EFL - this is not Scrappleface, but it should be.
Atheist, agnostic and humanist organizations in the Americas, Europe and Asia are gearing up for a five-year campaign aimed at achieving international recognition of Feb. 12 as "Darwin Day." Their target date is 2009 -- the bicentenary of the birth of British biologist Charles Darwin whose own faith in a deity who created the world collapsed before the theory of evolution he set out in 1859 in his ground-breaking "The Origin of Species."
| There are agnostic organizations? I'm not sure I believe in them, but I guess I'm open to proof... |
Why push for an annual celebration of Darwin now? His ideas are widely shared and even religious leaders from churches that once denounced him as a heretic accept that life on Earth evolved over 3 billion years from primitive forms. "Because a Darwin Day would send out a signal that science matters in an era when pseudo-science and fear of science seem to be gaining ground," argues the British Humanist Association, which is playing a key role in the campaign. In the United States, where a survey in 2002 found that 45 percent of the population believe an all-powerful deity created the universe and all life in it within the last 10,000 years, this concern has even stronger force. Under the administration [of] President Bush, who says he is a born-again Christian, U.S. humanists and atheists say there has been a broad offensive by "creationists" aimed at undermining or even halting the teaching of evolution in schools. The creationist stance has been boosted by a newer movement arguing that, while the Earth may indeed be billions of years old, evolution leaves open many questions that can only be answered by the existence of an "Intelligent Designer."
"It is very, very scary," says Amanda Chesworth, head of the U.S. Darwin Day movement which works to counter the trend by organizing community festivals marking the biologist’s birthday. "Creationism is spreading further and further. Our nation went from the Earth to the moon a few years ago and discovered these worlds date back billions of years. Now it is sticking its head in the sand, claiming the whole lot was made in a flash a few millennia ago by one entity"...
Other schools may follow, Keith Porteous Wood of Britain’s National Secular Society says, unless critics speak out. In India, where humanism and atheism have a strong tradition and are not so distant from traditional Hindu thought, which rejects "ultimate truths," rationalists are alarmed at the rise of an aggressively militant version of Hinduism.
The worlds most urgent problem - militant Hinduism ???
| The world's most urgent problem — whether God created the universe in six days in 6006 B.C., or if he took billions of years to do it. How long is one of God's days, by the way? I surely wish I had enough time on my hands to spend it on pondering the subject, but I've got more important things to do. Like wash my hair. |
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