"Oprah's Favorites to Complete Your List"

I am reminded more of my lostness. I am incapable of determining the tasteful, the pertinent, the Good on my own. Were I to pray for the archetypal experience of tea drinking (I've always been a wayward coffee guy since my mother weened me from those white bottles of non-caffeination), or just to look into the matter for any tea drinker on my Christmas shopping list, Oprah, of course, would be the pedagogical authority on what is the Good tea set to purchase. The tea sets at which I now peer through the mall shop windows are not merely endorsed by O, they're actually her favorites.

Being an A-list celebrity must be exhausting. Your meditation constantly interrupted. Unenlightened seekers of wisdom like me endlessly scale your mountain of solace to have audience. You must fulfill our quests for the tasteful, the pertinent, the Good. Then, as it's stenciled on a storefront window, all can glean from "what is written." Mall pilgrims then glaze by, beyond, and, who knows, perhaps serendipitously into the church on any day but Sunday.

For you, Mr. or Ms. Consumer, it's not just your shopping list that can be completed. Now you absorb what before was universal secrecy. Mystery now neatly wraps the life worth living with such order and pretty paper that you'd never comprehended until the present moment. It's the moment when this year's (Curse last years!) styles, colors, and, of course, selection all come together to make inner sense. It all feels Good. So this object could be just the fit for the person on your list, who is of equal or greater value. Or so you tend to hope.

Heaven is made of stars, and we cast our spirits toward the stars--daytime and primetime--who descend from the fake living room sets or the celestial stadia. What paves the path that orients us heavenward bursts forth from the Scripture, Sermon and Evangelistic appeal of Branding. In Branding "we live, and move, and have our being." Come, sit and sip. No, be saturated by The Tea Set and so much more. But please stop in and drink today because supplies are limited. Equally mysterious.

My Comments (& Others) at KyDeptEd Hearing on Proposed New Ky. Science Standards

I addressed the Ky Dept of Ed at the public hearing in Frankfort Tue, July 23, 2013 about the Next Generation Science Standards. My 5 minutes of comments target the evolutionary biology aspect.
Here's the whole video of the KDE hearing. http://mediaportal.education.ky.gov/videos/kde-public-hearing-7232013/  I'm at 15:30 run time mark, the first one of about 20 or so to address the science standards. Nothing from me about fascism, murder, genocide, or the like, so I didn't make the Courier Journal's cut. You'll have to listen to some of the others to get that perspective.

Or, if you prefer to just read, my text is pasted below:

We and our Kentucky kids are being misled.  The Next Generation Science Standards do not reflect all the latest scientific research, at least the research on evolutionary theory—not by a long shot.  Much is not settled.  And we’re being misled to assume all opposition to this view of biology is a matter of religion.

Random mutation is not settled with Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe.  He doesn’t talk about religion, but his research in the Journal of Molecular Biology discusses how amino acids fold up 3-dimensionally in just the right complex shapes to form the exact kind of proteins needed to construct and do work in the living cell. Axe says, among all the possible amino acid combinations, the probability of random mutation generating just one short protein capable of folding and remaining stable is roughly[[[[[[[ 1 in 10 to the 74th power, or ]]]]]]]]] one chance in a hundred trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.  Will our kids get to consider this or anything else that challenges macroevolution by chance mutation and natural selection?

Gerd Muller and Stuart Newman published essays by several scientists wondering how neo-Darwinism could explain the origin of epigenetic information.  [[[[[[[But when it comes to comparing  traits of various species,]]]]]]]] the NGS standards over-emphasize genetic similarities between species to prove macroevolution, and seem to overlook these crucial epigenetic factors, that is, microbiological factors that are not traced to genes, that determine how organs are shaped and body plans come together.  So, when it comes to evolutionary microbiology, the writers of the NGSS are behind the curve.

[[[[[[[The truth is there are a multitude of problems that have biologists branching off into all kinds of competing theories that have to forsake Darwin, but preserve at least some kind of evolutionary model.]]]]]]]

A group of leading evolutionary biologists, known as the Altenberg 16, completely without religious concerns [[[[[[except, perhaps, not to be seen as religious]]]]]]]], are explicitly calling to toss out the old for some new theory of evolution that might really work.  If you’re afraid to teach our kids the controversy and let them weigh some issues for themselves, then maybe we are raising them to be intellectually weak.

It’s been said these standards are unified by research in multiple fields.

Well, will our kids learn what’s going on in Paleontology?  Paul Chien, University of San Francisco.  He doesn’t talk about religion, but he’s researched how Pre-Cambrian rock strata in southern China have fossilized soft-bodied embryos.  This helps to prove that the great number of new species that suddenly arose in the Cambrian era have no evolutionary ancestors.  Darwin worried how the kind of fossil evidence that we have today could eventually threaten his theory.  Will our students learn this?

Mathematics:  John Lennox shows mathematic evidence to question seriously how blind nature itself could have produced novel semantic information necessary for the first biological life or new species to arise. Now Lennox does believe in God, but he’s also professor of mathematics at this quaint little college called Oxford.

There are Philosophers of Science who are somewhere between admitted agnosticism or atheism, and yet say challenges to Darwinism can have merit. These include Princeton-educated David Berlinski, who also makes mathematic challenges, and Princeton-educated Bradley Monton, now professor at University of Colorado at Boulder. New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel says the current evolutionary paradigm based on materialistic reductionism is bankrupt in explaining the existence of the mind. Will our kids’ minds get exposed to this?

Cosmology:  The late Allan Sandage, the twentieth century’s most influential astronomer, conceded, "The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. [[[[[I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together." He did eventually become a theist. (Cited by Lennox, 176). ]]]]]]]

I urge the KDE not only to reject the NGS Standards related to evolutionary biology, but also to review current state standards that do not adequately address these and other substantive disagreements among real scientists.  [[[[[[[These challenges are based on observable research and analysis, not religious agendas.  If you made your decision to pass the NGSS without weighing these scholars' arguments with at least a cursory understanding, then now’s the time.]]]]]]] Are our kids being prepared to wrestle through the controversy behind such an important issue while considering the different sides?  If not, they’re really not becoming educated.

This has everything to do with our school childrens’ understanding of their own significance and what purpose is behind their own lives.  It’s more than just science.  We can’t get this wrong.  The gravity of the theoretical domain of evolution demands that you burn the midnight oil in comprehending these arguments.  Because the writers of the NGSS are either misleading us or they themselves are underprepared and underinformed.

5:30  [[[[[[4:40]]]]]]

References:

Axe, DD.  “Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds.” In J Mol Biol. 2004 Aug 27;341(5):1295-315.

Berlinski, David. “The Deniable Darwin.” Commentary 101 (1996): 19– 29.

_______. “On Assessing Genetic Algorithms.” Public lecture, “Science and Evidence of Design in the Universe” Conference, Yale University, November 4, 2000.

Britten, Roy J., and Eric H. Davidson. “Gene Regulation for Higher Cells: A Theory.” Science 165 (1969): 349-57.

Chien, Paul, J. Y. Chen, C. W. Li, and Frederick Leung. “SEM Observation of Precambrian Sponge Embryos from Southern China, Revealing Ultrastructures Including Yolk Granules, Secretion Granules, Cytoskeleton, and Nuclei.” Paper presented to the North American Paleontological Convention, University of California, Berkeley, June 26– July 1, 2001.

Lennox, John C. God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Oxford:  Lion, 2009. Chapters 9-11.

Mazur, Suzan. The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry. Berkeley, CA:  North Atlantic Books, 2010.

Monton, Bradley. Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. Buffalo, NY:  Broadview, 2009.

Müller, Gerd B., and Stuart A. Newman.  “Origination of Organismal Form: The Forgotten Cause in Evolutionary Theory.”  In Organization of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology, edited by G.B. Müller and S. A. Newman, 3-10. Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2003.

Nagle, Thomas. Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York:  Oxford University Press, 2012.

Shapiro, Jams A. Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press Science, 2011.

The Disconnect Between Gay Marriage and the Civil Rights Movement

Even before the historic U.S. Supreme Court decisions last week on DOMA and Prop 8, many, if not most, gay marriage supporters have seen the movement as a continuation of the black civil rights movement. Justification to do so has a problem (among others). To understand this particular logical problem, we must consider the specific things African Americans and other minorities were denied access to leading to the racial civil rights movement and contrast those things with "marriage" as generally understood in our civic and religious culture.

 Rosa Parks, for example, was denied access to the front of the city bus. She and other black people were forced by authorities to sit at the back. In the ensuing protest for racial justice, the issue at hand was the right for blacks to sit where they wanted on the bus. No one needed to redefine what exactly it meant to "sit where one wants on a bus."

 Another example would be blacks not being allowed to use public facilities, such as water fountains and restrooms (at least not use the same ones as whites). Civil rights leaders had no interest in redefining what it meant to "drink from a public fountain" nor to reinterpret "using a public restroom." The same logic applies to affirmative action initiatives such as the meaning of "consideration for a good job" and the definition of "acceptance into a good college."

The gay marriage movement, on the other hand, is grounded in an effort of redefinition. The movement is fundamentally about society agreeing that marriage should be explicitly redefined in a way that differs starkly from how it has been understood throughout western (and perhaps even non-western) history--both civil and religious. Exceptions have been perfunctory, until now. History has advanced with the overwhelming definitional understanding of marriage as being between one man and one woman. Religious polygamous anomalies such as in Islam are more provisional than normative.

Whether there are any merits to such a redefinition is, of course, another discussion and is perhaps the discussion of the modern era. But the gay marriage movement has been logically weak in binding its nuptials to the black civil rights movement, and the fact that this weakness keeps getting lost in the discussion is unfortunate.

Bureaucracy, Lawyers, and No Light from Ky Dept of Ed

This is another letter to the editor I sent to the Glasgow (Ky) Daily Times. This was published in the June 8-9, 2013 edition under the heading "Parents Need Answers from KDE on Standards." Page A-5.

Dear Glasgow Daily Times Editor,
I have a very precise question about the goals of the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). They say they don't have to answer my question, even though it directly relates to what and how your kids are being taught. The question is about the exact person or persons who crafted much of the most important language stated in the Kentucky Core Academic Standards. This is the authoritative document that determines the minimum knowledge and abilities our public school kids must have to graduate high school. (Much of it is based on the 2006 Program of Studies).

After many discussions with interested Glasgow/Barren County parents, teachers, and school administrators, they suggested that the answer probably lies hidden somewhere amidst the bureaucracy of Frankfort at the KDE, so there I turned.

I realize my question below is "razor thin" in specifics, but I think it's the kind of question concerned parents and citizens should be asking the KDE all the time:

“My query should be focused on the team responsible for writing the revisions and/or development of the High School level, Arts and Humanities, Big Idea statements for the 2006 Program of Studies. No team of two or more persons can conceivably conclude how such language would be specifically worded without a committee chairperson, of sorts, making the final decisions for exact composition. So two questions: First, if you do not have the name of such a committee leader on record for public access, could you direct me to who would? It would be surprising that the names and specific process for such a team would not be on record somewhere. And secondly, do you have names of these different team members? I realize this might involve many individuals, but the individuals most closely involved with the final 2006 Program of Studies, Arts and Humanities, Big Ideas, for High School level draft--and such a team's leader(s)--would be of most interest.”

After fruitless discussions with multiple KDE standards bureaucrats, the inquiry process finally drug me to the mercy of--you guessed it--the lawyers. Do you think they were any help? In a nutshell, they painstakingly explained that the answer to my question is not documented on record. Does it make sense to you that there's no public record at the Kentucky Department of Education of who exactly writes standards that your kids must be taught? So, since apparently no one wrote this information down, case law says that they do not have to answer me.

Government transparency is a recurring theme, not only in the national news, but now also regarding our own families more and more. It proves to be difficult to shine sufficient light in a place that directly affects our kids--the Kentucky Department of Education. Whether or not the KDE is intentionally hiding important information from our light is a question that every public school parent should ask incessantly. But do any care at all? Surely our action--or lack of action--will quickly tell us a lot about ourselves and the kind of hope--or lack of hope--lies ahead for our kids.

Warned Kentuckians Avoid Treacherous Prayer

Correction to the following post:  Even though AP reported before Friday that administrators would NOT allow student-led prayer during Friday's Lincoln County commencement (   http://bit.ly/15a1EUV   ), I'm glad to make a correction. Student prayer was allowed and stated after all. My apologies for not catching the story over the weekend from Lincoln County's nearest newspaper, the Advocate-Messenger. The updated details are here: http://bit.ly/Za3Sz5

Instead of what I assumed had happened when I wrote the post below, the administration did not "capitulate" to secular pressure after all.  However, this quote from a leading atheist involved with complaints supports my main point in my blog:  "Every student should feel safe at their graduation and should not have to worry about religious bullying."

Consider whether public prayer really comes close to bullying while reading my original article below:
---

I once laughed when I heard a Christian comedian shout through the mic, "If it offends you when I publicly state my Christian beliefs, where a helmet!" The audience then erupted in laughs and cheers.

I know what it's like to be a minority among, not just a crowd, but a whole national culture, when it comes to publicly expressed religious belief and worship. Yes, I admit without hesitation that the call to prayer, broadcast at various times throughout every day over loud speakers during my visit in predominately Muslim Malaysia, sounded eerie and unsettling. That and much more that saturates Malay culture constantly aroused strange feelings of loneliness throughout my stay. But it never crossed my mind that someone should stop the call.

Even if, hypothetically, I were to stay in that or a similar country long term or, again, hypothetically, to change my citizenship with such a people, I would never conceive of asking the imams even to turn down the volume on their speakers. I can't conceive of confusing my discomfort as a minority with some contrived "right" not to be made uncomfortable by the surrounding majority, regardless of the majority's intentions.

Do the young and the old in America--now, surprisingly, in Kentucky, more specifically--no longer have the inner stamina to survive and thrive through feelings of cultural and civic discomfort? Does some weakly conceived idea of a thorough "separation" of church and state give some of us the only pitiful strength we can muster to push away what hurts our feelings? This is what civic integrity has come to, even in the small community of Lincoln County, Kentucky, where school administrators capitulated to a very small minority of self-proclaimed atheists. They complained that they would be overwrought if student-led prayer were forced upon them during last Friday's commencement. It's being reported that most Lincoln Countians have had to work hard to understand and accommodate the decision.

Perhaps it would have been much easier on all those citizens if the shaken atheist minority had just aroused a morsel of intellectual strength to defend their worldview through the lost art of public discourse. They also should have done what any frightened soul should do when ravaged by the onslaught of terrifying public prayers that slap "human rights" in the head. Wear a helmet.

Some Thoughts About Snipping

What abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell had been doing in Philadelphia is making all who care to listen to the gruesome details more than just a little sick in the stomach. How could this have happened anytime, anywhere as a part of the unfolding of the human race? How could this have happened in America, in the city that birthed our constitution; the city that's named after "brotherly love?"

We all gasp at the details of Gosnell and employees allegedly snipping the spinal cords and killing fetuses in the womb and babies who had just been born. "Babies just being born" seems to produce the loudest gasps. Let's ask why. What do you say we keep asking why until answers are made as clear and articulate as possible from abortion rights advocates?

Since this trial is grabbing the nation's heads by the hair and forcing us to look at blood and death and the snipping of innocence squarely at what it is, there's now absolutely no justification for any thinking, feeling soul alive who's learned these details also not to face the mother of all questions regarding human life, reproductive rights, and the choice of terminating pregnancies. This is the question of what justifies any demarcation--any warranted dividing lines--between which heart we may legally stop before God and before human law and which we may not. What makes a baby breathing outside the womb worthy of snip protection, while another, inside the warm water of the feeding womb, unworthy?

Politicians of various American states have stroked their chins and voted a collective confusion of snip-worthiness with "man's measurements," such as 24 weeks in one state, a particular trimester in another.  We, of course, who have come of age, attempt to hide the naked arbitrariness of such measurements by sewing together our fig leaves of "science."  Kermitt Gosnell is a scientist--credentials, smock, and lots of tools to do science with.  Some legislators have determined snip-worthiness based on which stages and proceedures present too great of a risk to the mother's health.  Nature, it seems, labors to outwit science, at least for now.  But science will relentlessly find the right concoctions for inducement, chemicals for detachment, and instruments for delicate peeling and prying that will put maternal health risk in the history books. Our current understanding of what it means to be human will become mere history as well.

We embarrass ourselves with how this demarcation of abortion worthiness is so will-of-the-wisp.  There is nothing, however, that is ambiguous about when these little bloody lives will be terminated. It's at a decisive point in time and at an eternally hallowed place where such a little thing gets touched by the tools of science.

"Science." "Rights." "Laws." These little ones have not been allowed to grow into any comprehension of such things. If they've been able to comprehend any significant idea at all, it's the idea that they are not wanted. But the very last idea they possibly encounter is their babyish puzzlement over What exactly is that foreign object coming after them? Too bad they'd never grown to be able to appreciate the thing that killed them-- science.

As arrogant as I can be sometimes, I know I'm not the first to raise such questions. Just let me remind you to watch how people squirm when asked to justify any demarcation of fetal development.  When do abortionists have to put down their "medical" instruments and just let the thing grow?  Let's take the tiny tweezers of intricate logic to any answers abortion advocates might give.  Let them squirm about it until, some day, the little ones in the womb  squirm no more. And the only tool they're concerned with is their own little suckable thumbs.

Academic Standards for Your Kids: The "Art" of Missing the Point

This letter to the editor was published in the Glasgow (Ky.) Daily Times weekend edition, April 27/28, 2013, page A5, under the headline "Academic Standards Missing Key Aspect."

Do the people who drafted the Kentucky Core Academic Standards document, who have recently been given serious authority to determine the ultimate educational goals of your schools, share your most fundamental beliefs about the world and life? Decide for yourself, especially in the Arts and Humanities sections, the sections that one would think should inspire students toward the most important ideals and truths we hold as families of Barren County. (Space here limits me from sharing significant quotations, but the document is easily accessible online.)

 Something huge is missing from this agenda. What should art education really be all about? I’m concerned about the way the KCAS writers limit the purposes of art to the mere feelings and emotions of the artist. Good art truly strikes us, often emotionally, but in doing so it should prod us towards reality that we behold as something ultimately beyond fleeting sentimentality and feelings. The KCAS document implies that graduating students need no comprehension of the difference between art and aesthetics. The word “aesthetics” is not even mentioned in the Arts sections. Aesthetics relates to the ideals and values that transcend the piece of art, the artist’s own feelings (no matter how interesting), and even the cultural setting from which the expression arises. One must at least begin to understand aesthetics—as opposed to mere art—in order to become educated. Parents must then develop tastes in their children that readily identify works of art that convey these universal aesthetic ideals. If you agree that you should do this as a parent, the people behind the KCAS don’t seem to be willing or able to help you.

 So proper aesthetic education, of course, requires judgment by families and the community to determine what ought to be preferred, and ought is becoming more and more passé when it comes to art, humanities, and cultural discussion. While the diversity of cultures in America must be taught and understood, the celebration of various cultures must be tampered with discernment. Some cultural expressions, especially in art, are simply inferior to others in aiming students toward what south central Kentuckians believe to be their highest ideals. There, I said it!

 Art best expresses such ideals when they move the souls of us, the observers, as well as the artists. The KCAS Arts and Humanities drafters—whoever they are—seem to care little for teaching the relationship between material works of art and eternal souls. In fact, the general KCAS document implies that nurturing the souls of your students toward transcendent truth is of little concern to the Kentucky Department of Education. Of course that’s ultimately your job as a parent. But are they working alongside you, staying out of your way, or are they hindering you? If they’re hindering you, it’s time to ask them why and ask yourself what you’re going to do about it.

Comments welcome, especially from parents and educators.