Saturday Night Radio Drama - Tina Fitzpatrick - Marginalia

 Marginalia 

With Gary Murphy, Norma Sheahan, Roger Gregg and by Irene Kelleher. Marginalia directed by Aidan Stanley.

then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life

"whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life — which means, of course, that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at 50 what you believed at 15, then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life."
 
Christian Wiman

I'VE POINTED OUT before that there are lots and lots of atheists who proudly declare they'd had it all figured out by the time they were fourteen, or twelve, or nine.   Or eight.  They had it all figured out that religion was all bunk and, it's pretty clear they've never changed their minds since.  I could add that their arguments about religion generally show that their thinking remains at about that age level if you engage with them on the issue.  Unfortunately, they're not the only ones who are cases of frozen development, there are lots of people within religion who never thought seriously enough about religion to question their beliefs to come to a more mature view of things.  

That quote at the top of this post comes from an article by Jonathan Merritt about a famous biblical scholar who I'm not very familiar with, Richard B. Hays, who wrote a book in 1996 which contained a  argument against LGBTQ relationships that, apparently, was much cited by those who wanted to discriminate against us.  I don't travel much in white evangelical circles so I'd never had "chapter 16" from that book pulled on me in arguments, oddly, I don't think I've ever had a Catholic care to get into it with me and any arguments I had on it were on grounds of would-be science and secular stereotyping.  But a lot of People do get into it with "evangelicals."  The article gives some of the angry, frightened responses from white evangelicals to the news that the man who provided them with their arguments has changed his mind in a forthcoming book he wrote with his son, also an eminent biblical scholar.  Some of them are blaming the son with leading the father into apostasy.

I was interested in that because another very respected bible scholar, the very Luke Timothy Johnson who I've cited a lot recently, said that he had been guilty of the sin of homophobia until some of his out of the closet students and his own Lesbian daughter had shown him what he believed about LGBTQ+ People was wrong. The accusation made by one evangelical conservative that Hayes had been led into apostasy by his son makes me think that it's not surprising that it would be younger People who did because the older generation, including mine, grew up with LGBTQ+ People being invisible and silent.   By the time the elder Hayes reached adulthood, he might have lived his life in a milieu in which LGBTQ+ People didn't figure much, just as some can live a life in which they don't have much direct contact with members of other targeted minority groups.  Their concepts of us were based, not on direct and open knowledge, but on lurid stereotypes and imaginations.  Their knowledge of the lives of gay people might be like someone basing their knowledge of straight Peoples' sex lives on what was presented in pornography.  Younger People  are more likely to have grown up knowing out of the closet LGBTQ+ People and knowing their lives showed the full range of relationships, from faithful, equal marriages to those who acted as bad as any straight immoralist.  Ranging from moral, responsible adults to self-indulgent perpetual 12-year-old boys to sadistic assholes and down to the likes of Lindsey Graham or Peter Thiele.

Johnson comes out of a Catholic background so there are differences in his own view of Scripture is bound to differ from that of someone with an evangelical orientation.  One that holds Scripture as important, even authoritative and at times to be taken literally but holding it loosely and not so tightly as to squeeze the life out of it.  The differences in quality and type of authority, perhaps, too.  I take Scripture as something to be considered and studied and thought about in coming to a variety of contingent conclusions as to how to live and think about things that can't be discovered through history or science or secular literature.  And that exercise can't possibly be done without thinking about it apart from our own, lived experience.  The Scriptures are full of People doing that, especially the literature of the Bible that Jesus cited the most, the Psalms and the Prophets.   That's especially true of a Christian whose understanding of Jesus the Christ is that Jesus is the Living Christ.  

Luke Timothy Johnson has pointed out that Scripture is merely one way of knowing the living Jesus and said one of the ways we learn about the living Jesus is in our life experience and, especially, in our interactions with other People, those close to us in our families and acquaintances and also in those who live lives on the social, economic and political margins, those without power.  There are certainly Biblical, especially Gospel and New Testament texts that support that idea, especially that the "Kingdom of God" is open to those on the sexual margins.  Jesus told the religious establishment, the "white evangelicals" or "good Catholics" of his time that prostitutes as well as tax collectors would enter into the Kingdom of God before they would.  He didn't say "reformed prostitutes" or even "reformed tax collectors" though in the case of Zacchaeus the tax collector who climbed a tree to see him, he said he'd stop stealing and give back what he'd stolen.   I could point out that in another Gospel Jesus didn't give the Samaritan woman a lecture on her less than faithful sex life before he offered her the "living water" which is certainly the same as an invitation to the Kingdom.  Paul might have had qualms about those who practiced same-sex sex, though it's pretty clear he had no idea about People who had an exclusively same-sex orientation, he figured they were out of control hetero-sexual libertines.  As the theologian Cheryl Anderson and Audre Lorde would say, he was thinking of everyone as a member of his expected authoritative default.   I think it's quite possible that two thousand years of hostility to LGBTQ+ People is based on the naivety of Paul in regard to sex and a misunderstanding of his use of that in his more general arguments in Romans and elsewhere, out of those are a few other clobber passages in the Bible which, as I've pointed out before, are as fraught with issues as the parts of the Bible dealing with slavery and other issues.  Johnson, a deep scholar of the Pauline literature, says that whenever Paul was up against the dominant mores of Mediterranean patriarchal culture, his radical egalitarianism went out the window.  He then made distinctions that he otherwise and eloquently rejected as being relevant to the Church he was helping to establish.

The Bible is not read today as it was written in societies in the very ancient and classical Eastern Mediterranean regions.  We can't reproduce the mind-sets of that time or the times and conditions lived under, we can't un-live the cultural accretions that are part of the world and lives we have lived and continue to live.  We can try to understand it on something closer to the writers own terms and thinking than a naive and dishonest "literal reading" of it will produce.  We can understand when churches doctrines and dogmas are an inheritance from the past that was, as well, conditioned by their own lives and understanding to judge if those are valid interpretations and valid ways to decide how to live.  And we can certainly grow in our understanding of it as we learn from living our lives, that is if we choose to learn anything from experience and, really, how can you exclude that and not be spiritually as well as intellectually dead.  But ignoring Scripture, a rich repository of the inspired writing of many People like us and unlike us in so many ways would be to give up one of the richest spiritual and literary and, for want of a better word, psychological resources there is. So that's not a productive option, either.  

The Six Fascists On The Court Are Trying To Turn This Into A Republican Presidential Fascism

THAT IS THE PLAIN reading of the hearing on Trumpian immunity.    The Court has to be stripped of its usurped powers and cut down to size by first imposing a term limit that will remove the RAT in that putrid building, Roberts, Alito and Thomas, and then the others as they have sat on that bench for a term.   Along with the absolute and strict ban on them and their spouses profiting off of anything to do with anything they did on the court.   

The Supreme Court, the Corrupt Court is the most corrupt branch of the government and it has been since they were ruling in favor of their own slave-holding.  

baleful effects on our general culture - A Footnote

LATE LAST night I remembered reading this in Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free,  it also supports my use of Denis Noble's talk in discussing politics.

The belief that genes are the basis of almost all inheritance is not just an intellectual theory but has had enormous economic and political consequences.  It has resulted in the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in genome and biotechnology projects.  If genes are the keys to life, then people want to own them and exploit them.  But if genes are grossly overrated, genomics will never live up to the high hopes it once engendered.  A few companies make useful products, but many make promises that never come true.

The gene-centered view of life has dominated science since the 1960s with baleful effects on our general culture.  Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO of Enron, a corporation noted for its greed and predatory behavior, said that his favorite book was The Selfish Gene, and the selfish-gene theory was a major part of Enron's corporate culture until the company collapsed in 2001.  Skilling, who is serving a long jail sentence, interpreted neo-Darwinism to mean that selfishness was ultimately good even for its victims, because it weeded out losers and forced survivors to become strong.

Genes are not individualistic and selfish, despite the rhetoric suggesting they are.  As parts of larger wholes, they work cooperatively in the development and functioning of organisms.  If they have any moral message for humans, it is that life depends on working together and not on ruthless competition.  

A broader understanding of heredity that includes genes, gene modifications and morphic resonance opens up many new questions, and helps free the life sciences from the tunnel vision of molecular biology.  It makes a big difference scientifically.  For a start, the word "hereditary" is no longer synonymous with "genetic."  Genes are part of heredity, not all of it. . . 

Which gives only one of so many possible examples of how neo-Darwinism has had a malignant effect on the general culture of the modern period, businessmen making use of it goes back into the gilded age robber barons,  John D. Rockefeller brought his understanding of natural selection into the infamous YMCA lecture he gave.

The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. … The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.

Anticipating the repetition of the common received lie that "survival of the fittest" isn't the same thing as natural selection, Darwin, himself said they were identical in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, something which I never seem to have to stop pointing out.*    But even if Darwin had not said that is irrelevant because what matters is how such people as Charles Sumner,  Rockefeller or Skillings reads Darwin, or how Galton, for that matter reads and uses his ideas and how anyone uses the ideas of neo-Darwinism as popularized by those such as O. E. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.  

Earlier in the same chapter Sheldrake said after a brief mention of John Stuart Mill's ideas about modifying the society to change "human nature" for the better:

On the other hand, Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, made a strong scientific case for the predominance of heredity which is often taken to support a more conservative philosophy.  In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), he argued that the prominence of Britian's most distinguished families depended more on nature than on nurture.  Galton was a pioneering advocate of eugenics, a word he coined.  He also realized that the question of nature and nurture could be studied with the help of identical twins.  He argued that identical twins had a similar hereditary constitution, while non-identical twins were no more similar than ordinary brothers and sisters.  And, sure enough, he found remarkable similarities between identical twins in a wide range of characteristics including the onset of disease and even time of death.

Some political philosophers used Galton's ideas on heredity to justify the British class system, and Galton himself proposed that the state should regulate the fertility of the population in such a way to favor the improvement of human nature through selective breeding.  The eugenics movement had a large following in the United States  and reached its apogee in Nazi Germany.  Not surprisingly, Nazi scientists were very interested in twins who were kept in special barracks.  Mengele told one of his colleagues, "It would be a sin, a crime . . . not to utilize the possibilities that Auschwitz had for twin research.  There would never be another chance like it."   

Sheldrake gives ample citations, as he always does even in his more popular writing such as Science Set Free,  If you haven't read the book, it's very interesting and provocative reading and you can check out his footnotes and citations.

I would fault him for missing several points that I made, that Darwin's theory of natural selection was the absolute inspiration and basis for Galton's eugenics, Galton said so in his Memoir in which he published Darwin's letter praising Hereditary Genius and we know that Darwin used Galton's eugenics writings to support his theory of natural selection in his later The Descent of Man (1871), rather an instance of circular reasoning, using an application of the theory in the theories support.  And, his point about the use of Galton's eugenics to support the British class system is a wider instance of circular reasoning because Darwin, himself, said that one of his greatest inspirations in inventing natural selection was his reading of Thomas Malthus on Population, in which Malthus props up the British class system and the laws that produced it and the extreme economic inequality that Darwin and Galton, as well as Malthus got the better end of the stick of that inequality.   As I recently pointed out you cannot possibly disassociate the British class system (and the self-interest of those who benefited from it)  from natural selection because its intellectual inspiration is utterly saturated with it, supports it and identifies its inequality with the way of "nature" when it is entirely man-made, artificial and the result of intentionally pursued self-interest.  The fact that the basis of that unholy trinity is based, not on natural conditions but the artifice of the English crown and aristocracy during the Tudor period and then expanded during the British period plays no small part in my complete skepticism in regard to the theory of natural selection, that and the fact that no instance of natural selection or even an artificial selection experiment has produced a new species in line with the entire stated motive of coming up with the theory to start with, to explain how the present diversity of life came about with myriads of "favored races" surviving as "unfavored" ones died out or, quite graphically in Darwinian fantasy as a result of a struggle for life or death.  

He could also, in line with what I added, have noted that through Galton's eugenics, Nazism was a direct consequence of a belief in Darwin's natural selection theory because what he abbreviated in a line I've shown in a long series of posts with citations, long passages given and often links to online publications of original documents.  

So, I'm hardly the only one who has noticed that this particular line of science has a strong dramatic and often extremely dangerous impact on politics and laws.   I could go on at length, but I already have, many times.  There's some difference between someone who knows the territory who accepts that evolution has happened and someone who is a "young earth creationist" who does or doesn't.  And there's a complete difference between anyone who is familiar with the primary literature and those who are too lazy or cowardly to look at it and admit what it says.

* I should point out that in looking for material for this post I ran into several online sources (here, for example) that repeat the lie that Darwin never intended his theory to be applied to the human species when his second major book on the topic, The Descent of Man had exactly that application as its theme and motivation.   I've come to believe that just about everything in that regard is either Darwinists who have never actually read what Darwin wrote or Darwinists who have read it and who are blatantly lying about it.  

The list goes on because no aspect of today's society can have escaped dogmas like

 "we are born selfish," "they, genes, have created us body and mind," . . .

DENIS NOBLE'S talk that I've been transcribing and commenting on ended very laudably with this:

Now I want to come to a final plea, back to the question of water. Because I want to finish this talk by returning to the unusual and amazing properties of water.  And you People in Iran will know only too well the importance of water.  You have sessions at this congress on the importance of water preservation.  And you might think this is a concern only in the traditionally arid areas of the world.  But I tell you it's much more serious than that.  My own country, England, illustrated in this image is also suffering a drought this year.  The whole of the Eastern part of my country is, at the moment, in a disastrous drought state.  You can see the ground is brown, not green.  So, even in England's "green and pleasant land" water is now a scarcity and the countryside is no longer green.  It is, therefore, urgent.  Young People everywhere in the world should plead with their rulers to save the world because life, as we've seen, cannot exist without water.  

So, I want to finish this talk with a wake-up call to the world everywhere, not only in Iran and my country, England, but everywhere in the world because the challenge is on a scale which human society has never faced before.  The climate change problem is a problem for a new generation, to create a world fit for the challenges of the 21st century.  They, that upcoming generation, they will face many looming signposts to warn them what went wrong.  The fires, the droughts, and the other problems.  So their generation will be the one that has to take responsibility for the way in which the Earth's ecosystems need rescuing.  Even for our own species, we humans, to survive.  Theirs will be a generation who can try to recover from the damage to society that results from reductionist models of physiology and evolution that have metaphorically shaped our ideas and models in fields as diverse as economics, sociology, philosophy, ethics, politics, , ,  The list goes on because no aspect of today's society can have escaped dogmas like "we are born selfish," "they, genes have created us body and mind," "it's in his DNA," and all the myriads of other tropes of related types that we now use almost without thinking.  Those future generations will also need to rewrite the textbooks, not only because they see the virtue of, "let us therefore teach our children"  to quote Richard Dawkins, but also because their politicians, economists, sociologists and philosophers will also need to find new strategies in collaboration with biologists and ecologists to lead them out of the gene-centric impasse.  It is, arguably, a challenge the scale of which human society has never faced before because the very future of life, of humans on this planet is at stake.  So I wish them all well.  

The chemistry of life begins and ends with water.

So thank you for your attention at this congress in Iran you can download all of the articles I've referred to free of charge from my website, www.denisnoble.com

Thank you very much and thank you for asking me, yet again, to talk to the Iranian Congress of Biology.

So, you can see that my diversions into politics as well as within biology aren't that far from the thinking of Denis Noble, but that's where I'll leave it for now.  I'm sure there will be more reasons to go into what he and his colleagues have said on these topics and their social, legal and political consequences.  

Harold Darke - O Brother Man

 

 

 

Boston Trinity Church Choir

 

O Brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of Him whose holy work was " doing good " ;
So shall the wide earth seem our Father's temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.

Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor
Of wild war music o'er the earth shall cease;
Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!

 

John Greenleaf Whittier  

I resolved to post more music this year and I haven't been keeping it yet. 

given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true

FOR THIS NEXT TO LAST post on Denis Noble's short lecture The Chemistry of Life Begins With Water, I'll comment just a little on his summary of why he believes that the actual, detailed molecular chemistry of life supports concepts of free will that the old-fashioned, cartoonish view of DNA and even cruder concepts of life and reproduction and evolution are used to actively refute in service to the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism.  Not that I couldn't point out the relevance of many of his points to what I'm interested in, political, legal and social implications of this but I'll wait to do that seeing how I must have strained your tolerance for that in my last couple of posts.   Later, I might risk posting my transcript of his talk without my commentary some time in the future along with a link to the video in which you can compare what I've typed out to what he said and, don't forget, his, for once, extremely useful slides.    

Nerve cells are densely packed with ion channels in their membranes.  And those channels are also continuously jiggling around in a stochastic dance.  Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance. Just as the immune system can distinguish between the forms of DNA variation to enable it to latch on to a new virus or a new bacterium so our nervous systems can latch on to the neural mechanisms that satisfy the criterion of social choice.  This is not a new idea incidentally, it was originally formulated by Gerald Edelman who won the Noble prize in 1972 for his discovery of the structure of the immune system's immunoglobulin proteins.  He went on to suggest the same harnessing of chance could be operating in the nervous system. He even called it "neural Darwinism" in a book he published many years ago.

So, I've pursued this question together with my brother zoologist and philosopher Raymond Noble to ask the question, does that enable values to influence physiology?  The choice of what we should do.  And where, in those articles, I argue that conscious organisms have the ability to match up their behavioral routines with the constraints of social interactions.  Including, for example, the concepts of fairness and for many other values for which we all live our lives.  If that is so then we have a process by which natural stochasticity, chance can be harnessed, that is used to enable us to act with what philosophers call the only free will worth having.  But can conscious choice influence our biochemistry?  Can it control the genome that way?  

Passing up the temptation of the phrase "neural Darwinism" in line with my skepticism about the existence of natural selection, I'll point out that this series of posts really began back with my posting of Thomas Merton's short essay "What is Liberty?"  in which he defined the basic level of liberty, freedom as being the ability to choose what was good over what was evil.  Certainly, in my context of political, social and legal use of freedom as a good thing, opposed to the kind of libertarian freedom which, under "liberal democracy" holds that all kinds of evil actions and oppression and even killings are permissible as "liberty,"  that IS the most important question. 'Liberal democracy" as it is encoded in most political and legal systems facilitates individuals to harm others, other People, other animals, the environment we all depend on as "liberty."   Egalitarian democracy depends on our choosing to restrain our inner two-year-old brat to allow others to live a decent, safe life.  But even more than that is under attack from the ideological choices and decisions of many influential People presented to us by the publishing media and industry.   As I will never stop pointing out, the kind of denial of the possibility of free thought, "free will" that is all the rage among materialist-atheist-scientistic academics and babblers and scribblers is rightly seen as a basic and direct attack on democracy as much as anything the billionaires, especially those with political control of some of the largest and richest countries on Earth are financing, today.  

Considering the use of "twin studies" by those whose Darwinism turns to eugenics and scientific racism, concentrating on seemingly uncanny similarities in twins separated a birth, this use of more detailed studies of twins by Denis Noble is very welcome.  

Now I come to a very interesting study that physiologists have done over many years looking at identical twins.  Identical twins have nearly identical genomes.  There are small differences but they're very slight.  Now imagine that one of them is brought up in an environment that leads him to choose to train as an athlete and the other does not.  Not surprisingly, as shown in the photo here, the body builds are completely different.  And in an extensive study of such cases of identical twins, physiologists have been able to identify the control RNAs in the athletic ones that enable their muscle proteins to grow so much.  So, the decision to train as an athlete, provided that decision is implemented in practice, leads to precisely those changes at the molecular level that enable the athlete to succeed.

Now, what is impressive about this study is that it identifies the small RNA molecules that control the genome.  And, in fact, this is happening all the time.  Our decisions to do whatever we do are inevitably controlling our genomes because similar physiological processes must be involved.   There are armies of small RNAs, of control RNAs wait to do just this.  

Now, is this what we call free will?  What I have shown is the harnessing of stochasticity, the use of stochasticity or chance clearly enables a form of creativity in behavior that allows social constraints the ideas of value and judgement that go with them to influence the physiology of our bodies.  But why should we call this "free will?"   Doesn't it mean that,  after all, we are determined but just by social interaction processes rather than physical processes?   

Well, yes, that's true in a sense. But what surely would disturb us as a challenge to our ability to choose would be a demonstration that there we are always impelled to do what we do by purely physical processes.  "My Genes Made Me Do It" is even the title of a book.  

So, being physically compelled and socially influenced are very different forms of determination.  Being influenced, even feeling compelled by the social influences of shared values and judgements surely does not worry us in the same way.  We can even observe the same processes in other species.  Packs of dogs illustrated in my image here, and groups of monkeys have both been shown in careful studies to be capable of discriminating against the members of the pack who are not cooperating.  These distinctions, therefore, between the physical and the social influences are surely the basis for what many philosophers   refer to when they talk about the kind of free will worth having.

You see, as the person, Denis Noble, I'm not worried by the fact that my upbringing and my social interaction has greatly influenced my values and, therefore, my actions.  Why ever should I wish it to be otherwise?

So, social freedom is the form of freewill worth having.  Furthermore, influence by social factors does not imply compulsion.  Social factors and the reasons we may give for our actions are what philosophers call defeasible.  Meaning, that in retrospect we may give the reasons for what we do.  Legal processes in our law courts illustrate that process all the time.

The concept of defeasibility was developed as a legal concept as well as having a philosophical basis.  

Now, clarifying what kinds of free will are worth having is, indeed, a philosophical question.  But what I hope I have done is to outline a way in which physiological processes, dependent upon the stochastic properties of water and, in turn, the stochastic properties of all the molecules that are in and dissolved in or suspended in water can exist and enable that kind of free will to occur.  Indeed, I would go further.  Given what we know of the chemistry of life, of its dependence on these interesting properties of water and the ability of water to give us the variability that we need to make choices, given all of that, that kind of free action must surely be true.

All of this is certainly welcomed by an egalitarian democrat like me because it gives a physical mechanism by which we can exercise free thought, free choice and it should be welcomed by anyone who has any esteem for human thinking, human reasoning, the long and large academic heritage and, even in its frequently decadent and self-destructive forms current in academia today, it defeats the simplistic, cartoon of physical determinism that is the default ideology imposed by the social and intellectual coersion that has hegemonic control of academia, the media and, increasingly, the legal and political mainstream.  Even those hardest of hard core physical determinists, and almost all of them are some species of materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism, don't want the logical conclusions of their ideological holdings because, as I've pointed out, it can't but help undermine any esteem that their professional product is held in.  

I don't, however, think that what Denis Noble says goes far enough, though as a scientist he is properly keeping in bounds with what his profession can honestly say about any of this.  You might have noticed that in the beginning of this section of his talk, Denis Noble said, "Nervous systems are almost designed to be harnessing chance."   In that "almost" is the formal reticence of a scientist who knows his science cannot determine if even something so reasonably concluded to have been a product of design because the design would require a designer.  Whether that designer is in line with the traditional concept of God, the Creator or if it is the design of an individual, overseeing living mind that does what he attributes to the molecules and cells and systems of cells in the body, harnesses the physical properties of water and fats and other molecules to do things toward an end, witnessing such a process makes it intellectually allowable, maybe even respectable to conclude that someone is in control of it all just as someone would have to make the choice above even the social influences and coercions, in the end.  

Having been steeping myself in the late plays of Eugene O'Neill during this same time as I've been doing this series, plays in which addition to alcohol and opiates are at the center of the tragedies he presented, plays about his family members and himself, we aren't only given one set of social influences to choose among, we are not compelled to choose one or another even on that level.  And the choices we make are not determined by our environments, those are defeasible as well.  We can reject or accept what our families and communities present as a better choice.   Listening to Long Days Journey Into Night, I heard the excuses the mother gives for her remaining addicted to morphine and recognized every excuse that the alcoholics in my family gave for not giving up alcohol.  I have said here before that when my brother refused to try AA because he "rejected a higher power" I could tell him he had chosen a higher power in the form of the ethyl alcohol molecule, that was his higher power to which he had sacrificed his health, his mental health, his job, his family, his home and car and everything else.  It's a rather bitter joke to me that ideological atheists have adopted a cartoon picture of an atom as the equivalent of a cross or star of David or a crescent moon.  To me that choice says everything there is to know about the choice that they have made and why it is incompatible with life.  

Though it isn't directly relevant to my use of Denis Noble's lecture, I will try to get around to typing out the last five or so minutes in which he makes a highly moral and laudable choice to concentrate on the politics, laws and social aspects of the provision of clean water which is as much in danger as egalitarian democracy is under the various gangster legal regimes from the worst dictatorships to the less corrupt liberal democracies which allow millionaires and billionaires to buy "water rights" and deprive People of the very basis of life, itself.  I think it's telling about the limits of traditional biology that this is the first time I've heard or read an in-depth analysis of that fact, that our bodies are mostly water, the substance that all of my previous reading in biology and related sciences just considered as if it was there to fill up space while the larger, more complex molecules operated independent of it.  Such a basically simplistic and incompetent view of life has been what has dominated the culture of biological sciences in my experience.  For that alone, this is a landmark lecture in my understanding of science.   

Spring Cleanin' Getting Ready To Blog - With A Response

LOOKING AT yesterday's posts this morning, I notice that I'd accidentally posted a rough draft of the long post instead of something more like one I'd want to post.   I've gone through it and added some things that got deleted in the rough edit and fixed a couple of problems with verb agreement,  something that's bound to happen when you decide to change a single or plural subject around.    

Since materialism is a monistic ideology, holding that everything that exists is a product of material causation in line with what science claims about that, in responding to the real-life consequences of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology I have every right to relate that to the very real political situation in which egalitarian democracy is thwarted and prevented and endangered, especially as those with academic credentials and a platform are undermining the very foundations of equality and democracy on behalf of that ideology,  denying the reality of the possibility of freedom of thought.   That seemingly academic polemical self-impeaching ideological struggle does have real life consequences, as can be seen in that ideology being held, either formally or loosely by some of the worst despots and mass murderers in history.   Having Robert Sopolsky out there promoting the belief that free thought is impossible as Trump, with the neo-Stalinist, Putin's and Xi's support, is trying to destroy democracy in the U.S., in Europe and elsewhere has to count as among the most irresponsible antics by an academic yet in  this century. 

And it's on the basis of old-fashioned, outmoded, refuted biological orthodoxy which started to crumble about eight decades ago.