Relativism

An old satire I re-wrote some and just used in a comment at Delawarepolitics.net:

Once upon a time two people were having a discussion and one made a judgment the other did not like.

So her friend said, “Who are you to judge?”

The first replied, “Who are you to judge that I am judging?”

“I….uh, what?”

“I figure that when I make a judgment I am probably the same type of person you are when you judge me for making judgments. If so, I suppose that is who I am to judge, just like you when you judge.”

“Huh? No, by asking who are you to judge I mean that you’re not supposed to judge because it is judgmental!”

“Who are you to judge what is judgmental?”

“You just need to stop that, right now!”

“Who are you to judge me?”

“I asked about you first, so you have to answer my question first.”

“It seems like just another questionable question. But who am I to judge? I am a sentient being, sentient beings think, which can become existential belief, which can become knowledge and then deeper knowledge when something is truly known. Knowledge is sound judgment and what people make further judgments based on. That is who I am to judge. I am not the omniscient “I AM that I AM.” of scriptures and I never claimed to be. I can still judge a few things here and there due to being conscious but who are you to judge?”

“Look, I never meant for you to actually answer that question.”

“I guess that question is just your passive agressive way of saying that you do not know the answer to something and do not want anyone else to know either. So you just drag everyone down to unthinking, unknowing moral degeneracy with questions which are questionable.”

“What?! Why, I…..you are judgmental!”

But her friend just laughed.

Show and tell?

For people who used to read this blog I'm still around. I debated some liberals on homosexuality in the military here and have begun discussing the history of Islam here. (Although it looks like someone is going to take that on a tangent.)

My new puppy...

Volition

Interesting short film here.

Socialism

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

--Frederic Bastiat

Islamic Doctrines

With due respect to Imam Kringle and Islam’s other American cheerleaders, this neither “twists up the religion to serve a political agenda” nor “hijacks” Islam. Hamas, to the contrary, accurately quoted Islamic scripture. As the scholar Andrew Bostom observes, the pronouncement by Mohammed about Muslims killing all remaining Jews on the Day of Judgment comes straight from a canonical hadith, Sahih Muslim, Book 41, No. 6985. Hadiths are collections of the prophet’s words and deeds, and the one in question flows seamlessly from the Koran itself, from verses like Sura 2:61, which condemns Jews for purportedly rejecting Allah’s signs and “slaying his Messengers.” That indictment, reiterated in Sura 3:112, is echoed in the Hamas charter’s opening passages: “They have incurred anger from their Lord, and wretchedness is laid upon them. That is because they used to disbelieve the revelations of Allah, and slew the Prophets wrongfully.” Thus, the charter warns, “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

THE BROTHERHOOD
This is why Imam Rauf and his friends get so tongue-tied when it comes to Hamas.
....
Again: no separation of the spiritual and the temporal, of Islamic and civil law. They are one. And, it turns out, the top priority of Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative is the Sharia Index Project, which is designed to plant and expand Islamic law in every country. Wonder of wonders, that just happens to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s top priority — the installation of sharia being the necessary precondition to the Islamicizing of a society. And, lo and behold, Rauf’s partners in the Sharia Index Project include Jamal Barzinji and his International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).
Why they can't condemn Hamas by Andrew McCarthy

Wanting to kill the Jews but not Americans is not moderate, it's degenerate. To the extent that good Muslims take Islam seriously they will be bad people.

That's interesting.

Someone said of this blog:

I had an argument with this person about a year ago about this blog, in the comments section. I was a little scared that someone who is obviously this well read would be so dangerously wrong.

I gave up in the end, a little shaken. This person was infinitely more sophisticated than this Michael character...

Would be interested to know what anyone thought of the fracas on the comments page. It appears that I rattled Mynym's cage a little bit, because two subsequent blogs made mention of me.

Here is the original post: Social Leftists at it again

I've noticed that people trying to tell me what my feelings are or focusing on my supposed feelings are usually saying more about themselves than anything. For instance, it would appear that I "rattled his cage a little bit," especially given that he was a "little shaken" and was still thinking about arguments I brought forth a year after he read them.

It seems like the same thing happens to biologists when their philosophy is challenged or even discussed. The reaction is not intellectual, it tends to be much more visceral. Perhaps that sort of reaction is actually apposite given the brute stupidity of what biologists typically believe about intelligence, origins and so on. Thus it seems that the sweaty little hands of the censor are quick to emerge.

There is one thing in the comments worth repeating:
As a person who makes fun to have some fun myself, my perspective and "interpretation" might even be that this is the most important lesson to be drawn from the imagery so often invoked about Galileo. Don't censor those who make fun.

On another note, why do people almost always have to shift away from the pursuit of the truth to talk about me instead? I'll be dead soon enough but the truth will remain.

Bear Grylls on Faith

“Christianity is not about religion,” Grylls says. “It’s about faith, about being held, about being forgiven. It’s about finding joy and finding home. We all want that, but nobody wants religion. Why do people turn away from faith? They’re not, they’re turning away from religion most of the time. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t want to be forgiven or held or find peace or joy in their life. We try loads of other stuff—we think booze or foxy women or whatever will fill it—but it doesn’t fill the hole.”

“It’s about being strengthened. It’s about having a backbone run through you from the Person who made you. It’s about being able to climb the biggest mountains in the world with the Person who made them.” cf. (World Mag)

I found this interesting because I've watched a lot of episodes of Man vs. Wild.

The Road to Serfdom

It is not to the Germany of Hitler, the Germany of the present war, that England and the United States bear yet any resemblance. But students of the currents of ideas can hardly fail to see that there is more than a superficial similarity between the trend of thought in Germany during and after the last war and the present current of ideas in democracies. .... There is the same contempt for nineteenth-century liberalism, the same spurious "realism" and even cynicism... Although one does not like to be reminded, it is not so many years since the socialist policy of that country was generally held up by progressives as an example to be immitated...
The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Germany it was largely people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in democratic countries, who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for every thing they detest. .... Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. This is a truth which most people were unwilling to see even when the similarities of many of the repellent features of the internal regimes in communist Russia and National Socialist Germany were widely recognized. As a result, many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of naziism, and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
...the socialism of which we speak is not a party matter, and the questions which we are discussing have little to do with the questions at dispute between political parties. It does not affect our problem that some groups may want less socialism than others; that some want socialism mainly in the interest of one group and others in that of another. The important point is that, if we take the people whose views influence developments, they are now in the democracies in some measure all socialists. If it is no longer fashionable to emphasize that "we are all socialists now," this is so merely because the fact is too obvious.
(Introduction to The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek)

Comment on progress in knowledge/science

You’re invoking a false mythology of progress. They did not consider intelligent design and then reject it in modern times. Instead they rejected ID a century ago, about the same time that the professionalization of science took place. So no matter what new evidence modern science uncovers many will support evolutionary creation myths that have been fused to their professional identity. Ever since the professionalization of science many0 have even openly admitted that scientific consensus and their professional identity come first and the actual empirical evidence second.* Only the ignorant and naive believe that scientists are always interested in empirical evidence per se.

*E.g.

Mainstream science reacted predictably to any suggestion that the prints were made by humans. Geologist Albert G. Ingalls, writing in 1940 in Scientific American, said: “If man, or even his ape ancestor, or even that ape ancestor’s early mammalian ancestor, existed as far back as in the Carboniferous Period in any shape, then the whole science of geology is so completely wrong that all the geologists will resign their jobs and take up truck driving. Hence, for the present at least, science rejects the attractive explanation that man made these mysterious prints in the mud of the Carboniferous with his feet.”
(The Hidden History of the Human Race by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson :151)

Note on materialism

I just want to file this so I can look it up, from comments at UD:

The key word here is information. The key issue is how does a philosophy (naturalism) explain the existence of information within the confines of its explanatory resources? Since the very definition of naturalism includes the idea that the universe is causally closed (that is all causes ultimately resolve in physical laws – NOT mind) and therefore that the laws of physics ONLY have explanatory power, how then do they account for information?

They cannot. Information requires language. All languages are comprised of symbols and rules for the arrangement of those symbols. It is impossible to have information apart from a language. It is equally impossible for the laws of physics to explain either symbols or the rules that govern the use of those symbols. Therefore, naturalism can never, ever, explain information, and thus life. When darwinism succumbs to the next naturalist explanation of life (evo-devo or whatever) the new explanation will face the same insurmountable challenge. How to explain information in terms of physics and time? The game is over but we seem to still be playing. Why is that? I think it must be rebellion against Reason. Tom