Continue Reading "Awfully Coincidental" » »Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.
The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. "There is no explanation for it being left off the list," Ms. McLane said. "It has always been an eligible major."
...
If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
...
That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution.
Dr. Shaber tries hard to separate fact from fiction because, she says, "rumor and hearsay can start to seem real." In the past, she'd sometimes refer patients to government websites and printed fact sheets, or rely on those outlets to help create her own materials. Not anymore. "As a physician, I can no longer trust government sources," says Dr. Shaber. She is not a political activist or a conspiracy theorist; in addition to her own practice, she's Kaiser Permanente's director of women's health services for northern California and head of the HMO's Women's Health Research Institute. Yet this decidedly mainstream doctor and administrator says, "I no longer trust FDA decisions or materials generated [by the government]. Ten years ago, I would not have had to scrutinize government information. Now I don't feel comfortable giving it to my patients."... Continue Reading "Fact From Fiction" » »
President Bush ordered the Department of Homeland Security yesterday to create a center for faith-based and community initiatives within 45 days to eliminate regulatory, contracting and programmatic barriers to providing federal funds to religious groups to deliver social services, the White House announced last night.
...
Federal funding is controversial among such groups. Some organizations, such as Catholic Charities, accept such funds, while others, such as the Rev. Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing, have said in the past that they would not accept it.
After weeks of prodding by Republican lawmakers and the American Red Cross, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday that it will use taxpayer money to reimburse churches and other religious organizations that have opened their doors to provide shelter, food and supplies to survivors of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
FEMA officials said it would mark the first time that the government has made large-scale payments to religious groups for helping to cope with a domestic natural disaster.Continue Reading "Faith & Charity" » »
"IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs."
The film mentions a connection between the DNA of microbes in undersea volcanoes and that of humans. Crazy science!
Washington, DC -- The Bush Administration has decided that it will stand by its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Despite telling members of Congress and the public that the legality and appropriateness of the National Park Service offering a creationist book for sale at Grand Canyon museums and bookstores was "under review at the national level by several offices," no such review took place, according to materials obtained by PEER under the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, the real agency position was expressed by NPS spokesperson Elaine Sevy as quoted in the Baptist Press News:
"Now that the book has become quite popular, we don't want to remove it."
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Published: October 17, 2004
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
Continue Reading "Reason & Religion" » »LA PLATA, Md. -- Margaret Young, vice chairman of the Charles County Board of Education, believes her school system's required reading lists are filled with "profanity and pornography, fornication and adultery."
"I think parents would be appalled if they really read the books their kids were reading that were so filled with profanity and pornography," she told The Washington Post. "I rely on the school system to provide good wholesome reading for my children."
Young supports a recent board recommendation that calls for "removing anything (from reading lists) that provides a neutral or positive view of immorality or foul language."
But some in the southern Maryland county are upset, fearing that some board members are attempting to impose personal religious and moral beliefs on the public schools.
They point to the book list and a proposal that recommends distributing Bibles in schools, removing science books "biased towards evolution" and teaching sexual education classes focused exclusively on abstinence.
"They're basically trying to skew the curriculum, to teach their own conservative Christian values," said Meg MacDonald, a representative from the Charles County Education Association.
President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state."
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."
In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be "God's will" and then tells aides to "f*** over" anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
Unitarian Universalists have for decades presided over births, marriages and memorials. The church operates in every state, with more than 5,000 members in Texas alone.
But according to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Denison Unitarian church isn't really a religious organization -- at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: the organization "does not have one system of belief."
Never before -- not in this state or any other -- has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group's religious philosophy, church officials say. Strayhorn's ruling clearly infringes upon religious liberties, said Dan Althoff, board president for the Denison congregation that was rejected for tax exemption by the comptroller's office.
....
Strayhorn's ruling, as well as a similar decision by former Comptroller John Sharp, has left the comptroller's office straddling a sometimes murky gulf separating church and state.
What constitutes religion? When and how should government make that determination? Questions that for years have vexed the world's great philosophers have now become the province of the state comptroller's office.
Continue Reading "Creedless" » »DENVER -- The head of Colorado's second-largest Roman Catholic diocese says he will deny Communion to Catholics who vote for politicians who support abortion rights, stem-cell research, euthanasia and gay marriage.
In one of the strongest statements yet from a U.S. bishop in the debate over how faith should influence Catholics in this election year, Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs said Communion will be allowed only for such voters if they recant and repent in the confessional.
Continue Reading "Confessional" » »Jan. 12 -- Following is the transcript of a speech delivered May 8, 1999, at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., by then-Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo. Ashcroft is President-elect George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general.
...
A slogan of the American Revolution which was so distressing to the emissaries of the king that it was found in correspondence sent back to England was the line, "We have no king but Jesus." Tax collectors came, asking for that which belonged to the king, and colonists frequently said, "We have no king but Jesus." It found its way into the fundamental documents of this great country. You could quote the Declaration with me. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.