Paul Elkins' Wonderful Inventions

I have got the opposite of wanderlust but once in a while I wish I could get used to sleeping where there is noise and bugs and not much between me and the thunder and lightening... OK, I'm scaring myself out of it.  

You might like watching Paul Elkins' great videos about his tiny, really, really tiny huts, small, vehicles and boats  and even his teeny-tiny survival kits much smaller than an Altoids tin. He's more the Burning Man type, not the prepper type.  But this one, a Coroplast (what they make campaign signs out of these days) streamlined bicycle camper is really tempting.

Even got the old campaign signs, saved up in case any of these guys run again. They don't know I took them from the ones they were sending to recycling so they won't be missed.  They'll probably change their campaign colors. .  I've even got the Reflextic aluminized bubble wrap insulation-light reflector.   I am really tempted to build one of these and take to the open road.  Or at least the tote road up to my garden in case I've got to discourage raccoon when my corn gets to the milk stage.  Maybe if I put a chicken wire fence around it to slow down bears.   I haven't seen the bears but I'm told there are some in the woods.  They come after my corn, they're welcome to it.

Hate Mail - Stupid and Dishonest

Actually, it was the blog atheists who blamed Dr. George Tiller for his murder by blaming his murder on Christians, indiscriminately.  That is his murder as he ushered at his Reformed Lutheran Church service.  

I gave up trying to figure if blog thread atheists were stupid or just entirely dishonest because people like you showed me that those weren't mutually exclusive but generally mutually reinforcing.  

Asserting that is relevant to my comments about Katha Pollitt's disgusting column praising those bigots who provoke murderous violence only adds weight to that observation.   Her column is like those websites that encouraged the atmosphere that led to deadly violence against Tiller and other abortion providers, only in Muslim majority countries, most likely and most predictably.  I'm sure she feels far safer sitting where she is than so many in so many other places. 

I'm having computer problems and may be out for a day or so or, in the mysterious ways of computers, maybe not.

I'm not dead.

Just in case anyone was getting their hopes up.

Harry Somers - String Quartet no. 3

Accordes String Quartet

Hate Mail 2: Redux

Leave it to my little off hand remark about the dear old commies of our childhood being liars to get the biggest reaction.  Well, they were lying about the Rosenbergs being innocent of trying to give Stalin the bomb.  What do you want me to do, pretend we don't know that now?    I don't care who else bought the lie back then, how otherwise admirable they were.  They were as duped as we all were or they were in on the lie.  The people who pushed that on us are a bunch of liars who never deserved our belief.  We know that now too.

Other than what you obviously consider the insignificant detail of the many tens of millions of people who were murdered under Communist governments, the hundreds of millions who were oppressed and at times enslaved by those governments, among the others damaged by them were those who could have benefited by reforms that were successfully prevented by those who created a false association with those and the red-fascist regimes.  Including many aspects of socialism.  Socialism, as an idea and a word is so damaged by that association that I don't think it can ever be used again.  Which is a genuine tragedy and a crime in itself.

You can leave that behind and go either the one baby-step from one form of despotism into  that advocated by the far right, as so many ardent Marxists have in the past, or you can leave it for a more genuine left that doesn't put a dictatorial, anti-democratic ideology before morality and democracy.  I exited to the left, buddy and am not at all sorry I did.  I only regret I wasted so much time on junk I should have seen through from the beginning.

"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." William Randoph Hurst As The Model of Our Atheist Hatemongers

For someone who used to like reading her column in The Nation, I've got to say that Katha Pollitt has turned into a real asshole these days.  She's pushing the "blasphemy is good" line hard, no doubt hoping to raise her standing in organized atheism, clearly her planned retirement career as paid scribbling isn't as secure as it used to be.  She's pushing that in a couple of recent pieces, one last month and one this month that is behind a pay wall, its subtitle probably gives away her motives in all of this,

The Courage of ‘Charlie Hebdo’
The French magazine is blasphemous—and isn’t that an honorable thing to be?

I am sure in the bubble of the New York City scribbling class who are also prominent in anti-religious organizations, such as Pollitt, it is honored but considering the death toll of their publicity stunts you could only find it honorable if you truly didn't care about those people.  In the very apt analogy of Noam Chomsky, clearly for such writers as Katha Pollitt the people who die in the violence which is quite intentionally incited by such "honor" are like the ants you step on when you have to walk somewhere, only you can't help but having to walk and there is no need to intentionally incite murderous violence by drawing seriously unfunny cartoons to service the hate industry.

While her point that women in many Islamic countries are seriously oppressed is certainly valid in those countries - not nearly as true in all Islamic countries - I would really like to read the opinion of the majority of feminists in those countries as to whether or not what Pollitt is championing, such garbage as the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, are at all helpful in promoting rights of women in such countries.  I strongly suspect that such Western stunts by Western atheists is more likely to harden attitudes that will need to be softened to make any kind of progress for women.  Atheists who dream of weakening and overturning Islam are deluded, dreaming idiots.   Only I have come to see the effort that Pollitt is championing as more massively and coldly cynical, more like Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Midge Decter than Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm.

If I were curious enough about her thinking I might go into her archive of columns and see if that kind of indifference to such lives wasn't evident in other ways, aside from the stupidly romantic view of Marxism well after body count from that ideology as lived in real life was in the tens of millions.   There was, actually, a big difference between those on the left who saw Marxism as honorable and good and desirable and those on the left who saw it as a fact of life which,  if we didn't want to be continually involved in ruinous wars and risking nuclear annihilation we had to live with, while being frequently appalled by the violence, the viciousness and the expansionist goals of communists.  It is rather telling that the post-communist atheist scribblers seem to be calling for policies not unlike those they opposed when it was the cold warriors promoting them in opposition to communism.  I will reserve the observations centered on the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont for now, though they are certainly apt and relevant.

It is telling that someone like Pollitt, who seems to consider herself as something of a red diaper baby, continued and perhaps continues to see communism as something to hope for in the future, even in the face of its massive violence, its inherently anti-democratic and oppressive features, whereas she is joining the atheist war on the billion and a half Muslims in the world, clearly praising the attempt of her fellow blasphemy fans to incite more violence so she can get more columns out of condemning it.   Whereas I wish I didn't have to talk about such stupid, puerile, corrupt and dishonorable scribblers at all, concentrating on problems that already exist instead of those which are invented by such folks so they can do what the commercial media does,  attract eyes so they can make money.

And at Salon, their resident exploding cesspool of hate, Jeffrey Tayler is doing his bit to fan the flames.  I won't give you a link, I have decided that I won't link to the really serious haters who clearly are deranged.   There is a level of irresponsibility that I won't encourage people to read.

Update:   Here's my response to Tayler's hate-feast at Salon.

If the more than a billion and a half people who are Muslims were reading those verses in the Quran in the way Jeffrey Tayler wants to pretend they must read them, the bloodshed would be thousands of times more than it is in the real world, outside of his febrile assertions.

Let me break this to you, Salon Hate Choir, a billion and a half Muslims don't care what you think but a sizable number of them will react if you intentionally insult Muhammad or depict Muhammad insultingly or kill their children or do any of a number of other acts.  AND YOU CAN'T MAKE THEM STOP DOING THAT BY DOING THAT.

It must feel really frustrating for you boys and girls that you can't just insist that they convert to atheism and have them go along with it, but that's never going to happen.  In the mean time it's for the adults among us to face reality and to try to repair the damage you insist on causing.

If you want to contain Islamic imperialism, a real problem caused by petro-billionaires wanting to impose their will on others - hardly a problem exclusive to Islam or other religions and almost always having an economic and egotistical motive - don't use so much oil.  Defund them. Though the atheists in places like China will be more than willing to make nice with the billionaires anywhere, absorbing a few inconveniences, such as funding for Islamic nationalist groups which they will put down in ways I imagine the Taylers and Mahers and Gellers here can only dream of.

The ideas in this piece are far more of a danger to egalitarian democracy here than mainstream Islam as practiced by most American Muslims who haven't been radicalized by being insulted and oppressed.

Update 2:  I should note that the overwhelming violence of the Islamic fundamentalist imperialism funded by petro-billionaires has been paid by Muslims in more moderate Muslim societies.  It is a mark of how cynical our foreign policy props up the elites that sponsor that imperialism based on business and economic interests.  There is some point to be made about us paying for the rope that is going to hang us, only it's more likley to hang people in less developed countries, many of them Muslims.   The extent to which Islamic fundamentalist killing is considered an acceptable price to do business can be seen in the Bush Crime Family invasion of Iraq when the enhancement of Islamist groups and movements resulting from it was one of the most certain costs of overturning Saddam Hussein.  The position of women in Iraq taking a drastic down turn was another of those predictable results.

Never worry about what people who won't read what you say think they're thinking about it.  

For People to Do Good Things, That Takes Religion

A while back I posed a problem for the materialistic model of the mind and our thoughts, how, unless an idea already was present in the brain, how would our brains know how to build whatever molecules or structures were required to comprise that idea as a physical structure in our brain.   That was only a shorthand version of the problem, it would still be there whatever the idea-structure proposed to comprise the material existence of an idea was.   How could the brain build exactly the right complex physical entity that would be the physical existence of a materialist idea without the idea actually being present in the brain to serve as a model or blueprint of the idea?   Though, if the statistics of my blog are correct I would guess several hundred people or more read that question but no one proposed an answer to the problem that would be consistent with a "brain-only" currently fashionable, materialist, "physicalist" or "naturalistic" explanation of our minds, our thoughts, our most basic and essentially experienced being and existence, the base from which we do every single thing we are capable of doing, including experiencing and observing the physical universe, thinking about it and coming up with any idea we might have, materialistic, idealistic, atheistic, religious, agnostically indifferent, frivolous or serious.

Our minds, the minds of other animals, consciousness, mental activity have always been the "hard problem" of materialism, I think, essentially for reasons like the one I posed, there is no way to make sense of our experience of thinking, especially in real time, in a material frame work.  The attempts of atheists to dispose of consciousness, other than being the supreme example of intellectual decadence, has had real life, political dangers because if you begin with a program of devaluing human minds, you inevitably start a program of devaluing human lives by turning people into objects.  Which does, actually, constitute a coherent universal explanation of the problem of evil as done by human beings to other human beings and, also, to all sentient creatures and life, in general.  There have never been a shortage of people who, no matter how fervently and readily they will firmly believe in some purportedly objective devaluation of other people, will exempt themselves and those they care about from their otherwise universal practice.  The practice of devaluing other people into less than human, less than deserving the full measure of our moral obligation is the origin of all human evil.

------

In reading around the web over my posts about Max Tegmark, I again came across a person who passes in sciency materialism today as an expert on issues of morality, "the question of evil", etc.  Steven Weinberg, who uses the existence of evil as one of the major planks in his personal war on religion.  In the first of the things I came across this weekend a Profile of Steven Weinberg from The End of Science, Scientific America's John Horgan says:

Weinberg was well aware that many people hungered for a different message from physics. In fact, earlier that day he had read in The New York Times that the physicist Paul Davies had received a million-dollar prize for work “advancing public understanding of God or spirituality.” Davies had written numerous books, notably The Mind of God, published in 1992, suggesting that the laws of physics reveal a plan underlying nature, a plan in which human consciousness may play a central role.

After telling me about Davies’s prize, Weinberg chuckled mirthlessly. “I was thinking of cabling Davies and saying, ‘Do you know of any organization that is willing to offer a million dollar prize for work showing that there is no divine plan?’”

In Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg had dealt rather harshly with all this talk of divine plans. He raised the embarrassing issue of human evil and suffering. What kind of plan is it that allows the Holocaust, and countless other evils, to happen? What kind of planner?

Many physicists, intoxicated by the power of their mathematical theories, have suggested that “God is a geometer.” Weinberg retorted, in effect, that if God is a geometer, then He is a cruel or callous geometer, and Weinberg wanted nothing to do with Him.

I asked Weinberg what gave him the fortitude to sustain such a bleak vision of the human condition. “I sort of enjoy my tragic view,” he replied with a little smile. “After all, which would you rather see, a tragedy or–” He hesitated, his smile fading. “Well, some people would prefer to see a comedy. But… I think the tragic view adds a certain dimension to life. Anyway, it’s the best we have.” He stared out his office window, brooding.

To the point, many atheist websites contain many quotes from Weinberg, some mentioning the Holocaust, for example there is this from the rather ironically named "Positive Atheism".

Religious people have grappled for millennia with the theodicy, the problem posed by the existence of suffering in a world that is supposed to be ruled by a good God. They have found ingenious solutions in terms of various supposed divine plans. I will not try to argue with these solutions, much less to add one of my own. Remembrance of the Holocaust leaves me unsympathetic to attempts to justify the ways of God to man. If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.
-- Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

I have long thought that the physicist Steven Weinberg has been one of the more absurd figures to hold as an expert on questions of morality and to listen to on these issues, since his scientific specialty has done more than most to create weapons and to give people the potential to make the Holocaust look like a trial run for universal and instantaneous evil on a scale that would make every living being, with, perhaps a few exceptions, the victims of organized, scientific death.   He, in fact, while not mentioning, explicitly the role of his fellow scientists, many of them, in fact, atheists, in creating the nuclear threat to all of life on Earth, notes its existence in John Horgan's Scientific American interview with him.

But the money quote that atheists will ususally give, the obvious reason he is so beloved by atheists who otherwise know nothing about him, despite the obvious contradictions between his life, his science, and the line is, also from "Positive Atheism"

Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things -- that takes religion.

Well, obviously, in the case of nuclear weapons it took the work of a lot of atheists to do bad things.  Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller, ...   In the case of the Soviet atomic and nuclear weapons system, it took the work of atheists giving one of the most massively evil regimes and men in history those weapons*, something which could also be said of Mao's weapons program and, I would imagine, that of the Kim regime in North Korea.  Though Kim had the help of a physicist who was prepared to sell the technology of mass murder for profit or to act as a broker, depending on who is explaining what happened. That is something I can't imagine the Muslim religion would countenance,  putting such weapons in the hands of atheists, leaving aside the disputed assertion that all nuclear weapons are banned by Islam.

But it is his comments linking the Holocaust to his arguments against God that are especially interesting to place beside Weinberg's more developed concept of morality.  In posts last year,  I went into what he said about morality during a session of Sean Carroll's "Moving Naturalism Forward" in which he stated that he was only really interested in the good of his family and his university department,  putting their welfare and even comfort before any moral obligation to others.  In short, Steven Weinberg's moral concern is related, entirely, to proximity of other people to himself, drawing a distinction between people close to him and all other people who he doesn't view as equally deserving his concern.

It may be unwelcomed or impolitic to say it but Weinberg's morality is exactly the same kind of moral frame that the Nazis gave for their policy of exterminating other, competing groups of people.   Jews, Poles, members of other minority groups, who were to be replaced by German People who required the space on Earth occupied by those competing people.   The policy of "Lebensraum,"  the policy of expanding the land base on which the German population could replace those who lived there, was central to the entire Nazi policy of mass murder of conquered people.  It was an extension of the circle of those who were close to the Nazi theorists and establishment based on national and ethnic identity, a wider circle than that which Weinberg explicitly states are the beneficiaries of his moral concern not based on universal equality and an equal right to the moral concern of others but based on personal identification with a group with superior claims on that moral concern.

In his explanation, on the video from Moving Naturalism, of how he adopted and give up different theories of morality, Weinberg notes that his final conclusions about radically restricted universes of moral concern are widely practiced in the human population.  I would agree that they are commonly, though not universally practiced.  Most people resist any impulse to extend their moral concern outside of their family circle and their larger circle with themselves at its center.  Which is among the most obvious reasons that people are treated unequally and exploited, used, used up and disposed of.

In fact, and in total contradiction of Steven Weinberg,  about the only reason that some people do try mightily to practice universal moral equality is, in fact, the religions that teach that.  As recently noted here, Marilynne Robinson identifies one of the major sources of that religious attempt at resisting human habits of selfishness in the Jewish Law as first given by Moses**.   It is certainly taught by Jesus as his universal moral concern, which is given in commandments, includes your enemies and those who persecute you, the hardest of his teachings include giving your money to those who won't give it back to you.  His very controversial teachings include the dissolution of familial obligations in favor of universalizing moral obligations, expressed in the most dramatic of terms, I suspect to emphasize just how radically different the morality Jesus taught was.   What is usually translated as a requirement to "hate" your closest family members (Luke 14:26) which, in a world saturated with exactly the kind of morality based in ego-centrism which Weinberg practices, must be about the most extreme opposite to it.

If Weinberg wants to know why the Holocaust could have happened if there is a God, he has his answer in his own moral discourse which is the same kind of morality as that which led to that mass murder.  He has the freedom to decide that for himself, other people had the same freedom to make the same kind of decision, that is why there was a Holocaust.  I don't hear him complaining about having that freedom of thought.  Anyone who through voluntary decisions of their own practiced the religious teachings of the two major prophets of Western religion, could not have produced mass murder such as the Holocaust.   Any society which practiced an unrestrained form of Weinberg's morality could, I think, hardly hope to avoid one.   I think that, given the ubiquity of Weinberg's morality, that it may have been due only to the inhibitions contained in the professed religions of people which prevented there from being more bloodshed.

The problem isn't that too many people are religious, it is that too few people are religious enough to overcome the natural tendencies of self-concern, self-interest and selfishness.  And, as even Weinberg says to his opponents in that circle of elite atheist thinkers, nothing in science will give you a durable reason for overcoming those.   The difference is that he rejects the one thing that can. Atheism has nothing in it that can do that.  For Weinberg to wallow in his dark vision of humanity is also his choice***.  It's not one that the human species can survive if too many people make it and actively work to dissuade people of the one thing that can, at times, resist it.   I am not one of those people who assert the moral equivalence of atheism, I suspect that any morality exhibited by atheists is a vestige of the moral teachings of religion retained by habit and mere inclination.  It's my observation of de-religionized families that you shouldn't expect it to persist more than a couple of generations, if that long.

*  I would suspect that the known nuclear spies who worked in the Manhattan Project were atheists, as all of them were, obviously,  Stalinists.   To be willing to give such weapons to someone whose record of mass murder was nothing to consider a minor detail apparently it didn't take religion.

**  The point which Robinson has been making, over and over again, in public for many years, that The Law of Moses included equal treatment for aliens living among the Israelites and an obvious concern for the lives and rights of other people, even Pagans, is in starkest contrast to the morality of those I'm examining here.

***   I asked Weinberg what gave him the fortitude to sustain such a bleak vision of the human condition. “I sort of enjoy my tragic view,” he replied with a little smile. “After all, which would you rather see, a tragedy or–” He hesitated, his smile fading. “Well, some people would prefer to see a comedy. But… I think the tragic view adds a certain dimension to life. Anyway, it’s the best we have.” He stared out his office window, brooding.

Update:  Hate Mail - No, we now know that the campaign to beatify Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was based on the lie that they were both innocent of trying to give Stalin the bomb years before he got it.   We now know that he certainly and she almost as certainly were, in fact, engaged in atomic espionage while he was employed by the government of the United States.   How that would differ from anyone who was trying to give Hitler the bomb is a matter of mere details.  And they were hardly the only Stalinists who were engaged in trying to give Stalin the bomb.

I know that's not what we were all told in the phony, pseudo-leftist folk lore we were brought up with but that happens to be only one of the many areas in which those dear old commies of our past lied to us, not what Woody would have alluded to in one of his movies.  Not that the fascists were telling the truth, ususally, but they did to the extent that they got the guilt of the Rosenbergs right.  They still shouldn't have been killed, THAT was a miscarriage of justice.  I know that's more nuanced than you're used to being but that's not my fault.

By the way, when I say "Hate Mail" most of it is actually in the form of rejected comments.  I stopped posting my e-mail address a long time ago, about the time I first started moderating comments.

Harry Somers - Symphony No.1

Canadian National Arts Centre Orchestra
Victor Fledbrill - Conductor

Harry Somers was a fine Canadian composer whose music should be played more often on this side of the border.

Tegmark Stubs a TOE

In thinking about, not the absurd ideas Max Tegmark is pushing about consciousness but about his idea that any form that can be mathematically calculated exists in the universe, that it is quite problematic for a lot of his fellow peddlers selling the line of naive materialism, some of them quite well known and working at similar academic institutions.

First is that I'd like to know, mathematics being at least effectively if not actually infinite, how that could achieve verification, there could always be a class of objects that could be calculated which could also not exist, especially in some as of yet unknown and unsuspected form of mathematical relationships.  It would seem to me that ultimate proof of such an idea would require a grand unified theory of mathematics and physics which would never be available.  Though I'd like an explanation of how you could get by that problem.  Even if, as I assume from reading various articles about Tegmark's ideas, he wants to get rid of the idea that mathematics is actually infinte, that still leaves the problem of it being effectively infinite as compared to the entire combined ability of human beings to reach the end of it, and not only us but, let me ask, if it surpasses the ability of all of the combined intelligence in the universe - which our full professors of physics and cosmology don't have and will certainly never have access to.*

The second problem is for that oh, so popular quest for a "theory of everything" within physics and cosmology if all something had to be to exist in the physical universe was to be calculable.  Doesn't the idea expand the problem of coming up with such a complete theory infinitely?   There would always be more forms, more relationships governing those forms, more aspects of those forms that would not be covered by existing theory, etc. ad infinitum.   I would think that the infinite vistas of complexity and detail that are implied by such a proposal would mean that the entirety of human knowledge about the physical universe is less than a drop in the bucket but also of negligible worth, if hankering after completeness is the Holy Grail being sought.   Yes, even that currently most popular item in the hazy reverence of the sci-rangers, the Higgs particle, and its epic of discovery is just  meh.

There is a story that after Thomas Aquinas finished his massive opus, the Summa Theologica  he had a mystical experience which led him to declare that all of his intellectual work was "as straw" compared to what he had experienced.   I, somehow, doubt that such questers as Sean Carroll and the such are going to be content to have their quest reduced to the same status.

*  Yesterday's posts were provoked by the exchange I had with some true believers (and I suspect employees of) the SETI hobby project and the study of "exo or astrobiology".   The blind and naive faith of the sci-rangers can be measured in direct proportion to the blind and naive denial that their faith is faith and, far more so than most of religion, based in wishful thinking.   I mean, there aren't any moral prohibitions on doing what you want to do and being selfish in the Church of Atheist Science.  Its prosperity gospel has less exigent demands than that of the most banal and repulsive TV peddler of the competing product.

Hate Mail - Well, I Thanked The Dolt Didn't I?

I would never have mentioned what was said speculating about my reaction to Max Tegmark's absurd ideas about consciousness - if what he says is true, paradoxically one of the casualties will be the possibility that physical law can be objectively true which would falsify his other big idea - if I hadn't read Peter Woit's review of Tegmark's book last year, along with several, though not all of Woit's links to other peoples' posts about Tegmark.

I'm not going to apologize for being able to use that unsought opportunity to illustrate my contentions in a blog post I wrote before I was notified about the comment and before it was even made.   If people are going to insist on giving me those kinds of opportunities, I'm certainly going to take them.  

As for the other idiots you notify me of, not interested, they provide nothing. 

The New Dark Age of Scientistic Materialism

Note:  See an illustration of what I say in the Update below.

I am still learning a lot about the phenomenon of college educated ignorance and scientific ignorance of the most basic practices of scholarship and even science.  I had little to no idea how bad things were until I went online and read lots of people with degrees, many of them with academic careers in science and other academic topics who are abysmally ignorant and entirely willing to violate the most basic of all rules that we were told were required in tenth grade.   And a lot of those doing that are in my age cohort, this has been building for quite a while.

Understanding how we came to this position isn't easy, one thing I have concluded is that a lot of it is a result of cutting corners and relying on things based on repute instead of rigor.   And there is nothing that fits that bill like anything that can be sold as science.  It doesn't actually have to be scientific, the definition of science, set for such topics as physics and chemistry, were gradually expanded to include the study of life and associated entities which can't possibly be studied successfully or as completely due to the far greater complexity of the subjects of study.   As that study expanded the applications of the methods of science were stretched to an extreme and, with the theory of natural selection and a desire to include such things as behavior and mental activity, it passed the breaking point.  However, I believe largely in the interest of academic politics, what was being done was still called "science" though the methodology was often only a pantomime of what was done in the physical sciences.   And, as theoretical physics extends beyond any practical possibility of confirmation in nature and, more to the point, as physicists and cosmologists have desired to use the authority of science to support their ideological materialism, they've even outdone the psychologists in demanding an exemption from the most basic requirements for doing science.   I've gone through this idea before but it is coming ever more into focus for me.   

Science may be the one area of intellectual activity which has enjoyed the highest repute and, ironically enough, the blindest faith in the history of the species.   Among the educated of today, even those with little to no knowledge or understanding of science and its requirements, the faith in anything called "science" is as absolute as any state religion has ever enjoyed.   The uncomprehending faith in science is ubiquitous, even as the areas of science presented as infallible and entirely reliable are a matter of picking and choosing.  Hardly anyone has a uniform faith in science that is unrelated to either their ideological or, more often, financial interests.   Self-interest trumps even that faith.   Yet, picking and choosing along the way, one of the greatest of all modern sins is to disbelieve in something which either is, actually, reliable science or which enjoys the label of "science" no matter how lacking in reliability it is.  Those who deny the science of human caused climate change will claim "science" in support of their denial, creationists have had to invent their own "science" to support their denial.  But it's as true that much of what is accepted in the conventional canon of science isn't much more founded in the scientific observation and analysis of evidence in the natural universe. 

The classifications of periods of human history is hardly a science, it's not even very sophisticated history.  No period of human history was uniformly dark,  the age called the "enlightenment" has contained some of the darkest, most homicidal acts in the history of our species.  The claims that those dark blots on "enlightenment" are claimed to represent remnants of medieval, mystical, and other allegedly regressive hold-overs of the past when all of them used what was represented to be and widely taken as science as their intellectual foundation.  All of the darkest, most benighted regimes of our time and in the past two hundred years put enormous resources and efforts into science and, especially, the products of science, the level of that usually tied to the economic resources available to the regime and, in the absence of that, mined out of the people living under that regime.  In his quest for nuclear weapons, Zia ul Haq, the former president of Pakistan said that he would pursue the bomb even if it meant the people of Pakistan would be reduced to eating grass.  The despoliation and destruction of entire regions of people in the Soviet union and, in developing catastrophes in such places as Sellafield in Britain and Hanford Washington represent similar phenomena.  

Science, even real science has proven itself able to accommodate the darkest of patrons and the darkest of ideologies.  Scientists have proven themselves to be capable of enjoying, encouraging and even demanding the belief of people in their pronouncements, even those pronouncements which are not in any way understood by those believers.  Every day on comment threads, in blog posts and articles, you can read the same kind of demand made by people whose educations and intellectual formation contain nothing which would permit them to understand what was being said or to choose between the sciency statements of those they support.  That is true even for the most obviously ideological statements which are in no way widely accepted by other scientists or mathematicians, philosophers with relevant competence or others who do understand what is being asserted.   I can just about guarantee you that if I were to land on any comment thread on any blog or web-mag this minute there would be an assertion of that kind made by the most entirely ignorant of people.   I've wasted months of my life arguing with people like that over things like consciousness, abiogenesis, free will, natural selection, multiverse creationism, ... and that doesn't even get to the outright and massively believed in pseudo-sciences such as evolutionary psychology and the social "sciences".   The stupidity of such believers is generally matched with the most massive of conceit and arrogance, which can be amusing to encounter, even as it rapidly becomes tedious.

Being in the midst of a dark age can be exhausting if only intermittently amusing.  But I don't think there's much of a choice because if you suspend rigorous consideration you can get suckered into it, too.  So, I think I'll keep on with what I'm doing.

Update:

Max Tegmark, someone is snarking about my speculated reaction to Max Tegmark's most recent attention grabbing star pose of turning consciousness into matter.   Well, I suspect that the idiot who did that knows nothing about Tegmark (who, by the way,  changed his name from Shapiro because he thought it would make him more marketable, an irony in itself) but he unwittingly provided about the best current example of what I said here by doing so.

Peter Woit's blog post on his "Mathematical Universe" is worth reading in so many ways, showing how a first class mathematician applying the standards of science to scientific claims, not to mention mere logic and rigorous analysis, can come away quite skeptical of that.  I think the idea that every possible thing that is calculable existing is a rather silly idea but I can't apply the same level of thought to it that Woit does.

However, the most telling part of the blog post is in the comments where Tegmark's greatest supporter, unlike Woit and other skeptics, hadn't read the book under discussion.

"CJ says:
January 27, 2014 at 10:12 am
Dear Max, it is your behavior that is having the chilling effects not only on this blog, but throughout the entire physics community.

It is quite remarkable that while you are the one with millions upon millions of dollars at your disposal, a professional publicity machine, MIT’s PR department, and legions of Ph.D.-free pop-sci-fanboys, you accuse Peter of being a “creationist” bully for merely reading your book and reflecting on its empty content as a lone individual. To pile irony upon irony, it is also remarkable that while your book does little more than promote a faith-based initiative, which is not testable science, you then have the gall to accuse scientists and objective writers of behaving like religious fanatics.

Max Tegmark’s biggest defender Orin writes, “Peter, I’m afraid I haven’t had the time to read the book yet, but I’m familiar with the material I expect to be in it.”

Max, you do realize that your career is built more on laymen who have not read your book, than on scientists who have?

Orin says:
January 27, 2014 at 11:35 am
Well Peter, this “Ph.D.-free pop-sci-fanboy” has given your blog a fair shake. Specimens in irony like the above only do you a disservice by lending credence to Max’s comparison. Enjoy your echo chamber.

Peter Woit says:
January 27, 2014 at 11:44 am
Orin,
I hope once you do get around to reading the book under discussion, if you find a non-vacuous argument in it for the MUH or the Level IV multiverse, you return to let me know."

I suppose I should thank the dolt for reminding me of such a good example of what I'm writing about and that there is a tie in to the upcoming Koch bros. financed NOVA 

From Woit's piece, I especially liked this:

"There’s only small part of Tegmark’s book that deals with the testability issue, the end of Chapter 12. His summary of Chapter 12 claims that he has shown:

The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is in principle testable and falsifiable.

His claim about falsifiability seems to be based on last page of the chapter, about “The Mathematical Regularity Prediction” which is that:

physics research will uncover further mathematical regularities in nature.

This is a prediction not of the Level IV multiverse, but a “prediction” of the idea that our physical laws are based on mathematics. I suppose it’s conceivable that the LHC will discover that at scales above 1 TeV, the only way to understand what we find is not through laws described by mathematics, but, say, by the emotional states of the experimenters. In any case, this isn’t a prediction of Level IV."

Though I think this is far more explanatory as to why he gets as much attention as he does:

"One answer to the question is Tegmark’s talent as an impresario of physics and devotion to making a splash. Before publishing his first paper, he changed his name from Shapiro to Tegmark (his mother’s name), figuring that there were too many Shapiros in physics for him to get attention with that name, whereas “Tegmark” was much more unusual. In his book he describes his method for posting preprints on the arXiv, before he has finished writing them, with the timing set to get pole position on the day’s listing. Unfortunately there’s very little in the book about his biggest success in this area, getting the Templeton Foundation to give him and Anthony Aguirre nearly $9 million for a “Foundational Questions Institute” (FQXi). Having cash to distribute on this scale has something to do with why Tegmark’s multiverse ideas have gotten so much attention, and why some physicists are respectfully reviewing the book."

As Woit mentions, Tegmark would seem to not have an awful lot of use for mathematicians for someone who wants to reduce consciousness to mathematical fluctuations and to give mathematics the ability to determine ultimate reality of things otherwise entirely unobserved.

"A very odd aspect of this whole story is that while Tegmark’s big claim is that Math=Physics, he seems to have little actual interest in mathematics and what it really is as an intellectual subject. There are no mathematicians among those thanked in the acknowledgements, and while “mathematical structures” are invoked in the book as the basis of everything, there’s little to no discussion of the mathematical structures that modern mathematicians find interesting (although the idea of “symmetries” gets a mention). A figure on page 320 gives a graph of mathematical structures which a commenter on mathoverflow calls “truly bizarre” (see here). Perhaps the explanation of all this is somehow Freudian, since Tegmark’s father is the mathematician Harold Shapiro."

Update  2:

Massimo Pigliucci's article which Woit links to leaves me wondering how anyone can take Tegmark seriously.    I mean:

While I have commented positively on ontic structural realism (again, without necessarily buying into it), and more generally on the idea of a “naturalistic” metaphysics (i.e., a metaphysics that takes seriously the best known physics), my conversation with Max Tegmark actually generated more doubts than illumination.

One obvious problem is posed by what it would mean for the world to be “made of” mathematical structures. The notion of mathematical structure is well developed, so that’s not the issue. A structure, strictly speaking, is a property or a group of mathematical objects that attach themselves to a given set. For instance, the set of real numbers has a number of structures, including an order (with any given number being either less or more than another number), a metric (measuring the distance between points in the set), an algebraic structure (the operations of addition and multiplication), and so on.

The problem is in what sense, if any, can a mathematical structure, so defined, actually be the fundamental constituent of the physical world, i.e. being the substance of which chairs, electrons, and so on, are made.

Of course, both Julia and I asked Max that very question, and we were both very unconvinced by his answer. When Tegmark said that fundamental particles, like electrons, are, ultimately mathematical in nature, Julia suggested that perhaps what he meant was that their properties are described by mathematical quantities. But Max was adamant, mentioning, for instance, the spin (which in the case of the electron has magnitude 1/2). Now, the spin of a particle, although normally described as its angular momentum, is an exquisitely quantum mechanical property (i.e., with no counterpart in classical mechanics), and it is highly misleading to think of it as anything like the angular momentum of a macroscopic object. Nevertheless, Julia and I insisted, it is a physical property described by a mathematical quantity, the latter is not the same as the former.

Could it be that theories like MUH are actually based on a category mistake? Obviously, I’m not suggesting that people like Tegmark make the elementary mistake of confusing the normal meaning of words like “objects” and “properties,” or of “physical” and “mathematical.” [I don't know why not, he would certainly seem to do just that.]  But perhaps they are making precisely that mistake in a metaphysical sense?

There are other problems with MUH. For one, several critics of Tegmark’s ideas have pointed out that they run afoul of the seemingly omnipresent (and much misunderstood) Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Mark Alford, specifically, during a debate with Tegmark and Piet Hut has suggested that the idea that mathematics is “out there” is incompatible with the idea that it consists of formal systems. To which Tegmark replied that perhaps only Gödel-complete mathematical structures have physical existence (something referred to as the Computable Universe Hypothesis, CUH).

This, apparently, results in serious problems for Max’s theory, since it excludes much of the landscape of mathematical structures, not to mention that pretty much every successful physical theory so far would violate CUH. Oops.

It does, actually, get worse after that in Pigliucci's article.  I will point out that I've been critical of both Woit and Pigliucci on ideological grounds but if they've got problems (some of which I can even sort of get) with Tegmark's fashionable ideas, it's wise to take their reservations at least as seriously as you might want to take Tegmark's ideas.   They both know what they're talking about in their areas of expertise and they're saying far less outlandish things than Tegmark.

DEBUSSY ETUDE no.5 Pour les octaves - Maurizio Pollini

And Even More Friday McBrien - The Inconsistencies of Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is of interest to people today because it has acquired new political power. 'The Moral Majority, for example, exercises considerable influence on elections to the U.S. Congress. Its leader, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, appears on television and in the print media as a significant national figure.

In the Moslem world -- Iran is a dramatic case in point -- Islamic fundamentalism is changing the face of governments and the shape of social life and customs.

To an extent, fundamentalism has made some inroads even in Roman Catholicism. It is ironic that Protestant fundamentalists, once so bitterly anti-Catholic, now find common cause with Catholics on various social issues, e.g, abortion.

Protestant fundamentalism has always been of a biblical kind, based on the premise that all Scripture is inspired (Second Timothy 3:16) and, therefore, also infallible. Scripture alone, as interpreted by fundamentalist authorities, are the measure of truth and moral life.

The Catholic version of fundamentalism is of a doctrinal, not biblical, kind. Catholic fundamentalism is based on the premise that all official Church teachings are, supremely authoritative (if not "inspired"). As such, these official teachings alone, as interpreted by certain Catholic authorities, are the final measure of truth and moral life.

Both kinds of fundamentalism are really based on rational principles, not on the Word of God or divine authority, as they often claim.

Biblical fundamentalism rests its case on Second Timothy 3:16. "All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. . . ."

By a process of rational deduction, not by appeal to Scripture itself, the Protestant fundamentalist concludes that Scripture is infallible (inerrant) and is the exclusive source of divine revelation.

I say "by a process of rational deduction" because the Bible itself nowhere says that it is infallible or inerrant. One has to deduce the principle of inerrancy rationally from the principle of inspiration.

One also has to determines by process of reasoning, not by appeal to Scripture itself, which books are inspired and which are not, which are canonical (ik.e., part of the official "list") and which are uncanonical.

There is no place in the entire Bible where it tells -us how 'we know. which books belong in the Bible and which do not.

Neither is there any place in the entire Bible where it says that everything written in the Bible is unfailingly accurate, in every historical detail.

Nor does it say anywhere in the Bible that the bible is central, or exclusively authoritative, for Christian faith and life. Second Timothy 3:16 says only that Scripture is "profitable" for teaching, etc.

Nor is there any evidence in the bible itself that Jesus ever sanctioned the New Testament, although his reverence for the Old Testament is clear.

Indeed, there was no New Testament in the early church, and yet there existed Christian faith and Christian life. The New Testament came after the Church, not before. The Church produced the bible, not vice-versa.

For Protestant fundamentalism principles ("fundamentals") are primary; people are secondary. And yet the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25) suggests that we are to be judged not by our adherence to principles but by our behavior toward one another.

Catholic fundamentalism, of a doctrinal rather than of a biblical kind, labors under similar inconsistencies. Catholic fundamentalism, too, is rationalistic in the sense that its main principles, or fundamentals, are derived through reason, not through direct appeal to doctrine itself.

Nowhere is there any official list of doctrines which the Church officially and infallibly requires every Catholic to accept.

The Church doesn't even provide us with a list of dogmas, i.e., with a list of infallible teachings. We know a few, but not all. We have to deduce them rationally, i.e., by a process of theological reflection.

Nowhere does the Church officially, much less infallibly, teach that Church doctrine alone is the source of truth for our faith and life.

Nowhere does the Church officially and infallibly teach that doctrines are always the last word in any disputed matter.

Nowhere does Jesus himself refer to a set of doctrines as the core of the Gospel or as the final test of fidelity to his call to accept and practice the Gospel.

Indeed, the early Church got along for centuries with no, or very few, doctrinal pronouncements.

The point of this essay is not to suggest that the Bible is unimportant to Christian faith and life, or that doctrine is similarly insignificant. On the contrary.

Our concern, rather, has been to underline the radical inconsistency: of the fundamentalist positions, Protestant and Catholic alike. Both claim divine authority for their social, political, and ecclesiastical views. But, in fact, both rely on rationally deduced principles to support those views.

Fundamentalism is, indeed, a form of rationalism. Its appeal to divine authority is superficially compelling, but ultimately without warrant.

Fr. Richard C. McBrien,  5 / 15 / 1981

Fundamentalism I and II - Richard McBrien on Fridays

Note:  I'm glad to say that the situation in the Vatican is far different under Pope Francis than it was under John Paul II, when this article and the one it refers to were written.

The issue of fundamentalism comes up frequently online since it is part of the neo-atheist program to pretend that either all religious belief is fundamentalist or that fundamentalism is the only genuine form of religion.  The self-serving aspect of that insistence is pretty clear in that fundamentalism, along with cults of idols and material gods are among the easiest of religious ideas to refute.  That anywhere from many hundreds of millions to billions of religious people aren't fundamentalists and believe in an uncreated, non-material God is among the biggest frustrations of both fundamentalists and neo-atheists.

I

Too many people -- politicians and ordinary citizens alike -- continue to refer to the "war on terror" as if terrorism were the enemy. As a number of more careful commentators have pointed out, terrorism is simply the deadly means employed by the enemy; it is not itself the enemy. 

The real and immediate enemy is Islamic fundamentalism. Not Islam as such, but Islamic fundamentalism. To be sure, the all-encompassing problem is fundamentalism of every kind, in whatever religious tradition it is found.

Religious fundamentalism flourishes, for example, within Shi'ite and Wahabist Islam, within ultra-orthodox and orthodox Judaism (the Haredim and Hasidim), within so-called Bible-belt Protestantism, and increasingly, in recent decades, within Roman Catholic traditionalist circles as well.

Of course, fundamentalism is a complex phenomenon, having been the subject of serious and sustained study by Martin Marty, emeritus professor of Church history at the University of Chicago, and his former student and current Notre Dame professor, R. Scott Appleby, who co-edited a highly regarded five-volume series on the topic. 

Given the general focus and audience of this column, however, its attention will be directed mainly to Catholic fundamentalism, with the hope that its broader ecumenical and inter-faith implications will be evident.

One of the best articles ever written on the subject of Catholic fundamentalism appeared over 17 years ago in the Jesuit weekly, America (4/11/87). It was entitled, "The Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism." Its author, Father Patrick M. Arnold, S.J., has since died. 

So impressive was his piece that I devoted an entire column to it. I think it worthwhile now, if only as a memorial to Father Arnold, to reproduce the main points of his article. It stands up very well indeed to the passage of years.

Like all careful and insightful observers of the fundamentalist scene, Father Arnold took care to distinguish between fundamentalism and conservatism, with which it is often confused, to the detriment of conservatism.

Conservatism, he insisted, fulfills a necessary and constructive role in the Church and in society alike. It is concerned with preserving a community's historical heritage, especially in times of cultural change. It urges a cautious approach, as captured, for example, in the familiar saying: "Look before you leap." 

Fundamentalism, on the other hand, is neither necessary nor constructive. Working out of an absolutist perspective, it sees the world as filled with evil forces conspiring against everything that it regards -- with unquestioned certitude -- as true and good.

Father Arnold identified five unhealthy characteristics of religious fundamentalism in general and of Catholic fundamentalism in particular.

First, it is marked by paranoia and self-righteousness. There is always some terrible enemy out there that has to be fought and ultimately destroyed.

Fundamentalism is marked, secondly, by fear and rage directed not only against the enemy outside the ranks but even more intensely against the enemy within, including bishops, priests, sisters, and theologians.

Father Arnold called this "the most revealing and dangerous characteristic" of fundmentalists because it leads them to engage in divisive activities. They spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to purge people, to get them fired, to destroy their reputations and, therefore, their influence.

Fundamentalists are captivated, thirdly, by the "myth of the Golden Age." They imagine that Catholicism in the decades just before Vatican II was in its pristine and ideal state, exactly as God intended it to be, without problems or deficiencies of any kind.

For the fundamentalist, fourthly, all truth is to be found in a single source. For the Muslim, it is the Koran. For the Jew, the Torah. For Protestants, the Bible. And for Catholics, the pronouncements of the pope and the Roman Curia.

Fifthly, religious fundamentalists tend to link themselves with right-wing political regimes and movements in the hope of advancing their own theocratic policies. Accordingly, Catholic fundamentalists are unenthusiastic about Catholic social teaching. They tend instead to emphasize a limited range of other issues as if they were primary.

Less than two years later, another Jesuit scholar, Father John Coleman, addressed the same topic in Commonweal magazine, linking today's Catholic fundamentalists with the Integralist movement of the early-20th century. The Integralists also claimed that the most dangerous enemies of the Church are within, and that the way to deal with them is through censorship, repression, and even excommunication.

Father Coleman offered some examples: Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, Opus Dei in Spain and around the world, and Catholics United for the Faith and the Wanderer Forum in the United States.

Not since the pontificate of Pius X (1903-14), when the Integralists flourished, have groups of this type enjoyed such favor at the highest levels of the Vatican. 

II

In late July, 1985, I devoted a column to "the threat of Catholic fundamentalism." I suggested that fundamentalism may pose the most immediate risk to Catholic faith in the United States today, pointing to the thousands of ex-Catholics who now belong to the Jehovah's Witnesses and various other fundamentalist, evangelical, and Pentecostal churches.

I quoted a prominent Catholic biblical scholar who had observed that the number of Catholics who have been lost to the Church because of Hans Kueng could hold a convention in a telephone booth, but the number lost because of fundamentalism is in the thousands.

I did not identify my source at the time. It was the late Father Raymond Brown, one of the Church's most distinguished New Testament scholars, who is sorely missed by all who have benefitted from his many writings and lectures.

Regrettably, the pastoral situation today is little different from what it was in mid-1985. Many Catholics continue to come under the sway of Protestant fundamentalists and they are still defenseless against their attractively simplistic interpretations of Sacred Scripture. 

The fact also remains that the modern Catholic biblical renewal, promoted initially by Pope Pius XII in his landmark 1943 encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, and reinforced by the Second Vatican Council two decades later, has made no impact at all on a very large portion of the Catholic community. It is as if the renewal never happened.

I proposed in that column, some 19 years ago, that the U.S. Catholic bishops should write a pastoral letter to address the problem. To be sure, it was a time when the bishops' conference was still capable of achieving sufficient consensus to produce substantive and compelling documents on a wide range of major topics, including war and peace (in 1983) and the state of the U.S. economy in the light of Catholic social teaching (in 1986).

Soon after my column appeared, the bishops' conference established an Ad Hoc Committee on Biblical Fundamentalism, which issued a "Pastoral Statement for Catholics on Biblical Fundamentalism" in September, 1987. (For the full text, see Origins, November 5, 1987). 

"Fundamentalism," the statement pointed out, "indicates a person's general approach to life which is typified by unyielding adherence to rigid doctrinal and ideological positions -- an approach that affects the individual's social and political attitudes as well as religious ones."

The bishops urged the creation of a pastoral plan to enhance understanding of the Bible at the parish level by encouraging better homilies that apply the biblical texts to daily living, by providing better preparation for lectors at Mass, and by insuring that the content of religious education programs is solidly biblical at its core.

The chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee happened to be at the time my archbishop in Hartford, Connecticut, the late John F. Whealon, a biblical scholar in his own right. It was Archbishop Whealon who informed me that my column had been the catalyst for the formation of the committee and for the issuance of the statement on biblical fundamentalism.

He and his brother bishops were aware, of course, that there is more to Catholic fundamentalism than its uncritical use of the Bible. Their statement noted that fundamentalism also involves "rigid doctrinal and ideological positions" that affect "social and political attitudes as well as religious ones."

For an understanding and effective critique of this broader notion of Catholic fundametalism, there is no better resource than a 100-page paperback by my former Notre Dame colleague, Father Thomas F. O'Meara, O.P, Fundamentalism: A Catholic Perspective (Paulist Press, 1990). Unfortunately, the book is out of print.

I highlighted its many positive features in my column for the week of May 18, 1990, and subsequently compressed its central points in my book, Catholicism, which is still very much in print. 

"Catholic fundamentalism, [O'Meara] suggests, is a corruption of Catholic values, especially of sacramentality. It sees the world as evil and dangerous, forgetting that God is its Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.

"It limits the manifestation of grace to the extraordinary and even the bizarre, forgetting that God is present to ordinary people, in ordinary situations of life. And it limits access to God's grace to a chosen few, the righteous within the larger community of the unrighteous, forgetting that God wishes to save all and has won salvation for all in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ" (Catholicism, p. 94).

"Fundamentalism," Father O'Meara shrewdly observed, "is not a conservative attitude, for it rejects every past but the one it rigidly honors."

So much that is regarded as conservatism in the Church today is not conservative at all. It is fundamentalism. 

The bishops' statement is still pertinent.

Ignorant Armies Clash By Monitor Light

I was informed at Salon that looking for a citation for the libel of Sam Harris, that Christian missionaries in the New World would baptize Native Americans then kill them so they could go to heaven was an example of "obsessive compulsive disorder".    Just so you can see how much darker this dark age is going to be than the last one, so denominated, even the most basic aspect of research is now considered pathological when what is found isn't liked or what was wanted to be true isn't supported.

This is the result of the always business based concentration on the STEM subjects, apparently, that the most basic methodology of research seems like diseased thinking among the young and sciency.   I ran into another example of something similar but am waiting to see how it works out.

It all reminds me of Dover Beach

Dover Beach  by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I don't think it's necessary to give up like Arnold did due to the arrogant refusal to admit that, in the end, finding a way out of his dismal vision required the choice to move out of the darkness. And it required faith, just as it required faith of a different and more facile kind to go into the dark.   Arrogance, pride, vainglory and even nationalism were what I think led Arnold there, though he clearly knew better.    Which reminds me of nothing so much as West London as set by Charles Ives.

Colleen Philp - soprano
Ann Muir - piano

George Philippe Telemann - Concerto in e minor for Flute and Recorder

Flute - Georgia Browne
Recorder - Ian Wilson
Violins - Tuomo Suni, Hilary Michael
Viola - Emma Alter
Cello - Harriet Wiltshire
Double bass - Kate Aldridge
Harpsichord - David Goode

One for NTodd, one of the wildest of the baroque concertos.

The Unformation Age

Before I go off to do some much neglected garden work - it decided to skip spring and go from winter to summer around here -  I've got to share the, so far, best try to answer my accusation that Sam Harris was lying, as detailed below.

One "happyhaze" says, at Salon:

happyhaze 54 minutes ago
@Anthony_McCarthy

Sam may have gotten the details wrong, but this account --from Bartoleme de Las Casas, Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies. (1542)--is even worse than his 'fable'. 

From that time onward the Indians began to seek ways to throw the Christians out of their lands. They took up arms, but their weapons were very weak and of little service in offense and still less in defense. (Because of this, the wars of the Indians against each other are little more than games played by children.) And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, "Boil there, you offspring of the devil!" Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. To others they attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw and set them afire. With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim's neck, saying, "Go now, carry the message," meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them....

http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/02-las.html

I'm not exactly certain of the chronology but I think after he read my response pointing out that de las Casas was a Catholic missionary, he said:

FlagLikeReply
happyhaze 44 minutes ago
@Anthony_McCarthy I say "worse" because there is no calculation of the infant victims going to heaven. 

On the other hand, this was not the work of missionaries as such. Just xtians of the ghastly strata. Believable because de las Casas was a man of the cloth and major source for eyewitness accounts of events of the time; and because Spain gave us Torquemada, who set the bar for religious loopy pretty low. 

If this is the story in Sam's mind, based on a much earlier reading of the account, his recall may have been inaccurate. 

So, citing A CATHOLIC MISSIONARY, believed to be the earliest advocate for the human rights of the natives of the Americas, calling out the crimes against them by the conquistadors, the earliest opponent of slavery in the Americas, who DIDN'T SAY WHAT SAM HARRIS CLAIMED in support of his condemnation of CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES on a charge that they baptized, then murdered them so they would go to heaven.  

Welcome to the unformation age, where truth isn't just optional, it's meaningless, logical coherence is replaced by convenience and lies don't matter if you can get away with them among people who don't care as long as they like the lie.  And all brought to you by the champions of sciency, evidency, simulated reality.   Throwing in Torquemada doesn't do anything but send up a smoke screen to mask the lie.

I'm Calling Harris Out As A Liar Until A Citation is Provided

I have been looking for a documentary source for the accusation Sam Harris made, to the effect that Christian missionaries in the New World would baptize infants and then murder them to send their souls to heaven and have found nothing.

Without him providing documentation I'm left with the belief that it is a sensational lie that he invented, himself.  Which, apparently, no one else would seem to have noticed.  Perhaps that is because in the neo-atheist period that Harris did so much to incite, no lie would seem to be too extreme or too absurd to not tell and be believed by people who consider themselves to be intellectually sophisticated, at least when those being lied about are Christians or Muslims. Though other religious denominations are lied about with abandon by atheists, lies told about other groups are more likely to be refuted, in my experience, at least.

Which is more than a bit ironic, considering that, in the west the main advocates for the killing of live born children in the modern period and up to today have been atheists.  I have documented, at the first of those links, from their own words, in their own books published as science, such heroes of many atheists as Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel advocating infanticide as a benefit to the general population.   In the inverted morality of atheist "ethics" from such as Peter Singer and Michael Tooley, murdering infants is considered as a form of salvation, for the infant, relief of a presumed bad life due to disability.  Even more than that, some of these "ethicists" propose that an infant not be considered a human being and leaving it to the discretion or just merely the choice of parents whether or not they want to be bothered with the child, allowing them to kill it up to a sometimes unspecified age.

Which brings us right back to the beginnings of the Christian era when it was only with Christianity becoming politically potent in the Mediterranean region that it became illegal to murder infants, infanticide by various means having been endemic to many local and even imperial cultures. The murder of disabled children was routine, that of girls about as routine.  It was in, first, the Jewish Law and later in Christianity that the practice was banned in many places.   It is still widespread and a major form of violation of rights committed against one of the most easily discriminated against groups in the world because they are not articulate and are powerless.  I would like to know of any organized atheist effort to oppose infanticide.  But, then, I'd like citations to support a lot of what the Sam Harrises of the world say.

Despite the tale told by Harris, in recent years it has been Christian missionaries such as those in Brazil who have met resistance when they tried to call attention to the practice of infanticide in some indigenous groups in the Amazon, though I don't think their decision to issue a video dramatization of the practice was the wisest way to do it.  I don't know enough about that particular group's history and motives to judge their missionary activity but I do know that opposing a traditional form of murder is a worth while thing to do.  I don't see that it is an old custom is a valid reason to not oppose it.  Just about every single thing that the concept of rights were considered over and struggled for addressed long standing customs and cultural habits of thought and life.  The idea that even the "untouched by modern thought" isolated cultures don't change all on their own and are some kind of living museum peopled by the people who live in them is ridiculous and condescending.

I mentioned a while back that I was reading about the history of the blood libel, which, I have to conclude, isn't unrelated to this issue.  I hope to be able to write about it later this week.

Debussy - Masques - Lazare Levy

I found this recording online years ago and have regarded it is the greatest performance of Debussy's music I've ever heard.  I only wish the quality of the recording matched the playing.