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To: VadeRetro
"The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of positive sciences, and with this an intensification in skepticism about God and the claims of traditional religion, especially among the educated classes. This inclination became most marked after the publication of The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin ascribed man's immediate ancestry to the anthropoids, supposedly through a process of gradual evolution. Man was no longer a creature made in the image of God, but merely a natural extension of certain lower forms of life... a refined gorilla, as it were. It was these circumstances, and this intellectual milieu, that led philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to declare that "God is dead" and to predict the rise of new and terrible manisfestations of barbarism in the century that was to come. As he put it, "For ... we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which have never yet been dreamed of ... there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth." The non-believer Nietzsche would agree wholly with the Christian believer Dostoyevsky about one thing: Without faith in God, all horrors, all of man's worst nightmares, would become possible. And so they did. What men believe really matters."
12 posted on 02/16/2002 12:41:29 PM PST by f.Christian
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To: f.Christian
You're saying that we can't handle the truth. But we have to and anyway I for one want it.
13 posted on 02/16/2002 12:46:12 PM PST by VadeRetro
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To: f.Christian
Without faith in God, all horrors, all of man's worst nightmares, would become possible. And so they did. What men believe really matters."

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

27 posted on 11/21/2002 1:41:32 PM PST by js1138
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