‘Creation’ film distorts history through evolutionary eyes
Ted Baehr, Jeff Holder and Tom Snyder
For years, the mass media have been trying to turn science against religion while trying to demonize anyone who believes in more traditional, and more biblical, forms of Christianity and Judaism.
Such is the case with the new movie “Creation,” which opens in two or more cities Christmas Day. Despite its title, “Creation” is not about God creating the Earth. Instead, it’s the story of evolution’s founding father, Charles Darwin, and his struggle to write the book that would “kill God.”
Calorie Restriction: Scientists Take Important Step Toward ‘Fountain of Youth’
ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) — Going back for a second dessert after your holiday meal might not be the best strategy for living a long, cancer-free life say researchers
The Past Matters to Plants
ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) — It’s commonly known that plants interact with each other on an everyday basis: they shade each other out or take up nutrients from the soil before neighboring plants can get them. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan have learned that plants also respond to the past.
Steven Chuaims to tackle climate change by reviving the technological urgency of the Manhattan Project, enlisting the best minds to find a way to power the world …
Published on Saturday, December 26, 2009 by Inter Press Service Africa: Drying, Drying, Disappearing…by Paul Virgo
ROME – Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is les than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years.
Published on Saturday, December 26, 2009 by The Toronto Star/Canada Climate Change Doesn’t Scare Us. That’s Frightening
by Peter Gorrie
We’ve just ended a two-decade experiment in global problem solving.
It failed: Now we must figure out how to manage the consequences.
Published on Saturday, December 26, 2009 by Al-Jazeera
The US Military is ‘Exhausted’
by Sarah Lazare
The call for over 30,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan is a travesty for the people of that country who have already suffered eight brutal years of occupation.
It is also a harsh blow to the US soldiers facing imminent deployment.
As Barack Obama, the US president, gears up for a further escalation that will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to over 100,000, he faces a military
gnxp
“The Faith Instinct” is not what its title claims it to be, and the book doesn’t do what the jacket copy says it will do: “Nicholas Wade traces how religion grew to be so essential to early societies in their struggle for existence that an instinct for faith became hardwired into human nature.” If Wade had actually done that here, people of faith might be justifiably annoyed, but he didn’t, so they don’t have to be.
gnxp
Everyone knows that “time flies when you’re having fun,” but a new study suggests that the reverse is also true. Researchers tricked people into thinking that either time was flying … or dragging. Those who thought time had “flown by” rated their experiences as more fun
Why Our System Doesn’t Work
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly at 5:01 AM on December 25, 2009.
The passage of health reform is a revelation of just how desperately change is needed and how difficult it will be to achieve.
Can We Rescue the Republic Before the Dark Politics Take Over?
By Kirk Nielsen, Miller-McCune.com. Posted December 25, 2009.
Books by Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann and Cass Sunstein suggest that we’ve nearly lost our sense of self-government. None show the way to get it back.
The Darwin Show
Steven Shapin
Nowhere mentioned or discussed the complete fraud/plagiarism of Darwin vis a vis Wallace, as depicted in The Darwin Conspiracy.
The silence on this book shows that the so-called science community is a fraud in motion.
It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free drinks, science-themed rock bands, cake, decor and a dancing gorilla’ (stuffed with a relay of biology students). Circulating around the university, student and faculty volunteers declaimed the entire text of the Origin.
On the Galapagos Islands, tourists making scientific haj were treated to ‘an active, life-seeing account of the life of this magnificent scientist’, and a party of Stanford alumni retraced the circumnavigating voyage of HMS Beagle in a well-appointed private Boeing 757, intellectually chaperoned by Darwin’s most distinguished academic biographer. The Darwin anniversaries were celebrated round the world: in Bogotá, Mexico City, Montevideo, Toronto, Toulouse, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Bangalore, Singapore, Seoul, Osaka, Cape Town, Rome (where it was sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture, part of a Vatican hatchet-burying initiative), and in all the metropolitan and scientific settings you might expect. The English £10 note has borne Darwin’s picture on the back since 2000 (replacing Dickens), but special postage stamps and a new £2 coin honoured him in 2009, as did stamps or coins in at least ten other countries.
Religious Piety as a Mating Strategy
The darwinization of religion via evolutionary psych gets more and more desperate: this one has discovered the need to trash piety in the name of Natural Selection.
When beautiful people boost belief in God
The evolutionary significance of religion is a hot topic. Several researchers have suggested that religious belief is one or another sort of parasitic meme that exploits the existing architecture of the human mind (I made joking reference to this view in my earlier post How the Dawkins Stole Christmas, but I suggest a couple of serious readings below). Others have asked whether religious beliefs might be adaptive in some way — inspiring group cohesiveness or helping us stay in line when we’re not sure whether anyone is watching.
The God Gene
The term ‘god gene’ was already used, so Wade’s book on evolution and religion tried the ‘faith instinct’. The reviewer reverts to form.
The problem with this genre is that it makes not sense, for the simple reason that natural selection/Darwinism don’t explain the evolution of religion.
As we examine the eonic effect, the Axial Age we see the far more complex process involved.
It is unfair to be subjected to these endless Darwinizations of the whole of human culture. The game is stupid, and a brand of bad science.
How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for?
Falsifying Darwinism Once we see that history and evolution are braided together and that the descent of man is ‘all of a piece’, we can use the data of history to assess the earlier stages of human evolution. Armed with the eonic effect we see at once that something is missing in standard accounts. In the process we can see that natural selection is not what is driving historical macroevolution.
Many of us know that the origins of Christianity have nothing to do with silent nights or wise men. So what are its true origins? John Pickard looks at the reality of how this religion came about – from the standpoint of class forces and the material developments of society, rather than by the pious fictions fed from church pulpits.
For anyone on the left, the bone-headed stupidity of historical materialism can be dishearening, the more so as no learning occurs, and decades after the fall of Bolshevism, the bolshie buttheads are still the reigning ideology.
Let me note, however, that I cite this article because it has some interesting history, that of the text of Kautsky’s book on this subject, for one.
Christianity, whatever we think of the result, is a complicated mystery, one that won’t yield to the analysis of Marxists, none of whom has yet made contact with the reality of the Axial Age, and the way in which monotheism shows a macro component.
Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French contagion safely bottled up. Smart fellow, that Hazlitt. He should have stayed drunk for a month.