Louisiana science coalition begs Jindal: Veto the creationism bill
posted at 9:10 pm on June 17, 2008 by Allahpundit
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Via LGF, showcasing a killer quote from Jindal’s college biology professor, the Louisiana Coalition for Science makes its case. The bill’s been on his desk since yesterday, having passed the state senate 36-0 and the house 94-3. You’ll find the text here, scoured of any references to creationism or intelligent design and mentioning religion only in a heavy-handed section aimed at shielding the bill from the inevitable Establishment Clause challenge. I recommend reading the annotated version instead, but whatever you do, note that the state isn’t compelling every school district to teach ID; they’re leaving it up to each local school board that wants to teach it to request permission to do so. That’s another concession aimed at limiting the scope of the legislation to maximize its chances of surviving a constitutional challenge, although in light of what Jindal had to say about empowering individual school districts on “Face the Nation,” it might be there to make the bill more attractive to him, too.
Given the size of the majorities in both houses, it’s going to pass no matter what he does. Even so, I’m curious to see how he games this politically. If he signs it, he leaves himself open to attack from the left four years from now. If he vetoes it, he pisses off the base. If he does nothing … it becomes law in 20 days, although that would indicate a certain lack of backbone on the hottest of hot button issues. Prediction: He signs it.
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given their reaction to ID, this is laughable.
they will tinker at the edges, but anything that threatens the ATHEISM inherent in evolution is strictly forbidden.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:35 AM
laughable. no fact will alter evolution…there is always a ‘just so’ story to fit any fact into evolution.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:36 AM
Once scientific knowledge enters an arena, religious belief must withdraw from it, for when knowledge and belief conflict, knowledge will eventually win out, because the scientifically true also tends to be useful, and to confer a technological advantage upon those who accept and use it.
The physical world is the realm of scientific knowledge; the metaphysical is the realm of religious belief. This was not always the case, when we scientifically understood so much less of the physical world, but it has become the case now, and that fact, and that demarcation, is not going to change.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 11:39 AM
I agree.
On this I disagree. The point is Creation or ID must stand up to the rigors of being challenged by the scientific method in order to earn a place in Science class, and they don’t.
Actually what I usually see is hope on the part of creationists is that if evolution were proven wrong, then creationism would win by deault. It wouldn’t. It would still have to stand on its own merits.
They’re very comfortable saying that. The essence of scientific pursuit is identifying areas where our knowledge is lacking and vigorously trying to gain that knowledge. This is done by using the scientific method, which is the best thing mankind has come up with to separate fact from fancy, and is what the credibility of science hinges upon.
backwoods conservative on June 19, 2008 at 11:40 AM
oh yeah the ‘magic’ energy of the sun…
The evolutionist rationale is simply that life on earth is an “exception” because we live in an open system: “The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things.” This supply of available energy, we are assured, adequately satisfies any objection to evolution on the basis of the second law.
But simply adding energy to a system doesn’t automatically cause reduced entropy (i.e., increased organized complexity, or “build-up” rather than “break-down”). Raw solar energy alone does not decrease entropy—in fact, it increases entropy, speeding up the natural processes that cause break-down, disorder, and disorganization on earth (consider, for example, your car’s paint job, a wooden fence, or a decomposing animal carcass, both with and then without the addition of solar radiation).
Speaking of the general applicability of the second law to both closed and open systems in general, Harvard scientist Dr. John Ross (not a creationist) affirms:
“…there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated [closed] systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems … there is somehow associated with the field of far-from equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.”
[Dr. John Ross, Harvard scientist (evolutionist), Chemical and Engineering News, vol. 58, July 7, 1980, p. 40]
link
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:40 AM
for a more mathematical view of the 2nd law…
link
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:42 AM
they do…thats why you darwiniacs have to try to silence the opposition. you can’t handle the truth.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:43 AM
The scientific community has responded to the PR-renamed creationist religious dogma of intelligent design like it would to any untestable and unsupporable dogma; ask it where’s the beef? That beef (being defined as some assertion entailing testable consequences) being absent, it has quiote rightly dismissed it as being irrelevant to scientific pursuits.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 11:43 AM
by sueing, harassing, and trying to silence them, because ’science’ cannot falsify or answer either.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:45 AM
because of evolution, science has now become atheism. and it has given us such wonders as eugenics, and the nazi death camps…
you evolutionists are proud of your long history of racism and oppression.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:46 AM
Life does not happen in either the realm of order or the realm of chaos; rather it happens in the area between them, the area of complexity. To better understand life, it is thus useful to grasp the science of complexity.
The foremost institution studying the science of complexity is the Santa Fe Institute.
http://www.santafe.edu/
Bon appetit.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 11:48 AM
One cannot make moral arguments against scientific knowledge; this einvolves a category error.
Knowledge is neither good nor evil; the uses to which human may put it may be both.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 11:49 AM
Every time a ’scientist’ says ‘it mutated’ evolution has been disproven. Lots of physics (celestial) disproves the theories because the assumptions required for evolution are impossible.
When a scientist says ‘it mutated’, that’s like a Creationist saying ‘it’s a miracle’. If a planet wobbles from it’s predicted path, you look for reasons why. . . you don’t just say . . . ‘it’s a miracle’. Sometimes a planet wobbles because of another gravity acting on it that we can’t see (like twin planets rotating around each other). But for everything but evolution there is rational science to back it up. In evolution it is always either ‘we’ll find something eventually’, or it’s ‘it mutated’. . . sort of like Apollo and his chariot dragging the sun across the sky.
The point is that every time it is dis proven, evolutionists just say ‘it’s a miracle’ and claim that it hasn’t been dis proven because the person bringing up the evidence is a religious fanatic. And they make up another mythological story to explain why the evidence contradictory to physics still fits the evolutionary model.
ThackerAgency on June 19, 2008 at 11:49 AM
All I see is a comparison between lower life forms and higher life forms, again a lot of assumptions and could haves and mights and we believe this. I just don’t see the science, you cannot test any of these assumptions. Because scientists start with the belief that evolution is true, they are not really testing the theory, but making everything fit into it.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 11:51 AM
in other words, lets not blame hairygod darwin for the racism, and evil inherent in his theory..
can you bend over any farther for your hairygod??
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:52 AM
bingo!!! evolution is not science, just a bunch of ‘just so’ stories to fit the data.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 11:52 AM
Mutation can be caused by many things; an abnormal uniting of genetic material during reproduction, simple chemical degradation, chemically indiced alteration, radiation displacement…
And no one can point to a single instance where the basic framework of evolution (mutation and natural selection) or its mechanism (DNA) have been falsified in any way whatsoever. It does not cause a car not to drive when one adds pinstripes, a cueball shift or a big foot gas pedal. Elaborating and refining a theory only strengthens it, and allows it to more comprehensively and precisely circomscribe its arena of application.
Scientists start with the understanding that they have identified a gap in their knowledge, and proceed to investigate and experiment in order to fill it; it is creationists who both begin and end with their unchangeably frozen assumption of an ancient religious dogma.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 11:59 AM
ah yes, the Darin-of-the-gaps theory…thats what evolution….
we don’t know..but there has to be an evolutionary explanation somewhere…
because evolution is all in all….praise darwin!!
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:04 PM
Darwin is as much to blame for Hitler as Jesus is to blame for the Dominican monks who baptized Native American infants into Christianity, then smashed their skulls against walls so they would not grow up to be heathens and their eternal souls would be saved. That is, not at all.
In fact, most Third Reich Germans were Christian. And many Christians have had the decency to apologize for their part in the Holocaust:
http://chi.gospelcom.net/GLIMPSEF/Glimpses2/glimpses207.shtml
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:05 PM
Creationists worship at the feet of the God of the Gaps. They grow more upset by the day as the gaps continue to grow progressively smaller and smaller.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:06 PM
Not to mention that thwere are also progressively fewer of them.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:07 PM
It isn’t the “creationists” that are having a fit about the bill that Jindal is considering signing. We have no problem with both ID and evolution being taught. No problem at all.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 12:10 PM
That’s because you have no problem with religious dogma being taught in public schools. I, however, believe that the place for religious dogma to be taught is in private churches.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:12 PM
I can just imagine the chaos that will ensue (pun intended) when Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists and the many different types of Pagans all sue for the right to have their own versions of creationism taught in schools…;~)
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:16 PM
When “religion dogma” was being taught in school, the schools were doing a much better job of teaching in all areas. But I have either home schooled or sent my kids to private schools. I just don’t think that secularists should be allowed to use my tax money to further their agenda by demanding that their pet doctrine be taught without being examined more honestly.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 12:16 PM
ID would fit in with all of the religions that you mentioned. Since ID does not specifically name the intelligence behind the design.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 12:18 PM
another lie. you’re just full of them..
hate to tell you, christianity is growing rapidly all over the world…
all those decades of lies (darwinism) hasn’t worked!!
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:20 PM
Any parent is free to homeschool their kids in any religious dogma that they wish, but when they place their kids in public schools, they deserve the assurance that their children will not be taught religious dogmas to which they do not themselves subscribe. In a nation of many faiths, and including many with none, this entails that no religious dogma whatever be taught in public schools, however generic and vanillafied it may be rendered.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:21 PM
you’re a liar. again.
So this second Christmas of Hitler’s war finds Niemoller and upwards of 200,000 other Christians (some estimates run as high as 800,000) behind the barbed wire of the frozen Nazi concentration camps. Here men bear mute witness that the Christ—whose birth the outside world celebrates unthinkingly at Christmas—can still inspire a living faith for which men and women even now endure im prisonment, torture and death as bravely as in centuries past.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,765103-1,00.html
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:21 PM
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” (Darwin, Charles R. [English naturalist and founder of the modern theory of evolution], “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,” [1871], John Murray: London, Second Edition, 1922, reprint, pp.241-242).
The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.” (Darwin, Charles R. [English naturalist and founder of the modern theory of evolution], “The Life of Charles Darwin”, [1902], Senate: London, 1995, reprint, p.64).
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:22 PM
The popularity of a belief has nothing to do with its truth. The earth was not flat when practically everybody believed it was, nor did the sun circle around the earth when practically all believed it to do so.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:22 PM
The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler.
Yes, that would be the Nazi ideology that the Darwinists of today—and major media—pretend sprang on the world fresh from the head of Hitler, wholly unconnected to the history of Darwin’s theory, Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel. For the ten minutes it spent on this topic, the current film Expelled, starring Ben Stein, has been the target of unstinting left wing media attack and revisionist history.
The Methodists’ resolution—adopted by a vote of 836 to 28—apologizes for the denomination’s own failure to resist the eugenics movement in this country in the 20th century. They were not alone, as John West explains in Darwin Day in America. But no other mainline Protestant denomination has yet had the courage to admit to the racism of Darwinist eugenics and the supine attitude that leading American religious leaders, as well as the scientific establishment, adopted towards it.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/04/methodists_nail_nazi_record_wa.html
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:23 PM
Religion has often been in conflict with science from resurrections to turning water into wine to heliocentrism. In order to be a Christian you need to believe that the laws of nature have been suspended, at times, by God.
Religion involves comprehending a divine being with our human intellects. Science requires us to interpret the natural world. Neither discipline provides irrefutable proof for some of the ultimate questions, and both are limited by the tools at their disposal.
Gould is arguing that religion and science are separate. Are you making the case that religion needs to inform science?
dedalus on June 19, 2008 at 12:24 PM
The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”
The standard biographies of Hitler almost all point to the influence of Darwinism on their subject. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: “The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.” What Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was its rejection of Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”
John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography says this of Hitler’s Second Book published in 1928: “An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right.”
In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw explains that “crude social-Darwinism” gave Hitler “his entire political ‘world-view.’ ” Hitler, like lots of other Europeans and Americans of his day, saw Darwinism as offering a total picture of social reality. This view called “social Darwinism” is a logical extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory and was articulated by Darwin himself.
The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin’s writing.
Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards. It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas. On a particularly delicate moral topic, for example, he wrote: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”
In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:
“Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” In this desacralized picture of existence, to speak of life as possessing any kind of holiness is to introduce an alien note.
Most disturbing of all, in The Descent of Man, Darwin prophesied: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
link
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:25 PM
I’m making the case evolution/atheism is a religion…you cannot believe in christiantiy and be an evolutionist.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:25 PM
Yes, children should be exposed to conflicting theories, even if the theory may have religious undertones. The goal of a totally secular society is a dishonest one since we will never be a totally secular people. It is wrong to teach evolution without acknowledgment of the problems that face the theory.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 12:27 PM
Darwin, like most people, shared the bigotries of his age. That fact does not, however, invalidate the theory of evolution. A theory stands and falls upon its own merits, not due to the other opinions of its author. In fact, it was through mapping out human genomes, the mechanisms of evolution, that we discovered that we are indeed a single race, and that people are quite frequently genetically more different from those with whom they share complexions than they are from those with whom they don’t.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:27 PM
and evolutionists down to Watson, recently have shown the racist nature of the theory.
racism is implicit in evolution.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:28 PM
|More about the Christian-Nazi connection:
http://www.nobeliefs.com/ChurchesWWII.htm
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:29 PM
tell me are you masochistic? every lie you bring up, I swat down easily…doesn’t that bother you?
but I know you’re doing the work of the darwiniac faithful…keep the faith.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:29 PM
Didn’t Hitler and the German people have additional sources to fuel their anti-Semitism? What about Luther?
dedalus on June 19, 2008 at 12:31 PM
EVOLUTION HAS BEEN DISPROVEN LONG AGO…WHY ARE STILL TALKING ABOUT IT?
WHY ON EARTH WOULD WE ALLOW OUR CHILDREN TO BE INDOCTRINATED WITH LIES?
Let’s vote out all the politicians who will not ban it from being taught!
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 12:31 PM
Actually, it was the Ku Klux Klan who Biblically justified racism by claiming that the mark with which God had burned Ham for witnessing his father’s drunkenness, a mark that signified that all his descendents should be enslaved, was the darkness of his skin.
But it was wider than that. The Southern Baptist Church split from the rest of the Baptists in 1845 specifically on this point.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:32 PM
SaintOlaf tries to cash a check with his alligator mouth that his hummingbird posterior lacks the funds to cover.
Please provide me with a single solid instance of the basics of evolutionary theory being conclusively disproven.
You can’t. Because no such instance exists.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:36 PM
You’d need to explain the Christian believers and church officials who recognize much of the science as compelling, but not in conflict with their beliefs. Surely they are not atheists.
dedalus on June 19, 2008 at 12:37 PM
thanks for proving you’re a wacko atheist
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:38 PM
That’s a shameless lie.
The KKK was founded by an illuminati member, General Albert Pike.
For those of you that don’t know…the illuminati members are not Christian. They worship Baal(Satan).
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 12:38 PM
Hitler attacked the jewish people as a race not on religious grounds as luther did
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:38 PM
actually they are the ones who have to explain how they reconcile their christianity with the anti-christian, racist, doctrine of evolution.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:39 PM
As Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf, the fundamental political category is biological. Consequently, “the highest aim of human existence is not the maintenance of a State or Government but rather the conservation of the race.” This aim accords with Hitler’s larger Darwinian view of the cosmos, wherein the “fundamental law of necessity” reigning “throughout the realm of Nature” is that “existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife….where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws must obey them or be destroyed.” Survival of the fittest.
Hence Hitler’s creation of a kind of “folk” religion, that is, a religion of the racially defined Volk. Worship was directed to the Germanic race as the only one capable of eliminating the weak and bringing the �bermensch – “superman” – into existence in accordance with the cruelties of Nature. Hitler’s words all too clearly portend the atrocities to come when the Nazis gained power:
“[T]he v�lkisch concept of the world recognizes that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for mankind. In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind. Therefore on the v�lkisch principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the v�lkisch concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this recognition it feels bound, in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker…. For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity would be lost for ever.”
link
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:42 PM
The KK was founded by a former Confederate general named Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I can see the loonier fringes of your belief system coming out now in your Illuminatic and anti-Masonic beliefs. Do you also accept the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as genuine, instead of the Czarist forgery it in fact is?
And, since the Roman Catholic Church has no problem with accepting the theory of evolution as valid science, I guess you consider the majority of self-professed Christians to be lying about their faith and allegiances, too.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:43 PM
What is often called social Darwinism was a malignant force in Germany, England and the United States from the moment that social thinkers forged the obvious connection between what Darwin said and what his ideas implied. Justifying involuntary sterilization, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” He was not, it is understood, appealing to Lutheran ideas. Germany reached a moral abyss before any other state quite understood that the abyss was there to be reached because Germans have always had a congenital weakness for abysses and seem unwilling, when one is in sight, to avoid toppling into it.
These historical connections are so plain that from time to time, those most committed to Darwin’s theory of evolution are moved to acknowledge them. Having dismissed a connection between Darwin and Hitler with florid indignation, the authors of the site Expelled Exposed at once proceed to acknowledge it: “The Nazis appropriated language and concepts from evolution,” they write, “as well as from genetics, medicine (especially the germ theory of disease), and anthropology as propaganda tools to promote their perverted ideology of ‘racial purity.’”
Just so.
Would he care to live in a society shaped by Darwinian principles? The question was asked of Richard Dawkins.
Not at all, he at once responded.
And why not?
Because the result would be fascism.
In this, Richard Dawkins was entirely correct; and it is entirely to his credit that he said so.
link
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:43 PM
oh yeah the title of hairygod’s book says it all:
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
the bible to evolutionists…
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:44 PM
I figured that sooner or later right4life would begin hauling out the Discovery Institute links. These are precisely the people who engineered the relabeling of creationism as intelligent design theory, in a blatant and self-conscious propaganda effort to sway public opinion, regardless of what the truth of the matter was – a fact uncomfortably revealed when their Wedge Document was leaked.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:46 PM
1. Darwin argued that humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the “anthropocentric” view that humans are unique and special.
2. Darwin denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including reason, morality, aesthetics, and even religion, originated through completely natural processes.
3. Darwin and other Darwinists recognized that if morality was the product of mindless evolution, then there is no objective, fixed morality and thus no objective human rights. Darwin stated in his Autobiography that one “can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.”
4. Since evolution requires variation, Darwin and other early Darwinists believed in human inequality. Haeckel emphasized inequality to such as extent that he even classified human races as twelve distinct species and claimed that the lowest humans were closer to primates than to the highest humans.
5. Darwin and most Darwinists believe that humans are locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence. Darwin claimed in The Descent of Man that because of this struggle, “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
6. Darwinism overturned the Judeo-Christian view of death as an enemy, construing it instead as a beneficial engine of progress. Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”
These six ideas were promoted by many prominent Darwinian biologists and Darwinian-inspired social thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All six were enthusiastically embraced by Hitler and many other leading Nazis. Hitler thought that killing “inferior” humans would bring about evolutionary progress. Most historians who specialize in the Nazi era recognize the Darwinian underpinnings of many aspects of Hitler’s ideology.
link
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:46 PM
much better than the atheiest wackos-r-us links of ‘nobelief’
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 12:47 PM
Luther’s teaching about the Jews went beyond theological debate. In his writings he said “We are at fault in not slaying them. Rather we allow them to live freely in our midst despite all their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying, and defaming”
He also put forward an plan for the Jews that included:
–Set fire to their synagogues
–Burn their houses too
–Take away their prayer books
–Forbid the rabbis from teaching under penalty of death
–Forbid them from the highways
–Require forced labor from the strong ones
–Drive them out of the country
dedalus on June 19, 2008 at 12:51 PM
Animals lack self-conscious awareness, and therefore act according to instinctual nature. Humans, who possess self-conscious awareness, also possess free choice as a result. This is why there is neither good nor evil in the natural world, but humans have the capacity for both.
This is how I poetically put it:
Hard Question, Hard Answer
Why are we the only ones?
Of all life,
We commit mass homicide,
Kill ourselves,
And befoul our only home.
Only we.
Why?
After painful meditiation
And careful consideration
I’ve come to believe
That we are infected
With a blessed, damned disease
Called consciousness.
Caught between beasthood and divinity
Between being of the world and not of it
Between knowing none and knowing all
Between utter self-ignorance and supreme self-understanding
We are the creatures of individual possibility.
In the natural world there is neither good nor evil;
With awareness comes the capacity for both.
That same infection which permits art, altruism,
Loyalty and loving care, allows violence, indifference,
Cruelty and psychosis,
For it spawns personality and its offspring
Personal choice.
I have come to believe in both the divinity
And the diaboly of human nature
And that they are inseparable.
Our disease is terminal
And all we can do is try to make the best of it
By striving to treat its more virulent symptoms
While reaping its manifold blessings.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 12:57 PM
They may very well have to. But for your point to be correct, some who believe themselves to be practicing Christians are actually atheists. If this is so, then it isn’t necessarily limited to evolution.
dedalus on June 19, 2008 at 1:00 PM
yeah luther said some terrible things about the jews..I can easily admit that, but no darwiniac can admit any connection between darwin and hitler.
but again Hitler attacked the jews on racial grounds, not religious.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 1:02 PM
why don’t you try to explain how you reconcile the two?
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 1:03 PM
Here are a couple more poems of mine that I think correxctly characterize the midsets of the religiously fundamentalist:
Lenses: A Love Song for Salman Rushdie
We are wanderers all
In the shapeshifting dunes of our days
Seeking amidst the sandstorms
The sight of a sheltered course
So we sift our pasts to cast our futures
And grind lenses to focus our lives.
Most are less than original
But each has its own eccentricities
Fitted for one eye, one terrain;
No lens is universal, and no path.
Most of us hide our quirks of vision
From others, and even from ourselves
Lest some fatal slip should betray us
And hew to some hard line or other
Packed by souls of similar stripe
Who confuse the safety of numbers
With the security of a way well chosen
And who, fearing the walkers of other ways
As challenges to their own decisions’ wisdom
Strive to herd those they must consider misled
Back to their proper route, or failing that
Seek to end their journeys.
But some crazed few of us
Too honest for our own damned good
Craft our lenses from every gritty grain
Of the wide beach of experience
Fusing them carefully in insight’s crucible
Until they crystallize clean and true
And then we wave them radiantly
Before the wandering world.
These folks are followed, or killed, or both.
Poets and messiahs are the glaziers
Of living visions, and well wrought lenses
May powerfully concentrate the common gaze
Promising pathfinding clarity.
But- remember this:
Art is metaphor, and metaphors are chameleons.
They are colored by our journeys
As surely as they shape them.
Empty and aimless are those who lack lenses
If such pathless ones exist
But stumbling blind are those who
Given the lenses of others
Wear them as if they were windowpanes
And polish them not with their lives.
Responsibility
Some solicitous souls would advise us
To relinquish all attempts to guide our own futures
To surrender control rather than to strive for it
And to submit to the rule of celestial will
Humbly accepting its divine dictation
Rather than to possess the monumental
Temerity and prideful gall of endeavor
To try to choose our own life paths.
But we cannot move the leaden weight
Of our freedom from our shoulders
Simply by claiming to have shifted it elsewhere.
We may indeed choose
To embrace such self-delusions;
Our world will not be so easily fooled:
We are still the ones deciding – and who must –
Whether or not we acknowledge it.
We were not sculpted
By the hand of some vast spirit
In its transcendental image;
Rather it is the other way around
And that such beliefs
Have shaped many actions
And therefore our common history
Proves not that it was molded
By a believed-in other.
We fabricated our gods and satans
From the suns and shadows of our souls.
The absolutes of human virtues
Were assigned as deific attributes
And abstracted human vices
Are reckoned as demonic traits.
And when we beseech them in prayer, it is
Whether ‘tis beknownst to us or not
Our greater, or higher
Or deeper selves to whom we appeal.
We also ask our gods to bless for us
Those whom we ourselves
In our thoughts bless
And the same goes for damnation.
Such profound imprinting of our desires
Upon our psyches’ templates
Leads us to strive for their fulfillment
In ways both conscious and subliminal
And thus may prayers be effortfully answered.
Karma requires not reincarnation.
Its retributions and rewards
May be suffered and enjoyed
Within the same lifetime
In which our actions conjure them.
Whatever actions we apply to others
Whether they be well or ill
Will most likely be returned to us by them
In both extent and kind.
Nevertheless, we cannot depend upon life to be fair.
It lies beyond or beneath such human categories
And no cosmic authority mandates such things.
It simply is what it is
And whatever we choose to make of it.
The concepts of Heaven and Hell
Were themselves purified and crystallized
From the joys and sorrows of our experience
And how we build our lives decides
Which ideal house our dwellings more resemble.
And although we cannot possess
Full mastery over our forthcomings
As would an oarman
Paddling in a lake of placid possibility
Neither should we see ourselves
Being bourne helplessly downstream
Limbs bound
Swept by a maelstrom of descending events.
Rather, we are rowing in moving waters
And both events and ourselves
May move within them:
Events in whatever way the flow of causation dictates
Ourselves insomuch as the power of the current
And the strength of our effort allows.
Each pull on the sculls opens some possible courses
And closes others;
We happen to life as surely as it happens to us.
So, although we lack absolute sway over our eventualites
We yet have some say concerning what will happen with us.
And yet, it is we who are held accountable for it all
Even for those occurrences whose courses elude our grasp.
Our responsibilities exceed our freedoms
Yet we are the only ones who
In the final analysis
Can be honestly held responsible for our fates:
Even by ourselves.
It’s all on, and up to, us.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 1:05 PM
I would advise seeking professional help. seriously.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 1:07 PM
I would not find such advice to be credible, coming from one such as you.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 1:09 PM
Quite simply, when evaluating advice, I consider the source, but no more than it merits or deserves, which is, in your case, not much at all.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 1:10 PM
Now I understand why you believe in evolution.
If you have researched evolution in the same way you have researched who the founder of the KKK was(googled KKK founder and believed the first thing you read)..I can see why you have serious flaws in your researching/reasoning ability.
Yes, Albert Pike was the illuminati leader at the time and he did found the KKK. It is a proven fact.
He is mentioned in numerous, historical, KKK documents as it’s founder.
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 1:11 PM
Does the clown actually expect anybody to read that manifesto?
corona on June 19, 2008 at 1:11 PM
I’d agree that Darwin’s work could be used as an intellectual justification by some like Hitler who believed in racial superiority.
I’d argue that the merits of Common Descent should rise and fall on the quality of the science. What a madman like Hitler infers from the theory doesn’t determine whether the theory is valid or not.
Gould (along with others) was extremely critical of sociobiology as a science, arguing against the notion that genetic makeup should play a role in the structure of society.
dedalus on June 19, 2008 at 1:16 PM
so you’re a typeface of misinformation??? lets go over definitions:
2: a plumbing fixture that provides a flow of water [syn: fountain]
font: 1: a specific size and style of type within a type family [syn:
fount, typeface, face]
2: bowl for baptismal water [
now you need english 101!!! you think you’re a ‘typeface’ of misinformation???? thanks for the laughs….
While I wrote before that I would not read or respond to a particular troll's posts, this is too great an opportunity to pass up. Because it illustrates, clearly and without ambiguity, the lengths of deception and dishonesty that one side of this debate will go to. Admittedly, this is clearly a complete and utter tangent to the main point -- however that only serves to illustrate the foundational techniques that are used.
The dispute is over the use of the word 'fount' in the phrase 'a fount of [something].’ I have only heard and read the word as ‘font.’ A search via ask.com on ‘font of wisdom’ does, in fact, pull up over 700,000 hits. A search on ‘fount of wisdom’ by comparison pulls up a little over 50,000. Now, clearly, when I was snide about the use of the word ‘fount’ in the phrase, I was wrong. It is a valid variant of the phrase, of which I had been ignorant before. And when I posted the definition of the word ‘font’ from the American Heritage Dictionary, the work ‘fount’ appears in that definition, even in the particular definition I highlighted. I did not edit that out. By contrast we have, from the troll, two sets of definitions. The first is apparently the definition of the word ‘fount’ taken from WordNet (this I found by searching that exact phasing used). Except what is given is the second of two definitions. The full definitions at WordNet are:
fount
noun
1: a specific size and style of type within a type family [syn: {font}, {typeface}, {face}] 2: a plumbing fixture that provides a flow of water [syn: {fountain}]
So here we have two problems. One is that WordNet, while it includes definitions for words, is not intended to be a dictionary but rather ‘…a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.’ So we have the use of an inappropriate resource.
The second problem is that the primary definition provided at WordNet for the word ‘fount’ is identical to the primary meaning of the word ‘font’ at that site. Yet this fact is hidden, as is the source for the information.
That is a primary tactic that is used consistently and repeatedly by Creationist/ID propogandists.
The next tactic is the ad hominem attack. Note that I am mocked as a ‘typeface of misinformation’ and told that I need English 101; even though the definition for the word he had used also carries the meaning ‘typeface.’ And he had to have known that fact in order to cut and paste the second definition, verbatim, from the source that so defines ‘fount.’
In what way is any of this honest?
Furthermore, I ask those who think that this troll is defending their faith — how can you truly think that the techniques that he (or she) uses properly reflect any of the values for which that faith is supposed to stand?
I chose to point out these techniques using something that was as tangential and unimportant as this is for a specific reason. There is no conflict of faith with regards to it. Anyone and everyone can check for themselves, and compare: who was forthright, and who was deceptive? I will admit that I cannot claim much if any moral highground — I was rude when I mistakenly corrected the use of the word ‘fount.’ But was this rudeness solely on my side? Did my rudeness continue once I had learned that I was mistaken?
On one side there is honesty, full disclosure, and at least an attempt at civility. On the other there is none of these things. Compare my response, with regards to this, to his and decide for yourself which is which.
And once you have looked at this sidebar and judged, go back and review the debate over the main topic. You will find the same patterns and techniques repeated there.
TABoLK on June 19, 2008 at 1:16 PM
Actually, according to many different sources, John C. Lester and five other Confederate Army verterans (none of whom was Albert Pike) originated the idea of the Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865, and Nathan Bedford Forrest was their first Imperial Wizard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/kkk/default.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=4&item=kkk
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_kkk.html
When the Klan reappeared in 1915, Albert Pike had been dead for 24 years.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 1:25 PM
I have only seen one civil atheist post on Hot Air in the time that I have been reading these threads. That person has not been posting for a long time.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 1:34 PM
“The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.”
I’m not a scientist but this suggests to me that there was more than one step involved leading to this new capability.
FloatingRock on June 19, 2008 at 1:36 PM
PBS and wikipedia?
Try again buddy.
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 1:39 PM
The two are totally compatible. Many mutations are likely weeded out by natural selection and only those that are neutral or beneficial are likely to survive.
FloatingRock on June 19, 2008 at 1:40 PM
RushBaby on June 19, 2008 at 1:46 PM
Mutations are ALWAYS harmful and never beneficial.
You do not get order out of chaos. It’s just a simple fact.
Your whole theory hinges on something that contradicts all basic natural laws.
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 1:52 PM
Sorry, Mr. Baby, you’re right. I forgot that you were an atheist. You are always civil. Maybe that is why I overlooked you. I hope you will accept my apology. I just get tired of the sarcastic, mean spirited, comments that are directed towards faith during these discussions. It is not necessary. People can argue their position without the demeaning comments.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 1:52 PM
Morgan horses are a mutation that originated naturally, from one genetically dominant male named Figure, in 1789. Please explain how their mutation has been anything but beneficial, and if so, why they are so highly prized by many people.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 2:00 PM
In addition to historical KKK documents..Pike is mentioned as it’s founder and leader in all pro KKK books.
Try reading Susan Lawrence Davis’s 1924 book; Authentic History, Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1877. This is a KKK apologist book.
In her chapter on General Pike’s leadership of the Klan, Miss Davis applauds Pike’s clever stewardship of the KKK secret organization.
She reproduces in her KKK history an oil portrait of Albert Pike given to her for the KKK book by Pike’s son.
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 2:03 PM
looks like the truth hurts.
you are a nut case. seriously get some help.
of course the number of google hits is meaningless because its going to search for each word, not the entire phrase…duhhhhhhhhhhhhh
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 2:03 PM
unfortunately its not just a madman like hitler…its people like Sanger, Oliver wendell Holmes..
Holmes believed in eugenics ñ how did this fit into his life?
It was his only political cause and was obviously is in line with his Darwinism. Holmes’ eugenic views were in fact more extreme than those of other eugenics enthusiasts of his time. Others talked about sterilizing “imbeciles” while Holmes advocated executing unfit babies.
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/010315/alschuler-holmes.shtml
this cheapening of human life that is implicit in the theory of evolution has led to the deaths ofhundreds of millions
the idea of eugenics was very prevalent in the US…and of course goes in Sanger’s legacy, planned parenthood.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 2:07 PM
ok good, lets say there were several steps…in 20,000 generations…and this is the grand evidence for evolution….uh huh…thats it?
The team tested the robustness of E. coli while mutating a gene for a lactamase (TEM-1) that confers some resistance to ampicillin.
Subjecting TEM-1 to random mutational drift and purifying selection (to purge deleterious mutations) produced changes in its fitness landscape indicative of negative epistasis; that is, the combined deleterious effects of mutations were, on average, larger than expected from the multiplication of their individual effects. As observed in computational systems, negative epistasis was tightly associated with higher tolerance to mutations (robustness). Thus, under a low selection pressure, a large fraction of mutations was initially tolerated (high robustness), but as mutations accumulated, their fitness toll increased, resulting in the observed negative epistasis. These findings, supported by FoldX stability computations of the mutational effects, prompt a new model in which the mutational robustness (or neutrality) observed in proteins, and other biological systems, is due primarily to a stability margin, or threshold, that buffers the deleterious physico-chemical effects of mutations on fitness. Threshold robustness is inherently epistatic-once the stability threshold is exhausted, the deleterious effects of mutations become fully pronounced, thereby making proteins far less robust than generally assumed.
Bershtein et al, “Robustness-epistasis link shapes the fitness landscape of a randomly drifting protein,” Nature 444, 929-932 (14 December 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05385.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 2:09 PM
The first claim that Albert Pike was a founder of the Ku Klux Klan was made by Walter L. Fleming in 1905, 14 years after Albert Pike’s death, and quite in synchrony with the anti-masonic sentiment sweeping the country at that time. Susan L. Davis was second, 19 years later, and she referenced Walter Fleming’s work. All other subsequent sources quote and rely on one or both of them, and neither of them was able to substantiate their contentions with source documentation, transcribed testimony or any other corroborating evidence.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 2:11 PM
So now you’re saying that when a horse “changes” into a horse it is a mutation and not natural selection?
Wrong again.
A mutation is when information gets scrambled…there is not additional,more ordered, information added.
Mutations becoming more intelligent and ordered is an imaginary and disproven concept
Face it. All of your “proof” for evolution are just examples of proven natural selection within species(”micro evolution”).
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 2:11 PM
Man you are a stubborn person.
So I guess Albert Pike’s SON is a liar when he claimed his Dad was the founder of the Klan.
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 2:14 PM
Maybe. Or could it be that the author of the book was a liar when she asserted that Pike’s son made such a claim. But one of those two is most surely true.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 2:16 PM
I appreciate that, Rose.
A little more give and a little less badgering would be pleasant, but on the other hand, this is an internet forum. Imagining it to remain polite and civil seems a bit Utopian :)
Maybe look at it this way. This place represents freedom. We can see the evidence of creeping tyranny in our politics. We have a unique opportunity to resist it because regular people can communicate with one another, and our gov’t, for the time being, can’t do a thing about it.
Isn’t the trade-off worth it? Every time you type a comment and hit submit, you are exposing your thoughts to the whims of strangers, who can and do respond with laughter, approval, ridicule, thanks, insults, compliments, sometimes just dead silence.
In return, you get loads of information that you know your own family members, friends, co-workers, and co-Americans are not all getting. You get perspectives that you never even considered, because people with such varying experiences are participating.
This is a tough room and a tender room. It’s contentious, boisterous, dark and light, rage-inducing and tender. I wish you would comment here more, because the more decent folks who do, the higher the caliber of the conversation.
ps. And you can learn very creative insult strings. Hey – creative writing is creative writing!
RushBaby on June 19, 2008 at 2:16 PM
olaf, some mutations don’t work, some do, and still others don’t make a difference. Only when the organisms containing the mutation attempts to survive and reproduce within their environment can it be judged, by the results, whether the mutation is beneficial, detrimental, or inconsequential.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 2:19 PM
And I guess every one of the authors of the many KKK historical documents that state that he was the founder and all the KKK members who wrote in KKK meeting logs that he was in attendance were all liars also…
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 2:19 PM
Either they were liars, or they were referencing liars. No document exists that lists Albert Pike as a founder of the KKK prior to Walter L. Fleming’s 1905 book.
All you have to do to invalidate this claim is to produce a link to such a document.
I am waiting.
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 2:23 PM
Okay RushBaby, you win. I totally agree. But you must admit that your very civil way of presenting your argument helped.
Rose on June 19, 2008 at 2:25 PM
Fair points, but there are thousands of years of history where human life was treated cheaply (via slavery, mass killings, or starvation) by people not influenced by Darwin.
dedalus on June 19, 2008 at 2:26 PM
WE win.
RushBaby on June 19, 2008 at 2:26 PM
oh the irony…
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 2:26 PM
Not that ironic. I produce links to work that supports my contentions; in fact, quite unintendedly, right4life has produced links that support my contentions, as well…;~) Now THAT’S ironic!
Salamantis on June 19, 2008 at 2:30 PM
Like the links to PBS and Wikipedia that you used to “validate” your theory?
I will let you guess who the founders of the leftist propaganda PBS network are.
Yes the KKK was founded by illuminati leader General Albert Pike.
More importantly it is a proven fact that the founder of evolution Erasmus Darwin, was an illuminati member…
As were all of the main people that seriously promoted the theory for them.. such as Thomas Huxley.
When you find out that this is true…will you give up your belief in the false theory of evolution?
SaintOlaf on June 19, 2008 at 2:32 PM
thats delusional. and shows how little you understand about your own faith (evolution)..you are a legend in your mind only.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 2:33 PM
Not that ironic. I produce links to work that supports my contentions; in fact, quite unintendedly, right4life has produced links that support my contentions, as well…;~) Now THAT’S ironic!
See, the problem is that you are reading the whole thing. If only you completely ignored all of the many bits that support you, you would see that those links utterly demolish your case.
It’s all about selecting the ‘correct’ data and ignoring context. Well, that and the gratuitous insults. I salute you for your patience.
TABoLK on June 19, 2008 at 2:39 PM
why don’t you go ahead and post those…but you can’t.
take up my challenge then, should be easy.
right4life on June 19, 2008 at 2:44 PM
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