Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Gray locates the West's supposed secularism deep within the Christian tradition; indeed, "secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society which had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought."

One day, humans would be able to rise above their messy, irrational natures and be freed from the inconvenient bond of marriage, blood ties and property rights.

The idea that one can be motivated solely by reason to defend reason is incoherent. . . an Enlightenment purged of the non-rational is a chimera. If it is good to know, and if we have a duty to truth, then Enlightenment does not escape from the realm of moral judgements.

In a philosophy book I read recently it was said that atheism is merely a cult within Christianity. I think he means that the atheist can have all the benefits of Christianity and absolve himself from any checks to his self-indulgence. That he "cherry-picks" his beliefs on utilitarian grounds.

Im sorry I missed the mornings lectures by Prof Spendius. However I was in urgent need of a haircut.

I'd like to know what impartial book wrote this. Or was it perhaps something you interpreted from the great philosophy book formerly known as the bible?

Coolwhip wrote-

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I'd like to know what impartial book wrote this. Or was it perhaps something you interpreted from the great philosophy book formerly known as the bible?

Iamb sorry. I gave it a go but couldn't find the reference.

Part of the idea is that the common and popular argument, which has been seen on here, that God does not exist because if he did he wouldn't allow all the evil we see to take place is Christian through and through.

Such a proposition rests for us on the Christian conception of evil.

What for us is evil is not always so in other cultures. We would consider it evil, for example, to fasten our best examples of the male to a flat rock with torches burning around it and have the high priestess cut out his heart and offer it to the moon, as the drumming and wild dancing reaches a crescendo, with a fiendish shriek in the hope the gods would send more goodies for her personal comforts and those of her acolytes who would also shriek in sympathic harmonies as one might expect. In some cultures such practices would be the epitome of good manners and correct etiquette as those who undertake religious ceremonies of the type vaguely described are not aware that they lead to ruination.

Hence the evil which the anti-IDers say is proof of the non-existence of God is a Christian concept and thus those who use that argument are Christian to the core of their being.

Psychologists have long argued that we are what heredity and nurture make us and thus if one is born and brought up in a Christian world one is Christian through and through and cannot escape being no matter how much one twists and weaves the threads of language to justify one's degeneracy and sinfulness.

Wittgenstein taught us that there is no connection between a word and what it depicts in the world of reality except in its usefulness as a picture we have of that reality which is more or less a unity within a given culture and its language. And there are cultures within cultures right down to households and street gangs who use some words in ways outsiders don't understand. Even lovers.

Something like that. fresco knows more about that than I do.

If you grew up in the English language you grew up with Christian pictures. Like the one we have of evil. Denying it is an acceptable form of vandalism within the lower middle-class. Further down the social order the type break windows.

Why did a quote of my "I'm sorry" turn into "lamb sorry" after CW copied and pasted?

I hope it isn't scientific technological expertise showing signs of fraying at the edges like Jean Luc Goddard predicted in Alphaville.

Lust is one of art's favourite subjects. Or, at least, it used to be. But to understand what was going through Lucas Cranach's mind in Germany at the beginning of the 16th century, when he painted the charming Adam and Eve that is the focus of an enticing new display at the Courtauld Gallery, we need to understand lust in the old way, and not in the new way. Which is to say, we cannot approve of it on any level. We cannot show it any tolerance or allow it any mitigating circumstance. We cannot mistake it for a mere human foible, and we cannot, most certainly, in any situation, forgive it. To understand Cranach's Adam and Eve, to understand any of his paintings in which naked chaps are paired with naked girls in pretty forest clearings, we need to recognise lust as an atom bomb of sins: the ultimately destructive human weakness, a lethal crack in our make-up through which everything that is terrible in the world slunk in.

What is the anti-IDers policy towards lust when everybody who is biologically "in play" knows that Darwinian sexual selection is grounded 100% in lust and the ensuing struggle for survival leaves a very large number of dead bodies in its wake.