I did not say that

I'm glad to have misunderstood, Tom. Is your contention though that Rohinga whose ancestors lived in Arakan before there was a British Burma, let alone a Myanmar or a Bangladesh, don't have a country to be driven from?

Wikipedia is free and one should consider whether one is getting what one pays for, but it does have a process for challenging verifiability, unlike the secretiveness about sources here that make me wonder if folks think they have some sort of journalistic privilege. The Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar article has a very extensive bibliography, and my somewhat cursory knowledge of Arakan is from Hall's A History of South-East Asia and several similar volumes by Coedès.

Apologies for not bearing in mind that CMAA hosts a worldwide forum and that not everyone is familiar with local Turkey Day customs. But if you're British, as I now take you to be, you must be aware that the New World genocides began well before 1776.

Many of the new world deaths were caused by measles and other diseases the Europeans brought with them. The native people had no immunity to them. I read in a recent article in a history magazine that, believe it or not, salmonella was a big culprit in Native deaths, at least as far as Aztecs and Incas were concerned. The researchers seemed quite surprised by that.

It is also verifiable that superior and more highly developed technology tends to win out over more primitive cultures. If you have better weapons, you win.

Now about those persecuted Oompa Loompas. It was the patriarchal, privileged, and misogynistic white culture that caused their fatal sugar addiction.

Tomjaw,

C14 dating well since the half life is 5,730 years (the time taken for half the C14 to decay), while the oldest dates that can be 'reliably' measured by this process date to around 50,000 years ago, the tree ring calibration only goes back 13,900 years!

Maybe C-14 is not such a good example to argue for an old Earth ... how about this one (sorry for the technicalities)?

Lets take the natural terrestrial abundance of three (to keep in simple) elements, Technetium (Tc), Uranium (U), and Plutonium (Pu) (periodic table numbers 43, 92, and 94), which haven't any stable isotopes. The isotopes with the longest radioactive half-life of each of these elements are, respectively:

U-238: 4.5 billion years - abundance like other (non-radioactive) heavy elements
Pu-234: 80 million years - extremely rare but traceable (first time in 1971)
Tc-98: 4.2 million years - not traceable.

[Note that Pu-239 and Tc-99 are a bit more abundant - still extremely rare naturally - yet have a shorter lifetime than the isotopes above; but they are known to be formed from U-238, so they do not matter in this context.
And have in mind that it takes about 10 times the radioactive half-life to reduce the amount of an isotope by a factor of 1000, 20 times for a million, 30 times for a billion and so on.]

What do we make of this?

Scenario 1: old Earth
- The Earth is many, many, many times older than 4.2 million years, so any original Tc-98 has decayed, with no more than a tiny remainder if any;
- the Earth is a tens of times older than 80 million (= a few billion) years, so only small traces of Pu-234 are left;
- the Earth is not an awful lot older (maybe younger) than 4.5 billion years so that at least a large part of the original U-238 is still there.

Scenario 2: young earth (less than a million years)
a) God created these - and a lot other - radioactive isotopes in amounts designed to fool people a few thousand years later (once they started research in nuclear physics) into concluding that scenario 1 was correct;

b) ????

I really was trying to keep this thread to the “religion of evolution” but it’s very hard to divide it from young earth creationism in the discussion mode

Superiority in technology can make a large difference. Look at the native American cultures. They had no animals the size of horses to carry materials and ride into battle. They hadn't discovered steel. They didn't have the wheel. The Incas, for example, fielded an army the likes of which had not been seen in Europe in a couple of thousand years. They had slings and threw rocks. Put that against battle-hardened Spaniards who gained experience fighting the Moors. No contest.

Yes, we should fear the Muslims. Islam is a political system wrapped in the trappings of religion with a goal of world domination. There are some Muslims who have departed from that and are peaceful, but still plenty exist who are anything but.

The U.S. asks Europeans for money because it has defended and paid the defense bill for Europe since World War II. It is not unreasonable to ask Europe to pay some for its own defense. Some countries do while others are cheap and want a free ride.

The 'noble savage' is a persistent fiction. The Amerind throughout North and South America were engaged in lethal inter-tribal warfare (even, in some cases, genocide and culture murder) long before 'we' arrived. That is not to excuse what 'we' did. I have always maintained, much to the chagrin even of some of my friends who championed the superior technology argument, that the only superiority that counts is a moral superiority. On this score 'we' all too often do not make a very good showing.

One of the greatest difficulties in discussing history is called "presentism" and it can render a discussion of good factual information useless since it uses an interpretation that is completely and totally not applicable to the subject at hand. The inadvertent transfer of biological organisms unknown to the men who spread them cannot be interpreted as "murder", "genocide", etc. The causes of many diseases unknown until the nineteenth century could not be "biological warfare" in the sixteenth century. Racial attitudes developed in a western country in the twentieth century cannot be applied to the conduct of people who lived in the eighteenth century, either. Contemporary attitudes do not apply to those whose cultural framework do not include our cultural attitudes which, by the way, are in many cases quite as illogical and with less excuse, as those of any bygone age.

Corinne,

Is the fill-in-the-blank's answer "flat"?

Bhcordova... which vatican? I or II?

Genocide is a term coined in 1944, and has a fairly precise legal definition. It has subsequently entered the mainstream of American scholarship: Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide, The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846–1873. (2016) and Brendan C. Lindsay's Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 (2015) carefully document my state's paying out $1,000,000 (1870 dollars) in bounties for human scalps, for which California was reimbursed by the US Congress. So we're not just talking about smallpox and syphilis.

If you enjoy quizzes, see how well you do:

1. "The Immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more."
2. "But even in this last case the mongrel product would succumb in the mutual struggle for existence with a higher racial group that had maintained its blood unmixed."
3. "This unfortunate race, whom we have had been taking so much pains to save and civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination."
4. "in the midst of another and superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear."

a. Hitler
b. Washington
c. Jefferson
d. Jackson

Last time I was able to participate on this forum was this past September, when I was surprised to find a thread on science/evolution. Coming back today, I find not only has that one continued these past several months, but this second thread has also been added. Reading some of the posts, there are many places that I would like to add clarification on church teaching or the understanding of the methods of science and philosophy. Unfortunately, as a parish priest I don’t have the ability to engage in too extensive a manner online.

With the danger of oversimplifying, I have tried to very briefly summarize Chapter III of my master’s degree thesis Evolutionary Science and the Church Church. (Sorry that I exclude direct quotes and citations, but these can be found following the links below.) There are four main areas that the Church has addressed concerning biological evolution.

1. Philosophical and Theological Truth

The Church recognizes all three areas of science, philosophy, and theology as legitimate ways of gaining knowledge. Each of these have their own methods and limitations. The Catholic Church has no official position on biological evolution as a science. It leaves investigation into the veracity of specific scientific questions to scientists. But the Church has much to say when someone goes beyond the limits of the methods of science to make philosophical and theological claims that are in opposition to the faith. She rejects all false philosophies that have used biological evolution as justification for their erroneous beliefs (including materialism, communism, atheism, new age, etc.). In doing so, she does not reject the science itself, but a scientism that often masquerades as science. In defending philosophy and theology as legitimate ways of knowing, the Church rejects the idea that science is the only means of gaining knowledge (scientism). In order to investigate if biological evolution and revealed Christian truth are compatible, one must utilize philosophy (in particular metaphysics).

2. Divine Providence and Random Processes

The Church rejects the idea that our world, including ourselves, is the result of mere chance with no place for God’s divine providence. She defends the truth that God is the origin of all things, and that he continues to actively work his divine plan in creation. God’s action extends to everything that exists, so an “unguided” evolutionary process, one not subject to divine providence, would be impossible. At first, this may seem like the Church is rejecting biological evolution, since this theory sees random processes as playing a large part in the development of different forms of life. But once again, the Church is rejecting false philosophies rather than the science itself, since concepts like “mere chance” or “completely random” used to exclude God are philosophical ideas not scientific ones.

3. Uniqueness of the Human Person

The Church allows for science to investigate into the origin of the human body from already existing and living matter. But the faith obliges us to hold that spiritual human souls are directly created by God, and could not have emerged only from matter. The creation of the human soul can rightly be called a “divine intervention” and would mark an “ontological discontinuity” between man and all other creatures.

4. Original Sin

The Church defends her divinely revealed teaching on original sin. Sin began by a personal act of our first parents and is transmitted to all humans by propagation. “It is not at all apparent” how polygenism can be reconciled with the revealed truth concerning original sin. The Church rejects any claims that 1) sin was always a part of man’s existence, 2) there were no first parents who personally sinned or 3) sin was transmitted by imitation.

--

There is much more that can be said about each of these four areas. I am sure that some who read these four could conclude evolution is completely compatible with Christianity, while others will interpret it to mean evolution is irreconcilable. But putting forth what the Church has said about evolution is only the start of further philosophical discussions that I make in the following Chapters IV and V. Overall I try to show the extent to which Catholic Christianity and the strictly scientific theories of biological evolution can be reconciled and what questions are still to be answered. While careful distinction among the methods of empirical science, philosophy and theology leads to the resolution of many objections to their compatibility, there are some aspects that will continue to cause tension. For a fuller explanation read the complete chapter:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ixamn1p7GMdWuosXpJNbkBpQpdp1qiVG/view?usp=sharing
Or here is the full thesis:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kParq0DVnkpsQS8IRRuKXCoNX9JCjHpv/view?usp=sharing

God bless,

Fr. Vogel

Actually the Columbian/precolumbian origin of syphilis controversy hasn't yet been settled

Actually, it has pretty much been settled. It is a disease originating in the new world. The following article is a summation of research findings without getting into overly technical publications. I expect, however, the politically correct will find a white plot in there somewhere. Wish they were that good at finding reality.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-origin-of-syphilis

IIRC, the Jews--with the open and significant assistance of God--killed off all sorts of tribes in order to occupy Israel. So here's a proposal: tell the Jews that they should check their privilege and go back to Egypt and see how that plays.

If human rights are consistent throughout the ages, there are a whole lot of Hittites who are owed reparations.

I really am too indulgent about this off-topic discussion. Sinking the thread. Restarts will be deleted.