Evolution N Stuff

If my last post is vitriolic, it's because I see the Democratic Party continuing its terndency to see America's backwardness and ignorance as an opportunity to cravenly surrender.

Maybe the Democrats keep getting their butts smacked because the only games they remember is defense and sacrifice.

The solution to the fact that a very large number of Americans are backward and refuse to vote for a Democrat because of this backwardness is not to try to court these folks based on their backwardness.

The West is in the middle of a war of ideas. It is a war of liberalism and modernity against reaction and backwardness. If we cannot win here in the US, then all is lost. Obviously the solution is not to bomb our domestic Taliban or assassinate our domestic mullahs. That is barbaric and inconceivable. But that was never the liberal plan for this war of ideas.

How do you reach the millions of Americans who think evolution is an evil fiction? Well, try to persuade them that it isn't. Outside of Stephen Jay Gould and a few others, there is little popular nonfiction out there making the case. Try to persuade America that it's better to live in the 21st century, or at least the 20th or second half of the 19th. Is that so crazy?

The Democrats seem to spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to see which constituency they should ditch in order to gain a new one in the middle. They spend a very small amount of energy trying to build constituencies. This has got to stop.

PS. This is part of the reason I write this. Ugh.

Random jot on the Spawn of Lucianne

I know you've probably heard this argument a zillion times because you follow this stuff far more than I do. But it's always seemed to me that one strong motivation for pursuing embryonic stem cell research over less offensive techniques has been simply that it would make abortion "necessary."

That's the editor-at-large for the National Review Online. William F. Buckley must be spinning in his grave.

That might not be the stupidest thing I've read this week if not for the fact that embryonic stem cell research doesn't make abortion necessary. Anyone with a functioning brain knows that reproductive technologies produce extra embryos that aren't going to be used to create new human beings. Only if you're the type of lead paint-addled moron who writes for conservative publications would you confuse, either willfully or out of staggering ignorance, IVF with abortion.

After this Jonah launches into a similarly absurd attack on the supporters of reproductive rights as twisted utopians. He attacks these maniacs for having the temerity to impute anti-modernism to the pro-life movement. Well Go-olly. Maybe if the pro-life movement wasn't dominated by religious fundamentalists whose ideal society is some sort of pre-modern patriarchy he might have a point. This is of course not to tar all opponents of abortion as fanatics. Abortion is an ethically complicated issue.

The logic that allows one to believe the fundamentalist tenets of the prolife movement, including that contraception is a violation of God's will, is the same kind of logic that allows one to believe that the earth is roughly 6,000 years old and that the fossil record is some kind of Satanic hoax.

And you know what, the fact that so many Americans don't believe in evolution might get my attention, but it doesn't mean I'm going to treat these flat-earthers like their position is legitimate. It isn't. It's the triumph of cretinism, not the triumph of faith.

The biblical literalism that compels fundamentalists of all stripes to believe things that aren't so is, itself, a contradiction. Anyone who's read the Bible recognizes the poetry, metaphor, and prophecy that runs through it. I will make no claim as to the holiness of the Holy Bible, but I know that the literal readings of that book are poor readings.

To make a concrete example, take televangelist Jack Van Impe's show of news and end-times prophecy. There is little that separates his willful misreadings of the book of Revelations from readings of Nostradomus' prophecy. Science tells us that human civilization, in the holy lands, no less, dates to at least 7,000 years ago. If a bunch of nincompoops, even if it is millions of them, has a problem with that, or, like Van Impe, thinks COMPUTER = 666, that's their problem, not mine.