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Intelligent Design a Boondoggle

Intelligent Design a Boondoggle

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In a roundtable interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers President Bush said yesterday that he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

No problem. Just don’t ask science teachers to teach it. Teach it in religion classes, not alongside evolutionary theories in biology class. The principle of selection: what lives to reproduce passes on its genes. There are discussions about different theories within the science of evolution – debate about catastrophic events, punctuated and gradual evolution, the big bang. Much of science has latent mysterious content – read up on string theory or strange attractors, for example. However, renaming “creationism” as “intelligent design” doesn’t make it science. What are you going to teach? Bible verses? In any case, there are lots of creation stories – you’d then have to teach them all, not just the Genesis account. Wouldn’t it be better to leave that to families and the worship centers of the different religions? Why would the public school system be teaching Judeo-Christianity?

Intelligent design refers to the theory that “unspecified intelligent causes” (i.e. God the Father) are responsible for the origin of the universe and of life in all its diversity – well anyway, the life we know, which is based on carbon.

Don’t laugh – these pseudochristics are serious! They are already anti-intellectual, anti-science. They want followers, not thinkers.

The House Subcommittee on Basic Education in Pennsylvania heard testimony Monday on a bill that would allow local school boards to mandate that science lessons include intelligent design. The legislation is sponsored by only a dozen lawmakers. A federal judge will consider the issue this fall, when a lawsuit against the Dover Area School District is scheduled to go to trial. The suit alleges that the school board violated the constitutional separation of church and state when it voted in October to require ninth-grade students to hear about intelligent design during biology class.

Of course, here in Georgia, the infamous Cobb Country had big stickers in all the science textbooks proclaiming that evolution is just a theory until a federal judge in Atlanta finally put the nix on it in January saying the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. The stickers were added after more than 2,000 parents complained that the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life, such as the biblical story of creation. Six parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then sued, contending the disclaimers violated the separation of church and state and unfairly singled out evolution from thousands of other scientific theories as suspect. The judge ruled that “While evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.” “By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof.” Last year, Georgia’s education chief proposed a science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution” in favor of “changes over time.” The idea was dropped amid protests from teachers.

This focus on the new creationism is very clever. If they get religion taught as science they gain more control over the children (get ’em while they’re young). Such children will be unable to distinguish between science and religion, but as Bush himself shows, many of our kids are impervious to the very best education. We may lose out in the science and technology wars of the future, but hey, we’re going down anyway with the gradual destruction of the public school system that helped us rise. If the fight fails, they still motivate their fearful, hateful base -energizing them with that ole God is on our side bull at a time when people are getting less enthused about Iraq, oil/gas prices, and so on. Now that’s strategic politics.

One question, though – if you believe in creationism (and that’s what this is), then you probably also believe that God placed humans in the position of the stewards of the earth. How is it that the same group of people who advocate for creationism are first in line to let corporations pollute? Where are their environmental concerns? Some stewards.

What possible joint interest could a real Christian have with the death and power policies of this administration? Believers are so easily manipulated – don’t you remember that warning about false prophets?

Global Warming Virtual March

Global Warming Virtual March

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Join the Stop Global Warming Virtual March and make your voice heard!

This one is big enough that it might make some waves.

Some of the other participants are:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Senator John McCain
John H. Adams, President, NRDC
Laurie David, Founder
Senator Joe Lieberman
R. James Woolsey, former Director of Central Intelligence Agency
Senator Maria Cantwell
Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
General Wesley Clark
Andy Stern, President, SEIU
Richard Klausner, MD, Executive Director, Global Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Father Paul Mayer, Co-Founder of the Climate Crisis Coalition
Ross Gelbspan, Author
Gus Speth, Dean, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
Al Franken, Author, Air America Radio
Leonardo DiCaprio, Actor, Environmental Activist
Martha Marks, Pres., REP America
Susan Joy Hassol, Independent Scholar
Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Geosciences and Intern’l Affairs, Princeton University

An excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s call to action:

…we have the technology to avert catastrophic global warming. We only need to muster the political will. We must require our leadership in Washington to once again mobilize our country’s scientific and technological capacity – the way America did to win World War II against the Nazis in 1945, to put a man on the moon in 1969, and to fix the ozone crisis in 1988. Today, we need a Apollo project to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, we need our leadership to muster America’s capacity for invention and innovation, our entrepreneurial energies and our willingness to sacrifice –and deploy our invigorated nation to rescue human civilization.

Second, all the actions we must take to avert this global warming, are things America ought to be doing anyhow to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, our entanglement with petty dictators, our vulnerability to price shocks on the international oil markets, and to improve our national security, modify our trade deficits, reduce our national debt, stimulate our economy, create new jobs, and give our children clean air and water, robust health and safer, more wholesome communities. Immediate dramatic action on global warming will restore America’s global leadership and our moral authority among the nations of earth.

We are asking you to help us express your own commitment to stop global warming through a single act of community – a giant petition drive that we call the “Stop Global Warming Virtual March on Washington.” Over the next year, we will mobilize millions of Americans to join our march and make their personal commitment known by joining together to urge Washington to begin taking the steps necessary to derail global warming.

Our mandate to stop global warming transcends politics. It is a moral imperative. The battle to save the planet is the ultimate human rights struggle and, as with America’s civil rights movement, the first steps must be to mobilize citizens to remind our elected leaders of their moral obligation. Global warming is a theft of our children’s future. It is criminal and sinful.

It would mean a lot to me if you would join under my personal impact page.

“Good Steward”????

“Good Steward”????

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Well, all in all, both men did very well. These presidential debates are the most serious, the most exciting, the most historically resonant of any in my living memory. Anyone who wants to now has plenty of information to do their own research, and make an informed voting decision. Voter registration is up.

I’m really beat and I’ve had an extraordinarily…um..unusual week. But I can’t go to bed after the second presidential debate without at least screaming out to cyberspace:

Bush claimed to be "a good steward"????????

A GOOD STEWARD??????????

I hope that the religious communities do a little comparision in their own theologies, and consult one another about what the biblical definition of "steward" is. For one, it is a highly charged phrase. It distinguishes between two kinds of biblical interpretation regarding Genesis. Some believe that God granted man dominion over the world, to rule over it – and others believe that God appointed man as steward, a manager over the animals and fish and the entire world until such time as he would be held accountable (Gen. 1:26-28).

A good steward is an administrator of another’s property or estate and so, in the same way, humans (or even just men and not women) are entrusted with God’s property, to manage and care for God’s creation.

Kerry missed a big big big chance there. A quick listing of the top ten anti-environmental actions of Bush might have gone a little distance here. Yes, yes, we all understand that Kerry will respect science as Bush does not. But he could’ve really really zinged him on that!

Here are just a few little thoughts on stewardship that one can find with minimal digging before falling asleep.

In the OT [OT Old Testament] a steward is a man who is ‘over a house’ (Gn. 43:19; 44:4; Isa. 22:15). In the NT [NT New Testament] there are two words translated steward: epitropos (Mt. 20:8; Gal. 4:2), i.e. one to whose care or honour one has been entrusted, a curator, a guardian; and oikonomos (Lk. 16:2-3; 1 Cor. 4:1-2; Tit. 1:7; 1 Pet. 4:10), i.e. a manager, a superintendent-from oikos(‘house’) and nemoµ(‘to dispense’ or ‘to manage’). The word is used to describe the function of delegated responsibility. Christians are the stewards for the Christ, admitted to the responsibilities of Christ’s overruling of his world; so that stewardship (oikonomia) can be referred to similarly as a dispensation (1 Cor. 9:17; Eph. 3:2; Col. 1:25).

Worthy to be stewards of rent and land. –Chaucer.

As good stewards of the manifold grace of God. –1 Peter 4:10

For Tolkein fans, the steward of Gondor. The Stewards watched over the throne until it could be reclaimed by a true King of Gondor, an heir of Elendil.

To spiritual people negotiating the priorities between Mammon (wealth, a false god) and the health of the earth itself, a good steward has the connotation of an attitude toward the environment, a sense of connectedness and belonging, an understanding of the interconnectedness of everything in the universe – a sense of being at home. When the earth has serious disruptions in its cycles, its energy systems, and its living systems, it can heal by regaining its balance; pollutants are transformed, physical damage is corrected, animal and plant populations adjust. But when the earth’s systems are extremely disrupted then homeostasis, balance, and self-regulatory processes cannot be re-established in the same way – and major changes can occur detrimental to human life.

Examine your consciences – can anyone really say that Bush is a good steward, in any sense?

Some people think that stewardship is all about tithing or donating money or time to a church, but numerous sites- I found one just off the bat – also talk about the different spiritual responsibilities of stewardship in the religious sense. It "demands a way of life that encourages virtue and bears the fruit of solidarity among peoples."

A steward does not own the kingdom. The king determines when and how long a steward serves him. A steward handles affairs for someone else. If Bush is a "steward" is it for the American people? For the world? For God? Do you really believe that it could be any of these? Really?

Each person contributes or should be able to contribute to the well-being of society, and each person has the opportunity to care for others and to help them thrive. Stewardship is collective.

I believe that, collectively, we are stewards. We all have to answer to ourselves and to our children and all our seventh cousins of the world, in repercussions and disrupted systems, and the widening gyres of destruction. We have to take responsibility for what we have allowed to happen, from the dumbing down of the population, to allowing certain power interests to take over our country.

Is Bush a good steward? Christians, you know what a good steward is. Is it the mark of a good steward to smirk and brag that he is a good steward? Has he enabled us and all the world to breathe easier, to thrive, to find healthier interchanges between humanity and the planet, between our nation and the rest of the world, between ourselves and our neighbors?

There are lots of things to say about this excellent debate, but I thought that if this phrase of the "good steward" stuck out to me as code for "I’m a christian" it might for others as well. My question is, what exactly is the nature of this christianity? It doesn’t seem very christian to me. As the highest executive of the US (of course, that is a matter of some debate), Bush is meant to be a steward of the American people. Is that really what you see?

Look around you. Open your eyes.