Re: Teilhard de Chardin - new documentary

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, 19 May 2024 11:40:57 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
 

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, 18 May 2024 23:20:44 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
 

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, 18 May 2024 18:24:27 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
 

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

(RNS) - In the history of the Catholic Church, too many innovative
thinkers were persecuted before they were accepted and then embraced
by the church.
 
The list includes St. Thomas Aquinas (whose books were burned by the
bishop of Paris), St. Ignatius Loyola (who was investigated by the
Spanish Inquisition) and St. Mary MacKillop (an Australian nun who was
excommunicated by her bishop for uncovering and reporting clergy child
sex abuse).
 
It's not surprising, then, that a French Jesuit scientist, Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, who tried to bridge the gap between faith and
science, got himself in trouble with church officials and his Jesuit
superiors in the 20th century. Only after his death was he recognized
as the inspired genius that he was.
 
His story is magnificently told in a new PBS documentary, "Teilhard:
Visionary Scientist," which was produced by Frank Frost Productions in
a 13-year labor of love. It took Frank and Mary Frost to four
countries on three continents, a total of 25 locations, and included
more than 35 interviews.
 
[?]
 
"Teilhard: Visionary Scientist" will premiere on Maryland Public
Television on May 19 and be available for national and international
streaming for two years, beginning on May 20, on the free PBS app.
 
https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2024/05/13/pierre-teilhard-de-chardin-pbs-documentary-247920
 

Will this awkwardness be included in the magnificent retelling?:
?Teilhard has been criticized as incorporating common notions of Social
Darwinism [sic] and scientific racism into his work, along with support for
eugenics,[41] Teilhard sharply criticized the idea of racial equality,
saying in 1929: "Do the yellows?[the Chinese]?have the same human value as
the whites? [Fr.] Licent and many missionaries say that their present
inferiority is due to their long history of Paganism. I'm afraid that this
is only a 'declaration of pastors.' Instead, the cause seems to be the
natural racial foundation?"[41] Too, he said in 1936, "As not all ethnic
groups have the same value, they must be dominated, which does not mean
they must be despised?quite the reverse?In other words, at one and the same
time there should be official recognition of: (1) the primacy/priority of
the earth over nations; (2) the inequality of peoples and races."[41] And
around 1937, he said, "What fundamental attitude?should the advancing wing
of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups? The
earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate,
racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity? More generally still, how
should we judge the efforts we lavish in all kinds of hospitals on saving
what is so often no more than one of life?s rejects??To what extent should
not the development of the strong?take precedence over the preservation of
the weak?"[41]
In 1951, Teilhard continued to argue for racial and individual eugenics,
and wrote a strongly worded criticism of the United Nations declaration of
the Equality of Races. He continued to argue for eugenics as late as 1953,
two years before his death.[41] Nevertheless, he has also been defended by
theologian John F. Haught.[42][43]?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin
 
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/teilhard-eugenics
 
https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ctsa/article/view/11473/9623
 

 
 
Funny how that author of that piece chooses to quote so much from an
attack on Teilhard by Slattery, a recent doctoral graduate, but quotes
nothing from the dismantling of his arguments by Haught, a
Distinguished Research Professor. Equally funny that you give a link
to Slattery's response to Haught without referring at all to Haught's
arguments. [1]
 
Echoes of those who take isolated quotes from Darwin's work out of
context to make him out to have been a racist.
 
 
[1] https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/trashing-teilhard
 
 

Credentialism duly noted, alongside evasion of the issues addressed by
newbie PhD Slattery, how dare he go up against a Distinguished Research
Professor.

 
Yet again, you cannot attack me for what I said so you try to attack
me for something I did *not* say.
 

You’re the one who resorted to flaunting social status of the Distinguished
Research Professor over the lowly recent doctoral graduate, indicative of
an overweening arrogant condescension I’ve come to expect from you.

 
Nope, I simply pointed out that both the Wiki editor and you have
chosen to emphasise the lesser qualified person and ignore the better
qualified one - bias confirmation, anyone?
 

Are you bias confirmed against recognizing Teilhard actually flirted with
eugenics?

>
Your claim about "credentialism" is somewhat like somebody buying Ron
Dean's opinions about Darwin and Paley and ignoring the opinions of a
certain learned professor who frequents these parts and just happens
to know rather a lot about the subject.
 

So the lowly PhD Slattery is likened to Ron Dean? And I am likened to
Nyikos? That’s all you’ve got?

 
 
Nyikos is dead, ling live Hemidactylus!
 

Topped off by a gratuitous insult. 

 
You've worked hard to earn the handle, that's 3 times I've called you
out for it in as many weeks. Stop behaving like him and I will stop
calling you out for it.
 

And if I’m not actually behaving like him?

>

 
I get it. Your hero Teilhard can have no warts.

 
Oh, he has plenty of warts but none quite so bad as the irresistible
itch he seems to give you.
 

Well I need no credentials or Distinguished Research Professorship to look
in my own copy of *The Phenomenon of Man* and, as us untutored folk may do,
look at the index entry in this book to pages 282-283:

[begin quote] For these two reasons, to deciper man is essentially to try
to find out how the world was made and how it ought to go on making itself.
The science of man is the practical and theoretical science of
hominisation. It means profound study of the past and of origins. But still
more, it means constructive experiment pursued on a continually renewed
object. The programme is immense and its only end or aim is that of the
future.

What is involved, firstly, is the care and improvement of the human body,
the health and strength of the organism. So long as its phase of immersion
in the ‘tangential’ lasts, thought can only be built up on this material
basis. And now, in the tumult of ideas that accompany the awakening of the
mind, are we not undergoing physical degeneration? It has been said that we
might well blush comparing our own mankind, so full of misshapen subjects,
with those animal societies in which, in a hundred thousand individuals,
not one will be found lacking in a single antenna. In itself that
geometrical perfection is not in the line of our evolution whose bent is
towards suppleness and freedom. All the same, suitably subordinated to
other values, it may well appear as an indication and a lesson. So far we
have certainly allowed our race to develop at random, and we have given too
little thought to the question of what medical and moral factors *must
replace the crude forces of natural selection* should we suppress them. In
the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable that a nobly human
form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our personalities, should be
discovered and developed.

Eugenics applied to individuals leads to eugenics applied to society. It
would be more convenient, and we would incline to think it safe, to leave
the contours of that great body made of all our bodies to take shape on
their own, influenced only by the automatic play of individual urges and
whims. ‘Better not interfere with the forces of the world !' Once more we
are up against the mirage of instinct, the so-called infallibility of
nature. But is it not precisely the world itself which, culminating in
thought, expects us to think out again the instinctive impulses of nature
so as to perfect them? Reflective substance it quires reflective treatment.
If there is a future for mankind, it can only be imagined in terms of a
harmonious conciliation of what is free with what is planned and totalised.
Points involved are : the distribution of the resources of the globe; the
control of the trek towards unpopulated areas; the optimum use of the
powers set free by mechanisation; the physiology of nations and races;
geo-economy, geo-politics, geo-demography; the organisation of research
developing into a reasoned organisation of the earth. Whether we like it or
not, all the signs and all our needs converge in the same direction. We
need and are irresistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all
physics, all biology and all psychology, a science of human energetics.

It is in the course of that creation, already obscurely begun, that
science, by being led to concentrate on man, will find itself increasingly
face to face with religion. [end quote]

I wonder what is “the physiology of nations and races”…as would I suppose
my doppelganger (or channeled by seance strange bedfellow) the late Nyikos,
because it is far easier to compare me to him than to actually address the
topics at hand.