I don’t normally bother with the Creationist newssheet, Evolution News and Views, but the recent article there by David Klinghoffergoes beyond what I am willing to suffer in silence. Klinghoffer himself, of course, is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, and the author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. I do not know his academic credentials – I seem to remember that he is a lawyer, but neither his biography on the Discovery Institute website, nor his Wikipedia entry (which follows that biography rather closely), give any details, and I hope that some readers can tell us more about this.

I also think it worth noting that Klinghoffer’s article has nothing to do with Intelligent Design, misguided though that may be. Like so much Discovery Institute material, it is an attack on the well-established facts of common ancestry. In other words, what is being advocated is, in the strictest and narrowest sense of the word, creationism. And not even creationism as a philosophical or religious position, but as an interpretation of the facts of biology, in a manner that has been intellectually unsustainable since around 1830.

Anyway, to business: in my own recent posting here I describe why, when announcing their finding in 2010, the discoverers of Au. sediba chose, on reflection, to include it in the genus Australopithecus rather than in the genus Homo. That 2010 account does, however, give a long list of ways in which Au. sediba is closer than Australopithecus to modern humans, and the title I chose for my piece (An Almost Human Tragedy) reflects this. I also described the most recent, rather surprising, finding; that the diet of Au. sediba ignored available grasses, in favour of woodland products such as tree bark.

Now here is what Klinghoffer has to say about this same finding:

Another Human “Ancestor” Bites the Dust Bark

…Sure enough, the cooling trend [concerning the importance of Au. sediba] is now plainly in evidence, with Nature reporting that the creatures had a very notable characteristic in common with chimps, not humans, that had not previously been recognized: their diet, highlighted by tree bark and wood. This was found thanks to an analysis of tooth enamel and dental tartar and microwear. The NY Times lets its readers down softly:

“Dr. Berger was an author of the new journal report. Few other paleoanthropologists agree with Dr. Berger’s contention that the new species is the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans. [Emphasis added by Klinghoffer]. Dr. [Amanda G.] Henry’s group said that studies of additional fossils from the Malapa caves “will provide a better understanding of the dietary ecology of Au. sediba.””

Actually, the New York Times account amplifies an earlier one, which said

The discoverer of the fossils, Lee Berger of theUniversityofWitwatersrandinJohannesburg, says the new species, known as Australopithecus sediba, is the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans. Several other paleoanthropologists, while disagreeing with that interpretation, say the fossils are of great importance anyway, because they elucidate the mix-and-match process by which human evolution was shaped.

And the original paper in Science actually said, in the Abstract,

Combined craniodental and postcranial evidence demonstrates that this new species shares more derived features with early Homo than any other australopith species and thus might help reveal the ancestor of that genus

…and, in the body of the paper (p 203, column 3),

We can conclude that combined craniodental and postcranial evidence demonstrates that this new species shares more derived features with early Homo than does any other known australopith species, and thus represents a candidate ancestor for the genus, or a sister group to a close ancestor that persisted for some time after the first appearance of Homo [my added emphasis].

The situation is exactly as I described it, with no great claim to originality, in my earlier account here:

The problem is no longer one of finding a missing link, but one of tracing an individual branch (the one that led to us) through a densely forking bush. It is always notoriously difficult to distinguish closely related species, because of individual differences. Even when we can, we have no way of being sure which extinct species lie on our direct ancestral line; it is difficult to tell the difference between our great-grandfather and our great-great-uncle, or between one great-great-uncle and another.

In short, then, on the basis of newspaper accounts and apparently without having read the original literature, Klinghoffer gleefully demotes Au. sediba from a position that most workers in the field had never even claimed for it, in the belief that the evolutionary account is thereby in some way undermined. Actually, the boot is on the other foot; the loser is the religious doctrine of separate creation. For if the 20 or so known distinct australopithecine and other early hominin species are not related by common descent, and were therefore doomed to extinction without progeny, why were they ever created in the first place?

Projection being a behavior frequently engaged in by creationists wherein they project their own “…unacceptable qualities or feelings and ascribing them to other people“, namely scientists and defenders of science education.

In this example David Klinghoffer of the Discovery(less) Institute lays the projection on thick in his criticism of a recent article written by Jonah Lehrer in the The New Yorker, which was about the recent Gallup poll showing that nearly half of people in U.S. are still mired in denial regarding evolution.

The problem with this analysis [Lehrer's attempt to explain rampant evolution denial in the U.S. - T.B.] is that we are familiar, from long experience, with a no less impressively obdurate ignorance on the part of Darwin’s believers. No doubt there are plenty of people who reject Darwinism on the basis of a gut response alone, who never have taken the time to probe the evolution controversy and who fail to realize that it has two sides, both of which have a case to make.

But many — no, I take that back, almost all — the public Darwin defenders I can think of give evidence of having meticulously insulated themselves from knowing what the other side says.

Never mind Klinghoffer’s minimization of the level of scientific ignorance amongst creationists (which I can tell you from experience is prodigious), at least he’s admitting it exists. But to try and turn this around and argue that it is we defenders of science (as opposed to the “Darwin defenders” which is just Discoveroid frame-speak, i.e. propaganda) who are not only ignorant of creationist claims but “meticulously” insulate ourselves from them? That is hilarious!

Yes Mr. Klinghoffer, I, a twenty year veteran of defending science and science education from the attacks of creationists like yourself, have “meticulously insulated” myself from your ideas by amassing a collection of creationist literature containing nearly four hundred references (so far), dating from the 19th to the 21st century (never mind the video tapes, DVD’s and audio recordings); by  attending nearly every creationist event I hear about that’s within reasonable driving distance of where I live; and by regularly perusing creationist websites and blogs, like the one you’re posting on.

All that I do just so I can maintain my blissful state of insulation from what your side says.    

On the contrary, it might be justifiably said that I am somewhat obsessed with what creationists (of all stripes) are saying. However despite my obsession I have somehow failed to notice the meticulous ignorance of the subject that Mr. Klinghoffer’s claims to see in my colleagues (whose magazine, journal and blog articles I also obsessively imbibe).

[Who else out there bought the Creation/Evolution Journal collection from the NCSE and read all 39 issues at once like it was one big book? Let's see hands? Anyone? Anyone? Oh, I suppose was that just me? Like I'm the only one who would do that...]

Forget for a moment about who, Darwinists or Design advocates, is actually right. If you took a sample of ID folks and a sample of Darwin people, specifically those who have felt confident enough in their views to write about them for publication, and then quizzed each group about what arguments their opponents offer, there’s no question that those from the ID community would know better what their opposites in the debate say.

I question that. [See how easy that was?] Having observed them for many years I can say that it is vanishingly rare to encounter a creationist who can accurately relay the basics of evolutionary theory and its supporting evidence. They may get this or that part correct, but unvaryingly they go off the rails at some point, mischaracterizing either the theory of the facts (usually both).

Intelligent design “theory” is little more than a litany of antievolution arguments (misinformation, half-truths, logical fallacies, and out of context quotations of actual scientists) that have been floating around the creationist movement for decades (see links below), combined with “positive ID arguments” that are nothing but deliberately veiled versions of “God did it”.

See: “Expelled’s intelligent design theory – this IS your daddy’s creationism”, Part I & Part II

Just look at ENV as a convenient illustration. We strive to keep up with toughest challenges, such as they are, from evolutionists. Now look at the competing Darwin blogs. Guys like PZ Myers & Co. concentrate their fire on naïve young-earth creationists.

Actually I haven’t noticed this either. However if there is any small truth to this it might be because, unlike ID creationists, young Earthers (YEC) occasionally attempt to make testable claims for their views (i.e. arguments for a young Earth or Noah’s Flood). Whereas ID has been deliberately stripped of such things in an attempt to avoid conflicts with the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, leaving only the aforementioned attacks on evolution and untestable “God did it” assertions.

Are there old Earth, progressive creationists among the ID ranks? Sure, but they’re still creationists and a significant proportion of their target audience (the people in the pews) are good ol’ YEC (see the results of the Gallup poll Lehrer was lamenting).

Jerry Coyne and his colleagues in the Darwin-defending business are careful to stay unaware of the very serious challenges to Darwinism from ID.

Klinghoffer is sort of right about this one. We defenders of science are completely unaware of any “very serious” scientific “challenges to Darwinism evolutionary theory”; there are however theologically motivated, scientifically non-credible, political challenges that are a very serious danger to the future of science education in the United States. Of those we are all too aware.

Of that large portion of the media that remains committed to Darwin and never misses a chance to lash out at doubters, most are so utterly ignorant of the terms of the debate that that they cannot even distinguish intelligent design from creationism and use the terms interchangeably. You can point out their error again and again, but they never seem to understand.

Right. I’ve got two word for ya Mr. Klinghoffer: “Cdesign Proponentsists“. A refusal to countenance deceit is not a failure to understand it.

It’s common sense that human beings are hobbled by prejudices of all kinds. You didn’t need a study in a scientific journal to tell you that. The beginning of wisdom, surely, is to recognize your own ill-founded preconceptions and areas of stubborn ignorance. To that project of self-enlightenment, the community of Darwin defenders is uncompromisingly resistant.

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?“

Reference

Klinghoffer, David (2012) “The Stubbornness of Their Ignorance“, Evolution News and Views (blog), downloaded on 6-10-2012

—

So I am posting SEVEN video clips from a recent Biola University conference on theistic evolution. (H/T Mysterious Jonathan)

Conference details:

These questions and more will be addressed at the one-day conference by Marvin Olasky, editor of World magazine, biologist Jonathan Wells, political scientist John West, philosopher Jay Richards, attorney and science writer Casey Luskin and authors David Klinghoffer and Denyse O’Leary.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, Christians, Jews, and other religious believers have grappled with how to make sense of it. Most have understood that Darwin’s theory has profound theological implications, but responses have varied dramatically.

Some believers have rejected it outright; others, including “theistic evolutionists” such as Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, have sought to reconcile Darwin’s theory with their religious beliefs, often at the cost of clarity, orthodoxy, or both. As a result, the whole subject of God and evolution is a source of confusion for many believers.

Join us for this one-day seminar, featuring contributors to the new book, God and Evolution, exploring these issues and offering a wide-ranging critique of those who seek to reconcile materialistic theories such as Darwinism with belief in God.

Here is the playlist for all SEVEN video clips.

Clip 1 of 7: Jay W. Richards: The Central Issues (34 minutes)

Clip 2 of 7: John G. West: Three Big Questions (22 minutes)

Clip 3 of 7: Casey Luskin: Why the New Atheists Won’t Be Appeased (21 minutes)

Clip 4 of 7: Denyse O’Leary: Catholics & Evolution (29 minutes)

Clip 5 of 7: David Klinghoffer: Judaism & Evolution (17 minutes)

Clip 6 of 7: Jonathan Wells: Science and Theistic Evolution (26 minutes)

Clip 7 of 7: Panel Discussion with Marvin Olasky (99 minutes)

So it looks like there are 2 Catholics (Richards, O’Leary), 2 Jews (Luskin, Klinghoffer), 2 Protestants (West, Olasky) and 1 “Other” (Wells) in that list. It’s a diverse group.

Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.

Yeah, the Shirley Sherrod video didn’t show the full context. Boo fucking hoo. When was the last time anybody on the Left cut anybody on the Right a break because their comments were taken out of context? Yeah exactly. It never happened.

I’m not gonna cry over one dipshit liberal hack bureaucrat taking it on the chin. Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to get butt-hurt over Shirley Sherrod. The Left has determined the rules of the game. I think it’s only fair that the Right gets to play by those same rules.

You know what’s even better, Davey? It turns out that if you dig a little, you’d find that-shock of shocks-Shirley Sherrod is a racist. Breitbart might not have gotten the full story with that video, but eventually we got to the truth of Sherrod’s bigotry. I’d say the potty-mouthed Breitbart still managed to score a win here.

What has become of conservatism? We have reached a point at which nothing could be more important than to stop and recall what brought us here, to the right, in the first place.

OOOooooOOOoooo goody! I love gauzy time-travel escapades!

Buckley’s National Review, where I was the literary editor through the 1990s, remains as vital and interesting as ever. But more characteristic of conservative leadership are figures on TV, radio and the Internet who make their money by stirring fears and resentments.

Don’t be a chicken-shit, Klinghoffer. Just come out and say it. You don’t like Rush Limbaugh. You have little use for Hannity, Levin or Beck either. They hurt your delicate hushed coffee house sensibilities. Fair enough, but at least have the guts to name names.

With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism.

Baiting blacks? How? By using their own words? If we’re not allowed to quote black people when they say stupid and/or racist and/or statist nonsense, I guess we should all just fuck off and throw in the towel right now.

People are rightfully concerned about the millions of illegal immigrants that pour into America by the truckload every year. What, are we not allowed to mention where the vast majority of illegals come from? Are we not supposed to get angry when the Mexican president gets a Congressional Democrat hummer after coming into our country and beating up on Arizona’s immigration laws?

RE Muslims: I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with current events but the last ten years have been shaped by radical Islam’s continued attacks on the West in general and America in particular.  Meanwhile, ‘hate crimes’ against Muslims remain negligible.  There has been no ’baiting’ here. 

In fact, we have a president that bows to the Saudi king.  The large majority of American Muslims have never made a strong public break with the psychotic elements of their faith.  Elements of sharia law are being de facto adopted in many parts of the West.   

I guess putting our heads in the sand and ignoring theses issues would be more urbane.  It wouldn’t do anything real or constructive, but it would make for a quieter, smoother, less bothersome slide into American irrelevance.

Once the talk was of “neocons” versus “paleocons.” Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons.

Oy vey.  Get the hell over it, dude.

Conservatism wasn’t just a policy agenda, a set of partisan gripes or a football team seeking victory on the electoral field. Above all, it was a satisfying, sophisticated critique of modern, materialist culture, pointing a way out and up from liberalism.

Oh…”a satisfying, sophisticated critique” eh? That’s what you had in mind? Well, I don’t necessarily disagree with you. In it’s highest rhetorical form, conservatism is incredibly sophisticated. 

The problem is that often conservatives don’t have time to get into George Will-style nuancey debates.  The general public is by and large apolitical.  Right-wingers can use arcane phraseology amongst themselves all they want, but it should be obvious that when they throw out shit like ‘Don’t immanentize the eschaton’, it’s going to confuse a lot of people.  If your trying to preach to the choir, by all means dig deep into the nether regions of the Laffer Curve theory or whatever you’re discussing.  If you’re trying to win over broad swaths of American voters, hot rhetoric and slogans are going to be the most effective methods.

That might mean some broad generalizations will be used.  It could mean that some of the rich nougaty peanut-rich nuance of our arguments will have to be saved for another time.  But it will probably get the conservative message across to more people than if we sat there and went the non-flashy deep-thinker route.

Defining conservatism is notoriously difficult. But no one did it better than philosopher Richard M. Weaver in a book that, more than any other, launched the modern conservative movement. Published in 1948, the book was “Ideas Have Consequences.”

Weaver compared his role to a doctor diagnosing an illness. It is not enough to want to treat the symptoms — in this case, of our demoralized, dispirited culture. You must understand the genesis of the disease.

Weaver describes the course of the revolution in thought that led from a seemingly obscure philosophical debate in the Middle Ages through Darwinian evolutionary theory to class-based determinist theories in economics and onward to contemporary liberal relativism.

In the process of disintegration was an ancient, shared picture of the world and our place in it. Once, Western culture was blessed by a “metaphysical dream” that meaningfully explained man to himself as, in the phrase from Psalms, “a little lower than the angels.” Now humans were reduced to mere animals.

A-ha.

Here’s the rub.

Klinghoffer is pissed because not every conservative wants to fight it out over the theory of evolution.

Here’s the thing-I don’t really want to have that particular argument right now at all.  Why?  Because to be quite frank, I think it’s counter-productive to what’s going on in 2010 America.  We’re staring at trillion dollar deficits from here to eternity, state-run car companies that will be a constant drain on our economy…AND… a g0vernment run health care system that will curtail our freedoms and install a semi-permanent statist bloc into or political system.  So of course this is the perfect moment  to expend precious time and scarce political capital debating Darwin’s theories.

When I became a conservative, that is what I signed up for: a profound vision granting transcendent significance to public life and hope in private life. The goal wasn’t to defeat Democratic officeholders or humiliate left-wing activists. It was, and still is, with those who remember, to save civilization.

I think most conservatives are animated by the idea that…in some way…they are conserving or saving the great things about America.  Property rights, the rule of law, federalism, constitutional government, checks and balances-all these things are elements of the United States’ political framework that right-of-center types are fighting to save.

To pick out one example, the fight to secure the borders has to be seen as a fight to recognize the rule of law.  If we’re trying to save civilization, hows about we start right here, with the American civilization?  Illegal immigration creates a near-slave underclass of semi-permanent poor.  Conservatives who want to tighten up the border wish to prevent that civilizational disaster from occurring any more.  But Klinghoffer thinks that’s not nearly as important as his pet axe that he wants to grind. 

There is probably more than enough room on the Right for David Klinghoffer to have his grand debates about evolution.  I don’t want to broach the subject too often, but that’s just me.  It would be nice if guys like Klinghoffer recognized that there is plenty of space for other arguments within the conservative movement besides the ones he wants to have.

UPDATE:  Ace has a great take on the Klinghoffer piece as well.  Check it out, ya’all.

It’s best to listen politely. They have what they think are facts, and you have what you think are facts. No one is going to change their mind. And it’s been like that – the second father-in-law was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, with the big office in the Pentagon and all, and he would go on about how Martin Luther King had been a communist, and clearly paid quite well by the Kremlin for all he did.

Right. In those discussions it was best to do that active-listening thing, where you go on autopilot and take the last few words said and repeat them as a question. You say he was paid by the Kremlin? It’s not hard, and you can almost do it in your sleep. That technique keeps the other party going, and keeps them happy, if you can manage to look interested. They eventually run down, and smile contentedly. Then you can talk about fast cars or fine wine or football, and no one gets hurt.

Is that cowardly? If you think something is true and right you should stand up and explain and defend it – and you tell the other party that they’re full of crap, and why they’re full of crap. At least that’s the idea.

But to what end – to pat yourself on the back? When what you say is perpetually dismissed out of hand, with a sad condescending smile at your foolishness – the one rule the other side plays by – the best outcome you can hope for is a renewed sense of your own smug self-righteousness, mixed with a bit of playing the noble and misunderstood victim, a martyr to the truth – the real truth. Yes, that’s an option, to make yourself feel better, but being that sort of self-important jerk is not very attractive. You don’t want to go there. So it’s a cost-benefits thing. Diplomacy – tricking them into running on and on until they run down – seems the best option, even if it seems like cowardice. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, they stop dead in their tracks, realizing they have somehow wandered off into the realm of nonsense. It happens. Not often, but it happens.

And along with diplomacy there is waiting. That would be waiting to see how things turn out. The Republicans had it all from 2000 through 2006 – the White House and both houses of Congress – and got to do what they said should be done, and created a hell of a mess. So sometimes, if you wait long enough, you won’t have to argue policy at all. You just point at the mess – enough said. Domestic, foreign and economic policy – those folks got their shot. There is empirical evidence out there about what happened, evidence that’s far more convincing than any elegant and impassioned argument. You just have to be willing to write off the lost years, and write off New Orleans.

But this is the summer of our discontent – the reverse of those words from Shakespeare’s Richard III – as the nation is ramping up for the midterm elections where the Republicans may well win back control of the House, and possibly the Senate. Summer of our discontent, winter of our discontent – the season doesn’t matter. People are unhappy. Things are still a mess. Maybe they’re worse than ever. And the Republicans are saying they were right all along – cut taxes on the wealthy, rid corporations and Wall Street of stifling regulation, shut down as much of the government as possible – don’t spend money on much of anything – and don’t bail out anyone or anything – let what should fail just fail. It’s the old argument. If the government does next to nothing, and collects no tax money as they’d not need to collect tax money, then the people, and the economy, suddenly unburdened and free, will thrive. They are essentially asking America to remember those obvious truths, after almost two years of the Obama nonsense.

The only problem is the steaming pile of empirical evidence sitting out there in the street for everyone to see, and smell. On Monday, August 2, Obama was in Atlanta speaking to Democratic fundraisers and said the obvious about what is being proposed by the Republicans – “They have not come up with a single, solitary, new idea to address the challenges of the American people. They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas – not one.”

This is the politics of pointing to the stinking turd in the street. And it’s not a matter of remembering, Obama told those Democratic fundraisers that Republicans are betting the farm on voters having “amnesia” in the midterm elections.

Of course there was a bit more:

In his Atlanta speech, Obama blasted GOP opposition to his small business tax cuts and loan bill, saying Republicans are opposing their own ideas in an effort to hurt Democrats.

“Republicans say they’re the pro-business party, isn’t that what they say?” Obama said. “You would think this is a bill that they would want to pass. And, yet, day after day, week after week, they keep on stalling this bill and stonewalling this bill and opposing this bill. Why? Pure politics.”

The president also criticized House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other Republicans for pledging to repeal healthcare reform if Republicans win back Congress. “They’re more interested in the next election than the next generation,” Obama said. “And that’s why they can’t have the keys back – because we need somebody who is driving with a vision to the future.”

But it is easy to long for the past in tough times. You miss the good old days, even if they weren’t that good. It happened at the Washington Post, where Fred Hyatt is working on transforming the op-ed page into something anti-Obama and pro-corporations and more Fox News than Fox. To the mix of George Will and Charles Krauthammer he has just added former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, who in this item suggests the United States use “military assets” to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. And Eva Rodriguez is puzzled:

Does Thiessen think we’re going to send in Special Ops to pluck Assange from Iceland, Belgium or Sweden, where he’s known to hang out? Or is he thinking that a drone strike might be more effective or efficient?

Thiessen asserts that the United States does not need “permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world” and that the U.S. should act alone if allies won’t cooperate. I’m not sure this is legally accurate, but let’s assume it is. Is Thiessen suggesting it would be a good idea to disregard an ally’s sovereignty, perhaps do irreparable damage to our relationship with it and the international community just to get our hands on Assange?

Well, some people miss George Bush, and some miss Dick Cheney. Of course at the Post, as with the Wall Street Journal and most newspapers, the op-ed page is walled off from the news operation. You don’t want to mix the two. Reporters work on gathering and reporting empirical facts, while the op-ed writers are not burdened by those. The facts may inform their opinion, but they are being paid for their opinions, not for bare and cold facts. And consider how these things are called informed opinion. The adjective, the modifier – informed – is only a modifier, not the thing itself. It can get amusing, as if the guys writing the op-ed pieces don’t even read their own newspaper.

But that’s a minor matter. The real issue is selective amnesia, and self-respect, and the embarrassment of being a sane conservative – ask David Frum about that, or Andrew Sullivan. Their noses work just fine, and they smell the stink. And now add the big-gun conservative from out here, the famous UCLA law professor Steven Bainbridge, who says it really is getting embarrassing to be a conservative:

These days it’s getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.

These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They’re dumb and crazy.

And he says that conservative pundit David Klinghoffer nicely captures what has been bothering him:

Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions – like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.

What has become of conservatism? … With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of “neocons” versus “paleocons.” Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons. …

Conservatism wasn’t just a policy agenda, a set of partisan gripes or a football team seeking victory on the electoral field. Above all, it was a satisfying, sophisticated critique of modern, materialist culture, pointing a way out and up from liberalism.

It was? Who knew? Glenn Beck is not ten times deeper and more insightful than William F. Buckley, and not far more influential than Edmund Burke? Don’t tell Roger Ailes.

But it’s not just that. Bainbridge has a list of ten things that make him, a life-long conservative, embarrassed by the modern conservative movement, starting with this:

A poorly educated ex-sportswriter who served half of one term of a minor state governorship is prominently featured as a – if not the – leading prospect for the GOP’s 2012 Presidential nomination.

And then there is Tom Tancredo saying President Obama is ”the greatest threat to the United States today” and arguing that Obama be impeached:

Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies – however misguided – is an impeachable offense is just nuts.

And then there are former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, in this Investors Business Day column suggesting states should secede from the union if Obama doesn’t change his ways. Bainbridge calls it “foaming at the mouth” and cites Doug Marconis here – “The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine.” And of course “when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, and the White House in 2000, the desire to use the levers of power to create ‘compassionate conservatism’ won out over any semblance of fiscal conservatism. Instead of tax cuts and spending cuts, we got tax cuts along with a trillion dollar entitlement program, a massive expansion of the Federal Government’s role in education, and two wars. That’s not fiscal conservatism it is, as others have said, fiscal insanity.”

Bainbridge notes that today’s Republican Party “still has not articulated a message of real fiscal conservatism” – all you get are catchphrases.

And this made the list too:

Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to oust Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?

And Bainbridge also is not fond of the anti-science and anti-intellectualism crap, or of trying to pretend Afghanistan is Obama’s war. And there are the Birthers and assorted nativists. But what really bothers Bainbridge is this:

The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?

The professor is getting angry. But it’s not just him. There’s David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, unloading in the New York Times:

If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt – if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts – in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too.

Those days are gone. He explains it all. And Andrew Sullivan can relate to this:

It’s the kind of op-ed that has one sitting up straight with the sting of fresh memory. Back in the 1980s, I was a Thatcherite. I believed in low taxes but I also believed in – you know – balanced budgets as a core principle of – you remember – conservatism. It was odd coming to America to be told that here – for the first time in human history – you could cut taxes and raise revenue at the same time! It was triply odd, coming from green eye-shade Thatcher-land, to hear that “deficits don’t matter.” In his first term, of course, even Reagan felt it necessary to adjust from this madness – a madness that, far from “starving the beast”, simply made Americans believe that the beast never needed full funding. The first Bush, to his enormous credit, did the responsible thing – but was destroyed by his party for violating the no new taxes pledge. From that moment on, it became not policy but doctrine for the GOP. And the results of further tax cuts and further spending increases, mitigated by divided government in the 1990s, but unleashed in full force under Bush-Cheney, is what we face today…

And he cites Stockman:

By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too – signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier.

Sullivan:

No intellectually honest person can hold Barack Obama responsible for this long term sabotage of America’s fiscal health. The spending he has authorized has to be seen in the context of the massive financial crisis that nearly caused the second Great Depression and may well still cause a lost generation of output and jobs and productive lives.

But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated [note: that's a Palin joke] we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.

But they will probably win the House and maybe the Senate, due to what Slate’s foreign correspondent Anne Applebaum calls America’s Peculiar Amnesia:

Historical amnesia is at once the most endearing and the most frustrating of American qualities. On the one hand, it means that – F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary – there really are second acts in American lives. People can move somewhere else, reinvent themselves, start again.

On the other hand, our inability to remember what our policy was last week – never mind last decade – drives outsiders crazy. We forget that we supported the dictator before we decided to destroy him. Then we can’t understand why others, especially the dictator’s subjects, don’t always believe in the goodness of our intentions or the sincerity of our devotion to democracy.

Domestic policy is no different of course, and she had argued in a previous column that Americans on both the left and the right have, for the last decade, “consistently voted for high-spending members of Congress and consistently supported ever-higher levels of government intervention and regulation at all levels of public life.” And it is nonsense, as she noted in that column:

I’ve read up on the primary candidates who want to take back government, take down government, burn down Washington. I’ve seen it all, heard it all, and I don’t believe any of it. …

If you don’t live here all the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans – with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession, and above all their addiction to government spending programs – demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t just want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is either prevented or fully compensated. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

So, coming home, she finds home strange:

Look around the world and we don’t seem as exceptional as we think. Chileans are willing to save for their own retirement. Most Europeans are reconciled to the idea that not everybody, at any age and in any condition, is entitled to the most expensive medical technology. A secretary of state or defense traveling with dozens of cars and armed security men would seem absurd in many countries, as would the notion that the government gives you a tax break if you buy a house, or that schools should close if there is ice on the roads. Yet we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we reserve the right to rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created -democratically, constitutionally, openly -to deliver it.

And thus, in the follow-on column, she senses profound amnesia at play, as folks are under the impression that President Bush believed in small government and that recent Republican congressional leaders opposed federal spending:

Here is a more accurate assessment: “President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ.” I didn’t write that; the astute libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy did. She also points out that, during his eight years in office, Bush’s “anti-government” Republican administration increased the federal budget by an extraordinary 104 percent. By comparison, the increase under President Bill Clinton’s watch was a relatively measly 11 percent (a rate, I might add, lower than Ronald Reagan’s). In his last term in office, Bush increased discretionary spending – that means non-Medicare, non-Social Security – by 48.6 percent. In his final year in office, fiscal year 2009, he spent more than $32,000 per American, up from $17,216.68 in fiscal year 2001.

But Bush is not the only culprit. After all, the federal government usually spends money in response to state demands. Look, for example, at the demands made by Alaska, a state that produces a disproportionate quantity of anti-government rhetoric, which has had Republican governors since 2002, and which has a congressional delegation dominated by Republicans. Nevertheless, for the last decade, Alaska has been among the top three largest state recipients of federal funding, per capita. Usually, Alaska is far ahead – sometimes three times as far ahead – of most other states in the union.

Largely, this is because of one famous Alaskan, Sen. Ted Stevens – a Republican – who devoted himself to securing federal funding for his state during more than four decades in the Senate. Not only were his efforts extremely popular among his Republican constituents – he was re-elected multiple times – they won him many, many imitators.

And she reminds us that Timothy Noah has pointed out that Sarah Palin, when mayor of Wasilla, hired Stevens’ former chief of staff as a Washington lobbyist – “As a result, the 6,700 inhabitants of Wasilla enjoyed $27 million in federal earmarks over a four-year period.”

It seems someone needs to learn and grow:

Of course, parties can change, politicians can see the light, lessons can be learned – and perhaps some Republicans have learned them. But you cannot start from scratch. You cannot forget history. You cannot pretend that the Republican Party has not supported big and wasteful spending programs – energy subsidies, farm subsidies, unnecessary homeland security projects, profligate defense contracts, you name it – for the last decade. Before the Republican Party can have any credibility on any spending issues whatsoever, Republican leaders need to speak frankly about the mistakes of the past.

And there’s the growing part:

They also must be extremely specific about which policies and which programs they are planning to cut in the future. What will it be? Social Security or the military budget? Medicare or the TSA?

Vague “anti-government” rhetoric just doesn’t cut it anymore: If you want a smaller government, you have to tell us how you will create one.

Yeah, yeah – but how can you argue with someone who has amnesia, and who has also lost their sense of smell? And why even argue? Sometime all you can do is point.

Well, my class is over, at least one student is complaining about their final grade, and I’m diving back in to trying to get back to work and play. And blogging — yeah, that too.

I hadn’t thought of a good quick post topic to write about lately until I saw someone else’s post tonight about the Discovery Institute yet again reviving the canard that Darwin is responsible for the Holocaust. But the blogger raised an interesting point that I hadn’t thought about before, so I decided to do my own quick post on it.

Darwin and the Holocaust

If any of you are unfortunate enough to have watched that Ben Stein docudrama piece of G-rated-term-inserted that came out a year or so ago, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” then you know that a common claim of the Intelligent Design movement — indeed, any “anti-Darwin” or “-Evolution” movement – is that the idea of human evolution from a more “primitive” creature is directly linked to and the cause of lots of atrocities such as Hitler’s holocaust, Stalin’s holocaust, forced sterilization, eugenics, and so on.

This isn’t a straw man here — if you’re not aware of these claims, then I invite you to read any of the following:

• “The Dark Side of Darwinism” by David Klinghoffer, a Discovery Institute (Intelligent Design think-tank) fellow
• “Hitler’s Ethic and the Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress in Nazi Policy” by Logan Gage interviewing historian Richard Weikart, a Discovery Institute podcast
• “The Dark Darwinian History of Eugenics” by John West, a Discovery Institute podcast
• “Dr. Josef Mengele, Angel of Death and “Devotee of Darwin”" by David Klinghoffer, cross-posted on the Discovery Institute’s blog
• “Darwinists, Moral Relativism, and Hitler” by Richard Weikart, posted on “The Church Report”

Any of those will do. And now, let’s be clear: Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the same day and year as Abraham Lincoln. Conjures up an immediate feeling of “cool” and “he must be great” due to that simple association with Lincoln, right? Contrast that with: Darwinism led to Hitler! Gasp! Shudder! Instead of that warm, fuzzy feeling your gut is now reeling in contempt for the man. Hence why comparison with or association with or even just mentioning Hitler these days is almost in and of itself a logical fallacy (poisoning the well or ad hominem).

Anyway, my purpose here is to present what the ID folks and some Christians are doing in order to attack the formalizer of evolutionary theory and the theory itself, trying to link it with culturally distasteful concepts, happenings, and people. Let’s also be clear: Darwin died in 1882, fully a half century before the Nazi holocaust.

Does This Make Sense?

The purpose of this blog is not at all about evolution. But rather astronomy with some physics and geology thrown in. Hence the connection to the above: Claiming that Darwin was the cause of Hitler’s holocaust, or eugenics, or whatever is the same as saying that Isaac Newton is responsible for bombs. Or for missiles. Yes, dear reader, it’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter that projectile weapons had been in use for, oh, maybe 100,000 years before Newton was born. Or that missiles weren’t created until maybe 300 years after Newton died. Doesn’t matter. It’s the exact same logic that the Intelligent Design folks use to say Darwin was responsible for the holocaust.

Why? Because Newton formulated gravity. Without understanding how gravity works and being able to predict how objects will behave when forces are applied, then we can’t understand how bombs or missiles work. The entire idea behind “The Rocket Equation” (the bane of undergrad physics) wouldn’t have been possible without the gravitational theory Newton formulated or the calculus he is generally credited with creating. (“The Rocket Equation” is a differential equation that describes the motion of a rocket as mass is lost because in a rocket, the fuel is a significant fraction of the initial mass.)

The Bottom Line

Does that mean, from an actual objective view, that Newton really is responsible for missiles? Or is Archimedes responsible for battleships (after all, he’s generally credited with figuring out buoyancy)? Of course not. These men developed ideas of science that could predict how things would behave in the future and explain how things behaved in the past.

Similarly, Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution to describe the scientific theory that all creatures are descended from a common ancestor. This theory describes how things behaved in the past, and it is used to predict how things will behave or discoveries that will be made in the future.

So, Darwin Isn’t Responsible for the Holocaust?

No, he’s not. A scientific theory in itself does not have any sense of morality attached to it. It just is. It is neither good nor bad. People can use it and abuse it for good or bad things. Just as Newton’s theory of gravity describes how a missile launched from Iran can strike Israel, it also describes how Apollo 11 landed on the moon and returned safely with its crew. Using a theory to do something that is considered good or bad by the majority says nothing about that theory’s origin, nor should the blame or credit be given, necessarily, to that theory’s formulator.

Science is built upon the shoulders of giants, and if Darwin hadn’t formulated evolution when he did, someone else would have shortly thereafter. Similarly for Relativity — if Einstein hadn’t formulated it when he did, someone else would have very soon after, for the pieces were already out there, they just needed someone to put them together in a new way.

Final Thoughts

If you’re still not understanding this, let’s think of it a different way. Let’s use Christianity. Many Christians, I’m sure, are wonderful people who believe that Christianity stands for helping the sick, feeding the homeless, keeping children off the streets and occupied with productive things, and so on and so forth. Those are the tangible things – I’m ignoring the more spiritual for purposes of this argument.

So under this idea, priests will go to hospitals and sit with people who need to just have someone there with them. Churches will organize groups to work at a soup kitchen, etc.

But, using the exact same philosophy, using Christianity as a justification, the Crusades were launched from Europe, killing tens of thousands. The Inquisition destroyed livelihoods and lives throughout Europe a few centuries later. Literal witch hunts killed dozens in America, but tens of thousands across much of England and some of Europe only a century or two after that.

People will give Jesus credit for the ideas of Christianity and why they are volunteering in a school for underprivileged children, or running a daycare in the church basement. Do they also give Jesus credit for killing hundreds of thousands of people because of everything else people have done supposedly in his name?

Think about that next time you hear someone say that Darwin is responsible for Hitler.

But… I have no choice. You see.. so people are so stupid they literally kill off brain cells when they speak. They don’t even have the good sense to only kill their own cells. Everyone that hears them ends up… a little dumber for having heard the words.

For example… David Klinghoffer. He has an idea that evolution is false. That instead of that well founded theory, we must accept that God designed us. Not uncommon. Not a danger to the brains of the nearby.

But then he goes a little further. He says that if there was no God behind it all, than evolution would have produced hideous things. Ok, first off, it has produced some pretty grotesque things, but I’ll let that slide. You see, then he goes further. He gives an EXAMPLE.

He said that without God directing evolution, nature would have evolved… CTHULHU.

Take your time to process that but not too long. I seriously believe thinking about that for too long could cause aneurysms.

Better? Good. Now you probably have questions. So do I. Klinghoffer offers no answers. I don’t know what Cthulhu would have evolved from. I don’t know why nature would have evolved a Great Old One if left to its own devices. I don’t know how removal of the Christian God leads to an Lovecraftian nightmare.

I just don’t know. But I’m fairly sure that regardless of your side of the evolution debate… this guy is 2 scoops short of a box of Raisin Bran.

I bet David Klinghoffer is a HUGE Greco-Roman wrestling fan

Women will suffer from gay marriage, because once men have a taste** of that sweet succulent manmeat, they can never go back to the pussy. Throbbing, pulsing, swollen ohhh *fapfapfap* OH GOD

For people who claim to be utterly repulsed by teh gheysecks, conservatives sure spend a lot of time obsessing over it. You know what repulses me? Cooked spinach. I spend about 0.0000000007 seconds a day thinking about it.

*”Shorter” concept stolen from Sadly, No!.

**In the mythical Eisenhower-era fantasy world these loons inhabit, no one fucks before getting a ring on their finger. Also lesbians do not exist, unless you count the drunken sorority sluts licking each other’s nipples for a free t-shirt on Girls Gone Wild.

As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels.

Unfortunately for his disgusting gloating, the cited passage demonstrates misunderstandings of evolutionary theory on par with the ones that Klinghoffer and friends routinely propound. Shall we count the ways?

1. “Natural Law” has nothing whatsoever to do with “miscegenation” — it mainly promotes Chopric practices like Transcendental Meditation and Yogic Flying

2. Inbreeding does not typically improve a species, unless you consider having only two toes (like Cletus) an improvement.

3. Lots of the “non-strong” survive. In fact, in today’s Web 2.0 economy, the Super Crunchers and the AJAX programmers are totally outsurviving the strong, most of whom work at soon-to-be-defunct government-owned automobile manufacturers.

4. There is no such thing as “lower on the evolutionary scale.” In fact, there is no such thing as an “evolutionary scale.” There is an evolutionary tree, which I am surprised that the Discovery Institute has not tried to deface; however, its different levels refer not to different species but to different granularities of species-grouping. Species can be closer on the evolutionary tree. They can be farther. They cannot be higher or lower.

None of this stops Klinghoffer from his demented accusations:

No, he doesn’t cite Darwin by name in the part of his book that’s readable online — the first 6 of 12 chapters. But do you get the general drift?

Yes, we get the general drift. The general drift is that a white-supremacist jackass who doesn’t understand evolutionary theory in the slightest (but who haphazardly and illogically appropriated some of its concepts to buttress his terrible pre-existing racist theories) went on a shooting spree. And also that there is apparently no depth that Klinghoffer, as part of his tireless crusade to impugn any science that contradicts the superstitious beliefs bequeathed to him by his cavemen ancestors, will not stoop to in order to promote his nonsense.

That’s the “drift” you had in mind, right?

[Maybe] God imprints a certain kind of religious preference, one of numerous possible imprints, on each person.

This theory has a number of virtues. For instance, it’s non-falsifiable. And also it allows Klinghoffer to take shots at the god gene theory, which casts doubt on his twin dogmas of “god is true” and “evolution is false.”

However, off the top of my head I can come up with a number of alternative, non-supernatural explanations for his friend’s conversion:

• Attracted by Jewish love of Chinese food
• Shared history of interest in Communism
• Asian obsession with Woody Allen
• Want to get into movie industry but creeped out by Scientologists

I know what you’re thinking: none of these theories explain Klinghoffer’s second stylized fact, which is that Marvin Olasky converted from Judaism to Atheism to Christianity. I guess maybe Klinghoffer’s theory that god “imprinted” Olasky with a preference to be atheist for a while could explain this. But why would god do such micro-meddling?

Maybe God makes us this way to keep humanity safely divided into discrete peoples and nations. The Tower of Babel story, which comes shortly after, shows the danger of a world state with a world-spanning ideology. We would abuse its power, tyrannizing each other.

To keep us “safely divided”! That makes perfect sense! Good plan, god!

In Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, David Klinghoffer attempts to argue that the Jews of Jesus’ day didn’t have adequate reason to believe that Jesus was their Messiah:

If no verse in the prophets unambiguously presented resurrection as a criterion for recognizing the Messiah—and none does—then such a hypothetical wonder [Jesus’ resurrection] would prove nothing. (pg.88)

Although Klinghoffer is correct that the Old Testament doesn’t provide any explicit statements that the Messiah will be resurrected, there is a wealth of implicit evidence—every Old Testament portrait of the Messiah’s death is accompanied by a cryptic glimpse of His “resurrection,” or at least a portrait of His life after death! If this is the case, it defies all odds.

I’ll just provide two examples. Peter quotes Psalm 16 in his first evangelistic speech (Acts 2:25-32) in reference to the resurrection:

For You will not leave my [David’s] soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption [the decay of His body] (Psalm 16:10).

Here, in one quick snapshot, we see the Messiah’s death, but also a promise of His future life! Perhaps more dramatically, Isaiah pictures the Messiah living once again following His ordeal:

And they made His grave with the wicked–but with the rich at His death, because He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities. Isaiah 53:9-11

Although Jesus died, becoming an “offering for sin,” He nevertheless “prolonged His days.” Perhaps now you might like to try to identify His “resurrection” in several other portraits of His death (Psalm 2 {with Acts 4:25-26}; 22; 31; 69; 40; Zech. 12:10; Daniel 9:24-26).

Why did our Lord hide His stunning truth so diligently? Perhaps Paul provides the best explanation:

But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:7-8).

By His Mercies Alone, Daniel Mann

To read Myer’s post click here.

I hope this little exchange leaves a bad taste in your mouth and leads you one step closer to acknowledging the volatile climate which exists for those challenging Darwinian Evolution.

Apparently marriage is defined as a union between a religious man a woman – Yeah, that’s right. In SIN City, along with the rest of Nevada and in other states, you must belong to a congregation to get married. Oddly, self-proclaimed Humanists can get away with saying they’re part of The Humanist Society, which has tax status as a religious group. But many atheists like myself don’t consider that a viable option. And this isn’t just some old law on the books that nobody even knows about let alone enforces.

Michael Jacobson, a 64-year-old retiree who calls himself a lifelong atheist, tried this year to get a license to perform weddings. Clark County [Nevada] rejected his application because he had no ties to a congregation, as state law requires.

So Jacobson and attorneys from two national secular groups — the American Humanist Assn. and the Center for Inquiry — are trying to change things. If they can’t persuade the state Legislature to rework the law, they plan to sue.

. . .

“… I’m not going to do it by saying I belong to a religious organization,” he said. “That’s a sham, because atheists are not religious.”

The awesome Massimo Pugliucci rips tears the L.A. Times a new one for their recent opinion piece on the rise of superstition – I’d briefly touched on this story here. Massimo, who I had the fortune of meeting at a recent lecture, goes off on this poorly reasoned story that criticizes materialism (creationists’ favorite boogyman) and points out something I didn’t even notice when I’d originally skimmed the article:  according to the byline at the bottom of the page, the author, David Klinghoffer,  is:

. . .a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of “The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy” and “Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History.”

Ugh! That explains SO MUCH.

Scientists ‘baffled’ again – CNN uses the old cliche to sensationalize science news again. They said:

“Scientists are baffled by mysterious acorn shortage.”

But according to Steve Novella:

In turns out that scientists are not baffled at all. Acorn crops run in cycles. Last year there was a bumper crop – much larger than normal. Bumper crops tend to be followed by lean crops as the trees now need to conserve resources. This cycle may have been exagerated by a wet spring, which also tends to decrease acorn production.

Mystery solved.

AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:

Warm Plasma Cloak Surrounds Earth – “A detailed analysis of the measurements of five different satellites has revealed the existence of the warm plasma cloak, a new region of the magnetosphere, which is the invisible shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surround and protect Earth from the onslaught of the solar wind.”

”God’s Politics” will often turn our partisan politics upside down, transcend our ideological categories of Left and Right, and challenge the core values and priorities of our political culture.

While I would personally avoid the term ‘God’s politics,’ the point is clear. Too often we simply mould our faith around political ideologies rather than using our faith to critique them. Wallis proposes instead that we should make a list of our ‘moral priorities,’ and use these as a basis for voting. He then provides his own morality-based list, including how we treat the poor and oppressed in our society, a willingness to actively pursue peace, valuing human life, protecting the environment, human rights and human dignity, and family values.

In an interesting debate called ‘who would God vote for?’ (again, not a title I would choose myself) between moderate Jim Wallis and conservative David Klinghoffer, Klinghoffer provides us with quite a different view of what our ‘moral priorities’ should be. Klinghoffer, the author of ‘How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative’ (this is honestly the name of his book!) in my opinion is a classic example of someone who begins with a political ideology and then approaches the bible from this perspective, rather than vice versa. Klinghoffer clashes with Wallis on numerous issues, arguing for example, that fighting poverty should not be a priority for the government, and that war is the ‘normal tool of statecraft.’  For Klinghoffer, the bible is more concerned with stopping homosexual relationships and abortion, because ultimately the wealth or poverty of people is related to issues such as these. Wallis ends the debate exasperated, stating:

I am very glad that America has a separation of church and state and that people who would prefer a more theocratic vision of society (as I interpret you to prefer) don’t get to run things they way they would like. We both have to convince our fellow citizens that what we believe is best for the common good. That’s a good thing and I welcome that debate.

The ancient Hebrew prophets critiqued the political theocracy of their day, and while much has changed since then, we can still learn much by reading these ancient texts. Perhaps the most stiking thing to emerge is that the prophets condemned Israel because of how it treated the marginalised and oppressed in their society. Today, sadly, it seems that Christians often contribute to the marginalisation and oppression of people rather than seeking to end it. In my home country of New Zealand, for example, the opposition by many Christians to the Civil Unions Bill was one area where they found themselves marginalising a major segment of society rather than working to ensure that they have the same legal protection in their relationships as other people. In another example, ‘Section 59′ was repealed by almost the entire New Zealand parliament to remove the legal defence of ‘reasonable force’ in child abuse prosecutions, and yet amongst many Christians the issue never went beyond a parents right to smack their children (something peripheral to the bills intent) rather than how we can do all we can to defend the most vulnerable members of our society against abuse.*

These are just two examples of issues in which we need to listen to different perspectives with an open mind to appreciate the complexity of what is involved. In my opinion it is possible to have reservations about homosexuality and yet support the Civil Unions Bill, just as it is possible to believe the occasional light smack is not detrimental and yet support the repeal of section 59. Listening to the arguments of other people with an open-mind is essential, and whether you are left or right leaning we can all learn from each other. Have a re-think of your moral priorities before this election,  and don’t forget to vote.

* I have a blog on this topic here. A recent Otago University study found that 80% of all child abuse begins with physical discipline, and so unsurprisingly the change was overwhelmingly supported by organisations involved with child welfare, including the NZ Paediatrics Society, the Human Rights Commission, Plunket, Barnardos, Unicef, and Save the Children.