Creationism just won’t quit
I once had an argument back in High School with a fellow student that, despite mountains of scientific data, SWORE that the very earth I stand on today was no older than a few thousand years old. Hell, people used to swear the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around US, but they got over it when they were proved wrong… surely we can’t STILL be so blind to science in 2007.
Obviously not. Religious fundamentalism is at an all time high in America, and as such places all over our country are being censored as to not offend the sensitive beliefs of those doing the censoring. Take the Grand Canyon for example. A huge, deep scar in the face of the earth, forged by the eb and flow of the Colorado River over many hundreds of thousands of years.
Park Rangers and other staff at the Grand Canyon National Park are now required to answer questions regarding the geologic age of the canyon with ‘no comment‘.
According to documents released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) on the 12/28/06, pressure from officials appointed by the Bush administration has made discussion of the age and creation of the canyon so “un-PC” that a simple ‘no comment’ is all that is uttered.
PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch had this to say about the religious gag order. – “In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology.”
All of this started back when a book went on sale at the Canyon Bookstore that brought forth the theory that the Grand Canyon was not carved over the course of many thousands of years by the flowing river, but in one grand surge caused by the floods and Noah’s Ark. Park officials back up their decision to sell the book, claiming they feel the Park Bookstore to be “like a library” allowing for all points and counterpoints to be expressed. While this is all well and good, laws and park policy dictate that ‘materials are only to reflect the highest quality science and are to closely support approved interpretive themes’. Even more ironic is that two years after the contradictory decision to add such a book to their sale racks, NPS put forth Director’s Order #6 in 2005 which states “The history of the Earth must be based on the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism [and] Interpretive and educational programs must refrain from appearing to endorse religious beliefs explaining natural processes.â€
Odd that such a directive would be in place, yet to this day the only “correct” answer we can give those seeking answers is nothing at all.
mgroves
2 Jan, 2007
Keep in mind that while rangers are told by their boss to say “no comment”, it could simply be a political swipe at the Bush administration from those in charge who don’t like him. “Look how crazy he is, he makes us say ‘no comment!’” Similar to “The Patriot Act requires us to [insert something that The Patriot Act doesn't require them to do at all].”
In any case, a simple preface should be all that’s necessary to avoid controversy, if that’s truly the goal. “Most scientists say that…etc etc” Someone who’s really bothered by that kind of stuff could just say “Pff, scientists, what do they know!” and move on.
I don’t think there’s a problem with selling that book there, but the “no comment” thing is ridiculous.
Nick
2 Jan, 2007
Wow, this is getting pretty bad. If I was a park ranger or supervisor for the Grand Canyon and someone asked my how old it was, I would clearly say it’s over 5 or 6 million years old.
http://www.nps.gov/archive/grca/grandcanyon/faq.htm#3
The above link still states that the Grand Canyon is over 5 million years old. I wonder how long that will stay there until the religious fanatics find it.
Geek
3 Jan, 2007
Your title says it all.
If you’d really like to see the lengths those who despise those “godless evolutionists” will really go, by all means go read the Circuit Court Ruling for the intelligent design case out of Dover, PA – Kitzmiller v Dover.
Frankly, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
iamtired
24 Jan, 2007
Not sure if this will help.
Ok.
Separation.
of
Church & State.
No one seems to get it, @ least not in my church.
There were some good points in the 2 preceeding blogs.
Here ya go.:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12115700/site/newsweek/
“Some Americans think the country has strayed too far from God; others fear that religious zealots (from the White House to the school board) are waging holy war on American liberty; and many, if not most, seem to believe that we are a nation hopelessly divided between believers and secularists.”
“However dominant in terms of numbers, Christianity is only a thread in the American tapestry—it is not the whole tapestry. The God who is spoken of and called on and prayed to in the public sphere is an essential character in the American drama, but He is not specifically God the Father or the God of Abraham. The right’s contention that we are a “Christian nation” that has fallen from pure origins and can achieve redemption by some kind of return to Christian values is based on wishful thinking, not convincing historical argument. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, George Washington assured his Jewish countrymen that the American government “gives to bigotry no sanction.” In a treaty with the Muslim nation of Tripoli initiated by Washington, completed by John Adams, and ratified by the Senate in 1797, we declared “the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. … ” The Founders also knew the nation would grow ever more diverse; in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s bill for religious freedom was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.” And thank God—or, if you choose, thank the Founders—that it did indeed.
Understanding the past may help us move forward.”
“The Founding Fathers and presidents down the ages have believed in a God who brought forth the heavens and the earth, and who gave humankind the liberty to believe in Him or not, to love Him or not, to obey Him or not. God had created man with free will, for love coerced is no love at all, only submission. That is why the religious should be on the front lines of defending freedom of religion.”
“Still, Jefferson’s declaration of independence grounded America’s most fundamental human rights in the divine, as the gift of “Nature’s God.” The most unconventional of believers, Jefferson was no conservative Christian; he once went through the Gospels with a razor to excise the parts he found implausible. (“I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know,” he remarked.) And yet he believed that “the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” and to Jefferson, the “Creator” invested the individual with rights no human power could ever take away. The Founders, however, resolutely refused to evoke sectarian—specifically Christian—imagery: the God of the Declaration is largely the God of Deism, an Enlightenment-era vision of the divine in which the Lord is a Creator figure who works in the world through providence. The Founding Fathers rejected an attempt to rewrite the Preamble of the Constitution to say the nation was dependent on God, and from the Lincoln administration forward presidents and Congresses refused to support a “Christian Amendment” that would have acknowledged Jesus to be the “Ruler among the nations.”"
“At the same time, the early American leaders were not absolute secularists. They wanted God in American public life, but in a way that was unifying, not divisive.”
“The Founders understood that theocracy was tyranny, but they did not feel they could—or should—try to banish religion from public life altogether. Washington improvised “So help me, God” at the conclusion of the first presidential oath and kissed the Bible on which he had sworn it. Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he privately told his cabinet, because he had struck a deal with “my Maker” that he would free the slaves if the Union forces triumphed at Antietam. The only public statement Franklin D. Roosevelt made on D-Day 1944 was to read a prayer he had written drawing on the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. John Kennedy said that “on earth, God’s work must truly be our own,” and Ronald Reagan was not afraid to say that he saw the world as a struggle between light and dark, calling the Soviet empire “the focus of evil in the modern world.” George W. Bush credits Billy Graham with saving him from a life of drift and drink, and once said that Christ was his favorite philosopher.
Sectarian language, however, can be risky. In a sermon preached on the day George Washington left Philadelphia to take command of the Continental Army, an Episcopal priest said: “Religion and liberty must flourish or fall together in America. We pray that both may be perpetual.” The battle to preserve faith and freedom has been a long one, and rages still: keeping religion and politics in proper balance requires eternal vigilance.
Our best chance of summoning what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” may lie in recovering the true sense and spirit of the Founding era and its leaders, for they emerged from a time of trial with a moral creed which, while imperfect, averted the worst experiences of other nations. In that history lies our hope.”
From AMERICAN GOSPEL by Jon Meacham, to be published by Random House on Tuesday, April 4. © 2006 by Jon Meacham.
I couldn’t have said it better.
You can read the full article @ the above link. Please continue to question & read. Learn all you can. And remember, our most important strengths as American’s is our ability to question authority to avoid tyranny, and work together to achieve a common goal, said goal being a well-balanced & FREE country.
Deism-(many of the framers (Ben Franklin,Thomas Jefferson,etc. of the Constitution were NOT Christians. They were DEISTS. Some were Christians from different sects. This was during the time in history classified as the “Age of Reason”. (Here is a definition)-”Deism is defined in Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1941, as: “[From Latin Deus, God.Deity] The doctrine or creed of a Deist.” And Deist is defined in the same dictionary as: “One who believes in the existence of a God or supreme being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason.”
Benjamin Franklin:
“Benjamin Franklin’s enlightenment deism: Benjamin Franklin early-on adapted a creed that would last the rest of his life: a virtuous, morally fortified, and pragmatic version of deism. He fit squarely into the tradition—indeed, was the first great American exemplar of the Enlightenment and its Age of Reason.” – Readings In Science And Religion
Skeptical Inquirer, March-April, 2004 by Walter Isaacson
Thomas Jefferson: “Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743-July 4, 1826) is known the world over as the principal author, in 1776 at age 33, of the Declaration of Independence; as author of the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom instituting separation of church and state in Virginia, passed in 1786; and as third president of the United States, 1801-09. As president Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark expedition, launched in 1803, to map the vast, unknown territory northwest of St. Louis; and he negotiated and persuaded Congress to fund the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, greatly increasing the size of the U.S. He also protected crucial trade interests of his young nation by making war with the Barbary States,1801-05. The character of Jefferson’s religion is one of the most interesting aspects of his intriguing life. Certain evangelicals, who were also his political opponents, tried very hard to make Jefferson’s religion a factor in elections. They filled the press with scurrilous attacks on his “deistical” beliefs. He made it his steadfast policy never to respond to any of these attacks or, indeed, to make any public statement at all concerning his faith. Ironically, in spite of the attacks, evangelicals flocked to support Jefferson because they favored the end of tax support for established churches—which meant freedom for their independent churches—as passionately as did he. Today religious conservatives portray Jefferson as a sympathetic figure, unaware of his religious beliefs, his understanding of religious freedom or his criticisms of evangelical religiosity.Jefferson’s earliest writings on religion exhibit a natural theology, a heavy reliance on reason, and the belief that morality comes not from special revelation but from careful attention to the inward moral sense. In a letter to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787, Jefferson advised, “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god.”
He considered Jesus the teacher of a sublime and flawless ethic. Writing in 1803 to the Universalist physician Benjamin Rush, Jefferson wrote, “To the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.” Jefferson found the Unitarian understanding of Jesus compatible with his own. In 1822 he predicted that “there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian.” Jefferson requested that a Unitarian minister be dispatched to his area of Virginia. “Missionaries from Cambridge [that is: Harvard Divinity School] would soon be greeted with more welcome, than from the tritheistical school of Andover.” Jefferson’s christology is apparent in these and similar letters, and also in one of his most famous writings, the “Jefferson Bible.”
Of immense appeal is the image of President Jefferson, up late at night in his study at the White House, using a razor to cut out large segments of the four Gospels and pasting the parts he decided to keep onto the pages of a blank book, purchased to receive them. This original project of 1804, which he titled “The Philosophy of Jesus,” he refined and greatly expanded in his later years. The final product, completed in 1820, he called the “Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” which was the version Congress published. Jefferson’s “Life and Morals” argues no theology. It is simply his edited version of the Gospels. He literally cut out the virgin birth, miracle stories, claims to Jesus’ divinity and the resurrection. Some scholars believe he first assembled his collage of Jesus’ teachings for his own devotional use. A late reference to the “Indians” who could benefit from reading it, was likely directed at those public figures, often Christian ministers, who had viciously attacked his religious beliefs without in the least understanding them or—as Jefferson believed—Jesus.
Thomas Jefferson’s genius is everywhere apparent in his thirst for and his comprehension of the best enlightened philosophy, history, science, political theory, agriculture and religion of his age. Tragically, he failed utterly to engage, in any substantively practical way whatsoever, the massive realities of American racial oppression and injustice. Jefferson’s writings display deep reservations as well as moral anguish concerning Negro slavery; yet he never freed his own slaves. Much attention, in Jefferson’s time and in ours, has focused on his alleged sexual relations with his mixed-race slave, Sally Hemings, the light skinned half-sister of his wife. There is now compelling DNA evidence that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Hemings’ children. He did free two of Hemings’ children in his will and Hemings was given her freedom shortly thereafter. But millions of African Americans have had to suffer many more decades of cruel economic slavery, even after legal slavery was ended in the 1860s, because of the common, absurd notion, which Thomas Jefferson shared and only mildly questioned, that the “dark” races were inferior to the “white.” Moreover, Jefferson’s presidential removal policies proved horribly destructive to Native Americans. They set the pattern for the Bill for Indian Removal, signed by President Jackson in 1830, whose cruel enforcement resulted in the Trail of Tears of 1838-39 and other atrocities. Jefferson’s prophetic advancement of human liberty is deeply tainted by his shameful legacy in matters of race.”
umm, I guess no one’s perfect.
more info:this is a website formed by Deists worldwide.I am sure that some of the info is anti-Christian, but there is @ least factual info about Deism here, & thought based on the powers of reason that you might find interesting. (We all have to understand one another. That is the only way that you can truly begin to love. I am sure that Jesus would agree.)
http://www.deism.com/paine_essay01.htm
http://www.deism.com/deism_vs.htm
http://www.deism.com/think.htm
Ok, please find out the facts for yourself.
Oh, in regards to “lying”, I am not sure if anyone here is aware of the book “Tempting Faith” written by David Kuo this past Oct., 2006, but it is quite interesting. Please read the following article, & watch his interview on 60 Minutes.
Link below:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/14/60minutes/main2089778.shtml
Ok, so please read, do research, UNDERSTAND, & speak wisely. Hatred is a by-product of fear & ignorance.