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Apologia Report 12:36
September 28, 2007
Subject: How scientists are destroying science to "save" it
In this issue:
ISLAM - more beginning to notice the time-bomb ticking in Europe
MORMONISM - Newsweek reports LDS women uneasy over expectations of polygamy in the afterlife
ORIGINS - new book claims "many" transitional forms, seeks to "discredit the creationist movement"
+ coming film "documents the crushing of any investigation or questioning of materialist Darwinism" within the academy
POTTER, HARRY - with Rowling finished, what is the verdict?
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ISLAM
"Islam, the Marxism of Our Time: Some troubling signs in Europe" by Theodore Dalrymple -- "The Times of London, relying on a police report, recently observed that the Deobandis, a fundamentalist sect, now run nearly half of the 1,350 mosques in Britain and train the vast majority of the Muslim clerics who get their training in the country. The man who might become the sect's spiritual leader in Britain, Riyadh ul Haq, believes that friendship with a Christian or a Jew makes 'a mockery of Allah's religion.' At least no one could accuse him of a shallow multiculturalism.
"According to Le Figaro [a leading French daily newspaper], 70 percent of Muslims in France intend to keep the fast during Ramadan, up from 60 percent in 1989. Better still, from the Islamist point of view, non-practicing Muslims feel increasing social pressure to comply with the fast, whether they want to or not. The tide is thus running in the Islamists' favor.
"Best news of all for the Islamists, however, comes from Germany. Two of the men that the German police arrested in early September for plotting a series of huge explosions in the country were young German converts to Islam. It is impossible to know how many such German converts there are, but it is thought to run into tens of thousands, principally men; in the nature of things, it is also uncertain how many of them are attracted to extremism, but few people are so attracted by moderation that they are converted by it." (This last line bears retention for future use if anything in this issue of AR does. - RP)
"All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. ... The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths' personal angst.
"This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us." City Journal (Manhattan), Sep 17 '07, <http://tinyurl.com/36pwfd>
AR consulting editor Mark Hartwig adds: For a well-researched and thoroughly-documented treatment of the Islamic problem in Europe, see Eurabia, by Bat Ye'or [5]. For more of a street-level, but still reliable, treatment see Melanie Phillips' Londonistan [6] and, more recently, Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept [7].
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MORMONISM
"Mormons: Is Polygamy in Afterlife OK?' by BeliefWatch columnist Lisa Miller -- "'I wish to state categorically that this church has nothing whatever to do with those practicing polygamy,' said LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley more than a decade ago.
"Much less clear is the church's position on polygamy in the eternal hereafter. ... If a Mormon man becomes a widower, or if he is divorced, he can remarry in the Temple - and thus be sealed [for eternity] to more than one woman. (Mormon women, on the other hand, need to have their previous sealings canceled before they can be sealed again.) ...
"'Most Mormon women are worried about the polygamy issue,' says Margaret Toscano, a professor at the University of Utah who was excommunicated by the LDS Church for her feminist writings. 'They're worried they're going to be forced into polygamy in the next life.'" (Perhaps long-ignored questions about gender equality in LDS teachings are now rising to higher levels. - RP) Newsweek, Sep 3 '07, p13. <http://tinyurl.com/3cbaec>
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ORIGINS
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, by Donald R. Prothero [8], a geologist at Occidental College. The unnamed reviewer notes that n writing the book, Prothero's "goal is twofold. First, he wants to demonstrate the wide variety of transitional forms that have been found, many within the past 20 years. Second, he aims to discredit the creationist movement. 'I have tried to document how they routinely distort or deny the evidence, quote out of context, and do many other dishonest and unethical things - all in the name of pushing their crusade.' He accomplishes both of his goals (though he can be repetitious regarding the creationists), and his descriptions of recent research, much of it his own, are compelling." Publisher's Weekly, Sep 3 '07, pp50-51.
"New Film Investigates Crushing of Dissent from Darwinian Orthodoxy" by Hilary White -- "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," starring the New York writer and intellectual Ben Stein, is "set for release in February 2008 [and] documents the crushing of any investigation or questioning of materialist Darwinism that is the orthodox position of most of the scientific establishment. ...
"A PRNewswire release says that Stein, a lawyer, economist, former presidential speechwriter, author and social commentator, was 'stunned' when he investigated the debate surrounding Intelligent Design theory and Darwinism. Stein uncovers what he says is an elitist scientific establishment that actively suppresses any research that may lead to questioning of the accepted Darwinian theory.
"The film features interviews with scientists and thinkers including biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their ideas suppressed for questioning adherence to the materialist theory. ...
"Stein writes that the Darwinian orthodoxy in science is as dangerous politically as it is antithetical to free scientific inquiry.
"'America is not America without freedom,' he writes. 'Human beings are supposed to live in a state of freedom. Freedom is not conferred by the state: as our founders said, and as Martin Luther King repeated, freedom is God-given.'
"'A huge part of this freedom is freedom of inquiry.'
"Expelled was produced by Premise Media and marketed by Motive Entertainment, the company that has spearheaded The Passion of the Christ, Polar Express and The Chronicles of Narnia." LifeSiteNews.com, Aug 30 '07. <http://tinyurl.com/2go488>
For the movie trailer see: <http://tinyurl.com/39wbof>
Ben Stein's weblog: <http://www.expelledthemovie.com/blog>
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POTTER, HARRY
What are people concluding about Harry now that Joanne Rowling has finished the series and has seen over 100 million of her books in print as a result? Consider what Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College, says in his Books & Culture review (Sep/Oct '07, pp47-50) of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [9]: "A little more than a hundred years ago, a number of British educators, journalists, and intellectuals grew exercised about the reading habits of the nation's children. The particular target of their disapproval was the boy's adventure story - the kind of cheap short novel, full of exotic locations and narrow escapes from mortal peril and false friends and unexpected acts of heroism, that had come to be known as the 'penny dreadful.' ...
"Then came riding into the fray a young man - twenty-five at the time - named Gilbert Keith Chesterton [who wrote:] 'The average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets.'
"And above all, what Chesterton loves about the penny dreadful is this: 'It is always on the side of life.'
"I have been meditating on these thoughts in recent days, as I have scanned cyberspace for the many and varying responses to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final tale of the Boy Who Lived. ...
"We already know that some Christians mistrust the Potter series because of its depictions of magic; we already know that some critics (Harold Bloom most prominent among them) deplore the books' lack of literary grace. But another and different set of critics has emerged here at the end of the series, for whom the evident traditionalism of the books is their greatest flaw. ...
"What could one say in defense of these books, so unliterary, so unsophisticated in their morality and style, so bourgeois, so heteronormative? Perhaps only this: that J. K. Rowling has produced, in the vast, seven-book, thirty-five-hundred-page arc of Harry's story, the greatest penny dreadful ever written."
Jacobs' argument follows at great length. Then he concludes: "It should be obvious at this point that the Harry Potter books amount to something more, far more, than your average penny dreadful. But they belong, firmly, to that moral universe, even as they expand it beyond what we might have thought possible. ...
"They have many flaws, but I have not dwelt on them here because I forgive J. K. Rowling for every one. Her seven books are, and thank God for it, always on the side of life." [1]
Then there is the remark in Newsweek from Lisa Miller's BeliefWatch column ("Is 'Harry Potter' a Christian Story?", Aug 6 '07) that in the series "the Christian parallels are glaring." [2]
More to the point, Newsday columnist Raymond Keating writes in "Harry Potter and the Christian allegory" (Aug 13 '07): "As for Rowling herself, she told a Vancouver Sun reporter in 2000 that she's a Christian. She added: 'Every time I've been asked if I believe in God, I've said, 'yes,' because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that, I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books.'
"That's evident in the 'Deathly Hallows,' which is rich in Christian imagery and references if one pays attention," concludes Keating. [3]
The most persuasive, yet concise sympathetic argument that we've seen comes from conservative Christian radio commentator Jerry Bowyer in "Harry Potter and the Fire Breathing Fundamentalists" (Townhall.com, Aug 2 '07) [4].
For an opposing opinion, see ex-New Ager Marcia Montenegro's review: http://tinyurl.com/2joqrc
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Sources, Digital:
1 - http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/005/1.47.html
2 - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20010717
3 - http://tinyurl.com/34a94x
4 - http://tinyurl.com/2tedfl
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Sources, Monographs:
5 - Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'or (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Prs, 2005, paperback, 384 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/083864077X/apologiareport>
6 - Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips (Encounter, rev ed, 2007, paperback, 212 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594031975/apologiareport>
7 - While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, by Bruce Bawer (Broadway [September 11] 2007, paperback, 272 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767920058/apologiareport>
8 - Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, by Donald R. Prothero (Columbia Univ Prs, 2007, hardcover, 408 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0231139624/apologiareport>
9 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), by J. K. Rowling (Arthur A. Levine, 2007, hardcover, 784 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0545010225/apologiareport>
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