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Showing posts from November 3, 2013

St. Paul on Edward Snowden

St. Paul said that now we see as in a glass, darkly. I find this an excellent prescription for reading the news. For instance, the news about Snowden’s revelations. According to the papers and the Bush – I’m sorry, the Obama, my mistake, sometimes it is so hard to tell one from the other – administration, Snowden’s revelations have harmed the security of the American people, which is protected by the intelligence services. Now, by the simple method of inversing this often repeated phrase, we get to the truth. Did Snowden arm the taliban and the Islamic mercenaries that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s? No, the CIA did. Did Snowden create the international network of paths through which Islamicists were able to spread globally? No, the CIA did. Did Snowden give a visa to Omar Abdel Rahmen, the organizer of the first attack on the WTC in 1994? No, that was an employee of the American embassy in Sudan who, all things considered, was probably bowing to a CIA suggestion,

the evolution of ghosts

It has long been my contention that there is no story about life on earth that does not boil down to an evolutionary story. The creationist version of life on earth has, since the 19 th century, made large use of the notion of intelligent design – but anybody who knows anything about design knows that it evolves. The intelligent design argument is a mess, since the standards it uses to critique Darwinism are, of course, entirely absent when it tries to construct the meaning of intelligent design. Just as we can trace the evolution of the design of the watch by the material left behind in its wake – diagrams, tools, etc. – so too, if intelligent design were true, we would be able to see the material left behind in its wake – proto-humans, for instance. At this point, intelligent design simply gives up the intelligent part and opts for supernatural design, a design that defies the same physical laws that, on its critique side, intelligent design uses to try to de-legitimate Dar