Plead the First

The Dover Area School District trial is still going on, pitting Intelligent Design against Evolutionary Theory. The York Daily Record (via The Panda’s Thumb) takes a look at the recent testimony of Brian Alters as he examines the implications of the statement that Dover Area High School students are required to listen to.

Part of the article is very telling. Advocates of ID often claim that Intelligent Design is not about religion. For instance, if you go back to the opening days of the trial, you’ll find statements like this:

In his opening statement yesterday, Pat Gillan, the lead attorney for the defence, argued the case was “about freedom in education, not about a religious agenda … It is not religion. Intelligent design is really science in its purest form – a refusal to close avenues of exploration in favour of a dominant theory.”

Yet according to the York Daily Record article, this exchange happened during the Defense’s cross examination of Alters:

As he continued, Alters said the statement singles out “gaps” in evolutionary theory, unlike, for instance, gaps in the theory of trajectory. The message conveyed to students is that evolution is to be mistrusted.

During cross-examination, Dover attorney Robert Muise raised differences in perceptions between evolution and other scientific theories.

He asked Alters about Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins’ statement that Darwin’s theory made it possible to be “an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

“Are you aware that the trajectory theory has ever made anyone an intellectually fulfilled atheist?” Muise asked.

Alters smiled and said he was not.

What does that have to do with anything if ID has nothing to do with religion? Lines of questioning like this, along with the fact that the majority of ID advocates seem to be of a single faith, make it difficult to give that claim any credence.

Via Jeff Thigpen, Guilford County has redesigned their website. Visually, they’ve come a long way: 1997, 2000, 2004.

Blogging was so much fun, I decided to spruce things up a bit. A little bit of Photoshop, an easy WordPress installation (courtesy of Dreamhost, my existing webhost for a different, non-blog website), and here it is: Plead the First. I still need to tweak and categorize some of my imported blogger posts, and my rss feed seems to contain all my test posts (if anyone knows how to clear them out, let me know), but other than that it should be good to go. I’ve only been able to test it on Mac browsers and one or two versions of IE on Windows, so please post a comment if anything looks overly funky. Enjoy!

Update: The funky feed seems to have fixed itself automagically – all the test posts should be gone.

It seems that the recent bankruptcy laws are so harsh that even our own government won’t enforce them. Via The Talent Show (who found it at TPMCafe):

the Justice Department has announced that it will waive enforcement of portions of the new bankruptcy law for Louisiana residents and some Mississippi residents. They got it right: On the eve of the effective date of the new laws, they see that the bill is a terrible mess for people who are in desperate financial trouble. Hurrah for the Justice Department for saying they will back off this terrible bill. Notice that to provide even minimal protection for people following a catastrophe, the Justice Department must offer wholesale waiver of enforcement of multiple provisions that Congress specifically put into the bill. That’s pretty strong evidence that the changes in the law are going to have a hard impact on families in trouble–including those who don’t get a special hurricane break.

Of course, this doesn’t help all the people around the country who are facing their own personal disasters, such as medical emergencies, job loss, and other such circumstances. Why should those issues be any less deserving of help simply because they aren’t concentrated in one geographical area?

Roch has some audio from Converge, a collection of brief comments from some of the participants.

By any measure, ConvergeSouth seems to have been a success. I enjoyed my time there Saturday. The talks were great, and it was a lot of fun meeting some of the local bloggers I’ve talked to only online.

The organizers and session leaders did a great job, and it was nice how Ed floated around between sessions and gave the conversations a shot in the arm on the rare occasions when things seemed to lag. I think Roch’s talk on Local Online Alt Media was my favorite. The audience participation seemed to be at its best there, and it was inspiring to hear about how blogging can actually effect change in the real world.

An ironic quote: “No medium is more powerful than the moving image” — From a slide in a Powerpoint presentation that contained no images, moving or otherwise, in the Video blogging session. To be fair, Amanda had several videos ready to show us, but unfortunately the sound on the computer couldn’t be hooked into the room’s PA system.

A profound quote: “You ask a question and you’ll get an answer. And it may not fit with your view of reality.” — Michael Bowen, talking about interaction on blogs.

Looks like ConvergeSouth has been a success so far. I’ll be there tomorrow for the Saturday session, hoping to meet a few local bloggers in person and absorb some knowledge and ideas.

There’s been a lot of coverage about the upcoming Greensboro City Council elections. However, living in High Point, I feel left out of it all. As far as I can tell, High Point has City Council elections coming up as well, but the only information I could find is this list of the candidates’ names (you’ll need to scroll down to pages three and four to see them). Is there coverage I’m missing? Are the High Point elections of no interest to anyone? Am I totally wrong and there’s actually no High Point election coming up? Somebody fill me in please.

President Bush will be giving a “major speech” today:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan characterized Bush’s planned remarks Thursday morning as a “major speech” that will address the connection between Iraq and the broader war against the al Qaeda terrorist network “in greater detail than he has before.”

Time has an article on the upcoming Narnia movies, wondering if they’ll maintain their Christian message. There will be an easy way to tell, they say:

The White Witch: “That human creature is mine. His life is forfeit to me. His blood is my property.”

Aslan (later) : “The Witch knew the Deep Magic. But if she could have looked a little further back… she would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.” —from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

…The second, more intriguing question, “Has it reproduced the Christian character of C.S. Lewis’s book?” could also be worth tens of millions if it inspires Passion of the Christ-style repeat viewings by conservative Christians. And the answer could lie in whether the four sentences above, which constitute a kind of evangelical sniff test make it into the film.

I, for one, think it would be a shame if Disney were to leave out the Christian motifs present in the original story. They’re so intertwined throughout the series, that cutting them out would either involve some major reworking of the story, or would significantly water down the strength of the emotions and motivations of the series’ characters.

There’s little reason to cut them out anyway, as the story is far from preachy. Lewis worked the themes in rather subtley in most cases, and nearly all of the specifics are changed in some way. As the Time article points out, for instance, Aslan’s sacrifice is “on a huge stone table … not [on] a cross; and performed with a stone knife, Aztec-style”, and the books pull from many other traditions such as folk tales, and classical and Norse myths.

One thing I’m not sure about though is Time’s notion that the film could “be worth tens of millions if it inspires Passion of the Christ-style repeat viewings by conservative Christians”. Passion of the Christ was pretty much a literal retelling of a portion of the Bible. It would be hard for most Christians to find fault with that concept. Narnia, on the other hand, is a land populated by magic and witches, and many of the more fundamentalist Christians don’t take too kindly to those things, even when put to use as allegory for Christian themes.