Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Is THAT all you need to be scary these days? Alternatively, why the New York Times will close its doors in a decade …

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truly scary - St. Peters/Manfrotto

Leaving ID theorists with a blank slate to deal with, instead of a horde of bawling trolls?

In “Of Course: NYT Editor Suddenly Very Interested in Candidates’ Churches” (Townhall , August 25, 2011 ), Guy Benson notes,

We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

Rick Santorum? He’s a member of the oldest, biggest, and most bureaucratic institution on Earth: The Roman Catholic Church:

No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. More.

Yeah. How revolutionary can you get?

Mark Oppenheimer’s NYT column on Frank Beckwith (the Synthese affair) was an unusual example of journalism – as opposed to a dying establishment’s propaganda – the normal NYT fare.

No one believes it any more, but we do need to know is how the latest policy apocalypse might affect us.

But note Oppenheimer’s premise: ID types had caused all the trouble.

No, they hadn’t.

Beckwith was not an ID theorist. A Darwinist prof labelled him as such, even though she had every reason to be in full possession of the facts of the case. Any resulting setback to the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby was nothing more or less than a man’s efforts to defend his actual views. But Oppenheimer could not have just written that. As a Times salaryman, he had to pretend that ID guys had somehow caused the problem that the Darwin lobby created for itself.

Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury, one of many Canuck bloggers that officialdom may never quite succeed in shutting down. Hand to South!

Comments
Good points. That said, human attention span is not unlimited, and print is the medium least oriented to streaming with all the others. It's not accidental that print-based media have been losing money for some years now. At some point, the differences should start to make a difference. News
August 27, 2011
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Radio is still here doing just fine, over sixty years after television came into existence. and many ruled it out for the same reasons. Internet news is just as different from a newspaper, and both will continue quite successfully on their own, after the usual shake-out period. Operating expenses are neither here nor there. I gladly pay for a newspaper where I wouldn't pay for internet news.SCheesman
August 26, 2011
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of related note: IDTheFuture podcast: "What Does Politics Have to Do With it? Darwinian Evolution & the Presidential Campaign" http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2011-08-26T14_35_14-07_00bornagain77
August 26, 2011
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Seeing that atheistic/materialistic ideology was behind the unparallelled atrocities of the 20th century, should not the Times, by full rights of being a leading journal documenting history, be much more appalled that any candidates might harbor atheistic/materialistic tendencies than Christian tendencies??? The unmitigated horror visited upon man, by state sponsored atheism, would be hard to exaggerate,,, Chairman MAO: Genocide Master “…Many scholars and commentators have referenced my total of 174,000,000 for the democide (genocide and mass murder) of the last century. I’m now trying to get word out that I’ve had to make a major revision in my total due to two books. I’m now convinced that that Stalin exceeded Hitler in monstrous evil, and Mao beat out Stalin….” http://wadias.in/site/arzan/blog/chairman-mao-genocide-master/ From Darwin To Hitler - Richard Weikart - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_5EwYpLD6A Was Hitler influenced by Darwin or by Christianity? Some thoughts on posts by Mr 'Godwin' http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/02/was-hitler-influenced-by-darwin-or-by-christianity-some-thoughts-on-posts-by-mr-godwin.html =============== As we have seen, World War I broke out because of European thinkers, generals and administrators who saw warfare, bloodshed and suffering as a kind of ‘development’, and thought they were an unchanging ‘law of nature. ‘ The ideological root that dragged all of that generation to destruction was nothing else than Darwin’s concepts of the ’struggle for survival’ and ‘favored races’.,,, That the Nazis were influenced by Darwinism is a fact that many historians accept.,,, In short, there is an unbreakable link between the theory of evolution and communism. ,,, http://absolute-truth.net/2009/12/darwins-dark-legacy/#Abortion_and_Darwin.27s_theory The Dark Legacy Of Charles Darwin - 150 Years Later - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4060594/ Darwin's Deadly Legacy (1 of 7) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mxXICZ9mXo further notes; How Darwin's Theory Changed the World Rejection of Judeo-Christian values Excerpt: Weikart explains how accepting Darwinist dogma shifted society’s thinking on human life: “Before Darwinism burst onto the scene in the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of the sanctity of human life was dominant in European thought and law (though, as with all ethical principles, not always followed in practice). Judeo-Christian ethics proscribed the killing of innocent human life, and the Christian churches explicitly forbade murder, infanticide, abortion, and even suicide. “The sanctity of human life became enshrined in classical liberal human rights ideology as ‘the right to life,’ which according to John Locke and the United States Declaration of Independence, was one of the supreme rights of every individual” (p. 75). Only in the late nineteenth and especially the early twentieth century did significant debate erupt over issues relating to the sanctity of human life, especially infanticide, euthanasia, abortion, and suicide. It was no mere coincidence that these contentious issues emerged at the same time that Darwinism was gaining in influence. Darwinism played an important role in this debate, for it altered many people’s conceptions of the importance and value of human life, as well as the significance of death” (ibid.). http://www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn85/darwin-theory-changed-world.htm fn: I believe the body count for abortion is over 50 million now in America since it was legalized. by judicial fiat, in 1973 in America: Born Alive – Abortion Survivor Gianna Jessen http://www.faithandfacts.com/abortion/born-alive-abortion-survivor-gianna-jessen/bornagain77
August 26, 2011
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The problem is, SCheesman, that the Times's operating expenses greatly exceed those of many Internet-based operations. It's not a question of good or bad. Their competitors for eye time can operate at a fraction of their costs. Like the difference between a unionized US factory and a Chinese factory. We know how that turned out.News
August 26, 2011
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I have no doubt that the NYT will be around 25 years from now.SCheesman
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