Sacred Cows of The Nothing-Sacred Clique, Cluelessness of the Clued-In

One of the things I've learned in the past two weeks is that for the secular, sciency soi disant "liberals", the icon puncturing, nothing sacred thing that is "satire" is an inviolable  sacred cow.   Boy did they ever go all Margaret Dumont over my mild observations about Charlie Hebdo's incitement of murderous violence,  Mort Sahl's endorsement of a terrorist and war criminal, even as the bodies in his terror war were piling up, the inability of real satirists through history to get the effect they wanted with their pens and the such.  Which was too funny, the very raw material of satire.  But how can I write it when they produce it themselves, in real life?

Well, brace yourself because I'm going after another one today, one I've gone after before, pointing out that he stole the boresome atheist scold shtick of that other sacred cow of atheists, the mediocre comic George Carlin.   What I'm getting at is that Bill Maher has spoken again and, as always, what came out of his forequarters is what comes out of a cows hindquarters.

Bill Maher explained his choice to make decisions based on fact versus “ancient myth” in a video that aired online earlier this week. The video is a promotion for the Openly Secular campaign, which encourages “atheists, freethinkers, agnostics, humanists and nonreligious people” to be more forthcoming with their secular beliefs in order to help dispel discrimination.

“Hey, sign me up!” Maher exclaims in the advertisement. “I’m openly secular!”

“It seems to me the most obvious decision a person could make in their life,” Maher explains. “Do I want to make real-world policy decided on the basis of proven facts and the reaches of what humans have gotten to do in science? Or do I want real-world decisions made based on ancient myths written by men who didn’t know what a germ or an atom was, or where the sun went at night?”

“I picked choice A,” Maher stated emphatically, “science and facts.”

The quotes in this passage  are so full of myths, self-contradictions and ignorance that it didn't take me till the second sentence to count up several definitively discrediting ones.   And then there's the smug conceit, which is the real purpose of Maher, Dawkins et al.  This has nothing to do with "science and facts" it is a bald faced, PR appeal to the conceit of people who like to think they're better than other people and nowhere near as good as they tell themselves they are.  It's no different from any other ad campaign that appeals to that universal human folly of human vanity and conceit.

We've been over the impossibility of an atheist who is a materialist to believe that such a thing as "free thought" was possible and any who called themselves "freethinkers" are guilty of a massive unawareness of the logical necessities of their own ideology.   Freedom of anything is something you would have to go outside of materialism to find.  It is invisible to science,  science couldn't find if it were right in front of the scientists noses., their methods and tools are all dependent on material causation.  Apparently his degrees in History and English didn't prepare him enough in either science or philosophy for Maher to understand that much about the science he has also taken up as a part of his shtick instead of as an intellectual endeavor.

The foremost presence of "free thought" and "free will" and free anything in what is passed off as science has been as things to debunk and refute, but only among such scientists who have pretended to destroy those because of the difficulty they pose for their extra-scientific ideology of materialism, something they generally adopt in service to their scientistic atheism.  Most materialists, even among scientists are pretty clueless as to the absolutely inescapable and necessary logical conclusions about their own ideological holdings.   And those aren't attractive, they certainly don't support freedom of any kind for the reason that they deny what you would need for human minds to escape the bonds of material causation, what makes free thought even possible.

The political usefulness of the attractive idea of free thought is due to our non-scientific, human experience and non-quantifiable and rigorously analyzable history of what happens when it is made impossible.  People, including those such as Maher, who pretend to know much of anything about the physical sciences,  know what it is when someone can be denied their freedom and that the difference between freedom and bondage is as real and as experienced and as knowable to be the difference between right and wrong and so know it is as real as anything in science - also entirely reliant on human experience - is.

The pose of sciency atheism is that science gives them access to a higher reality that is not dependent on mere human experience, choice, judgement and preference and that is the founding myth of their ideological faith.  That it is human minds who are doing all of this science is pretended to not matter, not to mention that its methods are not only demonstrably prone to human error and human vice (fraud, cover up, etc) and that most successfully adopted of all scientific errors, ideological wishful thinking, but attempts, imperfect attempts, to correct and prevent those errors were put in place by the choices made by scientists based on that experience.

And also part of the mythos of the Maher mind is that science has universal power when it is, actually, constrained by those same methods and choices.   Science works only when it extracts and, often, abstracts a small specimen of reality to subject to its methods.  It is most successful when those specimens are sufficiently simple in themselves or the aspects of those specimens are sufficiently simple to discern limited factual information of great reliability about them.   Chemistry is far more successful at reaching its goals than biology is, due to the far greater complexity of organisms, especially those who act through volition and behave in unpredictable ways due to their behavior being motivated by volition and not by simple physical forces.

Physics on a small scale is certainly more successful at generating enduring information than cosmology is, though cosmologists, many of them physicists, enjoy the reverent faith of many millions who ignorantly follow their wild ride through various absolute holdings about the ultimate character and fate of the physical universe due to the reverence that physics has built up for itself.   I've grown ever more skeptical about the reliability of anything a cosmologist says because of 1. the dogmatic nature of the pronouncements of cosmologists, 2. their history of being wrong and those dogmas being rapidly overturned and seldom universally agreed on by eminent cosmologists.  The belief of anything any cosmologist says by any math-physics deficient layman is due to the myth that it has any of the reliability that its history proves it to not have.

You could add the clearly ideological nature of so much that cosmologists say these days, especially in the post-war period, which is obviously invented to explain things they can't explain and, especially, to try to avoid anything that might be taken to imply that there is a God who created the universe.  Something which, by the absolute claims of scientists, science shouldn't even be involved in because any scientist with enough knowledge of philosophy would know science couldn't ever deal with those questions.*

Maher's disdain for the knowledge and thinking of ancient people is, also, saturated in the most clearly a-historical myth.   Atheism, itself, is the product of such men as who didn't know much about the physical universe.  You could add to the achievements of such disdained primitives the foundations of mathematics, written culture, etc.  Only a true idiot could escape Cornell with a degree in history without knowing that or how to find that information if he cared about reality instead of commonly held atheist myth.

That brings to mind my recent, angrily met and unacceptable free thoughts about the self-contradicting, dogmatic and silly Strunk and White, another Cornell product, another inviolable sacred cow of Maher's iconoclastic target audience. You're not allowed to think its reliability is a myth even as its content proves that it is unreliable.  And its reliability is a myth you will be commanded not to attack. One might conclude that, perhaps, most commonly used intellectual contribution of Cornell would show that Ivy League school doesn't produce a reliably reliable product.   Strunk-Whitewise, they also gave Maher a degree in English.

Oh, and Maher isn't funny.   He's just telling you what he hopes you'll want to hear.  It's not satire. 

* It is remarkable, considering how eager scientists are when their discoveries can be prostituted by the military-industrial and political aspects of human culture, how horrified they are when religious folk, some of them fully qualified and even accomplished scientist, draw religious conclusions incorporating their findings.  Their angry, irrational reaction, much of it called "science" is a dead giveaway as to their real motives and what they really care about.

Update:  To the idiot who challenges me to "call a theologian" the next time my computer crashes,  the guy I take my computer to isn't a theologian but he is a deacon in his church.  He's something so many others including your sacred cows aren't, honest.

Update 2:   Sorry that a subscription is required but I can't resist posting this in lieu of writing a response:

FRANKENSTRUNK, BY JAN FREEMAN

God bless Jan Freeman. At least there is one newspaper writer on language who has, in addition to great style and humor, good research and a real sense of what is important and what is not. And in the case of Sunday's column, a better critique of Strunk and White ("this aging zombie of a book") in its stupid new full-color illustrated edition ("a colorful shroud on a corpse that's overdue for burial") than I could imagine writing myself. I will say nothing more about the October 23 "The Word" column in the Boston Sunday Globe, headed "Frankenstrunk", other than this: go and read it.