Recently, an analyst of the Kansas state science standards controversy drew my attention to the fact that “every newspaper in southeast Kansas was against the standards and went out of their way to promote the candidacy of [x’s] opponent and his defeat.”
Yes, I’ll bet. Most media people are liberals. And just as materialism is the organized religion of the school system (and Darwinism its creation story), liberalism – in its modern form – is the social policy arm of materialism.
(That’s why so many litmus tests for liberalism (legal partial birth abortions, stem cell research, euthanasia) attack the uniqueness of humans. It’s not incidental.)
One outcome is the astoundingly ignorant legacy media coverage of “religion” stories. Since the mid-Nineties, I’ve yawned with peers through lots of meetings on the subject but don’t consider the problem resolvable until there is more diversity of ideas and cultural background in the newsroom. But now, on Darwinism in particular, media pros can understand private non-rational dissent (“I just don’t believe it in my wee little heart”), but not public, evidence-based dissent (“In my professional opinion it did not happen that way”).
Actually, it doesn’t even matter to the media materialist whether Darwinism is true. What Darwinism UPHOLDS is seen as true. That is, of course, promissory materialism – the belief that even if the evidence is weak now, we will find strong evidence one day because materialism is true. Lying about or suppressing contrary evidence or persecuting dissenters isn’t a serious problem because materialism is true, and anyone who doesn’t believe it is mad, bad, sad, or stupid.
Two complexities:
– legacy mainstream media are declining steadily in social importance. Declining organizations interpret the march of events as malice aforethought.
Thus, the ID folk can’t just be mistaken; they must be a conspiracy. The same sources never assume that the activists they support (e.g. on global warming) might be a conspiracy. Yet the odds are the same.
– most American Christians/theists/karmics/perennial philosophy types have unintentionally but fully accommodated to materialism. The Christians isolate a little tiny bit of reality called “the Word of God,” or “Scripture,” and announced that it and it alone is divinely inspired … Of course, if there is anything to ID, all of nature must be top down, as George Gilder proposes, not bottom up. In other words, either mind is at the top or matter is. Or, as physicist James Jeans put it, the universe is either a great thought or a great machine (he plumped for the former). So, to accommodate top down thinking, many people who are not hostile to ID must reorient to the whole of reality.
(All this is separate, of course, from the evidence problems of Darwinism. A different materialist theory in biology might be correct. It just won’t be Darwinism.)
Here’s what I told my friend: “If you divert a spring at its source, you change the landscape. Trying to divert it when it is a raging river could get you drowned. Right now, in Kansas, you face a raging river [of materialism]. Also, you are taking on the system right at its heart, the public school system. You might have better luck chipping away at the edges.”
Materialists need the public school system desperately because:
1. Kids are compelled to go there
2. It is paid for by everyone, not just by them.
3. Theirs is the only legal religion there.
And
4. Materialists’ birth rates tend historically to be low , so they ain’t growing them at home.
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