# Any conservatives want to defend Palin on these quotes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 15, 2009, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625 "2009-11-15T02:42:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![cerberus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/71e660/32.png) [@cerberus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cerberus)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/21 "2009-11-15T04:56:11Z")
There is a well known distinction between and among fiscal conservatives, small/limited government conservatives, social conservatives and the theocratic types. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/22 "2009-11-15T05:00:30Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > I think most Christians probably don’t really believe in the Adam & Eve version of creation. Where the rub is, I believe, is that in speaking of evolution the prevalent idea is that evolutionists are saying that some living cell somehow got sparked in some random way and that all life as we now know it grew and evolved from that, and IMO that’s as unlikely and hard to believe as is any religious belief. Evolution researchers do not deal with the origins of life. (Evolutionist is a word that implies a dogma and creationists prefer to apply it to the scientists, unfortunately for the creationists there are also theist evolutionists) > **[Abiogenesis vs evolution.](https://www.science20.com/genomicron/blog/abiogenesis_vs_evolution)** > > At The Panda's Thumb, Nick Matzke has a post about abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-life) and evolution. He, PZ, and others argue that abiogenesis is part of evolutionary biology and that it is a cop-out to deflect challenges about it from... > [@](#): > > The influence is one-way, and this is the opposite of the way anti-evolutionists perceive it. They argue that if we do not know how life started, then evolution is false. In actuality, knowing how life started has nothing to do with studying how life has evolved since the first complex cells appeared. However, understanding how complex cellular life evolves probably tells us something about how life arose because the same processes are relevant whenever there are variable replicating entities. > > In my opinion, it remains a valid and useful argument to point out that uncertainty regarding the origin of life is irrelevant to the factual standing of evolution over the past 3.8 billion years. > **[CB090: Evolution without abiogenesis](http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB090.html)** > [@](#): > > 1. The theory of evolution applies as long as life exists. How that life came to exist is not relevant to evolution. Claiming that evolution does not apply without a theory of abiogenesis makes as much sense as saying that umbrellas do not work without a theory of meteorology. > > 2. Abiogenesis is a fact. Regardless of how you imagine it happened (note that creation is a theory of abiogenesis), it is a fact that there once was no life on earth and that now there is. Thus, even if evolution needs abiogenesis, it has it. ---
**Author:** ![Revenant\_Threshold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f1d935/32.png) [@Revenant\_Threshold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revenant_Threshold)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/23 "2009-11-15T05:08:34Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > Yes, but remember, that highly unlikely event is only the beginning. How does the cell survive? How does it reproduce? And if it is surviving and reproducing, how is it managing to develop the highly complex electrical and chemical and organic systems that have developed in its wake when there is no apparent need for them in the first place? I don’t think these questions can be answered merely by laying them at the feet of natual selection. Why not? Natural selection is about context. It’s the same overall ideas that more recently (relatively speaking) we see the differences between various species of cat. The “need” is provided by environment and competition; it’s not a matter of whether it can survive, whether it can reproduce, but whether there are better variants of it, or better completely different things, that are better at it that mean there’s less food or room to survive and reproduce. It doesn’t matter if it can do a thing; what matters is if it does it better or worse compared to the competition. That there are highly complex systems is because once they were just complex, and before that they were simple, and before that they were rudimentary. And that changed because the changes granted a benefit to the creatures that had them, in the context of competition and environment. > [@](#): > > But I will say I find it very hard to believe that organisms could develop teeth and eyes and split into opposite sexes, both of which are necessary for reproduction (and why would this be necessary if the organism was already reproducing…and how could the transition be made without the organism dying in the process even if the need to make such a transition should suddenly spring forth in the first place? Well, here’s the point at which I say i’m not a biologist and so won’t be able to give you detailed explanations of how those specific mechanisms evolved. That said, I would like to ask a question of you; why do you select those particular points as your examples of hard-to-believe things? Are there things you think are comparitively easy to swallow? ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/24 "2009-11-15T05:13:18Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Evolution researchers do not deal with the origins of life. I know. This is what I’m trying to say is the main problem with most of the people who are scornful of evolution: they do mistakenly think it deals with the origins of life. (And IMO this is largely because so many evolutionists are scornful and dismissive of people who believe in God. And if God didn’t create life, what other explanation can there be but that it erupted and develped all on its own?) ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/25 "2009-11-15T05:19:48Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > I think most Christians probably don’t really believe in the Adam & Eve version of creation. Where the rub is, I believe, is that in speaking of evolution the prevalent idea is that evolutionists are saying that some living cell somehow got sparked in some random way and that all life as we now know it grew and evolved from that, and IMO that’s as unlikely and hard to believe as is any religious belief. There is no such idea in evolutionary biology. For one thing, evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. It only describes what happened after life got started. For another thing, there is no notion or hypothesis in any part of biology that a cell just “sparked” into existence. The development of cells was a long, layered process with several intermediate steps, not just a single step or a single cell. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/26 "2009-11-15T05:22:10Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > I know. This is what I’m trying to say is the main problem with most of the people who are scornful of evolution: they do mistakenly think it deals with the origins of life. (And IMO this is largely because so many evolutionists are scornful and dismissive of people who believe in God. And if God didn’t create life, what other explanation can there be but that it erupted and develped all on its own?) On again, you are ignoring that there are theistic evolutionists. But the main point remains that we have a peculiar kind of creationists that pretend that there is an ongoing controversy in science and that therefore we should “teach the controversy”. Creationists are \*\*lying \*\*here. You bet that creationists deserve more than scorn when they try to take their church dogmas into the classrooms. ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/27 "2009-11-15T05:23:14Z")
> [@Revenant\_Threshold](#): > > That said, I would like to ask a question of you; why do you select those particular points as your examples of hard-to-believe things? Are there things you think are comparitively easy to swallow? No, there are a great many other things I could have listed also. Those just came most readily to mind as being things whose complexity and function everyone is familiar with and whose development seems not only highly unlikely but unnecesary in terms of having sprung up on their own, and mostly as a matter of convenience. Take eyes for example: how on earth would eyeballs and flexible lenses and muscles to move them and retinas to be focused on and optic nerves leading to the brain all develop out of nowhere just because it would be handy for an organism to see what was going on? I would think the organism would either die out or continue to get along as it always had long before anything as complex and seemingly intelligently designed as eyesight ever came into being. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/28 "2009-11-15T05:24:52Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > I know. This is what I’m trying to say is the main problem with most of the people who are scornful of evolution: they do mistakenly think it deals with the origins of life. (And IMO this is largely because so many evolutionists are scornful and dismissive of people who believe in God. And if God didn’t create life, what other explanation can there be but that it erupted and developed all on its own?) Why do you persist in using the obviously derogatory term “evolutionists”? There are the vast majority of _scientists_ that recognize the reality of evolution, and the few that refuse to accept that evidence. Do you label people that accept the Theory of Relativity “relativists”, or call those who accept that 2=2+4 “mathists”? ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/29 "2009-11-15T05:28:02Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > On again, you are ignoring that there are theistic evolutionists. No, I’m saying that theistic evolutionists are virtually invisible to the public eye and most people aren’t aware of them. About the only things one hears from evolutionists on the public stage are about how valid evolution is and how stupid people who believe in God are, so it appears to most God-believers that evolutionists are saying that there is no God and evolution proves it. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/30 "2009-11-15T05:29:33Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > Take eyes for example: how on earth would eyeballs and flexible lenses and muscles to move them and retinas to be focused on and optic nerves leading to the brain all develop out of nowhere just because it would be handy for an organism to see what was going on? I would think the organism would either die out or continue to get along as it always had long before anything as complex and seemingly intelligently designed as eyesight ever came into being. Am I mistaken or has this particular example been discussed(and explained thoroughly) a few times before on this board? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/31 "2009-11-15T05:31:34Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > No, I’m saying that theistic evolutionists are virtually invisible to the public eye and most people aren’t aware of them. > > About the only things one hears from evolutionists on the public stage are about how valid evolution is and how stupid people who believe in God are, so it appears to most God-believers that evolutionists are saying that there is no God and evolution proves it. Could you perhaps provide a few cites from prominent scientists who said things like this in a public forum? ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/32 "2009-11-15T05:31:49Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Why do you persist in using the obviously derogatory term “evolutionists”? There are the vast majority of _scientists_ that recognize the reality of evolution, and the few that refuse to accept that evidence. > Do you label people that accept the Theory of Relativity “relativists”, or call those who accept that 2=2+4 “mathists”? No degrogatory meaning is intended. I believe in evolution myself, up to a point. What would you call them? (And yes, I would call people who accept the Theory of Relativity “Relativists,” just like I call believers in Objectivism “Objectivists,” thus I don’t see where your ire is coming from.) ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/33 "2009-11-15T05:34:50Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Could you perhaps provide a few cites from prominent scientists who said things like this in a public forum? If you can show where I ever said anything about scientists making such pronouncements, I would be happy to. ---
**Author:** ![Revenant\_Threshold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f1d935/32.png) [@Revenant\_Threshold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revenant_Threshold)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/34 "2009-11-15T05:36:21Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > No, there are a great many other things I could have listed also. Those just came most readily to mind as being things whose complexity and function everyone is familiar with and whose development seems not only highly unlikely but unnecesary in terms of having sprung up on their own, and mostly as a matter of convenience. Take eyes for example: how on earth would eyeballs and flexible lenses and muscles to move them and retinas to be focused on and optic nerves leading to the brain all develop out of nowhere just because it would be handy for an organism to see what was going on? I would think the organism would either die out or continue to get along as it always had long before anything as complex and seemingly intelligently designed as eyesight ever came into being. Interestingly enough, the evolution of eyesight is one of the specific cases I was taught in high school level biology. I think the problem with your question is that those things didn’t just pop up out of nowhere - they built upon less impressive, less efficient versions of what they were. So you don’t have blind fish, blind fish, fish with complex, interdependent working eyes. You get a blind fish, and then maybe a fish with a slightly light sensitive spot, and then a fish with a yet more sensitive one, and so on and so forth. There are, literally, billions upon billions of years, billions upon billions of generations, for all this to add up in. As for dying out - the very point of natural selection is that those traits which helped are the ones that survived. If that incredibly rudimentary light-sensitive spot on precursor fish helped it to survive in some way, then those with them are going to survive more, and survive longer, than the ones that don’t. You talk about convenience as if it’s trivial, but of course it matters. If there’s a shop selling a product you regularly buy 10 miles away, and then another shop with that same item opens up just 2 miles away, all things being equal, you’re going to go to the more convenient location to get your product. The nearby shop will survive better than the far shop, because it has properties which make it more convenient, more able to survive in the context of you as a shopper and the competition. ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/35 "2009-11-15T05:38:20Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Am I mistaken or has this particular example been discussed(and explained thoroughly) a few times before on this board? What bee has gotten under your bonnet? Do you expect that I’m aware of and fully versed in every thread that has appeared on this message board? I’m trying to explain why people such as Palin and other believers in God appear to believe that way rather than in evolution to explain life on this planet. You, however, seem to be wanting to fight some battle I’m not even vaguely aware of, so I’d appreciate it if you’d at least let me know what your problem is. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/36 "2009-11-15T05:39:00Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > No, there are a great many other things I could have listed also. Those just came most readily to mind as being things whose complexity and function everyone is familiar with and whose development seems not only highly unlikely but unnecesary in terms of having sprung up on their own, and mostly as a matter of convenience. Take eyes for example: how on earth would eyeballs and flexible lenses and muscles to move them and retinas to be focused on and optic nerves leading to the brain all develop out of nowhere just because it would be handy for an organism to see what was going on? I would think the organism would either die out or continue to get along as it always had long before anything as complex and seemingly intelligently designed as eyesight ever came into being. No, even having a simple detector of light and darkness is an advantage over critters that do not have even a simple photoreceptor: [http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/the\_eye\_as\_a\_contingent\_divers.php](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/the_eye_as_a_contingent_divers.php) > [@](#): > > Vision evolved in the pre-Cambrian, and we have all inherited the same basic machinery — since then, we’ve mainly been elaborating, refining, and randomly varying the structures that add functionality to the eye. > > Now there’s a new and wonderfully comprehensive review of the evolution of eyes in one specific lineage, the vertebrates. The message is that, once again, all the heavy lifting, the evolution of a muscled eyeball with a lens and retinal circuitry, was accomplished early, between 550 and 500 million years ago. Most of what biology has been doing since is tweaking — significant tweaking, I’m sure, but the differences between a lamprey eye and our eyes are in the details, not the overall structure. [http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/12/evolution\_of\_vertebrate\_eyes.php](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/12/evolution_of_vertebrate_eyes.php) > [@](#): > > From those early pre-Cambrian days on, there have been two (well, three, but let’s not get into that right now) basic kinds of photoreceptor: ciliary and rhabdomeric. The differences between the two are in cellular organization—rhabdomeric receptors have an apical elaboration of the cell membrane, while ciliary receptors modify a protrusion called the cilium to do the same thing—and in the cellular pathway they use to trigger changes in current flow across the membrane. Different lineages have appropriated these two kinds of photoreceptors in different ways. We vertebrates use ciliary photoreceptors in the image-forming part of our eyes; we have rhabdomeric receptors, too, but they’re used in a more general way to sense light and dark, and play a role in circadian rhythms. Most invertebrates instead use rhabdomeric receptors for vision — the eye of the octopus, for instance, which superficially resembles ours, contains rhabdomeric photoreceptors instead of the ciliary rods and cones of our eyes. These ciliary receptors are found in all chordates, even in cephalochordates which lack true eyes, but do have simple light sensors. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/37 "2009-11-15T05:47:13Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > If you can show where I ever said anything about scientists making such pronouncements, I would be happy to. So when you referred to “evolutionists on the public stage”, you were talking about…? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/38 "2009-11-15T05:49:43Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > What bee has gotten under your bonnet? Do you expect that I’m aware of and fully versed in every thread that has appeared on this message board? > > I’m trying to explain why people such as Palin and other believers in God appear to believe that way rather than in evolution to explain life on this planet. > > You, however, seem to be wanting to fight some battle I’m not even vaguely aware of, so I’d appreciate it if you’d at least let me know what your problem is. Actually, all I was doing was asking if anyone could direct me to previous threads discussing your example, because I was pretty sure it had been covered before and it would suit us better than rehashing arguments that had already been made. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/39 "2009-11-15T05:49:49Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > No, I’m saying that theistic evolutionists are virtually invisible to the public eye and most people aren’t aware of them. :rolleyes: As a lapsed Catholic (and as a part of one of the biggest Christian denominations in the USA) I can tell you that most are aware of them. > [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > About the only things one hears from evolutionists on the public stage are about how valid evolution is and how stupid people who believe in God are, so it appears to most God-believers that evolutionists are saying that there is no God and evolution proves it. :rolleyes::rolleyes: No, only a sub set of creationists are stupid. (The ones that want to put creationism in schools) That subset (like Palin) does want to convince all Americans that what the smack-downs that they deservedly get on school and on the courts applies to \*\*all \*\*people of faith. Those creationists are also lying. ---
**Author:** ![ambushed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@ambushed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ambushed)\ **Post date:** [November 15, 2009, 5:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625/40 "2009-11-15T05:50:20Z")
> [@Argent\_Towers](#): > > It’s easy to forget sometimes that Christianity - real, believing Christianity - has 2,000 years behind it. 2,000 long years, century after century after century of people believing - really, truly believing - in God. Conquering nations, constructing cities, building cathedrals, creating art, sculpture, music, all in the name of God. I’ll never understand peoples’ indignant surprise that there are “still” people out there that literally believe in their religion’s scriptures. _This board is not a representative sample of America or the world._ A mere two thousand years is very nearly trivial compared to human history’s longest-running, most popular religion / belief “system”, but unfortunately it doesn’t have a very good name. Pascal Boyer referred to it as “witchcraft” in his engrossing (if unduly repetitive) book [_Religion Explained_](http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Pascal-Boyer/dp/0465006965), but at least here in the Western world that term is too strongly associated with old hags and broomsticks and the like to be properly understood by the general public. It is composed of a vast grab bag of beliefs centered on an imagined sense of hidden, mystical _ **agency** _ behind events, arising from the subjects / objects – physical or otherwise – around us which are thought to be imbued with the “breath” of powerful forces. A central tenet is that these hidden forces can be subtly manipulated by those possessing the relevant _gnosis_, many of whom are believed to be transcendent or can only be described using vastly different ontologies than our own, the effects of which are variously revealed in “luck”, in the “evil eye”, in our ancestors’ will or respect, in specially designated animals, in the “Word of God”, in “fate”, in “horoscopes”, in “psychic powers”, in “prophecy”, in “church”, in “alien abductions”, etc., etc. You Christians (along with many others) have artificially added a great deal of subtle intellectual heft to the same root concept and refer to it in English as _ **spirit** _. This “religion” is at least as old as _Homo sapiens_, and remains the dominant belief system in the world even today throughout the world. Consider the enormous current popularity in the West of vampires, zombies, the paranormal, ghosts, Mayan death calendars, etc. Consider such popular books as _“The Celestine Prophecy”_, _“The Holy Bible”_, _“The Secret”_, and _“The Qur’an”_. All just different representations of the belief in _spiritus_. Applying what we have learned from that background to Sarah Palin’s and so many others’ belief that their lives can be, or are being, “guided” by “the spirit of God”, we can observe that what began as animism is still the preeminent foundation of that worldview. Humanity has layered astonishingly complex, subtle, and often extremely beautiful intellectual edifices on top of animism, but ultimately, animism it plainly remains. And the extreme danger of secular power in the hands of people with that worldview telling us that their lives have been “taken over” and are now “in God’s hands” is that their decision-making has thus become virtually unquestionable! Just as George W. Bush took us into an utterly unjust war in Iraq because he was certain that God had told him to do so (God was wrong about WMDs, too, apparently), if listening to secular advice and following secular laws and heeding the secular democratic will conflicts with “God’s will”, guess who gets the short end of the straw and suffers “God’s wrath”? - - [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-conservatives-want-to-defend-palin-on-these-quotes/517625.md?page=3)