Significant Soundbites
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 6 March 2009
Abstract
Where are the Scientific Voices?
Kenneth Marsalek, president of Washington Area Secular Humanists, in Secular Humanist Bulletin 13:2 is rightly concerned that scientists pander excessively to religious belief. Before he died, Stephen Jay Gould began to sound like a theologian. Carl Sagan hesitated, at his Pale Blue Dot lecture at the Smithsonian, to admit that God has no place in scientific theories. Marsalek commented:
If I were a cynic I might suggest that such discretion is motivated by a desire to keep book royalties flowing. Or, it could be based on a sincere desire to avoid alienating one’s audience to the point of losing them altogether, and then accomplishing nothing. Still, my preference is for more intellectual humanists to come out of the closet.
The religious right have been working towards a new Dark Age for seventy years, and where are the prominent scientists who feel strongly enough about all their lies and deceit to stand up and counter it with something frank and honest? The ones who do are a tiny minority.
Note this. Jerry Falwell Ministries has campaigned to get 35 million Christian right voters registered to influence US election systems. This violates charity law. And this. A closed-door meeting of the Christian Coalition held around 1995 was secretly taped and made public by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. In it, the Coalition founder and chairman, Pat Robertson, outlined a conspiracy to elect federal, state, and local officials. Robertson’s remarks prove that the Christian Coalition was never merely a religious organization, allowing it a 501(c)4 tax-exempt status, but was illicitly a political secret society. The Federal Election Commission has sued the Coalition in the past for contravening its charitable status by coordinating campaigns with Republican candidates in 1990, 1992, and 1994. Robertson bragged that the organization could have the power to select the next president of the United States. Curious that!
Why is there no co-ordinated movement for “Truth” as opposed to the “God’s truth” of the neo-cons and their lunatic leaders.
We have the utter farce of a US President, whose basic humanity is so much in doubt that cartoonists all over the world portray him with simian characteristics, claiming—as a recent book (The Faith of George W Bush, S Mansfield) now reveals—that God chose him! Those who think they are chosen by God are almost uniformly insane, and sufficient proof of it must be that this jungle king had to be appointed by God fiddling the ballot to discount half a million votes. Christians are never daunted by making God into a crook, like themselves. In return for God’s favour, Bush in September 2003, made $60 billion available for religious “charities” who will use much of it for right wing Christian propaganda—more bunkum.
While good men and women just stand by while all this Christian trickery goes on, we can look foward to a return to compulsory self-cooking as a punishment, though it will doubtless be in man-sized microwave ovens to make sure of its efficacy. In the US, organizations like the Campus Freethought Alliance have been opposing the religionists as part of its “Save Our Science” campaign. Scientists, historians, progressives, liberals and anyone appalled by the Christian swindlers ought to take a stance on this while they can. If they do not, it might not be long.
Moses and Exodus
