Later...

I'm going windsurfing. I finished the post below this one. Maybe those who find creationism so craaazy can try to criticize it.

Young Earth Creationists

I just finished reading another book, it refers to evidence with respect to this comment: "Just so I get the timeline correct. Were people believing in a sky god at the same time they were on friendly terms w/ dinosaurs?" so I may as well answer it.

But first a note on the first part, note that groups of people from all around the world have always believed in the Creator God that tends to be associated with explanations as to their most ancient of origins and the matter of Good and Evil, from beginning to end. Examples: Hananim (Korean, the Great One), Shang Ti (Chinese, the Lord of Heaven), Koro (Bantu, the Creator) Magano (Ethopian, the ultimate Creator again, as contrasted to the malevolent Sheit'an), the Great Spirit (American Indian), Deos (Greek, perhaps corrupted to Zeus and drawn down into a corrupted anthropromorphic focus, later reformed back by the philosophers under the new name Theos), and so on and on.

As to that last, Aristotle used logic to trace things back to the unmoved Mover, while Xenophanes commented:

Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all the things which among men are shameful and blameworthy - theft and adultery and mutual deception. . . [But] there is one God, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought ... he sees as a whole, he thinks as a whole, he hears as a whole ... Always he remains in the same state, changing not at all ... But far from toil he governs everything with his mind.

Xenophanes text fragments (Colophon: c. 570 - c. 478)

As to the second part of the comment, ancient man considered dragons a great threat and so there were probably fewer and fewer places where it could be said: "Here be dragons." No one would deny that man hunted many species of large animals to death. If we are not blinded by the false standards that the charaltans so typical to science and the keeping of knowledge these days make use of to protect their demonstrably false philosophies, then we can open our eyes to textual evidence. This is not to say that there is no physical evidence that can be found or that texts can be taken to stand alone, yet note that organisms easily die and recede back into the ground with nary a trace of them to be found within a short time.

Text is a better and more lasting way of saving information than most of the processes that happen by supposed happenstance upon the earth.

E.g., textual evidence:

There are, of course, the famous descriptions of two such monsters from the Old Testament, Behemoth and Leviathan
Job 40:15—41:34), [The curious thing is that the Great Serpents are used metaphorically to represent a nonphysical Serpent/Evil, e.g. Isaiah 21:7 vs. Psalm 104:26] Behemoth being a giant vegetarian that lived on the fens, and Leviathan a somewhat more terrifying armour-plated amphibian...
The Egyptians knew Behemoth by the name p’ih.mw, which is the same name, of course. Leviathan was similarly known as Lotan to the men of Ugarit. Babylonian and Sumerian literature has preserved details of similar creatures, as has the written and unwritten folklore of peoples around the world. But perhaps the most remarkable descriptions of living dinosaurs are those that the Saxon and Celtic peoples of Europe have passed down to us.
The early Britons, from whom the modern Welsh are descended, provide us with our earliest surviving European accounts of reptilian monsters, one of whom killed and devoured king Morvidus (Morydd) in ca 336 BC. We are told in the account translated for us by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the monster ‘gulped down the body of Morvidus as a big fish swallows a little one.’ Geoffrey described the animal as a Belua.
Peredur, not the ancient king of that name (306-296 BC), but a much later son of Earl Efrawg, had better luck than Morvidus, actually managing to slay his monster, an addanc (pr. athanc: var. afanc), at a place called Llyn Llion in Wales. At other Welsh locations the addanc is further spoken of along with another reptilian species known as the carrog. The addanc survived until comparatively recent times at such places as Bedd-yr-Afanc near Brynberian, at Llyn-yr-Afanc above Bettws-y-Coed on the River Conwy (the killing of this monster was described in the year 1693), and Llyn Barfog. A carrog is commemorated at Carrog near Corwen, and at Dol-y-Carrog in the Vale of Conwy.
Moreover, ‘dinosaurs’, in the form of flying reptiles, were a feature of Welsh life until surprisingly recent times. As late as the beginning of the present century, elderly folk at Penllin in Glamorgan used to tell of a colony of winged serpents that lived in the woods around Penilin Castle. As Marie Trevelyan tells us:

‘The woods around Penilin Castle, Glamorgan, had the reputation of being frequented by winged serpents, and these were the terror of old and young alike. An aged inhabitant of Penllyne, who died a few years ago, said that in his boyhood the winged serpents were described as very beautiful. They were coiled when in repose, and “looked as if they were covered with jewels of all sorts. Some of them had crests sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow”. [...] His father and uncle had killed some of them, for they were as bad as foxes for poultry. The old man attributed the extinction of the winged serpents to the fact that they were “terrors in the farmyards and coverts”.

...whilst we are in Wales, it is worth noting that at Llanbardan-y-Garrag (is Garrag a corruption of carrog?), the church contains a carving of a local giant reptile whose features include large paddle-like flippers, a long neck and a small head.
[...]
One could multiply such reports by the hundred. In England and Scotland, again until comparatively recent times, other reptilian monsters were sighted and spoken of in many places. The table at the end of this chapter lists eighty-one locations in the British Isles alone in which dinosaur activity has been reported (there are, in fact, nearly 200 such places in Britain), but perhaps the most relevant aspect of this as far as our present study is concerned is the fact that some of these sightings and subsequent encounters with living dinosaurs can be dated to the comparatively recent past. The giant reptile at Bures in Suffolk, for example, is known to us from a chronicle of 1405:

‘Close to the town of Bures, near Sudbury, there has lately appeared, to the great hurt of the countryside, a dragon, vast in body, with a crested head, teeth like a saw, and a tail extending to an enormous length. Having slaughtered the shepherd of a flock, it devoured many sheep.’

After an unsuccessful attempt by local archers to kill the beast, due to its impenetrable hide:

‘...in order to destroy him, all the country people around were summoned. But when the dragon saw that he was again to be assailed with arrows, he fled into a marsh or mere and there hid himself among the long reeds, and was no more seen.’

Later in the 15th century, according to a contemporary chronicle that still survives in Canterbury Cathedral’s library, the following incident was reported. On the afternoon of Friday, 26th September, 1449, two giant reptiles were seen fighting on the banks of the River Stour (near the village of Little Cornard) which marked the English county borders of Suffolk and Essex. One was black, and the other ‘reddish and spotted’. After an hour-long struggle that took place ‘to the admiration of many [of the locals] beholding them’, the black monster yielded and returned to its lair, the scene of the conflict being known ever since as Sharpfight Meadow.
As late as August, 1614, the following sober account was given of a strange reptile that was encountered in St Leonard’s Forest in Sussex. The sighting was near a village that was known as Dragon’s Green long before this report was published:

‘This serpent (or dragon as some call it) is reputed to be nine feete, or rather more, in length, and shaped almost in the form of an axletree of a cart: a quantitie of thickness in the middest, and somewhat smaller at both endes. The former part, which he shootes forth as a necke, is supposed to be an elle [3ft9ins or ll4cmsl long; with a white ring, as it were, of scales about it. The scales along his back seem to be blackish, and so much as is discovered under his bellie, appeareth to be red...[The dragon] rids away (as we call it) as fast as a man can run. His food [rabbits] is thought to be, for the most part, in a conie-warren, which he much frequents ... God, I hope, will (to defend the poor people in the neighbourhood) that he shall be destroyed before he grows...

This dragon was seen in various places within a circuit of three or four miles, and the pamphlet named some of the still-living witnesses who had seen him. These included John Steele, Christopher Holder and a certain ‘widow woman dwelling neare Faygate’. Another witness was ‘the carrier of Horsham, who lieth at the White Horse [inn] in Southwark’. One of the locals set his two mastiffs onto the monster, and apart from losing his dogs he was fortunate to escape alive from the encounter, for the dragon was already credited with the deaths of a man and woman at whom it had spat and who consequently had been killed by its venom. When approached unwittingly, our pamphleteer tells us, the monster was...
‘...of countenance very proud and at the sight or hearing of men or cattel will raise his neck upright and seem to listen and looke about, with great arrogancy.'[...]
Again, as late as 27th and 28th May 1669, a large reptilian animal was sighted many times, as was reported in the pamphlet: A True Relation of a Monstrous Serpent seen at Henham (Essex) on the Mount in Saffron Waldon.
In 1867 was seen, for the last time, the monster that lived in the woods around Fittleworth in Sussex. It would run up to people hissing and spitting if they happened to stumble across it unawares, although it never harmed anyone. Several such cases could be cited, but suffice it to say that too many incidents like these are reported down through the centuries and from all sorts of locations for us to say that they are all fairy-tales. For example, Scotland’s famous Loch Ness Monster is too often thought to be a recent product of the local Tourist Board’s efforts to bring in some trade, yet Loch Ness is by no means the only Scottish loch where monsters have been reported. Loch Lomond, Loch Awe, Loch Rannoch and the privately owned Loch Morar (over 1000 ft deep) also have records of monster activity in recent years. Indeed, there have been over forty sightings at Loch Morar alone since the end of the last war, and over a thousand from Loch Ness in the same period. However, as far as Loch Ness itself is concerned, few realise that monstrous reptiles, no doubt the same species, have been sighted in and around the loch since the so-called Dark Ages, the most notable instance being that which is described in Adamnan’s famous 6th century Life of St Columba.

(After the Flood: The early post-flood history of Europe traced back to Noah
by Bill Cooper :131-135)

And so on. I do not have time to go into comparisons with Darwinian narratives that are based on reasoning of this sort: "If I can imagine this historical happenstance, then that is evidence that it happened that way. Wow, I'm being overwhelmed by the evidence of my own imagination now!"

I would note that you can see the way that the door is open for metaphoric interpretation of many ancient texts because the serpent comes to be used as a symbol for evil and the like. It is metaphoric. I noted above that the Bible does the same thing. Yet because people lack the spiritual capacity to understand metaphoric truths these days they come to believe that it is all just a story with virtually no literal/physical truth to it, the fairytale narrative of slay the dragon and be the hero. I guess one could say that they are metaphorically blind.

[Related posts: Here be Dragons...here and there
Unidentified Sea Creature Found After Typhoon

Not much tonight...

I wrote a comment here.

The War Against Boys

Thanks to the psychological dynamics typical to the Left they tend to make war against everything that men tend to. If men tend to provide for and protect their families, then the Left is against wealth/provision and guns/protection. If men tend to be the moral instructor for their children, then the Left seeks to do away with any "imposition" of values. If men tend towards a military ethos and an ethic of justice, then the Left tends to be against the military and seeks to smother the ethic of justice with an ethic of caring.

In the background a sort of cosmic Oedipus complex seems to guide it all, thus they want their Mommy Nature and so on. In all these patterns the feminine is always Good and so the Yin is always victimized by the Yang. I suspect that even if women were going to college at rates of 80% and men fell to 20%, if they could choose to try out "their" offspring for a few days and then kill them or force men to pay child support depending on their choice, if they lived twenty years longer than men, etc., they'd still be victims of it all according to many feminists. They have become quite good at sniveling, have they not? Once there is nothing left to snivel about those who have made sniveling their profession will invent something for the sake of job security.

E.g.

With great fanfare, How Schools Shortchange Girls was released to uncritical, even enthusiastic, media. The promotion proved to be spectacularly successful, generating more than 1,400 news reports and a flurry of TV discussions of the “tragedy” that had struck the nation’s girls.
Susan Chira’s 1992 article for The New York Times was typical of media coverage throughout the country. The headline read “Bias Against Girls Is Found Rife in Schools, with Lasting Damage.” The piece could have been written by the AAUW’s publicity department. Indeed, the entire Times article was later reproduced by the AAUW and sent out as part of its fund-raising package. Chira had not interviewed a single critic. [For good reason, once again progressive junk science is fed to a willing Old Press.]
[...]
How do boys fit into the “tragedy” of America’s “shortchanged” girls? Inevitably, boys are resented, being seen both as the unfairly privileged gender and as obstacles on the path to gender justice for girls. There is an understandable dialectic: the more girls are portrayed as diminished, the more boys are regarded as needing to be taken down a notch and reduced in importance. This perspective on boys and girls is promoted in schools of education, and many a teacher now feels that girls need and deserve special indemnifying consideration. “It is really clear that boys are no. 1 in this society and in most of the world,” says Dr. Patricia O’Reilly, professor of education and director of the Gender Equity Center at the University of Cincinnati.
It may be “clear,” but it isn’t true. If we disregard the girl advocates and look objectively at the relative condition of boys and girls in this country, we find that it is boys, not girls, who are languishing academically. Data from the U.S. Department of Education and from several recent university studies show that far from being shy and demoralized, today’s girls outshine boys. Girls get better grades. They have higher educational aspirations. They follow a more rigorous academic program and participate more in the prestigious Advanced Placement (AP) program. This demanding program gives top students the opportunity of taking college-level courses in high school. In 1984, an equal proportion of males and females participated. But according to the United States Department of Education, “Between 1984 and 1996, the number of females who took the examinations rose at a faster rate. . . In 1996, 144 females compared to 117 males per 1000 12th graders took AP examinations” (see Table 1).
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, slightly more female than male students enroll in high-level math and science courses (see Table 2).
The representation of American girls as apprehensive and academically diminished is not true to the facts. Girls, allegedly so timorous and lacking in confidence, now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and even in debating clubs. Only in sports are the boys still ahead, and women’s groups are targeting the sports gap with a vengeance.
At the very time the AAUW was advertising its discovery that girls were subordinates in the schools, the Department of Education published the results of a massive survey showing just the opposite (see Figure l).
Girls read more books. They outperform males on tests of artistic and musical ability. More girls than boys study abroad. More join the Peace Corps. Conversely, more boys than girls are suspended from school. More are held back and more drop out. Boys are three times as likely as girls to be enrolled in special education programs and four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

(The War Against Boys
by Christina Hoff Sommers :21-26)

The way that progressives tend towards feeling that the feminine is always victimized has much more to do with their own phobias and psychological dynamics than the facts. At any rate, if you have a boy it may be a good idea to keep him out of State schools where feminists and the progressive/effeminate types have their smothering influence.

Given the general neurosis of the Left one shouldn't be surprised at its impact when it comes to boys.

Unfortunately we'll all pay for it. I was thinking this last night while reading a debate on pornography that came about among some guys. I would quote it directly but the forum it happened on is gone now. Summary: "It's just a harmless hobby." "They've taken everything else away from us, the more degrading to women the better." (Only it wasn't spelled that well or stated that well. They tend to write at a fourth grade level, don't you know.)

Metaphorically speaking, the Harlot awakens the Beast that eats her.

A rather amazing interview...

An Arabic woman who is a secular humanist challenges Islam, she packs a lot of knowledge in some comparative and plain evidential arguments. (Some of which I also make. She is not entirely consistent when she shifts from arguing that the issue is not a clash of civilizations but then it turns out to sound exactly that way. But it seems to me that total consistency is asking a lot. Her reference to "dhimitude" in the middle is the Islamic teaching of the civil subjugation of other religions under Islamic law.)

I wonder if she is still alive, often strongest dissenters are not allowed to live under the "religion of peace."

It is interesting to think about how the average UofD student is conditioned to react to criticism of Islam. Their conditioning is based on a rather banal and ignorant template that Leftists tend to use. For instance, contrast the politically correct emotional conditioning typical to the American Left (e.g., the posts below this one, thanks to my local Leftist) with positions taken based on history, plain empirical facts, knowledge and principles. It takes more time to know about what you're talking about than to simply run with the Herd, so many just go with conditioning and buzzwords.

The Leftist mind so often seems to be intellectually degenerate these days, blindly feeling its way along based on its own emotions as represented in buzzwords. I wonder, is that woman "Islamophobic"? It seems to me that any fear she might have of Islamic clerics is quite rational. Yet by her actions she is obviously not very fearful.

When it comes to propagandists you're not even supposed to think about what their own words actually mean, though. (A phobia is an irrational fear given that not all fear is irrational, nor should all feelings of fear be defined as neurotic or psychotic.) It is supposed to be enough that they have painted a negative verbal image of some type which conditions the "correct" emotional response. That is how the politically correct is sometimes set against what is empirically, logically and morally correct.

Yeah, it's a code brown today.

Even though evangelical Christians claim they don’t have the attitudes of the crusaders,

a major poll carried out last summer by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press, found that a strong plurality of 50 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that Islam "is more likely than others to encourage violence among its believers", while only about a third of mainline Protestants and Catholics [read “liberals” according to the American Taliban] accepted that view.

Common Dreams

Imagine if Muslims held that Christianity “is more likely than other [religions] to encourage violence among its nations."

...it’s those evangelicals that seem to have the biggest issue with Islamophobia...

(Link)
_________

Like I said, he's easily taken in by the Gay© propaganda points and its methods and modes. Note the original idea behind defining all disagreement as phobias, for although other terms "...might be more accurate, '-phobia' works better as rhetoric because it...suggests, in quasi-clinical terms, that anti-gay feelings stem exclusively from the bigot's own unhealthy psychological hangups and insecurities." I.e. when you engage in proto-Nazi propaganda methods (note the move towards medicalization) the more that you mix in personal attacks for manipulation and emotional conditioning, the better.

It is not something that is based on accuracy, facts, logic or evidence. Note some of its possible contradictions, I'm the "American Taliban" and the Leftist invokes that for his propagandistic fear-mongering....yet it is phobic to fear Islam.

At any rate, there are millions of Muslims who just want to live well, eat, have some sex, provide for their families, and die well. But even there it seems that the majority hates the Jews and many who have any political power whatsoever still carry a copy of the Protocals of the Elders of Zion. I suppose it would be "phobic" to go into actual evidence and why it is that it is radical Muslims terrorizing Jews as well as Russians, Hindus, Americans and on and on when the simple fact is that Christians, even radical Christians, have no such similar international terrorist movement (nor possible legitimization from their religious texts for one.).

Anyway remember now, don't be hatin'...or fearin'!

Sometimes the point of emotional conditioning is to transfer to you the propagandist's own feeelings through his projection of them. It seems that if you throw them back on him instead of beginning to accept what he tells you about your own feelings and so on then they may just grow and wind around his own head tighter and tighter. There's nothing much to be done about that.

Satire is fun though...

[Related posts: On code browns]

[Update: Right and wrong go out the window when it comes to emotionally based propaganda methods but: Imagine if Muslims held the view that Buddhism or Hinduism "is more likely...to encourage violence among its believers." Imagining it? Okay, good. If Muslims did hold that view then they would be wrong because there is no comparable international terrorist movement among Buddhists as there is among Muslims. On the other hand, if Buddhists held the view that Islam encourages more violence among its believers than other religions then they would be correct as a matter of historical facts, current events around the world, etc. But the propagandist does not care about what is actually correct or incorrect, he cares about conditioning your feelings in positive or negative ways based on his politics and the like. Thus the focus on feelings like fear, hatred, etc.]