Non Sequitur
In Stacey”s Letter to the Editor today she suggests that people in their right minds know that the Mount Rushmore Monument was man-made and did not come about by random processes, chance, and time. She asks “[w]hy then do people believe that the actual presidents themselves were the results of such things?” I find Stacey”s comments arrogant and disingenuously naive simply because when she cannot think of how nature could have created anything through evolution, it must mean that scientists cannot do so either.
There is no doubt that this creationist thinking revolves around hoping to ban the teaching of evolution in school, demanding equal time for Genesis with Darwin and demanding equal time for “creation-science” and “evolution science.” As I”m sure Stacey is aware, a court of law in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case ruled that intelligent design (creation-science) in public school biology classes violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States because its teaching is not science and it cannot de-couple itself from its religious antecedents.
It is important to note that this creation/science debate is mostly confined to the United States with its highly Christian population (and in some other countries with a high percentage of Christian believers) while the acceptance of evolution is world-wide.
We find a vast majority of the scientific community and academia supporting evolutionary theory as the only explanation that can fully account for observations in the fields of biology, paleontology, molecular biology, genetics, anthropology, astronomy and many others. Only about 5 percent of American scientists identified themselves as creationists with about 95 percent believing that evolution is how man came to be where he is today.
Our scientific community considers intelligent design a neo-creationist offshoot and is unscientific, pseudoscience, or junk science with the National Academy of Sciences stating that “claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life” are not scientific because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own.
Rather than performing real science with testing and verification and articles written for scientific journals creationists would rather indulge in pseudo-scholarship which is the indispensable foundation of pseudoscience.
Greg Blinn, Kelseyville
Who does he think he is?
What does House Speaker John A. Boehner think he is doing? He has invited the head of another nation to speak before the Congress without consulting with the President. Does he think he IS the president? Article II section 3 of the constitution gives the President the duty to “… receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers”. And Mr. Boehner said, “I did not consult the White House,” and added that Congress “can make this decision on its own.” Is this what we are to expect form a Republican controlled Congress? Shameful!
Kevin Bracken, Kelseyville
Truth and fact
For the very nature of a known fact we give credence to science; for science is the area of actuality, the very field of obvious fact. We are necessarily aware of fact, consciously and unconsciously, singly and congegationally at all times during the common activities of our everyday lives. We live with fact necessarily. To disbelieve obvious fact would be insanity.
The base of religion, on the contrary, is faith. Beside being the foundation of religion, faith is a close companion of duplicity. Faith comes every Sunday evening to the little church in the vale where the people get together and give extreme exercise to their faith. This exercise empresses deeply, and coupled with all the interpersonal affects complementary to congregations of people that set about expressing their deepest feelings together, common and obvious fact is soon transcended. People are not quite sane expressing such enthusiasms.
Set in this circumstance, religion cannot but lose the respect of the general population. As people become more educated they begin to ask question related to what and why, and modern science has the only answers. The evidence of religion would be hard to detect in downtown USA, even on Sunday.
However, the fact probably most forgotten in all walks of the world is the fact that public opinion has nothing to do with fact. The opinions of millions of people add up to only somebody”s opinion. The truth would stand supported by nobody”s belief.
Dean Sparks, Lucerne
What value for money?
Is there anyone else that believes that here in Lake County our property taxes keep going up, property values keep going down and services from the county become less and less? The answer to this question is surprisingly yes! I had a conversation with a district supervisor, as he was leaving for his Christmas vacation in regards to mud slide damages to my property caused by the excessive run-off from uphill properties. His response was “Taxes are going up and services are less and less.” I presented this same issue at the Board of Supervisors meeting January 6, 2015. To this date I have not had a response from any county official.
Ronn Weshart, Lower Lake
