Dear Editor:
While this week we direct our thoughts to God in thankfulness for His manifold blessings that He lavished upon us even in the midst of a severe economic downturn, many of today’s elite in the scientific and academic community are celebrating Charles Darwin‘s 150th anniversary of the publication of his book “On the Origin of Species” - on November 24 to be precise. We in Downey deplore this Godless and outright dangerous philosophy of evolution, which led to the rise of communism, Nazism, abortion, eugenics and more.
Besides being an unproven theory (as in, “Where are the transitional fossils or missing links you predicted would be found by now, Charlie?”), evolution has proven to be totally useless over the past 150 years as it has contributed nothing to help put man on the moon, design the space shuttle or the electric car, build computers and cell phones, develop laser eye surgery and many more life saving modern medical procedures. The list is endless. Besides, farmers from all over the world count on evolution to not work every time they plant a new crop. They have yet to see a hamster or a tomato or a whale to grow on a cornstalk, or a dog to bring forth a baby elephant.
To say that we evolved from a chemical reaction in a primordial bubbling soup formed by rain upon a rock 4.5 billion years ago without any scientific evidence of any kind requires faith, which clearly makes evolution a religion. The creation vs. evolution debate is therefore not about religion vs. science. Both are religious in nature, with Biblical creation declaring “In the beginning God...”, while evolution essentially says “In the beginning dirt...”. The difference is that evolution is a carefully protected state religion, whereby should a Christian scientist in a leading scientific institute even so much as question evolution, he or she can end up in academic Siberia, as was so well documented in Ben Stein’s 2008 blockbuster movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”, now available on DVD.
While I know that many universities have held lectures and panel discussions to mark this anniversary, I am glad to report that as I looked far and wide all over Downey this week, no one celebrated here or even took notice of Darwin’s infamous book. Way to go Downey! Let’s keep it that way.
— Dan Cristea,
Downey
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Published: November 27, 2009 - Volume 8 - Issue 32
Let me first say,Mr. Cristea, that as a Jew, a man of faith, I believe in the Torah, especially in the book that you call Leviticus in which we have been given the supreme mitzvah (commandment) to love our fellow man because there is a Creator who loves us, His creation.
Let us look, rationally, at this creation. As an educator, and as an educated man, who has discovered, observed, studied, experienced, analyzed and learned about this creation for a lifetime, it has become clear to me that we humans, as a part of Creation, are endowed with the unique intellectual capacity to study and to deduce what there is to know about Creation. We call this process science. It is equally clear to me that we are also endowed with an ability to believe in a faith that assists us in comprehending many parts of Creation that our limited ability in science cannot explain, such as the existence of the human soul, and other inexplicable phenomena we call miracles, for lack of a better term.
Somewhere, along the line of Creation, Mr. Cristea, you and others of your narrow minded, fundamentalist ilk, have succeeded in separating reason from faith and the Creator from science. The greatest scientific mind of the last century, Albert Einstein, believed that all science led to an understanding of the presence of the Divine in the universe. In the 10th Century in Spain the Jewish scientist, philosopher, physician and scholar, Rambam (you may know him as Maimonides) when asked how the Earth could have been created in six days, responded, "How long is a day in the eyes of the Creator?" Clearly both these scientists and men of faith, were at home with the idea of a Creator working in a rational, scientific way to bring about the miracle of Creation and human life.
When we separate reason from faith, science from religion, we create the ignorance of religious extremism and the emptiness of science without ethics. Four hundred years after Rambam's writings, the ignorance of the Spanish Inquisition caused the eradication of the Jewish and Muslim peoples from the Iberian peninsula so that pure and Catholic kingdoms could be created in Spain and Portugal. Within our own lifetime, the denial of religion produced the horrors of Mengele's laboratory experiments at Auschwitz. You see, Mr. Cristea, when we separate religion from reason, science from faith, we journey into the existentialist desert of despair that is Sinai.
I then would like to give religion credit where it is due as well with The Crusades, The Inquisition, Religious Extremism (from all religions), The Dark Ages and numerous other acts of murder in the name of God.
Religion, much like Science, has a good side as well and thank goodness for that.
What is with this overtone of anti-science that prevails through-out America? We were the leaders in multiple fields of science, then religious groups suddenly revolted in the late-70's to mid-80's. After the Republican Revolution of 1994, suddenly science was an evil.
I'm not saying it's simply a Republicans Only affair, but what is the problem that people have with science? Most athiests and scientists have nothing against religion. It's just that using the Scientific Method, not much in religion can be proven as fact, and that's all they're simply saying.
This does not inhibit you from continuing to carry on your religious practices, unlike some religious groups, which have had a hand in deliberately inhibiting scientific research. If someone had informed people that Stem Cell Research is primarily done with 57 other types of stem cells, not embryonic stem cells, than maybe the macular degeneration in my eyes today could have been reversed.