Genetics Of Justice Quotes

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The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)
Humans have long since possessed the tools for crafting a better world. Where love, compassion, altruism and justice have failed, genetic manipulation will not succeed.
Gina Maranto (QUEST FOR PERFECTION: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings)
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)
when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice—all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn’t evolve for the “good of the species” and aren’t reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever how (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self-interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony.
Robert Wright (The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology)
Should I be concerned over the obvious delight our daughter takes in the ultraviolence?" "It's genetic.
Young Justice
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (SCIENCE MASTERS))
As eminent scientist R Buckminster Fuller stated: We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply in terms in which we have been conditioned to think His words are echoed by Dr Michael Ellner: Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside-down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality
Michael Tsarion (Atlantis, Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation)
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)
A moral system based on continuous rather than categorical thinking gives us a biological and evolutionary foundation for the expansion of the moral sphere to include nonhuman animals, based on objective criteria of genetic relatedness, cognitive abilities, emotional capacities, moral development, and especially the capacity to feel pain and suffer. This is, in fact, what it means to be a sentient being, and for this reason I worded the first principle of this science-based moral system as the survival and flourishing of sentient beings.
Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
Three generations--the expectant parent, the fetus, and the eggs in that fetus's ovaries--can be genetically altered by stressors during pregnancy. By understanding this, you can see that both cultural and family legacy burdens are not just beliefs; they're also physically expressed.
Natalie Y. Gutiérrez, LMFT (The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color (The Social Justice Handbook Series))
science and reason, which has found itself in recent decades under attack on many fronts: right-wing ideologues who do not understand science; religious-right conservatives who fear science; left-wing postmodernists who do not trust science when it doesn’t support progressive tenets about human nature; extreme environmentalists who want to return to a prescientific and preindustrial agrarian society; antivaxxers who wrongly imagine that vaccinations cause autism and other maladies; anti-GMO (genetically modified food) activists who worry about Frankenfoods; and educators of all stripes who cannot articulate why Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) are so vital to a modern democratic nation.
Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
The boundary between the natural and the social, and between the realm of fortune and that of justice, is not static. What we have taken to be moral progress has often consisted in pushing back the frontiers of the natural, in bringing within the sphere of social control, and thereby within the domain of justice, what was previously regarded as the natural, and as merely a matter of good or ill fortune.
Allen Buchanan (From Chance to Choice: Genetics & Justice)
There is no other industry as cruel and oppressive as factory farming. With regard to numbers affected, extent and length of suffering, and numbers of premature deaths, no other industry can even approach factory farming. Billions of individuals are exploited from genetically engineered birth, through excruciating confinement, to conveyor belt dismemberment. Consequently, there is no industry more appropriate for social justice activists to boycott.
Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation....In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins
There is no place left for the buffalo to roam. There’s only corn, wheat, and soy. About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year. Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal. They count, and they died for your dinner, along with all the animals that have dwindled past the point of genetic feasibility.
Lierre Keith (The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (Flashpoint Press))
This approach is flawed on multiple levels. First, when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself. Second, this approach empowers entrenched managers to create the visible appearance of diversity in their organizations while avoiding the need to engage with true diversity of thought, including challenges to their incumbency. Third, when a narrow conception of diversity is implemented through affirmative action or other quota-based systems, that fuels racism and sexism by fostering tokenism in the workplace and animus among communities that fail to benefit from these programs.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
I follow you. So now you aim to get to a good college. In order to do justice to your talent.’ ‘Well, something like that. My mother and I both thought that maybe Atlas Brookings, being a generous and liberal college…’ ‘Sufficiently generous and liberal to be open to all students of high caliber, even some who haven’t benefited from genetic editing.’ ‘Exactly, sir.’ ‘And no doubt, Rick, you understand, because your mother will have told you, that I currently chair the college’s Founders’ Committee. That’s to say, the body that controls the scholarships.’ ‘Yes, sir. That’s what she told me.’ ‘Now, Rick. I’m hoping your mother hasn’t been implying that the selection procedure at Atlas Brookings is subject to any favoritism.’ ‘Neither my mother nor I would ask you to help me out of favoritism, sir. I’m only asking you to help if you think I’m worth a place at Atlas Brookings.’ ‘That’s well said. Okay, let’s take a look at what you have here.
Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun)
Some destruction is required to live. We cannot eat rocks and air. Yet why should one organism eat so greedily that all others are imperiled? When we’re finished grazing in the garden, I want there to be some garden left. This is more than aesthetic desire- though surely it is the beautiful complexity of nature that woos me. It is moral desire. To use nature beyond its capacity to restore itself is to destroy the force and process that have given us our lives. We have not fallen from nature, we have risen from it; all human accomplishment, feeling, and belief along with flesh and blood are rooted in that generative power. Even our strange human inwardness that imagines such guiding abstractions as faith, justice, love, and compassion is a gift of nature. The theory of evolution, our long genetic entanglement with all the other living things, is not at odds with theories of the sacred. It locates the sacred in living things. I believe we owe nature the deep sense of gratitude that people once expressed to their gods. The earth’s life is finite, as is my own, and these are the realities I accept with sorrow, the place and the passage made sacred by their limits.
Alison Hawthorne Deming (Writing the Sacred into the Real)
What If God Is a Creep? What if God is a creep who wishes He was taller who didn't get the girl who picks on people not His own size? What if God laughed when Jesus had second thoughts? What if His sense of order is no more complex than kids playing King of the Hill or Smear the Queer? What if God is really a creep who beats His wife embezzles when He can and jerks off to violent porn? Perhaps God put Darin on earth to help us understand that the very traits of man which survive the longest and determine the fittest are God's own favorite attributes? Maybe He's a boss who expects favors a professor who makes others feel stupid a witness obstructing justice. What if God is really just a creep? Maybe Machiavelli was His inspired son and The Prince remains our most sacred text. What if Hitler sits at God's right hand tended by a heavenly host of bigots, bullies, soldiers and other serial killers who look to an angel name Manson for advice. A God capable of biological brilliance and genetic genius is no more likely to care about justice and kindness than His creations are. Why assume that God likes women any more than men do? Why imagine He wouldn't hurt His children? God's morality might be just as steeped in struggle as accented by abuse as spiced with exploitation and as baked with brutality as our own common recipes. Drink up. One taste and you are in Heaven. If God really is a creep that certainly would explain a lot.
Nancy Boutilier (On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone: New Poems)
Those who are willing to work for change, and make changes, too often do so only for the sake of their own liberation, without much thought to the oppression of others—especially other species. Feminists lobby against sex wage discrepancies, gays fight homophobic laws, and the physically challenged demand greater access—each fighting for injustices that affect their lives, and/or the lives of their loved ones. Yet these dedicated activists usually fail to make even a slight change in their consumer choices for the sake of other much more egregiously oppressed and exploited individuals. While it is important to fight for one’s own liberation, it is counterproductive (not to mention selfish and small minded) to fight for one’s own liberation while willfully continuing to oppress others who are yet lower on the rungs of hierarchy. While fighting for liberation, it makes no sense for feminists to trample on gays, for gays to trample on the physically challenged, or for the physically challenged to trample on feminists. It also makes no sense for any of these social justice activists to willfully exploit factory farmed animals. Can we not at least avoid exploiting and dominating others while working for our personal liberation? Those who seek greater justice—whatever their cause—must make choices that diminish the cruel exploitation of others. As a matter of consistency and solidarity, social justice activists must reject dairy products, eggs, and flesh. There is no other industry as cruel and oppressive as factory farming. With regard to numbers affected, extent and length of suffering, and numbers of premature deaths, no other industry can even approach factory farming. Billions of individuals are exploited from genetically engineered birth, through excruciating confinement, to conveyor belt dismemberment. Consequently, there is no industry more appropriate for social justice activists to boycott. Even if we aren’t prepared to take a public stand, or take on another cause, we must at least make a private commitment on behalf of cows, pigs, and hens by leaving animal products on the shelf at the grocery store.
Lisa Kemmerer (Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices)
Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us. Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature. Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world. It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.
Michael G. Cordingley (Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention)
Capitalism began as a theory about how the economy functions. It was both descriptive and prescriptive – it offered an account of how money worked and promoted the idea that reinvesting profits in production leads to fast economic growth. But capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic – a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth. Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you are likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need therefore to inculcate Afghan tribesmen in the values of free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Scientific research is usually funded by either governments or private businesses. When capitalist governments and businesses consider investing in a particular scientific project, the first questions are usually ‘Will this project enable us to increase production and profits? Will it produce economic growth?’ A project that can’t clear these hurdles has little chance of finding a sponsor. No history of modern science can leave capitalism out of the picture. Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely. The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years – such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill. Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
How we vote on policy issues, for example, is influenced by whether we attribute economic and achievement inequalities primarily to genetic or environmental forces. If the differences are due to nature, society may decide to take pity on the unfortunates who lost out in the genetic roulette that produced them but could also feel that the rest of the world is not culpable for their misfortune. If it’s the environment that is mostly responsible for who we are and what we become, then is it up to us to change it to reduce the injustices it has produced? How you see the role of heredity and prewiring in willpower, character, and personality affects not just your abstract view of human nature and responsibility, but also your sense of what is and is not possible for you or your children.
Walter Mischel (The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control)
these creatures grow up with a peculiar knowledge. They know that they have been born in an infinite variety. They know, for instance, that in their genetic material they are born with hundreds of different chromosome formations at the point in each cell that we would say determines their "sex". These creatures don't just come in XX or XY; they also come in XXY and XYY and XXX plus a long list of "mosaic" variations in which some cells in a creature's body have one combination and other cells have another. Some of these creatures are born with chromosomes that aren't even quite X or Y because a little bit of one chromosome goes and gets joined to another. There are hundreds of different combinations, and though all are not fertile, quite a number of them are. The creatures in this world enjoy their individuality; they delight in the fact that they are not divisible into distinct categories. So when another newborn arrives with an esoterically rare chromosomal formation, there is a little celebration: "Aha," they say, "another sign that we are each unique." These creatures also live with the knowledge that they are born with a vast range of genital formations. Between their legs are tissue structures that vary along a continuum, from clitorises with a vulva through all possible combinations and gradations to penises with scrotal sac. These creatures live with an understanding that their genitals all developed prenatally from exactly the same little nub of embryonic tissue called a genital tubercle, which grew and developed under the influence of varying amounts of the hormone androgen. These creatures honor and respect everyone's natural-born genitalia –including what we would describe as a microphallus or a clitoris several inches long. What these creatures find amazing and precious is that because everyone's genitals stem from th same embryonic tissue, the nerves inside all their genitals got wired very much alike, so these nerves of touch just go crazy upon contact in a way that resonates completely between them. "My gosh," they think, "you must feel something in your genital tubercle that intensely resembles what I'm feeling in my genital tubercle." Well, they don't think that in so many words; they're actually quite heavy into their feelings at that point; but they do feel very connected –throughout all their wondrous variety. I could go on. I could tell you about the variety of hormones that course through their bodies in countless different patterns and proportions, both before birth and throughout their lives –the hormones that we call "sex hormones" but that they call "individuality inducers." I could tell you how these creatures think about reproduction: For part of their lives, some of these creatures are quite capable of gestation, delivery, and lactation; and for part of their lives, some of them are quite capable of insemination; and for part or all of their lives, some of them are not capable of any of those things – so these creatures conclude that it would be silly to lock anyone into a lifelong category based on a capability variable that may or may not be utilized and that in any case changes over each lifetime in a fairly uncertain and idiosyncratic way. These creatures are not oblivious to reproduction; but nor do they spend their lives constructing a self-definition around their variable reproductive capacities. They don't have to, because what is truly unique about those creatures is that they are capable of having a sense of personal identity without struggling to fit into a group identity based on how they were born. These creatures are quite happy, actually. They don't worry about sorting /other/ creatures into categories, so they don't have to worry about whether they are measuring up to some category they themselves are supposed to belong to.
John Stoltenberg (Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice)
Listen to this incredible explanation by one of atheism’s champions, Richard Dawkins, of Oxford: In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.5
Ravi Zacharias (Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message)
I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success.
James Lee Burke (Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux #19))
An unusually clear statement of the secular view of evil and suffering is made by Richard Dawkins in his book "River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life"- He writes: “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation....In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” This is a complete departure from every other cultural view of suffering. Each one sees evil as having some purpose as a punishment, or a test, or an opportunity. But in Dawkin's view, the reason people struggle so mightily in the face of suffering is because they will not accept that it never has any purpose. It is senseless, neither bad nor good- because categories such as good and evil are meaningless in the universe we live in. "We humans have purpose on the brain," he argues. "Show us almost any object or process and it is hard for us to resist the 'Why' question...It is an almost universal delusion...The old temptation comes back with a vengeance when tragedy strikes..."Why oh why, did the cancer/earthquake/hurricane have to strike my child?" But he argues that this agony happens because "we cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking purpose....DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Timothy J. Keller (Walking with God through Pain and Suffering)
Like our personal genetic inheritance, we cannot simply walk away from our religious past. That past is alive and powerful within our various cultures, even those that seem quite secular. Two-thirds of the world’s humans affiliate with one or another of the world religions. And the other third continues to live out cultural scripts whose deep roots reach back into religion. To pursue gender justice demands of us that we engage actively in the struggle over interpretation, the struggle over the perceived meanings of the texts and teachings of our religious legacies. It is a contentious terrain precisely because it continues to deeply affect people in their daily lives. Yes, interpreting the sacred is a scholarly task, but it is also a highly political task because interpreting the sacred shapes how power is used in society. To interpret the religious tradition is to enter a conflict and to make a choice. Our appropriation of our heritage is never neutral; it displays our intention and purpose for its use. It is taking up sides, even if, or perhaps especially if it claims not to.
John C. Raines (What Men Owe to Women: Men's Voices from World Religions)
On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.
Ellen Vaughn (Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years)
The Führer is the first statesman in the history of the world who not only acknowledges and understands the achievements of research in racial purity and genetics, but has raised them to be the guiding principle in the administration of justice. For him, nothing is more important than a healthy nation.
Péter Nádas (Parallel Stories: A Novel)
So what happens when an entire generation stands to benefit from the economic spoils of their parents’ work? Enter millennials—the children of baby boomers. For example, many of my peers at Harvard and at Yale grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attended Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and then matriculated at Ivy League colleges, often advantaged by their parents’ alumni status. These were the kids who needed at once to benefit from their parentally endowed privileges while also being morally superior to their parents for recognizing those privileges. Becoming woke to genetically inherited attributes like “whiteness” fit the bill perfectly, since it allowed an entire generation to blame their forefathers for the sin they had inherited at birth. It wasn’t quite their fault; it was someone else’s sin that they were merely burdened with.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
Life is rarely so straightforward as the fairy tales would have us believe. Truth. Justice. Happy endings. Life is, and excuse my alphabet, effing complicated. Should children be held responsible for their genetics or circumstances or the way they were raised? Of course not. Yet after some arbitrary span of time, we do just that. Because at some point the responsibility has to shift to them. Yet how much of who we are is a product of our nature and nurture, really? I suppose the only thing that seems unambiguous is kindness and mercy. But even those are questionable if in granting them you’re denying victims justice or closure…” He sighed. “Like I said, it’s complicated.
Isla Frost (Vampires Will Be Vampires (Fangs and Feathers, #3))
Should children be held responsible for their genetics or circumstances or the way they were raised? Of course not. Yet after some arbitrary span of time, we do just that. Because at some point the responsibility has to shift to them. Yet how much of who we are is a product of our nature and nurture, really? I suppose the only thing that seems unambiguous is kindness and mercy. But even those are questionable if in granting them you’re denying victims justice or closure…” He sighed. “Like I said, it’s complicated.
Isla Frost (Vampires Will Be Vampires (Fangs and Feathers, #3))
Earlier, I stated that social constructivist arguments were necessary to expose the wizard behind the curtain of Jim Crow racism, which relied upon pseudoscientific claims that Blacks were inherently genetically inferior to Whites. Today, the primary challenge for racial justice is not exposing the wizard behind the curtain. It is revealing how the wizard exerts its power in visible and not-so-visible ways. It is exposing the powers and principalities of racism in a “postracial” age. Social constructionism takes us only so far in doing that. That is because the social constructionist argument is, first and foremost, an argument about the scientific utility of race as a variable for analysis; hence, the racial eliminativist assertion that race is not a biological reality and thus should not be treated as such in scientific research. This does not mean, however, that scientists believe that the concept of race has no social or cultural significance. In other words, the fact that race is socially constructed does not mean that it is not real.
Chanequa Walker-Barnes (I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity (PC)))
of. The true purpose of Marxism and communism was never social justice or the fair redistribution of wealth and property. Its founders knew they couldn’t publicly announce their plan to create an all-powerful totalitarian world government, so they found softer words to convince the masses that this would be in their best interest. Given the deaths of tens of millions of people in the twentieth century’s communist revolutions and Hitler’s National Socialism movement resulting in World War II and the Holocaust, this would seem a formidable task. But the ruling elite, the oligarchy, the “scientific dictatorship,” the Illuminati, or whatever you choose to call them, really believe that the masses are genetically inferior and can be deceived by a well-funded campaign of carefully crafted messaging and subliminal and overt scientific mind control. Remember, the elite are completely convinced of the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution in which certain races and genetic lines are vastly superior to others. That’s why the occult ruling families are obsessed with having their children breed within certain genetic lines to preserve their superiority. In the early twentieth century, the Rockefeller family funded eugenics programs—the science of selective breeding. The term was coined in the late 1800s by British natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Darwin’s theory, proposed a system allowing “the more suitable races or strains of blood a
Paul McGuire (Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (Babylon Code))
At the time this book was set, Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder wasn’t widely known about. Now it’s thought to be the most common, non-genetic cause of learning disability in the UK. Research suggests that every year 7,000 babies in the UK are born with FASD. Adolescents and adults with FASD are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and more than 70 per cent of children with FASD have been in the care system. There is now a specialist clinic in the UK for assessing and treating children and adults with FASD.
Maggie Hartley (Not To Blame: Rejected by everyone, can loving foster carer Maggie reach a troubled girl?)
Stuck In One's Craw by Stewart Stafford Nobody's beeswax,' still, you nosily ask: 'Is it the last supper to eat that fast?' Try blackened potato skin's bitter taste, A heritage of hunger's grim, gaunt waste. From Celtic mist, this heir apparent, My grandparent's grandparent(s), Survived Ireland's holocaust famine, As a local catch, not New World salmon. Crop blight drove their starving plea, With lots cast bleak to die or flee Genetic appetite fed the strongest, Those who eat fastest live longest. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford