Primrose Road

While researching dissection for a paper on Early Modern anxieties about not being able to encounter *everything* via sensory functions, I came across an interesting claim: Jonathan Sawday, author of one of the most influential texts on the topic of Early Modern dissection, notes that the idea that the human body is "designed" is very much specific to the late twentieth century.

Indeed, the historical specificity of biological "design" seems to run counter to some claims that the concept is as old as Abrahamic religion.

Slightly terrifying clip on this morning's McLaughlin Group: Mike Huckabee telling an audience that he's in favor of a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion and same-sex marriage. (Pat Buchanan, of course, thought this was a viable possibility.) I'm no political scholar (obviously), but I do know that the purpose of Constitutional amendments is to guarantee rights not already explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution. An amendment that would effectively take rights away, therefore, does not make sense in the context of the US Constitution.

There was also lots of talk of this country being founded on the freedom of religion. Except, one of the founding principles of America was the separation of church and state, not freedom of religion, or the freedom to work religion into every aspect of American life.

This has nothing to do with Shakespeare, but everything to do with books.

The Unicorn Museum: a clever counter to Northern Kentucky's $27 million Creation Museum. The folks behind the Creation Museum argue that we need to accept the historical record laid out by the Judeo-Christian Bible prior to any biological, chemical, geological, or physical investigation of the Earth. But as you'll see on the Unicorn Museum's site, the young-earth creationists seem to have overlooked the unicorn, a creature referenced nine times in the Bible.

The people behind the Unicorn Museum site are seeking to place a billboard near the Creation Museum, and it appears that there's a bit more to their project than simply having a laugh at the expense of creationists. The people most likely to buy in to the "worldview-first-then-shoehorn-shoehorn-shoehorn" approach are children. I'm speaking as a teacher, not necessarily an atheist, when I say this image turns my stomach justalittle.

(The image comes from BlueGrassRoots, which offers a walkthrough and some commentary on the "parenting skills" of those who take their children there.)

A stack of books versus what I presume to be a single scroll of the Pentateuch/Torah. You could read hundreds of books and spend all day thinking, or you could just believe. The display is an insult to a Judeo-Christian tradition which, despite its supernatural side, has always depended on stacks of books. Orthodox Jews, for instance, may read that scroll from the display as law, but it's law that requires generations of books' and scholars' interpretation and reasoning. And even a quick glance at the Wikipedia digest of Christian thinkers in science suggests that books and reasoning don't quite stand apart from Bible scrolls.

Wikipedia aside, I'll be happy to take any comments supplying specific examples of Judeo-Christian thinkers who read (and wrote) books other than the Bible. I suspect that there will be many, many more than the Creation Museum's 'read less, believe more' signs would suggest.