Bones of Contention.

[jcrawford]

Creationist professor Marvin Lubenow contends in his 2004 edition of "Bones of Contention" that all neo-Darwinist theories about the origins and evolution of the human race are a scientific form of racism. Being somewhat familiar with the several claims, arguments and ramifications of his thesis, I am prepared to defend his claim that neo-Darwinist theories of human origins and evolution are theoretically racist should anyone care to debate and substantiate their claim to the contrary.

[otseng]

Sorry folks if I broke any rules.

Yes, you broke the rules. In the future, if you know that what you are about to post will break the rules, don't hit the "submit" button. Go ahead and vent your feelings, but then delete it. That way no rules will be broken. Since you willfully violated the rules, I'll have to issue a formal warning here. In the future, please exercise a little more restraint. Thanks.

jcrawford, please see Quick BBCode Tutorial on how to quote.

[jcrawford]

quote="Nyril"

"Could you please apply your massive intellect to discovering the proper function of this board's "quote" feature? Simply highlight the section you wish to quote with your mouse, and click "quote" at the top."

I'm trying. How's this?

"Could you be so kind as to highlight this for us? Perhaps type it out if you can't find an online version? I've looked over the three pages and didn't see it. I'll admit, I could have missed it."

OK: Dictionary entries for definitions of terms in The American Edition of the The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus published in New York and Oxford by the Oxford University Press in 1996.

Race: noun.
1 each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics.
2 a tribe, nation, etc., regarded as a distinct ethnic stock.
3 the fact or concept of division into races (discrimination based on race).
4 a genus, species, breed or variety of animals, plants or micro-organisms.
5 a group of persons, animals or plants connected by common descent.
6 any great division of living creatures (the feathered race, the four-footed race).
7 descent; kindred (of noble race; separate in language and race).
8 a class of persons etc., with some common feature (the race of poets).

1 and 2 include and refer to stock, tribe, nation, people, folk, clan and family.
7 includes and refers to blood, descent, breed, kin, kindred, family, stock, line and lineage.
8 see CLASS, noun.


racial: adjective.
1 of or concerning race (racial diversities; racial minority).
2 on the grounds of or connected with difference in race (racial discrimination; racial tension).


racialism: noun. = RACISM


racism: noun.
1a a belief in the superiority of a particular race; prejudice based on this.
b antagonism toward other races, especially as a result of this.
2 the theory that human abilities, etc., are determined by race.

1 includes and refers to racialism, apartheid, jim crowism, chauvinism and bigotry.


racist: noun. see SUPREMACIST.
racist: adjective. racialist, prejudiced, chauvinistic, bigoted.


"As for a scientific definition of race, several people have done this for you."

I prefer Oxford's definition of race.

"Does this help you understand what we're talking about when we mean "race"?"

Yes, but does Oxford help you understand what Lubenow and I are talking about when we mean "race?"

"Could you direct my attention to such instances where this is true please?"

Including humans in the same taxon as apes in the Hominidae family is confusing the issue of human origins.

[jcrawford]

If most "scientists" can't define race or don't even use the term because they don't regard humanity as a race, creationists can easily charge that such theories are racist, by definition.

It doesn't make any sense to say that not using the word "race" nor subscribing to the idea of race is racist. Please state your reasoning.

Simply denying the idea of race and not using the term doesn't automatically disqualify or exonerate one from charges of racism. If I said I was prejudiced and discriminated against certain members of the human race for non-racial reasons, would that mean that I couldn't be classified as a racist by anyone?

[jcrawford]

I don't know what any one could mean by

for geneticists to trace it to an African tribe which neo-Darwinists theorize descended from an African species of apes is racist.

It makes no sense to me.

Unless he means that because they(anyone?)
came from Africa, and Africans are black and talking about blacks is racist.

Merely talking about Africans or "blacks" is not necessarily racist unless, of course, one is reiterating neo-Darwinist theories of the original African people's evolutionary descent from a species of non-human apes.

[McCulloch]

Merely talking about Africans or "blacks" is not necessarily racist unless, of course, one is reiterating neo-Darwinist theories of the original African people's evolutionary descent from a species of non-human apes.

Maybe I am still missing something. How is a scientific theory which postulates that all humans are descended from non-human primates in Africa racist? It is not like they are saying that African people descended from lower primates but Europeans were created directly by god.

[McCulloch]

Dr Lubenow has a Master of Theology degree (Th.M.) from Dallas Theological Seminary with a major in systematic theology. He also has a Master of Science degree (M.S.) from Eastern Michigan University with a major in anthropology.

This is not necessarily an ad hom comment. I just thought that it may be relevant to the point. According to Answering Genesis his book, Bones of Contention, is the leading creationist work in fossil study today. But one does have to ask why the leading creationist "scientist" studying fossils has his science degree in anthropology and that only a Masters. (Not to put down Masters degrees, I don't have one, but usually the leading researchers in areas have gone beyond the masters stage by the time they retire).

[jcrawford]

[quote="Cathar1950"]

"Where is this heap of evidence?"

In Lubenow's 2004 edition of "Bones of Contention."

"It is not any kind of Racism!"

Of course it is. It is a scientific "kind" or form of racism. It is the kind and form of racism that creationists can easily observe and identify, since science can't even define race or racism.

"If there is a common descent how could that be racist?"

Common descent from Adam and Eve is not racist. Common descent from some mythological woman in Africa is both racist and sexist though, since neo-Darwinist theorists fail to identify her sexual partner(s) but merely assume that he or they were both of Homo sapiens racial stock and not some mutant breed of Homo ergaster, erectus or neandertalis.

[jcrawford]

quote="Cathar1950"

"Who is calling African people apes?"

Neo-Darwinist racists who call all human beings apes. That's who.

"We are all African! Get it?"

If we are all Africans, then some of us Africans don't like being classified in the taxonomic family of Hominidae with the rest of your apish ancestors, and consider it racist.

"He didn't unearth anything, or discover crap, well maybe crap.
He is a crack-pot. I am being kind. Now if he is talking "social darwinism", ok it is racist. Maybe he dosn't know the difference."

Maybe you don't.

"Your the only one doing the substituting."

Anyone who theorizes that members of the human race can be sub-divided into different and separate species is a racist.

[McCulloch]

"Where is this heap of evidence?"

In Lubenow's 2004 edition of "Bones of Contention."

We are not all going to rush out and buy the book. Can you summarize?

Common descent from Adam and Eve is not racist.

Yet, the idea of common descent from one of Noah's grandchildren has historically been used as a racist justification.

Common descent from some mythological woman in Africa is both racist and sexist though, since neo-Darwinist theorists fail to identify her sexual partner(s) but merely assume that he or they were both of Homo sapiens racial stock and not some mutant breed of Homo ergaster, erectus or neandertalis.

I'm still missing the connection. How is that racist?

[McCulloch]

I saw this in my newspaper this morning.

Interracial marriage was a crime in South Carolina as late as 1998 when the state repealed its anti-miscegenation law.
Although the repeal was supported by a majority of voters in a referendum, almost 40 per cent opposed it. Among them was a Republican state representative who argued interracial marriage was "not what God intended when he separated the races back in Babylonian days." His stance, ha acknowledged, probably stemmed from his Southern Baptist upbringing.
Disassociating his denomination from the representative's remarks, a spokesperson for the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) said that "to wrap our prejudice in the Scripture is a sinful thing to do" and referred to the SBC's 1995 public repentance for the role slavery played in its formation 150 years earlier.
The SBC's belated apology to Afreican-Americans for "condoning and/or perpetuating individual and system racism" came 133 years after slavery was abolished in the southern states following the southern defeat in the American Civil War, and almost 400 years after the first slaves were unloaded on American soil.
Breaking from northern Baptists over the issue of missionaries owning slaves, the ultra-conservative, evangelical SBC preached a Biblical basis for slavery and later used its pulpits to vigorously oppose anti-segregation laws.
Today, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. forms a significant segment of the Christian support for the Bush administration [...]
Baptists were not the only southern Protestants who preached that slavery was in harmony with Christianity and the Bible and was sanctioned by God. Other Christians used the pulpit to fertilize the weeds of bigotry, discrimination and oppression to preduce one of the most shameful chapters of U.S. history.
As Stephen Haynes notes in Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery.(Oxford University Press, 2002), the 1864 general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America affirmed it was the mission of the Sothern Church to conserve the institution of slavery and to make it a blessing both to master and slave.
And then there was the Rev. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, who plays a central role in Haynes book.
Streets, parks schools and orphanages in the U.S. South bear the name of this prominent Christian evangelist, orator, "founding father" of the Southern Presbyterian Church and esteemed New Orleans cleargyman of the second half of the 19th century. But, as Haynes points out, Palmer was also a vicious bigon, "a vociferous advocate of slavery who relied on the so-called curse of Ham to justify the South's peculiar institution."
[...]
In Genesis, the first book of the Old (Hebrew) Testament, the story is told of Ham coming across his naked father Noah who was sleeping off a drunken binge. Instead of covering his father, Ham runs and tells his brothers Shem and Japheth who avert their eyes and cover their father's nakedness. In retaliation for Ham's behaviour, Noah puts a curse on Ham's son, Canaan.
"Cursed be Canaan, lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers."
[...] while both books of the Bible are replete with references to slavery and how it should be regulated, there is no specific condemnation of the practice.
[...]
In Karen Armstrong's book, In the Beginning: a New Interpretation of Genesis, the well-known author and lecturer sugests that Noah's refusal to take responsibility for his drunken state shifted his guilt and self-disgust onto an innocent party, Canaan.
"Some of the worst atrocities of history have occurred as a result of this type of scapegoating when we blame others for our own crimes and inadequacies," Armstrong says. "It proveded a retional for Israel's later subjegation of the Canaanites and the proposed genocide of the native people of the Promised Land as described in the Book of Joshua."
With the later belief that Africans were Ham's descendants, "the scriptural defence of slavery had evolved into the most elaborate and systematic statmetn of proslavery theory," Haynes says.
What distinguishes Palmer among former slave apologists, says Haynes, is something he shares with many American Bible readers: "the American penchant for reading Genesis as a manifesto of racial destiny quite apart from the question of slavery". Palmer, who read Noah's curse as a blueprint for the natural hierarchy of humans, insisted tha God had assigned the American people a unique historic mission.
Outside of slavery, he argued, the black race would experience "rapid extermination before they had time to waste away through listlessness, filth and vice."
[...]
As long as people read the Bible to seek justification for group hegemony, Palmer's racist views should not be regarded as ideological relics, Haynes says.
"Noah's curse may be dormant, but it is not dead: it may be in remission but it is still in need of a remedy."
Michael McAteer can be reached at mrpmcateeraol.com

This points out specifically how a passage in the bible has been used to foster and promote a specific racist policy in a specific place and time. What I am looking for from jcrawford is specifically how a scientific theory has been used to foster and promote a specific racist policy in a specific place ant time. Is that too much to ask?