I grant you that allowance... but perhaps I should also clarify that while my children provided me with insightful gifts beyond measure; I also drawn my conclusions from having survived almost 60 years of life on this planet - a good part of it in the most hellish circumstances imaginable.
I believe what you say about you learning from your children. Like I said, I haven't had children of my own, but I have learned a thing or two from other peoples' children. My girlfriend student-teaches at an elementary school as part of her teaching credential program, and she tells me all the time that she learns new things from her kids. I think that children can teach us much because, for the most part, they haven't been as contaminated by the world as adults have.
If I take what you say to be truth and apply it to a town of a 100 people, would you disagree if I said that 67 people out of the 100 are "bad"?
In other words - take yourself and two others around you. Given your argument of "a whole lot of bad ones" - who amongst your troika are the "bad ones"?
I don't think that I would say that 67% of people are bad in any given situation; I think that the percentage depends on where you're looking. If you took me and 2 others, I would say that the bad ones are me and one other person, or all three of us, or just me, depending on who the other 2 are. I don't think that just because you pick out 2 other random people they're necessarily going to be bad.
Ach! Let us examine some examples, shall we?
Our greater intelligence in the past century created:
1. Air flight
2. Penicillin
3. Atomic energy
... but it also created:
1. Bombers
2. Biological weapons
3. Nuclear weapons
Who the hell talks about CAT scans? Improved IV needles? Sterile OR techniques? Hand washing guidelines? Eradication of diseases? Super-antibiotics? Laproscopic surgery? LASIK? Disposable contact lenses? Oral and injectible diabetes medication? The Triple Cocktail Regimen to contain AIDS? Radiation and Chemotherapy to prolong the lives of cancer victims? MRIs?....
.... all that I listed, simply came from the top of my head and were limited to modern medicine alone. THINK of the progress made in other fields....
I could think of several more advancements we have made in transportation, agriculture, communications, etc. Our problem is that we take all this creative power and turn it on ourselves, whether it is directly or indirectly. There are the obvious weapons technologies which allow us to make more powerful weapons that can cause greater damage, but some of the technologies that are meant to be beneficial end up being a double-edged sword. Take, for instance, ethanol. Yes, it's a way to reduce our dependency on oil, but, as we have seen in the past few months, it also contributes to causing food shortages worldwide.
Well, if you truly understood the concept of evolution, then ideally you'd protest the "preservation of species" in the name of "natural reserve" or "protected forest" etc.*
I do understand the concept of evolution. I don't think, however, that evolution was originally meant to encompass systematic destruction of species and habitats. It's one thing for a creature to outlive its neighbor because it has adaptations that allow it to find food, or escape predators, but it is something
completely different for a whole species to be wiped out by some unforeseen chemical pollutant that doesn't even give the species a chance to adapt. I'm not necessarily advocating the preservation of species, I'm just not advocating the destruction of everything on the planet.
