The left preaches inclusion, tolerance, and acceptance. Honesty is to be heralded. Really?
Given events that have taken place over the past four decades, I beg to differ. Tolerance and acceptance are offered by the left only when they agree. It is far from acceptable to “tolerate” the views of those who have strong moral or religious convictions. Honesty is only acceptable to the left if what one says fits with preconceived leftist ideas. When anyone forwards an honest belief or even an honest theory that differs with the left the result is far from acceptance. One recent example was the denigration of Larry Summers, President of Harvard University for daring to say that science might want to look at possible gender differences across professionals. Mr. Summers has been forced to apologize over and over again. He is still being castigated by fellow “academicians” and by the press.
A more important example has taken place within the past week. President Bush forwarded the idea that the concept of intelligent design be taught along side the theory of evolution in our schools. To the left this represents one of the ultimate evils. Leftists are condemning our president as ignorant. They are saying that he didn’t profit from his Harvard education. They are saying he is a fundamentalist (this being the single worst crime in leftist
The left castigates the religious right both for having religious thought and for endorsing its relevance to American past and to the American present and future. They assert that the religious right holds onto their beliefs and their faith in a blind and intolerant manner.
Meanwhile, they completely and blindly cast out any possibility that the concept of intelligent design has any place in the study of science and particularly the study of the origin of humanity. They are as much blind adherents to a faith (i.e., atheism) as many on the religious right are to their belief system.
Blindness to fact prevents learning. The left professes such openness to learning and yet they shun contrary views. We all can benefit from some degree of agnostic openness. We all can benefit from listening to the views of others without calling them names. Such openness allows us to answer the really critical questions that we avoid if our beliefs are fixed in cement. Dennis Prager has asked one of those core questions of the evolutionary theorists. Prager does not presuppose an answer but does presuppose that evolutionists must be able to answer it before the concept of intelligent design is scrapped entirely. The question to the evolutionists and to the left is: If evolutionary theory is correct, what started it?
I too do not presuppose an answer to that question. Maybe evolution is entirely random. It is equally possible that there was (or is) an intelligent force that underlies it. None of us know. To shut out discussion of such a critical debate by fiat is ridiculous. But of course that is exactly what the left is trying to do within its pretense of inclusion, tolerance, and acceptance.
