You can make an observation after everything settles down.
I don’t know about the US, but various religious organizations have done their bit in providing essentials for the poor in India. In fact, other than NGO’s (many of them christian), it was mosques, churches,temples and gurudwaras which stepped forward with relief activities.
Reasoning, empathy and cooperation are not things which are exclusive to humanists and absent in religious people.
Doctors,nurses and healthcare workers are at the forefront of the battle against COVID-19. Many of these (the vast majority atleast in India) are religious.
Its this kind of intentional blindness to reality that amazes me.
What protects the scientific method is the effectiveness of the method. People will use it because its effective.
You are afraid for no reason.
This sounds like politics to me… scaring people about things that will never happen, so that they will vote for you in order to be saved from the "others "evil guy…
Not really. Science is, as the postmodernists and the creationists like to remind us, a social activity. While it is true that people will always use scientific findings in such things as engineering because they are useful, it is surely NOT true that people will always maintain the integrity of science in such things as evolutionary biology just because good science generates good results. There are always fundamentalists on the march against science, and there likely always will be.
Yes, it’s politics, and yes, the fundamentalists are in the business of scaring people. And there are good reasons to be scared of the fundamentalists, as the Trump and McFlightsuit administrations have shown us.
These things are usually a double edged sword and there is a political party at each end.
In india this is done through either religious differences such as between Hindus and muslims or through caste differences, pitting high castes against low castes.
One party scares the hindu to get votes, and another scares the muslims… similarly along caste lines also.
This way, people will identify themselves with a particular political party and sell their votes "cheap… fewer questions will be asked as long as the “other” guy is effectively squashed.
Politicians love identity politics. Makes them less accountable for the actual work they do.
Yes, but before you make me out for a fool, as you plainly are suggesting, you might want to consider whether it is just possible that these issues – the preservation of democracy against racist, halfwitted theocrats – might BE the important issue about which people are being distracted from asking questions. The other thing you might want to consider is that I’m not saying I am a single-issue voter on this subject. The reality is that I am very politically and economically conservative in areas that have nothing to do with this war against the halfwits, and those conservative views lead me to vote consistently for the Democratic party, which happily also happens, in addition to being the more politically conservative party of the two, to be the party identified with secular government.
There is nothing there that says any person mistreated on the basis of their skin color, or perceived physical or cognitive capacities, deserves to be mistreated.
There is nothing in biology that says we should treat anyone in some particular way. Hence there is no basis for claiming that evolution or science supports racism.
You are basically committing the naturalistic fallacy, like the people who reference putative differences between different ethnic groups are.
Is it your contention that if God created some ethnic group less physically capable, or less cognitively equipped, than some other ethnic group, that would justify mistreating them?
No, not missing the mark. Weikart is one of the “experts” on which the film relies, and as you point out, he did indeed despise the message science was bringing and so he attacked the messenger, Darwin, trying to basically slander the science away.
Surely you do not think John West has a reputation to lose, though, do you? Are you truly unable to cite a single source that any intelligent person could possibly respect?
We’ve discussed scientific racism several times before, including here, Reckoning With Human Zoos. There are far better sources than this documentary that you posted.
I think any sensible discussion of racism and origins will acknowledge that there was both scientific and theological racism. My issue with the video you linked is that it only tells half the story, the one about evolutionary racism. Here is an article I’d object to for the same reason, it only tells half the story, the other half, about creationist racism.
What do you think of it?
While Morris was the most effective 20th-century exponent of biblical creationism, his theories derived largely from those of the Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price, whose ideas derived in turn from those of Ellen G. White, founder-prophetess of Adventism. White had spoken of the evils of crossbreeding. Price ascribed the variety of human races to the dispersal after Babel, the deleterious effects of interbreeding, and environmental effects, which had given the Negro his dark skin, while, Price said, “his mind became a blank.”[2]
Apartheid beach sign (Natal, 1989) in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu, Guinogg via Wikipedia
Biblical literalism and creationism were used to support racial discrimination and bans on interracial marriage until quite recently. In South Africa, biblical literalism was used to justify apartheid, on the grounds that when God dispersed the various nations at Babel, He intended them to remain separate. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa supported apartheid until 1986. The Southern Baptist Convention, now the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with 15 million members, was formed, in 1845, specifically in defence of slavery, and did not apologise for this until 1995, when it adopted a resolution on racial reconciliation, and committed itself to the removal of racism. Bob Jones University, rigidly creationist and biblical literalist, and the publisher of numerous texts for creationist homeschooling, refused admission to black students until 1971, and denied admission to applicants engaged in an interracial marriage or known to advocate interracial marriage or dating until 2000.
The story on racism is far more expansive in both science and theology. I cover some of it in the GAE. What did you think of the chapter on polygenesis?
