intelligent design is bad for you
Intelligent design is a philosophical position. All of it's claims of natural phenomenon are disputed widely by scientific evidence. Talk about it all you want in christian religion class. Leave it out of science class.
Sadly, this tightening grip of traditional religious values painfully recalls all collapsed societies of the past. In his book, Collapse, Jared Diamond cites how most failed societies have fallen because they held onto traditional beliefs that are incompatible with a changing environment. Think about how Easter Islanders slowly destroyed their forests (so slowly that they didn't realize it over generations) to build religious statues, or how the Greenland Norse refused to learn how to fish from native aborigines and instead died in their reliance on livestock because native peoples and fish were dirty according to their early christian beliefs.
Many Christian values, like Intelligent Design and anti-abortion, may have arisen for good reasons such as early explanation of unknown phenomenon and protecting women while growing our population respectively. But now they are out of place. We have proven our evolutionary ties to apes with almost every type of science, especially genetic science. Humans are more genetically related to chimps than chimps are to gorillas and than zebras are to horses. With regards to abortion: we no longer need to grow our society, abortion is safe, and it is the number one cause of crime reduction in the past 20 years (read Freakonomics by Leavitt). Besides, neurologists have proven that no mental activity occurs until killer cells destroy the embryonic stem cells 60 days after conception. The hard evidence that we need to forward scientific progress and allow abortion to succeed as a society in this vastly more competitive world economy should be more important to us as a people than holding onto our religious values, right or wrong.
Why do we hold onto these religious beliefs? First, we don't perceive the long term ramifications of holding onto them. We don't see that our spending time thinking about this nonsense and slowing scientific progress will result in America not keeping pace with the rest of the world and eventually losing our economic vitality. Also, we fear change in our lives away from what we felt were what made us strong and successful in the past. However, what was good in the past is often not good for the future. Again, as Jared Diamond has shown to be the case for so many who have tried to hold on and died out because of it.
This really makes me think that Islamic attacks on America have succeeded in sparking the demise of our societal progress. To be victorious over their attacks on our culture we need to continue our scientific progress away from fundamentalist religious ways - not be more like them by fighting fire with fire and intensifying the hold of religion on our society.
Sadly, this tightening grip of traditional religious values painfully recalls all collapsed societies of the past. In his book, Collapse, Jared Diamond cites how most failed societies have fallen because they held onto traditional beliefs that are incompatible with a changing environment. Think about how Easter Islanders slowly destroyed their forests (so slowly that they didn't realize it over generations) to build religious statues, or how the Greenland Norse refused to learn how to fish from native aborigines and instead died in their reliance on livestock because native peoples and fish were dirty according to their early christian beliefs.
Many Christian values, like Intelligent Design and anti-abortion, may have arisen for good reasons such as early explanation of unknown phenomenon and protecting women while growing our population respectively. But now they are out of place. We have proven our evolutionary ties to apes with almost every type of science, especially genetic science. Humans are more genetically related to chimps than chimps are to gorillas and than zebras are to horses. With regards to abortion: we no longer need to grow our society, abortion is safe, and it is the number one cause of crime reduction in the past 20 years (read Freakonomics by Leavitt). Besides, neurologists have proven that no mental activity occurs until killer cells destroy the embryonic stem cells 60 days after conception. The hard evidence that we need to forward scientific progress and allow abortion to succeed as a society in this vastly more competitive world economy should be more important to us as a people than holding onto our religious values, right or wrong.
Why do we hold onto these religious beliefs? First, we don't perceive the long term ramifications of holding onto them. We don't see that our spending time thinking about this nonsense and slowing scientific progress will result in America not keeping pace with the rest of the world and eventually losing our economic vitality. Also, we fear change in our lives away from what we felt were what made us strong and successful in the past. However, what was good in the past is often not good for the future. Again, as Jared Diamond has shown to be the case for so many who have tried to hold on and died out because of it.
This really makes me think that Islamic attacks on America have succeeded in sparking the demise of our societal progress. To be victorious over their attacks on our culture we need to continue our scientific progress away from fundamentalist religious ways - not be more like them by fighting fire with fire and intensifying the hold of religion on our society.
posted by Angelo at 9:15 AM
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