Posted on 12/09/2010 7:56:44 AM PST by spirited irish
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An otherwise fine article devolves into a screed about Darwin. What a disappointment.
Looks like a good article but I’m too brain dead right now and in denial of major truths to grasp anything of major importance so I’m pinging my self to read later.zzzzzzzzz
It just threw Darwinism in with all the other ‘isms’ where it belongs.
But again it is demonstrated that creationists are among the least educated segment of society, and apparently that extends to science AND history.
BTTT
The article is fundamentally correct. But I am wondering if the Original Lie does not actually trace further back to Aristotle’s empiricism, rather than Occam’s nominalism. Occam framed it, but Aristotle spawned it, I think.
Aristotle postulated the law of the excluded middle which set the basis for clear logical thinking, which is the way this article is written. The Left is not totally devoid of spirituality. The New Age “philosophy” is a mish mosh of ideas about life after death, the paranormal, ancient spiritual traditions - anything but Christianity and the West. World Religion is a whole other subject with it’s conservative and liberal adherents.
My criticism is that conservatives reject what they should study and know - as in Know Thy Enemy. Instead, we prefer to be ignorant of the enemy. Fatal mistake.
But I will argue that there is a basis for a New Age Christianity, but that’s another story for later.
I agree with the thrust of the article, but the left does have traces of religion and spirituality that should not be ignored.
The parting thought is that our forebears did worry about “perfectability of the human soul”. That’s why they read the Bible. In an effort to follow Christ more closely, they addressed their failings directly. This conflicts with the conservative notion that you cannot change human nature. Instead, individuals can change. But forcing wholesale social change by government intervention is destructive.
Solzhenitsyn once remarked how bitter truth is to man’s pride. It is your pride that has you trying to discredit the “bitterness” of the essay by way of hairsplitting.
For Chambers, the crux of the matter is whether God exists. If God exists,said Chambers, a man cannot be a Communist, which begins with the rejection of God. But if God does not exist, it follows that communism, or some suitable variant of it, is right. This thesis is at the center of Chambers’s understanding of the conflict between communism and Western freedom.
Darwinism by any variant, whether in its original form, its neo-form, or its’ neo-neo form (astrogenesis) denies the existence of the supernatural Creator. In its’ “theistic” form, death enters the picture millions and even billions of years before Adam and Eve, making God culpable for death while simultaneously fictionalizing sin and negating the reason for Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry.
How peculiarly backward your tagline is! But unlike Chambers and many other analytical thinkers who connected the dots between evolutionism (by any name) and the death of God and the death of man’s soul, spirit, mind, conscience, and free will, you on the other hand have placed your faith the word of fallible men who call themselves scientists. Of course they would never, ever deceive you, would they?
If Darwinism is paradoxically true, then why ought anyone heed a word you say, allmendream? For your “thoughts” such as they are, are nothing more than the interaction of chemicals in your brain, and that goes for this: “But again it is demonstrated that creationists are among the least educated segment of society.”
If the author thought Communists were “Darwinists” during the time of Chambers, he knows very very little about history.
Nothing in the theory of evolution denies the existence of God, any more than the theories of gravity and nuclear fusion means that God did not create our Sun and that the planets do not move according to HIS will (via gravity).
So add to historic ignorance the false premise that to accept a scientific theory is to deny God.
I am a fallible man and a scientist. Science has been the most productive means ever devised of gaining useful and predictive information about the natural world.
But your creationists teachers wouldn't ever deceive you would they? Of course they do. Lying about science is a creationists bread and butter.
It is absolutely a fact that the less educated a person is, the more likely they are to be a creationist. Creationist sources count on this, as their representations of what is “science” is so laughably inept and full of lies.
ping
Thank you, will read and ping out today.
Lysenko Trofim is merely a smokescreen set up by you to disguise the fact that Karl Marx warmly embraced Darwin, as did Stalin. Marx was an antitheist. Communism is antitheism as well. Hence Darwin imaginatively annihilated God, then came Lysenko with his dangerous nonsense.
As for Chambers, when he spoke of the beautiful design of his daughters ear it wasn’t Lysenkoism he rejected at that moment but evolutionism.
Darwinism is naturalism. Naturalism is like a coin. It has two sides: materialism and pantheism.
Long before Darwin there were the mystical Upanishads, Buddha, and spiritual pantheistic evolution. Darwinism is merely the materialist side. Already many materialists are crossing over into mystical pantheism and embracing Eastern pantheist and Telhardian spiritual concepts of evolution.
Having rejected evolution. Chambers fully embraced true Christianity and then expressed his exasperation with unthinking individuals in one of his most imaginative essays,”The Devil,” which appeared in Life magazine in 1948. The gist of this essay is a conversation between a pessimist (Chambers) and the Devil.
The Devil struts into a New Year’s Eve celebration to boast about his victories.The Devil was immaculate, with a Miami tan.
Looking upon this designer-Devil,the pessimist muses, “Except for a face a little too characterful to be contemporary, the Devil might have been a movie magnate, an airline executive, a college president, a great surgeon or a grain speculator.”
The Devil then exulted over how well he knew the rationalist and liberal mind, the modern mind that still does not understand the nature of a commonplace like electricity but does not hesitate to question the existence of Heaven and Hell; the mind that cannot grasp the mystery of the universe . . . but does not hesitate to doubt that its Creator and the Creation are divine. The mind that denies itself on behalf of “science.”
The Devil brags of his master stroke:the introduction of evolutionary theory, and how the little monsters snapped at the bait.
The Devil gleefully boasted. “In less than a century I had undone the work of more than a thousand years and knocked the studs from under the religious culture of Europe. Why? Because Evolution explained the universe without Him. They wanted to get rid of Him. Then I knew the secret longing of their nasty hearts. Then I knew I had them.”
Chambers, through the voice of the Devil, is illuminating the real problem: men desire to get rid of God. They do not wish to be accountable to Him. They will follow willingly any new idea that replaces Him, be it evolution, communism, or whatever.
That, then, is the foundation for Chambers pessimism: men rebel against the Creator and seek to set themselves up as their own little deities.
But then, what did Chambers know? When he rejected evolution he lost his passport to the illustrious “inner circle” and “fell” in with stupid creationists.
Absolutely FALSE.
Stalin did not embrace Darwinism but firmly rejected it in favor of Lysenkoism-Lamarkianism. Teaching evolution through natural selection, or genes and chromosomes, was reason for exile to Siberia or execution in the U.S.S.R..
Such a warm embrace that if you taught it or said you believed it, you would be imprisoned or killed! What absolute ignorance you display! Why should anybody treat you as if you have even a modicum of credibility when you say things that are so OBVIOUSLY incorrect?
I suggest you learn some history, as well as some science. It would serve you well if you want to be taken seriously, or at least it will teach you to misrepresent the truth more artfully; because right now what you said is so obviously untrue you do your side no favors by stating something so easily verifiable as having no basis in fact, but being antithetical to the truth.
Thank you so much for this outstanding essay!
I didn’t get to this today - got a lot of things added to my “plate” unexpectedly.
Will read and ping tomorrow.
You were wrong about Chambers,and you are wrong about Stalin. I’ll not bother posting any factual accounts, for by your reactions you have repeatedly shown your disinterest in such.
You say I’d be better informed if I gained some knowledge of “science.” True science is the art of pursuing the truth of “how and why things work.”
The “science” you refer to and which you are determined to protect is not of that caliber. No, it is the art of gaining and keeping power, status, influence, and wealth at any cost.
This “science” is aptly decribed by Richard Lewontin, who provides ample evidence of why “pride goes before a fall:”
“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 an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” (”Billions and Billions of Demons” Richard Lewontin, b. 1929, PhD Zoology, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University)
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