----- Original Message ----- From: <kjkhoo at softhome.net>
I think one can live with the 37% of divinely-guided evolution -- it's at least indicative of a willingness to accept current knowledge, while holding on to a religious belief.
And actually, you can't blame them either. So many of the nature programmes, the popularisations, present nature as if it had some design and intentionality, that things are the way they are today because of fulfilling some goal. And it's easier to wrap one's head around an ordered complexity from a grand design, than of one emerging out of the randomness of differential survival.
Moreover, belief in a divinely-guided evolution is fully compatible with a respectful relationship with the environment and with the idea of stewardship.
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"Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas."
"But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation...His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection." [Einstein]
It is this notion that is the tacit aesthetic of the producers/directors/cinematographers of so many nature programs. In a certain sense they feel charged with the project of undoing the sacred/secular binary that constitutes so many antagonisms regarding religious sensibilities in the USA today. That's why they [and we] love the photos of the birds on the backs of hippos in mudholes and rhinos etc.; nature as ultimately benign despite the existence of lions, cancer etc.
>
It's more than time to take an aggressive stand on values -- our
values vs their values, and our practices vs their practices. The
religious right has been allowed to get away with the good slogans:
who is not pro-life, or for moral values, against which pro-choice
begins to sounds mean and narcissistic.
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Well I hope aggressive is metaphorical because it's precisely the problem of aggression in all "it's" multidimensional/multicontextual complexity that is an immense problem in human life; else what are we anti-war for?
Against their "trustworthy", there's not only the fact of lies and the practice of systematic lying, of corporate sleaze and corruption, but we have the "caring for people" (those listing this as a central quality voted 3:1 for Kerry).
Against their "family values" is the fact of their divorcing in similar proportions as everyone else, which no manner of rationalisations about the "godless" "fornicators" and "co-habitors" can erase. There are their teen pregnancies in about the same or higher proportion than the secularists, controlling for race.
kj khoo
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Um..........yup.