Why do you say in your opening remarks ‘only in the United States?”

@Geoffrey51 ummmm, the UK, home of raucous debate in their House & Commons? And the Magna Carta?
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@Beowulfsfriend I wiah i was surprised to hear it but no, i knew, and it sucks, to lut it mildly.

g

Victims of child abuse and people trafficking are the lucky ones eh? Perhaps they could consider their ‘outrageous gifts’ and put them to some use!

Life is only wonderful if you are a middle class white male in the First World.

Naive complacency only enhanceds these other people’s terrors.

Yes and in the most religious states too.

@abyers1970 Everywhere, secular governments too.

Muslims are being rejected everywhere because they carry the most profound ignorance. Islam is darkness. No one who is aware of what has happened when islam has come to conquer, wants muslims in the neighborhood.

@Jacar all religions are ignorant, all have their own darkness, they all suck ass!

Even Chinese atheists (communist party) are killing and imprisoning musies and some xtions and, even some practitioners of Qi Gong (I do it - it is like a slow version of Tai Chi). The Chinese have a Qi Gong master with 60 million followers - too scary to allow someone like that around.

Agree. There are still Christians that think we should go back to Old Testament justice.

The Rwanda war was all about Catholics killing Catholics , encouraged by the priests.

@Jacar no it wasn’t. It was about retribution after the Belgians left bringing an end to colonial rule and the preferred treatment of the Tutsi over the Hutu.

Incorrect. Darwin for instance was a member of the Church of England up to his death. He wrestled with his science and his religious beliefs throughout his life, but refused to give up all the way to his deathbed.

Newton and Religion
The sheer scale of Newton's investigations into Church history, prophecy, and natural theology demonstrates that religion was central to his life. He grew up in a religious environment, and his uncle, stepfather, and early patron were all Church of England clergymen.

A few years after Newton’s Principia was published in 1687, the classical scholar and theologian Richard Bentley posed a series of penetrating questions to Newton about its religious implications. Newton responded by reassuring Bentley that one of the reasons for composing the Principia had been to invite intelligent people to consider the nature of God more closely. Through these exchanges, Bentley forced Newton himself to think much more carefully about God’s role in maintaining the cosmos.
[thenewatlantis.com]

In order to teach at Cambridge. Newton would have had to put up a theist front. In the end his beliefs put him into a nonorthodox classification. They were marginal enough to have been heretical at the time.

If I'm not mistaken, the Golden Age (Age) came about 400 years after Galileo.

“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.” Charles Darwin
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"But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-82
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"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." Charles Darwin

@Archeus_Lore Thank you for those quotes.

Charles Darwin flunked out of medical school his first semester. his embarrassed father, a famous surgeon, sent Charles to Christ's College at Cambridge to study and become an abbot. True story... few know though. He basically stole the Evolution work from a man employed by the Darwin Family, Alfred Russel Wallace who was "coincidently" studying finches in Central America under their employ. SMH

@t1nick ~ Yes, Galileo live in the century before Newton, who lived in the century before Paine, who lived in the century before Darwin. Spanning the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries.

@ExculpatoryLover

Incorrect. Wallace was several years younger than Darwin. Wallace took his journey of exploration nearly a decade after Darwin did. Darwin had already written the Origin of Species when Wallace returned to London.

This is a wonderful example of the contemporaneous evolution of a scientific principle. Knowledge does not occur in a vacuum. Darwin and Wallace's contemporaneous development was foreshadowed beforehand given the plethora of work that proceeded them (eg Lyell, Linnaeus, etc.). The time was ripe for this advancement and they were in the right place and the right time.

Wallace quite possibly could have been attributed with originating the concept of evolution had he spoken first at the Royal Society of London, but Charles spoke first.

True Darwin was an indifferent student at Cambridge, (much like Einstein was in his undergraduate work) when he was getting his undergraduate. He found his calling in Naturalism onboardi the Beagle. I consider Darwin in the same light as Newton or Einstein, or Stephan Hawking. His powers of observation, for taking disparate pieces of evidence and connecting the dots puts him up their among the greats.

Your true story is just one more conspiracy theory and untrue like most conspiracy theories. Publically, Darwin never abandoned the church. He questioned the church in his private writings, but ultimately could not publically denounce. A sign of the historic times and the danger of being shunned and his reputation destroyed.

@ExculpatoryLover I've heard that before. However, I believe it is still in the area of opinion. Darwin did, however, bring the theory of evolution to public light and even today some religious people choose creationism over evolution.

@ExculpatoryLover Yes, I was referring to the 19th century as recognized as the golden age of reason. But ever since the renaissance there have been courageous smart thinkers that bucked the church and risked public and church punishment.

@t1nick Thank you for your erudite posts. It’s important that the fact of a matter is laid out to counter some of the folklore and, on some occasions deception, peddled here.

Yes it’s like a religious Trump card. I’m a Christian and if you disagree with me you’re going to hell