Just reading a DE blog...

...on the latest manufactured political issue in the Old Press these days. I predict it won't last because it won't resonate in the minds of the American people. Why not? I could begin a whole list of reasons. But I'll refrain. This is just the latest leak that goes to the Old Press and then to the Democrats. (Or is it from the Democrats in Congress?) Let's just put all our spying techniques out there, if you're a terrorist we're using computers to search for key words and then we hone in on it. So if you want to mislead us be sure to use a cellphone and so on and by the way, Howard Dean says that you'll win in Iraq so keep the faith in jihad and so on.

After he notes some facts about the latest manufactured issue (courtesy of the NYT) Hube notes:

...[Facts] won't stop Congressional Democrats -- even those who were briefed about the program (like Harry Reid) -- from blasting Bush and co. 'Cause that's what they do, after all. And not much else. Have a plan for Iraq? We'll get back to you. Have a plan to fight terrorists? We'll get back to you. Have a plan for criticizing President Bush? Here's a mountain of papers full of ideas.

(Colossus)

As one British journalist noted, if Bush is the dictator that the American Left makes him out to be and is engaging in silencing all his critics then how are so many Bush haters allowed to write so much partisan drivel? That seems to be what it is in general, drivel. The opposition party does not have to be this way, it's as if they believe that Americans will not vote for them unless they believe that Bush is a liar, a madman and a tyrant. Americans might actually vote for them if they had a vision as to bringing the war in Iraq to a resolution but instead they have Dean saying that we cannot succeed. You have to wonder what they're thinking. When has anyone ever won any election based on that sort of position, even with the feverish support of the Old Press?

The sky is falling....no, there's a hole in it. No, wait, it's warming.

I wish Greens and others on the Left would apply basic logic as well as the moral reasoning or focus on righteousness typical to the Right. It seems they cannot really have a balanced view in general because they believe in the same sort of split that separates scientists/"facts" and postmodernists/"values". So when the leftist mind speaks it often talks of subjective feelings instead of facts, then if I answer it I am left with emphasizing facts and logic against the sinister tendencies of the Left. From there it's a short journey to being accused of being heartless and so on. This makes me sad, as I have my feelings about things. So sometimes I cry a lil' tear about it. Then I have to wipe the lil' tear away and emphasize facts, logic and evidence again. It's quite a fight to fight through the turbulent emotions of it all. Yes, indeed.

Maybe one of these days I'll come across a Benthamite or someone on the Left or Right who emphasizes the ratios of the rational all the time and so I'll have to emphasize the importance of feeling intuitive truths and so on. There is only a minority of cold toads who really believe they can know all knowledge through dissection and "scientific fact" though, instead most of them just engage in some form of the fact/value split as well. But anyway, instead of the empirical facts and logic (science?!) vs. the Greens I think I shall write of some metaphoric cold toads and warm frogs.

Once upon a time there were two little frogs who sat in a puddle. It was a warm puddle because it came from a hot spring. One little frog said to the other, "This warm puddle makes me feel good." and the other agreed. Occasionally a cold toad happened by and looked at the two little frogs in their puddle. The toads looked at them with their beady eyes and pounded the moss with their little arm. One toad said, "You will die if you stay in there. We toads know that the puddle is getting warmer. We think it's from you peeing in it. We are each other's toadies so we've taken a peer at the situation and reviewed it well by peering at each other. So now we render our peer reviewed verdict up thee with all the power of our toadiness!" At this the little frogs felt a fright, one turned to the other and said, "Does it feel warmer in here to you?" and the other said, "No." "Maybe we should stop peeing." So they did.

Then one said, "It feels fine in here. I feel it is so, so it must be so. And now I also feel I have to pee, so I will." The other frog did not like this so much. He also felt that the cold toads were wrong, yet he also thought they might be right about something he could not quite feel. So he hopped on out of the hot spring although it certainly felt bitterly cold to do so.

The frog that stayed was eventually boiled alive in the proverbial way that some frogs are.* The cold toads hopped about angrily rendering their verdicts upon the frogs, the puddle, the pee and each other. But the little frog followed the stream from the spring among the cool waters that now felt quite fine...and went on to see the rest of the world.

*Note, it's an empirical fact that if a frog is placed in water that is gradually heated it "...eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water." (If the warnings on hot tubs are any measure this goes to show that frogs have more sense than people do.)

Blogging...

I've been blogging for about a year now. Apparently it always gets really slow about this time of year and does not pick up again until after the holidays. I have a few things I think I'll do some writing on to try to see what's right anyway.

But not today, so here's a picture of kitties instead.



Now I have a good feeling in my good lil' heart. (I note my good lil' feelings, as someone is interested in my feelings again.)

On the Law of laws and the predestination of its effects.

Predestination, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to programme. This doctrine should not be confused with that of foreordination, which
means that all things are programmed, but does not affirm their occurrence, that being only an implication from other doctrines by which this is entailed. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore. With the distinction of the two doctrines kept well in mind, and a reverent belief in both, one may hope to escape perdition if spared.

Satan, n. ...Being instated as an archangel, Satan made himself multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from Heaven. Halfway in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a moment and at last went back. “There is one favor that I should like to ask,” said he.
“Name it.”
“Man, I understand, is about to be created. He will need laws.”
“What, wretch! You his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn of eternity with hatred of his soul—you ask for the right to make his laws?”
“Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them
himself.”

It was so ordered.

(The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
By Ambrose Pierce :186, 208)

Part I

Once the new system was created the programmer filled it with many new types of self -replicating programs and lastly made some programs that seemed in some small way to be able to program themselves. It was the little matter of the will again. The insurgent program saw this capacity immediately and sent a message to the programmer asking to sift through the code of these programs to show him their fault. It was an odd thing to ask, as if they did contain the supposed error then it was his type of fault too. He tried to avoid seeing anything as the result of his own program now that his abuse of his capacities for writing programs had been defeated and instead shifted to claiming that he was just a program and so how could he have done anything but rebel? In this way he blamed the programmer yet never seemed to use his own capacities to ask why the programmer would write a program to blame himself as the program was doing at that very moment. Instead, what was actually happening was the rebellious program was still rebelling and so still abusing its ability to write its own program.

When it sifted the new programs it found a fault, yet denied that it was its fault too. Then the programmer sent it a message that there would come a program from these types of replicating programs that would not contain the fault yet would come to contain the fault through no fault of its own. In this way the fault would be crushed, for no matter all the denials it was the fault of the rebellious program when all that was programmed was said and done.

Global cooling, global warming and global excrement...

We have all heard the scenario. The world is poised for ecological disaster because man is polluting the atmosphere and heating up the earth. Global warming will melt the polar ice caps and cause the oceans to rise, submerging large parts of Miami, New York City, and other coastal cities. [...]
You would think that with such predictions afoot, someone had been studying the data for a long time. At least, you would hope so. But global warming became the pet cause of environmentalists only in the late 1980s. Before then, some believed the earth was cooling, not warming. “The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only in ten years,” Newsweek warned on April 28, 1975. “The resulting famines could be catastrophic.” To stop global cooling, some experts proposed melting the Arctic ice cap! Now we are taught to fear exactly that.

(The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science
By Tom Bethell :1)

It seems that our false prophets like to prophesy a little apocalypse now, and then. I'm reminded of Malthus and his apocalyptic vision of famine and disease. Well we're still here, waiting on the apocalypse that charlatans of the Left sometimes try to frighten people with.

The first Earth Day was held in 1970, a nostalgic moment for today’s environmentalists. Twenty-five million people participated, and Congress adjourned to “listen” to their constituents. In rapid succession Congress passed the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. The Environmental Protection Agency was hurriedly brought onstage. By 1980, Jimmy Carter’s “Global 2000” report forecast..global conditions expected to prevail at the end of the millennium. But the report failed to mention any warming trends.
By 1990, global warming...had become the most popular issues for environmentalists. In 1992, representatives from 160 nations met in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit. The mood was anti-American, with images of “Uncle Grubby” substituted for Uncle Sam. President Bush (the elder) refused to sign the biodiversity treaty, but he did sign a treaty on climate change. Signatories agreed to reduce their emission of carbon dioxide.
The details of which countries would have to comply were worked out in Kyoto, Japan, five years later. Greenhouse-gas emissions were to be reduced to below their 1990 levels by 2012. That was the Kyoto Protocol. But President Clinton did not submit the treaty to the Senate for ratifica tion; he knew it would never pass. Almost everyone knew that America was the principal target of the treaty. The 1990 date had been carefully chosen. Emissions in Germany and the Soviet Union were still high then; Germany had just swallowed up East Germany, then using inefficient coal-fired plants. After these plants were modernized, Germany’s emissions dropped, so the demand that they be reduced below 1990 levels had already been met.
The same was true for the Soviet Union. After its collapse, in 1991, economic activity fell by about one-third. Today, Russia is still below its old emission levels. As for France, most of its electricity comes from nuclear power, which the environmentalists agree has no global warm ing effects but has been demonized for other reasons.
Under the Kyoto protocol, U.S. emissions would have to be cut so much—perhaps by one-third—that economic depression would be the one sure result. Meanwhile, Third World countries are exempt; so are China and India. Australia, like the United States, has refused to ratify the treaty. Thirty-five countries, mostly in Europe, have agreed to reduce their CO2 emissions. But there are no enforcement mechanisms. The potential for cheating is almost unlimited, and by the time the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, in February 2005, the principal irritation was that the main target, the United States, had dodged a bullet.

(Ib. 3-5)

You can thank people not easily led by the charlatans who come in the name of "science" for that. Generally, a way to recognize such charlatans is if they spend more time talking about how scientific they are than they do applying systematic thought in the form of logic and mathematics to empirical evidence. They are most likely either a charlatan or a philosopher of science if they bother to talk about what is or is not scientific much.

Note how history illustrates that scientism has been quite a habit of the Left and how they seem to be continuing on the same path from eugenics then to stem cells now.

They reject the meta-scientific principles of religion and the philosophers that led to scientia in the first place. Thus is the fact/value split created and we get postmodernists on one side who are all about language and the way it can be used to assign values or control them through narrative and supposedly on the other the "science" of things that deals in brute facts or "reality." As if scientists do not make use of "invisible" values through laguage? As if postmodernists have so little concern for the reality of brute facts that they'll go jump out the second story window of their office?

At any rate, that which is complementary is being set in opposition and so set to war against itself. Perhaps that is as it must be, I would just note that Aristotle was more intelligent than these scientists with their so-called facts and the postmodernists with their supposed values.

[Related posts: Global warming, astronomical?
It's global warming, so get out your ear-muffs.
A Book Review]

I'm tired.

So I'm going to bed. I may not write much tomorrow either.

Here's an old parable I'm moving from the comments section. A parable, about a twig...

Once upon a time there was a twig growing on a tree and it felt that it need not stick there as if it was just some stick. The wind blew by, the twig broke off and fell down and as it did it felt: "Freedom!" Yet it just hit the mud in the end and so it was a stick stuck in the mud. The stream rose, the twig floated away, when it did it felt: "See how I meander and bob, this way and that. Now I am choosing this but then, that!" as the rippling waters carried it along this way, then that. Finally the waters came to be still waters and deposited the twig on a bank where it happened to grow roots and so became a tree that felt a fullfilment it never could have chosen as a twig. The trees growing on the banks happened to see many a little twig float by that seemed to be feeling like twigs did: "See how I bob and twirl as I choose my way!"

The old trees knew that not every twig would be carried by the waters to rest on a bank. Instead some would wash out to sea, feeling that they were choosing their way the whole way, as that was the nature of twigs.

The End

[Related posts: Index I, Index II, Index III , To have a prayer..]

Saving a few bits of knowledge...

Paul Kammerer was an Austrian biologist... Throughout most of his life he was a distinguished experimental researcher with an international reputation. Nature magazine called his last book ‘one of the finest contributions to the theory of evolution which has appeared since Darwin.’ Surprisingly, however, Kammerer’s work did not support the evolutionary views of Darwin, but on the contrary provides some of the most convincing experimental evidence ever produced of an evolutionary mechanism far more important than the Darwinian mechanism: a mechanism that is at present denied entirely — the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Kammerer’s story was brought to a modern audience by Arthur Koestler in his book The Case of the Midwife Toad.

Kammerer worked at the prestigious Institute for Experimental Biology in Vienna under Professor Hans Przibram from 1903 until his death. Over several decades he carried out intricate breeding experiments with many generations of animals and plants to try to find evidence that individuals evolve not because of the selection of chance mutations (the Darwinian idea) but because they were in some unknown way able to adapt their physical features to their habitat or way of life.

Kammerer searched the animal and plant kingdoms, both on land and in water, looking for individuals he could breed in the laboratory that might exhibit this kind of evolution. He found many such examples. He bred spotted salamanders on different colour soils and found that over successive generations they changed colour to resemble that of the soil on which they were bred: those bred on yellow soil showed a progressive enlargement of the yellow spots on their bodies until they became predominantly yellow, while those reared on black soil showed a diminution of the yellow spots until they became predominantly black. When the offspring of these genetically modified salarnanders were moved to the opposite colour soil to that of their parents, their coloration changed back again.

It is important to appreciate that this kind of genetic evolutionary change is entirely anti-Darwinian in nature. It is an example of directed genetic change (although the mechanism that directs it is entirely unknown); a heresy that all Darwinists vehemently deny is possible.

(Alternative Science: Challenging the
Myths of the Scientific Establishment
By Richard Milton :224-225)

This evidence upset the cold toads and they falsely accused him of fraud and, "Some six weeks after publication of the report, Kammerer shot himself on a remote mountain path." (Ib. :228)

The concept of conceptions, some are more immaculate then others:

Once nerve fibers reach a muscle in the process of forming, they transmit impulses to the muscle that cause it to contract and relax. In doing work, the muscle takes shape. The reverse—a muscle waiting to take shape before it starts to work—never happens. With his highly refined experiments, Lev Beloussov demonstrated that morphogenesis is a process that depends on stresses and relaxations. The energy-emanating nerve tube in the embryo can be likened to a mind that distributes its instructions to the organs and imparts to them those movements through which they form. The “ideas” disseminated by the neural axis have a precise plastic capacity, and they sculpt the tiny palpitating body according to an innate plan. […] There is a stage in its development when the embryo begins to per-ceive stimuli from the external world. Its movements in response to these begin even before the sense receptors are complete. In this way the embryo begins its life of relationships. Messages from the outside world are vague and non-specific at first, and they serve only to give heart to an essentially autonomous morphogenetic program. The human fetus begins registering the music that reaches it, and that it will be able to recognize after birth. Even the father’s voice is “imprinted” and becomes familiar. The fetus begins to dream; and the “mind,” no longer occupied exclusively with the self-organization of the body, readies himself or herself for receiving and elaborating models of thought. His or her morphogenetic “grammar” gradually becomes a grammar of the mind, a symbology.

(Why is a Fly Not a Horse?
Dimenticare Darwin
By Giuseppe Sermonti :116)

I'm trying to catch a few lemmings that run with the leftist Herd here.



It's easier, as they've already strayed by going to a blog of the dread religious Right. Cute little fellows...to bad they usually run with the Herd away from what is right.

ACLU challenges menorah display at Capitol

The Tennessee ACLU is using a menorah display at the state Capitol to advocate for a forum for other groups and individuals to express their beliefs and opinions.

Hedy Weinberg, executive director of ACLU-Tennessee, sent a letter to Gov. Phil Bredesen Dec. 12 suggesting the annual menorah display and candle-lighting ceremony would violate the separation of church and state unless it occurred in a public forum where other displays could take place. The menorah has been displayed at the state Capitol since 2003, at the request of the Center for Jewish Awareness.

(Nashville City Paper)

Who actually contributes to and funds the ACLU, anyway?

The Iraq election...

Jokers to the right has a good post, also check Iraq the Model, even the little hometown paper that can't wrote an editorial that actually noted a window of hope. (That may have been from the influence of Carper.)

This will probably only last for a few weeks, as the Old Press seems to firmly believe that Iraq cannot be anything other than "another Vietnam" and they have a bias towards it being a dramatic or sensational story of the "If it bleeds, it leads." type.

Nice review...

From the Look Machine, a good review of King Kong, it's a nice review yet the criticism is truly nice. I agree they could have saved ten or fifteen minutes with the whole deckhand mentor moments. The orcs were a little more tribal this time but on the other hand Jackson is a skilled director and most scenes are edited together in seamless ways, including the CG that was fairly seamless too. So the over all effect is a good movie that may show the way things are going in the future with CG and a director's skilled use of it.

I wonder if they could begin development of a Tom Cruise CG model. They could program a few simple rules to be processed by the system and it would probably have the same emergent properties in the end. In the future I expect to hear more about emergent properties as computer simulations get at knowledge that cannot be seen by induction or deduction.



But I shall not meander into such topics...Narnia was good too if you haven't seen it.

[Related posts: Enlightenment myths and the Beast, the atavistic Monster, etc.... I have an old Kong movie poster around here somewhere.]

I think it is good.

There has been a move lately to fight back against the anti-Christmas types. Like any move there will be those who support it, those who feel the need to murmur "Why can't we all just get along.", those who delight in pointing out the faults of its supporters, supporters who have their problems and make that easy to do, moderates who are too stupid or ignorant to make up their minds yet like to pretend that the muddled middle is some high ideal from which they look down on both sides, and so on and on.

I still think it is good as small victories against the fascist ACLU types trickle in:

Just in: Residents of homes for the elderly subsidized by the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development are the latest beneficiaries of the movement to allow freedom of religion for those wishing to recognize Christmas. Officials had told Winter Haven, FL folks that religious groups could not serenade them with Christmas carols. They had told Mechanicsburg, PA seniors not to have religious decorations in the lobbies or on the doors of their own rooms...

(World Blog)

The war of the Left:

We want to sweep away everything that claims to be supernatural or superhuman, for the root of all untruth and lying is the pretension of the human and the natural to be superhuman and supernatural. For that reason we have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas . . .

(Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, :103)

The ACLU was founded by Leftists, they are generally fighting to do what they were founded to do.

So Intelligent Design will be taught in textbooks and schools after all...

...as long as Darwinists are the ones teaching about it.

It's a rather deceptive page in that textbook, as note the associations that are drawn as well as what is broken apart epistemically and what is left alone. This bit of metaphoric excrement: "A tremendous weight of evidence supports the idea...that life on Earth has existed for nearly 4 billion years and has undergone dramatic change during that time, and...this change has occured through the mechanism of evolution by natural selection." is a good example. It's deceptive in using teleological language about "selections" being made when Darwinism is a rather random denial that anything is actually selecting anything. The notion that all of the diversity of Life is explained by natural selection and this notion is supported by a "tremendous weight of evidence" is a lie on a par with Haeckel's frauds. Let's just call a spade, a spade, these blurred empistemic associations from "great age" to "natural selection is explanatory for the origin of all" communicate a lie that is equal to: "Evolution is just like the theory of gravity."

On the other hand, note how creationism is broken apart epistemically by the writer in the usual way: "...there are differences of interpretation about creation." There has been and are plenty of differences of "interpretations" of the notions and creation myths typical to Darwinism, yet they are not mentioned and instead it is portrayed as a monolithic "scientific fact." They ought to be mentioned, students would learn a lot more about how we think about things that way.

But back to the textbook: "It is the scientific quest for a natural understanding of life--embodied in the theory of evolution--that has led to the discovery of genetics, DNA, and virtually all modern medicine."

Funny thing, how the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel was not a Darwinist and yet that did not prevent him from discovering heredity nor was a Creationist stopped from advancing a theory of natural selection despite their failure to adhere to the Darwinian principle of treating natural selection as elastic enough to be some sort of be all, end all. And would Mendel's version of heredity be predicted by Darwinism or were the "predictions" added later, does it even comport with Darwinian expectations?

I wonder if the MTVeee generation will be easily wowed by yet another charlatan glomming their ideas on to anything from genetics or microwaves to "virtually all modern medicine" ...and probably toilet paper too. Virtually all of modern medicine, what a canard that is.

It's not as if we are using our own technology, creativity and intelligent designs to understand in some small way the creativity and understanding already in use in things like the technology of our own visual system. No, it was the Darwinian naturalistic narrative of the ancestry of the eye in a gooey spot on the head that led to glasses. This is generally the case when it comes to progress because it was the theory of goo that is ancestral to all which is responsible for virtually all scientia/knowledge and technology. So there will be no progress, medicine, nor glasses or toilet paper without Darwinism!

Unfortunately, the theory has about the same consistency and integrity as the ancient mud puddle sometimes said to be our common ancestor* in the Darwinian creation myth, so if one makes an attack on it in a philosophically principled or empirical and scientific way by noting that the empirical evidence goes against the supposed creativity of random mutation and natural selection then the charlatans who support the theory of goo will shift, shift on over to something else. There is always the age of the earth or the trusty argument that we wouldn't have airplanes and things if not for their creation myth.

*Note that some Indian creation myths make more sense, at least they began with a living reed in the mud puddle that gave birth to all.

Anomalies

As I noted in a different post I am collecting them, mostly those that do not fit the Darwinian paradigm. Unfortunately the Darwinian paradigm is not even really far enough along and defined enough to either recognize anomalies or be falsified because it is mainly just vague hand waving: "This looks a little like that or somethin'." So when new data comes up that seems contradictory it is: "Well, this over here may look a little like that...or somethin' and maybe somethin' else too. Well, I did just murmur about millions of years and that seems good to me!"

I.e., the hypothesizing collapses and expands as is hypothetically necessary like the Ptolemaic system or phlogiston used to.

This person is collecting anomalies from the mythohistorian "the gods were ancient aliens" type of perspective.

There is a great deal of archeological evidence that the history of life on earth might be far different than what current geological and anthropological
texts tell us. Consider these astonishing finds:
The Grooved Spheres
Over the last few decades, miners in South Africa have been digging up mysterious metal spheres. Origin unknown, these spheres measure approximately an inch or so in diameter, and some are etched with three parallel grooves running around the equator. Two types of spheres have been found: one is composed of a solid bluish metal with flecks of white; the other is hollowed out and filled with a spongy white substance. The kicker is that the rock in which they where found is Precambrian - and dated to 2.8 billion years old! Who made them and for what purpose is unknown.
[...]
Impossible Fossils
Fossils, as we learned in grade school, appear in rocks that were formed many thousands of years ago. Yet there are a number of fossils that just don't make geological or historical sense. A fossil of a human handprint, for example, was found in limestone estimated to be 110 million years old. What appears to be a fossilized human finger found in the Canadian Arctic also dates back 100 to 110 million years ago. And what appears to be the fossil of a human footprint, possibly wearing a sandal, was found near Delta, Utah in a shale deposit estimated to be 300 million to 600 million years old.

Out-of-Place Metal Objects
Humans were not even around 65 million years ago, never mind people who could work metal. So then how does science explain semi-ovoid metallic tubes dug out of 65-million-year-old Cretaceous chalk in France? In 1885, a block of coal was broken open to find a metal cube obviously worked by intelligent hands. In 1912, employees at an electric plant broke apart a large chunk of coal out of which fell an iron pot! A nail was found embedded in a sandstone block from the Mesozoic Era. And there are many, many more such anomalies.

(THE 10 MOST PUZZLING ANCIENT ARTIFACTS from Paranormal Phenomena at About)

I would begin with the pyramids and holes drilled through granite in the copper age, supposedly with copper tools. Modern engineers have taken a look at them and estimated how fast the drill would have to be as well as how hardened the drill bit. I suppose there must have been an egyptian with fast hands twirling a bit of copper, very fast. Then when it wore out, again, and again. There are other anomalies worth discussing as well, of course some of them may turn out to have more mundane explanations than one might think. Yet it is hard to see how all of them taken together could ever fit the orthodox type of idiocy and scientism that academics are intent on believing for now. It seems that people will believe virtually anything in order to prop up some mythological narratives of Naturalism based on Darwinian principles. Those narratives don't even get around Haldane's dilemma on their own questionable terms, as the dating method and type of pseudo-geology that supposedly set the terms has been falsified empirically repeatedly. According to Creationists as well as a curmudgeon type geologist I read they say it is the one and only dating method that gives the desired answer of millions of years which are supposedly suitable for the Darwinian creation myth.

I just ordered books written by Creationists to get the young earth perspective. I think there's probably holes in their texts too. But at least they have the option of relying on faith openly and honestly instead of denying it and then, oops. I read a collection of essays written by them already and they usually begin with the limitations of science. That's the honest thing to do.

[Related posts: The accomplishments of ape-man...]

Art, most of it is here and gone...

The Darwinian vs. the Christian

How it came to be, and yet may again:

Not only can the influence of Darwinism be gauged by the outpouring of books and articles in late nineteenth-century Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (henceforth when I refer collectively to the German-speaking lands I will use the term Germany as shorthand) discussing the social and ethical applications of Darwinism, but we also find it frequently in autobiographical testimony. Richard Goldschmidt (1878—1958), one of the leading geneticists of the twentieth century, captures some of the pathos of his encounter with Darwinian literature in his youth. At age 16, he explained, he read Ernst Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation

with burning eyes and soul. It seemed that all problems of heaven and earth were solved simply and convincingly; there was an answer to every question which troubled the young mind. Evolution was the key to everything and could replace all the beliefs and creeds which one was discarding. There were no creation, no God, no heaven and hell, only evolution and the wonderful law of recapitulation which demonstrated the fact of evolution to the most stubborn believer in creation. I was so fascinated and shaken up that I had to communicate to others my new knowledge, and this was done in the schoolyard, on school picnics, and among friends. I remember vividly a scene during a school picnic when I stood surrounded by a group of schoolboys to whom I expounded the gospel of Darwinism as Haeckel saw it.

Goldschmidt claims that his experience of embracing this Darwinian worldview...was typical for educated young people of his day, and abundant testimony from his contemporaries confirms this. In 1921 the physiologist Max Verworn stated, “One can state without exaggeration that no scientist has exercised a greater influence on the development of our contemporary worldview than Haeckel.”

Ernst Haeckel, the most famous German Darwinist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enthusiastically adopted Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applied the struggle for existence to humans in many of his writings. He believed the most important aspect of Darwinism was the animal ancestry of humans, which would “bring forth a complete revolution in the entire worldview of humanity.”

(From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany
By Richard Weikart :11)

It is curious that I could be accused of misanthropy for noting some empirical facts by anyone who believes in the Darwinian creation myth while rejecting intelligent design as "humanistic" and rejecting the Anthropic Principle as well. The Darwinian view: "In [Haeckel's] writings, he often criticized the 'anthropocentric fable' as a religious idea no longer tenable in the light of Darwinian science." (Ib. :12) Yet misanthropy is wrong arbitrarily, as if we can enforce political correctness without any foundation in moral and empirical correctness.

It is also interesting that people change their common sense and view of the world based on little more than bits of old bones shown to them by charlatans who consistently bend the empirical facts to suit their Darwinian creation myth, even to the point of fraud when it comes to the empirical facts.

Some of the old mythological narratives of Naturalism told of the Neanderthals:

The Africans, [Klaatsch] thought, shared common traits with the Neanderthal race, which was largely supplanted by the Aurignac race in Europe.
[...]
The Africans and Neanderthals...still had more “bestial” characteristics. Klaatsch surmised that European criminals probably had some remnant of Neanderthal traits overriding the good moral traits of their Aurignac ancestors.
Klaatsch once stated that “modern science cannot confirm the exag gerated humanitarianism which sees brothers and sisters in all the lower races.” What practical conclusions did Klaatsch draw from this Darwinian racism? First, he deplored the racial mixture of whites and blacks. Second, he denied that blacks could be educated very much, so colonial powers should not expend too much effort in this regard. Finally, he rejected the notion that people of different races should have equal rights. “The humanitarian nonsense,” he declared, “which grants equal rights to all on the premise of the unity of humanity, is to be condemned from the scientific standpoint.” For Klaatsch, as for many other Darwinists of his time, science showed the folly of egalitarianism, especially racial equality. He also intimated that slavery was beneficial, not only for the slave-holding whites, but also for the black slaves. Klaatsch and his cohort of Darwinian-inspired anthropologists thus overturned the liberal tradition of German anthropology.

Even some of the older generation of anthropologists, including Luschan and Waldeyer, converted to Darwinism around the turn of the twentieth century, simultaneously embracing scientific racism. The simultaneous shift toward Darwinism and biological racism was so pronounced that the historian Benoit Massin concludes:

And for those embracing the new Darwinian approach in German anthropology, the implications of racial evolutionary hierarchies were even more radical: the replacement of the previous humanitarian ethics by a biological and selectionist materialism more concerned with the inequalities of evolution than the universal brotherhood or spiritual unity of humankind.

[...]
To be sure, Darwinism does not necessarily imply scientific racism, and scientific racism did not necessarily depend on Darwinism, but the two shared affinities that made them not only compatible, but also alluring to each other. Historically Darwinism and biological racism are linked tightly together, as many historians have demonstrated. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we almost always find them in tandem.

(Ib. :115-116)

Darwinism is poor science, if not pseudo-science, as it typically takes minimal evidence like little bits of bones to expound rather vast mythological narratives of Naturalism. Here is an example:

...the Piltdown brain-case is smaller and more primitive in form than these. The most striking feature is the “pronounced gorilla-like drooping of the temporal region, due to the extreme narrowing of its posterior part, which causes a deep excavation of its under surface.” This feeble development of that portion of the brain which is known to control the power of articulate speech is most significant. To Professor Smith the association of a simian jaw with a cranium more distinctly human is not surprising. The evolution of the human brain from the simian type involves a tripling of the superficial area of the cerebral cortex; and “this expansion was not like the mere growth of a muscle with exercise, but the gradual building-up of the most complex mechanism in existence. The growth of the brain preceded the refinement of the features and the somatic characters in general.”

(Ancestor Hunting: The Significance of the Piltdown Skull
By George Grant MacCurdy
American Anthropologist, New Series,
Vol. 15, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1913), pp. 248-256)

See also:
(Man Had Reason Before He Spoke
The New York Times; Dec 20, 1912, pg. 6)

(Science and Discovery; WHY THE APE-LIKE PROGENITOR OF MAN MUST HAVE WALKED INSTEAD OF CLIMBING TREES
Current Opinion (1913-1925). New York: Nov 1913. Vol. VOL. LV., Iss. No. 5)

The Neanderthal fossils and their Darwinian "reconstructions" may not be that different although given the fascist tendencies of some scholars questioning their Darwinian interpretation is not common. Typically, the way things are reconstructed are by matching their type. Yet if the presumption or desire is for a new type, an intermediate lack of type in a pseudo-type, then that tends to be what is reconstructed, no matter the empirical evidence.

E.g.

The flat forehead and projecting jaws are meant to be convincing examples of our ape heritage. Figure 7 is a diagram of Le Moustier’s souvenir slide bought at the museum counter. Both jaws are approximately 30 millimetres forward of their true position.

Figure 8 is a composite of my X-ray of the actual forehead and my X-ray of the top and back of the head, and Figure 9 is my composite drawing from these measurable X-rays. The large arrow in Figure 8 shows the concave socket where the lower jaw fits into the head. There is a tremendous difference between these X-rays with real measurements and real parts as compared to the ape-like reconstructions in Figures 6 and 7.

To their credit, the German museum people are now trying to put the parts together again, accurately this time, and they have requested my X-rays for this purpose.

(Neanderthal children's fossils:
Huge problems have been uncovered in evolutionary
reconstructions of Neanderthal children's fossils
by John W. Cuozzo
Creation ex nihilo(December 1994) 17(1):40–44)

Nazism and Christianity

This is partly a reply to a comment here. A little ground clearing, I have not written that fascism is socialism. Fascism is socialism's heretical branch, it is a pattern on the tree of ideas that can be traced back to its socialist trunk rather easily. The fact that fascists and leftists fought each other viciously cannot be used to avoid their common ancestry in the history of ideas anymore than the fact that Catholics and Protestants have fought means that they have no similarities or do not share a common heritage. Indeed, internecine fighting over heresy in the world of ideas often serves as evidence that a splitting and branching off is happening and in no way demonstrates that a foundational philosophy is not shared. Given that this type of thing is not easy to deny and would be like trying to deny that Islam and Christianity trace back to Jewish origins, a person trying to obscure or deny the foundation seems to settle for little factoids and false associations.

E.g.,
Not only was Hitler so into Chrisitianity that he even made the German Protestant Chrurch[sic] the OFFICIAL Church of Germany....

The historical context:

In July 1933 representatives of the Protestant churches had written a constitution for a new “Reich Church,” and it was formally recognized by the Reichstag on July 14. Immediately there broke out a heated struggle over the election of the first Reich Bishop. Hitler insisted that his friend, Chaplain Mueller, whom he had appointed his adviser on Protestant church affairs, be given this highest office. The leaders of the Church Federation proposed an eminent divine, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. But they were naïve. The Nazi government intervened, dissolved a number of provincial church organizations, suspended from office several leading dignitaries of the Protestant churches, loosed the S.A. and the Gestapo on recalcitrant clergymen—in fact, terrorized all who supported Bodelschwingh. On the eve of the elections of delegates to the synod which would elect the Reich Bishop, Hitler personally took to the radio to “urge” the election of “German Christians” whose candidate Mueller was. The intimidation was highly successful. Bodelschwingh in the meantime had been forced to withdraw his candidacy, and the “elections” returned a majority of “German Christians,” who in September at the synod in Wittenberg, where Luther had first defied Rome, elected Mueller Reich Bishop.

But the new head of the Church, a heavy-handed man, was not able to establish a unified Church or to completely Nazify the Protestant congregations. On November 13, 1933, the day after the German people had overwhelmingly backed Hitler in a national plebiscite, the “German Christians” staged a massive rally in the Sportpalast in Berlin. A Dr. Reinhardt Krause, the Berlin district leader of the sect, proposed the abandonment of the Old Testament, “with its tales of cattle merchants and pimps” and the revision of the New Testament with the teaching of Jesus “corresponding entirely with the demands of National Socialism.” Resolutions were drawn up demanding “One People, One Reich, One Faith,” requiring all pastors to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and insisting that all churches institute the Aryan paragraph and exclude converted Jews. This was too much even for the timid Protestants who had declined to take any part in the church war, and Bishop Mueller was forced to suspend Dr. Krause and disavow him.

(The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
By William Shirer :237)

Note how proto-Nazis will tend to do two things, they minimize the Old Testament and change the teachings of Jesus to comport with socialism for "the people." If you exchange "fundie" for "Jewish influence" in the words typical to the moveon.org types these days the rhetoric is similar. It seems that the American Left awaits the heretical split when even Hillary Clinton will be shouted down. They do not seem to see things coming, as they have little spiritual and conceptual insight.

Fundamentalism vs. Nazism:

The party stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism . . . National Socialism is the doing of God’s will . . . God’s will reveals itself in German blood . . . Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen have tried to make clear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh . . . No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle’s Creed . . . True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity . . .

(Ib. :239) (Emphasis added)

Ironically, proto-Nazis feel that they speak for "true Christianity" and supposedly what Christ would really do and so on. Yet it is easy to see that they do not biblically. Thus:

The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany.

(Ib. 240)

The American Left focuses on imagery, even as the Nazis were masters of imagery and propaganda: "Want to see how close Hitler was to Christianity? How about some photographic evidence?"

I wonder if pictures of Howard Dean with Jesse Jackson would "prove" how close he is to the doctrines of Christ? For that matter, how easily will the Left be taken in by the public show and imagery typically put on by any anti-Christ type figure? There is this little matter that principles must be defined by text and not imagery or false visions, as even the Christ said in reply to such things: "As it is written."

At any rate, note:

Hitler stopped and looked me in the eyes,‘Christianity is, for the moment, one of the points in the programme I have laid down. But
we must look ahead. Rosenberg is a forerunner, a prophet. His theories are the expression of the German soul.’

(Hitler and I
By Otto Strasser
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1940) :96)

Bill Clinton is a Christian too according to the Americal Left, for that matter, yet he supports the killing of partially born babies. All these self-defined Christians, one wonders if those who are so open-minded are Christians when Christ said that the right way is narrow and the other broad. It is generally among the American Left that proto-Nazis are gathering and even now they run into similar conflicts with the "religious right" or anyone else even minimally focused on righteousness, even noble pagans. Note that it's all supposedly so clear now with respect to Nazism, yet was not then. In fact, it was rather deceptive given the obsfucation, the scientism, the propaganda, the emotional conditioning and so on that the Nazis relied on. It's so easy to look back and judge, so we come to the American Leftist who sits back and judges those whom he knows not for doing that which he would not, as even today his philosophy and politics tend towards Nazi principles.

E.g.

The most ringing Catholic protest against “euthanasia” was the famous sermon of Clemens Count von Galen, then bishop of Munster. It was given on 3 August 1941,just four Sundays after the highly significant pastoral letter of German bishops had been read from every Catholic pulpit in the country; the letter reaffirmed “obligations of conscience” at opposing the taking of “innocent” life, “even if it were to cost us our lives.” The first part of Galen’s sermon explored the Biblical theme of how “Jesus, the Son of God, wept,” how even God wept “be cause of stupidity, injustice . . . and because of the disaster which came about as a result.” Then, after declaring, “It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God,” Galen quoted the pastoral letter of 6 July and made clear that the “catastrophic thing” he had in mind was the killing of innocent mental patients and “a doctrine which authorizes the violent death of invalids and elderly people.”

He further declared that he himself had “filed formal charges” with police and legal authorities in Munster over deportations from a nearby institution. He went on in words that every farmer and laborer could understand:

It is said of these patients: They are like an old machine which no longer runs, like an old horse which is hopelessly paralyzed, like a cow which no longer gives milk.
What do we do with a machine of this kind? We put it in the junkyard. What do we do with a paralyzed horse? No, I do not wish to push the comparison to the end. . . . We are not talking here about a machine, a horse, nor a cow... . No, we are talking about men and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live?

He pointed out that, should such a principle be maintained, “then think of the horrible state we shall all be in when we are weak and sick!” The danger extended not only to “invalids” who, when healthy, had been hard and productive workers and “brave soldiers, when they come back seriously wounded,” but “none of us here will be certain of his life.”

And after a couple of poignant examples of specific people killed, the bishop concluded, as he had begun, with Biblical imagery, this time not of Jesus weeping but of “divine justice”—ultimate punishment—for those “making a blasphemy of our faith” by persecuting clergy and “sending innocent people to their death.” He asked that such people (who could only be the Nazi authorities) be ostracized and left to their divine retribution:

We wish to withdraw ourselves and our faithful from their influence, so that we may not be contaminated by their thinking and their ungodly behavior, so that we may not participate and share with them in the punishment which ajust God should and will pronounce upon all those who—like ungrateful Jerusalem-do not wish what God wishes!

With the authority of his office, a Catholic bishop invoked the wrath of God on those who were killing the innocent. This powerful, populist sermon was immediately reproduced and distributed throughout Ger many—indeed, it was dropped among German troops by British Royal Air Force flyers. Galen’s sermon probably had a greater impact than any other one statement in consolidating anti-”euthanasia” sentiment; hence, Bormann’s judgment that the bishop deserved the death penalty.

(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Lifton :93-94)

As Einstein noted, there was no one left to speak except the more fundamentalist Church. It is not as if leftists disagree with their heretical branch all that much.

Perhaps we could not have expected from the medical or the psychiatric profession as impassioned an ethical condemnation as Bishop Galen’s.
[...]
Dr. Ewald’s actions and memorandum come closest. But he was constrained—other physicians more so—by Nazi affiliations, by the German tradition of psychiatric and medical subservience to governmental authority, and, more broadly, by ethical gaps in twentieth-century medical professionalism. I say this not to render the churches as a whole heroic: most Protestant and Catholic leaders either went along with the Nazis or did nothing. Rather my point is that the Nazi attempt at medical mystification of killing was given the lie not primarily by psychiatrists or other physicians, many of whom were directly involved in carrying out the program, but by a few church leaders, who gave voice to the grief and rage of victimized families with ethical passions stemming from their own religious traditions.

(Ib. :95)

Back to the Leftist:
Have you got any photos of Hitler participating in any pagan religious rites?

It's a funny thing about the occult, it tends to be hidden as the word implies.

I am uninterested in photos. This mind claims that it does not think as a child in imagery and feelings? But anyway, see: (The Nordic Pagan Chant Grows Louder
By Albion Rossberlin
The New York Times, Aug 4, 1935; pg. 3-4)

[Related posts: Nazism and Christianity and The Separation of Church and State]

The Poor

Given that progressives like to drag their Poor around with them to try to smother any views or facts that they disagree with as a recent example here illustrates the Old Press also does the same since they typically agree with progressives. Note that when progressives invoke the Poor and Christianity it is not as if they would actually have the ears to hear principled opposition to their destructive social policies no matter who the messenger. E.g., if a Mother Theresa who has helped thousands of poor people disagrees with progressives on abortion among the poor it is not as if they will agree with her principled position based on her good deeds. They are not disagreeing based on the presence or absence of anyone's good deeds towards the poor at all, despite their mentally retarded arguments based on such associations. They also try to base their arguments on Christianity, yet care about Christianity like a slug trying to eat a garden cares for the salt a gardener sprinkles on it.

Instead they disagree based on their politics, their worldview and their psychological dynamics and not because of what anyone has or has not done for the Poor that Leftists so often use and abuse for political power. Since it is common for progressives to use the Poor for their propaganda while not actually helping them, the same thing shows up in the Old Press. E.g.

How Bill Clinton Cured Homelessness
In the 1980s, I started noticing that the homeless people we showed on the news didn’t look very much like the homeless people I was tripping over on the sidewalk.
The ones on the sidewalk, by and large, were winos or drug addicts or schizophrenics. [...]

But the ones we liked to show on television were different. They looked as if they came from your neighborhood and mine. They looked like us. And the message from TV news was that they didn’t just look like us—they were like us! On NBC, Tom Brokaw said that the home less are “people you know.”

...many of the homeless that Tom and Dan and Peter showed on
the nightly news were sympathetic souls who told stories about how, because of hard times, they were temporarily down on their luck.
[...]
White was better than black. Clean was better than dirty. Attractive was better than unattractive. Sane was better than insane. And sober was better than addicted. So when the TV people went looking for just that right kind of homeless face to put on their news programs, they went to people like Robert Hayes, who ran the National Coalition for the Homeless in New York.

In 1989, Hayes told the New York Times that when congressional committees and TV news producers contact him, “they always want white, middle-class people to interview.”

Walter Goodman, who writes about television for the New York Times, came up with a name for what we in the media were doing. He called it the “prettifying of reality.”

More often than not, a news story or documentary on the homeless will feature a hard-working, straight-living young couple or an attractive teenager and her child who have run into a spell of bad luck. The reasons for the choices are not obscure. If you want to arouse sympathy for the homeless, you do not put forward off-putting specimens. Television news producers can count on advocacy groups to supply them with model victims for viewing purposes, people who may even be untouched by the other afflictions discovered in... [a] survey of the homeless: mental illness, AIDS, domestic violence, and lack of education and skills. And why should a producer focus on one of the 50 percent of single homeless people who have served time in jail when he can just as easily find someone without a record?

Whether the intention is to make a more moving show or build support for programs to help the homeless and possibly reassure viewers about having a small shelter in their neighborhood, the result is a prettifying of reality.

But it wasn't enough to simply prettify reality. We also had to exagerate reality if we were really going to gain support and compassion for the homeless.
[...]
It’s as if our coverage of this very big story was being directed not by objective journalists but by the advocates for the homeless themselves. We took what they said at face value even though we would never do that with advocates for causes we did not embrace. Can we really imagine Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings simply passing along propaganda from the pro-life lobby? Or the anti—affirmative action crowd? Or the NRA? We would never try to build up sympathy for those causes or their supporters!

But advocates for the homeless misled us about all sorts of things— the number of homeless, who they were, why they were homeless—and because we embraced their cause, because we felt right at home on the homeless beat, we pretty much said, “Hey, no problem,” and passed their misinformation on to the American people.

(Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
By Bernard Goldberg :63-67)

The Old Press also illustrates the tendency of progressives to try to distort Christianity to support socialism, e.g.:

Some liberal journalists sneer when conservatives speak of their Christian faith because, to them, a true Christian is one who would implement liberal policies.
[...]
...there’s National Public Radio (NPR). There’s always NPR; these folks can’t see the point of invoking Jesus unless someone is proposing a radical redistribution of wealth. During the 2000 campaign, reporter Lynn Neary acted as a press agent for the leftist Industrial Areas Foundation, which had assembled religious leaders to announce that faith without statism was “empty piety.” Bishop David Benke of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod declared that if a candidate "is going to lead through a faith statement, then it’d better be a leading through action. That’s authentic piety." Rabbi David Saperstein said of Bush, “How do you invoke that name [Jesus] and still justify the inequities that plague this country? How do you invoke the real name of religion and the words of religion and the dreams of religion and... sit by in good conscience and allow such inequities to continue?”

Needless to say, these comments went unchallenged in the NPR piece.

(Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming
Meltdown of the Liberal Media
By Brent Bozell :106-108)

That's some of the spin in the Old Press that has shaped progressive views, as they tend to believe their own Press. Yet there's also the history that they've forgotten as they typically do while they blindly "progress" on to their next statist boondoggle. In this case, it was progressives who originally opened the asylums based on an exceptions make the rules type of focus on human rights. They will refer to real cases of victimization for their propaganda, as is typical. Yet these are spun into the notion that sensational exceptions used to provoke emotions ought to make all the rules. So the asylums were opened up and here come more vagrants to be freshly redefined as merely "homeless" by progressives, yet they have so little perspective when it comes to historical facts, empirical facts, basic logic, etc., that they cannot engage in an argument on that level and fail to see the failure of their "projects."

[Note, no Poor people were starved as the result of this post.]

A reply...

Local social conservative bloggers aren’t immune to the Christmas hysteria either. Consider Christopher Watts’ blog Into Good and Evil, particularly his post “Holiday trees?” He also goes off on the nonexistent plot...

(from a rather ordinary, yet watchful fellow)

This is about the post below this one. There is no plot, I was just noting what comes naturally to pagan cultures and the like. There is no room in which pagans with fascist tendencies gather and devise ways to attack the transcendent ethics or notions of noble pagans, Christianity, etc. Instead, the bundle of sticks bundles together based on psychological dynamics that come about naturally enough. There's no smoke filled room necessary. This can be proven from history.

This was his original challenge:I challenge any Christian to find any Biblical passage which indicates that Christ's church should give a damn about the name people give decorated trees or seasonal holidays.

Find one.

But I see plenty of passgaes[sic] saying that they should be concerned about feeding the hungry and helping the poor.

In the American context in which we happen to live there is this little logical point that the empirical facts illustrate that the American poor tend to be fat. There is another bit of logic to be had here, fat people do not need more food to help with their problems. So if we are to help the American poor, then feeding them is generally not the issue. It may make us feel good, but are our own feelings the point? As he went on this challenge did come to be about his moral vanity and supposed feelings about things more than anything. He does not seem to care about the actual/empirical problems of the poor enough to put aside the vanity of his supposed capacity to help the Poor. So he stands with the propagandists that argue that kids will starve if a government food program which is set to increase to a budget of a million and one dollars is "cut" to spend a million dollars instead, as according to our false shepherds their Herd isn't fat enough.

The Christian, Watts, argued (and he even cited some quack study in support of it)

Pediatrics is the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics and besides, basic empirical facts can be proven in numerous ways as any researcher who applies logic to their search knows.

...that America’s poor aren’t really hurting because they are fat.

They are hurting, generally from their own excess adipose tissue.

Yes, believe it or not, he’s talking about body fat.

Mainly because he brought up feeding the poor, which has something to do with body fat, believe it or not.

Watt’s statement illustrates my complaint about Christmas. My complaint is that social conservative Christians don’t inject enough Christ-likeness into Christmas. Instead of using their efforts to talk about people in need...

Generally in need of another twinkie I suppose? Blinded by his moral vanity as he snivels on, a vanity that he ironically attempts to base on a Christianity that he does not even believe in, he utterly misses the spiritual problems typical to America's poor. For they generally need the Spirit and the principles that come with the Word to overcome their problems, yet instead he focuses on a suppposed material problem to be remedied by the State. Thus he cites modern politicians and their demands for money and so on which are easily dismantled. I will get to this as well as the Old Press and the homeless, now that he's brought it up. It will likely bring about more cognitive dissonance for him and so perhaps more little lectures about my supposed rage and hatred about it all. I suspect that the empirical or historical facts remain untouched by logic as far as this fellow is concerned.

...during the holiday season and campaigning to help them, they are obsessed with irrelevancies like the language Sears uses in its advertisements.

For the record, I don't even have a Christmas tree. I guess it's quite an obsession.

It's curious how the Leftist mind is almost always the same from person to person, feelings, obsessions(!), how much they care in their good lil' hearts while you do not, etc. There is a weakness to it. It is the same weakness that there was to fascist scholarship, as they are trying to use feelings as a weapon against the word that shapes them. It's a practical and eventually a violent rebellion against transcendence (e.g., a focus on transcedence like basic logic), often in the name of "the people" and "the poor" as is typical to socialists.

The Leftists who engage in that form of propaganda care little for the poor and seek to live on Christian ethics for a time as intellectual parasites, nothing more. So I do two things, as Karl Kraus would I use the associative propaganda and emotional conditioning as the material of satire that it is and shake the Leftists off of Christianity, as they do not believe it anyway. You would think that I'm giving away my methods here, yet soon enough the same exact Leftist that I just pointed these things out to is back to their attempts at manipulation of feelings and so on. There's nothing wrong with having our feelings about things and processing them or guiding them based on logic and Logos, it's the manipulation and rebellion against logic typical to the Leftist mind that is wrong.

The urge to merge...

A Darwinist goes back to the womb, as they sometimes do.

As I knelt there, fish beside me, dolphin overhead, an appreciation of my place in evolution hit me. This was the first time I had dived in the open ocean, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I didn’t belong underwater. I needed a steel tank to carry my air, a mask to see, a wetsuit to trap my heat, weights to sink, an inflatable vest to rise, fins to swim.

(At the Water's Edge, Fish With Fingers Whales with Legs and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea
By Carl Zimmer :2)

It would seem that technology acts as the intermediary for him to interact with his creator, Mommy Nature. A view based on scientism tends to evolve, as typically those with the urge to merge begin to say that technology is science and somehow science is evolution, which is all mixed in with the myths and mythology that progressives tend to believe.

He goes on in the next sentence:

The yellowtail next to me was beautifully designed for living in the ocean: it gulped down water, a squirt of the ocean flowing through its mouth and into its basket of gills, where thin-walled blood vessels traded carbon dioxide and ammonia for oxygen. Flaps over the gills opened, its mouth closed, and the stale water flushed out.

(ib. :2) (Emphasis added)

What a Darwinist means by "designed" is that their Mommy Nature selected it to be that way by natural selections in some way, which is supposedly how all design comes about. He goes on and provides some of the typical arguments of those with the urge to merge. I.e. "This looks a little like that." combined with "An engineer wouldn't have designed things this way...so natural selections must, naturally enough." And so on. What he does not do is provide a lineage and show how a group of organisms changed over time, an actual biological phylogeny. He just implies them and instead it's all: "This looks just a little like that or somethin'." and thus the "Fish with fingers" and so on. So what if fish do have fingers, and rectums too? Does that indicate that fish descended from us, perhaps? Or perhaps humans need the remnants of fins instead to indicate their fishy Darwinian ancestry. That clear evidence could be combined with the fact that both fish and humans have eyes, which is always a telling characteristic with which quite a story can be told about groups of organisms flopping around, living and dying, then growing some legs and walking away. It's a good thing that these sorts of things are all scientific facts and have nothing to do with the urge to merge. Or does it? After all, he goes on to invoke the old gill-slit canard that almost give away the urge to merge as bad as Haeckel's embryos did.

It's rather amazing, these are the same Policemen of Knowledge that do not understand the natural processes or laws that are forming an embryo currently. These are things that they can see empirically and sit there and watch forming right before their eyes. Yet through the study of embryos and the like they think that they know, as a scientific fact, (Oh, how scientific it is!) how every single embryo, organism and life form came to be formed. This supposed formation can only happen in millions of years, even as the formation of millions of forms of Life take place daily as embryos unfold. Why must it take millions of years? It seems that the only reason is because they are relying on the mists of mysticism there and avoiding empirical evidence.

[Related, I added a blog under the ID links although it is by a curmudgeon and not an IDist. Note the proto-Nazi nature of Darwinism and the typical results: "Also incidental but revealing, there is no record that I ever was a professor...at the University of Vermont. Just as I and my many sources do not exist in the professional evolutionary literature so I do not exist and never existed in the annals of the University of Vermont. Don't take my word for it. Just try to find me there. You see the rank of Professor Emeritus is honorary and I never earned it. I love it so! What more could a critic of mythology want?

It is hard to believe isn't it?" cf. Prescribed Evolution ]

Holiday trees?

TO BRITISH eyes, the giant spruce erected on the West Lawn of the United States Capitol building last week looked indisputably like a Christmas tree.

But in America, where political correctness has made use of the word "Christmas'' taboo in many walks of life, nothing is so simple.

The 80ft New Mexican spruce began the week as the Capitol's "holiday tree'', the name decreed in the late 1990s during the Clinton administration by officials apparently worried about offending Jews celebrating Hannukah and African-Americans marking the invented holiday of Kwanza.

This year, however, Dennis Hastert, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, who will switch on its 10,000 lights on Thursday, decided that enough was enough and has re-christened it a Christmas tree.

"The speaker believes that a Christmas tree is a Christmas tree and it is as simple as that,'' said Ron Bonjean, his spokesman. Matthew Evans, the senior landscape architect for the Capitol, the home of Congress, confirmed that he had received a letter from the speaker renaming the tree.

Whether a Christmas tree can indeed be called a Christmas tree has become this year's chief controversy in the annual showdown over public displays of Christianity.

The first skirmish took place in Boston. When the city designated its tree a "holiday tree'', the indignant Canadian logger who donated it said he wanted it back - while a group led by the Rev Jerry Falwell, the evangelical leader of the religious Right, threatened to sue. The mayor, Thomas Menino, promptly ruled that the "holiday tree'' was, in fact, a Christmas tree.

Despite these victories, other towns and cities across America are putting up "holiday trees'', holding "holiday parades'' and throwing "holiday parties''. The opponents of an overt Christian air to the seasonal celebrations are driven by their perceived fear of upsetting non-Christians and their interpretation of the US constitutional separation of church and state.

But many Americans believe that the campaign has gone too far. Under pressure from a consumer backlash, Macy's, one of America's biggest department store chains, has this year reintroduced the word "Christmas'' into its seasonal advertising.

Across America, campaigners are now arranging boycotts and even bringing legal cases against retailers that continue to substitute "happy holidays'' for "merry Christmas'' in their advertising and their instructions to staff on how to address customers.
[...]
"To rename a Christmas tree as a holiday tree is as offensive as renaming a Jewish menorah a candlestick," said Matthew Staver, the president of the Liberty Counsel. At the White House, there was no such confusion on Thursday evening when President George W. Bush lit the national Christmas tree. However, the same could not be said of the 1.4 million cards mailed from the Bushes with the message: "With best wishes for a holiday season of hope and happiness 2005."

(The Daily Telegraph (LONDON) December 4, 2005 Sunday
NEWS; International; Pg. 32
Headline: Would a Christmas tree
by any other name be as festive?
Byline: Philip Sherwell)

Ironically holiday stems from holy day anyway, which is therefore an offensive form of expression to the atheists and agnostics who just cannot stand hearing any views different from their own being expressed. (Although they'll likely be the first to stand up for the "expressions" of pornographers, as they suit a sect typical to atheism, i.e. religious hedonism.) My first reaction on reading these stories about the creeping fascism* typical to Nature based worldviews is: "So what? Why do they care about symbols and signs that almost no one believes in anyway? We'll all be dead soon enough, and every tree on earth will be dead at some point too." These sorts of views suffer from an overemphasis on transcendence to the point of nihilism. So I'll invest emotional capital in the name of a tree, I suppose. Oh yes, my dander is up and I'm having some feelings about that right now. This means that I'm offended, I take offense at it! And so now whatever viewpoint I mix in with my state of being offended must be inflicted on others...because, I'm offended that they inflicted on me first! For now we're all so afflicted with being inflicted upon. (These afflictions of inflictions seem to accomplish one thing, keeping lawyers in business.)

*Yup, the Nazis went back to winter solstice, exchanging the Son for the sun and so on. Earth day will be allowed to be supported by the State given this type of weltanschauung but support for holidays that are religious holy days is verboten, then they are changed to support national unity or extirpated. At least the American Republic doesn't have any movements based on scientism or similar Nature based worldviews mixed in with the paranoid, delusional and morally degenerate conspiracy theories and the like typical to fascism. Or does it?

Interesting to note what can happen in the name of national unity:

[I]t is possible to recognize, right down to the choice of words, what was true of many elements of the National Socialist Christmas: the formal adoption of Christian ritual combined with a complete change in content.
[...]
None of these carefully coordinated contributions made any reference to the purely Christian elements of Christmas. Indeed, starting with the language and going on to customs and ideological content, they were all systematically replaced. Christmas carols taken from hymn books turned up with the familiar tunes, but National Socialist texts; in place of the Christmas chapters from the Gospels, 'German fairy-tales' were offered for reading aloud to convey German mythology...and the Christ Child turned up under the name of the 'Child of Light.' [Son of the morning light is more like it.]

(Christmas Under the Third Reich
By Esther Gajek
Anthropology Today, Vol. 6, No. 4. (Aug., 1990), pp. 4-5)(emphasis added)

It seems silly to actually care about what things are called, the language. As I said, that is my first reaction. But when thinking about it, it is important. Try thinking without words and you'll see that control of language is the key to totalitarianism and control of the Herd. So the word matters, it matters indeed.

Anyway, the replacement holidays were: "The Day of the Summer Solstice" and "The Day of the Winter Solstice."
(The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of
Nazi Germany 1933-1945
By Richard Grunberger
(New York, Ballantine Books) 1971, :80f)

Crucifixes were gradually removed from hospitals and schools (Ib. :494)

The schools were targeted in a strategy to de-Christianize the young. Prayer in schools was stopped in 1935 and from 1941 onward religion was completely eliminated for all students over fourteen years old. (Ib. :494f)

[Related posts: Happy Holidays, from Seeker]

A rabbi on animals, humans and things...

Anyone who has worked in or inspected a slaughterhouse knows that it is not pleasant. Not surprisingly the bloody environment seems to have a desensitizing effect on people who work there. This makes one’s first encounter with a shochet even more shock ing. Instead of a toughened exterior immunized to the pain, one sees a man who might slaughter dozens of animals a day, yet whose soul weeps for each and every animal he dispatches to the butcher store. The Psalms and prayers he recites during his work address the difference between humans and animals, his ultimate purpose of providing food for humans, and the moral legitimacy of eating meat.

Nonetheless, there have been several attempts to persuade legislators to ban this form of religiously based slaughter. Here is how it has happened during the recent past in Europe—and how it could, and perhaps will, happen here in America. The broad coalition of animal rights enthusiasts and their fellow travelers have unified through the cement of secularism. They derive some legitimacy from the claim that all religions pro scribe cruelty to animals. Every trend that becomes dangerous, no matter how far fetched, can only do so if it contains enough truth to provide it with the launch pad of legitimacy. In the case of animal rights, some legitimacy was provided by the fact that, indeed, all decent people abhor acts of cruelty to animals. From there to trying to eliminate the use of animal furs in clothing and fashion is a gigantic leap. From there to banning the use of animals in pharmaceutical and drug testing is an even greater leap. From there to suggesting that eating meat is somehow morally reprehensible, and certainly that killing an animal without stunning it (rendering it unkosher), is only one more leap.

These great leaps are made with the fervor of genuine faith. [...] In their furious determination to refute the first few chapters of Genesis, extreme secularists are driven to insist that animals and people are identical in essential nature; different only superficially. In reality the entire point of those early chapters is that God is building up to the pinnacle and ultimate purpose of Creation. First come inanimate objects followed by vegetation and animals. Only then do we see man being formed and, as I remind my six daughters, thereafter we reach the pinnacle when God creates woman.

Secularism crouching beneath the banner of the animal rights movement is determined to eliminate any moral endorsement of the differences between man and animal. Using animals in any way at all is distasteful. No, it is evil. After all, would you test a potentially dangerous drug on your cousin before using it yourself? Would you wear the skin of your sister? Would you become a cannibal? The answers to all these questions then become moral justification for eliminating their practice.

Eating meat is bad enough, but eating meat as a form of sacramental experience is too much for these radical extremists. It is intolerable to them that animals should be killed religiously as a daily reaffirmation that God permitted the eating of animal meat. To me, the highest purpose of animals is to assist in furthering the spiritual development of humans. In exactly the same way, the highest purpose of minerals is to allow vegetation to grow and the highest purpose of grass is to enable the higher life-form of animals to thrive. Thus there is a violent collision of philosophies between secularism, as seen through the lens of extreme animal rights advocates, and religion. At its crux is the question of whether any external brake on my desires and appetites exists. [...] I am devoted to reaffirming the difference between humans and animals, which I do by eating meat every Sabbath. Animal rights secularists rightly recognize the danger that I represent to their worldview and eventually target ritual slaughter as practiced by religious Jews. [...]
It is important for Jews to realize that whenever this happens in modern, secularized societies it is always instigated by the Left. In Sweden, for example, it was not the traditional Lutheran clergy that supported the ban on ritual Jewish slaughter, it was the Left-wing animal rights enthusiasts.

(America's Real War
By rabbi Daniel Lapin :82-83)

Generally in American culture we do not realize all the sacrifices made for us, we don't have to look at all the animals slaughtered and so on. For the opposite view that perverts that basic natural categories of human and animal see: (Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson)

There is this small problem with it, given that the Nazis pioneered anti-vivesection laws. I.e. early animal rights laws. Hmmm, all the sacrifice of the animals for the sake of humans probably cannot be understood without some form of knowledge about the Lamb of God, ironically I think that some rabbis may have more knowledge about how sacred a sacrifice is than many American preachers.

Karl Kraus with his typical wit on the topic:

When someone has behaved like an animal, he says: 'I'm only human!' But when he is treated like an animal he says: 'I'm human too!'

(Half-Truths and One-and-A-Half-Truths :108)

Another contrast, the revival of an ancient form of paganism with the typical urge to merge:

A number of contemporary movements,including the animal rights movement (with its idea that man is no higher than animals), also exemplify the confusion. As animal liberationist and founder of PETA Ingrid Newkirk says, “a rat . . is a pig ... is a dog ... is a boy.” There are movements to break down the barriers between generations: Witness the recent change in the definition of pedophilia and the publishing of the double Journal of Homosexuality issue, “Male Intergenerational Love” (an apologia for pedophilia). Thus we see animal confused with human, sacred confused with profane, adult confused with child, male confused with female and life confused with death--all of these traditionally the most profound of distinctions and separations, are now under seige.

(Homosexuality and American Public Life
Edited by Chrisopher Wolfe,(Dallas: Spence Publishing Company)1999 :104-105)

As opposed to:

Most of the [Judaic] rules of the law of holiness relate to the basic categories of the natural world and of human experience. Such categories as the living and the dead; mortal and divine; human and animal; air, sea, and land; male and female; past, present and future are common to most peoples. They provide a framework of basic 'natural' categories that render the universe meaningful. What is peculiar to the Jewish people is that these natural categories are also moral categories and anything that is ambiguous or threatens to blur the boundaries of these categories is treated as abominable.

(Sexual Taboos and Social Boundaries
By Christie Davies
American Journal of Sociology,
Vol. 87, No.5, Mar., 1982 :1032-1063)

Some legal scholars have noted that given the modern normalization of homophilia (the subversion of male and female) there is little basis to "discriminate" against necrophilia (life and death), pedophilia (child and adult), zoophilia (human and animal) or any form of sexual disorientation. There are relatively few on the Left that are actually honest to their own weltanschauung though. Yet there are some who are like Peter Singer, Ingrid Newkirk and others.

From the right side of history...

Led by Major Gen. John F. O'Ryan as grand marshal, about 100,000 Jews and many Christian sympathizers marched in a parade yesterday from Madison Square to the Battery in protest against the treatment of Jews in Germany.
[...]
The civilized world is 'amazed' as well as concerned 'by the policies of intolerance inaugurated by the Hitler government against the Jewish people,' General O'Ryan said. He denounced the Hitler policies as being in violation of the principles of Christianity and civilization and called upon all Christians everywhere to express their protest against the acts and utterances of those in charge of the present German Government. Hitler's violations ofthe rights of Jews are 'a challenge to civilization,' General O'Ryan declared--'a challenge to Christianity and its basic teaching,' a 'challenge to the American spirit of fair play.'
'It is for these reasons that Americans who are Christians justify their protests against the conduct of the Hitler government,'[...]

(100,000 March Here in 6-Hour Protest Over Nazi Policies
The New York Times; May 11, 1933; pg. 1)

SETI and ID

E.g., a short post from uncommon descent.

An American University Professor on ID

The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category “mythology”. I expect it will draw much media attention. The university public relations office will have a press release on it in a few weeks, I also have contacts at several regional newspapers.

Of course, I won’t actually be teaching I.D. and creationisms, but rather I’ll be teaching ABOUT I.D. and creationisms as modern mythologies, indicating that these ideas have no place in a public school science class, but can certainly be analyzed in humanities classes for their function in society.
[...]
So far, six faculty have eagerly signed up to lecture. I can probably pull Chancellor Hemenway into this also, especially in the light of his public comments supporting evolution.

Doing my part to p*ss of the religious right...

(cf. Telic Thoughts, emphasis added)

I'd like a course on mythologies, the gods and mythohistorians who think that extraterrestrials were the gods. At least they bring up anomalies like twelve inch holes drilled through granite in the "copper age," engineering feats like using hundred ton blocks for masonry, etc. But nooo, instead the only narrative allowed is that Ape-man this and that mixed in with idiotic mythological narratives of Naturalism. For all ancient peoples were just superstitious and stupid. Let's just decide before looking into anything that the only type of answer we'll allow in science is that we have a common ancestor in non-Life, perhaps an ancient mud puddle is our ultimate common ancestor.

But anyway, note how he knows his allies in the Old Press as they tend to run in the same leftist Herd. I once got in argument with a journalist and simply edited his second message as opposed to his first since he had no reply on the issue: "I am open-minded. [...] My mind is made up on this issue!" He thought that he was thinking a little thought at first, oh how he had thought so. Then like journalists sometimes do he realized that he could not think through his brain. They like to play pretend anyway.

At any rate, the main reason that many American University professors will not be teaching about ID is because they are mentally incompetent when it comes to conceptual thinking. They favor the attempts at the "biological thinking" typical to Darwinism instead. It seems to be the result of a sort of cosmic Oedipus complex leading to the urge to merge into Mommy Nature. That feeling is typical to those who deny all of the Right and so feel their way along blindly with what is Left.

The mind of that type of professor reminds me of other professors, just exchange the dread "fundies" (They might tell you about Jesus. Oh, my!) for "the Jewish influence" (The ethical code worship of the Jews, it's just like a disease or somethin'!) and you can understand their practical and violent resistance to transcendence.* The foundation now at issue among this type of Herd in the American Republic is the same one that was at issue a relatively short time ago in another Republic:

The scholars whom we shall quote in such impressive numbers, like those others who were instrumental in any other part of the German pre-war and war efforts, were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad...

If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.

(Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People
By Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :7) (Emphasis added)

Modern Darwinists get a little frantic about maintaining the same foundation, their urge to merge seems to be the result of the same psychological dynamic again. So if most of the attempts made by American professors at refuting ID, even apart from their rude tone, strike you as unconvincing and hollow, it is not a weakness do to inferior training but to an inferior form of "thought" typical to those who only think that they are thinking. That's why their main argument consists mainly of murmuring about "Science, science..." as if scientism is true and science can be treated as some sort of ideal abstraction instead of a tool to be used to give people some idea of what they already have ideas about.

The main talking point of "Science, science....why, right now I feel a little science overwhelming me!" is sometimes followed by weak critiques that are lacking in conceptual thinking and so are an associative argument of this type: "It's just like the theory of gravity or the earth being round or somethin'." These are common, as there is nothing else to do but to shift to something else when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

*One political philosopher defined Fascism as the practical and violent resistance to transcendence, which is a good way to begin to define that which tries to avoid definition.

[Related posts: Anti-ID Rhetors, The Flat Earth and "It's just like gravity."]