Posted on 09/26/2005 5:44:09 AM PDT by DARCPRYNCE
Charles Darwin, the 19th century geologist who wrote the treatise 'The Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection' defined evolution as "descent with modification". Darwin hypothesized that all forms of life descended from a common ancestor, branching out over time into various unique life forms, due primarily to a process called natural selection.
However, the fossil record shows that all of the major animal groups (phyla) appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago, and virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered which suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion, and even Darwin knew about the lack of evidence in the fossil record to support his theory a century and a half ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at chronwatch.com ...
Why Professor, you astonish me. A group of people in a local jurisdiction propose to do something of which you disapprove, and you want to haul them into federal court (and call them a mob, to boot). I can see it now: the Professor awakes in a cold sweat from a nightmare of pine-tar torches, pitchforks, and hemp ropes, and of being pursued by rubes who want to teach their kids that the earth is flat, and who will encourage them to marry their first cousins. That more resembles the behavior and the understanding of a Liberal, than someone who purports to be ‘Right Wing.’
What was the complaint, in the first place, that generated this particular variation on the thread? Someone was lamenting the fact that “people in classrooms hearing about intelligent design,” more than anything else, would be made into a political issue. Fate sealed the destiny on that circumstance way back whenever we put government in charge of education. If you don’t want to be subject to the tyranny of the mob, remove the excuse for the tyranny. Instead, you seek to entrench the federal grip, by giving them further opportunities to strengthen precedents establishing their control over local schools.
We had a little discussion a couple of weeks ago with a couple of Christian Reconstructionists, a group who want to throw out parts of the constitution, institute a theocracy, and introduce stoning for homosexuals, adulterers and disobedient children, exactly as laid out in the Bible. These adherents of CR happen also to be vocal creationists.
So, yeah, I do take them seriously. Three hundred years ago we were hanging witches in this country. I'm sorry, but a significant number of your co-religionists seem to have moved not a bit from the mind set that permitted those horrors.
The Discovery Institute have said, in writing, that the teaching of ID in schools is a wedge strategy to get the teaching of religion into schools. Why wouldn't I take them at their word? Why should I trust instead the reassurances of someone I suspect of dissimulating his real motives?
That more resembles the behavior and the understanding of a Liberal, than someone who purports to be ‘Right Wing.’
The Professor, since he knows a little history, remembers that fundamentalist Christians in this country were until recently Democrats who voted for statist economic policies. Now he has to endure being lectured by these johnny-come-latelys about what a conservative is.
If you don’t want to be subject to the tyranny of the mob, remove the excuse for the tyranny. Instead, you seek to entrench the federal grip, by giving them further opportunities to strengthen precedents establishing their control over local schools.
With the massive assumption of federal control of education at the behest of the current President, a little judicial oversight of school districts scarcely seems worth worrying about. In any case, this battle was lost when the 14th amendment was passed. The US Bill of Rights is now binding on the states. You can't go back 150 years to the aftermath of the civil war, any more than you can go back 300 years to theocracy.
that's what I was saying...the difficulty of painting such a masterpiece couldn't just happen without an artist doing it. A human body is so much more detailed and complex, it only makes sense that there had to be a designer behind it.
yes, living things are produced by "nature"...but what I was saying is that they are so much more detailed and complex than a mere painting. So a designer has to be behind it just as a designer is behind a masterpiece.
Well, you and I completely disagree. The only evidence you can present is your own incomprehension, and that's not science, that's just incomprehension. Sorry.
"The Nationalist Socialists were Christian..."
"I regard Christianity as the most fatal, seductive lie that has ever existed."—*Adolf Hitler
The Nazi leaders and ideologues were not Christians. They were pagan, some quite explicitly. For the rest, the ancient myths celebrated in Wagner became a pillar of their doctrine of Teutonic racial superiority.
Nazism was itself a "political religion," Cardiff University historian Michael Burleigh stresses in his magisterial "The Third Reich: A New History." It sought to displace the traditional church and command spiritual authority as well as temporal. Its special animus toward Jews was not religious but racial, and it "had one foot in the dark irrationalist world of Teutonic myth, where heroic doom was regarded positively, and where the stakes were all or nothing--national and racial redemption or perdition."
The Nazi attack on Christianity was widely understood at the end of World War II. William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" recounts the Nazi plan for the Christian churches: It included an intention to "exterminate irrevocably . . . the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800." Current denominations would be replaced by the National Church. Its altars would have only a copy of "Mein Kampf," with a sword to the left. The Christian Cross would be removed, replaced "by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika."
"Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary thinking—probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas, quite undisguised, lie at the basis of all that is worst in Main Kampf and in his public speeches. A few quotations, taken at random, will show how Hitler reasoned . . [*Hitler said:] ‘He who would live must fight; he who does not wish to fight, in this world where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.’ "—*Robert E.D. Clark, Darwin: Before and After (1948), p. 115.
"I cannot deny that the theory of evolution, and the atheism it engendered, led to the moral climate that made a holocaust possible."—*Edward Simon, "Another Side to the Evolution Problem," Jewish Press, January 7, 1983, p. 248.
Hitler on National Socialism and Christianity:
Hitler on signing the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . ."
In a speech at Koblenz, August 26, 1934, Hitler said: "National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life . . . These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!"
October 24, 1933, in a speech in Berlin, Hitler said: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
In a speech delivered April 12, 1922, published in "My New Order," and quoted in Freethought Today (April 1990), Hitler said:
My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.
Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.
As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . .
And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.
When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.""
Wolf
Science cannot differentiate between what is good or what is evil. Science isn't a morality system. It can only tell you what works and what doesn't.
Many Scientists are opposed to abortion. Many think that adult stem cells hold more promise. So there is no "Scientists seem to say it is good". That is a construction YOU made.
Wolf
I don't believe that for a second. Others do believe that. I can live with that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.