

”The other poster claimed "science is a religion" - I.8.8. is my evidence against that assertion.”

Your “evidence” is a joke. The “other poster” made a logical assertion. Let him defend the logic of his assertion, and you criticize the logic of his assertion. Or, there are establishment cases you can cite. Both avenues are arguable, but to cite a constitutional clause protecting the right to private property by enumerating a Congressional power to grant patents and copyrights is so bizarrely irrational that it misses the mark by an intergalactic distance. It would be useless, I suppose, to refer to Jefferson’s observation that we are all imperiled when we try to make of the Constitution a blank slate. Your frenzied sense of invincible virtue would not permit you to see the truth of his point, or to admit to it if you did.

”Your postings have given me doubts about your truthfulness.”

”Treason!” cried the king. “Blasphemy!” shouted the mufti. “Unprincipled Liar!” snarled the Master of the Universe. Does your superiorist attitude go so far that you assume your word is undoubted, and that any dissent can only be explained out of wickedness? Do you think your bullying can impose silence by the sheer force of your personality? Bring paper, pencil, and a timer, if you wish to administer a test. See who answers the bell and acknowledges your authority to give it.

The point is, Congress is empowered by the Constitution to issue copyrights and patents.

In a debate over whether or not the Founders would agree that "science is a religion", the means by which Congress may promote science are irrelevant. The fact that Congress has such power with regard to science - whereas it does not have such power with regard to religion - is the point. Maybe this will help you:

Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Simple question: Do you think the Founders would agree with the other poster's claim that "science is a religion"?

The "other poster" made a logical assertion. Let him defend the logic of his assertion, and you criticize the logic of his assertion.

He never replied, so perhaps he saw his mistake. You, OTOH, can't seem to stop shooting yourself in the foot.

Do you think your bullying can impose silence by the sheer force of your personality?

Your question makes no sense. I've been trying to get you speak up on a simple question, but it is you who insist on silence.

Bring paper, pencil, and a timer, if you wish to administer a test. See who answers the bell and acknowledges your authority to give it.

Son, you've been taking the character test since your #366. You received your grade in my last post.

”the means by which Congress may promote science are irrelevant.”

Not when someone is trying to make more out of a constitutional provision than the text allows or the creators intended. You can’t use the patent and copyright clause to argue that Congress is empowered to promote science in a way it is not empowered to promote religion when both science materials and religious materials alike may be issued copyrights, and Congress may not do anything for the one that it cannot do for the other under the authority of this clause. You’re trying to give a significance and a cast to the clause that it simply does not possess. You might as well try to fit a tutu on a water buffalo.

”Maybe this will help you:”

And you go on to cite the Constitutional clause on patents and copyrights, then follow with the establishment provision of the First Amendment, as though either has much of anything to do with the other (see above). You’ve acquired an obsessive-compulsive fixation on a connection between the Establishment Clause and the Article I clause on patents and copyrights that is non-existent, and would be pointless if it did exist.

All you’ll need to do is to suck up to the Stalinists, the insane anarchists, and all the other Marxist/Socialist crazies who infest our university campi like maggots on a carcass, and they will be pleased to confer a special status on Science and provide it with extra funding. You will have to go along with the Global Warming (“Climate Change”) con game, and all the other “scientific” funding for political purposes, but there should be plenty left over, and you’ll never have to worry about the intrusion of religion. The “useful Arts” may provide some competition, but that will consist mostly of “Diversity” studies, “Black” studies, “Feminine” studies, and the like. Those are going to happen no matter what you do, so you might as well relax and make things easy for yourself. As compensation for the junk “studies” that passes for culture on the college campus of today, you will see the same continuing decline of Western Civilization cultural influence that has been going on for the last fifty years. One more generation and Science should altogether be entirely safe from the insidious influence of Western Civilization.

The Constitution is neither a “living” document (it never was) nor an enduring document (I want to say it once was, but I guess that’s not strictly true since it no longer endures). It is now simply an historical document, of some slight occasional interest as a curiosity. But do not despair. You can still use it from time to time to achieve your ends (you’ll have to tolerate others doing the same, but don’t worry – a majority of nine black robes should keep you reasonably safe). It will be another generation or so before there is a serious push to do away with it entirely.

”Simple question: Do you think the Founders would agree with the other poster's claim that "science is a religion"?”

Simple answer: I thought I had made it clear that I do not intend to go galloping down the sidetracks you set up for me.

”He [the “other poster”] never replied, so perhaps he saw his mistake.”

Perhaps he did. I won’t pretend to read his mind, but it strikes me that he never intended to frame his remark in a constitutional context, and when he saw what a maladroit mess you were making out of the proposition, he may have decided that the candle was not worth the game.

” You, OTOH, can't seem to stop shooting yourself in the foot.”

I’m not the one trying to fit a tutu on a water buffalo.

”Son, you've been taking the character test since your #366.”

Spoken like an elitist who has made a fool of himself and hasn’t the sense to know when to make as quiet and as dignified an exit as he can manage. You’ve not the gravitas, either intellectually or morally, to presume to administer me a test or to issue a grade. Nor do you have the cachet to pretend you’re the alpha male in this pack. All you can do is try to usurp a status you don’t possess or deserve, by using the language of a superior addressing his junior. You may think that it gives you the appearance of haut monde, but all it does is unmask your pretentiousness. To this point in the discussion, you’ve done nothing but display most of the least appealing traits of a Liberal: assuming an air of inherited superiority; changing the subject (presumably to one more to your comfort); misdirection (here! here! look over here! don’t look over there!); shifting the burden (in the hopes of forcing the other fellow to defend or explain the issue, freeing you to attack); ignoring the crucial question; vilifying your correspondent; positing a distinction possessing no difference; invoking the automatic disqualifier; and the scrambling of meanings and terms. All in the finest tradition of the Goebbels model of avoiding the point.

I, on the other hand, have no need to administer you a character test even if I were presumptuous enough to do so. You’ve laid it out there for all to see without the need of my participation.

This thread has gone to crickets. Further discussion will get us nowhere. You may have the last word if your ego permits you to think that it’s OK for you to inflict further pain on this forum.

Good night Mrs. Malaprop (and Dr. Stadler), where ever you are.

You can't use the patent and copyright clause to argue that Congress is empowered to promote science in a way it is not empowered to promote religion when both science materials and religious materials alike may be issued copyrights, and Congress may not do anything for the one that it cannot do for the other under the authority of this clause.

Copyrighted religious materials are original works by human authors, and fall under the useful Arts provision. By the same token, a book that advocates laws to restrict religion could obtain a copyright under the same useful Arts provision. The clause was not meant to support or oppose any particular viewpoint or outcome. It was simply meant to promote the useful Arts. It is not valid to read any promotion or restriction of religion into I.8.8.

OTOH, the same cannot be said for science. The clause specifically names Science as a thing to be promoted.

I wrote: Simple question: Do you think the Founders would agree with the other poster's claim that "science is a religion"?

You replied: Simple answer: I thought I had made it clear that I do not intend to go galloping down the sidetracks you set up for me.

I'm adding intellectual cowardice to your evaluation.

Another follow-up from Mr. Derbyshire over at The Corner:

Wrong Target [John Derbyshire]

A reader:

John,

I think you and other conservative critics of Ben Stein's movie are overlooking a significant part of the damage this film is doing: it diverts attention away from the areas of the academy, such as English, Poli Sci, Sociology, gender studies, black studies, etc. that really have become real cesspools of leftist dogma and actually are dire need of reform.

Conservatives who care about higher education ought to be scrutinizing the pseudo-scholars in these disciplines and leaving the real scholars in the natural sciences alone. Ben Stein is diverting resources away from where they could actually be doing some good.

Worse, the fact that conservatives are attacking the natural sciences makes them less credible when they call for reform in the humanities and social sciences. Efforts to promote Intelligent Design are being used as an argument against the Academic Bill of Rights in Florida, for example.

The damage Ben Stein is doing to efforts to reform the academy is incalculable and perhaps the worst effect of his movie.

I agree. Part of the anger that I, and a lot of other science-literate conservatives, feel towards Stein arises from his joining in the creationists' attempts to breach an academic barrier we've put our faith in, perhaps complacently. While every kind of lunacy has run rampant through our Humanities departments this past couple of decades, we've taken consolation in the fact that science and math departments have been able to go quietly about their work without any of the lunacy really affecting them. You can have Gay Legal Studies or Latina History, but Feminist Differential Geometry is much harder to get started. Being firmly in touch with empirical reality, or in the case of math with rigorous proof procedures, the sciences can't easily be disturbed by politicized crackpottery.

Stein's movie is an open assault on that barrier, an attempt to bring over what Roger Kimball calls "experiments against reality" from the Humanities departments into the sciences. It is not a coincidence that the current strain of creationism exemplified by Expelled gives off a strong whiff of postmodernism: ruthless power-holders imposing their own version of reality, etc. "When the religious Right adopts the epistemology of the multicultural Left — that truth is relative — there goes the Enlightenment …" That's a surviving fragment from Noam Scheiber's piece on this in The Australian a couple of years ago, the piece itself apparently no longer available.

05/05 02:52 PM

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjhlNzU1MWJlYWM2OWRhNGJmMzg0M2E1M2U2Yjg4Zjg=

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