hell’s handmaiden

Come on, Mark, act like you have some sense. Child rape is not a liberal value and it does not follow from liberal principles. If anything, a better case can be made that abuse, including rape, is a conservative value. It follows from putting one segment of society in subjugation to another, as, for example, a wife to her husband. It is easy enough to find the connections. The Right likes to point to fundamentalist, and certainly not liberal, Islam. Your Christian polygamists aren’t typically liberal, either. Several sites have also compiled lists of Republican sex crime. Look those up if you are inclined, but I don’t feel like making that argument. The truth is closer to the claim that child rape has precious little to do with political affiliation.

One would think that since the ID community has so much invested in the idea that Intelligent Design is not in any way religious, that ID proponents would shy away from religious arguments. That seems to not be the case. Yesterday, I noted that Dembski invoked a Sunday School teacher. Today he invokes a theologian, and, not surprisingly, he invokes a Christian theologian. ID’s veneer of theological neutrality is wearing very thin.

Fr. Martin Hilbert’s article is theology pure and simple. It is not science. Hilbert invokes Papal statements, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Vatican II report, the International Theological Commission, and such like documents. He does not invoke science.

Yes, Bill Dembski, Intelligent Design powerhouse and all around smart guy (who knows better than all the rest of science combined), has opted to let Jerry Bergman, who “teaches Sunday school at a Mennonite church in West Unity, Ohio” and who “is a former lay speaker at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Montpelier, Ohio” speak for ID. Bergman, to be fair, also teaches at Northwest State College in Archbold, Ohio.

Bergman, interestingly, starts his article in Journal Gazzette by stating precisely what ID theorists deny with oaths on their mother’s graves.

Dembski demonstrates once again that he is an incompetent biologist.

He quotes an article, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which concerns the ideas of “Jeffrey Schwartz, a noted anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh and one of a growing group of critics of standard Darwinian theory.” He subtitles the article– titled in the Post-Gazette, “Pitt anthropologist thinks Darwin’s theory needs to evolve on some points”– “Presenting a united front — Evolutionists are finding it more and more difficult”.

Dembski’s wordplay with the title ought to send up some red flags. Schwartz, as is obvious from the original title alone, wants to alter the theory of evolution. Dembski paints it as if the sky is falling.

Well…

… unless one happens to be a Biblical Patriarch, in which case marriage equals one man and several women, or even one man, several women and free use of slave girls called concubines.

Or if one happens to be a legendary Israelite King then marriage equals one man and hundreds of women plus slave girls.

Or if one happens to be a Jew up until the tenth century, marriage could mean one man and several wives.

Much the same held in China for century upon century.