Duncan, Know Thyself

I don't know if Duncan was referring to the series I've been posting with passages from The Bible Makes Sense,  I don't know if he is aware of more about what I do here than what a few of his regulars misrepresent and lie about on his blog, I am certain he knows about that because it happens there every day.   That post where he accuses Christians of not knowing, as he put it in his jr. high level way, the "buy-bell" made me think first of the time Richard Dawkins embarrassed himself on BBC 4 while declaring that most Christians weren't Christians because they didn't know the Bible or were unable to answer questions about it.   When pressed by the Rev Giles Fraser to state the full title of On the Origin of Species, after assuring him that he could, he couldn't do it.   And he's the self ordained high priest of Darwinism.

To take just a typical example of the same kind of thing among the atheists and secularists, I can guarantee you that almost none of the Darwin fan club, including those among Duncan's regulars have read him or understand his theory of natural selection and his own support for its appalling social and political applications and the rest of what I was shocked to discover over about the last decade and a half.   I know that because I was both one of the regulars at his blog and I was someone who bought the common received wisdom about the phony, post-war Charles Darwin which fell apart as soon as I did what I hadn't done before, read the first hundred pages of his second book,  The Descent of Man and realized that his citations proved I'd been sold a whopper of a lie ever since high school.   A lie which  I would guess, most American atheists believe with all their hearts, though I'm certain Dawkins knows better because he certainly has read the books and read Darwin's glowing endorsements of Galton and Greg and Haeckel and made his own assertions about the great benefits of letting poor people, sick people, the disabled die of neglect if not by outright slaughter, complaining about the dysgenic effects of vaccination, medical care and the horrifically bad level of support given the destitute by the work houses of Victorian Britain.  It's right there for all to see. 

In short, Charles Darwin would have fit right in with the worst of the Republicans on economics, provided they didn't oppose the teaching of evolution.  It was one of the first things I realized,  that Darwin's belief in his own theory led to him agreeing with the worst of economic theory.   And if Richard Dawkins bothered to read the fifth and sixth editions of On the Origin of Species, he would know that Darwin, himself, said that Natural Selection, proper, was identical to Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism and that he said so at the urging of his co-inventor of the idea,  Alfred Russell Wallace.

As any number of people who have read the scriptures could tell you, the economics laid down in the Bible not only might serve as the source of American liberal economic thinking (I'm convinced it is the actual origin of it), it is more radically redistributive downward than anything that any radical economic expert ever thought of.  In practice the theories of Marx produced a horror.   It certainly makes the program of the British Labour Party, even today, look like the trafficking in pittances that Marilynne Robinson pointed out it was in her great and neglected book,  Mother Country.   Darwinian economics are so brutal and so awful that even Richard Dawkins has said the human society they produced is one no one would want to live in.  I'd add no one except the most depraved of the Darwinists*.  And those have, actually, shown us what can happen when you base a political regime on Darwinian biology.

So, are the regulars at Duncan's blog who don't know that because they never read any of Darwin's science not true believers in Darwinism?   Not to mention the other, enormous areas of science that they believe in on pretty much the same basis as a devotee of some alleged supernatural apparition believes in that?  That's something that we all have no choice in doing because no one, not even the most accomplished scientists can know more than a small bit of science and have to take most of what they accept as knowledge in that area on faith.

And when it comes to the social sciences, what a naive faith it must be because the social sciences are about the most faith-based academic fields there are.  I do find it funny that someone whose claim to intellectual credibility is based on his PhD in economics would fault someone else for faith in something that is too big to know and which is, pretty much, in the business of selling assertions about a huge and mysterious phenomenon they neither can know or understand.

So much more could be said about the house religion of Duncan's regulars but I've got to get back to regular business.   I think we could agree on one thing, too many people who profess Christianity aren't very good at knowing it and doing it - something, which, by the way,  Jesus predicted and warned about - if American Christians really believed that they were to do unto others as they would have done unto them, American democracy and a genuinely traditional American liberal economics would flourish.  The entirety of egalitarian democracy with economic and social justice is warranted under that saying and reinforced and extended by others.  Atheism provides nothing similar, materialism undermines and rejects it.

*  Including his own son who ran for a seat in parliament on a Darwinist program, including opposing vaccinations.   Luckily he lost.   But I will point out again that as Francis Galton's successor as the leader of British eugenics,  he agitated for Germany to adopt eugenics, despairing that they wouldn't until he was thrilled as could be when the Nazis came to power and instituted their eugenics laws.  If Duncan missed me pointing it out,  Leonard Darwin said in April of 1939 that his father's thinking had led to Germany being turned "in the right direction".  The same year they started the actual, industrial program of mass murder and started World War Two to implement an overtly Darwinian program of replacing the population of Poland with "Aryans".