A life with no purpose

[dweller]

Darwinism implies that the only eternal life we have is in the recycling of our atoms. I find that comforting
George Monbiot
Tuesday August 16, 2005

All is not lost in America. When George Bush came out a couple of weeks ago in favour of teaching "intelligent design" - the new manifestation of creationism - the press gave him a tremendous kicking. The Christian Taliban have not yet won.

But they are gaining on us. So far there have been legislative attempts in 13 states to have intelligent design added to the school curriculum. In Kansas, Texas and Philadelphia, it already has a foot in the door. In April a new "museum of earth history" opened in Arkansas, which instructs visitors that "dinosaurs and humans did coexist", and that juvenile dinosaurs, though God forgot to mention it, hitched a ride on Noah's Ark. Similar museums are being built in Texas and Kentucky. Some 45% of
Americans, according to a Gallup poll last year, believe that "human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God ... essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago".

And not just in America. Last month Vienna's Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, asserted that "any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science". He appears to have the support of the Pope. Last week the Australian education minister, Brendan Nelson, announced that "if schools also want to present students with intelligent design, I don't have any difficulty with that". In the UK, the headmaster of one of
Tony Blair's new business-sponsored academies claims that evolution is merely a "faith position".

The controversy fascinates me, partly because of its similarity to the dispute about climate change. Like the climate-change deniers, advocates of intelligent design cherry-pick the data that appears to support their case. They ask for evidence, then ignore it when it's presented to them. They invoke a conspiracy to explain the scientific consensus, and are unembarrassed by their own scientific illiteracy. In an article published in the American Chronicle on Friday, the journalist Thomas Dawson asserted
that "all of the vertebrate groups, from fish to mammals, appear at one time", and that if evolution "were true, there would be animal-life fossils of particular animals without vision and others with varying degrees of eye development ... Such fossils do not exist". (The first fish and the first mammals are in fact separated by some 300m years, and the fossil record has more eyes, in all stages of development, than the CIA).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5263262-103677,00.html

dp

[newscott]

1. Kurt Vonnegut once postulated that

human beings are water carriers. Whereever we go, spreading water around.

[Xipe Totec]

2. Everyone brings joy into our world...

Some when they enter it...


...some when they leave.

There is no life without purpose...

[dweller]

3. O nobly-born

when thy body and mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse Of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.
That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.

TBOD

http://www.mystae.com/restricted/reflections/buddha.html

dp

[bemildred]

4. I guess intelligent design is better than stupid design.

But the fact is really complicated stuff is not designed at all, it's grown.

And, if you need a deity to explain us, what explains the deity? Have you really explained anything, or just postponed the explanation enough to pretend you know what is going on?