Natalia's History Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/28/AR2010052801856.html

vivezacriolla:

Corruption, which extends in all institutions, in the form of perks, direct appropriation of public funds, cronyism, poor allocation of state resources and benefits of staff in the public interest.

The extreme individualism, with distrust of others and little ability to partner and cooperate…

cotygonzales:

Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told regardless of what is right.

(via mypantsareonfire)

The Scopes Trial:
The Scopes Trial is one of the best known in American history because it symbolizes the conflict between science and theology, faith and reason, individual liberty and majority rule. The object of intense publicity, the trial was seen as a clash between urban sophistication and rural fundamentalism. The trial was further popularized by the 1955 play, Inherit the Wind, which became a hit film in 1960. The play and subsequent movie cast the trial as a struggle for truth and freedom against repression and ignorance.

In the summer of 1925, a young schoolteacher named John Scopes stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating the state law against the teaching of evolution. Two of the country’s most famous attorneys faced off in the trial. William Jennings Bryan, 65 years old and a three time Democratic presidential nominee, prosecuted; 67-year-old Clarence Darrow, who was a staunch agnostic and who had defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb the year before, represented the defense. Bryan declared that “the contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death.”

The five-year-old American Civil Liberties Union had taken out newspaper advertisements offering to defend anyone who flouted the Tennessee law. George Rappelyea, a Dayton, Tenn., booster, realized that the town would get enormous attention if a local teacher was arrested for teaching evolution. He enlisted John Scopes, a science teacher and football coach, who arranged to teach from George Hunter’s Civic Biology, a high school textbook promoting Charles Darwin’s arguments in The Descent of Man.

The trial was marked by hoopla and a carnival-like atmosphere. Thousands of people swelled the town of a thousand. For 12 days in July, 1925, 100 reporters sent dispatches.

The trial judge had prohibited the defense from using scientists as witnesses. So, on the trial’s seventh day, the defense team called Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible. Darrow subjected Bryan to a withering cross-examination. He got Bryan to say that Creation was not completed in a week, but over a period of time that “might have continued for millions of years.”

The play, Inherit the Wind, would caricature Bryan as a Bible-thumping buffoon, but in actuality, Bryan’s position was complex. He opposed the mandated teaching of evolution in public schools because he thought the people should exercise local control over school curricula. He also opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection because these ideas had been used to defend laissez-faire capitalism on the grounds that a perfectly free market promotes the “survival of the fittest.” As early as 1904, Bryan had denounced social Darwinism as “the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”

In addition, Bryan opposed Darwinism as justification for war and imperialism. In The Descent of Man, Darwin has argued that “at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races.” The textbook that Scopes taught from, Civic Biology, identified five “races of man” (Ethiopian, Malay, American Indian, and Mongolian) and “finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.” Bryan was also unhappy with Darwin’s assumption that the entire evolutionary process was purposeless and not the product of a larger design.

Not a Biblical literalist, Bryan was aware of serious scientific difficulties with Darwinism, such as Darwin’s theory that slight, random variations were enough to generate life from non-life to produce a vast array of biological species. But Bryan mistook the lack of consensus about the mechanisms that Darwin advanced to explain the evolutionary process for a lack of scientific support for the concept of evolution itself.

The day after this exchange, Darrow changed his client’s plea to guilty. Scopes was convicted and fined $100. However, the conviction was thrown out on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court (that the judge, and not the jury, had determined the $100 fine). In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down Tennessee’s anti-evolution law for violating the Constitution’s prohibition against the establishment of religion.

Five days after the trial’s conclusion, Bryan died of apoplexy. The journalist H.L. Mencken wrote of Bryan: “He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was passing out a poor mountebank.” As for Scopes, he left teaching and became a chemical engineer in the oil industry. He died at age 70 in 1970.

The Scopes trial resulted in two enduring conclusions: that legislatures should not restrain the freedom of scientific inquiry, and that society should respect academic freedom.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=448

Morality Defined
Morality speaks of a system of behavior in regards to standards of right or wrong behavior. The word carries the concepts of: (1) moral standards, with regard to behavior; (2) moral responsibility, referring to our conscience; and (3) a moral identity, or one who is capable of right or wrong action. Common synonyms include ethics, principles, virtue, and goodness. Morality has become a complicated issue in the multi-cultural world we live in today. Let’s explore what morality is, how it affects our behavior, our conscience, our society, and our ultimate destiny.

Morality and Our Behavior
Morality describes the principles that govern our behavior. Without these principles in place, societies cannot survive for long. In today’s world, morality is frequently thought of as belonging to a particular religious point of view, but by definition, we see that this is not the case. Everyone adheres to a moral doctrine of some kind.

Morality as it relates to our behavior is important on three levels. Renowned thinker, scholar and author C.S. Lewis defines them as: (1) to ensure fair play and harmony between individuals; (2) to help make us good people in order to have a good society; and (3) to keep us in a good relationship with the power that created us. Based on this definition, it’s clear that our beliefs are critical to our moral behavior.

On Point 1, Professor Lewis says most reasonable people agree. By Point 2, however, we begin to see problems occurring. Consider the popular philosophy “I’m not hurting anyone but myself,” frequently used to excuse bad personal choices. How can we be the good people we need to be if we persist in making these choices, and how will that result not affect the rest of our society? Bad personal choices do hurt others. Point 3 is where most disagreement surfaces. While the majority of the world’s population believes in God, or at least in a god, the question of Creation, as a theory of origins, is definitely hotly debated in today’s society.

A recent report in Psychology Today concluded: “The most significant predictor of a person’s moral behavior may be religious commitment. People who consider themselves very religious were least likely to report deceiving their friends, having extramarital affairs, cheating on their expenses accounts, or even parking illegally.” Based on this finding, what we believe about Creation has a decided effect on our moral thinking and our behavior. Without belief in a Creator, the only option that seems to be left is to adhere to moral standards we make up for ourselves. Unless we live in a dictatorial society, we are free to choose our own personal moral code. But where does that freedom come from? The view of many who do not adhere to Creation is that morality is a creation of humanity, designed to meet the need of stable societies. All kinds of life are in a process of deciding between life and death, choosing what to do with power and/or authority. This ultimately leads to a system of virtues and values. The question is: what happens when our choices conflict with each other? What if something I believe I need in order for my life to continue results in death for you? If we do not have an absolute standard of truth, chaos and conflict will result as we are all left to our own devices and desires.

Morality and Our Conscience
Morality impacts our everyday decisions, and those choices are directed by our conscience. Again, we must decide for ourselves where the conscience originates. Many people hold to the idea that the conscience is a matter of our hearts, that concepts of right, wrong, and fairness are “programmed” in each of us. This is in keeping with the writings of Paul the Apostle, who points out that even those who do not believe in God frequently obey God’s laws as given in the Ten Commandments: “for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them” (Romans 2:14-15 (NKJV)). Again, those who do not believe in God are left with the only possible conclusion they can come to - that our decisions are based solely on our need to survive. What we call our conscience, then, would be based on learned behavior, rather than part of a Divine design.

http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/morality.htm

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are,” by Roy Disney