Dmitri Guzner of Verona, New Jersey pleaded guilty to charges of cybercrime against the religious organisation and related websites, which began in January 2008. The “Denial-of-Service” attacks involved using several computers to flood the websites with up to 220 Megabytes of malicious traffic every second, resulting in the websites being unavailable to legitimate visitors.

Guzner, who entered his plea at a New Jersey court on Monday 11th May, is due to be sentenced on 24th August. Some sources have suggested he may face up to 10 years in prison if handed the maximum sentence. Guzner was a member of the underground hacking group “Anonymous”, whose mostly teenage members began attacking the Scientology movement last year. In response to the initial attack, the Church of Scientology released a new information website, the “Scientology Video Channel,” which went online on 13th March to coincide with their annual celebration of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday.

Syndicated from NowPublic.com

The US presidential elections are huge news, spanning the globe with their influence. Recently we’ve tuned in to criticism of Sarah Palin, Republican candidate John McCain’s chosen running mate for the potential Vice Presidency. She’s a pro-life Christian and said that evolution and creationism should both be discussed in schools. She’s under heavy fire at the moment and I’m not about to take sides, but she’s been very open about her personal beliefs, which is a bold move in politics. A professor at the Royal Society said that creationism should be taught as a ‘world view.’ He was blasted in readers’ comments because he is also a Christian minister.

All doom and gloom? I don’t think so. Perhaps the most religious people I know are atheists. “What?!” you say. Well if we’re going to talk about ‘religious’ in terms of firmly set beliefs and a kind of stubbornness toward changing them, then to me it’s those who believe that ‘religion’ is nonsense who are the most guilty. I, of course, am willing to deal with that, as I do every day in our increasingly secular society, isolated from religion by an increasing mockery of it in the media. Religion vs. science is a far more heated debate, and I’m not about to throw myself as bait to the likes of Richard Dawkins, who I see as the [un]spiritual leader of the atheist movement. Oh, have a laugh won’t you? Let’s not get serious.

So back to school, as they say. We’re looking here at two viewpoints that have been represented as diametrically opposed to one another. Creationism is defined by Oxford as “the belief that the universe and living creatures were created by God in accordance with the account given in the Old Testament.” Evolution is a bit different. In our sense, we’re looking at what Oxford says is “the process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed, especially by natural selection.”

Genetics is a subject that deals with evolution as a principle. When I studied genetics in biology and additional classes, the process of natural selection was discussed. It was stressed however that this is a theory for which much evidence exists, but which cannot be conclusively proven. Genetic anomalies and the survival of unwanted hereditary conditions such as night blindness, were cited as examples of its unpredictability. In addition, it was postulated that the improvement of modern medical procedures could have had an impact on the process of natural selection, because we can now save the lives of those with traits that would, in theory, have been made extinct by the evolutionary process.

Then there’s creationism. When I was at school, Religious Education was compulsory. I had one good R.E. teacher and he left the teaching profession to become a priest. The rest of my R.E. teachers made lessons boring and restricted thinking during classes so that it just became a chore. For me it became a game: how can I annoy the R.E. teacher today? I would regularly write “God” without a capital “G,” refer to anything but Christianity in my essays, and try to find ways to fault the teacher. Needless to say, I’ve grown up since my school days. But there was always a sense of what I termed ‘ramming it down your neck’ in those lessons. I am emphatically not a proponent of such teaching methods. But even in R.E. lessons, at least during secondary (high) school, creationism was rarely discussed. It was left to the personal beliefs of the students. The one time it was discussed was in debating the possibility that the Bible could be interpreted as symbolic rather than literal, an idea which many Christians I know hold true.

But if evolution says that life changes and adapts, and creationism says that life was created by God, how can the two be positioned in a head-on battle? The simple answer is, they can’t. Creationism is a religious and personal belief about the coming into existence of life and the physical universe. Evolution is a theory postulated by Charles Darwin about which much scientific evidence exists. But nothing in history has succeeded in discounting the possibility that there is another influence on evolution than mere ‘chance’; indeed, it is seldom stated that this is impossible, or even improbable.

The Big Bang is another theory which is almost as difficult to prove as the existence of God. But scientists have clung to it because it explains many phenomena which they see in space. It tends to reconcile the evidence they have before them. You might note that this similar to a line used by some atheists in ‘explaining’ why people hold religious beliefs: “It tends to explain what they see around them.” Either way, many scientists also hold religious beliefs and the idea that you have to be an atheist in order to be a scientist is false, and I cannot stress that enough.

The most important thing in all of this is one’s integrity. In short, this is being true to your observations and knowledge. If you see something and as far as you’re concerned, you know it happened, then that’s fine with me. Just because I didn’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for you. And it works both ways. If you don’t believe in miracles because you’ve never experienced one, or if you know miracles can be because you have experienced them, then I would say both are equally correct. The problem comes when the two opposing views begin to, well, oppose one another. If I were to criticise everything that I heard about that wasn’t in line with what I personally believed, I would be seen as a bigot, most likely.

What is true for you is what you have observed yourself and when you lose that you have lost everything.
—L. Ron Hubbard, Personal Integrity.

Destruction of an opposing reality is far from the nicest thing one can do. That’s not to say we should be passive about radical ideas that could have a negative impact, nor that we should teach the theory of evolution as a mere ‘belief.’ In a school science lesson however, the possibility of other, perhaps spiritual factors, in shaping the course of evolution, should not be attacked. It probably shouldn’t be promoted either, as this would be seen as unscientific due to the lack of tangible evidence. But there is no tangible evidence for the existence of ‘chance’ either, and scientists should be reminded of this. In my opinion, creationism is not a matter of scientific interest. The Big Bang then, should always be taught as a theory until such a time as more evidence becomes apparent. But the opposition of science and religion should not be brought into the school system and nor should their separation.

Before you get too excited, I moderate these comments. I’d love to hear what you think about this, but let’s not get carried away. I understand this is a touchy topic…