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The Privileged Planet - How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery

1 stars (Elevation of the ego to a new level) - The proponents of this Intelligent Design worldview based book and some reviewers here see this book as a breath of fresh air to put purpose back into a directionless, material based culture. The first premise that evolution,Copernicus and science has taken away our purpose in life is not valid to me. Science has only enhanced our understanding of life and it's task is not to provide a purpose in our lives because like religion that is a subjective experience. Science explains how things work and does not presume to answer why we are here. I think that the philosophy of this book and other ID dogma does the opposite of restoring a purposeful based view of life. It only adds to the self-absorbed pathological sickness that infests many individuals in the American culture...the sense of being special, divinely ordained to be the center of the world and a gross sense of entitlement. Everything then was created just for us. Believers are superior to athesist and agnostics,Christians are superior to non-Christians, Americans are superior to other cultures and now the ego even goes out further... the earth was designed and placed so humans(specifically Judeo-Christians) could appear,evolve and be the priviledged observers of the cosmos and discover the creator. That is obscene, absurd and ludicrous to propose such a thing in a universe with literally billions of galaxies and 15 billion light years across. In the midst of all that space, how likely is it that the lifeforms on one tiny orbital body would have the "truth" nailed down in their corner. Is it some grand purpose that stellar objects go super-nova and explode perhaps wiping out billions of life forms that may be in the vicinity. Or how about that some galaxies are on crash courses that will cause future destruction. Is it purposeful that the sun will one day go cold and all life on this planet will cease to exist. Or what about asteroids that have and ma...
Regnery Publishing Inc :: Science & General :: Solar systems :: Science&Mathematics :: Science :: Religion & Science :: Planets :: Philosophy & Social Aspects :: General :: Earth :: Discoveries :: The Privileged Planet - How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery

 

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

5 stars (Great book) - I'm not a scholar, and I'm not Catholic. But I found Dr. Woods' book an engaging, interesting read that sheds new light on the Middle Ages and Renaissance years. It's the kind of work that provides (at least for a non-History major) an epiphany a page. You can read it in a week, and come away with a much broadened understanding of the topics explained. 5 stars (Woods's Reviewers Prove His Point!) - 1) One reviewer comments that Woods writes of anti-Catholic prejudice in America without giving evidence. This is a matter of historical record: from individual events like the burning of the Ursuline Convent to movements like the KKK (founded against Blacks, Jews, and Catholics), the Eugenics movement (ostensibly to rid society of the so-called "feeble-minded," but pushed by uber-eugenicist Margaret Sanger against "Southern Europeans" - i.e., Italian Catholics) - to the Know-Nothing party to the entire "nativist" movement in the US to the vicious and ignorant response to John F. Kennedy's campaign (and I am only scratching the surface!) anti-Catholicism in the US is well documented and would fill volumes. The same reviewer wants "evidence" of the ignorance about the middle ages - well, open just about any popular book on history and there it is - a thousand year blank between the Greeks and the self-proclaimed Renaissance! Many, many textbooks and even historians are just as bad - they skip over the rich, thousand-year tapestry of the Middle Ages - which had universities that in some ways were even freer intellectally than our "political correct" thought police of today - with apparently no knowledge whatsoever of what an exciting and even radical time it was (do you think it was easy for St. Thomas Aquinas to introduce Aristotelian ideas?) The Church did not stifle debate - they were its source! The evidence won't fit in an Amazon review - or in an encyclopedia sized volume. The author shouldn't have to provide evidence for the self-evident! ...
Regnery Publishing Inc :: Religion- general :: Religion & General :: Spirituality - General :: Religion - Roman Catholic :: Religion :: Influence :: History :: Civilization :: Western :: Civiliz :: How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization