03.29.09
Posted in atheism at 7:06 pm by nemo
Comment on atheism….
If Tibetan Buddhists are that bad, imagine what we are like in the American Buddhist chaos! Too bad, marked down for extermination by the atheist fanatics.
My point was the narrowness of the Feuerbachian/Marxist atheism (one of the unspoken sources of the current New Atheism, next to Darwinism, etc,…)
I am actually severely critical of Tibetan Buddhism, but I am wary of the issue now, since everyone is ganging up on them, the Chinese set to destroy them.
James said,
March 29, 2009 at 3:23 pm ·
My feelings here are a bit mixed. Tibetan culture is certainly interesting and I deplore the actions of the Chinese, but the Vajrayana is problematic in terms of being representative of Buddhism in its genuine forms or giving us any insight into an ancient form of “atheism” (my intention is to speak in terms of history and not from the perspective of conservative dogmatism). Even though TB is presented in the West as being the only form of Buddhism, it is such a late entrant into Buddhist history that this perception is rather misguided. It is not my intention to be impolite, but TB shows all of the signs of being a product of the chaotification and egregious mysticism that characterized the medieval period (it seems to be some eclectic mixture of Upanishadism, indigenous Tibetan shamanism, Nath tantra, and Buddhism).
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Posted in neuroscience at 6:55 pm by nemo
This Is Your Brain on Religion A neuroscientist argues that God can change your brain.
Still another stupid book on neuroscience, god and religion.
And in this case we see an example of the damage being done by scientists, and not only scientists.
Harvesting meditation for its health benefits is a total misunderstanding of what meditation is.
One has to be on the move here, reinvent these traditional practices in terms of their essential meaning, change terminology, and move on.
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Posted in Kant, Philosophy, Science, The Eonic Effect at 3:19 pm by nemo
Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism
One of the mysteries of current science culture is the way Karl Popper is taken as the methodological ‘take me to your leader’ guru.
His views, while of the greatest interest, do not square with the average sense in which science is taken. In fact, Popper appears rather uncomfortably in the series of critics of scientific methodologies, with Feyerbend and Lakatos at the start and Fuller a generation later.
Popper is famous for his critique of ‘historicism’, a term with a complex history, and this is really a critique of Marx. Now, everyone applauds this critique, but then fails to realize that Popper is essentially saying that a ‘science of history’ is highly problematical, and the next kid on the block in trouble is ‘evolution’.
In fact, Popper is ‘notorious’ for his initial swipe at Darwinism as unfalsifiable, a position he is said to have retracted, as his bio is airbrushed here.
In any case, Popper’s critique is one starting point for the eonic model, and the resolution in terms of a perspective on the antinomies of Kant is the right answer to the ‘historical inevitability’ argument against scientific determinism misapplied to social subjects, and we must suspect to biological subjects.
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Posted in atheism at 2:56 pm by nemo
Comment on Hyping The New Atheism
This comment shows the reason I am wary of the New Atheism. It seems unfair: a whole class of atheists is unwelcome in that movement of budding fanatics. This post even prefer the extermination of non-conformist atheists.
The Tibetan lamas and their politics are not really relevant to the issue of Buddhist ‘atheism’ (so-called).
We see that the ‘new atheism’ is really a label for a lot more than atheism as such: scientism, Darwinism, reductionism, and a fanatic hatred, as with Nietzsche, of even the slightest signs of a value-oriented universe to guarantee that atheism.
It is important to not forget that cultic fanatics are the most dangerous to those of the same persuasion.
So those traditional ‘atheists’, taking the term loosely, are at risk of the first extermination. Take the warning and change the labels, ditching the term ‘atheism’, which has very little meaning.
And remember the first law of stupid religious movements: they are run by nice guys when they are out of power. When they come into power the nice guys are pushed aside as a new breed takes power.
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Posted in atheism at 2:49 pm by nemo
I was perhaps unfair to Hanif Kureishi here, but this article raises the obvious issue of Nietzsche, among the New Atheists: http://darwiniana.com/2009/03/29/new-atheists-and-other-nietzschean-idiots/
What exactly is influence of Nietzsche here? Up to a point, the connection would seem straightforward, or even desirable.
But I think that Dawkins has led his troops into uncharted waters where the Nietzschean influence is going to go rancid and destroy his movement.
I used to be a non-theist sort of ‘sort of’ atheist, but then I realized that I was a subtle promoter of Nietzsche, against my will, so I moved on.
Nietzsche is completely obsessed by the nihilist issue, thence his atheism.
The result is an attack on Christianity that even a critic of Christianity would find excessive, monomaniacal, and quite unhistorical.
Then the issue of the ‘genealogy of morals’ arises. The problem here is that Nietzsche bungled the job, perhaps due to his Darwinian influences. His depiction of the emergence of morals is far worse than anything in the religious vein.
More to be said here. But that’s the catch in the New Atheism: it starts to front for a strange Nietzschean fanaticism.
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Posted in atheism at 2:38 pm by nemo
Religious people aren’t necessarily stupid…and atheists aren’t necessarily smart
P.Z.Myers rightly takes on Richard Lynn here:
“Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ,” Lynn told the Times Higher Education magazine. “Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God.”
It must be said, however, that many atheists in the ‘New Atheist’ movement, plus Dawkins fans, tend to imply this, if only by the detection of ‘smirks’ during debate.
So making the issue explicit shows how wrong it is. Clearly there is a correlation, not very significant, between sociological/educational/institutional factors and atheist believes. But just at this point we have the obvious influence, and success, of the Darwin Propaganda machine in academic and other circles.
So Lynn’s statement seems to mean that those subject to Darwin propaganda are more intelligent!!!
This is the sad irony of the current Darwin debate: the meritocracy is being dumbed down by Darwinism, and the resulting baton is passed to those ‘unintelligent’ followers of religion who must carry one side of the debate.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:27 pm by nemo
Darwinists Trick Themselves in Texas
From Evolution News:
The New York Times got the preview story wrong, and the Washington Post editorial writer probably was too rushed to question the charges of “creationism” coming from the National Center for Science Education, the Darwin-only lobby. So this week’s important decisions by the Texas Board of Education (TBOE) on how to teach evolution were predicated in the media by the big question of whether teachers should provide both “strengths and weaknesses” of Darwin’s theory. Those words might sound benign, readers were told, but they really are “code words” (take the press’ word for it) for creationism and religion.
To the media left, any questioning of Darwin is reserved for denizens of Dogpatch.
So, what did the TBOE do? Well, it turns out that they are fairly adroit politicians. They did remove language providing for “strengths and weaknesses” and then added new language–quite a lot of it–providing that students will learn, for example, to “analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations…including examining all sides of scientific evidence… so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.” Perfect! A policy distinction without a difference! In fact, the new standards are just fine, an improvement, in fact. Now teachers can tell the kids about the scientific evidence in a variety of fields that seems to contradict the Darwinian account as well as the supposed evidence in support.
Once again the NCSE was too-smart-by-half. It ran blogs making fun of religion, while organizing public speakers who gave fulsome testimony to their Christian faith and how compatible it is with “evolution” (meaning Darwinian evolution). To the purists like Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers it probably makes them look like toadies.
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Posted in atheism at 2:21 pm by nemo
‘Most religious leaders are fools’
by BBC Interview with Hanif Kureishi
Reposted from Dawkins site
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7895604.stm
The author and playwright Hanif Kureishi was born in London in 1954. He is the author of The Buddha of Suburbia, Intimacy and Something to Tell You. His first play, Soaking the Heat, was staged in 1976, and My Beautiful Laundrette , for which he wrote the screenplay, was released in 1985.
He was appointed CBE in 2007, for services to literature and drama. Here he briefly tells BBC News his thoughts about religion.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 2:06 pm by nemo
Rage Against the Art Gene
Darwin revolutionized our understanding of mankind’s origins. Now scientists think they can apply his theories to the source of our creativity without it sounding like a lot of monkey business.
Someone needs to tell the folks at Newsweek that Darwin’s theory of natural selection doesn’t work. Of course, this is needed at the Times also, and repeated input has failed to budge the idiots with big shot journo credentials there.
The relationship of art to evolution is of great interest, but the reduction of the question to Darwinian fundamentalism is a misunderstanding squared that vitiates the whole point of the aesthetic dimension.
And that is the danger of Darwinism: it becomes a reigning paradigm and that causes the elimination of all other forms of explanation. And that leads to people trying to derive everything from Darwin’s theory. The resulting impoverishment of discourse starts to go unnoticed.
Here is a passage from the article: note the completely speculative character here. Scientists are hard pressed to even get the toolmaking sequence straight, let alone aesthetic issues. And there is very little, in fact almost none, evidence for artistic production until after the period of the so-called ‘great explosion’ in the period after 50,000 years ago. Intimations perhaps in the era of ‘archaic homo sapiens’.
There is ZERO evidence artistic behavior arose through natural selection/sexual selection.
These are ‘Just So’ stories in their classic form. And people will believe them as more and more things get put through the Darwin sausage machine.
Dutton sees evolution generating an art instinct in two ways. First, creative capacities would have helped our ancestors to survive in the hostile conditions of the Pleistocene, the epoch beginning 1.8 million years ago, during which Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. An ability to invent and absorb stories, for instance, would have helped early humans work out “what if” scenarios without risking their lives, pass along survival tips and build capacities for understanding other people around the campfire. The best storytellers and best listeners would have had slightly greater odds of survival, giving future generations a higher percentage of good storytellers and listeners, and so on.
Second, on those long, dull savanna nights after the day’s hunting and/or gathering was done, a big vocabulary and a creative streak would have improved a man’s chances of wooing a lover (and thereby passing on his genes to a child)—just as an amusing woman would have been more likely to entice the guy to stay (thereby boosting the child’s odds of survival). According to this view, which Dutton derives from the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, evolution turns the brain into “a gaudy, overpowered Pleistocene home-entertainment system” for winning and keeping lovers.
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Posted in Evolution at 2:00 pm by nemo
Texas science education debate over – but the win is a loss
The final vote was cast today in Texas as to the fate of the “strengths and weaknesses” language that was proposed to be put back into science education standards. That idea was abandoned. However, this is not a time to celebrate.
Though that particular language was dismissed, what was voted in instead is equally disturbing. By a vote of 13-2, teachers will now be required “to encourage students to scrutinize ‘all sides’ of scientific theories,” according to one report.
It is not clear why Darwin fanatics are so afraid of these amendments, unless their motives are strict propaganda control. Creationist thinking may be a problem, but so is Darwinian.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:50 pm by nemo
Does Prebiotic Material Exist In Outer Space?
ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2009) — Both a Spanish and a French astrophysicist have identified a band in the infrared range that serves to track the presence of organic material rich in oxygen and nitrogen in the interstellar dust grains. Should any telescope detect this band, the presence in space of aminoacids and other substances, which are the precursors to life, could be confirmed.
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Posted in Evolution, global warming at 1:48 pm by nemo
Climate debate daily:
We are now in the midst of a human-induced mass extinction – the so-called “Holocene event”. There is a sense among researchers that it will be very bad indeed …
Dead reckoning
Calculating the costs of an ongoing mass extinction
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Posted in General at 1:40 pm by nemo
Published on Sunday, March 29, 2009 by International Herald Tribune
Propaganda.com
by Evgeny Morozov
This year?s report on ?enemies of the Internet? prepared by Reporters Without Borders, the international press advocacy group, paints a very gloomy picture for the freedom of expression on the Web. It finds that many governments have stepped up their attacks on the Internet, harassing bloggers and making it harder to express dissenting opinions online.
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Posted in General at 1:36 pm by nemo
Published on Saturday, March 28, 2009 by the Guardian/UK
Spanish Judge Accuses Six Top Bush Officials of Torture
Legal moves may force Obama’s government into starting a new inquiry into abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib
by Julian Borger and Dale Fuchs
MADRID – Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed.
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Posted in General at 1:33 pm by nemo
Published on Sunday, March 29, 2009 by the Toronto Star/Canada
Earth Hour 2.0 a Success
City smashes last year’s record low power usage as lights dim across the GTA and as far away as Beijing
by Daniel Dale
And the environmentalists said let there be darkness. And – for an hour, at least – there was darkness: in downtown office towers and suburban homes, in stores big-box and mom-and-pop, at gatherings long-planned and impromptu.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:30 pm by nemo
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/191393
Obama’s Nobel Headache
Paul Krugman has emerged as Obama’s toughest liberal critic. He’s deeply
skeptical of the bank bailout and pessimistic about the economy. Why the
establishment worries he may be right.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:23 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/world/asia/26tribal.html?scp=1&sq=mazzetti%20+schmitt&st=cse
New York Times March 26, 2009
Afghan Strikes by Taliban Get Pakistan Help, U.S. Aides Say
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:21 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/blog/2009/03/official-unemployment-numbers-grim.html
Dollars and Sense March 26, 2009
Official Unemployment Numbers Grim
by Dollars and Sense
Real World Economics
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:19 pm by nemo
RG mail
Globe and Mail March 28, 2009
Obama now owns Afghan war and will be judged by it
It could imperil Mr. Obama’s presidency, as Korea undermined Harry Truman’s second term, Vietnam destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s administration and Iraq made George W. Bush one of America’s most unpopular presidents.
John Ibbitson
Washington — A bad war destroys its president. Just ask the ghost of LBJ.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:17 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/science/29grene.html
March 29, 2009
Marjorie Grene, a Leading Philosopher of Biology, Is Dead at 98
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
With an uncompromising, volatile brilliance, Marjorie Grene helped shape a modern philosophical approach to biology, opening a new field that strives to interpret the deepest meanings of the scientific study of life, including the meaning of humanness.
A philosopher of biology who once spent time as a farmer’s wife writing scholarly works before doing chores, Dr. Grene was one of the first philosophers to raise questions about the synthetic theory of evolution, which combines Darwin’s theory of evolution, Mendel’s understanding of genetic inheritance and more recent discoveries by molecular biologists.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:15 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/weekinreview/29revkin.html
March 29, 2009
Among Climate Scientists, a Dispute Over ‘Tipping Points’
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The language was apocalyptic. Last month, a leading climate scientist warned that Earth’s rising temperatures were poised to set off irreversible disasters if steps were not taken quickly to stop global warming.
“The climate is nearing tipping points,” the NASA climate scientist James E. Hansen wrote in The Observer newspaper of London. “If we do not change course, we’ll hand our children a situation that is out of their control.”
The resulting calamities, Dr. Hansen and other like-minded scientists have warned, could be widespread and overwhelming: the loss of untold species as ocean reefs and forests are disrupted; the transformation of the Amazon into parched savanna; a dangerous rise in sea levels resulting from the melting of the mile-high ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland; and the thawing of the Arctic tundra, which would release torrents of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere.
But the idea that the planet is nearing tipping points — thresholds at which change suddenly becomes unstoppable — has driven a wedge between scientists who otherwise share deep concerns about the implications of a human-warmed climate.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:13 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-immunization29-2009mar29,0,5706474.story?track=rss
From the Los Angeles Times
California schools’ risks rise as vaccinations drop
A Times analysis finds hundreds of campuses, which tend to be in more affluent areas, at risk for childhood disease outbreaks. Parents seem to fear shots more than mumps or measles.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:11 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2009/03/unfounded_alarmism.php
Some Unfounded Alarmism Regarding Compact Fluorescent Lamps
Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), or “energy saving light bulbs”, are much more energy efficient than conventional light bulbs, and they have a significantly longer lifetime. On top of that, replacing your conventional bulbs with CFLs won’t just save energy, but will also save you money. Most importantly, this is one small action that we can all contribute to the fight against global warming.
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03.28.09
Posted in archaeology at 7:42 pm by nemo
The Indo-European homeland, found: Not!
The blog Mr. Verb summarizes one of the extended hypotheses: the collation of the Renfrew/Anatolian and Gimbutas/Kurgan interpretations of the homeland thesis:
I’ve now actually read David Anthony’s book, The horse, the wheel and language, which Mr. Verb mentioned earlier here. The book is, I have to say, stunningly bold. Anthony claims flatly:
it is now possible to solve the central puzzle surrounding Proto-Indo-European, namely, who spoke it, where was it [sic] spoken, and when (2007:5).
In fact, Anthony is mostly taking over the old Kurgan hypothesis — that the early Indo-Europeans were associated with the ‘kurgan’ burial mounds (pic from wikipedia) and came from the area north of the Black Sea — as developed by J.P. Mallory and others. Recent book on IE and historical linguistics have come to treat this as the most likely homeland, but that’s far more conjecture than secure conclusion.
The alternative is more promising than Anthony makes it out to be, surely, namely that these people started out in Anatolia more like 9,000 year before the present and spread out with farming. This view is associated with Colin Renfrew, who has recently summed his view up this way: “Everybody agrees that farming came to Europe from Anatolia. So Anatolia must be the point of departure [for languages too]” (Balter 2004:1324, in Science).
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Posted in History at 6:54 pm by nemo
An interesting side show map of PIE homeland and successions. With commentary here
An OIT page
The Rigveda represents a language, religion and culture which is the most archaic in the Indo-European world. As Griffith puts it in his preface to his translation: “As in its original language, we see the roots and shoots of the languages of Greek and Latin, of Celt, Teuton and Slavonian, so the deities, the myths and the religious beliefs and practices of the Veda throw a flood of light upon the religions of all European countries before the introduction of Christianity. As the science of comparative philology could hardly have existed without the study of Sanskrit, so the comparative history of the religions of the world would have been impossible without the study of the Veda.”
To say that the early vedic is the most archaic is misleading and hardly established correctly.
Here’s the strange anomaly: Anatolian seems, in some arguments, to be an offshoot prior to the formation of PIE. It would then have to break off from proto-Vedic as the putative people so associated migrate to Anatolia from India.
I doubt it.
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Posted in History, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 6:39 pm by nemo
Archaic Greece: The Clue
We go through so many contortions attempted to grasp the significance of the Old Testament, or the period of the Indian Axial, or the Axial Age in general, but fail to see the ironic clue in the history of Archaic Greece. Everything else has been mythologized, but in the case of early Greece the solution to the riddle stands out in plain sight if we know where to look.
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Posted in religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 3:27 pm by nemo
Doniger’s The Hindus.
James cites some criticisms by Witzel of Doniger. But my interest in the book isn’t concerned with the eccentricities of Doniger, which are apparently considerable. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 1:51 pm by nemo
In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: Tuesday, March 18, 2003
I just reread N. Wade’s Before The Dawn, a book on human origins, and, despite its Darwinan framework, a useful and recent book on the subject.
I note that he follows the 50K timeline for the ‘Out of Africa’ scenario.
Here is an older article (material appearing later in his book) on the click languges of the San of South Africa.
This phenomenon of the click languages (and the general complexity of San languages with over a hundred phonemes!!) raises issues not only of their antiquity, and possible connection to the earliest modern humans, but of the nature of evolution, not just linguistic evolution.
Whenever we see these one way valves we suspect something. That is, we see people who have lost the click sounds, but virtually noone ‘evolving’ back into them.
Suspicious circumstance. We see decline in complexity, not the reverse, by and large (there have been increases in complexity in some ways in some cases we can infer, e.g. the relatively recent, ca. 10K? BCE, complexification of proto-Indo-European grammars, etc,…)
Reread the material on the ‘great explosion’ in WHEE:
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap2_3.htm
From the article: Do some of today’s languages still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Booknotes at 1:25 pm by nemo
Comment on ‘Forces outside of nature’
James said,
March 27, 2009 at 9:09 pm ·
Book mentioned in the SA piece:
http://www.amazon.ca/Quantum-Non-Locality-Relativity-Metaphysical-Intimations/dp/0631232214
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