Re: [TIED] Re: We, the weed

----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2000 5:05 AM
Subject: Re: [TIED] Re: We, the weed


Dany wrote in response to Glen:

> Huh. I was raised in a fundamentalist church (basically a
very conservative
> Presbyterian-Baptist-semiPentecostal amalgam), eventually
ended up a Roman
> Catholic. And the Catholic church is quite liberal and
tolerant compared to
> what I grew up in.
>
> Concerning evolution: I'm not a strict creationist, but I
have doubts about
> evolution, mainly because I haven't been impressed enough
with the evidence we
> have now -- plus nothing can't become something on its
own. If there was a Big
> Bang, where did it come from? (Not meant to be a plug for
God or religon or
> anything.)

Well, the evolution of life and the Big Bang theory are two
independent things from different departments of science.
What they have in common is just that both are disliked by
religious fundamentalists. No offence, Danny, but if you
haven't been impressed with the evidence for evolution, you
probably haven't read and seen enough. It's one of the
best-evidenced and logically most satisfying theories in the
natural sciences. Even the Vatican must have been impressed,
since the Pope has recently pronounced neo-Darwinian
evolution to be "more than a mere hypothesis" and something
that a Roman Catholic is permitted to accept. Perhaps
paradoxically, Teilhard de Chardin's interpretation of
evolution in theological terms is still officially regarded
as somewhat heretical (and serves him right, the wooly
philosopher), while the "lay" version is OK.

> ... But what scares me is when someone
> takes ideas such as Indo-European palaeontology or what
not, and turns it into
> an entire argument for Aryan supremacy or what not.
(Anybody remember the
> highly anti-African book _The Bell Curve_ by the way?)

When the Nazis were sending the Roma to concentration camps
it didn't occur to them that their victims had a much better
claim to the name "Aryan". When I was in a German university
town a few years ago, an Indian student was attacked and
badly beaten up by a gang of skinheads with Neo-Nazi
sympathies, to whom she wasn't Aryan enough.

Piotr