Thursday, December 24, 2009
Blame Gamesmanship
David Klinghoffer has added to his rogue's gallery of "Darwinists."In addition to Hitler, Stalin, Charles Manson, James Von Brunn (the lunatic white supremacist who shot up the Holocaust Museum), the Columbine shooters and, of all people, H.P. Lovecraft, Klinghoffer is now blaming Darwin for Josef Mengele.
Klinghoffer confuses "Social Darwinism" (not to mention the Discoveryless Institute's version of "Darwinism") with evolutionary theory, a point made by "Steven J.," a frequenter of Klinghoffer's commentariat, which regularly demolishes his rantings (leading, I suspect, to his often repeating them at the DI's commentless Ministry of Misinformation).
Klinghoffer disingenuously repeats his "Is/Ought" fallacy:
I'm tired of having to explain that an idea's having been put to an evil use, even if that occurred time after time for more than a century and a half, doesn't by itself make the idea a false description of reality. But if that is what happened, as it is here, it's an awfully good reason to think twice and carefully, for yourself, about the evidence said to underlie claims made on behalf of the idea.
Anyway, my yet-to-be-moderator-approved comment at Klinghoffer's blog is as follows:
Rober Bannister, in "Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought" has shown that there was no such "thing" as "Social Darwinism" ... it was a term of abuse used by people of many political viewpoints ... liberal, conservative and everything in between ... to describe viewpoints they didn't like. Applying it to Nazis is nothing more than carrying on a disreputable tradition. Steven J.'s point, if I may make so bold, was that "Social Darwinism" (and your version of "Darwinism") is not the same thing as scientific evolutionary theory.
As to whether Mengele studying the Bible would have been trumpeted by anti-theists, are you actually arguing that two wrongs make a right? After all, we can certainly come up with examples of people who intensely studied the Bible who, over far more than a century and a half, did great wrongs ... Torquemada leaps to mind as one of many examples ... but is that reason to think twice and carefully about the evidence said to underlie claims made on behalf the Bible, rather than about the person who is supposedly "applying" it?
If so, the evidence for evolution far outstrips that for the Bible.
The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Christ is on the web. Redefining all primary elements including Faith, the Word, Baptism, the Trinity and the Resurrection, this new interpretation questions the validity and origins of all Christian tradition; it overturns all natural law ethics and theory. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history and moral teaching.
This new teaching has nothing whatsoever to do with any existing religious conception known to history. It is unique in every respect. What science and religion have agreed was not possible, has now become all too inevitable.
Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle, and offers the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds directly to an act of perfect faith with a individual intervention into the natural world; correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries. Intended to be understood metaphorically, where 'death' is ignorance and 'Life' is knowledge, this experience, personal encounter of transcendent power and moral purpose is the 'Resurrection', and justification for faith.
This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable and 'extraordinary' evidence based truth embodied in action. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new moral tenet, not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof for its belief.
This is 'religion' without any of the conventional trappings of tradition. An individual, virtue-ethical conception, independent of all cultural perception in a single moral command, and the single Law finds it's expression of obedience within a new covenant of marriage. It requires no institutional framework or hierarchy, no churches or priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, dogma or doctrine and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single, categorical moral imperative and the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.
If confirmed, this will represent a paradigm change in the moral and intellectual potential of human nature itself; untangling the greatest questions of human existence: consciousness, meaning, suffering, free will and evil. And at the same time addressing the most profound problems of our age.
Trials of this new teaching are open to all and under way in many countries. For those individuals who can imagine outside the historical cultural box, with the moral courage to learn something new, and test this for themselves, to stand against the stream of fashionable thought and spin, an intellectual and moral revolution is already under way, where the 'impossible' becomes inevitable, with the most potent Non Violent Direct Action any human being can take to advance peace, justice, change and progress.
Published [at the moment] only on the web, a typeset manuscript of this new teaching is available as a free [1.4meg] PDF download from a variety of sites including:
[www].energon.org.uk
<< Home
