Archbishop of Canturbury backs evolution over creationism

Archbishop of Canterbury backs evolution ... Apparently the Intelligent Design quandry has been raised in England as well as here in the U.S. I shouldn't be surprised since it's clear the political strategists behind this are international in scope. In any case it's interesting how Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canturbury, have all announced that it's a mistake to teach creationism in schools, and how we should accept evolution into religious peoples view of the world.

The Intelligent Design crowd are fundamentalists who seem to be at odds with leading religious figures. Hmmmm.... Interesting.

Here's the Guardian article: Archbishop: stop teaching creationism ...or...

"I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories ... My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," he said.
The debate over creationism or its slightly more sophisticated offshoot, so-called "intelligent design" (ID) which argues that creation is so complex that an intelligent - religious - force must have directed it, has provoked divisions in Britain but nothing like the vehemence or politicisation of the debate in the US. There, under pressure from the religious right, some states are considering giving ID equal prominence to Darwinism, the generally scientifically accepted account of the evolution of species. Most scientists believe that ID is little more than an attempt to smuggle fundamentalist Christianity into science teaching.

It's clear these religious leaders aren't saying to ignore the Creation story and only look at Science and Evolution. The Archbishop's words seem to center on guarding the specialness of the Biblical Creation story.

In my eye the story isn't as simple as Evolution is superior over Intelligent Design. And, for that matter, its disturbing that the Archbishop seems to be saying we shouldn't be questioning or debating the validity of the Creation story.

First, consider this: Establishing control over a society ... the gist is that religion is easily be used to control the beliefs of society. The Intelligent Design debate is precisely an example of religious claims being pushed by political operatives to establish some control over society. And, further, it's an example of the people in society being expected to suspend their power of critical thought just because their church tells them to do so.

Why shouldn't the claims of religion be tested? We have the power of critical thought. We have the power of independant reasoning. Why not examine spiritual practices, experiences and beliefs?
Okay, one problem with that leaps immediately to mind. Scientists have regularly tried to test religion and ended up bashing religion, largely because they're testing it in the wrong way. Religious folk are expected to lean on "faith" and to not ask questions, leading to a dependency on something other than rational critical thought for making decisions. Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to trust only logic and equations and critical thinking, and to distrust subjective experience.

The problem is the nature of the religious claims. God is said to be something which created the universe and everything within it. God is said to be everywhere. How can a scientist hope to measure such a claim? The proof of God comes from subjective experience, the thing scientists are taught to distrust.

For example, when you pray what happens? Do you feel good when you pray? Most do. Is that a subconscious thing firing off some brain chemicals, and that because you believe God is helping you feel nice when you pray, therefore the chemicals your subconscious fires off will help you feel good? Or is there a divine presence that reaches inside you?

What about miraculous healing? What about prayer for someone who's sick? It's been shown in several studies (double-blind etc) that intercessionary prayer helps the ones who are prayed for.
It seems to me the critical mind, the dependence on logic, can easily go too far. And that the dependence on logic interferes with subjective experience. That the way to experiment with the divine is to operate with both subjective experience, and the critical mind. Subjective experience is not to be pushed away but to be embraced. Just as we are wired for the critical mind so are we wired for subjective experience.

Hmmm... I seem to have strayed from Intelligent Design versus Evolution. Sorry....

Establishing control over a society

I want to share a realization that recently came to me. It is a way of establishing control over a society, allowing you to bend them to your will. However in practice this will take generations to really lodge into society, so you probably won't have direct benefit but your heirs will.

Step 1: Beg, borrow, steal or forge a set of spiritual writings

Step 2: Present those writings as the Word of God

Step 3: Present the writings as being the infallible source of truth

Step 4: Appoint a group of people as the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words as written in those writings

It helps to have an authentic spiritual guru deliver the writings you are going to start with. That's not an absolute requirement. The other steps serve to separate the individuals in the society from their own authentic ability to determine the truth.

The other steps make it so Truth is determined only from the spiritual writings, and that Truth is so difficult to understand that only the select anointed ones can tell what's right or wrong. Hence when someone has a question, they won't be able to answer it for themselves but instead have to turn to the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words to tell them the truth.

Once the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words are established with credibility, then can claim literally any idea as being Gods Infallible Truth. Of course this assumes the official interpreters become corrupt, and no longer be serious students of spiritual truth.

In the ideal the priesthood's role is to explore the divine and to have the freedom to devote their lives to authentic spiritual practice. But we can think of dozens of religions throughout history where it began as an authentic spiritual practice, then devolved into corruption and power mongering.

I believe we all have access to divine truth. There are many spiritual teachings which say so, and which say we can look within for the divine truth. They tend to encourage us to explore and experiment for ourselves divine truth. In my experience the confidence this gives is stronger than "faith".

Cool Tool: 1491

Cool Tool: 1491 -- What happened to the native peoples of this land after Europeans arrived can only be described as genocide and ethnic cleansing. There were advanced civilizations, cities, culture, everything. All wiped out because of the arrival of Europeans. Some of it was accidental, due to diseases the Europeans carried for which the native peoples did not have biological immunity. But in many cases it was ruthless cold-blooded murder.

1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Amazon.com

1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley

A 1491 Timeline

Europe and Asia	Dates	The Americas
	25000-35000 B.C.	Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.
Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.	6000
	5000	In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.
First cities established in Sumer.	4000
	3000	The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures
Great Pyramid at Giza	2650
	32	First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)
	800-840 A.D.	Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war
Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America.	1000	Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.
Black Death devastates Europe.	1347-1351
	1398	Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth.
The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.	1492	The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.
Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew.	1493
Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.	1519	Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox** Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.
	1525-1533	The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.
	1617	Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.
English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.	1620

*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77).

Salon.com | Let us prey

Joe Conason, Salon.COM, is providing us this think-piece about the role of Religion in the Halls of Power. Let us prey Jack Abramoff and his deeply religious right-wing cronies express their "biblical worldview" by swindling Indian tribes and bribing legislators. Verily, mysterious are the ways of the Lord.. There is an array of scandals hitting Washington circling around illegal bribery, and other schemes to defraud and lie. The people doing these illegal acts also claim to be led by the Voice of God, and to be leading the fight to reintroduce Morality into American life.

An example cited is the era of the Clinton Impeachment. Tom DeLay claimed his justification for seeking impeachment was Clinton held the "wrong worldview". In another context he explained the worldview thusly:

Several years ago, at one of many fundamentalist meetings he has addressed, DeLay explained: "He [God] has been walking me through an incredible journey, and it all comes down to worldview. He is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me."

So one wonders how bribery, cheating, etc is something God is leading DeLay to do?

Bangladesh won't be another Afghanistan: Nizami

When you think of terrorism Bangaladesh doesn't exactly come to the front of the mind. For some reason this country isn't getting much coverage in the War On Terror, but according to this article there are "terrorists" active there: Bangladesh won’t be another Afghanistan: Nizami (By UNB, Dhaka, The Nation of Bangaladesh, Sat, 24 Dec 2005, 11:15:00)

The article quotes a speech by Jamaat-e-Islami chief Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami talking about some bombings that occurred recently in Bangaladesh. The culprits haven't been identified, but Nizami claims it's clearly the "terrorists". It's clear that what he means by "terrorists" are the Islamic people who are into bombs and fighting The West.

Probably what's going on stems from Bangladesh being an Islamic country. There is a movement among the Islamic countries for hardliner fundamentalists to convert their governments over to strict Islamic law. Bangaladesh is no doubt being affected by this movement.

The thing that stands out in this article is the broad brush stroke used to apply the "terrorist" label. This is a pattern a lot of people are following.

There are different organizations around the world who use terror tactics. If you label them all "the terrorists" that implies they're working together in some way. But why would you expect the Northern Ireland terrorists to be in cahoots with the Islamic terrorists or to be in cahoots with the Basque terrorists?

Terror is a tactic used by people fighting wars. In fact, the label of "Terror act" can clearly be placed on the "Shock and Awe" phase of the Iraq war. Both acts have the same goal, that is to induce "shock and awe" into an enemy. The difference is most terrorist groups try to work under the radar, on a shoestring budget, while the Shock and Awe phase of the Iraq war was funded by the U.S. Government and operated totally in the open.

In any case, I would really appreciate it if news commentators and others would remember, there are multiple groups who use terrorist tactics. It's innapropriate to label them all as "the terrorists" because it confuses the issue.

Separation of church & state

Frist speaks to Christian anti-filibuster rally Other religious leaders call rally a false union of faith, politics (Monday, April 25, 2005 Posted: 5:01 AM EDT (0901 GMT) CNN.COM)

Remember that one of the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution is the separation of Church and State. There is no official state religion in the U.S., unlike many countries. The two institutions operate in their own spheres, and this gives individuals the freedom to choose the religion that suits their taste, etc.

Can someone to me explain an event held over the weekend?

In a Baptist church in Louisville KY (I lived just down the road in Lexington KY for nearly 20 years) was used as the rallying stage for a joint appearance by several ministers and members of congress. The rallly was a telecast program, named "Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith", and was aired in churches around the country.

At issue are judicial nominations. The Bush Administration has nominated several radical right-wing nutjobs, and now are complaining that they aren't being approved. As a result the Congressional leaders are moving to end the ability to filibuster as a tactic to stop a judicial nomination. The Republicans are complaining that the Democrats have filibustered a couple of their judicial appointments.

Well, excuse me, but when the shoe was on the other foot the Republicans were fighting Clinton's appointments just as hard as the Democrats are fighting Bush's appointments.

Frist's participation in the event drew fire from Democrats and hundreds of religious leaders, who accused Christian conservatives of raising unsubstantiated allegations of religious persecution.

Four hundred thirty religious leaders from across the country signed a letter to protest Sunday's rally. And the FRC rally prompted opposition rallies, including one in Louisville.

"What we detect instead is the work of a political organization using Christian language to exploit Americans' desire to preserve religious values by framing their political strategy in terms of religious liberty," wrote the Rev. Joe Phelps of Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, which held the opposition rally. "This is deceptive, manipulative, and false."

"In theocracy we trust"

Earlier I asked How did DeLay get to his post?, because I was incredulous over a demand by Senator DeLay that Congress reassert its "authority over Congress".

I don't know which country he lives in, but the one I live in there is a separation of powers, and the Legislative, Judicial and Administrative branches of government are separate and distinct.

In any case, the full story is worse than I could have imagined. Because DeLay's comments were part of a convention bent on reestablishing the U.S. as a Theocracy.

In theocracy they trust (By Michelle Goldberg, April 11, 2005, SALON.COM)

The article puts this vision forward

Having won control of two branches of the federal government, the activists of the religious right have come to see the courts as the intolerable obstacle thwarting their dream of a reborn Christian nation. They believe in a revisionist history, taught in Christian schools and spread through Christian media, which claims biblical law as the source of the Constitution. Thus any ruling that contradicts their theology seems to them to be de facto unconstitutional, and its enforcement tyrannical.

Some believe that the problem can be rectified by replacing liberal judges with conservative ones. Others, noting that even judges appointed by Republicans often rule against them, have become convinced that they must destroy the federal judiciary itself. Thus, ideas offered at the conference ranged from ending the filibuster and impeaching all but the most right-wing judges to abolishing all federal courts below the Supreme Court altogether. At least one panelist dropped coy hints about murder.

And, we see that Stalin is their role model:

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said, "Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest political figure of the 20th century…He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'"

Fortunately the conference was only 200 people. But they are influential, and we can expect the Republican Party will end up pushing some of the agenda.

Here's a little more about their point of view:

Christian Reconstructionism calls for a system that is both radically decentralized, with most government functions devolved to the county level, and socially totalitarian. It calls for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of "unchastity before marriage," among other moral crimes. To be fair, Phillips told me that "just because a crime is capital doesn't mean you must impose the death penalty. It means it's an option." Public humiliation, he said, could sometimes be used instead.

Indeed, the whole article paints a very scary picture of a fundamentalist Christian government bent on stomping real hard on any activity that doesn't fit within their narrow minded version of reality. And, whats worse, is that they intend to use the Bible as the source for their authority, claiming the Bible to be the "Word of God" when in truth it is anything but that.

Some Jews bent on ... what? ... armagedden?

Both the Jewish and Muslim religions preach forgiveness and acceptance of others. So why can't they just get along?

Here's an example:

Protests target Jerusalem holy sites (Sunday, April 10, 2005 Posted: 10:21 AM EDT (1421 GMT) , CNN.COM)

The story talks of hardline Jews in Israel who are trying to attack the Al Aqsa mosque and other buildings. Jerusalem is the 3rd most sacred site to Islam, and it is this site in Jerusalem that is sacred to Islam, Jews, and Christianity. To the Hebrew and Christians, this is the Temple Mount, the place where King David built the Temple, where the Temple was rebuilt, and there's a tradition about trying to rebuild the Temple on the Temple Mount.

The problem is that Islam reveres the same site as the place where Mohammed ascended to heaven.

A visit to the site in September 2000 by then-opposition leader Sharon led to rioting that escalated into more than four years of violence. Jews revere the Temple Mount as the site of their biblical temples, while Muslims tradition says the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven from the spot.

The current wave of violence in Israel was sparked, as it says, when Sharon visited the place. One guy visiting that site sparked over four years of violence, so think what would happen if the hardliners were to succeed with this plan:

Security officials say they fear hardliners will attack the hilltop shrine, home to the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques, with the aim of blocking the Gaza pullout. Possible scenarios include the firing of shoulder-launched missiles at the mosque.

Also in the article is discussed the dismantling of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. These were established illegally, but apparently with some backing from the Israeli government. These settlements are an encroachment on the Palestinians, and is surely part of what's incited the violence.

But, for the purpose of stopping that pullout, the hardliners would wish to attack the Al Aqsa shrine? Don't they realize what kind of war that would unleash?

How about this? These people pretend to be religiously minded, and following their spiritual traditions. How about they study up on forgiveness and the concept of loving their neighbors?