© Merle Harton, Jr. | About | XML/RSS

Science evolves in Georgia's new K-12 biology curriculum.  On Thursday afternoon, Kathy Cox, Georgia's State Superintendent of Schools, held a news conference to dispel some weird misconceptions circulating about the state's new Georgia Performance Standards Biology Curriculum—specifically to address complaints that the curriculum nowhere includes the word "evolution." Like a rotten egg in a classroom lab, the stink gets around fast and even Jimmy Carter got his nose bent out of shape over this: "As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox's attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia's students," the former president said in a written statement. [Source: CNN, January 30, 2004]

And he should be embarrassed. Apparently no one, the former president included, actually read the document, which is still a fluid work in progress. In her response to the public reaction, Cox pointed out that the curriculum draft is effectively able to cover the scientific concepts that are so dear to contemporary dogmatic science, but in a way that does not require the specific use of the word "evolution." How cool is that? Here, in part, is what she said:

Those who read the draft of the science curriculum will find that the concepts of Darwinism, adaptation, natural selection, mutation, and speciation are actually interwoven throughout the standards at each grade level. Students will learn of the succession through history of scientific models of change, such as those of Lamarck, Malthus, Wallace, Buffon, and Darwin.

As a result, students will become "scientifically literate" and better prepared for college by exposure both to the process of scientific inquiry and to how science changes its paradigms. Georgia students, she said, "will become familiar with the development of living organisms and their changes over time, including inherited characteristics that lead to survival of organisms and their successive generations." They just won't start gagging on the E word, which was deliberately left out for this interesting reason: "We don't want the public or our students to get stuck on a word when the curriculum actually includes the most widely accepted theories for biology."

Kudos to Georgia—and to its bold, new administrative species.

Whether as Christians or as pagans, our concept of the person seems like an easy concept to grasp, something with which we are so familiar as not to require any depth of thought, but when my students begin thinking about "person," they just can't seem to turn loose the idea that persons are either male or female—they can't seem to get beyond the human aspect of our idea of a person. This is important. It really cuts into our whole idea of fairness and equality, our ability to talk about other beings without the very special prejudices that our own humanity imposes on our frame of reference, and our need to appreciate the logical fact that our very notion of humanity presupposes our grasp of persons as being without humanity. With my students I try out the realistic beings created in the literary laboratory of science fiction—such as RoboCop, Star Trek's Data, the many thousands of nonhumans on Star Wars, Ursula K. LeGuin's strange, androgenous beings—but like boomerangs their minds come back around to thinking of them as humans or, well, as kind of like humans. Like all logical simples, it takes effort to get past what is obvious, to see what logic requires.

Our idea of "person" is not in fact about a human at all.  Efforts to look upon people as persons in effect requires that we look past them as human beings. Without this ability to talk about persons as nonhuman, we cannot make sense of angels, God, and our Lord Jesus as persons but not humans like you and me. Unable to speak about persons as something other than as beings with our unique humanity, we cannot then appreciate Love as an activity apart from Eros—then Love will always be an emotion which is tied inextricably to behavior encased in the context of human emotions and their glandular origins.

I just received in the mail my urgent packet from Morris Cerullo.  In it I got his tabloid "America Is In Trouble," detailing the background of his ministry's Save America Now project and website, and with it a pretty lapel pin depicting a patriotic ribbon overlaid with the words "Save America Now."

Also in the packet was his pamphlet The End-Time Crisis Hits America: A Call to Prayer for America.  In this he reveals his prophetic burden for America to return to faith in the Lord. At issue is this: "the devil has declared war on Christianity in America, but we can stand firm and strong to tell him in no uncertain terms, HE CAN'T HAVE IT!" Cerullo is calling for a national prayer initiative with 9 "prayer targets" intending to bring about a Christian revival in the US. But in the process he obscures this message with a factual error:

America was founded on the idea that the living God was in charge, and He was responsible for our rights as humans.

It was founded on the idea that a nation which denies Him can't long exist.

America was the first country, since the nation of Israel, which was founded on the idea that serving the living God was the reason the nation existed in the first place.

Even the form of government, a Democratic Republic, was designed around the idea that God governs, through anointed and appointed men and women, people who have given their consent to be governed in such a way. [p. 13]

Now by "anointed" men and women he means not merely faithful or believing or inspired Christians, but people whom God has hand-picked for leadership. This is the very idea behind the so-called "divine right of kings" doctrine championed by King James and it is a pernicious error in the developing American Church. It is what sustains some evangelicals' political support for the Bush administration and it lies in the background of dethroned Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore's defeated exertions in support of his 2.6-ton "Ten Commandments" monument. It is a belief, not at all Christian in origin, that God is in effect running the country, but through an elite corps of God-chosen men and women. This was not at all what Paul meant in Romans 13:1-6 when he instructed us to "submit to the authorities," although this is the source of that pernicious doctrine which threatens to infect the whole of the American Church.

Numbing down the rest of the world.  In "Liberation without War," a new feature article in the February 2004 issue of Sojourners Magazine, Jack DuVall presents a spirited defense of the doctrine favoring a "nongovernmental, international body" that would help to "internationalize and expedite the removal of all political oppression" by empowering indigenous movements through training in "the strategies of nonviolent action" and "better information technology."

I happen to agree with DuVall on this, but he—and, of course, many others—seem not to note the existence of a really time-worn American tactic for "regime change." We tend to think that the US has in its toolbox only two schemes for making wide-sweeping changes to a sovereign nation's political structure: (1) economic sanctions or (2) the dreaded preemptive war. In fact, we have always used a policy of what I can call stealth subsumption, whereby, through deliberate pro-business intervention, we so completely permutate a country's cultural fabric as to subsume it totally within our sphere of influence. It has gone under many names, most notably "Westernization," but in most cases it is extremely effective. It hasn't worked well in the Middle East and has also met with violent resistance in Asia, but that's only because it sometimes is too obvious a strategy, thus violating the "stealth" factor of this strategem. In a culture where the sari has been worn for centuries, for example, something looks amiss when your teenager comes home wearing Levis jeans. Because this must do its work by stealth, it requires subtlety and development over time. For example, you might start with Coca-Cola® and then move on to hamburgers, potato chips, chocolate, and bacon; once they're hooked on the food, then just add mind-numbing music, television, and slang; this sets the proper foundation for the rest of the subsumption through clothes, modern notions, Starbucks Coffee® and an itching desire for more of the same.

Now the logical extension of stealth subsumption is a strategy that Americans have never overtly used—actually buying the whole country. Instead of invading, bombing, and assassinating our way to a change of regime in a foreign, sovereign nation, we could always just send over a squadron of guys in blue suits to negotiate the sale of the country, or at least to buy-out the dictator. That would save thousands of innocent lives, preserve the country's physical structures, and get us to ownership of its culture, which we will get anyway, but in a fashion that conforms closely to a tactic that is most appropriate for a capitalist nation such as ours. I mean, for example, which is cheaper overall, going in up front and buying Iraq or taking it preemptively? I think we could have negotiated a better deal.