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To: xzins; Moseley; P-Marlowe; wmfights; betty boop; Quix; Buggman; metmom; boatbums
Evolution’s message to us all is: you’re probably worthless.

God’s message is: “For God so loved the world He gave his only begotten Son...”

Indeed, dear brother in Christ!

And if people don't wake up and stop listening to those who would do politics under the color of science, the result will be infanticide on top of abortion:

Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor of Psychology (a "soft" science) - recognized by the National Academy of Sciences with the Troland Award for an evolutionary basis for language - obviously influential and respected - rationalized infanticide in this New York Times article:

Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. Many mammals bear offspring that see and walk as soon as they hit the ground. But the incomplete 9-month-old human fetus must be evicted from the womb before its outsize head gets too big to fit through its mother's pelvis. The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world. And that complicates our definition of personhood.

What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed? Animal-rights extremists would seem to have the easiest argument to make: that all sentient beings have a right to life. But champions of that argument must conclude that delousing a child is akin to mass murder; the rest of us must look for an argument that draws a smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life.

Peter Singer - Princeton Professor of Bioethics (ahem...) well known for his animal liberation work has similar ideas about abortion:

Singer states that arguments for or against abortion should be based on utilitarian calculation which weighs the preferences of a woman against the preferences of the fetus. In his view a preference is anything sought to be obtained or avoided; all forms of benefit or harm caused to a being correspond directly with the satisfaction or frustration of one or more of its preferences. Since a capacity to experience the sensations of suffering or satisfaction is a prerequisite to having any preferences at all, and a fetus, at least up to around eighteen weeks, says Singer, has no capacity to suffer or feel satisfaction, it is not possible for such a fetus to hold any preferences at all. In a utilitarian calculation, there is nothing to weigh against a woman's preferences to have an abortion; therefore, abortion is morally permissible.

Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"[20]—and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."[21]

By Pinker's argument there is no qualitative difference between a human and an insect and thinking there is a difference is tantamount to racism. And Singer would no doubt agree because animal liberation activists have a very low bar for what is autonomous, rational and self-conscience.

And then there is Richard Dawkins, Oxford zoologist and activist for atheism who had this to say about God:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

And of course, Lewontin who is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist had this to say in his review of Sagan's book:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

They are sowing the wind, they will reap the whirlwind.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. - Gal 6:7

God's Name is I AM.

44 posted on 03/22/2012 8:49:17 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl

One has to wonder what makes them think they are so valuable?

Different circumstances, and they would be oven bait.

When arguing they are little different than a rock, then they also argue they can be crushed.


72 posted on 03/22/2012 11:29:33 AM PDT by xzins (Retired Army Chaplain and Proud of It! Pray Continued Victory for our Troops Still in Afghan!)
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