Letters to the Editor 09/28/2005

To the Editor:

I don’t believe that I need to “justify” why I drive my child to school, but I would be glad to explain the reason to Mr. Lester (Letter to the Editor, The Nugget, September 21). My five-year-old full-day kindergartner could catch the bus at 6:50 a.m. and ride around for over an hour, getting to school around 8 a.m. In the afternoon, he could catch the bus at the grade school at 2:40 p.m., ride to the middle and high schools then arrive home at about 3:30 p.m..

Currently, we leave our house 15 minutes before school starts and get there right on time. In the afternoon we can be home 15 minutes after school is out.

Why would I get my two-year-old and kindergartner up an hour earlier every morning to drive 1/2 mile down the road so my five-year-old can spend two hours a day on a bus with middle and high school kids? We’re already in the car, so five miles is no big deal. Personally, I enjoy the commute and the time I gain with my child. The time he would spend on the bus would cause him to lose valuable sleep and family time.

Hundreds of families in town do use the school bus service and as far as I know, the transportation department does an excellent job. They seem organized, efficient and are truly concerned about the safety of the children. My choice to take my child to school has nothing to do with any issues concerning the transportation department. It is simply more logical and practical in my situation.

I don’t want to debate anyone about who is more “justified” in using certain streets at a certain time of day. I’m sure Mr. Lester feels that he had a good reason for being near Locust Street and Highway 20 at 8 a.m. on the morning that annoyed him so badly, just like I feel that I had a good reason for being there.

To me, “a huge traffic problem” is trying to evacuate over a million people from an area in a few days. Let’s keep things in perspective.

Karla Young

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To the Editor,

The re-emergence of the evolution vs. creation/ID debate is a reminder that things can get gnarly when people talk religion and politics, even in our little weekly paper. Why? When core beliefs bump against each other, we feel compelled to defend our own against the perceived “threat.”

But here’s a conflict that doesn’t need to be one, as long as we are clear about the overall purpose of each set of notions in question, and are able to give each other some room to express ideas.

The central question that ID wants to answer is who is responsible for all that we know of the earth and it’s plant, animal and human inhabitants and why it all exists. This is fundamentally a philosophical or religious question.

The scientific method (hypothesis, followed by gathering information that either supports or doesn’t support the original hypothesis) is a how-it-happened question, primarily concerned with the mechanics of how life is developing and adapting. This is a science question.

When the religious community raises questions concerning the origin and existence of life to the scientific community and meets with skepticism, it may be because science doesn’t purport to address religious/philosophical “why” issues, its purpose is to explore “how” life works.

This may be why thousands of scientists of devout faith sleep just fine at night.

Dawn Mead

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To the Editor:

To try to convince everyone of ID in 300 words or less in a letter to the editor is why I gave my e-mail [email protected]

Mr. Bryan did not contact me about my huge scientific resource pool. Scientists would be saddened to hear that years of studies and books written should be thrown out because it’s not in any field of science he is aware of or because it never made it to major media.

The major media sure loves us Christians, Republicans, and Intelligent Design Scientists and are always looking for every chance to lift us up.

The hydrocarbons and glycine in molecular clouds and amino acids and hydrocarbons in meteorites do not give enough information to make such huge assumptions about life on earth. Theories of how meteors could have come from Earth are available.

If despite the virtually impossible odds, proteins arose by chance, there is not the remotest reason to believe they could even form a membrane-encased, self-reproducing, metabolizing, living cell. Huge leaps and bounds here. No scientist has ever demonstrated that this fantastic jump in complexity could have happened-even if they entire universe had been filled with proteins.

If you typed the four-letter alphabet code for DNA code for a bacteria it would take 2,000 single spaced pages. However, for a single human cell, the length of the code would require one million pages.

Radiometric methods make huge and unreasonable assumptions. Constant rate of decay over the past so-called billions of years are assumed. Huge floods and how the rock formed during volcanic activity make monumental difference to these methods. In more than 400 published checks of radiometric testing versus the evolution based ages for fossils that lie above or below radio-metrically dated rock, the age was at least one geologic age in error – indicating major errors in the methodology. Even Carbon Dating has been used to show diamonds (assumed by evolution to be billions of years old) as 58,000 years old.

Teach facts, not just the ones we prefer. Many scientist and many Christians have been wrong too many times for us to choose our preferred science and say it is 100 percent accurate or even close. Didn’t the American Medical Association say smoking was beneficial to our health back in the 1920s? (I have a reference for this too).

Jeff Haken