Need Another Day Off, Here's the last two moves in my brawl

Ancient Brit   5 hours ago −

I have a big project in the works so I can't give this drivel the treatment it deserves, but a few points need emphasizing:

1. Pew themselves regard their study as barely adequate, primarily because it relies upon true anecdotal evidence, something you seem only dimly aware of (prison chaplains in 50 states stating what they think prisoners may hold as beliefs - which is NOT the same as self-reporting, you absolute cretin).

2. I chose not to use Pew originally because I didn't think it was a good example, but then you came out with such drivel about Pew's scientific reliability I figured what the hell, he's dumb enough to open that door, so I'll follow up. If even Pew say in writing that it's not a scientific study, what does that say about your comprehension skills?

3. The relationship I proposed between morality and crime was drawn not by an atheist but by a Christian. I figured quoting someone from your camp might carry some weight with you, but apparently not. He was obviously the wrong type of Christian.

4. Your discussion of Darwin is an ad hominem attack because you're trying to say that flaws in his character must mean there are flaws in his ideas. If your article ends up saying "but despite all these character flaws he produced a solid piece of scientific reporting that has given us the solid grounding of evolutionary theory today" then I'll happily withdraw the ad hominem accusation - but we both know you hate the man's ideas and so you're trying to undermine them by showing his failings in comparison with today's accepted social norms. He was a product of his time and STILL managed to produce some decent science in spite of that.

Whichever way you slice it, you're out on a limb with little credibility, and you have no chance of even denting the solid body of science until you come up with a rational scientific critique that is acceptable to most scientists (just as they do among themselves).

Anthony_McCarthy   6 minutes ago −

1. What survey can you point to that doesn't ask people to answer questions that the surveyors can't verify the answers to? They asked questions about religious belief, how do you propose to discover what they really believe on a basis other than "anecdotal evidence" THAT, BRIT, IS WHAT YOU GET FROM PEOPLE TELLING YOU WHAT THEY BELIEVE. I've been on record going back to 2006 as calling for the banning of political polling during election years because polling is a pseudo-scientific effort, as, indeed, all sociological surveying of that kind is.

2. I said Pew's methodology was better than other polls I've seen cited in these arguments, what I should have said is that it was less bad than a lot of them, generally on the basis of sample size and other factors. Most surveys use a far smaller sample and survey methods KNOWN to be less reliable. Which gets us to the fact that I DIDN'T START TALKING ABOUT SURVEY TYPE STUFF WHICH I DON'T REGARD AS "EVIDENCE" FOR ALL OF THE ABOVE REASONS.

3. YOU are the one who brought the matter of prisoner populations into this discussion, not me. I'm the one who pointed out that it not only was a false measure of morality but that your argument, depending on their honesty in identifying their religious belief was self defeating of your use of them as a measure of their immorality SINCE YOU WOULD HAVE HAD TO HAVE TRUSTED THEM TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH ABOUT THAT.

4. You obviously didn't read my series on Darwin because that's not what I did. In fact, the piece I posted in it yesterday pointed out how Darwin used natural selection to argue that the same things had opposite effects depending on which class or ethnicity he was applying them to, and that, inevitably it was his class of rich, white, "Saxons" that came out better for exactly the kinds of things that, when provided to the poor and the "savage" (his word, not mine) he said was catastrophically dysgenic, dragging everyone down. He sounded like today's Republicans here and the worst of the fascists in your government.

I used to be as superstitious about Darwin as you were before I did what you so obviously haven't done, read him. I'd suggest you try what I did, read The Descent of Man, noting his endorsement of both Galton's and Haeckel's eugenics assertions and Haeckel's twisted, degenerate materialistic monism and the degenerate results he drew from them. Of course that means having to look up and read Darwin's numerous citations, which I've been doing. I, for example, discovered Darwin lied about something Schaaffhausen said to make one of his most infamous statements in that book. You can read all about it at my blog, the pieces I've been posting in June and July.

http://zthoughtcriminal.blogsp...

Your Darwin is the Darwin I discovered was a post-war invention, unknown to generations of Darwinists before the war, including his own sons, professional colleagues and others who did what neither you nor any other post-war Darwinist has, met the man and talked to him, never mind knew him as well as his sons did, including Leonard Darwin. I've read them in their own words, from Darwin, those he cited in his books and letters, his sons and his professional associates. You are superstitious about the guy, I've relied on the evidence he and they provided.

Oh, and as to what scientists say about Darwin?  That, Brit, is generally based in the same superstition I used to suffer from and you still do.  If scientists knew more about how historians and others in the humanities use documentary evidence left by people such as Darwin and those others mentioned - which has the decided advantage of being written by them IN ORDER TO EXPRESS WHAT THEY THOUGHT AND DID TO OTHER HUMAN BEINGS - they might not be so superstitious about him.  That evidence doesn't need nearly, nearly the amount of interpretation that the evidence he and they use to assert natural selection does, it has few of the ambiguities or the susceptibility of conscious or unconscious bias completely distorting it.  And it can always be checked against the original in its context which, I've discovered to my disappointment, is so seldom done in science these days.  If scientists  weren't so ignorant of such evidence and so arrogant about the methods scholars have developed to deal with it, they might not be so completely in the dark about this particular demi-god of scientism.