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Friday, August 05, 2005

Oh Man, Why Does He Say This Kind Of Stuff?

Ugh! He’s killing us! Killing us, we tell you!

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President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

Why do let him go unscripted like this? What could this possibly get us? Solidify the base? What does he need that for? All this does is make it more difficult to prosecute his agenda, including The War.

Ironically, Kid Various agrees with the President that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. The theories of Evolution and Intelligent Design should be taught together side by side so that high school kids can be trained to think critically and understand science from retrograde quackery.

This is important because, despite all the cries of unrestrained horror from the left in the U.S., the sad fact is that 90% or more of all Americans believe in stupid stuff. Sure, you lefties laugh at the primitive Christian belief systems of the President, but how many uncounted of you believe in a “goddess earth mother,” Native American “wisdom,” some form Eastern mysticism or some other ill defined concept of “spirituality?”

Not to even get into ghosts, reincarnation, alien visitation, Elvis, angels and “alternative” medicine.

It’s all unreconstructed BULLSHIT.

And people have to be taught to distinguish science from bullshit. Because our natural tendency is to believe in superstitious nonsense. That’s inbred in millions of years of evolution that allowed us to make survival decisions before we had access to reason and logic. Now that we have developed a forebrain big enough to give us the capability to understand linear time and cause & effect, we can deduce the inner workings of the universe through reason.

And reason is in short supply in America (though, in greater supply than in the rest of the world – trust The Kid on this one.)

Intelligent Design is not science. To quote the National Academy of Sciences (via the wikipedia)

intelligent design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because their claims cannot be tested by experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own, instead they find gaps within current evolutionary theory and fill them in with speculative beliefs. The scientific community does not recognise ID as a scientific theory and considers it to be creationist pseudoscience. Both the Intelligent Design concept and the associated movement have come under considerable criticism.

It’s not falsifiable. It’s not testable. All it does is say “Evolution has not given a complete picture of the creation of life. Therefore, it is deficient. There are mysteries left. We think those mysteries are best explained by the presence of a ‘Creator’”

The “Creator” could be God… could be aliens from Alpha Centauri.

Given the looks of ID’s proponents, Kid Various is betting they’re thinking of a white man with a flowing beard and robes.

And so, once again The President stirs up a hornet’s nest for no good reason. And as Carl Zimmer asks (a son of a Republican Congressman to boot!)

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and even the Department of Energy have all decided that evolution is a cornerstone to advances in our understanding of diseases, the environment, and even biotechnology. They have found no such value in Intelligent Design. Are they wrong? Can you tell us why?

3 Comments:

At Monday, August 15, 2005 at 4:06:00 AM EDT, Blogger AlanDownunder said...

Why do let him go unscripted like this?

This IS his script. Has been since the 2000 campaign at least.

See from here -
Another is the statement of Texas Governor George Bush, who last week in New Orleans declared, "I believe children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started." Bush campaign spokesperson Minday Tucker followed up, saying "He (Bush) believes both creationism and evolution ought to be taught. He believes it is a question for states and local school boards to decide but he believes both ought to be taught."

There are more votes to be had from believers than there are to be had from thinkers. It's a USA kind of thing. We're talking here about the most stupid allegedly first-world nation on the planet.

Note in the above link that Gore also felt constrained to humor the US of Idiots.

You guys either have a big problem or are a big problem. (from a foreign POV, both)

 
At Sunday, August 21, 2005 at 6:54:00 PM EDT, Blogger melior said...

Seriously, this is the first you've noticed?

You must have been sleeping through the climate change denials, Terri Schiavo delusions, stem cell preservation concerns, and the numerous other instances of anti-science idiocy from the Bush camp.

 
At Wednesday, October 19, 2005 at 9:04:00 PM EDT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It always helps to check several places. Like this one ohio law

 

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