A separation typical to scientism

Example:

The Christian churches build on the ignorance of people and are anxious so far as possible to preserve this ignorance in as large a part of the populance as possible; only in this way can the Christian churches retain their power. In contrast, national socialism rests on scientific foundations.

(The German Churches Under
Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
By Ernst Helmreich
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979) :303)

There is a form of separation of church and state that those who believe in scientism tend to advocate. It is distinct from what the American Founders had in mind when they used such language. The socialist version of separation seems to have a lot in common with the Reich Concordat with the Vatican, in contrast the Founders were often adhering to separation as a lack of establishment itself based on religious rationales. That form of separation did not have the purpose to stifle religious influence in politics but to promote it.

As noted in a review of that book there were at least some German clergy who believed in the Founder's form of separation although many others found a path toward the other form of separation:

The fifty-five page epilogue sketches the situation of the Protestant and Catholic churches from the end of the war to the present time. It is noteworthy, but hardly surprising, that the [biblically based] Confessing Church, by and large, furnished the leadership for the revived postwar Evangelical Church.

The great majority of Evangelical pastors did not join either the [pro-Nazi] German Christian movement or the [anti-Nazi] Confessing Church, although many were in sympathy with the latter. The story of these [neutered] “neutrals” has yet to be researched and told. [...] [They're always there. The people who just lack judgment...and the tolerance of them for their lack.]

The book is an exceedingly valuable contribution to the literature of the German church struggle; it is exhaustive in scholarly research and rich in bibliographical material, documentation and heretofore unused archival sources.

(The German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle and Epilogue
By Ernst Christian Helmreich
Reviewed by Arthur A. Preisinger
Church History, Vol. 49, No. 3. (Sep., 1980) :347)

Compare what was said of the German churches which went along with their culture with what was said of early American churches by Alexis de Tocqueville:

I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her harbors...; in her fertile fields and boundless forests; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution.

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.

America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

The safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law as well as the surest pledge of freedom.

They were cultivating their culture and if you are an American you have reaped where you have not sown. It seems that we do not even know what the term posterity means now as we spend our way into oblivion, although many early Americans tended to be interested in the heritage they were leaving.

The fertile fields, habors, boundless forests, rich mines and so on can help a nation avoid poverty yet as the oil rich Arab nations prove, natural resources are a necessary but not suficient means to do even that. The answer is not all material, although Leftists have always tended to say it is. As in everything a union between basic spiritual principles and the physical is the only way to get to Liberty. Those German clergy who supposedly took the “two kingdom” doctrine to its logical conclusion in Nazi Germany were not doing so, as the doctrine contains no such conclusion. Jesus did not separate the kingdoms, so he says that people ought to take advantage of the opportunity to call down God's will to earth. What shall one say of separation then? Perhaps that's a topic for another post.

William Jennings Bryan

Bryan is probably most (in)famous for the Scopes Monkey Trial rather than remembered for being a leading progressive of the populist sort, anti-eugenics, a leading Democrat and so on. The thanks you'll get for opposing forms of proto-Nazism and Darwinism will be propaganda and personal attacks, as they are similar patterns of thought.

Since attacking the urge to merge is a thankless task, Bryan's propagandistic portrayal ran like this:

Bryan, prosecuting the poor school teacher, is portrayed as "a mindless, reactionary creature of the mob," a bigot who quotes the Bible and rejects all science as "Godless." He dogmatically asserts that "the Lord began the Creation on the 23rd of October in the year 4004 B.C. at--uh 9 a.m." Darrow mocks him by retorting, "That eastern standard time?"

(Six Modern Myths About
Christianity & Western Civilization
By Philip J. Sampson :53)

The charlatans of Darwinism seem to revise history and filter all things to support their progressive creation myth. It is the myth that is protected. So Bryan's opposition to eugenics and the textbook at issue devoting a chapter to supporting the science of eugenics is gone. Instead he is turned into a rube. That's typically the attitude of those who believe in whatever the current scientism is, everyone else is a rube. If you even try to engage in a dialectic about their creation myth then you are a rube, like some peasant from the Dark Ages. The template of a bigot's mind is strong enough to overcome all truth about a person once the stereotype is activated and the imagery and emotional conditioning typical to propaganda come into play, so even someone intelligent and demonstrably proven correct by history is still cast into the bigoted template. Although Bryan was clearly vindicated in his concerns by history and the advent of Nazism the charlatans and propagandists for Darwinism seem so numerous in academia that the truth is hidden away in peer reviewed journals of history or old books and papers that no one reads.

It seems that most progressives are ignorant enough to believe the scripts about rubes, scientists, etc. For example:

In 1925, John T. Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., was indicted for the crime of teaching the theory of evolution to his students.

Journalist and author H.L. Mencken convinced the legendary trial lawyer Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. Former Democratic presidential candidate and Christian fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan volunteered to join the prosecution.

What followed was perhaps the greatest spectacle to have ever taken place in an American courtroom. For most Americans, the Scopes trial was the moment when fundamentalism was exposed to the world as being anti-science, anti-reason and anti-logic.

Anyone who has read Mencken's now-famous coverage of the trial, or remembers the dramatization of the trial in the play and film, "Inherit the Wind," knows how ridiculous it all was. And even though Scopes was eventually found guilty and fined $100, the spectacle in Tennessee left fundamentalists as objects of laughter and ridicule for decades afterward.

However, when one reads about what has been happening around the country over the past year or so regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools, it's as if the Scopes trial never happened. [...]

Opinion polls that show about two-thirds of Americans support teaching creationism and evolution side-by-side in public schools. Even when the fundamentalists dress up creationism with a bit of science and call it "intelligent design," it still is pushing the Bible's version of events, a version thoroughly and completely discredited by science.

"Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory," wrote David Quammen, an award-winning science author, in the November 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine. "It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say it's 'just' a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is 'just' a theory." [...]

(Brattleboro Reformer (Vermont)
July 11, 2005 Monday
SECTION: EDITORIALS
HEADLINE: Scopes on trial again?)

By their own account Mencken convinced Clarrow to defend Scopes and then reported on the trial as one of the "objective journalists." In so doing he helped other journalists and artists create the myths that "everyone knows" as represented in Inherit the Wind. Apparently one charlatan cannot make the distinction between fact, fiction and bias in the work of other charlatans, so they build on each other.

It seems to me that the case should be remembered as the one where the ACLU began to establish its template of contrived victimization as the path to power for petty tyrants.

Scopes did not instigate this historic legal challenge: He was merely the willing tool of others who objected to the statute. The idea began with the American Civil Liberties Union ("ACLU"), then an obscure organization of socially prominent, politically radical New Yorkers.

(The Scopes Trial and the Evolving Concept of Freedom
By Edward J. Larson
Virginia Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 3. (Apr., 1999) :512-513)

By "politically radical" he means communists and socialists.

Anti-ID Rhetors

It's rather popular at the moment to be anti-ID among progressives.

An argument, if you get in an argument online with someone arguing against intelligent design then note that given their own anti-ID arguments the text that they are writing is nothing more than an artifact of the biochemical state of their physical brain events in that moment. It is not as if one can systematically detect an artifact of transphysical intelligence designing or leaving an imprint on the physical, after all. So one cannot say that their intelligence has left an imprint in their text and so perhaps one should look at them physically instead. If they reply that they know human intelligence by human convention and that is the only way to detect intelligence then I would note that if one traces their brain events back through the evolution of human convention and the language which shapes it then what sits at the end of it? Again, they are back to the biochemical state of a brain if one applies their own philosophy consistently. There is nothing in such a philosophy to draw a mind forth into thinking through the brain, so it is of little surprise that a vulgar and crude belief in Naturalism had little to do with the rise of scientia/knowledge and its application in technology.

There is no design at all in any organism or artifact if design in biological organisms is an illusion. If our pattern recognition capabilities are making us think something is designed by a mind then those are delusions based on illusion and superstition.

Given no transphysical intelligence to generate design in biological organisms there can only be illusions of design and delusions that design is evident in anything. That would include the brains of those that seem to feel that they've encoded or symbolized reality with little symbols and signs of their own "design." Their own intentions are also an illusion. The activity of their minds exists only in their imaginations.

Narratives

It seems that most progressives have been taught myths about how progress came about in the past. These are the narratives and the texture of the texts that develope a worldview capable of supporting the grand mythological narratives of Evolution. For instance, if a Darwinist is being proven wrong about Darwinian narratives then suddenly Galileo or the flat earth may pop up although they have nothing to do with anything. The irony is that some of the stories used for associative "just like" arguments are not even true anyway.

E.g.,

Like any story, that of Galileo has a plot, characters, a setting and props. The plot is the war between religion and science, and it is presented to us...through the adventures of a charismatic individual. Armed only with a telescope and reason, plucky Galileo stood against the might of the church. He was tortured by the Inquisition, condemned as a heretic, and wasted away in a prison cell; Italian science floundered. The main draw back to this plot is that most of it is untrue.

As the philosopher Aristotle sagely observed, a drama must concern but one action of one man, entire and complete. We know the action. The man is, of course, Galileo. As Bertrand Russell says, “everyone knows” about Galileo. Scientist and hero, he invented the telescope, discovered how the earth moves around the sun, conducted his famous experiment on the (even then) Leaning Tower of Pisa and courageously added to his recantation of the earth’s motion: “Eppure si muove” (“yet it does move”). As it happens, little of this is true either. However, where decisive scientific discoveries are lacking, the myth supplies them: the Leaning Tower and the telescope build up Galileo’s character nicely.

To become a martyr to knowledge, our hero needs an antagonist, and this is provided by the church, sometimes appearing in the form of Pope Urban VII, sometimes as Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, but most commonly as the Inquisition. It is powerful, bigoted and ignorant.

The story has two settings, corresponding to the two dramatis personae. Galileo occupies the wide, sunlit high ground of reason and observation, free from obscurantist dogma and superstition: the realm of knowledge and facts. The church, on the other hand, prefers to live in the cramped monastic cell of religious dogma and faith.

The props are simple. Galileo has his telescope; the church has its Bible. And so the stage is set.

(Six Modern Myths About Christianity & Western Civilization
By Philip J. Sampson :29-30)

You would think that when budding progressives first learn a narrative from a book or their professors that so tightly fits into progressive ideology that they might question it. Is it suddenly so easy to make vast discriminations about science and religion for those who couldn't be intolerant enough to be against peeing on the front lawn before? Now they suddenly have the degree of judgment necessary for intolerance.

Darwinists often use myths originally written by progressive charlatans to support mythological narratives of Evolution. I've been researching some of their associative propaganda to see if it is neccessary to smash the link or to just answer the shift in argument. Examples: disagreeing with the grand narratives of Darwinism is "just like" the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo or "just like" saying that the earth is flat or disagreeing with gravity and so on and so forth.

Examples:

The immensity of World Youth Day events that took place this summer in Toronto were a vivid illustration of the enduring power of religion. In fact, the vast majority of the human race believes in God.

Surely such a massive consensus enveloping countless societies can't be wrong, can it?

An atheist can take solace in the fact that truth, unlike politics, is not swayed by public opinion. There once was a time when Earth was perceived as being the centre of the universe. Then, 350 years ago, Galileo built a telescope and made the revolutionary discovery that Earth revolves around the sun. The Catholic Church disagreed.

But it was not strictly for this reason that Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition. His real "crime" was his insistence on communicating his discovery to the general public. It was only under threat of torture that he recanted his position and was sentenced to life imprisonment. ...to automatically point to "intelligent design," ...fails to consider the evolution of science.

(Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada) September 25, 2002 Wednesday Final Edition
Forum; Pg. A15
God is not the answer to humanity's existence
By Vlado Zeman) (Emphasis on false narratives added)

Religious leaders in Kansas who oppose the teaching of evolution August 9, should have learned a lesson from the Galileo incident, when Bible scholars clung to the belief that the sun circled the Earth. In opposing scientific truth, they did much harm to religion's teaching authority. Evolution is not a theory in the sense of a hypothesis. It is a logical explanation of facts.

Galileo caused an improvement in Bible interpretation. Science, rather than harming, will, given time, enhance the understanding of the Bible and religious truth. Conversely, opposition to evolution will cause religion to be discredited again.

(Palm Beach Post (Florida)
August 16, 1999
OPINION, Pg. 13A
Creationists Hurt Religion's Credibility
By Connell J. Maguire) (Emphasis on myth added)

And so on.

I suppose it is too much to hope that those supporting Darwinism would point to specific biological organisms and predict their adaptations given natural selection, as assuredly as one can predict an object's fall given the law of gravity. That would be something. Given their own propaganda they should be able to do so rather easily. If Darwinian principles are just like Newtonian principles then everyone should be able to make great use of the predictive power of the "law of natural selection" just like the law of gravity. For Darwinism is probably about as certain as what goes up must come down.

The Space Brothers

I don't really feel like writing tonight. See what you think of this article.

The notion of extraterrestrials is not contradicted by the grand mythological narratives of evolution nor ancient creation myths based on "Those who from heaven to earth came." and so on, nor even the mythos of Christianity. In that last instance "they" would be more like extracosmosials, although still technically extraterrestrials too. Given that almost all mythological narratives comport with extraterrestrials one would expect that there would be little opposition. Yet what happens is that some people are kooky and other people don't want to look like the kooks, so evidence for UFOs is treated with a lot more skepticism than is evidence based on little bone fragments fitted to Darwinism. The UFO evidence is not allowed to generate much of a narrative to be taken seriously and instead tends to generate science fiction, yet little pieces of rocks do generate rather vast narratives all said to be "scientific fact." It seems that the skeptics sometimes stop being skeptical based on looks, and concern for their own credibility as opposed to perceptions of kookiness.

But sometimes what is taken to be a scientific fact, is in fact not a fact. For instance, I think this hoax was used against me in a debate on dino-birds and then there is what seems to be a modern case of Piltdown revisited in the case of human evolution. The thing about it is this, these "fitting frauds" that seem a lot like Haeckel's (Who defended himself with the telling argument, "Every biologist fits the data!") as well as skulls and bone fragments are used to generate rather vast mythological narratives of Naturalism that end up shaping people's philosophy of life, if not their religion. Some in the face of scientific fact "separate" their religion from all of physical reality, which becomes involved in a fact/value split, etc.

In the case of UFOs small amounts of physical evidence generating grand narratives would be looked on as science fiction, yet in the case of evolution the evidence is said to generate a narrative that is a "scientific fact," pretty much just like a narrative about gravity.

Given such associative propaganda and an apparent fear of being associated with rubes (the equivalent of UFO kooks in the other debate) skepticism towards the grand narratives of evolution is often smothered...or relegated to kooks and rubes, which works to validate the epistemic rules being created.

It's interesting to note that finding living dragons probably wouldn't change much as far as the epistemic rules. Some creationists seem to think that it would, yet there are already many empirical observations that seem to contradict Darwinism that are "fitted" into it anyway. If the fossil record shows millions upon millions of years of an organism not changing, then Darwinism explains that. If it shows changes, then Darwinism explains them too. If dinos were alive, then Darwinism would be said to explain them. Since they are dead, it explains that instead. One thing will be consistent, the purported vast explanatory power of Darwinism, even if it doesn't seem to be explaining things in a defined and scientifically falsifiable way.

It is pretty much unshakeable and comports with almost any observation one can make.

On the other hand , gods/space brothers coming down from the sky and claiming that they've been directing evolution and so on would probably shake things up a bit in both religion and philosophy.

Related posts, on mythological narratives of Naturalism based on bones:
(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)

(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)

It's a cloud.

An interesting cloud spotted over Spain...of course, people thought it looked like Jesus. Some said to say, "Shouldn't we look like we're busy loving each other or somethin'?"

Then some realized it was just a cloud, and one with a big nose at that, and life went back to normal.

Churchill's Judgment

On Hitler,

This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of soul-destroying hatred, the monstrous product of former wrongs and shames.

If Hitler were to invade Hell, I would find occasion to make a favorable reference to the devil.

On Charles DeGaulle,

What can you do with a man who looks like a female llama surprised when bathing?

On Japan,

It becomes stil more difficult to reconcile Japanese action with prudence or even sanity.

On his political opposition,

He delivers his speech with an expression of injured guilt.

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

There but for the grace of God goes God. (Churchill, when seeing his opponent pass by.)

On another politician,

A modest man, who has much to be modest about.

He's a sheep in sheep's clothing.

An opponent fights back,

Nancy Astor, "Winston, if I were your wife, I would put poison in your coffee."

"Nancy, if I were your husband, I would drink it."

As quoted in: (Distory: A Treasury of Historical Insults
By Robert Schnakenberg)



There is no winning a war of wit with some fellows.

Effeminacy

As I recall, clinically it is a boy taking on the mannerisms of the mother. Sometimes a smothering mother, sometimes not, as any human behavior pattern is complex in nature and can be traced out in patterns of cause and effect only so far.

It can be rather humorous, as a sense of humor is a sense of our own humors.

Comic trivia...

Batman used to be known as the Batman:

Words....

As they are a way to judgment people tend to avoid definition. For example, this racist wants to deny definition as such:

"I'm not racist or anything," he said. "It's just, some people I hate, some people I don't get along with. And black people just happen to be the ones because they think they're better than everyone else."

The student said his parents were shocked at his decision, Mom dismayed and Dad disappointed.

"I just can't believe you'd wear a shirt like that [Of the KKK dragging black men behind their pickups.] to school," he said was their reaction. "My mom was kind of upset about it. My dad was like, whatever, it's your life."

The 18-year-old said he has friends who are black, and he said he does not think they would be mad at him because they know he would not do what was depicted on the shirt.
[...]
"I'm a redneck," he said. "But no, I'm not racist."

(Fleming senior wears racist T-shirt to school, Jacksonville News)

All we really have when it comes to ethics is the definition of our own words. If you seek after the meaning/spirit of them long enough, perhaps you will come to Spirit. That skinny southerner is avoiding doing so. As long as he is not defined as "racist" then he is happy, yet he is a racist.

(One with a distant father and close mother...etc. in a pattern where immanence and transcendence are perverted, which can lead to the blurring of the metaphysical and the physical typical to racism, same ol', same ol'...evil can be banal.)

Censorship

I'm for free speech even if it does make talk cheap. I've found in two or three instances now that it is not a good strategery to argue against censorship on the very forum that the censor controls. It often seems to bring out the sweaty little hands of the censor. Yet I do it anyway because such a forum is not worth writing on.

So I shrug and smile at all the prissy kitties who cannot uphold the principle of free speech for a cuddly little fella like me.



[Edit: This post has been edited for puss in boots.]

What Fortune can effect in human affairs, and how she may be withstood

I AM NOT ignorant that many have been and are of the opinion that human affairs are...governed by Fortune and...that men cannot alter them by any prudence of theirs...and...that they must leave everything to be determined by chance.

Often when I turn the matter over, I am in part inclined to agree with this opinion, which has had the readier acceptance in our own times from the great changes in things which we have seen, and every day see happen contrary to all human expectation. Nevertheless...I think it may be the case that Fortune is the mistress of one half our actions, and yet leaves the control of the other half, or a little less, to ourselves. And I would liken her to one of those wild torrents which, when angry, overflow the plains, sweep away trees and houses, and carry off soil from one bank to throw it down upon the other. Every one flees before them, and yields to their fury without the least power to resist. And yet, though this be their nature, it does not follow that in seasons of fair weather, men cannot, by constructing weirs and moles [or levees], take such precautions as will cause them when again in flood to pass off by some artificial channel, or at least prevent their course from being so uncontrolled and destructive. And so it is with Fortune, who displays her might where there is no organized strength to resist her, and directs her onset where she knows that there is neither barrier nor embankment to confine her.

(The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli)



To have a fortune, you have to make a fortune. Yes, yes...I will stop writing that so often. Or maybe to have me stop writing that, you'll have to make me stop writing that!

Machiavelli with his attempt to base virtue on virility transcending vice and virtue is a rather Nietzschean philosopher in trying to go beyond good and evil. Yet the knowledge of good and evil is a false promise and now to be known as being Machiavellian is a little better than being sadistic or Sadean, yet still considered evil. Perhaps Machiavelli was writing for the Prince of this world.

A story on the emergence of intelligence...

An inventive [killer whale] devised a brand new way to catch birds, and passed the strategy on to his tank-mates. The 4-year-old orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish onto the water's surface. He waits below for a gull to grab the fish, then lunges at it with open jaws. "They are in a way setting a trap," says animal behaviourist Michael Noonan of Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, who made the discovery, "They catch three or four gulls this way some days."

“The orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish into the water. He waits for a bird to grab the fish and then lunges”Noonan had never seen the behaviour before, despite three years of observations for separate experiments. But a few months after the enterprising male started doing it, Noonan spied the whale's younger half-brother doing the same thing. Soon the brothers' mothers were enjoying feathered snacks, as were a 6-month-old calf and an older male.

(The New Scientist)

When Man and Nature don't get along...

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. -- Jerry Dunlap spent more than a year fixing up his 1910 dream sailboat. But a gaggle of about 15 hefty sea lions managed to sink the 50-foot craft in just one weekend.
[...]
The scuttling of Dunlap's $24,000 boat may be the most striking example of mayhem that sea lions have caused since they started showing up in the harbor in May.

(Sea Lions Sink Man's 50-Foot Sailboat, WFTV)

Writing on uncommon descent...

If you get some of this humor then you probably need to stop reading and get out more.

Dawkin's says:
"It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.316"

That's amusing.

One might add: It is almost as if the typology and anti-sequential ordering typical to Nature was designed to communicate, "Darwinism can only be clung to if you have the urge to merge like Darwinists do."

Or it is almost as if there is a biotic message designed to communicate, "There is one common designer of fundamental types, yet see how I make things hard for those who want to argue for sequence and common descent."

It is little wonder that Darwinists rely on their Mommy Nature and the womb of Naturalism in the face of numerous "gaps," separation, convergence and teological emergence bringing forth Life as well as mountains of anti-sequential empirical evidence in need of some form of merging. Yet crawling into the womb of Naturalism seems to be little more than a shift into a philosophical debate about what is "natural" or "scientific" and so on which avoids dealing with empirical evidence of the natural typology of Nature. I doubt that they are being purposefully dishonest in all the shifting and merging, as their own psychological dynamics seem tightly bound to such shifting. Mommy Nature probably scientifically selected such shifting for them by her au naturale natural selections, naturally enough. Apparently that is just the science of things if one murmurs the term science enough.
This fellow Carl Zimmer has a funny passage where he seems to be going back to the womb and merging with fishs. We probably had gill slits in the womb of Mommy Nature, don't you know. I'd like to write about this fellow, perhaps some other time.

Dawkin's, "These are sky-god religions."

This won't suit his Cosmic Oedipus complex, I suspect, oh no, no indeed!

He continues, "They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates."

Yes, all theistic husbands and fathers through the ages have loathed women but Dawkins knows the feminine, just as Mommy Nature selected for him to know. He's quite a fortunate fellow in that way because Lady Luck gave him and the biochemical events of his brain a chance to be good enough to fight evil. Or did she?

Sometimes to have a chance you have to take a chance. Some fellows are not used to doing that.

Dawkins, "The sky-god is a jealous god, of course."

Crybaby. I should go no farther as psychoanalysis is all ad hominem, like satire often is. I don't feel bad about that because he sets the rhetorical fire and besides, what is left to deal with if you take the sapience out of the Homo sapiens? Those left will have diminishing intelligence and a lack of purpose by design. Then all that will be left is a bunch of little fellows with brain events that are fodder for some type of analysis based on the nurture and nature of Mother Nature herself. Such fellows should not mind analysis, as they seem to have lost their mind of the synaptic gaps in her.

If mankind is nothing more than a physical organism then Darwinism is its excrement.

So psychoanalysis seems apposite, as "Psychoanalysis is an occupation in whose very name "psyche" and "anus" are united."
(Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of
Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
By Thomas Szasz)

Hurricanes and Civilization

The recent storm revealed a lack of civlization, a degeneracy that was already there. Civilization is not defined by buildings but by distinctions drawn from language, law and Logos, buildings and technology are just an artifact of it. So when socialists come in to try to develope civlization and cultivate culture with housing projects and economic solutions they inevitably fail. Soon enough, their "projects" become synomous with a lack of civilization in "the projects" and so on.

New Orleans is an example as the storm only brought out what was already there.

[New Orlean's tourist] romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. [...]The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

(Slate)

The level of the decline of civilization had apparently reached a point at which even those supposed to be enforcing the law were corrupt. The day after the storm police are found among the looters(video). Interwoven in it all is the issue of race, which is supposedly defined by something physical. Unfortunately it may be impossible to get away from the Leftist version of "race consciousness" as long as so many African American men do not live by the Word of the Christianity that they purport to believe in. It is what makes civilization possible. Instead the majority of them seem to have fallen into Leftism and effete notions of victimization. It is as if the failure of socialism in Africa must be revisited on them in Third World cities in America. Yet the American Left says, "Let us help you more...and more! See how helpful we have been?"

Kanye West is a cultural symbol of the stupidity and ignorance typical to the African American Left. The problem is not the storied moral degeneracy of New Orleans police and others, instead it is all the fault of The Man. Kanye seems like a stupid and ignorant(video) man.

I would reply to him the same as to those who come up with semi-illiterate Leftist conspiracy theories about the plutocracy, cronyism and corruption typical to the Right. Of course there is an element of truth to them, although some are clearly psychotically paranoid delusions based on patterns of thought typical to the Leftist mind.

E.g. the war on terror: All the Leftist conspiracy theory in the world does not change the fact that the radical Islamist is still there, and he wants to make you wear a burka if you are a women and cut your head off if you disagree and so on. On the other hand, the plutocrat and the businessman want to make money by selling you some oil and perhaps they will kill the Islamist to do so. Now what?

E.g. the hurricane: All the effete Leftist hatred for the masculine ethos of the military, SUVs or racist rubes with pick-ups and shot guns will not change the fact that you need to call in the National Guard (maybe even with guns next time) when your city is revealed to be uncivilized. It's probably even a Guard made up mainly of men with guns and SUVs and things which will cause global warming. Now what?

As a creature of ressentiment the Leftist tends to hate the very thing that they need.

[Update: CNN's story on the plutocracy questioned here, as it seems to have a Leftist spin.]

American Labor

Not only did American labor contribute more than its share to the downfall of communism, it also proved to be one of the great obstacles to the global advance of socialism in any form. “Ideology is baloney,” George Meany liked to say. Indeed, it could be said that Meany’s very cast of mind was the antithesis of Marxian consciousness. In the dense theoretics of Marxism one learns that the observable universe is mere “superstructure.” Meany, in contrast, believed that things should be expressed plainly and taken at face value. To him, a plumber was a plumber, not a “proletarian.” A worker was a guy trying to squeeze the most he could out of his job and hoping to get a better one. And if he was something more than flesh and blood, as he assuredly was, it was not because he was an embodiment of historical processes, but rather a husband, father, worshiper, patriot, pianist, artist, baseball player.
[...]
America’s resistance to socialism had consequences far beyond its own borders. By the late 1970s, some 60 percent of mankind was living under socialist government of the communist, social-democratic or Third World variety. Had America, too, embraced some form of socialism, that idea’s triumph would have been complete. It is not likely to have been undone merely by disappointing economic outcomes such as Tanzania and so many other countries experienced. History is replete with examples of dogged human persistence in practices not validated by their results. The use of bleeding to cure disease, of human sacrifice to appease the gods, of trial by ordeal, of mercantilism or colonialism to generate wealth—all reflected time-honored wisdom that was impervious to experience. Social ist economies yielded little growth, but economic growth has been the exception not the rule throughout history. People are unlikely to relinquish ineffectual practices unless they can envision a better alternative. Just as the remarkable success of East Asia’s four tigers made it harder to explain away the dismal performance of Third World socialist economies, so on a grander scale, the American counter-model undermined socialism’s appeal.

(Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
(2002: Encounter Books) by Joshua Muravchik :259-261)



I was reading this book on Labor Day and that seemed appropriate. I would note that with a few exceptions like Tony Blair, European socialists tend to hate America, while the American Left tends to align itself with the same Europeans. Now they seem to be focusing on the recent hurrican as an excuse for class and race consciousness and the typical "shame on America" sort of message. I watched the news on PBS over the weekend and they had a panel saying things like, "This is a good way to illustrate the divisions of class and race that exist in America." Is it? I think it is mainly just a catastrophe. Yet most likely if it happened to the middle class we wouldn't have to read a bunch of silly moral preening about definition/judgment by journalists like "looters" vs. "finders" and "refugees" vs. "evacuees." The American Left, such as it is, seems quite interested in false consciousness raising based on Leftist notions of race and class combined with a false sense of shame about the existence of poor people in America. Yet it is doubtful that they feel remorse for sins that they are actually responsible for as individuals. E.g. personal sins of narcissism, divorce, careerism, greed, infidelity or what have you. Perhaps instead of feeling shame about things that they are personally responsible for they want us all to feel shame for things that we are not responsible for. In the way of thinking typical to the Left there is a lack of judgment. Although they seek a lack of judgment they are making judgments, sometimes absurd judgments by shifting from individuals who have distinct reponsibilities to "society," "class," "race" or "government" in which responsibility can more easily be blurred. So the journalist or commentator will come on PBS news and make judgments based on class or race consciousness about how revealing the existence of the poor is, which is to America's shame and so on. Yet although I am an American and I have my own sins, the fact that many poor people exist in New Orleans is not one of them. I feel no shame about that. Even if I were rich, that would have nothing to do with someone in New Orleans being poor. Yet if I felt remorse about things I had done to get rich then I would probably become more socialist to try to hide in the social crowd. I could hide and hopefully have the ancient issue of guilt and redemption shifted to supposed social responsiblity or class responsiblity, things to be remedied by the State, a totalitarian State if necessary.

The Christian...imagines the better future of the human species...in the image of heavenly joy... We, on the other hand, will have this heaven on earth.

--Moses Hess, A Communist Confession of Faith, 1846

The Christian replies that such a goal is impossible.

...it must be admitted that no society will ever be so just, that some method of escape from its cruelties and injustices will not be sought by the pure heart. The devotion of Christianity to the cross is an unconscious glorification of the individual moral ideal. The cross is the symbol of love triumphant in its own integrity, but not triumphant in the world and society. Society, in fact, conspired the cross. Both the state and the church were involved in it, and probably will be so to the end. The man on the cross turned defeat into victory and prophesied the day when love would be triumphant in the world. But the triumph would have to come through the intervention of God. The moral resources of men would not be sufficient to guarantee it. A sentimental generation has destroyed this apocalyptic note in the vision of the Christ. It thinks the kingdom of God is around the corner, while he regarded it as impossible of realisation, except by God’s grace.

(Moral Man & Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics
By Reinhold Niebuhr :81-81)



(Related posts: Perspective and Historical Patterns)

Crikey, that's how it's done mate.

TARENTUM, Pa. (AP) - Crocus, a 2-foot pet alligator escaped from his backyard enclosure, but was captured by a girl who used what she learned on a nature TV program.

Nicki Hilliard and several friends saw the animal swimming in the Allegheny River.
Hilliard said she learned how to catch the animals safely by watching the television show "Crocodile Hunter." The secret is to grab the animal's snout and hold its mouth closed. [...]

(Girl Captures Gator After Watching TV Show, the AP)

Although, if her arm had been bitten off then her parents probably would've sued what's-his-name for failing to say "Don't try this at home." enough times.

A few more pictures

The audience,




Someone already knows how to pose.

A short video from a different perspective, (5.6Mb) I was trying to jump in that gust but didn't really have the speed for it.

Figures...

You probably don't have to wear a life jacket when windsurfing after all. Safety first!

Gaming the system

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A young Singaporean man has been granted a deferment from military service so he can take part in an international computer games competition, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. [...]

"In line with the Government's support for sports, culture and the arts, the Ministry of Defense will consider granting one-time deferments for pre-enlistees who are selected to represent Singapore at prestigious international sports and cultural events," the Straits Times quoted a spokesman as saying.

(Yahoo)

Did I ever mention that gaming has taken off in Asia even more than in America? (And it is an industry that moves billions of dollars in America.)

I can see it now, though. "I can't be drafted....because, well, can't you see that I'm supporting Halo 2 culture here!"

Labor Day

I was windsurfing...






Here is a short Video (8MB)

I think I'll save some pictures for when I don't have time to write.

The fragility of civilization...

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The mayor of New Orleans issued a "desperate SOS" Thursday as violence disrupted efforts to rescue people still trapped in the flooded city and evacuate thousands of displaced residents living amid corpses and human waste.

(New Orleans mayor issues 'desperate SOS'
Violence disrupts evacuation, rescue efforts)

Hmmm?

I found this story from evolution news about some cold toads trying to make their dissections and render their verdicts on how scientific they are being and how unscientific everyone else is.

A few notes,

"I've gotten a lot of public support, people who are cheering for me," Gonzalez tells the caller. "But just reading the newspapers and such, it just feels like the world is against me." ...his face rests a wearied expression. It's the face of a 41-year-old man fighting for his reputation as a legitimate scientist.

If it feels like the world is against you in your feely feelings then consider that it may be from the structure of a certain type of propaganda which is based on the projections of a psychological minority. So it tends to works to shape the views of the majority through emotional conditioning with respect to how you are in the minority and so on.

When a cold toad recognizes a form of thinking that they fear and hate they will not engage in conceptual argument and instead will shift to associative propaganda based on buzzwords like the vaunted term "science" or "just like" arguments. Perhaps they tend to shift to the perceptual and vague imagery in such ways because they are trying to deny the conceptual in their Selves, lest obvious conclusions evolve from their conception...naturally enough.

Shirer, on the impact of the methods and modes of propaganda and what it can accomplish in the mind:

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. [...] It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hail, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
A History of Nazi Germany
William L. Shirer (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :247-48)

Back to the article, an atheistic sort of fellow says:

"Even cockroaches can make that assumption (that Earth was intended to support cockroach life)," Avalos says. "Just because life is important to you as a human being doesn't mean that's what is important to a designer. . . . You have to differentiate what you can prove and what's a claim of faith.

Actually, cockroaches cannot make that assumption. They may lack the neural nets for it. Apparently he does not understand that to have an assumption, you have to make an assumption. And the assumptions that you make may be some rather anthropic assumptions at that, which may be almost spiritual in their design. Even the most militant and misanthropic Darwinist (Those who seem to be trying to compensate for being stuck in the womb of Mommy Nature by being a manly man in educating everyone on the hard, cold, indifferent facts.) make a warm and fuzzy little anthropic assumption that their misanthropic words are valid. For who says that the little symbols and signs used by humans to represent the natural world can do so? Maybe we should ask some cockroaches what assumptions they make about it?

Note that one has to assume that Life or human life is important enough that we should derive meaning from this fellow's sentences as if they are an artifact of a special sort of sentience that can lead us all to knowledge. Does he believe that we are Homo Sapiens or would he have us be homos? The answer to a riddle calls for a rather sapient form of Wisdom which must be sought and found.

The fellow there is alive and sentient, supposedly. Although he does seem a bit dead in the head. Perhaps he is one of those who wants to try to let his Mommy Nature make his selections for him, naturally enough. The answer to Mother Nature calls for Wisdom, who calls out her name in the square as the Spirit of the age.

"You can believe in God, but you can't present that as science. That's what's wrong with intelligent design."

You can be a textual degenerate but that only means that any symbols and signs you try to use to express your design are relatively meaningless as they have no spirit/meaning.

At any rate, the fellow is apparently concerned about Iowa University becoming a research hub for ID. Note the irony, on the one hand the argument is that ID isn't science because there isn't enough research published in peer reviewed journals and on the other that such research cannot be allowed. I will make another post on just how cold some cold toads have been as far as research refuting Darwinism. Given the psychology typical to Darwinists, it seems it should be expected.

At any rate, science is the systematic pursuit of knowledge. So it is something that is practiced and not artificially defined by half-wits arguing about how their mythological narratives of Naturalism are "just like" the theory of gravity and pretty much "just like" all scientific knowledge accumulated to date and so on. Knowledge is not all on the same epistemic level, even if it is classified under the term "science."