Creation "science" is bunk & any professor is perfectly within his rights to write or not write recommendations for students who ask him. I have declined to write letters for students about whom I had doubts. Dr. Dini has merely made his standards publicly available. It's certainly not surprising, given the degraded times in which we live, that AG John Ashcroft, whose beliefs are not far removed from those of a medieval mullah, should be investigating this perfectly ordinary bit of academic procedure. I teach a class every other year called Imagining Science & on the first day I tell the students that, while I am perfectly willing to grant a diversity of religious beliefs, for the purposes of this class we will assume that evolution by natural selection, as broadly understood by the scientific community, is true. I have not yet been presented with the practical choice Dr. Dini has responded to--I teach in a Humanities department & am not usually called upon to warrant the scientific credentials of my students. I might find it necessary, though, to mention the fact in a letter of recommendation--even for a non-scientific position--that a particular student rejects a fundamental body of scientific knowledge. Or I might give the student a choice of a letter that mentions this fact or no letter at all. In any case, I don't make hard & fast distinctions between the sciences & the arts & it seems to me that anyone who has read Darwin & considered some of the recent controversies about evolution & who then asserts that "creation science" should replace that body of knowledge is a defective intellectual. I would not recommend a defective intellectual for graduate school in Sociology, let alone medical school. A person who has accepted creationist doctrine has made a choice not to participate in the intellectual life of his or her culture. Choices entail consequences. Surely, even John Ashcroft would assent to that proposition.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
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