Re this:
The principles on which this site is run are summarised here and here. The key rule is: “assume other posters are posting in good faith”.
That does not mean that you have to believe that they are posting in good faith, simply that you should make that assumption for the purposes of discussion.
I will not “correct” posts – people are responsible for their own posts, and for any errors they contain. I will not delete posts, although I may move posts to a different thread, or to the Sandbox or to Guano. They remain publicly viewable. I will however, delete links to porn or malware, and posting such links or material are the only grounds on which I will ban anyone. Posters are complete free to disagree with me, with each other, and to be mistaken.
UD is run on different lines. Fine. I prefer mine.
Since I know that you are aware of the National Center for Science Education and its reason for existence, I am going to assert that you know damned well that ID/creationism is a socio/political movement to get sectarian dogma into the public schools and keep evolution out. You know about the ongoing attempts by sectarian state legislators to introduce ID/creationism and climate change denial into the classroom by law.
You know damned well that the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin shows up regularly at state school board meetings pushing ID/creationism. You know about the various legal cases in which citizens have had to spend taxpayer money in order to keep this socio/political agenda out of the public school classrooms.
You know that ID/creationists as a group think the secular world is evil. You know about Howard Abramson and his millennial movement activities; and you know about the millions of dollars he dumps into the Discovery Institute. You know about the Wedge Document.
I will also assert that you are well aware of similar sectarian attempts to replace the US Constitution, and that you are also well aware of the culture wars that seek to replace secular government with a theocracy.
ID/creationism is one part of that extreme, Right Wing, sectarian culture war; as you are acutely aware. Yet you dissemble, deny, and project.
However, what you DON’T know is the real science. In fact, you can’t even read or understand the writings of the “gurus” of your own ID/creationist movement. You can’t vet their writings and claims and you can’t compare their assertions with real science; not even at the high school level.
You and the current crop of ID/creationists are not as unique or as clever as you think you are, William. ID/creationists have been playing this game for something like fifty years now; and they all have the same misconceptions and misrepresentations of science, and they all use the same “debating” tactics that were laid out by Henry Morris and Duane Gish back in the 1970s.
You know this; yet you pretend not to. Arguing, no matter how strained and pretentious, is all you have left; but you still don’t know even high school level science, and your knowledge of middle school science is shoddy at best.
We don’t want that ignorance, and the sectarian bigotry that goes with it, to become the norm in society.
You know damned well what the ID/creationist goals are; and you are being called out on it right here.
Mike Elzinga: I’m not sure how that response corresponded to my question. Are you speaking for Liz, or are you saying that this is why **you** involve yourself in this debate – to do battle against what you see as an attempt to install a theocracy?
I’m fully aware of the reason why some anti-ID advocates argue, but I didn’t ask them – I asked Liz, who – from my reading – doesn’t seem to agree with your view. Which is why I asked. She spends a lot of time and effort debating something she (from what I can tell) thinks is largely a waste of time by decent but erroneous people without the necessary skills to see the error of their ways.
Perhaps you can enlighten me – even if ID advocates wanted to install a theocracy, so what? What’s wrong with that? Is a theocracy not an acceptable way to run a society?
If, under this theocracy, black were deemed white, or more mildly, the state decided (on the basis of its holy writ) what were and were not acceptable factual statements to make about the world, I’d see that as a backward step, strenuously to be resisted. Among many other potential ills. Seems like a crap idea to me. Don’t tell me that IDists, if they achieved this assumed goal, would not interfere in that way.
So here you are changing the subject in order to avoid responsibility for learning anything.
Do you like being burned at the stake for “heresy?” Do you like John Calvin’s “solution” to Michael Servetus’s “heresies?” Do you approve of threats of torture for claiming the Earth moves?
Do you think the Massachusetts Bay Colony is a model for government? Would you like to live in Salem, Massachusetts at the time of the witch trials? Do you like having stones piled on you to get you to “admit” being a witch? Do you think witches should be hanged?
Whose theocracy would you like best, John Calvin’s, Martin Luther’s, or the Pope’s?
Which human being advocating a theocracy do you think has the real insight into the mind of a deity? Do you trust everyone who quotes scripture?
What about an Islamic theocracy; would you like that? Do Muslims know the mind of a deity better than Christians or Jews? How about a Buddhist theocracy? How about a Mormon theocracy? Hindu theocracy anyone?
Which of the thousands of mutually suspicious and blood-warring sectarian versions of religion do you think would make the best theocracy?
Notice how you changed the subject. You can’t admit your ignorance of science or even your ignorance of ID/creationist writings. You can’t admit the history of ID/creationism. Yet you continue to “argue;” Gordian knots of argumentation and mud wrestling over things you know nothing about and refuse to learn.
Elizabeth has been accommodating and polite; yet you return the favor with ongoing ignorance. You insult with your ignorance and your refusal to learn. You want everyone to come to you, but you make no effort to understand even basic high school science. You don’t even make the effort to understand the writings of your own heroes of ID. You can’t vet them; you can’t compare them with real science.
Yet you argue. You moon people with your ignorance; you insult, and you know that you insult. What does that get you? Do you think your tactics aren’t obvious?
You’d see it as a backward step? So what? Theists can – and do – look at secularist policies and see them as “backwards steps”. Is your argument against a theocracy summed up as “because you think its a backward step”? Or, more simply, because you wouldn’t like it?
Mike Elzinga said:
So, your argument against theocracy is that you wouldn’t like it? That seems to be the consensus “argument” offered here by anti-theocracists.. How does one arbit between “because I like it” (pro theocracy) and “because I don’t like it” (anti-theocracy)?
Minus the invective, I wonder if anyone here can explain to me why secularism has a preferential right to governance over theocracy? Or a rational reason why it would be more suitable?
What about your ignorance of science; when are you going to correct that?
If “creationists”, as people like to term it here, indeed get ID materials into the classroom, and universities, and get people elected that change some laws in favor of a more “ID” perspective, so what?
Let’s assume that ID advocates “don’t like” the secularist/materialist swing in politics/culture that has been going on for the past 50-60 years, and let’s say that secularists “don’t like” where ID advocates would take the country (speaking of the USA and maybe some other Western nations). This is the nature of democracy and the ongoing social struggle for ideological and political power, is it not?
It’s not as if secularism is some kind of magic wand that turns humans into angels. The history of secularist nations and regimes is not any better than that of religious ones. There are worse things that could happen if western culture swings back some to the religious side of the pendulum.
You still are refusing to face the fact that ID/creationism is pseudoscience.
You are engaging in gut-busting refusal to learn anything; and you are advocating that everyone be as ignorant as you are.
Theocrats in the ID/creationist movement are not just religious bigots who think they have a superior morality; they are completely ignorant of science, the Enlightenment, and the reasons we have moved away from theocracies.
Whether you like it or not, we aren’t going back. Nevertheless, your stubborn ignorance has been called out. Your attempted diversions into what you think secularism is simply compound your obvious ignorance of science.
Go live in a fundamentalist country. Let us know what you think.
From my point of view, a theocracy would seem to require that I accept that members of the priest caste are interpreting to me the commands (or whims) of a divine being. I’ve never seen or heard this being, and cannot hold it to account if things go wrong; it also seems to me that priests find it easier to hide their malfeasances and hypocrisies than secular authorities.
Whilst I couldn’t claim that secularism is a perfect basis to run a country, or that secularists are all lovely people, it seems to me at this point in history that religious differences (or pretences thereof) are killing an awful lot more people than are secular ones.
Now, if there was a divine being willing and able heartily to smite those of its representatives who stepped out of line, I might reconsider. But kiddy-fiddling priests and Sunnis murdering Shi’ites murdering Sunnis, Bhuddists attacking Muslims and so on suggest to me that the respective divinities don’t exist, or are helplessly weak, or are actively malevolent.
I don’t actually think anyone or thing has a right to governance. Permission to assume the responsibilities whilesoever they behave themselves is as far as it should go, with rapid and condign punishment if they fuck up too much
So your principle is that whichever happens to be killing the least people at the time – secularism or religion – the opposite should have governance privileges?
William, I think you’re a great advert for ID. Keep going!
Try and think this through, Mike.
1) If I don’t know much about science – which I admit – how could I possible vet your claim that “it’s a fact” that ID/creationism is “pseudoscience”?
2) I don’t care if ID is pseudoscience or not. I believe what I want to believe, not what evidence supports – as I’ve already pointed out on this forum.
I’m not really sure why you keep throwing science into the debate, Mike. What does science have to do with how a nation should be governed, or what values a culture should embrace?
So, once again, I’m guessing that your principle against a theocracy is “I wouldn’t like it”? How should that conflict be decided – the conflict between those that wouldn’t like a religious government/societh, and those that wouldn’t like a secular government/society?
It’s already been decided. It’s called the First Amendment.
I assume that what we’re talking about is as much a theocracy as interpretations of the constitution will allow. Let’s not forget that Thomas Jefferson made the Capitol a church, brought in the military band to play during church services, and the congress back then paid for Bibles to distribute to schools and hired missionaries to go evangelize troops on the frontier. By today’s standards the US has spent a lot of time as a de facto “theocracy”. In my youth, you still had to swear an oath on the Bible to give testimony in court – and all of that was under the same first amendment.
Now, legal precedent and modern sensibilities might make it difficult to swing that pendulum too far back to the religious side, but I have yet to see a valid argument why it shouldn’t swing back.
Good luck trying.
Yes, my aversion to theocracy is also that I wouldn’t like it. Then, I’m the kind of guy who wouldn’t enjoy living under a dictatorship. I’m just that kind of bleeding heart liberal, you know? I just don’t dig authoritarian regimes.
Then, I kind of have this thing for paying attention to reality over believing what I want to believe too. I tried closing my eyes and believing I lived in a mansion but I kept tripping over things.
I suppose life would be dull if we were all on the same planet.
I didn’t say I was trying. Mike Elzinga gave a very impassioned diatribe about the DI and “ID creationists” trying to insert theocratic/religious material into the school system, and that it was pursuing an agenda of changing he culture and government into alignment with a more Christian perspective.
The question is: even if so, so what? Isn’t that how politics and culture gets hammered out – competing beliefs taking it to the various cultural institutions, including politics?
Mike – and many others on both sides of the debate – are cultural crusaders, fighting for their view of the future of America. I didn’t really suspect that Liz was such a crusader, or felt that way about ID proponents, which is why I asked her why she was committing so much time and effort to this debate.
So, your basis for opposing it wouldn’t be any more principled than “cuz I say so”. Which is odd, because later you say that you dislike authoritarian regimes – which are also based on the “cuz I say so” principle.
It’s already been hammered out, William. You lost. Get over it.
William, you’re clearly not talking from experience. We’d like to afford you that opportunity. Iraq – for 5 years. Don’t forget to write, they may not let you use the Internet.
Not interested in a philosophical wankfest, William. You are ignorant of the experience. Go live it.
It’s interesting to note that virtually every comment here about why secularism should be favored over religion is all about what that poster likes and dislikes. No principles offered. No sound reasoning. Just “what I personally like” or “what I personally want”, a principle that if extended to others gives them the exact same right to pursue a religious culture and a more religious government – because it’s what they would like, and what they would want.
William, I suggest you actually read some history, particularly the history surrounding the Bill of Rights. You would find principled arguments for a sectarian government.
If you also read the history of science as it interacted with theology you would find principled arguments for secular science.
Should we be required tho offered principled arguments against honor killing, clitorectomy, slavery? I’m happy just saying I don’t like it and won’t put up with it. There are debates that are over and done.
Secularism is relative! Checkmate Atheists!
Where do YOU live, William? Why?
William, in case you haven’t noticed all preferences boil down to likes and dislikes. Even religious preferences.
William J. Murray,
I have not been a “cultural crusader,” William; I have been a scientific researcher and an educator for well over fifty years. I generally believe in live and let live.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees citizens the right to worship as they please. It also forbids sectarians from using the institutions of government to impose their sectarian religion on everyone else.
Unfortunately, that is not good enough for some sectarians. It is not enough for them to have their churches; they want everything else, and when they can’t get it, they resort to the Trojan horse of pseudoscience and the mucking up the political processes to insert their dogma into the public schools and other public institutions.
You have chosen to remain ignorant of science; and you have obviously also chosen to be proud of that ignorance. You have also chosen to reject the lessons of history and the Enlightenment. They don’t matter to you as long as you perceive you don’t have the ultimate power in your hands to rule and punish as you see fit.
You choose ignorance because you believe that ignorance protects you from any responsibility to the society that feeds and protects you. You choose ignorance to assuage any possibility of guilt for your parasitism of that society and for any responsibility for what gets passed on to future generations.
You think you are unique in your radical rejection of secular society. Yet you are simply another unhappy and poorly educated sectarian who perceives secularism as a competing religion that must be eradicated. You are no different from all those sectarians who kill and maim others for not holding to a particular set of sectarian beliefs. It makes your blood boil to think that others might enjoy life without your sectarian beliefs.
The US Constitution allows you to believe whatever religion you like; other secular democratic societies allow similar privileges. However, you will remain in your place and not use force or the institutions of government to impose your beliefs on others as long as you choose to live in such a society.
If you don’t like secular, democratic societies, then I am quite sure you can still find a suitably harsh theocracy in which you will be very happy. Just be sure you are not in the minority in that society, and that there exists a minority whose persecution can add to the ecstasy of your sectarian beliefs.
Mike E,
I think you’re basically just using me to rant about some stereotype for whatever reason.
I’m a very happy person. I have no problem with the kind of secular government we have – I haven’t “radically rejected it”; I greatly appreciate it. I was asking you what principle you held as being valid in terms of a theocracy being wrong – I wasn’t advocating that we should have a theocracy.
But, as usual, you – and others here – misunderstood questions about principle and warrant for declarations of belief and intent.
Well, it appears that you argue just to argue; and you don’t take sufficient responsibility to make yourself clear.
I have been observing the ID/creationist community and their tactics for something like 50 years now. I have been in some of their churches, I have read their writings, and I know their misconceptions and misrepresentations of science far better than they do.
I am not wrong in my assessment of their attitudes and goals; it is not a stereotype, and I think I made myself perfectly clear.
You, on the other hand, know neither the science nor the pseudoscience of ID/creationism; so you are in no position to make assertions – e.g., “stereotyping” – about either. Is that sufficiently clear?
Interesting question, William. I guess a fallacy is a challenge (why would we even have a word for it if it didn’t matter to us?) and I also like to get things right. I guess I also have a strong instinct against unfairness, and I think many of the arguments against “evolutionists” are grossly unfair (a few against ID proponents too).
As we discussed on a previous thread, I think that the human desire for fairness is probably both a culturally and genetically inherited trait that helps us survive as a social species, and it’s part of what we reify as morality.
And evidence-based reasoning to me seems the best bulwark against the very subjectivity that you seem to see as a weakness in atheism.
Not really. There is a fundamental assymetry between pursuing desires that frustrate the desires of others, and pursuing desires that do not.
What a thunderingly poor analysis of my statement. I’d see “that” [state interference in scientific ‘fact’] as a backward step, therefore that is the sum of my argument against theocracy?
Anyway, most people’s arguments on most things political could be dismissively summed up as “I wouldn’t like it”. It may well be, on deeper analysis, that their dislike would stem from effects on others besides themselves, but I’m not sure you would even recognise that such a level of thought exists, based (with equivalent disregard for the potential subtlety of your political opinions) on your statements re: altruism &c.
You ask God to decide?
The ol’ elephant in the room here, of course, is that choosing one’s god is at least as subjective as choosing one’s morality.
More so, I’d say, because we can evaluate moral systems against some objective (i.e. available to independent observers) measuring instruments, such as poverty rates, GDP, crime rates, indicators of wellbeing, perinatal mortality, etc.
Trying to test whether you’ve got the right god is not even what you are supposed to do in some religions (“do not put the Lord God to the test”).
There’s a strange asymmetry in WJM’s argument. When ‘secularists’ object to the activities of religious groups in pushing ID agendas, WJM seems to say that their objections should be rethought because the religious groups are simply following the democratic process of persuasion of greatest number (might makes right, indeed!). But objections to such manoeuvres are also part of the democratic process.
For my own part, I give somewhat less of a damn about politics – particularly the US version. I just hate to see scientific concepts mangled. WJM claims total unconcern as to whether his science is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, so he’s happy to throw his weight behind the movement. The skill is in picking (or coat-tailing) a scientific viewpoint that is not so obviously wrong that laymen laugh at you.
You’re frustrating Williams desire to be in charge. For shame!
When you consider that even after I explicitly explain my position, you and others simply ignore it and go right back to assuming something I’ve repeatedly made clear otherwise, I hardly think that the problem is on my part.
Hi William,
I just wonder how you assess whether one of your comments is clear to others. I consider myself of at least in the normal range of reading ability and I am never really clear on what you are driving at.
No asymmetry at all. I fully agree that both sides have full rights to the democratic process. The secularists have just had a lot of success the past 50-60 years, and now are facing a more sophisticated challenge. Religion/spirituality has had to improve its cultural/political game.
I guess that’s a fair point, Alan.
I assume that when I say things like “I’m not a Christian” or “I believe what I wish, not what the evidence may indicate” or when I say that I’m arguing about whether or not something is logically coherent, not whether or not it is the factual state of affairs, I assume such straightforward statements are properly interpreted (if not archived in memory).
However, I suppose that there’s no real reason to assume that even such simple, straightforward statements are being properly interpreted, considering the fact that posters here so often post things that are in contradiction to them.
I’m not really sure what “scientific concepts” you think I’ve “mangled”, given that I generally avoid the science portion of any debate.
However, I will give you the reason why I’m not worried about the science, per se. As I see it, science – the hard sciences, anyway – is a collection of wonderfully useful descriptions of the regularities of physical interactions. To say that one is “anti-science” is usually nothing more than invective; how can anyone be against an ongoing catalog of useful descriptions of the interactions of matter and energy?
It is only if one uses the term “science” as if it were interchangeable with a non-theistic, physicalist metaphysic that the general charge can be made that IDists or Creationists are “anti-science”. They’re not against developing a useful catalog of descriptions whatsoever; what they are “against” is the ideological agenda – not the science. I’m against the agenda, not the science. I have no quarrel with science, although I may have a quarrel with how it is employed in some instances.
But , if Dawkins and others can use the gravitas of science to promote an ideological agenda culturally and politically, why shouldn’t ID proponents do the same? Groups use science all the time to promote their agenda. Calling one group “anti-science” is just a rhetorical device.
Science is a tool we use to describe and manipulate physical phenomena. Perhaps there are some actual “anti-science” people around, but even the Amish use science – unless they’ve given up the use of levers and screws?
So, secularists pursue cultural and governance desires that do not frustrate the cultural and governance desires of the the religious?
I have to agree with others that I haven’t a clue what you are trying to accomplish or why. You discuss logical incoherence but support a political movement that is completely irrational.
And you support theism, which is anti-rational.
Only if you subjective assume in the first place that any of those things have anything whatsoever to do with morality. But then, you’ve supported my point; if it’s all subjective, the secularists (from their paradigm) have no more right or authority to pursue their secularist agenda than the religious have in pursuing their agenda.
It’s all a matter of subjective assumption and interpretation, from that perspective. Which is why it is hypocritical to attack religious groups for pursuing their cultural and political goals – unless, of course, one admits it’s not a matter of principle, but just a rhetorical means to gain the secularist ends.
Theism which holds that god’s nature is inherently rational – is the very essence of rationalism. It is physicalism which is anti-rational, because it offers no reason in the first place why we should expect reason to matter, or ourselves to be capable of mutually engaging in it, and renders reason nothing more than subjective feelings and rhetoric.
I have a purpose in making the arguments I make. For example, my whole argument here is about the moral/principle equivalence of the means and ends of both secularism and religion ( that is, under the physicalist perspective). IOW, I’m pointing out that you and others here have no principled objection to the cultural/political ambitions of IDists – that, by the reason you’ve offered (“I don’t like it”), they have an equal reason and validity to their means and ends.
Basically, you don’t like what you think they want to do, and how they want to change the country, and so you attack them with whatever you have in your arsenal to aid in stopping them. Fair enough, but then that applies for the other side as well.
William J. Murray,
If you believe what you wish, wish for better things, obviously. End hunger, poverty and suffering.