Re: West Virginia creationism

Chris Thompson wrote:

Ron Dean wrote:
 major snip
 

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The Slave-holding South. Southerners bought slaves from the North. What about the Northern Slave Merchants and Manufacturers who built ships for the cargo for the slave trading North. This is rarely mentioned in history. And of course, history is written by the victors.
Not to mention the real cause of the US Civil War was tariffs imposed on the South. Lincoln had no objection to slavery. In fact slavery as a issue did not exist until 2 years after the start of the war. It was raised by Lincoln only after Great Brittan showed an interested in entering into the war on the side of the South. Slavery was then made a moral issue, which deterred Britten, which earlier had outlawed slave trading.
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 Well we can add US history to the lengthy-but-ever-expanding list of topics about which you blather sans knowledge.
 The founders knew that slavery would eventually have to be abolished. But they also know that if they tried to do so immediately after gaining independence from Britain there would be no hope of forming a single nation. That didn't stop them from fighting about slavery (and viciously at times) in the Constitutional Convention of 1787- rather a fair bit of time before the 1858 point in time you assert (idiotically) people all of a sudden became concerned with slavery. And at that Convention a resolution was passed that the international slave trade would be banned in the US in 1800.
 You also apparently slept through the part in class when the Missouri Compromise was discussed. That was in 1820, and the result was Missouri coming into the US as a slave state and Maine as a free state.
 We probably should also mention the Compromise of 1850, brokered between Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas (do those names sound at all familiar?). This group of laws included, shamefully, the Fugitive Slave Act, which would do much to inflame tensions between north and south.
 But the two compromises also led pretty much directly to the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) which precipitated the disaster now called "Bleeding Kansas." Maybe you've heard of John Brown, and the Pottawatomie Massacre and the raid on Harper's Ferry? No? Not surprising if you think no one cared about slavery until two years before the Civil War.
 And tariffs were the cause of the Civil War? Even for you, that's unmitigated, steaming fetid fecal matter. It. Was. Slavery.
Not. Tariffs.
Not. States'. Rights.
Slavery.
Read the individual states' articles of secession. They're all available. Without fail, they all inform us that the reason they are seceding is slavery.
Read the reports of the Cornerstone Speech by Alexander Stephens- the Vice President of the CSA. Slavery is the cornerstone of their ideology; it is the reason for the war; it is the inherent inferiority of Black people ("the Negro") that relegates them to their lot as slaves.
 You're wrong about everything.
And this revisionist crap about the cause of the Civil War is especially disgusting. Stop it.
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Not that I don't find the fact that slavery is repugnant, unjustified and inhuman: I absolutely do.
But again there's enough guilt to go around. The Northern states originally were also involved with
slavery, a fact not mentioned by you and rarely iealsewhere. Northerners were the slavers that built slave ships and manufactured goods for trading and Northern merchants traded with native people for slaves. It was not Southern farmers going to Africa for invading the continent for slaves, but they bought slaves from the northern merchant. In fact my ggggrandfather (3) gfathers was a slave.  This also applies to most African- Americans. My 14 year old gggmother was raped, and he was hung. Heard this from my grandmother. Not that I'm proud of this part of my ancestory. But I have had life, which otherwise I would not have had.
My mother was from Germany, married my father,  stationed in Germany after WWII. So, had it not been for slavery I would not have had life, nor life in the US. Would my father and mother ever have met except for WWII - not likely.   The point is we don't always have control over the events that happened, and often tragedies that happen can have positive outcomes for some of us.
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https://www.marottaonmoney.com/protective-tariffs-the-primary-cause-of-the-civil-war/
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https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/tariffs-and-the-american-civil-war.html
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_United_States_history

Chris.
   

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Darwin stated, "The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope . . . the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/11/darwin-and-the-descent-of-morality >
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Conversely, people having strong emotional attachments
to their pets is documented long before modernity. A
Roman emperor had a servant who injured his dog brutally
killed, and in the early 17th century, we read e.g. that
Sir Roger de Coverley, was praised for his loyalty to
his servants like this:  "They had all grown old with him, from
his grey-headed butler to ‘the old House-dog, and . . . a grey Pad
that is kept in the Stable with great Care and Tenderness out of regard to his past Services, tho’ he has been useless for several Years’"
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So for the writer, a human servant and a service dog and
horse are pretty much treated in the same breath, their status was due to the servant role that they shared.
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The watershed moment, if there was any, was the ate 17th, and
18th century in Europe, when "social pets" became more common,
animals valued for their social bonds rather tha n their usefulness, and that again is centuries before Darwin. (cf.eg.
The history of emotional attachment to animals by Ingrid Traut,
The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History, 2018)
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Are there any ethical implications of common descent?
I doubt it, though maybe in the margins, a slightly more pronounced tendency to be in favour of animal rights and
against vivisection, But even this is ambivalent,
There was a really interesting historical dialectic between Darwin,
and Christian conceptions of animal souls, played out in the vivisection
debate in Victoria Britain. The Darwinian notion of the relatedness of
all life had given a  boost to the anti-vivisectionists, and
observing that Darwinian arguments had success where religious ones had
had less let religion based anti-vivisectionists like Hull revive
theological arguments about animal souls.
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Who do you think anyone approves of such as this today. Do you think is was ever justified by the general population. But it's the result of power. Lord Acton once remarked "that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This I think probably explains much of man's inhumanity to man both in the past and today. Unfortunately, we see this in our world today and in recent history.
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