Posted in Evolution at 8:49 pm by nemo
Dennett fails to see the social contribution that religions have made to civilization. Critiquing them, by the way, is no scientific monopoly. Spiritual sages have criticized religions for millennia. They do little else. And yet Dennett actually manages to bungle the whole job of debriefing ‘religion’.
And what does Darwinism offer these poor religionists Dennett so despises? Suvival of the fittest, class warfare, a ’scientific’ ideology to justify extermination, claptrap about ‘favored races’ from Grubby Whigs like Darwin….
The world’s religions, whatever their flaws, were, at least in the beginning, protection for the little guy.
These Darwin thugs want to take that away, apparently… Big Science thugs, et al…
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Posted in New Age at 8:54 pm by nemo
In the last post I cited a letter to Enlightenment magazine (wie.org) about the ’second Axial Age’, and in the process of reading up on it found a note on this guy, ‘Da Free John’, one of the more notorious of the New Age gurus. Many will not have heard of him. After the blowout of his ashram in the eighties, he escaped to a Pacific island with his harem.
Now he has returned to California and is back in business apparently.
I have an idea: why doesn’t Dennett try and study this guy and see why he is well named the Vampire. (Hint read, Rudranandra’s old book Spiritual Cannibalism).
This Da free John is a man to beware of, a truly nauseating case. I tangled with a number of these people in the seventies and was totally disillusioned by the degree of dishonestly, explotation, crypto-fascist anti-modernism, and everything else.
Gurus, of course, are completely written off in secular circles, but people rarely understand them. Just as well secular types stay away from such people.
My heart goes out to the innocent people who get hurt by vultures like this one. (I have no connection(s) whatever with such groups, but I am sensitive to these people from a distance, the worst are certain sufis, and some of the Tibetans)
This Da Free John actually stooped to making his disciples go sell plasma to make donations to his ashram. Since he’s got plenty of cash stashed you have to wonder at the need. Maybe the vampire symbolism, which he seems to enjoy. Get the point. You can suffer real harm from these people. They could care less about your spiritual path. They want your ‘grubstake’.
Take him at his word! Stay the hell away from such people. Don’t ever get involved in their orbit on the basis of consent. They have no authority whatsoever you are required to submit to. Don’t agree to anything. That’s what makes you vulnerable.
Gurus are supposed to help people on their spiritual path. Don’t believe it. Too many, as here, will do everything they can to keep you mesmerized and undeveloped.
In any case, note from below the dangerous lunacy he is proposing now: an eternal contract of some kind. Spit in his face, and walk out the door. This is not India, where a guru’s word is law, and a disciple’s dissent is a sentence of death.
Spit in his face and walk out the door.
There are a thousand sutras you can use to find your own way. Old Buddhism amply warned of the need to maintain you independence, although nowadays with all these Tibetans around the guru racket is rife among Buddhists too. Be ye lamps unto yourselves.
You MUST do the game alone. Like the Lord of the Rings they will find you, trying to do that, so be ready.
With the Da Free Johns out for blood, you have no choice in any case.
Religions prey on children, gurus on yound adults. You have to survive that early green period and find your way through to something real.
Dan Dennett, get to work on it.
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Posted in New Age, The Axial Age, Evolution at 8:12 pm by nemo
I have a previous post on Karen Armstrong’s notion of a ‘Second Axial Age’, a completely confused idea, see here. This was an interview at Enlightenment magazine. A letter to the editor in the next issue shows total confusion on the subject. Sit down and study the eonic effect, and the eonic model, and the fallacy of Armstrong’s thinking will become clear. My problem with this is the postmodern strategy of the gurus trying to promote these New Age anti-modern religious movements. That, in an off itself, would not be so problematical–apart from mere lunacy–if it weren’t for the concealed anti-democratic nature of the basic initiatives.
Armstrong has completely confused the Axial Age as a kind of era of spiritual movements, when its character is far more general. The birth of modern secularism occurs in the Axial Age. The rise of modernity is the only meaningful successor to the phenomenon seen in antiquity.
This situation is a pity because we are being deprived of correct knowledge of one of the critical datasets both for history and the question of evolution.
The letter to the editor below is full of so many inaccuracies and fallacies I can hardly deal with all of them: a separate post analyzing it would be helpful.
Beware of the list of sages and gurus the letter writer gives. If they have some wisdom, fine. But if they are going to be used as evidence of a second Axial Age, to the exclusion of all secularists, scientists, democrats, and the rest, then we are in for another New Age distortion.
Note one thing: People who call themselves ‘enlightened’ can’t afford to make such a simple set of mistakes. They should be able to claim they understand history. But clearly they don’t!!!
More on this some other time.
Since Armstrong’s book on this is about to come out, I will pursue this at length.
Getting the Axial Age straight is not so easy, as this sad letter makes clear.
These gurus are setting up such people with a New Age historicism to justify their authority.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 7:19 pm by nemo
Rightwing website tries to tar socialists with Darwinism: Darwinism and the Religion of Scientific Materialism.
The tactic won’t work. The enthusiasm of early socialists for Darwinism is real enough, but if ever there was a theory tailored to classical liberalism it was Darwin’s. In fact, that is the fallacy of Darwin’s theory: its resemblance to economic theory, in a false analogy.
The ID gambit has obscured the conservative ideology lurking in Darwinism as the political polarization of right/left on Darwinism takes hold.
Critique of Evolutionary Economy
You won’t get away with….
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02.26.06
Posted in Evolution at 10:26 pm by nemo
Judge Jones (that ‘notorious so and so, etc…) has spoken out on his decision: Philly.com.
To rule that ID is not science is one thing. But to imply therefore that Darwinian natural selection is science, then, is a subtle trap into which the Judge fell. For a biologist to go that route is one thing, he could be confused, opinionated, or lying.
But a judge….
Not a single real bit of the evidence or literature critiquing natural selection appeared at the trial. That was the fault of the ID people, really, who have coopted the old Darwin debate.
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Posted in Evolution at 10:05 pm by nemo
The use of the term ‘evolution’ is, of course, very general, and I was amused to come across this revealing snippet, here
p2p news view / p2pnet: The network providers say that a vibrant market will evolve if we just let them prioritize their networks.
But evolution requires feedback. The problem with the AT&T (say) model is that it controls an essential feedback mechanism of the network, and makes real feedback impossible.
We project the mechanism backward into deep time, leaving us free to believe without reality checks in the directionless nature of evolution by natural selection.
But the need for ‘feedback’ arises spontaneously in a discussion in a real situation using the term ‘evolution’.
The eonic effect, of course, shows how we can miss this ‘feedback’ aspect in the complexities of scale. But we can track it down historically.
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Posted in Evolution at 7:16 pm by nemo
Fwd’d: Science For The People
February 21, 2006
Palm Trees and Lake Fish Dispel Doubts About a Theory of Evolution
By CARL ZIMMER
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02.24.06
Posted in Evolution at 10:56 pm by nemo
At the beginning of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell he notes the title echoes Meera Nanda’s Breaking the Spell of Dharma. Below is a revealing essay on Sam Harris’ The End of Faith by the same author. Harris must be baffled by the flak he has taken for the ‘mystical’ overtones in his book. I would have thought such an effort to communicate with the secular/atheist crowd would have gone over without a hitch, but as Nanda’s remarks below reveal, you have to pass a fairly strong sniff test to past muster with the howler monkey set.
That’s the disastrous aspect of Dennett-style fundamentalism. It simply becomes tone-deaf on such questions. The Dennett’s should be held responsible for the immense misunderstandings they are creating in a new generation, witness the pathetic posturing of Nanda.
Let me say right out that I have my own critique of Eastern spiritualities, but confronting this type of unreasonable nitpicking instead of dealing with real issues is somehow sad, especially in someone from that tradition. Nanda’s reactions are against her own tradition, and sometimes that is healthy, and deal with the current reactionary Hindu nationalists, a group that might make anyone get restive with the Hindu tradition.
But the fact remains, why would the Dennett’s and their followers seriously use positivistic thinking to attack Advaita Vedanta? That’s beyond belief, ignorance at the hillbilly level, and I am no fan as such of Vedanta, and, by the way, put a webpage on Samkhya at my website, but I wouldn’t ever try to simply dismiss based on the kind of secularism you get at Skeptic’s mag or the Darwinian view of things at Talk.Origins or the NCSE.
It makes me sad, because modernity will fail at that level, as the subversive postmodern gurus chuckle under their breath, what to say of the Al Qaeda.
I merely indicate this example as direct proof of what I said in an earlier post on Dennett’s book that it is a series of abstractions to front the destruction by indirection of all the things he hates fanatically but won’t list in public.
But we can see that Hinduism is one of those on the hit list: Dennett is obviously fully aware of the issues here therefore.
You won’t beat such people with the intellectual routines now current in the Darwin debate.
Forget it, Mr. Dennett. The question of a critique of Hinduism, the New Age movement, and Eastern spiritual lore simply won’t happen right from the perspective of Darwinism.
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