The Dangers of Evolution

[Daniel Sullivan]

For those who actually believe that their great great great ancestors came from a bowl of soup that was runoff from a rock (evolution theory), you may find the true title of Darwin's book interesting. Darwin's book was originally titled "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." Darwin said that, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by the centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace, the savage races throughout the world. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows." You can see why dictators like Hitler (who used Nazi propaganda to make Germans believe that he was a Christian), REALLY liked Darwin's philosophy; it enabled them to embrace racism, and indoctrinate the masses to view people of different "races" as of a lesser species which hasn't "evolved" to their level yet (ie. an animal). The Theory of Evolution is a false religion that attempts to remove God from authority and puts man in his place. MACRO-evolution does not happen. You didn't come from a bowl of soup, and the world is much younger than 'scientists' would have you to believe. Please watch the video below for a more in depth look at the dangers of the theory of evolution.

I have no comment on the video or your thoughts on evolution and Darwin; I consider age of the earth arguments to be nothing more than a pointless rabbit trail and the debate of creationism (which is different than a general belief that the world was created) vs. Darwinism to be a distraction.

At some point, somewhere along the line, some people made less than kind remarks about God and supported their remarks with Darwinism. That seems to have caused some Christians to become preoccupied with a topic that is frankly meaningless.

Jesus focused on loving God, loving your neighbor, loving your enemies, being honest, being true to one's word, and rendering aid to others. He also placed a lot of emphasis on the folly of pursuing the accumulation of wealth, responsible behavior (such as counting the costs of an enterprise before beginning it), and stewardship (many parables about that!).

Personally, I feel that Christianity in general has really missed the boat. Jesus said that Christians will be known for their love. Instead, Christians are just as argumetnative, confrontational, hateful, spiteful, and dishonest as everyone else. And while clergy and impassioned laity point fingers and look down their noses at the world around them, Christian divorce rates mirror those non-Christians, evangelists have made an art out of conning senior citizens out of their savings and social security checks and out of bilking the sick with false cures and fruadulent miracles while coopting new age thought to create a prosperity gospel that is so full of holes and bad advice that ought to be investigated by the FTC, and the most sweeping child sex abuse scandal in recorded history was perpetrated by a branch of the oldest Christian denomination in existence.

Not to mention that Evangelical Christians have overwhelmingly supported political platforms that reward the greedy and impose great hardship on the poor and needy (those people that Jesus was closest to) and have become pharisaical in their attitudes towards those different from themselves.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture. The apple has fallen very, very far from the tree. So when you preach the evils of Darwinism and discuss how the secular world is attacking Christianity, you are engaging in the superfluous. You should be looking at the decay and corruption within, for that is what is truly destructive to Christianity. The state of Christianity today is perfectly reflected in Luke 11:39. Then the Lord said to him, "Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness."

So instead of setting up those who believe in evolution or Darwinism as ungodly, misinformed, duped, or otherwise posessing less wisdom than yourself (your first sentence is very condescending, though you may not have intended it to be) and creating a state of enmity, I would strongly recommend demonstrating love and compassion.

Last year, I got caught up in a multi-thead argument in the taekwondo section. While I stand by the accuracy of my statements, the fact is that I was not a peacemaker. I could have been, and I could have made the exact same points while doing so. But I didn't. And belief in Jesus didn't magically make it so that I did.

We all fall short, giving us the opportunity to do better, not to mention giving us that taste of humility that we all need from time to time. If we're imagining ourselves as being right and others as wrong and patting ourselves on the back for it as we critique and put down others, we end up being no different than the pharisee in Luke 18:9-11, who went to the temple thanking God that he was a righteous man while putting down the publican in the next pew who, unbenownst to the pharisee, actually had the ear of God.

 

[harlan]

@ Cyr:

I don't need to google, thank you. I have a Federal Repository at my fingertips, and some brilliant minds in this field available to me if need be. As for Wiki...considering issues of veracity, I wouldn't personally turn to that as my first reference.

You can be mean all you like, but if posting about skin color differences you are frankly dealing in devalued currency.

harlan...out

 

[Cyriacus]

@ Cyr:

I don't need to google, thank you. I have a Federal Repository at my fingertips, and some brilliant minds in this field available to me if need be. As for Wiki...considering issues of veracity, I wouldn't personally turn to that as my first reference.

You can be mean all you like, but if posting about skin color differences you are frankly dealing in devalued currency.

harlan...out

You seem to be looking too far into this. Why do you think skin pigmentation is the way it is? Do you think its just coincidence that it coincides with climate? Go to the federal respository then. I dont have that here in the middle of the desert. Or ask the brilliant minds - I promise you they wont tell you that skin color and other characteristics which are a result of evolution didnt just happen for fun.

Read my points in relation to the OP, not like theyre an attack on human evolution. I did say that this isnt how i look at it.
Im awaiting information which disproves what ive been saying.

 

[arnisador]

For those who actually believe that their great great great ancestors came from a bowl of soup that was runoff from a rock (evolution theory), you may find the true title of Darwin's book interesting. Darwin's book was originally titled "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." Darwin said that, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by the centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace, the savage races throughout the world. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows." You can see why dictators like Hitler (who used Nazi propaganda to make Germans believe that he was a Christian), REALLY liked Darwin's philosophy; it enabled them to embrace racism, and indoctrinate the masses to view people of different "races" as of a lesser species which hasn't "evolved" to their level yet (ie. an animal). The Theory of Evolution is a false religion that attempts to remove God from authority and puts man in his place. MACRO-evolution does not happen. You didn't come from a bowl of soup, and the world is much younger than 'scientists' would have you to believe. Please watch the video below for a more in depth look at the dangers of the theory of evolution.

Coming from a bowl of soup is abiogenesis, not evolution. Different theories.

Hitler was a Christian (Catholic) who also had other supernatural beliefs. He believed in the existence of the Christian god until the end. In any event, Hitler believing, or misusing, something doesn't make it false. He was working on an atomic weapon also. Atomic theory is valid even though he believed in it.

For your quote of Darwin, see this page on well-known misquotations of Darwin:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Notable_Charles_Darwin_misquotes

The world is probably not much younger than scientists believe it to be.

Even there were 'dangers of the theory of evolution' it wouldn't mean anything about its truth or falsehood.

Kent Hovind is a well-known pseudo-scientific crank with diploma mill degrees.

 

[arnisador]

Of course we did not come from soup, we came from wood. Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve made the first man and woman, Ask and Embla, from a tree on the beach.

Heretic! There is no evidence to suggest that the tree was on a beach.

 

[arnisador]

The INSTANT one uses the term 'race'

It meant something different to Darwin, in his time, where he also spoke of the different races of cabbages, for example. The term is loaded now in a way it wasn't in the 1850s.

 

[crushing]

Also, i *think* the all-people-originating-from-africa thing was debunked.

Presently it is understood that both Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam lived in Africa, although they may have lived up to 140,000 years apart.

 

[Daniel Sullivan]

It meant something different to Darwin, in his time, where he also spoke of the different races of cabbages, for example. The term is loaded now in a way it wasn't in the 1850s.

Words shift in their meaning as they cross borders and years. Darwin was a ninteenth century Englishman, so his words are crossing both borders and years. Many English words are used differently in England than they are in the United States. While some people do not take that into account when they comment on Darwin's words, others actively use those shifts in meaning to support their own agendas.

 

[Sukerkin]

Aye, from Harlan's reactions I was thinking that 'race', which is an innocuous word to me, denoting nothing more than a roughly 'continental' definition of different appearances of human being, meant something rather more emotive and sinister to him. Words do have agreed meanings but those can vary from place to place and time period to time period so we have to tread carefully sometimes if we don't want to give true offence when no such thing is intended.

 

[Daniel Sullivan]

Aye, from Harlan's reactions I was thinking that 'race', which is an innocuous word to me, denoting nothing more than a roughly 'continental' definition of different appearances of human being, meant something rather more emotive and sinister to him. Words do have agreed meanings but those can vary from place to place and time period to time period so we have to tread carefully sometimes if we don't want to give true offence when no such thing is intended.

In the United States, the term 'race' is very much a loaded word. It has been less than a century since the Civil Rights movement and there are still people in the United States who believe that their skintone gives them more rights than those of a differing skintone. Though not quite as much now, inter-racial couples still raise eyebrows with some people. It shouldn't, but it does. Some of it is also regional; certain attitudes are more prevalant in certain parts of the country than they are in others. You frequently see a microcosm of this in the states, where parts of the state are more open and progressive and other parts are not.

The debate about immigration is, to a great extent, impacted by it as well due to differences in skintone. There are people in my family who assume that every Hispanic that they see is an illegal immigrant. It is ignorant, but that attitude is not confined to just a few people. If it were only a few crackpots who thought that way, it wouldn't be an issue.

But the fact is that in the United States, skintone is the basis for a lot of prejudice.

 

[Sukerkin]

Sadly, with events of recent times, it's sliding back that way over here too .

For a little while it looked like we were getting somewhere and that, whilst there would ever be those with racist attitudes amongst us, on the whole we were going to be just fine as a multi-ethnic country. After all, we've been that way for a couple of thousand years really - time smoothed out the appearance differences and we were all 'British', whichever tribe our roots were originally in.

My own family is a good way of pointing out how we are all a mixed bag of genes. I'm probably the most 'Celtic' or sort-of-Viking looking of the siblings, one of my sisters is very Nordic and my other sister could easily pass for Spanish. Getting hung up on race is so silly it makes me grind my teeth but the extremist groups do like an obvious difference in appearance to point to .

 

[SahBumNimRush]

i could say that because "From ~1.2 million years ago to less than 100,000 years ago, the ancestors of all people alive were dark-skinned Africans."

And then we "non-Africans" bred with Neanderthals, from the north.. . Producing "fair skinned half breeds". Today, non-Africans contain 1-4% Neanderthal DNA.

http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-human-interbreed-dna.htm

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10
/neanderthal_and_denisovan_genetics_human_ancestors_interbred_with_extinct.html

http://news.discovery.com/human/genetics-neanderthal-110718.htm

 

[SahBumNimRush]

My own family is a good way of pointing out how we are all a mixed bag of genes. I'm probably the most 'Celtic' or sort-of-Viking looking of the siblings, one of my sisters is very Nordic and my other sister could easily pass for Spanish.

I bet you are closer to the 4% Neanderthal DNA.. . :bangahead:

 

[Sukerkin]

:nods: Aye, I have heard that connection for us Western European types - tho' it was my understanding that the genetic link was stronger for blond hair and blue eyes?

 

[elder999]

So much to address here, and I'm stuck in class with only my phone.... :lfao: talk about torture!:lfao:......For starters, though, perhaps a biologist might point out the differences between macro and micro evolution, if there is one.... :lfao:

 

[Sukerkin]

:grins: Be strong, mate - those walls will not always contain you and your erudition can burst free of it's iPhone chains .

 

[SahBumNimRush]

it was my understanding that the genetic link was stronger for blond hair and blue eyes?

Yeah, I believe you are correct. Wonder where that puts me as a red head?

 

[Daniel Sullivan]

For starters, though, perhaps a biologist might point out the differences between macro and micro evolution, if there is one.... :lfao:

At least in how the terms are popularly used, there is a difference.

Macro evolution is evolution from one distinct species into another distinct species. Therapod dinosaurs evolving into birds over millions of years would be macro evolution.

Micro evolution is the evolution of traits within a species. Humanity spreading to different parts of the world and evolving traits that enhance their living in those parts of the world (skintone, hair texture, etc.) nets different varieties of humans, but they're all still human.

We induce micro evolution by breeding dogs; I can mix labradors and poodles, pick out the ones that have the best traits of both and breed them as Labradoodles (which someone already has done). While a Labradoodle is neither Labrador nor poodle, it is still a dog.

Again, to take it back to the OP, I don't really care if an evangelist can win a creation/evolution debate. So at the end of the day the moderator declares him victorious. So what? First of all, it proves nothing except that his debating skills were better than his opponents. But more importantly, in the time it took the evangelist to win his debate, hundreds of children died of starvation, and nobody is going to convert just because he won a debate anyway.

So instead of arguing with people about how old the earth is or digging up evolutionary conspiracy theories, if you really want to spread Christianity, go out and do charitable works. Feed the hungry, cloth the naked, house the homeless. Faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and arguing about the age of the Earth on the internet does not fall into the category of works as it relates to one having saving faith.

 

[Sukerkin]

Time for some research I reckon, Dr. Rush . It's one great thing, other than the delights that fora such as this can bring, that I think the Internet has really made easier - in 'ancient times' it could take me days and a fair bit of travel to find the books I needed to research something that wasn't covered well in the encyclopedias and other texts I physically owned.

 

[harlan]

True, but if one can't convert them, one can kill them. At least, that seems to be an age-old tried and true method of 'winning'.

And while the internet is fluff, is it part of a serious 'war of words' going on by certain groups for idealogical supremacy/legitimacy.

At least in how the terms are popularly used, there is a difference.

Macro evolution is evolution from one distinct species into another distinct species. Therapod dinosaurs evolving into birds over millions of years would be macro evolution.

Micro evolution is the evolution of traits within a species. Humanity spreading to different parts of the world and evolving traits that enhance their living in those parts of the world (skintone, hair texture, etc.) nets different varieties of humans, but they're all still human.

We induce micro evolution by breeding dogs; I can mix labradors and poodles, pick out the ones that have the best traits of both and breed them as Labradoodles (which someone already has done). While a Labradoodle is neither Labrador nor poodle, it is still a dog.

Again, to take it back to the OP, I don't really care if an evangelist can win a creation/evolution debate. So at the end of the day the moderator declares him victorious. So what? First of all, it proves nothing except that his debating skills were better than his opponents. But more importantly, in the time it took the evangelist to win his debate, hundreds of children died of starvation, and nobody is going to convert just because he won a debate anyway.

So instead of arguing with people about how old the earth is or digging up evolutionary conspiracy theories, if you really want to spread Christianity, go out and do charitable works. Feed the hungry, cloth the naked, house the homeless. Faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and arguing about the age of the Earth on the internet does not fall into the category of works as it relates to one having saving faith.