Posted on 08/28/2006 6:31:13 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Festival-of-slime-and-unregulated-ignorance placemarker.
I never claimed to be perfect. I am not aware of any misstatements that I have made, but will not pretend that I don't make mistakes.
I, however, have tried to keep this conversation about facts. I see little from you other than attempts to obfuscate and distort.
I notice you didn't name any exceptions.
Yeah. And these guys accuse Christians of wanting to set up a "theocracy" where all speech is censured!!!!!
Now that's what I call a fun kind of question.
But, since Jim Jones became a convinced Marxist and even moved his operation to a Marxist nation, the comparison is irrelevant.
Over five-hundred posts, and no one has criticised the producers of this creationist video from approaching the director of the human genome project under false pretenses to get him on film, and then advertising his participation in the show without his consent.
You: "And it was the "sense" that was made, that is objectionable, in the case of Galton, eugenics and the Nazi science derived from these sources. Back to square one."
I confess that with this statement you've lost me. Are you saying:
(1) That the theory of evolution is itself scientifically untenable (and if so, perhaps you could provide some specifics)?
-- or --
(2) That the theory of evolution is correct, but that knowledge of it is simply too dangerous to the moral fabric of civilization, and it must therefore be suppressed and replaced with a kind of agreed, universal ignorance?
Collins is one of those -- gasp! -- evolutionists. As such, he is entitled to no courtesy, no rights, and no consideration at all. Why don't people of your ilk understand these simple rules?
Christianity must be saved from the Evil of Christ. We need to listen to more brilliant individuals like Dr. D. James Kennedy (President of Coral Ridge Ministries) instead of nitwits like Jesus.
Their perceived abuse at the hands of other students, faculty and society at large.
You are suggesting that we should be allowed to blame what we read for our actions. This flies in the face of taking personal responsibility for what we do and how we act.
Perhaps we should dig deeper into the psyche of people like Hitler and the Columbine gunmen to determine what lies behind their aberrant behaviour before we start blaming those distortions of other's ideas they seek for support.
In Hitler's case, had not humans witnessed the change for the better in domestic population when the weak are removed, had Plato not suggested a method of improving the human species, had the Spartans not winnowed out the weak in an attempt to produce stronger warriors, and had not Darwin discovered the process of common descent and it's mechanism, natural selection, Hitler would have found some other rationale to support his hatred.
Whether Darwin had racist tendencies or not, and it can be argued that in comparison to modern ideals he could be classed as a racist (albeit poorly), his views on human classes are not responsible for the actions of Hitler or the Columbine gunmen. At most his ideas are tools which can be and have been illicitly used to promote distorted ideologies.
Darwin, despite his tremendous contribution to science, and his modern approach to scientific methodology, was a product of his time. Just as everyone else in the Britain of the era, he confused technological level and the formalization of human interaction, not just in every day life but in war, with a fundamental superiority. Even with that erroneous view, one so prevalent in his society, he obviously abhorred the idea of one subspecies of human subjugating another and considered all humans to be one species.
His views on human racial differences were far more modern than even the religious leaders of the day.
If you compare the racial ideas of the Victorian era with those of today, and take a rather broad definition of 'racist' then you can claim everyone of the Victorian era, including yours and my great, great grandparents as racists. Among those of the Victorian era, Darwin was unusual in his belief of all humans being fundamentally the same. Remember that Darwin was a man well versed in the classification of species based on very minor differences. Two organisms, too similar for a layman to differentiate between, Darwin, through his own or through other's work, would classify them as separate species. Yet he considered Africans and Caucasians to be of the same species.
Those that recognize minor morphological differences between individuals and cultural differences between societies are not racists because they acknowledge those differences; they become racist when those differences become the focus of hate, or their actions and words become based on unfounded bias. That does not describe Darwin.
"While they tried to gain respectability for their ideas by piggy-backing on the theory of natural selection and by citing to Darwin's work"
"Descent Of Man" has fallen down some sort of memory hole, apparently.
Newsflash: Humans *are* apes (a.k.a. "members of the primate superfamily Hominoidea").
There, you learned some science today.
--R.
I don't know much about Tibet except that it doesn't appear to have been Judeo-Christian-Muslim during it's period of religious tolerance. Perhaps I should amend my claim to exclude Buddhism.
I do appreciate you listing Cromwell as an exemplar of religious toleration. That made my day. He does get points in my book for being one of the few people subjected to a posthumous execution. That's pretty cool.
I say Darwin was responsible for both the National League and the American League.
_______
You, you, you .... REVISIONIST!!!!!
Darwin is solely responsible for the designated hitter rule in the American League, having evolved from the National League.
Some of us have actually read it, you know. Do yourself a *huge* favor and quit while you're behind.
--R.
As if Wikipedia didn't have issues of its own, but here is a pertinent excerpt from the link you provided:
"Darwin was sympathetic to the views of the Social Darwinists and the eugenicists, but he did not believe that action should be taken. He did feel, though, that the "savage races" of man would, like it or not, be subverted by the "civilised races" at some point in the near future: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." He did show a certain disdain for "savages," professing that he felt more akin to certain altruistic tendencies in monkeys than he did to "a savage who delights to torture his enemies." However, Darwin is not advocating genocide, but clinically predicting, by analogy to the ways in which "more fit" varieties within a species would displace other varieties, the likelihood that indigenous peoples will eventually die out from their contact with "civilization", or become absorbed into it completely."
A clinical prediction of genocide is not outright advocacy. An instance of praising with a faint damn, perhaps.
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