Thoughts in a Haystack

Yeowser!

Try and guess where this comes from:

According to the mindset of ID leaves could have been green or they could have been blue. But God chose green because he was feeling a bit green that day. Or maybe he thought green would really bring out the color of Adam's eyes; it's hard to say really. ...

[A]ttributing every aspect of biology to the arbitrary design of a divine tinkerer explains as much about biology as attributing the eruption of volcanoes to the anger of the Lava God would explain
geology. ...

Biology (already burdened with the study of the most complex phenomenon known to man) is reduced by Intelligent Design to a meaningless cataloguing service for divine handicrafts. ...

Everyone loves the idea that God made flowers and puppies. But do you like the idea that he made the AIDS virus, smallpox, and polio -- and is busy at work on bird flu? ID takes us back to an age when our best explanation for disease was divine will. The middle ages were nice in their way, but surely we can now move on. ...

Intelligent Design is The DaVinci Code of Biology -- an emotionally attractive conspiracy theory that seems to explain the most amazing facts and coincidences. ...

Don't bother to Google. It is from an article in, of all places, Human Events, entitled "Intelligent Design, and Other Dumb Ideas" by Mac Johnson. The subtext is at least as important, if not more so, as the message:

The Left believes, correctly, that Intelligent Design is a political loser, and so they gleefully attempt to hang it around the neck of every right-of-center movement from libertarian neo-conservatism to isolationist populism -- shouting all the while "See, the American Taliban has come for your children! Elect a Democrat before it's too late!" ...

I, for one, have religiously ignored the topic before now. I have done this partly out of a sort of professional courtesy to its supporters, with whom I share most other beliefs (and in many cases a personal affection), partly out of a belief that the idea was too obscure to argue over, and partly because the idea is so patently ridiculous to me that I felt that pointing this out would be somewhat akin to telling a friend that they have really, really bad breath. ...

Intelligent Design is a bad idea, and the otherwise intelligent men that are espousing it would do well to re-examine their beliefs, before they corrupt both science and faith --and the amazing progress that conservatism has made during the last forty years. ...

Perhaps this is another small sign of the fracturing of the unholy alliance between the Righteous Right and the rational Conservatism of yesteryear, exemplified by Barry Goldwater, where tin-plated moral certainty didn't turn every public issue into a winner-take-all death struggle and our government at least sometimes actually represented We the People. Let's hope so.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 7:24 AM