Posted on 06/17/2002 3:10:50 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
It depends upon how you interpret it, now doesn't it.
And what would call post #2? I've been seeing that for at least two years and it's no more convincing now, than it was the first time.
You've heard of the Medelin Cartel, El Pino, Pablo Escobar, the Pagans, and all of the other drug dealers of our times. The truth is, all together they probably don't add up to a hill of beans compared to the operations of the British empire in the 19'th century. At least one major eastern city was set up for no other reason than to serve as a conduit for Indian opium into China and an entire war was fought to protect the opium trade.
Now, you don't need to be Albert Einstein to comprehend that for a supposedly Christian nation to be engaging in this sort of business must have created at least two problems on an organizational level. One was the question of motivating men to fight and die for such causes: "For God, Bonnie Queen Vickie, and the Opium Trade, CHARGE!!!!!!" probably wouldn't get it...
The other problem which springs to mind immediately would be that which the CEO or chairman of the board of the East India Company must have faced in conducting board meatings. Picture it:
"Gentlemen, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The good news is that profits are up 73.2% on a volume of trade which has increased 27% over the same three-month period last year, and that all of our operations appear to be running smoothly. Indigenous peoples of India, Burma, China, and several other areas with a propensity to cause problems are now happily stoned out of their minds on our products, and are causing no further trouble.""The bad news is that we're all probably going to spend the next 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years roasting on a barbecue pit for this shit..."
Now picture Chuck Darwin walking into this scene and telling all of these people that they're sitting around worrying over nothing, and that the only moral law in nature is "The Survival of the Fittest". Can you not see all of those peoples' eyes lighting up, their hair standing straight up, and somebody screaming "By Jove, I think he's got it?"
I mean, it doesn't even matter what led Darwin to devise the theory of evolution. In any normal time or set of circumstances, he'd have either been laughed to scorn, hanged, or burned. He succeeded precisely because he solved several major problems for the Godfathers of 100 years ago. In other words, there's more than a little truth to my claim that someone has to be stoned to buy off on this BS.
Yes indeed! It is interesting that as far as the number of genes, humans have devolved from the simple amoeba!
Actually, that would be a classic case of the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem.
The premise.
When a Scientific American article opens with a sweeping, bald-faced lie such as this, then the rest of the article may safely be assumed to be a worthless polemic, not science.
Attacking Creationists is a political act, not a scientific one, and it should be well-noted that the politics are Leftist. True science takes no political position.
You are simply denying the existance of literalists who have an interpretation that differs from yours. Many literalists say the human punishment for homosexuality is indeed to put the homosexual to death -- as justified by the Bible.
Your interpretation is different -- yet you both claim to be literalists.
So where does that leave us? The Bible is ambiguous. No two literalists read it the same way. Therefore if the Bible is 100% true, nobody seems to agree what that truth really is.
Maybe some "literalists" have a sufficiently flexible interpretation that they can read evolution into the allegorical nature of most of the Bible.
You say they're wrong, they say you're wrong. I'll let you duke it out. But to say you have a lock on the one true literal interpretation -- that's laughable.
I would call it a list of links. Believe it or not, medved knows how to link when he condescends to do so. But he'd prefer we have to scroll over pages of his same old nonsense on every thread.
No, so get thee back to the Bible. What are you doing on the internet anyhow? Anything that supports the Bible is superfluous, anything that negates the Bible is heretical. To look at nature for your own answers is to doubt the Bible. Shame shame shame.
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