Over at Intelldesign

I wrote a few posts on Darwinism:

The Difference Between Skeletal Remains and Living Organisms

Darwinism and Wikipedia

Intelligent Design vs. the Imagination

Debate on Entropy

A good debate is going on here.

Everyone wants me to read and write stuff.....

Sheesh, my sister just sent me this article. It's quite the intellectually toxic mix of a journalist writing about the Bible and marriage. Apparently they are passing most of their opinions off as an accurate understanding of the Bible as the expert on religion at Newsweek.

They begin by noting polygamy:

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile?

They may as well cite King David's adultery as an instance of the Bible condoning adultery. For those who do not know, according to the Bible we are still living with the fall out of Abraham's lack of faith and it may turn out to be literal nuclear fall out some day if some of the sons of Ishmael have their way.

Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists.

The Bible notes that most of them had problems for just that reason. For example it notes that Solomon had many wives and was led to paganism, the occult and "Did evil in the eyes of the Lord." as a result. It is interesting to note that if the Bible was inspired totally by the minds of men then it is likely that the mentality read in it would read just like a lot of cults read. Something along the lines of: "One of the rules is that men get to have sex with as many women as they like, preferably virgins." One would think that the fact that it doesn't read that way might cause these journalists to pause and think but then, they are journalists.

Moving on:

Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Many married couples have done just that and our culture is shaped by it. One of the main metaphors for understanding the Christ and therefore understanding Christianity is that of the bride and bridegroom. And if men do follow the biblical model and lay down their own interests, desires and even their lives for the sake of their wives it does not generate a terrible or oppressive civilization as these journalists seem to believe. Their modern notions of romantic love only arose after the biblical model came to prominence. A man and woman are naturally complementary and people often sense that this comes about by design but romantic love did not typify the pagan world. Much of what we call romantic love arose when Christian knights began to do away with pagan ways and to honor women. You would think that people would think of this given that it is still represented in the form of fairy tales and the like. Note that this form of romantic love has little to do with the "gender equity" that these journalists mention. Just think if every romance movie had a guy in the girl's role and so on, of course they do not because men and women are not the same and we should be thankful that they are not. Vive la difference!

Moving on:

...while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

It may not be explicit enough for journalists to understand but it is explicit enough to promote marriage while condemning all forms of adultery and even lust. Pedophilia, zoophilia and homophilia are all explicitly or implicitly condemned because the "two in one flesh union" which is only possible between a man and a women is also the only possible way for their union to be exemplified in the flesh of their children. Given the biblical model it is the same type of union whether or not it is ever exemplified by children.

Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world.

The fact that polygamy was often pointed to in a negative light although the practice was common shows that there is a difference between the biblical ideal and what goes on in the real world. It does not show that the biblical ideal is wrong, instead it seems to indicate that the Bible was inspired more than the interests and desires of the men who wrote it. I'm no biblical expert but here is an interesting experiment, look in the Bible and see if you can find anywhere where polygamy is mentioned favorably. Something along the lines of: "This man was a great man because he had many wives." Etc. Would it not be in the interests of those who wrote it to portray polygamy in the best light possible?

He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew.

Yes, and he also said that anyone who causes a child to stumble should have a stone put around their neck and be thrown into the sea. That's something that proponents of same-sex marriage might want to remember because their focus is invariably the "rights" and desires of adults and they do not seem to care about children. It is already known that adopted children often go through a process of wanting to know their biological parents. It is not generally known what would happen if they were generally denied representatives for their natural or biological parents and instead lived with two women or two men or two effeminate men or one manly woman and another taking the feminine role. Gender roles do not simply disappear even among homosexuals because they are rooted in basic biosocial realities.

Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce...

He never explicitly mentions necrophilia, pedophilia or zoophilia either because some things should go without saying. It's funny how everyone turns into a prude when it comes to deep sexual disorientations and their main argument would be that no argument is necessary (After all, who would even talk about such things?!! Well, philosophers would and have...) but in the instance of homosexuality they've been conditioned to do away with basic forms of common sense having to do with basic natural categories which pretty much everyone but psychotics have a knowledge of. Ironically even the psychotic serial killer or sexual pervert who denies basic natural categories admits to them while in the process of perverting them. I won't go into how that is so, it's probably not worth thinking about for most people. Unfortunately people are probably going to have to think about sexual disorientations and perversions thanks to articles like this one. The funny thing is that this article was apparently written by "experts" on religion at Newsweek.

I may reply to more of in a future post. Or I may not, I'm not sure it's worth dealing with. It seems to be structured for people who want to believe something no matter what the truth of anything actually is because they have a nice gay friend who they want to support no matter what the truth is. The truth is that the Bible condemns homosexuality explicitly and implicitly time and again, every gay activist I've debated actually understands that and yet apparently these journalists from Newsweek cannot. I wonder if they even really expect people to take this article as some sort of serious news report on a current event or if it is just their way of saying: "We're nice and tolerant so we support homosexuality and you should too."

Blogging notes

I may be posting more at Intelldesign and archiving more here while mentioning the decline of American civilization and the end of the American Empire occasionally. ;-)

This blog has always tended toward being an archive of my comments, research, etc. The Shrink offered to let me write at Intelldesign and I took him up on it. I'm not sure how much posting I'll do here or there. After all, right now I have a 300GB Raptor RAID array that I want to set up. Etc. ;-)

Archive, on the Enlightenment

…so what would you accept as true about the intellectual, artistic, and political movements of the 17th through 19th centuries…

I would accept many things as true but you tend to weave a mythology of Progress around things which are true that actually isn’t true. That’s the main issue.

For example you seem to imagine it likely that polytheism gave rise to theism which ultimately turns into deism and perhaps that turns into atheism at the end of this scenario of imaginary Progress.

That seems to be what you’re imagining here:….from ancient Greek polytheism to modern Christian theism/Enlightenment deism…

But the Darwinian tendency to project Progress onto everything by imagining things has been widely undermined by historical and anthropological evidence, so the views of someone like Edward Tylor carry about the same weight as the hypothetical goo typical to Darwinism in general.

It’s far more likely that polytheism is a corruption or falling away from monotheism than that theism arose out of polytheism. The most ancient traditional knowledge of many cultures is monotheistic.* In fact if one were to draw a line of progression based on the evidence it would more likely go from theism to polytheism to secularism and nihilism.

*E.g. 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.

You said of the Enlightenment: Our commitment to scientific methods (doctrines being, quite frankly, irrelevant) and to the Constitution are both aspects of the Enlightenment legacy.

But the development of science as we know it had little to do with the Enlightenment and the mythology that tends to surround it. Take the work of Newton as an example to compare the imagery and mythology typical to “enlightenment” with the historical reality of what Newton himself actually wrote:

One of the first actions of those who proclaimed the ‘Enlightenment’ was the ‘deification of Newton.’ Voltaire set the example by calling him the greatest man who ever lived. Thus began an unexcelled outpouring of worshipful prose and extravagant poetry. David Hume wrote that Newton was ‘the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.’ As Gay noted, ‘the adjectives ‘divine’ and ‘immortal’ became practically compulsory.’ [...] In 1802 the French philosophe Claude-Henri de Sain-Simon (1760-1825) founded a Godless religion to be led by scientist-priests and called it the Religion of Newton (his pupil Auguste Comte renamed it ’sociology’).
However, as the ‘Enlightenment’ became more outspokenly atheistic and more determined to establish the incompatibility of science and religion, a pressing matter arose: what was to be done about Newton’s religion? Trouble was that Newton’s religious views were not a matter of hearsay or repute. He had, after all, in 1713 added a concluding section to the second editions of his monumental Principia, the ‘General Scholium’ (or proposition), which was devoted entirely to his ideas about God. In it, Newton undertook to demonstrate the existence of God, concluding that:
‘…the true God is a living, intelligent, powerful Being….’
‘…he governs all things, and knows all things that are done or can be done.’
‘….He endures forever, and is everywhere present.’
‘…As a blind man has no ideas of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.’
Worse yet, Newton had written four letters during 1692-1693 explaining his theology to Richard Bentley. In the ‘Bentley Letters’ Newton ridiculed the idea that the world could be explained in impersonal, mechanical terms. Above all, having discovered the elegant lawfulness of things, Newton believed that he had, once and for all, demonstrated the certainty that behind all existence there is an intelligent, aware, omnipotent God. Any other assumption is ‘inconsistent with my system.’
(For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch Hunts and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark :167-168)

Monotheism is associated with science as we know it as well as Progress traditionally understood as Providence but it leads to a different attitude about knowledge/scientia. This caused Newton to comment:

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. cf. (Newton’s Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World by David Berlinksi :167)

If you are arguing that the Constitution and the founding of the American Republic is an aspect of the Enlightenment legacy then what explains the vast difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution? I’m not sure what may be imagined about history but here is some of what the Founders said about the French Revolution:

And what was their Phylosophy? Atheism; pure unadulterated Atheism . . . . The Univer[s]e was Matter only and eternal; Spirit was a Word Without a meaning; Liberty was a Word Without a Meaning. There was no Liberty in the Universe; Liberty was a Word void of Sense. Every thought Word Passion Sentiment Feeling, all Motion and Action was necessary. All Beings and Attributes were of eternal Necessity. Conscience, Morality, were all nothing but Fate. (Letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (Mar. 2, 1816), in The Adams-Jefferson Letters)

Original comment

Democracy and the Decline of Civilization

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage:
3. from courage to liberty:
4. from liberty to abundance
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy:
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage.
--Alexander Tyler, 1787

Earlier scholars noted how Republics tend to decline:

Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root…and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite…For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader…someone bold and unscrupulous…who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man…the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He…emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power. –Cicero (De Republica, i, 2.)

Money is language, a statement of value and cost and so on. Civilization is rooted in language, when it declines then its monetary systems follow necessarily. Fiscal conservatives try to separate moral language from economic forms of language and so on but a separation between fiscal and social conservativism typically undermines both because it all has to do with language spoken by the same people stating their values in different ways.

Financial credit is no different than credibility in general, a nation of decadent liars cannot create or support a sound monetary system through the application of intelligence or better policies and economic management.* There is no way to manipulate an economic system in order to overcome the corruption of individuals and the decline of a civilization in general. So on we go, put more copper in the coin!

*Poor Obama, naive and ignorant people seem to view him as some sort of savior in this respect.