Posted on 04/09/2008 7:27:17 AM PDT by js1138
Laugh all you like. I've read a detailed description of the content and heard Ben talk about it.
No, they both point to an all-powerful ever-living creator. Space aliens had to be designed too. The chain of creators (small c) always leads back to a Creator (capital c) "The Creator" is simply an undefined circular argument. The creator has no definition except that it created everything. Who created the Creator? He was always around. If the creator can exist forever, why can't the Universe? Only the Creator can exist forever. Why. Because he is the everliving Creator.
There are Nazi films about eugenics and extermination of the mentally retarded. It is not fiction.
"Ben Stein (Benjamin J. Stein) was born November 25, 1944 in Washington, D.C., (He is the son of the economist and writer Herbert Stein) grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Montgomery Blair High School. He graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with honors in economics. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1970 as valedictorian of his class by election of his classmates. He also studied in the graduate school of economics at Yale.
He has worked as an economist at The Department of Commerce, a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C., a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., a university adjunct at American University in Washington, D.C., at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. At American U. He taught about the political and social content of mass culture. He taught the same subject at UCSC, as well as about political and civil rights under the Constitution. At Pepperdine, he has taught about libel law and about securities law and ethical issues since 1986.
In 1973 and 1974, he was a speech writer and lawyer for Richard Nixon at The White House and then for Gerald Ford. (He did NOT write the line, "I am not a crook.") He has been a columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner (R.I.P.) and King Features Syndicate, and a frequent contributor to Barrons, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew major national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, E! Online, and most of all, has written a lengthy diary for twenty years for The American Spectator. He currently writes a column for The New York Times Sunday Business Section and has for many years, a column about personal finance for Yahoo!, is a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, and for Fox News.
He has written, co-written and published thirty books, including seven novels, largely about life in Los Angeles, and twenty-one nonfiction books, about finance and about ethical and social issue in finance, and also about the political and social content of mass culture."
Anybody have access to Roger Friedman's bio? I'd love to compare the two.
If he wrote that somewhere, I missed it.
The theory of evolution is just that : a theory.I personally believe is is just a "Hypothetical construct".
“In “Evolution, Religion and Free Will” (American Scientist, Volume 95, 294ff) , Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine found that, of 149 eminent evolutionists polled, 78% were pure naturalists (no God) and only two were clearly theists (traditional idea of God). Some were in between these poles.”
If something like 3/4 of your colleagues are committed atheists, it’s hard to believe evolution is a neutral scientific theory, having no effect on what one believes about God—or the promotions of one’s underlings.
The same logic says “of course the mainstream media isn’t biased, even though over 3/4 of them always vote Democrat!”
So I guess one has a choice of blaming God for all evil, or, denying there can be a God at all?
You’ve identified what philosophers call “The Problem of Evil” and why, in Judaism and Christianity, God is shown to have in the future a final Judgment Day.
Your questions about the Creator show that you’re limiting your analysis to a strictly materialistic viewpoint.
Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
The material universe has a beginning, and therefore a cause, and this cause has to transcend what it caused.
It’s funny that those who originally thought that the universe had no beginning held strongly to the causality principal, until it was shown that the universe DID have a beginning, then they set about trying to disprove the causality principal.
Of course, it’s an extremely impressive bio. But it’s not at all clear that he took Biology 101 or any sort of science. Which might explain why he doesn’t even seem to understand the definition of evolution and has beliefs about scientists that bear little resemblance to the experience of those of us who have worked for years in scientific fields.
I like to point out in this debate that only *parts* of evolutionary theory are objectionable. Many of its parts are sensible to everyone. For example, “natural selection”.
The better boxer wins. The faster dachshund gets the table scrap. The girl looks at a lot of guys before somehow deciding which one she wants to marry, if he wants to marry her too, and if she can just make up her mind. But there is always some advantage or disadvantage that means that somebody wins and somebody loses. It is all natural selection.
Natural selection also determines when species die out. They just couldn’t compete against some thing or some other species. Rats and dogs vs. Dodos means Dodos lose.
But things get much harder from there. This is because natural selection is only “after the fact”. All it does is point out which are the winners and losers after they have already won and lost. And it is also fickle, because those who appear to be winners may lose “in the long run”, and the losers may win.
So what does natural selection add to the theory of evolution? Perhaps more than it should. But unto itself it really isn’t that objectionable.
But lots of other parts of the theory of evolution are like natural selection. They make sense as limited theories, that often only resolve long after the fact, so they always seem to be right, even if they have to change several times to do so.
Yes, it was the faster dachsund. But it got the table scrap so often that it is now the fatter dachshund, and isn’t quite so fast anymore.
Exactly my point. I agree with you. However I’m tired of people who point to the evils of atheistic Nazism and ignore the just as great (and far greater, in numbers, extent and time of existance) evils of atheistic Communism. The atheist Nazis, over 60 years ago, killed about 20 million innocent civilians, atheist Communists, in the old USSR, and China and the far East have killed over 150 million innocents and counting...
I believe that Hitler was Catholic, liked dogs, and believed strongly in eugenics.
(Yes) Strongly enough to make genocide a household word.
I believe that Darwin was a brilliant observer, an ardent scientist, and that he neither addressed original cause nor the death of God.
I believe that science is badly served by practitioners who demand that their views be given status equal to a religion...whether their position is global warming or neo-Darwinism.
Finally, I believe that Roger Friedman is a nasty little man who should only wish he had Ben Stein's mind or his money.
Please tell me what the Creator is and what caused it.
Genetic variation within and between populations is one of the most powerful forms of ammunition needed to rapidly respond to inevitable natural environmental changes. What is a lack of fitness in one set of conditions may be beneficial in another. Evolution does not justify socialist/fascist/communist centralized control of procreation, nor does it justify euthanasia. Quite the contrary.
What evolution justifies, at the political level, if anything, is laissez-faires economics. Sink or swim - no compulsory collectivism (parasitism) to punish the fit for their success or subsidize the unfit for their failure (it is true that we could become maladapted to our environment via dysgenic welfare-state policies).
Note that the individual voluntary charitable notions of Christianity are entirely compatible with this view.
You, as well, believed Hitler’s propoganda?
That IS the ultimate hypocrisy of Libs isn't it. They want the freedom to promote their ideology, no matter how flawed and irrational, but they want to squelch anything they disagree with.
This author sounds like nothing but a smarmy, ill-tempered hypocrite who demands that everyone accept his and his ideologues point of view.
“Where do rainbows come from?” tumblindice at 9
“God put them in the sky as a promise that He would never
destroy the world again with water.” My harried Sunday school teacher
“When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.” I Cor. xiii. 11.
How ironic that leftist anti-theists and atheists also happen to be communists/socialists that don’t believe in Darwinism in economics or cultures, allowing the best to thrive and the inviable to die out.
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