$27 Million Evolution-Debunking Museum To Open

[Watchman]

I'm pretty sure cats and mice aren't too different in their degrees of sentience and sapience anyway. One is however a carnivore and the other one of the things it feeds on (although as numerous accounts by soldiers on assorted "nightmare fronts" who've had their toes chewed off by rodents point out, mice are quite happy to munch on other animals if the opportunity presents itself as well).

Things eat things to survive. Fact of the world. If you don't like it, file a complaint with the Creator and/or the elementary laws of physics and biology according to personal preference. I can quarantee neither will give a hoot.

I don't get how you can say that it is "good taste" to not take offense at a world in which brutally butchering lower sentient life forms for food is "normal." Indeed it is good taste to be horrified by that, and rather disturbingly poor taste to not care.

I fail to perceive anything abnormal about it. To say it is not "normal" for the cat to do so is to fundamentally fail to cope with reality, which tends to be rather uncaring and harsh. Indeed, the descriptor "brutal" is entirely inappropriate in the context of nonsentient beings anyway - those are fundamentally incapable of any sort of moral choice, consideration or decision by default. Such adjectives are but naive anthropomorphization.

I find that whole way of thinking downright offensively ignorant, self-centered and outright delusional. It amounts to the statement of "I do not like this aspect of the world because it makes me queasy, therefore it must be somehow unnatural" which is reality-denial and hubris par excellence. As if the world existed for our convenience.

Stinks of an infantile longing after some rosy fantasy world where, as it were, the lion and the lamb sleep side by side - which would beg the question why the lion and its highly sophisticated arsenal for killing and eating the lamb existed in the first place anyway - which is pure escapism.

[Banquo's Ghost]

I find that whole way of thinking downright offensively ignorant, self-centered and outright delusional. It amounts to the statement of "I do not like this aspect of the world because it makes me queasy, therefore it must be somehow unnatural" which is reality-denial and hubris par excellence. As if the world existed for our convenience.

Stinks of an infantile longing after some rosy fantasy world where, as it were, the lion and the lamb sleep side by side - which would beg the question why the lion and its highly sophisticated arsenal for killing and eating the lamb existed in the first place anyway - which is pure escapism.

Let's be careful please that we don't stumble into personal attacks.

Navaros has a perfect right to promulgate his beliefs, as we have to question them and seek clarification.

However, they are his beliefs and they are shared by many people. Calling those beliefs "infantile" is stepping just a little over the line.

[Watchman]

I can use "naive" instead of course. But I actually think "infantile" is the proper word in the specific instance I used it in - it seems to me that the as such quite understandable longing for a world without death and pain is in fact a longing for the warm comfortable darkness of the womb before birth.

The desire for a "pure land" free of need and suffering is a very recurring theme in messianic peasant revolts brought about by intolerable socioeconomical circumstances for example, and abounds in many very widespread depictions of afterlife (not a few add the threat of an eternity of agony for good measure, but that's beside the point here). I'd say that suggests it to be a rather fundamental human longing - but also primitive and atavistic, as many such impulses are.

[KukriKhan]

If a "Museum" is a Muse-house, or a place to store and display objects meant to inspire man-thought, I don't understand the objections to this one being established - unless we think that anything less than the Louvre, or without pillars, arches, and marble cannot be a museum.

There's all kinds of museums in the US, from the famous Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, to the less-famous UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. There's even a Menstruation Museum in Maryland, devoted to the plusses and minusses of that biological function.

All have an "agenda" (they would use the word "theme"), and seek to inpire thought on their subject(s). Most were started by individuals or groups, and are run on a non-profit basis. What is different about this one?

If what it inspires is derision, contempt, and a closer reaffirmation of one's own beliefs, I submit that the viewer's/thinker's mind may not be as open to new data as he asserts. One would think that at the very least, a non-believer would find entertainment value, or some appreciation for the presentation.

By golly, that almost qualifies as a rant. Sorry.

Do please go on about how carnivorous behavior relates to the opening of a new museum.

[English assassin]

Although I largely agree with the post above, (with the caveat that the world probably does not need a hagiographic Museum of Fascist thought, and so there must be a line somewhere, and nonsense might be on the wrong side of the line too), I don't agree with this:

If what it inspires is derision, contempt, and a closer reaffirmation of one's own beliefs, I submit that the viewer's/thinker's mind may not be as open to new data as he asserts.

Its simply not possible to be open minded to every single bit of bubble-headed nonsense that someone with $27 million to blow might advocate. IMHO its perfectly reasonable, to take an example, to take biology A level, and a degree in biochemistry, and say that yeah, we looked pretty hard at the evidence for speciation by natural and sexual selection, that evidence entirely consistent with those theories was there in abundance, and that henceforth no further debate will be entered into. There is no "debate", any more than there is debate that water is wet. If the lead paper in Nature is ever "Darwin was Wrong: Adam's Skeleton found; one rib missing" then I will happily reconsider.

This isn't being closed minded, its simply prioritising all too finite mental resources.

[Pannonian]

Stinks of an infantile longing after some rosy fantasy world where, as it were, the lion and the lamb sleep side by side - which would beg the question why the lion and its highly sophisticated arsenal for killing and eating the lamb existed in the first place anyway - which is pure escapism.

Your knowledge of history is evidently as deficient as your knowledge of science. The answer is, of course, that the Devil put it there. Cats are the Devil's spawn, and the sooner we return to burning them in wicker baskets the better.

[Goes to get his pitchfork]