Into Good and Evil

The history of Jesus

2009-02-26T13:03:00.001-05:00

Good post here.

Interesting chart...

2009-02-12T13:40:00.001-05:00

Check out the comparisons in the chart to the left of this post.

Thoughts on eugenics...

2009-02-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

Their view, so far as I understand it, is that since human beings create things of magnificence and beauty, but do not create according to principle of random variation and natural selection, it does not seem plausible to them that anything magnificent and beautiful — such as various natural phenomena — could have emerged through variation or selection, either.

No, creativity often emerges through variation and “selection,” the main point is that some are trying to reduce intelligent selection and sight that we already have knowledge of to blind processes. We know that we see and select by experience but they argue that this is an illusion. The language used to specify the views of Darwinists is consistently contradictory because we are in fact living, seeing, knowing beings who cannot be reduced to blind, dead, ignorant processes. The only people who argue that we can be are those who are dead in the head themselves. They pollute language and speak in contradictions but in so far as they are supposedly saying anything Darwinists argue that humans themselves arose through variation and natural “selection”/culling. They probably imagine that they happened across the truth of things by some happy happenstance in their own biological brain events. But given their admittedly ignorant and imbecilic view of things human beings creating “things of magnificence and beauty” are themselves created by variation and culling. This is why Dawkins believes that it is possible to breed for things like mathematical or musical ability.

So do you similarly agree that the creativity of human beings was created mainly by processes like random variation and natural culling or not?

The Day the Earth Stood Still

2009-01-15T15:48:00.002-05:00

I didn't know that the original had Christian allusions:

In the original, Klaatu the alien messenger descends from the heavens offering the gift of healing and bearing a message for the world that could mean either salvation or destruction. He is killed by small minded authorities but is resurrected a short time later; he delivers his final message of peace to the world before ascending back into the heavens. Oh and his cover name while walking among the humans? Mr Carpenter.
In the new movie he is just Klaatu, he walks on water, he doesn’t need resurrecting but he does resurrect someone else and his message is not so much one of salvation or destruction as a warning of impending destruction. In the first movie, intelligent space-faring civilizations of the cosmos warned humanity that if they didn’t give up our war-like ways they would cleanse the Earth of us. They could ignore us before we had nukes but now we were a threat to everyone. In the new movie the intelligent space-faring nations are alarmed at the environmental damage we are wreaking on Earth. Klaatu is kind of an alien Al Gore (“An Inconvenient Alien?”).
Read the rest at Uncommon Descent

Over at Intelldesign

2008-12-17T17:00:00.003-05:00

I wrote a few posts on Darwinism:

The Difference Between Skeletal Remains and Living Organisms

Darwinism and Wikipedia

Intelligent Design vs. the Imagination

Debate on Entropy

2008-12-11T15:23:00.001-05:00

A good debate is going on here.

Everyone wants me to read and write stuff.....

2008-12-08T22:47:00.005-05:00

Sheesh, my sister just sent me this article. It's quite the intellectually toxic mix of a journalist writing about the Bible and marriage. Apparently they are passing most of their opinions off as an accurate understanding of the Bible as the expert on religion at Newsweek.

They begin by noting polygamy:

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile?

They may as well cite King David's adultery as an instance of the Bible condoning adultery. For those who do not know, according to the Bible we are still living with the fall out of Abraham's lack of faith and it may turn out to be literal nuclear fall out some day if some of the sons of Ishmael have their way.

Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists.

The Bible notes that most of them had problems for just that reason. For example it notes that Solomon had many wives and was led to paganism, the occult and "Did evil in the eyes of the Lord." as a result. It is interesting to note that if the Bible was inspired totally by the minds of men then it is likely that the mentality read in it would read just like a lot of cults read. Something along the lines of: "One of the rules is that men get to have sex with as many women as they like, preferably virgins." One would think that the fact that it doesn't read that way might cause these journalists to pause and think but then, they are journalists.

Moving on:

Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Many married couples have done just that and our culture is shaped by it. One of the main metaphors for understanding the Christ and therefore understanding Christianity is that of the bride and bridegroom. And if men do follow the biblical model and lay down their own interests, desires and even their lives for the sake of their wives it does not generate a terrible or oppressive civilization as these journalists seem to believe. Their modern notions of romantic love only arose after the biblical model came to prominence. A man and woman are naturally complementary and people often sense that this comes about by design but romantic love did not typify the pagan world. Much of what we call romantic love arose when Christian knights began to do away with pagan ways and to honor women. You would think that people would think of this given that it is still represented in the form of fairy tales and the like. Note that this form of romantic love has little to do with the "gender equity" that these journalists mention. Just think if every romance movie had a guy in the girl's role and so on, of course they do not because men and women are not the same and we should be thankful that they are not. Vive la difference!

Moving on:

...while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

It may not be explicit enough for journalists to understand but it is explicit enough to promote marriage while condemning all forms of adultery and even lust. Pedophilia, zoophilia and homophilia are all explicitly or implicitly condemned because the "two in one flesh union" which is only possible between a man and a women is also the only possible way for their union to be exemplified in the flesh of their children. Given the biblical model it is the same type of union whether or not it is ever exemplified by children.

Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world.

The fact that polygamy was often pointed to in a negative light although the practice was common shows that there is a difference between the biblical ideal and what goes on in the real world. It does not show that the biblical ideal is wrong, instead it seems to indicate that the Bible was inspired more than the interests and desires of the men who wrote it. I'm no biblical expert but here is an interesting experiment, look in the Bible and see if you can find anywhere where polygamy is mentioned favorably. Something along the lines of: "This man was a great man because he had many wives." Etc. Would it not be in the interests of those who wrote it to portray polygamy in the best light possible?

He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew.

Yes, and he also said that anyone who causes a child to stumble should have a stone put around their neck and be thrown into the sea. That's something that proponents of same-sex marriage might want to remember because their focus is invariably the "rights" and desires of adults and they do not seem to care about children. It is already known that adopted children often go through a process of wanting to know their biological parents. It is not generally known what would happen if they were generally denied representatives for their natural or biological parents and instead lived with two women or two men or two effeminate men or one manly woman and another taking the feminine role. Gender roles do not simply disappear even among homosexuals because they are rooted in basic biosocial realities.

Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce...

He never explicitly mentions necrophilia, pedophilia or zoophilia either because some things should go without saying. It's funny how everyone turns into a prude when it comes to deep sexual disorientations and their main argument would be that no argument is necessary (After all, who would even talk about such things?!! Well, philosophers would and have...) but in the instance of homosexuality they've been conditioned to do away with basic forms of common sense having to do with basic natural categories which pretty much everyone but psychotics have a knowledge of. Ironically even the psychotic serial killer or sexual pervert who denies basic natural categories admits to them while in the process of perverting them. I won't go into how that is so, it's probably not worth thinking about for most people. Unfortunately people are probably going to have to think about sexual disorientations and perversions thanks to articles like this one. The funny thing is that this article was apparently written by "experts" on religion at Newsweek.

I may reply to more of in a future post. Or I may not, I'm not sure it's worth dealing with. It seems to be structured for people who want to believe something no matter what the truth of anything actually is because they have a nice gay friend who they want to support no matter what the truth is. The truth is that the Bible condemns homosexuality explicitly and implicitly time and again, every gay activist I've debated actually understands that and yet apparently these journalists from Newsweek cannot. I wonder if they even really expect people to take this article as some sort of serious news report on a current event or if it is just their way of saying: "We're nice and tolerant so we support homosexuality and you should too."

Blogging notes

2008-12-08T16:57:00.002-05:00

I may be posting more at Intelldesign and archiving more here while mentioning the decline of American civilization and the end of the American Empire occasionally. ;-)

This blog has always tended toward being an archive of my comments, research, etc. The Shrink offered to let me write at Intelldesign and I took him up on it. I'm not sure how much posting I'll do here or there. After all, right now I have a 300GB Raptor RAID array that I want to set up. Etc. ;-)

Archive, on the Enlightenment

2008-11-20T00:47:00.001-05:00

…so what would you accept as true about the intellectual, artistic, and political movements of the 17th through 19th centuries…

I would accept many things as true but you tend to weave a mythology of Progress around things which are true that actually isn’t true. That’s the main issue.

For example you seem to imagine it likely that polytheism gave rise to theism which ultimately turns into deism and perhaps that turns into atheism at the end of this scenario of imaginary Progress.

That seems to be what you’re imagining here:….from ancient Greek polytheism to modern Christian theism/Enlightenment deism…

But the Darwinian tendency to project Progress onto everything by imagining things has been widely undermined by historical and anthropological evidence, so the views of someone like Edward Tylor carry about the same weight as the hypothetical goo typical to Darwinism in general.

It’s far more likely that polytheism is a corruption or falling away from monotheism than that theism arose out of polytheism. The most ancient traditional knowledge of many cultures is monotheistic.* In fact if one were to draw a line of progression based on the evidence it would more likely go from theism to polytheism to secularism and nihilism.

*E.g. Hananim (Korean, the Great One), Shang Ti (Chinese, the Lord of Heaven), Koro (Bantu, the Creator) Magano (Ethopian, the ultimate Creator again, as contrasted to the malevolent Sheit’an), the Great Spirit (American Indian), Deos (Greek, perhaps corrupted to Zeus and drawn down into a corrupted anthropromorphic focus, later reformed back by the philosophers under the new name Theos) and so on and on.

You said of the Enlightenment: Our commitment to scientific methods (doctrines being, quite frankly, irrelevant) and to the Constitution are both aspects of the Enlightenment legacy.

But the development of science as we know it had little to do with the Enlightenment and the mythology that tends to surround it. Take the work of Newton as an example to compare the imagery and mythology typical to “enlightenment” with the historical reality of what Newton himself actually wrote:

One of the first actions of those who proclaimed the ‘Enlightenment’ was the ‘deification of Newton.’ Voltaire set the example by calling him the greatest man who ever lived. Thus began an unexcelled outpouring of worshipful prose and extravagant poetry. David Hume wrote that Newton was ‘the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.’ As Gay noted, ‘the adjectives ‘divine’ and ‘immortal’ became practically compulsory.’ [...] In 1802 the French philosophe Claude-Henri de Sain-Simon (1760-1825) founded a Godless religion to be led by scientist-priests and called it the Religion of Newton (his pupil Auguste Comte renamed it ’sociology’).
However, as the ‘Enlightenment’ became more outspokenly atheistic and more determined to establish the incompatibility of science and religion, a pressing matter arose: what was to be done about Newton’s religion? Trouble was that Newton’s religious views were not a matter of hearsay or repute. He had, after all, in 1713 added a concluding section to the second editions of his monumental Principia, the ‘General Scholium’ (or proposition), which was devoted entirely to his ideas about God. In it, Newton undertook to demonstrate the existence of God, concluding that:
‘…the true God is a living, intelligent, powerful Being….’
‘…he governs all things, and knows all things that are done or can be done.’
‘….He endures forever, and is everywhere present.’
‘…As a blind man has no ideas of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.’
Worse yet, Newton had written four letters during 1692-1693 explaining his theology to Richard Bentley. In the ‘Bentley Letters’ Newton ridiculed the idea that the world could be explained in impersonal, mechanical terms. Above all, having discovered the elegant lawfulness of things, Newton believed that he had, once and for all, demonstrated the certainty that behind all existence there is an intelligent, aware, omnipotent God. Any other assumption is ‘inconsistent with my system.’
(For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark :167-168)

Monotheism is associated with science as we know it as well as Progress traditionally understood as Providence but it leads to a different attitude about knowledge/scientia. This caused Newton to comment:

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. cf. (Newton’s Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World by David Berlinksi :167)

If you are arguing that the Constitution and the founding of the American Republic is an aspect of the Enlightenment legacy then what explains the vast difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution? I’m not sure what may be imagined about history but here is some of what the Founders said about the French Revolution:

And what was their Phylosophy? Atheism; pure unadulterated Atheism . . . . The Univer[s]e was Matter only and eternal; Spirit was a Word Without a meaning; Liberty was a Word Without a Meaning. There was no Liberty in the Universe; Liberty was a Word void of Sense. Every thought Word Passion Sentiment Feeling, all Motion and Action was necessary. All Beings and Attributes were of eternal Necessity. Conscience, Morality, were all nothing but Fate. (Letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (Mar. 2, 1816), in The Adams-Jefferson Letters)

Original comment

Democracy and the Decline of Civilization

2008-11-14T20:51:00.005-05:00

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage:
3. from courage to liberty:
4. from liberty to abundance
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy:
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage.
--Alexander Tyler, 1787

Earlier scholars noted how Republics tend to decline:

Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root…and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite…For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader…someone bold and unscrupulous…who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man…the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He…emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power. –Cicero (De Republica, i, 2.)

Money is language, a statement of value and cost and so on. Civilization is rooted in language, when it declines then its monetary systems follow necessarily. Fiscal conservatives try to separate moral language from economic forms of language and so on but a separation between fiscal and social conservativism typically undermines both because it all has to do with language spoken by the same people stating their values in different ways.

Financial credit is no different than credibility in general, a nation of decadent liars cannot create or support a sound monetary system through the application of intelligence or better policies and economic management.* There is no way to manipulate an economic system in order to overcome the corruption of individuals and the decline of a civilization in general. So on we go, put more copper in the coin!

*Poor Obama, naive and ignorant people seem to view him as some sort of savior in this respect.

I didn't know that Micahel Crichton died.

2008-11-08T13:47:00.005-05:00

Here he is making a point I have sometimes made:

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. cf. Uncommon Descent

He's right but I wouldn't lump all religion together. I would at least classify some as more transcendent and some as more immanent. Environmentalism is an immanence based religion which matches patterns in other immanence based religions. For example, Catholics worship the mother of God while environmentalists tend to worship Mother Earth. Catholics used to sell indulgences so that one could pay for their sins while environmentalists sell carbon credits so that one can pay for their sins against the environment. And so on. You can't simply lump all religion together though, there are transcendent (Islam/Allah, Jews/Jehovah, Christians/Father God) and immanent patterns to them. It seems to me that there is only one which reconciles patterns of transcendence and immanence, as it is claimed in Christianity that the transcendent God was immanently incarnated, etc. It's even claimed that this is not a mythic, philosophic or symbolic way of unifying the mental patterns typical to us into One, it's a historical claim about what really happened. Despite the details in the end either it did or it didn't. As odd as it is I think it happened, so I'm a Christian. I'm not sure from what perspective it seems odd to me that God would do things in such a bloody, messy or dirty way because if it is odd then we're very odd creatures of blood, mess and excrement ourselves. If the gardening God wants to get His hands dirty or to create evil then I'm not in a position to object on "moral" grounds and neither is anyone else that I know. And in order to think things odd I must be imagining some other "normal," "clean" or "logical" way for the same ends to come about, yet the simple fact is that for all I know there may be no other means to achieve the same ends.

I know that logic may not help people experiencing evil in the moment but if an infinite God is totally good and a greater good can come about by creating, using or allowing for evil to exist then vast amounts of evil must necessarily exist. If messy forms of redemption are "more perfect" than law-like forms of perfection then evil must necessarily exist to the same extent that all the "more than perfect" things like redemption, mercy, forgiveness and so on exist.

Archive, on Chimps and Humans

2008-11-05T17:26:00.002-05:00

…to say that humans are over one-third daffodil [based on their DNA] is more ludicrous than profound. There are hardly any comparisons you can make to a daffodil in which humans are 33% similar. DNA comparisons thus overestimate similarity at the low end of the scale (because 25% is actually the zero-mark of a DNA comparison) and underestimate comparisons at the high end.
….
The problem is that in being told about these data without a context in which to interpret them, we are left to our own cultural devices. Here, we are generally expected to infer that genetic comparisons reflect deep biological structure, and that 98% is an overwhelming amount of similarity. Thus “the DNA of a human is 98% identical to the DNA of a chimpanzee” becomes casually interpreted as “deep down inside, humans are overwhelmingly chimpanzee. Like 98% chimpanzee.” ….
…whatever the number is, it shouldn’t be any more impressive than the anatomical similarity; all we need to do is to put that old-fashioned comparison into a zoological context.
The paradox is not that we are so genetically similar to the chimpanzee; the paradox is why we now find the genetic similarity to be so much more striking than the anatomical similarity. Scholars of the eighteenth century were overwhelmed by the similarities between humans and chimpanzees. Chimpanzees were as novel then as DNA is now; and the apparent contrast between our bodies and our genes is simply an artifact of having two centuries’ familiarity with chimpanzees and scarcely two decades’ familiarity with DNA sequences. (What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee by Johnathan Marks :28-31)

The primates confirm the predictions of message theory. There are large gaps, and there is no clear-cut phylogeny.
….
The apes thwart any attempt to separate man from nature: they unify man with nature. The apes possess innumerable similarities to us. The apes show that we are a part of this unified collection of objects. We are a part of the biotic message, so we must draw the same conclusions about our origins. The apes make it abundantly clear-The designer of earth’s diverse life forms and the designer of man are the same. Our designer authored the biotic message.
Kenneth Miller writes:
‘The big emotional issue among creationists is human evolution. It might be safe to say that all their previous arguments exist only to support the notion that humans are in no way linked to the other animals.’ (Miller, K., 1982, p 9-10, my italics)
Miller is mistaken. Creationists are not saying that humans are “in no way linked” to other animals. On the contrary. All organisms are linked by design, not descent. This has been part of the creationist thinking from the beginning. Because of this, the discovery of the apes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not frighten them.

‘Now you would have thought that the discovery of these half-animal, half-men [apes] would have most profoundly scared and upset people-this evidence of a link between animals and man. And yet the literature of that period contains no evidence of any such frightened references.’ (Medawar, 1982 p 106)
(The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message Theory by Walter ReMine :323-324)
Dawkins on the same topic, perhaps citing his own imagination and mythology as the equivalent of evidence as he sometimes does:
The rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century polarised attitudes towards the apes. Opponents who might have stomached evolution itself balked with visceral horror at cousinship with what they perceived as low and revolting brutes, and desperately tried to inflate our differences from them. This was nowhere more true than with gorillas. Apes were ‘animals’; we were set apart. (The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins :108) (He cites the “distinquished philosopher” Peter Singer approvingly in a footnote in the same chapter, yet as I recall Singer approves of infanticide.)

In another section he argues rather ignorantly:
Many of our legal and ethical principles depend on the separation between Homo Sapiens and all other species. Of the people who regard abortion as a sin, including the minority who go to the lengths of assassinating doctors and blowing up abortion clinics, many are unthinking meat-eaters, and have no worries about chimpanzees being imprisoned in zoos and sacrificed in laboratories. Would they think again, if we could lay out a living continuum of intermediates between ourselves and chimpanzees, linked in an unbroken chain of interbreeders like the California salamanders? Surely they would. Yet it is the merest accident that the intermediates all happen to be dead. It is only because of this accident that we can comfortably and easily imagine a huge gulf between our two species-or between any two species, for that matter.
(Ib. :303)

Note the way that the Darwinian mind constantly works towards citing imaginary evidence, so by the end of his paragraph he’s treating his imaginary ancestors and imaginary events in the past as if they are a reality which must be “imagined” away by others. Ah well, it bears repeating that he’s the one imagining things! It's a "huge gulf" as he puts it which can be observed empirically. That is simply a fact. And if one does away with the mental illusions typical to Darwinian reasoning (in which the imagination is somehow transmuted into “evidence” while the actual evidence that we can observe empirically and verify now is lost), it’s invariably the case that the Darwinist is relying on imagining things and passing it off as "science." That’s been my experience, at any rate. Also note his ignorance, he should know that if there were actual evidence for his imaginary ancestors it wouldn’t make a huge difference. Does genocide happen among humans? Of course. Do people who know that they have the same ancestors still kill each other? Of course. Is common ancestry among humans or chimps any safeguard if the Darwinian creation myth is true? Of course not, Jews were experimented on by Nazis who firmly believed in Darwinism and the Nazis advanced anti-vivisection laws at the same time that they performed experiments on Jews. There is no reason to become a vegetarian or to stop experiments on animals if the Darwinian creation myth is true, he seems to be playing pretend again by imagining that Jewish ethics are linked to Nature based paganism or the merging of basic natural categories but they aren't.

The ground of all being....

2008-10-23T23:21:00.003-04:00

I've noticed that Intelligent Design tends to be linked to Deism, not Theism. It comports with Theism and could be reformed but often it leads to the view that God set the universe up to run like clockwork somehow and then left. This is based on a mechanistic view of cause and effect which extends into the past. Tick tock! But it's interesting to note that a study of cause and effect leads to the same type of philosophical questions here and now, not events in the distant past created by a distant God. For example, the fact that you're reading this sits on chains of cause and effect as your eyes see, your optical nerve sends signals to the brain, certain brain events are taking place, the brain is composed of the same fields of energy and matter and so on as everything else, etc. We know that things are linked in causal patterns, yet they cannot extend infinitely so what is it that is at their end? Aristotle would answer that instead of an infinite regress there must be an infinite Being, an unmoved Mover or an unchanged Changer. Christian philosophers like Aquinas would go on to point out that this is God and go on to derive many conclusions about God such as omniscience.

Obama on abortion

2008-10-17T12:12:00.006-04:00

Here's a detailed post at Two or Three. I didn't know much of it, although you would figure that he must be pretty radical because he failed to support protection for babies born alive. His argument in the last debate was that they were already protected but what would be wrong with making sure given what was happening? It's telling that even people like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy supported some of the bills that Obama is still capable of rationalizing his failure to vote for.

Interesting point....

2008-10-08T13:58:00.002-04:00

Cal Thomas on William Ayers and the Old Press:

William Ayers is not somebody who just did evil things when Obama was eight years old. They have an adult relationship and Ayers has been a booster of Obama's and they have worked together on 'education issues' in Chicago. Let's have some perspective here. What do you suppose the mainstream media reaction would be had McCain been associated with an abortion clinic bomber?

Windsurfing

2008-10-05T17:01:00.007-04:00

Old videos:

Windsurfing1
Windsurfing2

Related posts: Gone Windsurfing, My Vacation and Windsurfing at the Keys

Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac

2008-10-03T13:00:00.005-04:00

Interesting arguments in video here and here. The second is a little more propagandistic than the first.

The Medieval...

2008-09-30T15:46:00.002-04:00

An excerpt from a book I'm reading, I'll probably archive a few more excerpts because progressives tend to believe in mythologies that they imagine about Progress more than historically based views on how progress as we know it has happened:

In many ways the term "Scientific Revolution" is as misleading as "Dark Ages." Both were coined to discredit the medieval Church. The notion of a "Scientific Revolution" has been used to claim that science suddenly burst forth when a weakened Christianity could no longer prevent it, and as the recovery of classical learning made it possible. Both claims are as false as those concerning Colombus and the flat earth.* First of all, classical learning did not provide an appropriate model for science. Second, the rise of science was already far along by the sixteenth century, having been nurtured by devout Scholastics in that most Christian invention, the university. As Alfred W. Crosby pointed out, "in our time the word medieval is often used as a synonym for muddle-headedness, but it can be more accurately used to indicate precise definition and meticulous reasoning, that is to say, clarity" (his emphasis). Granted that the era of scientific discovery that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was indeed marvelous, the cultural equivalent of the blossoming of a rose. However, just as roses do not spring up overnight but must undergo a long period of normal growth before they even bud, so, too, the blossoming of science was the result of centuries of normal intellectual progress.... Copernicus provides an unsurpassed example of this point.
(For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark :134-135)

Insight...

2008-09-30T00:09:00.002-04:00

A philosophy of insight from some geek to guru dialogues, the guru pointing out that what matters most to us typically isn't matter and mechanisms:

…it should be obvious to you that the neuronal activity that accompanies your act of seeing the meaning of “Give me liberty or give me death” is not the same as understanding what the thought implies.
Let me show you what I’m saying just by pointing out what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to convince me that no independent meaning-processing takes place in our minds. This is what you mean to communicate to me, this the point you want me to see. But is your point, the meaning you wish to communicate, purely a matter of neuronal transactions and brain states? Are you trying to alter certain of my brain events or to get me to see something to be the case? If it’s the latter, then meaning is something different from physiological states of affairs. You could say it’s dependent on a physiological substrate, but you would still have to admit that it’s not the same thing as the physiological transaction itself.
[...]
You can’t be convinced of something by the action of certain physical causes in your central nervous system. You’re convinced by reasons. You disagree with me because you haven’t seen enough reason to agree. Meaning is all about reasons and not causes. If I say a poem is beautiful, neither my message nor its truth is reducible to neuronal excitement in given regions of the cerebral cortex. It’s all about concepts, reasons and meanings, not causes and effects. I cannot see how you can dispute any of this without blatant self-contradiction.
(The Wonder of the World by Roy Abraham Varghese :165,166)

Superstition...

2008-09-25T13:14:00.004-04:00

I'm going to read a few books on the history of science and Christianity. Most indicate that science as we now know it as a system of thought is linked to Christianity. The atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett actually admits this point given the historical evidence but argues that we can essentially harvest the seeds of good ideas grown from a field of bad ideas.

It seems to me that there are possible lines of historical evidence that such a harvest is impossible or can't last long. E.g. the post-Christian culture of the Weimar Republic in which Nazism fermented based on a return to "scientific" forms of Nature based paganism which was associated with pseudo-science, superstition and the occult. The pattern seems to be that science begins with Christian assumptions but then science is said to be rooted in methodological naturalism, which naturally and gradually tends to build a philosophy of naturalism which undermines Christianity until science is turned into a form of Nature based paganism, then all the old occult/"hidden" practices and superstitions typical to the type of paganism that Christianity originally did away with emerge again. Those who base their opposition to Christianity on science are often in the odd position of undermining the ground upon which they stand. It seems that a protestation of Protestantism itself opens the door for superstition again.

Here's a recent WSJ article citing evidence of this apparent pattern:

From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians. Look Who's Irrational NowBy MOLLIE ZIEGLER HEMINGWAY

That old topic...

2008-09-17T19:54:00.002-04:00

A few comments on homosexuality and history here, it will be interesting to see if anyone attempts to reply based on historical facts.

The Funeral of a Great Myth

2008-09-13T14:31:00.000-04:00

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes: in the Myth it is a fact about improvements. Thus a real scientist like Professor J. B. S. Haldane is at pains to point out that popular ideas of Evolution lay a wholly unjustified emphasis on those changes which have rendered creatures (by human standards) 'better' or more interesting. He adds: 'We are therefore inclined to regard progress as the rule in evolution. Actually it is the exception, and for every case of it there are ten of degeneration.' But the Myth simply expurgates the ten cases of degeneration. In the popular mind the word 'Evolution' conjures up a picture of things moving 'onwards and upwards', and of nothig else whatsoever. And it might have been predicted that it would do so. Already, before science had spoken, the mythical imagination knew the kind of 'Evolution' it wanted. --C. S. Lewis, The Funeral of a Great Myth

A bitter irony

2008-09-11T14:32:00.006-04:00

Martin Luther King on Margaret Sanger:

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. Planned Parenthood

Historical facts:

...Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist... Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically superior strains could multiply without competition from "the unfit." She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as "human waste" not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human "weeds" should be "exterminated." Moreover, for both political and genuine ideological reasons, Sanger associated closely with some of America's most fanatical eugenic racists. Both through her publication, Birth Control Review, and her public oratory, Sanger helped legitimize and widen the appeal of eugenic pseudoscience.
[...]
...on page after page, Sanger castigated charities and the people they hoped to assist. "Organized charity itself," she wrote, "is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish th espread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuation constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents."
[...]
...she never lost her eugenic raison d'être, nor her fiery determination to eliminate the unfit. For instance, years after Sanger launched birth control, she was honored at a luncheon in the Hotel Roosevelt in New York. Her acceptance speech harkened back to the original nature of her devotion to her cause. "Let us not forget," she urged, "that these billions, millions, thousands of people are increasing, expanding, exploding at a terrific rate every year. Africa, Asia, South America are made up of more than a billion human beings, miserable, poor, illiterate labor slaves, whether they are called that or not; a billion hungry men and women always in the famine zone yet reproducing themselves in the blind struggle for survival and perpetuation....
The brains, initiative, thrift and progress of the self supporting, creative human beings are called upon to support the ever increasing and numerous dependent, delinquent and unbalanced masses....
(The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's
Campaign to Create a Master Race
by Edwin Black :127, 129, 143)

On not giving Chance a chance...

2008-09-10T17:22:00.004-04:00

I was trying to think through chance in a recent comment:

Ironically the notion of chance is a science/knowledge stopper, it is an argument which stops the study of cause and effect. A scientific view rooted in the study of cause and effect would be that chance is an illusion brought about by an absence of knowledge. Even the examples that people use to argue for the creative power of “chance” combined with a process of filtering like natural selection can be surrounded by knowledge based on an actual scientific view. For instance, some use a coin toss to illustrate the concept of chance. Yet since chance is actually just an illusion brought about by the absence of knowledge it is easy to point out that if the trajectory of the coin, its mass, the force it was flipped with, etc., was all known then “chance” disappears as one advances toward a knowledge of how the coin will come to rest. Chance is ignorance, chance is ultimately nothing, yet it’s typical for proponents of Darwinism to argue as if it something which explains all there is to know.

A satire of philosophies based on chance:
Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

(Found on Uncommon Descent)