uh....welcome to FR...I think
I agree with this. Democrats are unnatural. They believe in crippling the fittest and promoting practices that rather than propagate the species would lead to its extinction.
They even advance notions such as humans become euphoric during starvation/dehydration even though that would have guaranteed the extinction of humans shortly after they appeared.
You are trying to change an intellectual point into an emotional point. That may make you feel better, but it's a denial of the logical philisophical and religious implications in your beloved theory.
There is total conflict between 'Darwinian science' and (my view of the) truth.
Thus, I have no need of Darwin or his theories.
"There is no necessary conflict between Darwinian science and religious belief."
I suppose that depends what your religious beliefs are. A Christian, for example, can believe the Bible is literally true and also in Micro-evolution (variation within species). This is what the Bible means when it says, "God created according to kind."
That is where it would stop, however. The Bible teaches that God formed man unique as a seperate act, and blew His breathe into the man. Man has a soul, different than the soul of a chimp. That's why men write poems and have a desire for meaning, and monkeys don't.
Also, regarding Jesus the Messiah and paul the apostle, they referred to the Creation account, and/or Adam and Eve as literal. If Jesus and Paul were wrong about that, maybe they were wrong about salvation, too?
Evolution must stand or fall on it's own evidence, but it is not compatable with a Christian's literal interpretation of the Bible.
Welcome to Free Republic!
Heh. I've always thought that crevo Conservatives and preachers needed Darwin because he gave them a good way to drum up votes and money.
Welcome to FR!
Relax, not everyone here is hostile to the theory of evolution. In fact, I suspect that the ID crowd is a vocal minority within the conservative movement.
Very interesting article, by the way.
Let me introduce you to a mini tradition. When the CS/ID folks get too adamant I post alternate creation stories.
Why, here's one now (just in case)!
At first there was only Nun, the primal ocean of chaos that contained the beginnings of everything to come. From these waters came Ra who, by himself, gave birth to Shu and Tefnut. Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture gave birth to Geb and Nut, the earth god and the sky goddess. And so the physical universe was created. Men were created from Ra's tears. They proved to be ungrateful so Ra, and a council of gods, decided they should be destroyed. Hathor was dispatched to do the job. She was very efficient and slaughtered all but a remnant, when Ra relented and called her off. Thus was the present world created. Against Ra's orders, Geb and Nut married. Ra was incensed and ordered Shu to separate them, which he did. But Nut was already pregnant, although unable to give birth as Ra had decreed she could not give birth in any month of any year. Thoth, the god of learning, decided to help her and gambling with the moon for extra light, was able to add five extra days to the 360-day calendar. On those five days Nut gave birth to Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis, and Nephthys successively. Osiris became the symbol of good, while Set became the symbol of evil. And thus the two poles of morality were fixed once and for all.
I'm not buying that one. Why are there so many socialists and big government people in the world? The Leftist subspecies should have died out long ago. Natural selection doesn't seem to have weeded them out.
The philosophical fears of the creationists, and how this fear drives them to self-righteously defend such bad scientific arguments, is something that many of us evolution-accepting freepers have been trying to explain to the creationist-freepers for years.
When the Discovery Institute started their crusade for ID, I was taken aback at their stated aims to defeat naturalism in favor of supernaturalism in the scientific arena - in order to save society from nihilism. Yikes!
Their fundamental premise is that the natural world gives us no objective criteria by which to decide an act is "good" or "bad". IOW, they accept large parts of the left-postmodernist view of reality, where truth is merely a social construction. In this kind of subjectivist world, the major moral struggles are between interest groups, all of whom are driven by a belief in self-serving arguments which reality will never judge to be true or false. In such a world, the victors will always be simply whichever interest group was most ruthless in pursuing its goals.
So I can understand their fears - given their premises. But in fact the world is governed by objective reality, and reality serves as the final, objective judge for which moral system is best for us to follow. (Otherwise, nobody could ever learn anything from history!)
For the first two whole years of the DI's intelligent design project, they were quite proud & upfront about their motivations. The blistering prologue to the infamous Wedge Document was lifted whole from their about page, for example.
In your article you have this exchange:
We must note that at least in the USA, there are two quite different branches of conservatism, one espousing religious fundamentalism and the other classical economic liberalism. They have almost nothing in common intellectually and are simply politically linked by historical events. Arnhart does not stress this point.So, when exactly did the traditionalist strain of the conservative movement go off the deep end into what seems like right-wing postmodernism?There surely is a tension between the libertarian conservatism that begins with Smith and the traditionalist conservatism that begins with Burke, a tension that fuels much debate among conservatives. But in my book, I argue for a fundamental agreement between libertarianism and traditionalism, which is suggested by the intellectual friendship between Smith and Burke. Libertarians and traditionalists generally agree on a realist view of human nature as imperfecti ble and on the need for the evolved, spontaneous orders of family life, private property, and limited government as the basis for ordered liberty. Darwinian science helps to explain how those spontaneous orders conform to the evolved nature of human beings.
welcome to FR
But Darwin demolishes Genesis, taken literally. And that's basically what it's all about.
2. Be not downcast that the Creationists discovered your post first. There is actually a group of evolutionist conservatives here following the tradition of T H Huxley
3 If you remsain you will be accused by the TaliBornAgain of being a degenerate, atheist, communist and part of an organised evolutionist cabal attemptin to destroy the USA
4 Darwin Central (not an organised evolutionist cabal) has decreed that your title DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM. must be altered to DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM offer not valid in Kansas
Failure to do this will invoke the full force of Darwin Central (not an organised evolutionist cabal) sanctions
5. Welcome to Freeish Republic
Here here.
as one poster often uses as a tagline:
"Liberalism is a cancer on America, and Creationism is a cancer on conservativism."
Evolution is a generic theory that can pertain to engineering tasks as well as culture.
"Social Darwinism" has gotten a bad name for the reason that it tends to justify tinkering with society against the will of the people. But that doesn't mean that social darwinism doesn't operate.
There should be no excuse to forcefully tinker with society. But we need to recognize that the world our grandchildren will live in WILL be changed because of cultural evolution.
I'll elaborate on this later.
That today's conservatives don't want to be on the same side as the eugenicists of the early 20th century is very much to their credit. That today's liberals don't mind opening the door to a decline in the value of life is a shame, and some of them will come to regret it later.