tejek, check this article out. Looks like Christians really are in the majority in this country and Bush has emboldened them to become more active. I know you and others probably don't think this is a good thing, but I do. I think it is about time that a revival of morality reinvigorates this country. I have been complaining for years to my wife that I felt our country was decaying from within due to slackening morals.
It is indeed happening. But what do you think of this?
aaup.org
Some quotes from the link:
The Culture Wars
In his keynote address to the RAPID conference, William Dembski described intelligent design's "dual role as a constructive scientific project and as a means for cultural renaissance." (Emphasis added.) Reflecting a similar revivalist spirit, the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture had been the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture until 2002. Explaining the name change, a spokesperson for the CSC unconvincingly insisted that the old name was simply too long. Significantly, however, the change followed hard on the heels of accusations that the center's real interest was not science but reforming culture along lines favored by conservative Christians.
Such accusations appear extremely plausible, not only in the absence of any scientific research supporting intelligent design, but also in light of Phillip Johnson's claim that "Darwinian evolution is not primarily im-portant as a scientific theory but as a culturally dominant creation story. . . . When there is radical disagreement in a commonwealth about the creation story, the stage is set for intense conflict, the kind . . . known as 'culture war.'" Similarly, the "Wedge Document" states that the goals of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (as it then was) were to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies. To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
For Johnson, the Wedge is waging a Kulturkampf: "We're trying to go into enemy territory . . . [to] blow up the ammunition dump. What is their ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation." The battlefield extends to politics, and the Discovery Institute is politically connected: its president, Bruce Chapman, held positions in the federal government during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and U.S. Representatives John Boehner, Steve Chabot, and Mark Souder and Senators Judd Gregg and Rick Santorum have expressed sympathy for intelligent design. Indeed, Santorum proposed a symbolic "sense of the Senate" amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that tendentiously described evolution as controversial.
Although a vestige of the Santorum language appeared in the conference report, the amendment itself was not included in the legislation that President George W. Bush signed as the No Child Left Behind Act. But proponents of intelligent design and creationists generally construed it as a victory anyway. When the CSC involved itself in a 2003 controversy over the selection of Texas science textbooks, Santorum, Gregg, and Boehner wrote a letter to Bruce Chapman—on congressional stationery—echoing the CSC's interpretation of the amendment. The letter designates Santorum as the amendment's author, but Johnson asserts in his 2002 book, The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning, and Public Debate, that he actually drafted it. Yet he earlier told a reporter, "We definitely aren't looking for some legislation to support our views, or anything like that." |
