I think Catholicism and Main stream Protestantism, and even Judaism and Buddism and Islam have much to say in the American dialogue. The media likes to focus on the fundies. And the more we have left the public square naked of spirituality, the more the fundies have filled it.
As for the Rabbi, I think he was clear enough. If he opposes social darwinism, and accepts the truth of Darwinism, how could he identify the two as the SAME (rather than historically linked)
As it happens there is a discussion at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York on a related topic. Here are some quotes they assembled as a prelude:
"SHABBAT LUNCH: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS
What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful and blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature!
--Charles Darwin (in an 1856 letter)
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
--Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species (1859)
The world is not characterless, it acts with a uniformity that gives meaning to its existence ... The salvation for which man strives is to live in rapport with that meaning.
--JAC, p. 461
Just as the magnetic needle is the source of our knowledge of the earth’s magnetism, so is man’s salvational behavior the source of our knowledge about God...(this requires) no blind leap into the dark.
--QJA, pgs. 80,88
Jewish religion maintains the eventual triumph of justice over brute force as the very essence of faith in God.
--BVJR, p.43
There is no reason to hope that eventually all manner of things will be well... The kind of order and complexity produced by evolution has nothing to do with the right or the good. Moral ideas can not be part of the scheme until evolution produces creatures like us; and we, being accidental offshoots of the universe, have no power over the whole and very little within it... (this view) allows us to see ourselves as trying to rise above unpromising origins, rather than having spoilt everything.. It is a dark view but not an ignoble one.
--Janet Radcliffe Richards, Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction (2000)
The God idea is not the reasoned allocation of chaos, cruelty, pain and death in some neat logical scheme. It is the passionate refusal of every atom in the human being to be terrified by these ogres.
--Judaism as a Civilization, p. 330 "
As for the Rabbi, I think he was clear enough. If he opposes social darwinism, and accepts the truth of Darwinism, how could he identify the two as the SAME (rather than historically linked)
As it happens there is a discussion at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York on a related topic. Here are some quotes they assembled as a prelude:
"SHABBAT LUNCH: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS
What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful and blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature!
--Charles Darwin (in an 1856 letter)
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
--Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species (1859)
The world is not characterless, it acts with a uniformity that gives meaning to its existence ... The salvation for which man strives is to live in rapport with that meaning.
--JAC, p. 461
Just as the magnetic needle is the source of our knowledge of the earth’s magnetism, so is man’s salvational behavior the source of our knowledge about God...(this requires) no blind leap into the dark.
--QJA, pgs. 80,88
Jewish religion maintains the eventual triumph of justice over brute force as the very essence of faith in God.
--BVJR, p.43
There is no reason to hope that eventually all manner of things will be well... The kind of order and complexity produced by evolution has nothing to do with the right or the good. Moral ideas can not be part of the scheme until evolution produces creatures like us; and we, being accidental offshoots of the universe, have no power over the whole and very little within it... (this view) allows us to see ourselves as trying to rise above unpromising origins, rather than having spoilt everything.. It is a dark view but not an ignoble one.
--Janet Radcliffe Richards, Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction (2000)
The God idea is not the reasoned allocation of chaos, cruelty, pain and death in some neat logical scheme. It is the passionate refusal of every atom in the human being to be terrified by these ogres.
--Judaism as a Civilization, p. 330 "
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