Sex Assault Message Hits Urinals

This post is a little crude, I guess. So you've been warned. Fortunately, I think I lost any younger readers back when I first wrote the word "metaphysical."

(AP) BLOOMINGTON, Ind. Indiana University is taking a message to prevent sexual assault to an unusual place—men’s restrooms. Members of Raising Awareness of Interactions in Sexual Encounters, or RAISE, have placed 600 red drain guards in urinals in Indiana dorm rooms with a message urging students to stop sexual assault.

(Sex Assault Message Hits Urinals, CBS)

Doing that will give some drunk guy pause, he will probably see it and then think, "Huh, well I was going to try to take advantage of the girl I'm with...but now, now this message that I'm peeing on right now, it's really makin' me think man!"

I've seen these sorts of messages in the same place saying don't do drugs. It seems to me it would be more effective if the urinal was hooked into a drug testing system that would lock the bathroom doors and call the police if it went off. That would be something. The don't do drugs message changes color, an alarm goes off and then, "Hey, what the...?!"

But I shouldn't give the ones who want to keep us all safely safe any ideas.

This is probably a better idea, as far as sexual assault:

A controversial device, which its inventor claims clamps itself to a rapist's penis forcing him to seek medical treatment and be revealed to the police, will be launched by a South African woman on Wednesday.

The "Rapex" device is inserted into the vagina by a woman who feels she is at risk of rape, and if she is attacked, small burr-like teeth will attach themselves... explained inventor Sonette Ehlers.

...it is only possible to remove the device by surgery, Ehlers said ahead of a launch and demonstration at Kleinmond near Cape Town.

(IoL)

Alright, I'll end this post now before it gets any worse.

Good and Evil

It's Sunday, so a little theology. Although I am no biblical theologian, hmmm.

Evil seems to want to posses, wants to get inside and be ingested, wants to merge into, eat up, rule over, etc.

"Eat me and let my form of knowledge all inside you in this moment, to merge into you, posses you..." As opposed to, "Eat me and do this in rememberance of me, as me. I do this for you, as you. Trust me in very small ways and you will come to love me for who I am too."

Good seems to want to give as in the gift of grace, wants self-government to be learned, is the Way out of being possesed by Evil, is based on marriage of complementary beings instead of merging all types of being together, etc.

Perhaps both the Prince of this world and the Prince of peace are communicating that to come to be a part of them they have to be symbolically eaten as an act of will. Perhaps one should be careful of the will, as it guides what will be done.

Is this theology? Hmmm...

Evolutionism and Proto-Nazism...

This is a re-write of a comment on uncommon dissent.

I don't have Fox News but apparently the common sense populist fellow there who sometimes doesn't quite seem to know what he's talking about was discussing Darwinism. One of his common sense intuitions may be correct:

Well, I think it’s more than that. I think this is a concerted effort in a fascist way to punish…

(Fox News (Emphasis added))

It's interesting that he should say that. Some history on the fascist way:

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)



Some fellows with the urge to merge want to try to engage in "biological thinking" rather than thinking through biology.

E.g.,

Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin...

(Ib. :33)

Since it is weak, the “Jewish influence” must be quarantined and opposing views must be censored somehow and so on.

E.g.,

...in Darwin's Dangerous Idea Daniel Dennett views religious believers who dissuade their children from believing Darwinian evolution as such a threat to the social order that they need to be caged in zoos or quarantined (both metaphors are his).

(Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
Edited by William Dembski, Introduction)

A similar sentiment:

"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side...I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.' And on May 1, 1937, he declared, "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
By William L. Shirer. (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :249)



As to the notion that religious parents be quarantined, isn't that what State schools combined with the increasing oligarchic tendencies of the Judiciary do already? Such a notion is not idle talk or purely metaphoric. It is a goal that proto-Nazis have a history of working towards. Yet the “biological thinkers” seem to have no idea what they are writing about as textual degenerates. It’s more of a feeling as in the urge to merge, so they do not deal with their own texts as if they can be reduced to pseudo-scientific notions about their own "biology."

Biological thinking in Nazism:

“And they were all doctors like me, who tried to think biologically, biology as the foundation of medical thought. . . . We didn’t want politics—we were critical of politics—but [concerned} with the way human beings really are—not just an idea or philosophy.”

National Socialism as Applied Biology

The nation would now be run according to what Johann S. and his cohorts considered biological truth, “the way human beings really are.” That is why he had a genuine “eureka” experience—a sense of “That’s exactly it!”—when he heard Rudolf Hess declare National Socialism to be “nothing but applied biology” (see page 31). Dr. S. felt himself merged with not only Hess (he told me, with some excitement, “I was standing no more than ten meters from him at the time!”) but with the Führer himself... S. quickly joined the Party and devoted himself to the realization of that biological claim.

He pointed out proudly that these early SA doctors formed the nucleus of the National Socialist German Physicians’ League (Nationalsozialistischer DeutscherArztebund), the doctors who, as he put it, “were the first intellectuals to have complete confidence . . . in National Socialism to march in the streets”—in effect, to put their bodies on the line.

(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :129) (Emphasis added)


E.g., modern proto-Nazism:

I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don’t care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way.

-–PZ Myers/Paul Myers

Translation: “Let me at them! Why, I just put my smarty pants on and I’m feeling a bit scientific now. It may seem that I like Mommy Nature a bit too much but I'm not effeminate, I'm really not!”

Lifton notes that "Professionals and intellectuals have additional susceptibilities [to proto-Nazism] as an antidote to isolation and weakness...as a denial of effeteness..." and that scientists "...may do [evil] things with the conviction that they are 'in accord with the natural history and biology of man,' and that one is acting as healer and savior." (Ib. :491)

I think that Karl Kraus’s answer was best. Satire is also the most fun. To have fun, you have to make fun. You have to make something to have something, which makes a lot of sense if you have the sense to think about it.

Telic Thoughts had fun with proto-Nazi metaphors:

As for the brass knuckles and hammers, those must go. Instead...
“I say, their pastries have a bad taste. It’s time for scientists to break out the aprons and mixing bowels, and get out there with a better cake.”

Or what about drawing from metaphors of knitting and weaving?

“I say, their sweaters have holes. It’s time for scientists to break out their knitting needles and multi-colored yarn and knit something that is much more pleasing to the eye.”

Good comment...

No time to write tonight, a good comment on "Philosophical materialists [who] have the preternatural urge to inject their religion into science..." is here.

Perhaps that urge is similar to their urge to merge.

The "God of the gaps"

That is an old canard typical to those with the urge to merge. It is symbolic of the fact that they want to fill every gap instead of looking at gaps and separations for what they are empirically. The simple fact is, sometimes there are gaps and separations. Just as one cannot deny the existence of self-evident truths and circles to avoid the logician's condemnation about circular reasoning one cannot deny gaps just to suit those with the urge to merge.

The typical reaction of a materialist to a gap in empirical or physical knowledge opening an opportunity for faith is that any mists of mysticism or singularities can then be filled with anything at all because all faith is at the same epistemic level, so enter Santa, pink unicorns, etc. That's because materialists are mental retards that do not realize that gaps are not necessarily so empty of meaning that they can be filled with anything at all, although when dealing with a child or childish half-wits, bringing in Santa, Tooth Fairies and so on might actually be appropriate.

One cannot say anything about the transphysical or the spiritual, there can be patterns to gaps that contain meaning, as sure as there can be patterns to which neurons fire over synaptic gaps to allow you to think through your brain right now. Interesting to note that most of the time you actually aren't intervening in most of your physical brain events, you just go on breathing and so on. Yet you could intervene in things that you are for the most part sovereign over, if you willed it so. Typically your will can be thought in your own brain thanks to being created in the pattern of a Being who can also intervene in what He is sovereign over, even if it was never His will to intervene, the fact of ultimate sovereignty would remain.

Newman describes the role of a traditional God in terms of providence, or the laws that bring about an orderly universe, and intervention, in which the Creator infuses new and special levels of order, whether in the creation of life or in the individual human being and human consciousness. He agrees that the notion of an intervening God raises again the “God of the gaps” problem, but insists there are gaps nevertheless.

You’ve either got a God of the gaps or a natural law of the gaps. So you look at what kind of gaps they are. Some gaps are pretty large. In those cases, when you have to theorize billions or trillions of universes for natural law to fill those gaps, then I begin to suspect that we’re really looking at evidence of some kind of intervention.

(By Design: Science and the Search for God
By Larry Witham :52)



Although it seems that God has left enough evidence that one only needs a small mustard seed of faith to have the eyes to see it, those that are blind will believe in millions of universes and so on as there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Related posts:
(The supposed argument from ignorance...)

On treating the inanimate as if it is animate and the inanimate as if it is not.

It is a Leftist tendency to begin to blur basic categories together. Given that, the Left will begin to try to treat inanimate objects as if they are persons and persons as if they are inanimate objects. From guns to animal rights to the way that the Left seeks to treat the poor or addicts as if the only issue is one of economics or medical "treatments" the basic confusion and disordered thinking is similar. The essential and primary issues that must be placed first are of philosophy, spirit and will, with therapeutic and nurturing treatments being secondary. It is not as if nurturing is inferior to ethical teaching, yet it is secondary and can become inferior if vanity drives people into a denial that it is secondary.

Social change is in the language first, prisons gradually become Departments of Corrections (as if Walmart could run prisons and correct criminal's lives with therapeutic treatment or perhaps an economic solution) as they cannot be a penitentiary, where a penalty is due and some transphysical notion of "justice" served. In the Socratic dialogue the culture has come to be on the side that argues for a lack of justice in any essential, transcendent sense. Yet we still have to get along somehow, so subjective therapy and medicalization will have to do. Besides, that's probably scientific, which always leads to safety and nurture.

Bad: Obsolete; superseded by insane, mentally ill, sick.
Good: Obsolete; superseded by sane, mentally healthy, healthy
Ethics: Obsolete; superseded by the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
....
The therapeutic ethic: convict and punish the innocent, and call it mental hospitalization; diagnose and excuse the guilty, and call it the insanity defense.

(The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary
By Thomas Szasz :57)


Despite the tendency to venerate science there may never be a way to implement the effete Leftist dream of a Scientific State ruled by Mother Nature for the benefit of all. Perhaps one can model the impact of one pebble on a pond as its effect ripples out, yet the issues involved are more like measuring the impact of many pebbles of different sizes being dropped at different rates and all the ripples constantly changing each other. Change and flux is a part of Nature, in seven years you will not have the same body given the amount of cells dying and being replaced in your physical body right now. Yet here "you" are, and you may feel like pretty much the same person you were seven years ago. Maybe that is because you are in fact a person, with a mind and will capable of causing small ripples of cause and effect in Nature.

The Leftist mind does not seem to grasp that point. The other day I was answering a Leftist mind going into its typical murmurings about science and a littany of problems. And it is always a littany! This one was something like, "Leftists go with science all the time, from global warming to abstinence education it's all just scientific or somethin'. Hey, I bet giving teenagers pieces of plastic to keep their sex safely safe is like the theory of gravity too. Saftey first!" Is it scientific? The truly scientific answer may be much more Socratic than the scientism typical to the Left, as I noted to this mind murmuring about science and its littany of problems like abstinence education, there is the issue of condoms and seatbelts. That is because most persons are more like small versions of Aristotle's notion of an unmoved Mover and less like inanimate objects than the Left typically feels, so the primary issue for young people is ethical and not a piece of plastic.

But leave it to the Left to feeel otherwise in its touchy feely feelings. Most of their minds are probably smothered by now.

What I should be doing...

A photographer happened by and took this picture. She gave it to some people staying at my parent's vacation house later. She had told me to sail over there and she'd give me a picture. Believe it or not there was wind further out and once I got out there I sailed for a while. The woods on the beach was blocking it all in this picture.

The next day was nominally windy, enough to go about 15 to 20mph I'd guess. It's hard to say on the water. The marine police stopped me that day and gave me a ticket for not wearing a life jacket. I'm not sure if there is actually a law, in some states there is and in some there isn't. It all depends on if you consider a surfboard a "vessel," I suppose. At any rate, I didn't argue about it although they could have given a warning instead of a ticket with a steep fine. It was my fault in too many ways.

Besides, if the fellows who care more about keeping your life safely safe than you do weren't around we'd probably all be dead by now. And the unsaftey of that, it just doesn't seem safe. So it's a good thing they are there, as I'm sure they'd point out. Saftey first!

Related posts:
(Picture archives)
(Index of old pictures)
(This is the best picture of a jump that I have. I've been a bit higher.)

Writing...

I did some writing here and here as well as a few other places. Same ol', same ol', I'm going to write about different things again soon.

I noted PZ Myers psychological tendency towards proto-Nazism again in the first. Come to think of it, I may have been a little harsh with his sycophant. But it seems to me that if you don't like a bit of rhetorical fire, then do not light it. If you do, then let's come together to light it and see what is burned away.

Archive...

I'll need this, since there are so many people who like this sort of argument: "I think evolution is true because I'm being scientific right now or somethin'. It's all just like gravity. I did just say the word gravity so that means I am being scientific....or somethin' and so disagreement with me is just like disagreeing with science."

One is supposed to begin to assume that Darwinism is "just like" gravity or some other well established knowledge/scientia. Darwinists seem very fond of shifting into "just like" arguments (examples)instead of dealing with the application of systematic thought and empirical evidence to the sort of mythological narratives of Naturalism promulgated by popularizers like PBS.

But very well, if Darwinism is "just like" physics or some other form of science that actually comports with the empirical evidence instead of either mutating to fit itself to it or forming the evidence to fit to itself, then what is the well established metric for natural selection? What is the equation for Darwinism's most basic and foundational tenet? Shouldn't such equations be learned by every student of biology? Is Darwinism “just like” a form of knowledge that is so well established by empirical evidence that any anomalies ought to be fit to the theory, at least for now? These “just like” associative arguments that Darwinists are so fond of seem to reveal that they actually can’t track and predict the destination of an adaptation “just like” the trajectory of a physical object can be traced given gravity and physics. What is the mathematical language that represents natural selection and makes predictions that can be falsified or verified, about as sure as gravity? Given the incessant attempt at an association, aren’t Darwinian principles as sure as gravity and as verifiable as tracing the trajectory of an object before it is set in motion? Do Darwinists think that physicists sit around after an object comes to rest and then write an equation or perhaps a little story about how Nature selected it to be there by supposed "natural selections" operating in ways that are unverifiable? Is Darwinism on the same epistemic level as theories that make predictions and have been repeatedly tested and encoded in the precise language of mathematics, or not? What equation represents the notion of natural selection, what trajectory of adaptation has it predicted and how has it been verified by empirical evidence? All of such questions are easy to answer in physics with respect to gravity's impact on physical objects and Darwinism is incessantly said to be on the same epistemic level. Given that, Darwinists should be able to make predictions about the adaptations found in living organisms and so have an actual theory subject to falsification. Yet it has been my experience that they can't and instead begin to make excuses about how complex living things and their relationships are. Yet if they can't, they should have never made the argument about their hypotheses being on the same epistemic level as the theory of gravity in the first place.

Dialogue...

Apparently the tag team fellows trying to support Darwinism in the comments here didn't last very long. If you know of some replacements then send them my way.

Terrestrials, Extraterrestrials, Extra-extraterrestrials, ID and Evolution

Ironically, we'd probably only be able to detect the existence of extraterrestrials by ID. (Let alone any extracosmsosials.)

An interesting note:

...it is not only their radio signals we would expect to detect. The American theoretical physicist, Freeman Dyson, of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, has raised the interesting point that if there were indeed highly developed technological civilizations extant in the universe we should expect to find other signs of their existence. It is worth quoting some of Dyson’s arguments at length:

My argument begins with the following idea. If it is true, as many chemists and biologists believe, that there are millions of places in the universe where technology might develop, then we are not interested in guessing what an average technological society might look like. We have to think instead of what the most conspicuous out of a million technologies might look like. The technology which we have a chance to detect is by definition one which has grown to the greatest possible extent. So the first rule of my game is: think of the biggest possible artificial activities, within limits set only by the laws of physics and engineering, and look for those. I do not need to discuss questions of motivation, who would want to do these things or why. Why does the human species explode hydrogen bombs or send rockets to the moon? It is difficult to say exactly why. My rule is, there is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible.There are two more rules of my game which I shall state explicitly. Others may like to choose different rules, but I think mine are reason able and I shall defend them if anybody objects to them. Second rule: I assume that all engineering projects are carried out with technology which the human species of the year 1965 A.D. can understand. This assumption is totally unrealistic. I make it because I cannot sensibly discuss any technology which the human species does not yet understand. Obviously a technology which has existed for a million years will be likely to operate in ways which are quite different from our present ideas. However, I think this rule of allowing only technology which we already understand does not really weaken my argument. I am presenting an existence proof for certain technological possibilities. I describe crude and clumsy methods which would be adequate for doing various things. If there are other more elegant methods for doing the same things, my conclusions will still be generally valid. My third rule is to ignore questions of economic cost.

Dyson goes on to argue that some civilizations, either in their quest for energy or for purposes obscure to us, would inevitably create artifacts or change their planetary systems on such a colossal scale that they would be visible across hundreds of millions of light years. Given time, there is no reason why even the energy of stars might not be utilized and the structure of whole galaxies drastically changed. But the heavens are curiously empty of any artifact-like phenomena and Dyson concludes:

At the end of all these delightful speculations, we come back to the hard question, why do we not see in our galaxy any evidence of large-scale technology at work? In principle there might be two answers to this question. Either we do not see technology because none exists, or we do not see it because we have not looked hard enough. After thinking about this problem for a longtime, I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that the first answer is the more probable one. I have the feeling that if an expanding technology had ever really got loose in our galaxy, the effects of it would be glaringly obvious. Starlight instead of wastefully shining all over the galaxy would be carefully damned and regulated. Stars instead of moving at random would be grouped and organized. In fact, to search for evidence of technological activity in the galaxy might be like searching for evidence of technological activity on Manhattan Island. Nothing like a complete technological takeover has occurred in our galaxy. And yet the logic of my argument convinces me that, if there were a large number of technological societies in existence, one of them would probably have carried out such a take-over.

So in the end I am very skeptical about the existence of any extra terrestrial technology. Maybe the evolution of life is a much less probable event than the molecular biologists would have us believe.

(Evolution: A Theory In Crisis
By Michael Denton :258-260)

The argument is along the lines of Hawking's argument about time travelling, i.e. we know that we never invent it because we've never met anyone from the future. That seems a valid argument to me, knowing the nature of humanity. One explanation for a lack of time travellers could be that they invent it yet make a rule against using it to travel to the past for the sake of their own existence. That would make sense, yet even if humans tried to adhere to a rule about time travel it would be broken by someone soon enough, just like every other rule we make.

Related posts:
Martians, ID and Evolution

C.S. Lewis commenting on such matters in his day:

I look forward with horror to contact with the other inhabited planets, if there are such. We would only transport to them all of our sin and our acquisitiveness, and establish a new colonialism. I can’t bear to think of it. But if we on earth were to get right with God, of course, all would be changed. Once we find ourselves spiritually awakened, we can go to outer space and take the good things with us. That is quite a different matter.

(The Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis: God in the Dock :482)


It seems that Lewis always did that, beginning with things of spiritual significance first and then being all reasonable about it. If you begin with a rationale for rationality, then being rational is a good thing to attempt.

The fellow is trying, I suppose...

From the economist, what comes of admitting to ID:

An intelligent designer could have started this universe an instant ago with all of our memories and perceptions, all of the information present in the universe, pre-programmed to his/her/its whim. Though this sounds to me like a pretty good scientist, the story itself will never be science. It is a belief and nothing more. There is no way to ever test the proposition that the world suddenly arose as it is an instant ago and that’s what makes all the difference between science and intelligent design.

That is typical. The history of science shows no such thing as far as telic thoughts resulting in the corruption of knowledge or a descent into the rhetoric of sophists, in fact history illustrates that naturalism of the Darwinist sort turned scientia into the proto-Nazi pseudo-science of the eugenics movement. In contrast, history shows that teleological thinking can be and often is fertile ground for developing the pursuit of knowledge even if a few mistaken thoughts are thought.

For example, this is telic thinking:

...in the 1950s Royal Society fellow Edmund Whittaker wrote on the numerical quest taken up by Eddington and the implications of finding any physical constants at all.
...the argument was the same as Heisenberg’s: “Mathematical law is a concept of the mind, and from the existence of mathematical law we infer that our minds have access to something akin to themselves that is behind the universe.”

(By Design: Science and the Search for God
By Larry Witham :52) (More examples)



The evidence shows that it is the thinking of those who have no rationale for rationality that tends to break down into scientism, dogmatism and propaganda if there is no dialectic set against it.

This is propaganda:

An intelligent designer could have started this universe an instant ago with all of our memories and perceptions...

In the same way Nature could have begun on its own an instant ago and all of the biochemical events of our brains are deceiving us into thinking that ratios lead to the rational. Such a mixture of sophistic and solipsistic argument can be made, all from within the context of a Naturalism that is argued to be the definition of "science." Is that a valid argument against philosophic naturalism?

There is actually more reason to believe that Nature's secrets can be found out if Nature's laws have been written by a Writer than if they have come about by "random chance." What defines chance and does evolution, evolve? We could go back to Heraclitus and the notion that all is in flux. Yet if it is all in flux then we must have some solid ground and a standard from which to judge it so, lest that judgment be in flux too.

It is odd how these types of arguments about two minute old universes, Santa and the Tooth Fairy come up among Darwminsts. The fact that such arguments are made seems to reveal a vain arrogance with respect to knowledge and Nature. Ironically, these associative arguments are found among those who tend to argue about how "fundamentalist" anyone who disagrees with them about naturalism is being.

On the argument that admitting to intelligence is like saying that the Cosmsos is two minutes old:

...for the naturalist, the world is intelligible only if it starts off without intelligence and then evolves intelligence. If it starts out with intelligence and evolves intelligence because of a prior intelligence, then somehow the world becomes unintelligible.

The absurdity here is palpable. Only by means of our intelligence are science and our understanding of the world even possible. And yet the naturalist clings to this argument as a last and dying friend. This was brought home to me when I recently lectured at the University of Toronto. One biologist in the audience insisted I must take seriously that the world is two minutes old so long as I accept intelligent design. Presumably any creating intelligence could just as well create a deceptive world that appears old but was freshly created two minutes ago as create a verisimilitudinous world that appears old because it actually is old. That is certainly a logical possibility, but do we have any reason to believe it? Hundreds of years of successful scientific inquiry confirm a world that’s structured to honestly yield up its secrets. If, further, the world reveals evidence of design, why should the mere possibility of a deceptive or capricious designer neutralize that evidence or lead us to disbelieve in the existence of a designer?

If we’re going to take seriously the possibility of a designer misleading us, then we also need to take seriously the possibility of a natural world devoid of design misleading us. Imagine a natural world, devoid of design, where the laws of nature change radically from time to time, where time can back up and restart history on a different course, and where massive quantum fluctuations on a cosmic scale bring about galaxies that seem ancient but are in fact recent. It’s not just designers that can be deceptive and capricious. The same is true of nature. Yet if science is to be possible, we need, as a regulative principle, to assume that nature is honest and dependable. And if nature is the product of design, that means we need, again as a regulative principle, to assume that the designer made nature to be honest and dependable.

It follows that the “two-minute-old universe” argument against intelligent design is an exercise in irrelevance. It cuts as much against naturalism as against intelligent design. And it can’t even touch the point at issue, namely, whether certain biological systems are designed.

(The Design Revolution
By William Dembski :23)

It's a red herring. But I'm sure it is fun for progressives to murmur about science yet again. Those who engage in talking about what science is or how scientific they are instead of making a sound argument about knowledge typically do so because they do not have a sound argument, scientific or not.

Galileo Galilei

Galileo was not arguing about science and religion the same way that those who seem to think that they speak for him now argue. I.e., an argument of this type: "Because the Bible speaks of the four corners of the earth and science contradicts that then the Bible cannot be revelatory." Shifting that argument into our context the argument would be: "We speak of sunrise and sunset, yet science shows that the earth is revolving around the sun, so every word we speak is now undermined!"

That is simply not the type of thinking that Galileo adhered to. So he argued:

“The holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word.”
--Galileo Galilei, Laws of Dynamics,
astronomical confirmation of the heliocentric system
(The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science
to the Mind of God
by Roy Abraham Varghese :103)

There is no contradiction in that, anymore than there is in saying that there will be a sunset today as the sun goes below the horizon.

One rather clever fellow notes that although Darwinists are fond of using the case of Galileo as an argument against common intuition as a form of knowledge it can easily be right as well as wrong.

Pretheoretic intuitions can be right as well as wrong — the moon appears to go around the Earth and it does in fact go around the Earth. The job of science is to get at the underlying truth, regardless of whether it coincides with or contradicts our intuitions.

(Uncommon Dissent)

Unlike the modern interpretation that many Darwinists seem to believe of science constantly undermining or destroying religion Galileo saw himself as a reformer of the Catholic Church and not a destroyer. (He was like Luther in that, although both men had people use their work in destructive ways.) E.g.:

Galileo’s first writings about the process of creation appear in a series of untitled and unpublished manuscripts on motion that were mainly, if not entirely, composed while he was teaching at Pisa, before he left in 1592 to take a new position at the University of Padua. The creation theme is first touched on in the manuscript now known as Galileo’s Dialogus, and it is then developed in a long essay today known as the De motu antiquiora, which is followed by some brief revisions of the first two chapters and then by a much revised and shorter essay in ten sections. Although Galileo never published any of these materials, they reflect a deep and lasting interest in God’s creation, and some twenty years later, after his discoveries with the telescope so greatly enlarged the world, Galileo’s concern with what he now saw as the true constitution of the universe seems to have become an obsession. It was imperative to him that the Church accept the true (that is, Copernican) system of the universe, for she must not be in error concerning such matters.

(Galileo and God's Creation
By Winifred Lovell Wisan
Isis, Vol. 77, No. 3. (Sep., 1986), pp. 473)


I would note that it was not just the Catholic Church that was in error but also common intuition, as well as almost all of philosophy, cosmology and the state of scientia/knowledge at the time. As Luther demonstrated, it is not as if the Catholic church was necessarily overly concerned with supporting and promulgating knowledge to be found in Scriptures, whether literal or metaphoric. I suspect that if Aristotle thought that the earth revolved around the sun, then that may have been the knowledge that the Catholic church would have been supporting.

It seems to me that the main problem with those who believe in philosophic naturalism is that they do not quite understand the use of words and text as artifacts of intelligence, let alone which words are meant to be literalized to become as flesh and which are meant for a message by use of metaphor. If a text such as the Bible makes use of the metaphoric, then they tend to immediately write it all off as pretty much meaningless. That sort of anti-metaphoric thinking is incorrect. For example, the statement that something will go forth as unto the four corners of the earth contains the metaphoric meaning in the mind's eye of a total covering. The most meaningful words are those that conjure up a visualization in the mind's eye so that one can see what is being said. Those that pretend that the use of metaphors make it easy to discard a writer's message will soon enough make use of a metaphor in their own writings. One might say that by discarding every metaphor but their own they will gradually become vain in their visualizations.

Interesting...

Apparently, the

controversial theory of "intelligent design" has won the qualified backing of [Australian] Education Minister Brendan Nelson, who says it should be taught in schools alongside evolution if that is the wish of parents.

(The Sheep's Crib)

Well...

I kept up with various debates tonight. I really should be playing Halo now.

So sorry, no post.

Fun with the Left...

I had some fun here.

The blind leading the blind...

Plato is the philosopher that wanted people to come out of a cave, as if to be born again to see the light. There is more to seeing than meets the eye and more to thinking than you might think.

Plato:

Plato knew more than all the earnest statisticians who would reduce science to an uninspired recording of observable phenomena. Man does not move himself; he does not struggle toward moral existence by Hartley’s ludicrous instrument of Association. No, man is drawn forward by a power outside himself, which works through Ideas. An Idea is an immutable spiritual truth communicated to man through the faculty of intuition: the dogmas of religious faith, the principles of morals, the rules of mathematics, and the laws of pure science are apprehended through the intuition (varying in its strength from one man to another), and by no other means can this knowledge be obtained. Ideas are beyond the grasp of the mere Understanding. And Ideas, well or badly apprehended, rule the world. The Benthamite mind, the political economists’ mind, reaches no higher than the useful but limited Understanding, and therefore never attains to general truth— only to particular means and methods. Without Faith to restrain Understanding (and Faith is the product of true Reason), mankind succumbs first to the death of the spirit and then to the death of the body. Coleridge, in the introduction to his second Lay Sermon, caricatures the Utilitarian as a dim-eyed old philosopher who “talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite series of causes and effects,” which turns out to be a string of blind men, one following another by clinging to his predecessor’s coat-tails, all striding confidently forward. “Who is at the head to guide them?” asks Coleridge; and the contemptuous sage informs him, “No one; the string of blind men goes on for ever without any beginning: for although one blind man cannot move without stumbling, yet infinite blindness supplies the want of sight.”

(The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot Seventh Revised Edition
(Regnery Publishing: 1985) :136-136)

This type of philosophy unifies Darwinists and the Left. In his satiric look at Benthamites who believe that all is a set of ratios even as they lack a rationale for rationality Coleridge writes, "...although one blind man cannot move without stumbling, yet infinite blindness supplies the want of sight." That is what Darwinists are trying to say of the Blind Watchmaker as the result of the same philosophy of Naturalism.

E.g.,

Life itself involves a conflict between two antagonistic phenomena: Self-replication can produce, in theory, an infinite number of products; yet, in reality, the world that supplies the materials for replication is finite. Life, then, is a tension between the infinite and the finite. It is inevitable that the finite prevails.
(Science as a Way of Knowing:
The Foundations of Modern Biology
By John A. Moore :1)

At least they sometimes have a half-witted sort of half-sense that Life is more than finite. Yet isn't Nature finite by definition, how is there some distinction between Life with its capacity to be infinite and a finite Nature that it comes to be in "tension" against? Is Life an unnatural selection working against the natural selections of Nature, naturally enough? There is no answer in Naturalism.

I've noticed that Darwinists attack philosophers (including Plato), physicists, mathmeticians and of course ID theorists. It seems that they feel they can hang almost all Darwinian philosophy on biologists.

The Darwinian focus on biology combined with seeking to attack or undermine any limitation to biologizing all of Life was a proto-Nazi tendency among intellectuals of the past.

E.g.

"Our whole cultural life for decades has been more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin...

(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) :33)

Jihad update...

Investigators conclude that the Koran was not flushed down the toilet and that suspected Islamic terrorists are considering converting to Hogwartism. (Unfortunately I don't know any Harry Potter jokes because apparently I'm not as up to speed on it as a the typical Guantanamo torture victim.)

Books about boy wizard Harry Potter have become favourite reading material among Islamic terror suspects at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Quoting a librarian working at the centre, The Washington Times newspaper says JK Rowling's tales about the boy and the school of wizardry are on top of the request list for the camp's 520 Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, followed by Agatha Christie novels.

(Harry Potter popular with Guantanamo detainees: report, ABC News)

An effete reporter in the Old Press heard to ask the investigators, "Yes, but did they threaten to flush one of the prisoner's Harry Potter books down the toilet to...did they, did they? Why, the torture of it! That's because all soldiers are like Bullies!"

Another said to reply, "It just goes to show that America is like a Big Meanie...yes, an assertive Bully just like the one that used to take the books of an effeminate fellow like me in highschool and put them in the toilet. Bush is like a Bully too, every reporter knows that.

Flush my books down the toilet will they? I'm the Big Reporter now, so I can protect all the Victims!"

The Revenge of Conscience

[W]hy do things get worse so fast? It would be well to know, in case the process can be arrested.

The usual explanation is that conscience is weakened by neglect. Once a wrong is done, the next wrong comes more easily. On this view conscience is mainly a restraint, a resistance, a passive barrier. It does not so much drive us on as hold us back, and when persistently attacked, the restraining wall gets thinner and thinner and finally disappears. Often this explanation is combined with another:
conscience comes from culture; it is built up in us from outside. In this view the heart is malleable. ‘We do not clearly know what is right and wrong, and when our teachers change the lessons, our consciences change their contents. What once we deemed wrong, we deem right; what once we deemed right, we deem wrong.

There is something to these explanations, but neither can account for the sheer dynamism of wickedness—for the fact that we are not gently wafted into the abyss but violently propel ourselves into it. Nor, as I will show, can either one account for the peculiar quality of our present moral confusion.

I suggest a different explanation. Conscience is not a passive barrier but an active force; though it can hold us back, it can also drive us on. Moreover, conscience comes not from without but from within: though culture can trim the fringes, the core cannot be changed. The reason things get worse so fast must somehow lie not in the weakness of conscience but in its strength, not in its shapelessness but in its shape.

(The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man
By J. Budziszewski :21-22)


Conscience and Hitler:

Over and over again [Hitler] showed that he was bothered by conscience and felt the need of dulling its demands:

Only when the time comes when the race is no longer overshadowed by the consciousness of its own guilt then will it find internal peace.

Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision....

I am freeing men from. . . the dirty and degrading modification of a chimera called conscience and morality.

We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience.

We must be ruthless . . . we must regain our clear conscience as to ruthlessness.. .. Only thus shall we purge our people.

(Adolf Hitler's Guilt Feelings: A Problem in History and Psychology
By R. G. L. Waite
Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
Vol. 1, No. 2. (Winter, 1971), pp. 229-230)


The man who seeks to separate the conscience from consciousness is about to tell you the way in which he wants to subvert right and wrong.

Or he may seem to work to kill his Self to be rid of self-evident truths that are evident in the Self:

Hitler also sought to lessen his feelings of guilt through self-punishment—hence his abstentious habits and the masochism of his perversion. [...]And time and again he promised to commit suicide, the ultimate masochistic dissolution. Among the many childish games he played was a form of substitute suicide. Hitler disliked tying his own necktie and ordered his valet to do it for him. He would hold his breath during the process and count slowly to ten. If Linge could finish the knot before Hitler had finished counting, the Führer was greatly relieved.

(Ib. :237-238)

Throughout his career, Hitler seldom contemplated a line of action without thinking of defeat. The disjunctives which characterized his thought almost invariably included the possibility of failure and of suicide. Typically, in the midst of the Beer Hall Putsch, he turned to Gustav von Kahr, Lossow, and Hans von Seisser and said, “You must be victorious with me or die with me. If things go wrong, I have four bullets in my pistol: three for my fellow workers if they desert me, the last bullet is for me.” He contemplated failure and suicide on many other occasions: while hiding at the Hanfstaengl summer home in 1923; upon his arrival in 1924 at Landsberg; in 1931 after the suicide of his niece, “Geli” Raubal; in 1932 if he were not appointed chancellor; in 1936 if the occupation of the Rhineland failed; and on many other occasions.

(Ib. :241)

There are some who might turn away from dealing with the sexual perversions typical to evil because of its utter depravity. Yet it would seem that this is not the time to do so, as people want to begin to normalize perversions now. There is no avoiding it. Besides that many a tyrant illustrates the pattern of evil manifest in sexual perversion, from Nero to the sons of Saddam, which seems to indicate its importance.

E.g., in this instance:

Hitler also seems to have felt guilty about incestuous desires. His relations with both his mother and his niece were very close indeed, and the word incest was often on his mind. Whether or not he actually acted out his incestuous feelings is not very important psychologically. As Freud showed us long ago, fantasies can be as psychically formative as realities.

It is also possible that acute feelings of unworthiness, guilt, and self—loathing were a consequence of a massively masochistic sexual perversion. Hitler gained sexual satisfaction by having a young woman—as much younger than he as his mother was younger than his father—squat over him to urinate or defecate on his head.

(Ib. :234)

There is a parasitic sort of meaning in the perversion of the true version of things which cannot have a meaning/spirit without living off of Life, yet of itself brings Death. E.g.

What does it mean, I asked him, when a man puts the part of himself which represents the generation of life into the cavity of decay and expulsion?Seeing the answer all too well, he refused to reply. Permit me to spell it out. It means 'Life, be swallowed up by death.'

--J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

Death often seems to become manifest among those that pervert the creation of Life, examples in this case:

Alois Hitler was twenty-three years older than Klara, whom he called his “niece” when they were married. Adolf Hitler was twenty-eight years older than his niece, “Geli” Raubal, of whom he said, “Geli is the one woman I could ever marry.” He was twenty—three years older than Eva Braun, twenty-seven years older than “Mimi” Reiter, about twenty—four years older than Renée Mueller, and twenty-five years older than Unity Mitford. Miss Mitford probably never had intimate sexual relations with Hitler. All of these young women committed suicide or attempted to do so...

(Emphasis added, Ib. :234)

Or one could look to the example of the link between consciousness and the conscience in the case of prostitutes, as that is slowly being normalized in the American Republic. They are those who hope that their brazen laughter will cover the way that they sell their bodies to sell their souls. Eventually it becomes apparent that they are selling their Life and they begin to seem hardened, dead in the eyes. Then the men who buy or sell the feminine must look for some fresh Life to sell, for don't all flowers wither and die anyway?

What Darwinism is good for.

It's been hot out. I don't usually sweat like a fat person does but I have been lately, enough to run down in my eyes. So I was thinking and wondering how little hairs and the like can be selected by Nature.

The evolutionary hypothesis seems like this, there are groups of individuals who reproduce their little descendents to the point that there is a tension against their environment which they must fit to or die trying, so some live and some die. So I suppose that if I got some sweat or dirt in my eye and fell down a hill and died while a unibrow fellow did not then that would act as a rather vague sort of "natural selection" for the unibrow. He would be more likely to have children with unibrows or good thick eyebrows, until one day there would be a whole unibrow race. There are so many other variables and things that I can think of, yet "natural selection" is the Darwinian focus so it is best to leave it at that. Although I could probably extend the whole scenario to: The Origin of the Unibrow by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of the Unibrow Race in the Struggle for Life, by Mynym.

If I was intent on being a half-wit about it I would try to make the hypothesis elastic enough to extend to the origin of all organisms, organs, life-cycles, eco-systems, human behaviors, etc.

For example, Ape-man:
In the case of eyebrows, perhaps the Ape-men lost much of their hair in a random mutation that natural selection culled from the original population for whatever reason. That is a small variation which could happen easily enough. The new hairless apes may have found a new place to live, leaving the other apes behind, they probably had to because of the lack of hair. That's pretty basic. Some people are more hairy to this day, which proves some common characteristics with apes, not to mention the fact that both apes and humans have heads and arms. In the case of the eyebrow specifically, the proto-humans that had the variation of some forehead hair may have been culled because they could live to see females to mate with, as they were less likely to get sweat or dirt in the eyes. Perhaps the unibrow is an atavistic feature of this, which is why it is now generally looked down on in modern times. That attitude about unibrows may be part and parcel of the mountains of evidence for evolution.

In the end, given the mountains of evidence it seems obvious that my original hypothesis indicates that every living thing has a common ancestor in an ancient mud puddle. And since it is a good explanation for the unibrow, it can probably explain everything else too.

If sometimes it seems that it cannot be made elastic enough, then perhaps vestigial eyespots hold some explanatory power:

Is it so weird?

At various times I have traced back links to this blog and read, "I read this on this weird blog. What do you think about it?" Etc. I guess weirdness is not so bad in some ways:

Main Entry: 2weird
Function: adjective
1 : of, relating to, or caused by witchcraft or the supernatural : MAGICAL
2 : of strange or extraordinary character : ODD, FANTASTIC
synonyms WEIRD, EERIE, UNCANNY mean mysteriously strange or fantastic. WEIRD may imply an unearthly or supernatural strangeness or it may stress queerness or oddness . EERIE suggests an uneasy or fearful consciousness that mysterious and malign powers are at work

Although I wonder why people do not just ask about connections being made or patterns being used that they do not understand. It may be that some minds are trying to wire their neural nets to make some connections by intelligent design. It makes you think.

At any rate, I'm not weird, only my words are. My words may tell you about the future and other things that do not exist, which may be what gets spooky for some. So you can comfort your Self with the fact that such weird things as the future do not even exist now. After all, why concern yourself with things that do not exist?

E.g.
(The Human-Techno Future: How Weird? How Soon?
By Sean Markey
National Geographic News, August 3, 2005)

In his new book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means to Be Human, (Random House, 2005), author Joel Garreau describes research so cutting edge it seems mind-boggling:

• A telekinetic monkey at Duke University in North Carolina uses its mind to move a robotic arm 600 miles (a thousand kilometers) away in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• At a Pentagon R-and-D facility in Virginia, program managers aim to create the ultimate warriors—soldiers that can fight without sleeping, tell their bodies to stop bleeding, and regrow lost hands and limbs.

Garreau notes that regular doublings in computing power are driving unprecedented advances in genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology. These "GRIN" technologies are following a curve of exponential growth that could redefine life as we know it within 10-20 years.

Note the ahistorical view typical to socialists: "The Christians speak of heaven but we will bring heaven on earth." It is typical to those who believe that Nature defines human meaning/spirit:

In the heaven scenario that Ray and others portray, what happens is that the curve goes straight up, and there're all sorts of wonderful technological changes that solve all sorts of problems that have plagued mankind forever. This produces a change in what it means to be human that is basically good. As Ray describes it, it's essentially indistinguishable from the Christian version of heaven. [Except that Good and Evil are not even dealt with, essentially, which always leads to evil living as a virus on the Good.]

Ray, for example, doesn't think he's going to die. He takes 250 pills a day. And his view of it is that if you can stay healthy for the next 20 years, the curve of technological change will be advancing so rapidly that an awful lot of what ails [us we] will essentially be able to conquer.

(Ib.)

Or hell, which if given increasing Naturalism and a decline of Spirit is the historical pattern:

The poster boy for the hell scenario is Bill Joy, who invented [much] of what makes the Internet work—another big-deal technologist, heavy dude.

He's looking at the same information about this curve of technological change, and he's saying, Wait a minute. This could go just the opposite way. He says with the GRIN technologies, what you're doing is offering incredible powers to ordinary individuals. Some of them are bound to be nuts, you know. What's going to happen as a result?

One of the things that drives him nuts, for example, is the Australian mouse pox incident. [...]
They made one small change in the genetic structure in this mousepox virus, and the resulting organism was 100 percent fatal to the mice, no survivors. They all died. Researchers had never seen anything like this before. That just doesn't happen.

It was amazing how bad this change was.

...then they published the results on the Internet, where anybody who'd wanted to could look it up and see what they'd done and how they'd done it.

And this just drives Bill Joy nuts. He says, "Well, if you handed a million people their own private atomic bomb, do you suppose one of them would be crazy enough to use it?"

What is really amazing is how when things get bad, then suddenly everyone is more interested in philosophy and religion and the many things that do not exist now, like the future.

Global warming astronomical?

...new research suggests that the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

(Are Earth ice ages created by stars?
Researchers link solar system travel, terrestrial climate
By Keay Davidson, SeattlePI)

It may be that...or the twelfth planet, I suppose. But since the ancients wrote that there were twelve celestial bodies and so on in their astronomy/astrology then the moderns will say something else, probably just to prove that they are being scientific and modern. It is too bad that science is not scientia, knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge as such and the application of wisdom.

Instead there seems to be a lot of scientism. As I noted before of global warming, (It's global warming, so get out your ear muffs.) vast claims need vast evidence. The claim that a globe is warming is an astronomical type of claim and scientists would probably be better off looking for astronomical evidence, even a galactic hypothesis like this. Instead, according to the usual Herd on the Left it seems that we are supposed to believe that tiny little human specks driving SUVs around causes an entire planet to warm appreciably, which may lead to global flooding. Interesting to note that although there may be global flooding from driving SUVs and the like the global Flood of Noah is simultaneously so unlikely that it is just more ancient superstition. Maybe if the Sumerians had driven some SUVs, then there would have been the sort of Deluge that they wrote of, see.

There is nothing that can convince a "skeptical" half-wit on such matters. In fact, I've found that there is nothing that can convince me of some wit when my will is intent on rebellion against knowledge that I do not want to have. The ironic thing is that often, you still know it. (More on the tell tale signs of some things that you cannot not know, later.)

Balance

I remember reading this story (Gay Iranian Teenagers Hanged) a while back, although it was indeed reported under (Two child rapists publicly hanged In Iran). The truth as far as the charges go is probably somewhere inbetween the two ways of framing the story. One could report a statutory rape as a love story between a young man and a younger but mature woman or tell the story as that of a "child rapist." Although it is valid to have laws about child abuse and so on there are some people that will always get caught up in such laws unjustly. On the other hand, there are some laws that are just unjust.

E.g.,
As far as the law of "death to homosexuals," I suppose a theonomist would argue that is biblical Law and so valid for the State. I would note that the law of Moses was given for the Jewish nation. One cannot just discard the ethics and principles of the law of Moses whenever one feels like it with some vague handwaving about "That was only for ancient Jews." because of the current "cult"ure one lives in, i.e. just to go along with the current cult. Removing the "Jewish influence" from Christianity was a tenet of Nazism for such a reason, it was out of anti-Semitism yet also to enable people to go along with the pagan cult of the culture. That is no reason. Yet the implementation or enforcement of principles by the State cannot simply be enforced exactly as it was for the Jews so that we have a State of the Law of Moses and so on. It is not as if we are a wandering tribe that may die off of odd diseases if we don't kill all men who have sex with men or do things that are in other ways "unclean." It's not as if the Law itself was to be venerated, it had and has purpose, spirit and meaning. It's the same with circumcision. It may not be a symbol of anything but we still do some things just to keep clean, clean.

Often both the ethical and ritual laws given to the Jews fit into Nature and there is not even much distinction between the ethical and the symbolic.

I would note the simplicity of much of the law written on the heart and the logic of the Jewish prophet wandering the wilderness and coming back to speak the Logos/Word: "IF you keep dancing around the high places all day engaging in the hedonism of the pagans THEN you will be overtaken by another nation."

There is basic natural revelation to be had by those who want to seek and find, logically enough.

(I meant to make this post about balance and the way that much of Islam is essentially all masculinity, all the time and existentially it is just about nothing. It always gets a little long if its about religion. Perhaps I will do that some other time, after a post on Hitler's guilt complex and the revenge of Conscience. It seems that the Word will have vengeance.)

The profile of the Left

The topic (from Worldmagblog) and a satire:

Once upone a time there was a Leftist community and the crime of rape occured in it, so the police questioned the little grannies down the street about it all.

One asked them, "What in the world are you questioning me for?"

"Well, ma'am, when we questioned the young men they said we were discriminating against them in a sexist way. Then, they sat down and cried about it."

"Is it my fault that men have begun to act like pansies around here?"

"No...but you forget that this is Spain and we are infinitely Gay now because all is equal, yay!"
('Infinitely gay' celebration of same-sex
marriage erupts in Spain's capital, CBC News)