That's surprising.

As I recall the novelist Kurt Vonnegut is one of those fellows who points to the parasites, the viruses, the venereal diseases and so on, throws up his hands and wonders why it all exists if God is good. That's the way he engages in natural theology and blames Good for evil, which matches the Darwinian way. As the Devil might say of Good, "If God is good then how do I exist? Now throw yourself off this cliff as I have, since God is good he will still let you exist just as I do! I do exist, don't I?"

But anyway, on the other hand Vonnegut apparently also says:

...look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.

INSKEEP: Does that mean you would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom?

Mr. VONNEGUT: Look, if it’s what we’re thinking about all the time; if I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it’d be on my mind all the time as to how the hell we really got this way. It’s a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can’t think this? Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion.

(Interview on NPR, cf. ID the Future)

Well, it's like this. If the issue of origins is taught in science class and anything but the Darwinian creation myth is taught then modern medicine will cease because it came about based on the survival of the fittest, while Creationist engineers* will stop designing technology because they rely on natural chance instead of design, which is unnatural, and so on. So although the evidence goes overwhelmingly against Darwinism, leaving Darwinists pointing to people born with elongated spines or pointing to their own noses and saying, "Would you just look at these things...why God, why?!" it is still what must be taught so that medicine and technology do not just crumble away. For isn't it obvious that they rely on the Darwinian creation myth?

Anyway, Vonnegut also said, "Something perfectly wonderful is going on. I do not doubt it..." Interesting, I agree. But given all the war, the starvation, the rape, etc., there is clearly something terrible going on too. That can be known by anyone who has any sense of good and evil left in them.

Yet it is good, there is much that is good. I think that most people just go with whatever mood they are in at any given time though. If they are in love, then it is all good, so good. But if someone just cut them off in traffic then God should just end it all now because it's all just so damned evil, especially those damned drivers.

We're fickle like that, with no real perspective to judge either.

*Even the mental retards have noticed: "...the Salem Hypothesis states that creationists with formal educations are more likely to be engineers than they are to be other kinds of scientists. This hypothesis is supported primarily by anecdotal evidence: a good number of creationists who post to talk.origins claim to be engineers, and creationist organizations seem to be disproportionately populated by engineers. Why engineers would be more prone to creationism than other scientists is a good question." (Talk.origins) Well...is it so hard to figure out why that would be so given that they work with design problems in the real world every day instead of engaging in natural theology of a sort based on prissy Christianity, e.g.: "Why would God let excretory organs exist next to reproductive organs? So it is settled then, Nature selected all the organization in all the millions of organisms that exist by uh...things living and dying."

Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth.—Søren

Another scholar takes the Darwinian mind at its own words:

The book begins (p. ix):
“In my previous books... I tried to show that the currently accepted theory of evolution—called ‘neoDarwinism’ or ‘the modern synthesis’—is false. Taking an interest in the history of evolutionary thought in the course of subsequent work, I made a very remarkable and unexpected discovery: nobody, not even Darwin and his closest friends, ever believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection: Darwinism was refuted from the moment it was conceived.”
And on its last page (p. 422):
“I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.”

(Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth
Reviewed by Gareth Neslson
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Mar., 1988) :80)

It was Richard Dawkins who noted: "It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe..."

Isn't it ironic.

Note that all a scholar has to disagree with to come into disagreement with Darwinism is the assertion that historical claims or mythological narratives of Naturalism about random variation and natural selection explain the organization of all organisms. I.e. the Darwinian assertion is that organisms learning and designing is an illusion. Note how it is not apparent how the Darwinian mind designed its statement to contain any meaning or purpose, yet it imagines it is so.

The anti-Darwinian notion that they have "emergent properties" that are vital to their existence or which shape their evolution is also said to be false, nor do organisms make any choices with respect to how they will organize. Instead the explanation for their whole being is their evolutionary history, which Bios/Life has no role in because all "selection" comes from an inanimate environment given natural selection. Isn't it ironic that Darwinism is anti-biological and cannot explain the origin of Life, nor much of the organization typical to it either. It seems that the most unnatural thing to the Darwinian mind is Life itself, naturally enough. Given its failure to study Life the claims of the Darwinian mind are more historical than biological, e.g.

The viewpoint of Coyne et al. (1988) is one in which past events are argued to explain, in a causal sense, the world around us. Such explanations cannot be verified or tested, and the only biological observations they require are that variation and differential reproduction occur. [I.e., "Things change or somethin'."] This is not a caricature, as a reading of Coyne et al. will verify. [Those with the urge to merge will claim that all definition is false, including their own. I.e., "Strawman, I say!" And if you pin down their mind with their own texts and language then they will snivel about "quote mining," "semantics" or "rhetoric" as definition brings an end to their merging.] In keeping with this general viewpoint, proponents claim that species are explained with reference to history. Important characters are hence “mechanisms” that have established and maintained the separation between diverged lineages of an ancestral population. According to Coyne et al., even the adaptive purpose of the changes that resulted in these mechanisms is irrelevant.
We would ask where biology enters into this schema. The answer is that it does not. Rather, biology is interpreted in terms of a range of historical processes, including selection of variation over time. This could, with equal relevance, be used to understand any nonbiological phenomenon such as the development of the automobile, agricultural methods, culture, or men’s suits (Lewontin, 1976).
[...]
Let us outline the terms of the disagreement so as to avoid any possible confusion. Within contemporary biology it is commonly argued (e.g., Mayr, 1988) that, in order to maintain the distinctness of species, their integrity must be protected. This protection will have evolved as a result of a history of natural selection on individual genes and characters that have the “function” or “effect” (sensu Williams, 1966) of isolating one species from another. The isolation concept of species is, therefore, not separable from such a historical approach to biology. According to this viewpoint, species are only understandable in terms of history, as Mayr (1988) so correctly recognized.
In contrast, our view is that the biological-process of mate recognition results in species self-definition, and mate recognition represents the most appropriate basis for the delimitation of particular species (Michaux et al., 1990). Rather than regarding mate recognition as a set of independent traits that isolate species, we view it as a highly integrated communication system. As such, it is not amenable to selectionist and/or reductionist analyses. In a more general sense we suggest that biology should have primacy over historical scenarios (Lambert et al., 1989). That is, although we acknowledge that all attempts to investigate the world are colored by theoretical perspectives, we strongly believe that explanations should derive from knowledge of demonstrable biological phenomena rather than historical suppositions.

(Points of View
Species and Neo-Darwinism
By C. S. White; B. Michaux; D. M. Lambert
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 39, No. 4. (Dec., 1990), :400-401)

The Darwinian mind...or lack thereof...

I was going round about with some people apparently easily overwhelmed and taken in by the charlatans of talk.origins here. I think I will use some of their text as material here later. I'm most impressed by the, "This looks a little like that or somethin'." type of argument, as well as the notion of humans with tails being used as part of the evidence that so easily overwhelms half-wits. For that matter, Darwin used his own nose as material evidence...but I'll get to such things later. The Darwinian mind is good material to grow the ideas of Life in, given that the excretions of the Darwinian brain are the excrement that the mind smothers itself in. So it can be used for good fertilizer for the conceiving of the conceptual, if the perceptual is cultivated by language.

Cause and Effect

The laws of physics, I understand, decree that when one billiards ball (A) sets another billiards ball (B) in motion, the momentum lost by A exactly equals the momentum gained by B. This is a Law. That is, this is the pattern to which the movement of the two billiards balls must conform. Provided, of course that something sets ball A in motion. And here comes the snag. The law won’t set it in motion. It is usually a man with a cue who does that. But a man with a cue would send us back to free-will, so let us assume that it was lying on a table in a liner and that what set it in motion was a lurch of the ship. In that case it was not the law which produced the movement; it was a wave. And that wave, though it certainly moved according to the laws of physics, was not moved by them. It was shoved by other waves, and by winds, and so forth. And however far you traced the story back you would never find the laws of Nature causing anything.

The dazzlingly obvious conclusion now arose, in my mind: in the whole history of the universe the laws of Nature have never produced a single event. They are the pattern to which every event must conform, provided only that it can be induced to happen.

--C.S. Lewis on the Laws of Nature (The Quotable Lewis :457-458)

[Edit: There are various philosophical problems with what Lewis said, yet that type of thinking has proven to be as good a start as any.]

Art History

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

It's probably why comments like this: ""We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture," he said, adding that the school board's declaration is just a first step." happen. (From Pharyngula)

PZ Myers and writers like him conflate an American cultural tendency with evidence for the veracity of the Darwinian creation myth, thinking that if scientists or intellectuals tend to believe something then that is evidence that it is true. The Darwinian Herd is especially fond of this type of supposed evidence, in fact it sometimes seems that it is their only argument and the actual empirical evidence does not matter as long as there is a "scientific consensus" or everyone who is educated thinks that it is so. This neglects the fact that even the most educated segments of any culture have maintained incorrect beliefs. E.g. the belief of educated Chinese for some time that the earth was flat that can be proven from their texts, unlike the Darwinist and progressive myth that educated people in the West used to think that the earth was flat. It's a mistake to think that scientific consensus or "everyone knows" is evidence of any type. Evidence indicates that when people begin using that argument in lieu of pounding their opponents over the head with evidence then it is the time to question their claims and focus on the evidence.

But why would a pastor say such a thing and feel that he is ignorant and stupid as opposed to the educated and intelligent? There are a few reasons other than the fact that cold toads like Myers have been sucessful in abusing the State to set it against "religious" education so that people are forced by the State to spend billions of dollars on "secular education" while they are not allowed the choose to educate their children religiously. The main reason for such weakness seems to be the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

Institutional dimensions of the intellectual scandal do not exhaust the difficulties for evangelical higher education. A further problem is created by the generations-long failure of the evangelical community to nurture the life of the mind. That failure has created what William Hull, provost of Samford University; has called “the tragic imbalance which now exists according to which the dominant religion in America is almost destitute of intellectual firepower.” As Hull describes it, the desire to carry “the Christian dimension to the heart of the learning process” must advance realistically. College administrators and intellectuals in the churches must face the sober realities that Hull encountered when he sought to define such a goal at his own university:

Long experience in academic personnel recruitment convinces me that a sufficiently large pool of qualified candidates to staff [an] entire University faculty with Christian scholars . . . is just not out there. . . . Suffice it to say that the church has failed to define its intellectual responsibilities in compelling terms, to call out from among its own those gifted to discharge this neglected stewardship, and to provide such budding scholars with support for the kind of advanced training that will equip them to do credible work on so exacting a frontier. The very few who decide to make the integration of Christianity and scholarship a lifelong calling usually do so at their own initiative, with precious little encouragement either from the church or from the academy. Ironically, the handful who do express an early interest in the vocation of Christian scholar are usually shunted into seminary for graduate theological study, producing a surplus of those qualified to teach religion but a paucity of those trained to teach the other ninety-five percent of the academic disciplines as they relate to the Christian faith. . . . We must not deceive ourselves into supposing that there is a large guild of seasoned Christian scholars somewhere on which we can draw in staffing our University faculty.

[...]
Nowhere in the Western world is it possible to find an institution for graduate training — that is, for the training required to teach at evangelical institutions of higher learning — that exists for the primary purpose of promoting Christian scholarship defined in a Protestant, evangelical way. Thankfully, there are a few Roman Catholic and Jewish institutions where Catholic or Jewish understandings of God and the world receive careful attention, and evangelical scholars have sometimes made use of such institutions. But for most of the faculty members at most evangelical institutions of higher learning, to ask in the course of their most advanced training the deepest and highest questions about the relationship between God and the world would be irrelevant, or it would create prejudice against them. Yet, once called to evangelical institutions, part of the task of these same scholars is to guide students and publish research that asks precisely those questions.
In sum, the scandal of the evangelical mind arises from the specific institutional arrangements of evangelical higher learning in North America. Even if an evangelical were convinced that deep, probing study of the world should be undertaken as a specifically Christian task, it is by no means self-evident where that task could be pursued.
Finally, there is a theological dimension to the scandal of the evangelical mind. For an entire Christian community to neglect, generation after generation, serious attention to the mind, nature, society, the arts — all spheres created by God and sustained for his own glory — may be, in fact, sinful. Os Guinness has recently called attention to this dimension in a memorable passage worth quoting at length:

Evangelicals have been deeply sinful in being anti-intellectual ever since the 1820s and 1830s. For the longest time we didn’t pay the cultural price for that because we had the numbers, the social zeal, and the spiritual passion for the gospel. But today we are beginning to pay the cultural price. And you can see that most evangelicals simply don’t think. For example, there has been no serious evangelical public philosophy in this century. . . . It has always been a sin not to love the Lord our God with our minds as well as our hearts and souls. . . . We have excused this with a degree of pietism and pretend[ing] that this is something other than what it is — that is, sin. . . . Evangelicals need to repent of their refusal to think Christianly and to develop the mind of Christ.

The scandal of the evangelical mind is a scandal from whichever direction it is viewed. It is a scandal arising from the historical experience of an entire subculture. It is a scandal to which the shape of evangelical institutions have contributed. Most of all, it is a scandal because it scorns the good gifts of a loving God. The rest of this book is an effort to show why this scandal emerged as it did in North America and how it might be possible to minimize its pernicious effects.

(The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
By Mark A. Noll :21-23)

I've noticed that too, some seem to keep things hermeneutically sealed, real tight like. Good biblical scholarship....and well, that's about it, as if there is nothing more to God and Life than text. On the other hand there are the charismatic types and well, wow...some of that clearly isn't even Christian in any form, let alone Christianity informed by text. In trying to deal with it once with people who I did not know were given to such things at first, the main criticism against my criticism seemed to match the pastor's above. I.e. it was a sin for me to use intelligence to go on the attack and so on. It's a curious pattern.

Everyone is a censor on this debate.

I'm saving a few things from the Panda's Thumb. I suppose I won't bother with them anymore now that they censor everything, in this case including some accurate history with respect to Benjamin Franklin and Congress that refutes the ignorant and bigoted judgments typical to federal judges these days. Such information is on topic, they are just more interested in their form of scientism as applied to politics than the truth. I.e., they're interested in the mere label of "science" that they do not even define as the pursuit of the truth anyway.

Here is some of what I wrote mixed in with a few murmurings and mewlings from those with the urge to merge.

---
Actually the Panda's Thumb does censor many people that you're apparently not counting, often when things go against the Leftist way the mewlings and murmurings begin, which indicates that they're typically more concerned with politics and labeling things "scientific" than what is true. That's what the original post of this thread is about, the conflation of the term "science" with all that Leftists happen to believe. That has been going on over a century, ever since modern science emerged from Christianity and the general revelation typical to the Greek philosophers with their Forms and Unmoved Movers.

Unlike Marx, modern Leftists do not seem to be very honest about what they are actively doing. Instead they pretend to be doing nothing and science just happens to be defined by and as everything that they say about it. E.g. they claim that science is at "war" with Christianity instead of just admitting that they are making war on Christianity, regardless whatever systematic thought as applied to empirical evidence may indicate. In fact, the very definition of science that they try to prop up politically is that "science" is opposed to or utterly distinct from religion. For if it comported with religion in any way then it could not be taught in science class given the perversion of the separation of church and state into the separation of religion and state and then into the separation of whatever "offends" some atheistic kook and state. Given that effeminates offend easily, that's a lot of separation, and about the only separation or discrimination that those with the urge to merge will allow.

KL
Posted: Jan. 24 2006,17:14
Regarding comment 75444:

Jesus, mynym!!! What are you smoking? Larry makes WAY more sense than you. [See, at least a new threat to their urge to merge takes the heat off of other people. But I'd suggest that anyone tempted to write there let the dead in the head bury their dead. That's what their Mommy Nature selects for them by natural selections anyway.] Do you have any training or education in the sciences? My teenage son is more coherent than this on his worst day.

Flint
Unregistered
Posted: Jan. 24 2006,17:14
[...]
And finally, here is mynym who seems to think if he mislabels evidence "leftist politics", then he doesn't need to ever notice the stuff.

Any more evasion and distortion and maybe I'll convert to creationism myself. That's mighty compelling.

What a grouchy, unpleasant fellow you are, mynym! How perfectly you exemplify EVERYTHING not only wrong, but unpleasant, about creationists (under whatever cover name).

mynym
Unregistered
Posted: Jan. 24 2006,17:42
If those with the urge to merge found my writing pleasant just as they seem to like the uncivilized and censorious politician above then I would be concerned that I was not making enough separations, discriminations and that type of thing. It's good to see that is not the case. Of course you didn't really say anything about the perversion of separation of church and state from the intentions of Founders like Franklin that leads into absurd situations like some federal judge trying to define "religion" and "science" for everyone, but that's to be expected.


mynym
Unregistered
Posted: Jan. 24 2006,17:42
First, Atheism is a religion. It’s fairly relevant under the separation clause that atheists be protected equally with others, but likewise, through your own statement, science cannot possibly comport with atheism (a religion)...

Atheism is no more a religion than is theism, there are various sects of theists and atheists but neither philosophical position is sectarian nor a full "system of beliefs."

Thus, how is there a war against religion going on, when the very material you asserted is being used in this war is, in fact, not allowed to be used by your own assertation?

The material being used is a pattern of outright frauds combined with distortions of the evidence based on the capacity for a paradigm to sift evidence with the remainder cloaked in the pollution of language in terms like "evolution" which can encompass all "change" that takes place in the Cosmos yet is supposedly specific enough for very specific statements.

Second, the correct statement is that science will not comment upon religion in either a positive or negative manner. It simply gives it the cold shoulder, so to speak, and moves on with science regardless of the existence of religion. Why? Because science (correctly) asserts that it has no standing to comment on spiritual matters, as the very fundamental principle of naturalistic methodology removes the ability of science to say anything meaningful about religion.

In the past that has been the way that science has been set up to be a methodical way of denying all spiritual matters and all that is essential as not "existing." (I.e., enter the Flying Spaghetti Monsters, Pink Unicorns and Santa here.)

And when people set out to correct the mistaken belief that science is constantly and methodically building up "natural" answers the first to try to stop them are people like those who post on the Panda's Thumb. E.g., if I were to begin a criticism of the way that science has been defined as a methodical way of coming to a materialist or naturalist philosophy (by materialists, surprise, surprise) then writers here would be the first to try to disagree with and reject such criticism.

Rather than arrogantly assert faith as fact, science takes the much more humble stance of admitting what it doesn’t know and not trying to convince anyone.

That's silly. Scientists advance their hypotheses based on something and someone looking in from the outside may even think that they sometimes stick to them against the facts based on the faith that they will be vindicated. They also try to convince people.

Third, how do you comport your statement with the fact that the vast majority of scientists identify themselves as part of a religious group?

For one thing, my statement was about the way that charlatans have abused science and tried to not only set it against religion, but define its very nature as being at best a different answer than a "religious answer" and at worst eliminative of a "religious" answer. I.e. religion is treated as heretical, this comes up in anything from catastrophism in geology to Darwinism in biology. It's not really clear sometimes how the "scientific answer" elimiates the "religious answer." E.g. a "morphogenetic field" is the "cause" of an embryo coming together vs. God knitting together in the womb, for where do the laws of Nature reside? Or is it that God is unnatural, yet science is natural? Why are some selections called natural selections yet it is pretended that others would be what, unnatural?

I am not, of course, referring only to christians here, but the vast multitude of hindu, muslim, jewish, buddhist, etc, etc, etc scientists across the entire world who believe in evolution.

I believe in evolution. Why do you think that I don't? You're probably using the word in an odd way if you cannot understand how I can easily believe in evolution.

---

I suppose I won't bother now that the ID fellows have gone and given those with the urge to merge the opportunity to censor, which is what they wanted to do all along as revealed by their own words. It is odd though, that the ID types who are all about their "uncommon dissent" and so on would censor too. It makes me wonder about ID, perhaps everyone is tending towards the stifling and totalitarian views typical to scientism these days. At any rate, I'm generally not going to write where the sweaty little hands of the censor are at work.

Dawkins again...

From Answers in Genesis, found through Seeker:

Dawkins is not a man of patience. This was demonstrated by his visit to the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. In an extraordinary interview with its pastor, Ted Haggard, Dawkins’s opening gambit was to accuse Haggard of orchestrating a service like a ‘Nuremberg Rally’ (massive Nazi rallies in that German city held in the 1930s). ‘Dr Goebbels would be proud’ of churches like Haggard’s...was his offensive remark. Haggard came across as a man of warmth and humility. His warm demeanour seemed to enrage Dawkins, whose questions and comments became more and more angry. Haggard’s telling rebuke to Dawkins was: ‘You will find yourself wrong on some things and right on some things, but, please, in the process, don’t be arrogant.’ Haggard had, for me, summed up Dawkins quite well: his manner (witnessed so often on TV and in his writings) can only be described as exceptionally arrogant.

I do not have any problem with strongly stated views. In this postmodernist day and age people often mistake certainty about the truth or even some rather basic forms of knowledge for arrogance. But Dawkins's argument can only be true or close to the truth as a matter of historical facts if such celebrations comport with Social Darwinism of the sort where Haggard is the head of the social organism that decides who lives and dies in it, i.e. if the celebrations are about the deification of Haggard by his Herd. Somehow I doubt that's the case in the least if that fellow Haggard has any Scripturalist focus whatsoever, as biblically the Herd is not his own.

I wonder about Dawkins's arguments where he says that IDists are like Holocaust deniers or that some American evangelicals are like the Nazis of Nuremberg. It seems that he wants to try to learn lessons about good and evil from Nazism that apply to everyone but himself, while claiming that good and evil essentially don't really "exist" anyway. It's as if he senses his own proto-Nazi urge to merge and the mendacious type of scholarship that results from it, which is evil. I've already written of that many times here before. (E.g., Darwinism and proto-Nazism) That argument can be supported and has been in many ways, which may be why Dawkins tries to make Nazism about everyone but himself. As to the topic he brought up in his example, I'm not sure what Haggard's services look or "seem like" to the mentally retarded but here is part of a more accurate notion of what they'd have to be like to comport with Nazism.

[W]e hope to demonstrate that Nazi political ritual cannot just be understood as, for instance, the expression of the ‘irrational adulation and deification of Hitler’, but rather should be seen as a central component of an ideological system (weltanschauung)[i.e. worldview] which consciously sought expression in the ‘mysteries’ of myth and symbol. Second, an examination of the structure of National Socialist mythos and its symbol-world, suggests that the very nature of the Nazi weltanschauung led the NSDAP towards an increasing reliance upon political ritual as a means of ideological presentation.
[...]
[They note that various days of significance to the NSDAP were made into holidays.]
Conversely, important events which already had a strong cultural tradition in Germany, whether as expressions of the Christian churches’ influence or that of the Labour movement, were taken over by the propaganda machine of the party, emptied of their original content, and transformed into public expressions of the new National Socialist weltanschauung. Remembrance Day on the 16 March, for instance, traditionally a day of mourning for the dead of the First World War, was transformed under Hitler’s personal orders into an opportunity to reflect upon the heroic nature of the German soldiers’ sacrifice.
[...]
Other traditional celebration days, such as Easter, Whitsun, Mothers’ Day, the Harvest Thanksgiving and Christmas suffered a similar fate, with NSDAP worthies announcing that ‘authentic’ ceremonies and ancient Teutonic folk-customs must be revived in view of the onslaught against ‘traditional’ culture by the spirit of Jewish—Marxist materialism.

(Symbol and Ritual under National Socialism
By Simon Taylor
The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 4. (Dec., 1981) :505-506) (Emphasis added)

I suppose Dawkins thinks that the Nazis were "fundamentalists" instead of a heretical branch of the socialists. Given the imaginations of Darwinists all our words lose their meaning to the point that there is no difference between fundamentalism, Nazism, Islamism, Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism and on the list could go.

If we are to abuse words and pollute our language to the extent that those with the urge to merge do then in the end we will not be able to mean anything that we say. When there is no meaning, it is not as if you can mean what you say. Yet since we are creatures of meaning we will not stop trying to mean what we say just as Darwinists cannot and instead we will misuse and abuse language more just as they do.

I mentioned Karl Kraus's thoughts on sapient creatures of words and thoughts of words before. It bears repeating.

His greatest concern was with the misuse of language and the resultant moral implications of such misuse. He showed that the imperfections of a person's language mirror the imperfections of his character...Kraus saw...'the connection between maltreated words and the maltreatment of human souls and bodies, and he avenged lives by restoring words to their state of integrity, health, and vigor in which, of their own accord, they could 'speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about.'
...Kraus thus anticipated the insights--into the relationship between the control of language and of liberty, between the destruction of the human word and of the human soul, between semantics and politics--of the celebrated authors of our age who have sounded the alarm against the utopias of hell being readied for us....

(Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis
and Psychiatry
by Thomas Szasz) (Emphasis added)

Dawkins is not a man of his word, given what he writes he cannot be. His mind will not seem to let language definitively define principles that shape and define its thoughts. Instead it is constantly thinking of ways to blur things together, exchanging the conceptual for the perceptual. Such a mind is always percieving yet never conceiving and so almost always deceiving.

His claims about Nazism are a deception and not a very good one at that.

End of the Spear

I heard about this movie on Preston and Steve. They had the son of the missionary who was killed and the Waodani tribesman who helped murder him on last week. It reminded me of the story of a Rwandan mother who forgave the killers of her son who was hacked to death with machetes.

Generally people do not understand this type of thing and the more irreligious or lacking in spiritual focus they are the more they do not understand it. Indeed, I do not understand it very well.

Those who claim to understand it enough to sit in judgment on the spiritual focus of such people seem to me to misunderstand it more than anything. For instance, the writer of the movie review that was published in the News Journal purports to understand it and judged the missionaries as guilty of "hubris" for their actions. I suppose they could make the same criticism of Martin Luther King or anyone else who chose to put themselves at risk of death based on the principles that they believed in. The ultimate example that the movie reviewer cannot understand would be Christ, given that he knew he would die and lived based on principles defined by the will of God anyway. Hubris? After all, if he had just denied "hubris" about being the son of God when he was brought in then he probably could have "lived." It's curious how those who have not even lived this life often want eternal life. But I shall not meander, few of the promo pics:




I also wanted to save a few bits of information here that I've been using to answer some Leftists on the IMDB forums, in case I ever find myself debating about missionaries again.

The stereotype of the native is drawn partly from Darwin’s belief that “weaker” races would become extinct rather than evolve and partly from the “noble savage” of the Romantic tradition. This has produced a composite image of vulnerable nobility and earth-friendly lifestyle. Ironically, this sidelines real native peoples and suppresses their struggle, their resistance and their survival. James Miller, an aboriginal author, is rightly scathing of this stereotype:

[Missionaries] were no more successful in converting Kooris to Christianity than the churches were in converting the white community. If it is said that Christianity destroyed Koori culture, then it can be said that Koori culture was not a strong culture and that Koori society in general was inferior. Such thinking depicts the Kooris to be the helpless victims of brain-washing who abandoned everything that they ever believed in as soon as someone stood up and preached from an open Bible. This was not the case and such thinking degrades Koori society. Kooris were not helpless and Koori culture was not destroyed.

Miller’s opinion is repeatedly supported in missionary diaries. Take, for example, that of John Eliot, who on October 26, 1646, became the first European to preach in Algonquin. The stereotype is of native people being “brain washed,” readily abandoning their traditions and adopting new beliefs for reasons of material self-interest or cultural subservience. Eliot’s account tells of a seventy-five minute sermon, after which the Algonquin closely and perceptively questioned him for a further hour and a quarter. When Eliot left, there were many who wished to put more questions to their guest. This is not a picture of a “primitive,” passive people overwhelmed by European culture. Indeed, in comparison with the modern custom of a twenty-minute sermon, desultorily received and immediately forgotten, the Algonquin come out of it rather well. What contemporary suburban congregation would be capable of so much?
The orthodox story also stereotypes missionaries, who are cast in the dominant role and stripped of vulnerability or sensitivity before the story begins. Thus we would be unlikely to read of John Paton on Tanna burying his wife and baby son in a grave dug with his own hands, nor of his anguished cry that but for Jesus he would have “gone mad and died beside that lonely grave.” The Christian beliefs of the missionaries are, the orthodox story tells us, austere, repressed and puritanical. The more orthodox the belief, the more flint-faced and joyless. Indeed, Norman Lewis calls Christian mission an “apparatus for the repression of joy” in the naturally harmonious and joyful life of the native. This stereotype of the austere missionary was already familiar to Darwin who himself rejected it after staying with missionaries during his voyages aboard The Beagle. Indeed, any faniiliarity with the literature of biblical Christianity shows that this is a caricature.

(Six Modern Myths About Christianity & Western Civilization
By Philip J. Sampson :106-107)

When it comes to missionaries the culture typical to anthropologists is one of intolerance. E.g.

Although a missionary once served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, anthropological enculturation commonly includes categorizing missionaries as enemies. The conditioning seems to be more covert than overt, since anthropology texbooks seldom deal specifically with missionary activity and few ethnographies contain condemnations of missionaries. Two presuppositions which may influence the antimissionary attitude are (1) that the culture of a primitive society is an "organic unity" and (2) that religious beliefs are essentially meaningless. [...] It is therefore not surprising that anthropologists have a negative attitude toward those whose lives are committed to teaching people that the acceptance of specific religious beliefs is important. We should be concerned with the bases of the negative attitudes which many of us manifest, for an unwillingness to deal with them candidly will make it difficult to control for bias in field research.

(Anthropologists Versus Missionaries: The Influence of Presuppositions (Abstract)
by Claude E. Stipe
Current Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Apr., 1980) :165-179)

I suppose you can tell by the necessity of bring up such facts that the artists who work in movies (or those who like to pretend that they do) have some of the same tendencies and attitudes as anthropologists with respect to the spiritual, or conceptual principles. For they tend to work in mere images and the imagination of their mind, sight over insight, the visible over the invisible. This would be fine if they could typically have insight about what they saw in such a way. But they do not, as that is typically not the way of the Word.

[Related posts: A Plain Parable]

The smothered history of the human race...

One example out of many, artifacts being older than they "should" be:

The Mousterian is an accepted stone tool industry of the later Pleistocene. Warren thought it impossible that one could find tools in Eocene strata. But those free from such prejudices might wonder whether Warren had actually discovered, in the Eocene strata of Essex, a genuine implement.

In the discussion following Warren’s report to the Geological Society, one of the scientists present pointed out that in some cases the Moir’s tools were found in the middle of Tertiary sedimentary beds and not directly on the hard chalk. This would rule out the particular pressure explanation given by Warren.

At this point, the controversy over Moir’s discoveries was submitted to an international commission of scientists for resolution. The commission, formed at the request of the International Institute of Anthropology, was composed of eight prominent European and American anthropologists, geologists, and archeologists. This group supported Moir’s conclusions. They concluded that the flints from the base of the Red Crag near Ipswich were in undisturbed strata, at least Pliocene in age. Furthermore, the flaking on the flints was undoubtedly of human origin. Members of the commission also carried out four excavations into the detritus bed below the Red Crag and themselves found five typical specimens. These tools would be at least 2.5 million years old. And because the detritus bed contains materials from ancient Eocene land surfaces, the tools might be up to 55 million years old.
Commission member Louis Capitan stated: “There exist at the base of the Crag, in undisturbed strata, worked flints (we have observed them ourselves). These are not made by anything other than a human or hominid which existed in the Tertiary epoch. This fact is found by us prehistorians to be absolutely demonstrated.”

Surprisingly, even after the commission report, Moir’ s opponents, such as Warren, persisted in attempting to show that the flint implements were the product of natural pressure flaking. Warren said that the flints may have been crushed by icebergs against the ocean bottom along the coast. But to our knowledge no one has shown that icebergs can produce the numerous bulbs of percussion and elaborate retouching reported on Moir’s implements. Furthermore, many of the Red Crag specimens are lying in the middle of sediments and not on hard rock surfaces against which an iceberg might have crushed them. In addition, J. M. Coles, an English archeologist, reported that at Foxhall implements occur in layers of sediment that appear to represent land surfaces and not beach deposits. This would also rule out the iceberg action imagined by Warren.

After Wairen put forward his iceberg explanation, the controversy faded. Coles wrote in 1968: “That.. . the scientific world did not see fit to accept either side without considerable uncertainty must account for the quite remarkable inattention that this East Anglian problem has received since the days of active controversy.” This may be in part true, but there is another possible explanation— that elements of the scientific community decided silence was a better way to bury Moir’s discoveries than active and vocal dissent. By the 1950s, scientific opinion was lining up solidly behind an Early Pleistocene African center for human evolution. Therefore, there would have been little point, and perhaps some embarrassment and harm, in continually trying to disprove evidence for a theoretically impossible Pliocene habitation of England. That would have kept both sides of the controversy too much alive. The policy of silence, deliberate or not, did in fact prove highly successful in removing Moir’s evidence from view. There was no need to defeat something that was beneath notice, and little to gain from defending or supporting it either.

(The Hidden History of the Human Race
By Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :38-39)

There are some atheists still looking to prop up the Darwinian creation myth who seem to believe that the same tactics will work against intelligent design. It's typically the last tactic. It puts the flight into fight or flight.

I suspect that Darwinian tactics won't work in this day and age. Even if they did, the knowledge will still be there tucked away somewhere for anyone willing to seek and find it.

On another note, a recent comment suggested that I want kids to be taught that dinosaurs and man existed at the same time in schools, apparently based on my focus on the issues of origins and because there are various lines of possible evidence that a few "dragons" did exist at the same time as man. It's not as if species thought to have gone extinct being found to be living would or could not comport with Darwinism anyway. But anyway, I do not care what gets taught in schools and would only argue that children should be taught whatever their parents want them taught, as a matter of principle. I.e., if parents are stupid and ignorant enough to believe in the Darwinian creation myth and want their children to learn it, then by all means it should be taught. It wouldn't be the first time in history that children were taught something utterly stupid that went against reason, facts, logic and evidence as if it were a "fact," or even a "scientific fact." (E.g. the textbook that brought on the Scopes Monkey Trial which contained some eugenics junk science.) Such things happen, it's the parent's responsibility.

[Related posts: Keep in mind that people mentioned in the post below this one are those now controlling access to a lot of the artifacts and evidence, using State funds to do so. I suppose that if this were true it would be one way to give Darwinists the finger on the issue.

Elements of the example above with respect to seeking any explanation other than design remind me of Yellow and Pink.]

Networks, Nazism and things...

An interesting example of how the proto-Nazi tendency to shift from the conceptual to the personal is difficult to hide in the information age from Teleological Blog:
In the first link below we read that:

A lengthy and detailed letter from OSC attorney James McVay, dated August 5, 2005, and addressed to Sternberg, summarizes the government’s findings, [with respect to an investigation into the Darwinian Herd trying to trample him for publishing a paper on ID] based largely on e-mail traffic among top Smithsonian scientists.

...we read there:

A typical internal e-mail on the subject fumed, “I hope we are not even considering extending his access to space.” (All quotations from e-mails given here are taken from the OSC’s letter to Sternberg.) Another expresses frustration that a good pretext for dismissing him had so far not been identified: “As he hasn’t (yet) been discovered to have done anything wrong,... the sole reason to terminate his appt seems to be that the host unit has suddenly changed its mind. If that’s OK w/NMNH, let me know and I’ll send him a letter stating so.” One manager huffed, “Well, if you ask me, a face-to-face meeting or at least a ‘you are welcome to leave or resign’ call with this individual is in order.” The same e-mail indicated that a manager had been compiling trivial offenses by Sternberg that could be cited in telling him to get out. Among other things, the Smithsonian staffer had gone over Sternberg’s library records. He “has currently 50 books checked out from the SI library (I checked this with the library).”
[...]
From an e-mail from Smithsonian authorities attacking Sternberg and Christian America:

Scientists have been perfectly willing to let these people alone in their churches, but now it looks like these people are coming out and invading our schools, biology classes, museums and now our professional journals. These people to my mind are only a scale up on the fundies of a more destructive kind in other parts of the world. Depressing. Oh, if we only still had Steve Gould to lead the counter-attack.
[...]
An e-mail by a NMNH scientist that was sent to your [Sternberg’s] supervisor sums up the sentiment of the e-mails, as it relates to this issue. It reads, “The whole situation sounds like a pain in the…neck. Hopefully, the ID folks will get distracted with something else soon. After spending 4.5 years in the Bible Belt, I have learned how to carefully phrase things in order to avoid the least amount of negative repercussions for the kids. And I have heard many amazing things!! The most fun we had by far was when my son refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because of the ‘under dog’ part…”

These are the people controlling access to knowledge these days. It's getting difficult. It is hard being a Policeman of Knowledge now, as the old way of controlling networks from the top down does not seem to be working very well for them. You may wonder from their texts how their minds come to be so ignorant and just plain stooopid. It would take too long to go into but note the typical textual degeneracy in this example: "These people to my mind are only a scale up on the fundies of a more destructive kind in other parts of the world."

For to the Leftist mind those who believe in a textual principle such as: "Blessed are the peacemakers..." are somehow the same as those who believe a textual principle such as: "When you battle the infidel, cut off their heads." Because well, they can both be called "fundamentalists" based on belief in textual principles. That's not the real reason that the Leftist mind tries to merge them but going deeper into the Leftist mind would be a tangent into its type of neurosis, that place where stereotypes and a limited mind's vain attempt at a lack of all types lurks.

So instead, note its apparent type of argument here: "They seem the same to my mind because both are fundies...or somethin'. I have a little blurred image in my mind of it, so I know it by my imagination! Fundies, I say!" It seems that such a mind doesn't even understand itself and the self-evident truths that are evident in its Self. Essentially the Leftist mind often hasn't even thought about what it is saying conceptually, as its mind comes to be all in its imagination. At the lowest levels it is reduced to mewlings and murmurings of its own feelings and nothing more.

At a higher level there are attempts to engage in logic, argument or assertion:
"There is no such thing as essence." --Richard Dawkins cf. (The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution :308)

Do you see what he means about that? Too bad there is no such thing as meaning if he is unwilling to admit to the Right enough to be right, so essentially he cannot really mean anything about a proper marriage between the Left and the Right. That's a typical problem for Leftists/"liberals".

(They probably will not want to be called Leftists or "liberal." They tend to want to blur away or condemn a recognition of their own type too.)

I'll probably research this.

The claim:

Schmidt comments repeatedly throughout his work on the persistent tendency of scholars to ignore or discredit the sky-god phenomenon. Not until as late as 1922, he says, did the first scientific monograph on the subject appear. It seemed that the possibility of using any other aspect of religion as the starting point for the development of religion had to be exhausted before the Sky-God could be considered.
In Schmidt’s eyes at least, evolutionary theories like Tylor’s seemed strange because of this common denominator of indifference among scholars toward the one line of research which they apparently felt would not support an evolutionary explanation.
Virtually ostracized by his fellow scholars in Britain and ignored by scholars in mainland Europe, Andrew Lang wrote: “Like other martyrs of science, I must expect to be thought importunate, tedious, a fellow of one idea and that idea wrong. To resent this would show great want of humor, and a plentiful lack of knowledge of human nature.”
Still Lang pressed his attack, relying especially on “the startling discoveries of A. W. Howitt concerning the Supreme Being of the South-East Australian tribes. . . and on information given by Mrs. Langloh Parker concerning [other Australian tribes]. . . . He also made use. . . of facts from the Bushmen, Hottentots, Zulu, Yao, the West African peoples, the Tierra del Fuegians, and somewhat more extensively from the North American Indians.”
Long before Lang called public attention to Howitt’s Australian research, Tylor himself had read Howitt’s papers shortly after they were first published in 1884. What was his response? Schmidt reports: “His only resource. . . was to. . . question the native origin of these gods, referring them to European, and specifically to missionary influence.”
Tylor made this reply official six years later in an article entitled “The Limits of Savage Religion.” But Howitt, who still did not perceive that his research was undermining Tylor’s theory, which he admired, and who later actually criticized Lang for using his research to attack Tylor’s theory, had already indicated to Tylor that no such “out” was available.’
Other scholars similarly proved that missionary influence could not explain the same phenomenon already showing up in many other parts of the world besides Australia. It was the beginning of the end for Tylor’s theory. Schmidt comments that, toward the end, “Tylor and Frazer could not be induced to speak, despite Lang’s direct challenges to them.”
More data kept pouring in, so he published another volume, and another, and another until, by 1955, he had accumulated more than 4,000 pages of evidence in a total of 12 large volumes!
The entire thirteenth chapter of Schmidt’s The Origin and Growth of Religion is devoted to quotations from dozens of anthropologists, showing that acceptance of Schmidt’s research was virtually universal. The tide had turned! And yet— Before its downfall, Tylor’s theory had inspired certain scholars to apply his ideas in other fields. One would think that refuting the “mother theory” would cause its “conceptual offspring” in other fields to decline as well. This has not been the case. Some of the conceptual offspring of Tylor’s theory took on a life of their own, so to speak, and managed to distance themselves from their mother. Thus when she was axed, they were spared and persist, however unjustifiably, to this very day!

(Eternity in Their Hearts: Startling Evidence of Belief in the One True God in Hundreds of Cultures Throughout the World
By Don Richardson :139-141)

On many topics that is the case, the knowledge is actually tucked away somewhere, it's just that Leftist professors and their ilk do not seek it or teach it. I suspect that may be the case here. Apparently only evidence against religious narratives is allowed, as if it is a part of the very definition of "science" to always be providing evidence against "religion" given the progressive notion that science can be defined as being at "war" with religion. Apparently they cannot just be open and honest with the fact that they are making war on religion, as Marx was. Instead they pretend that it is somehow just what science is, all on its own.

It also seems that teachers and professors sometimes prefer to teach known frauds instead of accurate knowledge to promote a progressive worldview. E.g. Darwinian biologists recently went all craaazy about putting a sticker distinguishing theory from fact on a textbook yet have yet to demonstrate much concern about Haeckel's faked images being placed in the minds of children. It seems that Darwinists need such images to shape the minds of children.

Note that Tylor’s theories on religion were a part of German "higher criticism" of the Bible in proto-Nazi times while at the same time various frauds of Darwinism came together, from Piltdown and Haeckel's forged embryos to the peer reviewed scientism of the eugenics movment, to Tylor’s anthropological hypothesizing against the evidence combined with racist anthropology and so on and on.

Browsing...

I better go to bed before I get into reading blogs. This Christian gaming article from Seeker could lead to good things. E.g., "Just one more game mom, can't you see I'm evangelizing here!"

I should join one. E.g., "So, what did you do this weekend?"

"Well, I spent a lot of time evangelizing. Those guys in Halo seemed to be born again pretty quick....after my baptism of blood!"

I best stop there.

[Edit: For the record I cleaned up my place, read a bit, fixed some of my computers and engaged in other constructive and worthwhile activities over the weekend.]

A comment...

I set up a new computer with a dual core 4600, RAID array, etc. So I haven't checked my email in a while. I'll get to it. I also didn't see this frightful comment before. I got to it before it rolled off the page. It's nothing factual or logical, just: "Me scared."

(That's probably what that fellow Dana should stick with too, his own feelings. "Me angry now." "Me hate that." Etc. That way he wouldn't get stuck with trying to tell other people what their feelings are, apparently through projecting whatever he's feeeling.)

Dawkin's, on the supposed benefits of the Darwinian urge to merge...

Many of our legal and ethical principles depend on the separation between Homo sapiens and all other species. Of the people who regard abortion as a sin, including the minority who go to the lengths of assassinating doctors and blowing up abortion clinics, many are unthinking meat-eaters, [Edit, it is worth thinking about such a sacrifice, just not the way that he does as one who is blind to the sacred.] and have no worries about chimpanzees being imprisoned in zoos and ["]sacrificed["] in laboratories. Would they think again, if we could lay out a living continuum of intermediates between ourselves and chimpanzees linked in an unbroken chain of interbreeders like the Californian salamanders? Surely they would.

(The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
By Richard Dawkins :303)

At least he said the "minority" who blow up abortion clinics, as for all the millions of people who disagree with abortion the clinics do not seem to be blowing up left and right. Given that the little fellow seems to play loose with facts often enough and is also easily "overwhelmed" by evidence apparently drawn from little more than his own blurred imagination (pg. 13) it is good that he makes at least some distinctions and separations in his text. Back to it: "Would they think again, if we could lay out a living continuum of intermediates..." We already have historical examples of people who believed in the Darwinian creation myth to look to in order to find out what Homo sapiens tend to think about human rights, animal wrongs, or human wrongs that seem right in an animal sense when placed in a Darwinian milieu.

For example, the Nazis believed in Darwinism and it permeated their worldview. They did "think again" so to speak, although their form of thought was really just the nonsense of trying to engage in "biological thinking" instead of thinking philosophically about and through biology. Given their worldview they began to gradually treat humans as animals and animals as human. So on the one hand they passed anti-vivisection laws (i.e. animal rights legislation) and promoted vegetarianism, while on the other they sought to breed humans, even going so far as to use human products as if they were animal products for their convenience.

A book briefly notes this "unexpected" turn in history:

The first chapter of Part One is perhaps the strongest of the entire volume. Here, Munro skillfully compiles a social history of animal rights activism within the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, the spatial bounds of his study. This summary incorporates a range of components...and even a brief reflection on the unexpected vegetarianism and animal protectionist stances of...the Nazi German’s ideologies.

(Compassionate Beasts: The Quest for Animal Rights
By Lyle Munro
Review by Suzanne R. Goodney
Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 6. (Nov., 2002) :763) (See also: The Implications of Nazi Animal Protection)

Note Dawkin's excretions, these artifacts of his biological feeelings that give the illusion of sight and insight: "...many are unthinking meat-eaters, and have no worries about chimpanzees being imprisoned in zoos and sacrificed in laboratories."

How does one "sacrifice" an animal in a lab, anyway? Does he believe that scientists set up a little altar for each rat that they test? It seems that Dawkin's proto-Nazi worldview is of the type that seems to make sense to those easily wowed by charlatans of his sort. It is a worldview that seems to lead to more systematic forms of sense, knowledge and scientia at first, yet was really just nonsense all along and goes against science in the end.

Note the unrepentant immanence that was based on the rejection of the Word which perverted biology or "science" into a total worldview, i.e. a religion:

The German doctrine of blood and soil led, however, to systematic torture of the Jewish people over a period of years, inevitably ending in horrible death. Such seemingly impossible conduct resulted from distortion and exaggeration of the stereotype of the Jew in order to heighten the German prestige, from sexual aberrations*, from innate brutality, and above all from a great hatred against the Bible—”a book of pimps and traitors” as the Nazis expressed it. They made a mockery of concepts such as justice, piety, conscience—in brief, everything that raises man above the level of witless beasts.

(Political and Civil Life
The Jews under the Nazi Regime
By J. F. Krop
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 245, The Netherlands during German Occupation. (May, 1946), pp. 28) (Emphasis added)

I say that Dawkins is a mental retard not as an insult but because his mind is retarded by biological thinking, which itself seems to be more of a physical feeling than a metaphysical thought or concept. That's why I call it the urge to merge. It's a shame to see such a mind wasted into the textual degeneracy typical to Darwinism but that's the way it is.

It has been popular among those with the urge to merge to compare ID types to Holocaust deniers. Dawkins himself apparently said: “How should one respond to ID proponents? Dawkins’s first impulse would be to take those who confront him with that view and throw them out of the lecture hall — exactly as one would do to students of history who question the Holocaust.”(Uncommon Descent)

Isn't it ironic, such a mind has been so twisted in on itself that it most likely cannot recognize that censorship is the Nazi way and go from there to question why censorship is its first reaction, with abuse of Jews for an associative argument and emotional conditioning being its second reaction. Apparently there is no form of proto-Nazi scientism that Dawkins will not willingly go along with given his apparent urge to smother himself in the tittles of Mommy Nature.

*Notice how the "sexual aberrations" typical to the Nazis recieve little mention these days. That indicates how sucessful identity politics and emotional conditioning can be on people that are not "raised above the level of witless beasts."

[Related posts: A rabbi on animals, humans and things...
Right2Left revisited
Keeping up with a mental retard...
Specified Complexity]

Keeping up with correcting a mental retard...

It seems that any text that Richard Dawkins writes is the material for satire, almost just matter, little more than his excretions, rather like his own excrement.

A correction for today, Dawkins:

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION began at the wane of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, in the so-called Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is the cradle of human civilisation whose irreplaceable relics in the Baghdad Museum were vandalised in 2003, under the indifferent eyes of American invaders whose priorities led them to protect the Ministry of Oil instead.

(The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
By Richard Dawkins :27) (Emphasis added)

Invasion and action, it all seems so very invasive to Leftists like Dawkins, those who clearly have the urge to merge.

Reality is most likley a little more shaded inbetween the Right and Left, e.g.:

On April 15, 2003, in the Iraqi city of Basra, an enraged British journalist whose name has been lost to history stormed up to a US marine colonel and his men and denounced them as "macho assholes". The colonel had been looking for weapons and cash left behind by the ousted Iraqi regime, but this reporter believed fiercely that he should be more concerned that "the finest museum in the world has just been looted".

By a peculiar turn of fate, she had stumbled on the one person in the whole of modern Mesopotamia who both cared deeply about the cultural calamity at Baghdad's Iraq museum and possessed the expertise, determination and clout to do something about it. His name was Matthew Bogdanos - a Greek-American classics scholar and a New York prosecutor, whose toughness and tenacity had earned him the nickname "pit bull" even before he went off to fight the "war on terror".

Colonel Bogdanos cannot remember the name of the reporter who vented her frustration at him, but she appears to have set off an extraordinary train of events. Five days after the encounter, he had overcome the objections of his superior officers and was at the gates of the Baghdad museum, heading a mixed bag of volunteer soldiers and investigators, ready to hunt down Iraq's lost legacy.

What followed over the next two years was an epic feat of wartime sleuthing which took Bogdanos along a trail from pitch-black underground chambers and submerged bank vaults in Baghdad to the sleek antiquity dealerships of Madison Avenue, in pursuit of lost treasures with Harry Potterish names, such as the Sacred Vase of Warka. Along the way, more than 5,000 artworks, including unique pieces from the first fluttering of civilisation, were recovered. Bogdanos left active duty in the marines last month, but he is still on the hunt for the thousands of objects still unaccounted for. When he returns to the Manhattan district attorney's office, where he worked before the September 11 attacks, he has permission, he says, to set up a new arts and antiquities unit.

The story so far is told in his new book, Thieves of Baghdad, the royalties from which will go back to the Iraq museum.
[...]
All the acclaim notwithstanding, Bogdanos gives the impression of boiling with anger from the first hello. He launches into a tirade against media reports of the looting (including the Guardian's account) which exaggerated the number of stolen objects, claiming 170,000 were missing. According to Bogdanos the figure was less than a tenth of that. And he is still infuriated by the suggestion that, as he puts it, "Coalition forces stood idly by as looters ransacked the museum." That, he insists, "is simply and undeniably factually inaccurate".

Between April 10 and 12 2003, when most of the thefts took place, Bogdanos says the museum was being used as a redoubt by Iraqi Special Republican Guard troops. "It simply could not have been secured without a battle that would have been devastating, or blood loss that would have been criminal on the part of the commander on the ground," he says.

On the other hand, and with an equal measure of outrage, Bogdanos holds the US forces responsible for taking four days to arrive at the museum after the management's appeal for help on April 12. "It's not sinister. It's not evil. It's inexcusable," he says. In those four days, he says, the museum's Iraqi curators kept the thieves of Baghdad at bay themselves, but much of the damage had already been done.

Half an hour into the interview, Bogdanos is still fighting mad, and it is clear that enraged bellowing is his default mode of communication. A truly accurate transcript of our interview would have to be entirely in capital letters, punctuated with multiple exclamation and question marks, and occasionally hyphenated to show where he slows down, as if instructing a raw teenage recruit. Is he always so hot under the collar? "Injustice always angers me," he replies.

(The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
November 21, 2005
Guardian Features Pages, Pg. 12
HEADLINE: G2: The hunt for Iraq's lost treasure: When thousands of antiquities were looted from Baghdad's Iraq museum, US marine Matthew Bogdanos pledged to get them back. After two years of sleuthing, he has become a national hero.
Byline: Julian Borger)

Note: "On the [Left] hand...Bogdanos holds the US forces responsible for taking four days to arrive at the museum after the management's appeal for help on April 12. 'It's not sinister.'"

I think I would minimize the sinister view from the Left here if all that can be said is that it took four days for the Right to set things right.

Some of the specifics bear repeating, Dawkins: "This is the cradle of human civilisation whose irreplaceable relics in the Baghdad Museum were vandalised in 2003, under the indifferent eyes of American invaders..." vs. "...he is still infuriated by the suggestion that, as he puts it, 'Coalition forces stood idly by as looters ransacked the museum.' That, he insists, 'is simply and undeniably factually inaccurate.'"

What use has the Leftist mind for facts, logic and evidence, though? Apparently Dawkins has set out to prove that one can write a 500 page book that avoids empirical facts or abuses facts to fit his type of mentally retarded psychological dynamics.

The ACLU and the Judiciary

In light of the Alito nomination process here is a little background on how Leftist interest groups like the ACLU have learned to manipulate the Judiciary. This background is part of why the nomination process has become so political, as Democratic senators are like puppets for interest groups that now work through the Judiciary. So instead of such Leftist groups passing legislation for which the Democrats would be responsible for they hide in the Judiciary, manipulating judges and corrupting legal system as they do so.

E.g.,

Melvin L. WuIf, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, claims credit for first raising the idea with Harlan in the ACLU’s friend-of-the court brief in Poe v. Uliman. Wulf later explained his strategy for getting the Court to adopt the privacy rights approach:

Judges dislike breaking entirely new ground. If they are considering adopting a novel principle, they prefer to rest their decision on earlier law if they can, and to show that the present case involves merely an incremental change, not a wholesale break with the past. Constitutional litigators are forever trying to persuade courts that the result they are seeking would be just a short step from some other case whose decision rests soundly on ancient precedent.
Since the issue of sexual privacy had not been raised in any earlier case, we employed the familiar technique of argument by analogy: If there is no exact counterpart to the particular case before the Court, there are others that resemble it in a general sort of way, and the principles applied in the similar cases should also be applied—perhaps even extended a little bit—to the new case. [Emphasis added.]

In other words, Wulf understood that the Court would be open to rewriting the Constitution by pretending to uphold it. Although Harlan’s was a minority opinion, and had no immediate legal effect, its impact would soon become clear. After Poe was decided, Planned Parenthood officials found a way to get arrested so they could mount another challenge to Connecticut law. In 1965, Justice William Douglas adopted Harlan’s reasoning in the majority opinion in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, and the right to privacy became constitutional law. Douglas, who was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, is most famous for being the longest-serving justice and, to conservatives, for writing one of the most parodied phrases in Supreme Court history. In order to strike down the Connecticut law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives, Douglas wrote that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”
Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know what emanations from penumbras are. Young lawyers across America had to pull out their dictionaries when reading Griswold for the first time. A penumbra is an astronomical term describing the partial shadow in an eclipse or the edge of a sunspot—and it is another way to describe something unclear or uncertain. “Emanation” is a scientific term for gas made from radioactive decay—it also means “an emission.”
Douglas’s decision not only found a right to privacy in a penumbra of an emanation, it manipulated the facts of the case...

(Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America
By Mark Levin :56-57)

That's how the Judiciary sometimes will just pull a position that the ACLU wants out of the stench of its own penumbras. Some legal scholars have noted that it seems as if the American Judiciary has become the public policy wing of the ACLU, as on almost every issue the Judiciary tends to align with the ACLU. It increases its own power as it does, so such a tendency is not surprising among Leftists. It's also what Jefferson said would happen. So now the Leftist focus when it comes to the nomination process tends to be personal and political instead of legal. That is an inversion of a system that was supposed to begin with the crass and the political and refine and define it into legal principles that are changed by passing laws, not some nomination process.

Alito is not going to change things very much, at any rate, so it's not exactly clear why the Left feels the need to go after him personally on pretty much everything. I wasn't around for the nomination process of Ruth Ginsberg, yet I suspect that the Right didn't try to portray her as a person who wants to kill babies and so on. Yet the Left's line of questioning is almost always personal, the argument is that Alito is against the "little guy" and doesn't mind if the "little guy" dies in a mine and so on, poor little fellow. It's always some victimization propaganda, as the Left can't just take a position and let that be that based on some concept, fact, logic or legal principle. No, instead the Leftist mind cannot seem to think conceptually and instead has to attempt to sit in judgment of other people's hearts, feelings, intents and motivations.

[Here is a good example of the Leftist mind, that's about the fourth or fifth time I've written back that intents and motivations are irrelevant when it comes to historical facts and the like. Yet note how it seems that feelings are all that the Leftist mind can work in. If it is an extremely Leftist mind then once its attempts at emotional conditioning and the projections of its own feelings are taken away it often has nothing left to say....and certainly nothing Right.]

On a more serious note...

...wow, Joe Biden sure is a blowhard. I happened to hear some of the Alito hearings on the radio and he just kept going on and on. At the end, all he seemed to be saying was that pretty much everyone is discriminating and one of his own discriminations in the past was not liking some people at Princeton.

There was only one interesting point and that is the fact that we still have the right to dislike someone else. It's surprising that anything is left for people to make their own discriminations about given the tendencies of effeminates and the smothering mothers of our maternalistic Judiciary, those who will just pull words out of their own penumbras in order to increase their power enough to make our discriminations for us. Even if judges are conservative or libertarian enough to limit their own power and focus on our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association there are still pompous blowhards like Biden, who often seem to make laws based on their own personal "discrimination" just for the sake of making laws with their names attached to them.

All in all, it's amazing that the people can still make some discriminations, associations and separations for ourselves. Although...flatulent people may eventually organize with fat people in order to combat the hatred and discrimination directed against such minorities and so doing away with some of the last of the discriminations still left to the people, as people.

[Related posts: Benjamin Franklin, vegetarianism and flatulence]

Another comic to movie, Ghost Rider

Plot Outline: Based on the Marvel character, stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze gives up his soul to become a hellblazing vigilante, to fight against power hungry Blackheart, the son of the devil himself.

Ghost Rider (2007)





"Being cursed by the Devil makin' me cry, man..."





Ghost Rider on women:


[Related posts: Comics and Movies]

Beam weapons almost ready for battle...almost, well...sort of, if they get some funding as the result of media stories like this one.

They are labeled "directed-energy weapons," and they may well signal a revolution in military hardware — perhaps more so than the atomic bomb. [<--They run on a new form of energy called Hype!]
[...]
Beason said he has a blue-sky idea of his own, which he tags "the voice from heaven." By tuning the resonance of a laser onto Earth’s ionosphere, you can create audible frequencies. Like some boom box in the sky, the laser-produced voice could bellow from above down to the target below: "Put down your weapons."

(MSNBC, today)

I suppose it might work if they used it to say, "Allah here, enough with jihad already...and down with those burkas too."

Possible weaponry, note the titillating aspect of "Active Denial Technology":




Some of the article is probably science (science!) hype to get funding, drivel on the level of stem cell reporting and so on, although it's an interesting prospect.

It's also interesting how we come to the point of deniability and questionability as far as anything supernatural. Is it the voice of Allah or the Americans with their laser weapon? Is it the seemingly demonic angel of light that Mohammad supposedly saw or a CIA trick based on their studies of UFO cults? If there were some supposed prophets around calling down fire from the sky you would think that everyone would listen to their message. Yet they would not if they simply would not will to, instead they would say it was the aliens, a government conspiracy, etc. I'm reminded of the mythohistorian types (Who seem to tend towards New Age kookiness.) with their "fire of the gods" notions and their arguments, like the ark of the covenant being a relic taken out of Egypt that was based on mysterious ancient technologies and the like that hold explanatory power to explain pretty much everything. There are ancient anomalies like holes drilled through granite and so on to be sure but they get a bit kooky about things too. Their argument with respect to the ark goes along the lines that the ark was an electrical device, which is why it was carried on poles and so when someone touched it they died. And so on, it seems that there is always an argument that people can fit to observations that seems to fit. In the end, everyone is in some sense choosing to make it fit by an act of will. You'd think that if the empirical evidence keeps going against someone then they'd change their mind yet that is not necessarily so for anyone, not even scientists.

At least one thing is certain, there is a right answer, so most of us are wrong.

Newspapers

I never read the papers. Why does anyone? They’re nearly all lies, and one has to wade thru’ such reams of verbiage and “write up” to find out even what they’re saying.

--C.S. Lewis (The Quotable Lewis :458)

For example, take the The New York Times on one of the issues that they are bound to go insane in the membrane on. (You know the issues that the average journalist or progressive gets all craaaazy on.)

Like AIDS,

If the New York Times and other mass media had given the first thousand AIDS victims even a fraction of the coverage given to the seven victims of poisoned Tylenol capsules, millons of Americans would have learned of the new disease much earlier, and tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans who are now dead might be living. Instead, the Times published fifty-four stories on the Tylenol affair (several on the front page) and a total of three stories on AIDS— none of which appeared on the front page, and none of which used the words 'sex' or 'homosexual.'

(Homosexuality and American Public Life,
Edited by Chrisopher Wolfe
(Dallas: Spence Publishing Company) 1999, :122)

What happened to the Naderian focus on saftey first? It seems that the New York Times will publish whatever their Gays© say they should publish.

So on the other hand,

In 1998 the New York Times published a lengthy series of articles about African AIDS, titled “Dead Zones.” The articles were mostly veiled sermons against “social attitudes and gender relations,”“stigma,” “silence,” “superstition,” and “conservative religious beliefs.” Oddly, the series failed toreport statistics from the one sub-Saharan country with respectable data on births and deaths—South Africa. All the published figures came from Geneva—the same old unreliable WHO estimates of HIV/AIDS. [E.g., "Hey this person is coughing and we don't have the facilities to clinically check what they have, so they must have HIV."]
[...]
“All across Africa,” the New York Times had reported (but without giving details), “the coffin business boomed.” But when Malan investigated, he found that entrepreneurs who were trying to sell cheap cardboard caskets had gone out of business. “People weren’t interested,” he was told. “They wanted coffins made of real wood.”

So I called the real wood firms, three industrialists who manufactured coffins on an assembly line for the national market. “It’s quiet,” said Kurt Lammerding of GNG Pine Products. His competitors concurred—business was dead, so to speak.
“It’s a fact,” said Mr. A. B. Schwegman of B&A Coffins. “If you go on what you read in the papers, we should be overwhelmed, but there’s nothing. So what’s going on? You tell me.”

Malan didn’t know, so he investigated Johannesburg’s derelict downtown, where coffin makers can be found. It was the same story. One likely place turned out to be “locked up and deserted. Inside I saw unsold coffins stacked ceiling high, and a forlorn CLOSED sign hung on a wire.”
Hysteria about African AIDS reached a peak in 2000, when Vice President Al Gore took the issue to the UN Security Council. World Bank president James Wolfensohn said the epidemic was “more effective than war in destabilizing countries.”
[...]
An earlier New York Times series on African AIDS, published in 1990, emphasized the need for condom distribution—as though that had been overlooked. The paper reported that USAID “has given seven billion condoms to developing countries.” Since then, of course, billions more have been shipped.
Africans could be forgiven for thinking that condoms are America’s principal export. They may even be under the impression that our educated classes think that there are too many sub-Saharan Africans. Let’s hope they don’t see the recent newspaper column by CBS commentator Andy Rooney, who blurted out what may indeed be on the minds of some of our more hard-hearted compatriots.
Rooney said he would like to see more American aid spent on “reducing the number of Africans we’re trying to feed. Their biggest problem is not a shortage of food, but a proliferation of people. . . . The birthrate in Africa is a disgrace and birth control information and condoms should be handed out before the food.”
Someone should tell Mr. Rooney about the U.S.-funded AIDS program. It is, above all, a condom distribution program.

(The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science
By Tom Bethell :114-117)

Saftey first!

Or is it? To read the Old Press or watch the evening news that takes its cues from them one would think that Africans are generally having sex as if they are some religious hedonists that value pleasure over life, while Gays© continue being modern apostles of love and tolerance working to give the poor Africans some condoms.

Don't say bomb on a cellphone...or type it on your blog.

Bomb, bomb-a-bomb, bomb!

I guess I shouldn't go further than that. E.g.

...a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, 'Oh, Danny really bombed last night,' just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.

(60 Minutes Transcript, 2000)

Given this type of spying when 9-11 hadn't even happened, civil liberties groups moved to impeach Clinton.

Not.

Specified Complexity

An ironic example:

We can be very sure there really is a single concestor of all surviving life forms on this planet. The evidence is that all that have ever been examined share (exactly in most cases, almost exactly in the rest) the same genetic code; and the genetic code is too detailed, in arbitrary aspects of its complexity, to have been invented twice. Although not every species has been examined, we already have enough coverage to be pretty certain that no surprises — alas — await us.

(The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
By Richard Dawkins :7) (Emphasis added)

I just began reading this book. It seems that it will be amusing. For if all that man is or ever will be is an organism, then Darwinism is its excrement. And excrement always gives us a sense of our own humors, another benefit is that it can keep us humble as long as we do not totally forget our distinctions and how humans are not just humus, even if we are brought forth from it. If we seek a lack of judgment about such things and call that humility we will degenerate into crud even as we live, a crudity which is no laughing matter. [Edit: Yes, I know that wasn't written that well. I just don't feel like fixing it.] Yet for now I can laugh at what is shaping up to be an amusing book (written by a Leftist mind, it would seem) and perhaps plow some of its humus up with an iron plow. As it is ironic, given that this little fellow will eventually have to deny "arbitrary aspects of complexity" as evidence that we can be "very sure" of, to be sure! It seems the only reason he does not engage in trying to deny that calling a spade a spade is typically correct in this case is because here he feels it suits the urge to merge that is shaping everything he writes.

Yet does the evidence actually support Darwinism? No. E.g., given that the sorts of narratives that those with the urge to merge write are hardly specified in any absolute way there is absolutely no way that his narratives would not have been fit to more than one puddle as the ultimate "concestors" of all Life, if that had been the evidence found to date. And in that explanatory accomodation he would probably have also explained, "So there is no way that Life could be imprinted with a common design by a Creator who says that they are One because see, there is no unifying principle common to all Life. Instead the evidence is just how we expected to find things based on Darwinism, yet again! Amazing the overwhelming evidence, isn't it? Besides, why would one designer make things that appear to lack a unifying principle? Well it is settled then, Mommy Nature selected everything. Nature is selecting what I'm saying right now too, which is why it's just like gravity or somethin'. Say, how can you deny gravity?!"
____

A side note, doing away with the philosophical failings of these little fellows who refuse to heed the advice of Plato and Christ with respect to all that is essential when coming on out of the womb of Mommy Nature for a moment, it's interesting to think about what the best design to communicate a message within some parameters derived from the nature of things and persons would be. E.g., perhaps instead of the genetic code being written so that even those who do not have the eyes to see find themselves seeing some of the nature of things by design, I would write on the moon, "Made by Yawheh." This and many other solutions seem simple and workable, even if it is in God's nature to divide himself from sin so that a great divide between God and sinful man comes about, it would seem simple to get the message through. For people would just look at the moon and remember, would they not? Only they would not because they will not. It's the little matter of the will. So instead they would begin to say that Yaweh was an alien as well as this, that and the other things. Once the memory was no longer fresh enough and the message on the moon had degraded, its language forgotten and the one who supposedly wrote it all invisible and just like Santa, people could also begin to say that the message was an illusion created by meteors striking the moon. Given the science of things, all it would take was enough meteors and enough time. They had accumulated more knowledge by that time than people had before them, so the witness of all those who were closer in time to witnessing the events must be all wrong, mere superstitions. They might go on to say, "Besides, anyone looking back to try to find knowledge wants to take us back to the earlier times that they look back at. So if you like toilet paper and other miracles of science you'd best stop looking back for knowledge about such things!"