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From: anderson@lynx.cat.syr.edu (Joseph Anderson)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Why have Marriage Laws? (was Re: Are Humans Naturally Monogamous?)
Message-ID: <1991Jan7.223252.20522@rodan.acs.syr.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 91 04:10:40 GMT
References: <1990Dec06.185754.29171@pmafire.inel.gov> <6290003@hpindda.cup.hp.com>
Organization: Syracuse University
Lines: 61

In article <6290003@hpindda.cup.hp.com> alanm@hpindda.cup.hp.com (Alan McGowen) writes:
>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

	No disagreement from Mr. McGowen....but there are a lot of issues that
	aren't so well defined or are more insidious.

	What do you call silence in the face of Ronald Regan (the american 
	press).  
	What do you call challenges or uncertainties to the not so well
	founded sciences, regarding: Sexuality, AA, Supreme Court Reversals,
	US and Russia refusing to set a limit on C02 emissions, failures
	of US banks that started innocently and insidiously as regans
	deregulation.
	All this stuff went on while we head banged to Twisted Sister and
	undulated with Madonna (even while bashing Homosexuals).

a	is the Socratic Method a game no two people can play?
	is there a limit to what can be argued, what view can be tolerated
	without question or explanation and if so what is it?
.