Bobby Jindal
A Creationist Campaign: Louisiana students are suffering for Bobby Jindal’s presidential ambitions.
Source: Slate
By Zack Kopplin
When Pastor Louis Husser spoke to the Louisiana House Education Committee in 2008 in support of a law that allows science teachers to include creationism in their lessons, he joked that the five-minute limit on testimony had been in place with “preachers and politicians in mind.”
The chairman of that committee, state Rep. Don Trahan, had his own one-liner. “There’s a difference?” he asked.
Our governor, Bobby Jindal, acts as if there is no difference. And that is a big part of his strategy for pursuing the presidency—and as he announced on Monday, he has formed a presidential exploratory committee. His ambition for even higher office has led him to pretend that along with politicians, science teachers should be preachers, too.
A few minutes after Husser’s joke, the bill that he had been supporting—the badly misnamed Louisiana Science Education Act—was passed out of committee, and Jindal later signed it. It was the summer before my sophomore year at Baton Rouge High School.
I remember the day that this act became law. I was sitting in the car, pulling off my shin guards after soccer tryouts, when a family friend, the editorial writer for our local paper, the Advocate, walked by. I heard him ask my dad, “Did you hear that Jindal signed the creationism bill?”
I couldn’t believe it. For most of my life, my family has known Bobby Jindal. He and my father had worked together under Gov. Mike Foster, and my parents had been friends with Jindal and his wife, Supriya. The Jindals still send my family a Christmas card every year. When Jindal first ran for governor in 2003, when I was a fifth-grader, I talked up his campaign to my classmates at the University Lab School, the same school that Jindal’s own children now attend.
Earlier in that 2008 summer, the creationism bill had come up at our dinner table, and my family was sure that the governor would veto it. We knew him. He wasn’t a creationist, he was a Brown University biology major. But Jindal wanted to run for president, so he became a creationist.
Additional Reading
Our collection of articles in favor of Guided Evolution
Videos: Biological Evolution Session of Quran and Science Symposium 2014
Categories: Americas, Biology, Evolution, Highlight, United States
If Bobby Jindal does not change his public stance in favor of Creationism, we would hope that he or his spokesmen would like to present his evidence.
We would love to have an honest and written debate here.
I have linked all the evidence in favor of guided evolution in the articles linked above in the post.
“–WE WOULD HOPE THAT HE OR HIS SPOKESMAN WOULD LIKE TO PRESENT HIS EVIDENCE”.
Evidence of or for what?
Being a biology major at Brown’s does not preclude Gov. Jindal from being a creationist. If he did not believe in creationism he would not have signed the bill into law.
To effectively defend creationism, one has to have a sound knowledge of biology to enable him refute every mis-presentation.
The thing about your ‘guided evolution’ is that you never did and will not allow any differences of opinion.
Namelee you can claim whatever you want; you certainly have a fertile mind.
But, argue against the evidence for evolution in molecular biology presented in this short video:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5hAMQWEi6s&w=470&h=275%5D
Many of the arguments in the above speech are covered in the following article: MOLECULAR BIOLOGY: A CHECKMATE TO
CREATIONISM
Zia, I have not watched the video but have read your article which is linked to it since you say that both views are identical.
Interestingly, out of the three reasons Darwin gave, you have chosen to concentrate on only the first one which is concerned with evolution.
Why are lose interest in the third one, which according to your article, “-DARWIN OR AT LEAST NEO-DARWINISTS, SUGGEST ABSENCE OF LIVING WILL THAT CONTROLLED THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS AND THEIR OUTCOME”?
One would imagine that such ‘a living will–‘ is God. He, according to Darwin and his group, with you in tow, argue that God has no involvement in evolution.
That is certainly true because the God I know and worship is not an opportunist. Darwinian evolution is opportunistic based on presuppositions which keeps changing as time goes by.
It is your view that Darwin’s theory conveys ‘the essential notion that life originated in the distant past with a unique, spontaneous event’. That theory of spontaneity contradicts evolution which is said to have been gradual spreading over billions of years.
One example of a common origin of life is the concept of the homologous structure where parts of the body in different organisms performing similar functions are given as having the same origin. It is said that the limbs of vertebrates originated from the fins of fish, the not so distant ancestor.
Writing on this, Prof Michael Denton, in his “Evolution: A Theory In Crisis” uses the alimentary canal to debunk the theory. According to him, the alimentary canal, though superficially homologous, has been found to have formed along completely divergent paths in different species. It forms “FROM THE ROOF OF THE EMBRYONIC GUT CAVITY IN SHARKS, FROM THE FLOOR IN LAMPREY, FROM THE ROOF AND FLOOR IN FROGS, AND FROM THE LOWER LAYER OF THE EMBRYONIC DISC, THE BLASTODERM, IN BIRDS AND REPTILES”.
Why should there be such marked structural differences in an organ that performs similar functions in different species?
“–THE GREEN AND BUDDING TREES MAY REPRESENT THE LONG SUCCESSION OF EXTINCT SPECIES”
This is pure speculation as no imperical proof has been offered.The operative word is ‘MAY’. The theory does not say that the extinct green or budding trees ever evolved from or into grass/weeds.
“THE AFFINITIES OF ALL THE BEINGS OF THE SAME CLASS HAVE SOMETIMES BEEN REPRESENTED BY A GREAT TREE. I BELIEVE THIS SIMILE LARGELY SPEAKS THE TRUTH”.
The Holy Bible says that God created everything and “ITS KIND”. This means that every creature has a class with peculiarities. The idea of classes is, therefore, not original to Darwin.
The concluding part of the third paragraph of your article begs the question whether it is science or some misguided theology. The article is Googled as the view of the Ahmadiyya movement.
In that paragraph you liken Darwin’s position to the belief of the Jews, muslims and Unitarian Christians because “HE DID NOT PROPOSE THREE TREES AND NOT A TREE WITH THREE TRUNKS EACH SHOWING CREATION OF GOD THE FATHER, JESUS CHRIST AND THE HOLY GHOST, IN LINE WITH THE TRINITARIAN CONCEPT OF GOD”.
While a tree does not have more than one trunk, in most cases it has branches and, in every case, it has leaves and roots.
If you have read that portion of the Bible which is common to the Jews and all Christians, you will come across this in Genesis 1:26 “AND GOD SAID, LET US MAKE MAN IN OUR IMAGE, AFTER OUR LIKENESS–“. It is rather intriguing that allah, supposedly a unified god, would say a similar thing. It says again and again, “WE CREATED”. Allah has made it abundantly clear that it has family and spirit, whose knowledge, of course, is beyond human beings.
When trying to mock those you call ‘Trinitarian Christians’, think of what your quran says on the same subject.
Namelee you are catching at the straws like a drowning man.
The 10 minute video linked above gives very powerful almost fool-proof arguments for evolution from molecular biology.
Zia, if, according to you, the content of the video and your linked article are identical, it is up to me to choose which of the two I should access. Having preferred your article to the video, it will be meaningless repetition for me to view the video in addition, except if you are not sure of what you penned.
From what I read there is no ‘very powerful almost fool-proof arguments for evolution from molecular biology’. Scientists claim that molecular genetics does not prove Darwinian evolution. Rather, it confirms Linnaeus’ taxonomic phylogenetic sequence.