Posted on 03/22/2012 7:44:32 AM PDT by Moseley
Here is evolution for you:
http://upressonline.com/2012/03/fau-student-threatens-to-kill-professor-and-classmates/ This is very sad. And it seems crazy at first.
BUT THINK ABOUT IT. It is obvious to me what is going on here. Yes, I am guessing / reading between the lines. But I think it is very clear.
The class was being taught about EVOLUTION:
A fellow classmate, Rachel Bustamante, was sitting behind Carr prior to her outburst and noticed she had been avoiding looking at the professor until 11:35 a.m. — that’s when she snapped. The classmate reported that Kajiura was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question about evolution. She asked it four times, and became increasingly upset each time Kajiura’s answer failed to satisfy her.
DID YOU CATCH IT? The professor was discussing the evolutionary role of "attraction between peacocks."
In other words, how do animals / people choose a mate?
If you remember what evolution teaches, it teaches that INDIVIDUALS *MATE* BASED UPON PERCEIVED *SUPERIOR* CHARACTERISTICS for evolution.
So this Black woman Jonatha(?) Carr obviously perceives that BEING BLACK IS ASSUMED (by many) to be INFERIOR and that evolution means that men CHOOSE women based upon what is perceived to be SUPERIOR qualities.
What evolution means to Carr -- and who can blame her, logically? -- is that men are going to choose "BETTER" women than her, and she is not going to get chosen as a valuable person or desirable mate.
Hence, the discussion of how animals, like peacocks, CHOOSE A MATE based upon how they other one LOOKS.
So this Black woman is obviously perceiving that evolution means that men will choose the SUPERIOR candidate for mating and reproduction, and evolution produces "improvement" over time by men selecting SUPERIOR women -- meaning NOT HER.
Whereas Christianity teaches the value and infinite worth of E V E R Y human being in God's eyes, and that every man and woman is not only valuable just for who they are, but infinitely valuable in God's heart, evolution teaches that this Black woman is INFERIOR to other women, to be discarded and rejected in the evolutionary march toward perfection.
Buried in her thinking must be the idea that Black men (so the cliche goes, true or untrue) prefer White women over Black women. (I suspect this flows from Blacks being persecuted and wanting the affirmation of being valued by a perceied more powerful class, not because there is anything inherently superior about White women over Black women in an evolutionary sense.)
God looks over the vast diversity of human types and characteristics, and says IT IS GOOD: ALL OF IT. All of the vast differences and variety. There is no "better" or "worse" in God's eyes. There is no human being more (or less) valuable than this Black woman Carr. Everyone is equally cherished in God's heart.
Somewhere, if we can learn to follow God's plans (which unfortunately is much more difficult and mysterious than it sounds, and can be a frustrating search), God knows the PERFECT CHOICE of a man for Jonatha Carr.
NO, the man isn't perfect, any more than Miss Carr is perfect. No one is perfect. Marriage involves the strange situation of two VERY IMPERFECT human beings trying to live a life together without killing each other. Therein lies the challenge of learning to APPLY God's principles in real life. Marriage is like the "lab class" in comparison with the "class lecture." We get to put into practice during the week what God tries to teach us on Sunday.
But God says that if Miss Carr can put her trust in God's hands, there is a perfect choice of a mate for her. God doesn't move on our time table, and God can be frustrating sometimes. But in God Miss Carr lacks nothing.
However, evolution tells Miss Carr that life is a hostile, adversarial, dog-eat-dog COMPETITION in which she is necessarily going to be the LOSER because (in her mind, as she has been bombarded with negativity) being a Black woman puts her at the bottom of the list of choices.
Evolution means survival of the fittest and (she thinks) that ain't her.
Can you see now why she yells "I HATE EVOLUTION!"
The question is:
DO YOU?
DO YOU HATE EVOLUTION, TOO?
For the very same reason that Miss Carr understandably hates evolution, shouldn't we all?
Evolution is not simply an irrelevant side show for those who believe in God.
EVOLUTION IS A DIRECT AND VIOLENT ASSAULT ON THE WORTH AND DIGNITY AND SELF IDENTITY OF HUMAN BEINGS, TEARING DOWN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THEMSELVES, AND PITTING BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER AND SISTER AGAINST SISTER, IN AN UNGODLY COMPETITION. Evolution breeds violence, hatred, depression, and despair.
There is not a single human being alive whom God does not want. And there is not a single human being alive whom God wants any more than any other.
Yet evolution tells this young Black woman - and any one else who has ever, temporarily, felt inferior for a moment in time -- that she is destined to be discarded by life, that she is trash to be excluded and rejected by the world.
Do you hate evolution with a passion, yet?
Its effect is physical. But natural selection itself would have to be understood as a type of cause. Causes are not physical things, though their effects often are.
I think you conflate cause and effect here. But they are not the same thing, epistemologically speaking.
What is causing the natural selection in the example I mentioned? It was a physical cause - causing physical death of those variations that the antibiotic could physically bind to.
What was the effect of the natural selection I mentioned? Only those variations that the antibiotic could not physically bind to were left alive.
Full retreat into semantics and epistemology is not answering my rather simple question.
Absent any knowledge on your part of what DNA is or what it does - I cannot take at face value any assertion that you make about it not being necessary and sufficient to its assigned task.
Absent ANY description of the physical mechanism of the evolution you say you believe in, I must conclude that you have no real intellectual curiosity on this subject to go along with your almost complete lack of knowledge.
So you say you believe in evolution, and that there is some underlying physical mechanism - but you have no idea how to describe it without it being a “Darwinist” argument.
That right there is real amusing!
If I believed evolution was just fine and dandy, then I’m sure I’d be saying something different regarding theology, too. It’s hard to say which is the cart and which the horse under any other theology, but coming to believe in evolution will cause a man to adjust his theology. It would be illogical not to.
It's not a question of being "fine and dandy", but being the best explanation we have for the evidence that was put in front of us.
Whether it makes you "adjust your theology" is going to depend on what your theology was to start with.
All Christian theology must start as biblical theology.
Is this where you tell me that I’m reading it wrong, and try to convert me?
Nope. This is where I tell you that biblical theology must deal initially with the plain literate sense of the text and of any biblical episode. After that is when we do interpretation, doctrine, etc.
Otherwise, it would be just fine to do a term paper on “The Old Man and the Sea” without ever having read the book.
You’re very good at doing what you’re not doing.
Actually, I think you are a literate person, and I’ve a whole string of posts from you to prove it.
You know what the plain sense of a story is. What a paragraph is. What a sentence is.
Christian theology must begin as biblical theology. It’s only after you do that work that you can branch into interpretation.
That’s no different than any other interpretive task with any other writing.
I also know impossibility of the Book of Genesis being a first-hand account of events.
But you have to deal with the plain sense story first.
It’s not fair for me, for example, since I believe in capitalism, to approach the bible with the intent of having it support capitalism.
The truth is that there are hints of capitalism in some of the stories of the bible, but mostly what we see are theocracies and empires with their fingers in the commercial pie, too, just like they had control over everything else.
“A decree went forth from Caesar Augustus that the entire world should be taxed.”
What does that mean? In the context of the "plain sense of the story" it is immediatly apparent that whoever wrote it could not possibly have seen it happen. It's a good story, but there's no basis for any assertion that it's an historically accurate account of events.
You are interpreting before you even analyze the story.
Until you interpret - convert sequences of symbols to ideas - there's nothing to analyze.
You’re just not familiar with theological lingo.
The interpretive step is that step dealing with meaning.
In the study of languages, we can quibble over the meaning of translation and interpretation. But we’d not be talking the same thing as meant by the theological interpretive step.
The first step is the text and what IT says.
Does the text not describe events that happened before the existence of anyone to observe and record them?
The text itself would have to answer that question.
I prefer a methodology that produces answers and clarity, rather than evasions and obucation.
That’s not an obfuscation.
There’s a narrator/storyteller in Genesis. It says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...” Then it goes on.
Does the narrator identify him/her self?
That IS the text whether we like it or not.
What does the Declaration of Independence say, and is credit given in it to the author(s)? Who were they?
Does the author’s name CHANGE any of the verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc., that comprise it?
You could easily have answered the question about it describing events that happened before anyone existed to witness and record them. Instead we have to play "20 questions" and make it like pulling teeth.
Why would I possibly want to adopt a methodology that results in that?
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