Rudy Takala, "Making Darwin Right" (2006)

Making Darwin Right

Rudy Takala

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.”
> <br> 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.
> <br> 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.
> <br> 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.
> <br> 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.
> <br> 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.
> <br> 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.
> <br> 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.”
> <br> 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.