Being the Change I Wish to See

Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species and the man who discovered evolution and wrote the scientific doctrine of it, was extremely torn between his faith and love for his wife and the factual science he learned from his many years of study of the data and samples he collected on his 5 year journey on the HMS Beagle. He didn’t publish his book until after his wife’s death because she believed fundamentally in the Bible stories of creation, and they were the underpinnings of her faith.

We now know that evolution is more than a theory and has been studied thoroughly for more than 150 years. In 150 years, no one has found any defensible evidence that disproves Darwin’s theory of evolution. People have attempted to make up evidence, but none has been found using the scientific method.

No one bought “Creation” to distribute and show in U.S. theaters because they thought there might be right-wing backlash? Schools take backlash for teaching evolution all the time. Theaters can’t risk a little backlash, even in progressive cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco or LA? Wussies. Since when did the art world become noncontroversial?

Rachel’s point is a vitally important one. What does this attitude mean for the U.S. long-term? Has America decided facts are no longer important? The Republicans surely seem to have decided that over the past 8-9 years. By deciding that the study of facts and rational thought are not important, where will that lead the country 20-30 years from now? Will there once again be only 4 elements instead of 118? Will medicine devolve into the study of the humors (blood, bile, phlegm) again? This fact-free attitude scares me, too.

But it doesn’t scare me too much because the people who spout the vitriol about Darwin and evolution being the truth are a very noisy, but rather small minority of Americans. The problem is we have a silent majority. The majority needs to stand up, shout out the facts and drown out the wing-nuts once in a while. The loud minority seems to live within their own little world so much that they don’t know a much bigger world that vastly outnumbers them is out here.

I don’t believe that the majority of mainstream Americans disregard facts. A fair number of Americans either don’t believe evolution is the factual explanation or aren’t sure. If you add those two groups together, the result is larger than the number who believe it is the truth, making them the minority. But most of the people who aren’t sure say so because they haven’t studied biology and admit they aren’t sure because they don’t know the facts.

I don’t believe there will be fewer scientists in the future, there will probably be more. Schools today focus a lot harder on teaching 4 maths and 4 sciences in high school, algebra 1 & 2, geometry, advanced math, physical science, biology, chemistry and physics. Four English classes are also required now. In my generation, 1-2 sciences, 2 maths and 3 English courses were required if you weren’t college bound. Most students today are college bound, even if it’s a 2-year associate degree from a community college. Colleges are still filling up with young minds desiring lots of facts and hard, rational thought.

Even Catholic schools today teach evolution as the facts in biology and leave Biblical creation in religion class. Some southern Baptist preachers have stopped insisting the Bible’s creation stories are facts. They are stories that were told to primitive, semi-nomadic people to explain things they couldn’t understand. What do we do when we don’t understand something? We either ignore it or we make up stories to tell ourselves that make some sort of sense to us.

Understanding the real mechanisms (processes) of how the universe came to be, understanding the human body and modern medicine, and understanding and delving deeper into chemistry and physics in no way means one can’t still have deep faith in God. As a scientist myself, I believe God is much bigger, more complex and much harder to fathom than He was before modern science. It doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist. Personally, I believe God created the big bang and evolution. I never bought the “poof” theory of the Bible creation stories. Nothing on this planet or in the universe that we have studied happens without a process.

But going as far as not showing a movie in the U.S. about the writer of the Theory of Evolution and his dilemma between his faith and the facts he couldn’t ignore? Ridiculous!

Hopefully, “Creation” will be available for rent or purchase on DVD…

Technorati Tags: choosing to ignore facts, Creation the movie, creationism v evolution, Darwin, facts v fact-freedom

written by joubess \\ tags: choosing to ignore facts, Creation the movie, creationism v evolution, Darwin, facts v fact-freedom

I had no idea this project existed, but The National Priorities Project celebrated their 25th anniversary in October 2008.

Here is a 12 minute video about the project and those who work on it:

America’s priorities are made very clear and very real by how our government spends the money we pay in taxes. NPP follows that money all the way to the local level. If we don’t have a handle on where the money is going and what it means in human terms, we can’t change the nation’s priorities.

To most of us, the federal budget is so huge it’s like Monopoly money. The amounts are unfathomable. If we break those numbers down into chunks we can swallow, we can understand how they effect our lives. We can only change the nation’s priorities when we get the people involved on a grass roots level, but we can’t do that if they are lost about what the numbers really mean for each of them.

We can’t reduce and eliminate the military/industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about in his 1960 farewell speech if we don’t know what is being spent on Cold War projects. Between now and then, President Reagan brought back the military/industrial complex in a huge way at the expense of everything else in the U.S. federal budget.

This year, for the first time in a very long while, Congress finally cut something out of the Pentagon’s budget. They put an end to the production of F-22 fighter planes that the Pentagon doesn’t want, the Air Force doesn’t want and the rest of the military doesn’t want.

It’s all very far from over, but that one change to a different priority in military funding is a start in the right direction. The wars we fight now are guerrilla wars on the ground, not country-against-country where both have a full compliment of military mite. Al Qaeda and the Taliban don’t have a Navy or an Air Force. We don’t have dog fights with them. F-22’s are for dog fights. That money can be spent on other military needs, such as F-35 fighters that support guerrilla ground troops.

I am not against equipping our fighting soldiers with the best that we can get them. But we need to make sure what we are providing them is in fact what they need to improve their safety, performance and allow them to win more quickly in the type of warfare they have to fight today.

By critically reviewing what the military spends money on, it can result in some budget savings by equipping them with what they really need rather than continuing to produce weapons, ships, guns, and planes designed to fight the Soviet Union. Should a hot war arise against Russia or China someday, we have the capability of nationalizing all our production facilities to produce what that type of war would need. They did it in 1940 with the technology of the time. We can sure as hell do the same type of thing today if we have to.

In the meantime (should this type of war ever happen again), we don’t have to be completely prepared for a large scale, nation-to-nation, conventional, hot war. The money being spent on those projects can be used to rebuild infrastructure, reduce poverty, improve education, provide jobs, develop alternative energy and fund health care for every American.

What is the federal budget doing for your community and what has been cut from it since Reaganomics? Visit NPP and find out. Then start a dialogue with your family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, state legislators, governor, Senators and Representatives. Armed with the numbers and where the funding is going v where it is needed, we can have meaningful conversations, discuss much smarter policies (which dictate where money is spent), turn this country around and get it going in the right direction for a new century and a new millennium.

Lets start the discussion in the comments.

Sources:
National Priorities Project
Media Education Foundation

Technorati Tags: American priorities, federal budget, National Priorities Project, spending equals priorities

written by joubess \\ tags: American priorities, federal budget, National Priorities Project, spending equals priorities