At the home page of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, Dawkins explains that he wanted to write his most recent book, The God Delusion six years ago but his literary agent was horrified. He was told “don’t even think about it.” But that was then and now is…
Archeologists in Ethiopia reported yesterday the discovery of a 3.3 million-year-old fossil humanoid: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060920/sc_nm/ethiopia_fossil_dc_1 It will be amusing to see how creationists write off this discovery. Perhaps by "finding" yet another "gap" in the fossil record?
This cartoon makes a nice point.
This Guinness commercial is quite entertaining, if not entirely substantiated by the fossil record. While watching this I had to wonder what Charles Darwin would have thought.
A follow up, answer, another viewpoint…
The title is somewhat rhetorical. Hate–in its undiluted, culturally-disseminated form has only one reason–the perpetuation of local power–for the individual, the power to insist that he/she is right and refuses to countenance criticism, implicit or otherwise; for the state, the power to maintain power in the face of outside insistence on change. . If those against whom the hatred is directed are unfortunate enough not to see how they play into it, then the issue becomes complicated. What we now see in the Middle East and many other parts of the world is a hatred based on local potentates (single rulers, committees, vested interests, or cultural hegemons) desire, need, hunger to maintain a privileged position in their section of the world, something that became more and more untenable int he aftermath of World War ll.
Can that really be? After the decades of beating ourselves (namely, the West, which includes Europe, North America, and certain isolated pockets here and there and may now, paradoxically, include Japan, but certainly includes Australia, and may in time include India…) for our “responsibilities” in causing global problems (such self-recrimination soundly based on the legacies of a colonialist past), maybe it’s time to revisit some of that surplus self-loathing and see where the responsibilities actually lie.
The current exacerbating events of the current mess are all from the same source–the end of the second world war and the onset of the Cold War. Lest we forget, WW ll was …
