(no subject)

[elfs]

It's religion and politics time, boys and girls.

First, in an unlovely specimen of a right-wing rant about Jack Kevorkian and Terry Schiavo, columnist Ashley Evans sneezes into the punchbowl of reason and writes:

It reminds one of the Creationism vs. evolution debate in public science classes: should it not be mentioned that evolution is still a theory, that there are serious gapes, or that most people trust in intelligent design?

I don't know about you, but I don't know about many serious "gapes" in evolutionary theory, although I have been known to gape (look with open-mouth amazement) at people who write something quite so ignorant. (I resist mightily the inclination to make porn "gaper" jokes...)

In similar news, Rep. Bill Sali (R - Idaho), while talking about how allowing a Hindu priest to conduct opening prayers for Congress should never have happened, dropped this lovely bomb: "We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes -- and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers."

In more serious news, the Armed Forces is considering disciplinary action against four generals who appeared in an Evangelical group's fundraising video in uniform, implying that the group had the support of the Armed Forces. One general said he believed that the group, Christian Embassy, had become a "quasi-federal entity." Another said that Christian Embassy had been at work among the Christians in the Pentagon that he believed the group was "a sanctioned or endorsed activity."

I cannot emphasize just how devastatingly dangerous it is that we have four generals who, after having taken their oath as a soldier, then go on to proclaim that "their first loyalty is to Jesus Christ" and that "my weekly prayer sessions are more important than doing my job." Dude:

I, _____, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

When you put your loyalty elsewhere, you are a domestic enemy.

Meanwhile, Stephen Baldwin (the dumbest of the Baldwin brothers) is running a Pentagon authorized project called "Operation Straight Up," a standard old-time revival. Their Iraq project is called "Military Crusade." If you give them money, they put it into a "soldier's care package" which includes these gems:

"More than a Capenter" by Josh McDowell

This classic evangelical tract is designed to be most effective when given to people who are vulnerable due to stress or mistreatment. OSU includes this lovely blurb: "We can only hope that since the book is double printed on the reverse side in the Arabic language that it will indeed influence the nations overseas as well." Since the Pentagon is supposed to punish attempts at proselytising, I can't imagine why they're letting this through. [By the way, the misspelling of "Carpenter" in the title is verbatim from the OSU website.]

"Left Behind," the Video Game, PC Edition

In this charming video game (in the Warcraft/Starcraft style of play) you command an army of soldiers against the army of evil as you battle for the streets of New York City. The soldiers in the army of evil all wear blue berets and United Nations uniforms, and when you kill one of them your soldier forces shout out "Praise the lord!"

Comments

[dossy.livejournal.com]

No more extraordinary of a claim than the evolutionary theory's claim that the universe's random number generator has consistently produced the necessary outputs across time to produce life as we know it and to keep it from randomly collapsing on itself, obliterating everything.

That's almost as ridiculous as making the claim that one could flip a fair coin a few hundred billion times, each time landing heads, in a row.

Yet, you accept it without extraordinary proof?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

No more extraordinary of a claim than the evolutionary theory's claim that the universe's random number generator has consistently produced the necessary outputs across time to produce life as we know it...

Except no one has claimed that, and to say so is a classic misunderstanding that the "intelligent design movement" exploits to keep people ignorant. At one level-- the level of sheer, raw physics-- the universe *is* absolutely, stochastically consistent. Everything else is built on top of that, but it's all probabalistic. We don't have to exist. If we ran the whole thing over again, there's no reason to believe we would exist.

This is not flipping the coin a few hundred billion times, each time landing heads, in a row. This is the coin flipping and falling... and landing. It doesn't really matter which way.

Besides, biology has a ratchet. As long as the sun shines on the Earth, excessive energy is being poured into a chemically active system, energy that can be exploited into anti-entropic organization.

This has to happen-- at least on Earth-- only once. Not a billion times.

Once.

Once chemistry has bootstrapped into biology, evolution is more or less an emergent property of the system. There are no guarantees: there's nothing that dictates that dinosaurs, dogs, or hominids will emerge. But biology will run its course as long as it has the power to do so. As long as the sun shines.

Besides, it's a huge universe. Too many people fail to appreciate how huge, fail to have an imagination broad enough to grasp how huge. In all the universe, the science experiment called chemistry is being run around every star in the sky, billions and billions of times. We're just the outcome of one of those experiments: chemistry bootstrapped to biology, bootstrapped to consciousness.

It's a nifty outcome (at least, I think so), but it's hubris and self-deception to think that we're special in some way, that the universe cares about us.

Once you allow for supernatural events in your biological history, you suspend all judgement and damage all conclusions. If you believe that some power has interfered with the outcome, has "leapt over" gaps that are biologically insurmountable (by the way, every gap that Behe, et. al., has proposed has been shown to be surmountable by ordinary chemistry and biology, so far), you have no justification for trusting the outcome of biological science.

The consequences of this are huge: you have no reason to believe that animal testing tells you anything about the efficacy of drugs on human beings. None; it works on faith. You have no reason to investigate the genetic history of cancer, to isolate the high-preservative genes that can lead to cancer, because you have no reason to suspect that high-preservative genes exist at all. You have no reason to believe that comparative anatomy tells you anything about human beings.

You have no reason to believe the evidence of your own eyes.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

You're ignoring the Weak Anthropic Principle. There could be any number of Universes whose physical laws could not support sapient life: by definition we are in a Universe whose physical laws could. Otherwise, we would not be here to have the discussion.

Furthermore, once physical laws allow the appearance of life, there is no logical reason why they should change in such a fashion as to no longer permit it.

If you are referring to the fact that our planet has remained habitable for billions of years, you are ignoring three points:

1) This has been true on Earth: on any number of other planets the local environment may have changed in such a way as to extinguish their ecosystems. We have strong reasons to believe that something of this sort happened to Mars, for instance.

2) Actually, Earth's environment (including atmospheric composition) has changed dramatically over billions of years: you or I would die quickly attempting to breathe the atmosphere of 3 billion years ago. Earthlife has changed with it, adapting to the atmospheric changes.

3) And again, the Anthropic Principle: had Earth's climate changed so radically as to exterminate her complex life, we would not be here to have the discussion.

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

And we're seeing more and more evidence that life may be the rule instead of the exception, when conditions which support it (and those are much, much broader than we imagined even 20 years ago) are present. It's truly quite amazing.