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To: Heartlander

Thanks for those quotes.

Keep in mind that these statements actually go beyond anything in the science. They are extra-scientific and reflect their own interpretations explicated in the socio-political realm.

I think they are such true believers that they don’t know they’ve broken their own covenant with science as practitioners.

At the same time, they are great quotes to throw back in the faces of liberal atheists who don’t understand the cognitive dissonance of their own views.


12 posted on 02/05/2014 8:36:28 AM PST by ifinnegan
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To: ifinnegan
At the same time, they are great quotes to throw back in the faces of liberal atheists who don’t understand the cognitive dissonance of their own views.

Ha! The cognitive dissonance of the liberal atheist – that would be an easy book to write. Neo-darwinism (random mutations, natural selection and survival of the fittest) makes man just another animal and no more exceptional than plants or other animals - then it follows that man has no exceptional moral responsibilities either-- including to safeguard the planet or care about other living beings, whether animal or human. Darwin knew this:

If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.

To natural selection killing your siblings and offspring is all the same as loving them. Selection only favors what works to enhance survival and reproduction, and it does not matter if it is nice and moral, or harsh and brutal.
- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, and Selection in Regard to Sex

In the Darwin view of humans as animals, what would cause us to stop practicing animal husbandry within our own species? Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game. Scientific data is well supported in animal husbandry. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.
Eugenic racism in 1925 was consensus science in the field of human evolution. By 1928 there were 376 university-level courses on eugenics, and there was widespread support from scientists and other academics at leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, to name a few -- as well as enthusiastic support from media and government. Eugenic science was funded lavishly by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harriman Railroad foundation, and the wealthy businessman J.H. Kellogg. Many national and international conferences on eugenics and human evolution were hosted at leading research institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, and eugenic science gained the imprimatur of leading scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. Wealthy donors created the Eugenic Records Office on Long Island, later to become the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. By the 1930s, thirty-one states in the U.S. would pass compulsory sterilization laws based on mainstream eugenic science and human evolution, and eugenics would receive the explicit endorsement of the Supreme Court in 1926. By the end of the first half of the 20th century, sixty thousand Americans had been sterilized involuntarily on the basis of consensus eugenic science.

…Racism and eugenics were the hallmarks of the theory of human evolution in the early 20th century, representing a clear consensus of evolutionary biologists as well as other scientists and leaders in higher education and government. There were a few dissenters, but such skeptics were disdained in mainstream scientific circles.
- Michael Egnor

Eugenics is an ugly part of our history and even taught to our children (See: Hunter’s Civic Biology ).
Improvement of Man. - If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.

Eugenics. - When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, that dread white plague which is still responsible for almost one seventh of all deaths, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science is of being well born is called eugenics.

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. - Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.
- Hunter’s Civic Biology (the textbook at the centre of the Scopes Trial)

Why would unguided evolution even select human consciousness? It has no evolutionary benefit – it actually stifles evolution - it causes us to help the weak and let them reproduce. We try to stop dogs with genetic defects from reproducing – why not humans? What would be the liberal atheist’s counter argument? Yep, cognitive dissonance – even Darwin experienced it with his own theory:
“Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Charles Darwin

16 posted on 02/05/2014 9:52:33 AM PST by Heartlander (We are all Rodeo Clowns now!)
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