CIIR: 'God, and not Monsanto, creates life'

'Like slavery in past centuries there is no good patenting regime. It is
totally at variance with the Biblical teaching that life is a gift of God to
be shared by all. Christians believe that God, and not Monsanto, creates
life.'

------

CIIR AGM calls for a precautionary approach to GM
22 Oct 2004
http://www.ciir.org/Templates/Internal.asp?NodeID=91077

CIIR AGM calls for a precautionary approach to GM

Key issues surrounding genetic modification (GM) and its potential impact on
the world's poor were explored at the Annual General Meeting on 15 October
of the Catholic Institute for International Relations.

After the business part of the AGM, chaired by Catholic journalist, ecologist
and author Ellen Teague, two eminent guest speakers - Columban missionary Fr
Sean McDonagh and Nicaraguan GM activist Victor Campos - took to the podium
to make their case for a precautionary approach to the controversial topic
of GM.

Taking inspiration from the central theme, 'GM - Beyond the Myths', Fr Sean
McDonagh told CIIR members about his attendance at the recent conference,
'Feeding the World; The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology,' held on
September 24 at the Gregorian University in Rome and co-sponsored by the
U.S. Embassy to the Vatican and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Dublin-based Fr McDonagh, who has written numerous books on the GM,
including: 'The Vatican and GE Food?' and 'Patenting Life? Stop!' said that
his main concern was that GM was pitched at the conference as a solution to
world hunger, a concept he disputes.

He said: 'Genetically Engineered (GE) crops will not feed the world. Many
countries where poverty is endemic are actually food exporters. Brazil is
the third largest exporter of food in the world and yet one fifth of its
population - 32 million - go to bed hungry every night.'

He added: ' GE crops are patented so the Catholic Church, which presents
itself as a Pro-Life institution, should recoil in horror at the arrogance
involved in patenting life. Like slavery in past centuries there is no good
patenting regime. It is totally at variance with the Biblical teaching that
life is a gift of God to be shared by all. Christians believe that God, and
not Monsanto, creates life.'

He continued: 'Hunger and malnutrition are caused by poverty that results
from inequitable economic, social and cultural policies. The Holy See should
not allow itself to be hijacked by giant corporations whose only concern is
to make trillions of dollars by selling crops to poor people in the majority
world. The Holy See should listen to the voice of development workers, and
Christian leaders in the Philippines, South Africa and Brazil.'

Victor Campos, a Nicaraguan farmer, renowned lecturer and sub director of
Centro Humboldt, Nicaragua's leading environmental watchdog, talked about
how GM crops had been brought into his country as food aid.

Outraged by this situation, which effectively robbed Nicaraguans of the
chance to object to GM prior to its arrival in their land and in their food,
Mr Campos set up an NGO called The Alliance for a Nicaragua free of GMOs,
which gains more members each year and has pushed the issue higher up the
political agenda. Mr Campos also spoke about the devastating impact of GM on
poor small farmers, who carry out the age-old practice of sharing and
saving seeds.

Max L. Stackhouse is the Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Professor
of Reformed Theology and Public Life at the Princeton
Theological Seminary, where he directs Kuyper Center for
Public Theology. An ordained minister in the United Church
of Christ, Dr. Stackhouse is a member of the American
Academy of Religion. This essay is a condensed version of
the Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs,
delivered on October 14, 2004. This lecture was established
by a grant from Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. Previous
lecturers include Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British
Commonwealth; George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul
II, and James Billington, Librarian of Congress. All the
lectures are posted on:
www.fpri.org/education/templetonlecture.html

PUBLIC THEOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY'S FUTURE

The 9th Annual Templeton Lecture On Religion and World Affairs

by Max L. Stackhouse

The defeat of fascism, the victory of anti-colonial
movements, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late
20th century made it appear possible that democracy would
spread worldwide, accompanied by a fuller realization of
human rights, a global economy that benefits more of the
world's people, and a reduction of military threats to the
world's security. That "end of history" view may yet prove
to be the most probable global direction -- some 120 nations
adopted democratically oriented constitutions for the first
time in the last half century. But there are many reasons
to be concerned about the character of a democratic future.
Some of the newly independent nations have become one-party
states hovering on failure. Some Islamists have repudiated
democracy altogether and advocate a return to Caliphate
governance under sharia. Russia sometimes seems bound to
resume a czarist model of centralized political control; and
China is adamant in resisting democratic movements.

Moreover, some oppose the idea of human rights, one of the
pillars of democracy, claiming that its implicit assumption
-- that humanity consists of autonomous individuals -- is a
modern secularist invention. Still others protest the
currently emerging global economy, viewing it as a threat to
sovereignty and a design of the rich to exploit the poor.
And many fear endless attacks by shadowy, stateless
terrorist networks or by ethnic factions, both of which
challenge democratic prospects by inducing such a
preoccupation with security that democratic freedoms are
eroded.

In this situation, the world's most dynamic democracy and
only superpower is expected to be not only the world's
policeman, but also its godfather, bringing peace,
prosperity, and democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq and
solving every other problem that appears on the horizon,
from Haiti to global warming to the AIDS crisis in
subsaharan Africa. This charge could tempt the nation into
a new imperialism. Even as the United States is criticized
for not engaging the problems of the world, it is condemned
for intervening everywhere and seducing the world's youth
away from their own cultures.

The deeper difficulty is that Americans do not have a clear
moral or spiritual view of what we are about, of why we
believe what we believe and do what we do. How can, should,
or may we use our power, and why? And what is the source of
that power?

Suppose that the U.S. succeeds in planting democracy
throughout the world. One might see this as either cultural
imperialism or a justifiable conversion of an unholy tyranny
to a just system that corresponds to the deepest levels of
human nature and the highest discernible sense of divine
intent. That sense might of course simply be the reigning
consensus among the currently powerful nations. Does that
consensus have, or need, a deeper grounding, an ultimate
source and norm of truth and justice that can guide how
humanity ought to live?

Historically, advocates of democracy believed that it did.
The late medieval "conciliarists" who displaced popes and
overrode emperors thought so, as did the Reformers and the
Puritans. We know that the deists and theists who advocated
the Bill of Rights thought so. And the U.S. didn't hesitate
to establish democratic regimes in Cuba and the Philippines
at the end of the Spanish-American War, in Germany and Japan
at the end of World War II, and in South Korea after the
conflict there.

Is there in fact a basis for democracy that is deeper than
the fact that it has apparently mostly worked better than
other forms, at least in the West? How can we make the case
for it today, especially with globalized media, technology,
economy, culture, and religions that are beyond the control
of any one government?

Critics regularly charge that America is an imperialist
nation bent on ruling the world, ready to override other
societies with its massive multinational corporations. No
doubt some Americans have such interests, but most see their
nation as rooted in "that order which we call freedom," with
a mission to help others form open societies, adopt
democratic values, and establish human rights in a
flourishing economy. We have sometimes failed in this
mission, but most agree on the mission.

However, religious leaders, theologians, political leaders,
and commentators have failed to enunciate the basis for our
mission, or identify ways to reform it when it goes wrong.
Can we justly clarify what it is that makes us ready to send
our young men and women to kill and die for democracy?

No civilization has yet endured that did not have a
religious vision at its core. History is littered with the
rubble of empires that fell as much by spiritual emptiness
as by economic and military weakness or external pressure.
But the enduring civilizations have had religious cores that
touch the hearts and minds of the people, becoming the moral
architecture to guide the leaders and evoke sacrificial
commitments. These enable the societies' continual renewal.
It is not that everyone agrees with the religious vision, or
has to, but that there is a framework within which debate
takes place.

One cannot imagine trying to understand the politics of
China or India without reference to Confucianism or
Hinduism, or the systems of government in Southeast Asia or
the Middle East without understanding Buddhism or Islam, or
what is going on in the EU without reference to the legacy
of traditional Christendom (even if the EU's current
advocates resist any reference to religion in its new
constitution). Nor can we understand the U.S. without an
awareness of Protestantism's historic influence -- or of the
failure of its mainline traditions to define the urgent
social issues -- and of the rise of Evangelicalism and
Pentecostalism, on the one hand, and post-Vatican II
Catholicism, on the other, as they seek to offer other
perspectives on the ultimate issues. It is not the duty of
religious organizations to make public policy, as some try
to do; but it is their responsibility to seek to influence
people's consciences so that their political decisions will
be informed by moral and spiritual convictions.

Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that
many have tried to interpret the world as if religion were
not central to societies and politics. But he argues that
life cannot be understood exclusive of religious ideas, as
they are incarnate in the dominant values of the culture.
Indeed, Huntington speaks of the irrelevance of purely
secular thought to contemporary politics, holding that
politics is and must be religious:

During the twentieth century, a secular century, Lenin,
Ataturk, Nehru, Ben Gurion, and the Shah (for instance) all
defined the identity of their countries in the secular
century's terms. That has changed, the Shah is gone, the
Soviet Union is gone, and in its place is a Russia that in
public statements identifies itself quite explicitly with
Russian Orthodoxy. In Turkey, India, and Israel, major
political movements are challenging the secular definition
of identity. Politicians in many societies have found that
religion either is crucial to maintaining their legitimacy
as rulers or must be suppressed because it presents a
challenge to that legitimacy.[1]

Societies do tend to have common features in the sense that
we can study them comparatively and see how they similarly
adapt to similar conditions and interests. Yet, societies
develop differently because they are bent in different
directions by distinctive religions; regulating convictions
have become woven into cultural values.

Some of the regulating convictions that shape democracy
become clear when we speak of human rights, which are
affirmed by the vision behind democracy, notwithstanding our
horrible record with regard to slavery and women's rights,
and the betrayal of our own principles in wartime, from the
early struggles with Native Americans to Abu Ghraib in 2004.
Still, the conviction that humans have rights has prevailed
again and again. Indeed, even in dark moments, prophetic
voices have drawn on Biblical roots to demand the
recognition that each person is made in the image of God and
thus has inalienable rights -- even the criminal, the enemy,
the heretic, the prisoner, and the terrorist.

As Michael Perry, one of the nation's leading authorities on
law and morality, has put it, "some things should never be
done to anyone; and some things should be done for
everyone."[2] That is why the authors of America's
Declaration of Independence and the UN's Declaration of
Human Rights could appeal to Biblical principles to advocate
rights. They are "self-evident truths" that shape
consciences, civilizations, and history. When one appeals
to human rights in the face of tyranny, torture, servitude,
arbitrary arrest, extortion, discrimination, or religious
persecution, one has played a valid moral trump, and the
people have the basis to demand a law code and to form
judicial process as a recourse and remedy. The awareness of
such principles gives hope for democratic vitality under
just law.

A second feature of society that gives hope for democracy
has to do with economic life. Capitalism is the most
efficient and productive economic system yet to be devised,
and it is sweeping the world. It improves the well-being of
most people, including the poor. Not only parts of South
America and the "little tigers" of East Asia, but also the
two most populous nations of the world, India and China,
have turned to versions of capitalism, making it likely that
the World Bank and UN millennium goal of halving world
poverty within ten years can be met. However, these same
trends will also increase inequality. A great many are
raised a little, and a substantial number are raised a good
bit, but only a few are raised a great deal, widening the
gap between the wealthy and the still struggling. A free
society does not demand enforced equality of economic
status, but it must work to equalize opportunity.

The formation of new middle classes and the rising
aspirations of those who have grasped the lower rungs of the
ladder increase the prospects for democracy. People with
some financial means and even relative security are better
able to educate their children, adopt new technologies,
develop more stable lifestyles, and migrate out of
dependency. They gain some command over their destinies,
demand their freedom from restrictive constraints, and
become more concerned about developing excellence in various
areas of their lives -- professional, educational,
environmental, and institutional. They deal with others
with greater integrity and seek to provide goods or services
that make them contributing members of society.

But the formation of new middle classes does not guarantee
democracy's development. Only some parts of the middle
classes begin to extend economic opportunities, form
communities of commitment, and exercise citizen
participation. The prospect that the new middle classes
will seek to extend democratic possibilities depends on
their "calling." It is one thing to have a job and a
career, it is quite another to see what one does in all the
daily rounds of life as being under the scrutiny of a God
who cares how we live and has purposes for our lives. Max
Weber probably had it about right when he argued that this
doctrine of vocation in the world played a distinctive role
in bringing about the asceticism that generated the modern
middle classes and its quest for excellence and
professionalism.

Today's massive conversions to Pentecostalism in Latin
America and Africa, and to Evangelicalism in Asia replicate
the earlier Reformation dynamics, though usually without the
same doctrinal apparatus. This is also the case with the
growth of parallel movements in America, in the "mega-
churches" that puzzle the mainline churches that are
declining in membership. Those given the opportunity to
move toward the middle classes are questing for a new
ordering of their lives, and these movements are drawing
people into bonds of discipline and are often less tolerant
of libertine lifestyles, that are having a notable political
impact.

There are two key doctrinal points here that support
democratic prospects: first, that humans are made in the
image of God, and second, that God calls each person to live
a godly life that is manifest in the development of
excellence in all areas of worldly life. These doctrinal
points are incarnate in the now public dynamics that are
globalizing our world, one working through the attempt to
articulate principles of justice, the other appearing in the
forms of increased productivity and disciplined lifestyles.
One aids democratic prospects from above, one from below.
Both form a new middle.

I believe democracy does have a theological base, but a less
direct one. It usually depends on a basically mechanical
and statistical procedure whereby each person votes to
determine leadership or policy. That procedure involves
only two agents -- individual votes, cumulatively tabulated,
and the state, the organized body that manages the election
and accepts its results. The Terrors of the French
Revolution and of the Red Guard's Cultural Revolution remind
us of the perils of the mobocracy into which mere populism
can degenerate, while the fact that both Hitler and Stalin
both claimed to be elected reminds us of what statism can
become.

If a democracy is to have an inner moral fiber, it must have
several other things besides voters and the state, an
independent legal system that recognizes the voters' human
rights and civil liberties, and a free economic system. It
must also have:

* schools that teach critical thinking;

* media that provides information and inspiration from a
range of perspectives;

* stable families that nurture responsible persons and
inculcate moral habits and spiritual insight;

* political parties that voice the needs and hopes of
the people and form the "loyal opposition" when they are
not in power;

* voluntary associations that take up causes or perform
services that need attention but are not the obvious
duty of the government; and

* above all, independent religious communities able to
treat both the political and social aspects of life from
a transcendent point of view.

In short, a viable democracy depends on a division of powers
not only within the government, but among the institutions
outside state control in a viable civil society. This
demands a separation of church and state, with the religious
organizations providing an organized moral and spiritual
center of loyalty that does not allow interests to be the
only basis of politics.

Civil society is strongest where multiple religious
institutions are well developed. Democracy as a political
design was first mentioned in ancient Greece, but it did not
flourish there: it fell every time it was tried to tyranny,
mobocracy, plutocracy, or imperialism, for the character of
ancient Greece religion could not sustain a moral core.
Democracy only flourished after the church became a center
of loyalty and began to form schools, hospitals, guilds,
parties, and associations for fellowship and service, in
what was a long and slow, but providential, process.

Other forms of democracy, most notably deriving from the
French Revolution and influencing in various ways the German
Enlightenment, the Russian Revolution, and the secular
democrats of the Americas, renounced the idea that religion
was a necessary part of democracy. Secular democrats
attempted to establish a state-guided democracy based on
what Rousseau called the "general will." Religion would be
removed from public discourse, even prohibited from public
display (as we have seen in the recent banning of the
wearing of headscarves by Muslims and nuns, in schools and
government offices).

This development was partly understandable, for there are
forms of religious dogma that do not defend human rights and
that inhibit economic development. And there are movements
claiming roots in the Christian church that are anti-
intellectual and sectarian. These groups hate pluralism and
engender enclaves of self-righteous piety that worship a God
who only condemns the world.

But their critique of bad religion banishes too much. The
French Revolution yielded Napoleon, Germany's enlightened
philosophers easily succumbed to fascism, the Soviet
"people's democracy" fell to Bolshevism, and the secular
populists of the Americas became prey of liberationist
ideologies. As they say now in Latin America, the church
opted for the oppressed, and the poor opted for
Evangelicalism. Not only must religion be taken seriously,
but also the kind of theology that is willing and able to
touch the heart and address public issues must be seen as
necessary for the future of democracy. A profound theology
will press us toward a democracy ordered in a way that
accords with God's law and purposes. That poses the
critical issues.

All of us have a personal faith, a theology, a set of
personal convictions about ultimate reality; and millions of
people belong to some organized wing of their religious
tradition. Each tradition has a distinctive way of defining
the ideal political order. Some are more capable of
supporting the conditions under which democracy flourishes
than others. Most have some national or international
religious body, or chief representatives, who periodically
issue statements that have direct political implications --
ethical issues framed by a theological tradition tend not to
stay under the steeple.

Today, the debate about the morality of the Iraq war is very
alive, with theological convictions about "just war"
doctrines just below the surface. The question has arisen
whether human rights are being compromised for the sake of
security and national defense. The issue of the extent to
which government should control corporations' ecological or
outsourcing practices is also on the agenda, as well as the
propriety of limiting abortion or stem-cell research. An
open debate about these theologically laden issues is vital
to democracy.

Public theology has the task of engaging in public dialogue
on such ethical issues. The Judeo-Christian tradition
offers two deeply rooted Biblical themes that undergird the
"principled pluralism" that presses society toward the kind
of democracy that is the necessary supplement to the idea of
the image of God, on which human rights rest, and to the
idea of vocation, on which professional integrity rests.
These are the recognition of sin and the possibility of
covenant.

Recognizing sinfulness implies awareness that humans and
their societies are all imperfect. Thus, every idealistic
quest for harmony of all the parts will lead to pride and
totalitarianism. The consolidation of power in the hands of
the few tempts humanity to an arrogance that corrupts the
powerful and either exploits or makes passive the rest.
Accordingly, power must be distributed and thereby limited.
If each sphere of civil society is well developed, the
various spheres can correct one another or cooperate to
reform the whole.

That cooperation invites the possibility of forming
covenantal relationships. Daniel Elazar, one of the great
scholarly gems of the last century, traced this idea through
the West's history and documented how, from its roots in
ancient Judaism, it was adopted and adapted by certain
strands of Christianity and found resonance in many
cultures, engendered a passion for a pluralistic democracy,
and opposed both the hierarchical authoritarianism found in
most classical cultures and the balkanizing atomism of
modernity. The idea of covenant is based on the formation
of communities of commitment for purposes that include but
transcend our human material interests.

Christianity contributed to this concept the idea of love as
the inner spirit of covenantal bonding. That is what forms
character and reforms society in this life, even though
perfection is impossible and forgiveness is necessary.
Christians believe that this is what Christ manifest and
what is working among us in all the spheres of common life.
It is what gives us faith that, in spite of sin, evil will
not prevail. Being realistic about sin and confident in the
possibility of love allows Christians to believe that there
is a moral and spiritual heart of a democratic society and
political order.

If these theological motifs are, as I believe, already
present deep within democratic life, they need to be made
conscious for democracy to flourish and spread. A serious
public theology will have to engage the great world
religions to find out whether they have comparable concepts
and prospects and where they may be able to adjust such
motifs for the emerging global civil society. This is
another area, for many the newest one, where our theology
must be public.


Notes

[1] "Religion, Culture, and International Conflict After
September 11," Ethics and Public Policy Center
Conversations, June 17, 2002, www.eppc.org.

[2] The Idea of Human Rights, Oxford, 1998, p. 35.

The attached sermon by laywoman Liz Morris (née McNeill) delivered at St
George's Epsom last Sun struck my wife & me as good old-fashioned sense.
It was illustrated with trendy PowerPoint® diagrams, of which hints show in
this text.

SERMON 24TH OCTOBER 2004
READY FOR A FIGHT :
THE ARMOUR OF GOD

CLICK ñ Screen 1 READY FOR A FIGHT

Intro; Ready for a fight? The Armour of God
Look at the Armour, Who we are fighting against and who we are fighting with

CLICK ñ Screen 2 Victory or Die

Clan Motto ñ Victory or die, sheep stealers and murders and centuries of
warfare and fighting (ask David).
Paul was a prisoner under house arrest in Rome. when writing his letter to
Ephesus there would have been a guard at his door
A Roman Soldier was an image familiar if not liked by everyone as Rome was
the occupying force. Roman army were viewed as a well honed and prepared
fighting force.

Click ñ Screen 3 flexible and protection
Two reasons the Romanís designed armour their way
INCLUDEPICTURE
"http://rubens.anu.edu.au/student.projects97/armour/icon/ballblack.gif" *
MERGEFORMATINET The first was that armour be flexible enough to allow
the wearer freedom of movement; and
INCLUDEPICTURE
"http://rubens.anu.edu.au/student.projects97/armour/icon/ballblack.gif" *
MERGEFORMATINET Second, it also had to be lightweight enough to be worn
without tiring the wearer whilst providing protection against opponents'
weapons.

CLICK ñ slide 4 Whole, chink

Put on the whole armour of God ñ the devil will attack if we are
unprotected. If a piece of armour is not put on properly then that will
leave a weakness a chink to be attacked

CLICK ñ slide 5 Belt

Belt
This was a very important piece to the Roman Soldier's armour.ÝIt was a
wide belt which held a lot of equipment. There was loops, for different
swords, ropes and a rations sack. The belt was tied in several places to
stay in place, so that no matter how the soldier moved about, fell down,
climbed hills, the belt was always in place with weapons at the ready.ÝIf
the belt was not on straight, then everything would be out of place for the
soldier. This would cut down his efficiency in battle and may even cost him
his life.

CLICK ñ slide 5 Held swordÖHeld tunic

The "apron" of leather strips gave some protection but the noise made when
the legionaries marched helped to intimidate the enemy
The belt gathered in the tunic and helped keep the breastplate in place

CLICK ñslide 6 Belt of Truth

Belt of Truth
The belt was the first thing that the soldier put on and to be put on
properly. So the belt of truth must be the first thing we put on and it
must be in place properly. If we do not use the belt of truth, which is the
Word and character of God then we have no foundation on which to base our
warfare with the enemy.

CLICK slide 6 Truth in love

Paul has said that we are no longer to be "tossed back and forth by the
waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the
cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming." Instead we are
to "speak the truth in love, speaking truly, dealing truly and living
truly" (Ephesians 4.14-15).. Our lives are to be consistent flowing from
his truth in Jesus Christ. This part of the armour is the most important
for us to wear, because it is truth in todaysí society that is most
challenged. Paul says "the time is coming when people will not endure sound
teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves
teachers to suit their own liking and will turn away from listening to the
truth and wonder into myths.

Click - slide 7 Truth is relative

Society says Truth is relative ñ may be alright for me but you have to
decide for yourself ñ subjective
Euan in the post office

Click slide 7 absolute truth

Josh McDowell says ëabsolute truth is that which is true for all people,
for all times, for all places.
Josh "Because God is Truth it comes from His nature, and whatever is
contrary to God's nature is sin."
Honesty is right because God is true. Truth is not something God does, nor
is it something He possesses; it is a part of who He is.
"God must be true," the Bible says, "though every man be proved a liar"
(Rom. 3:4, Revised English Bible).
Because God is true, lying is against His nature. Dishonesty is evil and
wrong because it is contrary to God's character.
This is the belt of Truth we are called put on the very character of God
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life, not sometimes and if it
suits He is the truth, he is the belt on which all the rest of the armour
is put on and secured by.

Click ñ slide 8 Gods nature

If the belt is not put on properly then the armour will be loose and impede
the soldier There may be habits, ambitions/pastimes attitudes that donít
line up with the truth God calls us to put on ñ his Nature His word, what
Jesus has done for us
Just as the soldier had his belt to put on every day to keep his armor
together,Ýwe must apply the Word of God to our lives on a daily basis or we
will not be able to maintain our defenses.Ý

Click ñ slide 9 Soldiers of truth

The belt of Truth is the Truth of the Gospel of Christ but we put on the
characteristic of truth, integrity. Are we soldiers of Truth and integrity?
Both the breastplate of righteousness and the sword of the Spirit depend on
the belt of truth.

Click ñ slide 10 Breastplate

Breastplate
This breastplate was attached to the belt by leather thongs It was anchored
to the belt,
Click ñ slide 10 heart, vital organs
The breastplate covered the body from neck to thigh and was usually made of
bronze.One key area the Soldier's breastplate protected was the heart.

Click ñ slide 11 ñlife force

Breastplate of righteousness
Breastplate protects the Heart ñ our life force
The heart suggests our affections, emotions and desires. Also our
relationships with God and others ñ Solomon said Guard your heart with all
vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life.

Click ñ slide 11 ñ think right, act right

When we believed, the righteousness of Christ was put in our hearts but we
have to learn how to use itñ which means trusting Christ to give us the
grace to think right and act right especially in our relationships with
others. Righteousness is like truth two fold ñ being made righteous through
Christ and then living righteously with others
We are to stand firm "with the breastplate of righteousness in place" (v.
14b). In our society, righteousness has rather a bad name. It makes us
think of someone rather smug and superior. Righteousness is "rightness". It
is the character of God. Paul says in Ephesians "For it is by grace you
have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the
gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast" (Eph. 2.8-9). We are
made righteous only by grace, only by what God has done for us in Christ.
But the purpose of God's grace is to lead to transformation. So
righteousness expresses not only the character of our heavenly Father to us
but also to the world.

Click ñ slide 12 Moral

It is a sad thing to reflect that integrity and having moral standards are
qualities that are not so commonly found or admired in society today In
these days when integrity is an increasing rarity amongst our national
leaders, and the moral standards in the world are becoming almost
non-existent, surely this is the time more than ever we need to put on the
breastplate of righteousness

Click Slide 13 - feet

Feet
Some historians credit footwear as one of the greatest reasons why the
Roman Army was so victorious over its enemies. The Roman Soldier was
equipped with footwear made of several thicknesses of leather, studded with
hobnails for marching over rough ground and using on the enemy when he had
fallen.

Click slide 13 ñ leather hobnails

These boots (it is incorrect to call them 'sandals')Ý were laced all the
way up the front. Military boots were as important as armour, because the
legions won wars by fast marches as much as by battles.

Click ñ slide 14 Good news

Feet fitted with the readiness that come from the Gospel of Peace
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say
to Zion, 'Your God reigns!' " (Is. 52.7) (6.15). Christ himself "is our way
of peace" (2.14). "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and
peace to those who were near" (v. 1. This gospel of peace is an important
key for the battle - it is the only sure foothold for the campaign in which
we are engaged.- it is our firm grip. It also offers good news to all we
meet.
What soldier would want to be caught with his boots off. ñ unprepared and
unready
Peter says Be ready at all times to answer anyone who asks you to explain
the hope you have in you
Its about standing in the Gospel. Its not about doctrine but about Christ
and what he has done for us
The devil fears and hates the Gospel because its Gods power to rescue
people from his clutches.
Click ñ slide 15 shield
Shield
The Romans had a long, rectangular, knees-to-chin shield which protected
them from spears and could be knelt behind during an arrow barrage. Groups
of soldier who were besieging a town could form close together and hold
their shields over their heads to make a huge circle to protect the group
from fiery arrows.
Shields were usually made of double or triple thickness plywood and they
could ward off great blows from stones, pikes and from darts
Click ñ slide 15 ñ Shield of faith
Shield of Faith
The Roman shield stands for the faith of the believer in the promises of
God. The value of faith lies not in the person exercising it, but in the
person whom the faith is in.. Romans 10:17 tells us that faith comes by
hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. Knowing the Bible and the God of
the Bible gives you greater faith.
Click slide 15 - Faith
Faith is our active dependence on the truth of who God is and what he has
done for us. The devil will often throw adverse circumstances at us to
tempt us to drop our shield (have a crisis of faith) ñ All faced with
circumstances that have tested us
With this roman shield it is impossible to look down.
Peter got out of the boat and walked on water ñ when his eyes were on Jesus
his faith was invincible when he looked at his circumstances he lowered his
shield of faith and doubt and fear resulted
Click ñ slide 17 - acusation
If we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus the attacks of the evil one - whether
through accusation, temptation, doubt, discouragement... - can have no
effect when the shield of faith protects us.
Satanís attack on the church are increasing, but God has given us the
shield of faith which is more than adequate to withstand his every assault.
"Resist the Devil and he will flee from you." (James 4/7)
Remember it is God that fights with you and that is some awesome protection.
Click ñ slide 17 Helmet
Helmet

The Romans had the best helmet of the ancient world. Many other nations
used helmets of cloth or bones. The Roman helmet had a chinstrap, visor,
and came down to cover the back, sides of neck.

The parts of the Roman helmet were: a lining of leather, for comfort and
good fit; and was mad of bronze cast. The helmet was designed to protect
the solider from sword attack on nearly every part of the head and
horizontal slats at the back of the neck prevented the enemies sword taking
off his head.
Click ñ slide 18 Helmet of Salvation
Helmet of Salvation
One of greatest battlefield is in our minds. This is the area that the
enemy wants to attack the most. One key area he wants to damage is our
assurance of salvation.

Click ñ slide 19 - mind
Paul gave some good advice in Philippians 4:8. Finally, brethren,
whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things
are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there
be any praise, think on these things. We must be on guard on what we let
run free in our minds.

Click ñ slide 20 - mind
Satan is very subtle in these areas. He has blinded the world and he will
do the same to the unsuspecting or careless Christian. We must have a clear
mind to be discerning in all situations.
What do we fill our minds with ñ TV, magazines, the internet.
My thing is womenís magazines what is yours

Instead we must fill it with God's word and prayer.

The Helmet we wear is the assurance of salvation through Christ death on
the cross. Death no longer has a hold ñ Satan would try to convince us
otherwise


Click ñ slide 21
Sword

Paul mentions different types of Roman swords. This one was a two-edged
sword with the end turned upward. It inflicted much more damage than the
other swords. Not only was it intended to kill, but also it could rip the
enemy's insides to shreds. It only needed to penetrate the enemy a depth of
two to three inches to mortally wound him. ÝAnother advantage to this sword
is that the soldier did not have to turn his sword around to inflict damage
to the enemy. It cut in two directions.

Click ñ slide 22
Sword of the Spirit
Paul describes the Word of God as an awesome and powerful personal weapon.

Our sword of the Spirit is the word of God. When Jesus was tempted by Satan
in the wilderness, He quoted His Father's words and spoke them with
authority. Consequently, each Word was like a sword-blow to Satan's head!
God has given us the same authority to use His words. God speaks with
ultimate authority in the universe. He spoke and the universe came into
being from nothing. When we speak God's word according to his will, there
is no power in the universe who can withstand it!

Click ñ slide 23
Hebrews 4/12 say "the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any
two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, and
discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
The Word of God - is God's revelation of his nature, his purposes, his
redemptive love... It is a weapon that God expects us to use in spiritual
warfare, but how many of us really know how to use it effectively. Smith
Wigglesworth once said that he would pay anybody £5 (probably about $300 in
todayís money), if they ever caught him without his Bible. It is quite
surprising how many of us do not even take our Bibles to church these days.
There is great power in declaring the name of Jesus, his character and his
victory. The word of God is our main weapon of attack against the devil
We have our armour but how do we put it on
Click ñ slide 24
Prayer V18
Prayer is to pervade all our spiritual warfare. We are to pray at all times
(regularly and constantly). With all prayer and supplication, with all
perseverance and for all the saints
Not weapon - it holds armour together
We need strength beyond our own, wisdom beyond our own -it is not a battle
against flesh and blood.
As Barclay says, "Let the Spirit be the atmosphere in which you pray."
Build up your relationship with God. Be open to him! Listen to his word!
Seek his will! So what if something is beyond you - bigger, harder than you
thought? Then be strong in the Lord - committed to his will, yet knowing
that, apart from him, you can't do it!
Click ñ slide 25
Prayer builds our relationship with God ñ inner strength
Put each part of the armour on in an attitude of prayer ñ leather straps
and binding
It holds everything together
Click ñ slide 26
Who are we fighting against ñ knowing your enemy
Dr Lloyd-Jones said, I am certain that one of the main causes of the ill
state of the church today is the fact that the devil is being forgotten.
All is attributed to us; we have become so psychological in our attitude
and thinking. We are ignorant of this great objective fact, the being, the
existence of the devil, the adversary, the accuser and his fiery darts.
Click slide 28
In 1 Peter 5/8 it says " your adversary the devil, prowls around like a
roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."
This is not an enemy to be dismissed
Click ñ slide 29
We fight the Powers of darkness who have not conceded defeat ñ darkness and
wickedness characterize their action ñ if we are to overcome them we need
to bear in mind they have no moral principles, no code of honour and they
donít recognize the Geneva convention, they are unscrupulous and ruthless
in their pursuit of victory.
Sometimes the attack is subtle, sometimes not ñ Flu, Euan, car ñ Heíll try
and find what your weakest link is, may be a person, may be a part of your
character or personality and if you are missing a piece of the armour then
heíll attack
In this battle the devil has to attack because we are defending the ground
Christ has already won on the cross.
Part of the devil's trickery is that he has already been beaten but he
doesn't want us to know that. He doesn't want us to believe that. Because
he and his spiritual forces are destined for hell, he's determined to take
as many with him as he can.
The armour is to enable us to resist and hold ground against theses powers
Click ñ slide 30 Who with?
Who are we fighting with?
Who has seen an army of one!!!
When the Roman Army marched as one or put their shields together they were
like an impregnable wall
Click ñ slide 31 - Wesley
Wesley once said "give me 300 men who fear nobody but God, and hate nobody
but the devil, and I will turn the world upside down."
. Jesus said "that they may be one, as we are one" (John 17),
In 1 Corinthians 15/57 & 58 Paul says ìBut thanks be to God, who gives us
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren
be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.
So God is calling us to stand and hold the ground, to be steadfast,
immovable, constant, fixed, firm and established. Together
Standing implies unity, hence the well known proverb "united we stand,
divided we fall". Well, since we are in a spiritual war, how much more
should the churches of God unite and stand together for the purpose of the
Kingdom of God. A soldier does not have a personal agenda; his only concern
is his service to his unit and his general, and working as one with his
fellow soldiers.
Notice that it says that we should stand - not fight and conquer. Why? -
because Satan has already been defeated
If the church operated like the Roman Army did, I think that it would
unrecognisable from what it is today, and the fulfilment of Jesusí great
commission to preach the gospel to every nation would soon become a reality.
On holiday -
My dream about the end of the world everyone doing everyday things then
there was a massive explosion and everyone started running around. Everyone
stated running ñ there was a sense of panic and fear. I had Finlay and we
ran around a corner in a throng of people and there was the Devils army and
the last thing I remember is being hit on the back of the neck. My mind is
my chink
No one was ready and we certainly were not a well prepared army.

Click slide 32
ARE WE READY FOR A FIGHT?
Remember
We donít fight this Battle on our own
Weíve been given the armour/equipment to fight the Battle
Click ñ slide 33
The Battle has already been won by our Commander and Chief
Click slide 34
So use every piece of Godís armour to resist the enemy whenever he attacks,
and when it is over, you will still be standing up.
Ephesians 6 : 13

I believe I've not previously sent youse this transcript. I remain
content with it, especially in view of the somewhat heckling interviewer;
even rank it as an Improving Tract fit for onsending ... It gives a far
different impression from the disgraceful Royal Commission ...

R

Radio Rhema's Stephen Tetley-Jones interviews Dr Robert Mann about

"Gene-jockeys" and the stakes in the GE race

Radio Rhema interview Aug 2 2000

transcript in _Stimulus 8_ (4) 7-14 (Nov 2000)

Stephen Jones: To me, genetics is weird science. I have always preferred
the 'relative' absolutes of the physical world, to what seems to me to be
the nebulous nature of cytoplasm, cells, zygotes, etc. Biology, and to a
lesser extent chemistry, hasn't interested me much. But these sciences,
particularly microbiology and the biochemistry of human beings, are now the
focus of exciting new technologies. Exciting, because science is starting
to reach into the very fundamental physical structure of what, in
biological terms, makes us what we are, what makes each of us biologically
members of the human race. We've long known that our genetic makeup
determines many of our physical traits, but we've not had much capacity to
tinker with it. Well that might all be changing.

This interview attempts to make some sense of what is an increasingly
complex and difficult development to keep up with, genetics, gene science.
No doubt many are familiar with the acronym DNA. For example, DNA testing
has become significant in forensic science. But what about genes, genomes
and genetically modified food? What is a genome? More specifically, what
is the human genome about which we are hearing a lot these days? And what
are the ramifications of genetically modified foods for all of us? Are
they going to change, improve or degrade our lives? Or is the genetic
modification of organisms for food and other purposes being driven by a
whole lot of very large, well-funded, multi-national corporations seeking
to exploit rapidly advancing scientific know how? What are the
implications for humankind? These are some of the questions we'll explore.

It's a very, very, complex topic.

Dr. Robert Mann is a retired biochemist from the University of Auckland and
long-time ecologist. He was with that university for "a couple of
decades". He was in the Biochemistry department, which he ruefully notes,
"doesn't exist any more"; then he moved into Environmental Studies when he
saw, as he says, "the cluster of looming threats to the biosphere which
became apparent in the early 1970s". A conservationist of some time, he
has among other things chaired his local branch of Forest & Bird. He's
also a keen rider and sometimes racer of classic motorcycles.

I talked to Dr Mann about the current concerns related to genetic
engineering.

Jones: We hope you will enlighten us about this business of genetic
engineering, genetic modification, and help us, as lay people, to
understand where it might be taking us. I know that while there are many
questions, answers in this area really are a bit short at the moment. It's
really just developing, isn't it?

Mann: I must warn that there has never been a scene in which P.R. has been
more dominant. Public relations agents are behind almost every significant
utterance regarding genetic engineering, and perhaps most of all this
so-called human genome project. People will have noticed that a few weeks
ago statement by Messrs Clinton and Blair, announcing what they call a
rough draft of the human genome. Many people will have found that
incomprehensible, and I don't think they should feel ashamed of that. It is
a rough draft, not claimed to be complete . . .

Jones: Can we go back a step? What exactly is the genome?

Mann: It's a rough draft of the sequence of what are called bases, units
in a chemical that occurs in almost all cells. Every living thing,
including every human, has this chemical from its genesis. It is a
chemical called deoxyribonucleic acid - DNA for short - discovered many
decades ago, but only closely studied for about the last six decades.

Jones: Partly by New Zealand, I understand. There's a New Zealand link
there isn't there?

Mann: Yes, there is. A New Zealand-born man named Maurice Wilkins, who
still lives in London, shared the Nobel Prize with the two much more
vaunted chaps, Crick and Watson, for proposing a structure for the folding
of this very long molecule.

Jones: DNA is the key to all this?

Mann: Yes. In a cell it is folded up very tightly and very small. But
actually, if you unfold it, you can see DNA. You can get a bacterium and
cause it to rupture at the interface between two liquids - burst it open
- and the DNA will spill out. You can then metal-plate it and see it in an
electron microscope. Like that it's about a thousand times longer than the
cell. So, you have a cell that's a thousandth of a millimetre long, and
you can spew out of that this long springy molecule, a single long thread
of atoms joined together which is about a thousand times longer than the
cell! And a human cell has about a thousand times more DNA than that. So,
it's a very, very long string of atoms.

Jones: And we've all seen these depictions of a double helix, haven't we?

Mann: Well yes, that is the icon of the late 20th century, but it's
practically irrelevant to our theme today. Folding like that, on the
Watson-Crick-Wilkins theory (or others, which I prefer) is not the issue.
The question with this genome project is what's called the primary
structure. That is the sequence of atoms that are joined together in a
particular cell's DNA. That sequence, in groups of atoms called bases, is
- in the conventional theory - a set of blueprints, so as to speak, the
means to specify, as a code, the proteins that a cell can make. Which
proteins it will make and when, and whether it will refrain from making
which proteins and when. This is the matter of control.
But there's a lot we don't know about it. For example, how does a
fertilised frog egg - a zygote - develop into a frog rather than a
dog? The issue of development is very poorly understood. Biochemistry,
the speciality in which I trained, is still relatively incomplete.

It depends on how you look at it. If you get a look at the
metabolic pathways chart, which biochemists love, you'll think, "Oh we know
a lot about how cells work". But we do not know much about how they
develop. The question of control, why a zygote develops into the organism
it does, and not something else, is not well understood.
Well, the human genome project, a very large commercial activity, is the
attempt to find the sequence of the bases in somebody's DNA, and then
figure out what the codes are for the various proteins for which our DNA is
the blueprint.

Jones: But let me be really basic and ask: Why would you bother to do that?

Mann: Well, it's not really science; it's claimed to be commercial
technology. The claim is that once we have found out what the genes
actually are, in terms of these sequences of bases, then we will be able to
improve them.

But read Genesis 3! That should give Christians, at least, pause
for thought. I do think Genesis 3 is where you start with respect to the
implications for Creation of human choices. What does it mean for humans
to say we know better than God how the world ought to be, and in particular
how the basic biology of human beings should be?
The claim that we know what we're doing is easy to come by. For example in
Time magazine they mention inherited diseases; a favourite is cystic
fibrosis. There are 800-odd versions of the cystic fibrosis gene that have
now been sequenced, and the claim is, we will somehow make a good version
of that gene; we do know what it looks like Š

Jones: And somehow repair it?

Mann: Yes, we do know what it is like Š

Jones: And prevent it being passed on in a hereditary way. Is that what
the aim is?

Mann: Yes, and more immediately than that, treat the person that suffers
from the disease. Gene therapy is the name for that sort of thing. Now,
there isn't a single case of gene therapy yetŠ

Jones: How far are we away from it then?

Mann: Very difficult to judge; it depends whom you ask. The people who
have invested a great deal of money in it of course say, "Well it's just
around the corner". But it has been just around the corner for a good many
years now, and I don't think there is a single example of human gene
therapy that's ever actually been done.

Jones: Getting back to the human genome project: we've got two
organisations that were working independently on this, the Anglo-American
Consortium, and a corporate group. They are now working together. They've
just announced - or put it this way, they're no longer arguing - they've
announced that they have completed their rough draft. What does that mean?

Mann: It means that they have something like three thousand million -
three billion - bases, strung out in a row, which you can look up on the
internet, if you've got time. It's not complete, that is to say, they don't
actually allege that they've got them all worked out.
But there are many more fundamental difficulties with it. It's not just
that the game, as they have defined it, is incomplete. The game that they
have defined is a fake. I said recently on BBC World that it's a vulgar
con-trick, and I will stand by that.

Here are the reasons. The bases that they say they measure in the
DNA, aren't actually done on real DNA from a human. What they do is make
copies, with certain systems of enzymes and bacteriaŠ

Jones: So we know how to copy DNA?

Mann: Ah ... yes and no. The copies that they produce with these systems
have only the famous four bases in them: adenine, thymine, guanine and
cytosine - called, for short, A, T, G, and C. Well, we do know, and we
have known for four decades, that real DNA, including human DNA, contains
bases other than the big four A, T, G, and C. So the copies that they
sequence are already deliberate simplifications. Having got rid of
complications, other bases, methyl-C, methyl-G - and others we've known of
for years too - they are pretending that those minor bases don't matter.
Well, that's an indefensible assumption! Scientifically speaking, you
cannot defend that idea. We don't know that much about the minor bases,
but we are certainly not able to assume that they don't matter. So there's
the first objection. The sequences that are produced are only of a
simplified kind and are therefore not really a sequence of actual human
DNA.

Then, people will have noticed that every human being is different in their
own DNA.

Jones: Hadn't escaped my notice; I mean we're actually remarkably different
aren't we?

Mann: DNA is in fact what makes each one of us biologically unique. It's
what DNA 'fingerprinting', the technique the police used wrongly to put
away David Doherty, depends upon. The claim is that this pattern of
fragments, that we got from this or that sample of DNA, is unique and is
better than a fingerprint as an identification of a person. Well, how do
you square that with the idea of the human genome project where nearly
everybody has standard DNA and all we need to do is sequence it and then
we'll know how to improve it? It is not a logically coherent game.

It's a very big commercial game. A lot of people are getting a
living out of it, but I don't think it's very promising for medical
science.

Jones: So who's putting up all the enormous amounts of money required for
these huge computers and automated systems that are doing this genome
mapping?

Mann: In the case of the joint government project that you mentioned, the
British/US government project, mainly the Wellcome Trust and the US
government.

Jones: Wellcome, the pharmaceuticals people?

Mann: Yes. In the case of Celera, the US company that joined the game
later and produces sequences faster, that's just a commercial venture.
Venture capitalists are easy to con money out of for playing around with
DNA. I'm afraid most venture capitalists can't understand exactly what it
is that's actually being claimed, so all sorts of genetic engineering
capers have been funded by venture capitalists, to the tune of billions of
dollars.

People should realise that the claimed applications of all this genome
project sequencing are in the future. They are at best hopes - they are
not facts, and that is one of the serious problems with genetic
engineering. I've just been corresponding with a member of our Parliament.
No need to name him I suppose, but he's given me a list of the 'benefits'
of genetic engineering as though they were fact. I've had to tell him,
none of these is a fact. They're all fantasies. At best they're nice
ideas.

Jones: They're attractive, hoped-for, maybes!

Mann: Exactly.

Jones: You sound remarkably cynical about this whole business.

Mann: Well, I don't say it's all worthless; we do have to go into some
details about where the good most likely can come; that's easy. The
benefits we have to date from genetic engineering are almost entirely
confined to growing microbes in - one hopes - very carefully contained
lab experiments, and putting genes from other species such as the human,
into these microbes so that the microbes will bio-synthesise desirable
proteins.

For example, most of the diabetics that are injected with insulin in New
Zealand lately have been injected with a genetically engineered version
claimed to be identical to human insulin, but made in a microbe. It took
them many more years than they said it would to produce this so-called
human-type insulin. But now that it is a commercial product, the
manufacture, or purification, of pig and cow insulin from meat works
by-products is being backed-off. This is much complained of by those
diabetics who find that the so-called human-type, genetically engineered,
insulin doesn't suit them. Bit of a mystery there, by the way - I don't
claim to have a full understanding of that example. But it is the flagship
of the fleet of genetically engineered products.
What are the others? There aren't very many, I'm afraid. But it is
important to distinguish what is done in contained laboratories from
un-contained organisms, notably crops.

Jones: Right. That's where much of the publicity has been in the past two
years or so.

Mann: Pretty much. And there you have a startling contrast. For example,
in North America and in Argentina you have millions of acres of genetically
engineered soybeans.

One of the ways genetic engineering is being tried with crops is by the
use of a gene from a bacterium so that the crop plant resists a particular
herbicide. The most common versions are to resist the herbicide called
generically glyphosate - Monsanto brandname 'Roundup'. 'Roundup-Ready'
soybeans are grown in a big way in America and some other places. The
argument is that because you can spray these Roundup-resistant plants
without damaging them you can spray away and kill off any weeds around
them, because the weeds aren't resistant. That way your genetically
engineered herbicide-resistant crop plants don't have to compete with the
weeds and supposedly you can get a bigger yield.
Then there are cotton linters, fragments of cotton fibres that are put into
various manufactured foods.

Jones: As fillers?

Mann: Yes, it's a binder. Cotton linters are edible, so genetically
engineered cotton fragments are being tried.

Jones: You don't know what you're eating these days.

Mann: That's the worry! And then there are some other crops that have been
genetically engineered to produce throughout the whole plant not a
herbicide resistance function but an active insect poison. You might worry
a lot. I'm not inclined to ingest insecticide! A modified version of the
protein toxin produced by a famous soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis,
is engineered into the crop plant. It was B. t. that was sprayed on
Auckland, as people may recall, a few years ago.

Jones: Yes, for the Gypsy Moth.

Mann: No, it was the White-spotted Tussock Moth. We have had several
invasions owing to very slack border control. But, yes, there has also
been the Gypsy Moth introduction and, at the moment, there's a very
worrying Painted Apple Moth loose in Auckland. But I was referring to that
successful control (not only by aerial spraying), using a live, whole
organism as an insecticide, namely Bacillus thuringiensis. Certainly it
does kill insects. But that was an application of the whole organism. One
organism against another, not the modification of one with part of another
to kill a third party.

Well the toxin from that bacterium can be produced, is produced as a
modified version of the toxin in these genetically engineered Bt crops, so
called. For instance Monsanto's NooLeaf®, which was up to five percent of
the US potato crop recently, is a Bt crop. But the percentage is now
waning as the farmers find it harder and harder to sell those potatoes.
Put simply, Europe will not buy the stuff and is very restrictive regarding
the growing of GE crops. As a result GE products are piling up in North
America, most noticeably maize.

Jones: The main objection to the GE crops seems to be that we really don't
know what result, admittedly if any, they will have on the human organism.
Some also would also have a what you might call it a spiritual objection,
that God made things to reproduce each after their own kind and that God
made it extraordinarily difficult for genes from one species to jump to
another. Yet we are doing it artificially. But not everyone would make
that complaint, as far as invoking God's activity in creation is concerned.
What is your comment about the safety of genetically modified food?

Mann: It is far more dubious than the media has given the public to
understand. The fact is that negligible testing has been done on
genetically engineered foods.

By the way, the expression 'genetic engineering' means the same as the
expression 'genetic modification' - they are equivalent, meaning the
moving, by artificial methods, of genes from one species into another
species where they don't naturally get. For example, jellyfish genes do
not show up in sugar cane; it doesn't happen in nature. But if you want
to, you can do it with these techniques. The techniques were invented only
a quarter of a century ago, and they have become commercially significant
only 10 to 15 years ago.

Of course people should have ethical questions about this sort of thing -
for example moving human genes into cows which now, after a long delay, has
been permitted for the commercial outfit AgResearch at Ruakura. This is a
matter of ethical dubiety. It's not just a technical matter: you have to
ask, "Is it ethical to put human genes into cows?", especially when the
claimed benefit is enormously exaggerated. A leading promoter of that
project's claims is Simon Upton. He has spoken in Parliament as though it
were highly plausible that a person suffering from Multiple Sclerosis - a
nasty inherited disease - might be treated just by drinking a glass of milk
from these special cows; the milk containing the human protein called
myelin basic protein, MBP.

Jones: Sounds wonderful!

Mann: Ah Š yes it sounds wonderful, but the reason to believe that it will
work is extremely slender indeed. The man in charge of that project
challenged me in a seminar in Hamilton. He showed up in the audience and
made various allegations. So I responded to him, "Oh while you're here,
let me take the opportunity to ask you, do you really believe that drinking
cow's milk with human MBP in it is likely to become a treatment for
multiple sclerosis?" and he said, "Well I hope so" - which I thought was
pretty revealing. He really thinks that it's not very plausible. There's
some reason to think it might work, but it isn't very plausible.

Jones: But, we have been introducing foreign substances into the human body
by way of inoculation for 50+ years; various things cultured on pigs,
monkeys and what have you - what is your comment on that?

Mann: Yes it's true that humans have been - if you want to put it this way
- 'tampering with nature' for a long time, certainly for many thousands of
years since agriculture began. We do various things that would not happen
if there weren't any humans organising nature. Yes, that of course is a
fact. Nevertheless, when you are going to do unprecedented, radical things
such as putting bacterial genes into potatoes, human genes into cows and so
on, you do have to look at it with special care because the results can be
damaging.

Now one of the GE proponents' lines is to say that not so much as skin rash
has been caused by this technology so far. Well, that's not true.
Let me tell you about the most interesting case. You might
remember a Japanese company called Showa Denko as a partner in the original
Comalco rort. In 1984, Showa Denko started to produce genetically
engineered bacteria for the purpose of getting a high yield of an amino
acid called L-tryptophan in what can be called micro-breweries. Now
L-tryptophan is required by human beings, a component of all normal diets -
you can't live without it. You can take more L-tryptophan than you can get
in food if you think it will do you good, and there are some lines of
evidence that it can do you good. So L-tryptophan became an
over-the-counter dietary supplement - not regulated as a medicine; no
serious testing. Unnoticed over many years a trickle of about 100 cases
occurred of a new disease called eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome - EMS - and
then, in mid-1989 in North America, suddenly thousands of cases of the
disease emerged. It's a nasty disease. I'm in touch with various people
who are still suffering from it. Five to ten thousand people went down
with EMS, an apparently new disease not seen before. Then it was found
that about a hundred cases had occurred in previous years before the
super-producer strain of the bacterium was put into production at the start
of 1989. Well, it's pretty clear that deviant metabolism in those
genetically engineered microbes caused EMS. Very toxic impurities, far
less than one percent of the total, caused that illness. There were
several other manufacturers making L-tryptophan in a similar way, but not
using genetically engineered microbes, so it's pretty clear that deviant
metabolism in those genetically engineered cultures produced the very toxic
impurities which, by bad luck, were not fully removed in purification. So,
it looks as though genetic engineering has already caused some harm.

Jones: One of the problems for the ordinary person, Dr Mann, is that we
can't look at GM food in the same way we can pick up an apple in the
supermarket and say, "That one has a blemish or a bruise, I am not going to
have that." We can't pick out genetically modified food in the same way.

Mann: That's right.

Jones: Therefore, is the answer to ban it completely?

Mann: I wouldn't allow genetically engineered food until there have been
careful relevant tests; but they simply have not been done. That's the
dismaying fact. One very prominent scientist contriving diets for test
animals, Dr Pusztai, a former Hungarian in Britain, in August 1998 made it
known that a genetically engineered potato, a rather promising genetically
modified potato which had not been released for commercial use, had
unexpectedly caused damage to the gut and other organs of the test rats
soon after they ate it. The resulting mud-slinging and vilification, by
people who should know much better, has been one of the real disgraces in
the recent history of science. Those tests were well designed and were
contrived, by the way, because the research institute where he worked had
been paid by Monsanto to develop methods to test genetically modified food.

The total number of tests that have been done on GM foods is
negligible. So, I am afraid we are gambling in an unprecedented way by
selling the stuff. And the idea that if you label it then people will
'have a choice' is a very moronic idea.

Jones: Well the fact is that some thirty to fifty percent of the world's
soya crop is now genetically modified - you may have some more up-to-date
information - but I gather that soya is essentially ubiquitous in
manufactured foods.

Mann: Yes but anyone that doesn't want to eat soybean products can pretty
thoroughly avoid them. Let me tell people where to learn more about this -
where they can read about it. Produced in New Zealand, the Soil and Health
Association magazine - just called Soil and Health - put out a GE issue in
August last year. You can still get that if you ask at a bookshop for the
GE issue of Soil and Health. Then for those who are connected into the
alleged 'real world' let me babble off some letters.

Jones: The virtual world!

Mann: Yep; www.PSRAST.org - that is a very good website with information
about genetic engineering and genetically modified food in particular. The
other good one is www.UCSUSA.org - that's the Union of Concerned
Scientists in USA. Between those two sites you'll get all the reading you
want for quite a while. They are top-rate, reliable sites. They will tell
you about the flops, of which there have been many.

Jones: I want to talk more about the human genome project. It has been
said that we will be able to select the physical traits of the human
beings we want, in terms of our offspring, or in terms of clones. We'll be
able to say I don't want brown-eyed people any more; I want blue eyes. Is
this within the realm of practicality, perhaps within the next twenty years
or so - is that where we're heading?

Mann: It's being attempted now, of course. There are cloned mammals.
There are quite a few cloned cows at Ruakura. A very prominent local
biochemist has opined that if some wealthy woman comes along and says, "I'm
past childbearing age, but I'll give you a million dollars to produce a
clone of me" then it would be attempted. This would be to implant what
originates as a cell of the body, not a germ line cell Š

Jones: But don't we still need an egg, at the current level of the
technology?

Mann: Yes, but the boys at Ruakura are working on it. Mammal genetic
engineering is coming along, in that they have made cloned cows at Ruakura
and there have been cloned goats made too at Lincoln University. Prof.
Bullock had a little flock of cloned goats; they were supposed to produce
in their milk a human protein that was supposed to be used to treat cystic
fibrosis. That experiment was a complete flop, and Prof. Bullock went
overseas. The goats have been destroyed. But the boys at Ruakura are still
going and they insinuate that they can make cloned mammals. Indeed, they
can, but the question is whether or not the properties they get are
sufficiently predictable.

You see at the moment in biological science what we've got is a gene fad.
The doyen of American professors of the sociology of science is Dorothy
Nelkin. She has written a book, along with Susan Lindee, called The DNA
Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon. It was published by W.H. Freeman in
1995 - an excellent book. At the moment, there's an excessive emphasis
on the genes with regard to the properties of the human being. Yes, of
course, genes do matter. You need the blueprints to make the proteins and
other chemicals that compose your body. But human beings are more than
their bodies and more than their genes. So it would be wise to go rather
carefully, as we have a rather poor understanding of the interactions
between upbringing and genetic endowment. But yes, there are people who
probably rather soon will take some big money to attempt to clone a human
being.

Jones: Now people with a spiritual disposition or a belief in the spiritual
nature of humankind would not take issue with you. But some scientist
consider that we are no more than a collection of atoms.

Mann: Oh yes, and the make millions of dollars selling books promoting that
view: Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, Stephen Weinberg. It's a big fad.
You just talk about mechanism and make out that the human being is no more
than a mechanism. That's fashionable, and in the context where people like
that are respected, then yes, cloning of a human being becomes a possibly
respectable thing to do in what is essentially a secular society.

Jones: We're getting into a scary realm though aren't we, in the sense that
if we do manage to create a human clone, just as we've managed to create
Dolly the sheep and the cows at Ruakura, then where does the soul of that
individual come from? I guess that's a theological question more than
anything else.

Mann: Oh, of course it's a theological question. But of course, for a
person like Dawkins who has many fans locally - including people who
brought him here and then insulated him from any discussion - there's no
such thing as a soul. This is now a fashionable version of science. It's
a terrible travesty, a real crudity, the idea that there is nothing but
atoms and energy and mechanisms, and thus biology is no more than
chemistry. But that idea, which is called reductionism, is very popular
and influential. As a result, real biologists are being sacked by the
University of Auckland to make way for gene-jockeys who will presumably
bring in money from the venture capitalists. At Massey University,
agriculture - the reason why Massey began and continues to exist - is
being screwed down. The Faculty of Agriculture has been abolished; the
Diploma of Agriculture is under serious threat. Major teachers thereof are
being given the bullet in order to make room for low-grade gene-jockeys,
some of whom utter straight-out falsehoods publicly and get put on official
committees.

Jones: Coming back to my question; is likely that within our lifetime we
will be able to manipulate physical traits to order?

Mann: Oh, yes. It's extremely likely that such technical abilities will
emerge very soon. And the question is, "are they under suitable control?".
Well, we have in this country one official agency called the ERMA, the
Environmental Risk Management Authority, which operates pursuant to a
statute of Parliament and which has issued twenty-two permits out of
twenty-two applications decided on field trials of genetically modified
organisms. The ERMA is just a very expensive rubber stamp, which
ingeniously collects a lot of money from the Government and from the
applicants, even when it doesn't actually do anything to inspect the
applicants' labs, for example.

Jones: But we're not talking about issues of statute or law, are we? We're
talking here about what it means biologically to be a human being.

Mann: Well you try talking like that to the ERMA and see how far it gets you.

Jones: Body-part farming: I'd like to know whether that's a possibility.
They're talking about growing livers and all sorts of things.

Mann: Yes, and including in humanised pigs.

Jones: What is a humanised pig?

Mann: A pig that has been genetically engineered in such a way that it does
not so readily evoke the immune reaction of humans when pieces of that pig
get put into them.

Jones: Sounds macabre.

Mann: Ah yes, of course. Many people find it repulsive. But on the other
hand, if you had a liver that was almost useless and if someone said to
you, "I can insert a humanised pig liver into you", and if you had plenty
of money, you might well give it a go.

Jones: Mind you, we've been putting pig tissue into heart valves for some
time, haven't we?

Mann: Oh yes, and using pig insulin with great success for decades, and I
wish they'd keep going with the production of it, by the way.
So yes, these are all possibilities. But here's the trouble: we've got a
kind of fantasy world in which people can relatively easily think up
combinations of genes. They say, "We'll move this property of this distant
organism into the soybean or whatever you think will result in a commercial
product. And then you say to the venture capitalists, "We can do this".
And they don't understand. They think, "Yeah, well err, it looks pretty
promising. You say we'll make a lot of profit . . . "

Jones: And he's got a white coat on; I'll have to believe him.

Mann: And he produces sets of numbers. He may have a B.Com as well, and he
produces future balance sheets which might look convincing. But there have
been many flops. The first genetically engineered crop was a tomato,
brand-named 'FlavrSavr®', in the United States Š

Jones: Ha! You say that so beautifully! Spoken like a true Yank.

Mann: Well, it was a great brand name. I didn't make it up. Here are the
main facts on the FlavrSavr®: number one, the plants didn't thrive; number
two, they didn't bear many fruit; number three, the fruit had a metallic
taste. And a lot of Florida tomato growers got into extremely serious
financial difficulties as a result of that flop. Of course, the U.S.
simply let in some more tomatoes from Mexico. The consumers didn't see
much of a difference across the whole of the United States. But that was
the first genetically engineered crop and it was a flop.

In no case that I've been able to discover have the yields of genetically
engineered crops been higher than the regular crops. Plenty of MPs who
should know better, and plenty of scientists who do know better, keep
talking about increased yield; but it hasn't happened. Those soybeans that
you mentioned, they've averaged 6% lower yield. That might sound like a
small number, a small amount of a farmers crop. But you take away
one-sixteenth of a farmer's crop and he might not buy that seed again,
especially as it costs him more in the first place. And in the drought
districts of the United States, the yields of the genetically engineered
soybeans have been 30% below those of proper soybeans. They turn out to
have different properties which weren't foreseen.

So 'higher yield' is a suggestion which is used create the impression
"We're going to feed the Third World. We're deeply concerned about the
hungry of the world." But that is one of the most deceitful and cynical
lines that has ever been. Most of them have no desire to feed the Third
World. They're just in it for the money, frankly. They haven't tried to
help the Third Word, with one exception; the 'golden rice', developed in
Zurich - took them a decade to do it. Hardly any of it exists yet, but it
does exist. This rice looks yellow. It is engineered with a little
metabolic pathway, three genes and more, to produce, not vitamin A, but
beta-carotene. Beta-carotene is a pro-vitamin A: when you eat
beta-carotene your body converts it into vitamin A. So this is a much more
suitable P.R. image for saying that genetic engineering must be tolerated
across the board because it's aiming to help the Third World.

Jones: The thing with many of these specials and hybrids is that they have
resulted in the loss of some of the more traditional varieties which, only
now, we are realising how valuable they were. Recently I read an article
about rice in Asia; the fact that we've gone from about a hundred varieties
down to about six, in about fifty years or so. But why is bio-diversity so
important?

Mann: Yes, that's an extremely important point, and some people who are
very interested in genetic engineering fail to see the perspective to which
you've just pointed. The commercial production of hybrid seeds - which do
breed fertile seeds, but nobody bothers to try to grow from them because
they are so extremely variable - that's half a century old. Pioneer
Hi-Breed, a company owned by DuPont with activities in this country, has
been producing hybrid maize for 50 years, and no big-scale, wealthy-world
farmers bother to save seed to plant the next season. But in the third
world saving your own seed is not only essential for your financial
survival, but also gives you the varieties that have evolved and adapted
over long periods in your local conditions, with your local fungi and so
on. And of course, there is the idea of trying to restrict seed-saving in
the most nightmarish, but unreal scenario, the Terminator seed. That is
not real, I'm happy to tell you. It is just a monster idea. I've studied
that patent. It is very complicated, and I don't think it will work. It
doesn't actually exist.

Jones: Did DuPont patent it?

Mann: No, a very nasty alliance between the US Department of Agriculture
and a firm called Delta Pine & Land, which is a big cotton-seed producer
that Monsanto has been trying to buy. So it's a joint
corporate/government-owned patent.

Jones: The idea of the Terminator gene is that the genes are crippled so
that it cannot reproduce itself.

Mann: Not quite - so that the seed will be sterile. But it is not real.
I don't think that it ever will be; but if it ever is I don't think it will
have the properties that you need in a real crop.

Seed-saving is essential to wise agriculture, and 'hybridity' - the
commercial reliance on first-generation hybrid crops - has become far too
common as it is. The idea of having to buy seeds from people is not new,
and a lot of people are already taken in by the 'hybridity' racket.

Jones: I don't know that we got to the end of body farming and whether that
was going to be likely.

Mann: I haven't tried to keep up with that particular line of things as
much as other things such as crops, because I think the body-part thing is
somewhat further off. But it is certainly being attempted.
Let me mention that this country has just set up a Royal Commission on
Genetic Modification, 23 years after it was first suggested by the New
Zealand Association of Scientists. It's chaired by the retired Chief
Justice, Sir Thomas Eichelbaum. You can learn about it at
www.gmcommission.govt.nz.

Jones: Briefly then in closing Dr Mann, do you think we've created a
monster?

Mann: Well, if you want to have simple slogans - which I tend to avoid -
yes. That is the general image. The benefits are few and far between.
Most of them are still fantasy. The threats are very serious; much worse
than I've actually spoken about today. I'm tired of being labelled a
scaremonger, so I don't bother to say as much as I could about the harm
that could result. But yes, this is a perversion of technology which, on
the whole, stands to do much more harm than good.

Upton-on-line

Diaspora Edition

21st October 2004

Terminal deconstruction

The Americans bury presidents and idols of the screen, the British bury
princesses (and animals), and the French? Well, they bury philosophers.
You can t get away from them. No corner of a French park is safe from a
stone fire staring ironically, disbelievingly or (very occasionally)
smugly down at the transient world of ordinary people playing, reading,
walking or making love. Needless to say, petri-fication in some forgotten
corner of a park is only the final stage in what is a protracted ritual of
national canonisation. It starts when Le Monde opens the door to
immortality by devoting a whole supplement to a recently deceased savant.
Such has been the happy fate of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).

Regarded as variously dangerous, deluded or depraved by uncomprehendingly
conservative philosophers (who by definition are not raised in France) but
fêted by those inclined to decode and deconstruct conventional wisdom,
Derrida became a national treasure before whom only genuflection would
suffice. Hence the outpouring of grave lamentations from politicians of
every conceivable colour. Whether they had read him we will never know.
It doesn t matter. In France this is a bit like the death of Christopher
Reeve or Elvis.

That said, one can't help but suspect that more people quoted and lionised
Derrida than understood him. Here s how Derrida explained deconstruction
in a 1992 interview reproduced as part of Le Mondes homage:

Deconstruction isn't simply a philosophy, neither is it a collection
of hypotheses, nor even the question of Being in a Heideggerian sense. In
one sense, it is nothing. It cannot be a discipline or a method because
that would be to transform it into a method with its own rules and
procedures that could then be taught & It isn't a technique entailing
norms or procedures. Of course, there can be regularities in the way in
which certain types of deconstructive questions can be posed. Viewed from
this angle, I can see how the possibility of teaching arises which entails
in turn the effects of a discipline etc. But even in terms of its
principle, deconstruction isn't a method. I have tried to ask myself what
a method might be in a Greek or Cartesian sense, or again in a Hegelian
sense. But deconstruction ism't a methodology in the sense of entailing
the application of rules.

If I was wanting to provide an economical and elliptical description of
deconstruction, I would say that it is a way of thinking about the origin
and limits of the question what is? , the question which dominates the
entire history of philosophy. Each time we try to think about the
possibility of what is? , to ask a question about this sort of
question or to ask ourselves about the necessity of this language in a
certain language or tradition etc., what we re doing at this moment is
only taking part up to a point in the question what is? And therein
lies, the difference of deconstruction. It is, in effect, a questioning of
something that is more than a questioning. 

It s all pretty straightforward, really. (And if not, you can always
blame upton-on-line s budget-constrained translation department.)

Radically predictable

With profundity of this order, sorting out the real world was a piece of
cake. Less than two months before his death on October 9th, Le Monde beat
its way to the door of the dying master for a final interview before his
thoughts went cosmic. (For Anglophone readers this is very roughly the
French equivalent of British soldiers rehearsing the Queen Mother's funeral procession in deserted London night time streets on and off over
the last twenty years). After applying finishing touches to a lifetime s
oracular wisdom, Derrida showed he was a man who could switch seamlessly to
the world of political action and fearless realism. He laid out the bones
of a new, altermondialiste Europe which would lead the world to new
understandings. Here it is in all its radical predictability:

A Europe altermondialiste, transforming the concept and practice of
sovereignty and international law. And possessed of a real armed force,
independent of NATO and the USA, a military power which, while being
neither offensive, defensive or preventive, would intervene without delay
in response to the resolutions of a new United Nations which would finally
be respected. 

Lest that seem too radical, Derrida took care to propose some more down to
earth and immediately realisable intimations of heaven on earth:

If I was a legislator, I would quite simply propose the removal of the
word and the concept of marriage from the civil code. Marriage, an
incarnation of religious, sacred and heterosexual values with the
accompanying vows of procreation and eternal fidelity, is a concession made
by the secular state to the Christian church and in particular its
monogamous form which derives neither from Jewish nor Muslim
[traditions]. In suppressing the word and the concept of marriage, this
equivocation, this religious hypocrisy which has no place in a secular
state, there would be in its place a civil union, something contractual, a
sort of generalised civil marriage, improved, refined, flexible and able to
be adjusted between partners of whatever sex or number. 

Perhaps it was no surprise then that Marie-George Buffet, the National
Secretary of the French Communist Party, paid the most genuine tribute
amidst a sea of fawning commentators most of whom wouldn t be seen dead
near any of these propositions. As she put it:

An indefatigable thinker, a writer who made no concessions, Jacques
Derrida scrutinised the world and philosophy with an eye that was always
new. A committed carrier of particular values, Jacques Derrida was the
last representative of a generation of philosophers who never ceased to
critique the way the world works and prise away its masks. 

Upton-on-line suspects that Buffet is right. While France likes to draw
pleasure from the scourges marks inflicted by its radical philosophers, the
distinctly comfortable, bourgeois look of most on the French Left suggests
that this is as conservative and conformist a society as you could hope to
find.

This has got to be one of the
cleverest E-mails I've received in a while.
Someone out there either has too much spare time or is deadly at
Scrabble.
(wait till you see the last one)!

DORMITORY:
When you rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM

PRESBYTERIAN:
When you rearrange the letters:
BEST IN PRAYER

DESPERATION:
When you rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS IT

GEORGE BUSH:
When you rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS GORE

THE MORSE CODE:
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS

SLOT MACHINES:
When you rearrange the letters:
CASH LOST IN ME

ANIMOSITY:
When you rearrange the letters:
IS NO AMITY

MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER

SNOOZE ALARMS:
When you rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO MORE Z'S

A DECIMAL POINT:
When you rearrange the letters:
IM A DOT IN PLACE

THE EARTHQUAKES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THAT QUEER SHAKE

ELEVEN PLUS TWO:
When you rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS ONE

AND FOR THE GRAND FINALE:

PRESIDENT CLINTON OF THE USA:
When you rearrange the letters
(With no letters left over and using each letter only once):
TO COPULATE HE FINDS INTERNS

Yep! Someone with waaaaaaaaaaay
too much time on their hands!

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/10/19/do
1902.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/10/19/ixopinion.html

I bet the Guardian editor £50 he's wrong
By Mark Steyn
19/10/2004 UK Telegraph

Have you seen this campaign the Guardian's been running? They identified
Clark County, Ohio as one of the swingiest counties in one of the most
critical swing states, so they got hold of the electoral roll and are
telling their readers to bombard the county's voters with reasons not to
vote for Bush.

This is excellent news for the President, who in recent days had been
looking a little wobbly in Ohio. But there's nothing like a barrage of
mail from condescending Guardian readers to send the locals stampeding
into the Bush camp. If the editor of the Guardian's up for it, fifty quid
says Bush will win a higher proportion of the vote in Clark County on
November than he did last time.

The reason is advice like this, from Guardian reader Richard Dawkins,
Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Dawkins begins his missive to the Clark County swing voter with a little
light Bushophobia: "An idiot he may be, but he is also sly, mendacious and
vindictive... thuggish ideologues. pariah state. brazenly lying. cynical
mendacity" yada-yada.

But then he goes on: "Now that all other justifications for the war are
known to be lies, the warmongers are thrown back on one, endlessly
repeated: the world is a better place without Saddam. No doubt it is.
But that's the Tony Martin school of foreign policy."

At this point, the Guardian's editors intervene with an explanatory
parenthesis: "[Martin was a householder who shot dead a burglar who had
broken into his house in 1999]." And then Dawkins continues: "It's not how
civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave. The world would
be a better place without George Bush, but that doesn't justify an
assassination attempt."

You just blew it big-time in Clark County, prof. Voters may be divided on
Bush and on the Iraq war but, in the American heartland, they're generally
agreed on a homeowner's right to take out a burglar. Insofar as the name
"Tony Martin" is known to Americans – and to older ones it means Cyd
Charisse's husband, who sang More Than You Know very nicely in the 1955 MGM
version of Hit The Deck...

Where was I? Oh, yeah: in America, Tony Martin's regarded as the fall-guy
for a vindictive nanny state that punished him for exposing its uselessness
and incompetence. My neighbour in New Hampshire is a loyal Democrat, he
spent the weekend packing his freezer with meat from the bear he shot, and
I wouldn't advise any Guardian columnists canvassing for Kerry voters to be
caught prowling round his porch at night. As for Ohio, Article I Section 4
of the state's constitution reads: "The people have the right to bear arms
for their defence and security."

If the Guardian's correct and this is a close election, we Bush backers
will owe Dawkins a vote of thanks for delivering Clark County to the
Republicans. But, even so, if he's commending the English constabulary's
approach to property crime as the model for the war on terror, then we're
all gonna die.

I would be gloating even more about the Professor of Understanding's total
misunderstanding of the American people if I weren't feeling on similarly
shaky ground vis à vis his country. The attentive reader (I use the
singular advisedly) may have noticed that I was absent last week. I wrote
a column about Kenneth Bigley which the editor didn't care to have in the
paper.

That's his right, but it's left me riddled with self-doubt, never glad
confident Tuesday morning again, etc. So let me come at it from another
angle, and, if this doesn't make it past the editors, I'm available for
seasonal fruit-picking and casual construction work.

I measure everything these days by a simple test: is it likely to get
people killed? In the last three weeks of Mr Bigley's life, the actions of
various parties - including, but not limited to, Fleet Street, the
governments of Britain and Ireland, and UK Muslim lobby groups - made it
more likely that more Britons and other infidels will be kidnapped and
beheaded. That is shameful.

The other day I received a letter from a very eminent British historian
mocking me for my support of America, a country of 300 million cowering in
fear because a statistically insignificant 3,000 people were killed and a
couple of buildings demolished. Ha-ha.

I wonder how he felt watching a country of 60 million drowning in "mawkish
sentimentality" (The Spectator) because just one man had been killed. I
credit The Spectator with the phrase "mawkish sentimentality" but that was
on Thursday.

By Friday, their editorial had been attacked as being insensitive to the
great City of Liverpool, Michael Howard had (naturally) denounced it and,
with a Scouse fatwa about to descend, Boris Johnson decided the
previous day's robust words were no longer operative.

The Islamists have made a bet – that the West, in its twilight days, is too
soft and decadent to muster the strength for this long struggle. Would you
say the Britain on display to the world in the weeks before Mr
Bigley's murder would have disabused them of that analysis or confirmed it?

Victim culture is now the default mode of our times. But Mr Bigley wasn't
a victim. He was a combatant, even if he didn't know it. In a terrorist
war, we are all potential combatants: we board a flight in Boston, we set
off for work in Manhattan, we go clubbing in Bali, or to the bank in
Istanbul, or to school in Beslan – and something happens. And, except for
that last category, we should all be grown-up enough to understand that.

I wish the Black Watch good luck in Fallujah. Tough town - and I'm only
talking about the stringy chicken I had for lunch there last year. But the
home front's important, too. Whatever happened to the good old British
stiff upper lip? Oh, wait. That's an Americanism - "I kept a stiff upper
lip" (The Massachusetts Spy, 1815) - only belatedly imported to the British
Isles.

But in Clark County I'm glad to see they're keeping a stiff upper lip as
John le Carré, Antonia Fraser and fellow sufferers of Bush Derangement
Syndrome flood the mailboxes. Linda Rosicka, director of the county's
Board of Elections, thinks the rampaging Brits will have little effect.
"The American Revolution was fought for a reason," she remarked drily.
That's the spirit.

FYI. My e-mail below was read on Newstalk ZB by Leighton Smith at
11.10am today

You are welcome to distribute it further afield, or to quote from it if
you wish. as long as due acknowledgement is also given.

I would welcome any feedback.
Best wishes,

Barbara
--------------------

From: Barbara Faithfull
To: Leighton Smith
Subject: Women and rape complaints

Memo to Leighton Smith

1 Your remarks this morning were “spot on" about changed male attitudes
towards women because of the risks men now run of being accused of rape,
sexual harassment etc. for even the most inconsequential types of behaviour
towards women. I, for one, for example, have always been flattered on the
odd occasions when a wolf whistle has come my way!

2 You mentioned an interview Paul Holmes did this morning with
criminologist Dr Jan Jordan re her new book The Word of a Woman : The
Police and Rape. While I didn't hear it, I did hear another interview with
her yesterday, and I can only conclude that on the matter of rape at least,
she is more of an ideologue for the feminist political line on rape than
she is a scholar.

An example of such screwy thinking which she held less than three years ago :-

In an interview in the N.Z.Herald of 2nd January 2002 she was
pushing for police to have specially trained sex crime investigators to
interview rape complainants. She was critical of the police's
“disbelieving" view re rape complaints. Jordan : “A victim (sic!) whose
case is dropped should be assured that this is done because of lack of
evidence, NOT because she was not believed."

Now there is a hint that she has modified such twisted thinking, but it is
no less questionable for all that. From my transcript of that interview :
Jordan : “I'm not saying that some women - um - y'know, that women never
lie about rape um because SOME WOMEN DO."

However, her new approach is to offer mountains of excuses as to WHY a
woman might make a false rape complaint - she is a victim of this or that
etc… - and to require specially trained police to play “psychiatrist" to
try and find out why, instead of just charging a woman with wasting police
time, as they would any man making a false complaint.

She then appeared to shift her ground back to her earlier twisted approach
by praising the way in which many British police are acknowledging “that
there is a culture of disbelief around rape allegations and are tackling
that head on."

Might I suggest that N.Z. media folk adopt a healthy sense of scepticism
and even caution when interviewing this woman, who is obviously a social
change agent? Also our police, who are being pressured by the likes of
her into radical feminist self-serving policy changes by such
pseudo-scholarly blatherings.

Barbara Faithfull

>From Concerned Women for America:

Suppression of Christians under 'hate crime' laws is no longer theoretical
or confined to Canada or Sweden. You might want to let any legislator who
voted for 'hate crime' laws at the state or federal level know how you feel
about the part he or she is playing in building a system that will jail us
and our children someday for living out our faith. Hiding behind a
"pro-life" or "pro-marriage" label will not suffice any more.
-- Bob Knight

Christians Arrested for "Hate Crime" to Be Arraigned on Monday 10/15/2004
By Robert Knight

'Philadelphia 11' charged with 3 felonies, 5 misdemeanors.

A group of Christians who were arrested on October 10 at a Philadelphia
homosexual celebration will be arraigned at 9 a.m. on Monday in the
Criminal Justice Center on charges that could bring 47-year prison
sentences.

None of the charges has been dropped or reduced since the arrests of 11
people ranging in age from 17 to 72 were made around 1 p.m. during the
Coming Out Day "Outfest", a spokeswoman from the District Attorney's office
told Concerned Women for America's Culture & Family Institute.

Michael Marcavage, founder of Repent America and the leader of the group,
said that mainstream media, including Philadelphia's major newspapers, have
ignored the arrests.

"We let the Associated Press know, but they didnít have any interest in
it," Marcavage said. "I mean, if they want to have a "hate crimeí law",
well, here it is."

Marcavage has done several Christian radio interviews, but none with
secular-oriented stations.

Police made the arrests after some homosexual activists calling themselves
the 'Pink Angels' confronted the Christian group near an entrance to the
event. A videotape of the arrests shows ìthat itís clearly the 'Pink
Angels' who are disrupting things, not us,î Marcavage said. None of the
"Pink Angels' was arrested.

The counts against the Christian group include:

1) "ethnic intimidation" (2nd-degree felony "hate crime").

2) "criminal conspiracy" (1st-degree felony).

3) "possession of instruments of crime" (1st-degree misdemeanor).

4) reckless endangerment of another person (2nd-degree felony).

5) "riot" (3rd-degree felony).

6) "failure to disperse" (2nd-degree misdemeanor).

7) "disorderly conduct" (2nd-degree misdemeanor).

"obstructing a highway" (3rd-degree misdemeanor).

The "ethnic intimidation" charge was made under Pennsylvania's Ethnic
Intimidation and Institutional Vandalism Act, the state's "hate crimes"
law, to which 'sexual orientation' was recently added as a victim category.

Law Center had filed suit against city

Two days before the arrests, the American Family Association Center for Law
and Policy (AFACLP) filed a lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia
alleging that Marcavage and his group have been denied their
constitutionally protected rights of free speech and free exercise of
religion, stemming from other incidents. "The City of Philadelphia
constantly threatened, intimidated, and, as evidenced by Sunday's actions,
arrested him merely for proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ on the
public byways," an AFACLP press release said.

"It's time that the City of Brotherly Love learned that the Liberty Bell
rings for Christians, too," said Joseph Murray, an AFACLP staff attorney.

http://www.cwfa.org/articles/6542/CFI/nation/index.htm

Listen to interview with Michael Marcavage, Brian Fahlilng, Robert Knight
and Martha Kleder:

http://www.cwfa.org/articles/6555/CWA/freedom/index.htm

Concerned Women for America
1015 Fifteenth St. N.W., Suite 1100
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone: (202) 488-7000
Fax: (202) 488-0806
E-mail: mail@cwfa.org
---------------------

MannGram®: endless drafts
Oct 2004

The modest announcement below from _Nature_ recalls when J Celera
Venter posed at the Presidential podium with Pres. Clinton smiling up
admiringly at him. Simultaneously Tony Blair gushed inanely, and very
ignorantly, about the 'landmark breakthru' represented by the announcement
of what turned out to be a partial draft of "the" human genome.

A couple y later, an 'improved draft' was announced.
Now the claim is still only that "the" sequencing has been
"largely" done.

If you're getting a picture of endless drafts, that's a reasonable
reaction.

By now you should be wondering to whom it matters whether the
plurry thang is "done". What is the good of it?

And meanwhile of course single-base differences (SNPs) are
assiduously detected in the hope of correcting those that are thought to
cause illness - many hundreds of them in just one gene (to do with cystic
fibrosis).

By now, indeed, everybody should be wondering what good "the" human
genome can be, if ever determined (which it cannot be, owing to faulty
logic in its defn, as I've just hinted). Supposing there were such a thing
as the correct DNA sequence for some Adonis or Venus (reminding ourselves
here that there must be *at least* two different human genomes). The idea
that some difference in the 3 x 10^9 base-pairs accounts for each human
difference e.g illness is grossly exaggerated. Gene therapy has an
unimpressive history (to put it kindly).

The whole approach should be admitted as mistaken.
Genes
* are far harder to identify than had been hoped - there are several
respectable defns of 'gene'
* act in ways we are only just beginning to understand
* have far less in illness than was hoped by the modern genetic determinsim
* offer far less scope for medical practice than insinuated by the
'genome' fad.

R

----------------

FEATURE OF THE WEEK

Human genome: End of the beginning

Just over three years ago, it was announced that a first draft of
the human genome sequence had been completed. In this free News and
Views article, Lincoln Stein describes how gaps and errors remained,
but the job of fixing those problems is now largely done.
http://info.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/eQof0BhdwI0Ch0ULe0AG

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN GENOME SEQUENCING CONSORTIUM
http://info.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/eQof0BhdwI0Ch0ULf0AH

A local physicist has deemed 'interesting' this propaganda

>>http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html

>Explosive growth has made the People's Republic of China the most
>power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced,
>meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy.
By Spencer Reiss«
...
>Wu and his backers aim to have a full-scale 200-megawatt version of HTR-10
>by the end of the decade. They've already persuaded Huaneng Power
>International - one of China's five big privatized utilities, listed on
>the NYSE and chaired by the son of former premier Li Peng - to pick up
>half of the estimated $300 million tab. Concrete is scheduled to be
>poured in spring 2007.

Asked to comment by someone in the Physics Dept U of Ak I can
hardly refuse. That group of personages failed rather comprehensively to
advise the public about nuclear power during the main push of 1973-77 -
except of course for the grossly misleading utterances of Alan Poletti.

Similarly, when Poletti was for services rendered given the junket
Polittee, PM Bolger's political cttee to legitimise marine reactors, a few
physicists made bold to query his crass slogans, e.g R E White, but again
most of those whose expertise should be available to interpret this complex
technology were not willing to challenge Poletti's bullshit publicly.

So, here are some comments.

1 "Full scale" has, for the last 3 decade, meant 1000-1200 MWe. If this
reactor is to be only 200 MWe, that would imply some rather radical
reappraisal of economies of scale. I'd like to see the details; meanwhile,
it is not to be believed.

2 This 'Doppler broadening' is by no means novel. A hi-T pebble-bed
reactor was being completed at Fort St Vrain, Colo, in 1975. Asked about
that in Chch, main nookluhluh PR agent Norman Rasmussen said "they're
having a little difficulty getting it on the line". Could someone bring
us up to date on that reactor? It was claimed to be 'fail safe' thru
Doppler broadening; how did it work out? It read well - including
transmuting Th-232 into U-233, hardly a solution to the 'safeguards
problem'. What has changed, except for the coining of the PR term 'walk
away safe'?

3 Nookuloh enthusiasts have never conceded that reactor meltthru is a
significant threat. "One in a million", they have intoned. They cannot
consistently now claim that abolition of the possibility constitutes
significant progress; if there was no significant problem, doing away with
the negligible problem is unimportant.

4 Reactor meltthru is only one of numerous unsolved problems with big
fission reactors. The spent fuel, even if nothing unscheduled has got out
of the primary system, poses hazards to neighbours, to those along
transport routes to reprocessing or disposal - and that latter has still
not been satisfactorily done.

5 U & Th don't amount to huge energy resources if used 'straight thru'.
Reprocessing doesn't extend the energy resource very much, unless breeding
is attained - a receding mirage for U-Pu fuel cycles, and unproven for
the Th-U233 cycle as far as I know. And if breeding were actually
developed, the mature fuel cycle entails thousands of A-bombs of fissile
material. Filching is notoriously hard to detect within a few bombs'
worth.

6 The reliability of this type of reactor is unproven. It might manage
annual capacity factors above 40% - that of a wind generator at a good NZ
site - but it might also break down for a year or more. Who would want
to provide a test-bed for it?

7 It might well also cost a lot more than NZ$2/W capital. The running
costs are vague but far from negligible.

8 The infrastructure required would be far too costly - slap the
research reactor at last into the hole in the Chem bldg basement, activate
at last the training centre in the top story, fly Poletti to Chch
frequently, upgrade the grid protection breakers to cope with the frequent
trips of this novel reactor, enhance secret police surveillance of
potential saboteurs, bring in refugees from the fading, demoralised nuclear
priesthoods of the UK & USA - these are likely to make J F Duncan look
intelligent & upright - the whole plurry scenario is highly dismaying.
And all to pay several dollars per W of peak generating power, whereas wind
with a capacity factor >40% can be installed as required for ca.$1.7/W and
does not require a new govt-funded infrastructure of monitoring, security
etc. Any expansion to the NZ grid that might be justified when the full
figures get disclosed should be wind-powered - genuinely renewable as
even hydro isn't.

I fail to see the claimed interest in the Chow propaganda. It cannot
give NZ a single kWh of electricity within a decade (more likely 15 y); it
entails hazards that have turned out to be intractable. Fission power was
a proven dud 3 decade ago, as the lack of utility orders confirmed; within
a decade, numerous Nobel prizewinners led by Henry Kendall had declared it
a loser. It is disappointing that any physicist could in any way continue
the sordid Poletti tradition. Even if this were a proven better reactor,
it would still be a rotten idea.

-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

MP my man

I gather from Green MP Ian Ewen-Street that his Hazardous
Substances and New Organisms (Moratorium Reinstatement) Amendment Bill
would re-impose the GM moratorium that was lifted last year. He tells me
the Bill has been picked from the Members' Ballot and is expected to be
introduced to the House tomorrow Wednesday 20 October 2004.

As the senior NZ biochemist critical of GM I might be expected to
play some role in drafting such a bill, or at the very least to be favoured
with a copy of what the experts Susan Kitschley list-MP and Jeanette
Fitzsimons list-MP have drafted. But of course my many y of criticising
also their PC ideologies gets me blacklisted, as with the PC media. So I
can assure you my opinion on GM is independent of those 'Rainbow' PC
poseuses.

Nevertheless I guess the bill is along the right lines and should
be sent to Jeanette's Local govt & Environment cttee. Your party, judging
by previous manoeuvres in amending of this Act, may try to send it to the
appallingly unsuitable Educ & Sc cttee - if the bill is introduced at all.

Anyhow I urge you to vote for the first reading. You should be
able to do so honourably, without intoning the favourite Green weasel-words
'we support this bill to Select Cttee but are neither for nor against'.

Our nation's record in control of GM is not nearly so impressive as
our self-protection from nuclear hazards. I must therefore exhort you: the
most dangerous technologies must be confined to special labs. Current
field trials are far too sloppy; open plantings of GM crops or trees should
not be allowed. ERMA should not be allowed to entertain applications for
GM releases.

And BTW Eichers' recommendation 6.2 has not been taken seriously -
review lab containment procedures & permits.

If the morality reflected in Sir John Marshall's autobiography is
still supported by your party, would youse have any difficulty being
conservative about letting loose uncharacterised GMOs? (And, yes, they
are *all* uncharacterised.)

cheers

-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

FORMER KENNEDY AIDE
PIERRE SALINGER DIES

Associated Press
October 16, 2004

Pierre Salinger, who served as President John F. Kennedy's press secretary
and later had a long career with ABC News, has died, the network said
Saturday. Salinger, 79, died from a heart attack at a hospital in France,
the network said.

The Washington Post, citing Salinger's wife, Nicole, reported that he died
Saturday at a hospital near his home in Le Thor, France. The couple moved
there four years ago from London and Washington, the newspaper said.

Salinger, who also served as press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson,
said Kennedy was a "special man" who surrounded himself with advisers who
"believed in each other" and in a common mission.

"There was no barrier on the president's door," Salinger wrote in McCall's
magazine in 1988. "Any of his dozen principal staffers could see him when
they wanted to. They didn't need permission from a chief of staff to gain
access."

A longtime print journalist, Salinger switched to television reporting when
he joined ABC in 1977. In the years following he worked as the network's
Paris bureau chief, chief foreign correspondent and senior editor in
London.

He had left the network by 1997, when he became a prominent backer of the
theory that TWA Flight 800, which crashed off Long Island in 1996 on a
flight to Paris, was accidentally brought down by a Navy missile.

Salinger had said at the time that a government document showed the Navy
was testing missiles off the coast of New York, and had been told planes
would be flying higher than 21,000 feet. The Navy was unaware that Flight
800 was flying at 13,000 feet because another commercial plane was flying
above it, he said.

The National Transportation Safety Board found no evidence of a missile
strike. It concluded that Flight 800 was destroyed by a center fuel tank
explosion, probably caused by a spark from a short-circuit in the wiring
that ignited vapors in the tank.
[ See accompanying stories below ]

Salinger's oldest son, Stephen, said his father's health had declined
noticeably when he last saw him at his home in Provence, France, four weeks
ago.

Although his eyes twinkled at a gift of his favorite Punch Punch Cuban
cigars, "his vocabulary was limited to only a few words," Stephen Salinger
said from his home in Los Angeles. "That was OK, because among the few
words he could still remember and words every son wants to hear. He said 'I
love you.'

"It's the first time in my life I wasn't going to receive a prognosis on
the upcoming election," Stephen Salinger said.

Born on June 14, 1925, in San Francisco, Pierre Emil George Salinger first
worked on the editorial staff of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1942 to
1943. He resigned from the newspaper to enlist in the Navy, where he
commanded a sub chaser in the Pacific during World War II. He was honorably
discharged with the rank of lieutenant in 1946.

Salinger, who graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1947,
returned to the Chronicle after the war before leaving to join Collier's
Magazine as a contributing editor in 1955. Two years later, he joined
Kennedy's senatorial staff and served as his press officer in the 1960
presidential campaign.

Kennedy, Salinger said, "was not a perfect man. ... For all his loftiness
of purpose, he did not take himself that seriously. He had no great vision
of himself as a political or intellectual giant."

But Salinger said Kennedy learned from his mistakes, citing private
correspondence between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev that he
said showed "two leaders of confrontational powers groping toward
understanding."

Once while he was press secretary, a journalist asked him directly about
Kennedy's sex life, Salinger said in a 1993 Washingtonian interview.

"I gave him a 1960s answer, not a 1990s answer: 'Look, he's the president
of the United States. He's got to work 14 to 16 hours a day. He's got to
run foreign and domestic policy. If he's got time for mistresses after all
that, what the hell difference does it make?' The reporter laughed and
walked out. That was the end of the story. For sure, I couldn't get away
with that in the '90s."

After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Salinger served under
Johnson before being appointed to complete the term of Sen. Clair Engle,
Dem.-California, who died in office. But Salinger lost his 1964 bid to keep
the job to one-time Hollywood song-and-dance man George Murphy.

After his political career, Salinger worked as a correspondent for the
French news magazine L'Express, and later for ABC.

Salinger, whose mother was French and who learned that language before
English, lived some 19 years in Paris, although later made his home in New
York. In 1978, the French awarded him the Chevalier of the Legion, France's
highest civilian honor, for increasing understanding between the two
nations.

Associated Press writers Chaka Ferguson in New York and Chris T. Nguyen in
Los Angeles contributed to this report

LIES, FABRICATIONS, COVERUPS
NATIONAL MEDIA CAUGHT
LOOKING AT A "FIRST STRIKE"
. . . AND THEN FOULING OUT

A.V. KREBS
The Agribusiness Examiner
September 26, 2003

It would be easy to dismiss Jack Cashill and James Sanders recently
published book First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America,
(Wind Books, Nashville, Tenn.: 2003) by questioning the right-wing
political agenda of the publisher and a few of the book's commentators, but
to do so would be a tragic mistake.

It would be a mistake because as the two investigative journalists
demonstrate those very government agencies established to protect the
citizenry, while conspiring with the media, failed so miserably in their
mandate.

Likewise, it would be easy to simply write off the book as another product
of the "conspiracy theorists." To do so, however, would ignore the evidence
found in the book's page after page of the lies, fabrications, and coverups
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Transportation Safety
Board, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency, the Central Intelligence
Agency, and the Clinton White House that surrounded the tragic destruction
of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound on July 17, 1996 in which 230
people were killed.

After the authors show that what really happened to Flight 800 was not due
to "mechanical failure." as the government would have us believe, they pose
a most plausible and surprising scenario in the closing pages of the book,
based on credible research, of how the passengers of Flight 800 may have
well been the precursors of the World Trade Center occupants on September
11, 2001, hence the book's title First Strike.

In seeking to refute the government's claim that no physical evidence of an
external attack exists the authors show how the evidence of what actually
did happen was "systematically lost, stolen, concealed, erased, deleted,
denied, or simply ignored.

"This," they state, "is not a matter of conjecture. This is a matter of
fact."

Thus what resulted on July 17, 1996 was a first strike in a new war of
terrorism that was intricately conceived, that would benefit from a bungled
military operation and was abetted by an outrageous effective government
coverup that in the author's minds succeeded because not even the
investigation's critics understood the nature of the attack.

Sadly one of the government's most willing accomplices to what became one
of the government's biggest lies of that era was the nation's mainstream
media. Their handling of the tragedy and subsequent coverup of the TWA
Flight 800 investigation remain prime examples of our national mainstream
media's dereliction of journalistic responsibility and accountability in
this information age.

It was Abraham Lincoln who once said: " I am a firm believer in the people.
If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis.
The great point is to bring them the real facts."

THE UNREPORTED STORY:
9\11 AND TWA FLIGHT #800

NICK WELSH
The Santa Barbara (California) Independent
September 9, 2004

"The last official body created and funded to get a 'full account' of the
greatest mass murder in U.S. history has cherrypicked the evidence, skewed
the findings, covered up compelling evidence of negligence on the part of
the U.S. intelligence community," Lance said in a recent interview. "When
they set out, the commissioners said they would conduct the most thorough
and complete investigation ever. They haven't. Instead they've tried to
give us a false sense of assurance they got to the bottom of what went
wrong. It's a fraud upon the American people."
--- Peter Lance

Most inflammatory, in his book, Cover Up: What the Government Is Still
Hiding About the War on Terror, Peter Lance claims that in 1996,
high-ranking FBI and Justice Department officials turned a deliberate blind
eye on documentary evidence provided by a high-ranking mob snitch that a
key Al Qaeda terrorist, Ramzi Yousef, behind bars for the original bombing
of the World Trade Center in 1993, was actively plotting to blow up what
turned out to be TWA Flight 800, which exploded 13,000 feet in the air
above Long Island in the summer of 1996, killing all 230 passengers and
crewmembers on board.

After a 16-month investigation, the FBI blamed that tragedy on mechanical
failure. Given that Yousef's uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was one of the
masterminds behind the September 11 plot, Lance contends the FBI blew yet
another golden opportunity to prevent 9/11 from ever occurring.

Intense, wiry, and endowed with James Bondian good looks and a crisp
handshake, Lance is given to exhaling huge volumes of
difficult-to-pronounce names, incriminating facts, and startling
revelations in a single breath, all delivered in the semi-sensational
rat-a-tat-rhythm of tabloid journalism.

Only the alarm clock ring of his cell phone gives him cause for pause.
Lance strives to be cool and professional, but radiates the urgency of a
man on fire. After ten minutes in his presence, you wonder whether he's had
a good night's sleep in the three years since Osama bin Laden attacked the
World Trade Center. But after half an hour, you begin to wonder how you'll
get to sleep in the future.

Lance is upset, in part, because the commission chose not to name names or
assign blame. "They haven't admitted that any person failed anything.
Instead they talk about 'institutional flaws.' Well, institutions are
filled with individuals, spear-carriers and policymakers alike. This is
akin to saying, 'We have a problem with Enron, but we're going to let the
company keep operating with the same people at the top.'"

But most fundamentally, Lance is angry because the commissioners didn't go
further in their investigation. By limiting most of their inquiry to events
that occurred since 1998 - and by setting the start of the 9/11 conspiracy
in 1998 rather than 1995 - Lance charged that members of the commission
never acknowledged, let alone addressed, a host of missed opportunities
that would have allowed federal justice officials to stop the lethal chain
of events that concluded with the attacks upon the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. "And that's a cover-up," he said.

Unlike the thousands of journalists worldwide who covered the 9/11
Commission proceedings, Lance was also an active participant. Thanks to his
close relationship with members of the Family Steering Committee, a group
of 9/11 widows who lobbied for the creation of the commission in the first
place, Lance managed to
finagle an invitation by commission co-chair, former New Jersey Governor
Tom Kean, to share what he learned while researching his prior book on the
9/11 tragedy, 1,000 Years for Revenge.

That unsparing critique, just released in paperback, blamed the FBI's New
York office for blowing chance after chance to investigate and apprehend,
before the fact, some of the key conspirators responsible for the 9/11
attack, charges that Lance reprises early in Cover Up. For example, as of
1989, the New York FBI began surveillance on four men associated with a
Brooklyn mosque, all of whom were later implicated in acts of Al Qaeda
terror in the United States and abroad.

"Back then, they were on our side," Lance said. "These were people fighting
the Soviets in Afghanistan." But in his book Lance blames subsequent
screw-ups on arrogance, incompetence, and the petty politics of
bureaucratic infighting. Shortly before the initial attack on the World
Trade Center in 1993, police picked up one of the co-conspirators several
times only to cut him loose.

In 1995, a Philippine colonel named Rodolfo Mendoza informed American
authorities that he'd obtained a confession from Abdul Murad, a close
associate of Yousef's, who revealed then that Yousef --- in addition to
assassination plots against the Pope and President Bill Clinton --- was
working on plans to send a hijacked airliner crashing into one or more of
six possible targets in the United States.

These included the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, a nuclear power plant,
the Sears Tower in Chicago, and the Transworld Building in San Francisco.
No date was set. In addition, Mendoza said Murad told him that Yousef had
enrolled his accomplices in flight-training schools. Lance claims Mendoza's
warning clearly establishes the official beginning of the 9/11 plot in
1995, not 1998 as outlined in the 9/11 Commission's report.

Lance remains incredulous that when Ramzi Yousef, whom Lance dubs "The
Mozart of Terror," was finally arrested for spearheading that bombing, FBI
agents failed to canvass the other rooms in the same guest house where
Yousef was staying. Had they done so, they would have found Shaikh
Mohammed, the key conspirator behind the 9/11 attack. As it was, a reporter
for Time managed to find Mohammed with little difficulty, who, using his
own name, provided that magazine's readers a description of Yousef's
arrest.

Another key failure of omission cited by Lance was the decision by federal
prosecutors to keep the role of Skaikh Mohammed, who was a co-conspirator
in the first World Trade Center bombing as well as mastermind of the
second, under wraps. Although Mohammed was indicted for the first bombing,
his name was never mentioned during the trial and his indictment was
sealed.

None of this, Lance charged, was addressed by the 9/11 Commission. Lance
doesn't subscribe to the notion that U.S. authorities intentionally allowed
the 9/11 attack to occur in order to justify the Bush administration's new,
aggressively unilateral approach to world affairs, explaining, "I'm not
some conspiracy guy, I'm a hard-bitten journalist."

Instead, he attributes the cover-up to the oldest motivation in the book
--- covering one's ass. "I think these people kept hoping and praying that
all this would just blow away, but in 1999, when two African embassies are
bombed with the direct participation of a guy the FBI had in surveillance
in 1989, what are they going to do, tell the American people, 'We screwed
up'?"

But few screw-ups rankle Lance as much as the decision by federal
prosecutors to dismiss as a "hoax and a scam," the testimony of mobster
Greg Scarpa Jr. Scarpa testified that he relayed messages from Ramzi Yousef
--- who in 1996 and '97 was housed in a cell next to Scarpa in the New York
Metropolitan Correction Center --- to another Al Qaeda operative next door.
Cooperating with authorities in hopes of obtaining a lighter sentence on
racketeering charges, Scarpa befriended Yousef and copied his notes.

In those missives, Yousef --- then on trial --- discussed blowing a plane
up as part of a strategy to obtain a mistrial. He also passed detailed
schematics of the bombs to be used and how they could be smuggled past
airport security. Working with the FBI, Scarpa set up an outside phone line
from which Yousef could patch phone calls from jail to anywhere in the
world. But when Yousef made such calls, the FBI agents found themselves
stymied because he spoke dialects of Urdu or Baluci.

And when the TWA Flight 800 blew up, investigators found trace explosives
favored by Yousef on the plane, but rejected sabotage as a cause in favor
of mechanical failure. Lance suggests that decision was based solely on
political considerations rather than the forensic evidence, as Scarpa Jr.
was already slated to provide key testimony in several high-profile mob
trials. Lance contends that high-ranking officials, like Jamie Gorelick ---
now the FBI's chief counsel --- shut down the criminal investigation into
the crash of TWA Flight 800 for fear that their outstanding cases against
various mobsters would unravel.

When Lance sought to deliver his information to the 9/11 Commission, he was
interviewed by former federal prosecutor Dietrich Snell --- one of the two
federal prosecutors who successfully convicted Yousef in 1996 ---
accompanied by a FBI agent. There was no tape recorder, no stenographer.
Snell took notes.

As Lance gave his statement, he also asked Snell questions. Why didn't
Snell mention Mohammed's name once during the trial? Why was Mohammed's
indictment sealed? Why didn't the Justice Department launch the same sort
of international dragnet for Mohammed as it did for Yousef. "He just looked
at me and smirked and said he was not at liberty to answer my questions,"
Lance said.

Such conflicts of interest were rife within the 9/11 Commission, Lance
claimed, and tainted the results. No less than 32 of the commission's staff
members had former ties to the federal investigatory agencies whose
failures were the subject of the commission's inquiry. With the exception
of Kean, who sits on the board of an oil
company doing business in Saudi Arabia, all commission members sat on
oversight committees reviewing the work of the nation's intelligence
agencies.

He noted that Gorelick was one of only two 9/11 Commission members who were
allowed to review White House documents. The other was Philip Zelikow, who
co-wrote a book with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in 1995.
After reviewing the White House documents, Lance said, Gorelick and Zelikow
wrote a report of what they saw and submitted to the White House for
screening. Then that report was read by two other commission members, who
relayed the contents to the 9/11 Commission as a whole.

"We need one final investigation of what caused 9/11. We need scholars and
journalists and people without the usual conflicts. Admittedly, that may be
difficult. But this is a democracy. Once we cede our oversight
responsibilities - especially when national security is involved - we may
as well give up."

Peter Lance is one outraged man. An award-winning, freelance investigative
reporter now ensconced in Montecito, Lance has just released a new book,
Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror,
blasting the official report recently completed by the 9/11 Commission that
details some of the wholesale intelligence failures preceding the most
deadly attack ever to take place on American soil.

'The Anglican' (diocese of Auckland)

19 Sep 2004

p. 2

Bishop John dealt with several issues which have the power to
divide the Church.
...

Civil Union Bill
Another contentious piece of legislation is the proposed Civil Union Bill.
The Bishop said, "Christians are divided in their opinions of the Bill.
While some welcome arrangements for a civil union, I hold that it is
important that Christian marriage continue to be seen for what it is ...
Our Church has not officially accepted any theological or doctrinal or
biblical scholarship that would support Anglican priests being involved in
the provision of priestly ministry at civil union ceremonies, and I thus
wish to make it clear that a licence from me does not authorise clergy to
be involved at such ceremonies. Careful and faithful pastoral ministry to
people is another matter entirely."

The Bishop referred to two recently established groups holding
contrasing views: 'Changing Attitudes' and 'Anglican Mainstream NZ', and
commented, "Mutual support and encouragement for like-minded individuals
which does not preclude a willingness to engage in careful and appropriate
public deebate over these issues does not present me with a problem at all."

Human Sexuality
The debate on human sexuality was also raised in connection with the
Lambetih Commission on Communion, of which Bishop John is a member. He
said, "I cannot see at present how the final Report of the Commission will
manage to keep the Anglican Communion entirely together.

"There are already rifts that seem to some to be irreparable, and
in the view of many we are facing a new possibility of schism, or at the
very least a much more severely impaired state of communion ... [In our
Diocese,] one day of the Licensed Ministry Conference in July was given
over to a process of what was called 'Respectful Conversations'. I was
grateful for the way that Conference went about those conversations, and at
the end of the day we gave thanks to God for the fact that we were all
still in the same room, still talking to one another."
...

- Jean Holm


p. 12
*Those Black Outfits*
Isn't equating dress with attitudes misleading? Isn't that what we
do too often to youth and migrants?

Would one also have to equate the GALS (Gay and Lesbian Singers) or
fashionably black-suited young business women of Queen Street with brutal
Nazi thugs?

{picture of black-clothed Gay and Lesbian Singers}

- anon

sorry about the spurious characters - I blame Gates

R

http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=70

October 16, 2004

EVOLUTIONARY FIGURE
Francis Crick, 1916-2004

Francis Crick is dead and gone. He has certainly not “passed on” - and, if he has, he’ll be extremely annoyed about it. As a 12-year old English schoolboy, he decided he was an atheist, and for much of the rest of his life worked hard to disprove the existence of the soul.
In between, he “discovered the secret of life”, as he crowed to the barmaids and regulars at The Eagle, his Cambridge pub, on a triumphant night in 1953. The opening sentence of his paper, written with his colleague Jim Watson, for Nature on April 25th that year put it more modestly:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid.

That’s DNA to you and me. And it’s thanks to Crick and Watson that we know the acronym and that it’s passed into the language as the contemporary shorthand for our core identity. Your career choice? “She says being a part of academia seemed to be hard-wired into her DNA because her father was a professor at the University of Virginia.” (The Chicago Tribune) Socio-economic inequality? “Income distribution appears to be hard-wired into the DNA of a nation.” (The Washington Post) New trends in rock video? “Staying cool is hard-wired into the DNA of MTV.” (The Los Angeles Times)

Francis Crick was the most important biologist of the 20th century. Like Darwin, he changed the way we think of ourselves. First, with Watson, he came up with one of the few scientific blueprints known to the general public – the double-helix structure of DNA (though he left it to Mrs Crick, usually a painter of nudes, to create the model). Later, with Sydney Brenner, he unraveled the universal genetic code. Today, Crick’s legacy includes all the thorniest questions of our time - genetic fingerprinting, stem-cell research, pre-screening for hereditary diseases, the “gay gene” and all the other “genes of the week”. In Britain, they’re arguing about a national DNA database; on the Continent, anti-globalists are protesting genetically modified crops; in America, it was traces of, um, DNA on Monica’s blue dress that obliged Bill Clinton to change his story. If you’re really determined, you can still just about ignore DNA – the OJ jury did – but, increasingly, it’s the currency of the age. Crick called his home in Cambridge the Golden Helix, and it truly was golden – not so much for him personally but for the biotechnology industry, something of a contradiction in terms half-a-century ago but now a 30-billion-a-year bonanza.

“We were lucky with DNA,” he said. “Like America, it was just waiting to be discovered.” But Crick was an unlikely Columbus. The son of a boot factory owner, he grew up in the English Midlands, dabbling in the usual scientific experiments of small boys – blowing up bottles, etc – but never really progressing beyond. Indeed, as a scientist, he wasn’t one for conducting experiments. What he did was think, and even then it took him a while to think out what he ought to be thinking about. His studies were interrupted by the war, which he spent developing mines at the British Admiralty’s research laboratory. Afterwards, already 30 and at a loose end, he mulled over what he wanted to do and decided his main interests were the “big picture” questions, the ones arising from his rejection of God, the ones that seemed beyond the power of science. Crick reckoned that the “mystery of life” could be easily understood if you just cleared away all the mysticism we’ve chosen to surround it with.

That’s the difference between Darwin and Crick. Evolution, whatever offence it gives, by definition emphasizes how far man has come from his tree-swinging forebears. DNA, by contrast, seems reductive. Man and chimp share 98.5% of their genetic code, which would be no surprise to Darwin. But we also share 75% of our genetic make-up with the pumpkin. The pumpkin is just a big ridged orange lump lying on the ground all day, like a fat retiree on the beach in Florida. But other than that he has no discernible human characteristics until your kid carves them into him.

Yet the point of DNA is not just to prove that the pumpkin is our kin but to pump him for useful information. According to Monise Durrani, a BBC science correspondent, the genetic blueprint of the humble earthworm is proving useful in the study of Alzheimer’s. Do worms get Alzheimer’s? And, if they do, what difference does it make? As Ms Durrani says, “Although we like to think we are special, our genes bring us down to Earth... We all evolved from the same soup of chemicals.” It turns out there is a fly in my soup, and a chimp and a worm and a pumpkin.

Having found “the secret of life”, what do you do for an encore? Crick disliked celebrity, and had a standard reply card printed to fend off his fellow man: “Dr. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to…” There then followed a checklist of options with a tick by the relevant item: send an autograph, provide a photograph, appear on your radio or TV show, cure your disease, etc. This is a view of man as 75% pumpkin but capable of crude, predictable, repetitive patterns of imposition on more advanced forms of life. Dr Crick also turned down automatically honorary degrees and disdained the feudal honours offered by the British state. Presumably the hyper-rationalist in him consigned monarchical mumbo-jumbo to the same trash can of history as religion, though he eventually relented and accepted an invitation by the Queen to join her most elite Order of Merit. Religion he never let up on. The university at which he practiced his science is filled with ancient college chapels, whose presence so irked Crick that, when the new Churchill College invited him to become a Fellow, he agreed to do so only on condition that no chapel was built on the grounds. In 1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel and Crick’s fellow Fellows voted to accept the money, he refused to accept the argument that many at the college would appreciate a place of worship and that those who didn’t were not obliged to enter it. He offered to fund a brothel on the same basis, and, when that was rejected, he resigned.

His militant atheism was good-humoured but fierce, and it drove him away from molecular biology. As the key to the mystery of life, DNA seems a small answer to the big picture, so Crick pushed on, advancing the theory of “Directed Panspermia”, which is not a Clinton DNA joke but his and his colleague Leslie Orgel’s explanation for how life began. Concerned by the narrow time frame – to those of a non-creationist bent - between the cooling of the earth and the rapid emergence of the planet’s first life forms, Crick determined to provide another explanation for the origin of life. As he put it, bouncing along a tenuous chain of probabilities:

The first self-replicating system is believed to have arisen spontaneously in the ‘soup,’ the weak solution of organic chemicals formed in the oceans, seas, and lakes by the action of sunlight and electric storms. Exactly how it started we do not know…

The universe began much earlier. Its exact age is uncertain but a figure of 10 to 15 billion years is not too far out…

Although we do not know for certain, we suspect that there are in the galaxy many stars with planets suitable for life…

Could life have first started much earlier on the planet of some distant star, perhaps eight to 10 billion years ago? If so, a higher civilization, similar to ours, might have developed from it at about the time that the Earth was formed… Would they have had the urge and the technology to spread life through the wastes of space and seed these sterile planets, including our own?..

For such a job, bacteria are ideal. Since they are small, many of them can be sent. They can be stored almost indefinitely at very low temperatures, and the chances are they would multiply easily in the ‘soup’ of the primitive ocean…

“We do not know… uncertain… not too far out… we do not know for certain… we suspect… chances are…” And thus the Nobel prize winner embraces the theory that space aliens sent rocketships to seed the earth. The man of science who confidently dismissed God at Mill Hill School half a century earlier appears not to have noticed that he’d merely substituted for his culturally inherited monotheism a weary variant on Graeco-Roman-Norse pantheism – the gods in the skies who fertilise the earth and then retreat to the heavens beyond our reach. To be sure, he leaves them as anonymous aliens showering seed rather than Zeus adopting the form of a swan, but nevertheless Dr Crick’s hyper-rationalism took 50 years to lead him round to embracing a belief in a celestial creator of human life, indeed a deus ex machina.

He didn’t see it that way, of course. His last major work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, was a full-scale assault on human feeling. “The Astonishing Hypothesis," trumpeted Crick, “is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”

It’s not a new idea. Round about the time Dr Crick was working on his double-helix, Cole Porter wrote a song for a surly Soviet lass fending off the attentions of an amorous American:

When the electromagnetic of the he-male
Meets the electromagnetic of the female
If right away she should say this is the male
It’s A Chemical Reaction, That’s All.

Of course, in the film of Silk Stockings, Cyd Charisse eventually succumbs to Fred Astaire and comes to understand her thesis is not the final word. Even if the Astonishing Hypothesis – that there’s no “You”, no thoughts, no feelings, no falling in love, no free will - is true, it’s so all-encompassing as to be useless except to the most sinister eugenicists. And in the end Francis Crick’s own life seems to disprove it: He was never a dry or pompous scientist, he liked jokes and costume parties, he was an undistinguished man pushing 40 with one great obsession. Perhaps the combination of human quirks and sparks that drove him to chase his double-helix are merely a chemical formula no different in principle from that which determines variations in the pumpkin patch. But, even if Francis Crick is 75% the same as a pumpkin, the degree of difference between him and even the savviest Hubbard squash suggests that as a unit of measurement it doesn’t quite capture the scale of difference.

It is too late to retreat now. Francis Crick set us on the path to a biotechnological era that may yet be only an intermediate stage to a post-human future. But, just as a joke that’s explained is no longer funny, so in his final astonishing hypothesis Dr Crick eventually arrived at the logical end: you can only unmask the mystery of humanity by denying our humanity.
The Atlantic Monthly, October 2004

~ Read Mark's "Post Mortem" column every month in the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly. This month Mark writes about William Mitchell, the collossus of Cool-Whip - on sale now.

>Nature
>Published online: 06 October 2004; | doi:10.1038/news040712-1
>
>Mark Peplow
>DNA pioneer dies aged 87.
>
>Maurice Wilkins, who shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA's
>structure, died yesterday aged 87.
...
>
>He pioneered a technique called X-ray fibre diffraction, which can reveal
>the molecular structure of biological material such as collagen or DNA.

This may be excusably vague in an obituary, but it continues an
unfortunate misconception regarding what level of structure is accessible
by this fibre diffraction method. The attached excerpt from a 'pop sc'
article accepted and then suppressed by David Penny (subverting NZ Sc Rev)
defines levels of molecular structure in polymers such as DNA. As remarked
in my http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/dec102003/1564.pdf :

>> It is not widely enough understood that X-ray
diffraction was never capable of playing a dominant role in the inference
of DNA conformations because DNA liquid crystals in wet fibres give only a
few dozen diffuse X-ray reflections rather than the thousands of sharp
reflections scattered by highly-ordered crystals.
>>Crick (with Cochran & Vand)32 showed mathematically that a whole-molecule
>>regular helical conformation can diffract X-rays mainly in a
>>characteristic "X" pattern. But other secondary structures too can give
>>that pattern of scattering ...

The point is that the fibre diffraction method gives only a vague
guide to 2° & 3° structure, nothing like the location of each atom in
*crystal* diffraction analysis. This confusion has allowed continuance of
the 'Watson, Crick & Wilkins discovered THE structure of DNA' furphy.

The Nature obit continues:

>Previously, X-ray images could only be derived from crystals, which
>excluded many large biological molecules that prefer to form strands.

Notice that this raver Peplow is unaware what the term 'strand'
means. 'Many large biological molecules' e.g DNA, RNA, collagen, starch,
etc, are strands. Some of them form tertiary structures in which 2 or more
strands associate by weak bonds, but they are all strand-type molecules.

More importantly, that closing phrase is notable for gratuitous
assertion of the Dawkins furphy that such things as molecules can have
properties like preference or purpose. So desperate are these crude
atheists to rule out final causes of non-material kinds e.g God that they
ascribe final cause to such entities as DNA molecules.

They elsewhere deny that there is any purpose in the universe. It
is bad enough to say that molecules can have purpose. But to say also that
there is no purpose in the universe is to contradict oneself.

This begins to take on that notable characteristic of all
totalitarian tendencies - the babbling of slogans which are blatantly
false - not subtly or arguably false, but flagrantly untrue. 'The Slavs
are sub-human' was a prototype 7 decade ago, from a totalitarianism that
provoked a world war. 'All men are rapists' is a prototype slogan of the
ruling ideology today.

Consider in this context the USA journalist Wm L Shirer 'The Rise &
Fall of the Third Reich' (Secker & Warburg 1960) p.248

"No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land
can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences
of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home
or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a
restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish
assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious
that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio
or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but
on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a
shock of silence, as it one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized
how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which has become
warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels,
with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were."

It is difficult to face the mass mental aberrations involved in
* the DNA-worship
* the idiotic sub-cult chanting "The Big 4 Rule OK"
* the kustom-genes cDNA fabricators
* the belief that GM-bastards from 'biolistics', kustom plasmid/virus
kassettes, or electroporesis, differ from proper plants only in the one
intended effect e.g RoundupReadiness®
* refusal to admit that novel pathogens may well emanate from these bastards
* {please build on this list; it will help if you murmur from time to time
"it's not me that's crazy - it really is the faddists"}.

It adds up to a kind of mass psychosis. Compounding the
difficulty, in a vicious cycle, is the political context within which these
"technologies" fall to be assessed: ascendancy these past few decades of
totalitarian ideologies which you can to identify by their characteristic
Goebelesque slogans: 'money is god', 'women need men like fish need
bicycles', 'girls can do anything', 'homosexuality & lesbianism are at
least as happy & healthy as normal sex', 'there is nothing wrong in Windows
98', 'there is no God', 'whites should grovel to alleged coloureds to
compensate transgenerationally for past wrongs', etc. - again, please do
get some practice at extending these lists of mottos by which you can
identify totalitarian ideologies. They are not subtly but blatantly false.
Their wickedness is supraliminal, so you had better develop the skill of
identifying them. Confirm by observing refusal of their proponents to
discuss. Expect wimps e.g Marcus Williamson to accuse you of prejudice
against women. Expect wild personal insults instead of reasoning. That
type of reaction is a further identifying characteristic of the
totalitarian ideologies in question.

The gene-fad commercial bubble has been purging biologists from NZ
universities to make room for gene-jockeys who are expected to bring in
venture capital. This is the first objection to the gene-jockey fad: it
has drastically degraded science, far more dishonestly than the nuclear
fanatics ever did. That this crap has now slopped over into evolution
theory, in the form of Dawkins and of kompuwankers like J Celera Venter,
David Penny and too many others, is sad for science and for philosophy.
Their searches in material & efficient causes will never compensate for
their refusal to acknowledge formal & final causes.

The second objection to this DNA fad is of course the dangers
created by gene-jiggering. This racket routinely uses "the" double helix
as if it were some mind-numbing talisman which - mainly by aesthetic
virtue - is brandished to justify the most dangerous technology of all
time. That double helix, and similar 2° structures, have very little
indeed to do with 1°-structure tampering which is what gene-jiggering
consists of.

It is all just too much bullshit. Science must be ransomed from
this appalling degradation. Can that be done short of recovery from the
recent dominant political Axis (wimminsLib, racism, and militant hxism)?
it looks to me as if those who try to live by one big lie are prone to
taking up several others, in an inchoate fashion.

Any hope of Science FOR the People in such an ideological context
is liable to doom.

R

Levels of Structure

It is important to distinguish the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of structure in DNA (or any polymer molecule).

The 1° structure is the sequence, defined by covalent bonds, of monomer residues - in a DNA strand, the sequence of deoxyribonucleotides each (usually) containing one of the bases abbreviated G, C, T & A.

The 2° structure is the short-range folding (conformation) of that covalent strand, defining - essentially by rotations about single bonds - the spatial relationships of residues with their near neighbours in the primary structure. It is of course essentially 3D; any conflation of '2°' with '2D' is erroneous.

Tertiary structure relates in space, by longer-range folding, residues which are distant in the sequence.

Both 2° and 3° structure are generally held together by bonds which are weaker than the covalent backbone - hydrogen bonds, van der Waals bonds e.g. in 'quasi-graphite' stacking of aromatic rings, etc.

Similar weak bonds also constitute, where it occurs, quaternary structure - a term used much more of proteins than of nucleic acids - the non-covalent association of polymer molecules (each generally having its own 1°, 2° & 3° structure) into loose dimers, trimers, etc.

Although weak bonds are instrumental in defining 2°, 3° & 4° structure, it should be kept in mind that all nucleic acids contain numerous permanent electric charges, both positive & negative, and the forces (termed 'coulombic') of attraction & repulsion between them are the longest-range forces in the molecular realm.

The W-C model belongs importantly in the category of 2° structure (and incidentally 4°).

I can't assess the merits of this, but thought you might find it
interesting.

cheers

R

>From: "cecarl"
>To: v.moses@qmw.ac.uk
>Subject: Why Judaized Christians' Push Bush
>Reply-To: info@straitgateministry.org
>Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004
>
>PHARISEE WATCH: Subscription is free at:
>http://www.straitgateministry.org
>
>WHY JUDAIZED CHRISTIANS ARE RE-ELECTING GEORGE W. BUSH
>By Charles E. Carlson
>
>Serial war's never-ending blood purges are now the dominant factor
>in our American culture. Each successive war is paid for by the
>dilution of our money, which is no more or less than a hidden tax on
>the consumer. The twin effects are unprecedented price inflation
>and a dismal decline in morality that has always accompanies
>militarism everywhere. The sad Soviet Union is the most recent
>example of this. All history warns us that political wars and
>dilution are the twin scissor blades of tyranny, and that the middle
>class and the fixed income consumer are always caught between its
>razor sharp blades.
>
>We Americans are now embroiled in the so-called "war on terrorism"
>which, ignoring the causes and excuses of it for the moment, is in
>practice a war on Islam. This war is focused on independent acting
>Muslim countries, such as Chechnya and Bosnia, named here only
>because they are just as Caucasian as any of us. The war on Islam
>is the successor to the philosophical "Cold War" against "communism"
>that sapped our resources and dominated our lives the last half of
>the 20th Century. This author first wrote about this in a published
>article in March 1994, called, Attacking Islam, Revisited. (See
>endnotes.)
>
>The predictable effect of dollar dilution is to divide the great
>American middle class into what are currently a millionaire class
>and those below. At the present rate of dilution sub-millionaires
>will soon be equivalent to the peasants of pre-industrial Europe.
>Neither class has much to say about our government. The
>sub-millionaire class is so busy making ends meet we do not think
>much or have time to contemplate issues. The millionaire class
>shortsightedly sees few problems that money will not solve.
>
>The political leadership of both parties is now in the hands of the
>multi-billionaire's class (the "haves" as George W. Bush called
>them). The "haves" opponents will not be elected, the controlled
>media sees to that.
>
>Americans are independent, they even want to keep their guns, and
>they fear being taken over from abroad, but for the most part they
>fail to recognize that a world hegemony already exists that is
>controlled by those who control the USA. We were taught throughout
>the Cold War to fear "world government," a supposed scheme to take
>over our own freedom and export control over our country from the
>outside.
>
>But the Cold War evaporated; it turned out to be only a hologram
>war image projected on the eastern sky. Its power sources came from
>New York and London, not from the USSR, as we were told for 40 years
>through two major wars that cost 100,000 American lives.
>
>Instead of seeing America become greater, we have seen our jobs
>exported and our cost of living rise 1000 percent in the lifetime of
>any grandfather. The hegemony exists all right, but it is within.
>Whoever controls America controls the world. It is our military
>might that the rest of the world fears. But, at the present rate of
>wars and dilution, soon only billionaires will be in control and
>many former millionaires will be paupers. This is a purely
>financial approach without even considering the moral cesspool we
>now are asked to swim in. Witness Abu Gareb prison for just one
>example. What future does this leave for our future generations?
>
>How do we break free? Sorry, without a better level of citizen
>understanding we cannot. We are doomed to a steady decline. The
>day will surely come when Cadillac SUVs, Lincolns, Mercedes, and
>macho Hummer gas-guzzlers are abandoned in supermarket lots. You
>will know the abandoned cars by the red tags tied to them: too many
>to tow away. But cheer up; there will be plenty of space for you in
>the mall because few people will be shopping.
>
>The obvious question is: how can the billionaire class assert so
>much control over the middle class in a supposed democratic
>republic? How can we be so dumb? English students in Gaza asked me
>this question. They wanted to know why, if Americans are peaceful
>people, we do not assert our constitutional rights? Its not just
>the Gazan students...the whole world wonders what happened to
>democracy in America?
>
>How do the haves keep the have-nots between the blades of the
>scissors? If every other country in the world can see that US
>foreign policy is both evil and self-destructive, as the polls show,
>why are the majority of Americans about to vote for more of the same?
>
>This is not a commercial for John Kerry, who has not differenced
>himself enough from Mr. Bush to give anyone a choice. His history
>is not without compromises according to his own account, and he has
>stopped short of opposing serial wars.
>
>But George W. Bush has as much as promised more wars on more Muslim
>Counties as soon as he is reelected. This may be the only election
>anyone can remember where a candidate has done so. Past politicians
>(I can name two or three) have always sworn they will keep us out of
>war, and they have done so at the very moment their primary
>supporters are planning to get us into a new one. The basic
>question is: who really wants war in our country?
>
>CHRISTIANS FOR WAR
>The answer is not complicated, but it is diabolical. The "haves"
>invented a religious war making philosophy to control the have-nots.
>Ariel Sharon calls this philosophy "Christian Zionism." Pharisee
>Watch calls it "Judaized Christianity" and this author knows, he was
>one! The modern disease by this name metastasized in about 1895
>under Theodore Herzl and others who are well known. But the Apostle
>Paul also contended with the same problem in the early church in the
>first century after Christ. Webster's Dictionary defines "Judaized"
>as "one who conforms to the religion of the Jews," referencing the
>book of Galatians. (Noah Webster, 1828 edition) (Note 3.)
>
>Any election revolt against the Hegemony presently requires the
>support of the Judaized Christian churches. It is a mysterious
>voting mass (hardly a block) that crosses all denominations and
>combines for arguably up to 40 million votes. Judaized Christians
>often have little in common and are unified by only one issue,
>Israel. They are a mass 20 times more significant than either the
>Muslim or the Jewish vote.
>
>It is reasonable to conclude that the Judaized Christians have been
>the swing vote in each of the last seven presidential elections,
>from Baptist, Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. They do not vote
>solid Republican, as some have mistakenly claimed. The Judaized
>Christians elected Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton twice.
>
>Judaized Christians (JC) are not unified around one party as we are
>often led to believe, but they are unified around the interest of a
>foreign country, Israel. As long as any politician can attach
>himself to Israel's interest he can count on most of this enormous
>mass of votes. The celebrity "Christian" media leaders let the
>Judaized Christians know who loves Israel the most. It worked for
>Carter once, Reagan twice, and for Bush, Sr., who rode in on
>Reagan's coattails, and who later lost to Clinton because the
>blatant pro-abortion libertine Bill Clinton carried a Bible under
>his arm and managed to convince the Judaized Christianity mass he
>was more passionately pro-Israel than Bush, Sr.
>
>President George W. Bush, his campaigners, and the national media,
>all unashamedly bank on enticing the "evangelical" vote just as they
>did four years ago. If they are successful Bush will win in spite
>of the war weakened economy, a thousand dead without a cause to die
>for, his pandering of the Warmakers (now called the Neo-Cons), and
>his spoken commitment to destroy the Islamic countries one by one.
>The reason this works is that the Judaized Christians have been
>persuaded that the wars in the Middle East are necessary because
>each is in the best interest of Israel.
>
>Judaized Christians have also been carefully tutored to think it is
>OK with Jesus to hate Muslims. "Hatred" is not too strong a word,
>but is totally alien to what Jesus teaches. This makes Judaized
>Christianity an oxymoron that makes no more sense to a logical mind
>than would a "friendly assault" or a "loving war." It is unlikely
>that John Kerry can overcome a 25 percent voting block. The
>Judaized Christians will sweep Bush back in office because he wears
>the twin pledges; he claims to be "born again," and he loves Israel
>(they think) more than life itself.
>
>WHAT CAN BE DONE
>Judaized Christians always vote for more war and more inflation
>because they are led to believe each new war is good for Israel.
>They feel they must do this for the sake of their own personal
>salvation and to win "God's favor" over America. Many are
>indoctrinated (by celebrity leaders) that eternal life with Jesus
>requires that they demonstrate their love for Israel. They are the
>only mass that actually vote with the interest of a foreign power in
>mind.
>
>Judaized Christians will likely sweep G. W. Bush back in office
>unless Mr. Kerry manages to convince some significant percentage of
>them that he is more pro-Israel than Bush. Mr. Kerry's strongest
>assets are his good choice of a second wife, and the assumption that
>he apparently learned to hate war though he did not always vote his
>conscience. Unfortunately, he is currently playing down one of his
>few virtues in hopes of a chance to share the Judaized Christian war
>vote!
>
>Pharisee Watch is an observer, not a political analyst, so the
>following statement should be viewed accordingly. Any chance John
>Kerry has of being elected require that he immediately denounce the
>war in every respect, including admitted he, Kerry, was wrong in
>supporting the attack on Afghanistan in the first place. He would
>have to promise to bring the military home and end Iraq on the day
>he is elected. Even then he will probably lose, but he might...just
>might find enough disgruntled and dissected evangelicals (some of
>whom are registered Democrats) to swing the balance. But only if he
>is able to convince them that war is also not good for Israel
>either! This happens to be true, as many Israelis admit.
>
>Presently there is no candidate to tell the public that wars are
>wrong. The logic of the Judaized Christians is false from a
>biblical point of view, and it is enormously self-destructive.
>Strangely enough, the vast majority of JC's themselves live between
>the blades of the scissors. They are vulnerable to dilution, and it
>is their sons and daughters who are being killed in Iraq. They are
>subtly taught from youth that they must support the state of Israel
>regardless of the personal cost. Kerry should appeal to those who
>can understand this letter, and forget the rest. -(end of
>uncompensated political advise to the Kerry campaign)
>
>Approaching Judaized Christians on a logical, secular or factual
>basis is next to impossible because they believe they are acting out
>their faith, and war to them is a worthwhile sacrifice if they think
>it is "Gods war." And if it is Israel's war, it has to be God's war
>because they believe Israelis are "chosen of God." Logical
>arguments and documents about the death count on both sides,
>histories of the various parties, errors and lies by our government
>rarely work, for a committed Judaized Christian will simply call it
>"God's will," and will probably quote an Old Testament Bible
>prophesy to prove God planned the war himself. All of this is based
>on falsification of the Bible itself.
>
>To end serial wars and dilution, we must find a way to change the
>thinking of the Judaized Christians. The task seems impossible, but
>we know "with God all things are possible." This letter and others
>like it need to be read by every one of them.
>
>IS IT POSSIBLE?
>This is why Project Strait Gate was formed out of We Hold These
>Truths. Its purpose is to expose the abhorrent religious heresies
>that fuel Judaized Christianity. We want to deliver our message
>into the willing hands of those influential few in every church who
>already know we are right. We know they are present in every church
>because this writer use to be one of them, as did several of our
>advisors. This remnant that has not been fooled needs a method and
>a program to convince their peers of what they have learned. Strait
>Gate Ministries hopes to generate the resources to reach this
>powerful few, in which there is hope with God's help.
>
>The vulnerability of the Judaized Christians is that each one is
>working against its own interest. They are undermining the very
>values of peace, justice, and morality that they claims to love.
>They are applying the muscle to close the scissor blades that are
>systematically snipping off their own parts. Most importantly,
>their biblical positions are unsound and unsupportable in
>traditional New Testament scripture, and are in some cases abhorrent
>to Jesus' own words.
>
>Let me make the point with an illustration. Last year, a man named
>Charles and this author made a two-day trip from Washington, DC to
>Lynchburg, VA. There the two of us organized a vigil at Liberty
>University for its giant pastors' and leaders' conference. It
>featured Falwell himself and nationally known celebrity "Christian"
>leaders, and it filled the hotels in cities around.
>
>Charles told me on the long drive from Washington that he had placed
>three sons in Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and three had
>graduated. Later he discovered the heresy of Judaized Christianity
>taught at the college and in his own church, and he was determined
>to take a stand on the sidewalks even if there were only the two of
>us there, he said.
>
>Charles then shared the story of his own Judaized Christian church.
>He explained that he had slowly awakened to the serious problems of
>false teaching from the pulpit, and of many associated problems he
>did not detail. Charles spoke out quietly at deacons' and business
>meetings, being careful never to undercut authority. He was
>disappointed that few if any rose to support him, and finally he
>left the church to find another. But he did not go without first
>preparing a letter carefully detailing the problems of the church
>and pastor, as he saw them.
>
>A short time later Charles said he was amazed to find his letter had
>done what his quiet appeals had not. A large number of the
>congregation walked out taking their support with them, and throwing
>the church into a financial and leadership quandary. The remaining
>deacons came alive, fired the pastor, and asked Charles to return.
>
>Charles' story was an inspiration to me of the power of one. That
>day the two of us, with two more local volunteers, set up a vigil
>outside the gates of Falwell University. The police did us a favor
>by ignoring us when we tied our oversized yellow and black
>billboards to utility poles, Burma shave style, on the only road
>into the campus. Our signs read, BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS;
>CHOOSE LIFE NOT WAR; APOSTLE, NOT APOSTASY; IRAQ, WHAT WOULD JESUS
>DO; and of course our own STRAIT GATE PROJECT logo sign.
>
>Charles and I talked to students and visiting pastors non-stop for
>four hours. As many as 7,000 streamed past the two of us, and there
>is not doubt many heard us. Visiting pastors got the message that
>someone knows Liberty University supports war in Iraq and Palestine,
>and rejects it as apostasy. (See endnotes.)
>
>Strait Gate Ministries is not interested in destroying
>evangelicalism; most of us are evangelicals, as is Charles. By
>evangelical we simply mean we want others to believe what we do
>about Christ. Our purpose is to return our faith to the
>fundamentals that the Apostle Paul taught and that Jesus dictated.
>Our approach is a scriptural one. We have carefully studied the
>scriptural excuses used to justify the false teaching that Israel is
>part of Christianity. We reject this as did the early hero's of
>Christianity did. It is not in the Christian Bible!
>
>Most Judaized Christians accept without question the unsupportable
>claim that the State of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical
>prophesy. As such today's Israel becomes tethered to their
>expectation for personal salvation, insomuch as most are taught that
>anti-Semitism is a "sin," a sort of 11th. Commandment. It is
>written into the footnotes of their favorite version of their study
>bibles. Not to love Israel enough is to invite judgment, even as a
>nation. These ideas could not exist before 1948 because there was
>no State of Israel. They are inculcated into almost every study
>bible, beginning with C. I. Scofield in 1962 Edition.
>
>If Judaized Christianity can recover from its heresy it will regain
>its patriotic, pro-American, moral voting patterns that it was known
>for before Israel became a state in 1948. We have no reason to
>believe that evangelicals would not then vote and act at least as
>intelligently and patriotically as the population as a whole. They,
>like secular Americans, would finally put America's interests first
>and demand that our politicians stop supporting Israel's war agenda.
>
>IT WILL NOT HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU!
>Project Strait Gate's believes its approach cannot fail because it
>is based on New Testament scripture. Followers of Christ,
>demonstrating patience and love, as Jesus did, and with the help of
>Muslims seeking their own best interest, can and will unwind the
>error of Judaized Christianity that is destroying our country and
>the peace of the world.
>
>Distribution of this paper is a step in the right direction. Over
>much resistance we have now reached 200,000 Christian leaders. And
>our aim is to reach one million or more before the November
>Presidential election, and to continue on thereafter regardless of
>the results. We can only do this with greatly increased support
>from our readers.
>
>Project Strait Gate also believes in activism to attract attention
>to our cause. We have organized activist Vigils challenging and
>picketing over 40 large churches and Judaized Christian conferences,
>including two in Lynchburg, Virginia. Its latest Vigil and picket
>was at a Billy Graham Crusade organizational meeting in Fresno,
>California.
>
>Related research papers: (use the title as a search topic)at:
>http://www.straitgateministry.org
>
>Gold: A Rediscovered Investment the Story of Dilution.
>
>Ending our Age of Serial Wars
>
>Pastor Jerry Falwell A Case History In Enabling War
>
>The Cause of the Conflict. Fixing Blame
>
>Attacking Islam, Revisited
>
>IT WILL NOT HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU!
>Dozens have helped us, and we need hundreds of sustaining members to
>reach the market we have in mind, One million Christian leaders in
>the next 30 days!
>
>IT WILL NOT HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU!
>Strait Gate Ministries has demonstrated our commitment and we now
>ask you to do the same. Please write a check or use your credit
>card. Calls are welcome in daylight hours.
>
>(Click the following link or paste in your browser window)
>http://www.straitgateministry.org
>
>Calls accepted during business hours, Pacific time.
>Please make checks payable to Strait Gate Ministries;
>
>Strait Gate Ministries
>PO Box 14491
>Scottsdale AZ 85267
>480 699 1902
>
>You are invited to subscribe your friends to our mailing list. It
>is perfectly legal to do so; we will take them off if they so
>request. info@straitgateministry.org

Comments inserted by RM on some parts

> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html
>The Crusade Against Evolution
>In the beginning there was Darwin. And then there was intelligent
>design. How the next generation of "creation science" is invading
>America's classrooms.
>By Evan Ratliff
>
>biologist Ken Miller from Brown University and physicist Lawrence Krauss
>from Case Western Reserve University two hours north in Cleveland,
>defended evolution.

This is an unfortunate brevity. All that IDT purports to challenge
is a postulated mechanism of evolution - neoDarwinism (as expounded by
e.g R Dawkins or Steve Jones).

The question of fact - whether evolution has occurred, rather
than all spp being created at once - is evaded by IDT, whereas its ally
"creationism" / "creation science" (a misnomer if ever there was one)
denies the fact of evolution.

I urge that any discussion of evolution should begin with a clear
statement of the fact of evolution.

Here for example is one (from my essay at
http://www.spc.org.nz/Science.asp):

>>The term 'evolution' means the appearance of new life-forms - new
>>species and bigger categories genus, family, order, class, phylum,
>>kingdom - over time. ...
>>Science has inferred from a large body of observations that life
>>appeared on our planet as blue-green algae 3 x 10^9 year BC, complex
>>animals 1 x 10^9y, mammals 2 x 10^8y, and man somewhere in the region
>>10^6 -10^5 y BC. Evolution has certainly occurred, in the sense that new
>>life-forms have appeared (mostly in bursts) over billions of years.
>>However, evidence for descent from one to another is much sparser than is
>>often assumed, and is difficult to come by. Many links are missing from
>>the fossil record found to date.

>Jonathan Wells, a biologist, Discovery fellow, and author of Icons of
>Evolution, a 2000 book castigating textbook treatments of evolution.

This operative is shown to be dishonest by the attached article
from a NZ science teachers' magazine.

> Meyer and Wells took the typical intelligent design line: Biological life
>contains elements so complex - the mammalian blood-clotting mechanism, the
>bacterial flagellum - that they cannot be explained by natural selection.
>And so, the theory goes, we must be products of an intelligent designer.
>Creationists call that creator God, but proponents of intelligent design
>studiously avoid the G-word - and never point to the Bible for answers.
>Instead, ID believers speak the language of science to argue that
>Darwinian evolution is crumbling.

- and that is a very very different contention from the
"creationist" denial of the fact of evolution. IDT is far more cunning.
But note that their million-dollar video 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life -
the case for ID' fails to mention that evolution has occurred.

>But scientists aren't buying it. What Meyer calls "biology for the
>information age," they call creationism in a lab coat. ID's core
>scientific principles - laid out in the mid-1990s by a biochemist and a
>mathematician - have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that
>Darwin's theories can account for complexity

This is false. Numerous examples of biological complexity, e.g
IDT's favourite the bacterial flagellum, have not been explained in terms
of neoDarwinian gradualism. (BTW I can't make out why neoDarwinists shun
macromutations and insist on gradualism.)

> Darwin - and 100-plus years of evolutionary science after him - seemed
>to knock Paley into the dustbin of history.

This appearance results not from logic but from mere refusal to
discuss. IDT is correct insofar as Jones etc have failed to explain how
blind rogueing of the less fit can lead to novel body plans as in the
Cambrian explosion. NeoDarwinism is largely hand-waving.

But I remind you - this is all on the level of theory of
*mechanism* - how did evolution occur. IDT doggedly refuses to deal with
the sheer fact of evolution. In this way it aligns with "creation science"
- and this alignment, thru Johnson & Wells, is no coincidence.

> the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's law. Because creation science
>relies on biblical texts, the court reasoned, it "lacked a clear secular
>purpose" and violated the First Amendment clause prohibiting the
>establishment of religion. Since then, evolution has been the law of the
>land in US schools - if not always the local choice.

This is a blatant misinterpretation of the first amdt by people who
don't understand - or pretend they don't - the term 'establishment of
religion'.

>Johnson presents not just antievolution arguments but a broader
>opposition to the "philosophy of scientific materialism" - the assumption
>(known to scientists as "methodological materialism") that all events have
>material, rather than supernatural, explanations.
> "Our culture has been deeply influenced by materialist thought," says
>Meyer. "We think it's deeply destructive, and we think it's false. And we
>mean to overturn it."

This at last is a statement of the real issue.

> With a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley, Wells has the
>kind of cred that intelligent design proponents love to cite. But, as ID
>opponents enjoy pointing out, he's also a follower of Sun Myung Moon and
>once declared that Moon's prayers "convinced me that I should devote my
>life to destroying Darwinism."

Please do study Prof Nield's analysis of Wells (attached).

> says Ohio State University biology professor Steve Rissing, the
>education debate coincides with Ohio's efforts to lure biotech companies.
>"How can we do that when our high school biology is failing us?" he says.
>"Our cornfields are gleaming with GMO corn. There's a fundamental
>disconnect there."

I strongly agree with Rissing that IDT is a mischievous distraction
from real, urgent issues such as GM.

======

Neo-Darwinian theory resulted from merging 4 types of theory:
mutation, selecting-out of the less fit, genetics, and population dynamics.
It is touted by aggressive atheists e.g R Dawkins, S Weinberg, L Wolpert,
who claim it is a thorough explanation of how species evolved.

NeoDarwinism is at last going thru some sceptical examination -
and is faring badly as in my opinion it deserves to because it can't
explain much.

Too few realise that natural selection is envisaged only as
decreasing the reproduction, and therefore after „1 generation the
abundance, of mutants that are somehow less fit for their environment at
the successive times when they live. No creativity is hinted at in this
'rogueing' role. Natural selection is actually claimed only to *narrow*
the variance.

All the creativity in evolution is thus, in this theory, assigned
to mutation. This process is normally stated to be random - not at all
to any plan but merely changing nucleic acids - DNA or RNA - randomly
(owing to damage by radiation or chemical mutagens, etc).

If you can believe that such randomness can lead to coordinated
ecosystems, or even a single cell, I suggest you read N Broom 'How Blind is
The Watchmaker' (IVP 2001).

The reason I summarise this controversy is that many have assumed
neoDarwinism is well established and a sufficient basis for predicting how,
say, bees or their pathogens will evolve in this or that changed
environment. More & more scientists are coming to the view that this is
another example of the emperor's new clothes.

In addition to pointing out how neoDarwinism is inadequate, we must
point out the next step forward in this line of theorising - morphogenic
fields as expounded by R Sheldrake.

R

This article was published in the NewZealand Science Teacher, no. 97, 2001, pp. 42-44
A response to "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth"by Jonathan Wells

Donald A. Nield
Department of Engineering Science,University of Auckland, P.B 92019, Auckland

All teachers of biology at the secondary level should read the book "Iconsof Evolution: Science or Myth?: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolutionis Wrong", by Jonathan Wells, Regnery Publishing Inc., Washington DC, 2000,if only to be able to give an informed answer to the "Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution" posted at www.iconsofevolution.com.

The reader should be aware that Jonathan Wells has publicly stated (see the document at www.tparents.org) that he has dedicated his life to destroying Darwinism. This is not mentioned in his book, the promotional description of which reads:

'In this shocking book,Berkeley-educated doctor of biology Jonathan Wells lets you in on scientific discoveries you won't learn about from college and high school textbooks – and reveals a dirty little secret known only to some of his fellow biologists.

The best known "icons of evolution" – from pictures of apes evolving into humans, to comparisons of fish and human embryos to moths on treetrunks – are false or misleading. For decades, biology students have been taught things about evolution that are simply untrue.

These icons of evolution appear in the most recent textbooks, although the scientific literature is full of evidence that they are false. Apparently, dogmatic promoters of Darwinian evolution fear that without these icons public faith in their claims will disappear, so they knowingly misinform our children and suppress scientific evidence.'

With one exception, the ten questions mentioned at the beginning of this article correspond to ten chapters of the book, and I discuss these indetail below. In his final chapter, Wells claims that dogmatic promotersof Darwinian evolution are not merely distorting the truth but they use their position of dominancein the biological sciences in the English-speaking world to censor dissenting viewpoints. He suggests that scientists who deliberately distort the evidence should bedisqualified from receiving public funds.

The book has two appendices. The first reports on an evaluation of tenrecent biology textbooks published in the U.S.A. They are all given afailing grade by Wells. The second appendix lists ten warning labels which Wells suggests that owners of textbooks can insert in their books.

There is little doubt that a number of textbook writers have been sloppy,and this is a matter of concern, but I do not accept that any of the authors have been deliberately fraudulent. Further, though the individual scientific facts may have been accurately presented by Wells, he has been selective in what he has reported and he has put his own particular spin on those facts.

I now list the ten questions, interleaved with my tentative brief answers(the reader is invited to improve them), which are composed in the light ofboth what Wells has written and what is actually written in the introductory biology text (one of those evaluated by Wells) in current use at the University of Auckland, namely NeilA. Campbell, Jane B. Reece and Lawrence G. Mitchell, Biology:Concepts and Connections Menlo Park: Cummings, 5th edn1999). I shall abbreviate this reference by CRM.

The questions and my answers are:

Q1. Why do textbooks claim that the Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on the early Earth –- when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?
A1. CRM (p.494) says: "The atmosphere in the Miller-Urey model was made up of the gases that researchers in the 1950s believed prevailed in the ancient world. This atmosphere was probably more strongly reducing than the actual atmosphere of the early Earth. Traces of O2 may even have been present. Many laboratories have repeated the Miller-Urey experiment using a variety of recipes for the atmosphere, including a mixture having a very low concentration of O2. A biotic synthesis of organic compounds occurred in these modified models,though yields were generally less than in the original experiment. Laboratory analogs of primeval Earth have produced all 20 amino acids commonly found in organisms. The Miller-Urey experiments still stimulate debate and research." The authors do not claim that the problem of the origin of life on Earth, or even of its building blocks, has been solved. Nevertheless, it is clear that substantial progress has been made.

Q2. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion", in whichall major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formedinstead of branching from a common ancestor –- thus contradictingthe evolutionary tree of life?
A2. CRM (pp. 595-596) does discuss the Cambrian "explosion",which may have been spread over as much as 40 million years. Theso-called explosion can be interpreted quite well using the idea of punctuated equilibrium, something that Wells avoids mentioning. On the appropriate time scale, the tree of life concept (with gradual changes as a result of natural selection) is not refuted.

Q3. Why do textbooks define homology as similar to common ancestry,then claim that it is evidence for their common ancestry –- a circular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?
A3. CRM (p.424) says "Similarity in characteristics resulting from common ancestry is known as homology Comparative anatomy is consistent with other evidence in testifying that evolution is a remodeling process in which ancestral structures that functioned in one capacity become modified as they take on new functions." Wells does not mention that in individual cases it is usually clear whether similarities in structure are examples of homology or of analogy, and this means that the apparent circularity in the argument can be broken.

Q4. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry -- even though biologists have known forover a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?
A4. CRM has a single figure illustrating comparative embryology. This is a photograph of a 4-week-old human embryo which clearly shows gill pouches and a postanal tail, two of the trademarks of all vertebrate embryos. The caption says that comparative embryology helps biologists identify anatomical homology that is less apparent in adults because the structures are extensively modified in different ways during later development of the organisms. The text (p. 424) reads: "Inspired by the Darwinian principle of descent with modification, many embryologists in the late nineteenth century proposed the extreme view that 'ontogeny' recapitulates 'phylogeny'. This notion holds that the development of an individual organism, ontogeny, is a replay of the evolutionary history of the evolutionary history of the species, phylogeny. The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement." Here the authors clearly point out that in the past some scientists have been led astray by their theoretical assumptions.

Q5. Why do textbooks portray this fossil [Archaeopteryx] as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds –- even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?
A5. CRM (p.649) says: "Archaeopteryx is not considered the ancestor of modern birds, and paleontologists place it on a side branch of the avian lineage. Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx probably was derived from ancestral forms that also gave rise to modern birds." Wells fails to make the distinction between 'transitional' and 'ancestral', and he wrongly assumes that more primitive organisms cannot survive after the evolution of more evolved descendants.

Q6. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged ontree trunks as evidence for natural selection –- when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
A6. The topic of peppered moths is not mentioned by CRM. Wells refers to Jerry Coyne, but in a letter to a newspaper editor Coyne says that Wells has misrepresented him. Michael Majerus, the authority on the subject, notes that Coyne dealt with only a small part of the scientific evidence when he reviewed Majerus's book in Nature . Evolution by natural selection remains the best explanation of melanism in moths.

Q7. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection –- even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended,and no net evolution occurred?
A7. CRM uses the experimental results of Peter & Rosemary Grant justas an illustration of how inheritable characteristics of finches track changes in climate. Clearly, cyclical changes in climate produce cyclical changes in characteristics, as Wells points out. However, what Wells does not mention is that long-term changes in climate can lead to long-term changes in characteristics, and this, coupled with isolation of breeding stocks, could lead to species differentiation. In connection with similar illustrations, CRM (p. 422) mentions that researchers havepublished more than 100 other accounts of natural selection in the wild.

Q8. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution –- even though the extra wings have no muscles and those disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?
A8. The topic of four-winged fruit flies is not mentioned by CRM. This item illustrates a process that contributes to evolution, and is not evidence for evolution per se.

Q9. Why are artists' drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident –- when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?
A9. At the beginning of its discussion of human evolution, CRM says:"Another misconception envisions human evolution as a ladder with a series of steps leading directly from the ancestral anthropoid to Homo sapiens. This is often illustrated as a parade of fossil hominids (members of thehuman family) becoming progressively more modern as they march across thepage. If human evolution is a parade, then it is a disorderly one, with many splinter groups having traveled down dead endsÉ " Wells has not presented an accurate account of what is now known about human evolution.

Q10. Why are we told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact –- even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?
A10. The question itself is based on a misrepresentation. The claims of Darwin's theory of evolution are not based on a misrepresentation of the facts. The reader is invited to read the whole of the relevant chapters in CRM soas to see something of the solid pillars behind the icons.

Various reviews and discussions of the book are posted at www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/icons_evolution.html.

The writer is grateful to Dr. Robert Mann for his comments on a draft of this article.

I cannot disprove the postulate that this is mere coincidence, but
I don't interpret as anything so trivial.

Immediately after sending you my commentary on the PC vicar's
evasion on the basis of PinC terms, I rehearsed the lesson 2 Tim 2: 8-15I'm
to read this morning, which includes:

14 ... charge [people] solemnly before God to stop
disputing about mere words; it does no good, and is the ruin of those who
listen.

15 Try hard to show yourself worthy of God's approval, as
a labourer who need not be ashamed; be straightforward in your proclamation
of the truth.

I comment on this latest (and, it implies, last) msg from a vicar who,
along with other Waiapu padres, rec'd my accostings discussing whether
known hx should be ordained.

If this is a typical example of at least one main kind of party in
the "debate", its characteristics should be studied.

>Please to not send me any more Emails

This one is different from the extreme example who cut off
communication at first msg, having only lodged her wounded reaction to my
ofensive terms 'PC' and 'wimp'. This one did discuss at first, but has now
gone on strike acting the delicate flower bruised by words.

>I believe I treated your earlier letters with appropriate respect, as they
>contain much valid material. You do not seem to be able to accord those who
>dissent with you with an equal respect.

This may be a fairly typical example of the trendies' tactics.
They infer from just a few words a whole attitude in the person they
disagree with, and assert that this huge inference is sufficient reason to
avoid discussion. It is the behaviour of a person vigorously seeking
excuses to evade discussion. It also entails maximal judgmental attitudes
(which is what the PC claim to be against). We are already immersed in
doubletalk & doublethink.

>You describe John Morton and William Temple as influences on your thinking.
>Neither of those men would have described other Christians as "wimps" ,
>"feminazis", "atheists", or other equally offensive epithets

This is another significant tactic - ascribe to third parties,
who are unable to confirm or deny (some of them dead), support for the
trendy position.

Temple d. 1944 when conventions were somewhat different, and cannot
be asked what he would say today. Mort certainly was already calling
Geering an atheist 20 y ago - but this trendy 'knows' differently.

Anyhow it is dubious to put all 3 of the quoted epithets in one
category. I'd put them in 3 categories, come to think of it.

'Atheist', when applied to one who has boldy declared that
label of himself e.g Brian Edwards, can not be legitimately complained of
as a term.

'Wimp' entials much more value-judgement, a process the
trendies purport to shun (but in their own slapping of labels like
'homophobic', 'ofensive', 'opressive' etc on such as myself, they reveal
their duplicity).

'Feminazi' has been relatively 'underground' if widespread,
so the PC innocents can pretend it is in itself so shocking that they can
evade its content; but it is a useful term for some extreme political
wimminsLibbers.

> that seem to
>flow gratuitously from your pen.

This is important. He is insinuating that the terms he dislikes
are *inherently* unwarranted ('gratuitous'); he claims these terms could
never be the result of assessing someone's characteristics and summarising
them. In other words, he is trying to abolish the categories that the
terms connote.

You can safely assume that this evasive posture is reinforced among
the ranks of the trendies as they confer amongst themselves -- mentioning
from time to time one of the "opressive" terms and rolling their eyes in
mute "understanding".

> Brian Dawson, Howard Pilgrim, Philip
>Culbertson, and THE REV'D Adrienne Bruce are my friends.

I infer this is evidence of the extent to which the trendies have
gained strength among the padres of Waiapu, and the extent to which
Culbertson influences them.

> If you consider
>that they (and I) write waffle

I never hinted at any such judgement of *his* writing; but now he
is trying to slink away in solidarity with those I've "insulted", even tho'
I've shown no sign of relegating him to their ranks.

>, I am sorry, but it is impossible to conduct
>a respectful or Christian debate in such curcumstances.

Who would adjudge this a reasonable reaction? I'd deem it evasive,
even cowardly.

>Thank you for the Christianity Today article 'the Ecstatic Heresy', which
>avoided such insulting
>language.

He implies he is willing to face up to the content of that article,
having deemed its language PC. I doubt it.

I've slipped in these annotations on this conveniently brief
glimpse of PC trendiness because I think the specimen is typical.

What does it tell us about how to go at the "debate" on whether to
ordain hx?

To help us examine that question, consider the similar reaction of
another Waiapu vicar, who upon first hearing from me accused me of

>> referring to all who fail to agree with you as 'wimps'

I responded to him:

>This is a wild mischaracterisation of anything I have done.

My reason was of course that what he'd said is just plain
wrong. Only a fraction of those I disagree with do I refer to as wimps.

One proposal can be considered: never use any term that the
deviants & their front-wimps say annoys them.

This approach has been adopted by some already. I would like to
hear from them how they have got on.

I can see some difficulties. The PC are likely to invent
perpetually excuses for acting 'ofended'. In much the same way as drill
sergeants deal with the ban on swearing by conferring that function on
hitherto lo-emotion words (e.g 'idle'), the PC are likely to continue
endlessly ruling new words or phrases PinC and using them as triggers for
refusal to discuss. How workable is our position if we accede fully to
that game?

Let us keep firmly in mind that major jurisdictions e.g Canada have
enacted laws to create the new crime of 'hate speech', a peculiar tilting
of the playing field by misuse of the criminal law. As a Christian lawyer
friend of mine recently remarked,

>It is revealing that other forms of deviancy and perversion, social or
>sexual, e.g "anti-social behaviour" (variously defined); alcoholism;
>gambling addictions; criminal behaviour; and other types of sexual
>deviancy, including paedophilia, are not really protected by the same
>"hate speech" laws (although there have been attempts in America - where
>else - to justify pornography on the grounds of free speech).
>Why are the laws applied in this way only with respect to homosexuality?

I suggest we have to think thru with some care the scenario in
which we allow PC to ban expressions that we deem useful. I strongly
suspect it will be unwise if we concede to them the entire power to define
what terms may not be used. The objective term 'homosexual' is feared by
the militant hx and their front-wimps because it has accreted unfavourable
overtones (ill health, unhappiness, early death, etc). That is not a
reason for us to cede the lovely English word 'gay' to them - and I have
never used it in their new way.

On the other hand we should of course refrain from creating
needless excuses for evasion. Thus, the term 'perverts' is not to be used
early in any interaction.

Perhaps, then, a draft rule would be: avoid use of terms that have
been labelled 'ofensive' or 'opressive' by PC, when speaking to them;
unless there is some considerable *reason* to use a PinC term.

I must say I am very sceptical that humouring their 'delicate
flower' image regarding language will actually encourage debate; but I'm
willing to give it a go to that extent.

Is it not becoming clear that we need a confab to explore these
issues in person? The PC have numerous confabs e.g the Coles cttee
(several long weekends at Tauhara). Could we tap conservative funding to
facilitate such a gathering?

R

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html

The Crusade Against Evolution

In the beginning there was Darwin. And then there was intelligent design.
How the next generation of "creation science" is invading America's
classrooms.

By Evan Ratliff

On a spring day two years ago, in a downtown Columbus auditorium, the Ohio
State Board of Education took up the question of how to teach the theory of
evolution in public schools. A panel of four experts - two who believe in
evolution, two who question it - debated whether an antievolution theory
known as intelligent design should be allowed into the classroom.

This is an issue, of course, that was supposed to have been settled long
ago. But 140 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 75
years after John Scopes taught natural selection to a biology class in
Tennessee, and 15 years after the US Supreme Court ruled against a
Louisiana law mandating equal time for creationism, the question of how to
teach the theory of evolution was being reopened here in Ohio. The
two-hour forum drew chanting protesters and a police escort for the school
board members. Two scientists, biologist Ken Miller from Brown University
and physicist Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University two
hours north in Cleveland, defended evolution. On the other side of the dais
were two representatives from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main
sponsor and promoter of intelligent design: Stephen Meyer, a professor at
Palm Beach Atlantic University's School of Ministry and director of the
Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and Jonathan Wells, a
biologist, Discovery fellow, and author of Icons of Evolution, a 2000 book
castigating textbook treatments of evolution. Krauss and Miller
methodically presented their case against ID. "By no definition of any
modern scientist is intelligent design science," Krauss concluded, "and
it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it."

Meyer and Wells took the typical intelligent design line: Biological life
contains elements so complex - the mammalian blood-clotting mechanism, the
bacterial flagellum - that they cannot be explained by natural selection.
And so, the theory goes, we must be products of an intelligent designer.
Creationists call that creator God, but proponents of intelligent design
studiously avoid the G-word - and never point to the Bible for answers.
Instead, ID believers speak the language of science to argue that Darwinian
evolution is crumbling.

The debate's two-on-two format, with its appearance of equal sides, played
right into the ID strategy - create the impression that this very
complicated issue could be seen from two entirely rational yet opposing
views. "This is a controversial subject," Meyer told the audience. "When
two groups of experts disagree about a controversial subject that
intersects with the public-school science curriculum, the students should
be permitted to learn about both perspectives. We call this the 'teach the
controversy' approach."

Since the debate, "teach the controversy" has become the rallying cry of
the national intelligent-design movement, and Ohio has become the leading
battleground. Several months after the debate, the Ohio school board voted
to change state science standards, mandating that biology teachers
"critically analyze" evolutionary theory. This fall, teachers will adjust
their lesson plans and begin doing just that. In some cases, that means
introducing the basic tenets of intelligent design. One of the state's
sample lessons looks as though it were lifted from an ID textbook. It's the
biggest victory so far for the Discovery Institute. "Our opponents would
say that these are a bunch of know-nothing people on a state board," says
Meyer. "We think it shows that our Darwinist colleagues have a real problem
now."

But scientists aren't buying it. What Meyer calls "biology for the
information age," they call creationism in a lab coat. ID's core scientific
principles - laid out in the mid-1990s by a biochemist and a mathematician
- have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that Darwin's theories can
account for complexity, that ID relies on misunderstandings of evolution
and flimsy probability calculations, and that it proposes no testable
explanations.

As the Ohio debate revealed, however, the Discovery Institute doesn't need
the favor of the scientific establishment to prevail in the public arena.
Over the past decade, Discovery has gained ground in schools, op-ed pages,
talk radio, and congressional resolutions as a "legitimate" alternative to
evolution. ID is playing a central role in biology curricula and textbook
controversies around the country. The institute and its supporters have
taken the "teach the controversy" message to Alabama, Arizona, Minnesota,
Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, and Texas.

The ID movement's rhetorical strategy - better to appear scientific than
holy - has turned the evolution debate upside down. ID proponents quote
Darwin, cite the Scopes monkey trial, talk of "scientific objectivity,"
then in the same breath declare that extraterrestrials might have designed
life on Earth. It may seem counterintuitive, but the strategy is
meticulously premeditated, and it's working as planned. The debate over
Darwin is back, and coming to a 10th-grade biology class near you.

At its heart, intelligent design is a revival of an argument made by
British philosopher William Paley in 1802. In Natural Theology, the
Anglican archdeacon suggested that the complexity of biological structures
defied any explanation but a designer: God. Paley imagined finding a stone
and a watch in a field. The watch, unlike the stone, appears to have been
purposely assembled and wouldn't function without its precise combination
of parts. "The inference," he wrote, "is inevitable, that the watch must
have a maker." The same logic, he concluded, applied to biological
structures like the vertebrate eye. Its complexity implied design.

Fifty years later, Darwin directly answered Paley's "argument to
complexity." Evolution by natural selection, he argued in Origin of
Species, could create the appearance of design. Darwin - and 100-plus years
of evolutionary science after him - seemed to knock Paley into the dustbin
of history.

In the American public arena, Paley's design argument has long been
supplanted by biblical creationism. In the 1970s and 1980s, that movement
recast the Bible version in the language of scientific inquiry - as
"creation science" - and won legislative victories requiring "equal time"
in some states. That is, until 1987, when the Supreme Court struck down
Louisiana's law. Because creation science relies on biblical texts, the
court reasoned, it "lacked a clear secular purpose" and violated the First
Amendment clause prohibiting the establishment of religion. Since then,
evolution has been the law of the land in US schools - if not always the
local choice.

Paley re-emerged in the mid-1990s, however, when a pair of scientists
reconstituted his ideas in an area beyond Darwin's ken: molecular biology.
In his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, Lehigh University biochemist Michael
Behe contended that natural selection can't explain the "irreducible
complexity" of molecular mechanisms like the bacterial flagellum, because
its integrated parts offer no selective advantages on their own. Two years
later, in The Design Inference, William Dembski, a philosopher and
mathematician at Baylor University, proposed that any biological system
exhibiting "information" that is both "complex" (highly improbable) and
"specified" (serving a particular function) cannot be a product of chance
or natural law. The only remaining option is an intelligent designer -
whether God or an alien life force. These ideas became the cornerstones of
ID, and Behe proclaimed the evidence for design to be "one of the greatest
achievements in the history of science."

The scientific rationale behind intelligent design was being developed
just as antievolution sentiment seemed to be bubbling up. In 1991, UC
Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson published Darwin On Trial, an
influential antievolution book that dispensed with biblical creation
accounts while uniting antievolutionists under a single, secular-sounding
banner: intelligent design. In subsequent books, Johnson presents not just
antievolution arguments but a broader opposition to the "philosophy of
scientific materialism" - the assumption (known to scientists as
"methodological materialism") that all events have material, rather than
supernatural, explanations. To defeat it, he offers a strategy that would
be familiar in the divisive world of politics, called "the wedge." Like a
wedge inserted into a tree trunk, cracks in Darwinian theory can be used to
"split the trunk," eventually overturning scientific materialism itself.

That's where Discovery comes in. The institute was founded as a
conservative think tank in 1990 by longtime friends and former Harvard
roommates Bruce Chapman - director of the census bureau during the Reagan
administration - and technofuturist author George Gilder. "The institute is
futurist and rebellious, and it's prophetic," says Gilder. "It has a
science and technology orientation in a contrarian spirit" (see "Biocosm,"
facing page). In 1994, Discovery added ID to its list of contrarian causes,
which included everything from transportation to bioethics. Chapman hired
Meyer, who studied origin-of-life issues at Cambridge University, and the
institute signed Johnson - whom Chapman calls "the real godfather of the
intelligent design movement" - as an adviser and adopted the wedge.

For Discovery, the "thin end" of the wedge - according to a fundraising
document leaked on the Web in 1999 - is the scientific work of Johnson,
Behe, Dembski, and others. The next step involves "publicity and
opinion-making." The final goals: "a direct confrontation with the
advocates of material science" and "possible legal assistance in response
to integration of design theory into public school science curricula."

Step one has made almost no headway with evolutionists - the
near-universal majority of scientists with an opinion on the matter. But
that, say Discovery's critics, is not the goal. "Ultimately, they have an
evangelical Christian message that they want to push," says Michael Ruse, a
philosopher of science at Florida State. "Intelligent design is the hook."

It's a lot easier to skip straight to steps two and three, and sound
scientific in a public forum, than to deal with the rigor of the scientific
community. "It starts with education," Johnson told me, referring to high
school curricula. "That's where the public can have a voice. The
universities and the scientific world do not recognize freedom of
expression on this issue." Meanwhile, like any champion of a heretical
scientific idea, ID's supporters see themselves as renegades, storming the
gates of orthodoxy. "We all have a deep sense of indignation," says Meyer,
"that the wool is being pulled over the public's eyes."

The buzz phrase most often heard in the institute's offices is academic
freedom. "My hackles go up on the academic freedom issue," Chapman says.
"You should be allowed in the sciences to ask questions and posit
alternative theories."

None of this impresses the majority of the science world. "They have not
been able to convince even a tiny amount of the scientific community," says
Ken Miller. "They have not been able to win the marketplace of ideas."

And yet, the Discovery Institute's appeals to academic freedom create a
kind of catch-22. If scientists ignore the ID movement, their silence is
offered as further evidence of a conspiracy. If they join in, they risk
reinforcing the perception of a battle between equal sides. Most scientists
choose to remain silent. "Where the scientific community has been at
fault," says Krauss, "is in assuming that these people are harmless, like
flat-earthers. They don't realize that they are well organized, and that
they have a political agenda."

Taped to the wall of Eugenie Scott's windowless office at the National
Center for Science Education on the outskirts of Oakland, California, is a
chart titled "Current Flare-Ups." It's a list of places where the teaching
of evolution is under attack, from California to Georgia to Rio de Janeiro.
As director of the center, which defends evolution in teaching
controversies around the country, Scott has watched creationism up close
for 30 years. ID, in her view, is the most highly evolved form of
creationism to date. "They've been enormously effective compared to the
more traditional creationists, who have greater numbers and much larger
budgets," she says.

Scott credits the blueprint laid out by Johnson, who realized that to win
in the court of public opinion, ID needed only to cast reasonable doubt on
evolution. "He said, 'Don't get involved in details, don't get involved in
fact claims,'" says Scott. "'Forget about the age of Earth, forget about
the flood, don't mention the Bible.'" The goal, she says, is "to focus on
the big idea that evolution is inadequate. Intelligent design doesn't
really explain anything. It says that evolution can't explain things.
Everything else is hand-waving."

The movement's first test of Johnson's strategies began in 1999, when the
Kansas Board of Education voted to remove evolution from the state's
science standards. The decision, backed by traditional creationists,
touched off a fiery debate, and the board eventually reversed itself after
several antievolution members lost reelection bids. ID proponents used the
melee as cover to launch their own initiative. A Kansas group called IDNet
nearly pushed through its own textbook in a local school district.

Two years later, the Discovery Institute earned its first major political
victory when US senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) inserted language
written by Johnson into the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The clause,
eventually cut from the bill and placed in a nonbinding report, called for
school curricula to "help students understand the full range of scientific
views" on topics "that may generate controversy (such as biological
evolution)."

As the institute was demonstrating its Beltway clout, a pro-ID group
called Science Excellence for All Ohioans fueled a brewing local
controversy. SEAO - consisting of a few part-time activists, a Web site,
and a mailing list - began agitating to have ID inserted into Ohio's
10th-grade-biology standards. In the process, they attracted the attention
of a few receptive school board members.

When the board proposed the two-on-two debate and invited Discovery, Meyer
and company jumped at the opportunity. Meyer, whom Gilder calls the
institute's resident "polymath," came armed with the Santorum amendment,
which he read aloud for the school board. He was bringing a message from
Washington: Teach the controversy. "We framed the issue quite differently
than our supporters," says Meyer. The approach put pro-ID Ohioans on firmer
rhetorical ground: Evolution should of course be taught, but "objectively."
Hearing Meyer's suggestion, says Doug Rudy, a software engineer and SEAO's
director, "we all sat back and said, Yeah, that's the way to go."

Back in Seattle, around the corner from the Discovery Institute, Meyer
offers some peer-reviewed evidence that there truly is a controversy that
must be taught. "The Darwinists are bluffing," he says over a plate of
oysters at a downtown seafood restaurant. "They have the science of the
steam engine era, and it's not keeping up with the biology of the
information age."

Meyer hands me a recent issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology
Reviews with an article by Carl Woese, an eminent microbiologist at the
University of Illinois. In it, Woese decries the failure of reductionist
biology - the tendency to look at systems as merely the sum of their parts
- to keep up with the developments of molecular biology. Meyer says the
conclusion of Woese's argument is that the Darwinian emperor has no clothes.

It's a page out of the antievolution playbook: using evolutionary
biology's own literature against it, selectively quoting from the likes of
Stephen Jay Gould to illustrate natural selection's downfalls. The
institute marshals journal articles discussing evolution to provide
policymakers with evidence of the raging controversy surrounding the issue.

Woese scoffs at Meyer's claim when I call to ask him about the paper. "To
say that my criticism of Darwinists says that evolutionists have no
clothes," Woese says, "is like saying that Einstein is criticizing Newton,
therefore Newtonian physics is wrong." Debates about evolution's
mechanisms, he continues, don't amount to challenges to the theory. And
intelligent design "is not science. It makes no predictions and doesn't
offer any explanation whatsoever, except for 'God did it.'"

Of course Meyer happily acknowledges that Woese is an ardent evolutionist.
The institute doesn't need to impress Woese or his peers; it can simply
co-opt the vocabulary of science - "academic freedom," "scientific
objectivity," "teach the controversy" - and redirect it to a public trying
to reconcile what appear to be two contradictory scientific views. By
appealing to a sense of fairness, ID finds a place at the political table,
and by merely entering the debate it can claim victory. "We don't need to
win every argument to be a success," Meyer says. "We're trying to validate
a discussion that's been long suppressed."

This is precisely what happened in Ohio. "I'm not a PhD in biology," says
board member Michael Cochran. "But when I have X number of PhD experts
telling me this, and X number telling me the opposite, the answer is
probably somewhere between the two."

An exasperated Krauss claims that a truly representative debate would have
had 10,000 pro-evolution scientists against two Discovery executives. "What
these people want is for there to be a debate," says Krauss. "People in the
audience say, Hey, these people sound reasonable. They argue, 'People have
different opinions, we should present those opinions in school.' That is
nonsense. Some people have opinions that the Holocaust never happened, but
we don't teach that in history."

Eventually, the Ohio board approved a standard mandating that students
learn to "describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically
analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." Proclaiming victory, Johnson
barnstormed Ohio churches soon after notifying congregations of a new,
ID-friendly standard. In response, anxious board members added a clause
stating that the standard "does not mandate the teaching or testing of
intelligent design." Both sides claimed victory. A press release from IDNet
trumpeted the mere inclusion of the phrase intelligent design, saying that
"the implication of the statement is that the 'teaching or testing of
intelligent design' is permitted." Some pro-evolution scientists,
meanwhile, say there's nothing wrong with teaching students how to
scrutinize theory. "I don't have a problem with that," says Patricia
Princehouse, a professor at Case Western Reserve and an outspoken opponent
of ID. "Critical analysis is exactly what scientists do."

The good feelings didn't last long. Early this year, a board-appointed
committee unveiled sample lessons that laid out the kind of evolution
questions students should debate. The models appeared to lift their
examples from Wells' book Icons of Evolution. "When I first saw it, I was
speechless," says Princehouse.

With a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley, Wells has the
kind of cred that intelligent design proponents love to cite. But, as ID
opponents enjoy pointing out, he's also a follower of Sun Myung Moon and
once declared that Moon's prayers "convinced me that I should devote my
life to destroying Darwinism." Icons attempts to discredit commonly used
examples of evolution, like Darwin's finches and peppered moths. Writing in
Nature, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne called Icons stealth creationism
that "strives to debunk Darwinism using the familiar rhetoric of biblical
creationists, including scientific quotations out of context, incomplete
summaries of research, and muddled arguments."

After months of uproar, the most obvious Icons-inspired lessons were
removed. But scientists remain furious. "The ones they left in are still
arguments for special creation - but you'd have to know the literature to
understand what they are saying. They've used so much technical jargon that
anybody who doesn't know a whole lot of evolutionary biology looks at it
and says 'It sounds scientific to me, what's the matter with it?'" says
Princehouse. "As a friend of mine said, it takes a half a second for a baby
to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean."

As Ohio teachers prepare their lessons for the coming year, the question
must be asked: Why the fuss over an optional lesson plan or two? After all,
both sides agree that the new biology standards - in which 10 evolution
lessons replace standards that failed to mention evolution at all - are a
vast improvement. The answer: In an era when the government is pouring
billions into biology, and when stem cells and genetically modified food
are front-page news, spending even a small part of the curriculum on bogus
criticisms of evolution is arguably more detrimental now than any time in
history. Ironically, says Ohio State University biology professor Steve
Rissing, the education debate coincides with Ohio's efforts to lure biotech
companies. "How can we do that when our high school biology is failing us?"
he says. "Our cornfields are gleaming with GMO corn. There's a fundamental
disconnect there."

Intelligent design advocates say that teaching students to "critically
analyze" evolution will help give them the skills to "see both sides" of
all scientific issues. And if the Discovery Institute execs have their way,
those skills will be used to reconsider the philosophy of modern science
itself - which they blame for everything from divorce to abortion to the
insanity defense. "Our culture has been deeply influenced by materialist
thought," says Meyer. "We think it's deeply destructive, and we think it's
false. And we mean to overturn it."

It's mid-July, and the Ohio school board is about to hold its final
meeting before classes start this year. There's nothing about intelligent
design on the agenda. The debate was settled months ago. And yet,
Princehouse, Rissing, and two other scientists rise to speak during the
"non-agenda" public testimony portion.

One by one, the scientists recite their litany of objections: The model
lesson plan is still based on concepts from ID literature; the ACLU is
considering to sue to stop it; the National Academy of Sciences opposes it
as unscientific. "This is my last time," says Rissing, "as someone who has
studied science and the process of evolution for 25 years, to say I
perceive that my children and I are suffering injuries based on a flawed
lesson plan that this board has passed."

During a heated question-and-answer session, one board member accuses the
scientists of posturing for me, the only reporter in the audience. Michael
Cochran challenges the scientists to cite any testimony that the board
hadn't already heard "ad infinitum." Another board member, Deborah
Owens-Fink, declares the issue already closed. "We've listened to experts
on both sides of this for three years," she says. "Ultimately, the question
of what students should learn "is decided in a democracy, not by any one
group of experts."

The notion is noble enough: In a democracy, every idea gets heard. But in
science, not all theories are equal. Those that survive decades - centuries
- of scientific scrutiny end up in classrooms, and those that don't are
discarded. The intelligent design movement is using scientific rhetoric to
bypass scientific scrutiny. And when science education is decided by charm
and stage presence, the Discovery Institute wins.

It is encouraging that the Science For the People list has begun to
examine the religious bases of ethics - a very important level of
analysis for the social control of technology.

However, Sam Harris (& Dawkins & Dave Straton & etc) are astray
with their attempts to make out that religions are more or less equal as
sources of antisocial fanaticism.

Let us not confuse the facts: Islamist fanatics have totally
eclipsed any rivals in the fanaticism rankings. It is grossly misleading
to make out that Christianity has done anything comparable in the past
couple centuries, and especially the past decade or so.

Is the following depiction by a Muslim too bleak? And confined to
the Arabs only? What of radicals in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia
and Indonesia?

In all of history, the worst gang were the Mongols, the irreligious
killers who gratuitously exterminated several ancient cultures as they
expanded to take Hungary (briefly) in establishing the biggest empire till
then, squeezing the relatively young Islam more viciously from the E.
during some of the time when the crusades were squeezing Islam from the W.
I suspect the fatalism, and the fanatical tendencies, of Islam can be
traced to that period which must have looked like imminent extirpation to
the Muslims of the near E.

Since then, organised Christianity has done nothing worse than the
Inquisition and the New World conquests, and by C19 had settled down to the
least indecent imperialism (as described by Kipling). By far the more
vicious fanaticisms since then have been the specifically anti-religious
Communism of the USSR & China, and the fanatical Islamist destructors. To
mention Christianity in the same breath is misleading.

But what about (I hear you cry) the terrible wars of C20 between
the Christians of Germany, the British empire, and the USA? And how does
Japan fit the picture? I have been simplfying in a big way; but I maintain
the category 'religious fanaticism' is unhelpful obfuscation in discussions
of current trends. Christianity has become so enfeebled or refined (strike
out whichever does not apply) that it is hardly capable of quasi-random
violence. To depict Hitler's stooge 'state church' as representing
Christianity is unconvincing.

R

Special Dispatch - Reform Project
September 20, 2004
No. 786

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http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD78604

Arab Progressive: The Arabs are Still Slaves to a Medieval Mentality

In a recent opinion piece, the progressive author and journalist Dr. Shaker
Al-Nabulsi condemned the growing support for terrorism and extremism in the
Arab world, and the rejection of moderation and reason.
The following are excerpts from the article1)

'We have become the Most Terrorist Nation and the Greatest Spillers of
Blood in the World'

"... If the Arabs had today a well-burnished mirror in which they can see
themselves, and if they had the requisite courage to look in it, they would
be stricken by fear and panic at the sight of themselves. The image [would
be] that we have become the most terrorist nation and the greatest spillers
of blood in the world in this [current] stage of history in which nations
resolve their problems through dialogue, diplomacy, conventions, and
through appeal to the world's better judgment, to public opinion, and to
intellectuals, instead of threatening [others] with bloodshed if this or
that demand goes unmet... The image is that we have become a nation devoid
of reason!"

'Why have the Arabs Gone Crazy in Such a Manner?'

"What happened to the Arabs in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,
Palestine, Morocco, Yemen, and in other countries? What caused the Arabs
to lose the rationality with which they led the world in the 10th century?
Why have the Arabs gone crazy in such a manner? Is it because they have
lost hope in comprehensive reform? [Or] because they have lost hope in the
success of the Arab world? Is it a result of the huge gap between the
haves and the have-nots? Is it a result of the degrading poverty that
reduces many Arabs to rummage through garbage cans to find food? Is it a
result of the pervasive corruption prevalent in governmental institutions
that do not want and are not willing to undergo any reform that would
result in the unraveling of even a single thread from the luxurious carpet
on which they rest, with the support of the police establishment which is
capable of obstructing any call for reform...?

"Did this ... occur because of the rule of the dark religious educational
system which incites to war against modernity, democracy, and the new
liberalism, and permits the spilling of the blood of its supporters,
pioneers, and students? Is it because the cultural elite have abandoned
its political role and in so doing has paved the way for the clerics, with
their white, green, or black turbans, to set the tone of political action
in the Arab world to such a degree that we no longer distinguish between
the political and the religious? The impure has become interwoven with the
holy, the mosques have turned into proving-grounds for armed political
campaigns, chaos has spread and in the Arab world a thousand religions have
sprung up, all of them [claiming to be] Islam...

"Did this occur as a result of the fact that the intellectuals have
distorted the truth and lack the courage to tell the truth to their
students? Is it a result of the frightening spread of illiteracy and
cultural ignorance in the Arab world, with the result that the vast
majority of people do not read, do not know, [and] do not think? Is it a
result of the cumulative political and cultural repression from which the
Arab people have suffered for the last fifteen centuries? Is it a result
of the proliferation of holy sites and the proliferation of totems in Arab
life to the extent that most people have lost faith in their efficacy and
[so] have invented their own totem, which is represented in a nationalist
totems such as Abd Al-Nasser or Saddam Hussein, or in a counterfeit
religious totem such as Bin Laden, Muqtada Al-Sadr, Al-Zarqawi, or many
others?

"Did this occur as a result of the fact that terrorist groups have huge
incomes from the charity tithes streaming in daily from good Muslims all
over the world? In a recent report it was said that the worth of Sheikh
Al-Qaradhawi, one of the preachers of terrorism in the Arab world, is
estimated at tens of millions of dollars. From the 'Al-Taqwaa' Bank alone
he lost three million dollars after it was shut down by the Americans...

"Did this occur as a result of the huge sums that the terrorists obtain by
growing hashish and opium on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border...?"

'The Arabs have Surrendered to the Demagogic, Hysterical, Provocative Media'

"All of the verses, all of the prophetic traditions, all of the wise
sayings, all of the poems and the words of intellectuals encouraging
thought and the application of reason have been wiped out from the Arab
memory. The Arabs have surrendered to a fake religious culture. The
Friday sermons, the religious programming, the religious literature and the
turbans have become the decisive factor in every matter - in religion,
politics, the economy, society, education, and culture. The Arabs have
surrendered to the demagogic, hysterical, provocative media and have begun
to search the news editions for bloodshed, beheadings, the dragging of
bodies, the flaying of skins, and the destruction of homes. The most
endearing sight of the year for the Arabs was that of the mass graves in
Iraq."

'Anyone Who Thinks and Makes Use of His Intelligence in the Arab World is
Detestable, Condemnable, and Accursed'

"Anyone who thinks and makes use of his intelligence in the Arab world is
detestable, condemnable, and accursed; he is of the seed of serpents and
the fruit of Satan, he is an agent of the new American colonialism, one who
writes [in support] of the Marines, and a spy in the service of foreign
intelligence agencies. The Islamists who hijacked Islam, stole it and
counterfeited it ... are now leading the flocks of Arabs towards the
annihilation of human history ... not through reason but through distorted
emotions and promises of the hidden Hereafter, and through a lack of pure
and simple faith in Allah. Indeed, the Arabs have lost their pure faith in
Allah and have turned into slaves of blood-drenched religious totems,
instead of being servants of Allah...

"The Arabs think in a medieval fashion regarding politics, society, the
economy, and education, even if [they do this] by way of modern
electronics. For their foods and their transportation they make use of the
latest in Western science and technology in all of the various fields, but
at the same time they think in a medieval fashion and behave in their lives
as though they are still living in the Middle Ages, and indeed they are
still slaves to a medieval mentality and to thinkers from the Middle Ages...

"Unfortunately the Arabs' stupidity has grown, as has their thirst for
blood, and they have distanced themselves from reason. Their humanist
political values have attenuated and they have begun speaking to the world
with the sword, the axe, and armies of masked bandits, robbers, and
murderers..."

Endnote:
(1) www.rezgar.com, August 14, 2004.

*****
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non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the
Middle East. Copies of articles
and documents cited, as well as background information, are available on
request.

MEMRI holds copyrights on all translations. Materials may only be used with
proper attribution.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
P.O. Box 27837, Washington, DC 20038-7837
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Fax: (202) 955-9077
E-Mail: memri@memri.org
www.memri.org

LOOSE CANON
Rotorua Daily Post
(publication date 12/10/04)

Over recent times I have found it particularly distressing to receive
questions from old friends expressing their pained reaction to what they
see are ethical changes within the Church. These come from people who
after my departure from different parishes have maintained a link through
e-mail, letter or telephone.

Traditionally the Church through the ages has laid great stress on the
ministry and authority of its Bishops. In this person is vested the hopes
and expectations of the Church. The consecration of such a person is
achieved only after much thought and prayer with regard to the suitability
of the candidate. In education, as a person of wide experience, of
holiness of life, a person of prayer and deep faith and possessed of the
gifts of the Holy Spirit to enable a ministry in which a huge measure of
trust is placed. In short, someone who is looked to as a guardian of the
faith. In particular the responsibilities of this office include a
concern for mission: the growth of the Church, so that people may be
brought to a faith in Jesus Christ.

Sometimes urgent ethical concerns emerge. A past Bishop of Auckland, Eric
Austin Gowing was quick to point out to his Diocese and the Church beyond
that links with the nation of South Africa in the playing of Rugby
compromised the Christians in that country who suffered under the apartheid
system. Bishop Gowing was pilloried by those who insisted that Rugby as a
sport should not be tarnished by an attachment to political issues. Long
before the matter became a popular secular concern and the means whereby
those who had different axes to grind would use the situation to justify
assault on the Police, Bishop Eric maintained a faithful pressure for
change. As is often said, "the rest is history".

Now another issue has arrived. The question of human sexuality has been
raised in a resource booklet entitled " The Human Sexuality Debate". It
is published by two Bishops who exercise their Episcopacy over that part
of the country that runs roughly from Tauranga in the north to Porangahau
in the south and through Taupo, in the Diocese of Waiapu.

The term " Human Sexuality" is quite misleading in that the whole booklet
engages exclusively with homosexuality and applies very particularly to
the question of the ordination of homosexual men and women to the ordained
ministry. The document lays great stress on the way it claims homosexual
people have been cruelly treated and seems to use this as an argument for
acceptance into that ministry. The impression being given is that our
Churches are crowded with large numbers of homosexual people. It is
difficult to sustain such an argument when the statistics place the whole
population at something in the region of 3 per cent at most. The booklet
insists that in every aspect of the Church's life such folk ".have been
part of the Anglican landscape" and suggests that " To edit them out of
the church's story is to be left with a story I don't recognise as our
Anglican story".

Those of us who have always sought to maintain a ministry that is open and
accepting will find this statement offensive and disturbing. All through
my ministry I have been aware of a few homosexual people who have been
part of the Church. In one parish every caring effort was made to help
those involved in a marriage break-up and from time to time people who
chose not to conceal their affiliations found a safe home in the Church.
Is it being suggested that because homosexuals have allegedly been treated
badly they should qualify as candidates for ordination as some sort of
expiation for their supposed sufferings? In a ministry of counselling,
the skills and training for which, I thank both God and a former Principal
of the Methodist Theological College, I believe that I was able to bring
peace of mind and help to many who came to discuss the issues of their
sexuality.

The whole tone of the booklet is couched in terms that brooks no reaction
of dissent. The suggestion, less than subtly made, implies that any view
other than that expressed by the authors can only be of those who are
ignorant, bigoted, or hopelessly narrow-minded. Expressions of opinion
that seem to deny any opposing voice can scarcely be that of the Gospel.
To have one's conscience thus impugned by people one respects is not an
experience I would recommend.

I find it deeply saddening to be placed in the position of one now
required to absorb the pastoral pain of those who, having placed their
implicit trust in Episcopal ministry, consider themselves betrayed.

*********
THE REV. CANON G.J.J.A. HADLOW
25 Ann Street,
Utuhina,
Rotorua 3201,
NEW ZEALAND
Telephone (07) 348 9894
e-mail: ghadlow@clear.net.nz
*********

Rev Edw Prebble
General Synod 2004

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power
of your hand to do so. -Proverbs 3.27.

Synod members with a long memory, especially my friends from he Diocese of
Auckland, will recall (hopefully with fondness) my Father, Archdeacon
Kenneth Prebble. He was actually only a member of this house once, in
1958, but is something of a legend in his lifetime, especially among those
of Anglo-Catholic and/or Charismatic persuasion. Dad has always been a
serious thinker, and now that his is nearly ninety, he has plenty of time
for it.

Dad has come up with a theory that has set me thinking hard. It is his
view that the late 1950s saw an invention that commentators will look back
on as a crucial historical watershed. I am speaking of the invention of
effective contraception. Up until that point, for thousands of years,
human society had as one of its key premises for law-making, social
control, and tenets of morality, an essential link between sexuality and
procreation. There were always exceptions of course, and some categories
of people who could not have children, but for the vast majority of people,
the essential purpose of sexuality was to bring about procreation. Peter
Carrell mentioned that link in his speech a few minutes ago.

All that has changed in the last half-century. It is now perfectly
possible, and very common practice, to indulge in sexual behaviour without
considering issues of procreation. Thanks to advances in artificial
insemination, it is even possible (albeit still difficult) to have
procreation without sexual behaviour.

What this means is a startling change in human history. We have witnessed
a change in our attitude to one of the central aspects of our humanity. If
our attitude to sexuality has changed, it is no exaggeration to say that we
are witnessing change in what it means to be a human being. Certainly we
are finding ourselves debating all sorts of ethical, moral, and behavioural
issues that would never have arisen in the minds of our grandparents.
Issues of womenís liberation/feminism, the whole abortion debate, fertility
questions and artificial conception, gender roles, the nature of the
family, and the issue that forms the subject of this motion, homosexuality.

So many of the laws, mores and accepted behaviour that have existed for
centuries now make very little sense. For example, very few of us (in fact
none, I hope) see women as economic property, given in marriage from their
fathers to their husbands. As a society we find ourselves in a transition,
exploring together how to make sense of new realities, and striving to find
new understandings of how to operate together.

At the age of 90, my father is somewhat relieved that he is not going to be
around to see what new rules, laws and mores we and our children develop.
We as church leaders, like it or not, cannot avoid the matter, because
these issues are certainly not going to go away.

It is absolutely certain and agreed that there has been a massive increase
in open homosexual behaviour in the last 50 years. Now we can debate till
the cows come home whether this is a new freedom for gay and lesbian
individuals who previously were required to suppress their essential
sexuality, or whether new freedoms have encouraged people to make a choice
that an agreed consensus previously did not allow. That is a rather
sterile and circular debate in my view. What is undeniable is that there
are many thousands of gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals in Aotearoa,
New Zealand and Polynesia, and (strange though that may seem) a significant
proportion of them still look to the church for moral guidance and pastoral
support.

I do not believe it is sufficient for us to look at the current debates in
the Anglican Communion purely from the point of view of our possible
impaired communion, and questions like: "To what degree can we agree to
disagree, and still be in communion?" The motivation behind this motion is
an increasing frustration with our behaviour as a church in deliberately
not addressing these concerns, because we are afraid that they will be
uncomfortable or divisive. The longer we keep the debate under wraps, the
longer some very fine people will pay the price of rejection
misunderstanding, and marginalisation.

So what does our motion ask you to approve?

The first clause is a recognition of fact. There are, and always have
been, a considerable number of gay and lesbian people in our church. Some
of them have been able to declare themselves openly; others chose to keep
things quiet. How many? Well, we don't know. The famous figure of 10%
associated with Kinsey's reports is probably an exaggeration, but it is
reasonable to assume that every priest in this house has some gay or
lesbian worshippers in their congregation. If any say, "No, not in mine!"
then it means one of two things. Either the priest has not created a
pastorally safe situation, and gay or lesbian parishioners have chosen not
to identify themselves, or the priest has made it sufficiently clear that
homosexual folk are not welcome, and they have left the church.

I hope that every member of this house feels able to assent to clause 1. I
have been asked during this synod a couple of times why we should honour
this particular group of Anglicans, rather than all our members. I have 2
answers. First, we do it all the time - either here or in our diocesan
synods, we frequently honour youth, or the aged, or those with
disabilities, or whomever we want to draw attention to. But Second given
the published views of some members of our church, and some things said
from pulpits that have been deeply hurtful to gay and lesbian people, I
believe such a declaration to be highly appropriate at this time.

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power
of your hand to do so.

Originally I wanted to say that we 'affirm and celebrate' the contribution
of gay and lesbian members of our church, but maybe that would be too
difficult for some to swallow. Can we at least acknowledge their
existence, and honour their contribution to our life? I hope we can honour
the work of readers, pray-ers, flower arrangers, servers, musicians, home
group members and leaders, and a number of clergy, who happen to be gay or
lesbian.

Clause 2 is also a statement of fact. It happens to be a fact of history
that the Anglican Communion is tied in knots over issues of ordination of
homosexual candidates, (especially Bishop Gene Robinson), and of the
blessing of same-sex unions. A commission of the Lambeth Conference spent
over a week of careful discussion, debate, and argument in 1998, and had to
conclude that they were not of one mind. If anything, we are further from
a consensus now than we were 6 years ago.

The real meat of this motion is clause 3, with its sub-clauses. The
Christian Church must always make some allowance for the miraculous, but
most of us would agree that for the Archbishop of Nigeria and the Bishops
of New Hampshire and New Westminster to come to a common mind in the next
few years will take a greater sovereign move of the Holy Spirit than most
of us have witnessed so far in our Christian walk. So what do we do in the
mean time?

The wording of the motion is deliberately vague, and non-directive here.
Some careful work will need to be done by Standing Committee to work out
the best way to tackle the task. But somehow we need to find a way to look
at these issues from the perspective of our own countries, and our own
Tikanga.

Are we going to forbid the blessings of same-sex unions?
Are we going to celebrate them with full ceremony and fanfare?
Are we going to acknowledge them but withhold a blessing, as one member of
this house suggested in a recent issue of Anglican Taonga?
Are we going to allow the words marriage and/or wedding to be used in this
context, or are we going to bless the unions so long as other words are
used?
Are we going to allow such matters to be decided on a Diocesan, or perhaps
a Tikanga level?

We have to realise that these are not abstract, or academic questions. If
we do nothing, it is inevitable that we will be overtaken by events. It
seems probable that the civil unions bill will pass through Parliament this
year. What are we going to do if a gay couple present themselves, and say,
"Our relationship is now recognised in law. We are good Anglicans who love
our church. Please can we have the support of our church family, and
celebrate our love and commitment before the altar?"

What is a priest, or a bishop, allowed to do? What are they forbidden from
doing? One Tikanga Pakeha parish in this country has on their current
web-page an article headed, "We celebrate same-sex unions - what about the
rest of the church?" Now if the wishes of some members of his house hold
sway, then that parish should be disciplined, and if the bishop does not
take action, then he (and it is 'he') should be disciplined. Is that what
we believe? I do not believe that the current commission of the Primates
will answer these questions, so we have to look closer to home.

The same sorts of questions apply in the area of ordination of gay and
lesbian candidates, whether they are ìpractisingî or doing it for real.
At the moment the bishops of our church find themselves dancing on pins to
know what they are authorised to do. At least one bishop in our church has
said to a homosexual ordinand, "No, I do not feel able to ordain you, it
would be too risky and divisive. But if you manage to become ordained by
another bishop, I would be very willing to license you in my diocese".
That kind of sophistry is totally unacceptable, but I don't think we can
blame the bishops. We owe it to them to provide them with a guide, and not
require them to figure out these impossible questions on their own, or
with merely the quiet support of their close friends.

So lets ask Standing Committee to help us find a way forward. That might
be a commission on doctrine and theological questions, it might be a
special commission, it might include the excellent format of meetings on
this subject recently sponsored by the Diocese of Waikato, it might involve
the new Social Justice Commission, it might even include a common life
conference. The one specific provision asked for in this motion is that
whatever process is chosen, it take a bit of advice often omitted when
people quote from the resolution of Lambeth 1998, and take active steps to
listen to the voice of the people most affected. For gay and lesbian
Anglicans, these questions are not theological debates or issues of church
order. They go to the very core of what it means to be themselves. What
is the relationship between my life, my faith, my sexuality, my church, my
friendships? And am I even allowed to ask those questions without being
pilloried or judged?

Mr/Madam President, two things have appalled me as I have researched this
topic, and prepared for this debate. One I was prepared for ñ a very
restrictive, judgemental attitude to issues of sexuality and personal
morality, based on a shaky foundation of a few short passages of scripture,
and a long history of cultural prohibition premised on outmoded
understandings of sexuality. But that sort of view point at least has the
integrity of being consistent with certain theological perspectives, and
when that viewpoint is defended sensitively, there is at least the
foundation for honest debate.

No, what has appalled me far more deeply is to observe a large number of
church leaders of a Liberal persuasion, ducking for cover left, right and
centre (well, not too much left, actually, but definitely right and centre)
on this issue. The very people who went out on a limb for the rights of
divorcees in our church, the very people who fought so hard for the
ordination of women, and the very people who made themselves unpopular in
working for our new constitution, are falling over themselves to say,
"Let's not be divisive on this subject." or "Let's not give the parish down
the road an excuse to ask for alternative Episcopal oversight." or "Let's
not rock the boat". Well, brothers and sisters, the boat is being rocked
already, and somehow we have to find a way to steady it properly.

This is not an extreme motion. We are not asking for sudden radical
changes to be made to our rules. We are saying simply, "There is a deep
disagreement among us, and it is a disagreement that we cannot ignore.
These are not questions that will go away if we ignore them long enough.
Let's embrace the bewildering changes that are occurring in our society,
and invoke the grace of the Holy Spirit to help us find a way ahead."

Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power
of your hand to do so.

Let's have the debate.

>Did this become law Robert???

Yes, and here are some sites to explore. I was interested in the last
(page 5) of Amnesty International's brief on the bill.

As we write Canada's Supreme Court is deliberating, at the Govt's
request, the issue of same sex marriage.

http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/3/parlbus/chambus/house/bills/private/C-250/C-2
50_3/C-250_cover-E.html

http://www.fotf.ca/familyfacts/takeaction/091802_c415.html

http://www.amnesty.ca/resource_centre/Bill_C250.pdf

>From U.S. News & World Report - April 19, 2004
>
>http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040419/opinion/19john.htm
>
>Nation & World
>By John Leo
>Stomping on free speech
>
>'Canada is a pleasantly authoritarian country," Alan Borovoy, general
>counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a few years ago.
>An example of what he means is Bill C-250, a repressive, anti-free-speech
>measure that is on the brink of becoming law in Canada. It would add
>"sexual orientation" to the Canadian hate propaganda law, thus making
>public criticism of homosexuality a crime. It is sometimes called the
>"Bible as Hate Literature" bill, or simply "the chill bill." It could ban
>publicly expressed opposition to gay marriage or any other political goal
>of gay groups. The bill has a loophole for religious opposition to
>homosexuality, but few scholars think it will offer protection, given the
>strength of the gay lobby and the trend toward censorship in Canada. Law
>Prof. David Bernstein, in his new book You Can't Say That! wrote that "it
>has apparently become illegal in Canada to advocate traditional Christian
>opposition to homosexual sex." Or traditional Jewish or Muslim opposition,
>too.
>
>Since Canada has no First Amendment, anti-bias laws generally trump free
>speech and freedom of religion. A recent flurry of cases has mostly gone
>against free expression. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ruled
>that a newspaper ad listing biblical passages that oppose homosexuality was
>a human-rights offense. The commission ordered the paper and Hugh Owens,
>the man who placed the ad, to pay $1,500 each to three gay men who objected
>to it. In another case, a British Columbia court upheld the one-month
>suspension, without pay, of a high school teacher who wrote letters to a
>local paper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation but a
>condition that can and should be treated. The teacher, Chris Kempling, was
>not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state
>defines as improper.
>
>That anti-free-speech principle, social conservatives argue, will become
>explicit national policy under C-250, with criminal penalties attached.
>Religious groups say it would become risky for them to teach certain
>biblical passages. If a student says something that irritates homosexuals
>in class, the student's parents might be held legally liable. Some
>Canadians worry that, for instance, discussions about gay men giving blood
>will be suppressed. Robert Spitzer of Columbia University, a longtime
>supporter of gay rights and an important figure in the American Psychiatric
>Association, published a study finding that many gays can become
>heterosexual. Would that study be banned under C-250 as hate speech? And
>since C-250 does not mention homosexuality but focuses broadly on "sexual
>orientation," Canada's freewheeling judiciary may explicitly extend
>protection to many "sexual minorities." Pedophilia and sadism are among
>the conditions listed by the American Psychiatric Association under "sexual
>orientation."
>
>Church foes? The churches seem to be the key target of C-250. One of
>Canada's gay senators denounced "ecclesiastical dictators" and wrote to a
>critic, "You people are sick. God should strike you dead." In 1998,
>lesbian lawyer Barbara Finlay of British Columbia said "the legal struggle
>for queer rights will one day be a struggle between freedom of religion
>versus sexual orientation."
>
>It's starting to be defined just that way in other countries. In Sweden,
>sermons are explicitly covered by an anti-hate-speech law passed to protect
>homosexuals. The Swedish chancellor of justice said any reference to the
>Bible's stating that homosexuality is sinful might be a criminal offense,
>and a Pentecostal minister is already facing charges. In Britain, police
>investigated Anglican Bishop Peter Forster of Chester after he told a local
>paper: "Some people who are primarily homosexual can reorientate
>themselves. I would encourage them to consider that as an option." Police
>sent a copy of his remarks to prosecutors, but the case was dropped. In
>Ireland last August, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned that
>clergy who circulated a Vatican statement opposing gay marriages could face
>prosecution under incitement-to-hatred legislation.
>
>In the United States, the dominance of anti-bias laws and rules limiting
>free speech and free exercise of religion is clear on campuses, not so
>clear in the real world. Still, First Amendment arguments are losing
>ground to antidiscrimination laws in many areas, and once stalwart
>free-speech groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, have mostly
>gone over to the other side. An unlikely split has occurred. In the
>interest of fighting bias, liberal groups reliably promote laws that limit
>First Amendment principles. The best defenders of free speech and freedom
>of religion are no longer on the left. They are found on the right.

I have no knowledge of the particular context into which this
sermon was delivered. But as it will probably get promulgated beyond where
it was delivered - and one hopes sermons will more or less stand on their
own - I comment.

>TREASURE IN
>CLAY POTS
>Auckland Synod Sermon, 4 September 2003
>The Rt Revíd Richard Randerson, Dean and Assistant Bishop of Auckland
>
>One of my favourite parables is that where Jesus likens the Kingdom of God
>to someone who happens across treasure in a field and for sheer joy sells
>everything to buy the field (Matthew 13.44). It is an evocative image
>about the unexpected discovery of God's love, and the immediate
>recognition that here is something that transcends any other reality in
>life.
>
>Then in 2 Corinthians 4.7 Paul tells us that the treasure of God is
>something we hold in clay pots. Paul is referring to himself and all
>followers of Jesus as clay pots, so that the light that shines in us may
>never be confused with the frail human vessels through whom that light
>shines.

Unfamiliar with this text, and wanting to get some idea of its
context, I look it up and find myself struck by the relevance of the
immediately preceding v. 2, which I would apply to many deceitful promotors
of militant hxism within the Church.

>The clay pots image may also refer to the many humanly constructed vessels
>designed to be agents of Godís light - the Church, creeds, Christian
>tradition, liturgy, and even the Scriptures themselves.

Or it may not - it appears to me to refer mainly if not solely to
individuals who tend to over-rate their own importance or authority.

>We worship God but, however much we love the Church and its formularies,
>we should never make the mistake of seeing them as objects of worship
>alongside of God.

I welcome this statement wrt 'the Scriptures themselves' as
"creationism" rabidly promotes a kind of idolatry of just a few selected
'literally true' parts.

>Clay pots are essential vehicles to transmit God's love to us, but God is
>mystery that always transcends the clay pots in which that love is
>contained.
>
>This distinction, or the failure to make it, lies at the heart of many of
>the issues that divide the Church around the world today. The issue of
>the ordination of women is long since agreed on in this country

not quite! - and of course no attempt is made by anyone at any
objective review of how this PC policy is working out. Not by their fruits
shall ye know them, but by their solemnly expressed PC motives.
Appeasement of political causes is the order of the day.

RR's drift appears to be along the lines 'PC ideology prevailed
regarding ordination of women - all dissent has been scattered; by analogy,
it must be right to ordain known hx'. This is spurious reasoning.

>, but still not in others. The issue of same-sex relationships

This is scarcely controversial compared with the live issue of
whether to *ordain* known hx. For him to run now this red herring of a
general "issue of same-sex relationships" makes me suspicious.

>will be a source of controversy for years to come, as will the way we
>relate to people of other faiths.

This tricky alignment would, if open to discussion, let in the
question of whether one chooses hx orientation, as one chooses a faith
(Islam etc). The militant hx, and their front-wimps e.g Bp Coles of Chch,
normally make out that hx & lesbians are congenitally deviant rather than
having any choice in the matter. (This is a lie, as shown in

N & B Whitehead 1999 'My Genes Made Me Do it! - a scientific look
at sexual orientation' Huntington House Publishers, P O Box 53788,
Lafayette LA 70505

ISBN 1-56384-165-7
I read the MS and was impressed. Apart from the unaccountable
omission of J Satinover, it seems to me a very valuable review of the
relevant science. Key facts were dishonestly evaded by Bp Coles'
long-drawn-out 'inquiry'. Even worse, Bp Coles suppressed the fact that
the Whiteheads had given that 'inquiry' several copies of their earlier
book.)

>Contrary positions on all these issues are taken by many who find in
>Scripture supportive evidence they regard as incontrovertible.
>
>Jesus displayed profound respect for Scripture and tradition, yet at the
>same time was willing to go beyond the tradition when the love of God
>required it. He caused great offence, for example, to the guardians of
>the Jewish law by healing people on the Sabbath. And when his disciples
>plucked grain to eat on the Sabbath, Jesus reminded his critics that the
>Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath. Tradition is a
>clay pot; the love of God is the real treasure we allow to shape our lives
>and our decisions.

This is specious. The term 'clay pot' is so vague, and has so
little defn from usage that RR feels able to slap anything he dislikes into
the category 'clay pot' - and keep out of it anything he wishes to
cherish.

>Jesus also said that the whole of the law is summed up in two great
>commandments : you should love God with all your heart, and your neighbour
>as yourself. This, I believe, is the touchstone for separating divine
>treasure from clay containers : we should allow the love of God
>experienced in relationship with each one of us, and between ourselves and
>our neighbours, to guide us to the truth.

fair enough - indeed v good; but how does this point to RR's
implied conclusion in favour of hx in ministry?

>This dynamic of relationship with God over-riding tradition was seen also
>in tonightís reading from Acts 10. Peter had been requested by Cornelius,
>the Gentile centurion from Caesarea, to come to see him. Peter said to
>Cornelius that it was unlawful for a Jew to associate with a Gentile, but
>he had come without objection because the vision of the great white sheet
>with all manner of creatures in it had taught him he should not regard as
>profane any creature that God had made.
>
>Peter went on to say (vv 34,35) that he now understood that God showed no
>partiality but that in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is
>right is acceptable to God. As Peter proclaimed the Gospel to Cornelius
>and his friends, the Holy Spirit fell upon them, and they were baptised.

The famous declaration in Galatians makes clear there's to be no
victimisation of Gentiles, slaves, women, etc. Nobody important was
advocating victimisation or excommunication of women, or of hx - a
non-issue, so far as I'm aware.

But then RR elides that into the v different q of ordination.

>The same dynamic of relationship with God over-riding tradition was seen
>very clearly with regard to the ordination of women. Synod after synod in
>the 1960s and 1970s debated the issue, at times hotly and divisively. On
>one side of the debate were impassioned appeals to the clear teachings of
>scripture and tradition to oppose such a move. On the other were equally
>strong appeals to be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit.
>
>Yet both during the debate and after the decision you would hear people
>saying : ìYou know, Iím totally opposed to women in the priesthood in
>principle, but Iíd be quite happy for our Rachel/Jane/Barbara to be
>priested because sheís such a wonderful minister of the love of Godî.
>Here was a clear example that what the rule-book was saying to people in
>their head was being over-ridden by the love and gifts of God they saw in
>women they knew who felt called to the priesthood.
>
>In retrospect we can see that with total clarity, but the Church has not
>yet reached the position where we can say the same with regard to
>homosexual people in ministry.

this is naked question-begging; the form of language implies that
hx will be ordained, and that when we see with clarity in hindsight, that
will look OK. He immediately flags away any duty to support this
assumption with any reasoning.

> There are significant numbers of such people in ministry in this country
>and around the world. It is not my desire tonight to argue for a
>particular conclusion on this topic.

Has he ever produced any argument on the issue? Or is it just
vague woolly PC hints all the way down?

> Rather let me share some thoughts that might help us to handle the
>ongoing debate.
>
>In my experience exactly the same dynamic is operative as in the debate
>over the ordination of women. Itís a case of rule-books versus
>relationships, or clay pots versus divine treasure. People say : ìIím
>totally opposed to homosexuality, but I have to admit that Dave/Jill/Bruce
>is such a good priest to us that I wouldnít want to see him/her leave this
>parish.î

I wonder whether anyone has actually said to this effect. And if
anyone has, why has such an individual utterance any particular authority?
Why is it not an example of an 'clay pot' sounding?

>Following the Lambeth Conference of 1998 I was the first bishop back to
>Canberra and it fell to me to report on the difficult Lambeth debate on
>same-sex relationships. In an article I mentioned that all our three
>children had a gay godfather. Two were Anglican priests, and two were
>living in stable same-sex relationships, one of more than 30 yearsí
>duration. We had not known that any of them were gay at the time we asked
>them to be godfathers to our children. Our choice was made on the basis
>of their Christian faith, not their orientation. Knowing what we now know
>we would still ask them to be godparents.
>
>Predictably I took some flak for this revelation, but there were also some
>astonishing things shared with me. One 75-year old woman took me aside at
>a parish event and told me she had been a member of the Anglican Church
>all her life and this was the first time she had felt welcome within it.

He had moved on to the issue or ordaining hx but has now reverted
in a disorderly fashion to whether lesbians feel welcome in the church. Is
this just sloppiness, or is he trying to confuse?

>But what was even more astonishing was a few weeks later when I went out
>to do a confirmation service in a parish where the priest would have been
>one of the strongest opponents of homosexuality. He was telling me about
>two of the candidates he was presenting for confirmation. One was 58 and
>had recently married a woman of 28 who had been his daughter-in-law. When
>her marriage to his son had failed he had taken the young woman into his
>house because she had nowhere else to live, and the relationship had
>developed from there. At that point in the story the priest
>kind of quasi-subliminal OK noises like this are hints of woolly thinking
and PC attitudes

>looked into the sky and said ìYou know, Bishop, I have to say this
>relationship doesnít fit my view of what is right, but there are some
>things I think you just have to leave in the hands of Godî. I was so
>moved I could hardly speak and, refraining from drawing the obvious
>parallel, I went with him into church to worship.

No rule or even strong tradition was being challenged by this
marriage. That one priest said he had felt it wrong is NOT a parallel to
the informed opinion of H Turner + large numbers against ordaining hx.

>
>What all these situations seem to me to be saying - Jesus and the Law,
>Peter and Cornelius, the ordination of women, and now the issue of
>same-sex relationships - is that the treasure we hold from God is in clay
>pots. The pots are important vehicles whereby to transmit the faith but
>in the final analysis the relationship we have with God and with each
>other is the true treasure we seek.
>
>The issue of same-sex relationships is not one we should force a decision on.

That's an interesting desire - does he think his liberalism would
lose if the issue of ordaining hx were brought to a formal decision soon?

> As the Australian priest said : there are some things we ought to leave
>in the hands of God, and this I believe to be one of them. At the
>previous Lambeth Conference in 1988 one of the most insightful speakers
>was Elizabeth Templeton, a lay theologian from the Church of Scotland, who
>was speaking in the ecumenical debate.
>
>She said that ecumenism could best be pursued by attending to the process
>rather than the content.

The Narzees did not say differently: as far as I've been able to
ascertain, they always acted according to law (having taken the trouble to
rig the laws as they wished). Their procedures were attended to ...

> The process she recommended was that instead of constructing some
>uncomfortable amalgam of different church formularies, we should rather be
>willing to travel together trusting that God would lead us to a truth that
>lay ahead of where any of us had yet got to.

How much trust do we observe in the pro-hx activists? Are they
willing to consider, or even to hear, our ideas? Have you experienced them
treating you on an assumption of good will? Haven't you noticed them
calling 'homophobic' at the drop of a hat anyone who tries to discuss any
aspect of their ideology?

>In order to take that journey, however, she said we have to be able to
>acknowledge that our current positions are merely provisional points along
>the way. When she spoke of provisionality at an ecumenical summit in
>London, however, Cardinal Ratzinger rose up and said: ìMadam, if I were to
>accept that the formularies of my church were merely provisional, the
>whole enterprise of catholic truth would be at riskî. ìAnd many a good
>Calvinist would agree with him,î said Elizabeth, ìbut I do notî.
>
>That too is a story about treasure in clay pots. For us as Christians our
>treasure is experienced just as it was by Jesusí disciples

I fail to see it so. Their circumstances & experiences were
extremely different from ours.

>, and has been by followers ever since.

A fan of martyrs could find this purported equation offensive. It
virtually abolishes church history, in a sense.

> In a recent Sunday's Gospel (John 6. 56-69) Jesus said that he was the
>bread of life, and that the words he spoke were spirit and life. Many of
>his hearers found the words too hard to believe, and went away. So Jesus
>asked the twelve : ìWill you also go away?î, to which Peter replied :
>ìLord, to whom else can we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we
>have come to know and believe that you are the Holy One of God.î
>
>That is the central treasure of our faith. When we find that treasure in
>Christ, and put everything else aside to attain it, then life is changed,
>our relationships with others are changed, and things that divide us are
>seen afresh through the eyes of Godís love.

He implies that such an approach to faith will dissolve objections
to ordaining hx. This type of un-argued insinuation makes me deeply
suspicious of him.

But the possibility remains, on the face of this waffle, that he
actually does see the sense of Harold Turner etc. on the subject.

Even those who go out of their way to promote ordination of hx have
been known, when asked "would you want your parish minister living in the
manse with a hx partner?", to admit they would not want their children thus
exposed. Why aren't anecdotal statements to that effect ranked similarly
to the anon statements cited by RR?

BTW I notice the latest Baptist paper has 4 apparently ordinary
Baptists insisting (against what initiative to the contrary, I don't know)
that hx are welcome to worship alongside us ornery sinners. In my
experience this was not at issue (and it never has been with me nor with
anyone I know).

Conflation of the two issues 'hx in the church' and 'ordination of
hx' is a standard deliberate tactic of militant hxism.

The 'clay pot' analogy is of limited helpfulness here. At this
rate, anyone who says s/he's acting 'through the eyes of God's love' is
justified in trying to break down any church organisation or tradition -
St Stephen's, Q Victoria, the Mother's Union, any creed, any rank or title
e.g Archbishop, ... Oliver Cromwell was fine, at this rate.

In a time of rapid radical change, perverts are likely to make
illegitimate gains by taking advantage of the naive & woolly-minded. They
will do so with the assistance - if only unintended - of such as RR.
This is not a time for appeasement. The closely reasoned, Bible-based
arguments of Harold Turner should be heeded rather than ignored.

R

In the "debate" (hardly worthy of that name) whether to ordain
homosexuals & lesbians, the word 'homophobic' is used as a purported
king-hit insult. I'm glad to see a vicar writing

>Homophobia is defined
>as an irrational fear or hatred of homosexuals, and I do not have an
>irrational fear or hatred of such people.

Please find attached a letter to (atheist & wimp) Brian Edwards
about the term 'homophobia'.

-
Robt Mann
consultant ecologist
P O Box 28878 Remuera, Auckland 1005, New Zealand
(9) 524 2949

524 2949
Dr Brian Edwards
Radio NZ 17-5-97
P O Box 2209
Auckland

Dear Brian Edwards,

You read out this morning a message from one Dominic about the term "homophobia". I had written to you some months previously about this and been somewhat surprised to get no response. In case that letter did not reach you, I reiterate much of it now. I think the discussion this morning hardly got to the point.

My view of this new term is different from the purist philology of Dominic. Realising that you are trained in psychology, I point out that the phobias are a significant category of illness, characterised by debilitating irrational fearfulness. If there exists a particular version of this psychopathology with homosexuals as its fixation, I have yet to learn of it, but in any case the term "homophobia" should be reserved for that condition (be it hypothetical or real).

Warren Lindberg, Kevin Hague, and their whole set of homosexual activists wallowing in the pseudo-victim role, instead use "homophobia" with not only the meaning which you stated - prejudice against homosexuals - but mainly a further, completely illegitimate meaning: they misuse this term "homophobia" to smear, ad hominem, any misgivings about homosexuality as a political cause.

To get down to reality, criticising the politically militant homosexuals such as Lindberg has several good grounds quite aside from any prejudice.

They promote homosexuality amongst adolescents by misrepresentations of human biology. They promulgate falsehoods about "safe" sex which are gravely misleading. They grossly exaggerate the efficacy of condoms against HIV, in attempt to continue the promiscuous homosexual lifestyle which was severely challenged by the onset of the AIDS epidemic. The Men's Centre North Shore, on whose committee I serve, could provide a couple of expert interviewees from whom an interview could elicit the truth on these important issues.

To conclude back on the philology theme:
the word "homophobia" hijacks an important form of word which should be preserved for its valid & important function: Z-phobia means irrational, debilitating fear of Z. Misuse of psychiatric diagnoses for ideological purposes had a sordid history under Stalin and Hitler, and should find no place in New Zealand public health discussions.

You should at least desist from using this lie-in-the-language "homophobia", and preferably become active in explaining how it is wrong. Lies in the language are among the most horribly effective and are central in the Goebbels tradition which, to a most dismaying extent, perverts today's world. Try compiling a list of lies-in-the-language: "reclaimed land" (meaning filled-in water or wetland) etc. . . . [ also: Rightsizing. Reforms (Rogernomics, Ruthanasia). Women's liberation. Repatriation (export of profits for foreign investors). Feminism. ]

Yours sincerely
Robert Mann

7-6-97: Edw read out the Times parts, repeatedly saying this was very interesting, but closing with "I think I'll leave it there [i.e. declining the MC interview idea] and I don't necessarily agree with it".

14-6-97: Edw read out a letter from Lindberg to the effect "we've pulled it off anyway - the word means as we wish - we've won that battle".

A month or two later, Edw roundly condemned the term ‘homophobia’ as an utterly illegitimate word-trick. I felt it was - just - OK for him at that time to refrain from mentioning anything of the history of his attitude to it.

Independent

Bush holds his summit amid the toxic waste sites

Georgia beauty spot chosen by President for G8 summit lies along one of
America's most polluted stretches of coast

By Michael Williams in Sea Island, Georgia and Geoffrey Lean
16 May 2004

President George Bush is to bring leaders of the world's richest to Sea
Island next month to showcase his "environmental stewardship".

But the island - the most beautiful of the sub-tropical Golden Isles off
the Georgia coast - is in one of the most polluted areas of the American
South. Glynn County, which contains Sea Island - the site of next
month's G8 summit - is home to 16 hazardous waste plants.

A nearby polluting paper mill is being closed down while the leaders of
the world's richest countries, including Tony Blair, are in the
neighbourhood.
The locals describe the island as "somewhere between Venice and heaven".

The 18th-century colonists from England thought it was the Garden of
Eden, and it certainly must have seemed like paradise to the President's
parents, George Snr and Barbara Bush, when they honey-mooned here 50
years ago.

Bush family sentiment is thought to be one of the reasons President Bush
is bringing the world's leaders here for the summit on 8 June. The salt
marshes and lazy creeks are also host to a proliferation of vegetation
and wildlife, making the area possibly the most environmentally
important on America's East Coast.

There are more than 200 species of birds here, including the
yellow-bellied sapsucker, the boat-tailed grackle and the northern
cardinal. Deer and wild turkeys inhabit interior forests of pine,
magnolia and ancient moss veiled oaks. Egrets, pelicans and herons skim
the surf. On moonlit summer nights, endangered loggerhead turtles creep
on to the beaches to lay thousands of eggs.

The summit's website says that the President wants to "showcase the
complementary benefits of environmental stewardship and a strong economy".

But critics will point out this is another case where the environmental
facts belie the President's words. For there is an unhappy parallel with
Venice, in that ecological danger lurks over the horizon.

Of the 16 hazardous waste sites within 10 miles of the island, four are
so contaminated they have been designated for government treatment
programmes. They include a tidal creek and landfill dump full of a
banned pesticide; a former chemical factory that dumped toxic mercury in
local creeks; and a defunct wood preservatives factory.

Before the clean-up began, shrimpers used to dock their boats in one of
the creeks so the pollution would kill the barnacles on their hulls.

The most visible sign of pollution is the Hercules factory, emblemised
by its two tall stainless steel chimneys gorging large clouds of vapour
over the causeway leading to Sea Island. Its smell - a cocktail of glue
and stewed cabbage - hangs like a pall.

The factory makes a variety of things, including paper and resin
products, but the G8 leaders won't smell it, since it will be closed
down during their stay for "holidays".

The locals are resigned to it. Emerson Gay, a retired policeman, says:
"Some folks say the smell is the smell of money, which is why it's
lasted so long. At least the stuff they're burning in it now is not as
nasty as it was."

But the summit - and George Bush's boasts - are unlikely to make things
much better. Virtually none of the millions spent on the G8 will find
its way into environmental projects. On the road approach to Sea Island
last week they were busy stuffing in mature palm trees and erecting
quaint lighting. But there isn't much else.

Gone are the dreams of a large pot of money to clean up the environment.
"I'd say stuff hasn't gone much faster than the path we were already
on," says the Glynn County Commissioner, Cap Fendig. "No monies have hit
here. Most of our stuff was for the police department."

The only substantial benefit has come from the telephone company Bell
South, which has just completed a $7m (£4m) upgrade for fear of
embarrassing world leaders phoning home with their previous creaking system.

Indeed many are concerned about serious further damage to the coast when
so many security men and personnel are crammed into such an ecologically
sensitive area. So far, the only major concession is that those guarding
the beach in front of where the world leaders will stay have been told
not to trample on turtle nests.

"I have no concept of why in the world we do this event whatsoever,"
said Judy Jennings, a Savannah-based environmental campaigner. "I see no
reason why we invite thousands of people to trample over the beach so
eight men can get together and talk. It's an atrocious use of our
environmental assets."

LOOSE CANON (publication date 16/03/04)
Daily Post Rotorua

The date of my induction as Vicar of Rotorua was 13 March 1980. The day
is observed in the Anglican Church in New Zealand as a memorial to two men
of the Maori race - Kereopa and Te Manihera. Manihera was not the birth
name of the latter. At his baptism he took the name of the famous
Missionary Robert Maunsell who translated the Old Testament of the Bible
and the Book of Common Prayer into Maori at Maraetai (now known as Port
Waikato). The Maori transliteration is Manihera. As Poutama he was an
important chief of Ngati Ruanui of Hawera and the first of his tribe to
become a Christian.

He was captured twice, once in a Waikato raid and taken to Tamaki, and
again in a Ngapuhi raid on Tamaki. While being taken north he was put on a
ship that was also taking The Rev. Walter Lawry to Tonga. Lawry bought his
freedom and took him to Tonga. During the voyage Lawry's son was washed
overboard and Poutama rescued him. After 18 months Poutama returned from
Tonga to Waokena near Hawera and was head teacher of his tribe. The
Reverend Richard Taylor wrote of him: "He was always conspicuous for piety
and attention to his duties and instead of his first love growing cold,
his love appeared to increase with time; indeed his love of Christ was
written upon his countenance".

His commitment to his faith and the Gospel led him to offer to go to the
traditional enemies of his tribe at Taupo, to share the Gospel of peace.
Sadly, significant and unresolved grievances existed between the two
tribes. Kereopa who also lived at Waokena offered to accompany Te
Manihera on the journey. Their decision was made on Christmas Eve of 1846
at a hui that attracted more than two thousand from many tribes in that
area. Richard Taylor records that they were commended to the Most High
and all were deeply affected by the solemnity of the occasion.

The two men were advised by Enau, the brother of Herekiekie, the chief in
that part of Taupo, to postpone their journey when he might be able to
ensure their safety by accompanying them. They waited but became
impatient when Enau did not return. Their sense of urgency was fomented
by their conviction that they were tapu or devoted to the Lord.

They left on 6 February and took a circuitous route to Rotorua where they
spent several days with Thomas Chapman the CMS missionary here. Once more
at Moutere they were again advised to change their destination, and
Manihera gained the impression that he would not survive his mission. At
Waiariki he preached a sermon filled with the passion of growing
conviction that before the sun had set he would be the inhabitant of
another world.

Accompanied by a group of young men from Waiariki they reached Tokaanu.
On hearing of the men's approach, the classical obligations of utu were
recognised, and a small party was sent out led by an elderly chief
Huiatahi. They waited in ambush. As the two came within range they were
shot. Kerepoa fell dead. Te Manihera was wounded; he was blinded, praying
for his adversaries and assuring his companions that all was light within.
Giving his New Testament and his missionary journal to one of the young men
who accompanied him he died as the sun set.

The bodies were returned to Waiariki to be buried near the pa. The words
of the first century Father of the African Church Tertullian were
recalled, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church".
Discussion then took place as to how the deaths might be avenged.
Subsequent discussions resolved the issue "that judgement be left with
God".

Huiatahi who had led the attack agreed to give land on which a Church
might be built. On completion Richard Taylor was invited back. Many came
for baptism and it is recorded that he conducted a further thirty
baptisms, celebrated the Eucharist and appointed Hemapo, Herekiekie's
brother a teacher for the Church. Taylor's notes were completed saying
that later developments at Tokaanu were "the fruits of Manihera's death".

Footnote: In writing this I have drawn heavily on material produced by the
Anglican Provincial Commission on Prayer Book Revision in a publication
entitled "For All the Saints".

Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004

Critics slam Vatican-US promotion of GM foods
Philippa Hitchen, Rome

The Tablet

The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to solve world hunger was
heavily promoted last weekend at a conference held at the Pontifical
Gregorian University in Rome. The 24 September meeting, entitled "Feeding a
Hungry World: the Moral Imperative of Biotechnology", was organised by the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the American embassy to the Holy See. The
conference came under fire from critics of GM foods who said it was
hopelessly stacked in favour of the controversial new technology.

The American ambassador to the Holy See, James Nicholson, opened the meeting
with a declaration that the key objective of GM technology was to help the
1.5 billion people suffering from hunger and malnutrition, mainly in the
developing world. This is an urgent moral issue, he said, because 15,000
men, women and children died each day of hunger-related causes. The biotech
industry can solve these problems by discovering ways of producing
healthier, more nutritious crops which will help poor farmers grow more and
better food using less labour and fewer dangerous pesticides, he added, and
the Church's role was crucial in convincing people of this moral imperative.

The ambassador's words set the tone for the rest of the day, with speakers
lining up to focus on the benefits of biotechnology in increasing crop
yields, providing greater resistance to pests and extreme weather conditions
and greatly decreasing the need for pesticides as compared with traditional
farming methods. Speaker after speaker insisted that genetic modification of
staple foods had been going on for some 10,000 years, ever since humans
turned to farming instead of hunting and gathering for survival.

Cross-breeding of plant varieties and species and the selection of strains
with favourable characteristics has a long history and occurs naturally in
the wild as well as in the laboratories, it was argued. Modern transgenic
foods - produced by crossing genetic material from one organism to another -
are subjected to the most stringent testing and there has not been a single
case of illness or risk to human health, the speakers insisted.

The director of the influential AgBio foundation, Dr C.S. Prakash, told the
conference that with the global population rising from fewer than 100
million at the time of Christ to a projected 9 billion people in 2050, all
countries must find ways of increasing food production. Biotechnology can
help tackle dwindling water resources, loss of forests, agricultural land
and vital topsoil, as well as a dramatic drop in human resources in
countries worst affected by Aids, Prakash argued. GMOs are "not the only
answer to the world's hunger problem", he said, but they are an important
"tool in the toolbox" available to mankind.

Dr Peter Raven, director of Missouri Botanical Gardens and a member of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences, criticised opponents of GMO for using
"emotive and colourful language" such as "Frankenfoods" and "Terminator
Genes" to describe the biotech industry. He accused the London-based
Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), which has criticised
the new technology, of spreading unfounded fears and politically motivated
opposition to GM foods. The CIIR, he said, was "not officially affiliated to
the Vatican and perhaps not even to the Catholic Church".

Fr Gonzalo Miranda, dean of the bioethics school at the Regina Apostolorum
university, set out the theological case for the use of biotech foods in the
developing world. Quoting from Genesis, Gaudium et Spes - the Second Vatican
Council's 1965 Constitution on the Church in the Modern World - and selected
papal speeches, he outlined his view of man as "the centre and the high
point" of Creation, who is called upon not just to "protect" but also to
"cultivate" nature according to the means at his disposal.

Fr Miranda did refer to the 1989 papal pronouncement that "we are not yet
able to measure" the consequences of an unchecked use of genetic
manipulation, but said he felt confident that in the intervening 15 years
there has been enough testing for it to be asserted that the benefits of GM
foods far outweigh any potentially negative consequences.

Conspicuous by their absence from the conference were speakers from the many
religious communities and faith-based development agencies who question the
long-term social and economic impact of GM foods on poor communities. Many
agencies are deeply disturbed by the prospect of farmers in the developing
world becoming increasingly dependent on a few big multinational companies
for all their patented GM seeds and fertilisers.

The Columban missionary and anti-GMO campaigner Fr Sean McDonagh, who worked
for two decades in the Philippines, told The Tablet that patenting seeds was
"a fundamental attack on the understanding of life as a gift from God" to be
shared with rich and poor alike. He recalled Pope John Paul II's words for
the Jubilee of agricultural workers in November 2000, when he stated that
the application of biotechnology "cannot be evaluated solely on the basis of
immediate economic interests". And to Italian farmers two years later the
Pope said that if modern farming techniques do not "reconcile themselves
with the simple language of nature in a healthy balance, the life of man
will run ever greater risks".

Some observers asked why, if the meeting was really about the moral and
ethical challenge of world hunger, there was no real discussion of other
widely held perspectives. If the scientists were so sure of the benefits of
their technologies, why were they so unwilling to engage in serious debate
with their critics from the faith communities?

A Vatican conference on this same subject last November concluded with an
appeal for more study and more cooperative effort to end the "climate of
ideological conflict" around the GM debate. By failing to address adequately
the concerns of so many church groups working with the poorest people and
communities, this latest meeting ran the risk of leaving the two sides more
deeply divided than ever.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4746289-111414,00.html

'Science cannot provide all the answers'

Why do so many scientists believe in God?

Tim Radford
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian

Colin Humphreys is a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. That is, he is professor
of materials science at Cambridge. He believes in the power of science to
explain the nature of matter. He believes that humans - like all other
living things - evolved through the action of natural selection upon random
mutation. He is also a Baptist. He believes in the story of Moses, as
recounted in the biblical book of Exodus. He believes in it enough to have
explored Egypt and the Holy Land in search of natural or scientific
explanations for the story of the burning bush, the 10 plagues of Egypt,
the crossing of the Red Sea and the manna that fell in
the wilderness -and then written a book about it.

"I believe that the scientific world view can explain almost anything," he
says. "But I just think there is another world view as well."

Tom McLeish is professor of polymer physics at Leeds. Supermarket plastic
bags are polymers, but so are spider's silk, sheep's wool, sinew and flesh
and bone. His is the intricate world of what is, and how it works, down to
the molecular level. He delights in the clarity and power of science,
precisely because it is questioning rather than dogmatic. "But the
questions that arise, and the methods we use to ask them, can be traced
back to the religious tradition in which I find myself. Doing science is
part of what it means in that tradition to be human. Because we find
ourselves in this puzzling, extraordinary universe of pain
and beauty, we will also find ourselves able to explore it, by adopting the
very successful methods of science," he says.

Russell Stannard is now emeritus professor of physics at the Open
University. He is one of the atom-smashers, picking apart the properties
of matter, energy, space and time, and the author of a delightful series of
children's books about tough concepts such as relativity theory. He
believes in the power of science. He not only believes in God, he believes
in the Church of England.

He, like Tom McLeish, is a lay reader. He has con tributed Thoughts for
the Day to Radio 4, those morning homilies on the mysteries of existence.
Does it worry him that science - his science - could be about to explain
the whole story of space, time matter and energy without any need for a
Creator? "No, because a starting point you can have is: why is there
something rather than nothing? Why is there a world? Now I cannot see how
science could ever provide an answer," he says.

Stannard will be one of a small group of scientists and theologians, having
a go at the question next week in Birmingham. The Science and Religion
Forum, founded by a group of scientists 25 years ago, meets on Monday to
discuss questions such as the place of humans in the universe. They are
not likely to actually come up with an answer, but they will certainly give
the question a bashing. The forum embraces what one of its begetters,
Arthur Peacocke, pioneer of DNA research in Britain, called "wistful
agnostics" and sceptics, as well as Christians and people from other
faiths. "It's about how we can worship a creator
God who is creating now, and still hold on to the scientific world view as
we understand it," says Phil Edwards, who trained in physics but is now a
chaplain to the Bolton Institute.

The subject - the place of humans in the universe - is a challenge. To the
scientific way of thinking, humans no more have a "place" in the scheme of
things than hamsters or harp seals. The universe itself may be an
incomprehensible event, and life a so far unexplained one, but scientists
see no ladder of creation with humans at the pinnacle. They can see no
"purpose" in being. We are here because we are here, a lucky accident -
lucky for us - but there was nothing inevitable about the evolution of
humanity, or its survival. God is not part of the explanation.

That is how scientists have grown to think, whether they come from a
religious background or not. But modern science did not emerge 400 years
ago to challenge religion, the orthodoxy of the past 2,000 years.
Generations of thinkers and experimenters and observers - often themselves
churchmen - wanted to explain how God worked his wonders. Modern physics
began with a desire to explain the clockwork of God's creation. Modern
geology grew at least partly out of searches for evidence of Noah's flood.
Modern biology owes much to the urge to marvel at the intricacy of Divine
providence.

But the scientists - a word coined only in 1833 - who hoped to find God
somehow painted Him out of the picture. By the late 20th century,
physicists were confident of the history of the universe back to the first
thousandth of a second, and geneticists and biochemists were certain that
all living things could be traced back to some last universal common
ancestor that lived perhaps 3.5bn years ago. A few things - what actually
happened in the Big Bang; how living, replicating things emerged from a
muddle of organic compounds - remain riddles. But few now consider these
riddles to be incapable of solutions. So although the debate did not start
out as science versus religion, that is how many people now see it.

Paradoxically, this is not how many scientists see it. In the US,
according to a survey published in Nature in 1997, four out of 10
scientists believe in God. Just over 45% said they did not believe, and
14.5% described themselves as doubters or agnostics. This ratio of
believers to non-believers had not changed in 80 years. Should anybody be
surprised?

"A lot of people are surprised. I think people have grown up to believe
that science and Christianity are at loggerheads, and that is what the
average man in the street believes," says Colin Humphreys. "I think you can
explain the universe without invoking God at all. And you can explain
humans without invoking God at all, I think. But where I differ from the
people who say, OK, the universe started with a big bang - if it did, it's
not too sure but let's say it did - and everything else was chance event,
then I would say that God is the God of chance and He had His plan and
purpose, which is working out very subtly, but through
these chance events."

He, like most scientists do in this debate, mentions Richard Dawkins, the
Oxford zoologist and professor of the public understanding of science,
whose rationalist stance is well known, and vigorously argued.

The real argument here is not about the importance of science, or its value
to humanity. "You have to recognise that science is enormously powerful in
going for the jugular, reducing complexity to its simple structures," says
Tom McLeish. "But it puts it back together again, and that is important to
stress, because, from Keats onwards, we have been accused of unweaving the
rainbow, and never weaving it back again. That is not true."

Doubt, expressed most potently 3,000 years ago in the biblical book of Job,
is the greatest scientific tool ever invented, he says. To do good
science, you have to doubt everything, including your ideas, your
experiments and your conclusions. "People like Richard Dawkins
characterise religion as doubtless, tub-thumping, blind certainty. But it
isn't like that; he knows it is not like that. There is Job, on his
ash-heap, doubting everything, but wondering where the light comes from,
and how the hail forms."

Russell Stannard says that when he became a reader in the Church of England
40 years ago, he was considered a bit of an oddball. But things have
changed. "You get a few scientists like Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins
[professor of chemistry at Oxford] who at least talk as though they cannot
understand how a scientist could possibly be religious. But I would say
that, generally speaking, throughout the scientific community there is
considerable acceptance that, OK, although one might not be a religious
person oneself, one's fellow scientist can be."

Colin Humphreys says that quite a number of his colleagues at Cambridge are
also believers. "My impression is - and it is just an impression - that
there are many more scientists on the academic staff who are believers than
arts people."

Tom McLeish says something similar. He cheerfully offers several reasons
why that might be so, one of which might be called the postmodernist
effect. "Our dear friends in the humanities do get themselves awfully
confused about whether the world exists, about whether each other exists,
about whether words mean anything. Until they have sorted out whether cats
and dogs exist or not, or are only figments in the mind of the reader, let
alone the writer, then they are going to have problems talking about God."

Within biology itself, there is an intense argument about evolutionary
origins of qualities such as altruism - the sacrifice of self for others -
and the enduring belief in God or gods, and an afterlife, with the
possibility of some kind of calling to account.
Robert Winston, the fertility pioneer, Labour peer and professor at
Hammersmith Hospital, is Jewish. This represents a huge tradition of
values that are important to him. At the age of 30 he went back to the
synagogue because, he felt, he needed the discipline of Judaism, although
this is not quite the same as believing in God, and he confesses to having
been through various phases of observance. In the last chapter of his book
The Human Instinct he said he felt it was very likely that spirituality -
the feeling of something beyond mortal life - had been important in
survival during the Ice Age, and through periods of great deprivation.

"The great question is whether or not that spirituality is God-given, or
whether it actually evolved because it was needed," he says. "I'm still
sitting on the fence."

Stannard has fewer doubts. "I would say that God does take a personal
interest in us. If you were allowed one word to describe God by, that word
would be love. That does not come from evolution by natural selection, it
seems to come from somewhere else, and the whole idea of morals does not
naturally arise out of evolution. Biologists will talk about altruism, but
they are using it in a very technical sense, which is not the religious
idea of altruism. It is more a case of you scratch my back and I will
scratch yours."

Richard Dawkins, however, remains unmoved. Is there a limit to what
science can explain? Very possibly. But in that case, what on earth makes
anyone think religion can do any better? "I once reached this point when I
asked the then professor of astrophysics at Oxford to explain the origin of
the universe to me," he says. "He did so, and I posed my supplementary:
'Where did the laws of physics come from in the first place?' He smiled:
'Ah, now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand
over to our good friend the chaplain.' My immediate thought was, 'But why
the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef?' If science itself cannot
say where the laws of physics ultimately come from, there is no reason to
expect that religion will do any better and rather good reasons to think it
will do worse."

The place of humans in the universe - world faith perspectives, at the
University of Birmingham Selly Oak campus, September 8-10. www.srforum.org

Further reading

A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by Richard
Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin 2003) ISBN
0618335404

The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist's Discovery of the Extraordinary
Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories by Colin J Humphreys (Continuum
2003) ISBN 0826469523

The God Experiment: Can Science Prove the Existence of God? by Russell
Stannard (Hidden Spring 2000) ISBN 1587680076

http://www.latimer.org.nz/index.asp

Hate Speech
1 October 2004

Do you think that Bible preachers in New Zealand could ever face prison sentences for being faithful to the text of scripture?

Why not? They are in Sweden! And now the NZ government is looking at similar legislation here.

http://www.latimer.org.nz/index.asp

NZ Presbyterians reject Liberal 'gay' Agenda

24 September 2004

While we Anglican evangelicals hold our collective breath awaiting the Eames Commission's report (due 18 October), our Presbyterian cousins have been facing their own 'make or break' issue on the floor of the 2004 General Assembly. And they have succeeded against all odds!

Lambeth Commission begins to Leak 10 September 2004

By now the Lambeth Commission will have completed its final meeting (6th -9th September)before presenting its report on 18 October.

However, on the eve of their meeting advanced warnings of what the report might contain have been leaked. Newspaper reports have appeared in the Times and the Telegraph.

I'm grateful to Canon Hadlow for this from The Oxford Dictionary of
the Christian Church.

It is useful in many ways, but I wanted to point out its use of the
term 'creationism'. The totalitarian, bullying political tendency lately
called 'creation science' or 'creationism' uses confusion of language in
several key ways; watch out for further confusion.

R

SOUL. No precise teaching about the soul received general acceptance in the
Christian Church until the Middle Ages. The Scriptures are explicit only on
the facts of the distinction between soul and body, the creation of the soul
of the first man by the Divine breath, and its immortality. St. Paul's
teaching on the existence in the human person of body, soul and spirit (cf.
I Thessalonians 5:23) seems to imply a "trichotomy" rather than the
"diichotomy" of body and soul of later times; but in his language he is not
entirely consistent, and spirit sometimes denotes the principles of
supernatural life in contrast to the natural life of the soul, and on other
occasions signifies the higher powers (intellect and will), as opposed to
the lower faculties (emotions etc).

The indefiniteness of Scriptural teaching, in conjunction with the confusion
of pagan philosophy where materialistic, pantheistic, and dualistic
conceptions were held side by side, was reflected in the writings of the
early Fathers. Thus Tertullian supporting his view by the material imagery
of the parable of Dives and Lazarus, held the coporeity of the soul, an
error from which even St. Irenaus does not seem to have been entirely free.
Origen on the other hand, was led by his strongly Platonist leanings to
affirm its pre-existence and explained its confinement in a body as a
punishment for sins committed in its previous incorporeal state. In the
post-Nicene period, these divergences largely disappeared. St. Gregory of
Nyssa and St. Augustine found in the soul an image of the Trinity (Noverim
Te, noverim me) and in Nemiseus and Maxima Confessor the doctrine of the
Schoolmen is already developed in its main aspects.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, who follows Airtotle in his definition of
the human soul, the soul is an individual spiritual substance, the 'form' of
the body. Both, body and soul together, constitute the human unity, though
the soul may be severed from the body and lead a separate existence, as
happens after death. The separation, however, is not final as the soul, in
this differing from the angels, was made for the body. As it is purely
spiritual, the soul is not as Traducianism affirms, a product of the
generative, and therefore entirely material, powers of man, but each
individual soul is a new creation of God infused into the body destined for
it (Creationism).

This Scholastic teaching is that which has received the widest acceptance in
the Chritian Church. Among orthodox Lutheran and Calvinitic theologians,
however,Traduciansim has been commonly preferred to Creationism, as
conforming more nearly with the Reformation tenet of the depravity of human
nature. Modern Christian theologians tend to consider the doctrine of the
soul per se, but in relation to the whole Biblical doctrine of man.

Keith Locke MP
4-19-04

This complaint of yours fails to mention any numbers which would
give us the means to assess how serious was your inconvenience.

You say the USA stop was "supposed to take only two hours" but some
people will not be so stupid as to fail to notice that you refrain from
mentioning how long it actually turned out to be. You also fail to mention
*how* late the plane was into Ak. Since what you are objecting to is not
primarily the photographing & fingerprinting but mainly the waste of time,
a proper complaint will have to say *how much* time was involved.

It is annoying to receive such a deceitful moan from a member of
Parliament. You may try to excuse it by saying it was written by a PR
agent and they deceive by definition, as a matter of habit; I would not
accept that as an excuse. More likely, your lifelong mistrust of our
system of govt has made you constitutively dishonest.

I therefore renew my request to you to declare your attitude to the
Communism which you so long espoused. As a loyal New Zealander I believe
citizens are entitled to know whether members of Parliament are loyal.

Regards

R

>4 October 2004
>
>Locke asks Govt to lobby US over transit fingerprinting
>
>Green MP Keith Locke is asking the Government to lobby US authorities to
>drop the fingerprinting and photographing of Air New Zealand s transit
>passengers.
>
>I have written to Foreign Minister Phil Goff to tell him that the
>inconvenient process, which began on Friday, is causing anger among Air
>New Zealand passengers,  said Mr Locke, the Green Party s Foreign
>Affairs spokesperson.
>
>Mr Goff needs to tell the US that such a dragnet is a bad look for a
>country which claims to champion freedom.
>
>The plane I was on last night, Air New Zealand 1 from London, was late
>into Auckland this morning. The reason for that, as explained to
>passengers by the pilot, was the time taken in Los Angeles processing
>transit passengers into a secure lounge.
>
>A major discussion topic amongst passengers in the slow-moving queue
>last night was how to get from New Zealand to Britain without passing
>through the United States. This is not good for Air New Zealand, whose
>only service to Britain goes via America.
>
>American authorities insisted on fingerprinting and photographing all of
>the 180 transit passengers even though none of us actually entered the US.
>The refuelling stopover was supposed to take only two hours.
>
>I have asked Mr Goff to take the matter up directly with the American
>authorities, telling him that such pointless time-consuming and intrusive
>measures can only be bad for Air New Zealand s business and are creating
>ill-feeling towards America
>
>I have also asserted that we must demand that they act according to
>internationally accepted privacy principles, which means that such
>personal information is not collected without good cause. There is no
>valid reason for the blanket collection of transit passengers 
>fingerprints and photo images.
>
>US Homeland Security obviously believes its power to collect information
>extends not only excessively into the lives of US citizens but also into
>those of anyone who it can get its hands on. We should be worried about
>the uses such a huge volume of personal information may be put to. The
>Homeland Security system is error-ridden, as we saw last week when a plane
>was forced to land because former pop singer Yusuf Islam, AKA Cat Stevens,
>was on board,  said Mr Locke.
>
>You have received this because your contact details are on the Green Party
>mailing list as interested in Civil Aviation, Foreign Affairs, Human
>Rights or Security and Intelligence.

More moral leadership from the US and the UK.

Expect little from the EU or UN.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 1, 2004
Ending the Cycle of Debt

ne of the biggest reasons that very poor countries can't provide decent education and health care is that they are stuck in a cycle of debt owed to the Internatnal Monetary Fund, the World Bank and regional development banks, much of it dating to the 1970's. Most have paid back in interest more than they originally borrowed but haven't been able to touch the principal, and the cycle continues. Nigeria, for example, borrowed $5 billion, has paid back $16 billion and still owes $32 billion on the same debt.

Everyone involved agrees that this is unjust, and the members of the club of nations known as the G-8, whose finance ministers are meeting in Washington on Friday, have endorsed the concept of debt relief. But concrete proposals have been lacking until very recently. Now the United States is proposing to cancel the debts of the world's 30 poorest countries, and Britain has joined in. The rest of the G-8 should endorse this plan.

One motivation for President Bush's efforts in this area is that he wants the world to greatly reduce Iraq's debt. He has run into objections from other nations who rightly do not want to see a country like Iraq, with the world's second-largest oil reserves, treated better than, say, Burkina Faso. But Mr. Bush's proposal is also consistent with his longstanding campaign to get the banks to give money, rather than lend it, to the poorest nations.

Current efforts to reduce these debts are failing. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative began in 1996, and was expanded in 1999, with the purpose of eliminating $100 billion in debt from dozens of poor nations. But it has been too slow and limited. It has not reduced debts to manageable levels.

Poor countries deserve more help to get out from under loans made by banks awash in oil money; a great deal of that loan money went to corrupt dictators. Today, sub-Saharan Africa pays $1.30 in debt service for every dollar it gets in aid, four times what it spends on health care.

Rich countries have yet to agree on who should pay. Britain has offered to contribute 10 percent of the needed money, but other G-8 countries are not likely to be similarly generous. The Bush administration's solution, that the I.M.F. and the World Bank cover the costs, is the best one. Surprisingly, leaders of those institutions, who had previously opposed financing debt cancellation, now say they are willing. One reason is that the I.M.F. owns more than 103 million ounces of gold, a holdover from the gold standard days that it values at about 10 percent of the market price. By selling a small part of that gold at market rates or by simply revaluing it, the I.M.F. could finance debt cancellation painlessly.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Someone should fw this to Him Kill who has had a certain fascination with
Hitchens.

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=450

In enemy territory? An interview with Christopher Hitchens
Islamofascism and the Left

To many of Christopher Hitchens' old friends, he died on September 11th
2001. Tariq Ali considered himself a comrade of Christopher Hitchens for
over thirty years. Now he speaks about him with bewilderment. "On 11th
September 2001, a small group of terrorists crashed the planes they had
hijacked into the Twin Towers of New York. Among the casualties, although
unreported that week, was a middle-aged Nation columnist called Christopher
Hitchens. He was never seen again," Ali writes. "The vile replica
currently on offer is a double."

This encapsulates how many of Hitchens' old allies - a roll-call of the
left's most distinguished intellectuals, from Noam Chomsky to Alexander
Cockburn to (until his premature death last year) Edward Said - view his
transformation. On September 10th, he was campaigning for Henry Kissinger
to be arraigned before a war crimes tribunal in the Hague for his massive
and systematic crimes against humanity in the 1960s and 1970s. He was
preparing to testify in the Vatican - as a literal Devil's Advocate -
against the canonisation of Mother Theresa, who he had exposed as a
sadistic Christian fundamentalist, an apologist for some of the world's
ugliest dictatorships, and a knowing beneficiary of corporate fraud.
Hitchens was sailing along the slow, certain route from being the Left's
belligerent bad boy to being one of its most revered old men.

And then a hijacked plane flew into the Pentagon - a building which stands
just ten minutes' from Hitchens' home. The island of Manhattan became
engulfed in smoke. Within a year, Hitchens was damning his former comrades
as "soft on Islamic fascism", giving speeches at the Bush White House, and
describing himself publicly as "a recovering ex-Trotskyite." What happened?

When I arrive, he is reclining in his usual cloud of Rothmans' smoke and
sipping a whisky. "You're late," he says sternly. I begin to flap, and he
laughs. "It's fine," he says and I give him a big hug. On the morning of
September 11th, once I had checked everybody I knew in New York was safe, I
thought of Hitch who had become a friend since he encouraged my early
journalistic efforts. He had been campaigning against Islamic
fundamentalism for decades. I knew this assault this would blast him into
new political waters - and I buckled a mental seatbelt for the bumpy ride
ahead.

I decide to open with the most basic of questions. Where would he place
himself on the political spectrum today? "I don't have a political
allegiance now, and I doubt I ever will have again. I can no longer
describe myself as a socialist. I miss it like a lost limb." He takes a
sip from his drink. "But I don't regret anything. I'm still fighting for
Kissinger to be brought to justice. The socialist movement enabled
universal suffrage, the imposition of limits upon exploitation, and the
independence of colonial and subject populations. Its achievements were
real, and I'm glad I was part of it. Where it succeeded, one can be proud
of it. Where it failed - as in the attempt to stop the First World War and
later to arrest the growth of fascism - one can honourably regret its
failure."

He realised he was not a socialist any longer around three years ago.
"Often young people ask me for political advice, and when you are talking
to the young, you mustn't bullshit. It's one thing when you are sitting
with old comrades to talk about reviving the left, but you can't say that
to somebody who is just starting out. And what could I say to these
people? I had to ask myself - is there an international socialist movement
worth the name? No. No, there is not. Okay - will it revive? No, it
won't. Okay then - but is there at least a critique of capitalism that has
a potential for replacing it? Not that I can identify."

"If the answer to all these questions is no, then I have no right to go
around calling myself a socialist. It's more like an affectation." But
Hitch - there are still hundreds of causes on the left, even if the
?socialist' tag is outdated. You used to write about acid rain, the crimes
of the IMF and World Bank, the death penalty... It's hard to imagine you
writing about them now. He explains that he is still vehemently against
the death penalty and "I haven't forgotten the 152 people George Bush
executed in Texas." But the other issues? He seems to wave them aside as
"anti-globalisation" causes - a movement he views with contempt.

He explains that he believes the moment the left's bankruptcy became clear
was on 9/11. "The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who
represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for
liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy?
And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality
between America and the theocratic fascists." He cites the cover of one of
Tariq Ali's books as the perfect example. It shows Bush and Bin Laden
morphed into one on its cover. "It's explicitly saying they are equally
bad. However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this.
It is not the Taliban, and anybody - any movement - that cannot see the
difference has lost all moral bearings."

Hitchens - who has just returned from Afghanistan - says, "The world these
[al-Quadea and Taliban] fascists want to create is one of constant
submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they
enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure
totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we've seen. It's
the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society. To
stand equidistant between that and a war to remove it is?" He shakes his
head. I have never seen Hitch grasping for words before.

Some people on the left tried to understand the origins of al-Quadea as
really being about inequalities in wealth, or Israel's brutality towards
the Palestinians, or other legitimate grievances. "Look: inequalities in
wealth had nothing to do with Beslan or Bali or Madrid," Hitchens says.
"The case for redistributing wealth is either good or it isn't - I think it
is - but it's a different argument. If you care about wealth distribution,
please understand, the Taliban and the al Quaeda murderers have less to say
on this than even the most cold-hearted person on Wall Street. These
jihadists actually prefer people to live in utter, dire poverty because
they say it is purifying. Nor is it anti-imperialist: they explictly want
to recreate the lost Caliphate, which was an Empire itself."

He continues, "I just reject the whole mentality that says, we need to
consider this phenomenon in light of current grievances. It's an insult to
the people who care about the real grievances of the Palestinians and the
Chechens and all the others. It's not just the wrong interpretation of
those causes; it's their negation." And this goes for the grievances of the
Palestinians, who he has dedicated a great deal of energy to documenting
and supporting. "Does anybody really think that if every Jew was driven
from Palestine, these guys would go back to their caves? Nobody is blowing
themselves up for a two-state solution. They openly say, ?We want a
Jew-free Palestine, and a Christian-free Palestine.' And that would very
quickly become, ?Don't be a Shia Muslim around here, baby.'" He supports a
two-state solution - but he doesn't think it will solve the jihadist
problem at all.

Can he ever see a defeat for this kind of Islamofascism? "This kind of
theocratic fascism will never die because we belong to a very
poorly-evolved mammarian species. I'm a complete materialist in that
sense. We're stuck with being the product of a very sluggish evolution.
Our pre-frontal lobes are too small and our adrenaline glands are too big.
Our fear of the dark and of death is very intense, and people will always
be able to profit from that. But nor can I see this kind of fascism
winning. They couldn't even run Afghanistan. Our victory is assured - so
we can afford to be very scrupulous in our methods."

But can he see a time when this kind of jihadist fever will be as
marginalised as, say, Nazism is now, confined to a few reactionary
eccentrics? "Not without what that took - which is an absolutely
convincing defeat and discrediting. Something unarguable. I wouldn't
exclude any measure either. There's nothing I wouldn't do to stop this
form of fascism."

He is appalled that some people on the left are prepared to do almost
nothing to defeat Islamofascism. "When I see some people who claim to be
on the left abusing that tradition, making excuses for the most reactionary
force in the world, I do feel pain that a great tradition is being defamed.
So in that sense I still consider myself to be on the left." A few months
ago, when Bush went to Ireland for the G8 meeting, Hitchens was on a TV
debate with the leader of a small socialist party in the Irish dail. "He
said these Islamic fascists are doing this because they have deep-seated
grievances. And I said, 'Ah yes, they

have many grievances. They are aggrieved when they see unveiled woman.
And they are aggrieved that we tolerate homosexuals and Jews and free
speech and the reading of literature.'"

"And this man - who had presumably never met a jihadist in his life -
said, 'No, it's about their economic grievances.' Well, of course, because
the Taliban provided great healthcare and redistribution of wealth, didn't
they? After the debate was over, I said, 'If James Connolly [the Irish
socialist leader of the Easter Risings] could hear you defending these
theocratic fascist barbarians, you would know you had been in a fight. Do
you know what you are saying? Do you know who you are pissing on?"

Many of us can agree passionately with all that - but it is a huge leap to
actually supporting Bush. George Orwell - one of Hitchens' intellectual
icons - managed to oppose fascism and Stalinism from the left without ever
offering a word of support for Winston Churchill. Can't Hitch agitate for
a fight against Islamofascism without backing this awful President?

He explains by talking about the origins of his relationship with the
neconservatives in Washington. "I first became interested in the neocons
during the war in Bosnia-Herzgovinia [good one - that's what I call it
too - RM]. That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never
thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps,
the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as
acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be
indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists."

"It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene,
we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise
the region.'", he continues. "And I thought - destabilisation of fascist
regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of
undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of
General Franco?"

"It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status
quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing.
And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the
aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National
Socialism," he elaborates. "So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author
Ed Herman go from saying ?Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually
supporting[ital] Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region."

"That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons.
I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look
down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's
Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying
that we had to act." He continues, "Before, I had avoided them like the
plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about
Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans,
or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky
- looked ridiculous. So now I was interested."

There are two strands of conservatism on the US right that Hitch has
always opposed. The first was the Barry Goldwater-Pat Buchanan
isolationist right. They argued for "America First" - disengagement from
the world, and the abandonment of Europe to fascism. The second was the
Henry Kissinger right, which argued for the installation of pro-American,
pro-business regimes, even if it meant liquidating democracies (as in Chile
or Iran) and supporting and equipping practitioners of genocide.

He believes neoconservatism is a distinctively new strain of thought,
preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread
democracy. "It's explicitly anti-Kissingerian. Kissinger hates this
stuff. He opposed intervening in the Balkans. Kissinger Associates were
dead against [the war in] Iraq. He can't understand the idea of backing
democracy - it's totally alien to him."

"So that interest in the neocons re-emerged after September 11th. They
were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we
have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule
racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So
we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive
side wins." He has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief
in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl
Marx.

But can we trust the Bush administration - filled with people like Dick
Cheney, who didn't even support the release of Nelson Mandela - to support
democracy and the spread of American values now? He offers an anecdote in
response. There is a new liberal-left heroine in the States called Azar
Nafisi. Her book ?Reading Lolita in Tehran' documents an underground
feminist resistance movement to the Iranian Mullahs that concentrated on
reading great - and banned - works of Western literature. "And who is this
book by an icon of the Iranian resistance dedicated to? [US Deputy
Secretary of Defence] Paul Wolfowitz, the bogeyman of the left, and the
intellectual force behind [the recent war in] Iraq."

With the fine eye for ideological division that comes from a life on the
Trotskyite left, Hitch diagnoses the intellectual divisions within the Bush
administration. He does not ally himself with the likes of Cheney; he backs
the small sliver of pure neocon thought he associates with Wolfowitz. "The
thing that would most surprise people about Wolfowitz if they met him is
that he's a real bleeding heart. He's from a Polish-Jewish immigrant
family. You know the drill - Kennedy Democrats, some of the family got out
of Poland in time and some didn't make it, civil rights marchers? He
impressed me when he was speaking at a pro-Israel rally in Washington a few
years ago and he made a point of talking about Palestinian suffering. He
didn't have to do it - at all - and he was booed. He knew he would be
booed, and he got it. I've taken time to find out what he thinks about
these issues, and it's always interesting."

He gives an account of how the neocon philosophy affected the course of
the Iraq war. "The CIA - which is certainly not neoconservative - wanted to
keep the Iraqi army together because you never know when you might need a
large local army. That's how the US used to govern. It's a Kissinger way of
thinking. But Wolfowitz and others wanted to disband the Iraqi army,
because they didn't want anybody to even suspect that they wanted to
restore military rule." He thinks that if this philosophy can become
dominant within the Republican Party, it can turn US power into a
revolutionary force.

I feel simultaneously roused by Hitch's arguments and strangely
disconcerted. Why did Hitch so enthusiastically back the administration's
bogus WMD arguments - arguments he still stands by? I think of the Bush
administration's denial of global warming, the hideous ?structural
adjustment' programmes it rams down the throats of the world's poor
(including Iraq's), its description of Ariel Sharon as "a man of peace"?
Why intellectually compromise on all these issues and back Bush?

Bosnia was not the only precedent for Hitch's reaction to 9/11. He was
disgusted by the West's slothful, grudging reaction to the fatwa against
his friend Salman Rushdie. Back in 1989, he was writing about the
"absurdity" of "seeing Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-imperial
movement." He was similarly appalled by the American left's indulgence of
Bill Clinton's crimes, including the execution of a mentally disabled black
man and the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that led to the
deaths of more than 10,000 innocent Sudanese people. This brought him into
close contact with the Clinton-hating right - and made him view their
opponents with disgust.

And so the separation of Hitch and the organised left occurred. Is it
permanent? Nobody was a better fighter for left-wing causes than Hitch.
Nobody makes the left-wing case against Islamofascism and Ba'athism better
than him today. Yet he undermines these vital arguments by backing Bush and
indulging in wishful thinking about the Republicans.

As I luxuriate in the warm bath of his charisma, I want to almost
physically drag him all the way back to us. He might be dead to the likes
of Tariq Ali but there is still a large constituency of people on the left
who understand how abhorrent Islamic fundamentalism is. Why leave us
behind? I stammer that I can't imagine him ever settling down on the
American right. He pauses, and I desperately hope that he will agree with
me. "Not the Buchanan-Reagan right, no," he says. There is a pause. I
expect him to continue, but he doesn't.

Back in the mid-1980s, Hitch lambasted a small US magazine called the
Partsian Review for its "decline into neoconservatism". I don't think Hitch
is lost to the left quite yet. He will never stop campaigning for the
serial murderer Henry Kissinger to be brought to justice, and his hatred of
Islamic fundamentalism is based on good left-wing principles. But it does
feel at the end of our three-hour lunch like I have been watching him slump
into neoconservatism. Come home, Hitch - we need you.

POSTSCRIPT: You can read a thoughtful commentary on this article at
http://marccooper.typepad.com/marccooper/2004/09/hari_to_hitchen.html

and another intelligent commentary by Norman Geras at
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/09/of_the_left.html

and an interesting comment at
http://thoughtatthemeridian.blogspot.com/2004/09/hari-hitchens-dilemma.html

and a critical comment at
http://www.beautifulhorizons.net/weblog/2004/09/i_defer_to_pier.html

Please e-mail comments (or links to commentary on this article) by
following the contact details above.

The Independent - 23/09/2004

from the Prostate Awareness & Support Society http://www.prostate.org.nz

Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA): the facts

by Peter Gilling, Hon Urologist, PASS

Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) is a protein produced by the cells that
line the glands in the prostate.

PSA is concentrated in prostate tissue and serum PSA levels are normally
very low. Disruption of the normal prostatic architecture, for example
with prostate disease, enables greater amounts of PSA to enter the
circulation.

Many different prostate problems cause elevated serum levels but prostatic
intra-epithelelial neoplasia

(PIN), a pre-cancerous state, does not appear to raise the serum levels of
PSA. PSA testing detects more tumours than does digital rectal examination
(DRE) and it detects them earlier.

However, the most sensitive measure for the detection of prostate cancer
uses both DRE and PSA. Both tests should be employed in a programme of
early prostate cancer detection. Of prostate cancers currently detected
about 75% have an abnormal PSA. Approximately 20% of prostate cancers with
aggressive features are found in men whose PSA is less than 4.0mcg/L. Many
of these can be detected with DRE.

A variety of factors can effect the serum levels of PSA and should be
considered when interpreting the
results. The three most common prostatic diseases - prostatisis, benign
prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and
prostate cancer - can all be associated with elevations of serum PSA levels.

Other factors that are known to cause secondary elevations in PSA levels
include physical activity,
infection and medications. Medications containing hormones can often lead
to quite dramatic falls in PSA, as will Proscar (Finasteride), an agent
used for the treatment of BPH and male-pattern baldness.

Various herbal medicines may effect PSA levels as well as these often have
an hormonal component.
Ejaculation and rectal examination are not thought to influence the levels
significantly although any
instrumentation of the urethra or biopsies of the prostate can effect the
levels of PSA. Testing should be postponed for at least one month owing to
this effect.

A prostate biopsy is indicated when the PSA is 4.0mcg/L or more, the
digital rectal examination is abnormal or there is a significant rise in
the PSA tests. Serum PSA levels are proportional to the risk and extent of
prostate cancer. The average man older than 50 has about a 20-30%
likelihood of having prostate cancer if his serum PSA is above 4.0mcg/L.
Interestingly, if a similar patient with a PSA between 2.5mcg/L and
4.0mcg/L undergoes a prostate biopsy, the likelihood of detection of
prostate cancer is approximately 27%. For levels above 10.0mcg/L the
likelihood increases to between 42%-64%. Half of all prostate cancers
with pre-operative PSA levels of between 4.0mcg/L and 10.0mcg/L have been
found to have invaded through the wall of the prostate into the surrounding
tissue already. When the PSA level rises above 10.0mcg/L this risk is
substantially greater.

The PSA test can be used to aid in determining appropriate investigations
before treatment of prostate cancer is performed. For example: a bone scan
is generally not necessary in patients who have a PSA
less than 2.0mcg/L unless there is some history suggesting bony pain,
particularly if the grade of the tumour is only moderate, such as having a
Gleason score of 6 or less. Another example of this is the need for
sampling of the lymph nodes in the pelvis, which is also unnecessary in
this same group of patients---those with a PSA of the less than 20.0mcg/L
and a Gleason score of 6 or less. Less than 5% or patients with these
features would turn out to have cancer in the lymph nodes.

After treatment PSA tests should come down to 0.1mc/L or less and should
stay there. This applies to
surgery and radiotherapy equally. The best results with radiotherapy are
achieved if the PSA drops to
very low levels (less than 0.5mcg/L). The rate at which the PSA rises
after treatment can help
determine whether or not treatment is necessary and what sort of treatment
would be appropriate.

When hormone treatment is given it can take between 3 and 6 months to
achieve the lowest levels that are going to be seen with this form of
treatment. The lower the PSA test result goes the better. PSA testing is
one of the most useful blood tests available in cancer treatment. It can
help with early detection, treatment planning and treatment monitoring in
cancer of the prostate.

From: (a Presby minister)

Re: PRESBYTERIAN ASSEMBLY

Those who are Practising Homosexuals cannot serve as ministers unless
called into parishes. There have been two a few years ago who "sneaked"
into the theological hall and have finished their training. They have not
been called into a parish. One has been waiting for 5 years. The two who
are in parishes, namely David Clark at St. Luke's Auckland and Margaret
Mayman at St. Andrew's Wellington are effectively stuck there as it is not
permissible for Presbyteries to induct them into other parishes.

The next major battle will be in 2 years at the next Assembly. Once
that is passed it will be very hard to shift the legislation.

The church is becoming more evangelical each year. To pass the
legislation requires a 60% majority. Over the last few Assemblies the
votes have been 54%, 58% and this one 63.7% (which the media should have
rounded to 64% not 63% - a minor bias).

The Assembly passed remits prohibiting the licensing, ordination,
or induction of Practising Homosexuals and those engaged in intimate
sexual acts outside of marriage. This applies to _de facto_
relationships. And it was adopted ad Interim - meaning it takes effect
from last Thursday. It will be in force as the new legislation is sent
down to Presbyteries and Session, churches for comment then ratification
at the next Assembly. That is a normal part of our democratic process.

The reason it doesn't apply to those existing Homosexuals in Ministry is
that they came in under a confessional base, then they "came out" of the
closet. They will be dealt with on a pastoral rather than a legal basis as
their terms of employment were under the old system. (We now have been
forced onto a legalistic base.)

I know it is a compromise but it means the church won't be taken to
the High Court for litigation. A good result for the future of the church
and it sets a line in the sand. I notice the New Zealand Herald hasn't
even reported it.

=======

I failed to note the details, but Radio NZ did report some action
- in a lawcourt I think - for retroactive enforcement of the new policy.
I think the movers were in Southland. Sorry to be so vague.

R

Hanson wrote the excellent Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the
Rise of Western Power, (Doubleday NY 2001) - I think subtitled "Why the
West Wins Wars". It is available through Ak. Libraries.

A DECAYING BODY

The U.N.? Who Cares?
Kofi Annan & Co. might as well move to Brussels or Geneva.

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Thursday, September 23, 2004

These are surreal times. Americans in Iraq are beheaded on videotape.
Russian children are machine-gunned in their schools. The elderly in Israel
continue to be blown apart on buses. No one--whether in Madrid, Istanbul,
Riyadh, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York--is safe from the Islamic fascist, whose
real enemy is modernism and Western-inspired freedom of the individual.

Despite the seemingly disparate geography of these continued attacks, we
are always familiar with the similar spooky signature: civilians
dismembered by the suicide belt, car bomb, improvised explosive device and
executioner's blade. Then follows the characteristically pathetic
communiqué or loopy fatwa aired on al-Jazeera, evoking everything from the
injustice of the Reconquista to some mythical grievance about Crusaders in
the holy shrines. Gender equity in the radical Islamic world is now
defined by the expendable female suicide bomber's slaughter of Westerners.

In response to such international lawlessness, our global watchdog, the
United Nations, had been largely silent. It abdicates its responsibility of
ostracizing those states that harbor such mass murderers, much less
organizes a multilateral posse to bring them to justice. And yet under this
apparent state of siege, President Bush in his recent address to the U.N.
offered not blood and iron--other than an obligatory "the proper response
is not to retreat but to prevail"--but Wilsonian idealism, concrete help
for the dispossessed, and candor about past sins. The president wished to
convey a new multilateralist creed that would have made a John Kerry or
Madeleine Albright proud, without the Churchillian "victory at any cost"
rhetoric. Good luck.

For years, gay-rights activists and relief workers in Africa have
complained that the U.S. did not take the lead in combating the world-wide
spread of AIDS. President Bush now offers to spearhead the rescue of the
world's infected, with $15 billion in American help in hopes that the
world's financial powers--perhaps Japan, China and the European
Union--might match or trump that commitment.

Nongovernmental organizations clamor about the unfairness of world trade
that left the former Third World with massive debts run up by crooked
dictators and complicit Western profiteers. President Bush now talks not
of extending further loans to service their spiraling interest payments,
but rather of outright grants to clean the slate and thus offer the
impoverished a new start.

International women's rights groups vie for the world's attention to stop
the shameful international trafficking in women and children, whether as
chattel or sexual slaves. The president now pledges to organize
enforcement to stop both the smugglers and the predators on the innocent.

For a half century, liberals rightly deplored the old realpolitik in the
Middle East, as America and Europe supported autocratic right-wing
governments on the cynical premises that they at least promised to keep
pumping oil and kept out communists. Now President Bush not only renounces
such past opportunism, but also confesses that "for too long, many nations,
including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in
the name of stability." He promises not complacency that ensures continual
oppression, but radical changes that lead to freedom.

The Taliban and Saddam Hussein were once the United Nations' twin
embarrassments, rogue regimes that thumbed their noses at weak U.N.
protestations, slaughtered their own, invaded their neighbors, and turned
their outlands into terrorist sanctuaries. Now they are gone, despite
either U.N. indifference or veritable opposition to their removal. The
United States sought not dictators in their place, but consensual
government where it had never existed.

What was the response to Mr. Bush's new multifaceted vision? He was met
with stony silence, followed by about seven seconds of embarrassed
applause, capped off by smug sneers in the global media. Why so?

First, the U.N. is not the idealistic postwar organization of our
collective Unicef and Unesco nostalgia, the old perpetual force for good
that we once associated with hunger relief and peacekeeping. Its membership
is instead rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes. Many of
them, like Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, have served on the
U.N.'s 53-member Commission on Human Rights. The Libyan lunocracy--infamous
for its dirty war with Chad and cash bounties to mass murderers--chaired
the 2003 session. For Mr. Bush to talk to such folk about the need to
spread liberty means removing from power, or indeed jailing, many of the
oppressors sitting in his audience.

Second, urging democratic reforms in Palestine, as Mr. Bush also outlined,
is antithetical to the very stuff of the U.N., an embarrassing reminder
that nearly half of its resolutions in the past half-century have been
aimed at punishing tiny democratic Israel at the behest of its larger, more
populous--and dictatorial--Arab neighbors. The contemporary U.N., then, has
become not only hypocritical, but also a bully that hectors Israel about
the West Bank while it gives a pass to a nuclear, billion-person China
after swallowing Tibet; wants nothing to do with the two present dangers to
world peace, a nuclear North Korea and soon to follow theocratic Iran; and
idles while thousands die in the Sudan.

Third, the present secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is himself a symbol of
all that is wrong with the U.N. A multibillion dollar oil-for-food fraud,
replete with kickbacks (perhaps involving a company that his own son worked
for), grew unchecked on his watch, as a sordid array of Baathist killers,
international hustlers and even terrorists milked the national petroleum
treasure of Iraq while its own people went hungry. In response, Mr. Annan
stonewalls, counting on exemption from the New York press on grounds of his
unimpeachable liberal credentials. Meanwhile, he prefers to denigrate the
toppling of Saddam Hussein as "illegal," but neither advocates
reinstitution of a "legal" Saddam nor offers any concrete help to Iraqis
crafting consensual society. Like the U.N. membership itself, he enjoys the
freedom, affluence and security of a New York, but never stops to ask why
that is so or how it might be extended to others less fortunate.

Our own problems with the U.N. should now be viewed in a context of ongoing
radical change here in the United States, as all the previous liberal
assumptions of the past decades undergo scrutiny in our post 9/11 world.
There are no longer any sacred cows in the eyes of the American public. Ask
Germany and South Korea as American troops depart, Saudi Arabia where bases
are closed, and the once beaming Yasser Arafat, erstwhile denizen of the
Lincoln Bedroom, as he now broods in his solitary rubble bunker.

Deeds, not rhetoric, are all that matter, as the once unthinkable is now
the possible. There is no intrinsic reason why the U.N. should be based in
New York rather than in its more logical utopian home in Brussels or
Geneva. There is no law chiseled in stone that says any fascist or
dictatorial state deserves authorized membership by virtue of its hijacking
of a government. There is no logic to why a France is on the Security
Council, but a Japan or India is not. And there is no reason why a group of
democratic nations, unapologetic about their values and resolute to protect
freedom, cannot act collectively for the common good, entirely indifferent
to Syria's censure or a Chinese veto.

So Americans' once gushy support for the U.N. during its adolescence is
gone. By the 1970s we accepted at best that it had devolved into a neutral
organization in its approach to the West, and by the 1980s sighed that it
was now unabashedly hostile to freedom. But in our odyssey from
encouragement, to skepticism, and then to hostility, we have now reached
the final stage--of indifference. Americans do not get riled easily, so the
U.N. will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, millions have
already shrugged, tuned out, and turned the channel on it.


Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover
Institution.

>"Getting Straight with Queer Theology"

>by Glynn Cardy

>(Adapted from a sermon preached at Auckland Community Church, St
>Matthew-in-the-City, 5th September 2004)
>Visit on-line at

>Today I want to give a straight response to queer theology. I want to
>walk out onto that holy ground of meeting, like Moses did, barefoot and
>tentative. I want to talk straight to the heart.
>
>I think the time is past where it can be assumed that a straight priest
>has a relevant message for queer people. Like a man speaking at a
>feminist conference, or a Pakeha speaking on a Marae, one is conscious of
>coming from a very different place and walking gently out onto the holy
>ground of engagement.

He seems to be saying he is not hx; is he saying that?

>Let me begin, as philosophers do, by talking terms. By 'queer theology'
>I mean the lived, ongoing, engagement with God by homosexual, bi-sexual
>and transgender

wot no takataapui? discriminating against fa'afaafine ?? Gotta
have the full incantation or you won't seem quite fully PC '-}

>people who identify themselves as queer. I don't mean written theology
>espoused by academics. I mean the stuff that happens in your life

This "defn" is so all-inclusive as to be useless.

> - the 'ups' and 'downs', the resurrections and crucifixions, the days
>when God is the very air you breathe and the days where God is nowhere to
>be found.
>
>Each of us will bring different associations to the word 'God'.

I dispute this attempted atomisation of the church. I would
contend, on the contrary, that many scores of millions of Christians have a
common working defn of God.

>For some it is a personal being - a 'him' or a 'her' or a 'both/and'.
>For some God is a verb, breaking out of the straightjacket of being noun.

- a nice little example of the 'transgressivity' so beloved of
perverts such as Culbertson. To say that God is not a person (or 3
persons) at all is to fart in the face of orthodoxy - a disgusting act.
For a vicar to do so from the pulpit is abominable. God's law was
summarised for us by Christ as 2 commandments; "Rev" Cardy is here mocking
& dismissing the First. And all for what - to seem suitably into
'transgressivity', so as to appeal to militant hx?

>For some God is a potent energy of ecstasy, or a deep rootedness of
>being. These words, ecstasy and rooted, of course have sexual
>connotations and I use them purposefully.

That's the stuff - sexual thrills at almost any price.

>I think when we get into the holy places of our lives sexuality and
>spiritually intertwine.

Not much spirituality, let alone Christianity, in this sermon so far.

>"Queer" is a word that while once a derisive insult, has been
>reclaimed

a lie in the langauge - they never owned it, and therefore cannot
*re*claim it.

What he means is, 'taken over & warped, in attempt to blunt or
abolish its pejorative use'

>by the
>homosexual community

this term also is dubious - a quasi-oxymoron

>- not unlike how some hip-hop artists are reclaiming the word 'nigger' -
>a reclaiming in order, as I hear it, to celebrate difference from the
>straight world. The message is: 'We don't want to fit into a
>hetero-normal mould, we just want to be.

If only that were true, we wouldn't be in such difficulty. But the
truth is, statistically, they don't just 'want to be' - e.g they try to
pervert the young much more often than non-perverts do. The per capita
convictions of hx for child molestation are an order of magnitude higher
than those of non-hx.

>Yes, we want to be accepted, but for who we are, not for whom you want us
>to be'.

Don't mention what God might want us to be, will you - just try
to make out it's merely a matter of human prejudice.

>I have a little straight theory that goes like this: When we are born we
>think everyone is like us - thinks like us, talks like us, has passions
>like us, etc. Bit by bit we learn otherwise. We find people have
>different bodies than ours. Their minds too are different from ours.
>Some have different languages and cultures. All this difference can be
>scary and despite most of us having an outward acceptance of difference
>inside we are trying to blend everything - mix it all together in the
>kitchen whiz to make it look the same. When it looks the same, when it's
>all smoothie, we feel more in control.
>
>This little theory

- which is devoid of supporting evidence

> helps me understand the people who are always 'looking for what we have
>in common'. They want to talk about common ground, our common baptism,
>and our common unity in Christ. All of which, of course, has a place.
>Yet if we don't know about difference - the difference of our neighbour -
>if we haven't really gone into the frightening places of otherness, then
>common ground is simply a common hole to climb in and pretend. It's not a
>holy place; it's a hiding place.

This is a cunningly confusing line of talk. It is well known that
the perverts, not the representatives of orthodoxy like Harold Turner, are
the ones who evade discussion.

>
>The flipside to blending is rejection. Those who like to blend
>everything and everyone, even God, into one great thickshake can, when
>something or someone doesn't mix, violently reject them. If you dress
>like us, sound like us, have relationships more or less like us, we, the
>homogenisers, are quite happy. But when you refuse to fit our categories,
>won't be blended, we can get angry, revolt, and throw you out down the
>drain.
>
>I know those feelings of wanting everyone to fit. It's the little child
>who wants all to do it 'my way'. That same little child when given power
>can become a tyrant. I know the blender, the homogeniser, who lives
>within me. We have regular arguments. Knowing those forces within myself
>helps me to recognise them in others, and in the policies of churches and
>governments. I suspect those who call themselves queer know those
>feelings of being unsuccessfully blended, then rejected and thrown out.

What a devilish line of rubbish! The implied reasoning is that
those who disfavour hx/lez want everyone to be identical. I know of no
evidence for this "theory" of Cardy's. Those I know who wish to continue
the ban on ordaining known hx/lez are nothing like this 'homogenizer' myth
Cardy has created. To oppose a particular sin is not to advocate that
everyone be the same in every respect.

>The homogeniser is not the only thing that lives within me, thank God!
>There is also the great delicatessen, a banquet of multiple choice and
>wonderful variety. It is the delicatessen that takes faith. To live
>with difference, to celebrate the delicatessen of difference, is to come
>to terms with your fears. Fears usually have a bit of reality about them.
>We know we could get hurt. We know things could get out of our control.
>To step beyond our fears, into the risky unknown, takes faith.
>
>Back to defining terms. Faith is not a series of beliefs we subscribe
>to. Faith is rather the risky act of following the unpredictable God,
>wherever she/he leads. Faith is about courage, loneliness, and awe.

OK - as far as it goes. But why does it stop before obedience,
reverence for what God has revealed? (Not to mention respect for earthly
fact, which the militant hx/lez evade.)

>I'm using the metaphor of delicatessen to talk about the great,
>variegated richness of the world. A delicatessen carries a lot of stock
>that produces little income. It is there simply as part of the diversity
>that is the essence of a deli. The stock that produces lots of income
>supports the stock that doesn't. It has a vested interest in variety. To
>work for change, straights like me need a vested interest in the outcome.
>To homogenise everything shuts down the variety and creativity of my
>spirit. My spirit would drown in sanitised sameness.

This "theory" of his is obnoxious. To maintian that hx/lez should
not be ordained - the current issue, as he must know - is not at all to
maintain that ZERO diversity is acceptable.

There is something badly wrong with anyone who will argue so dishonestly.

>We can become obsessed with trying to keep everyone happy. The words
>attributed to Jesus in Luke 14:25-33 are some of the harshest in the New
>Testament. They are addressed to disciples who were becoming captivated
>by 'the family'. They are being pulled into keeping the family happy,
>being loyal to the family, to the detriment of following the radical
>anarchist, Jesus. Just as some would have us strive for unity in the
>Church, keeping the Church 'family' happy, being loyal to the Church, to
>the detriment of those excluded from
>it's

This trendy error somehow fits with the sloppiness of his thinking.

>norms.
>
>Unity in Christ I think is more an accidental unity, rather than an
>intentional unity, of people committed to Jesus' vision.

Doesn't give the Holy Spirit much credit, does he?

>When unity in Christ becomes a club, or a family, or a 'One Holy Church',
>we need to be very careful. Loyalty to the group can supersede all else.

If that loyalty were indeed as total as he fears, prejudice would
evaporate. But also, tolerance of the perversions he favours would
disappear.

>Moses was encountered by a talking, burning bush. Instead of turning and
>fleeing, he walked forward. He overcame the fear inside him, the fear of
>the different, and the unknown. On instruction, he took off his shoes - a
>symbol of vulnerability. And there in that holy place of engagement he
>heard the call of God on his life. And, as we do at St. Matthew's,
>argued about it. He asked for God's name and received an answer: YHWH -
>the best translation of which is "I will be who I will be".
>
>"I will be who I will be". This is the name of the God who is always
>queer, and more than queer. This is the God who is always repelling each
>and every attempt to be constrained and controlled, who is outside our
>categories and doesn't want to come inside.
>
>This is the holy God who speaks to my heart.
>
>Glynn Cardy
>Vicar, St Matthew-in-the-City

It is tiresome to have to issue disclaimers which would not be
required in an honest debate; but in the present noxious context, one has
to take the precaution of mentioning orthodoxy such as

1 The responsible Christians trying to grapple with the hx/lez
onslaught within the church are not at all opposed to hx/lez in full
membership.
2 It is *ordaining* the perverts that is the issue. They insist
on making an issue of it, but then evade discussion of it (Cardy's sermon
being a good example of this evasiveness).

I copy for convenience my recent note on this phenomenon:

What has been happening, or rather 'not happening', for many y now,
is refusal to make progress toward any decision or rule on the key issue
whether to ordain known hx/lesbian/bisexuals.

Main tactics have been
1 keep definitions vague
2 pretend that nothing much is known about what mixtures
of Nature, Nurture & Will cause same-gender
(a) attraction and
(b) expression.
Merely assume perversion is congenital.
3 evade the issue; when anyone tries to get on with the
discussion of ordination, which you have said is the key issue, immediately
(but furtively) change the subject to claim perverts are, thru bigotry,
unwelcome as church members in general. Just one example of such bias will
serve to claim the whole outfit is so.
4 wallow in the victim role, in a v general fashion,
making out vaguely that the church is bigotted, intolerant, etc.
5 never allude to known ill health, unhappiness and early
deaths of hx, lez & bisexuals.
6 emphasize the few stable hx & lez unions; never allude
to the predominance of drastic promiscuity in these subcultures
("communities")
7 never mention that lez households tend to be more violent
8 of course make out that tolerance is the top virtue.
Thus furtively cancel discrimination between sin and right action &
thought; indeed, condemn 'discrimination' as a sin rather than a most
important human faculty. Use the word 'discrimination' as if it replaces
'victimisation'.
9 black out Bible-based analyses such as Rev Dr Harold Turner's.

SERIOUS FLAWS IN A CONFERENCE ON MORAL IMPERATIVE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY

There is certainly a moral imperative to ensure that
all in our human family have sufficient food and a
well-balanced diet. This is a goal we all desire and
which the World Summit on Sustainable Development
urged us to make steady progress toward achieving. It
is a goal repeatedly emphasised in encyclical letters
and statements from Pope John Paul II.

The surest path toward elimination of hunger and
malnutrition is to eliminate poverty and the unjust
social structures that underlie it. These are the
root causes of hunger, not lack of sufficient food
production. It is neither equitable nor sustainable to
talk of increasing food production without addressing
food distribution.

Failure to realize this appears to us to be a basic
flaw in the planning of the programme for the
conference to be held on 24 September 2004 at The
Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, entitled
“Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperative of
>Biotechnology.” The conference is presented by the
United States of America Embassy to the Holy See, in
cooperation with the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of
>Sciences.

The flyer announcing the conference rightly states
that “The magnitude of these avoidable deaths [from
hunger] should challenge everyone to take steps to
alleviate this crisis.” But surely the most important
steps to take are those that correct the injustices in
the social and economic structures of our human
society today. These are the injustices that are the
clear subjects of the moral imperatives found in the
social teaching of the church, e.g., trade, debt, land
reform, violation of human rights, degradation of the
environment, etc. It is the injustice of these
structures that prevent so many of our brothers and
sisters to have access to the food produced by
farmers, enough for a healthy diet for all six billion
of our human family. The world produces enough food,
but – shamefully – it is not justly distributed: while
millions suffer from hunger and malnutrition others
suffer from obesity.

A second flaw in the plan of this conference is the
absence in the programme of consideration of proven
methods to improve the nutritional status of the human
family, methods that are better, cheaper, more
sustainable, and more suitable for resource-poor
farmers than are genetic engineered crops. We know
this from the lived experience, not theoretical
discussions, of our Zambian agricultural scene. When
we talk here of sustainable agriculture, we know that
we rely on methods that Zambian farmers are
increasingly putting into place. As a result, we
currently enjoy in this country an increased
agricultural output, untouched by GMO approaches.

Surely a clear moral imperative for us is to research
and develop and promote these methods of sustainable
agriculture. Unfortunately for the poor in the world,
this is not the kind of research and development that
the large seed and chemical corporations appear to be
interested in pursuing. And this is a serious moral
fault!

A third flaw in the programme of the conference is the
apparent absence of any mention of the serious
scientific problems with genetic engineering. Many
researchers are pointing to a fundamental problem in
the approach of genetic engineering, namely, that it
is based upon an understanding of heredity that can be
considered simplistic and outdated. One example of
this is that the one-gene-one-protein theory at the
basis of genetic engineering has been invalidated by
many recent findings, notably by the discovery coming
>from the human genome project that there are many more
proteins than there are genes (approximately 100,000
proteins but only about 30,000 genes).

A fourth flaw in the design of the conference seems to
be a total absence in the programme of any mention of
the many failures of genetically engineered crops to
improve yields and to reduce chemical sprayings of the
crops, nor of the contamination of other plants
(including weeds) by pollen from the GE plants, nor of
the effects of GE crops on soil organisms, nor of the
effects of patenting GE crops upon farmers’ practice
of exchanging seeds.

These failures are problems that we in Zambia are
trying to avoid. For in all of these matters, it is
the resource-poor farmers who are most vulnerable and
who will suffer the most. And these, of course, are
the very ones who should benefit from any moral
imperative to ensure that all in our human family have
sufficient food and a well-balanced diet.

A fifth flaw in the programme of the conference
appears to be a lack of value-oriented socio-economic
analysis of the impact of GMO farming on the
livelihood of the small-scale farmer. Of major
importance in any such discussion – surely of major
importance to Zambia -- must be issues such as
dependence on outside seed sources, restructuring of
farm ownerships, possible curtailment of external
trade opportunities for the agricultural sector, etc.
One of the strong points of the church’s social
teaching has been to take seriously the socio-economic
context of the poor as a concrete application of the
“preferential option for the poor.”

Finally, a sixth flaw in the conference is,
unfortunately, quite obvious. To be honest, how is it
possible to examine with full intellectual vigour such
an important topic without voices that hold contrary
views to those espousing biotechnology as the solution
to the world’s hunger problems? The November 2003
conference on a similar topic, sponsored solely by the
Vatican’s’ Justice and Peace Commission, without the
cooperation of the USA Embassy, allowed at least a few
dissenting voices to appear on the panels. (We
presented a paper critical of GMOs from the
perspective of the church’s social teaching.)

The panel for the 24 September conference seems to be
based on the premise that there is already a fair and
fully deomonstrated conclusion reached, namely,
“…genetically modified foods can help the poor” and
“…biotechnology can contribute to protecting human
life and promoting human dignity”. (From the
conference flyer.) But these are precisely points of
view that need the contributions of representatives,
for example, of the Philippines Bishops Conference,
the South African Bishops Conference and the USA
Bishops Conference, groups that have just recently
cautioned about the GMO approach.

In conclusion, we raise these very serious issues
because of the importance of this conference to the
on-going international debate about GMOs and its
impact on the poor of Zambia and other developing
countries. We urge that the Vatican should be
extremely cautious that it not be seen as somehow
compromised through linkage with known promoters of
only one position on this issue. When ethical and
religious issues such as food security are being
discussed, there is no place either for only one
scientific view to be heard or only one political
force to be recognised.

To make our own point of view quite clear, we state:
there is certainly a moral imperative to feed our
hungry world, but there is no moral imperative to do
so with biotechnology.

20 September 2004

(Dr.) Roland Lesseps, S.J., Senior Researcher and
Instructor, Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre,
Lusaka, Zambia (rl@uudial.zm)

(Dr.) Peter Henriot, S.J., Director, Jesuit Centre for
Theological Reflection, Lusaka, Zambia
(phenriot@zamnet.zm)

=====
YURI R. MUNSAYAC
Coordinator, Sustainable Agriculture
Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP)-
National Secretariat for Social Action, Justice and Peace (NASSA)
470 Gen. Luna St., Intramuros 1002 Manila
Tel: (632) 527.4146/63
Fax: (632) 527.4144
E-mail: staff@nassa.org.ph

THE AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER
September 21, 2004, Issue #371
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness
From a Public Interest Perspective

EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
E-MAIL: avkrebs@earthlink.net
WEB SITE: http://www.ea1.com/CARP/
TO RECEIVE: Send name and address

NCRLC DIRECTOR DECRIES U.S. EMBASSY
AND PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
CONFERENCE ON THE MORAL IMPERATIVE
OF BIOTECHNOLOGY IN FEEDING THE WORLD

BROTHER DAVID ANSREWS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CATHOLIC RURAL LIKE
[sic] CONFERENCE: On September 24, 2004 the United States Embassy to the
Holy See will co-sponsor a conference at the Pontifical Gregorian
University with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled: "Feeding a
Hungry World: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology".


Below is a statement I have issued under my own name on this conference,
its title, and its context. I am concerned that the public will mistake
this as policy of the Holy See. I think it is best understood as a public
relations effort of the U.S. Embassy.

I wish I could be at this conference. The title strikes me with shock and
awe. As the Executive Director of the 81-year-old National Catholic Rural
Life Conference working locally, nationally, and internationally on world
hunger, agriculture, food and farm policy, I find the title of the
conference outrageous.

It appears that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has allowed itself to be
subordinated to the United States Government's insistent advocacy of
biotechnology and of the companies which market it. While one can
understand the United States' commitment to support the profits of the
biotechnology companies, it is difficult to appreciate how its "sound
science" justification can be a substitute for the more value-based
approach of Catholic Social Teaching.

In an important book on church and state relations, We Hold These Truths,
John Courtney Murray, S.J. stated clearly that the Roman Catholic Church
would never subordinate its identity to that of a particular country.
Unfortunately, that is what the Pontifical Academy appears to be doing in
this instance. Of course, the United States government, in its
justification, will identify the alleviation of hunger as the purpose, and
will want to claim the moral voice of the Roman Catholic Church as its
ally.

But the Roman Catholic Church has many voices, among them bishops, laity,
scientists, non-governmental organizations around the world. There are
other voices within the Holy See, within the particular churches (dioceses
and conferences of bishops), among the people of God. The People of God
have not been without a voice in the debate over biotechnology. Ecumenical
voices have been speaking as well (see our website:
http://www.ncrlc.com, for ecumenical dialogue on
biotechnology

A theology of communion makes imperative that the other voices of the Holy
See, the particular churches, the people of God, not be ignored in this
debate, either. I can understand the United States not wanting to pay
attention to the statement unanimously passed by the United States
Catholic Conference of Bishops (2003), "For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me
Food." The policy articulated there on biotechnology is quite nuanced, (see
our website:
http://www.ncrlc.com>http://www.ncrlc.com
for the document) unlike the claim of a moral imperative which the title
that the U.S. embassy conference trumpets.

The South African Bishops, Bishops of the Philippines, Bishops from Brazil,
and other particular churches have spoken clearly and from a moral
perspective on biotechnology. Why should one privilege the perspective of
the Pontifical Academy of Sciences? And, isn't it ironic that the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences, founded upon a quest for truth and
dialogue, should turn from its purpose of research and dialogue to one of
unsophisticated advocacy?

Or is the United States putting words in its mouth? It reminds me of many
state sponsored universities in the United States which take funds from
biotechnology companies and lose their scientific critical culture for one
of uncritical endorsement of the agenda of the companies which fund their
research.

There are other institutions within the structure of the Holy See, which
have spoken eloquently and clearly on hunger in the world, its causes and
its solutions. The leading policy position is that there is enough food in
the world to feed the hungry, problems of distribution and structure are
the causal factors to be considered. Why has the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences claimed for itself a lead voice? Is it because among its members
are leading American advocates, members close to Monsanto, a leading U.S.
biotechnology company?

The Pontifical Council, Cor Unum, has represented the Holy See at the World
Food Summits. During the 1999 World Food Summit in Rome, the Pontifical
Council, Cor Unum provided an analysis on world hunger entitled "WORLD
HUNGER A CHALLENGE FOR ALLEVELOPMENT IN SOLIDARITY."

It uses Catholic Social Teaching to provide the framework for analysis. The
theological evaluation is acute: "There are also many large-scale
"structures of sin" which deliberately steer the goods of the earth away
from their true purpose, that of serving the good of all, toward private
and sterile ends in a process which spreads contagiously." The opposite of
structures of sin, states "Cor Unum" are "structures of the common good".

Surely, among the structures of sin in the world today are agro-food
corporations that steer the goods of the earth toward themselves solely for
profit. If one thinks that the focus of these multi-national corporations
and their supporters is to cure world hunger, then one is among the most
naïve on the planet. (Consult the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative,
co sponsored by the Jesuit's Center of Concern and NCRLC
http://www.agribusinessaccountability.org>http://www.agribusinessaccountability
.org

One may look elsewhere within the Holy See for an analysis of world hunger,
its causes, effects, and solutions than to the advocacy of the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences and its ally, the United States. Among the other
organizations to be considered are those which deal directly with farmers'
organizations, those that grow the food.

The International Federation of Adult Catholic Rural Movements (FIMARC) and
the International Catholic Rural Association (ICRA), both are recognized by
the Holy See. ICRA is located in the Vatican at the same Palazzo San
Calisto as the Pontifical Councils Cor Unum and Justice and Peace. FIMARC
is located in Belgium.

Both represent associations of farmers and agricultural organizations. Both
have a significant perspective on agricultural biotechnology. Has the
Pontifical Academy contacted either group? Given Catholic Social Teaching's
preference for widespread participation in policy develop-ment, have even
these Vatican related entities been part of the conversation? I visited
ICRA this summer, and FIMARC this past spring, neither network of farmers
have been part of this dialogue, although they represent millions of
farmers in dozens of countries.

Monsignor Biagio Notarangelo, ecclesiastical assistant to ICRA, and well
known in Vatican offices, informed me that in an ethical consultation on
biotechnology for the Food and Agriculture Organization, he commented that
biotechnology as presently structured by the industries which foster it,
would represent a new colonialism. Have ethical evaluations such as his
been part of the dialogue within the Pontifical Academy of Sciences?

It appears to me that the United States government has been seeking to find
a way to get the moral voice of the Roman Catholic Church to support its
advocacy of biotechnology. It has found one place where Americans are
members, to hook its message into the Holy See. But there are other voices
within the Holy See, there are other Particular Churches (dioceses,
bishops' conferences), other groups within the People of God whose voices
have been excluded from this conference and who would be opposed to the
lack of nuance in the exhortatory title of the conference to be held in
Rome on September 24th.

The statements over the years by the Holy Father, John Paul II, have been
much more cautious than the title of this conference about the alleged
benefits of biotechnology:

Pope John Paul II reminded the faithful that the "earth is entrusted to
man's use, not abuse" (Jubilee of the Agricultural World, November 11,
2000). "This is a principle to be remembered in agricultural production
itself, whenever there is a question of its advance through the application
of biotechnologies, which cannot be evaluated solely on the basis of
immediate economic interests.

They must be submitted beforehand to rigorous scientific and ethical
examination, to prevent them from becoming disastrous for human health and
the future of the earth." This is far from thinking of biotechnology as a
"moral imperative."

In his World Day of Peace message, January 1, 1990, Pope John Paul II had
also addressed the ecological responsibility of humankind: "We can only
look with deep concern at the enormous possibilities of biological
research. We are not yet in a position to assess the biological
disturbance that could result from indiscriminate genetic manipulation and
from the unscrupulous development of new forms of plant and animal life,
to say nothing of unacceptable experimentation regarding the origins of
human life itself.

It is evident to all that in any area as delicate as this, indifference to
fundamental ethical norms, or their rejection, would lead mankind to the
very threshold of self-destruction." Again, we find a much more cautionary
approach, emphasizing dangers rather than promise, but in no case calling
biotechnology a moral imperative.

These statements alone are sufficient to give one pause. The title of the
conference being hosted by the Pontifical Gregorian University, sponsored
by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Embassy to the Holy
See, the presenters, and the purposes appear fully to me to be one-sided,
overstated claims to moral and scientific truth. They need to be
contextualized by a fuller voice of the Roman Catholic Church, found in
other places within the Holy See, within the communion of particular
Churches, and among the People of God.

In that context this conference can be seen as one small voice among a
larger chorus of voices. I think the larger chorus of voices takes more
seriously the concerns for hunger in the world, the concerns for the
livelihoods of small farmers, the concern for the "right to food" (a right
which the United States' government denies as a human right…a right which
the Holy See endorses), the concerns for a healthy environment.

We have a campaign at the National Catholic Rural Life Conference entitled
"Eating is a Moral Act." It is a program implementing the views of the Holy
Father: The Encyclical Letter Centesimus annus (1991) by Pope John Paul II
says that " a great deal of educational and cultural work is urgently
needed, including the education of consumers in the responsible use of
their power of choice…. I am referring to the fact that even the decision
to invest in one place rather than another, in one productive sector rather
than another, is always a moral and cultural choice."

Eating is a moral act!

The public needs education to think about where food comes from, how it is
produced, with what effect upon the environment, upon the poor, upon the
hungry! The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops has stated the
following:

"Why are consumers increasingly fearful about the quality and safety of
their food? … Consumers' responsibility calls for a conversion to an
attentive attitude about how their food consumption choices can affect
farmers, farmworkers, the poor and corporate policies and practices. …These
problems are not just rural or domestic. They touch the lives of consumers
as well as farmers, inner-city and suburban residents as well as rural
communities.

These problems certainly raise technical and political questions, but they
raise moral questions as well." United States Catholic Bishops, "Food
Policy in a Hungry World: The Links That Bind Us Together" November 8, 1989

Increasingly the U.S. government is providing high subsidies for large food
producers, processors and retailers while the quality of food deteriorates.
Our food is irradiated, genetically engineered, doctored by taste
"experts." and reduced in nutritional quality.

Hunger is growing nationally and internationally, especially in
agricultural regions. (NewYork Times, December 8, 2002: "Pastoral Poverty")
Obesity has become a global epidemic. Nutritionists tell us that dietary
guidelines are defined more by food companies' interests in sales than by
standards that would promote good health and nutrition. (See Food Politics,
Marion Nestle, 2002)

Each of us is created in the image and likeness of God. The human person is
sacred and is the clearest reflection of God among us. Our human dignity
comes from God, not from nationality, race, sex, economic status, or any
human accomplishment. The fundamental principle of respect for the dignity
of the human person is at the core of Catholic social teaching.

"It is central to the Church's teaching on human dignity that everyone has
a legitimate claim to the goods and services required to live a truly human
life. This central element underpins a set of specific personal rights that
constitute the baseline against which we assess society's ability to secure
them. The right to a truly human life implies the right to a diet that will
sustain that kind of life.

This means people need the amount and quality of food required for normal
physical and human activity and development, not just for survival" United
States Catholic Bishops Report of the Ad Hoc Task Force on Food,
Agriculture, and Rural Concerns, November 18, 1988.

The right to safe, nutritious food includes the right to ask questions
about our food system. The U.S. Catholic bishops have asked: How do our
food and agricultural policies enhance or diminish the life, dignity and
rights of the human person? What is their impact on human life, hungry
people, farm families, and the land that sustains us? … "We fear that the
global food system often seems adrift without a moral compass." (see Food
Policy in a Hungry World pg.

The right to food is guaranteed by international law. The right to food
includes a right to safe, healthy, nutritional food and a system which will
protect health. We need to support a sustainable food system which does not
distort food quality and safety provisions.

Rather than trumpet claims about the promise of biotechnology, the United
States should recognize the right to food, the right of farmers to
participate in decisions about the food system and policy. The United
States should examine seriously its own policy of subsidies for products
that cause small farmers to lose their livelihoods around the world, and
through such subsidies add to the number of the hungry.

The United States should examine its subsidies for corn and its products
that add to a public health crisis in obesity among children in the United
States. The United States has a lot of work to do on its own food policy,
its own contribution to the problem of world hunger. The Pontifical Academy
for the Sciences should work with other voices within the People of God
before allowing itself to be subordinated to the loud voice of the
government of the United States.

Such communication and conversation is part of the necessity to constitute
authentic moral deliberation about the right to food and the urgent quest
to solve world hunger. Such a quest is not advanced by narrow advocacy of
the promise of biotechnology and claims that biotechnology is a moral
imperative.

The National Catholic Rural Life Conference was founded in 1923. NCRLC is a
lead voice in the United States on Roman Catholic Church policy, education,
outreach and advocacy for food, farm and environmental policy. One former
Executive Director, Monsignor Luigi Ligutti was the first representative of
the Holy See to FAO. Monsignor Ligutti helped found the Pontifical Council
for Justice and Peace. NCRLC's Board statement on Biotechnology can be
found on our web-site:
http://www.ncrlc.com )

John Paul II, Homily for the Jubilee of the Agricultural world, 2000:

"Agricultural work should be better and better organized and supported by
social measures that fully reward the toil it involves and the truly great
usefulness that characterizes it. If the world of the most refined
technology is not reconciled with the simple language of nature in a
healthy balance, human life will face ever greater risks, of which we are
already seeing the first disturbing signs"

"Work in such a way that you resist the temptations of a productivity and
profit that are detrimental to the respect for nature. God entrusted the
earth to human beings "to till it and keep it" (cf. Gn 2: 15). When this
principle is forgotten and they become the tyrants rather than the
custodians of nature, sooner or later the latter will rebel."

Although no one who wishes to receive THE AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER on a
regular basis will ever be denied such simply because their priorities may
exist elsewhere, voluntary CONTRIBUTIONS FROM YOU THE READER are always
welcomed and much appreciated. Such checks made out to A.V. Krebs can be
sent to P.O. Box 2201, Everett, Washington 98213-0201

Too bleak? And confined to the Arabs only? What of radicals in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia and Indonesia?

R

Special Dispatch - Reform Project
September 20, 2004
No. 786

To view this Special Dispatch in HTML format, please visit:
http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD78604

Arab Progressive: The Arabs are Still Slaves to a Medieval Mentality

In a recet opinion piece, the progressive author and journalist Dr. Shaker
Al-Nabulsi condemned the growing support for terrorism and extremism in the
Arab world, and the rejection of moderation and reason.
The following are excerpts from the article1)

'We have become the Most Terrorist Nation and the Greatest Spillers of
Blood in the World'

"... If the Arabs had today a well-burnished mirror in which they can see
themselves, and if they had the requisite courage to look in it, they would
be stricken by fear and panic at the sight of themselves. The image [would
be] that we have become the most terrorist nation and the greatest spillers
of blood in the world in this [current] stage of history in which nations
resolve their problems through dialogue, diplomacy, conventions, and
through appeal to the world's better judgment, to public opinion, and to
intellectuals, instead of threatening [others] with bloodshed if this or
that demand goes unmet... The image is that we have become a nation devoid
of reason!"

'Why have the Arabs Gone Crazy in Such a Manner?'

"What happened to the Arabs in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,
Palestine, Morocco, Yemen, and in other countries? What caused the Arabs
to lose the rationality with which they led the world in the 10th century?
Why have the Arabs gone crazy in such a manner? Is it because they have
lost hope in comprehensive reform? [Or] because they have lost hope in the
success of the Arab world? Is it a result of the huge gap between the
haves and the have-nots? Is it a result of the degrading poverty that
reduces many Arabs to rummage through garbage cans to find food? Is it a
result of the pervasive corruption prevalent in governmental institutions
that do not want and are not willing to undergo any reform that would
result in the unraveling of even a single thread from the luxurious carpet
on which they rest, with the support of the police establishment which is
capable of obstructing any call for reform...?

"Did this ... occur because of the rule of the dark religious educational
system which incites to war against modernity, democracy, and the new
liberalism, and permits the spilling of the blood of its supporters,
pioneers, and students? Is it because the cultural elite have abandoned
its political role and in so doing has paved the way for the clerics, with
their white, green, or black turbans, to set the tone of political action
in the Arab world to such a degree that we no longer distinguish between
the political and the religious? The impure has become interwoven with the
holy, the mosques have turned into proving-grounds for armed political
campaigns, chaos has spread and in the Arab world a thousand religions have
sprung up, all of them [claiming to be] Islam...

"Did this occur as a result of the fact that the intellectuals have
distorted the truth and lack the courage to tell the truth to their
students? Is it a result of the frightening spread of illiteracy and
cultural ignorance in the Arab world, with the result that the vast
majority of people do not read, do not know, [and] do not think? Is it a
result of the cumulative political and cultural repression from which the
Arab people have suffered for the last fifteen centuries? Is it a result
of the proliferation of holy sites and the proliferation of totems in Arab
life to the extent that most people have lost faith in their efficacy and
[so] have invented their own totem, which is represented in a nationalist
totems such as Abd Al-Nasser or Saddam Hussein, or in a counterfeit
religious totem such as Bin Laden, Muqtada Al-Sadr, Al-Zarqawi, or many
others?

"Did this occur as a result of the fact that terrorist groups have huge
incomes from the charity tithes streaming in daily from good Muslims all
over the world? In a recent report it was said that the worth of Sheikh
Al-Qaradhawi, one of the preachers of terrorism in the Arab world, is
estimated at tens of millions of dollars. From the 'Al-Taqwaa' Bank alone
he lost three million dollars after it was shut down by the Americans...

"Did this occur as a result of the huge sums that the terrorists obtain by
growing hashish and opium on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border...?"

'The Arabs have Surrendered to the Demagogic, Hysterical, Provocative Media'

"All of the verses, all of the prophetic traditions, all of the wise
sayings, all of the poems and the words of intellectuals encouraging
thought and the application of reason have been wiped out from the Arab
memory. The Arabs have surrendered to a fake religious culture. The
Friday sermons, the religious programming, the religious literature and the
turbans have become the decisive factor in every matter - in religion,
politics, the economy, society, education, and culture. The Arabs have
surrendered to the demagogic, hysterical, provocative media and have begun
to search the news editions for bloodshed, beheadings, the dragging of
bodies, the flaying of skins, and the destruction of homes. The most
endearing sight of the year for the Arabs was that of the mass graves in
Iraq."

'Anyone Who Thinks and Makes Use of His Intelligence in the Arab World is
Detestable, Condemnable, and Accursed'

"Anyone who thinks and makes use of his intelligence in the Arab world is
detestable, condemnable, and accursed; he is of the seed of serpents and
the fruit of Satan, he is an agent of the new American colonialism, one who
writes [in support] of the Marines, and a spy in the service of foreign
intelligence agencies. The Islamists who hijacked Islam, stole it and
counterfeited it ... are now leading the flocks of Arabs towards the
annihilation of human history ... not through reason but through distorted
emotions and promises of the hidden Hereafter, and through a lack of pure
and simple faith in Allah. Indeed, the Arabs have lost their pure faith in
Allah and have turned into slaves of blood-drenched religious totems,
instead of being servants of Allah...

"The Arabs think in a medieval fashion regarding politics, society, the
economy, and education, even if [they do this] by way of modern
electronics. For their foods and their transportation they make use of the
latest in Western science and technology in all of the various fields, but
at the same time they think in a medieval fashion and behave in their lives
as though they are still living in the Middle Ages, and indeed they are
still slaves to a medieval mentality and to thinkers from the Middle Ages...

"Unfortunately the Arabs' stupidity has grown, as has their thirst for
blood, and they have distanced themselves from reason. Their humanist
political values have attenuated and they have begun speaking to the world
with the sword, the axe, and armies of masked bandits, robbers, and
murderers..."

Endnote:
(1) www.rezgar.com, August 14, 2004.

*****
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an independent,
non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the
Middle East. Copies of articles
and documents cited, as well as background information, are available on
request.

MEMRI holds copyrights on all translations. Materials may only be used with
proper attribution.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
P.O. Box 27837, Washington, DC 20038-7837
Phone: (202) 955-9070
Fax: (202) 955-9077
E-Mail: memri@memri.org
www.memri.org

- by a concerned Anglican layman, as input to a grad student's thesis
research.

What has been happening, or rather 'not happening', for many y now,
is refusal to make progress toward any decision or rule on the key issue
whether to ordain known hx/lesbian/bisexuals.

Main tactics have been
1 keep definitions vague
2 pretend that nothing much is known about what mixtures
of Nature, Nurture & Will cause same-gender
(a) attraction and
(b) expression. Merely assume perversion is congenital.
3 evade the issue; when anyone tries to get on with the
discussion of ordination, which you have said is the key issue, immediately
(but furtively) change the subject to claim perverts are, thru bigotry,
unwelcome as church members in general. Just one example of such bias will
serve to claim the whole outfit is so.
4 wallow in the victim role, in a v general fashion,
making out vaguely that the church is bigotted, intolerant, etc.
5 never allude to known ill health, unhappiness and early
deaths of hx, lez & bisexuals.
6 emphasize the few stable hx & lez unions; never allude
to the predominance of drastic promiscuity in these subcultures
("communities")
7 never mention that lez households tend to be more violent
8 of course make out that tolerance is the top virtue.
Thus furtively cancel discrimination between sin and right action &
thought; indeed, condemn 'discrimination' as a sin rather than a most
important human faculty. Use the word 'discrimination' as if it replaces
'victimisation'.
9 black out Bible-based analyses such as Rev Dr Harold Turner's.

P.S. More generally, comport yourself according to the attached PC code
of 'ethics' but never spell out any of the 'principles' - just behave *as
if* nobody could dissent from the PC code without dire breach of Christian
duty.

fw from a devout RC who is also a good friend of mine:

Pope Pius XI wrote on sex education in his 31 December 1929 Encyclical
'Divini Illius Magistri'

See www.vatican.va >the Holy See>The Holy Father>Pius XI>Encyclicals.

This encyclical is just as relevant (if not more so) today.

Casto Conubii ("On Christian Marriage") is also very good.

Monbiot's article below is so exhilarating in its forthright quest
for truth and contempt for dishonest media hacks that I feel provoked to
issue a new MannGram® in the quasi-samizdat series so studiously denied
overt acknowledgment in those media.

I esteem Monbiot more than almost all journalists commentating on
my field (applied ecology), so I do him the honour of respectful comment.

> http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=650

> The Fossil Fools

The dismissal of climate change by journalistic nincompoops is a
danger to us all

< right on Geo. In this country the "journalists" include
prominently, repeatedly in the NZ Herald the NZ agent of USA criminal &
nutter Lyndon LaRouche.

> By George Monbiot. Published in
the Guardian 27th April 2004

>Picture a situation in which most of the media, despite the
>overwhelming weight of medical opinion, refused to accept that there was a
>connection between smoking and lung cancer.

< Dictating too fast here, Geo. The issue is not "a connection".
It has moved way beyond that. The issue is whether most lung cancer is
caused by smoking. It is that clear; why are you so vague?

>Imagine that every time new evidence emerged, they asked someone with
>no medical qualifications to write a piece dismissing the evidence and
>claiming that there was no consensus on the issue.

time new evidence emerges on gynaecology. Indeed, nearly all the new media
items on O&G since 1987 are generated by 'someone with no medical
qualifications'. Rewards for these usurpations are large: the main
impostor is now Governor-general, another became a list-MP but retreated to
Mongolia accused of filching from the public purse, another is an Auckland
Regional Councillor and has been able to get The Lancet to publish sporadic
columns of her opinions. One of the originators of this crazy racket is
now head of the WHO non-infectious diseases division.

< As a secondary effect, midwives have been treated as more
important authorities on O&G than, for instance, a highly respectable FRCOG
and chairman of the NZ Medical Association. Almost all GPs have abandoned
obstetrics; midwives collecting large subsidies routinely fail to arrange
specialist backup at National Women's Hospital. These trends will have
harmed a certain number of mothers and babies.

< Geo's rhetorical manoevre is neat, but far from conclusive. He
depicts, as if it were impossible or extremely unlikely, usurpation of
authority by non-specialists in medicine or science. The awful truth is
that such usurpations are not rare these past few decades. One main cause
is affirmative action putting ahead of expertise some ideology (usually
either racism, wimminsLib, or militant homosexuality).

> Imagine that the BBC, in the interests of "debate", wheeled out one of
>the tiny number of scientists who says that smoking and cancer aren't
>linked

< That sloppy term again, Geo. The apologists hired by the
tobacco industry in attempt to dissuade successive ministers of health from
imposing legal restrictions on sale & use of tobacco did not deny a link.
Their assertion was that causality had not been stringently enough
demonstrated. It is a matter of degree. As a member throughout of the
statutory board advising those ministers on poisons, I'm proud to say we
weren't persuaded by those deniers: smoking tobacco was agreed to cause
lung cancer (and other serious illnesses). But I am also proud to say that
same Toxic Substances Board concluded the evidence (2 decade ago) on
passive smoking was far less persuasive, and rejected the pressure for
further restrictions from a group of unqualified publicists.

> , or that giving up isn't worth the trouble, every time the issue of
>cancer was raised. Imagine that, as a result, next to nothing was done
>about the problem, to the delight of the tobacco industry and the
>detriment of millions of smokers. We would surely describe the newspapers
>and the BBC as grossly irresponsible.

>Now stop imagining it, and take a look at what's happening. The issue is
>not smoking, but climate change. The scientific consensus is just as
>robust

the main point of the IPCC which is *predictions*. The evidence that
global warning has been caused by human activity, let alone the evidence
that it will in future get much worse, is not so conclusive as the evidence
that smoking has caused lung cancer. It is, however, conclusive enough for
governmental purposes, as expressed (minimally) by the Kyoto treaty.

>, the misreporting just as widespread, the consequences even graver. If
>it is true, as the government's new report suggested last week, that it is
>now too late to prevent hundreds of thousands of British people from being
>flooded out of their homes,1 then the journalists who have consistently
>and deliberately downplayed the threat carry much of the responsibility
>for the problem. It is time we stopped treating them as bystanders. It is
>time we started holding them to account.

condemnation of rogue *scientists*.

> "The scientific community has reached a consensus," the government's
chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, told the House of Lords
last month. "I do not believe that amongst the scientists there is a
discussion as to whether global warming is due to anthropogenic effects.
It is man-made and it is essentially [caused by] fossil fuel burning,
increased methane production ... and so on."2

Sir David chose his words carefully. There is a discussion about whether
global warming is due to anthropogenic (manmade) effects. But it is not -
or is only seldom - taking place among scientists. It is taking place in
the media, and it seems to consist of a competition to establish the outer
reaches of imbecility.

< The extent of error, and the potential harm, are even worse in
what the media so cynically call "the debate" on gene-tampering.

< Thus the most dangerous technology of all diverts hundreds of
billions of dollars and scientific talent that could in principle be
redeployed to appropriate technology & science. The BBC gives Monsanto PR
operatives, lying unchallenged, free unbalanced time as if they were
reliable scientists. The NZ media present propaganda agents with no
medical or scientific qualifications who are furthermore paid to generate
pro-GM 'spin', to give the final word in news items about GM.

>During the heatwave last year, the Spectator magazine made the case
that because there was widespread concern in the 1970s about the
possibility of a new ice age, we can safely dismiss concerns about global
warming today.3 This is rather like saying that because Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck's hypothesis on evolution once commanded scientific support and was
later shown to be incorrect, then Charles Darwin's must also be wrong.

< Your liking for analogy gets you into trouble yet again, Geo.
This time it's an awful tangle. You are wrong that Lamarck's main
hypothesis about evolution has been disproved. The penchant of the dreaded
media to depict every issue as a bipolar 'tis-'tisn't conflict has engulfed
even you, regarding evolution theory. Not only are examples known of
inheritance of acquired characteristics as envisaged by Lamarck, but much
more importantly, to the extent that Darwin was correct his ideas do not
logically exclude Lamarck's. The notion 'Lamarck v. Darwin' is a glaring
fallacy.

>Science differs from the leader writers of the Spectator in that it
>learns from its mistakes. A hypothesis is advanced and tested. If the
>evidence suggests it is wrong, it is discarded.

displace experts with unqualified attention-seekers, the scientific method
you so rightly admire will no longer work. The hypothesis that the Pap
smear is a reliable early warning of cancer, and that certain microscopic
anomalies of cells on the cervix indicate the uterus should be removed, is
not discarded, because it has become an ideological banner. The hypothesis
that synthetic genes can be inserted into plants by drastically novel
methods not resembling any process known in nature, to give a GM organism
that has all properties unchanged except for the desired herbicide
resistance, or novel modified insecticide, is based on junk science at many
steps of its illogic. Yet it prevails with governments, many of which have
invested in this new racket. Language of Monbiot-type vigour is fully
warranted in criticism of this crazy fad. GM has led the world far astray
because science has been sidelined.

>If the evidence appears to support it, it is refined and subjected to
>further testing.

of GMOs. Almost all the relevant testing has been omitted, and those few
scientists that have been funded to begin testing have been vilified &
purged if they report adverse effects (notably Ewen & Pusztai). The truth
on actual maimings & killings of humans by material purified from GMOs
remains largely suppressed.

>That some climatologists predicted an ice age in the 1970s, and that the
>idea was dropped when others found that their predictions were flawed, is
>a cause for confidence in climatology.

Mistaken analogies only muddy the waters.

>But the Spectator looks like the Journal of Atmospheric Physics by
>comparison to the Mail on Sunday and its Nobel laureate-in-waiting,
>Peter Hitchens. "The greenhouse effect probably doesn't exist", he
>informed his readers in 2001. "There is as yet no evidence for it."4

disgusted by that last statement from that agent, can you imagine how I as
a scientist feel about a *qualified* climate scientist - one of the few
in NZ - saying exactly that about global warming? A suave West Indian
Christopher de Freitas who did his doctorate with the respected K Hare has
consistently propagandized in the media to confuse and misrepresent the
science of climate degradation. Unprincipled hacks - hardly new, tho'
admittedly more rife than ever; but scientists issuing Hitchens-type
slogans - this is a yet more anti-social trend.

declare what rewards, if any, he has received for his propagandizing.

>Perhaps Mr Hitchens would care to explain why our climate differs from
that of Mars. That some of the heat from the sun is trapped in the
earth's atmosphere by gases (the greenhouse effect) has been
established since the mid-19th century. But, like most of these
nincompoops, Hitchens claims to be defending science from its
opponents. "The only reason these facts are so little-known," he tells
us, is (apart from the reason that he has just made them up), "that a
self-righteous love of 'the environment' has now replaced religion as
the new orthodoxy."5

>Hitchens, in turn, is an Einstein beside that famous climate
scientist, Melanie Phillips. Writing in the Daily Mail in January, she
dismissed the entire canon of climatology as "a global fraud" perpetrated
by the "leftwing, anti-American, anti-West ideology which goes hand in hand
with anti-globalisation and the belief that everything done by the
industrialised world is wicked."6 This belief must be shared by the
Pentagon, whose recent report pictures climate change as the foremost
threat to global security.7 In an earlier article, she claimed that "most
independent climate specialists, far from supporting [global warming], are
deeply sceptical."8 She managed to name only one, however, and he
receives his funding from the fossil fuel industry.9

>Having blasted the world's climatologists for "scientific
illiteracy", she then trumpeted her own. The latest report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which collates the findings of
climatologists), is, she complained, "studded with weasel words" such as
"very likely" and "best estimate".10 These weasel words are, of course,
what make it a scientific report, rather than a column by Melanie Phillips.

& totally certain (which good scientists like Sir John Houghton of the
IPCDC are not, in such predictions) - Melanie & her like would have
blasted them for failing to express uncertainties.

>If ever you meet one of these people, I suggest you ask them the
following questions:
1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide influence global temperatures?
3. Will that influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?
It would be interesting to discover at which point they answer no -
at which point, in other words, they choose to part company with basic
physics.

qualitative facts you mention are not disputed by Lindzen et al., so you
actually get nowhere by reciting them. What the industry stooges say is
that the *extent* of global warming in the past century is so small that it
is not utterly proven by statistics. Lindzen goes further; I have heard
him say in a scientific gathering (while funded to propagandize in NZ by
the Business Roundtable) that even if the IPCC predictions do come true,
retrospective statistical analysis will still not be able to prove
temperatures, sea levels etc have changed *owing to anthropogenic
emissions*. Precautionary, schmecautionary!

>But these dolts are rather less dangerous than the BBC, and its
>insistence on "balancing" its coverage of climate change. It appears to
>be incapable of running an item on the subject without inviting a sceptic
>to comment on it. Usually this is either someone from a corporate-funded
>thinktank (who is, of course, never introduced as such) or the
>professional anti-environmentalist Philip Stott. Professor Stott is a
>retired biogeographer. Like almost all the prominent sceptics he has
>never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change. But he has made
>himself available to dismiss climatologists' peer-reviewed work as the
>"lies" of eco-fundamentalists.11

...

>What makes all this so dangerous is that it plays into the hands of the
corporate lobbyists. A recently leaked memo written by Frank Luntz, the
US Republican and corporate strategist, warned his party that "The
environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in
general - and President Bush in particular - are most vulnerable ...
Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are
settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.

Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific
certainty a primary issue in the debate."12

>We can expect Professors Hitchens and Phillips to do what they're told.
But isn't it time that the BBC stopped behaving like the public
relations arm of the fossil fuel lobby?

>www.monbiot.com

< Right on Geo.

years, but on the other hand also riddled with unnecessary furphies. I
hope you can *relate to* that.