Posted on 05/20/2002 12:53:27 PM PDT by rpage3
See source for details....
The same could be said of many people, including Karl Marx.
You: The same could be said of many people, including Karl Marx.
Well, Marx wasn't perfect, but in his field he was the pits, as a writer he was below the pits, and his work harmed hundreds of millions. You think any of that could be said of Gould?
‘He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but on whom it falls will be crushed.’ (Matthew 21:44)
"In his parable of the tenants, Jesus looks across the years of Israel's covenant privilege, and gives his interpretation of them. He sees that Israel's history can be stated in terms of its refusal to recognize Him-the rejected stone. Through the prophetic ministry, Christ had made many pre-incarnational appeals to his people. "How often would I have gathered you together, even as a hen gathers her chickens."
"Thus did Jesus claim deep involvement in his nation's history. The Jews had stumbled over the Christ of the Old Testament. Many times the people had been humbled and broken through its rejection of his claims. So it may be with us. Our life story can be understood as the tale of a person engaged in a quest to make terms with the Stone-with Christ."
"From the beginning, Christ has been present to us. Our first meeting with him was through the warmth and love of our mother; then our father, and later, teachers and mentors. Christ has been there in providence; in good and ill. We have bumped into him time and again, in our attempts to be free of his claims. We have fought tooth and nail for our freedom from God. We have been burned and bruised repeatedly. These seasons of brokenness have been gracious. They have been... signs to us---that life will not work any other way but Christ's way."
"God enable me to discern the ministry of Jesus, the Stone, in my life."
Sadly, denying the Bible is now "small stuff" in all universities and most churches. But I am not disappointed for a day and an hour of judgment is coming when all will be set right.
Are you really sure that Jesus did not believe in Adam? What about Mark 10? (BTW He created Adam too, and since He was there I will take His Word for it)
Mark 10:5 And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. 6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
And what's with the risk of not believing in other gods?
What if it turns out that the Qu'ran was right after all? That would put you in a rather miserable position.
Institute for Creation Research
We all Belong to One Human Race
Micheal J. Behe "Darwins Black Box"
The Biblical Creation Society UK
Luke 16:19 There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: 20 And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, 21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. 22 And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; 23 And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. 24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. 25 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. 26 And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. 27 Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: 28 For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. 29 Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. 30 And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. 31 And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
Didn't you know? Some fundamentalists actually have vetting rights for all candidates for the heavenly hereafter. Don't p!$$ them off.
Does being an advocate of evolutionary theory make one a leftist?
What might that be?
I would assume this is Gradualism. Gould and Eldridge's Punctuated Equilibrium theory was a pretty serious attack on this position (though in latter years it was described more diplomatically as a refinement).
I tend to agree with you as to Marx's readability. However, if one judges him by his influence, and the fact that he's still in print after 150 years, Marx was quite a successful fellow. He did not, however, personally harm anyone, so far as I know. Nor did his work -- words on a page, after all -- harm anybody. The fact that other people used his ideas as the basis to harm hundreds of millions does not change the fact that Marx himself had no direct part in it.
Yet it is quite proper to condemn Marx for the harm his ideas have caused, because his ideas were so very pernicious. Which sets us up nicely to apply the same standards to Gould.
Gould's work has been widely used -- especially by the left -- as a justification to undermine the traditional moral foundations of our society, the disappearance of which has resulted in harm to many people. If we can condemn Marx, we can plausibly condemn Gould, too.
Of course, the very idea that "harm to hundreds of millions" is a bad thing, is something that Gould the atheist evolutionist could not rationally have defended. After all, developing the means to inflict harm, or to avoid being harmed, are presented as the primary engine of evolution.
At any rate, random evolution does not allow us to make the sort of absolute moral claims that is required to condemn a man for his ideas.
Nasty. Dare I say 'un-Christian'?
Not by "all accounts"! In fact, he's was accused of intellectual dishonesty -- lying -- by more than one scientist.
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UCSB July 7, 1997
Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books on Stephen Jay Gould's "Darwinian Fundamentalism" (June 12, 1997) and "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism" (June 26, 1997)
John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists." (NYRB, Nov. 30th 1995, p. 46). No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. If what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would preclude comment.
But as Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory" -- or as Ernst Mayr says of Gould and his small group of allies -- they "quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology's] leading spokesmen."[1] Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as "anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every major evolutionary biologist of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher profile Gould has inundated the intellectual world with.[2] The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism -- so properly are we all -- it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a professional position to know.
[big snip] Now, given the foregoing, one is left with the puzzle of why Gould so customarily reverses the truth in his writing. We suggest that the best way to grasp the nature of Gould's writings is to recognize them as one of the most formidable bodies of fiction to be produced in recent American letters. Gould brilliantly works a number of literary devices to construct a fictional "Gould" as the protagonist of his essays and to construct a world of "evolutionary biology" every bit as imaginary and plausible as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Most of the elements of Gould's writing make no sense if they are interpreted as an honest attempt to communicate about science (e.g., why would he characterize so many researchers as saying the opposite of what they actually do) but come sharply into focus when understood as necessary components of a world constructed for the fictional "Gould" to have heroic fantasy adventures in -- adventures during which the admirable character of "Gould" can be slowly revealed.
I could dig up many more quotes but it would take too much time. The above letter is available at this LINK
I've been posting on FR for 2.5 years, and I've never said anything like that. So either you maliciously made it up, or else you're listening to voices in your head. It doesn't really matter. I don't take your postings seriously.
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