Colorado Daily – July 12, 2007:
Last weekend more than a dozen envelopes bearing the image of skull and crossbones and containing letters threatening the lives of CU-Boulder evolutionary biology professors were slipped under the doors of CU-Boulder buildings.
According to a reprint of the letter posted online, the threat reads: “every true Christian should be ready and willing to take up arms to kill the enemies of Christian society.”
“EBIO (evolutionary biology) professors are terrorists against America and Š intellectual and spiritual child abusers of their young and impressionable students Š the EBIO department not only blasphemes God, who is invisible, but it blasphemes His Only Begotten Son and our Messiah, Jesus Christ, which is more unforgivable Š for all these reason all God-fearing and Truth-loving persons must say, They must go!”
CU officials won’t name a suspect, but numerous sources close to the case say the letters – as well as a barrage of threatening e-mails – were signed “Michael Korn.”
Menacher “Michael” Korn is a 49-year-old Israeli national and former Messianic Jew who says he was baptized into Christianity in the Sea of Galilee seven years ago and is now on a mission to convert Jews and Muslims. His blog, JesusOverIsrael. blogspot.com, references CU-Boulder specifically and says he lives in Denver, although he has a North Carolina area code.
Of course the US press is burying this story. It’s nearly a week old and this is the only report of it I could find on Google News!
#22 Mark
It’s in Boulder, COLORADO, you got it? C-O-L-O-R-A-D-O.
66. Angel, yes I know, Iive in C-O-L-O-R-A-D-O. Boulder is a liberal college town. Thats C-O-L-L-E-G-E. Home of the nutball professor, Ward Churchill.
#47 yes, this blog is pretty good, at worst an amusing diversion
Is it against the rules to post something just to be poster number 70 on a long thread?
No, because this one was predicted to go 70 so you win the prize.
#67
Then why did you said California?
#42 – The story of the symbol on shields, etc. is from the story of Constantine and lead to his ruling the Roman Empire, an subsequently the creation of Roman Catholic Church. The same ideas were attributed to Charlie to kick off the Holy Roman Empire to control the monarchies of Europe.
All bomb threats should be taken seriously, especially if they originate from a fundi-mental source, Muslim, Christian, Republican or Democrat. To recognize one instance and not another is pure propaganda and censorship in the name of one point of view.
It’s not what you believe, diversity gives use the strength to evolve towards enlightenment. The problem is the violent intent from ignorance.
Religion:
That poster with Uncle sam.
“I WANT YOU”
#44 – Abhishek,
here’s my theory of why religion is on the rise again – and has been even before the christians needed to feel the warm, cuddly “us” as opposed to the nasty, bad “them” that they often seem to project into anything muslim.
Religion is a response to ignorance. It’s a way of trying to explain things you have no better explanation for. Primitive people at the dawn of mankind experienced something that their animal predecessors didn’t know: fear.
What are those voices in the dark? The growls, the roars? Who’s are those quick steps in the grass behind me? They turned around and couldn’t see the animals, so over time, they believed they were ghosts. Ghosts became an explanation for the unexplained. Ghosts became a way of channeling the fear. Some people claimed they could deal with ghosts better than the rest of them, they became the first priests.
As the human mind started to ask the larger questions, they still remained unanswered. Where do we come from? Where do we go? Why do sun and moon move across the sky? Why does a volcano spit out fire? What’s on the bottom of the sea? You can easily see how those questions were important to people in certain areas and, in early times, were almost always answered with some godlike concept.
Gods, Religion became a way of dealing with Ignorance, encouraged by the priests, who saw that they could gain power over the ignorant masses this way.
For Europe (and the US as a consequence) this was strongest in medieval times.
Why? Most of the knowledge of the Greek and Roman civilizations was lost or in the possession of the priests. The average person knew little more than what was his day-to-day labor. They were, however, still facing the ultimate questions, and the priests were doing their best to keep the fire burning. As an effect, there was probably never a time when religion had a stronger hold over a whole continent than back then.
At the turn to modern times, science, that is secular science, came up again after centuries of hibernation. Scientists found answers, or, at times, found the answers that had been lost in time, for those questions that the priests claimed to have the ultimate answer to. And heck, the scientific answer was quite different from the religious answer. Galileo Galilei comes to mind, Giordano Bruno and many more.
For almost 500 years, it seemed that religion was losing the battle for the ultimate answers to science.
Scientific findings were, for the first time, accessible to people and, at the very latest, with the turn to industrial times came education for the masses. The world had become rather well explained and the need for ghosts and gods and cults was shrinking. There were simple not many more questions where religion had the only answer. The one remaining was “where do we go to when we die?” That’s not a lot for a whole huge organization to live off. But the churches have managed.
Now, in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve seen an explosive growth of scientific knowledge. With every new answer we find, 10 new and interesting questions come up and we embark on the next search for answers. it’s amazing times in science (just listen to futures in biotech on the TWIT network to get a feeling).
The amount of scientific knowledge available has vastly outgrown the capacity of most of us. Some of the scientific findings sound just completely irrelevant to many, some scary (remember there was a CERN experiment a few years back where the media reported that if this went wrong, it could actually destroy all matter in the universe by sub-atomar processes) and some seem ethically questionable like some parts of gene manipulations.
Now here we are, castaway in a sea of knowledge so complex, we don’t understand any of it. No wonder the priests are back with their promise of simple answers. No wonder, simple minds want to follow them and no wonder the herd is growing. Simple minds don’t want complex answers.
So, long explanation, simple thesis: religion is on the rise again because the gap between science and “the ordinary people” is widening quickly. Partly, that’s in the nature of the beast, as science is producing an amazing amount of knowledge that n oone can follow in any meaningful depth for the whole spectrum. But on the other side, it’s also a result of our educational systems, our entertainment habits and our social values. The only medicine against religion is intelligence and education. If we fail to provide good education, we will have to struggle with the priests (who, btw, usually are pretty well educated and thus clearly understand the chances they have right now).
pj
75, pj, If we fail to provide good education, we will have to struggle with the priests.
Indeed. I’ve been reluctant to step into this religious war since I’m not religious (just a scientist), but the following substantiated data seem to be representative of how myths and superstition (ie. “religions”) are believed among the countries of the world, vs. IQ.
http://hypnosis.home.netcom.com/iq_vs_religiosity.htm
Look at the data for Pakistan. Hmmm, war? I’d like to see the graph for countries at war vs. religious belief.
Dang, it’s probably too late to post again, no one will read this. Great post, BTW.
#76 – BubbaRay,
thanks for the link. As much as this study supports what I’m saying, I think it’s a much too cursory look at things. As detailed in the text below graph and data, it’s a meta study taking data from two or more independent studies. This would require at least adding some statistical facts like distribution/deviation.
As the site states – a direct study of importance of religion vs. personal IQ would be much more telling, despite the fact that I believe the results would not be very different, maybe even steeper.
pj
ps: how horrible must it be to live in a country where the mean IQ is below the normalized average…
upppsss… ps to my ps: just saw that here the IQ is normalized to England not average… what a funny idea.
pj
55,
Look back farther…Its already happened.
75,
You got most of it…
But think about this for a second.
HE who has the MOSt people under his BElt, has the MOST power.
If 1 group or person can control ENOUGH people, they can have ANYTHING done.
The human mind WISHEs to expand, Wishes knowledge….
If you keep that AWAY from the masses, What does the mind do…
It searches for ANYTHING to fill it.
IF you fill the World with BS(bull crap) the Mind will latch onto anything it can find.
IF you keep decenting comments/ideas AWAY and forbid them, ALL you get is BS(more crap).
Just a general, concentrated Brainwash.
Think of the time of Shakespear, and that HE wrote a story based on a BLACK person…
Think of Europe, and that the TURKS took over MOST of the area, until beaten back…
What happened AFTERWARDS…
Just before the City of ROME was Curtailed, and Cut back to what it IS TODAY.