This seems to me condescending to those apparently simple people who can’t accept truth without sugar-coating.
One can tolerate differences without accepting the truth of patently ridiculous stories. People are free to believe what they like, but they aren’t free to enlist science to prop up those stories. Go ahead and believe on faith; no problem.
Now that’s a serious distortion of the historical record. The main support of antisemitism has always been Christianity. Most Christian denominations in the south found biblical support for slavery. Religion has been as much a support for racism as has science, if not more so. One might even say that one of its functions is to separate “us” from “the other”.
Descent from Adam is no more a uniting factor than descent from an African population a few hundred thousand years ago.
I would question whether it’s a legitimate means of engaging those questions. And I deny that MLK makes sense only in a theological context.
Thanks for the tip, but I’m just answering the questions you give me. If you don’t want to talk to me about theology, I’m not pushing you to do so. You asked what I thought, and I am explaining.
Of course that is right. You are an atheist and MLK made sense to you. So certainly MLK makes sense outside a theological context. Never meant anything different.
There certainly have been many (and are many) racist Christians. I’m the first to acknowledge this. Even polygenesis came alongside both scientific and theological theories, so it is not as though only scientists brought it forward. Christians, however, are not the only racists, there have also been atheist racists. Honestly, seeing what see in society, I’m very glad that the evidence demonstrated that polygenesis is false.
Genealogical ancestry links us much more proximately, and this is important.
Remember, polygenesis (which we all should rejects) affirmed we all shared common ancestors a few hundred thousand years ago. However, scientists (and some Christians) argued several different types of humans arose, with different biological capabilities, that persisted to this day. In science took an immense amount of work from population geneticists like my colleague here at WUSTL Alan Templeton to figure out what the data really showed, that biological race is superficial, and human “lineages” are actually tightly linked. In theology, the resolute and total rejection of polygenesis as heresy became a key concern for many Christians. Now there is strong agreement from both Christians and scientists that polygenesis is false.
So we have moved passed polygenesis, but descent from an ancestral population 200,000 years ago was definitely not enough to affirm the unity of mankind in a meaningful way. Evidence from genetics of interbreeding everywhere is an important finding that was needed too. We are genetically linked much more tightly than a common ancestral population led us to believe. Genealogical ancestry binds us together even more tightly. The 2004 Nature article includes this beautiful picture:
To the extent that ancestry is considered in genealogical rather than genetic terms, our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu. http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureCommonAncestors-Article.pdf
Whether or not Adam was real, this seems to be a truly remarkable and important fact of the world. It certainly does teach a tighter unity than we first imagined. Is that not a beautiful thing?
There are so many irrational shibboleths being bandied about here, one can only conclude a deliberate unwillingness to understand, and instead, the consistent attempt to belittle those with whom you disagree, @John_Harshman .
That’s a position we have all come to expect here from time to time, but it is sad how truly uninformed and unwilling to get informed that some can be.
Thanks, however for helping Josh tune up his expression of ideas, though.
This is really not very clear. Am I to suppose that “it” means theology? What exactly is it that we do well to understand and recover now? What needs recovering? What I take from this is that King was a preacher, spoke with a preacher’s cadence, used lots of biblical allusions, and came to his ideas from a theistic perspective. But I don’t see the need to attribute some special power or virtue to theology therefore. His perspective was not unique to theism and need not emerge from theology at all. One can’t be sure it did even in his case. I suspect it emerged from his personal experience as a black man and from the example of Gandhi. I see your mention of King as no more than name-checking.
No real need; you’ve alluded to so many, including the hack phrase that the whole story is ridiculous. That pretty much sums up your approach to ancient historical research, so glad you’re here, getting straightened out on the rationality of those who have faith in the accounts as being communicatively meaningful and historical.
If you would like to discuss something I would be happy to argue any point. But if you just want to insult me, let me know and I will stand back and let you go on.
Instructing you in another’s viewpoint is not insulting you. You have a very seriously “falsely wounded” narrative going for yourself, as far as I can tell. That’s not an insult either, just an attempt to understand. Not interested in arguing. Arguing is a sad substitute for real dialogue and a fruitful interchange of ideas.
Perhaps you have the Monty Python view of argument, as simply contradiction or, perhaps, abuse. A real dialogue and fruitful interchange are impossible if you won’t tell me what, specifically, I’m saying that’s wrong, and why it’s wrong. You are not helping.
Perhaps you are more interested in trying to lampoon rather than to engage in dialogue. As students of history, we must give any ancient text the opportunity to be thoughtful and meaningful, first and foremost, rather than simply dismissing what we read, out of context, as “ridiculous.” The ancients were not morons. How can I be any clearer about your interpretive attitude? The rest follows from that. Believe me; I’m helping by confronting.
I never said the ancients were morons. But there are a lot of ancient stories that are, if understood as describing real history, silly. Any fairy tale from Grimm is equally silly. If you want to claim that Genesis is a collection of fairy tales, perhaps with didactic or metaphorical purpose, I’m willing to entertain the notion. But if you want to claim it records actual events, then it’s a reasonable response to say that the stories are silly, meaning absurd and implausible. Which is your position?
It’s silly of you not to recognize how overly simplistic and genuinely prejudiced you are against an ancient text. To read a modern translation without knowing its context and concluding as you have is the heighth of arrogance, silliness, and Monty-Pythonesque tomfoolery. Ciao!
This is truly not helpful, however much you may think it is. If you want to tell me I’m wrong about something, you need to provide particulars, evidence, and arguments. What context am I in need of? What is your position on any of this? Why?
You are an excellent demonstration for why Non-Christian don’t have much business on these boards. The “dual creation” scenarios discussed here are designed for Christians.
There are many helpful non Christians here. You should know that @gbrooks9. Rather than showing @John_Harshman the door, it would be great to include him in a better way.