Nazis on the Prowl

Monday, August 28, 2006  -  reddit

The Guardian has a story reporting that Pope Ratzinger is planning to resume the war on science and understanding of the natural world. The article author, John Hooper, wrote it in a rather biased manner that really bothered me. An example is a case I'm intimately familiar with, Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, in which the district had began introducing intelligent design into the classroom. Kitzmiller won without qualification or doubt, and the school board that approved the changes were thrown out unanimously by the voters before the verdict even came in.

Hooper describes the court ruling as the controversy, when in reality it was the Dover school board's actions in their attempt to circumvent Edwards v. Aguillard, a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that teaching Creation was an unconstitutional promotion of religion that was the real controversy. As was the case with Aguillard, the Dover district got blown out of the water. Hooper got it all wrong. The controversy was the original action, and the court case was the natural evolution of justice and the rule of law that happens every single day in this country.

Hooper also stated that several states within the U.S. teach Intelligent Design -- in fact no states in the union teach ID, given it's a religious doctrine. Hooper is a moron, but he's the lesser of two evils in this instance. Ratzinger fired Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, in retaliation for Coyne's support for evolution, albeit the misguided belief that evolution can exist within religious ideology.

Dominique Tassot is described in the article as an anti-evolutionist. That strikes me as a bit funny, as it's a little like being an anti-gravity, or anti-field theory (bye bye electricity and magnetics!) You would think that after so many centuries of science improving our lives and our understanding of the world that religious zealots who thank their God for the miracles science has provided such as medicine in one breath, and then toss it out the window when they find it most convenient in the next would be better educated by now.

Perhaps that is the biggest problem this country faces today, our lack of balls when it comes to educating kids even against their parents wishes when their parents are too ignorant to make sound judgements, because they themselves never received a proper science education. Religion is a joke that most of the rest of the world has forgotten, and it's sad that we can't do the same. It's sad we can't do better for our children than to teach them myths and magic rather than science and reality.

On another topic, here's the YS publishing page (that does everything it says it does):