An Amoral Morality Play

This is a really really good read (see link below). I particularily like the part where the author discusses evolution, but that's just me, this article is about FAR more than evolution. It's a fairly long but VERY well written article that blends politics with an explanation of why and how the right is attempting to exploit religion to achieve their political aims, and it does so better than most article I have read on the subject.

I particularily think the "sane" religious people out there need to read this article and hopefully begin to understand that they are being played ... played by people who would crassly use a person's faith to achieve a political agenda devoid of any of the values these people actually hold. This is an issue that transcends faith or lack thereof it goes to the very heart of what we in the west stand for.

Ken Ham, who runs a fundamentalist organization called Answers In Genesis, told Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour in a segment broadcast March 28, 2005, "Who was there to see (evolution) happen? Who was there to see life arise from matter? No one. How did they know it happened? It's their belief. Who was there to see the big bang? No one. How did they know it happened? It's their belief."

Except it is not "their belief." Like many theocrats, Mr. Ham ignores or dismisses well-established science. In the case of the big bang, echoes of the universe-creating explosion still rattling around the cosmos can be heard by radio astronomers; the two Bell Laboratory scientists who discovered and proved the big bang happened won a Nobel Prize for their work following intense peer review. Other scientists, measuring the shift of the red scale visible electronically in deep space astronomy, can nearly pinpoint when and where it happened, give or take a thousand years or so.

As for evolution, Mr. Ham's belief is that man was created by God 8,000 years ago, and dismisses the discovery of 40,000-year old bones of early homo sapiens as "theory". But he does not bother to explain how he reconciles this with his new "creationist" museum, where an exhibit suggests that human beings may have been riding domesticated dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Apparently, Mr. Ham's "belief" is that Jurassic Park was just a pre-historic version of the Wild, Wild West.

Still, he is right in one sense: Evolution is a theory. But so is gravity and science proves how, why and where it exists, and how much of it there is across the universe. The speed of light, relativity, cell theory, plate tectonics and a host of other scientific realities are called theories even though they can be measured and proved. Mr. Ham would know this if he would read something other than the Bible once in a while.

[there's more ... READ IT]

IA