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ANDIEZ Yoga The Soul of A Scorpio The Fire of A Lioness The Heart of A Hippie The Mouth of A Sailor Poster
However I suggest we restrain ourselves. That debate is very much off topic here and we’re not likely to resolve our differences.
COMMENT #270 [Permalink]… Kevin said on 12/8/2005 @ 8:53 pm PT… ANDIEZ Yoga The Soul of A Scorpio The Fire of A Lioness The Heart of A Hippie The Mouth of A Sailor Poster
Freedom Fan: Perhaps we can ‘act out of caring.’ But then again, that’s just a matter of prioritizing and deciding what is most important to the futherance of whatever it is we want to see in the world. How do you define an act of caring? Where do you draw the line at what is an act of compassion and what is an act of aggression? These decisions are ours to make, these boundaries ours to draw. However, I do agree: in order for the world to change, people must act. But we need not act from a place of simple need for action– the most effective action is engaged from a place of… Well, whatever it is you want to bring about. Perhaps, in some cases, such as those that you described, it /is/ a place of caring. You can act out of caring, can’t you? Maybe volunteering at an animal shelter, or a food pantry. That’s acting out of caring and compassion for human life.
And even wars must sometimes be fought from a place of compassion for human life. But, unfortunately, this is not always the case, and the… Darker side of things usually reveals to us that these are /not/ the intentions that wars are fought out of. This is a strictly alegorical example, but let’s look at… World War II. How can we be sure that the need to stop Hitler was to protect people in Europe and not out of, say, some need to protect foreign bank interests? (I’m just being hypothetical, since I don’t want to make up some huge scenario in a post like this.)
You see what I’m saying? Yes, wars are sometimes necessary, and yes, sometimes violence /is/ the last resort answer, but we need to be /sure/ that we are acting from a place of caring compassion and not of greed and self-aggrandizement.
Well, that’s what I think, anyways.
COMMENT #271 [Permalink]… Owen said on 12/8/2005 @ 9:40 pm PT…
Excellent points Autarkis.
Big K, you said: “But that does not mean that nature is not able to evolve, things are not able to change. Of course evolution exists, but they reject Darwin�s most ambitious theories. And of course, they are considered theories. It seams a lot of people forget that. True science is able to stand up to criticism and debate.”
You make the mistake that many conservatives make in your post. A scientific theory is (from Wikipedia): “In various sciences, a theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a certain natural or social phenomenon, thus either originating from or supported by experimental evidence (see scientific method). In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations made that is predictive, logical, testable, and has never been falsified.”
So, you see, this argument does not hold water. Darwin’s theories are by definition “true science”. The have been “able to stand up to criticism and debate.” We (and I say we because I am a scientist) have attempted to falsify Darwin’s theories for many years, and these attempts have been unsuccessful. In fact, we see natural selection and evolution of new species taking place on very rapid time scales in certain instances such as in cichlid fish.
Darwin was a very bright man, but there were some things that he could not figure out. First of all, in Darwin’s time, it was believed that there was no life prior to the Cambrian (about 500 million years ago). We now know that this was not true. In fact, there is evidence that microbial life (bacteria) began as long ago as 3.5 BILLION years ago, and it is universally accepted (among educated scientists and geologists) that by 3 billion years ago there were complex communities of microbial mats throughout the world.
SO, this is the part that you guys love to completely ignore–life did not jump up out of the “primordial ooze” and pull on a pair of pants. Life on Earth has been a work in progress for over 3 billion years, with amazing things happening like lateral transfer of entire genomes, and symbiotic relationships creating more and more complex life forms (look some of these terms up–I guarantee you will be astounded).
We have also had periods of punctuated equilibrium, where huge explosions of evolution rapidly occurred in response to various forcing mechanisms. In fact the “Cambrian Explosion” represents a time when the Earth’s atmosphere first became fully oxygenated, and larger organisms that used more energy were able to evolve. Where did the oxygen come from? Those microbial mats I spoke of earlier developed oxygenic photosynthesis about 2 billion years ago, and were busily pumping O2 into the atmosphere (ironically, ultimately at their own expense, as they were largely displaced by the animals, plants, and algae that were able to outcompete–or eat–them once the oxygen they needed became available.)
So, I would be a liar to state that we have everything figured out, but we do know that the arguments that the “Intelligent Design” folks put out there are completely bogus. Now if you want to rail about something posing as science, that would be a good place to start. Intelligent design IS NOT science, nor even a theory because it is not testable. It is a (half-baked) idea put forth by the same people who just a few years ago were trying to convince us that Adam and Eve appeared on our planet some few thousand years ago and rode around on dinosaurs during their leisure time.
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