Not So Polite Conversation – a lovely example of quote mining and referring to century old nonsense by christians

I found a typical post by a christian desperately trying to attack evolutionary theory. As is very common, it is marked by quote mining, ignorance and the need to find quotes that agree with their nonsense, quotes often quite old since these people depend on ignorance and ignoring modern research. 

here’s my reply:

Unsurprisngly, that’s a quote mine rather than what Aldous Huxley actually said. This is what is said in context (these quotes are from a good review of how christians lie about Huxley):

““No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingle to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behavior, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community.

The philosopher who finds meaning in the world is concerned, not only to elucidate that meaning, but also to prove that is it most clearly expressed in some established religion, some accepted code of morals. The philosopher who find no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is not valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary, as opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for examples, may be predominantly erotic, as they were in the case of Lamettrie (see his lyrical account of the pleasures of the bed in La Volupte and at the end of LʼHomme Machine [‘The Human Machine,’ a work of materialist philosophy]), or predominantly political, as they were in the case of Karl Marx.

The desire to justify a particular form of political organization and, in some cases, of a personal will to power has played an equally large part in the formulation of philosophies postulating the existence of meaning in the world. Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalistic system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press, and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of [Calvinʼs] Geneva and [Puritan] New England. In all cases they have shown that the meaning of the world was such as to be compatible with, or actually most completely expressed by, the iniquities I have mentioned above — iniquities which happened, of course, to serve the personal or sectarian interests of the philosophers concerned. In due course, there arose philosophers who denied not only the right of Christian special pleaders to justify iniquity by an appeal to the meaning of the world, but even their right to find any such meaning whatsoever. In the circumstances, the fact was not surprising. One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions. Passions may be satisfied in the process; but the disinterested love of knowledge suffers eclipse.” [Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 314-316]”

and

““For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever… The men of the new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the [conservative] reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence. [Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 316-317”

It’s a shame that christians choose to intentionally make false claims.

You also have the problem that most atheists are not nihilists as Huxley, so your attempt to claim we all are is yet another intentional false claim aka a lie. It’s always great fun when christians think that sex is bad, and repeatedly pretend their god watches everyone in the bedroom with no evidence at all.

“My guess is that the popular theory of evolution appeals precisely as an alternative to the Christian view of man, which not only demands faith but imposes moral obligations. People who adopt Evolutionism are not driven to it by consideration of the evidence; they like it without respect to the evidence, because they are passionate creatures, and it offers no moral impediment to their passions.”

Quite a nice false “guess”. This nonsene depends on the false claim by christians that they have objective morality from their god and we can see that is not the case since christians cannot agree on what morals this god supposedly wants. They also have the problem that they do not have objective morality since they must insist that their god doesn’t have to follow these morals. If morality is objective, then all must follow it to be moral.

“And the quote I was most looking for is: Watson, D. M. S., “Adaptation,” Nature, vol. 124 (August 10, 1929), pp. 231-234. p. 233 “If so, it will present a parallel to the theory of evolution itself, a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” ”

It’s notable that creationists have to give quotes almost a century old to support their ignorance. Alas for your lies, evolution has been repeatedly shown to be true, and not just an “alternative” to your silly myths.