30 September 2012. A Riposte to the Creationists and “Young Earthers”

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Yes… you can believe in an “old” earth… yes… you can believe in theory of evolution… and BE A CHRISTIAN! In fact, the “conflict” between Creation and Evolution is mostly fictive. In fact, what are in contention are Creationism and Evolutionism… two rather different beasts. Evolution’s a modest proposal, at base… organisms change and pass on these changes to their offspring, these mutations can be good or bad. Creation’s equally modest, God is the Unmoved Mover, indeed, but he didn’t deign to tell us the details of it all (nor did He give us a precise timeline for it all).

Creationism is an overly-detailed fairy-tale spread by the ignorant and uneducated terminally-religious, with excessive and unprovable detail. Evolutionism is an overly-detailed fairy tale found amongst the scientifically-ignorant and overly-credulous votaries of scientism. Neither one is overly scientific or theological… both are “mud-pie ideologies”… that is, no grounup can believe in either one. It interesting to note the basic similarities between the Creationist and the Evolutionist (the Evolutionist is more Spencerian than Darwinian, by the way). The Creationist believes that God will swoop in and destroy all those nasty immoral people by sending them all to hell. The Evolutionist believes that religion will die out because mankind will “evolve past that”. In other words, neither one is inclined to effect compromise because they believe that they’ll be the only ones standing at the end of the day. Neither one is scientific… and Evolutionism is less scientific than Creationism is! Evolutionism, stripped of its pseudo-scientific verbiage is an unsupported belief that things and organisms are getting continually better (through a rather nasty Hobbesian war of “all against all”). In fact, Evolutionism is MORE theological than scientific, to wit, it states a thesis, and goes from there, it doesn’t pose a hypothesis… it doesn’t experiment… it doesn’t observe… it doesn’t synthesise. In short, it uses NONE of the components of the Scientific Method.

As for what’s really there, I take a good-sense view… the rocks are 2.5 billion (or whatever) years old… but how they ultimately got there is a mystery, and true scientists don’t know either. They do have hypotheses, but all of them will tell you, “If there’s new evidence, that goes out the window”. Theology and science are companions… BOTH become perverted if the one or the other’s missing. As for the “Young Earthers”… God did make the monkeys first, and if he chose to use them to evolve people, why, that wouldn’t collapse my faith. After all, the beasts do have sentience… not human, of course… science teaches us that. Besides… let everything that breathes praise the Lord… theology teaches us that.

Give this a thought…

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Sunday 30 September 2012

Albany NY

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Church Wants End to Darwin School “Monopoly”

Editor’s Foreword:

There is a solecism in the second sentence that was in the original, so, I had to post it “as is”. Here is the sentence as it stands:

The time has come for the monopoly of Darwinism and the deceptive idea that science in general contradicts religion.

This sentence is a sign of poor and hasty editing… but the Moscow Times is famous for such, that’s why it’s not one of my favoured sources (besides their Neoliberal Corporatist bias, of course). This came in on my Google Alerts twice, so, someone is trying to make a point. Rather snarky, no? They get a Special Big Green Weenie Award…

BMD

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The Russian Orthodox Church (sic) has called for an end to the “monopoly of Darwinism” in schools, saying religious explanations of creation should be taught alongside evolution. “The time has come for the monopoly of Darwinism and the deceptive idea that science in general contradicts religion. These ideas should be left in the past . Darwin’s theory remains a theory. This means it should be taught to children as one of several theories, but children should know of other theories, too”, Archbishop Hilarion said on Wednesday at a lecture to Foreign Ministry officials. The atheist Soviet state used Darwin’s theory of evolution to disprove the biblical teaching that God created the world. The theory, which biologists say gives a verifiable explanation for how life forms develop through natural selection, now dominates in Russian schools, as it does in science teaching in most countries. Hilarion said the theory that one species could evolve into another had never been proven. Children “should know about the religious picture, the creation of the world, which is common to all the monotheistic religions”, he said.

Lyudmila Aleksyeva, a veteran dissident, said Russian liberals would fight any attempt to introduce religious teaching into the classroom, particularly in science. “It’s a dangerous idea, and we will do all we can to stop it”, she said. “We overcame communism as the state ideology, and certain forces want to replace it with Orthodox Christianity”. She said it was unlikely that religious teaching would replace Darwin in the national curriculum, but it could find its way into some schools with enough pressure from the church. Hilarion heads the church’s external relations department. His lecture was dedicated to fighting “fanatical secularism” of liberals hostile to religion and called for dialogue with moderate secularists and cooperation with Catholics against common foes.

10 June 2010

Reuters

As quoted in Moscow Times

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/church-wants-end-to-darwin-school-monopoly/408050.html

Editor’s Note:

There are two expat rags in English in Moscow that are of any consequence, the Moscow News and the Moscow Times. The first hews closer to the Russian reality in reporting the news, whilst the latter kisses the bum of the Western corporatist media machine. You can see that in the post above. It’s not closed down… there’s a free press in Russia. It’s simple… people don’t want to read the Western BS… they read stuff like KP and Pravda (which ain’t your daddy’s Pravda… they reinvented themselves after ’91). I can tell you that this story got NO mention in the Russian press save for a reference in NG (which is not remarkable… they have some people who lean towards the zapadnik position). What the Russian press picked up was Alfeyev shooting down a patriarch-pope confab and the story on inter-Orthodox relations. THIS is why English-speaking konvertsy never “get it”. They get their news from tainted sources, so, does it surprise you that they come to crook conclusions? Ah, yes… let’s have an example of such… there are one million people in the OCA! Paffhausen said so! Bobby K said so! It was on the English side of Pravoslavie.ru! There are two words for anything from a Western corporatist journalist on Russia (and that INCLUDES Sophia Kishkovsky at the International Herald Trib… remember that she’s Lyonyo’s daughter (she didn’t have to be any good, one of Lyonyo’s CFR buddies got her the job, no doubt)!):

CAVEAT LECTOR!

As this post abundantly illustrates, take along your BS-ometer whenever you read Western reportage. Much of it can’t be described any other way. Do remember that Reuters gave crook figures on Russian population decline recently. They DO have an agenda… and it’s anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox (do also note that SVS agrees with this agenda, by the way). Bear that in mind…

BMD