Posted on 03/18/2009 9:55:10 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
>>>It would be nice if people who criticize Darwin would actually pick up and read On the Origin of Species sometime. It would make them sound less ignorant.
There is pride of ignorance. Why else do we celebrate the flat earth in the main NEWS section.
Besides, it works. They wave “Darwin” like a cape to the bull, and just wait for the Bible verses to roll in.
==Besides, it works. They wave “Darwin” like a cape to the bull, and just wait for the Bible verses to roll in.
Natural selection is your god, and Darwin is its prophet.
But why? Why do you care about the political or religious views of someone who's been dead for 125 years? Do you think it somehow weakens the theory?
I'm genuinely curious. Because frankly, it seems like one long ad hominem argument, and just a way of giving ammunition to people who already don't like Darwin because they don't like his ideas. I know you try to address the ideas sometimes, with varying degrees of success. But I'm puzzled by your obsession with the man himself.
>>>Natural selection is your god, and Darwin is its prophet.
As opposed to the deity of crackpot blog ramblings.
And your mother wears army boots.
Dude, my posts exposing the racism of Darwin and co. are but a tiny fraction of my total posts. The only reason why there are more articles than normal exposing Darwin’s racist and eugenicist belief system is because of the bicentennial celebrations surrounding the life and work of this evil man.
The real howl-at-the-moon crackpots are those who believe that random mutations created super-sophisticated bio-nano-machines that merely give the “appearance” of design.
Evolution is perfectly compatible with Christianity.
DNA is preprogrammed/directed to be mutable. Many of these mutations are preprogrammed/directed to be subject to selection. Others just accumulate at the neutral mutation rate.
Yes, life is preprogrammed/directed to evolve by natural selection of genetic variations.
You really think Darwin was evil.
Reading his writing he comes across as a rather avuncular and caring individual.
I can see a creationist, in their fanatical ignorance, claiming that Darwin was wrong about his scientific theories; or even that his theories somehow are harmful (like fruit of the knowledge of good and evil); but believing that the man himself was evil?
It takes a special kind of delusion to conclude that Darwin was an evil man.
Thanks for the ping!
Well The Simpsons had Ned Flanders as really being Satan (It's always the one you least expect)
Sorry I took so long.
Darwin on slavery: In Voyage of the Beagle Chapter XXI ....
On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil, I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country.
To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves.
I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal.
I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face.
I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together.
I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of; nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually well treated; land they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull, who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master’s ears.
It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument long since protested against with noble feeling, and strikingly exemplified, by the ever-illustrious Humboldt.
It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease.
Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change!
picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of you wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.
from:
http://www.bartleby.com/29/21.html
Darwin speaks of slavery, but makes it agonizingly clear that even if the believes “negros” to be less smart than Europeans, he does not believe them to be less human or deserving.
As for his religion, note the first sentence.
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