Today's is Darwin's 200th birthday, I thought this was relevant in some way.

Every other year I teach a class on Asian History, usually focused on Modern East Asia. This year I am giving much greater attention to Korea in the class and we are reading several books on Korean topics.

Something I had my student's read this week has been resonating in my mind: Yi Ik's late eighteenth century critique of Catholic missionaries arguments, which ended with this:

"But the Europeans embrace the miraculous and the mysterious. The more perplexing the evidence, the more easily the ignorant are seduced by it. This being the case, they have no right to complain that only evil spirits delude people. The teachings of their Lord of Heaven do at least as much damage to the hearts and minds of people....
There is no subject these Westerners have not exhaustively explored and nothing too profound for them to understand, so it is really a pity that they have become mixed up with such nonsense."

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