Posted on 04/28/2008 12:01:40 PM PDT by Delacon
Thanks. I’m a Christian, but not a great one, not even a good one most of the time.
I’m also a nurse, was an Air Force medic and respect science, and make my living from it. To me there are extremists on both sides, and normal people seem stuck in the middle.
At the end of the day, I’m simply pro free speech, and anti-censorship.
There are ALOT more things that truly aren’t science...one of which is algoreacle’s global warming fraud...it’s snowing so bad in Denver today interstates are being closed, so scientists and Christians alike would be beter served in combatting the REAL problems!
ID is not a theory. How many times must this be explained to you?
You claim ID is science, perhaps you better learn and follow the rules of science.
.....ID is not a theory. How many times must this be explained to you.....
ID is just plain old fiction, made up from thin air
I don’t know how esteemed Richard Weikart is a historian. It seems as if he’s made the focus of his short academic career writing about “Darwinism” and the Nazis.
But the whole concept is flawed. Let’s say some of the freaks in the Nazi Party were intent on creating the Super Race. They wouldn’t look to Darwin. They would look to Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. And perhaps they did.
Mendel was an Augustinian Priest, though.
The Nazis were not trying to craft the Super Race through random mutations and natural selection of the effects of that.
So Ben Stein picked the wrong villain. You can’t smear evolution with a sideline story between Nazis and a priest completely unrelated to either Darwin or evolution.
Well, you can, because Ben Stein tried.
Weikart is a Discovery Institute fellow and ID proponent. His book was underwritten by the Discovery Institute, and it has been deployed by creationists and IDers as a supposedly independent, academic confirmation of their “Darwin Caused The Holocaust” thesis.
The book is shoddy scholarship at best, and frankly dishonest if one wishes to be a little less charitable.
You can read some of the criticism of it here:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/06/from_darwin_to_1.html
Failed attempts to blame the Nazis on Darwin aside, ID is not only not science, but anti-science as Ben Stein admitted himself (see post 377).
I am a little tired of the argument that proponents of ID make that it's not creationism in disguise. Even a freshman in high school can see through that charade. Who was the "Intelligent Designer"? ID doesn't have to tell you because you can't reach any other conclusion but that it was God. It wasn't Bill Gates.
In any event, it cannot be repeated often enough, since it rarely sinks in with many folks here, that evolution does not address the origin of life, and a belief in God and evolution is not at all logically or doctrinally inconsistent. Even the Vatican agrees with that.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2009777/posts
You’ve been described in this thread. And I see you’re exactly as I described...part of the crowd as described within, so desperate in many ways!
Look, you even proved it here too!
What’s next? Are you gonna sue? :)
Oh I don’t know, mayb he’s in a round-about way giving those that use suh a logic a glimpse into their own world?
It’s the first I’ve heard such a thing, but...
BUT I’ve cerainly heard how evil Christianity is and responsible for mass murders and genocide from the Crusades to the American Indian.
Can’t for the life of me find ANYWERE in the New Testament that makes this justifiable though.
thin air?
Sheesh, the big bang didn’t even have air! :)
Well I didn’t know I worked for you.
The point wasn’t pro or con on the movie. THE POINT was he didn’t see it and didn’t bother to see it. So everything he had to print after that was talking out his bum.
As for the movies you so petulantly and childishly pounded out on your keyboard, if I was commenting on those movies I would make sure I SAW them first before commenting.
You can go now. I wish you well.
So you’ve seen Stein’s movie (Expelled)?
The Old Testament is pretty much filled with it, though.
The "Chosen People" slaughtered like crazy, if the Biblical accounts are accurate. I don't think we switched Gods at the end of the Old Testament, did we?
That there have been wars and genocide in the NAME of Christianity is hardly disputable. The Crusades, the eradication of the Aztecs, and even the conflict in Northern Ireland are ample evidence of that.
I'm not blaming Christianity for any of that, but Ben Stein blames Charles Darwin for Nazi Germany, when you can't find anything in Darwin's writings which remotely support the acts or policies of Nazi Germany.
Use your own argument you just posted about Christianity against Ben Stein, because it's valid.
That is not true.
Or, put another way, that's a lie. It's 11th, with well over $5 million at the BO. It seems to be a pretty popular doc, contrary to your fantasies about its decline.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/
Science is open inquiry, or it is not science.It is not strictly necessary, I admit, for there to be Darwinism in order for a Holocaust to exist. It could exist with any belief system which rejects love as a foundational principle. It might be possible with Islam, or with whatever Ghengis Khan's belief system was.
But Darwinism is anticreationism, and anticreationism is antiChristian and anti jewish, and it historically was associated with the holocaust.
I've got this nagging suspicion that you've kind of dumped the Big Bang theory into a bowl, or maybe more accurately, some primordial pond, thrown in some ideas of abiogenesis (there is no Theory as defined by science yet), and the evolution theory.
And you treat them as if they're all one evil idea.
Well, they are not one idea or theory. They are three. And none is remotely dependent on the others.
There is no logic in arguing against evolution by saying you don't believe in the Big Bang.
It would help if you had reasons to argue why the Big Bang theory isn't true, but it's still irrelevant to Darwin.
They all have one (irrational IMO) thread and that is there’s simply no purpose or intelligence behind any of it.
It goes something like this:
out of no matter or energy, there was a sudden big bang.
Later, all these particles of matter, just somehow swirled around for ga-jillions of years, spinning around, concentrically, expanding and cooling.
Then, for similar inexplicable reasons, the conditions somehow got ripe enough for life, and so on...
thus we pick up with Darwin’s theory, etc. We came from the same single celled organism by sheer chance, accident what have you.
And yet, anything outside of that belief system is a fairy tale and has no place in science.
Not evil, just Godless.
Yup, which is why there IS a New and Old Testament.
The New is Christian, the Old is Jewish. They’re connected through history, culture and so on.
But there’s simply NOTHING in the New Testament or in Christ’s teachings that could possibly lend one to believe the horrors attributed were somehow Christian, or teachings of Christ.
Yes, I’m aware of all the mistaken assertions over the years the unknowledgeable have attributed to Christianity.
I’ve even seen atheists demonize Christianity to the point that Hitler was a Christian!
Because he read some scripture (from the Old Testament btw) to the masses at Nuremberg!
Church attendance, reading the Bible, and all kinds of things people dream up don’t make one a Christian.
Oh and a Christian isn’t perfect, he’s just aware that he’s not!
However, Jews and Christians seemed to have reconciled with it, just as we all learned that the Sun does not orbit the earth, as was established church doctrine.
And it has nothing to do with the Holocaust.
You can repeat these baseless conclusions repeatedly in the hope of making them true, but they are NOT true.
If you tell yourself a lie often enough, you'll believe it's true, but it doesn't work that way so much when you're telling them to other people.
By the way, there is no such thing as Darwinism. Using the term shows that you have already decided that one branch of science is a religious cult.
Another couple of thoughts: in the Old Testament, ancient times, I’m sure there were groups of people that couldn’t even live with themselves, let alone their neighbors...just like we see with Israel today come to think of it!
So yeah, call it survival of the fittest or God’s chosen people, but I think to a large extent som of Isral’s enemies have asked for it.
As far as Ben Stein, I do plan to see the movie. And if he’s asserting it’s somehow Darwin’s fault because Hitler killed so many people, well that makes about as much sense as the MOUNTAINS of idiotic criticisms I’ve seen against Christianity, Judaism, indeed alot of religion in general.
On the other hand I KNOW people like Hitler and So-damn insane and others would hijack not only religion but ANYTHING to suit their ends.
Yeah. I said that already. Likewise, academic freedom is in the mix.
”You were the one who introduced the enumerated power over education into our discussion”
Don’t complain. You opened the door by means of a grossly out-of-context reference to the constitutional powers of Congress in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. Had you the common courtesy to cite that constitutional provision in its proper context, nothing that followed would have been necessary. In fact, that constitutional quotation could not have been used because its context would have shown it to be irrelevant. As it was, you would seem to be perfectly content to leave the impression that Congress has virtually unlimited powers to promote science and the useful arts could you have gotten away with that misperception.
”You asked by what means Congress could promote science. I gave you a complete and accurate answer. You cannot justify reading anything else into it.”
See above. You made no such answer until a clarification of an ambiguous quotation was demanded of you. Now in your response here, you again make a statement bereft of context. That’s a bad habit you have there.
”it looks like you're running away from a challenge.”
What challenge? You’ve already conceded that Congress has no power to regulate or fund neither science, nor useful arts, at least in the context of education. And you seem reluctant to pursue that judgment to its logical conclusion. If you find going back over old ground and old arguments more comfortable than examining any further conclusions, than please feel free to do so. Just spare me the participation.
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