Charles Darwin was mentally ill

Originally posted by Skyfloating
I admit I didnt like Biology as a child. Neither math. I liked everything Darwin hated: Literature, Art, Philosophy, Linguistics.

J. H. L. Compton

The Vicarage
Shoreham
Sevenoaks

Sept. 15

My dear Mr Darwin

My recollections of your father at school & college is very bright & sunny.
At Shrewsbury we slept in the same room for some years & often beguiled the night with pleasant conversation. He was always cheerful & good tempered & much beloved by his school fellows. He was not a great proficient in his school studies, but was always busy collecting beetles, butterflies &c. He spent some time most evenings with a blow-pipe at the gas-lights in our bedroom.

[14 verso]

At Cambridge I used to read Shakspere with him in his own room & he took great pleasure in these readings. He was also very fond of music, though not a performer & I generally got an order for him for Kings Coll. Chapel on Sunday evening.
In after life we never met though of course his name constantly came before me & I could not easily forget the pleasant days of old.

Believe me,
Yours faithfully

J.H.Lovett Cameron

Originally posted by melatonin
Can you support this statement?

Originally posted by ladyinwaiting
If Darwin hadn't developed the theory, someone else would have. Digging in the dirt continues to teach us many things.

Originally posted by Skyfloating

What IS odd is what always happens in the threads and also behind-the-scenes to "get this guy de-modded" when I post things in this line of thinking. It shows the true face of the type of mindset Im dealing with here.

Originally posted by Skyfloating
Finishing Statement

Im not going to take this line of argumentation beyond what was originally intended. The original intention was to "give them some of their own medicine". Before calling religious people "mentally ill" or any other such thing, consider that people with other views than your own are simply people with other views than your own.

Also, Creationism is not owned by Christians but other Religions as well.

You guys defended the old man Darwin well and I applaud your efforts. I apologize for anyone I might have offended in the Course of this Discussion.

Good Luck

Originally posted by Skyfloating
There's a guy who sees everything as having coincidentally arisen from dead matter.

To some of us thats beyond ridiculous.

Originally posted by Skyfloating
From Darwins early life it is known that he found Literature, Languages, Lectures and Art dull and instead preferred Taxidermy, the art of displaying dead animals.

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.—Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if it be a pretty woman all the better.

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
Charles Darwin actually started a new belief system, it was ground breaking in that one now had a scientific out not to believe in God.

To me he is no different than Mohamed or Joseph Smith.

It's interesting that the person that started the belief structure that has lead to mass atheism, was mentally ill.