Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into “fundamentalism” if it ignores scientific reason.
Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed John Paul’s 1996 statement that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis.”
On October 21st, the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a forum on the issue of teaching Intelligent Design in the public schools. C-Span has Real Media videos of all three sessions available to view online at least through the first or second week of November. I haven’t watched them all yet as they total about 5 hours of video but I have heard it was a good event for supporters of Evolution.
First up was Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor and author of “Darwin’s Black Box,” who is considered an expert on Intelligent Design (ID). He has written that “intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose,” but when asked to name the driving force behind the concept, Behe could not.
Contrast that with Evolution. Darwin named “natural selection” as its driving force.
Montgomery continues the myth that challenging current state and church entanglements is hostile to religion or an attempt to “strip references to God from the public arena”. These challenges are meant to keep the state neutral toward religion. Favorable or hostile to none.
Probably a waste of time but an article on the conservative website MichNews caught my eye this morning.
Wednesday night a talk show on the Fox network hosted by loud mouth Bill O’Reilly, called the “O’Reilly Factor”, had as a guest the first paid lobbyist for those of us who support a secular government. Lori Lipman Brown, who works for the Secular Coalition For America, and the issues discussed included the latest Pledge of Allegiance case now in Federal Court.
Writer Michael J. Gaynor was not happy with how the interview turned out. It seems that his buddy O’Reilly failed to get the history of the Pledge correct and “allowed” Brown to gain an upper hand in the “debate”.
So the question that comes to my mind is – Why are we praying AFTER the event? Logic would dictate that if we want to save the victim’s soul then we should pray for them before the storm hit. In context, elected officials pull out the prayer card as way of soothing people. Sins or God really are not part of the reason they do it.