10.31.06
Posted in Philosophy, you've got mail at 10:33 pm by nemo
Hucklebird sends me a post from the Hegel@yahoogroups.com.
In all the debates over theism and evolution, with Dawkins promoting his challenges to the God Delusion, it is forgotten that shallow concepts of divinity, mostly parroted words based on the semantic confusions of the term ‘god’, invite and endless dialectic of skepticism and re-affirmation, while behind this stands a far larger tradition that predates monotheism as we know it. Read the rest of this entry »
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10.29.06
Posted in History at 7:42 pm by nemo
The Path of the Prophet.
Note: beside these two books we now also have Spencer’s The Truth about Muhammed, from the rightist Islamophe section, but with some uncomfortable exposes.
Arriving at the correct picture of Muhammed is getting increasingly difficult, and the subtle fear factor involved makes the question nearly impossible, at least for the moment. One problem is that we don’t have the right framework for real understanding.
But the fact remains that the efforts of such as Armstrong to whitewash the whole history don’t really carry conviction. We are not talking about Sunday school picnics here. Critical examination of the life of Muhammed and the history of Islam appear under the shadow of such works as the anonymous Ibn Warraq’s works on Islamic history. That makes a book such as this one by Armstrong unbelievable even if it were right.
Read the rest of this entry »
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10.25.06
Posted in Science & Religion at 9:44 pm by nemo
The Church of the Non-Believers: the title of this essay from Wired is significant. If you reverse the dialectic on ‘god’ you end up in another church, become fanatic, beging to try and force the issue on non-believers.
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.
Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith.
The sheer stupidity of this is mind-boggling. It seems to me that the movement beyond religion was far more intelligent in the generations before Darwin gave atheists a false foundation for their beliefs.
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Posted in Evolution at 5:41 pm by nemo
Historical Derangements
But it may be that the Bush miscalculation was more chronological than geographical. In his sternly compelling book, The Shia Revival, Vali Nasr suggests that the most momentous consequence of the Iraq adventure is the ignition of the Muslim civil war. Not the one between moderate and extreme Islam, which is already over, but the one between the Sunni and the Shia, which has been marinating for a millennium. We can say, with the facetiousness of despair, that it’s just as well to get this out of the way; and let us hope it is merely a Thirty Years’ War, and not a Hundred Years’ War. After that, we can look forward to a Reformation, followed, in due course, by an Enlightenment. Democracy may then come to the Middle East, with Iraq, in the words of one staffer (a month into the invasion), as the region’s “cherished modelâ€.
One problem here is that, if we study the eonic effect, we can see that this is a description of the ‘modern transition’, but this event will not repeat itself.
That’s part of the problem, the expectation that the modern transition will repeat itself globally. But that transition is fixed in time. We must create/recreate such a future, which is not so simple.
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Posted in Evolution at 5:25 pm by nemo
Shermer reviews recent evolution books. The current debate is too brain-dead to resolve these issues.
Shermer is stubbornly confused about Darwin’s theory. As long as Darwinists are stuck here everyone else must aggressively defend other views, and that is not an automatic endorsement of ‘religion’.
The issue is more than that of divinity. We can see the world in a far deeper fashion without getting caught up in the paradoxes of theology. Darwinians have ended up with the opposition they deserve: fundamentalists.
The evolution-creationism skirmishes that have periodically flared up throughout the past century embody the long historical tension between science and religion. It may surprise you, then, to learn that Charles Darwin matriculated at Cambridge University in theology, and throughout his five-year voyage around the world he was a creationist who regularly attended church services. It was only upon his return home that his loss of faith came about. Nagging doubts about the nature and existence of the deity chipped away at his faith from his studies of the natural world, particularly the cruel nature of many predator-prey relationships. “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”
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Posted in Evolution, Philosophy at 4:46 pm by nemo
From Real Physics
What do we mean by the Enlightenment? German Classical Philosophy offers the attempt to reconstruct teleology in the wake of Newton, Kant’s efforts being the most profound. But as Kant indicates, there is an antinomy involved in the issues of teleology, and in any case we can’t regress to an Aristotelian position.
essay on teleology
Purpose and Order in Nature
According to conventional wisdom, the dawn of modern science dispelled the gloom of moth-bitten superstition, and banished purposes from nature. But such Enlightenment propaganda leaves out the tradition the modern world inherited from its predecessors.
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10.24.06
Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age at 6:38 pm by nemo
Armstrong’s effort to find a common denominator to the Axial manifestations is really just PR, an extension of her inaccurate and deceptive portrayal(s) of Islam, as in her most recent (new) book on Muhammed. Here she is an atheist (or so she confesses online if you check Google) and yet blatantly tailors her new Muhammed book to a Moslem audience. Read the rest of this entry »
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10.13.06
Posted in Philosophy at 7:49 pm by nemo
Skeptics: I am all for skepticism, but the current brand is a new cult of crackpots.
Bad ideas are surely poison, but the sceptic movement is unable to offer us a great deal of insight as to why people actually swallow them. Instead of attempting to understand why ideas may take purchase in the public from historical, social, or material perspectives, many leading sceptics prefer to explain the take up of bad ideas as the transmission of ‘memes’. According to Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine and former parapsychologist, ‘the self is not the initiator of actions, it does not “have†consciousness, and it does not “do†the deliberating.’ Just as many of today’s social problems such as addiction, violence, and criminality are frequently blamed on genes, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet and Susan Blackmore explain the failure of rationalism and success of religion in metaphysical terms of agents competing for resources in the environment of our collective mind. This idea that the self, its autonomy, and consciousness are illusions allows sceptics to reduce humans to mindless beings which lack an understanding of their own interests and therefore need to be controlled. Such determinism, though, is exactly what creates the ideas that scepticism should want to confront. The idea that ‘units of cultural information’ have their own drives which humans are subject to, is as irrational as the idea that destiny is governed by the configuration of stars, or balances of energy within our bodies, or the visitations of aliens.
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 6:57 pm by nemo
Evolution of a delusion
by Irish Times
In his new book, prominent atheist Richard Dawkins outlines why he sees religious faith as a dangerous force and tries to explain its persistence in spite of evidence that God does not exist. Aengus Collins asks him whether there are any positive aspects to religion
Apparently according to Dawkins, there are no positive aspects. Unbelievable.
I find it extraordinary that we should get propaganda’d into such a corner by media dominant Darwin idiots to the point where we can’t look at the history of religion. Look at history: most major formations have suffered trainwreck. That doesn’t mean we have to deny their ‘positive aspects’.
That trainwreck is going to happen to science, if this silly Darwin obsession keeps going.
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10.12.06
Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 4:00 pm by nemo
Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins · Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
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Posted in Evolution at 3:45 pm by nemo
Shermer: Why Darwin Matters.
Debates over evolution range from Pennsylvania to Kansas to the University of California. Michael Shermer, a former evangelical Christian and creationist, argues that “intelligent design” theory appeals to a human predisposition to look for a designer behind life’s complexity. But in fact the theory of natural selection is supported by the scientific evidence and is the foundation on which modern biology rests. Conservatives and Christians should accept evolution because it explains family values, social harmony, human nature, and the origins of morality. Jonathan Wells, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, disagrees with Shermer.
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If your read Shermer’s book you notice how after the big build up the only evidence for natural selection offered (he never really gets around to this ) is that of the Galapagos finches. That’s not evidence.
Can we be done with the Galapagos finches. Their varieties don’t resolve the issue of evolution.
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10.08.06
Posted in New Age, Philosophy, Science & Religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 8:51 pm by nemo
My post yesterday on The Pagan Christ raised a lot of issues that are hard to deal with given the current environment of secular/religious debate. Read the rest of this entry »
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10.05.06
Posted in New Age at 7:54 pm by nemo
Borderline, in fact, not. A kind-hearted boddhisattwa type who tried hard to be shocking with mickey mouse stuff like sleeping with his students and drinking whiskey all day. However, his insidious and snide campaign against democratic thinking should be a warning of a sideline cheerleader.
The issue here is the open secret mentioned by Rajneesh, who was promptly driven from the field, of Buddhist involvement in early twentieth century fascism.
These charges have never been properly documented and are easily denied. Noone can handle such issues, and can’t figure out what is meant. It just isn’t spelled out in public.
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Posted in New Age at 7:29 pm by nemo
My post Evil Buddhas, Sufi Hyenas elicited some puzzlement: I meant what I said.
Check out a sufi front for E.J. Gold, a notable shadow figure in the sufi demimondaine. He promos himself as the successor to Gurdjieff, baloney, but the gang war for that dubious honor could go any number of ways.
I defined a ‘sufi hyena’ as someone who preys on spiritual children on the fringes of civil society. Track this fellow over time using your do-it-yourself occult first aid kit, and you will find I meant what I said and know what I am talking about.
Beware of this, and other dangerous characters on the fringes of the sufi world.
The problem is non-existent for most. The danger lies in those who enter the controlled spaces of such people with their guru pretenses and submit voluntarily to the will of someone else.
NEVER do that, don’t do it. DON’T.
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10.04.06
Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 6:54 pm by nemo
Why is it that one of the top critics of religion should be a biologist?.
That’s actually a good question. Biologists keep ranting about peer review and trusting the experts. So who is an expert in the religion field? Hard to answer! But biologists seem especially flatfooted here.
The failure to study the phenomenon of religion historically should discredit Dawkins’ glib dismissals.
Could it be that a deep understanding of biological evolution through natural selection really does lead one inexorably to atheism? If so, creationists might actually have reason to fear the inclusion of evolution in school curricula. Better not let them read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion then, because that’s one of the core messages of the book.
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Posted in Evolution at 4:19 pm by nemo
Philip Johnson. If the history of Darwinism proves anything it is that the success of an attempt on ‘evolution’ is a moment for suspicion that a hype factor is at work. We keep getting bumsteers from bestsellers, starting with Darwin.
There’s no doubt that Phil’s willingness to encourage the work of scientists and help create a network for them has allowed the movement to flourish. This book really shows just how far the intelligent design (ID) movement has progressed in a relatively short time, despite the best efforts of many Darwinists to shoot it down—because, as is becoming clearer and clearer, ID has the evidence on its side. (Emphasis added.)
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