re: #573 Charles

You’re completely eliminating the context.

You have been reading my comments, right? You do know I have no sympathy for creationism (and have gone even farther than you on how to deal with it politically)?

I’m not eliminating the context; I’m just going by what you quoted. The context was cropped by you! A better way to describe what I did would be “you are not looking at this in context”. “Eliminated” makes it sound like I’ve deliberately avoided citing it.

Please understand I’m not accusing you of “eliminating” it deliberately; you just grabbed a snapshot of it. But the context is gone, and I am not the one who lost it.

Glenn Beck is a creationist, who has bought into the standard creationist falsehood that evolution led directly to Nazi Germany. That’s what was behind this statement — not just a description of eugenics.

And when he does that I will be among the first to attack him for it. But in this case he went after the gene-tweaking, the “nice” brave-new-world eugenicism which is going to come out of embryonic stem cell research.

And no matter how you cut it, “Let’s put science truly in her place” is a disgusting statement.

Maybe it is. But he cited that as a thought-process of eugenicists. At no point in that excerpt is he citing what non-eugenists should do. It doesn’t stand to the nature of human speech that he would switch from talking about progressives, and then whipsaw to talking about his suggestion, and then whipsaw back to progressivism. If he had, I would have suspected an editorial change in the text, which we can all rule out immediately.

I know of what I speak, Charles; I have a degree in Ancient Mediterranean Civilisation which was heavily involved in textual criticism.

So maybe Beck is antiscience. But not in this quote. This quote is anti abuse of science by progressives.