At some point in the last twenty four hours, one of my favorite liberal Christian bloggers made an update to a post he made about claims that the National Park Service staff were prohibited from giving an answer about the……

Of course, to me, this raises some interesting questions about what one is to do in a world where even hardcore journalists can be so easily duped. Who do you trust? How do you decide who you should trust?

The power of the religious right on this matter can be illustrated in other ways. In early 2005, Roger Ebert wrote about how IMAX theaters in several southern cities refused to show the movie “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea” because it presented scientific information about the age of the earth that didn’t jibe with fundamentalist dogma. The battle against efforts by the religious right to dumb down science education in this country is never ending, unfortunately.

My interpretation of events (which, combined with a buck, get you a discount latte at Starbucks) is that PEER, a left-leaning group, is engaging in a bit of agit-prop – they want a specific memo from a Bushie saying that creationism is bunk; the Bushies have countered with a non-specific directive to base Ranger presentations on the best available science; and since that is not suitably embarrassing, PEER has delivered this press release.

So, offically, the Bushies have punted on the creationism question. Of course, the order to base presentations on science also leaves the Rangers without guidance as to the Paul Bunyon legend, Area 51 questions, alien visitations, Elvis – Dead or Alive, and a host of other issues, and yet PEER has ducked those.

More here (Sorry for the shameless self-promotion).

P.S.: I am hating IE7 right now as well – I used it for the first time last night and had a post disappear.

I do have a complaint, however: One thing I don’t like on a lot of web sites is the implication that it’s okay to be prejudiced against fundamentalist Christians because they aren’t worthy of being tolerated. I really hope this isn’t taken the wrong way, but the fact that young-earth believers are a “minority of a minority” doesn’t mean that it’s therefore okay to offend them unless there’s a good reason. To tell the truth, this argument scares me; it reminds me too much of “majority rights” arguments. Once again, I’m sorry if I’m making a wrong accusation or something. I’m not saying that you’re supporting “majority rights”, but that particular argument does scare me.

As it is, I personally don’t have much of a problem with what the NPS is doing; it certainly beats the harsh invective I often hear from various positions in the “evolution debate”. At least the NPS isn’t being prejudiced. When I was growing up, however, I was used to the fact people disagreed with me and tended to ignore any statements made about either evolution (which I still have no real opinion on one way or the other) or the age of the earth. (However, I have to agree with you on abstinence-only programs to combat AIDS in Africa; the problem is way too serious to do something like that that could cost numerous lives.)

P. S. I’m using Safari on an iMac, and the site looks just fine for me. I’ve been going here for a while (at least a year) and it still looks the same for me as always. I might advise you to see if you can fix the layout issues in IE7, but it might not be as much of a problem if the site is still readable.