05.31.06
Posted in General at 7:58 pm by nemo
Tyranny of the Christian Right? The problem is that the Darwin domination of the ’secular’ viewpoint has made their position indefensible over the long run.
“The top three ‘gainers’ in America’s vast religious marketplace appear to be Evangelical Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational Christians and those who profess no religion,” the survey found. (The percentage of other religious minorities remained small, totaling less than 4 percent of the population).
This is a recipe for polarization. As Christian nationalism becomes more militant, secularists and religious minorities will mobilize in opposition, ratcheting up the hostility. Thus we’re likely to see a shrinking middle ground, with both camps increasingly viewing each other across a chasm of mutual incomprehension and contempt.
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Posted in The Axial Age at 11:11 pm by nemo
Armstrong’s interview at Salon is a short compendium of the fallacies and wishy-washy religious sausage in her book on the Axial Age. There are two issues Armstrong can’t keep separate: making a serious effort to understand the Axial Age, and Armstrong’s existential crisis, which seems to have drifted into a combination of Dalai Lama style PR and vote-getting ‘atheism’ and various alarmingly shallow delusions, i.e. that the Judaic Jehovah and nirvana somehow come out as the same doctrine: it goes on and on. It might help to stop trying to be a convert to Axial Age superdoctrine and simply try to understand the historical dynamics of this period, which is spectacular. Having filtered out the synchronous aspect of this period, the great clue however is lost and we are left with a version of the Axial mystery that doesn’t make any sense. Meanwhile we don’t have to falsify the record to make a different age of religion compatible with our prejudices/delusions. To discuss religion and then claim the issue of the afterlife is a red herring isn’t exactly a fair portrait of Axial religions. Tibetan Buddhism didn’t exactly make the afterlife a side issue. They were obsessed with the question.
The inability of modern science to deal with such issues dooms it as a substitute for religion.
I am sorry to say it but her book is total junk, and its success is due to Armstrong’s chameleon tactics that play to well to contradictory publics. My own analysis of the Axial Age, because it doesn’t compromise, is virtually banned from the public media. The powers that be must be glad Armstrong made the Axial Age question so trivial that it threatens noone, and will amount to nothing.
So what is the future of religion? We thought we were done with them, but Darwinism, by a strange miracle, has gone a long way to forcing their revival.
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Posted in The Axial Age, Evolution at 7:51 pm by nemo
Armstrong in a Salon interview evades a indirect question on evolution.
But certainly there are a lot of people — both scientists and religious people — who speculate about whether there’s some cosmic order. For the evolutionary biologists, the question is whether there’s some natural progression to evolution.
Armstrong waffles here, unwilling to take on the controversial Darwin question. In the process an opportunity has been lost to do something useful at a time when Darwinism has completely confused everyone.
Who knows?
She has failed to see that the Axial Age is prima facie evidence of some kind of natural progression, if not teleology. By treating the Axial period in isolation, and smearing out the synchronous aspect, one disguises the evolutionary directionality implicit in the Axial interval.
But her other book this year, on the history of myth, provokes the question: the Axial Age is a stage in just such a progression, and the study of the eonic makes clear. The essence of this progression isn’t religion, but the total evolution of civilization. And yet, the term ‘evolution’ is the right one.
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05.27.06
Posted in Evolution at 8:42 pm by nemo
Amazon is listing Ruse’s new book:
Darwinism and its Discontents (Hardcover)
by Michael Ruse
I hope Ruse has learned something since his last book, enough to realize why Darwinism consistently generates discontents.
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Posted in Evolution at 8:21 pm by nemo
Forsaking atheism.
Since I hold no brief for either selectionist Darwinism or Intelligent Design, reports of sudden conversion strike me as peculiar episodes of metaphysical instability. Atheists reject divinity, but not the basic framework of monotheistic dualism. Simple negation induces flipflop. I am not a Spinozist either, but there are better ways to deal with the theism/atheism dialectic (such as Spinoza).
Of the many examples I know of people who left atheism and became theists because of intelligent design, I will cite only two.
Antony Flew, professor emeritus at Reading University, was a leading 20th-century intellectual and author of many books including “Atheistic Humanism.” Although as a youth Flew was a devoted Christian, during his teens he rejected Christianity because of his study of Darwinism. He concluded that evolution could fully account for the creation of all life – and that no need existed for a Creator who had been put out of work by science. Flew eventually became a leading defender of atheism for over half a century.
Flew kept reading and thinking about this topic, though, and eventually came back to the theism of his youth. His conversion was primarily because of his study of intelligent design. As he told The Associated Press, his views were now similar to the “American ‘Intelligent Design’ theorists who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe.” Michael Behe’s and William Bembski’s books were especially influential. Flew added that an argument from design, “assures us that there is a God” and that DNA research has provided us with “a new and enormously powerful argument” for design. Flew stresses that the main reason for “believing in a First Cause God is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.” He states that his whole life has been guided by the principle of Socrates, “follow the evidence where it leads” and, in this case, it led him to theism.
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05.26.06
Posted in Evolution at 6:21 pm by nemo
Film on evolution
…the film ponders, who will become this generation’s Dodos? Will extinction be the fate of those who insist religious revelation replace science, or rather of the irascible scientists unwilling to adapt in a struggle of socio-political Darwinism? In a world increasingly manipulated by simplistic slogans and talking points, scientists perhaps are, as one of them observes, “handicapped by their blind obsession with the truth.”
It seems that, on the contrary, the debate has been deadlocked since Darwin. Also, against all expectation religious arguments have persisted, always recurring. The dodo metaphor just might apply to selectionist Darwinist, although not to the idea of evolution.
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