Making Darwin Right

U.S. District Judge John Jones, in a recent 139 page ruling out of Pennsylvania, droned that mentioning intelligent design in a biology course violated the First Amendment. Selectively acknowledging only the precedent that happened to support his opinion, he said the proponents of intelligent design were "liars." He reduced the case to a question of whether or not promoting cognizance of intelligent design amounted to an "endorsement or disapproval of religion."

On page ninety-seven, he cited an occasion on which one board member gave an assistant superintendent one of David Barton's books, indubitable evidence that the board members didn't sufficiently revere separation of church and state. Thus, he reasoned, the board members' beliefs rendered their policies unconstitutional. Their standards of education would have been Constitutional only if they had been prompted by secular motives.

The irony of this decision coming less than a month after Paul Mirecki's resignation from the head of Kansas University's Department of Religious Studies is apropos. After Mirecki instigated an outcry by attempting to start a course that equated creationism with mythology, his course was cancelled, and he relinquished his prominent position. Mirecki is now attempting to sue the university for failing to support him vigorously enough.

These events are a microcosmic representation of evolutionism in academia as a whole. When left to the mechanisms of a voluntary society, the theory of evolution is unable to endure, and evolutionists can't hold an audience. That's why they need to force people into attending their institutions, and why they need to prohibit voters from determining what takes place in those institutions.

Let's momentarily discount the fact that atheism has been established as a religion by the Supreme Court on several occasions, and simply contemplate the intent of the Establishment Clause. Even if there had been an intention to erect a wall of separation, the reason for that wall was presumably to prevent any restriction of free expression, and to prevent the State from siding with any religious or political faction. The Founding Fathers, who had only recently escaped religious persecution, most readily envisioned another religious despotism. That was the most preeminent sort of tyranny in memory. They hadn't been acquainted with Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, or with the escalating grotesqueries to which it led.

But we have been accustomed to the grotesqueries of secularism, and it would be irrational for us to treat them as insignificant anomalies that could never be repeated. Atheists often claim that only the religious are capable of persecution. Of course, such assertions exemplify the utmost of arrogance. The philosophy of repression has been practiced by representatives of all political and religious doctrines. Alleged adherence to any faith or political creed has been irrelevant. If atheists want to boast some sort of unusual imperviousness to corruption, we need only to recall Nero, Stalin, or our contemporary Hu Jintao to find that such notions are without precedent.

The Constitution was conceived to protect all Americans against the agendas of any who would use the government in advancing their own personal interests or beliefs. Because humans tend to be alike in their penchant for exploiting power, the means to that end was a limitation on power. The solution was not suppressing particular groups in society.

Above all, it was most certainly not the vision of the Founders to inspire a national government with the authority to take and disperse the money of its citizens for the purpose of indoctrinating them religiously or politically. The federal government may arguably have the Constitutional authority to educate its citizens to the extent needed to perpetuate a civil society. However, the federal government incontrovertibly does not have a Constitutional sanction to educate them for any other purpose. Remember that, according to the ever-popular Thomas Jefferson, "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves... is sinful and tyrannical."

The American electorate's fissiparous nature is often lamented by pundits as a menace to our society. However, that is not the most alarming feature of our Republic. The propensity of humanity to persist despite its hedonism, adverseness to logic, and the resulting conflicts of interest is a proven phenomenon. So long as an avenue to reconciling those differences exists, humanity will continue to persist. But when certain factions conclude that the imposition of their values should supersede tolerance, political expression will become a luxury purchased with blood. In that respect, evolutionists are on en route to engendering at least one of Darwin's theories: survival of the fittest.

Open-Minded Intolerance

The University of Kansas is establishing a new course, called, "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and Other Religious Mythologies." Its purpose, according to an e-mail sent by Paul Mirecki, chairman of the KU Department of Religious Studies, is to "slap" the "big fat face" of "fundies" by teaching it under the category of mythology.

One teacher in the religious studies department agreed with the course, stating, "[Christians] want their religion taught as fact," and "That's simply something you can't do in a state university."

KU Provost David Shulenburger explained further, saying, "My understanding was that [Mirecki's message] was a private e-mail communication that somehow was moved out of those channels and has become a public document." In other words, the fact that the course was designed to mock Christians isn't something we were supposed to know, so no one should be offended.

Bringing academia's derision of Christianity to light is something that amuses me, because those who engage in it are rarely willing to tolerate dissent. Last time I wrote on the topic, one evolutionist called me a f***wit in a posting on his Website. Following an expletive-laden polemic, he declared that homeschoolers weren't socialized and couldn't handle the "real world," where people had different opinions. Evidently, evolutionists believe that you're only good at handling other people's opinions if you can curse at them when they disagree with you.

Never mind that evolutionists, not creationists, are attempting to suppress the opinions of others using tax dollars. I've encountered the same phenomenon in my own college biology class; in order to reach the eight or so chapters concerning evolution, it was necessary to skip about half a dozen other chapters to reach them.

The teacher was proud to tell us that her graduate thesis argued for evolutionism being taught to the exclusion of creationism. When she asked if we had any idea why she took that position, the first reply was a dutiful reference to the separation of church and state.

Of course I mentioned that, legally, atheism is a religion — that fact has been reaffirmed in a number of court decisions, from lower courts to the Supreme Court. In Kaufman v. McCaughtry, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled earlier this year that those who don't believe in a supreme being should still be considered religious. In United States v. Seeger, the Supreme Court ruled that disbelief in the existence of a God did not signify a lack of faith in anything whatsoever. The list could go on.

Sadly, she didn't seem to be listening. Her reply, roughly, was, "Right, so that brings us to a second reason." She proceeded to explain that learning about evolution would make us more open-minded. She told us that there was some compelling evidence in favor of it, and that if we were just open-minded, it could "really make you question your beliefs."

Unfortunately, I didn't have time for being open-minded, so I left early. That seems to describe most of her students, as more than half of the class we began with no longer attends the lectures. ("But don't forget to take Biology II next semester, because no one's signed up yet!")

For one to become truly "open-minded," one would think that it'd be necessary to understand more than one viewpoint. However, sanctimonious liberal professors have a propensity to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid, and simply isn't aware of the "right" opinion.

It's reminiscent of Chairman Mao's each-one-teach-one method of bringing literacy to China, for which he used the works of Darwin as his primary instruments of instruction. Indoctrination wasn't particularly relevant to learning how to read, but the two objectives did happen to converge. The same is true of teaching evolution as science today. The moral is that evolutionists have never really cared how their beliefs were taught, so long as they weren't taught as theories along with everyone else's.

The problem with teaching evolution as a fact is that, when people are the self-professed descendents of apes, they begin to act accordingly. That's why progressive liberals don't see anything wrong with ridiculing their opposition, abusing their power, using vulgarities, and, when possible, paying themselves with your tax dollars. If you'd like to send an e-mail to the Kansas provost, you can reach him at dshulenburger@ku.edu. If you'd like to reach the fine example of a liberal intellectual who chairs the KU Department of Religious Studies, you can find him at pmirecki@ku.edu.

[Editor's Note: Mirecki resigned from his position as chair of his department, and his course was cancelled. He is now suing the university for refusing to support him as strongly as he would have liked.]

Evolution is Unconstitutional

Evolution is Unconstitutional
By Rudy Takala
9/01/05

On August 19th, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a prison violated an inmate's religion by not allowing him to form a prayer group. According to the court, "Atheism is [the inmate's] religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being."

It's not the first time a court has ruled in such a way. In 1961, the Supreme Court defined "secular humanism" as a religion in Torcaso v. Watkins. In the 1965 case United States v. Seeger, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a conscientious objector who claimed that his "skepticism or disbelief in the existence of God" did "not necessarily mean lack of faith in anything whatsoever."

Nonetheless, conservatives seem to have fallen in lockstep on the latest case. A senior trial attorney from the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy said, "Up is down, and atheism, the antithesis of religion, is religion." Shortly after, conservative pundits began to rally in decrying the Circuit's ruling.

Such commentators have unfortunately missed the point. This is not, as one article argued, an issue of whether our founders were Christian men. This is an issue of reality — of what atheism really is. It is a matter of faith. It's an unproven hypothesis that its adherents want to propagate and convince others of.

As such, they have no right to talk about it in government schools. Because the thought of teaching creationism in schools usually causes liberals to hyperventilate, the thought of teaching evolution or atheism should now have the same effect. What's the real problem that liberals have with teaching creationism in schools? Do they oppose it because it's a matter of faith, and not of science? Or do they oppose it because it isn't their faith? We should know soon, since the predominantly atheist belief in evolution has now been defined as a religious matter.

Because non-religion is now a religion, the Establishment Clause of the Constitution now requires all court houses in the United States to publicly display a copy of the Ten Commandments. When religion was defined simply as a belief in God, it was unconstitutional to display religious monuments anywhere near court houses. However, the absence of God has also become a religion. At best, the amount of space in court houses filled by religious paraphernalia will have to be equal to the amount of space without any religious things.

Best of all, public schools are now unconstitutional. Vouchers, they told us, were wrong because, even though they worked, the government wasn't allowed to pay Christians for educating anyone. The government could only support liberal atheists. But because liberal atheism is now a religious establishment, their government-enforced monopoly over the nation's children can no longer be defined as Constitutional. (That's the fifth or sixth reason public education is unconstitutional, anyway. Maybe when we get to ten, it'll be enough to do something about it.)

Instead of rejecting atheists from the club of the abused, spat upon and persecuted, we should welcome them with open arms. While this may enable them to form special cliques called "prayer groups" when they're in prison, it will prevent them from receiving special privileges from the government. They will no longer be able to oppress everyone who professes to be religious, simply on account of their faith.

If atheism is a religion, then we truly have attained religious equality in America. The only question left is when we're going to appoint a judge who will enact that equality.

The Downside of Perpetual Youth

The Downside of Perpetual Youth
By Rudy Takala
8/22/05

Conservatives will often bemoan the degradation of American culture, perceiving that it is being destroyed by perverts and miscreants with low morals. And, despite decreases in juvenile crime over the past few decades, they'll say that the nation's youth are becoming more hopelessly immoral; perhaps because they play too many video games. Regardless, many people fail to understand why this is, and they unwittingly perpetuate the problem.

Recently, I attended a summer program on the campus of Yale University. Most people would probably believe that only intelligent, mature people can gain access to such a prestigious institution. Unfortunately, there can be as many irresponsible delinquents in voluntary summer programs as there are in public schools.

Males still didn't care if they could be differentiated from animals, and they certainly didn't care about academics. I asked a few people why they were interested in the program; their response was that it was a good way to meet girls.

At one point, some individuals determined that it would be amusing to post pornography in one of the dormitories. After they spent an hour printing out depictions of lesbian acts, they finally decided it would be better just to call one of their mothers and ask her to send her son's pornography collection.

These people represented the liberal side of American culture. They derived humor from perversion, and they believed their own narcissism justified doing anything they felt would be fun. Behaviorally, they were average students of the public schools. Academically, they were far superior. Nonetheless, the cultural infection that liberalism bestowed upon us has touched everyone, and many have succumbed to it.

However, liberals alone cannot be faulted for placing us in our present state of affairs. While they did provide the anti-religious fervor required for pervasive immorality to germinate, a minority did not transform our culture.

This observation dawned on me rather recently, when, ironically, I was attending the National Right to Life Convention as a reporter. In one session, I listened to three speakers talk about the need for more young conservatives in the media. Unfortunately, I was the only young conservative (I'm defining "young" as "under fifty") in the room. I imagine the rest of the young conservatives in the building were in a session more suited to them, such as the one about learning to speak of abortion without "losing your lunch."

On the last evening of the convention, Senator Sam Brownback gave a speech. At least, he spoke to the adults. The kids, meanwhile, went to a dance that had pizza and some sort of strobe lights.

In short, liberals aren't the only ones contributing to the downfall of our culture. The inaction of conservatism's younger generations and their failure to make an effort at transcending their peers in society can make them no less accountable.

In The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, Thomas Hine lamented the modern spectacle that youth has become. "What was new about the idea of the teenager at the time the word first appeared during World War II was the assumption that all young people, regardless of their class, location, or ethnicity, should have essentially the same experience, spent with people exactly their age, in an environment defined by high school and pop culture," Hine wrote.

Hine summarized the result of that assumption, saying, "This lengthy waiting period [of youth] has tended to reduce young people's contacts with older people... That in turn has led to the rise of a youth subculture that has helped define and elaborate what it means to be a teenager. Any account of the rise of the teenager is, in large part, an account of the changing shape and continuing importance of teen culture."

Of course, our nation hasn't been the first to become irrationally fixated on separating people into defined groups. Mussolini also once intentionally grouped people by sex, social group and age; under his reign, Italy had 20,000 dopolavoro recreational circles, thousands of veterans' organizations, fasci for women, Young Italian units for girls, balilla for little boys, and Wolf Cub circles for the smallest "new Italians." It all helped to prevent the autonomous expression of class identity or alliance.

In the past, liberals have sent me mail fretting over whether or not I've talked to enough poor people and learned enough foreign languages (in the spirit of diversity, I guess) to be truly compassionate. Well, by their standards, probably not. But until my peers recall the meaning of "vigilance" and cease allowing the obliteration of liberty in this nation, I will not keep silent.

Republicans v. Democrats

I found a picture I thought needed posting.

Bureaucracy is Not Freedom

by Rudy Takala

Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote, “In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’” Such words would seem to describe the state to which modern proponents of constitutionalism and individualism have been relegated.

The most recent example of this is the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). CAFTA passed the U.S. House on July 28th by a vote of 217-215. It’s a treaty that, as the name alleges, makes us a freer nation. Unfortunately, freedom today has been defined by bureaucrats as being large numbers of convoluted regulations. As one lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in justifying CAFTA, "We as a country are a party to a very small number of trade agreements globally, particularly compared to the EU (European Union).”

So the European Union is ahead of us in terms of economic entanglements. We must be doing something wrong.

The United States shouldn’t have to consign its sovereignty to international bureaucrats, as it did in CAFTA, to achieve “freedom.” Perhaps if our own legislators weren’t so incompetent at governing this nation, they wouldn’t need to ask foreigners to do it for them.

I also found what inhibited the two non-voting Republicans of the House from acting to be interesting. The first, Rep. Charles Taylor of North Carolina, thought he had voted against CAFTA. However, a problem with his voting card prevented the House’s computerized tallying system from recording his vote. He was told of the problem the morning after the vote.

The other, Rep. Jo Ann Davis, missed the vote by about half an hour because she was attending a Boy Scout Jamboree. That was after House leaders had to keep the vote open longer than usual to keep from losing.

So in the spirit of our democratic and somewhat sovereign Republic, CAFTA was approved by the House on account of a computer that disregarded the vote of one representative and a leadership that managed to block the vote of another.

Our government’s method of legislating has become more like a game than a serious legislative process. The question is no longer which side has more support, but rather what party will have the most dysfunctional voting cards on any given day of the month. Vladimir Putin was right when he said the United States lacked credibility in criticizing other brands of democracy.

Though the CAFTA vote may be over, that debacle should have served as an illustration of the extent to which we can trust our current elected officials to honor our liberties. The next big issue we might expect them to fail on is President Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, John Roberts. We don’t know much about him, but it’s been purported that he has Hillary Clinton’s vote. That probably isn’t a good sign. As Ann Coulter wrote, “Republican presidents – especially Republican presidents named ‘Bush’ – have lost the right to say ‘Trust me’ when it comes to Supreme Court nominations.”

Why is the Republican leadership so plagued by liberals who always manage to do the wrong thing on major issues? They’ve made their constituency look like it has no objectives, no ideals and no vision. Of course, many people don’t have those qualities; they think freedom and constitutionalism sound like good ideas, but they’ll refuse to accept that their favorite welfare programs contradict those ideals. They’ll lay their freedom at the feet of anyone who promises to feed them with government money and flowery speeches about liberty.

The rifts in the Republican Party are a result of the people who have a purpose versus the people who don’t have a purpose. Members of the prior group are devoted to unwavering ideals, and they work within a political party to realize them. Members of the latter group are committed to nothing more than talking points; they don’t care what effect legislation will have so long as the proper jargon about God and compassion is used in justifying it.

As a result, we have a party that doesn’t know where it’s going or why it exists. This can be made no more evident than by the recent spectacle of Senate majority leader Bill Frist breaking with his own president over stem cell research. Our highest Republican officials don’t know what their party stands for.

Those who accept euphemisms as a substitute for action only encourage our leaders to shirk their Constitutional obligations. It’s nice to have so many politicians talking about the role of God in their lives, but when their actions are nothing more than a detriment to American freedom and sovereignty, their alleged motivations are irrelevant. Until that fact is realized, the ascendancy of our bureaucracy’s size and corruption is not going to cease.

Rudy Takala is 16 years old and writes a column for more than thirty Websites across the Internet. He can be contacted at RudyTakala@Yahoo.com.

Another Reason to Increase University Funding

"Student gets F grade
for mentioning God."



The instructor in question "has not been reached for comment, but Judy Solis, chair of the English department, says Hauf was given three options: submit the report with God included, make revisions and edit out the G-word, or rewrite the entire report."

More Reasons to Increase Education Funding

This is an interesting piece.

"I don't need to have kids to create mini-me voters: I get classrooms full of other people's kids," writes Bill Savage of Northwestern University. "…Loyal dittoheads will continue to drop off their children at the dorms…And then they are all mine."

Hate Mail

I've been getting massive amounts of mail concerning my last article on education. Here's one I found particularly annoying. The grammar was already poor and my cutting doesn't make it any clearer, but it should be coherent enough to figure out.

Italicized text is from the enemy. Normal text is mine.

Minnesota is not California, which though it might be worse, you do not know that for sure and you are really just giving your opinion...
By the way extrapolations are not facts. You are taking your opinion from other opinions.

Which is it, my opinion or other people's opinions? You've impugned both possibilities. Are you just being thorough and covering all the bases?

Where will you be when you find folks who differ with you or that such opinion is not the actual fact? Out in the cold land of the ignorant and the arrogant.

I'm currently at Yale, actually, and I found a few people here who disagree with me. Honestly, it's mostly just the land of the arrogant.

There are many bad teachers out there and there are teachers who are so frustrated with all the rules and regulations and the lack of discipline in the classroom because there is no discipline many times at home. Too many times there is no one at home who can give a young person any sort of attention.

The problem does stem partially from a cultural trend, yes. That doesn't excuse schools that accomodate cultural degradation. When schools cease having idiotic zero tolerance policies on weapons (e.g. prohibiting six year olds from playing with toy guns) and instead implement zero tolerance for misbehavior, perhaps we can discuss an increase in their funding. But until educational bureaucrats stop spending what they already get like drunken liberals (there's a joke in there somewhere), I will not advocate for giving them more. Let liberals destroy the nation on their own dime.

You were one of the lucky ones, but most parents cannot afford to give home schooling to their children.


Which is why we need vouchers. The government should be paying homeschoolers the same amount they pay the public schools. All I recall ever getting is some pitiful amount every year for books. By my count, the government owes my mother more than $63,000. Where is it?

...before I wrote my opinion on such forums as newswithviews, I'd find out the facts.

Quote from article:

"According to data from 2004, less than half of California students are proficient in English-language arts or math. Just 30% of third-graders were proficient in English, down 3 points from 2003. Only 35% of sixth-graders were proficient in math, up 1 point from 2003."

Next time, before e-mailing an article's author, try reading the article in question. It helps.