05.30.09
Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability
From UD today, a link to: Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability: A Call to Scientific Integrity (Paperback)
by Dr Donald E. Johnson
Dave Allen On Religion
Introduction To Christianity – Comedian Dave Allen On Religion
BestOfAtheism – YouTube
from Dawkins site
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpVjBBDMOoA
It’s the Cooking, Stupid
Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid
by Dwight Garner – NY Times
from Dawkin site
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole.
Rise of the non-believers
The rise of the non-believers
by Neil Macdonald – CNCNEWS.ca
From Dawkins site
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/05/28/f-rfa-macdonald.html
I have no belief as to whether intelligent life exists on other planets. Furthermore, I don’t care. I don’t bother reflecting on the matter. It’s utterly irrelevant to me.
Similarly, I have no religious beliefs. None. When Homer said “all men need the gods,” he was wrong. Like roughly 34 million other people in this country (more than the population of Canada), I don’t.
Why do I feel the need to go into this here? Because I live in, and write about, the United States. In this most religious of countries, I have learned to keep my lack of belief to myself.
There are signs now that attitudes here are slowly changing and I’ll get to these in a moment. But think about it: holding no religious opinion at all, and saying so, has for many, many years been considered something of an antisocial act in this country.
While my neighbours might be amused by a discussion about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the sudden unveiling of an atheist at their table would likely provoke an uncomfortable silence.
…
Continue reading
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/05/28/f-rfa-macdonald.html
Get a Galileoscope!
Get a Galileoscope! Hurry!
by Phil Plait – BadAstronomyBlog
Reposted from Dawkins site
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/28/get-a-galileoscope-hurry/
A few months ago “I wrote about the Galileoscope, a wonderful inexpensively priced telescope that is being produced as part of the International Year of Astronomy. There were some initial problems with shipping, but I have been told that ’scopes are shipping and will be in the hands of eager folks by early June or July latest! Yay!
Let’s talk about god (? let’s not)
Opinion: Let’s Talk About God
by Lisa Miller
Newsweek
The atheist writers Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have presented us with a choice: either you don’t believe in God or you’re a dope. “It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God, simply because that belief makes him happy,” writes Harris in the 2005 “Atheist Manifesto” now posted on the Web site of his new nonprofit, The Reason Project. Their brilliance, wit and (general) good humor have made the new generation of atheists celebrities among people who like to consider themselves smart. We enjoy their books and their telegenic bombast so much that we don’t mind their low opinion of us. Dopey or not, 90 percent of Americans continue to say they believe in God.
This iteration of the faith-versus-reason debate has gone on for years, with no real resolution. Men (yes, mostly men) of faith have published passionate defenses of God. (See Tim Keller’s 2008 The Reason for God.) In response, believers have published accounts of journeys toward unbelief; atheists have testified to conversions. The latest entrant in this category is from the Marxist Terry Eagleton: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Yet despite the proliferation of viewpoints, I’m guessing few readers have ever closed one of these volumes and honestly declared themselves changed.
Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, which comes out next week, is about to reframe this debate. Wright doesn’t argue one side or other of the “Is God real?” question. He leaves that aside. Instead, he grapples with God as an idea that has changed–evolved–through history. Wright is a journalist who specializes in evolutionary psychology, and his previ-ous book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, was a reported meditation on the way human evolution changes us for the better. Over time, we’ve grown more moral, more responsible and more in-spired. In The New York Times Book Review, the British pale-ontologist Simon Conway Morris threw down the gauntlet: he accused Wright “of a failure of nerve.” Why not, he asked (and this is my rephrasing), connect that sublime human capacity for moral behavior to the thing that some people call God? (Writing in Slate, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker took the opposite tack, accusing Wright of providing ammunition to advocates of intelligent design.)
Wright picks up the challenge in The Evolution of God. He argues that the scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths were written in history by real people who aimed to improve things–economic, social, geographical–for their constituencies. (And then he exhaustively, minutely catalogs who those writers were and what those specific aims might have been. This is not a book to read on the beach this summer.) But he never argues that what he calls a materialist view of scripture disproves God. Instead, he takes another approach: as our societies have grown more complex and more global, our conceptions of God have grown more demanding and more moral. This is a good thing, for religion can “help us orient our daily lives, recognize good and bad, and make sense of joy and suffering alike.” Wright is optimistic even about Islam in today’s world: “The ratio of good to bad scriptures varies among the Abrahamic faiths, but in all religions it’s possible for benign interpretation of scripture to flourish.”
The problem here is that all of this is pseudo-history, and leaves out the place of ‘theism’ in the context of world religion.
And Wright, evidently a non-believer, can make no sense of what is going on with the ‘evolution of god’ because if you change the labels, he is lost.
I should point out that the Israelites did not speak of ‘god’, but reserved discourse on the subject to IHVH. So the ‘evolution of god’ is more generally a history of gibberish, as even the atheist sociologists fails to connect with his subject matter.
FoxP2 and mice
A Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse Squeaks
People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching chimpanzees how to speak. A delicate, if tiny, step has now been taken toward the real thing: the creation of a mouse with a human gene for language.
Series on ID
This two-part series on Intelligent Design, in part a response to our ongoing discussions about evolution, is by Logan Paul Gage, a policy analyst at the Discovery Institute and who has written extensively on evolution.
Blue whale in New York
Blue Whale Discovered Singing In New York Coastal Waters
ScienceDaily (May 30, 2009) — For the very first time in New York coastal waters, the voices of singing blue whales have been positively identified. Acoustic experts at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) confirmed that the voice of a singing blue whale was tracked about 70 miles off of Long Island and New York City on Jan. 10-11, 2009, as the whale swam slowly from east to west. At the same time, a second blue whale was heard singing offshore in the far distance.
Neanderthal reconstruction
Virtual Reconstruction Of A Neanderthal Woman’s Birth Canal Reveals Insights Into Evolution Of Human Child Birth
ScienceDaily (May 29, 2009) — Researchers from the University of California at Davis (USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) present a virtual reconstruction of a female Neanderthal pelvis from Tabun (Israel).
Gaza and rules of war
RG mail
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1088912.html
Last update – 13:53 28/05/2009
Amnesty: Israel repeatedly breached rules of war in Gaza
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz Correspondent
Amnesty International has accused Israel of repeatedly violating the
rules of armed conflict during its recent offensive against Hamas in
the Gaza Strip.
US and report of abuse photos
RG mail
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090528/ts_nm/us_iraq_abughraib_rape
Reuters May 28, 2009
U.S. slams British press over report of abuse photos
Iraq corruption scandal
RG mail
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-faces-the-mother-of-all-corruption-scandals-1692571.html
The Independent 29 May 2009
Iraq faces the mother of all corruption scandals
Allegations of kickbacks rock key government department as 1,000 officials face arrest and Trade Minister is forced to resign
By Patrick Cockburn
Iraq plans to arrest 1,000 officials for corruption after a scandal which has forced the resignation of the Trade Minister and is threatening the food supply of millions of Iraqis.
Depth of corruption
RG mail
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=534
28 May 2009
Britain: the depth of corruption
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the current scandal of MPs’ tax evasion and phantom mortgages conceals a deeper corruption that is traced back to the political monoculture of the United States.
The theft of public money by members of parliament, including government ministers, has given Britons a rare glimpse inside the tent of power and privilege. It is rare because not one political reporter or commentator, those who fill tombstones of column inches and dominate broadcast journalism, revealed a shred of this scandal. It was left to a public relations man to sell the “leak”. Why?
Silence of MoveOn
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/hayden
RG mail
The Nation May 26, 2009
The Silence of MoveOn
By Tom Hayden
The most powerful grassroots organization of the peace movement, MoveOn, remains silent as the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan simmer or escalate.
05.29.09
Collapsing coral reefs
Why Coral Reefs Around The World Are Collapsing
ScienceDaily (May 29, 2009) — An explosion of knowledge has been made in the last few years about the basic biology of corals, researchers say in a new report, helping to explain why coral reefs around the world are collapsing and what it will take for them to survive a gauntlet of climate change and ocean acidification.
Dodds: Greeks and the irrational
I was rereading parts of E.R. Dodds classic study, The Greeks and the Irrational. This work is remarkable indeed among specialized studies of the ancient Greeks in not being out of date (first published in the early fifties) and for its original discussion of the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ (with a counterpoint discussion of the irrational aspect of ancient Greek culture).
Secularists trying to defend themselves against the resurgence of religion might find the book of considerable interest, along with the larger historical architecture of the eonic effect.
We see the way in which the relationships of religion, tradition, enlightenments, and a later resurgence of religion, that is, a resemblance to our own times, is completely laid out in relationship to the Axial period. It might help if the secular question could achieve a more intelligible discussion than the current.
Confusions of faith
The previous critiques of Christiantiy, it should noted, which seem harsh, are not based on an ‘atheist’ secular viewpoint, but on a religious standard: these monotheisms have failed by their own standard, on the question of beliefs in ‘god’. In all the claptrap from political/cultural elite figures about faith and the rest of it, the key fact is lost that religious beliefs on the question of divinity have degenerated into a hopeless confusion little better than the religious confusion that monotheism attempted to replace.
Should Christianity (and Judaism, Islam) enter Chapter 11?
Did Axial monotheism destroy religion?
The previous post, or its title, is very provocative, and it might help to put the issue in a better perspective. The achievement of Christianity, in the context of globalization (which started in the Neolithic, and wasn’t invented by capitalists), in creating a common culture in the context of the Roman Empire, tokens the obvious need to study its history and theology with a very close monocle. I am not in the habit of treating these religions in a cavalier fashion (the more so given their obvious Axial context). The disastrous put-down in the title of the post isn’t really my doing, but that of Rajneesh, et al. So I leave it there.
The point is that religions have layers within layers, and at the level of ideology Xtianity is at risk being seen as a mesmerizing nexus that freezes rather than initiates spiritual development
Did Axial monotheism destroy ‘religion’
Post-evangelical Xtianity, comment…
James said,
May 29, 2009 at 4:41 pm ·
“…they have bought into their opponents beliefs, if only by dialectical negation, unaware that their position is, or should be, closer to the motherlode of religion itself.”Isn’t it strange how people across time and space become trapped by the very thing that they are attempting to transcend? The intellectual constraints of Darwinism, reductionism, and secular humanism are determined by their reaction against divinity beliefs and vice versa, etc.
Look at the world in the time of the Buddha and Mahavir, and then fifteen hundred years later. We can see that a strong case can be made that ‘monotheism’ in destroyed real religion and replaced it with theocratic propaganda systems and expansionary fanaticisms designed to control large populations.
Scientology con
Comment: Wikipedia bans Scientology
James said,
May 29, 2009 at 4:15 pm ·
Actually, I doubt it matters. I was dumbfounded the other day when I saw a Scientology commercial on mainstream TV. I guess the Thetans have decided to make their presence known to a larger population.
Scientology nonetheless remains a pernicious ‘gnostic’ con scheme with the potential to harm the unconscious of innocent and unsuspecting victims. The same can be said for sufism and buddhism, as noted many times at The Gurdjieff Con.
A new age of religion?
God is Back discussion, Economist
We have discussed this repeatedly here. Even if we grant that ‘God is Back’, we don’t have to grant that the increasingly chaotic religious formations that are ‘back’ represent real religious opportunity. Every ‘new age’ in world history, witness the Axial Age, creates a new approach to religion. The endless proliferation and persistence of decayed traditionalisms blocks that possibility of creative renewal.
The religion described here, we should note, is getting translated into the Economist’s ‘market language’, and we will soon see endless brands of fake religion that exploit people, and don’t produce any result.
Darwinism and conservatism
Arnhart’s Darwinian Conservatism: New And Improved!
Actually, the question of Darwinism and conservatism shows an ironic affinity between the two, the only problem is that Darwinism is false, and actually a crypto-conservative (or classical liberal) confusion over economic theory projected onto nature.
And the application of evolutionary theory to politics is a prima facie case of concealed Social Darwinism: they are two catergories altogether, mixed together.
A look at the eonic effect will show how to bring ‘evolution’ into the cultural/historical sphere.
Post-evangelical christianity?
America’s ‘Emerging Church:’ Will a New Post-Evangelical Christianity Reflect More Tolerant Views?
I am surprised that Alternet would abdicate the issue to the devices of creative Christians bent on producing new illusions in which to have faith.
Or perhaps the left is so frustrated by the persistence of religion that in desperation they are content to kibbitz the ‘inevitable’. Actually, it is a sign the left has been ‘left behind’ (temporarily) due to the Feuerbachian starightjacket they have embraced as a ‘scenario’ about religious ideology.
In general, the left needs something more than nineteenth century atheism/materialism (you think the New Atheists would have learned from the failure here) to combat the devices of the Bible Belt.
The left should be offering some real help here, if only theoretically, but this much they can’t manage. Why? They are stuck with Darwinism, overly metaphysical atheism, obselete materialism, Feuerbachian platitudes….
One might point to the great radical tradition of the Indian Axial Age, the Samkhya materialists, and their influenced descendants (e.g. Buddhists), and ask if there isn’t an ironic ‘alienation’ of the left here: they have bought into their opponents beliefs, if only by dialectical negation, unaware that their position is, or should be, closer to the motherlode of religion itself.
Instead they have the Bible Belt convince them that it has a monopoly on religion.
(A few oversimplifications here, but the point is significant)
A fog over the Darwin debate
A Fog Over the Intelligent Design Debate
Collins and Giberson are sincere Evangelical Christians — as far as I, a Jew, can tell — and undoubtedly innocent of all guile, but they represent an insidious trend in religious and intellectual life. This genuine opiate of the masses works as a stupor-inducing fog, enveloping the debate about intelligent design versus Darwinism. The fog lulls you with the thought that between the idea of design in nature, and that of no design in nature, there is actually no need to make a choice.
In one way the ID people have a point: theistic evolutionism simply can’t get the question right: of religion and Darwinism. Not ‘evolution’, but Darwinism.
But can this confusion be resolved by joining the ranks of the ID-ists? I think not. The question of design in nature versus ‘intelligent design’ is still another confusion that vitiates the ID position (whose exact statement I find obscure).
This blog has frequently distinguished ‘N-design’ (natura design??) and ‘G-design’ (god design??). Or natural teleology as considered by Kant, and (evidently supernatural??) design by an ‘agent’.
The difficult passage to postdarwinism requires seeing the limits of natural selction, finding out potentially teleological ‘mechanisms’ of a natural kind that can resolve the ‘uphill’ ‘climbing Mt. Improbable’ question. Actualy, anything that works is the answer. So what is the answer? We con’t know, and for good Kantian reasons we probably can’t find out.
Having critiqued theistic Darwinism, a la Collins et al., I find the ID proposition ambiguous, as with the ambiguity of Behe?
Is Behe really just a theistic non-Darwinian evolutionist? Or does he find the ‘design’ in molecular complexity the result of an embedded designer? etc…
If we study Kant we sense what is wrong here: the feeling we get of ‘design’ is the result of biological ‘natural teleology’, but this regrettably has a phenomenal and noumenal aspect (i.e. we can’t really observe ‘teleology’), or its indirect side-effects.
In any case, ‘intelligent design’ flunks the Kantian metaphysics test: it stands beyond the limits of the observable.
Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology
Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology
by Cade Metz – The Register
In case you haven’t heard of The Register before, doing a Google search turns up lots of hits – http://bit.ly/9LeJM /Mike
From Dawkins site
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/wikipedia_bans_scientology/
Exclusive In an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits, the Wikipedia supreme court has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.
Closing out the longest-running court case in Wikiland history, the site’s Arbitration Committee voted 10 to 0 (with one abstention) in favor of the move, which takes effect immediately.
The eighth most popular site on the web, Wikipedia bills itself as “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit.” Administrators frequently ban individual Wikifiddlers for their individual Wikisins. And the site’s UK press officer/resident goth once silenced an entire Utah mountain in a bizarre attempt to protect a sockpuppeting ex-BusinessWeek reporter. But according to multiple administrators speaking with The Reg, the muzzling of Scientology IPs marks the first time Wikipedia has officially barred edits from such a high-profile organization for allegedly pushing its own agenda on the site.
The Church of Scientology has not responded to our request for comment.
Officially, Wikipedia frowns on those who edit “in order to promote their own interests.” The site sees itself as an encyclopedia with a “neutral point of view” – whatever that is. “Use of the encyclopedia to advance personal agendas – such as advocacy or propaganda and philosophical, ideological or religious dispute – or to publish or promote original research is prohibited,” say the Wikipowersthatbe.
…
Continue reading
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/wikipedia_bans_scientology/
Hitchens vs Ken Blackwell
Hardball: Christopher Hitchens vs Ken Blackwell on the US Being a Christian Nation
From Dawkins site- YouTube
Junk dna and quick adaptation
‘Junk’ DNA helps in quick adaptation to environmental changes
London (IANS): The unknown side of the DNA, dismissed as “junk”, activates our genomic evolution, tuning gene activity and helping organisms adapt to environmental changes quickly, a new study has found.
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