Comments on: IS KIRK CAMERON ANTI-EDUCATION?

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:54:12 +0000

David,
I appreciate you printing this and seeing the common sense in how wrong this is. It’s a total perversion of literature. Why don’t christians just go into all of our favorite classics and insert tidbits of religious propaganda? We don’t need them pushing their views down our throats any more than they already do. This should be flat out illegal. Christians would go ape on an atheist if they inserted their views into the bible or any other piece of religious literature. People who are not religious, such as myself, mind our own business and leave others to believe what they want. Why is it so hard for religious followers to do the same? If we wanted more on their side of the story, we would pick up a bible and go to church. America being a free nation, allows us to do this. People who are interested in Darwin, did not choose this. Publishing religious opinions and slandering the author himself in one of his most timeless publications, will only anger people more. I wish Kirk Cameron could read this and keep his half baked “war on evolution” ideas to his tv shows and board games. Leave American literature out of it!

By: David P. Kronmiller

David P. Kronmiller — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:19:07 +0000

Apologies for taking time to post this – and time doesn’t permit me a lengthy reply but to comment on your first point – Cameron’s inserts into the Origin of Species attempt to link evolution to Nazism, eugenics and a host of other non-related phenom. It would be like me taking the Holy Bible and adding inserts into it mentioning how the practices involving discipline led to child and spousal abuse and how the old and new testaments appear to hold women subordinate to man. Though I might be able to make some links I would offend you and ultimately not prove any point – and I wouldn’t be correct – you could link passages in the Bible to a host of heinous acts – you can blame the Bible on the Crusades, the assination of Harvey Milk, Jeffery Tiller, heck David Carresh, and the list goes on – but it wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be right – the Bible didn’t cause any of those things – humans did.

By: Zach

Zach — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:55:27 +0000

Hey, David. I’m glad you wrote this piece and I found it quite interesting. Let me first say that I am a Catholic who sees no conflict between my faith and the acceptance of evolution. I read the article you cited and it says that Cameron is planning, in coordination with a Christian group, to visit various universities on the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and distribute copies of that text with a 50 page insert criticizing some its arguments and offering rebuttals and counter-arguments. Surely this doesn’t indicate that Cameron “thinks education is a bad thing”! It seems to me rather pro-education. Isn’t college, as you suggest, about exploring alternative viewpoints and making informed decisions? And isn’t Cameron’s group offering just such an alternative viewpoint to the theory of evolution? The fact that the viewpoint is a conservative Christian one should make no difference unless one wishes to exclude them from the debate. Also, I fail to see where suspicion or fear enter into this situation.

Incidentally, I consider it a great tragedy that there are, if your numbers are accurate, 35,000 different Christian denominations (though all but a handful are marginal in the extreme). However, I disagree with your assumption that because there are many points of view about something, that necessarily means that there is no single truth of the matter. The logic is unsound. For example, there are dozens of theories about the assassination of JFK. Some hold that the mob did him in, others say LBJ; some claim there was one shooter, others say three. But this hardly means that means that no single theory can be 100% correct! Or take some difficult math problem: each student in class may give a different answer, but that doesn’t prevent only one of them from being right. In other words, different interpretations do not suggest the nonexistence of truth.