Well, actually, they are advertising a coming boom in “political incorrectness.”Here. But one can not get more information, it would seem, without paying.
Given that political correctness is organized lying (usually for control and profit), a boom in political incorrectness is a boom in honesty.
Will we ever be able to discuss the cultural effects of Darwinism honestly? One thing we don’t hear as much of as we used to, it is good to note, is someone with (apparently) sponge toffee for brains getting up and announcing that he is a Christian but he accepts Darwin.
So? You don’t have to be smart to be a Christian (though being smart definitely helps in the long term, for all sorts of reasons).
But honestly would be so useful in discussing so many issues around Darwinism. For example, there’s no question that modern racism was mainly informed by Darwinism. That was the religious perspective that caused many people to picture these who looked different from them as behind them in the Darwinian ascent of man.
If we could just talk about all that honestly, we could move on. Maybe it’s coming.
See also: Demand for a ban on teaching creationism in Welsh schools. Bot not on teaching Darwinism.
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Let’s remember that a politician is not supposed to represent himself, he is supposed to represent somebody else. That is not dishonest, but it looks exactly the same. Then there is the question of just who he represents. Well, he has to appear to represent whomever he is talking to at the moment. That is not dishonest, but it looks exactly the same. And while representing so many people, he does not need to meet any particular description, he only needs to avoid the embarrassment of being exposed as not meeting it. That is not dishonest, but it looks exactly the same.
I forgot where I was going with this.
News: For example, there’s no question that modern racism was mainly informed by Darwinism.
Right on! Less than two years after Darwin published “Origins”, the US was fighting a civil war to keep slavery and the Darwinists apparently manufactured a couple of centuries of “evidence” that we’d been kidnapping blacks from Africa, transporting then across the Atlantic (with a very high “shrinkage” rate on the way) and working them to death in America.
Well, we COULDN’T have done any of that because we were a Christian nation back then and the Bible explicitly sort of … actually allows slavery. But Darwin rewrote the Bible! It didn’t use to allow slavery until Darwin came along!
Darwin took his preexisting views that he was racially superior and codified them in his work. It was Darwin that classified 4 distinct races, which was expanded on by the Eugenicists that soon followed. Slavery has existed since prehistoric times and continues to this day. Instead of calling it slavery, they call it human trafficking. For Darwinists, they cannot call slavery wrong, since that would require a belief in absolute morality.
The Bible actually requires the release of slaves after 7 years and was referred to as indentured servitude in the colonies that became the United States.
Leviticus 25:44-46
MatSpirit 2, you seem to forget the full title of Darwin’s great opus: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
And yes, I’ve seen evolution cited as the reason why black people are supposedly inferior. They just aren’t as evolved as whites, you know. No nonsense about all people being valuable because created in the image of God!
BobRyan,
Honest question: do you make this stuff as you go along, or is there some source for the erroneous claims you make?
BR
Mimus
Leviticus 24: 46
Mimus, I think that we know the answer to that question.
Exodus 21:2
“If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.”
Anthropic
In Origin of Species, race refers to the different races (populations) of plants and animals. Although, it is true that he felt that his theory also applied to humans. As do I.
One of the most famous quotes that is often used against him with respect to racism is the following:
Aside from the fact that he had a Eurocentric Victorian perception of what civilized means, he was simply making a prediction, not a judgment or moral statement. And if you look at the fate of most indigenous populations in throughout the world, I think that his prediction has largely become true. Not that their lineage has been exterminated, but their cultures, for the most part, have.
Darwin thought that the different races of human would be classified as different species to someone who didn’t know any better.
I can’t quote chapter and verse, but I know for a certainty that Yahweh told the Israelites that they must not on any account make a slave of a member of their own people, as slavery was a thing He detested. Presumably, He consented to it at an earlier date and in relation to the pagans, on the basis that it was a normal practice of mankind at that time – grace building upon nature. And indeed he laid down laws limiting the harshness with which slaves could be treated, and punishments for breaches of the laws he had laid down.
Bad Christians are always worse than bad pagans, having been given so much more. So, horrific as the chattel slavery of nominally-Christian Europeans was around the 16th century, it should not surprise us that it was so much worse than the slavery of defeated, pagan peoples in the ancient world.
In the NT, God would surely have commanded Christians to release any slaves they might have, except that Christianity was not intended to bring about progress by violent revolution. I suspect that, too, might have been be rescinded in modern times, at least, by the Holy Spirit, since our dictators have been so atrociously wicked and cruel in their lust for power and their determination to hold on to it at all costs to others.
I can only assume that, at the highest levels, my own Catholic church in particular, has had such an atrocious record in sole deference to Christ’s parable about the tares, the darnel. However, surely, particularly with the passage of time, and the level of civilised governance shown by the Scandinavians’ largely secular polity, in the interim, the Popes should have promoted the same streamlined, efficient central government in the secular world that the neoliberal socio/psychopaths deploy in pursuit of ever more abundant material riches for their already plutocratic class – at the very expense of the increasingly-immiserated, indeed often homeless, poor ; it is not a matter of a preferential option for the poor : it is the latter who, we are assured from the Magnificat onwards – indeed, throughout most of the Old Testament, it is they who are the True Israel, not a feckless fringe of wastrels. The Psalmists and the Prophets are constantly inveighing against ‘the rich’, who they see as the very exemplars of, greed, violence, fraud, all manner of wickedness. And the converse in relation to the poor.
Cultured, erudite, well-to-do people tend to assume that they are God’s ‘default’ human, ideal human, even. But it just ain’t so. Worldly intelligence will count for little in the next life, indeed, only when it was based on the spiirtual wisdom, upon which the blue-collar types tend to have a much firmer grip.
Axel
Yes, he said that it was OK to enslave people from neighbouring lands (not Israelites) and that these people could be enslaved for life and passed down from one generation to the next. This doesn’t sound like a being that detests slavery.
I don’t recall anything in the NT that says that slavery is wrong. However, I could be wrong.
Cultured, erudite, well-to-do people tend to assume that they are God’s ‘default’ human, ideal human, even.
I would argue that this is not limited to cultured, erudite, well-to-do people. I think that this is one of the pitfalls that religion and religious beliefs can and often do fall into.
You just got to love Atheistic Materialists trying to lecture Christian Theists on morality.
Morality does not exist in Atheistic Materialism. Period! Full Stop!
As Richard Dawkins succinctly put it,
Nor, since Atheistic Materialists deny to existence of free will, is there any guilt or innocence to be had if someone did commit some moral transgression. The moral transgressor simply had no choice in the matter and therefore cannot realistically held to be morally culpable.
According to Atheistic Materialism we are simply ‘meat robots’ with no more choice over the course of our actions that a leaf blowing in the wind has choice over the course of its fall.
Thus, it is hilarious for Atheistic Materialists to try to lecture Christian Theists on morality. Atheistic Materialism simply is a non-starter in regards to providing a coherent foundation for morality and for providing a basis for moral culpability in general. And yet, time and time again, Atheistic Materialists act as if that not only do they have a basis for morality, but they pretend that their own particular brand of atheistic morality is so much better than the Christian’s morality, that we should choose it over Christian morality. (If only we were able to choose to do so, I suppose),
I seriously don’t see how atheists make it through a single day without their heads exploding from the logical inconsistencies that they are forced to maintain in order to hold on to their atheism. Their worldview is insane!
Of supplemental note, Darwin’s view of races,
Now compare that to Wilberforce’s Christian view of slavery,
As well Abraham Lincoln’s own view against slavery was based on Christian principles.
Verse and Quote
BA77
Well, since I am an atheist and have morals, I guess your thousands and thousands and thousands of words, that nobody reads, trying to convince others that this is not possible, has as much value as Trumps Sharpie inspired hurricane forecasts.
^^^^
Sheesh, you don’t even understand what your own Atheistic worldview actually entails and yet you want to pretend to have the wherewithal to lecture others on their Christian worldview.
BA77
Maybe it is because the Christian world view keeps referencing a slave misogynistic endorsing document as their “bible”. The last time I looked, atheists don’t pretend that a man-made (and repeatedly altered) document is the literal word of their god.
Brother Brian:
If you do it is only because you were raised in a theistically dominated world.
BA77@
And
In my early science classes I was always told to go back to the original source. And, in this case, what is the original source? The Bible? And what does it say about slavery? You can own them until they die, or pass them on to your heirs. You can beat them without punishment as long as they don’t die.
Now that we have talked about what your bible says about slavery, are you sure you want to talk about what it says about women, homosexuals…?
Are you really sure that you want an atheist to tell you what your bible says? Some people might find that embarrassing.
John MacArthur wrote some words regarding slavery worth consideration:
It is significant that the New Testament nowhere attacks slavery directly. Had Jesus and the apostles done so, the result would have been chaos. Any slave insurrection would have been brutally crushed, and the slaves massacred. The gospel would have been swallowed up by the message of social reform. Further, right relations between slaves and masters made it a workable social institution, if not an ideal one.
Christianity, however, sowed the seeds of the destruction of slavery. It would be destroyed not by social upheaval, but by changed hearts. The book of Philemon illustrates that principle. Paul does not order Philemon to free Onesimus, or teach that slavery is evil. But by ordering Philemon to treat Onesimus as a brother (Philem. 16; cf. Eph. 6:9; Col. 4:1), Paul eliminated the abuses of slavery. Marvin Vincent comments, “The principles of the gospel not only curtailed [slavery’s] abuses, but destroyed the thing itself; for it could not exist without its abuses. To destroy its abuses was to destroy it” (Vincent, Philemon, p. 167).
One writer summed up the importance of Philemon in relation to slavery in these words:
The Epistle brings into vivid focus the whole problem of slavery in the Christian Church. There is no thought of denunciation even in principle. The apostle deals with the situation as it then exists. He takes it for granted that Philemon has a claim of ownership on Onesimus and leaves the position unchallenged. Yet in one significant phrase Paul transforms the character of the masterslave relationship. Onesimus is returning no longer as a slave but as a brother beloved (Verse 16). It is clearly incongruous for a Christian master to “own” a brother in Christ in the contemporary sense of the word, and although the existing order of society could not be immediately changed by Christianity without a political revolution (Which was clearly contrary to Christian principles), the Christian master-slave relationship was so transformed from within that it was bound to lead ultimately to the abolition of the system. (Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1970], p. 640)
https://www.gty.org/library/bibleqnas-library/QA0257/the-apostle-paul-and-slavery
BB states,
You just can’t make this stuff up. Not only do atheists completely ignore the fact that they have absolutely no basis for morality, (in fact ‘survival of the fittest’ is anti-morality), they also pretend that they can sit in moral judgement of God himself. Arrogance and ignorance is apparently a lethal combination on both the physical and spiritual levels.
Tell you what BB, once you live a morally perfect life, are crucified on a cross for the sins of the world, and most importantly, are raised from the dead by God to prove that the sins of the world are paid for in full by your atoning sacrifice, perhaps then you might have a moral leg to stand on to sit in judgement of God. Until then you are just a sinner, (an arrogant sinner at that), appointed to die and then be judged by God, just like the rest of humanity. A sinner in desperate need of forgiveness and redemption from Christ, just like the rest of us.
Around the 20 minute mark of the following Near Death Experience documentary, the Life Review portion of the Near Death Experience is highlighted, with several testimonies relating how every word, thought, deed, and action, of a person’s life is gone over in the presence of God:
Verse:
Quote:
Verse and video:
Supplemental note:
We have far more observational evidence for the reality of souls than we do for the Darwinian claim that unguided material processes can generate functional information. Moreover, the transcendent nature of ‘immaterial’ information, which is the one thing that, (as every ID advocate intimately knows), unguided material processes cannot possibly explain the origin of, directly supports the transcendent nature as well as the physical reality of the soul:
As Stuart Hameroff states in the following video, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse:
Bornagain, I’m awarding you the Denyse O’Leary memorial prize for reading comprehension for September.
I’m going to reprint one of the entrants that won that prize for you, along with a few little hints:
“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. >>>>> THE UNIVERSE <<<<>>>> THE UNIVERSE <<<<<! You know, the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, the galaxy and every thing else in the universe that doesn't have a mind. The sun does not care about you. The sun doesn't care about anything! The sun is INCAPABLE of caring! The sun has nothing to care with!
Enjoy your prize, but I'm warning you that Denyse is going to try to win it back just as soon as she finds out which gene is the selfish one.
And the amorality of your Atheistic materialism excites you to the point of awarding prizes why exactly???
If the amorality of atheistic materialism was actually true, according to another Dawkins’ quote, life would be ‘intolerable’:
In what should be needless to say, if it is impossible for you to live as if your worldview were actually true then your worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.
Moreover, Atheists have to steal objective morality from Theism in order to attack God and Christians in the first place
For atheists to have to ‘borrow’ objective morality from Theists in order to attack God and Christians as somehow being morally deficient is again, as Cornelius Van Til put it, “like the child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face.” Atheists need the moral foundation that only God can provide just in order to attack Him. Talk about self-refuting arguments!
BA77
It’s easy to sit in moral judgement of a being who says it’s OK to enslave people and beat them as long as they don’t die; to kill homosexuals; to kill women who aren’t virgins on their wedding night (but not kill the non-virgin husband); to kill the son who disrespects his father; to kill (or rape) all the men, women and children of the city they despoil; to instruct a faithful worshipper to kill his son.
Again, are you really sure you want to compare your vindictive “God” against an atheist world view.
BB, besides you having no idea what your own atheistic worldview actually entails, you have no clue as to what the true nature of God actually is.
Far from being petty and vindictive as you falsely imagine, the overwhelming love expressed in Near Death Experiences fits exactly what would be expected from a true Christian perspective:
The Bible condones slavery, Darwin condemned it:
Who is the more moral?
BA77
Actually I do. It entails a world view where I and others cooperate and establish a moral assemblage that we can all accept, live with and expect others to abide by. .
And, I dare say, neither do you. All I have to go with is the morally questionable and contradictory words in the bible.
Hogwash! As usual, you are severely deluding yourself. Especially if you think you can build an enlightened atheistic utopia where man makes up his own morality. Hundreds of millions have died, and more have suffered miserably, from your vain delusion that man can be his own god:
Even today in America, with its strong Christian heritage, and even though America overcame the Nazi and Communist scourges in Europe, has not escaped unscathed from the devastating effects of “Darwinian morality”.
Verse:
BA77
Your powers of discourse never cease to amaze me.
Another power that you excel at.
Who has suggested that this is likely? But if it is the only option we have available to us it would be irresponsible to lay back and hope that some mythological creature would provide it for us.
The bigger question is why your loving god would let hundreds of millions die, and more suffer, because he is so incompetent at getting his objective morality across to us. The way I see it, your god could use a dose of Viagra. If he is not able to get it up then we have to rise to the occasion and take ownership and accountability of our own morality.
The Darwinists say to look at the original source, when it comes to challenging anyone that disagrees with them. Not one seems to have read anything Darwin actually wrote. They ignore the original source and simply write off the parts they discover that interferes with their cult. Atheists like Brother Brian aren’t atheists. They hate God. In order to hate something, there must be the belief in its existence. Why would God do this? Why would God do that? I have a better question. How can you judge anyone? You live in a world where morality is seen as wickedness and wickedness is seen as good.
How embarrassing. I totally screwed up Msg 22 and didn’t notice. Serves me right for trying to post from a tablet. Here’s your piece again:
“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. >>>>>THE UNIVERSE<<<<< that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
– Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
Ah, that's better. And, as I said, the universe is not conscious and therefore is incapable of morality. That is what Dawkins is saying.
For the Darwinists that claim you can be moral and believe there’s no intelligent design. Compare Jewish and Judaeo-Christian countries with the rest of the world. That would be Israel, as it was and as it is, as well as the United States. All other Christian nations, removed the Jewish root. Where was the morality of the Japanese Empire when their army acted with the same disregard for human life as the Soviet Union?
bornagain77
The Darwinists celebrate abortion, because they need a reduction in world population. It has nothing to do with any end of the world moments, but for the sake of bringing about governmental control to the world. There’s a reason they celebrate numbers like more black babies aborted than born in the United States. That would be the racist part of them peaking out from behind their ivory towers of academia.
Seversky,
With all due respect, over the years you have shown no basis of authority to draw such a conclusion responsibly, as opposed to reiterating convenient new atheist rhetoric, in hopes of exploiting emotive responses when in fact since Plato in the Laws Bk X 360 BC it has been known that evolutionary materialism has no basis for ethical comment. Indeed, it is demonstrably an open door to nihilism.
Perhaps, too, you are unaware of the significance of
[a] the difference between ameliorative regulation of what is present and established in culture due to the hardness of hearts (cf. Divorce regulations with the outright declarations that “I hate divorce” [Mal 2:16] and “what God joins, let no man put asunder” [Mt 19:1 – 6]. Also,
[b] the historical and current significance of this argument by undermining, written by the apostle Paul while literally chained to Roman soldier guards and while awaiting trial before Nero Caesar on a potentially capital charge where evidence of supporting Spartacus like uprising or harbouring escaped slaves would lend to the accusations already on the table. So, whatever he did to deal with an escaped slave [who seems to have stolen money] had to be subtly, carefully done.
I draw this to your attention, as it literally is the textual source for the motto of the Antislavery Society: Am I not a man and a brother?
In 107 AD, there is record of a certain Bishop Onesimus of Ephesus. It has been suggested that this manumission letter was contributed to the then gathering collection of the NT by him. Thus, contrary to your ill-founded accusation above, the Bible contains in it a devastating counter to enslavement and by the like unto this and a fortiori principles, any other similarly oppressive institution. But, it does so in the context of heart-softened reformation and moral enlightenment, not ill advised radical calls for violence and imposition by force.
I suggest, you need to do some rethinking. Especially, as this has been on the table here at UD several times over the years.
KF
PS: I clip Plato’s warning, as it is directly relevant to any assertion of moral claims by advocates or fellow travellers of evolutionary materialism:
This is so stupid If atheistic materialism were true then we wouldn’t exist. If Darwin was right, we wouldn’t exist.
And if the world was governed by Darwinism then slavery, murder, rape, slavery- well anything and everything would be OK. So clearly the atheists here are just clueless trolls.
That said, if one people attack another and lose, the attacked definitely should be able to enslave the attackers to at least pay for their crimes against them.
And it remains that the ONLY reason any atheist has any morality at all it is because they were raised in a theistically dominated world. But they are so clueless that they don’t even grasp that simple fact.
You simply can’r make up BB’s response at 29. Nobody would believe somebody could be so lame!
People reject the objective morality of God and try to make up their own subjective morality, i.e. be gods unto themselves, and hundreds of millions of people die as a result in these Socialistic hellholes, i.e. Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, etc. etc., and what is BB’s response? It is to blame God for man rejecting God.
To call such a response pathetic is an understatement!
Headlined, for record: https://uncommondescent.com/laws/does-the-bible-condone-slavery-even-as-darwin-opposed-it/
Brother Brian:
Not even God can get through to willfully ignorant people like you, Brian. And all of the innocents that die get to go to Heaven. So that would be a huge PLUS for them. Death and suffering are part of the physical world. It is how we deal with such things that shows God our measure as a person.
So here we have Brian, who is obviously totally ignorant and apparently proud of it.
BR
Where was the morality when the US dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan killing thousands. Where was the morality when bomber command fire-bombed Dresden? Where was the morality when Europeans killed thousands of indigenous peoples and stole their land? Where was the morality of the slave trade? All of these atrocities committed by so-called countries with Christian foundations.
Brother Brian:
Saving millions, duh.
Germany shouldn’t have started the hostilities, duh.
But where they done by Christians? Or is Brian just a desperate loser?
Brother Brian: Where was the morality when the US dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan killing thousands
Perfectly moral. We were at war with Japan. They started it. We defended ourselves. The defense of the USA against Japan cost 42,000+ American lives and a lot of misery. We were fire bombing Tokyo 24/7 and they wouldn’t surrender. After the first atomic bomb was dropped, we told them a second one was on the way if they didn’t surrender. They didn’t surrender. Apparently, they didn’t care too much for their own civilians. Their decision not to surrender led to the second bomb. That opened their eyes. The U.S. war department estimated that over a million U.S. soldiers would have been killed if we had invaded Japan instead of using the A-bombs.
BobRyan
Funnily enough, I’ve asked you a couple of times for sources that support you claims about Darwin’s writing. In this thread, and the utterly bizare story you tell in this thread.
Neither of these claims are true, so you won’t be able to find a source for them. But I remain curious as to where you got these ideas from. Did you make them up, or where they passed on to you by someone else?