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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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Thursday, May 05, 2005

I STOPPED GIVING MONEY TO AMERICANS UNITED

for the Separation of Church and State a long time ago.  It seemed to me that they had been “captured” by a radical fringe wishing to expunge any acknowledgement of the Christian God whatever, and I didn’t want to support that.


My mind hasn’t been changed in the years since, as I’ve watched the increasing extremes to which this group will go, along with, admittedly, the numbers of things they do that I can support and even applaud.


Their latest outrageous crusade is at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as reported by HUGH HEWITT in the WEEKLY STANDARD  Americans United (sic) has

leveled a series of very serious charges against almost everyone at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado….Even a cursory review of AU’s “report” reveals it is built on multiple levels of undocumented hearsay.


Actually, it’s even worse than the Weekly Standard article suggests, as HUGH HEWITT.COM reveals.

The column had already been filed when a 2004 graduate of the Academy, who participated in a “Protestant chapel service during Basic Cadet Training” referred to in the document and in a general assembly of all cadets, flatly contradicted one of the most serious charges leveled at Commandant of Cadets General Johnny Weida—that he had developed a “system of code words” for communicated secretly with evangelical Christian cadets (p. 6 of the “report.”)

 


Even some fairly cursory research will convince most folks that AU is off on the wacky side with some of their “investigations”.  Yet I don’t remember a single time that my church (SDA) has warned AU, the membership of the church, or the public at large against the dangers of extremism among the “separation of church and state” crowd.  Contrast that with the constant drumbeats about the threats posed by the Pope, by James Dobson, and always about “The Religious Right”, in this country. 


Is there any room for balance?  Perhaps we should recognize the dangers of radical secularism as well as the “threat” of a coming theocracy…..the signs of the former are all around us, and I still have a hard time finding much evidence of the latter.

Posted by Earl on 05/05 at 09:46 AM
Comments •

Sunday, May 01, 2005

ENTERING THE AGE OF THE CHIMERA…...

Does CHIMERA mean anything to anyone these days…..?  It struck fear into the human heart for a LONG time, and one hopes that it will do the same in the 21st Century!  But, apparently some of us are past that ancient fear:

On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs.

The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab. He can’t wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus’ brain about two months ago.

“It’s mice on a large scale,” Chamberlain says with a shrug.

READ THE REST

What type of hubris is it, when we shrug at the idea of a combination of sheep and human that is no longer an animal with a human body part engineered into it?  Rather we are “progressing” to the point that it is becoming difficult to tell whether it’s really accurate to say that the being before us is a “sheep” at all….....  A line is being crossed here—has anyone read THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH lately?

Posted by Earl on 05/01 at 11:57 AM
Comments •

BACK WITH A BANG!!

I’ve been making and grading exams for the end of the semester for about three weeks, now.  Today was Commencement, and all the seniors marched and got their diplomas.  Now all I have left is the grading of papers written for projects in two classes - will finish and get grades posted by tomorrow (Monday). 

Meanwhile: THIS ITEM is really kind of scary.  If the political culture we see gaining strength in America doesn’t stop with institutions of higher learning and the main-stream media, but moves right on into our science journals…...we’re in even more trouble than it appears.  The Telegraph, a British newspaper carries the story—here are the first couple of paragraphs:

Leading scientific journals ‘are censoring debate on global warming’
By Robert Matthews
(Filed: 01/05/2005)

Two of the world’s leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.

A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.

READ THE REST….  (Hat Tip:  windsofchange.net)

Posted by Earl on 05/01 at 11:18 AM
Science • Environment • Comments •
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