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From: alanm@hpindda.cup.hp.com (Alan McGowen)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Why have Marriage Laws? (was Re: Are Humans Naturally Monogamous?)
Message-ID: <6290003@hpindda.cup.hp.com>
Date: 14 Dec 90 02:02:19 GMT
References: <1990Dec06.185754.29171@pmafire.inel.gov>
Organization: HP Information Networks, Cupertino, CA
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Daniel Mocsny writes:

>Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Organized Religion. But if a 
>person gets on the NET and wants to bash homosexuals, everyone will
>try to stop them. If a person wants to bash Fundamentalists, it's
>open season. Why?

There is a difference. Fundamentalism implies a cosmological doctrine
incompatable with -- and antagonistic towards -- a scientific world view.
Fundamentalists think that evolution, ecology, astrophysics, anthropology,
and a half dozen other fields are the special province of the Devil. And
they want "equal time" for their "equally valid" views in the tax-funded
educational system. 

This *is* an issue of freedom of thought. Ours. No one denies Fundamentalists
the right to believe whatever rubbish they like -- some of them even have
doubts about the Copernican hypothesis I hear. I wish them all joy of their
Medieval cognitive coccoon. But the problem is that they wish all of us joy
of their cognitive coccoon as well, and are prepared to go to court (at least)
to wrap us -- or at least our children -- up in it. They intimidate publishers,
many of whom are fundamentally spineless and cave in, not to allow a germ of
real understanding of evolutionary biology to enter a child's brain from
reading their watery productions. They do not want children to know what has 
been learned about what we are and how we came to be it. They do not want the 
kinship of other forms of life.

Tolerance does not require offering to commit intellectual suicide. As for
active bashing of Fundamentalists (is that what I am doing?) well, that is 
an ethical issue. I for one think that silence in the face of Nazism would 
properly be called not "tolerance", but "cowardice". There are certain
positions which demand something other than silent acceptance. Those who
would deny children -- the future -- the hard-won knowledge of humanity
about the history of life, or the age of the stars, or our kinship to and
dependence upon other species occupy such a position, as surely as did the
early christians who burned the libraries of the ancient world. Our duty
toward such is vigilance, not tolerance.

-----
Alan McGowen

alanm@hpindbu.cup.hp.com