Listics

Here are some fun facts about media history and mass culture.  I’m reminded tonight of American jurisprudence’s failure to enforce legal findings that "creationism" as a doctrine may not be taught in public schools, and the slimy way the no-brainers of the right wing evangelical movement have shifted from "creationism"to "intelligent design," staying one step ahead with their pettifoggery.  I was searching for a follow-up from AKMA on the Cobb County nonsense, but AKMA is a homeschooling professional Christian and a postmodernist, challenged by enlightenment values, who likely is also professionally and personally challenged by posting a public position on these matters.  If he has written further on this, I can’t find it.  I wish he would post because he  usually lends a moral weight to these issues  that  I lack.

Four hundred years ago we entered an historical period  in Europe that is commonly called "the Enlightenment."  This year in the Stevens Creek School in Cupertino, some sad-ass ignoramuses have had the sand to bring a suit against the school district because one of their own was prevented from preaching their brand of numbskull christianity when he should have been teaching fifth grade American history.  The most recent press release from the Cupertino School District is here (Acrobat required).   Other information is assembled here on a page created by 100 or so Stevens Creek parents.

These attacks on our common heritage, these attempts to roll back social progress to an era dominated by the "faith based" frighten me.  I see acceptance of our differences and a common understanding of our similarities as essential to the proliferation and maintenance of the health of a modern society.  If a post-modern era requires a return to strident evangelism, to a christian fundamentalism that is punitive of non-believers, then we had best reconsider what post-modern thought is doing for us, and reassess our posture with regard to promotion of its values.    

I pulled the following excerpt from here.   Just as particle physics will soon fall to a new understanding, so did the Ptolemaic system of epicycles as descriptors of planetary motion fall before Kepler’s and Galileo’s refined understanding of a heliocentric planetary system.  All of this progress was made in spite of powerful christian influences, not because of them.  Now we are faced with the prospect of a serious regression, a new dark ages.  What can we do?

By the mid-1600s the Enlightenment was in full swing; and the
various natural sciences were emerging; the methods of rational logic,
observation, and verification began to reveal gross distortions in Church
doctrines explaining the natural world.  Such distortions were becoming seen as
doctrine rather than divine truth, and the power of the Church to define reality
was forever undermined. [emphasis added -fp-]  Here’s a brief list of some of the more extraordinary
achievements of the 17th and early 18th centuries (compiled from Garraty and
Gay 1972, Boorstin 1988, Crowley & Heyer 1989): 

Time Line 1

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1609 Publication of Astronomia Nova by Kepler, containing his statement
on the first two laws of planetary motion

1610 Galileo publishes Sidereal Messenger, describing his telescopic
observations of the heavens

1619 Kepler publishes Harmonia Mundi, announcing his discovery of the
third law of planetary motion

1637 Descartes publishes Discourse on Method

1644 Milton publishes Areopagitica

1650 Hobbes publishes Leviathan

1660s Boyle publishes New Experiments in Physico-Mechanical Touching
the Spring of the Air;  legal definition of Negro (African and Carribean)
slavery begun in Virginia and Maryland

1662 Royal Society of London is founded

1666 French Academy of Science is founded

1676 Roemer determines the finite velocity of light

1677 The existence of microscopic male spermatozoa is discovered by van
Leeuwenhoek

1678 The wave theory of light is proposed by Huygens

1687 Newton publishes Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis

1690 Locke publishes Two Treatises of Civil Government; first American
newspaper, Publick Occurrences begins and ends in its first issue