On Thu, 24 Oct 2002, Jay Heuman wrote:

+++++ [CLIP] +++++

> I would add - with a note of caution against censorship or
> close-mindedness - the following: If a group objects so strongly to
> material presented in a museums, they ought to consider self-censoring
> (i.e., not visiting a museum) . . . rather than demand/expect a museum
> to compromise its ethical duty to present information of "intellectual
> integrity."  How dare anyone ask a museum to omit information and tell a
> half-truth?  That does not strike me as a suitable demand/expectation
> from a Christian group.  (Granted, I'm not Christian; so perhaps I
> misunderstand Christian ethics.)

==============================

Dear Jay:

You certainly don't misunderstand things: there's nothing in Christian
ethics - or "mainstream" Christian teaching - that allows anyone to make
any such demands of museums. Unfortunately, the "young Earth" and (wider
anti-science) Biblical Literalists that have become so vocal over the past
15 to 20 years or so are just another manifestation of a recurring
phenomenon on the fringes of Christianity.

Those over 40 or so will probably remember only too well the high profile
campaigns of Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" of 20 years or so ago, with
their demands for - among many other things - the right of veto over all
public library purchases.  In 1981 veteran Hollywood actor Lionel Stander
summed them up in what became one of the most widely quoted aphorisms of
the late 20th century: "The name is a misnomer.  They are neither moral
nor a majority.  It's like to '50s all over again: HUAC, Communist witch
hunting. It gives me a frightening sense of deja vu.", or as Frank Zappa
put it in 1993 when repeating Stander's by then famous "neither moral nor
a majority" put-down, saying that the Moral Majority" [since those days -
apparently - re-named the "Bill of Rights Legal Foundation"] is just "a
small yet influential group of bookburners".

Almost all the main Christian denominations resolved most of the serious
theological or scriptural concerns about the scientific evidence of the
age of the Earth and the geological time-scale (and indeed the immense age
of the Solar system) at least a hundred years ago, and have no problems
about recognising the evidence from palaeontology (and nowadays from
biochemistry, genetics etc. also) of biological evolution.

It's less that a quarter of a century since the widespread launch in parts
of the USA of the current wave wave of neo-creationism, with its claims
that the Universe was created in around 4,000 BC, and its grotesque
mis-representation of the mid-19th century arguments for the existence of
God from the evidence of order and design.  Now, even in Britain, teachers
of science (and design technology) are offered pamphlets on how they can
introduce into their lessons exercises on how to answer critics of the
literal interpretation of Genesis by calculating how Noah squeezed into
the Ark not only all the species listed in Genesis, but also all species
of dinosaurs, so that these too survived the Flood to be found as
(post-Deluge) fossils.

It is truly sinister that increasingly vocal political pressure is being
brought by such small, but apparently ever more powerful, groups on those
in education, libraries and museums to demand "equal representation" of
their "alternative" views - no doubt as a prelude to the eventually
banning of scientific orthodoxy.



Patrick Boylan

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