Fora.tv had a Dawkins talk. I didn't listen to him because I know what's always on his mind. I did read the comments to see how far along the evolution/religion debate had evolved. It's all as stagnant as ever.

I was going to post the following but with those people (on both sides) it would have gotten lost among the indecipherable comments that plague online comments.

I had wanted to ask all those who bask in Dawkins' and their own intellect that, if evolution is true, why do they not defend the child molester, the rapist, the terrorist, the serial killer, the homosexual, the thief? Was it because cowardice is also ingrained along with arrogance or is it because religion (in the U.S., at least) is an easy target?

Those who profess to know evolution should stop state capital punishment, incarcerations, and sundry other penalties, along with prejudice and bigotry born of societal ignorance. For the time being, leave people to the philosophies they were taught and, who knows, they may come around to your way of thinking if you can show them that the perversions that afflict them are not satanic spells but godly manifestations in the form of His grand evolutionary scheme.

The cynic might say that punishment is something that, surely, evolution created. Yes, it is true. But what is stopping us from finding the humane solution? We know that punishment doesn't deter anyone. Yet we spend untold billions on inflicting pain on our fellow man who, I can bet you any eternity in heaven that I might be blessed with, is behaving under forces outside his control. That's right, the mafioso who runs the New Jersey town; the Jews and the Muslims who, like the Christians (let's be fair), reads the bible like a lawyer reads the law; the President who promises this or that and falls victim to lobbyists of one ilk or another; the female teacher who seduces a student; the Catholic priest who stupidly is ordained to follow the edict of some eunuch pope of days gone by and fails; the capitalist who grows richer while passing off societies ills to, of course, society; all these are, in the grand scheme, faultless.

So what is the solution? The solution is one of education. The evolutionists spend all their time condemning the creationists as if all the ills of man are their doing or as if all the impediments to progress are their doing. NO. The fault lies with the man who has knowledge and knows not how to instill it in his neighbor. It may be because he would be forced to defend the child molestor--who would want to do that? But no one is being asked to send their children over to the deviant in order to appease the god of evolution--that would be ludicrous. But if we can agree--and teach--that perversion is outside the individual's control, we can treat the man or woman or child, organically, through surgery, chemistry, or genes. The solution is out there. Rather than the anachronistic call to incarceration and the crimson letter, let us collectively seek more humane treatment. The fiction of A Clockwork Orange was unfortunate in how it affected us. It may have single-handedly set us back decades for it showed how through our best intentions, man can not interfere successfully with nature; but the thinking man should have been aware that without man's intervention, we are stuck with the snail's pace of evolution to, hopefully, make a better man. But we should heed the lesson of the ant who has outlived us by eons and yet is, according to E.O. Wilson, one of the most warlike of species. Evolution has given us smarts. Let us not continue to be philistines.