Earlier this week, a fellow named Ed Conrad  posted a message discussing the Ultra Deep Field "hundreds of galaxies" shot that Hubble sent to an astounded world about seven years ago. Conrad is an "Intelligent Design" advocate, and so his premise is essentially, "it’s big, it’s pretty, it’s complicated, I don’t understand it, and therefore God must have done it."

The image is an amazing one. Over a period of several months, technicians had Hubble take thousands of shots of a piece of the sky that, when combined together, covered an area about the same as that of a match head held at arm’s length. The piece of sky in question appeared dark to the naked eye.

What they wound up with was an image that showed hundreds of galaxies, each with billions of stars, each lying on its own plane, different colors, different shapes, different sizes. In that little, "empty" patch of sky lay billions upon billions of stars.

Take, for example, this leading phrase from the website Intelligent Design: "Objectivity results from the use of the scientific method without philosophic or religious assumptions in seeking answers to the question: Where do we come from?"

So, these folks ask, why is debate increasing in the United States?

From the news reports, it’s not hard to imagine a jury giving the guy the death sentence using secular Colorado law. The accused, Robert Harlan, was "convicted in 1995 of kidnaping, raping and murdering Rhonda Maloney, 25." According to the AP article, he also "shot a passer_by who tried to help, leaving her paralyzed."

I reckoned I did. It was a major part of my life in the late sixties and early seventies, and as Putsch careens the nation toward a war in Iraq, it’s starting to become a prominent part of the American psychic landscape once again.

"Sure. What about it?"

"It’s Satanic."

"Say what?"

There was a news item today about some outfit calling itself "Answers in Genesis" announcing plans to build a "museum" in Kentucky called the "Creation Museum and Family Center" which, in the words of the London Guardian, would cost $14 million and would be "dedicated to telling the nation's schoolchildren that God made the world in seven days and that Darwin is a fraud."

Nothing new there. Religious nuttiness is a deep American trait, and there have always been shysters willing and able to pry millions of dollars from gullible viewers for a variety of dubious projects.

8/2/02

(Orig. written in 1995)

I still trip over the relative permanence of the web. I'm a computer net relic from the earliest days of BBSing, when a message lasted a week, or until the "room" the message was posted in reached its maximum new messages (usually 50) and it scrolled out, lost forever.

I got email commenting in some copyright remarks I had made in an essay on Infidels.org. That puzzled me for a few moments, until I remembered that I had written a piece and sent it to them years ago. Was it still on line?

I went and looked, and sure enough, there it was. From 1995, seven years ago. I remember that I was still getting used to the web at that point and wrote this piece rebutting the religious "Contract with the American Family" that the religious right was passing around as a kind of addendum to Newt Gingrich's yet-to-fail "Contract with America". I submitted it to the folks at Infidel.org, and got a dry "very funny" as a reply. To my horror, I discovered that I had sent a copy of the original contract that I was using for reference, rather than my reply to it!

When you deal with the right wing spin machine a lot, it gets pretty easy to tell when the Supine Court is taking up the issue of separation of church and state, whether it be use of public facilities for religious purposes, infringements on religious liberty, or school vouchers.

The religious right, always willing to portray itself as the biggest, meanest, strongest victim on the block, immediately starts a chorus of whines about how liberals and the ACLU "hate Christianity."

Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times reports that a prison in Wisconson has hired a Wiccan as prison chaplain, and the local wowsers are, not surprisingly, blowing their stacks over it.

The Wiccan’s name is Witch. The Reverend Jamyi Witch. As you might have guessed, the name is a professional honorific, and not the name she was born with, but it’s just the sort of thing to take the religiously unstable and send them into whirling, hissing paroxysms of fury and fear.

I got my first hint that a new wrinkle in the right wing hysteria was showing up when a client turned up asking me to edit a screed he had written about Harry Potter.

I thought it would be entertaining, because I knew the guy well, and knew that he was a conspiracy buff, and held some odd religious views. Of course, I regard almost all religious views as odd, and believe the truism that "just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you," so perhaps I’m not the best person to canvass on these sorts of things. But he doesn’t fall into the category of "vile religious bigot" and isn’t given to yammering and drooling over satanic influences.

It’s often said that religion fosters great art. Sometimes that’s true. A visit to the Vatican, or the great Cathedrals of Europe, will show conclusively that the Roman Catholic Church has been the repository and mentor of great art for over a thousand years. Much of the great art in Japan owes its existence to the Shinto faith. Hindu and tribal faiths around the world have produced marvels for the world to marvel at and ponder over.

But religion doesn’t just foster great art. It controls it. We’ll never know how many masterpieces and artists were lost to history because the artists failed to faithfully follow Catholic doctrine. Sometimes it destroys art. England has only a tiny fraction of what had been a collection of religious art to rival that of Rome’s, the rest smashed, burned, ruined in the madness of the Reformation, when Calvinist Protestants wrecked anything that smacked of papism and idolatry. Other religious artifacts, such as the Sphinx, Stonehenge, Ankor Wat, and the heads of Easter Island bear scars, vandalism and scornful graffiti placed on them by offended zealots. Those are the survivors.

With every commentator on the net weighing in on Putsch’s "Faith-Based" scheme, it seems redundant for me to try. After all, what am I going to add that won’t be said several hundreds times in thousands of essays? Not just from my fellow liberals and leftists, but from concerned moderates, old-style conservatives, and even quite a few religious folk who see disaster in the melding of church and state. By now, everyone’s seen the quotes from Jefferson and Adams, seen pundits weigh in on the First Amendment, heard the taunting questions about unpopular religions such as the scientologists and Moon–one of Bush’s biggest supporters, bye the bye. Besides, I already wrote a humor piece on it, speculating on the new "non-religious" nomenclature "faith-based organizations" would have to adopt in order to qualify for federal dollars.

So what could I possibly add that isn’t being said elsewhere? Just this: If we drop the separation of church and state in this mad gambit, it will eventually result in the deaths of millions of Americans.

Don't look now, but a group of Stealth pseudo-Christian wing nuts on the Colorado Board of Education have opened the doors to doing something that has been the dream of many Americans for years: taking that stupid "In God We Trust" off the money.

Now, this may seem like an odd thing for a bunch of rabid theocrats to be doing. After all, isn’t it their goal to claim the free and secular United States as their own private turf?

Well, yes. But...

First there was grass, and acacia trees, and animals with a wide variety of cunning devices for ingesting other animals. Small animals ate the grass, and larger animals ate the smaller animals, and when that disagreed with them, they ate the grass so they could put the smaller animals back where they found them.

It was a state of affairs that seemed to work out. The trick was to reproduce before you were eaten. If you could manage that, your species would survive. If your species survived, that was called "evolution", and if it didn't, that was called "libertarianism". It was a system that caused few complains, since the victors had little to complain about, and the nutrition was no longer in a position to complain.

But then one primate learned to look about, and shout, "the world is not fair!" and the human race began.

If the Christian Coalition want to be on the political stage, they need to realize that they, and their philosophy, will be subject to the same analysis, questioning, and even attacks that any other group, whether it be Libertarian, Liberal, or Environmental, receives.

This means they need to be able to answer such questions as: "What real-world examples do you have that your methods really benefit people?"; "How will you treat people who don't embrace your beliefs?"; and that most popular of political questions, "What's in it for me?"