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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (28225)	9/8/2006 1:30:39 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541235

True, there are some right wing Libertarians who are correctly aghast at such nonsense, (George Will comes to mind), but most either agree, or wisely stay silent, which IMO amounts to the same thing. I find the idea that most agree to be not just wrong but very wrong. I also don't thinking remaining silent does amount to the same thing. Each person has a limited amount of time, energy, money, etc. to deal with the issues in their lives. Only some of that will go to political issues, and most of that will go towards the issues they care most about. Caring more about other issues besides ID is not the same thing as being a supporter of ID, you could just as easily turn things around. A supporter of ID could talk about how some person makes no effort to support ID so he must be an opponent, or at least his actions amount to the same thing. From either side I find such thinking to be quite unreasonable. AEI is not a big proponent of ID, or generally a religious right organization. I'm not saying it never says anything in support of ID. Certainly some of its members and even prominent members do support ID (or talk about having "balance" between ID and evolution, which might reasonably be considered almost the same thing) but ID really isn't their cause. They do push some "cultural conservatism" for example this ( aei.org )list of 11 important issues includes "3. Keep God in the Pledge.", but the pledge isn't ID. And the majority of there articles and campaigns aren't about such issues. Their front page is all about economic and national security. Searching for the exact phrase "Intelligent Design" on AEI.org only resulted in 13 hits out of the thousands of articles, columns and events listed on their site, and none from 2006. Also they aren't all in support of ID, some are actually directly opposed to it )for and example see below), while others aren't really about ID, or are just announcements about debates on the issue, or more wide ranging discussions about religion and government that happen to mention ID. --- "When a federal judge in Pennsylvania struck down the efforts of a local school board to teach "intelligent design," he rightly criticized the wholly unscientific nature of that enterprise. Some people will disagree with his view, arguing that evolution is a "theory" and intelligent design is a "theory," so students should look at both theories. But this view confuses the meaning of the word "theory." In science, a theory states a relationship between two or more things (scientists like to call them "variables") that can be tested by factual observations. We have a "theory of gravity" that predicts the speed at which two objects will fall toward one another, the path on which a satellite must travel if it is to maintain a constant distance from the earth, and the position that a moon will keep with respect to its associated planet. This theory has been tested rigorously, so much so that we can now launch a satellite and know exactly where it must be in space in order to keep it rotating around the earth. It was not always that way. From classical times to the Middle Ages, many important thinkers thought that the speed with which an object falls toward the earth will depend on its weight. We now know that this view is false. In a vacuum, the two objects will fall at the same speed and, thanks to Newton, we know the formula with which to calculate that speed." aei.org