You wrote:
“‘flunk all the IDiots and make room for smart students’ … is clear-cut viewpoint discrimination.”
It’s more than that. The Darwinists know as well as anyone else how little good evidence exists for their current position* – which is much more far-reaching than Darwin’s original position, as their current position posits that the mind, the will, the cosmos, origin of life, you name it, is supposedly governed by Darwinian mechanisms.
They are way overstretched, and my gut tells me that they do not expect to be rescued any time soon.
How to make students swallow it all without protest? The simplest and surest way is to get rid of those who are not going to swallow it. It is from those students that most future ID researchers will be drawn.
By the way, you ID guys’ chief opposition is NOT the high materialist cult. It is the pop cult of the shopping mall.
(BTW, the mall is about consumerism, NOT capitalism; the disbursement of capital, not its accumulation and use.)
I cannot stress properly how important a foe I think the pop cult is. The university is funded by tax money. It couldn’t promote high materialism effectively, unhindered, EXCEPT insofar as pop materialism is the ruling culture.
Almost the only people you can depend on to back you in a pinch are the homeschooler types, NOT because they are fundamentalists but because they have made a big anti-materialist commitment already.**
Oh yeah, and a handful of teachers, truckers, and journalists whose careers have been wrecked because they wouldn’t shut up, maybe – plus a few artists and philosophers and others who think that life is more than pampering the body.
One quick story to explain my case – and then I must run (I do not make a living following the ID controversy): In 1988, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down all laws against abortion, at any age of the baby. Brian Stiller (Mr. Evangelical Canada) organized an emergency speaking tour of evangelical churches – and it was a bust. Assemblies were poorly attended because people were shopping or watching hockey.
The pastors just shrugged. What can you do? People make choices. They are busy. Gay marriage came, and the few who protested were isolated indeed.
One journalist I know was reduced from dozens of papers running his political column to only two who still dared. But through it all, the people who claimed to oppose abortion and gay marriage were at the mall or watching TV.
If you asked their opinion, they would say they were “opposed” but their life patterns, giving patterns, and voting patterns would not support that.
Are Canadians unusually cowardly? Possibly, but based on events in Europe, I think it more likely that we are merely a decade ahead of the US on this curve.
So I agree with you. The uglies who bossed other students around on the campuses of the Sixties are indeed in power now, and age has not mellowed or sweetened them. But that isn’t the problem. The problem is that there is no rising revolution against them, only isolated protest. So Larry Moran could well begin to carry out his threat – and what would be the response? A column by Mike Adams? By Charles Colson? By Jim Dobson?
Bunny, it will take far, far more than that before Moran’s type knows that he is not above the law, justice, or reason.
cheers, Denyse
(*Please, don’t write to tell me that speciation takes a long time. I am sure that is true, … but so? The fact that evidence is difficult to come by is a legitimate excuse, but it is not evidence, and we must ask how long we can reasonably be expected to wait, given that there are alternatives.
**I know a lesbian author/journalist who adopted an abandoned child who backs YOU ID guys, not the Darwinoids. Are you surprised? Remember, it’s not the fundamentalism***, it’s the anti-materialism that is the key. That will be very important to keep in mind as you increasingly move into international waters. – d.)
[P.S.: I did not put what follows in my letter to my friend because I just thought of it now: *** I bet that somewhere in the United States there is a fundamentalist shopping mall, where you can suffocate in Jesus kitsch. In my view, the fundamentalist would be safer and better off at home, reading library books on political theory and philosophy of government. – d. ]