Joe Kelley
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Discussion isn't popular on this forum. I think in terms of the difference between alternating and direct current. The reader can decide to think or not.
What brings me back to this topic is the idea that something needs to be uncovered, more or less, than it currently is covered.
Let me add that the covering is falsehood.
If someone raises their hand and says "I don't believe in evolution", then, that someone may find themselves covered with stones.
I am going to link this to Joe and see if he responds - Sobran.
I like Joe. I like me too - sometimes.
Work work work. Funny thing is - my ankle will soon be operated on.
Open your books to page 4:
As I hope to show in what follows, this error amounts to a literal perversion of the most important - area of knowledge to an instrument for the continued debasement, exploitation, and enslavement of man. It is, in fact, an error which, if wallowed to run its course, will one day send the species into the evolutionary shadows. there it will not matter if it expires with the bang and boom of farewell in an atomic or H-bomb holocaust, or with the whimper of exhaustion and decay.
That is a reference to the term 'evolution' as an observable phenomenon. Darwinism, on the other hand, is eluded to later in this book (to be linked).
Page 7:
This volume is designed to sound an alarm. It aspires to make a diagnosis of a sickness that debilitates our civilization and immobilizes the hands that should cure it. However feebly, it tries to write a prescription for use by all of us, especially by those whose concern is with the conditions of man singly or in his larger units. Admittedly, the prescription is a primitive one, compounded - as it has to be at this stage of awareness - of the basest elements. But is no less the prescription demanded by the disease.
Page 11
Stripped to its essentials, the above summary represents a statement of a proposition that men everywhere have accepted. If they do not take it for the aim of their lives, they regard it as a mode and pattern for living which will, at least, guarantee the realization of such aims as they have. Uncritically, and with little resistance, they have incorporated this collection of ideas into the very fabric of their existences, have made of them one big Idea by which to live. They arrange their affairs by it, judge their acts by it, weigh their values by it. Hardly ever do they call it into question, hardly ever do they dispute its soundness, and never do they consider its implications or its consequences. Blindly, trustingly, they assume its correctness, applaud and honor those who propagate it, scorn and revile those who fail or refuse to acknowledge its verity. Indeed, the idea that the best way of life is the way of adjustment has become an article of faith. And more than this, in its mandatory form it has, by popular subscription, been elevated to the status of an addition to the Decalogue, a virtual Eleventh Commandment.
Page 17:
When behavior scientist, philosophers, and educators joined the crusade to stifle the human spirit under the aegis of adjustment, they were not associating themselves with a new movement that appeared in the early days of the twentieth century by magic or sudden inspiration. Actually, they were joining a parade formed long centuries ago, and binding themselves to a notion which has characterized if not determined much of the course of human history. In the line of march in this parade these newcomers have a curious position: they stand near the pseudo Darwinians, and their neighbors are - strange partners! - the apologists for capitalism and the followers of Marx.
I am trying to find something specific (as I type) written in this book concerning "Darwinism" and "Evolution". I am transfering words that may spark an objective disinterest in the reader - as I go looking.
Ahhh - here it is on page 19. I have to pick and choose what to write in the effort to economize the transfer.
Since the time of Paul's defection there have been many martyrs to the cause of real human freedom and dignity, but they are lost among the hordes who joined the conspiracy to make human beings servile and to contain the bright, creative promise of Everyman. It would be tiresome for both writer and reader to catalogue here the persons who became the advocates of the myth of adjustment or the movements they led for the same reason. Suffice it to say that down the centuries, across the eras, and through the rise and fall of cultures, this perversion of truth has shackled humanity. Seized upon by princes and scholars, used by popes and bishops, employed by conquerors and adventurers, it has performed for them the work of rendering men nonresistant to conquest and manipulation. In the past century it was given a mighty impetus by what appeared to be scientific affirmation and support. This came in the form of evolutionary theory; but it was based upon what is now known to have been a calculated misreading of Darwin, a misreading influenced by the rising tide of capitalism. What, indeed, could be more convincing of the worth of conformity than what seemed to be biology's demonstration that only what "adjusted" survived? Insects changed color, animals strained to produce new limbs, forms evolved by painful distortion of self in mute subservience to a principle that appeared a fixed, immutable, universal rule. Writ large and plain, therefore, in characters clearly comprehensible even to a child, was the presumptive law of the universe: Adapt! Adjust!
At first it was difficult to reconcile the law of adaptation with evolution's other great discovery, the law of the survival of the fittest, since the latter was initially assumed to argue counter to it for a jungle rule and a ruthless kind of individualism. Indeed, a rising capitalist class was quick to seize upon this "scientific" rationalization for its relentless tactics. But by an adroit intellectual gymnastic, fitness and adaptation were soon correlated, and the reconciliation of these opposites was accomplished in a manner satisfactory to all. From this correlation, moreover, a certain amount of assurance could be derived; for now not only was one obeying natural law when he strove to adjust, he was also establishing thereby his fitness for survival and laying an oblique claim to be counted among the strong who deserved to - and would - survive.
http://www.biblio.com/books/25651454.html
Back to Joe Sobran:
“Here I am with this cow and this grass; what being could enjoy better felicity?” Touché.
From:
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070515.shtml
Last edited on Fri Jun 1st, 2007 02:55 pm by Joe Kelley |
