History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
This discussion of Shah, Gurdjieff, and Bennett has reached critical mass, and the point where I should point out something. Most readers will find this incomprehensible, SK maybe not.
Sillykitty, keep an eye on Hucklebird. He is prancing through Wilber land oblivious to his danger, this Cohen fellow who was out to get me, using Hucklebird as a medium.
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Pharyngula on Behe on evo-devo.
Mr. Myers, I never trust a thing you say, about your own subject.
Behe’s argument may have problems, but the style of Darwinists attacking him immediately casts suspicion on their presentations. When it comes to evo-devo, and the clear deceptions of the experts themselves, dressed up in hate and smear campaigns, the amateur is left to figure it out for himself. That’s tough.
Clearly, however, starting with Sean Carroll the evo-devo data started getting put through the propaganda routine, making us doubly suspicious.
Again, I admit, Behe doesn’t help by bringing in the design argument
The Present Threat of the Religious Right to Our Modern Freedoms
Edward Tabash
Reposted from: Dawkins site
and
Edward Tabash gave this speech to members of the Center For Inquiry during a recent cruise in the Galapagos. He will also be at the AAI 2007 Conference in DC, as advertised on the home page. Edward Tabash’s website is at www.tabash.com .
Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker
Chuck Kopec, cdk007
Reposted from:Dawkins site
Atheist polemic refuses to engage authentic religion
What he and the other writers of the new atheist manifestos, such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, attack is not religion, but the ossified forms of religious orthodoxy that have been misused for centuries to instill fear and obedience. The charlatans and demagogues who today dominate Christian radio and television stations, the James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons, continue a long and sordid tradition of claiming divine sanction to justify personal enrichment and empowerment. Piety, like blind patriotism, is an effective cover for the corrupt and the venal.
There is a case, of course, to be made against institutional religion. But there are great theologians from Paul Tillich to Ernst Kasemann to William Stringfellow who skewer institutional religion, indeed brand it as a dangerous form of idolatry. They write with a deftness, nuance and erudition that shame the tired cliches that pad out this book.
Secularist Europe Silences Pro-Lifers and Creationists
From the desk of Paul Belien on Sat, 2007-06-23 18:53
According to a recent article by J. Scott Turner….
The problem would not be solved by creating a tedious intellectual duoculture of Darwinism and ID.
Turner starts by observing that the real threat to education today is not ID itself, but the attitude of scientists towards ID: “Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I don’t see ID as a threat to biology, public education or the ideals of the republic. To the contrary, what worries me more is the way that many of my colleagues have responded to the challenge.” He describes the “modern academy” as “a tedious intellectual monoculture where conformity and not contention is the norm.” Turner explains that the “[r]eflexive hostility to ID is largely cut from that cloth: some ID critics are not so much worried about a hurtful climate as they are about a climate in which people are free to disagree with them.”
This synthetic life
Sunday, 24 June 2007
By Roger Kalla
Comment from Jayen defending Osho. Read the rest of this entry »
Comment from Jayen on Shah/Gurdjieff meeting.
Thanks for pursuing this question. Read the rest of this entry »
A comment from Hitchens and ?Rajneesh provides an interesting letter from Osho International to Hitchens and his publisher.
Klaus Steeg said,
June 23, 2007 at 12:50 pm · Edit
OSHO International received the following letter – which was sent to the Publisher and to Christopher Hitchens in response to the Osho chapter in his book. In his correspondence to us Mr. Allanach gave us permission to circulate his response.
This discussion of gurus is not some woolly abstraction.
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Someone expressed puzzlement at the material here on guru threads. Actually, in the round of the current New Atheists, and the initiative to critique religion it is important to try and establish some understanding of the labyrinth of Indian/Islamic spirituality.
We are getting an overdose, and these people, as Rajneesh made clear, finally, with his fascist nonsense, aren’t in the business of helping anyone. They wish to destroy modern civilization. In a way, that’s the best defense, assuming one survives: these people cannot grasp history, so much for enlightenment.
A new understanding is needed. And is already latent in secularism.
It can’t be accomplished by straight secular humanism. On the one we have to face the reality of what is going on with the guru shambles, on the other we are confronted with the oversimplifications of current science, especially the Darwinian absurdities on religion.
The question has been a crisis for a century plus, from Blavatsky through Gurdjieff to Rajnessh, et al.
Secular thought needs a new way to deal with the disintergrating mess of Indian/Islamic religion without getting involved in the round of destructive pseudo-understanding so common in humanist circles.
In a word, leadership is needed, but none is to be found.
That’s why a figure like Rajneesh is frustrating. He miscast the whole thing in a way that is indigestible to most. It could have been otherwise. He left the gross mis-impression that gurus, who might be crypto-fascists, are the spiritual authorities of last resort in some kind of hierarchy. His self-destruction shows that to be false. But as one commenter pointed out tonight, Rajneesh’s legacy is growing.
We need a new way to fight back, something that won’t work without some understanding of just how sneaky these gurus are, and how they operate. Noone will quite explain it in public.
We have to recast the foundations of a new understanding, but it will be a long fight against these guru entrepreneurs, who have, alarmingly, become corrupt.
Look at Wilber/Cohen and the attempt to annex the idea of evolution, via the ‘spiritual evolution’ thematic. There are actually three sets of lunatics here, the gurus, the ID gang, and the Darwinists.
Maybe they will all cancel out.
The training in Darwinian paradigm faith and scientific reductionism is insidious and creates in the high IQ set a narrowness that is in part behind the intractability of the current debate. Note what happens: science fans get excited about science as teenagers, and then follow a specialized track through college to their PhD’s, at the end of which they are almost ignorant of all other subjects.
Look at the current discussion of religion. I am a critic of religion myself, but these people, Dennett, Dawkins, et al., have left me flabbergasted by their cardboard takes on religion. I have to beat a hasty retreat, lest I be associated with that.
Most couldn’t even make a significant data statement of any kind about Indian religion, what to say of its meaning, and they are prepared to attack ‘religion’ in the abstract on the basis of cliche atheism, from Bertrand Russell, and others like him (actually, Russell is almost refeshing by comparison).
Comment on I. Shah:
Actually, I forget where I read that, sorry. I am almost sure I read it somewhere. However, it was very early on, evidently, check the dates. How old was Idries Shah in the thirties, forties?
Maybe I have invoked an impossibility???
But there was a clear response to Gurdieff in Shah’s work (consider the phoney pseudonymous work, under the name Rafael Lefort).
Hitchens and Rajneesh, actually I can’t fault Hitchens for disillusion. It was obvious to a media person what Rajneesh was up to. And Rajneesh attracted a tremendous number of people from all walks of life, deceiving them with his tricky style.
The more’s the pity for the way he blew the whole thing away. He created an almost insuperable argument against gurus, although, as you point out, his ashram is as big as ever. He’s a filthy asshole, who degraded the reputation of the Buddhas.
And turning innocent young minds into crypt0-fascists with his non-dual idiocy is the last inning for gurus.
The Rajneesh ashram: I don’t doubt Rajneesh is a big money maker now, 200,000 people a year! I am not surprised. How could you go wrong with his brand of tantra.
I will say, however, that Rajneesh tended to ‘vibe’ with India as much as the West: the nonsense about his Rolls Royce may have been for Indian consumpition. A guru, for the first time, flaunted wealth, instead of preaching poverty. A socialist sympathizer (not uncommon in the Nehru era) turns to market promotion. Rajneesh is one of the people behind the change of mentality leading to the current Indian economic phenomenon. Remember, the ancient traditions were tremendously antagonistic toward wealth.
Still, the earlier ashram was nauseating enought, at this point it must be closed to tantric phone sex capitalism.
http://darwiniana.com/2007/06/19/rajneesh-and-enlightenment-reincarnation/#comment-77622 : a Youtube connection to Rajneesh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v3OeszyaxE .
http://darwiniana.com/2007/05/23/cults-cults-and-other-cults/#comment-77623
This one is about Idries Shah, I will answer separately.
This discussion of Rajneesh and enlightenment could be missing the point, as one tries to understand the strangeness of his later life and its descent into chaos.
But Rajneesh himself gave out a clue in one of his little known later books, out of print, lost and forgotten,
Beyond Enlightenment (Paperback)
by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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James comments on my statements about the New Atheists vs the atheist religions (e.g. Jainism and Buddhism).
This is a problem for Sam Harris, and the inconsistency in the general denunciation of religion even as Christianity and Islam are the real targets puts a severe limit on his argument.
Secular humanists have a poor strategy for taking on religious tradition. It might help is something were known and digested from the already classic discourses of German classical philosophy on these issues. That philosophical period seems stilted to us now, and failed to maintain its once great influence after the rise of positivism.
The point is that between Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, among others, a deeper critique of religion emerged, one that didn’t tilt at windmills, i.e. ‘religion’ in the abstract. Kant insisted on the historical limits and failures of monotheistic religion, but proceeded to explore ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’. That classic is a bit gothic for secularist fanatics at this point, but the point is that religious belief was to be replaced with ‘critical philosophy’. There’s is hardly another option.
Why get into a fracas arguing over theism vs atheism after the Kantian Dialectic explores the essence of the debate in the ‘fourth antinomy’?
Armstrong on myth.
Armstrong’s puzzling contradictions include promoting religion as a disbeliever: one must suspect that at the pinnacle of her confusion she advocates religious belief as the benefit of myths. Please. This is a disservice to the already confused. This kind of hybrid pseud0-analysis briefly appeals to a culture in transition, with religion in an ambiguous state.
That is because they fail to understand the nature and role of myth. English scholar Karen Armstrong provides an enlightening insight in her recent book, A Short History of Myth. She builds a picture of myth as “stories that enable us to place our lives in a larger setting, that reveal an underlying pattern, and give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value”. Myths, then, are not about opting out of the world, but living more intensely within it.
MALAYSIA: CONFERENCE ON ISLAM-WEST DIVIDE TO OPEN
And who should show up but our ‘religious expert’ Armstrong, the jet-set fraud, and Axial Age coverup specialist. Bridge the information gap with propaganda.
Hey, guys, this gal is an atheist hypocrite.
Kuala Lumpur, 14 June (AKI) – A two-day international conference on ‘Islam and the West: Bridging the Gap’, is opening in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on Friday. The government body organising the event, the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations (IDFR), said in a statement that “the conference aims to determine the areas and causes of misunderstanding of Islam by the West, to bridge the information gap that divides Muslims and the West and to find a common language understood by both sides of the divide.”
Among participants will be Karen Armstrong, an expert on inter-religious relations, who will discuss ‘The Internal and External Challenges of the Muslim World’.
Last year, the IDFR organised another conference entitled, ‘Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?’.
James has the link for the Berlinski expose of the Dawkins computer simulation:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1509
and a comment on Behe reviews
Richard Rorty, 1931-2007
by Telos Press ·
Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8.
How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday
Granville Sewell
Mathematics Dept.
University of Texas El Paso
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Islamic version of creationism takes root in Turkey
By Nicholas Birch
Three in four reject Darwin’s theory
Darwinism is starting to generate a real crisis in the globalization of secularism. It is obvious to many, but not Darwinists, that Darwinian thinking is a conflict-generating ideology, with unmarked spinoffs like Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ nonsense.
“Darwinism is the only philosophy which values conflict,” the text explains. “We’re fighting a cultural war on scientific lines,” Mr. Yavas said.
Science review of Behe.
Why is everyone untrustworthy on the subject of evolution? You have to, MUST, do ALL the work yourself, no kidding, or these ID/Darwinist brazen liars will deceive you.
Look at the Behe debate. How many millions of wasted webpages litter the internet on the subject of the mousetrap.
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From Rad-Green
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2098272,00.html>
In Iraq’s four-year looting frenzy, the allies have become the vandals
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