History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
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http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3744
No way to “win” in Afghanistan
Gareth Porter: The United States doesn’t understand the forces it unleashed in Afghanistan
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http://www.middle-east-online.com/English/?id=32260
Middle East Online 2009-05-25
Armageddon Now?
Analysis of the Obama-Netanyahu summit by Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies provokes anxiety that Israel might soon “go it alone” and strike Iran’s nuclear energy sites – impatient with US-Iranian diplomacy, says Nadia Hijab.
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http://spinwatch.org/blogs-mainmenu-29/nicholas-jones-mainmenu-85/5279-nato-strategist-jamie-shea-gives-chilling-insight-into-militarys-media-control-at-times-of-war-
Nato strategist Jamie Shea gives chilling insight into military’s
media control at times of war
Faith in the future
John Gray
Published 21 May 2009
Contrary to what evangelical rationalists preach, it is perfectly possible both to be modern and to believe in God. But there is no reason to assume that the American religious model will prevail
We have posted on this essay/review of John Gray several times, but it keeps drawing one back, in part because it is almost surreal to read it. Almost scary. Both sides are so far from any sense that it seems we will suffer the worst case, lose religion and lose modernity both.
Evangelicals aren’t the only ones, despite Gray’s framing of the question, who wish to define modernity in association with atheism. The New Atheists seem to propose as much.
But such an equation is complete nonsense, and scientists/Darwkins fans who take such a stance should be wary of what they propose. And Evangelicals need to realize that they are as modern as anyone else.
Premodern Christianity is something they wouldn’t like, because they have already become used to a form of Christianity that never existed prior to modernity.
Please keep in mind that until modern times the public was not allowed to read the Bible. One of the great initial moments of modernity was the translation of the Bible into vulgate languages. The King James Bible, remember? It was a revolutionary text. And the Catholics of that era thought of Protestants the way people on Wall Street think of bolsheviks. A century and a half of bloody battle went into establishing the right to read the Bible.
In 1648 the fight stops and culture becomes secular, which means that the war over theocracy is finished. Noone imagined that religion was finished.
The ahistorical nature of this ‘debate’ between New Atheists and traditionalists is a form of idiocy.
Modernity arose as a ‘secular’ culture in the sense that religion became an individual rather than a theocratic matter. Thus religion’s place in civil society as a pluralistic entity is secure.
That does not mean that we have to let religion off the hook. From Biblical criticism to the findings of Old Testament archaeology new knowledge is forcing the issue of religious renewal. Secularists are probably right that culture is moving past Christianity, despite renewed resurgence in the last generation (scales of one generation can be misleading). The reason is that the Biblical religion simply can’t work for people any more. That is not an argument for atheism, or anti-religion, but a simple statement of fact about Christianity. If we look at the archaeology of the Old Testament, the Bible is off by a mile. A transitional period will obviously occur wherein traditionalists will attempt to produce ‘symbolic’ interpretations of the remnants, but in the end that strategy won’t work. Maybe in another century the passage will be complete.
We can see that ‘new religions’ by the dozen are coming into existence, none of them so far of much solidity: the New Age movement, or movements, for example.
We can hardly predict the future.
Atheists certainly have a place here, but they need to understand their position. Almost the entire transition to modernity was created by men who were in some form Christian, with clear exceptions like Hobbes, perhaps, and borderline cases like Jefferson being the non-exception that proves the rule. The appearance of a few proponents of atheism in the Enlightenment is therefore a form of dialectical balance, not a defining characteristic.
This is not an argument for theism.
Then suddenly in the nineteenth century, after the foundations of modernity are laid, a new brand of atheism, scientism comes into being claiming the whole Enlightenment.
The confusion arises because it seems to some as if modernity started at the end of the nineteenth century, with the birth of scientism, the triumph of materialism (in the last decades before quantum mechanics), and the by then more common atheism. But that is a false definition of modernity.
This is not to deny atheism its place in modernity! But atheists have spoiled their own case, in part because a combination of scientism, Darwinism, and materialistic pre-quantum fundamentalism has generated three strikes and you’re out. Actually you are not out, but the impoverished culture of atheism ends up forcing a resurgence of religion.
The transition to the modern period begins in the sixteenth century, starts to become clear in the seventeenth, and climaxes in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century is then the beginning of the modern period. And a lot of people appear who seem intent on fucking up modernity. One example being the extreme imblance of the proponents of scientism. Or Darwinism. Or, indeed, atheism, with fundamentalists, thoroughly modern types, not far behind.
In all fairness, the position of atheism, although a latecomer in the modern transition, is one way to recreate modernity free of much of the deadweight of the past. But so far the efforts of atheists have been pitiful.
Atheists who attack religion fail to see that modernity is actually the first time in history that a real ‘religion’ is possible, because it founds the freedom required, autonomy in the sense of Kant, to be ‘religious’, instead of the robot created by passive faith in ‘divinity’, that phantom created by priesthoods. The search for ‘real god’ (in the classic cliche) is probably easier for an atheist than for the adherents of dogmatic monotheism.
from Dawkins site
War room is no place for Bible study
by James Carroll – boston.com
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/05/25/war_room_is_no_place_for_bible_study/
via Pharyngula
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/war_is_no_place_for_the_delude.php
THAT Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld supplied President Bush with Bible-laced Pentagon intelligence briefings might only seem like more Bush-era loopiness, but wait a minute. The deeper, and still current, question is: What in heaven (or, what the hell) is going on inside the US military?
Chimps are distant cousins
A Sound Off writer was confused over evolution, so I decided to explain why there are still apes walking around and why evolution’s “only a theory.” Anonymous seems to have fallen into a common misconception that humans evolved from chimpanzees. This is not the case — modern humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor some 10 million years ago. From this ancestor the two species diverged and mutated gradually into modern forms.
How did the modern domesticated house cat — beloved pet and subject of countless art works, movies, and internet memes — evolve from its more wild brethren? The June issue of Scientific American seeks to answer the question using a mix of archaeology, genetics, and good old fashioned detective work.
This is not ‘evolution’, but a microevolutionary manipulation.
Tool-making Birds: Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention For Clever Rooks
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) — Researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London have found that rooks, a member of the crow family, are capable of using and making tools, modifying them to make them work and using two tools in a sequence.
Link Between Sociality And Brain Increase In Carnivores Questioned By Evolutionary Biologists
Rapid Climate Change Forces Scientists To Evaluate ‘Extreme’ Conservation Strategies
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) — Scientists are, for the first time, objectively evaluating ways to help species adapt to rapid climate change and other environmental threats via strategies that were considered too radical for serious consideration as recently as five or 10 years ago. Among these radical strategies currently being considered is so-called “managed relocation.” Managed relocation, which is also known as “assisted migration,” involves manually moving species into more accommodating habitats where they are not currently found.
How Genetics Influences Humans To Choose Their Mates
ScienceDaily (May 25, 2009) — New light has been thrown on how humans choose their partners, according to new findings presented May 25 at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics.
Published on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle
Here’s Good News About Your Net Worth
by Jay Walljasper
Let me offer some good news about the state of your wealth. Sure, the 401(k) tanked, the house lost a big chunk of value, and things are looking shaky at work. Indeed, the Federal Reserve recently reported that Americans all together lost $5.1 trillion during the last three months of 2008 alone.
But what you possess individually accounts for only part of your true net worth. Each of us also owns a stake in some extremely valuable assets: clean air, fresh water, national forests, the Internet, public universities, blood banks, rich cultural traditions and more.
All these things are part of what is now being called “the commons,” and they are more important than ever.
Published on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 by The Independent/UK
Shell on Trial
Oil giant in the dock over 1995 murder of activist who opposed environmental degradation of Niger Delta
by Daniel Howden
Royal Dutch Shell will revisit one of the darkest periods of its history tomorrow as a potentially groundbreaking court case opens in New York.
The oil giant stands accused of complicity in the 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian environmental activist.
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ijf_au6iZVxqxs2dU6ZdpUJHCs8A
Agence France Presse May 25, 2009
Jerusalem — Israel suspects Venezuela and Bolivia of supplying uranium to Iran, according to a foreign ministry document leaked to media.
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by Henry C K Liu
Asia Times Online (May 24 2005)
This is Part Ten of a series by Henry C K Liu entitled World Order,
Failed States and Terrorism. Click here for previous parts:
http://atimes.com/atimes/others/world-order.html
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http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3757
The Real News May 25, 2009
James Handley: Obama admin’s plan offers too much to Big Coal and Wall St to meaningfully cut emissions
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090524/wl_mideast_afp/irannuclearpoliticsisraelus
Agence France Presse May 24, 2009
Half of Israelis back immediate strike on Iran
Jerusalem – Just over half of Israelis back an immediate attack on the nuclear facilities of arch-foe Iran but the rest want to wait and see the results of US diplomacy, according to a poll released on Sunday.
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http://www.newsweek.com/id/199147?from=rss
NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated June 1, 2009
They May Not Want The Bomb
And other unexpected truths.
Fareed Zakaria
Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think.
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http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009052122/rx-and-single-payer
Rx and the Single Payer
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Moyers/ourfuture/blog: May 22, 2009
In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told a local
AFL-CIO meeting, “I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care
program.”
Single payer. Universal. That’s health coverage, like Medicare, but for
everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey
middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It’s a system that
polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as
two-to-one.
There was only one thing standing in the way, Obama said six years ago: “All
of you know we might not get there immediately because first we have to take
back the White House, we have to take back the Senate and we have to take
back the House.”
Fast forward six years. President Obama has everything he said was needed –
Democrats in control of the executive branch and both chambers of Congress.
So what’s happened to single payer?
After the previous post, I saw the link to this book at the After Eden bookpage: The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior (Paperback)
by Craig B. Stanford
It would be interesting to read the argument here.
But, in general, without referring to this book which I haven’t read, I find much of the fussiness of Darwinists on this theme to be misleading, if not incorrect. This is still another side agenda of the Paradigm, keeping culture well away from vegetarianism because of the claim, not proven, that meat was somehow crucial to human evolution.
There is one fairly good argument against that claim: man, until very late in his evolution, simply didn’t have the weapons to do much hunting. Most of his meat-eating was thus in the scavenger mode.
This is not to deny the reality of meat-eating in early hominids. But it is already present in chimpanzees. The marginal advances here are of course par for the course of human evolution, but the fact remains that hunting animals systematically in the fashion we see in full homo sapiens did not exist at most crucial stages of the evolution of man. In fact, we see that even with the Neanderthals the job of hunting for a living was hard and dangerous.
I might stand corrected on several points here, but I think we should be alert to the Darwinian ‘grunt’ syndrome, where the mystique of meat eating gets a free ride where it isn’t deserved: meat eating is hardly likely to be anything like a principal causal agent in human evolution.
And it has obviously become an ecologically destabilizing factor in general, and a liability of man’s evolution in particular.
We should note that one of the remarkable results of the Axial Age was the birth of vegetarian religions. Note this point: human macroevolution shows evidence of induced religious vegetarianism.
So much for the Darwinian ‘no nonsense’ meat-eater obsession.
After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination (Paperback)
by Kirkpatrick Sale (Author)
The previous post from Science News on the dwindling size and quantity of marine life made me think of ‘After Eden’, an unusual depiction of the descent of humans, and bringing out, as most such accounts often do not, the destructive character of homo sapiens, almost from the start. The list of extinct species in man’s wake is depressingly long.
Ocean Life Of Ages Past Boggle Modern Imagination With Incredible Sizes, Abundance And Distribution
ScienceDaily (May 25, 2009) — Before oil hunters in the early 1800s harpooned whales by the score, the ocean around New Zealand teemed with about 27,000 southern right whales – roughly 30 times as many as today – according to one of several astonishing reconstructions of ocean life in olden days to be presented at a Census of Marine Life conference May 26-28.
James said,
May 25, 2009 at 3:23 pm ·
Actually, I suspect that Wilkins is a closet reader of this blog. You can see some hints every now and then from his posts.
Wilkins is a talk.origins regular, or was for a long time, so I would think he will not become a postdarwinist. I should have followed the divergence more carefully, but it seems that the effort by Dawkins fanatics to make Darwinism some proof of atheism is part of the issue.
Hope he sees the light.
I mention all this because it is worth noting that the attempt to enforce the reigning dogma is starting to backfire.
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CommonDreams May 26, 2008
Immemorial Day – No Peace for Militarized U.S.By Bill Quigley
Memorial Day is not actually a day to pray for U.S. troops who died in
action but rather a day set aside by Congress to pray for peace. The 1950
Joint Resolution of Congress which created Memorial Day says: “Requesting
the President to issue a proclamation designating May 30, Memorial Day, as a
day for a Nation-wide prayer for peace.” (64 Stat.158).
Peace today is a nearly impossible challenge for the United States. The U.S.
is far and away the most militarized country in the world and the most
aggressive. Unless the U.S. dramatically reduces its emphasis on global
military action, there will be many, many more families grieving on future
Memorial days.
Comment of Religion within the Limits of Reason
James said,
May 25, 2009 at 2:13 pm ·
I don’t think the goal of either side is to support human autonomy (despite the animosity that these two sides have for one another, they really represent two sides of a single coin). One side wants us to believe that we are mechanistic robots and the other side wants us to believe that morality is only possible with the belief in some divine law giver. Either way, their prescriptions for action represent the antithesis of human autonomy.
Absolutely right, and the Kantian reference of course indicates this, since his critiques point to the critique of scientism as much as that of religion.
Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is a book I shouldn’t refer to, in a way, since anyone who reads it gets the wrong impression. It is a stronge work.
You can take it as an idea in the title that we have to recreate for ourselves. The point is that religious ideas can be studied without faithmongering in the secular sphere (religion within the limits of reason, etc, ).
Kant was a severe critic of religions, but once he had demolished them, he considered it important to maintain a study of the issues they carried with them.
Sounds simple, but it is totally absent in secular scientism, whose attitude is almost hysterical ‘don’t touch me’ at the mere thought of religious ideas.
Faith in the future: John Gray reviews ‘God is Back’
The question of the ‘secular’ is confused by the changing meanings of the word. As noted in previous post, the Protestant Reformation almost defined the ‘secular’, which meant a new age of civilization, a change of ‘saeculum’.
But the implications of that Reformation required a deeper insight, into the nature of human autonomy.
We can see the real conflict of religion and secularism in, ironically, Kant, who was no atheist, nor quite the typical theist, who spoke of ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’, and the premise here, as in his ethical thinking, is on human autonomy. On this question the traditional religionists are indeed a trojan horse gang leading us backwards.
The great irony is that without autonomy we cannot truly be religious. Thus it is in the context of secularism that true religion might come into being.
The issue is not secularism vs religion but false religion vs the possibility of real human self-consciousness (which you can call religion) and development without the tyrannizing self-aggrandizement of traditionalist religion.
Those who critique secularism need to go back and study Luther’s world, and Luther’s reluctant break with the hopeless corrupt world of Catholicism in his time.
Faith in the future
John Gray
Published 21 May 2009
Contrary to what evangelical rationalists preach, it is perfectly possible both to be modern and to believe in God. But there is no reason to assume that the American religious model will prevail
Over and over on this blog, we have essentially stated what John Gray is trying to say. But these conservatives can’t seem to get it straight.
The best way to consider the matter is in terms of the eonic effect and its study of the modern transition: We fail to distinguish the emergence of modernity and its subsequent fate. The two can be different, and if the realization of modernity shows some signs of failure then conservative forces attempt to make a comeback.
I said conservative forces, not necessarily religion.
In general, from the perspective of the eonic effect we can see that the debate over religion and modernity is suffering from a snafu.
First, anyone who says that ‘secularism’ and religion are incompatible has missed the point. The first great moment of the rise of the modern was the Protestant Reformation. Religion is thus a clear associate of modernity. The rapid transformation of the Reformation into the Enlightenment is what creates the tension between secularism and religion. But the Enlightenment is constantly misunderstood. It is the source of most of the debates, now deteriorated, over science and religion. The Enlightenment was a process, not a belief system held by Richard Dawkins. It was not an atheist movement, for crying out loud.
Both the New Atheists and conservatives religionists have tried to polarize the issues here, making discussion difficult. The idea that belief in god is not modern shows the last stages of the decay of terminology. All we can do is throw up our hands. And if this kind of discourse is what we can expect if ‘god is back’, then I hope we can pass beyond religion of that kind.
Again, the eonic effect shows that at a certain point the modern transition will show a tendency to deviate, or suffer regression. Religionists who wish to promote anti-modernism might thus think something is giving them a lift. I should think the effect temporary.
The real issue is to come to an understanding of religion for a secular age, and stop making a fetish out of traditionalist cults.
To say that ‘god is back’ is therefore a superfluous statement, and one more of the ways in which to pick a fight on the issue of religion.
It is interesting to note that the Evolving Thoughts blog at Science Blogs has moved out of the system into a loner blog.
The reason, if I understand it rightly, has to do with frustration with the Dr. Myers dogmas on religion.
What can you do with the Myers/Dawkins brand? It is a kind of adolescent cult on the subject of Darwinism and religion, and in the end secularism itself is at risk.
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