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Sadly, No! throws an offhanded dig at Mark Noonan’s descrip­tion of the “Kingdom of God” as a state of exis­tence. While Noonan even­tu­ally does come out in favor of democ­racy, you’ll note that it’s only because you can’t guar­an­tee you’ll get a com­pe­tent and benev­o­lent dic­ta­tor (one who only oppresses The Other) not because the idea of being ruled by fiat — being forcibly infan­tilized for life — is sim­ply repug­nant on it’s face.

The post reminded me of a dis­cus­sion I had a while ago, about Intelligent Design. During the dis­cus­sion, I had men­tioned a story I had read online about the empha­sis of cer­tain sto­ries (whether grounded in sci­ence or not) over oth­ers in edu­ca­tion. I was, regret­tably, unable to prop­erly explain myself the per­son in ques­tion, mainly because I was spend­ing more time attempt­ing to recall the story than explain­ing what it meant. With today’s renewed search I found it, and I’m blog­ging a huge excerpt so I don’t lose it again:

You see, Cap was a sci­en­tist, after all. That said, I felt I just had to ask a few things com­monly held to be true amongst American Christians which seem to be com­pletely at odds with sci­ence. You know the list. The two big ones are “how old is the world?” and “so what about evolution?”

He didn’t answer me philo­soph­i­cally. He answered me polit­i­cally, and it shocked me how right he was in his observation.

In his thick brogue, he gen­tly answers about evo­lu­tion, “Out of curios­ity, then son, do you know what the Soviets taught their chil­dren regard­ing the ori­gins of species of the world?”

“Well, cer­tainly they didn’t teach cre­ation­ism,” I answered. I didn’t know the answer, but I fig­ure Godless com­mies don’t do cre­ation­ism, right? I assumed evolution.

He looks at me and says, “Lamarck. You remem­ber that one from biol­ogy class, don’t you?”

“Lamarck? Isn’t that the the­ory that said giraffes stretched their necks their whole lives try­ing to get at food in the trees and their bod­ies responded by cre­at­ing chil­dren with longer necks?” I was proud of myself for remem­ber­ing the the­ory. It was one that we were taught was prim­i­tive, dis­proven, and taught solely to show us pre­de­ces­sors to mod­ern the­ory. “I mean, the Soviets were sup­posed to be all about sci­ence, why would they teach Lamarck?”

“Well, for one, it doesn’t really mat­ter where school­child­ren think they came from, does it? I mean, fac­tory work­ers and clerks and farm­ers and mechan­ics — does it really mat­ter one way or the other for the vast major­ity of folks if they think they came from fish or from God or whatever?”

“I sup­pose not, but that doesn’t explain why they would know­ingly teach some­thing known to be false science.”

“No. It doesn’t. But that’s because it wasn’t sci­ence they were teach­ing. Think about it. In a Lamarkian world­view, all the cells of the body are striv­ing for a sin­gle goal which will only be real­ized by the next gen­er­a­tion. All the cells of the body work­ing together as a col­lec­tive for a bet­ter future in which they may not even par­tic­i­pate. They taught Lamarck not because it was sci­en­tific or true — they taught Lamarck because it made good lit­tle commies.”

I felt relieved for a moment that I wasn’t in a total­i­tar­ian state that val­ued faith to the state over truth. Unfortunately, Cap kept talking.

“And what type of a soci­ety do you sup­pose school­child­ren taught Darwin would cre­ate, lad? One where the best, the fittest, the strongest, the fastest lux­u­ri­ate in the spoils of their vic­tory at the expense of the ones they van­quished along the way? What is to be said of the losers? They were weak, weren’t they? They didn’t fight hard enough. They were stu­pid. If that’s the world you want, you’ve got to teach the kids right, don’t you?”

Sure, I knew about the pop­u­lar­ity of Social Darwinism amongst the Gilded Age thinkers. It never occurred to me that we never really left that time. More impor­tantly, for the first time it occurred to me that whether or not some­thing is true doesn’t deter­mine if it is taught. There are plenty of true things that we don’t spend time on in the class room. Why so much empha­sis on some true things instead of oth­ers? Because they con­firm our world­view. It’s not a con­spir­acy or any­thing. It’s just that we teach what we value.

So that brings us full cir­cle to the world of Evangelicals. Commies taught their kids Lamarck because they val­ued col­lec­tivism; even after they knew that the the­ory was faulted. Capitalists teach Darwin; even after the sta­tis­ti­cal suc­cess of anti-Darwinian pro­grams like Social Security and the Interstate Highway sys­tem. What type of per­son — what type of a world­view val­ues creationism?

What is to be said of cre­ation­ism and val­ues? I mean, beyond just the “it’s what’s in Bible” stuff. What world­view does it espouse?

Things are as they are and always will be as they are because God made it that way and wills to keep it that way.

I’m here where I am in this place and this posi­tion in life because this is how I was made by God. I was divinely willed to push this broom, so I have to learn to deal with it. Whining is for the faithless.

Humans aren’t pow­er­ful enough to harm the environment.

It doesn’t mat­ter how much this world sucks.

The wealthy and pow­er­ful are where they are because God wants them there. George W is pres­i­dent because God wants him to be so.

Creationism is the value sys­tem of the monar­chists, is it not?

Brad from Baltimore, writ­ing to Joe Bageant in “Yes, I’m an Urban Liberal”

Inspired from from a com­ment on Ezra Klein: A Bit More On Gore, I went look­ing for Sartre, first as a tool in ser­vice of blame, until about three para­graphs in, when it became a tool in ser­vice of knowl­edge. This caught my eye:

Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to estab­lish Fascism, and the oth­ers may be so cow­ardly or so slack as to let them do so. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

So what will be your answer?

[Redacted because it wasn’t fair to loved ones.]