fayfreethinkers.com

Here's the latest column by Lowell Grisham in the NWA Times:

My college roommate Bubba used to say, “ I wish rainwater was beer, but it ain’t. ” Happily, it is a free country, and we have every personal right to believe anything we wish. We can believe that rainwater is beer — or that God created the earth from nothing in 144 hours — but there is a dear price to pay for believing in things that aren’t true.

In America you can form a Rainwater Beer Drinkers Society, freely assemble and enjoy fellowship together while sharing communion enjoying your favorite rainwater. You can create and publish books that compare the various beer qualities of different types of rain. You can encourage your followers to learn more about beer-rain, and even fund chemical researchers to publish non-peerevaluated academic papers listing the chemical properties that prove rainwater is beer. You can fund long lists of experts who testify to the glories of rain-beer.

You can spread those “ scientific” findings through any open communication means you wish and quash any critique on your own website. You can call real science “ junk” and redefine what science means to allow your own scholars to redefine rainwater as beer.

You can start your own schools and teach your children your truth about rainwater. As long as you can keep your children isolated from the rest of the world you can control their minds. You can build a museum to display the glorious beer qualities of rain. You might even get the Discovery Channel to run something glitzy about your findings. You can grow an industry to promote your theories, create hundreds of “ proofs” about rainwater and so flood the argument that the average person will be so overwhelmed that they can’t tell rainwater from beer. And whenever you are challenged, you can say you are being persecuted. Say that those people who believe in non-beer-rainwater are all atheists, and they are attacking everyone’s religious convictions.

Whenever those pesky scientists try to assert that rainwater is just rainwater, you can demand equal time. After all, saying that rainwater is only rainwater is just a theory. You’ve got a theory too. The media believes they must report both sides of every issue, so if you can make it an issue they’ll give you good quotes. Create a big controversy — “ New Findings Suggest the Presence of Hops and Barley in Rainwater. ” If any pointy-nosed university academicians challenge you, sic Bill O’Reilly on them. He’ll shout ‘ em down.

In a free country, you’ve got every Godgiven right to believe and to express your belief that rainwater is beer. I’ll defend your rights, and so will the ACLU. But I

don’t have to agree with you. We have such a tolerant society that you won’t run into too much complaint until you begin to cross lines and try to force others to swallow your beer unwillingly. If your motivated, well-organized minority takes advantage of low-turnout public races like school board elections and gains a majority of rainwater beer candidates on the school board, and if they then require public school teachers to teach the rainwater-is-beer theory alongside the rainwater-is-rainwater theory, you’ll wake some people up. By all means avoid going to court. If you ever go to court you face a substantial obstacle. Courts base their judgments on evidence. You’re gonna lose. Just like 100 percent of the creationist-intelligent design cases that have made it to trial. Even conservative beer-rain drinking judges will apply the law to the evidence. The problem with any organization, especially a religious one, attaching itself to a scientific untruth is that the organization loses credibility. It risks losing its children as they grow up and taste rainwater and discover for themselves it is not beer. Unless they are kept in controlled religious isolation, all Christian children will discover one day that evolution is true. If their parents and churches have taught them otherwise, the children are either going to move courageously toward a more progressive faith or fearfully conform to untruth to get along with their authorities or throw religion out entirely. Ferdinand Magellan famously mused, “ The Church says the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church. ”

For churches and religious people to be afraid of science and its noble search for truth is a betrayal of our witness that God is truth. Truth is continually unfolding. All new discovery of truth reflects God and adds to our understanding of God. Enjoy the wondrous journey. And have a mug of rainwater on Bubba.

Lowell Grisham is an Episcopal priest from Fayetteville.

SOURCE: http://nwarktimes.com/nwat/Editorial/50807/

"Father" Lowell is a good scout. Thankfully, he has a whole column to make these points with, instead of the 500 word limit of the letter writers.

Excellent essay. The only thing I'd take issue with is, "Courts base their judgments on evidence." Sometimes courts ignore/evade scientific evidence, as they did in earlier days about evolution, as they do today about e.g. cannabis. Courts generally follow the decreed/legislated laws of rulers, regardless of fact or science. If the law were to forbid the teaching of evolution, no doubt govt courts would support that law.

DAR
A person named Berry wrote this letter in response to Grisham's article above. Personally, I don't find it very "informative."

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Is this tolerance?

Lowell Grisham has again managed to demean the intelligence of Christians everywhere. “ If Only Rainwater Was Beer” [Times, March 5, 2007 ] equates the belief in intelligent design with a person who believes that the clouds actually rain beer. In other words, those who believe Genesis is literal and that there is ample evidence for intelligent design are nothing but morons.

Let’s see if the evidence bears out Mr. Grisham’s assertions. His affirmation that “ evolution is fact, ” shows a woeful understanding of the very definition of science. Even the world’s leading evolutionists agree that for something to be “ scientific” it must meet three criteria.

(1 ) It must be observable. George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist ) states: “ It is inherent in any definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really about anything... or at the very least, they are not science.”
(2 ) It must be demonstrable. The definition of “ science” from the Oxford Dictionary includes, “ A branch of study concerned with... demonstrable truths or with observed facts... ”
Theodosius Dobzhansky admits, “ Evolution has not been witnessed by human observers. ” And again he states, “ These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable and irreversible.”
(3 ) It must be testable. L. Harrison Matthews states, “ The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory... is it then a science or a faith?

Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation — both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.”

I am not one who believes that the theory of intelligent design be exclusively taught in schools, nor that the theory of evolution be banned from public schools. Neither intelligent design nor evolution are observable or repeatable and are therefore “faiths” that must be argued on the basis of evidence. For example, the evidence in the fossil record does not support transitional forms. Dr. Stephen Gould, evolutionist and Harvard professor, rejected intelligent design — but was so convinced that the fossil record did not support Darwinian evolution that he theorized giant leaps in the evolutionary chain; something on the order of a whale beaching itself and giving birth to an elephant. Since the fossil record shows the same distinction in animal classes as we see today, the evidence either supports Gould’s theory or intelligent design but not Darwin’s graduation.

Mr. Grisham has often touted himself as a proponent of “ tolerance.” But the only people he “ tolerates” are those who hold the same liberal, intolerant views as he does. Everyone else is on the level of a person who thinks rainwater is beer. Now there’s a nice way to start an intelligent discussion. I wonder, who’s drinking the rainwater and who’s
drinking the beer?

Berry Kercheville / Fayetteville

LINK

Darrel wrote:Even the world’s leading evolutionists agree that for something to be “ scientific” it must meet three criteria.

(1 ) It must be observable. George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist ) states: “ It is inherent in any definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really about anything... or at the very least, they are not science.”
(2 ) It must be demonstrable. The definition of “ science” from the Oxford Dictionary includes, “ A branch of study concerned with... demonstrable truths or with observed facts... ”
Theodosius Dobzhansky admits, “ Evolution has not been witnessed by human observers. ” And again he states, “ These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable and irreversible.”
(3 ) It must be testable. L. Harrison Matthews states, “ The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory... is it then a science or a faith?

Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation — both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.”

DOUG
Well, evolution is observable, demonstrable, and testable. It has been observed, demonstrated, and tested.

I guess Berry isn't up on the latest regarding evolution. In fact, Berry is at least 70 years behind.