The single greatest victory of the Darwiniacs is in the realm of rhetoric, not science.
They have persuaded the slumbering masses that anyone who questions the theory of evolution must do so out of religious fervor. No matter what argument you make against evolution, the response is Well, you know it's possible to believe in evolution and believe in God. Yes, and it's possible to believe in Spiderman and believe in God, but that doesn't prove Spiderman is true.
I admire the rhetorical technique and plan to use it during all future disputes.
Your time is up on the StairMaster.
You're just saying that because you believe in
God.
This is the express checkout lane.
Oh, I get it—you believe in God.
On August 24, 2005, the New York Times was required to run this amusing
"correction":
A front-page article on Sunday about the Discovery Institute, which promotes the concept known as intelligent design to explain the origins of life, referred incorrectly to the religious affiliation of the institute's fellows. Most are conservative Christians, including Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants—
not fundamentalist Christians.
Liberals can make dazzling distinctions between different types of Muslims. Osama bin Laden, for example, was a "fundamentalist" who would never have worked with a
"secular" Muslim like Saddam Hussein—although liberals think Osama was willing to suspend his principles long enough to work hand-in-glove with Ronald Reagan. But 160
anyone who questions evolution is ipso facto a "fundamentalist Christian."
The intelligent design movement is exactly the opposite of what the Darwiniacs would have you believe. Far from six-fingered lunatics handling snakes and speaking in tongues, the ID proponents are the real scientists—biochemists, astrophysicists, chemists, and mathematicians. As Behe says, intelligent design has been around since Aristotle and its "rising fortunes have been boosted by discoveries principally in physics and astronomy," such as the life-sustaining "coincidences" of the universe discovered by astronomers like the late Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle.
Bill Dembski has developed complicated mathematical formulas for detecting design in the universe, as distinct from chance or accident. Dembski has a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton. He has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. When faculty members at Baylor University erupted in rage at the research center Dembski had started up at the university to test theories of design in the universe, not one professor on the committee investigating Dembski could understand the mathematical arguments he had made.' (But just to be safe, they abolished his research center anyway.) In an article in the New York Times on intelligent design, the design proponents quoted in the article keep rattling off serious, scientific arguments—from Behe's examples in molecular biology to Dembski's mathematical formulas and statistical models. The Times reporter, who was clearly not trying to make the evolutionists sound retarded, was forced to keep describing the evolutionists' entire retort to these arguments as: Others disagree.'
That's it. No explanation, no specifics, just "others disagree." The high priests of evolution have not only forgotten how to do science, they've lost the ability to formulate a coherent counterargument. You keep waiting to hear a serious response to arguments by people like Behe, Dembski, and Hoyle, but the evolutionists just scream that evolution is a FACT and if you don't believe it, you must be a fundamentalist who believes the Earth is flat.
Which is rather presumptuous, considering the scientific standing of the typical evolutionist. Their grandiose self-conceptions to the contrary, the cult members are rarely scientists at all. They're almost always biologists—the "science" with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT "scientist" who fled the room in response to Larry Summers's remarks was, of course, a biologist. While I'm sure there have been groundbreaking discoveries about the internal digestive system of the earthworm, biologists are barely even scientists anymore. They're classifiers, list-makers, like librarians with their Dewey decimal system. Except librarians don't claim the Dewey decimal system holds the Rosetta Stone to the universe. There were once great biologists, but the morally vacuous ones began to promote their own at the universities. It was a sort of intelligently designed devolution. Like Marxists gradually dominating the comp lit department, biologists will only be given tenure today if they forswear any doubts about the evolution pseudoscience. Consequently, "biologist" almost always means
"evolutionary biologist," which is something like an "ESP biologist."
Curiously, the science writers at the New York Times—as opposed to opinion writers like Paul Krugman or Style section reporters writing about "girl crushes"—have 161
generally been extremely circumspect in what they say about evolution. The principal source for idiotic statements about the "overwhelming evidence for the theory of evolution" in the Times is letters to the editor. Writing a letter to the New York Times is what people who don't fight think of as fighting: That's it! I'm writing a letter! Why, I'll take him to court! One letter writer said evolution was a "fact" equivalent to the "fact"
that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq.3 A woman doctor wrote in to say that DNA evidence "shows our common heritage with the animals with whom we share this planet." 4 (And Elton John gave birth to Janet Reno.) If little Miss Smartypants could prove "common heritage" from similar DNA, she'd be awarded the Nobel Prize.
THE only evolutionist who ever tried to answer questions about evolution was Stephen Jay Gould, which meant he had to keep conceding key points—so much so that Phillip Johnson called Gould the "Gorbachev of Darwinism." If you can ever get the cult past the argument that their opponents are "fundamentalists," it's Game Over. I gather this is their strongest argument, since it's the only one you hear.
When the Kansas State Board of Education decided to hold hearings to determine what schoolchildren should be taught about evolution, they sought the views of prominent evolution defenders. They invited evolutionary biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University. They invited Eugenie Scott, Keeper of the Faith at the National Center for Science Education, a front group dedicated to banning any questioning of evolution.
(Liberals love organizations with names that are the opposite of the truth, like all the Communist front groups with "American," "peace," and "democracy" in their titles.) And they invited anyone at all from another organization devoted to banning discussion of evolution, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Not one of them was willing to defend evolution in a public forum. The evolution fanatics justified their disappearing act on the grounds that members of the school board did not have open minds. "The people running things," Miller said, "were people whose minds were already made up." This is as opposed to the minds of people who refuse to discuss the issue and keep suing to prevent anyone from challenging their theory.
Miller admitted that the refusal to debate "can be made to look as if you do not want to defend science in public, or you are too afraid to face the intelligent design people in public." But the real reason he refused to debate, he said, was that it was not a genuine debate. Evolution is true and everyone please stop asking questions!
Scott, of the American League for Peace and Democracy, remarked sadly that she had once debated critics of evolution. "I was one of the holdouts, saying yes, appear with these guys, yes, tell them what is wrong with their ideas, go to their conferences, treat them like scholars." Scott is to "science" what the "Reverend" Barry Lynn is to Christianity. (And both are proud recipients of the Playboy Foundation's "First Amendment Award" for blocking the speech of religious people while not infringing on the right of overweight women to dance in public wearing only pasties.) When the evolution skeptics refused to acquiesce to Scott's badgering, she concluded they were being dogmatic. "Our willingness to engage their ideas," Scott said, "was not being reciprocated." Scott had deigned to "treat them like scholars." And yet they refused to capitulate. This is the liberal definition of an ideologue: Someone who won't give in to them.
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Nazis can march in Skokie, Democrats can fill the airwaves with treason, and Air America Radio can give Randi Rhodes access to liter-ally hundreds of listeners every day, but the teaching of alternative theories to evolution is prohibited by law. They would prefer it if heretics from the official state religion could be put in prison and burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno.
A good example of the Darwiniacs' "willingness to engage" others' ideas occurred when a small school district in Pennsylvania proposed to read a statement to high school biology students mentioning intelligent design. The statement read as follows: The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's theory of evolution and eventually take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.
A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book "Of Pandas and People" is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.
With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.
The school leaves the discussion of the origin of life to individual students and their families.
As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on standards-based assessments.
That was it. Just an alluring reference to dissent from the official state religion that the students might look up in non—school hours.
From the reaction of the evolutionists, you would think the Dover schools were teaching fisting to twelve-year-olds (when, as any student knows, that's not covered until junior year). 5 Going for his own Playboy First Amendment Award, federal district court judge John E. Jones III ruled that this tepid statement violated the First Amendment of the United States Constitution by establishing a religion. The last person to demonstrate such mastery of the First Amendment was erstwhile Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers.
Judge Jones—or as he came to be known, "the well-respected, Bush-appointed judge"—had spent the better part of his career on a state liquor board determining such matters as that Zippers gelatin shots may not be sold in Pennsylvania. But now he had a case that would get him noticed. As Jones confided to a New York Times reporter, when he saw the Dover evolution case mentioned on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, he excitedly brought a copy home to his wife, telling her, "I'm on the cover of Rolling Stone!" At least he didn't pose for Vanity Fair in a Jaguar. At least not yet.
The judge who had spent his career handing out T-shirts to Little Leaguers with catchy antidrinking messages like "Stop underage drinking—Make the world a better place" concluded that alternative theories to evolution are unconstitutional. Jones wrote, 163
"[T]he fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom." Maybe some crazy scientific theory like quantum mechanics could be questioned, but not a rock-solid scientific theory that says a flying fish flew out of the ocean and became a bird. That's hard science. At least according to No Zipper Shots Jones, who held, "[I]t is unconstitutional to teach I.D. [intelligent design] as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."
The Times nearly ran out of fawning adjectives in its praise for Jones. Liberals hadn't been this alarmed by the activities at a high school since hearing about a high school football coach in East Brunswick, New Jersey, who allegedly prayed with his players for a good, clean game. In a single article, Jones was called "a man of integrity and intellect,"
"moderate, thoughtful and universally well regarded," and a "renaissance man." Needless to say, Jones was a "lifelong Republican appointed to the federal bench in 2002 by President Bush." The Times still won't mention that John Ashcroft went to Yale, but it managed to work in that Judge Jones's father graduated from Yale. All you need to know about Jones's breadth of intelligence is that he calls Tom Ridge the "singular inspiration of my life."
This is the scientific method when it comes to the state religion: Rolling Stone magazine and Jayson Blair's employer browbeat a hack judge into declaring the mere mention of alternatives to evolution "unconstitutional."
The cult loves to boast that there are no "peer-reviewed" articles on intelligent design, 6 but then treats the publication of such an article as a fireable offense. (Peer review is very important, because otherwise you might have South Korean scientists claiming they've used cloning techniques to create embryonic stem cells, as Hwang Woo-Suk did in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science. Oops.) In 2004, Richard Sternberg (Ph.D.s in molecular biology and theoretical biology) published an article by Stephen Meyer (Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University) in what the Washington Post described as the "hitherto obscure" journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
Meyer's article was peer-reviewed by three renowned scientists and "complied with all editorial requirements of the proceedings," ac-cording to a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. Among Meyer's points was the one about the Cambrian period having no Darwinian antecedents—something your children are not allowed to hear about in high school. Apparently, the six readers of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington weren't supposed to be told about the Cambrian period either.
It wasn't ever clear whether Sternberg actually believed in the heretical doctrine of ID, but for permitting the publication of a peer-reviewed article about it, he was adjudged a witch and banished from the Smithsonian. The obscure journal disavowed the article, and Sternberg was warned not to come to future meetings. As is always the case with the witch-burners, they went straight to Sternberg's sources of employment, demanding that he be fired.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates retaliation against federal employees, was soon looking into the Smithsonian's treatment of Sternberg. The Smithsonian not only objected to any inquiry into intelligent design, it especially objected to any inquiry into its treatment of Sternberg.
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The independent counsel investigating the attacks on Sternberg issued a harsh report on the behavior of the alleged scientists at the Smithsonian and Eugenie Scott's National Center for Science Education. In her usual role as Enforcer of the Faith, Scott had led a campaign of vilification against Sternberg. Leaping to action like angry gay David Brock when he's cranky because he's retaining a lot of water and has just seen a Bill O'Reilly broadcast, the NCSE immediately posted hysterical responses to the Meyer article on its website. Scott's organization helped draft a repudiation of Meyer's article for the journal to print, and then turned around and cited that very repudiation as proof that the article should not have been published.'
The NCSE, the government report said, had worked closely with the Smithsonian "in outlining a strategy to have [Sternberg] investigated and discredited."8 In the flurry of e-mails between the NCSE and the "scientists" at the Smithsonian Institution, Sternberg was accused of being a Young Earth Creationist. He was accused of taking money under the table to publish the article. His religion was investigated. He was accused of having no scientific training at all but only "training as an orthodox priest." None of this was true. But according to the independent counsel, the claim that Sternberg was not a scientist became so persistent that a colleague had to circulate his resume to dispel the rumor.
Remember, he has Ph.D.s in molecular biology and theoretical biology.
The Smithsonian's chief spider torturer, Jonathan Coddington, began making inquiries about Sternberg's religious beliefs and politics—in particular, questioning if he was a fundamentalist or rightwinger. 9 Another "scientist" at the Smithsonian wrote in an e-mail,
"We are evolutionary biologists and I am sorry to see us made into the laughing stock of the world, even if this kind of rubbish sells well in backwoods USA."1O
Scott defended the inquiry into Sternberg's religious beliefs, saying, "They don't care if you are religious, but they do care a lot if you are a creationist. Sternberg denies it, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it argues for zealotry." I'm no evolutionary biologist, but I think if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, that argues for it being a duck.
The report concluded, "[R]etaliation came in many forms . . . misinformation was disseminated through the Smithsonian Institution and to outside sources. The allegations against [Sternberg] were later determined to be false." The Smithsonian was unrepentant.
Asked about the report by the Washington Post, Smithsonian spokesperson Linda St.
Thomas said only, "We do stand by evolution—we are a scientific organization."12
Whatever else can be said of academics in cushy, comfortable jobs, they tend not to be big risk takers. If this is what one Cambridge Ph.D. goes through for publishing a peer-reviewed article simply be-cause he dared question evolution, you can be sure we're not getting honest answers from the rest of the scientific community. One tends to hear about prominent academics who doubt evolution in the same hushed tones one hears about Hollywood actors who oppose abortion (Martin Sheen, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty).
You could have ten times the IQ of Eugenie Scott—and most do—but if you gingerly raise scientifically based questions about evolution, you will be denounced as a creationist nut, your life will be turned upside down, and your employers will be hounded. You will probably be fired and certainly have to hire a lawyer. Now let's take a show of hands: Any Darwin skeptics? Good. Evolution has been proved again!
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THE most fanatical defenders of evolution are not Harvard professors, curators at the American Museum of Natural History, or Times science reporters. They are cretinous high school biology teachers and liberal know-nothings trying to relive their fantasy of the Scopes trial. HBO Documentary and Family president Sheila Nevins says she doesn't
"shy away from such R-rated topics as `G-String Divas' and `Taxicab Confessions,' " but she complained of the imagined persecution she would face if she "made a movie about Darwin." If HBO ran such a documentary, Nevins said, "I'd get a thousand hate e-mails."13 (Maybe, but only from lonely guys upset about missing "G-String Divas.") Evidently, it isn't that hard to make a fawning movie about Darwin in Hollywood. A partial list of movies and documentaries with Dar-win's name in the title on the Internet Movie Database includes:
Darwin's Nightmare (2004)
Genius: Charles Darwin (2003)
Freud and Darwin Sitting in a Tree (2000)
Darwin's Evolutionary Stakes (1999)
A&E Biography: Charles Darwin—Evolution's Voice (1998) (TV) Darwin (1997)
Galapagos: Beyond Darwin (1996) (TV)
Darwin (1993) (TV)
Darwin on the Galapagos (1983)
Terre des Betes: Darwin (1982) (TV)
The Voyage of Charles Darwin (1978)
The Darwin Adventure (1972)
Darwin Was Right (1924)
Felix Doubles for Darwin (1924) Darwin (1920)
What Darwin Missed (1916)
A Disciple of Darwin (1912)
Cowardly people who run from the room crying at the idea that men and women could have different abilities in science like to play-act that they are John Scopes speaking truth to power against hate-filled fundamentalist Christians ("truth" being defined as "a discredited scientific theory from the Victorian age"). They are like geeks playing air guitar in front of the mirror pretending to be Keith Richards. Except there really is a Keith Richards. (In fact, some scientists argue that Keith Richards is actually the missing link.) The John Scopes of liberal imaginations never existed.
In the great Hollywood tradition of All the President's Men, Erin Brockovich, Silkwood, Good Night and Good Luck, and every single moviemade by Oliver Stone, there are two separate and distinct stories: the one that actually happened and the movie version. Despite the raw fear that grips the Hollywood community at the thought of making a movie that reflects favorably on Darwin, there have been four movie versions of Inherit the Wind, in 1960, 1965, 1988, and 1999.
In the Book of Hollywood, it is taught that a brave high school biology teacher named John Scopes tried to educate his illiterate, tooth-less students in backwater Dayton, Tennessee, by teaching them "science." For his trouble, he was nearly lynched by 166
fundamentalist Christians, who stormed his classroom and arrested him on the spot for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. As told in Inherit the Wind, clergymen and businessmen immediately threw Scopes in prison, where he remained throughout the trial, with fundamentalist Christians screaming that they would lynch him and throwing things at his window. Scopes was crucified, died, rose again, and now sits—no, wait, that's a different story.
The real story of the Scopes trial is told in the book Summer for the Gods by Edward Larson.14 The Scopes trial was nothing but a publicity stunt. The idea for a trial on evolution was hatched by the ACLU in New York and seized upon by civic leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, as a way to drum up publicity for their town. Scopes was in on the prank, agreeing to be prosecuted even though he had never taught evolution and was not even a biology teacher. He did not spend one minute in jail, was never at risk of being sent to jail, was friends with the prosecutors, with whom he went swimming during the trial, and was even given a scholarship put together by the expert witnesses in gratitude for his star turn in the Monkey trial. When the trial was over, the school offered to renew his teacher's contract.15
Darwin's theory of evolution was a hot topic in the summer of 1925, with lots of public debates on the subject. The theory of natural selection was being used to justify racialist theories, eugenics, and German militarism—which I seem to recall took a turn for the worse shortly thereafter but I'd have to check my notes. The most important witnesses the defense considered calling as "expert witnesses" for the Scopes trial were all champions of forced eugenics.
A few other state legislatures around the country had prohibited the teaching of evolution, but other state laws were merely proscriptive, with no punishment attached.
Even in Tennessee, teaching evolution was only a misdemeanor offense, punishable by a nominal fine, much like drowning a girl in Massachusetts if your last name is "Kennedy."
The Scopes trial is, as Larson says, "the most widely publicized misdemeanor case in U.S. history."
The day the Tennessee governor signed the ban into law, he said it would never be enforced. And it never would have been—but for the bright idea of a native New Yorker who had recently moved to Dayton. Upon reading in a newspaper that the ACLU was offering to defend any Tennessee teacher who violated the law, George Rappleyea decided a trial on evolution would be a terrific way to get publicity for Dayton as a nice place to live and work (especially for busybody former New Yorkers with axes to grind).
Rappleyea took his idea to the town elders assembled in the local drugstore, telling them that a trial on evolution would put Dayton on the map and boasting of his connections with the New York ACLU. Civic leaders warmed to the idea as a splendid way to promote the town—raising the possibility that they were serving more than milk-shakes at the drugstore. Even the school superintendent—who had supported the law—
liked the idea of a cooked-up trial as a way to get Dayton national recognition. The ACLU signed on, agreeing to pay the costs of both the defense attorneys and the prosecutors.
All they needed was a teacher to teach evolution—or at least to cop to teaching evolution—and a prosecutor to take the case. One of the town prosecutors was friends with John Scopes, a twenty-four year-old teacher who sometimes taught biology when the regular biology teacher was out.
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There was the small problem of Scopes not recalling whether he had ever taught evolution—and indeed, not even being the school's biology teacher. The pharmacist pulled a popular biology book off his shelf, Hunter's Civic Biology, and asked Scopes if he had ever used it to prepare for class when he substituted for the regular biology teacher.(Among the scientific facts taught in Hunter's Civic Biology is that Caucasians,
"represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America," are "the highest type of all."76) Scopes said he had. The druggist excitedly proclaimed that the book mentioned evolution and everyone agreed that this was sufficient evidence for Scopes to be their defendant.
So right there in the drugstore, Scopes cheerfully admitted to the misdemeanor offense of teaching evolution and a warrant was sworn out for his arrest. The school superintendent delightedly exclaimed, "Something has happened that's going to put Dayton on the map!"
Publicity flyers were immediately sent to New York announcing a trial on evolution.
Both the prosecution and the defense were eager to rush the case to trial as quickly as possible—in order to prevent an-other town from beating Dayton to the punch and getting all the publicity. Each side retained prominent blowhards to assist: populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. From beginning to end, the Scopes trial was a scheme cooked up in New York and pawned off on the good citizens of Dayton, much like Cats.
Civic leaders formed a Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee to plan activities around the trial. The town erected tents for the show and requested extra trains to accommodate the expected crowds. Pamphlets were prepared, touting the town's virtues.
A carnival atmosphere attended the trial, with street performers and bands. Stores in Dayton got into the spirit of things by displaying monkeys in shop windows and selling
"simian sodas." The sheriff decorated his motorcycle with a sign that said "Monkeyville Police." The Progressive Club produced a souvenir coin for the trial showing a monkey wearing a straw hat. The drugstore where the plan was hatched displayed a huge banner proudly proclaiming, "Where It Started."
The rest of Tennessee was not so thrilled with Dayton's public relations stunt.
Chattanooga Congressman Foster V. Brown summarized the whole affair when he said the trial was "not a fight for evolution or against evolution, but a fight against obscurity."
Hardly a reviled figure by the townspeople, Scopes had to ask his students to testify against him, telling them they would be doing him a favor, and even coached the students on their answers. At least the students knew who Scopes was. When the famous defense attorneys arrived in Dayton for the first day of trial, they didn't recognize their client and handed Scopes their bags. Worried he might be asked if he was a biology teacher at trial, Scopes never took the stand in his own defense."
The defense sought to turn the case into a trial on God, rather than a trial on whether taxpayers could decide what would be taught in the public schools. Defense lawyers repeatedly moved to exclude the court's opening prayer on the grounds that it would prejudice the jury. When those motions failed, the defense demanded opening prayers only from people who believed in a god of nature. The judge turned the matter over to the local pastors' association. Being braying fundamentalist lunatics, the local pastors agreed to alternate prayers between pastors who prayed to God and pastors who prayed to Mother Earth.
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In his opening statement, Clarence Darrow compared fundamentalist Christians to dogs, suggesting that the best thing would be to strangle them: "To strangle puppies is good when they grow up into mad dogs." Just a little more than a decade before the rise of monstrous atheistic war machines in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Darrow informed the court, "There is nothing else, Your Honor, that has caused the difference of opinion, of bitterness or hatred, of war, of cruelty that religion has caused."
Despite the defense's religious hysterics, lead prosecutor Tom Stewart repeatedly returned to the dry technicalities of the law, saying the misdemeanor law was "an effort on the part of the legislature to control the expenditure of state funds, which it has the right to do." He denied that anyone's free speech rights were at issue. "Mr. Scopes might have taken his stand on the street corners and expounded until he became hoarse," he said, "but he cannot go into the public schools" and teach evolution.18 Stewart opposed the defense's request to bring in expert witnesses: "They will say [evolution] was simplythe method by which God created man. I don't care. This act says you cannot
[teach it] ."19
The judge largely succeeded in keeping the case confined to the law at issue, but he did allow Darrow a one-day Show Trial on God out of the hearing of the jury. Darrow called Bryan as his only witness and interrogated him about his personal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. The prosecution objected to the sideshow, but keeping Bryan from taking the stand would be like keeping Chuck Schumer from a microphone. For two hours, Darrow asked Bryan such questions as "Do you believe [God] made . . . such a fish and it was big enough to swallow Jonah?"
The atheists had their fun with Bryan, but the jury never heard any of it, inasmuch as it was utterly irrelevant to the misdemeanor statute. The next day, Bryan was champing at the bit to call Darrow as a witness and force him to answer questions, but the prosecutors for-bade it. When the jury returned, Darrow said, "We cannot even ex-plain to you that we think you should return a verdict of not guilty. We do not see how you could. We do not ask it." And so the jury did vote to convict Scopes on the misdemeanor offense of teaching evolution. Scopes was given a $100 fine, which Bryan offered to pay.
The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the misdemeanor law on appeal but threw out Scopes's conviction on a technicality. (The judge, rather than the jury, had levied the $100 fine.) Scopes called the dismissal of his conviction a "disappointment."20 The ACLU again put out an offer to bring a test case challenging any evolution law, but to no avail. The antievolution laws remained on the books in half a dozen states for another forty years. Still, somehow, the republic survived.
In other words, the movie Inherit the Wind portrays the Scopes trial about as accurately as The Flintstones portrays prehistoric man. The original play, written in 1955, was intended to be an allegory for McCarthyism. In the fifties, everything was an allegory for McCarthyism. The Crucible was an allegory for McCarthyism. Bad Day at Black Rock was an allegory for McCarthyism. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was an allegory for McCarthyism. McCarthy was an allegory for McCarthyism. For people who were living in abject terror during the McCarthy era, liberals sure churned out a lot of plays, movies, and TV shows about their victimization. When constitutional scholar Gerald Gunther went to see the Broadway play version of Inherit the Wind, he stormed out in disgust. "I ended up actually sympathizing with Bryan," he said later, "even though I was and continue to be opposed to his ideas in the case, simply because the playwrights 169
had drawn the character in such comic strip terms."21
And yet this fantasy of brave liberals standing up to fascistic Christians has permeated the entire debate over evolution. Liberals act as if they have to maintain a constant vigil against the coming theocracy in America because of what happened in Inherit the Wind. But consider that this vicious portrayal of Christians was the first in-flight movie ever shown in a first-class cabin on TWA.22 Try to imagine a movie that portrayed Muslims as ignorant, backward brutes. Forget it—your mind hasn't yet evolved to the point where you could even conceive of the worldwide chaotic hysteria that would follow the release of such a movie. Today, Inherit the Wind is shown in high school and junior high school science classes across the country.23
THE only religious belief driving opinions about evolution is atheism. God can do anything, including evolution. But the value of Darwinism for atheists is that it is the only way they can explain why we are here. (It's an accident!) If evolution doesn't work out for them, they'll have to expand on theories about extraterrestrials or comets bringing life to Earth. Harvard population biologist Richard Lewontin said, "[T]he tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories" of evolution and its willingness to accept "the patent absurdity of some of its constructs" flowed from the scientists' prior commitment to materialism. Materialism is absolute, Lewontin said, "for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door."24
Contrary to the cult members' description of science as requiring the exclusion of God, until the last few decades the only reason to do science was to understand God. All the real scientists believed their work was discovering God in the universe—Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, William Thomson Kelvin, George Gabriel Stokes, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli. I guess they weren't doing real "science."
Louis Pasteur said that "science brings men nearer to God." Pasteur was also, incidentally, one of Darwin's most scathing critics, not on religious grounds but on scientific ones. The inscription over the door to Max Planck's laboratory said, "Let no one enter here who does not have faith."
Sir Isaac Newton, who wrote a book about the prophecies of Daniel, said, "The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." Wolfgang Pauli, called "the whip of God," believed the greatest problem with science was "the lack of soul in the modern scientific conception of the world." His stated objective was to find the "spirit of matter."
Atheists absurdly try to claim Albert Einstein as one of their own simply because he claimed not to believe in a "personal God." I don't know what that means beyond establishing that he was not a fundamentalist Christian, which I already knew. Einstein described his life's work as trying to uncover God's thoughts: "I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon. I want to know God's thoughts—the rest are mere details." He said he believed in a God "who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists." He famously said in a letter to Niels Bohr that "an inner voice" told him the theory of quantum mechanics "is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not 170
really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."
Bohr had not kept up his Scientific American subscription so he did not know he was supposed to denounce Einstein for "filling the gaps with God." Instead he responded,
"Stop telling God what He must do!" If Eugenie Scott had ever found these letters, Bohr and Einstein would have been banned from teaching science at any high school in America.
Evolution cultists come up with crackpot religion, no more scientific than the intergalactic ruler Xenu, and their sole claim to "science" is that they have rigorously excluded God. Liberals have harnessed the language of "science" in order to destroy science. If our goal is to keep religion out of the classroom, evolution has got to go.
Philosophy professor and Darwiniac Daniel Dennett claims to study religion scientifically, saying, "Belief can be explained in much the way that cancer can."' He wonders why humans have a "craving" to believe in God. But there is no more scientific evidence for their creation story than for the Biblical creation story—probably less—so how about explaining their "craving" to believe in natural selection? What's that about?
Whether they conceive of themselves as practicing "religion" as such is irrelevant.
Darwiniacs have faith in some biological mutation process that dictates a consistent set of beliefs and faiths—among which is the belief that they are not practicing religion, and therefore government advancement of their beliefs is not prohibited by the Constitution.
Compared with their fanciful story of human consciousness developing by random mutation and a bloody battle for survival, the story of Genesis is quantum physics. It's not merely opposable thumbs and a bipedal gait that make us distinct from the other beasts. It is consciousness of our mortality, a moral sense, language, mathematics, art, beauty, music, love, longings for immortality, a sense of symmetry, the soul's ascent, the ability to accessorize, and our fascination with Branson, Missouri—none of which make sense in Darwinian terms. Darwiniacs like Dennett avoid explaining the human soul by calling the soul an illusion. As Dennett says, "[If] mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own `real'
minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation?"
Genesis posits a simple version of the human story: Adam and Eve are awakened to good and evil by their sin of pride, become aware of their nakedness, and stumble blinking out into the forest. However literal or metaphorical the story is, no one has improved on it in 4,000 years. No Freudian has a clearer image of man's consciousness.
We are in God's image, and we're the only ones in God's image, which is why we eat escargot rather than worship them. Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe we are distinct from the beasts, you're with God.
The Darwiniacs' creationism story is that man comes from an apelike ancestor and they will accept no other answer. They cling to Darwinism even as the contrary evidence accumulates, because it allows them to ignore God. Liberal secularists will not admit evolution is a crock until they have concocted a new creation myth that also excludes God.
It used to be that Darwiniacs avoided lucid statements of the significance of their religion. That's over. Dennett says it's time to abandon the "taboo" against attacking religion, a taboo similar to the PLO's taboo against attacking Israel. Toward the end of increasing at-tacks on religion, Dennett has written a book called Breaking the Spell, in 171
which he describes religious belief itself as a mere biological quirk in the Darwinian process. In the same book, Dennett attacks religious belief as a malignant force. It seems the miracle mechanism of natural selection has fallen down on the job if it failed to eliminate this harmful mutation. Luckily, Darwinism is a nondisprovable pseudoscience, otherwise, it might be difficult to explain how religion can be an unfit mutation and, at the same time, has won the battle of survival. Every-thing proves evolution. Good traits, bad traits, inexplicable organs, a tendency to eat poison, half-off sales at Macy's—
anything that hap-pens confirms Darwin's theory!
Dennett states as scientific fact that God does not answer prayers: "Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world—that's a hopeless idea. There's no such thing."2 He optimistically refers to Darwinism as a "universal acid," a substance "so corrosive that it will eat through anything!" Thus, he says, evolution "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view."3 That's putting it mildly, Professor.
Evolution even eats through logic. According to Dennett, the universal acid of Darwinism will "dissolv[e] the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding."4 Science has proved it: God is dead.
Richard Dawkins produced a two-part television series for Britain's Channel 4 that is nothing but an all-out attack on religion, titled Root of All Evil? He compares Moses to Hitler, says religion is equivalent to child abuse, and calls the New Testament a
"sadomasochistic doctrine." In the show titled "The God Delusion," Dawkins stands outside the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, warning his British audience of
"Christian fascism" and a growing Àmerican Taliban."5 (I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell.) While relentlessly attacking God, the Darwin cult hides behind the claim that they are merely doing "science." The New York Times stated unequivocally in an article on evolution that science can say nothing about "why we are here or how we should live."
(That's what the New York Times op-ed page is for!) Maybe a real science like quantum physics doesn't speak to "why we are here or how we should live,"6 but evolution's devotees pronounce on those questions all the time.
The theory of gravity has never been invoked to justify mass murder, genocide, or eugenics. Darwin's theory of evolution has. From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists.
Upon first reading The Origin of Species, Darwin's mentor from Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick, wrote a letter warning Darwin that he was "deep in the mire of folly" if he was trying to remove the idea of morality from nature. If such a separation between the physical and the moral were ever to occur, Sedgwick said, it would "sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history."'
As Darwinism gained currency, humanity did sink into greater degradation and brutalization than any since written records of human history began. A generation later, the world would witness the rise of the eugenics movement; racial hygiene societies; the first genocide in recorded history; Nazi Germany; Stalinist gulags; and the slaughter of 70 million Chinese at the hands of their exalted chair-man. To be sure, other books were published on the eve of the bloody twentieth century. But Hitler and Marx were not citing Louisa May Alcott's Little Women for support. They were citing Darwin.
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After reading Darwin's The Origin of Species, Marx dashed a note to Engels, saying,
"This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views."8 While Marx saw the "struggle" as among classes, Hitler conceived of the struggle as among the races.
Mein Kampf means "My Struggle," which Hitler described in unmistakably Darwinian terms.
The path between Darwinism and Nazism may not be ineluctable, but it is more ineluctable than the evolutionary path from monkey to man. Darwin's theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality. In-stead of honor thy mother and father, the Darwinian ethic was honor thy children. Instead of enshrining moral values, the Darwinian ethic enshrined biological instincts. Instead of transcendent moral values, the Darwinian ethic said all morals are relative. Instead of sanctifying life, the Darwinian ethic sanctified death.
So it should not be surprising that eugenicists, racists, and as-sorted psychopaths always gravitate to Darwinism. From the most evil dictators to today's antismoking crusaders, sexual profligates, and animal rights nuts, Darwinism has infected the whole culture. And yet small schoolchildren who know that George Washington had slaves are never told of the centrality of Darwin's theory to Nazism, eugenics, abortion, infanticide,
"racial hygiene" societies, genocide, and the Soviet gulags.
In his magnificent book From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart documents the proliferation of eugenics organizations in Germany around 1900, all of which asserted their "scientific imprimatur by claiming harmony with the laws of evolution."9 Darwin's theory was quickly and widely accepted among German biologists, a fact Darwin noted with approval, telling a friend, "The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail."10 Darwinism provided the lingo for "scientific" racism at the onset of the twentieth century." Not only were all eugenicists Darwinists, but nearly all Darwinists were scientific racists.12
The eugenics movement wasn't a wild, irrational perversion of Darwinism. It was a perfectly logical extension. Darwin himself believed the mentally disabled were a reversion to earlier humans—as proof, he cited the superior climbing skills of idiots.13
The very word eugenics was coined by Darwin's half cousin, the famed eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, who conceived his ideas for selective breeding of humans after reading The Origin of Species. He hailed Darwin's book for demolishing "dogmatic barriers" and arousing "a spirit of rebel-lion against all ancient authorities." Galton approvingly noted that the "feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind." But he despaired that without a pro-gram of eugenics, even the noble races were falling behind. Thus, Galton recommended forced sterilization of "unfit" humans, saying they could not be persuaded to stop breeding on their own. Eugenics, he said,
"must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion."
Ernst Haeckel, the creative genius behind the fake embryo drawings that were cited as proof of evolution for a century, was an influential German Darwinist. Upon reading The Origin of Species, Haeckel abandoned his practice as a physician and became a leading proponent of racism and nationalism. He gleefully wrote that Darwinism had overthrown religion's "anthropocentric fable," which had falsely elevated man above other species. He called politics "applied biology," a phrase later appropriated by the Nazis.
As Haeckel saw it, a "totally different value" must be assigned to "wooly-haired 173
Negroes" from the value assigned to "civilized Europeans." Haeckel pronounced the
"lowest" races of man "psycho-logically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs)" than to white Europeans. He had phony drawings to prove that, too! In a diagram of six human and six monkey heads, he positioned the European at the beginning, farthest from the apes, and the black and aborigine right next to the apes. Like his fake embryo drawings, the inequality of human races was supposed to prove evolution by demonstrating how man might have evolved from the ape. Haeckel forthrightly stated, "The value of life of these lower wild peoples is equal to that of the anthropoid apes or stands only slightly above them."14 With Haeckel's encouragement and advice, a Dutch scientist, Bernelot Moens, tried to artificially inseminate a black woman with the sperm from an ape.
Haeckel suggested a similar project, using a chimpanzee, to a German "sexologist."
In America, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and early proponent of
"positive eugenics," also cited Darwinism to pro-mote her "religion of birth control." She believed the theory of evolution provided grounds for eliminating the "unfit." In her 1922
book Pivot of Civilization, she advocated the elimination of "weeds . . . over-running the human garden"; the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted"; and the sterilization of "genetically inferior races." She was not oblique in identifying the
"weeds" of humanity. In a 1939 manifesto titled "Birth Control and the Negro," she noted that "the poorer areas, particularly in the South . . . are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations." Sanger recommended birth control to lessen the financial burden of caring for such weeds, "destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation." Undoubtedly, she would be delighted to know that today (1) Planned Parenthood is the leading provider of abortions in the United States, and (2) about 36 percent of our aborted babies are black, almost three times their percentage in the American population. Mission accomplished, Margaret!
Hitler's embrace of Darwinism is not a random fact, unrelated to the reason we know his name. It is impossible to understand Hitler's monstrous views apart from his belief in natural selection applied to races. He believed Darwin's theory of natural selection showed that "science" justified the extermination of the Jews.
In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:
[E]veryone who believes in the higher evolution of living organisms must admit that every manifestation of the vital urge and struggle to live must have had a definite beginning in time and that one subject alone must have manifested it for the first time. It was then repeated again and again; and the practice of it spread over a widening area, until finally it passed into the subconscious of every member of the species, where it manifested itself as "instinct."
Hitler said that the "general evolution of things" had indeed "placed the best in the position that it had merited." I guess when you're the dictator, a theory that says the fittest always rise to the top is easy to believe. In Mein Kampf Hitler explained that the races have higher and lower values and that his goal was "to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker." This, he said, was in accordance with "the eternal will that rules this universe."
The Nazis were constantly producing charts to demonstrate how Germany's population was declining, especially compared with the rest of the world. Hitler offered all kinds of monetary awards, Hero Mother medals, and other blandishments as 174
incentives to increase the "Aryan" population. Once the war began, those with large families were promised land in the colonies. But not just any Germans were encouraged to thrive. A big theme of the Nazis—demonstrated in charts, posters, pictures, and even newsreels and movies—was that too much money was being squandered on keeping
"idiots" and mental defectives like princes in ivory towers, while healthy, hardworking Germans were starving on the streets.
This is why Hitler hated Christianity: It filled people's heads with silly, sentimental notions about helping the weak and infirm. Like Dawkins and Dennett, Hitler believed that the "heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity."15 He rejected the idea of an ethical idea existing "if this idea is a danger for the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethics." Hitler denounced Christian charity as Jewish propaganda designed to hold the Germans back and help the Jews get an unnatural leg up. Otherwise, he believed, the "Aryans" would easily and naturally win the struggle for survival. The Holocaust was merely rushing along the natural process of evolution. Hitler said, "The Jews formed a sub-human counter race, predestined by their biological heritage to evil, just as the Nordic race was des-tined for nobility."
Liberals love to cite the fact that Hitler was anti-abortion and anti-gay, suggesting that he would fit right in with Christian conservatives in America. In an upbeat little piece on
"Christian fascists" in Harper's magazine, Chris Hedges cited his ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, James Luther Adams (an official with the Massachusetts ACLU), who "told us to watch closely the Christian right's persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933." (One wonders if, in his ninety-three years on earth, the Harvard Divinity professor ever saved one soul.)
In 2004, Gloria Steinem cited Hitler's opposition to abortion in order to compare him to President Bush: "Among the first things [Hitler] did when he came to office was declare abortion a crime against the state."16 In a column titled "Hitlers Great and Small,"
Ellen Goodman said pro-lifers "surely know that Hitler was a hard-line opponent of abortion." (Did that make him pro-life?)"
Hitler also loved dogs—that doesn't mean we should beat the little creatures. Still, it is puzzling that the author of the Holocaust should have scruples about homosexuality, much less abortion. Hitler's apparent "family values" don't make sense—until you realize that Hitler's worldview was based on Darwinism, not God. He didn't op-pose abortion because he believed in the human soul. In fact, and need-less to say, he didn't oppose abortion for everyone—only "Aryans." As Weikart explains: Hitler's ethical views do not comport well with traditional morality, since he based his morality on an entirely different foundation than did most conservatives.
Hitler's morality was not based on traditional Judeo-Christian ethics nor Kant's categorical imperative, but was rather a complete repudiation of them. Instead, Hitler embraced an evolutionary ethic that made Darwinian fitness and health the only criteria for moral standards. The Darwinian struggle for existence, especially the struggle between different races, became the sole arbiter for morality.t8
With all the books, essays, and Ph.D. theses that have been written promoting various theories on the rise of Nazism—the humiliation Germans felt as a result of the Versailles 175
Treaty (which is the opposite of the truth; the problem was we didn't crush them sufficiently the first time), the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic, the bad economy after World War I, the German character, Hitler's pain at being rejected as an artist, the immense popularity of the "Hitler mustache"—you would think the powerful influence of Darwinism on Hitler, as well as the pervasiveness of Darwinism among the German intellectual class preceding the rise of Nazi Germany, would merit a small mention in college classrooms.
Liberals get upset with people like Hitler and Stalin who apply Darwinism in ways they don't like, but they can't quarrel with the underlying philosophy. Certain patterns of behavior and beliefs flow naturally from the idea that man is an accident with no greater moral significance than a stalk of corn. Eugenics is a logical application of Darwinism.
Indeed, if Hitler hadn't given eugenics a bad name, public school students would be taught eugenics as a hard science in high school biology class right after watching Inherit the Wind.
Tenured bioethics professor Peter Singer at Princeton University's Center for Human Values represents the contemporary efflorescence of the Darwinian belief that man is just an animal like any other. Recognizing the bad name Marxism acquired in the twentieth century, Singer argues in his book A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation that liberals should drop Marx as their demiurge and make Darwin the center of their cosmology.
Embracing a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, Singer says parents should have the right to kill newborn babies with birth defects, such as Down syndrome and hemophilia, because killing a disabled child, the Princeton professor says, "is not morally equivalent to killing a person." Magnanimously, Singer allows that he "would not require it."19 Singer says there would be nothing morally wrong with parents conceiving children in order to harvest them for spare parts for an older child—or even for society to breed children on a massive scale for spare parts. 20 It goes without saying that Singer supports abortion rights, explaining in his book Practical Ethics that "the life of a fetus is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person."
While newborn babies are fair game, Singer says it is wrong to kick a mouse, which
"does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is." Needless to say, if we can't kick a mouse, Singer also frowns on eating animals.
Singer believes apes deserve a legally protected right to life, liberty, and due process.
He has even issued a demand that the United Nations adopt his "Declaration on Great Apes," which refers to chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas as our "community of equals": Members of the community of equals are not to be deprived of their liberty, and are entitled to immediate release where there has been no form of due process.
The detention of great apes who have not been convicted of any crime or who are not criminally liable should be permitted only where it can be shown that the detention is in their own interests or is necessary to protect the public. In such cases there must be a right of appeal, either directly or through an advocate, to a judicial tribunal.
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I vote for "directly." I would like to see a baboon deliver a scorching summation to a jury. If the ape throws his own excrement at the judge, you could sell tickets.
Bringing joy to white supremacists everywhere, Singer compares the liberation of apes to the black liberation movement, saying we must "extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species." And if you don't understand the trouble apes are having, put on a gorilla suit and try to get a cab to stop for you in Manhattan. Liberals didn't want us to depose a brutal dictator responsible for mass murder, rape rooms, and human torture, but now they want us to protect the entire animal kingdom from assault.
Oh yes—Singer also believes sex with animals is acceptable. That's what gets you tenure at Princeton these days. He has no objections to necrophilia, provided consent was received when the love object was still alive.21 For pronouncements that ought to land Singer in an institution for the criminally insane, he has been hailed by the liberal clergy at The New Yorker as "the most influential living philosopher." The New York Times says of Singer, "[N]o other living philosopher has had this kind of influence," and regularly publishes his ramblings. He is also published in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and fun-sounding journals with names like Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy—
in other words, all the places that would never publish a conservative. The New Scientist credits Singer with creating "a moral framework for the modern animal rights movement." 22 And of course, Singer is rewarded with a prestigious professorship at Princeton, the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at the university's Center for Human Values. The only accolade more shameful than that would be a Nobel Peace prize.
In Slate magazine, William Saletan tried to construct a liberal objection to Singer's argument for bestiality, happily settling on the absence of "consent" from the animal as the missing ingredient. And thus was bestiality narrowly averted as a plank in the Democratic platform!
But this is preposterous. Saletan is still imputing humanity to the animal. It is only through a quirk of its species that the poor mute goat is unable to communicate its consent, and man and beast are for-ever condemned to being star-crossed lovers, like Tristan and Isolde. I gather if the donkey were somehow able to grunt its permission to a sexual tryst, Saletan's objection would disappear. In the worldview of a liberal, it is wrong to have sex with a donkey because, absent the animal's consent, it would be rape.
(Remember: Whinny means "no"!) If consent is the only objection to bestiality, then why are animals allowed to have sex with one another? And if sex is permissible between animals because neither one is capable of granting consent, then there is no logical objection to infants having sex with one another. How about this: Any person who wants to have sex with an animal should be in a straitjacket?
Liberals occasionally get huffy with Singer, just as they get huffy with Howard Dean.
Like Dean, Singer says out loud what all liberals secretly believe. Liberals may quibble with Singer's conclusions, but his beliefs are logically unassailable if humans are no different from animals. By contrast, Christians are embarrassed by bad Christians, but they never say, "Oh well, adultery, thievery, and murder are perfectly logical extensions of Christianity." This is why liberals make such a big deal out of Christian "hypocrisy"—
they can't complain about the underlying theory, only about Christians not living up to it.
The worst a Darwinist can say to Peter Singer is "Shame on you for drawing logical 177
conclusions from our shared premises!"
Once man's connection to the divine is denied, you can reason yourself from here to anywhere. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." Christians and Jews believe God gave us dominion over the Earth and all the plants and animals.
That's not a license to abuse the Earth, but it does mean animals are subordinate to man.
Showing mercy doesn't make them our equals. But for liberals, as soon as they conclude it's bad to torture animals, they think they should be able to marry them. Why not? If horses and donkeys can have sex with one another, why not Dick Durbin and his German shepherd? What's the difference? Why should Dick and his faithful companion be denied the same basic right to marry the rest of us enjoy?
This is why liberals have panic attacks in response to any science that reveals differences in humans—differences in acquiring AIDS, IQ, mathematical abilities, and so on. If there really is a genetic component to IQ, what arguments do atheists have against sterilizing, en-slaving, or killing the stupid among us? What if porpoises are as smart as humans? Do they get Senator Dodd's preschool care, too?
No science is ever frightening to Christians. Religious people don't need the science to come out any particular way on IQ or AIDS or sex differences any more than they need the science to come out any particular way on evolution. All humans were created in God's image, and we don't have a right to dominate or kill them even if they are fetuses, have disabilities, can't do math, look like Peter Singer, or have low IQs and refuse to release their SAT scores, like New York Times publisher Punch Sulzberger. God exists whether or not archaeopteryx ever evolved into something better. If evolution is true, then God created evolution.
But with the secular crowd, their political ideology keeps shutting off open scientific inquiry. Over and over again, they can only accept one answer: AIDS doesn't discriminate, IQ is an artificially contrived social construct with no genetic component, there are no innate differences between the sexes, and the human soul was created by random mutation and natural selection. Their religion prevents them from engaging in honest discussion because science without God leaves them with no arguments against barbarism—like bestiality, abortion, slavery, and eugenics.
The only lesson liberals learned from Hitler is: Don't discriminate! Not that human life is sacred, but that we must never say people are different. Girls are the same as boys, and homosexuals are the same as heterosexuals, and blacks are the same as whites. That's their plan for nipping any aspiring Hitlers in the bud. Stripped of a belief in God, they have no coherent philosophical argument against genocide. Rather than defending human life, most of the time liberals are manufacturing excuses to kill it. So we all have to waste money and do pointless things—like letting girls try out for the fire department and the Navy SEALs—because the alternative would be to discuss the undiscussable.
If, as Darwin says, humans are just an accident of nature with no greater moral significance than a horsefly, it's perfectly logical to equate owning a pet with slavery and eating a hamburger with murder. And why not treat humans like beasts? Why not cannibalism? Humans: The New White Meat! Abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, assisted suicide—humans are just animals, so who cares?
Of course, most animal rights kooks would sooner abort an unborn human than an unborn tortoise. 23 After Palestinians strapped explosives to a donkey and sent the donkey to a group of Israelis at a bus stop in Jerusalem, Ingrid Newkirk, the cofounder and 178
president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), addressed a stern letter to "Your Excellency," Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat: "We have received many calls and letters from people shocked at the bombing." They were upset that the donkey died. "If you have the opportunity," Newkirk wrote, "will you please add to your burdens my request that you appeal to all those who listen to you to leave the animals out of this conflict?"
Even when liberals are trying to show their moderate, country music-loving side by claiming to oppose having sex with the family dog, they can't formulate a logical argument to explain why not. The idea of objective truth handed down from the God of Abraham makes them squirm. So they just assert that what they assert is true because they assert it. It's no wonder liberals' default argument is to throw food.
Thanks to people like Peter Singer and the animal rights wackos, these aren't hypotheticals. PETA posted a slide show on its website with graphic images of blacks being lynched, beaten, and burned alive—and compares their suffering to the treatment of chickens and elephants in a zoo. Another PETA billboard compares Christ to a pig, proclaiming under a giant photo of a pig, "He Died for Your Sins. Go Vegetarian." So at least the folks at PETA aren't a bunch of raving lunatics, like those Methodists Chris Hedges's Harvard professor warned him about.
Stephen R. Dujack, proposed witness for the Senate Democrats during the Supreme Court nomination hearings on Judge Samuel Alito, wrote an entire op-ed in the Los Angeles Times elaborating on the similarity of chicken farms to the Holocaust. As Dujack explained it:
Like the victims of the Holocaust, animals are rounded up, trucked hundreds of miles to the kill floor and slaughtered. Comparisons to the Holocaust are not only appropriate but in-escapable because, whether we wish to admit it or not, cows, chickens, pigs and turkeys are as capable of feeling loneliness, fear, pain, joy and affection as we are. To those who defend the modern-day holocaust on animals by saying that animals are slaughtered for food and give us sustenance, I ask: If the victims of the Holocaust had been eaten, would that have justified the abuse and murder? Did the fact that lampshades, soaps and other "useful" products were made from their bodies excuse the Holocaust? No. Pain is pain.24
This is liberalism's real strength: It is no longer susceptible to reductio ad absurdum arguments. Before you can come up with a comical take on their worldview, some college professor has already written an article advancing the idea. With Darwin as their god, every-thing is just a matter of personal preference. For Singer, the utilitarian ethic is based on "quality of life" and prevention of suffering of living things smart enough to teach at Princeton. For Hitler, it was increasing the population of "Aryans." For liberals, the utilitarian ethic is equality of outcome—which they will enforce with fascistic zeal through confiscatory taxation, abortion on demand, racial quotas, gendernorming strength tests, and "everybody gets an À' and a blue ribbon."
But who decides which preference prevails? In October 2005, black activist Kamau Kambon told an audience at Howard University Law School that blacks should wipe
"white people off the face of the planet." 25 So I guess that's his personal preference. How does Singer prove him wrong? Does being called "the most influential living 179
philosopher" by The New Yorker make Singer more "fit" than Dr. Kambon? Will that make him "fit" enough to withstand a bullet? Whose survival-of-the-fittest regime wins?
It's one assertion versus another assertion.
The fundamental difference between our religion and theirs is that theirs always tells them whatever they want to hear. Like the "living Constitution," Darwinism never disappoints liberals. They never say, "Well, I'd like to have cheap, meaningless sex tonight, but that would violate Darwinism." They can't even say, "I'd like to have cheap, meaningless sex tonight with a goat, but that would violate Darwinism." If you have an instinct to do it, it must be an evolved adaptation. Liberals subscribe to Darwinism not because it's "science," which they hate, but out of wishful thinking. Darwinism lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing—screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child—Darwin says it will benefit humanity! Nothing is ever wrong as long as you follow your instincts. Just do it—and let Mother Earth sort out the winners and losers.
Religious people have certain rules based on a book about faith with lots of witnesses to that faith. God is not our secret Santa. His commands are not whatever we want them to be, and the Bible is not a "living" document. This is why it's always so disorienting when liberals harangue Christians about Biblical commands. Unlike the liberal religion, morality exists outside our egotistical, materialistic, fickle, megalomaniacal Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Colin Farrell, Paris Hilton selves. These rules are decreed by a legislator whose opinions are not subject to appeal by the ACLU. We can't discover penumbras that will suddenly allow us to endorse genocide, sex with animals, gay marriage, strip clubs, premarital sex, or whatever the latest liberal fad is. The truth is the truth whether we like it or not. While secularists are constantly comparing conservative Christians to Nazis, somehow it's always the godless doing the genocides.
By their fruits ye shall know them.
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11 THE APED CRUSADER
Because though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, or thank Him, but rather became vain in their reasonings, and their heart, lacking understanding, was darkened.
Professing to be wise, they became fools;
And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and reptiles.
—Romans 1:21-23
aving given up on proving evolution scientifically, now the Darwiniacs simply assert that it is true and rush ahead to their main point, which is that God does not exist. On one hand, they're constantly proclaiming that it's possible to believe in God and in evolution, and thereby implying that only a religious belief could keep anyone from believing in evolution. And then when no one's looking, they announce that evolution has disproved God.
Of course it's possible to believe in God and in evolution. God can wind the clock, however the clock works. But that's not the plan of the Darwiniacs. They hysterically demand that we all pretend their pseudoscience is science and then keep slipping in the fact that evolution shows that belief in God is just a biological compulsion.
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