Why I support Kenneth R. Miller in the One Big Argument.

Having now completed reading Kenneth R. Millers Only a Theory
I will explain why I support his position in this debate and why he should be listened too.

What impressed me was his two prong attack on the Creationists and Intelligent Design:

• The evidence that contradicts the claims of ID and Creationism, such that there are no claims that stand up under even the minimum scrutiny.
• His support of Religion, even as a Evolutionary Biologist who is a practicing Roman Catholic. I am not a Catholic, however his position is one I take up against the New Atheists.

If you have ever wandered whether the Carbon Dating method is correct and why it is so, the all you need to do is read his essay in Science and Creationism, Ashley Montagu, 1984, OUP, p18 – 63, where he covers the Carbon 14 method first and its assumptions and then explains how it is supported by the Rubidium to Strontium decay, and therefore the C14 assumptions are verified. All because the various relative quantities between the three Strontium isotopes and Rubidium are constant and can be consistently mapped. He does this with a demonstration. It clears up the question for me with bells on and should be the gold standard for debating these Creationists.

Then we move on to Only A Theory where he covers a number of the more alleged objections from the more recent Intelligent Design crowd. They are:

• Bacterial Flagella:
• Information, The Conservation and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
• Predictions concerning Man (Homo Sapiens) relationship to Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodyte Troglodyte).
• The Human Globin Gene.

The lies and plagiarism of the ID set has really shown how bankrupt they are, and they all need to be held to account just like the hapless souls in Dover Pennsylvania who tried to introduce creationism in a public school, Dover Area High School, and denied and lied to a Federal Court Judge.  Such things are unchristian to say the least, after all, bearing false witness is a sin mentioned in the Ten Commandments.

In todays Australian is the front page article above the fold AFP admits there was no evidence against Haneef.

After beinf deported in disgrace by the Howard Government under alledged secret evidence from the AFP it has finally turned out that Mr. Keelty (Chief Cocky at the AFP) posted an announcement during Obama’s acceptance speech, that the case had no evidence.  I just wander if they will ever apologise to him and his family now in India.  Dr. Haneef is a Medical man and a very tenuous guilt by association case was launched aginst him which the former HowardGovernment swallowed hook line and sinker.  This only demonstrates that during the post 911 Australia under Deputy Sherrif Johnny Howard there was no checks and balances on the National Security apparatice and responsible Ministers of State.

Have any changes been made by the new Kevin Rudd Federal Government I don’t know, I would like to think that a Labor Government with a more soially responsible outlook on affairs would consider such Fascist behaviour by the security forces as unacceptable.  It is almost as if John Howard had successfully conducted a campaign to convince anyone whowishes to come here that they risk being harrassed and arrested for no good reason.  Hopefully that will change as the off shore detention centers are closing and reason is prevailling we can move on to a more responsible and democratic Australia.

One thing I have noted from visitors to this great land is their ignorance of a number of things that define Australia.  The first is the nature and unforgiving terror of the wilderness that makes up a good 80% of the interior.  The heat and emptiness is legendary, and travelling with just a days supply of water and food is plain stupid.  From time to time rtescue missions are conducted to find lost tourists, and it helps that they left their journey plans with someone in authority and kept to them.

Secondly, below the fold is an article by John Pilger explaining our position in the Western World and what our neighbours and anyone else should know.  We do think we can intervene in our neighbours affairs and stay as long as needed, which we of course define.  Pay attention, we are very much part of the US/UK nexus, which is good for us, but maybe not you.

Australia’s Hidden Empire March 05, 2008 By John Pilger

When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to venerable clichs of innocence – cricket, leaping marsupials, endless sunshine, no worries. Australian governments actively encourage this. Witness the recent “G’Day USA” campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman sought to persuade Americans that, unlike the empire’s problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under. After all, George W Bush had ordained the previous Australian prime minister, John Howard, “sheriff of Asia”.

That Australia runs its own empire is unmentionable; yet it stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to the ancient hinterlands of the continent and across the Arafura Sea and the South Pacific. When the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to the Aboriginal people on 13 February, he was acknowledging this. As for the apology itself, the Sydney Morning Herald accurately described it as a “piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away . . . in a way that responds to some of its own supporters’ emotional needs, yet changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre.”

Like the conquest of the Native Americans, the decimation of Aboriginal Australia laid the foundation of Australia’s empire. The land was taken and many of its people were removed and impoverished or wiped out. For their descendants, untouched by the tsunami of sentimentality that accompanied Rudd’s apology, little has changed. In the Northern Territory’s great expanse known as Utopia, people live without sanitation, running water, rubbish collection, decent housing and decent health. This is typical. In the community of Mulga Bore, the water fountains in the Aboriginal school have run dry and the only water left is contaminated. Throughout Aboriginal Australia, epidemics of gastroenteritis and rheumatic fever are as common as they were in the slums of 19th-century England. Aboriginal health, says the World Health Organisation, lags almost a hundred years behind that of white Australia. This is the only developed nation on a United Nations “shame list” of countries that have not eradicated trachoma, an entirely preventable disease that blinds Aboriginal children. Sri Lanka has beaten the disease, but not rich Australia. On 25 February, a coroner’s inquiry into the deaths in outback towns of 22 Aboriginal people, some of whom had hanged themselves, found they were trying to escape their “appalling lives”.

Most white Australians rarely see this third world in their own country. What they call here “public intellectuals” prefer to argue over whether the past happened, and to blame its horrors on the present-day victims. Their mantra that Aboriginal infrastructure and welfare spending provide “a black hole for public money” is racist, false and craven. Hundreds of millions of dollars that Australian governments claim they spend are never spent, or end up in projects for white people. It is estimated that the legal action mounted by white interests, including federal and state governments, contesting Aboriginal native title claims alone covers several billion dollars. Smear is commonly deployed as a distraction. In 2006, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s leading current affairs programme, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of “sex slavery” among the Mutitjulu Aboriginal people. The source, described as an “anonymous youth worker”, was exposed as a federal government official, whose “evidence” was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and police. Lateline never retracted its allegations. Within a year, Prime Minister John Howard had declared a “national emergency” and sent the army, police and “business managers” into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. A commissioned study on Aboriginal children was cited; and “protecting the children” became the media cry – just as it had more than half a century ago when children were kidnapped by white welfare authorities. One of the authors of the study, Pat Anderson, complained: “There is no relationship between the emergency powers and what’s in our report.” His research had concentrated on the effects of slum housing on children. Few now listened to him. Kevin Rudd, as opposition leader, supported the “intervention” and has maintained it as prime minister. Welfare payments are “quarantined” and people controlled and patronised in the colonial way. To justify this, the mostly Murdoch-owned capital-city press has published a relentlessly one-dimensional picture of Aboriginal degradation. No one denies that alcoholism and child abuse exist, as they do in white Australia, but no quarantine operates there.

The Northern Territory is where Aboriginal people have had comprehensive land rights longer than anywhere else, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. The Howard government set about clawing them back. The territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, including huge deposits of uranium on Aboriginal land. The number of companies licensed to explore for uranium has doubled to 80. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the American giant Halliburton, built the railway from Adelaide to Darwin, which runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world’s largest low-grade uranium mine. Last year, the Howard government appropriated Aboriginal land near Tennant Creek, where it intends to store the radioactive waste. “The land-grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse,” says the internationally acclaimed Australian scientist and actvist Helen Caldicott, “but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump.”

This “top end” of Australia borders the Arafura and Timor Seas, across from the Indonesian archipelago. One of the world’s great submarine oil and gas deposits lies off East Timor. In 1975, Australia’s then ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, who had been tipped off about the coming Indonesian invasion of then Portuguese East Timor, secretly recommended to Canberra that Australia turn a blind eye to it, noting that the seabed riches “could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia . . . than with [an independent] Timor”. Gareth Evans, later foreign minister, described a prize worth “zillions of dollars”. He ensured that Australia distinguish itself as one of the few countries to recognise General Suharto’s bloody occupation, in which 200,000 East Timorese lost their lives.

When eventually, in 1999, East Timor won its independence, the Howard government set out to manoeuvre the East Timorese out of their proper share of the oil and gas revenue by unilaterally changing the maritime boundary and withdrawing from World Court jurisdiction in maritime disputes. This would have denied desperately needed revenue to the new country, stricken from its years of brutal occupation. However, East Timor’s then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, leader of the majority Fretilin party, proved more than a match for Canberra and especially its bullying foreign minister, Alexander Downer.

Alkatiri demonstrated that he was a nationalist who believed East Timor’s resource wealth should be the property of the state, so that the nation did not fall into debt to the World Bank. He also believed that women should have equal opportunity, and that health care and education should be universal. “I am against rich men feasting behind closed doors,” he said. For this, he was caricatured as a communist by his opponents, notably the president, Xanana Gusmo, and the then foreign minister, Jos Ramos-Horta, both close to the Australian political Establishment. When a group of disgruntled soldiers rebelled against Alkatiri’s government in 2006, Australia readily accepted an “invitation” to send troops to East Timor. “Australia,” wrote Paul Kelly in Murdoch’s Australian, “is operating as a regional power or a potential hegemon that shapes security and political outcomes. This language is unpalatable to many. Yet it is the reality. It is new, experimental territory for Australia.”

A mendacious campaign against the “corrupt” Alkatiri was mounted in the Australian media, reminiscent of the coup by media that briefly toppled Hugo Chvez in Venezuela. Like the US soldiers who ignored looters on the streets of Baghdad, Australian soldiers stood by while armed rioters terrorised people, burned their homes and attacked churches. The rebel leader Alfredo Reinado, a murderous thug trained in Australia, was elevated to folk hero. Under this pressure, the democratically elected Alkatiri was forced from office and East Timor was declared a “failed state” by Australia’s legion of security academics and journalistic parrots concerned with the “arc of instability” to the north, an instability they supported as long as the genocidal Suharto was in charge.

Paradoxically, on 11 February, Ramos-Horta and Gusmo came to grief as they tried to do a deal with Reinado in order to subdue him. His rebels turned on them both, leaving Ramos-Horta critically wounded and Reinado himself dead. From Canberra, Prime Minister Rudd announced the despatch of more Australian “peacemakers”. In the same week, the World Food Programme disclosed that the children of resource-rich East Timor were slowly starving, with more than 42 per cent of under-fives seriously underweight – a statistic which corresponds to that of Aboriginal children in “failed” communities that also occupy an abundant natural resource.

Australia is engaged in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, where its troops and federal police have dealt with “breakdowns in law and order” that are “depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities”. A former senior Australian intelligence officer calls these “wild societies for which intervention represents a blunt, but necessary instrument”. Australia is also entrenched in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rudd’s electoral promise to withdraw from the “coalition of the willing” does not include almost half of Australia’s troops in Iraq. At last year’s conference of the American-Australian Leadership Dialogue – an annual event designed to unite the foreign policies of the two countries, but in reality an opportunity for the Australian elite to express its historic servility to great power – Rudd was in unusually oratorical style. “It is time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” he said, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world . . . I look forward to more than working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom, in bringing about long-term changes to the planet.” The new sheriff for Asia had spoken.

www.johnpilger.com

I have now decided to be on Kenneth Millers side after reading his latest Only a Theory, which has given his view as an evolutionary biologist and a practicing Catholic.  He has covered evolutionary explanations for so many creationist themes I highly recommend his book if you need the explanations in a readable format like I do.  It covers the nonsense from Ken Ham (not the astronaut), Dembski, Behe, to nominate three of the anti-evolutionists.

The understanding of Genesis as a creation myth rather than a true story to be understood literally is one of the fights amongst religionists, and I feel such threats to such people should be considered unchristian.  They need to understand this too.  Science is explaining how the world was created not why.  Those who are the New Atheists need to back off a bit, however they too are getting death threats from so called Christians and remember the Dover School Board, after voting the creationists from the School Board were told they shouldn’t pray for assistance from the Almighty because they have rejected God by a prominent Christian Politician.  How hypocritical was that after a court case found that the creationists (Bonsell, Buckingham et al) were lying.

The Religions in the US should be teaching their congregations to support the Constitution and not knocking it down.  The Dominionists are trying to turn the US into a Theocratic state, resembling Fascism and Nazism of the past that my ancestors fought a world war to prevent.  This goal will result in any non-conformists from their definition being named Heretics and we know what happened when governments enforced religion in the past.  The trouble is we are not learning from history on many levels, not just the one under discussion here.

So if your public school is teaching religion, not just creationism in science class, but every thing including prayers at assembly, then contact the ACLU and find others of the same concern in your community.  This is not just about one thing, it is about freedom to practice your religion without being forced by others through the Government and their schools.

With the Louisiana decision to promote Intelligent Design (a particular form defined by the Discovery Institute) I have bought a book from Amazon and read it straight away, which is unusual for me J.  I found “The Devil in Dover”, both informative and concerning.  Lauri Lebo, the author and resident of the area where the events took place gives us a very personal and detailed account of how the Fundamentalist Christian Creationists brought shame and expenses to the Dover Pennsylvania School Board, as well as personal heartache and stress.

Watching “Judgment Day” and “Flock of Dodos” is not enough, after Lebo there is a satisfaction that we can understand both sides of the Kitzmiller et al vs. Dover Area School District in the narrative Lebo gives us and we end up with a deeper understanding of the effects on both sides of this case.  From Lauri Lebo herself to the two who started the whole thing, William Buckingham and Alan Bonsell.

The invitation to the Discovery Institute and the Thomas More Law Centre for the Defendants, The ACLU and the Pepper Hamilton LLP for the Complainants.  The battle lines were drawn by a thorough research on one side and a lazy attitude to research on the other.  An example was Barbara Forrest’s testimony, the amount of work she and her associates did on the Of Pandas and People book was a detectives nightmare, yet they persisted with the tenacity only someone who understands science could do.  This sort of dedication to their case was not evident in their testimony, in fact they managed to contradict and show their lying.  Which must have been embarrassing for they were claiming to be followers of Jesus Christ!!

Buckingham’s health became an issue unfortunately and his addiction to a prescription drug became evidence about his inability to remember what happened.  Bonsell just failed any test given him, remaining ignorant about the costs to the School Board he had personally caused due to this whole Creationist nonsense.

I will be interested to see a legal discussion and commentary on this case, from one of the prosecutors, as their comments in “Judgment Day” were incisive and interesting.  The case is a primary reference on the subject of the “Wall of Separation” that is guaranteed in the US Constitution, something I would like to see here after John Howards attempts to introduce Religious Counseling in Schools.

In the US the influence of the Fundamentalist Christian Evangelical people is built into the current Government of George W Bush, in the Military and within State Republican Parties.  For example, an anti-evolution statement is in the Texas Republican Party Platform, so we can expect trouble there, and guess what, yes, it has happened.  More about that later perhaps.  What about Florida and Louisiana?

Or, Nonsense and Perfidy amongst Christians and Atheists.

I have become rather animated about a number of things that have happened this week last as I have listened to podcasts of radio shows from the US and Blogs and Commentaries both from the Internet, which tend to get to me before News Limited decide to publish in the Australian newspaper here in Australia, aka., Terra Australis Incognita.

We are all familiar by now about Mitt Romney’s problems with the anti-Mormon nature of his opposition from within the Republican Party, particularly, the so called, Christian Right.  The speech he gave some time ago where he quoted Brigham Young, one time leader of my and Mitt Romney’s Church.  Whatever Mitt quoted BY saying is irrelevant, because the response was acidic.  The argument being, that given Mitt Romney gave a quote from BY (from over a hundred years ago, then some other statement from this Great Man (BY) yet flawed Prophet is relevant.  This, of course is nonsense, unrelated to his speech that day defending his Mormon heritage, one I might add, is honorable and he is justifiably proud of, and a reasonable effort to answer his critics.

From this vantage point it looks like the critics had nothing to hook on except a past that did not include the candidate directly.  It looks absurd and irrational.

So weeks went by and I am busy listening to radio shows and Internet audio blogs when my attention was caught by KCRW’s “Left, Right and Centre” commentary on the weeks political events.  Obama on Race, Iraq Five Years Later, Obama Speaks, with a date last Friday, 21, March, 2008. Here a temporary replacement for Robert Shier (Truthdig.com) Lawrence O’Donnell started a train of discussion on Obama’s Pastor in Chicago and some statement related to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s opposition to US Foreign Policy and how Reverend Wright  is ashamed of it, and saying something like “God damn America” for these foreign Imperial escapades by the US.

Arianna Huffington, and Tony Blankley with Matt Miller made up the team.  However it was Lawrence O’Donnell’s foray into Mitt Romney’s Faith Speech that topped the cake.

Today’s generations of Americans have always known religious liberty. Perhaps we forget the long and arduous path our nation’s forbearers took to achieve it. They came here from England to seek freedom of religion. But upon finding it for themselves, they at first denied it to others. Because of their diverse beliefs, Ann Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay, a banished Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, and two centuries later, Brigham Young set out for the West. Americans were unable to accommodate their commitment to their own faith with an appreciation for the convictions of others to different faiths. In this, they were very much like those of the European nations they had left.

Here Romney is telling our story and how it relates to others of the American Foundation, Mormons experienced religious bigotry and intolerance and ended up with an assassinated Prophet and a move to found a Deseret State outside the Union at the time.  Of course Utah was established later.

The point I can’t understand is why Mitt Romney, because he invoked Brigham Young is therefore responsible for everything the man said in his prolific and verbose life as Prophet, Governor of an ostracized people.  I wouldn’t expect Barack Obama to be personally responsible for what Pastor Reverend Wright said some other time than Mitt Romney on what Brigham Young said 100 years ago or so.  I’m sure we could extract in appropriate material from many sources in Religion, these people are human after all.

I don’t want to say anymore for fear of upsetting the reader, but you get my drift I hope.  Barack Obama is not Pastor Wright and Mitt Romney is not Brigham Young.  Where did Lawrence O’Donnell get his education?

The Prime Minister John Howard MP has stated after the APEC Leaders Meeting which locked off a section of Sydney Last week:

It’s about the future of the country and it is about what I can offer,…….And whether I’m 68 or 48, that’s immaterial.”

So we have to wait another two weeks at least, with the Liberal Party back room boys trying to figure ways to boost their sagging poll ratings.  The APEC Summit failed to boost his ratings and if an election were held today the Labor Party would be returned with an absolute majority in both houses, a landslide by definition.

Two weeks, well, there is possible that another fear campaign can be dreamed up for the gullible and ignorant, myself , I am getting tired of the fear and detention without trial and the frequent unsuccessful prosecutions that have come to pass under John Howard MP PM.

Recently our erstwhile Defence Minister admitted that OIL was one of the strategic reasons for Australia being in the mess now in IRAQ. Very little has been said about it, as if silence will make the facts go away.

How long this conflict will continue or if or when Iran will join in and Saudi Arabia disintegrate into Wahhabbi Sunni Fighting as the Caliphate is being set up. Why do we need to be there? To hold Uncle Sam’s hand in this adventure seems to be the only reason. After all, Iraq wasn’t a threat to Australia or the US despite the Rhetoric coming out of Canberra and Washington DC.

Someday the truth will out but when is the question, I personally am getting impatient:)