Last evening I viewed Ben Stein's 2008 documentary entitled "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed".  As described in the Netflix introduction, this work examines "how pro-intelligent design scholars and scientists are often chastised, fired or denied tenured positions by those who believe in Darwin's theory of evolution"...with the enforced exclusion of any other approach.  Academic freedom is denied, and civic freedom is attacked by those who refuse to consider more recent evidence developed in molecular biology and in cell genetics that raise serious scientific questions about the origin of Man.  Instead, these self-proclaimed athiests work to marginalize anyone else as delusional crackpots.  Evidence is also presented regarding how this approach in earlier decades formed the basis of the Eugenics movement in the early 20th century that resulted in over 50,000 disabled people having been sterilized against their will in this country, and how insistence on Darwinian concepts formed the basis for pursuit of the Nazi Master Race and for Ms Singer's Planned Parenthood. 

 

Add to this the "Culture Wars" in which we are engaged in recent decades, pitting unbridled secularism and "positivism" against any concept of Natural Law and human morality.  And now, one question: Where has the Catholic Church - and other Religions, for that matter - been in these conflicts?  AWOL, that's where.  Instead of informing and marshalling the efforts of its Faithful in this pitched battle, with nothing less than our personal freedoms at stake, the Catholic hierarchy continues to content itself with stale homilies and platitudes, or with periodic undocumented declarations of Magisterium dogma.  To sample this disconnect, just visit our links to the incessant bad news reported in the LifeNews publications vs the offerings in Zenit - The World Seen From Rome.  The Hierarchy is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic!

 

Where are the Ten Commandments?  Where are the Seven Deadly Sins?  Where are Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, the free will promises and consequences of personal responsibility?  Where are sincere and open discussions with the Laity - rather than arrogant pronouncements - regarding beginning and end of life decisions facing all of us, personal morality and personal obligations toward social justice?  Where are the kind of topics which we discussed on fourty occasions in the section on this web site entitled Point and Counterpoint...and which the local Hierarchy chose to studiously ignore?  In a word, WHERE ARE OUR SHEPHARDS?  We the Laity, the Body of the Church, want to know.

GS