Religions > Atheism > Comment: I can barely Adam and Eve it, but creationism's catching on over here
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"JPG" |
| Date: |
02 Oct 2006 07:20:28 AM |
| Object: |
Comment: I can barely Adam and Eve it, but creationism's catching on over here |
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1884941,00.html
Comment
I can barely Adam and Eve it, but creationism's catching on over here
Nick Cohen
Sunday October 1, 2006
The Observer
Not the smallest of the crimes of the Bush administration is to allow
an affectation of cultural superiority to sweep Europe. By now, you
must know the list of our alleged virtues by heart and the odds are you
accept our moral pre-eminence as incontestable.
The Christian right wants an end to abortion, a rolling back of
homosexual rights and the teaching of creationism to gullible children
in state schools. These primitive beliefs put Republicans outside the
bounds of civilised discourse to everyone who matters except Tony Blair
and he'll be gone soon. The rest of us can savour the antics of Baptist
churches and Deep South demagogues as one of our greatest voyeuristic
pleasures - the pornography of the politically literate. Every time a
film crew comes back with footage of tele-evangelists milking their
flocks, the seductive thought that there is no moral difference between
Christian fundamentalism and Islamism becomes a little more appealing.
To be told that it is easier for creationists to get at children in
Britain than the US is as shockingly incongruous as opening a paper and
reading that more prisoners are executed in Devon than Texas. Yet
British scientists trying to uphold basic intellectual standards are
starting to believe just that.
It isn't that Britain has anything comparable with the US creationist
lobby. The Roman Catholic and Anglican churches accept evolution,
although there are signs from polls that the people likely to found
Muslim schools do not. The organisations that are pushing biblical
literalism in Britain are obscure. I doubt if one person in 1,000 will
have heard of Truth in Science, Answers in Genesis, the Emmanuel
Schools Foundation or the Creation Science Movement.
Typical activists describe themselves as 'street proselytisers', and
tour the country giving lectures in nonconformists chapels and
preaching from soap boxes in shopping centres. They look like living
fossils, but researchers for the British Centre for Science Education
show that they can be surprisingly effective.
Truth in Science has established a website and sent information packs
to every school. Its suggested coursework for teachers to base lessons
around is very slick and includes powerpoint presentations, video clips
and arguments questioning that life could have emerged without a
creator. If the group is to be believed, more teachers have thanked it
for their help than phoned to say they had thrown their packs in the
bin.
As in the United States, old-time creationism is dressed up in the
pseudo-scientific garb of intelligent design. Instead of appealing to
the literal truth of Genesis, smart creationists point to the
complexity of molecular structures as evidence that only an omnipotent
creator could have conjured life into being.
Stephen Layfield, head of science at the fundamentalist Emmanuel
College near Middlesbrough, explained that teachers who say the
'Genesis account may be actually historical and true stand to meet with
a barrage of criticism and scorn'.
Talking about molecular structures or gaps in the fossil record,
however, deflects the derision. More important, it appeals to teachers
who have no religion but suffer from what you could call the BBC
fallacy. 'We teach the theory of evolution,' they say to themselves,
'so we should balance that by also teaching the theory of intelligent
design.' They don't understand that you can't have balance between
truth and falsehood. Those who claim you can are putting themselves in
the same camp as Holocaust-deniers from the far right or deniers of the
Bosnian concentration camps from the far left who, when confronted by
incontrovertible evidence, always try to wriggle away by saying :'I'm
just trying to put the other point of view.'
Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association is emphatic that the
infiltration of British schools would be impossible in the United
States. Because we don't separate church and state, he says, we can't
simply say that it is illegal to bring God into the classroom. We
therefore condemn ourselves to fighting endless minor science wars in
the school labs. Last year in the US, by contrast, a federal judge
ruled that a Pennsylvania school board's policy of teaching intelligent
design in high-school biology class was unconstitutional because it was
clearly a religious idea that advances 'a particular version of
Christianity'.
His judgment showed that the great push by American Christians to
challenge Darwin was doomed to fail and most of the other Christian
initiatives look like going the same way. We are well into Bush's
second term, but abortion is still legal and homosexual rights remain.
Europeans enjoy their fantasy of the American dystopia too much to
notice what is in front of their noses.
The Republicans used religious passions to push largely working-class
American Christians to vote for Bush, then gave them next to nothing
when he was in the White House. Perhaps one day their brains, honed by
millions years of evolution, will work out that they have been taken
for fools.
How to bust an embargo the easy way
I hear that a dismal report from Amnesty International on the arms
trade, to be published tomorrow, will confirm how globalisation is
making control of the illegal sale of weapons close to impossible.
The model for imposing an arms ban is built on the assumptions of the
old nation state. Britain places an embargo on the Sudan, say, and
British companies have no choice but to comply with it. But rich arms
companies are as capable as any other manufacturer of sending their
assembly lines into the poor world. Components for weapons systems are
being assembled all over the globe, yet there is no global institution
to control the weapons trade.
A good question for Amnesty would be how can regulation be enforced
globally? For the life of me, I don't see how it can.
Furthermore: My policy on policies is not to bother with having any
policies
As if country hasn't suffered enough, we now face a clear and present
danger that the first former head of PR for a TV company to become
Prime Minister will soon be in Downing Street.
The only thing that can stop him succeeding seems to be the public
twigging that the former PR man is a former PR man and not believing a
word he says. The former PR man needs to counter the accusation he is
all spin and no substance and his smart PR move will be to deny he is
nothing more than a former PR man.
His spin doctors - the former PR man now has men to do his PR for him -
tell my colleagues that today in Bournemouth he will stress his
commitment to developing serious policy ideas.
This sounds a brilliant PR move. The former PR man is going to develop
his informal brand by adding serious policies ... classic with a twist,
as they say in PR.
Unfortunately, I don't think his marketing men have got their strategy
quite right. For a start, delegates will vote on motions using X
Factor-style electronic keypads, which I'm not certain will bring the
sense of gravitas the former PR man needs.
And although they promised the BBC that the former PR man is committed
'to developing serious policy ideas', the briefers went on to say that
he won't actually commit himself to any 'specific policy
announcements'.
The PR conundrum is how to give the impression that the former PR man
is interested in serious policies when he doesn't have any policies.
Perhaps they will arrange for him to be photographed reading the
Economist to his children or posing naked, hand on chin like Rodin's
Thinker, on a rock on the beach at Bournemouth.
Comments
.
|
|
| User: "Occidental" |
|
| Title: Re: Comment: I can barely Adam and Eve it, but creationism's catching on over here |
02 Oct 2006 10:43:57 AM |
|
|
JPG wrote:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1884941,00.html
Comment
I can barely Adam and Eve it, but creationism's catching on over here
For the perplexed:
Cockney rhyming slang
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Overview
Rhyming slang works by replacing words with short phrases that rhyme
with them. For instance, the term "boat race" would be used to refer to
one's face, as "race" rhymes with "face". Often, to quicken speech, the
phrase is abbreviated to only the first word or syllable. So, in a
similar fashion, "plates" would be "feet" ("plates of meat"), and
"bread" would mean "money" ("bread and honey").
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
