Writing a daily column offers some advantages. I get to write about issues that interest me and hopefully interest my readers. But there are always people out there who are downright nasty in the way they express their opinions about my opinions. You’re bound to upset people when you write on controversial topics, but some of the emails I get are over the top. Here’s one example by a guy who calls himself “Grimly Fiendish”:
“That still doesn’t excuse you from being a bible thumping idiot. What I enjoy the most about being Canadian is the fact that I can leave this conservative s**t-hole and go home, which I plan to do in the near future. I have had enough of the inbred sub moron level christians trying to legislate morality and force their archaic, hypocritical bulls**t down my throat. I guess that the inbreeding will take care of them eventually. Personally I would like to see Darwinism practiced on a more active level, at least if they try to cross the border into Canada. So frankly f**k you and I sincerely hope that you have not managed to breed so your faulty genetic material ends with you.”
Wow! This guy needs some help. He might consider a study of the Word-a-Day calendar to help him extend his limited vocabulary. His email is typical of those who protest the loudest with epithets standing in as arguments.
Other email writers are just misinformed, and the more they write the more ignorant they get. I received the following from an email writer yesterday. His ramblings are in bold.
“There is no debate in any of the universities or scientific circles around the world about Darwin.”
There is a debate, and it’s huge. Where have you been on this issue? I suggest that you read Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.[1] Behe teaches biochemistry at Lehigh University. You also might want to take a look at the Michigan State University Press book of more than 600 pages edited by John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Myer: Darwinism, Design, and Public Education(2003). Then there’s Thomas Woodward’s Doubts About Darwin:A History of Intelligent Design.[2] Also don’t forget Denyse O’Leary’s By Design or by Chance: The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life in the Universe.[3] The debate is raging all around you. You don’t want to acknowledge it because your worldview is being challenged lock, stock, and barrel and can’t stand the scrutiny.
“Why is it still such a big issue down there in the intellectual backwater of Georgia?”
Actually, I’m originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Your comment smacks of misinformed regional bias. If something doesn’t come from New York, Massachusetts, or San Francisco, it’s not worthy of study. There is a debate over Darwinism because the theory is flawed and protected by a cadre of secular priests who know their religion is being questioned. They must do everything to keep the public from noticing that evolution is more religion than science. This means keeping informed competition at bay. Here’s how Darwinists react to protect their crumbling worldview. Notice its circularity:
“Anyone who attempts to challenge Darwin is not a real scientist, so anyone who submits an article to a scientific journal questioning the assumptions of Darwinism isn’t doing real science. We must protect the integrity and reputation of our journal; therefore our editors can’t allow unscientific articles to be published because to do so would challenge the operating premise of the journal, which of course, is Darwinism.”
Universities must also protect the Darwinian religion, so they post the following sign: “Non-Darwinists Need not Apply.”
“Don’t you think you have bigger problems than Charles Darwin to deal with?”
Charles Darwin IS the problem. Darwinism affects everything from racism and eugenics to rape, mass murder, and Columbine. Here are two examples from reviews of Martin Brookes’ book Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton.[4] Decades after Galton’s death, “his theories helped inspire the Nazi Holocaust.”[5] Here’s another example:
[Galton believed that] it was not only possible but desirable to selectively breed a super-race, by encouraging the fit and intelligent to mate with one another. His theories were to lead to a logical conclusion of their own—the state—sponsored sterilisation programmes of the early 20th century, and Nazi euthanasia.[6]
I suggest that you take a hard look at Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.[7] Modern-day applications of Darwinism are pretty easy to find. “When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed Darrell Scott’s daughter, Rachel Joy Scott, and 12 other students and teachers at Columbine High School, the two teens used Charles Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory to justify their actions. Harris even wore a ‘natural selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings.” There are other examples. A Columbine-style killing spree was foiled by an astute photo clerk in San Jose, California, when she alerted police based on photos dropped off for development that showed 19 year-old Al DeGuzman in a t-shirt saying “Natural Selection” and brandishing a pipe bomb and sawed-off shotgun. He had intended to gun down students at DeAnza College in Cupertino, California. Another Columbine copycat plot was foiled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in November 2001 with the arrest of Eric McKeehan (17) and two other students who planned to kill “thugs, preps, and faculty” at their high school by detonating explosives and opening fire as they fled. Among the items seized from McKeehan’s bedroom was a photo of Adolf Hitler whose book, Mein Kampf quoted from Darwin’s Origin of Species—notice the subtitle—by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. The shooter in Pearl, Mississippi, left behind writings extolling his admiration for Hitler and Nietzsche, both students of Darwinism. In the 1920s, Clarence Darrow appealed to a judge to sentence Leopold and Loeb—two self-pressed superiors of the Darwinian kind—to life in prison instead of death by hanging by arguing that they were inspired to commit murder from studying Nietzsche at the University of Chicago. Darrow also referenced Darwin’s theory by claiming that the two killers were “made that way” through the forces of nature gone wrong.
I suggest that you also look at C. T. Palmer and R. Thornhill’s A Natural History of Rape (1997).[8] The authors suggest that rape “is either an adaptation favored in past evolutionary environments by natural selection . . . or a by-product of other biological characteristics of human males, such as aggression and promiscuity.” In any event, rape has an evolutionary origin. Since the publication of A Natural History of Rape, evolutionists have fallen all over themselves to disassociate evolution from the morality of rape. Here’s how Palmer and Thornhill explain it: “There is no connection here between what is biological or naturally selected and what is morally right or wrong.”[9] Why not? What is it in the evolutionary theory that makes behaviors either morally right or wrong? As materialists, evolutionists cannot account for moral theory. Animals do not consider morality when they leave their weaker young to die or when they attack and kill other animals and eat them. Why should we? Dogs rape dogs. Cats rape cats. Why can’t humans rape humans? Given evolutionary assumptions, why is rape OK for dogs and cats but not for humans?
Before you write again, you need to do some more reading, and I don’t mean back issues of National Geographic. I’ve given you enough material to cogitate over for some time. When you are more informed, please feel free to write again.
Endnotes:
[1] Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, 1996.
[2] Baker Books, 2003.
[3] Augsburg Books, 2004.
[4] Bloomsbury, 2004.
[5] A review of Extreme Measures in The Week (February 18, 2005), 24.
[6] A review of Extreme Measures by Mark Henderson (August 21, 2004): www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1223728,00.html
[7] Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004.
[8] M.I.T. Press, 1997.
[9] www.nytimes.com/books/first/t/thornhill-rape.html