Monday, April 07, 2008

Reality Watch

Here's a new one: Controversial Creationist Book Hits Scots Universities (from Sunday Herald):
Under a picture of the collapsing Twin Towers, a caption reads: "No matter what ideology they may espouse, those who perpetrate terror all over the world are, in reality, Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy that places value on - and thus encourages - conflict."

Harun Yahya is the pen name of Adnan Oktar, an Istanbul-based writer. Under his pseudonym, Oktar has produced hundreds of books, videos and articles.
Now, it seems to me one would have to be uniquely dense to write hundreds of books and articles and not be aware that what was motivating one was some kind of conflict. So, then, to blame it all on Darwinism, to imply or infer yourself flawless: is that being more or less dense?

Conflict, one might hypothesize, is the very original source of our grasping for the sacred. And it is just this that the Darwinists don't get: why would the sacred, as represented by our transcendent language and religion, first emerge? The first sign of language could not have "evolved", as one day and one moment it did not exist, and on the next it did. By whom and how was it first created? That is a fundamental question, begging a minimal hypothesis, that the school of "evolution" ignores, or answers poorly, without the anthropological common sense one finds in religion.

Thus, as conflict, or our withdrawal from it, is, one might hypothesize, the source of the sacred, we are prone to scapegoat the other in our search for the sacred:
And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out...(Koran 2:191)
On the other hand, some religions admit the conflict is of all humanity and find hope in the realization that God is love and does not underwrite our human scapegoating.

Which - Darwinism, Islam, or Christianity - is the greater stumbling block to understanding why and how we come to write these words?

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