Leaving ID theorists with a blank slate to deal with, instead of a horde of bawling trolls?
In “Of Course: NYT Editor Suddenly Very Interested in Candidates’ Churches” (Townhall , August 25, 2011 ), Guy Benson notes,
We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.
Rick Santorum? He’s a member of the oldest, biggest, and most bureaucratic institution on Earth: The Roman Catholic Church:
No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. More.
Yeah. How revolutionary can you get?
Mark Oppenheimer’s NYT column on Frank Beckwith (the Synthese affair) was an unusual example of journalism – as opposed to a dying establishment’s propaganda – the normal NYT fare.
No one believes it any more, but we do need to know is how the latest policy apocalypse might affect us.
But note Oppenheimer’s premise: ID types had caused all the trouble.
No, they hadn’t.
Beckwith was not an ID theorist. A Darwinist prof labelled him as such, even though she had every reason to be in full possession of the facts of the case. Any resulting setback to the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby was nothing more or less than a man’s efforts to defend his actual views. But Oppenheimer could not have just written that. As a Times salaryman, he had to pretend that ID guys had somehow caused the problem that the Darwin lobby created for itself.
Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury, one of many Canuck bloggers that officialdom may never quite succeed in shutting down. Hand to South!