By Carls S ~
There's another term for "intelligent design" - "Not Paying Attention.” Home schooling is the last-ditch effort to keep kids from finding out how Nature really works. Huge blinders are required and denial is indoctrinated. Talk about failure to evolve and adapt!
Darwin first started thinking about evolution by noting how breeders and plant hybridizers selected for certain traits, with results such as beefier cattle, faster race horses, splendid flowers, larger, tastier fruits, etc.
Humans design for purposes, but evolution is not itself designed. Natural selection is a hit-and-miss system, with a lot of misses strewn all along the trips, and what‘s left is just practical enough to get by. Adapt or perish is usually the prime criteria. There's no designer designing nature. And what's the "purpose” of a black widow spider, a 17 year locust, newly-discovered crabs deep in the ocean at poisonous vents, planet quakes on nearby planets, billions of stars? "Choice" is not a word you would use to describe their existence. “Chaos” would be more realistic, honest.
During the few years my brothers and I spent in parochial school, we were taught that, “God created us, and each of us had a purpose" (outside of the obvious eventual purpose to be with him in heaven). "Guidance” through the school years consisted in telling us how, as individuals, just what directions God was guiding us in making choices according to his wishes. In other words, "God has a plan for you," because after all, you were specifically designed to follow that plan, that intelligently designed purpose for us, one and all. Surely, this is a very "romantic" and reassuring way to answer life's multiple questions and demands - one size fits all? (Don’t laugh; millions ascribe to this.) This "explanation" is itself a construct of imaginations, except that it is by nature, incompatible with nature, which couldn't care less what you believe, and goes on doing what it does; you work with it. Nature has no intelligent purpose, and we are ALL of nature, made up of all the elements of the universe, subject to change, circumstances, bodily limits, limitations on what we can change for our purposes. We, too, design, procreate, make tools, and survive through adaptation and thinking, just like most organisms. If we didn‘t, we wouldn’t last.
The fossil record shows us that all previous species on this earth ultimately failed. My father made a very good living adapting and designing large scale equipment for earth-moving equipment. If he had a similar 99+% failure rate, his family would have starved to death; i.e., he would have been an "Intelligent Designer." If you could compare the corn Columbus found, eaten by native Americans, with the corn you eat today, you would see and taste the results of manipulated hybridization, and it becomes obvious that there is no designer behind it doing it 'right' in the first place. As that farmer being told to "thank God" for his abundant crops said, "You should have seen it when God ran the place alone." The very process of human tampering is necessary to make food more fruitful, tasty, abundant - evidence of it's inadequacy in the first place.
So, wait just a damned minute, before you go any further. Whatever your purpose in giving MY life a purpose is, I'm skeptical. Like a non-trusting Pinocchio, I'm not entering your Pleasureland, lest I become a beast of burden ass, a trained slave to no purposes than those of others. And no one else should, either. Nature and my nature don’t work that way. Are we not the designers of our own mental lives?
There's another term for "intelligent design" - "Not Paying Attention.” Home schooling is the last-ditch effort to keep kids from finding out how Nature really works. Huge blinders are required and denial is indoctrinated. Talk about failure to evolve and adapt!
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| The ligne is still used by French and Swiss watchmakers (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Humans design for purposes, but evolution is not itself designed. Natural selection is a hit-and-miss system, with a lot of misses strewn all along the trips, and what‘s left is just practical enough to get by. Adapt or perish is usually the prime criteria. There's no designer designing nature. And what's the "purpose” of a black widow spider, a 17 year locust, newly-discovered crabs deep in the ocean at poisonous vents, planet quakes on nearby planets, billions of stars? "Choice" is not a word you would use to describe their existence. “Chaos” would be more realistic, honest.
During the few years my brothers and I spent in parochial school, we were taught that, “God created us, and each of us had a purpose" (outside of the obvious eventual purpose to be with him in heaven). "Guidance” through the school years consisted in telling us how, as individuals, just what directions God was guiding us in making choices according to his wishes. In other words, "God has a plan for you," because after all, you were specifically designed to follow that plan, that intelligently designed purpose for us, one and all. Surely, this is a very "romantic" and reassuring way to answer life's multiple questions and demands - one size fits all? (Don’t laugh; millions ascribe to this.) This "explanation" is itself a construct of imaginations, except that it is by nature, incompatible with nature, which couldn't care less what you believe, and goes on doing what it does; you work with it. Nature has no intelligent purpose, and we are ALL of nature, made up of all the elements of the universe, subject to change, circumstances, bodily limits, limitations on what we can change for our purposes. We, too, design, procreate, make tools, and survive through adaptation and thinking, just like most organisms. If we didn‘t, we wouldn’t last.
The fossil record shows us that all previous species on this earth ultimately failed. My father made a very good living adapting and designing large scale equipment for earth-moving equipment. If he had a similar 99+% failure rate, his family would have starved to death; i.e., he would have been an "Intelligent Designer." If you could compare the corn Columbus found, eaten by native Americans, with the corn you eat today, you would see and taste the results of manipulated hybridization, and it becomes obvious that there is no designer behind it doing it 'right' in the first place. As that farmer being told to "thank God" for his abundant crops said, "You should have seen it when God ran the place alone." The very process of human tampering is necessary to make food more fruitful, tasty, abundant - evidence of it's inadequacy in the first place.
So, wait just a damned minute, before you go any further. Whatever your purpose in giving MY life a purpose is, I'm skeptical. Like a non-trusting Pinocchio, I'm not entering your Pleasureland, lest I become a beast of burden ass, a trained slave to no purposes than those of others. And no one else should, either. Nature and my nature don’t work that way. Are we not the designers of our own mental lives?
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