Biological Determinism IS Material Determinism And It Is Pervasive And Dangerous - I Find It Impossible To Hold To My Recent Resolution

NO ONE is under any obligation to respect the honestly considered experience of their own life as less reliable than the mathematical abstractions of scientists, especially when the claims of scientists are  theoretical without an actual physical demonstration of their truth within the material area in which such physical demonstration can be made.  When it is a merely theoretical claim without that physical demonstration that can be reproduced or otherwise verified independently, there is absolutely no reason to trust the claim more than someone trusts what their own, direct experience leads them to believe. Scientists who wander outside of the realm of the physically demonstrable are often skating on open water, held up by nothing but what they imagine must be there.  Of course they're not on skates, what they are skating on is the credulity of those who listen to them and that is not subject to either gravity or the properties of matter that support a skater on ice.  The popular understanding of science is just that sort of thing.  

That there are unintelligent or irrational People who will be led astray, sometimes dangerously astray, by trusting their own perceived experience is no reason for otherwise sound thinkers to abandon their own experience to the unfounded speculations of scientists.  That is especially true of their own experience of their conscousness about which they are the only possible experts.  No scientist, those who produce reliable, rigorously tested and verified information and those who produce no more than untestable theoretical musings, doesn't rely on their own experience to even get started in what they do, after all. And some of the greatest catastrophes in human history were a product of scientific speculation believed by those who took them as reliably reliable.

Materialists who will do everything up to making the ultimate decadent claim that conscious experience is an illusion could never have taken the first step on that road to college-credentialed delusion without trusting their own experience that leads to language, reasoning, basic arithmetic and a perception of science. Such scientists and philosophers who claim that never live their lives as if they really believed it.  They certainly don't conduct their professional lives on that basis or they'd never be retained even on the most decadent university faculty.  There really is no more decadent ideology than hard core materialism which is rampant among those who have gone to college.

In making these statements I'm certainly not limiting the means of discerning truth about things to science which, actually, has a very limited range of the universe it can be used about which to try to find out what is true.  No scientist uses only science to operate in the world, though I've encountered sci-rangers who have made that claim to me online. Claims that generally fall apart as soon as you prod them about what else they've said.  They're as stupid and reality denying as Trumpzis.  No scientists could only rely on the science they know to navigate through life, even the product of other scientists is something they use on faith or ignore or deny without actually testing it.  Scientists have no choice but to depend on their faith in the authority of other scientists outside of their specialty.   And much of what they rely on has no possible scientific verification.  

Many things outside of science can be known to an effective 100% of reliability.  That is proof that not everything that is known can be known through science or that science is necessarily the most reliable means of discerning reality.  As an example, in my research of Darwinism and its actual impact on real lives and reality it quickly became obvious to me that what Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, Pearson, Baur, Fischer, Lenz, etc. said could be known to within a virtual certainty because of the primary literary record they left, no matter the later claims of writers and even scientists who had obviously never really read them and who certainly never knew them.

That primary literary record can be read with complete comprehension of many statements.  For some historical facts a level of certainty is possible about the most complex of entities that is rarely if ever true of most of what scientists have claimed.  That's true, especially, of the most complex of entities that science is totally unable to be applied to.  Science can't tell you what Darwin said, Darwin's own writing and the reports of those who knew him intimately can tell you that and you can rely on it. Science is useless to tell you that. Which isn't a trivial aspect of the method of science, the literary reporting and interpretation of findings is as relevant to science as the observations and measurements that are only comprehensible through that kind of literary exposition.  

In regard to the character of natural selection in the world, that literary record is there and always will be as long as the texts are there and the chain of their transmission is as well known. No future findings of fact or science can overturn that they said what they said. That is especially true for things for which the handwritten manuscripts are extant and some of the most damning statements are contained in the manuscripts and letters.  You can deny that was said but that will never change that it was said.

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Biological Determinism IS Material Determinism

But, to repeat my point about the relationship between materialism, vulgar and elite, and the denial of truth or its importance, that didn't keep the ideologues within the professional establishment of science and universities, the media and fiction from mounting the post-WWII, post-revealing of the Nazi genocides white washing of the history of that most infamous of biological determinisms, natural selection.  No one I read in the pre-WWII period ever denied that link, including Leonard Darwin, Darwin's last surviving child.  That cover up which I had only suspected early in my research of Darwinism became glaringly obvious immediately as I read the primary documentation of the Darwinists,* from Charles to the last years of his last surviving son Leonard Darwin, his grandson Charles Francis Darwin, the Darwinists in science, from Galton and Haeckel and Huxley to Pearson to Watson and Crick to those today, which never once separated Darwinism from the biological determinism which is both the basic assumption of eugenics  and its motivation, including from almost the start eugenic murder.  Including passive murder through conscious Malthusian neglect and on to outright murder and genocide.  And also the selective elimination from the human future through policies to prevent People from having children. The revival of Darwinist eugenics which began in a big way in the 1970s is the strongest evidence of my suspicion that as long as natural selection is the mandatory or even a wide spread ideological holding within biology that eugenics and even the proposal of eugenic murder will recur and, as it has in places like Britain and the United States and Covid-ear Sweden, drive law and public policy.  Eugenic sterilization of that kind cannot be separated from genocide because they both have the same end, removing a People from the future.   I have posts on virtually all of those topics with citations and full quotes.  If I posted links practically the entire post would be red.

I strongly suspect that the post-WWII cover up of the relationship of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and the history of eugenics, including Nazi eugenics done by scientists and writers with ideological motives was made possible due to the pervasive materialism and scientism of those who carried off that successful obviously dishonest public relations campaign.  No doubt the least depraved of them saw their lying as prophylactic, lying done for a greater purpose, though I'm sure a lot of them didn't realize they propagated a lie because they'd merely relied on previous lies and they never, once, looked at the primary record to check what they claimed.**

Materialism and scientism were also basically at work in the snow job of anti-anti-communism from well before the Second World War as the Soviet Union was forming and the mass murders begun under Lenin and continuing under Stalin were first reported on within and outside of Russia and the lands that came under the oppression of that political regime and denied by the Communists and those on various lefts who were sympathetic to Marxism and those who were merely duped because they thought it was necessary to oppose the various capitalist criminals who held power in other places.  

The often as deadly denial of morality under capitalism is a somewhat different phenomenon which is no less in need of exposure as well as the cooperation between capitalists and fascists and Nazis, a particularly evil form of anti-communism. In many cases it was merely a less formal and philosophically based expression of more vulgar materialism.  The current Trumpzi anti-Marxism is the same out of the same vulgar materialist motives.  I'm certainly no capitalist even as I'm no Marxist. I'm an anti-anti-anti-communist even as I have absolutely no sympathy for communists or other brands of Marxists or for any breed of capitalist. I am anti-materialism on the basis of observation, not ideological choice.

The link of Nazism to materialist determinism you claim isn't there is blatantly there.  It should never be forgotten that as he was in prison, one of the foremost science publishers in Germany supplied Hitler with one of the most influential biological textbooks on Darwinian eugenics of the period to inform his political ideology.  That is reflected in Mein Kampf as he ranted it out, dictated to Rudolf Hess, the man who said that Nazism was nothing but "applied science" which was the basis of the entire line of Nazi eugenics and genocide as expressed by those who planned and carried those out.  

The textbook "Human heredity and Racial Hygiene" by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz went through five editions between 1921 and 1940. In contemporary journals, it received almost only positive review articles and was considered to be the standard textbook on racial hygiene in the Weimar Republic. After Hitler's takeover in 1933, it became the "scientific" basis for eugenic sterilization programs. In that year, the Nazis enacted a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of persons with diseases thought to be hereditary, mostly neurological and psychiatric disorders. Using review articles on the book, the position of neurologists and psychiatrists towards racial hygiene is analyzed. We describe how they prepared and maintained the acceptance of eugenic politics in the medical profession by praising the standard work on racial hygiene.

The influence of American and other eugenics programs which were also directly an application of natural selection is 100% certain by the same reliable textual record mentioned above and that is, as well, a blatant application of Darwinism, look at my archive, I've provided copious links.  The scientific basis of Nazism is undeniable in its claims.  Natural selection was that science of which Nazism was an application.  Hitler's conclusions are not different from the many enthusiasts for eugenics even before Nazism arose, they advocated everything including state murder of those they deemed unfit based on that deterministic theory. Those reluctant to advocate direct state murder often advocated the same by the slower murder of death through neglect of those who needed everything from basic medical care including vaccination and even food and shelter.  That literature starts almost immediately, including Darwin in The Descent of Man and his closest colleagues, friends and relatives based on the theory of natural selection whose writings Darwin supported and cited as highly reliable science.

In regard to my criticism of Hossenfelder's unevidenced deterministic claims, natural selection also actually has no possible verification out of the actual evolution of life on Earth.  That is a hard fact.  No one has ever seen speciation happen once determining that natural selection was what drove it to happen in that one instance. Never mind determine the way in which it happened to account for the uncountable millions of unique species that have lived on the Earth.  It is as gross a speculation as Sabine Hossenfelder's faith statement that if some divinely abled supercomputer could do the calculations they could reproduce the mind of a single one of us through mathematical modeling, predicting us entirely, predicting our every mental act. The intervening link that hard core Darwinist-fundamentalists claimed  that knowing "the human genome" would be able to make the intervening link, predicting a single human being through knowing their genome is already known to be hopelessly naive and grotesquely simplistic.  The wager that Rupert Sheldrake made with Lewis Wolpert, the Darwinist-fundamentalist is interesting mostly for the immediate hedging that Wolpert engaged in after he'd boldly and naively took the bet from a far more experienced researcher on the predictability of one organism from its genome.  The aftermath of the over-hyped campaign to map the human genome has shown just how naive the reductionist faith of naive genetics has been, though its claims pervade the popular understanding of science, including among many of the most famous of those who are professional scientists, right now.

It's telling, to me that Sabine Hossenfelder - who is no biologist or researcher into questions of consciousness anymore than I am - can so clearly see the problem of such rank speculation on the subatomic down to the Planck scale that her professional life makes her consider all important but she cannot see the problem of similar speculation to the scale she talks about in her claims about free will,  imagining an enormous bridge linking the scale of particle physics and the scale of complex life in which our minds exist. A bridge she, herself, knows will not be built so there is no way to scientifically verify her chosen ideological speculation.  But she so much wants that, to be there that she imagines it, she wills it into something she and her fellow ideologues can choose to believe must be there, even as there is absolutely no evidence that there is.

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Anyone who is skeptical of claims of ideological and unfounded science and materialist-ideologue scientists has ample justification in not only the words that scientists spoke and wrote down but, more so, in their advocacy and encouragement of laws and policies that have tried to wipe out entire groups of People, whether by preventing them having children or by murdering them or, somewhat less tidily, by laws and policies of neglect of those in need or under oppression.  In the formal literature I've pointed to, that takes the form of denying vaccination or food or shelter to actually advocating the salubrious effects of mass killing [See the Descent of Man] to bemoaning the practice of delivering babies by cesarian section on the speculation that the survival of the mother and baby will drive down the biological fitness of the human species, Karl Pearson said so as science.  And those are only a few of the depravities as reliable science that are contained in the actual history of material determinism.  Anyone who has read history from ancient to current closely is within reason to conclude that materialist-determinism has the most disastrous of consequences when it gains power.  That is a basic truth of the history of scientific biological determinism, whether it is expressed in biological terms such as the eugenicists still do or whether it is those who claim that particle physics proves that free thought is impossible.  The other major direct mass murdering entity of the 20th century, Marxism, was a thoroughly deterministic system based on even more general assumptions of materialist ideology.  Both Nazism and Communism with political power commissioned scientists to come up with science in support of those ideologies just as capitalist governments also commission scientists to do the same.  Scientists, ever on the look out for money and connections to power, oblige.

I am impressed with how often high-priced science makes claims that go through the pose of peer review and official publication and gains professional and, at times, even legal power because of that only to be shown to be everything from mistaken to an intentional fraud. As I always suggest, go through Retraction Watch blog.  It makes me wonder how much of what is retained as science and built on but which is never really tested is there at any given time.  

Much of the skepticism that scientists whine about is well earned by the scientists themselves, both those who are guilty of shoddy to dishonest practice and their colleagues who do nothing to clean up the entire thing.  Sometimes its merely through overselling and over-hyping an applied extension of what they have published.  Such as I criticized in Hossenfelder's application of the mathematics of particle physics to the experience of human consciousness.  

I certainly take science seriously, only an idiot or screw ball wouldn't, especially when it is about things of such vital exigency as HIV or Covid-19 research and public health to the even more urgent science around preventing things such as climate change from killing us all.  Such scientists seldom have the luxury of wallowing in ideologically constructing ways to get rid of God that those who get paid to make such speculations as that do little to nothing to save or improve lives and are held in an insanely irrational esteem that academia and the media give abstract speculation over saving lives.  I think the motive for that is the general vulgar materialism with pretenses of elite materialism which is the base ideology of many of those with college credentials. It is an absurdity that the most speculative theory removed from reality is esteemed most highly while the most practical and necessary is held in less esteem.

In the United States a lot of that is media driven by the scribbling, producing and directing classes among People, college-grad or not, who have little actual knowledge of science.  Current American culture being what it is, a large percentage of that ideological transmission comes in the way of entertainment, including much of the "science" and "documentary" junk of it. That kind of thing is what constitutes what "science" is for most of them, and that's the high end of it. I would bet that for everyone who watches only the best of PBS, there are thousands who get all they know from sci-fy and things like The Big Bang Theory.  I would bet you that not five percent of those college-credentialed folk - including those outside of science faculties at universities - who have substituted a crude and "popular understanding of science" for revealed religion could pass a high school course of basic algebra or statistics, without which they literally have to take everything on faith.  A lot of them are just annoyed when they're told they shouldn't sexually harass students or actors or those lower on the pay-scale or otherwise annoyed with some antiquated Protestant or Catholic scolding. Some of it is just to fit in with the posher class in hopes of gain or peer approval.  There's really not much more to it than that.  

No wonder largely college-credentialed driven American TV and pop culture and the presstituted  New York City media created the cult of Trump.  The pushing of STEM subjects in schools didn't prevent it, neither did the prep-Ivy equivalent schooling they had.  The college credentialed were a major part of his support in the 2016 election and among the January 6th insurrectionists.  The elite materialism isn't really that far removed from vulgar materialism.  So many of those on the college-credentialed left merely chose a different and equally depraved political cult, especially those who were white, male, straight and affluent.

* The original challenge to what I said on one of the Science Blogs, to prove the link between natural selection and eugenics was solved immediately when I cited chapter 20 of Francis Galton's memoir in which he not only stated, flatly that his eugenics was a product of his reading of On the Origin of Species but he also reproduced Charles Darwin's letter approving of his first major work on eugenics, Hereditary Genius.  The case was absolutely nailed down by citing Darwin's citations of that book and even more extreme statements of Darwinist eugenics in the work of the notorious proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel in The Descent of Man.  No one who had read Darwin's second major worn on natural selection could possibly honestly hold that Darwin wasn't a eugenicist on the basis of natural selection and that eugenics arose immediately from those who understood Darwin's claims the best, including Darwin, himself.

I will point out that the many claims that those Darwin, Galton, Haeckel et al made about those who were "unfit" having a higher birth rate and, so, dominating the human species was a direct contradiction of the claims that natural selection are based in that superior traits led to higher birth rates and successful lines.  What they feared were the effects of morality and civilization caused that to happen, though they used the results of morality and civilization to make their claims that Western Europeans, particularly Northern Europeans in the West were the crown of creation.  That is apart from the Irish who Darwin irrationally held were degenerate in a scientific work, though they had been subjected to the most brutal of "selections" through two major famines within the century before Darwin wrote his first major work. You would expect that such a selection would have led the Irish who survived to have been "fitter" than the English aristocracy who Darwin and Galton held were among the fittest of the human species. The claims of natural selection are riddled with self-contradictions from the start, it is truly one of the worst major scientific theories in the history of science.

** Just the other day as I was re-reading Alfie Kohn's book No Contest: The Case Against Competition I read

For many years, though, some biologists and ethologists have encouraged the widespread conception that natural selection is tantamount to competition.  "Survival of the fittest" (to use the term coined not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer) seemed to connote a struggle.  Winners live to fight another day.

I have noted that Darwin, himself, in the fifth and sixth editions of On the Origin of Species said that when he said "Natural Selection" he meant exactly the same thing that Spencer meant by "Survival of the Fittest" and that he had been encouraged to settle that question by his co-"discoverer" of natural selection. A.R. Wallace. Though anyone who read the first edition of OTOoS or his subsequent exposition of natural selection in The Descent of Man could possibly have missed that those who said what Kohn denies were right about what Darwin and those he cited to support him claimed. Though perhaps Alfie Kohn could be forgiven for not knowing that, the man he quotes to support his point had no excuse not to know it.

In fact, there is no necessary relationship between natural selection and competitive struggle. As Stephen Jay Gould put it recently

"The equation of competition with success in natural selection is merely a cultural prejudice . . . Success defined as leaving more offspring can . . . be attained by a large variety of strategies - including mutation and symbiosis - that we could call competitive. There is no a priori preference in the general statement of natural selection for either competitive or cooperative behavior."

Gould's point is that there is nothing about evolution that requires competition.  And indeed Darwin himself made clear that he was using the term "struggle for existence" in a "large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being upon another."  

The first thing to notice is that Kohn and, clearly Gould were shifting the meaning of the terms they were defending, as, in fact, Darwin did himself.  To conflate "natural selection" with the word "evolution" is a common folly, when it's not an obvious con-job tactic.  

What Gould said, in and among those ellipses that arouse my suspicion, (always give complete quotes when they can be had), shifted the meaning of "natural selection" entirely away from what Darwin, himself, said it meant.  Though Darwin was well rehearsed in playing fast and loose with the denotation of words, too.  He was a master at dancing a two step of saying, as factual science, truly terrible things, immediately denying he meant what he said  and then shortly after showing he meant exactly the worst thing despite his denial. It worked for him on some of the most terrible things he said that were believed and acted on. In his correspondence to Haeckel he recommended the practice. The entire exposition of natural selection is saturated with it.  When I found that one of my favorite authors on these topics, Gould, practiced it he went down considerably in my esteem.  

After more of such stuff Kohn expressed the pious and double-talking faith of that post-WWII con job.

Natural selection does not require competition;  on the contrary, it discourages it.  

The literature of natural selection from its beginning till today puts a lie to that, both the most definitive definers of it to its most vulgar exposition in he-man fiction and, yes, Nazi propaganda. It would have been far better if Kohn had left that mess alone in making his well stated case that competition was often an irrational, counterproductive and destructive framing of human activity, though like any pious college-credentialed writer on such subjects, he must have felt he had to deal with the human consuming monster created by science, natural selection.  Its graveyard is too big to whistle past in that way.

when distinguishing between truth and lies is a lost choice among too many people

or  When An Articulate Particle Physicist Inaptly Simplifies "The Hard Problem"

AFTER READING MORE of the reaction to Sabine Hossenfelder's debunking of "free will" and, in the second indictment of Trump, thinking about the events in the United States over the past decade, I'm going to bend my resolution about the once a week hate mail post.  I'm also going to get personal about it.

After going through an undetailed and extremely short description of the elementary particles that she believes - that is BELIEVES, DOESN'T KNOW - that everything is made of, Sabine Hossenfelder claims that everything we do is described in the enormously complex series of equations that physicists use to partially describe the actions of the particles in the standard model of physics.  Then she, truthfully, declares that for any of us or our actions those equations couldn't possibly be solved because of the impossibility of doing that for all of the particles contained in our bodies or, I'd guess, as she might think of it, "our brains."  But she skips over that problem for making a scientific evaluation of that claim that those would explain our actions, including, I guess, the choices we make or  conclusions we come to would be of unknowable truth because it is untestable.
 
Ok, so humans are one big collection of particles [and, according to her ideology, noting else].  What the particles do is described by the mathematics of the standard model. It's a lot of math and you need math if you want to answer difficult questions like what's going on in nhc [I'm not sure I heard her] collisions.  For simple questions like whether free will exists we don't need to know much about the math, relevant is just that ultimately what you and I do is also described by the standard model, and that means, yes, we know the equations for human behavior, we can write them down.  In practice that's a completely useless statement because we can't solve the equations for these 10 to the 30 or so particles that humans are made of.

That is a violation of so much of what she has said in her critique of things like string theory, that there is no way to test the claims made by it and so it isn't a legitimate scientific theory.  I am also struck at her doing in a shockingly obvious way exactly what her critique of so much of the recent detour into the cul de sac of string theory and its related fields as nothing but  mathematical speculations .  It is a basic inconsistency in her critiques of physics and cosmology that have made her, rightly, somewhat famous.

Of course what she is claiming is unproved, it is an ideological claim made on the basis of her chosen materialist ideology which cannot only not be verified mathematically and matched with observation of what she is claiming it explains but which, if you want to claim it as a scientific finding, is inherently self-impeaching.  If she wants to limit the products of human thought into mere results of physical and chemical reactions that can be fixed into mathematical equations relevant for a partial understanding of subatomic particles then she would very soon run into the fact that in the movements and interactions of organic chemistry, the efficacy of mathematics for even that quickly fade in their effectiveness.  

She later in the video brushes off the idea that minds are not material entities because that idea can't be used to make testable predictions of the kind that are supposed to be the legitimate substance of science, very simple observable material objects.  In other words, minds would escape the confined field of her professional competence and SHE CHOOSES TO REJECT THAT IDEA because she doesn't fancy it. Of course, there's no reason to suspect that anything outside of the things science was designed to study would make predictable predictions about those very limited things which science has successfully studied.  

Then there are those  who just insist insist that free will just exists but it is non-physical, the latter is a well trodden road for example Rene Descartes and Emanuel Kant were both in that camp. I say the idea is not wrong but I never understood the point because if free will is not physical it doesn't explain anything in the physical world so why bother inventing it.

SHE HERSELF ADMITS THAT THE CALCULATIONS SHE CLAIMS WOULD WORK THE WAY SHE CLAIMS THEY WOULD IN REGARD TO HUMAN THOUGHT CAN'T DO THAT SO THEY CAN'T BE USED TO DO WHAT SHE CLAIMS THEY COULD DO. So her very chosen framing can't do that, either. So why bother inventing that model of minds?  In this regard, she does exactly what the proponents of string theory, etc. do.  As to explaining anything in the physical world, any explanation of the physical world depends on consciousness which, under her very terms, cannot be demonstrated by the equations she bases her argument on.

I'd start by saying that her dependence on the current scheme of the standard model in support of her ideological materialism doesn't explain anything about the human experience of consciousness, not only the experience of us making choices and coming to conclusions as to what we will believe but also our ability to conclude that something is explained, including everything she presents as settled explanation.  The very framing of her entire public presentation is not explained by her claim that the equations that partially explain the evident motions of and even existence of the particles of particle physics could explain how that is related because of her truthful statement that the calculation of that couldn't possibly be done and so there is no actual evidence that her claim is true.

As I started, this is a continuation based on my reading of the indictment of Trump, the man who forced even the complicit American media -the much self-vaunted "free press"- to, briefly, notice that there is a problem when distinguishing between truth and lies is a lost choice among too many people.

I'd go so far as to say that Hossenfelder's claim impeaches the human belief that there is truth and there is untruth and what we call those is insignificant because under her framing truth would have to be, as well, a deterministic result of the merely local chemical reactions within human bodies based on the motions of subatomic particles within atoms and it would have no more truth value than any other chemical reaction.  Iron rusting, an acid and base reacting, salt dissolving in water is as significant as anything any physicist ever said. That would be as meaningful as whatever next comes out of the mouth of a Trump or a Franklin Graham or Alex Jones.  

As I've said in those who deny the existence or significance of consciousness, it is the ultimate statement of academic decadence because such a belief leaves no one any reason, whatsoever, to believe anything anyone else says has any significance.  No matter how skillfully expressed that ultimate decadence of materialist ideology is stated, it has the same result that it means truth, itself, is insignificant and likely of no more consequence than if the next digit in the operation of a random number generator is a zero or a one. If she wants to reduce everything to the particles of the standard model and the random chance of humanly invented quantum physics, her very specialty is no more a product of that chance than what she would consider to comprise the question of free will or determinacy.  

Having expressed my respect for her thinking about her professional specialty in the past, it is clear that as soon as Sabine Hossenfelder leaves it she is a case of someone who is so invested in her specialty that she doesn't much take the wider world seriously enough to think things through. I've made that critique of others such as Carl Sagan in the past. I'm going to go directly to the very real effects of her ideology in the wider world and I'm going to make it personal, in these days of waning American democracy, the consequences for me as an American facing Republican-fascism and the Trump cult and I think it's well past time to be nice and polite about it. Materialism kicks the legs out from under democracy, whether it's the vulgar materialism of a Trump or that which you'll find on university faculties and in the high overhead media.

Given her gender and her nationality I'm, frankly, shocked that she would be so unconcerned with a question so important in real life, one which in just barely living memory was a major issue of not only the Second World War but also the division of Germany into a somewhat democratic West and a totalitarian East, as well as the present  struggle between anything like a decent democracy and Neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism.  And, as I have never stopped pointing out, those systems of totalitarian ideology are derived from the claims of scientists. Marxists claim that Marxism is a materialistic scientific system and Rudolf Hess and Hitler claimed that Nazism was nothing but applied science, in that case a direct application of biological determinism as found in the theory of natural selection.  

Determinism would have pretty much guaranteed that, also within living memory and I'm confident in any places today, even an accomplished woman would be shunted off into the background of a male dominated profession.  I'm not that much older than her that I remember a physics teacher encouraging female students to drop his course because he didn't think females were biologically capable of doing the math necessary for even his preliminary course.  I don't know if he got into musing about subatomic particles in his thinking about it, I do know that among the two women he told that to, was the only one in that class who went on to have a career in science.  She was an actual research scientist, not a low-level physics teacher.

This Woman Is My Hero

 

Well, That's A New One

For the first time that I can ever recall it happening, I got a message as I posted the piece below that says, "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines."

I looked at the things that are supposed to get that warning and don't see anything I wrote that would get it.  I'd welcome someone telling me if they get such a warning so I'll know what it means.   Maybe my trolls have upped the ante?

The No More Than Once A Week Hate Mail Post - Why Abiogenesis Is An Obvious Pseudoscience Founded In Ideology, Not Observation

OF THE LECTURES that I've listened to on these subjects and the things I've read, the talk Professor Nick Lane gave a while back in Geneva was probably the least dishonest exposition from, frankly, the most likeable person I've heard on the subject which is more likely to be presented by a dishonest, arrogant ideologue.  Though it was largely a sales job  I don't think even he realized that's what was going on.  

His topic was "How Can We Know Anything About The Origin of Life?" That is, the way in which the theorized first living organism on Earth arose from non-living molecules, assembling, sparked into life somehow, maintaining life and, in perhaps the most inexplicable act of enormous complexity, successfully reproducing the first time resulting in two (who knows, maybe more) living organisms on Earth which continued to live, to maintain their lives and to successfully reproduce, eventually evolving and  eventually leading to life as it is known to human beings, now.  I think the most honest part of his lecture was the very beginning of it.

I'm going to talk about the origin of life.  But you may wonder how it is possible that we can know anything at all about the origin of life.  And  perhaps by the time I'm finished speaking you'll think we really don't know anything about the origin of life.  I'm going to try to persuade you that we can know somethings.  But it's different to other fields of science.  So, in physics, for example, if we want to know the origin of the universe, well, one thing we can do is have a large space telescope like the James Webb telescope and we can look to the furthest side of the universe which is looking back in time because the further away a star is the longer it takes for the light to arrive and so we can look back in time and observe things directly that were happening close to fourteen billion years ago. That's not something we can do on Earth there is no way of knowing directly what  the Earth was like four billion years ago there are some rocks, some fossils and bits and pieces but mostly it's damaged and destroyed and nothing very much to see. And actually, there's a philosophical point as well, if we could make a time machine and go back four billion years and look for the origin of life where would we go?  And what would we actually look for? And how would we know we had found it?

I will stipulate to start with that we both start from the common ground of assuming there was one "first organism" which successfully lived, maintained its life and successfully reproduced others most likely like it (once it had come together) though that isn't a scientific position, it's one based on belief on the basis of plausibility.  That earliest life evolved into other organisms of many forms to produce the life we see today is far more certain though it is, as well, a plausible conclusion based on available evidence, fossil, genetic, etc.  We start from the same assumptions.   I will say that for the argument I am willing to explore the issue on the basis of random chance for all of the events happening as they happened, though only so long as it's admitted that is an ideological position, not one of science or really one that accounts for what we can see of life and how it works, now.

From there he went on to present a number of seemingly plausible components of how life may have arisen, though his desire to be honest made him hedge about the unknowable way in which the mechanisms and the scenarios he presented about them could have fit together and, as he said at the beginning, there is actually no way to know if his plausible seeming scenarios were, actually, how it happened in the one and only way it actually did happen.  About the only thing he said that may have answered one of my questions about the currently fashionable view that life arose in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean was, if it happened once in the total absence of complex organic molecules that random chance could have had available to make it happen on the early Earth, why it isn't happening over and over again?  It wasn't exactly an answer to the question, it was a speculation that the free oxygen that early life saturated the atmosphere and, so, ocean with hundreds of millions of years after the first organism probably arose, has entered into the geology that gives rise to thermal vents now and, perhaps, that oxygenation prevents it happening on the present earth.  But, of course, all of that is rank speculation, too.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of what he said was interesting on its own terms, just there is no way to know if it has any relevance to his central claim that it is relevant to the assembly of the first organism on Earth.

As I pointed out to a boob with tenure from Harvard a number of years ago, the issue of life arising on the early Earth is a fundamentally different problem from the one some physicists and cosmologists, the Lords of Creation, propose to solve because that earliest theorized organism would not have possibly been accurately described or known through extending physical principles because organisms are too varied and too specific and far, far too complex to theorize.* An organism is as the organism is and to know anything about that particular organism you would have to have highly resolvable evidence of what that specific organism was like to know anything about it.  All through the lecture Lane proposed things about far, far later, most likely far, far evolved organisms which we can see alive now or for which there are somewhat resolvable remains to be had. He would sometimes hedge that by noting the original organism was likely much simpler than the ones he was referencing, though I'll bet a majority of the casual listeners to him didn't understand that as a foundational condition to any of the conclusions he presented.

The theorized original organism on Earth, furthermore, had a daunting uniqueness that would make much of later life irrelevant to how it arose.  

One thing we can know about even the earliest evidence of those "simple" organisms which we have to make wild speculations about is that unlike all of those an organism that arose before there was another organism on Earth didn't come from the reproduction of an organism but arose in a way not a single one of its descendants did and the division of a single-celled organism will not tell you how that original organism came about.  To think it had and used large, complex organic molecules that are of unknowable -I'll go so far as to say quite implausible- availability to that first organism and put to work by it through mechanisms that are not known to exist outside of living organisms is to beg anyone of any reasonableness to conclude that only a super-human intelligence could have made it happen.  For the "machinery" of even the simplest known cell to have arisen whole and complete by random chance chemical and physical interactions is about as incredible as expecting modern mammals to just spontaneously generate out of a vat of chemicals, even one spiked with a perfect concentration of all of the necessary proteins and other molecules which comprise the bodies of one.  

Even if scientists, today, were able to create a totally artificial organism of extreme simplicity it could not be relied on to tell you about how that first organism arose billions of years ago.  To disturb your materialist-atheist faith, as I will always point out such an artificial organism would only prove that so far as science could possibly know for certain, such an organism would need the intelligent design of the scientists who created it and so it would rightly be used by those who support the intelligent design of life to support their point. That certain knowledge of the necessity of intelligent design to its existence is practically infinity more certain than that anything learned from the experiment is knowable relevant to the first organism on Earth.   About the intelligent design that cause it to happen there is 100% certainty,  there is no way to even figure out the improbability that it is relevant to how it happened without human scientists  on the early Earth.

That's true of any science experiment that could possibly be done by abiogenesists to try to prove that God didn't do it, the philosophical problems of the materialist-atheist-scientistic quest for the origin of life on Earth start with that colossal oversight by Oparin, Miller, Urey, et al.  They cannot possibly filter out intelligent design from anything they come up with.  I don't think even that impossible direct observation that Professor Lane admits is not going to be done could have the operation of intelligence removed from whatever such scientists would publish in that high catechism of such materialist-atheist-scientism, Nature, any analysis of any science is saturated with intelligent design even by entirely non-ideological scientists.  It seems to me that the quest to expunge intelligent design from science is a dishonest denial of reality.  We are stuck with that because it is simply how our minds can work, they can't seem to work any other way.  Not even magnifying the intelligence involved to the imagined collectivity of the entire relevant bodies of scientists who could understand the paper can expunge intelligent purpose and design from the product.  Even if it can seem plausible that it works sometimes if you suspend your disbelief as science requires.  

I don't want to be too hard on Professor Lane because he is, I think, the most honest person I've heard on this subject but I think he's still playing a shell game as everyone else who goes into this game of stupendously improbable odds does.  In the life sciences, if you want to present things as the product of random chance, the odds of coming up with what you can observe dwarf those regularly proposed by that other vastly ideologized science, cosmology.  For anyone to think that they can find the right answer to the question of how life arose on Early Earth with any even general accuracy would be like someone with a blind fold floating in weightless conditions, free floating, being given a dart and insisting they hit the exact center of a a bullseye four billion light years away.  Only the bullseye may as well be invisible because, as Professor Lane admitted, there's no way to see what that goal actually looks like.  They might hit something and claim that they've hit it but there's no way to know if they really did.  And, believe me, if there's one thing you can be certain about such grotesquely speculative "science" their claims will be challenged and quickly become unfashionable. When you don't know what you're looking for and now to make it both plausible in terms of a "first organism" and how that relates to life which can actually be observed, you can probably come up with an effective infinity of such "first organisms."  You can't know which one is the right one.

Is this really any way to do science?  If it is, why figure there are any rules to it?

* I'm ever less impressed with statements by cosmologists about the origin of the universe.  I think George Ellis is probably right, at least for now, that they can't get near the actual Big Bang, if that's how it happened, because there is no way to extend what we know as physical law into such apparently unknowable conditions.  I think the Lords of Creation are a waste of funding and employment as opposed to those who are trying to keep us from destroying our planet and, so, preserve us into the future.  But, then, I have a faith that we are supposed to be part of the fulfillment of creation some time into the distant and unreachable future instead of trying impotently to prove that God isn't necessary for the creation of the universe or life. It's certainly a lot more useful to concentrate on the here and now that can be observed, measured and analyzed IN PART and so to find out helpful and reliable information. You know, to save us from our technology and our greed.   What has cosmology done to that end, or abiogenesis?  Or even the genuinely scientific study of early humans and our closest cousins?

Thoughts On This Side Of The Undiscovered Country From Whose Bourne Perhaps Some Report On

CARING FOR SOMEONE who is dying can make you face more directly your own fears of death.  That's what is shadowing my life right now, at my age it might for however long I've got to go, myself, reaching a certain age is like a warning that the end is coming closer.

My first try at writing this led me to go all over the place, mostly about stuff I go over regularly here, atheist to "white evangelicals" and trad-catho-fascists, eternal damnationists as opposed to universalists, etc.

I rather stupidly tried to divert myself by listening to a number of lectures by the archeologists and others who have been digging up and studying the Homo naledi remains and artifacts.  That was a big mistake, not because of the remains or artifacts but the descriptions of the deep, narrow, distant caves in which the remains and artifacts are found.  I have a terrible phobia about confined spaces and being trapped. It wasn't  a good idea to have to deal with that with what I'm dealing with.  

And I was surprised to find that I am no where near as diverted about those interesting but long dead cousins of ours as I used to be about our mutual cousins previously "discovered."  I would love to find out that there is evidence of interbreeding with the modern humans that were around when they were.  I love the idea that we're all mutts.  Pure breeding is a myth of putrid snobbery that apparently saturates such near or para-science.  Most interesting to me is the controversy that the discovery that those "small brained" cousins regularly seem to have buried their dead and did cave art with those who have a professional or ideological stake in denying the possibility that such "small brained" distant relatives of ours could have done that.  

What I find most interesting in that is how confident these men of science can be in their speculations about the lives of creatures they never saw in life but, nevertheless, have fixed opinions about.  Even before the physical evidence of them is in. Even.

I will say that considering the amount of highly detailed evidence available about this branch of the family due to what is being interpreted - on what looks like good evidence to me - that they buried those remains quite intentionally, it makes you doubt what they will claim about species known only by the most fragmentary possible information.  Some such species are known by a single bone or tooth.  The scientific denial of evidence is something that does interest me quite a bit as does the ideological insistence of what can and cannot be among those who, presumably, would chafe at being called ideologues who depend on speculation based authority and orthodoxy instead of evidence.  That orthodoxy and authority are almost entirely based on modern conjecture and narrative, often based on the scantest of actual evidence.  In this controversy and earlier ones about whether or not our nearest known relations, the so called neanderthals buried their dead, cared for them, created art, such conjecture and narrative, especially when embedded into professional self-interest, can swamp even conclusive evidence.

Related to that the only possible information we have about what may await us after death is in things like reports of near death experience, reports of what happens at death scenes, the sometimes seemingly uncanny accuracy of information given by mediums under controlled conditions and various apparitions of those who are dead the living report they see.  The deep emotional rejection of all of that whether by those who have a deep emotional investment in the denial of an afterlife or those who have a religious taboo against them are, I think, related to the invested ideological anthropologists, archeologists, etc. who insist that the recent discoveries of naledi remains cannot be interpreted to mean what they would seem to mean.  

I read Raymond Moody's famous book about near death experiences, Life After Life, a few years after it was published and I thought it was striking but at the time I was more interested in politics and life in the here and now.*  But in reading those who repeatedly tried to debunk the reported experience of those who experienced what they did, why the debunkers thought they had any standing to deny those people the interpretation of their own experiences seemed to be the most important points in their  dispute.  People are the only possible source for reports of their own experiences, especially experiences with no external aspects which are observable by others.  How anyone could think they know about that better than the People who had the near death experiences or related ones should be the first question anyone asks about such attempted debunkery.  That was something that, as I looked more skeptically at the "skeptics" and more critically at the critics, seemed to be relevant to all of that stuff.  Now I think that while there are such reports of experiences I find less and others more believable, I wouldn't automatically deny anyone who seems to be rational on what they have experienced in such things.  I certainly wouldn't figure any explanation I might grasp onto to deny they experienced what they did was any kind of evidence.  

There, I think I actually feel better having written this out and worked on it.  Something that no stupid AI bot could do.  I think People who don't write about their worst fears and obsessions to try to deal with them are missing out on something that the geeks who come up with such alleged intelligence seem not to be able to imagine.  This week I listened to an interesting podcast by Marc Vernon on that topic.  I think his point that people who work in AI spend so much of their life in that that they lose track of reality has a lot to recommend it.  I think Alan Turing's life might have been thwarted and shortened by that very phenomenon.  

*  I recently had occasion to watch The Return of the Secaucus 7 again and found that though I thought it was really good at the time it was made, I couldn't much stand the characters in the movie, now.  I was never that impressed with people my own age, even then.  Though I kept thinking at times what a good writer John Sayles was.  

Stephanie Miller Does The Best Trump Impersonation - Better Than Colbert's

 

 

She's the exact opposite of Ben Meiselas reading Trump tweets,  I can't stand listening to him read things.  Stephanie does it as well as anyone could.

I don't think we can base such a morally consequential question on the musings of materialist particle physicists.

MY ALCOHOLIC RELATIVE  I wrote about a week ago is at the end and, as I said, I'm one of the ones taking care of him.   I'm hoping to write more soon.  In the mean time, here's the estimable but not unlimited Sabine Hossenfelder again attempting to debunk free will, the sum total of her argument hinges on her ideological choice of materialism and materialist reductionism.   Despite all of the rather clever though not especially deep reference to "emergence" - I will say she does a better job than most English language and French materialists I've encountered - and other assorted materialist framings, her choice doesn't answer any of the questions I've asked on the topic which deal with accounting for our experience of consciousness, which encompasses our earliest conscious, pre-language moments to the most rigorous and comprehensive proofs of mathematics and, on a lower level of human structured thinking, physics and chemistry.   I'd be tempted to throw in that I'm a lot more impressed with the rigor of some theological writers.   They don't deal with with radically limited topics that physicists and chemists deal with but, then, physics and chemistry are entirely incompetent to deal with those aspects of human experience that theology takes as its subject matter.  I think that's one of the reasons that when I listen to the Evangelical apologist William Lane Craig, when he is refuting the claims of the likes of Sean Carroll and other militant atheists, he's impressive though I often disagree with him on topics proper to theology and Scripture study.  

Notice that her too pat dismissal of the idea that the mind is not material and so could not be limited to the web of material causality that her subject matter has as its only proper area of competence, physical objects and energy as those can be discerned from their (perhaps partial) presence in humanly perceived or reasoned networks of causation.   It's not surprising that someone so invested in physics would insist that the entirety of reality is governed by the rules People have discovered (or perhaps invented) to explain those to themselves is the sum total of reality.   To a carpenter everything looks like a nail, is the cliche.   

I'd like to see her explain why anyone should have any more confidence in the non-apparent ideas of elite physicists, chemists, theoretical biologists, etc.  have any more connection to reality than the freedom of choice that materialist atheists with a devotion to scientists are so ready to reject because it can't be made into an aspect of their framing of reality.   Every idea of mathematics or physics or any science is as fraught with the question of choosing to believe everything from our earliest notion of numbers or logical thought right up to the latest seemingly confirmed products of a particle accelerator or from an orbiting telescope.    We mere human beings can never, ever remove ourselves and our minds from the products of those minds, that's as true of even observable physics as it is from religious Scripture.

As a political blogger my concern about materialism is the fact that whenever People and other living beings are seen as material objects having no transcendent characteristics that make them more than objects, the consequences are a moral catastrophe.   The failure of academic intellectualism - apart from some of post-WWII theology and other areas of non-reductionist thinking - has failed to address the fact that whenever that view of human beings are mere objects, in part or in total, the dominant view of those with power, lots of people suffer the most terrible oppression, use, destruction and murder.  That is the consequence, whether under Marxism or Nazism, whether under European fascism or its American traditional form in white supremacy, etc. whenever People, in part or in total, are seen as objects, no more than that and that, as Nietzsche understood to be the consequence of scientific materialism, if you could get away with using, exploiting or killing one of millions of People, then there was no reason not to do it if you liked doing it.   That is a real-life proven consequence of the demotion of human beings into objects, whether it is Native Americans, Black People, Jews, LGBTQ+ or Women,  I don't think we can afford to allow someone to not address those consequences of their ideological assertions under the guise that when People invented science they decided to exempt it from questions of moral consequences.   I don't think we can base such a morally consequential question on the musings of materialist particle physicists. 

I know that the companies that put out cheap vodka in handles and "bum wine" know they are marketing to alcoholics.  In short, they see the alcoholics they market to as objects for profit even as it's obvious that they have abandoned their ability to choose to save themselves to a molecule.   They know they're making money off of killing People.    Just as I know the member of my family dying of COPD was marketed to by the tobacco industry and Hollywood when she was a teenager.   Surrendering your ability to choose to molecules seems to me to be that hazardous to your health.   It's as hazardous to believe someone who has spent so much of their life seeing molecules, atoms and subatomic particles as the ultimate reality can really account for our experience of our lives.   Much as I like Ms. Hossenfelder when she's talking about her topic of competence, she's pretty useless when she insists that's all there is to reality.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Whalley - The Maroon Cortina

 The Maroon Cortina

A few domestic problems mar the birthday celebrations of the Janice Clark - such persistent belief the police seem to have that her son, Alan, murdered his girlfriend. Of course nobody really believes that, certainly not Barry, her husband, who insists it's all a plot to hit back at him. Then her best friend Pauline seems to suspect Janice of playing around with her husband. Ron. and on top of all that none of her guests seem to fancy pizza.

 Cast:
Barry: Don Henderson
Janice: Lynda Rooke
Ron: Geoffrey Hinsuff
Pauline: Kate Fitzgerald
Curtiss: Colin Meredith
Alan: Joe Searby

Directed by Philip Martin BBC Birmingham

What do you mean by a naive concept of genetics?

I'M ESPECIALLY PRESSED for time so here goes. 

Watch these and you probably will be shocked at how much actual observational and experimental science has left behind what you probably learned about biology and evolution in high school and college. 

First and my favorite,  Dr. James Shapiro on What DNA Teaches About Evolution,  his Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture.

Dr. Denis Nobel on Physiology And Evolution. 

Denis Nobel debating Richard Dawkins on the "selfish gene".   This one was especially interesting due to how often when Denis Nobel answered Dawkin's Darwin fundamentalism with either disconfirming evidence based on observation and published experments or the historical and literary record (especially interesting to see Dawkins reduced to try to downgrade the 6th edition Darwin prepared of On The Origin of Species) Dawkins repeated had to plead the authority of old line neo-Darwinist orthodoxy.   

I'm especially busy right now or I'd go into some of what they say in depth.  I will comment that when Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Huxley wasn't mounting his ideological campaign for natural selection and some of its more putrid consequences, when he was actually teaching students he is reported to have stressed the study of physiology and not on evolutionary speculation.  Now that much of what has been speculated about for the past hundred seventy years can actually be seen, it's clear that his seeming instinct about that one thing was right.  Much of what was held to be clear and hard science, especially in the naive view of genes that more than a bit of the neo-Darwinian synthesis is made of,  that turns out to be quite wrong.  

I especially like how even as he lists and presents a huge amount of excellent observational and experimental information relevant to the topic of evolution, James Shapiro stresses how little we actually do know, the implication of how much we do know is that that unknown is enormous as compared to what we do know.  The incredible actions of cells, bacteria, other tiny creatures and plants in relation to DNA and "genes" their repair and manipulation of chromosomes, etc. is bound to be disturbing to an ideological materialist biologist such as Dawkins of Shapiro's frequent opponent Jerry Coyne because it looks ever more that a atoms and molecules up model that has some plausibility under conventional materialist-atheist-scientism, especially as it is stupidly, or, "popularly" presented by conventional science communicators.  I put "popular" in quotes because if there's one thing that has been with a very large, perhaps majority of people it has been unpopular. 

I  will go so far as to say the incredible amount of information transfer, back and forth between molecules and the cells which are the only thing that makes them more than dead and decaying things is bound to cause panic because some kind of intelligence at work where the materialists declare it cannot be is bound to make you ask how it could have all begun without the motivation of an intelligent creator.   Or, to drive you all crazier, Creator.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Zack Akers - Limetown

Limetown 

I posted links to this series several years ago, expecting that it would continue as an audio drama but they went to a TV series which I never watched.   I was wondering if they ever continued it as a podcast, which they didn't.   

I'd thought it was one of the best for-online drama series I have found and still think it was very good as produced and very promising for the future. So it's worth another listening.

I'm Well Into Doubting Anyone Recovers From A Serious Addiction Without Admitting To A Higher Power

THAT SHOW BIZ, HOLLYWOOD, fiction and comedy lie and misrepresent the reality of alcoholism was thrown forcefully in my face yesterday, as I had to face again what advanced alcoholism with liver disease is really like.  It was through someone who hadn't seen a relative I've been sharing the care of in a long time drawn out death from drinking. She hadn't seen him in a while and was horrified by the skin lesions, the jaundice, the swollen abdomen, the advancing dementia.  Like all of us, she'd seen the fictional representation of alcoholism for decades, comic drunks, good time guys and gals as inevitably set against stereotypically unattractive advocates of sobriety or even those who just don't drink.  Even when alcoholism is presented as a problem, it's never an honest portrayal of the real consequences of drinking.   She's older than I am and probably took in more of the completely false entertainment and media portrayal of alcoholism but nothing had prepared her for the reality right there before her.   I have gotten so used to seeing that in two of my brothers and other alcoholics I've known that it doesn't shock me when I see it.  

If I could do it, I'd force the media, show biz and alleged information programming, to show the consequences of alcohol use in their full reality.  The consequences of sobriety are certainly preferable to those.  Instead, they lie about the character of those who practice sobriety, turning sobriety into an unattractive personality trait.

In our discussion after she saw him,  I mentioned having encouraged him to try AA, to which she gave the typical trained response of those with college-credentials, that "it doesn't work."  The answer to that is that nothing they'd tried had, either.  I told her about my brother who tried to get clean with psychiatry for eight years and only got an added addiction to pills out of it.   And to have his shrink dump him when he lost his job and, with it, the ability to pay.  My brother's rejection had used the excuse that "I don't believe in God or any other higher power," a line provided to him by enlightenment modernism.  The reality was that he not only did recognize a higher power, the alcohol molecule, he'd sacrificed his family, his career, his safety and health and, after years of agonizing and dangerous living, he gave his life to it.  I won't go into the alleged "secular alternative" to AA because when I looked into it hoping to get him to try it, it turned out to be a Potemkin village false front unavailable in almost every location in the United States while there are half a dozen AA meetings within ten miles of where he lived.  

Thinking about our discussion last night, I remembered this passage from a conversation between Walter Brueggemann and S. Alan Ray and think it has probably the best thinking on that topic I can recall hearing.  It takes a while to develop the conversation so I'll give you my attempt at a transcript starting a few minutes before the point is reached.  

S. Alan Ray: . . . There is no one in this room that does not have the capacity at this instant to summon up very vivid images of Satan and demons, if I ask you do do that.  Your pre-modern mind is working just fine, thank you. So, my question is what is it that leads us to do this?  Is it a vestige of a pre-scientific era or is it some deeper component of ourselves?

Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think you're right, I think that language is mythic or it's poetic.  But I think it's an awareness that the visceral sense we have of evil cannot be categorized in the categories of enlightenment rationality. And so I think that we fall back into pre-rational or pre-scientfic or pre-enlightenment categories because it's the only way that we know how to talk about this force that cannot be reduced to a logical principle or an empirical description.  And I think it's viscerally much underneath that.  And I think the language of the personal is the only language we know.

I suspect the same thing is true with our personal language of God, that we can't catch what we want to say about God in enlightenment rationality either, and so we revert to poetic pre-scientific language that drives people like Richard Dawkins crazy. But we are speaking in poetic language when we do that.

S. Alan Ray: I agree with you and I think . . . Another way to tackle this is to take the observation that Reinhold Niebuhr offered us about the mystery of evil and some of his reflection on evil.  That, really, it is a mystery. And he says at one point, I think in The Nature and Destiny of Man, it's a mystery almost equal to the mystery of our redemption, of our being as people. It's very close to it.  And reflecting on this existence of evil in the modern period that I think we're dissatisfied that evil is a mystery to be endured rather than a problem to be solved. I think we are now-a-days all about how we can reduce the mysteries of the world to problems and the tackle them with our various tool kits.  Right?  Our tool kit of solving problems. And it occurred to me that this tool kit's tools are rather broad.  Once you reduce evil to a problem you can take up the tools of exorcism, if you have a tradition that uses that.  You can take up tools for countries that are mired in poverty, for example.  The evils of poverty and seek to eradicate it.  I'm not advocating a quietism that does nothing, please understand me.  But if we think that evil is a vestige or an accumulation of lots of bad deeds, then we put them in the category of phenomena and we can begin to know them and understand them according to our rules of understanding phenomena and then develop techniques for addressing them, trying to eliminate them.  Part of our frustration, it seems to me, is . . . or shocked, perhaps, is a better word, for the Holocaust, for example.  Or catastrophic events like 9-11 is that we're brought up short to again realize the mystery of evil, rather than just the prevalence of bad deeds.

I'll break in to note that the visitor to my relative was mystified about what she saw in front of her.  She couldn't fit it into her thinking or her expectations about what was a not atypical consequence of decades of alcohol use.  She kept trying to attribute it to other things and she couldn't understand why he couldn't just stop, why we hadn't been able to reason him out of it.  The consequences, the predictable consequences carried on by an intelligent person for so long, didn't match her faith in the efficacious applications of reason to prevent such terrible, disturbing consequences.  Brueggemann, rejecting the faith in the universal power of "enlightenment rationality" puts it better than anyone addressing it out of a secular viewpoint.

Breuggemann: Yeah. And I think that the theological tradition understands that evil is enormously seductive.  To go all the way back to Genesis 3 and the serpent we are seduced and deceived so that when we  do destructive things, it's not simply because we're stupid . . . we don't smoke because we're stupid, we don't engage in land wars in Asia because we're stupid, we do those kinds of things because we're seduced. And we are fooled into thinking that somehow we can get by with this and make it work.  Which finally leads us to I think to Paul's dilemma in the book of Romans that "The good I want to do I don't do and the evil I don't want to do I do and I don't understand why I'm doing it and I'm doing that because I'm seduced in ways that are beyond my resistance.  And I think what we know is that our modern rationality doesn't even begin to touch that.  So, I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters in which the seducer is always at work leading us into the very things about which we know better but we go there anyway.  And it seems to me that the religious crisis which gets acted out in 12-step programs is when we finally arrive at the awareness that I do not on my own have the capacity to resist this. And then you get the appeal to the saving power of God or something like that.

Having had years and years of directly viewing serious addiction and interacting closely with hard core addicts, I think this is the most insightful thing I've heard about this in a very long time.   I would bet that any accurate survey of those who succeed and those who fail at attaining sobriety that atheism would be a significant predictor of failure. 

Is it possible for someone to stop a seriously addictive behavior without addressing the power of seduction and the help of someone more powerful than their addiction?  I have profound doubts about that.  I think that even in some secular contexts success in recovery depends on exactly that kind of orientation.   Sometimes the higher power is a person, sometimes it's the leader of a recovery program.   In some cases, someone who turns that into a cult of personality.  The reality of cults around a charismatic psychiatrist or psychologist or, God help their victims, psychoanalyst is quite well documented.  I remember a narcotics recovery cult that a large number of prominent jazz musicians were caught up in back in the 1970s.  I don't think any of the AA meetings in the area here are rumored to have such a focus so maybe accepting God as the higher power is someone less likely to lead to that kind of thing.

I don't have the answers to anyone's particular addiction, I do have experience with what doesn't work and if there's one thing I've seen not work it starts in a puffed-up declaration that "I don't recognize any higher power."  I'd put "AA doesn't work, as another candidate for something that's almost guaranteed to mean that someone is going to surrender their life to their addictive substance of choice or as a result of someone licensed to prescribe pills to them.  The person in question has become addicted to opioids on top of his addiction as a result of the several accidents at home while they were drunk.  
 

Atheism Is So OO's - I'm not doing this more than once a week, from now on.

Someone pulled Richard Dawkins out in an online brawl I was involved with a few days back.  I realized it was the first time someone had done that in years, it was kind of a surprise considering how his claim to fame is fallen into discredit these days.  So I wrote this response.   I'm tempted to post links to things I've written about most of these subjects here but if you're interested you can do a search of my archive.  I generally gave full citations and links which may still work though I don't have enough online time these days to check that.

ATHEISM WOULD HAVE BEEN better off if the new atheist fad of the first decade of the 21st century hadn't happened, it was in every way a sign of intellectual decadence and often sank into grotesque stupidity.  As any popular fad, its stupidity is bound to lead to intellectual discrediting and they gave the opposition to them the motivation to discredit them.  Though their bullying and nagging probably led most people to just get tired of them. Especially the mean-boys who have always dominated ideological atheism and its false front, "skepticism."  The necessity of responding to them has forced people who probably had other things they'd rather have been doing to confront their arguments and claims and citations which, in so far as I've dealt with them in depth, all pretty well fall apart when subjected to even the standards that the new atheists claimed to champion.  There are, certainly, valid criticisms of the varied doctrinal, dogmatic and theological claims of the various sects and traditions of religion but materialistic atheism has turned out to be a pretty threadbare and tattered and raffish basis for making those criticisms.  And atheists have their own doctrines and dogmas and faith holdings that are not less vulnerable.   

The rigorous internal criticism of religion is more exigent and compelling than the general practice of throwing up what is generally either an ideologically motivated or popular level concept of science against those.  That is why what is what should have been, for any practical purposes, a minor and esoteric semi-science, the general study of evolution, has gained such an absurd place in modern culture, because it could be thrown up against a naive, far from majoritarian, mostly Christian reading of the first chapters of Genesis and could shock naive literalists out of what was generally never a deep knowledge of Christianity or any kind of secure faith. Almost any other legitimate, observation-based aspect of biology is far more scientific and far more important for doing something to make life better or even possible. There is no helping the trillions of dead organisms that comprise the actual subject matter of any subject of evolution, all but the most vanishingly tiny percentage of them has even left physical traces that can be studied in any specificity and even those fossilized remains can only be known on the basis of what is left of their observable, measurable physical remains.  All the rest is grossest speculation and, more frequently than will ever be admitted, frequently self-interested fantasy.

It seems to me that it is the weakest faith that is grasped onto most fanatically, leading to some of the greatest sins committed in the name of Christianity.  It is an irony that that the Fundamentalism that is the foil of modern atheism is, itself, a product of the same modernism that modern science is, the oldest theological traditions in Christianity didn't read Genesis as if it was either science or a modern conception of history.  The Cappadocians and even Augustine said taking those as stories as literally true was a misuse of them. So that was never news to the Christian tradition, no matter how many never got the message or suppressed it. I think Darwinism is enforced as the required framing of evolution - EVOLUTION which I have never doubted is the way in which the diversity of life on Earth came about - out of the knowledge of those who have thought most deeply about it, that it has never had much of any evidentiary or rational basis.  It has been maintained on  plausibility based on how little instead of how much is securely demonstrated in actual physical evidence.  As I said to your objection, "natural selection" has no known material existence so it cannot reliably even be located within the material universe.  You didn't tell me where it is when I asked you.

Other than as an object of curiosity, I don't think that much of practical importance has come out of the most rigorous and, perhaps, accurate claims about evolution.  Certainly as compared to the study of diseases, their prevention and their cures, even the lines of early hominids and even far more remotely back into our ancestry is of vanishingly little importance. And that's not to count the most important of related science, the science into how to sustain life against human activity and, worst of all, the quest to amass and concentrate wealth, the fossil fuel industry.

I think the extent to which evolution has led to some real science about life, now, as it is, much of it could probably have been achieved more directly and probably more usefully.  The bulk of scientific claims about evolution, especially on the basis of Darwinian natural selection and its drastically altered form in the "modern synthesis" a combination of something like Darwinism with that now 90 year old, and so quite naive, view of genetic inheritance, have been a disaster in human culture and history.  

Eugenics, modern scientific racism, much of fascism, the foundation of Nazism, some of the worst law made in the modern period and tens of millions of murders,  forced sterilization, neglect of the poor and destitute, untold economic privation, the obscene homicidal policy of "herd immunity" and the corrupt policy flowing out of the racist neo-eugenics such as is popularized in The Bell Curve, are all directly attributable to that one idolized aspect of the elevation of the semi-scientific study of evolution.  I think someday someone should really ask what the world has paid to allow biologists to pretend they have had a central theory as compelling as Newtonian physics or the 20th century additions to that.  Though the products of modern physics, atomic and nuclear weapons and nuclear power, may run up a body count that puts that of Darwinian eugenics as a distant runner up.  

Which leads to my most important refutation of your contentions.

The most compelling criticism of a belief in God and the assertion that God is all good, the problem of suffering, is far more a problem for the attempt to replace God with science because science is, by common agreement, permitted to entirely ignore questions of morality and so is by definition amoral.  

I will take a few seconds to point out that "amorality" is not a quality that is removable from the minds of People in which that "amorality" just sits there alone.  Without positive moral restraint, "amorality" is just the precursor of immorality, indeed, when it is realized as an opportunity, it is often the certain precuror of the most appalling immorality that there has been in the human population.  The modern self-consciously, self-defined scientific regimes have some of the most damningly huge body counts in human history.  The Nazis considered their basis to be biological science and the pseudo-sciences of modern anthropology, linguistics, etc. The various Marxist regimes regarded their practically similar governance as being based in science.  Other than, possibly, the bloody conquests of the Mongol Empire, they have the highest murder rates of human history.  That is certainly not unrelated to the status of the science they claimed to uphold as being held apart from moral consideration.  If it were to be taken as an ideological entity having different sectarian definitions and applications, materialist-atheist-scientism, probably counts as the most murderous ideology in human history.

The behavior of scientists has often been quite as terrible as any of the worst figures in the history of religion.  Christianity - which I'll address because it's always the focus of attacks made on what I write - forbids its followers to commit that kind of evil.  There has never been a murder committed by a Christian, an act of war committed by a Christian, the starvation or privation or discrimination against someone, violence against someone, which is not a violation of the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings in the books of the New Testament.  The same cannot be said of the relation of murderous, racist, etc. scientists to the central holdings of science because science was invented to exclude any consideration of morality.  Dr. Josef Mengele was faultless as a man of science and his scientific colleagues requested he send the parts of the bodies of those they knew he was murdering, he was an immoral monster by the most basic reading of The Gospel. I am unaware of any of them who lost so much as a faculty position in a major university for that.   What criticism there was of their mass murder, torture and amorality cannot come from science, it can only come from outside of it. I look at the moral depravity of so many in so many of the sciences, the  pseudo-sciences and that most putrid of philosophical specialties, "ethics" and am convinced that that self-granted permission to jettison all considerations of the morality of what is advocated has infected much of academic life.

I think it's because such questions are alive mostly within departments of theology accounts for not a little of the hostility of academic atheists to that area of study.  What is true of biologists who invented and supported eugenics is true of Charles Darwin as he asserted that sustaining the least among us was a danger to the population as a whole and that the early deaths of the least among us would be a boon for the surviving, neglecting and murdering human population, the very basis of Nazi theory. Science has never honestly admitted what is so obvious in the written evidence of what Nazism was and its inventors motives.  One of the most impressive campaigns of intellectual lying in modern life was the post-WWII campaign to sanitize the image of Darwin and Darwinism when even a reading of the later editions of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man proves he, himself, asserted the "Social Darwinism" that most allegedly educated persons will assert he had nothing to do with.  Virtually no one in the previous period, up till the crimes of the Nazis were exposed denied the connection of Charles Darwin to eugenics and scientific racism.  His own sons, his closest colleagues all directly connected him to eugenics and what they didn't call but which was scientific racism.  I have noted that five months before the start of World War II and the beginning of their genocides, his son, Leonard Darwin, proudly linked his father to Nazi eugenics as he had linked him to eugenics over and over again.  If you think you know Charles Darwin's thinking better than his sons, than his colleagues whose eugenic writings Darwin cited as reliable science in support of natural selection, you have discredited yourself.  That lie of post-WWII conventional thought is long, long due for discrediting and refuting because eugenics is alive and as dangerous as it's ever been.

The same point about the life consequences of the amorality of science is true of those physicists and chemists who worked on atomic and nuclear bombs, who work in other weaponry. I have noted before that even as it was being contemplated to bring Fritz Haber up on charges of war crimes for his part in inventing AND IMPLEMENTING the use of gas in warfare during the First World War, his colleagues in science gave him a Nobel prize in 1918.  That it was one of his inventions, Zyklon, that was adapted and used in the gas chambers of the Nazis carries a lesson in the danger of that self-granted permission to ignore moral consequences even within science.   I once encountered atheist-sci rangers online who argued that Haber had, on-balance, saved more lives than his chemistry caused to be murdered, so as to exonerate him of any moral culpability, such is the amoral calculation of materialist sci-amorality.

Materialism, atheism and scientism all lack the necessary foundation on which to mount an accusation of even the most evil acts in the recorded history of the human species.  As an ideological position, all of them being radically monistic, no one who upholds those as the foundation of reality has any rationally consistent basis for even addressing questions of evil.  In fact, all of them have proven far more of a basis for anything from the denial that such acts are evil to the actual claim that such evil is a force for "good" such as natural selection has been used to claim since the publication of the first edition of On the Origin of Species.  I have mentioned the very early adopters of that theory, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. almost immediately championed what became, through political and legal policy in various places, some of the greatest evils of the 20th century.  I have also pointed out that the atheism of Marxism has been a quite independent verification of the ability of another ideological formulation of materialist theory to generate huge numbers of murder, general enslavement and moral depravity.  I'd say the current ideological claims of academic atheists, such as those in utilitarian "ethics" in what one used to hope is the post-Nazi period is the third strike against atheism as a force for good.  It is striking how soon, within the first five years after On the Origin of Species was published, that Darwin's closest colleagues were applying the claims of it to contemplate genocide, wiping out future generations from the human species, by neglect of the least among us, imperialistic genocide, forced sterilization, other legal policies (as I've mentioned Charles Darwin supported such proposals made by his son, George) the opposition to mandatory vaccination of the poor, . . . Darwin even complained that the British death camps, the notorious work houses kept too many poor people alive to adulthood for it to be safe for the human species to even give that starvation level of sustenance to the British poor.  Thomas Huxley claimed that his anticipated genocide of African-Americans would be a boon for their white murderers at the conclusion of the American civil war on the basis of his belief in natural selection.  

I could and have gone on about all of these things, look for my citations in my archive, you can use the search engine on the left hand sidebar.

Getting back to the shoddy internal criticism of science.

I think it would probably be a much better world if science made a rigorous internal criticism of what has been successfully passed off as science since about 1860 which has little to no actual foundation in the rules of science, kicking out those things that couldn't be based in actual observation.  But, given the power of entrenched establishments in academia, such as those of psychology or sociology or ethology or the grosser speculative aspects of the study of evolution, that house cleaning is hardly likely to happen.  I think that much of the decadence of science that, for example, John Horgan bemoaned four years ago  is due exactly to that ideological motivation.  I could contrast the decadence which Bertrand Russell bemoaned about ninety four years ago, not on the basis of the legitimacy of the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics, but because he feared modern science undercut the ideological validation that Russell's 19th century style materialist, atheist, scientistic thinking so enjoyed.  

Just last week I listened to a young physicist brilliantly dismantling the 30 year fad that dominated the popular understanding of physics and not a little of the academic establishment of science, string theory, (see below, I can't get the friggin' thing to post where I want it to) complaining that because of it the particle physicists are finding it hard to convince democratic governments to fund even bigger, niftier accelerators (we just need another two hundred jillion dollars! to find the next particle!).  She also goes into that life-saver for materialist atheism in the face of Big Bang cosmology, multiverse fantasy, though not in as much depth.  

Though I think that an even better criticism of scientists discrediting science (without the friggin' annoying video game she was playing while she talked, on the screen) was made by the late Richard Lewontin in that essay I've quoted so often here, Billions and Billions of Demons, in which he points to the absurdly elevated claims of scientists as inevitably leading the public to being skeptical of science.  I'd have liked to discuss the issue with him because he, himself, in other writing, gave a good reason to be skeptical of Darwinism, which I've also quoted here before, you can't observe or measure the alleged "selective forces" that he claimed drove evolution because they happen over too long a period and were too weak a force to measure.  Yet he put his faith in them.  If you can't observe it and you can't measure the basis of natural selection, then any claim that it can enter into science needs to be explained fully because such stuff is exactly why science has become so decadent as so much money has been thrown at it.  I think natural selection is an imaginary entity that can't be defined and can't be observed and can't be measured, so it may as well be admitted that it may well be as imaginary as those things that made Ptolemaic  cosmology seem to work or any of a myriad of once widely held concepts within science which has now fallen into desuetude and the amnesia that is such a part of scientific culture.

I think that even as they allow the absurdity of academic psychology into science, the dominant forceful rejection by those working as scientists of the rigorously controlled research into those things bundled together as psychic phenomena, which has more than a century of rigorously proving those within the rules of science, even when they have implemented the critiques of their critics and still come up with highly significant confirmation of their hypotheses, is strong evidence in support of my contention that current science is ruled by a materialistic-atheistic, would-be scientistic ideology that may be the central driver of science into decadence.

It is certainly consistent with the organized "skepticism" industry such as can be seen in the alphabet soup entities started by Paul Kurtz and his fellow atheist ideologues, CSICOP (since the disgraceful sTARBABY scandal* - CSI, CFI, etc.) being, in fact, a front for the promotion of materialism, scientism, and the atheism which is, certainly, an obsessive interest of just about everyone involved with them.  Even the few of those who demonstrated they could understand the mathematical basis of the research into psychic phenomena, lied and covered up the obvious validity of that as scientific research, an effort that is ongoing in that pseudo-scientific debunking propaganda.  The efforts of the extraction industries in debunking legitimate climate change science and those who attacked the scientific response to the Covid-19 pandemic could certainly have been copying the "skeptics" in their tactics.

I think one of the things that's most obvious is that many, maybe most  scientists in at least the English language are seriously stupid when it comes to thinking or arguing out of any philosophical rigor. It is one of the things which I have to admit shocked me when I decided to look at what the new atheists of the 00's were writing and saying.  In looking into the history of such ideological atheism, it was certainly not something that was uncharacteristic of ideological scientists before the turn of the century. I was prepared to find it in Hitchens and Harris but was shocked at how bad Dawkins, Carroll, Coyne, etc. were in thinking.  I think it's been a huge mistake and more than just implicated in the general decadence of the college-credentialed class that there were not rigorous requirements for at least dealing with how to make and sustain logical arguments and reasonable conjectures starting before college but certainly before they got a bachelors degree.  But it's not as if current academic philosophy departments are without their own decadent tendencies. Some of the stupidest proponents of materialist-atheist-scientism have had careers in university based philosopy departments.  Paul Kurtz was just such an ideologue.  Dennett with his eliminative positivism is a true meat head.

* Do read about the sTARBABY scandal in which those champions of science such as Paul Kurtz proved he never bothered to master the mathematical basis of most of what he claimed about what he opposed, not to mention that scummy liar, the more popularly known (because he was a figure of show biz, like Trump) James Randi whose excuse was that he didn't understand  statistics.  It is remarkable how many of the biggest-fattest traders in that racket are far more ignorant of the scientific basis of what they champion and assert is the only reliable means of knowing anything than, in fact, those whose work they denigrate.  But, then, the actual scientists, EVEN THOSE WHO HAD TO UNDERSTAND THE STATISTICAL CLAIMS THAT CAUSE CSICOP TO DISCREDIT ITSELF, didn't think it was important enough to correct Kurtz et al because they were afraid upholding the science they claimed to champion would harm their ideological campaign against scientists who did and do follow the rules, coming up with stuff they didn't want to be true. In the sTARBABY scandal, the professional statistician and planetary astronomer who collaborated with Kurtz on it proved to be worse mathematicians than the neo-astrologers were.  I think organized "skepticism" is one of the most easily seen symptoms of the decadence of not only science but the ideology of modernism.  If they'd followed the basic rules in science, it wouldn't have reached the stage of intellectual decadence it has, though it would probably be as morally attrocious as it has so often been.  Perhaps the very neglect at applying the rules of mathematics in science depend on a moral committment to integrity and truth that is, as well, damaged by materialist, atheist, scientism.
 

[This] shows you the importance of justice instead of the tradition or practices that harm some in the community

We've mentioned here already how there were ways in which both Jesus and Paul changed their traditions. They rejected practices that had come before. And when I looked at them carefully I noticed that there were patterns to how that happened.

And the first one is that Jesus considered the impact of an interpretation or a practice on the marginalized, those who had ordinarily been ignored. (These are in your booklet and just to make sure I have enough time I won't focus on them as carefully as I might because you have them in your books.)

I assume she means the texts she shows in the slides so I will type those in.

Then he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!  Mark 7:9-13

But the first - think of this question, what are the consequences of an interpretation or church policy.  And that's a really important one, Jesus did over and over again.  And this is a great text from Mark Chapter 7 where there's a practice of tithing to The Temple  which means people of limited funds had a difficult time supporting their families and paying the tithe to The Temple.  And Jesus rejects that, he says: You are rejecting a commandment in order to keep a tradition.  So he's clearly saying it's far more important to keep these commandments but it means that he looked at the consequences on those who had less, those who would have had difficulty to do that.

Jesus's new interpretation is grounded in the Biblical tradition, itself.  I think that someone has already posted this already, the Matthew 23

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law:  justice and mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.  You blind guides!  you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!
Matthews 23:23-28

But he doesn't take this out just from the environment, he takes this, he grounds this in the Biblical tradition itself.  And I'd like to remind you of these words from Amos:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  
Amos 5:21-24

[This] shows you the importance of justice instead of the tradition or practices that harm some in the community.  

This is another point that Timothy Luke Johnson made in his talk which I've been referencing.  

Fifth conviction:  Obedience to the living God trumps Scripture.  As a medieval author said, "They name is "Truth," or Lord, not tradition."  If God is The Living God, if God's creative activity continues at every moment if God discloses God's-Self in the Resurrected Lord Jesus, discloses Himself in the fabric of our existence, in the stories that we live, then our obedience is to that Living God not to the words of Scripture or, heaven help us, of our previous understanding of those words of Scripture.

Though Cheryl Anderson quotes Jesus as referencing Scripture to overturn an embedded traditional practice of interpreting Scripture.  I think that the failure to make that distinction, between what Scripture actually says and the traditional, often enforced sectarian traditional meaning imposed on it, is one of the things that has led to the discrediting of Christianity.  It certainly has made it vulnerable to the opportunistic attacks by its enemies, fashionable and otherwise.  Not that some of the academic revisions of that reading are much of an improvement on the actual texts when read on their own terms.  I've become extremely skeptical of the historical-critical racket which wants to impose yet another sectarian filter on it, that of 18-21st century secularism and scientism.  

In terms of politics, this being a political blog,  it's as or more true in the right-wing reading of the United States Constitution by a majority on the Supreme Court that reigns us instead of what we've learned in the two hundred thirty years since that thing was written down, that that attempt, which always, dishonestly asserts that the wishes of the members of that Court are what the words as written means, is generally accompanied by a denial of the experiences and lives of those who are other than them and their sponsors.  It is an absolute certainty that the Republicans on that court are there as servants to those who enjoy the benefits of that "mythical norm," the wealthy - most of all, the white - almost as much, the male and the straight.  That the mindset of American secularism leaves us all as enslaved to that privileged minority and there is nothing in secular law to get us out of that should be seen as impeaching the established order we live under in secularism even more so than it does in the relatively disempowered churches, many of whom are far more flexible and far more able to break out of it and resist that established order.  I think it is one of the major reasons we find ourselves in the trouble we are in that the moral conscience of America has either been corrupted or gulled or intimidated out of resistance to it through the general secularization and Mammonization of culture.  As I said, listening to The Reformation Project and reading their material has given me some hope that nothing I'm reading in secular culture has.

I have mentioned a number of times the role an argument I had with some Buddhists over the reality of justice in my adult conversion to Christianity, I think any historical-critical assertions about the Christian and Jewish Scriptures that diminishes the practice of justice, especially the most radical justice as that asserted by Jesus and, in fact, James and Paul, etc. is far more discreditable than the texts as they have come down to us.  Though many of the denominations still traffic in the same thing as they focus on the sexual and reproductive lives of People, even those who have never accepted to profess those sectarian programs.  I think it was the focus on sexuality all along that has been the major distraction from the actual teachings of Jesus and those who were closest to him in proximity and time, those who knew him and who knew those who knew him.  

If Christianity had focused on justice all along, it would have been far more credible and far more immune to attack on the basis of corruption and hypocrisy.  And it's not as if the most nagging of sexual cops have proven to  practice what they preach, as the previous two sexually repressive papacies proved in their permissiveness to priestly sexual abusers and the conservative hierarchs who shielded them from facing legal consequences.  That was hardly a phenomenon limited to the right-wing Catholic hierarchy.  Nor is it unknown in secular contexts, either.  I would bet you that the Republican caucus in the House and Senate probably has more adultery and infidelity and sex criminals among them than the Progressive Caucus in the House.  I would bet you anything that that is true in virtually every legislative body and governorship across the country, allegedly Christian or otherwise.  

I think that anyone wanting to pretend that it's still 1953 in Catholicism or Evangelical style Protestantism (not to mention 1787 in U. S. law) should be suspected of just what Jesus warned the equivalent religious authorities and self-appointed experts of his day.  It's no accident that The Reverend MLK referred to that passage in Amos more than once in his struggle against traditional racism and the amoral acceptance of it by those who didn't like to think of themselves as racists.  I will confess, that all of that makes me suspect a range of moral depravities beneath the facade.