Tuesday, September 15, 2009

On the Front Page

“I commend the West Bend Community Memorial Library Board of Trustees, administration, and staff for their support of the principle of intellectual freedom, and I share the nominator’s awe of their commitment to defend people’s right to read materials of their choosing without arbitrary barriers that prohibit access to information,”
--Michael Zimmer, in a front page article in this morning's Washington County Daily News.

9 comments:

  1. On another page of this morning's Daily News, Leo De Groot offers a "Seek the truth on evolution" slanted critique of Tony Palma's September 8 "There is only science" letter. Tellingly, De Groot mentions science, philosophy, and theology (the study of God) in the same sentence. To him, a theory is a "scientific guess" that lacks proof. A scientific theory is an explanation of facts that has not been disproved thus far. Conversely, creationism has been disproved ad nauseam.

    He points to an innocuous www.allaboutscience.org which actually belongs to All About God Ministries of Colorado Springs, whose CEO, Greg Outlaw, claims that his terminal illness was "miraculously healed through prayer and the reading of God's Word in April of 2001".

    Just as tellingly, the movie "Creation" about Darwin's life, currently opening everywhere else, has not found a US distributor yet. There is a fear that portraying Darwin positively would offend the 61% of Americans who still believe in seven-day creation a short while ago.

    Poor Thomas Paine, poor Al Gore. Little "Common Sense" here, and an "Assault on Reason" indeed.

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  2. I read the "Creation" post on BoingBoing yesterday and it seems it also is just a pretty bad doc and maybe that is the real reason it hasn't found a home yet.

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  3. I saw that letter in the paper, and I'm biting my tongue hard to keep the focus of this blog on censorship, not creationism v. evolution. I formally study the creationism-evolution debate and how groups form and perform identities around the issue. And in spite of all my exposure, I'm always AMAZED at the pastors and politicians who think they're up to a scientific debate on the matter. Individuals, of course, are welcome to their private beliefs. But when it comes to public policy, creationism is an insane attempt by religous fanatics to subordinate science to faith.

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  4. Anonymous, your sources are interesting: BoingBoing by Happy Mutants LLC? If this movie is so poor, why is it opening everywhere on the planet BUT in the U.S.? What would you say if I told you that you cannot buy a Bible because I think it is a dumb old book?

    Non-Censor, I did not mean to shift focus from anti-censorship to anti-religion, but this is still an instance of movie censorship through intimidation by the religious.

    I think that the whole Maziarka debacle is inspired by religion anyway. She rejects homosexuality because the Bible condemns it. It all came from that.

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  5. I will do this only once: I started a blog at http://quetschscafe.blogspot.com/. Please visit.

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  6. Quetsch's last point is one of the reasons I think the creation-evolution debate and anti-gay censorship run in such parallel tracks: they're both motivated by an attempt to impose a certain religious perspective, and the politics that goes with that.

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  7. I was simply saying that maybe the movie is actually bad. Believe me I'm not a creationist! I mean Ishtar opened all over the world too, right? Just sayin'....

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