While Praying For The Kingdom of God There Is Not Getting Suckered Our Of Working Toward It

 Or, A Short Account Of My Life Online

FINDING OUT ABOUT the real lives of those who might have been heroes to us is frequently a disillusioning thing. Composers, musicians, writers, actors, their real lives are frequently entirely different from the public relations line.  What we know of the show biz folk are often little more than the stuff lies are made from. Over and over again when I looked deeper than the PR and the ideological hagiographical presentation of heroes of the left,  I wish I'd known what they were really like before I went to the bother of believing they were more admirable than they were. The influence on my thinking and maybe action from my idiotically misplaced admiration for them has certainly not generally been good.

I can take four of those as a unit, the four singers who made up the legendary black-listed pop-folk group of the late 1940s and 50s, The Weavers, especially the guy who I grew up seeing presented as St. Pete Seeger.  Learning about his and his associates in the previous legendary Almanac Singers carrying the American-Stalinist line of appeasement with Nazism during the months of the idiotic Hitler-Stalin pact pretty well put a permanent dent in the halos of ol' Pete and Lee Hayes and the even the more legendary Woody Guthrie, who, whatever else can be said of him, was a great songwriter.  

I have come, more and more, the more I look into the history of American Communism which such folk were associated with, if not card carrying members of, to see it as a combination of active and totally ineffective agents for Leninism, then Stalinism - with the disappointed fans of Trotsky in the mix. I think the most notable impact of communism and its associated figures impact on reality was in its bumbling tripping up and hampering of any real left, here and in many other countries. In all, they were a blight on the real struggle against the Constitution and for egalitarian democracy, economic justice, a decent, sustainable life, the real agenda of the real left.  There is something of a lesson in that,  the former Trots, the neo-conservatives were such masters in that discrediting effort of the egalitarian-democratic, the real left.

I think the habits if not active links between Soviet, now Russian dictators and the American secular left are, in fact, still on display in things like that Green Party line of Putin appeasement I posted the other day, a line taken up by someone I once respected in a similar way, dear old Noam Chomsky.  That they, in the end, turn out to have a similar line on that as Republican-fascism of the Trumpian variety doesn't surprise me nearly as much as it once would have.  There were so many of the old commies of the 1920s onward who did what the neo-con ex-Trots did, once their hero was murdered by Stalin's agents in Mexico and there was no prospect of him gaining power, turning full on Republican-fascist. Knee-jerk accusation of the United States to shift blame from, first Soviet, now Putonian crimes and violence, is one of the hall marks of the idiotically counter-productive secular lefties.  If there is one thing that egalitarian democratic Americans, and those who would like to be that, will not accept it is blaming even the extremely imperfect union that is the United States for the crimes of foreign dictators.  

One of those early figures to take what was mapped as a sharp turn right into corporate fascism but was really only a baby step away from Marxism was Max Eastman, the brother of Crystal Eastman, one of the founders of the ACLU, who went from what was considered the far left to Nazional Review style hackery.  He was, more than anything, an ideological atheist who broke with his good buddy the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont over the Stalin show-trials of their fellow commies.  

In his letter breaking with  Corliss Lamont Eastman didn't much mention the millions already murdered under Communist rule (he uses that putrid objectifying of the human population, "the masses") something well and accurately reported in the West, he lamented their fellow commies who, if they had had power, would likely have run up a staggering body count of their own, many of them had helped Lenin and Stalin amass theirs. Over and over again, I've found that to be the case with disaffected communists and, to some extent anarchists who often seem to have no more of a reverence for the lives of the underclass and minorities than the most brutal of capitalists.  Eastman's lament was based in their common cause which was not justice but promoting materialism and atheism, probably with atheism placed first.  He proclaimed himself still a great admirer of Lamont's magnum opus, his    Columbia Doctoral Dissertation arguing against the possibility of life after death.  Someday I might go into my radically updated opinion of his advisor, John Dewey.   He was also Max Eastman's advisor at Columbia.  

I recall hearing one of those dear old, well-spoken, well-off, college-credentialed commies who left the American Communist Party after Khrushchev  admitted the crimes of Stalin - crimes which had been well known and documented for more than two decades before as she remained a Communist - what had attracted her to it to start with.  After thinking for a while the best she came up with is that she wanted "a more rational politics."   Facing the mountains of corpses amassed by Lenin and her former hero Stalin, that's the best she could come up with as an explanation.  Hearing that was one of the landmarks in seeing through the secular left.

In the years when much of the unselected literature, magazines, essays, etc. of the secular left have come to be readily available online, I have come to find pretty much everything about the old American secular left obviously wrong-headed at best, quite repugnant quite typically.  When viewed without some ideologically motivated filtering, in their century and counting history of politics they proved themselves to be idiots who never had a lick of political success - American voters are smarter than to think that Soviet Dictatorship, later Chinese dictatorship, which achieved numbers of murders, oppression and enslavement on the Hitler level, was preferable to our own handicapped struggle for democracy.

The Greens, mentioned here the other day, elevated the Putin-Mike Flynn dinner companion, Jill Stein, to help give us the neo-Stalinist asset Trump.  I'd like to know if there was any foreign money involved in that Green campaign.  We are lucky that they didn't help Republican-fascists reimpose him on us or deliver the recently conducted election to them. I will guarantee you that they will try to play the spoiler again, probably in the next presidential cycle. If not, I will retract.  

If, as it appears now, the Republicans take the House of Representatives, that is due to the Roberts Court allowing Republican-fascist gerrymandering to thwart the will of the majority of voters, the majority of American voters are not as stupid as the secular left or the corrupted American political system. I haven't closely followed the activities of any Green candidates for the House, if there were any, but a number of never could win "independent" candidates on the ballot may have played a similar role. If there was ever a time when we didn't need that kind of idiotic ballot access such as 1970s style "liberals" in Maine imposed on us, it is now.  Splitting the opposition to fascism is one of the fascists greatest assets, one which the secular left has specialized in.

The secular left in America has never been much of anything but counterproductive, the longer I look into the actual  (generally all too temporary) successes of American democracy, the less it can be attributed to secularist ideologues, least of all ideological materialists, atheists and those who assert a line of scientism.  Most of the time any genuine egalitarian-democraic leftists have associated themselves with those often university and small-media centered ideologues it has not been good for the progress of the real left. The real left has had to deal with the burden of that association at the same time they have had to struggle for the progress which is their only real purpose to exist against political-economic gangsters. The long diversion into sympathy for those dear old commies because the gangster-fascists were mean to them was sympathy for Stalinists and, as such, sympathy badly spent.  Though it is a stupid habit that might be related to what I suspect keeps many an ACLU style liberal awake at night, the fear that somewhere, somehow, a liberal is saying mean things about Nazis, fascists and the American indigenous version of that, white supremacists.   I really have come to despise the ACLU.

The way you get notice and esteem on the secular left is generally through promoting yourself as an extreme devotee and "fighter" for some abstract, theoretical line of bilge.  Declaring yourself the most lefty in the room, such as the Leninist agents of Communism did in destroying the most successful leftist party in American history, the old Socialist Party in Chicago in 1919* and as the Maoists did, even as the mass murder of the Cultural Revolution was at its deadliest, about forty-five years later when the SDS was similarly wrecked. That is how you make a name for yourself in secular lefty politics.  Achievement of actual good for the lives of actual people and other living creatures is notably sparse for the secular left and, as they have never much reformed themselves in order to put that first, something they don't much care about.  That would be because they REALLY don't care about that.

The values of the secular left aren't especially admirable.  For example the promotion of addictive substances has about as weird a place in the culture of the left as could be imagined. Alcohol, tobacco and drugs are weirdly associated with the secular left, perhaps because more than being like the real left, they are more a weird combination of libertarianism attached to some of the worst of oppressive governments.  Maybe that's not so surprising considering things like the Soviet promotion of alcoholism, the better to control the inebriated masses, something that I understand Putin has brought back in a big way.  Getting back to the Weavers, that movie they made of their last appearance, which was sort of a benefit for Lee Hayes who was in bad health, an amputee in a wheel-chair, as I recall, started with Darlin' Cory - I believe they had collectively said that was their favorite folksong, if my memory serves - a song presenting moon-shining and the violence associated with it in a positive light, in a kind of low-brow glamor.  And that is typical of that, often college based, folky crap, associating the secular left with drinkin' and hell raisin', mostly from a perpetually adolescent male point of view and of the perpetually adolescent gals who like that kind of thing.  And that would be because that has always been such a reliable venue in the pursuit of economic justice and equality.  

Before you pick up on that, it was said sarcastically. Perhaps it is related to their elevation of the material to be a replacement for God (thus the "atom" symbol so many atheists have adopted as their mascot) in so far as alcoholics have put the alcohol molecule as their higher power that controls their lives and determines their actions, the thing they sacrifice themselves to.  Other denominations of addicts put other molecules in the same place.  It makes a perverted kind of sense.

Some longtime readers may have been puzzled by my frequent mention of the Eugene O'Neill play The Iceman Cometh but I really do believe it is probably the best meditation on the futility and defective nature of the secular left ever made, either as an artistic expression or, in fact, of any expository treatment of it.  That it takes place among a bunch of alcoholics in a flea bag bar is appropriate.  That the lefties are all either in a state of alcoholic dementia or bitterly cynical apostates who mix in with those who have had no ideals higher than those of a pimp or the hell raisin' good-time guy, the much anticipated drummer Hickey who, unlike them, has successfully held down a job as a traveling salesman.  

The amount of the play taken up with issues of the left, whether through the disillusioned anarchist, Larry,  Don, the son of his once lover and, perhaps his son, and the alcoholic anarchist periodical editor Hugo, that is certainly the primary focus of the work.  It is, I think, O'Neill's honest evaluation of the old-line secular left.  He was, for a time, part of that left and personally knew many of whose pre-WWII heroes held to be legends by the idiot secular lefties even today.  I first noticed the aptness of the play as a microcosm of the American secular left during the hey-day of the lefty blogs during the new atheism fad of the 00's.  Some of them were, fifteen years ago, turning into that kind of virtual tavern, a louche salon with all the comforts of home.  The cynicism was the same and dominated.  There might not have been ready liquor provided by the proprietor to keep your thinking down but you could BYOB.  There was the collective repetition of the litanies of the faith, the effortless citation of common received "wisdom," obeisance to the totems of club membership, the foolishness of which was obvious from its futility in reality and there was  the excitement of the in-group ganging up on someone who tried to insert a different idea into the discussion.

That secular left achieved nothing except attaching themselves to the real left, trying to gain the upper hand and discrediting the real thing.  That has been, actually, the strategy of those lefts from the 1900s onward, it is what killed the most successful party of the left, as mentioned above, it thwarted the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, etc.  Look at the idiotic exercise, the Left Forum, that continues year after year doing the same things and promising the suckers that it's, somehow, going to work this time for more than half a century (if you count the Socialist Scholars Conference it grew out of).  How many wasted decades and centuries does it take to face the fact that it is not only discreditable, it is permanently discredited.

The real left cannot grow out of materialism and atheism because those will always destroy what a real left has to start from, definite moral positions that are not only non-negotiable, they have to be held as a durable and certain structure of truths. Neither science nor mathematics nor logic can touch that reality, you have to choose it as a firm and unshakable belief.  That we are all of us, despite appearances, equal and the possessors of equal rights given to us by God, that those rights include a right to not only the minimum of sustenance to keep us in constant desperation and insecurity but enough to sustain us in a decent life.  That the environment that all life depends on must be protected so as to have it sustain us.  That there are real and bad consequences for any of us as individuals and as a society for not doing those things, if not personally, for us on Earth, then eventually in a way that we will experience. That what we do for the least among us will determine our futures.  And a lot of others that could be listed here.  No real left of any good will comes from any other basis.  

The misplacement of Marxism on the left of the idiotic old-style graph of political identity on the basis of what they claimed they were going to do with the money is the kind of thing that happens when you are a materialist reductionist who believes the modernist superstition that simple mathematical equations are an oracle of how reality is really structured. The idea was that Nazism on one end and Marxism on the other end, pivoting on the "center" made it all balance, so it must be real.  Marx may have mouthed some good slogans in The Communist Manifesto that made it seem like he was really and truly a champion of the rights of workers, and he may have been sincere in that, but he really had no belief that egalitarian democracy would be possible.  He believed in the clearly wrong belief that reality was mechanical, that we were simply cogs and springs in a machine that would work itself out to whatever it was going to end up being. The habit of believing you are working for the benefit of "the masses" ignores the reality that there is no "mass" that is separable from the individuals you imagine it out of.

I think a far more realistic graph of political identity might have materialist determinism on one end and the belief that we are all endowed with equal and inalienable rights on a place far from materialism on a line that might extend past that point on in that direction to infinity.  There is a reason that the modern mass-murdering regimes have had a pretense of being scientific, "National socialism is nothing but applied biology,"  the scientific pretensions of Marxism, etc.  Their shared materialism, even as they are held to be opposites on that absurd graph of political identity is too noticeable to not be implicated in what they produce.  The people who made those ideologies up weren't stupid, though those who powered themselves to the top in a way that might have pleased a Nietzsche and did, in fact, please the Fabian George Bernard Shaw, like Hitler and Stalin might have been mighty vulgar and not the greatest of readers.  The observed history and most notable characteristics of Marxism and its ideological allies, mass murder, oppression, terror, etc. puts those squarely next to Nazism and not that distant from capitalism at its worst.  There is a reason it was so easy for the KGB man, Putin to take that little step into something more akin to Nazism than social democracy.  The academic, intellectual Marxists who never noticed the destruction of intellectualism that comes with materialism are dolts.

Speaking of which, since "socialism" is a word so twisted and distorted that it was adopted both by the Stalinists and the Nazis, creepy entities such as Fabianism, as well as some genuine egalitarian democrats, it's probably a word that should be scrapped and a better definition of economic justice found for true egalitarian democrats.  I think the word got saddled with so much crap that it broke its back. Even where that association has not discredited it, the use of it to mean entirely different things makes it dangerously problematic and, in referring to the real effort for egalitarian democracy based on good will, some other word should be used.

The same is true for "democracy" which needs to be replaced with something that hasn't been used by the likes of the Soviet satellite dictatorships, the Kim regime in North Korea, slavery-supported, misogynistic, oligarchic systems (such as the original democracy of ancient Athens) and myriad other anti-egalitarian despotic regimes.  

And "republic" has similar problems with it.  We need a more accurate and specific vocabulary for the thinking of the egalitarian democratic left, we need it as badly as we do the definitive rejection of the secular, materialist-atheist-scientistic old left. Words designed to not only jettison old associations with the old terms but much of the actual ideological baggage of those, as well.  The ideological baggage is what earned those terms everything from disrepute to dangerous inspecificity in what they mean.

* I think the charge that those who were in control of the Socialist Party at the time were underhanded (Louis Boudin complained they were "crooks" before he very quickly decided the others were lunatics) in how they tried to deal with the John Reed camp putsch to take it over for Leninism is unfair because they were hardly dealing with people who were honest about what they were doing.

Those who do politics frequently find that the rules and regulations get gamed and hijacked in that way, the American Constitution certainly as been by corporate fascists, billionaires, millionaires here and those foreign billionaire gangsters and dictators which the Roberts Court empowered in Citizens United. It was easy for them to do it because the thing was rigged against equality and democracy from the start.  The Supreme Court is largely comprised of those who game the system for generally bad ends.  As can be seen in their use of even something as good as the 14th Amendment is susceptible to their studied, blatant dishonesty about its history. The brief period after World War Two, when the world saw, on full display, the horrors of military distatorship, fascism and Nazism, when the Warren court tried to game the Constitution for better ends, sometimes disastriously foolish in what they did, was a brief and long over abberation.  

I don't blame people who break the rules to protect things from really bad people who have no good intentions. I blame the really bad people for making that a necessity.  How do you judge when it is all right to do that?  By the intentions and their actions in trying to achieve them AND BY THE RESULTS. Given that the rules are so bent and broken as done by the worst of those in the judiciary, I don't think the real left can usefully volunteer to be hampered by the rules in ways our opponents, either on the gangster right or the gangster "left" don't feel restrained by.  And don't for a second believe that they are anything but the adversaries of equality, economic justice and real democracy.   I think being governed by solid, absolute moral stands is a far bigger problem for secular politics of a materialist sort because, in the end, materialism has no immutable goal and so nothing higher than the rules as written or temporarily imagined.  Anyone who "just wants an even playing field" is too little invested in equality and justice to trust.  That is one of the reasons I have come to distrust things like the "civil liberties" lawyers.  

You have to want more than that kind of technical, evil enabling "equality". The Republican-fascist right wants more than that, it wants power and the power to steal everything and to prevent egalitarian democracy. We know for a fact that they will do anything to get it, from the Brooks Bros. Supreme Court putsch that put George W. Bush in power to the actions of the sanctimonious James Comey and lies published by the New York Times and the free press got us Trump and the violent fascists who tried to keep him in power.  Compared to that the desire to want equality, economic justice, democracy is well worth breaking the rules for. Those goals are higher than man made rules, if you don't believe that, to hold that as determining your course of conduct, you have surrendered to the gangsters.

The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being.

THE MATERIALIST IDEOLOGY is based on unprovable assumptions that are intertwined, though not necessarily,  with our notions about science.  Among those are that

a. What human beings can discover about material reality can comprise an exhaustive description of what the physical universe is like. Given the fact that it is one of the major discoveries of modern physics that we cannot do that, the holding of that assumption, stated as a fact or, more honestly put,  merely felt as a preferred notion is justifiably considered to be a quaint remnant of 19th century scientism.  I say that knowing that sciency materialists just hate it when people call their faith quaint. And because it's true.

b. What science does not know about the physical universe is continuous in every aspect with what science is considered to know about it now.  Which, since science is limited by the humanly chosen methods and framing which comprises the method of science, is a pretty huge assumption. Honestly done science can tell you about nothing which cannot be accurately and honestly viewed through its chosen methods, even if those things are there. Actually, "science" is an imaginary thing that exists only in human minds, "it" doesn't tell you anything, those deputed to be scientists do. And lots of them are little more than carny hucksters, psychology profs at prestigious universities such as Jordan Peterson, Stephen Pinker, those who are allowed into the margins of  actual science such as Richard Dawkins, . . .  When you start to think about those things which are only "things" in human imagination, the list of those which modern folk consider as something else is rather astonishingly extensive, given the pretenses of the modernist ideology and allegedly hard realism.

It is entirely possible, as Eddington put it so well, that there may be entire realms of physical "law" that are undiscoverable by even the best of human investigation.  There may be aspects of physical reality which do not fit with the framing of the physical universe which comprises what we consider science and which we will never be able to make fit with it. If the famous discontinuity between physics as done by those in the tradition of Einstein and as done by those who investigated quantum mechanics will ever be reconciled or if that discontinuity is an already noticed hint of what we will never know and which, indeed may be unknowable is an open question.  At best this assumption of materialism is, to put it mildly, premature.  Yet entire fields of deputed science are based on that faith, the entirety of the "behavioral sciences" among the worst, cosmology and the speculative branches of evolutionary biology not that far behind in many cases.

c. That there is nothing other than what human science and the human conception of the physical universe which is real.  Which, considering that science intentionally throws out anything which will not work within the chosen framework of scientific method, may be the biggest leap of naive faith of these assumptions, none of which is a logical necessity to start with, science would probably be better if all were thrown out completely.

Science, as it is ideally conceived, can only make claims about that which is carefully and correctly observed and carefully and correctly measured, including those things which can be observed and measured through humanly invented, humanly made instruments. And those have to be correctly conceived of and working as intended and, quite often, their reported results correctly interpreted.  In the actual practice of professional scientists, that is not necessarily a strictly observed requirement.  

Anything which cannot fit into that framing or pass through that filter would be something science can't deal with at all. That is a lot of the science that is published and held to be science and it always has been.  The public presentation of science concentrates on the successes and not on the things which were once held to be as reliably known as today's science but is now discontinued, holdings which have certainly not to have retained its reputed reliability. Science is what living scientists say is science and if there is one suspicion about that which is reliable, it is that much of what scientists say is science at any given time will not stand a test of time.  I could go into Max Planck's famous remark that scientific progress is measured in funerals as the old guard gives way, the old guard holding to those ephemeral items of science.

Human beings with the credentials to call themselves scientists and get away with it can pretend that scientific methods can do what they can't do and colleges and universities, the media, law courts, etc. will pretend they are legitimate.  

The sociological divinatory practice of polling cannot even come up with the first logical requirement of doing what they claim to, having a large enough, actually randomly chosen sample of the large populations they claim to be able to describe, so their claims cannot even fit within the logical extension of scientific method which chooses to ignore that the entire basis of that assumption in this materialistic faith claims is true about reality.  Yet it is commonly held and treated to be applied science.  It's most openly corrupt form, in the kind of opinion polling that "journalism" focuses on is about as reliable as a newspaper horoscope, yet they continue on even as they whine that the vast majority of the population they poll can be known to actually do one thing, they hang up on telephone pollsters, yet that majority never figures in the reported results.  And journalism and politicians and even the pseudo-scientists who should certainly notice that glaring problem with it, buy it like the latest quack promoted on talk-TV.  

I strongly suspect that the fluidity and mutability and unpredictability of a single individual consciousness makes the claimed scientific basis of polling a pseudo-science from the start.  Yet it is a pseudo-science that is firmly believed in by, especially, the most ardent of materialists under the influence of the entirely unscientific corporate mass media which has largely given up the rather harder and more expensive reporting of fact, polling being one of the many replacements for that, opinion, personal preference being another of the major replacements of it. Modern journalism is more crap than it ever has been.

Forget the entirety of reality being comprised in the product of science, science knowably cannot deal with many aspects of our not only observed but all too well known, daily experienced reality.  

And that's only one of the aspects of the decadent dishonesty that comes in when you make materialism the required ideology of the allegedly educated class, a naive faith which is the actual basis of modernism, something which has gone from an ideology to being little more than a team brand or something more akin to the world of fashion than of philosophical conviction.  Or, more typically, a license to base your life and view of reality, the minimal extent to which you care about that, on selfishness. I think that's its major attraction among the affluent and those who would like to be, or academics who would like to have sex with more of their students.

There is a different view of materiality which the snobs and self-focused fan boys of materialism hate, that is something noted by Walter Brueggeman in that lecture I keep promoting, Slow Wisdom As A Subversion of Reality:

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy.

Which is a far different thing from the pretenses of would-be scientific materialism.  I have to point out that this view of "justice and righteousness' is a far cry from how those are commonly thought of in not only modernism but throughout human history.  "Justice" in modern non-egalitarian democracy is focused on the punishment and control of and, not infrequently, the destruction of those in the very underclass who Mosaic justice intends to lift up and relieve of their need and to gain their dignity.  "Righteousness" seems to often be regarded as a synonym of judgemental snobbery either of those in the upper class or in those in lower classes who can be counted on never to give them any trouble, kicking down instead of up.  Respectable scrupulosity is something it traffics in more than the morality that the Prophetic tradition talks about.  I think a lot of the worst of the 1960s would be social revolution foundered on the failure to define such terms adequately.  I'll post on that later today.

Last Bit Of Catching Up On Hatemail Before Going Back To Politics

THE NEW ATHEISM fad of the 00's and its blather on the blogs, in pop-lit aka "journalism", in academic lit, etc. taught me a lot about the eutrophic decadence of modernism and scientism and atheism.  But, then, so did the unedited, unselected, raw thought product of huge numbers of college credentialed people who wrote in something like the English language. 

The Darwin wars were something which before about 1995 I had the most conventional modernist views on, unknowingly and uncritically believing the post-WWII lies constructed to "protect science" from the truth of what he really said, what those he cited as reliable science said. In my subsequent researches, I never found a single case from before WWII in which those who supported the theory of natural selection denied that led to such things as eugenics, it was common knowledge then.  That is I stupidly accepted the conventional post-war "scientific" lie until I did what such atheists almost never do, honestly read his own words, those of his Darwinist colleagues he cited as reliable knowledge, those of his children about him and his theory and admit what they said and the consequences of what they said being believed by others such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe, Wilhelm Schallmeyer, Alfred Ploetz, Fischer, Baur and Lenz, and through them, Rodolph Hess, Adolph Hitler and later the likes of William L. Pierce and the Darwinist economists who had Trump's and the Swedish government's ear on Covid policy.  

I can say that almost every time I looked at the primary and cited secondary documentary evidence of such conflicts, the conventional modernist required POV turned out to be a rather obvious lie. That was true in researching Darwinism, many issues of history, such as those around the prosecutions of Galileo, Bruni, John Scopes, the Huxley Wilberforce "debate", the character of the U.S. Constitution, the personal integrity of many clayfootted heroes such as the fetishized "founding fathers," the real history of the American left,   around the controlled, published science done in such issues as telepathy and precognition, the actual character of the so-called sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology and, God help us, again, economics.   

I have never done anything but insist that an honest evaluation of such issues has to be heavily based in a critical reading of the primary documentation and such secondary literature as the creator of the primary documentation claimed as supporting their arguments, especially those whose point of view became conventionally viewed as authoritative on the matter.  That is with the little understood understanding that a critical reading can be confirmatory as well as disconfirming.  

I have never wandered into the actual primary and related secondary materials without being prepared to find my hypothesis about it was what turned out to be wrong.  I think I have always admitted when that was entirely possible, though I tend not to find that was the case, I'm kind of careful about making hypotheses. I had the history of psychology as as a cautionary lesson about doing that, if you're not careful you might just create an illusion of confirmation for of your hypothesis that is illusory.

Sometimes I had no really firm or definite commitment before I went into it.  When I first looked into some of them I was genuinely interested in finding out who was right, if that was possible to discern from the record.  Sometimes I have come out of it with the firm belief that neither side had enough evidence, often they had none at all that made believing their contentions logical or credible.

My arguments with academic, even scientific, EVEN MATHEMATICAL(!) ideologues of modernism, of material-atheist-scientism have proven to me over and over again they are usually far, far more interested in pushing their ideologies and even their rather easily refuted lies than they are in the integrity of their beliefs. More typically online, they're only interested in getting attention from their fellow ideologues and kicking the dirt around with them. That is especially true of the boys club of "Skepticism," atheism, scientism, whiny always-online geeks who love to whine about why females don't fall for them, etc.

Good theologians argue at a far, far higher level of adherence to the pretended standards of intellectual practice than any modernist, materialist, atheist devotee of scientism, even those who are supposed to be professional scientists and even mathematicians(!) regularly do.  The amount of time those who claim their disinterest in religion spend on trying to discredit or "disprove" the existence of God, having that as a rather obvious focus of their allegedly scientific work is rather self-discrediting as to both their disinterest and their interest in the integrity of their scientific endeavors.  It also, far more often than not, proves they don't really have any grounding in the philosophical character of science or even what you need to do to make credible arguments.  The appeal to prejudice is probably the major MO of a huge number of such scientific academics.  Certainly when they wade into popular conversations.  

Among other things over the period since I first went online and discovered along with the the enormous wealth of primary documentation, secondary documentation - especially that cited by the creator of the primary documentation, the first-hand evidence of observation and testimony by those who did what virtually no one else then or now could claim to have done KNOWN PERSONALLY AND OBSERVED AT FIRST HAND AND LISTENED TO, SINCE THAT'S ONE OF YOUR MAJOR BONES OF CONTENTION, CHARLES DARWIN, for another "the founding fathers" . . . among the other things that have happened is that my life long, childish belief in the integrity of many scientists, academics and intellectuals would not rather obviously lie about things they thought was important was just that, a childish belief which I held well into late middle-age.  

While there are scientists, academics, etc. who are very honest and, as a result, tend to be more modest in their claims, they are not typical of modern would-be intellectual life, especially among people hired in the professional world of alleged thinking. Especially those who are deputed to be "public intellectuals" now that the generation of those who were actual intellectuals seems to be largely past. I've had some of the most obviously dishonest arguments made to me by such as those and, more typically, they present nothing like argument at all but would be bullying and appeals to the prejudices of their fellow ideologues.

I used to get trolled regularly by "Skeptics" who complained bitterly when I was skeptical of the leaders in organized "skepticism," especially those around the rinky-dink circle of CSISOP and "Humanism" (funded by the trust-fund last Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, by the way), Paul Kurtz, the total fraud and blatant liar James Randi, Martin Gardner (who is one of the few who wasn't a proclaimed atheist), Carl Sagan, . . . whose torch is now carried by the likes of Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins and other professional atheists.  

I always found it amusing and telling how many of them, such as Ray Hyman were professionally involved in some of the most blatant of pseudo-science such as psychology and sociology as they misrepresented experimental research far, far more rigorously and honestly and carefully conducted than what their academic ideology accepted as science.  I have never, once, found a self proclaimed champion of science from that crowd who was prepared to be honest about the basic dishonesty of much of what is conventionally accepted as science when, like Pinker's and Dawkin's professoinal production, it is nothing of the sort. y

The lack of scientific integrity of that crowd was best exposed in the one flop of an experiment done by the Committee For The Investigation Of Claims Of The Paranormal, the infamous sTARBABY debacle, demonstrating how the champions of science were either entirely prepared to publish fraudulent science which it had been pointed out to them was botched.  Or, as in the case of the "Fellows" and allegedly governing group of CSICOP MANY OF WHICH HAD THE PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE TO UNDERSTAND HOW THEIR COLLEAGUES WERE MISREPRESENTING WHAT WAS DONE, including such alleged luminaries as Carl Sagan and two of those who conducted the "research" who certainly knew they had published lies.  It was so bad that one of those who warned from the start, a pretty extreme member of that club, Dennis Rawlins, blew the whistle on them after trying to get the likes of Sagan and Martin Gardner (who certainly had the mathematical chops to understand the fraud) and others he took to be honest proved they were in on the con-job. Rawlins is one of the few of that type who I can reluctantly say has proven he has a significant measure of scientific integrity, reluctantly because he's a pretty nasty materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism, himself who will never honestly consider scientific research that challenges his rigidly held ideology.  His subsequent ejection from the CSI circle led to at least a couple of others in it to leave, one of them, Richard Kammann wrote one of the best analyses of it.  

I now think that such junk pervades much of modern academic writing, even that which appears in so-called peer-reviewed academic and even scientific journals.i Certainly it pervades the "public understanding" not only of science but, also much of history and other important, supposedly fact-based facets of human culture.  I think a lot of those are full to the top of it, especially in those denominated sciences that don't really practice scientific methods and things such as American's alleged knowledge of their history, politics and the law.

And yet they wonder why, in so many cases, the public doesn't believe what they say.  Tragically, that earned skepticism among a dangerous percentage of the public is true in some of the most obviously correct and important science such as that done around human-created climate change, around rigorous immunology and epidemiology, around environmental science.  A lot of that good-will based belief was sacrificed on some of the most contentious science of lesser importance and of little to no importance of all (just what is most of the alleged science of the very real phenomenon of evolution any good for other than its use by ideological atheism? the same question could be asked about cosmology) and as well as "science" made to order and done for profit, such as "nutrition science" sponsored by corporations for the purpose of promoting their products, science such as touted the health benefits of alcohol, chocolate, etc.   Nutrition science at many universities and labs is little more than prostituting and pimping sci-credentials for money.

I don't find that to be nearly as true in the theology I read, perhaps that's because a lot of theologians believe something that it's impossible for an atheist to believe and for science to demonstrate, that it's a sin to tell a lie, bear false witness, to misrepresent the truth. Any theologian worth reading certainly has that as a starting point.  

I am far more impressed with how the handling of primary, secondary, etc. documentation is handled in the theology I read than I am in how many scientists handle it in their alleged scientific professional writing. I found a lot of them on their own and their colleagues blogs had a lot in common with the crudest and most dishonest of creationists and fundamentalists and denominationally apologetic of fanatics.  In fact, most of them are fanatics of materialist-atheist-scientism who would never let disconfirming evidence, exposure of logical incoherence or honesty get in the way of their promotion of their simple childish faith in their own chosen ideology.  They're about as interested in the integrity of science as Marjorie Taylor Greene is in what Jesus actually said in the Bible.
 

End The Green Party A Republican-fascist Spoiler Fraud

THE GREEN PARTY is as ridiculous as ever, touting another election season of epic non-achievement.  I haven't reproduced the entire post from their website. But you don't have to see the whole thing to get a sense of their absurdity.

While I wouldn't belittle any person who serves the public in a public office, that is unless their performance deserves it, for a party that pretends to be a national party this is just one more year of entirely unimpressive electoral victories, such as those are.

Green Party Election Report – November 2022 Elections

At least fourteen Greens have been elected in November 2022 elections:
– mayor (1)
– city council (1)
– school board (3), with a fourth in a tie for the last seat, unclear how that will be resolved
– water board (4), with two additional write-in candidates possible winners awaiting vote count
– community services district (1)
– fire protection district (1)
– advisory neighborhood commission (3)

Green incumbents
– Of nine Green incumbents running, seven re-elected, one in a tie for a last seat, one not re-elected

If this means that half of the seven are being returned to office and a grand total of nine Green incumbents were running for reelection, that only underlines the absurdity of the Green Party going on forty years of its existence, enjoying enormous publicity out of all proportion to their record of success.  And it's obvious that is what it means because they're talking about ALL of the elections won by greens in that number.  I wonder how long it will be before we find out if that fourteen "at least" isn't actually that number or one close to it which is actually, "at most."

Winning percentage
– At least 14/28 candidates for local county, city, school and special districts were elected, with results for two write-in candidates still to be determined and one tie (not clear how determined)

So a grand total of 28 candidates?  Across the friggin' country?  More Democrats got elected to offices comparable to those in my town and the towns contiguous to it and this is considered a Republican area of the state.

State-by-state electeds in November 8 elections
– CA (9)
– DC (3)
– ME (1)
– SC (1)

Maine is considered to be a Green stronghold and this.  

And the highest office of those won?

Bruce Delgado, Mayor, Marina, Monterrey County, California (elected incumbent, 2008-to present)
One candidate for one seat.   2636 votes, 100%.  ELECTED

Marina is a city in Monterey County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 22,359, not an inconsiderable metropolis but it ain't 312 million people, either.

Can an election in which only one person runs and wins be counted as an electoral victory?  I have no idea why no one else ran for the seat except it would seem the voters in Marina have been returning Bruce Delgado to the mayor's position for a long time now. I'd like to know how many of those who have voted for him have been persuaded to join the mighty Green Party.  If they like the job he's doing, that's good, I guess, though Chuck Grassley won reelection again and he's garbage as well as totally ga-ga.   But you can hardly count the winner of a non-contest as someone who was seriously challenged.  It leaves me wondering - though not hard enough to look for the information - how many of the others of the mighty 14 won uncontested elections.  As you go down the ballot, as most of these positions would be listed, it's not uncommon to find single-candidate "races."  Some of them I would imagine would be the kind of positions that they have a hard time filling.  Even when elected those would more honestly be called "volunteers." I mean, three of them are on "advisory neighborhood commissions".  Or maybe all three of them are on the same one. I'm not familiar with the office so I don't know what to think of it. If their role is merely advisory, that's hardly something that counts as political power.  I don't know what water boards are like in other places but the ones I'm familiar with tend to be kind of a rubber stamp for what the professional managers want.

The Green Party's only real national and almost all of its state-wide election presence has been in spoiling elections for Democrats, putting Republican-fascists in office.  Like the old time lefty parties, a friggin' fraud, every one of them, what they ended up doing was fighting against the one party that had actually done something positive when it could overcome the corporate, millionaire-billionaire serving Republican-fascists.  The Green Party is as much of a fraud as their 2016 presidential candidate, the Putin tool and Trump helper Jill Stein.  You should get a load of their Putin friendly policy on Putin's invasion of Ukraine.  They might achieve a worse position than the reflex, knee-jerk anti-American paranoia of Noam Chomsky these days. 

The dishonest portrayal of developments in Ukraine. Russian aggression is rightfully covered and denounced. However, sole attribution of blame to Russia whitewashes an extended history of inimical US interference in Ukraine, contributing to current hostilities. Additionally, depiction of the Zelensky Government as a democratic force representative of the Ukrainian people and selective coverage of Ukrainian military successes deceitfully engender popular support for the failing strategy of continued military aid. The West proudly lauds its freedom of speech and press. We encourage Western media to make use of this right in accurately and critically covering events in Ukraine.

GPUS calls for cessation of unconditional military aid to Ukraine, lifting of counter-productive sanctions regimes, and initiation of genuine negotiations toward a ceasefire and sustainable peace framework! We implore the Biden Administration to use its position of influence to facilitate peace by encouraging peace talks and engaging with Russia to de-escalate tensions – not to fuel war by further arming Ukraine and prolonging a terrible conflict.

The damned Green Party USA, it is a bunch of congenitally dishonest college-credentialed idiots who couldn't tell their asshole from their platform and who prefer defeat for the proclaimed issues (including peace) to strike these kinds of asinine poses so suit their mutual and competitive self-admiration.

But perhaps at least their tally of election night success is something a little like progress.  I remember when the Green running for Governor of Maine, coming in 4th, even after an unaffiliated independent was celebrated as a victory on their national website.  

If Greens really wanted to do something worthwhile in assistance to progress on the issues they claim to favor, they should dissolve the nearly forty year old fraud and work for candidates who can win elections.  Joe Biden in his two years as president has done more for the progressive agenda than all of the lefty play-parties in the history of such "third parties." Jimmy Carter did.  I'm skeptical of such parties in a parliamentary system, in ours they cannot serve any kind of good.  Though their history proves they can serve the worst and they never seem to learn, I'll bet the assholes run a presidential candidate in 2024.  The Democratically Controlled House and Senate this last session, even under the tyranny of Manchin-Sinema (who was a Green), has done more in that regard than all of them, too.  And never forget the guy who almost killed Paul Pelosi was one as well.  Why would it surprise anyone he'd go from a Green to a Trumpzi? That's what their existence has served more than anything.  I don't trust any Green or anyone who was active in that party.  Not until they prove they deserve it and so few have.

The lefty magazines and websites and shows and podcasts that pretend the Greens are what they claim to be might just be the biggest problem with the whole thing.  I haven't gone to see what sources such as The Nation, In These Times, "Democracy Now!" and the like may or may not have had to say about the Green Party recently but they had a very likely role in pushing the greenwash line to help put Trump in office as they did when George W. Bush was installed by a family-Republican-fascist putsch including the majority of Republicans on the Supreme Court.  

If the lefty media ever learns anything, I haven't seen much of that.  As a radical who does what they don't seem to much care about, want things like an environmentally sustainable life, economic justice, absolute equality and real democracy, I've got a lot less use for it than I used to.  Sometimes I wonder if their leftiness is like the alleged New York Times' "liberal" orientation.  But, then, I really have become entirely skeptical of the secular left, they actually serve one master while pretending to serve the better one, to relate this to my other piece posted today.

Catching Up With The Hate Mail: Take Two On This Issue

I HAVE CRITICIZED the foolish movement in some liberal Christian churches to declare "Darwin Sunday" on a Sunday close to the birthday of Charles Darwin, February 12th.  Given that Abraham Lincoln was born on the exact same day as Charles Darwin, that they were two of the major figures of the time who had drastically divergent view points on life and reality, if those liberal Christians wanted a figure to hitch their perhaps sluggish wagons to who was closer to the Gospel of Jesus they would have been far better to hitch it to Lincoln. And if they did that, I'd encourage them to reconsider that, too. I think the liberal denominations could do with a lot less of an attachment to academia and its frequently twisted values and articles of faith.

You can certainly be a faithful Christian while accepting the evolution of species, including human beings, that evolution is what the physical evidence supports.  That is something which many Christians and many churches have long accepted and, unless you go for the fairly modern heresy of Fundamentalism, evolution is not at serious odds with the Gospel of Jesus, perhaps give or take things like a reference to Adam. In my re-reading of the Gospels, I've come to believe that Jesus often used the Scriptures that were Scripture to him, the "Old Testament" not necessarily because he believed in their literal truth in all places but as a means of talking to his audience in terms, images and ideas that they knew and already took seriously. I don't think he was above what has latterly become known as "proof texting" which seems to me is what he did when he used Exodus referring to God as "The God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob," to refute the Sadducees' denial of life after death. But back to the theme of the post.

You cannot be a faithful Christian and believe in natural selection, certainly not as applying to the human species, because natural selection is an ideology which is directly contradictory of the Gospel of Jesus and the teachings of Paul, James, etc. You can't serve two masters, you'll serve one and hate the other and in so many cases the one such true believers in natural selection (by that name or not) come to hate is the egalitarian Gospel of Jesus with its preferential option for the poor, the least among us.  That's as true of the fundamentalists and other advocates of, for example, America's style of fascism, white supremacy, who deny the reality of evolution and despise Darwin but who believe in the malignant aspects of his theory as applied to the human species as it is for the most extreme true-believer in Darwinism who hates Christianity with all their heart.

Darwinism began in the political-economic depravity of the nominal Anglican Parson Thomas Malthus and it began its evil work in such things as the New Poor Law more than a decade before Darwin built on it to come up with his theory of natural selection. Malthus wasn't the start of that, either, it started in the English class system and such things as the Elizabethan Poor Law which the yoked and beleaguered English People still haven't shaken off.  Though the Church of England has, in many cases, made far more progress, led as it is through the consideration of the New Testament as seriously worthy of consideration and respect.

You cannot believe that you are to do to others what you would have them do to you while believing in the Spencerian theory of survival of the fittest, as pointed out here the other day, it is the phrase which Darwin, himself, said was exactly what he meant when  he said "natural selection".  The distinction of "social Darwinism" blamed on Herbert Spencer (despite the fact that Darwin lauded him as "our great philosopher" in On The Origin of Species) that is allegedly not Darwinism is a later ass cover made for denying the truly depraved consequences of believing in natural selection as its depravity became apparent and gained an opposition.

You cannot believe you are obligated to give sufficient material support and help to the least among us while believing, as Darwin explicitly did, that giving them support and help would degenerate the human species.  No one should bet against the massive evidence that given their choice, most people will not choose to do good that they believe will be to their disadvantage, even if they don't believe in Darwin's warning of the dysgenic effects of charity.  Selfishness has been enabled by the theory of natural selection which elevates it to a progressive force in nature (though I doubt any such force as natural selection, actually exists.   Darwin explicitly advocated the benefits to the survivors of neglecting and harrying the poor and destitute to early graves so they would not have children, that is when he was not advocating the extermination of racial groups he deemed inferior.

You cannot believe that the meek will inherit the Earth and believe that the strongest in a struggle for life who win by destroying the weaker in violence, something which was stated about natural selection from the start, shows us how human beings are supposed to act.  

I hold that elevation of killing, actively murdering or through neglect, was the  second most attractive feature of Darwinism for those who adopted it, especially those in the ruling class and those who despised religion.  The elevation of the powerful, the rich and those of inherited wealth as the crown of creation was the first such attraction.  Darwinism believes the strong, the aggressive and the violent rightly inherit the Earth, the term "struggle for life" is ubiquitous in Darwin.  The latter day attempt to introduce "mutual aid" into Darwinism was logically incoherent and an obvious job to "Christianize" it, though the first who did that probably despised Christianity as much as Huxley, Haeckel, Glaton and most of those who were less apt to suppress that idea than Darwin was. It's denial of the literal reading of Genesis and, so, it's utility to promoting atheism among people of overly naive faith was, possibly, the only greater attraction of it for Darwinism's largely little informed lay faithful.   I have noted that, not by that name, Darwinism, natural selection, in its promotion of inequality and racism and, lest it be forgotten, gender inequality, is rampant among American Fundamentalists and the like who support Trumpism, even as they deny the possibility of evolution of species.

Literally everything about natural selection advocates the opposite of the morality of Jesus and, by the way, The Law of Moses and the entire Prophetic tradition.  "Darwin Sunday" is as much as fundamentalism and the prosperity gospel a symptom of Christianity gone seriously wrong.  Or, more likely, the largely college-credentialed folk in charge at such churches buying the ubiquitous post-WWII con job that denied that natural selection was exactly what Darwin and his earliest to his latest disciples said it was.  The BBC PBS plaster saint Darwin is a lie which anyone who does what almost none but his critics does, read Darwin, and those he cites as reliable, Haeckel, Galton, Thomas Huxley and the latter day Darwin orthodoxy,  Karl Pearson.  Read him and his citations and admit that what they claim about reality is, in fact, exactly what I've said it was and at odds with the popular presentation of Darwin  distancing him from the eugenics he explicitly supported and the later development of that into Nazism. Both and their like in some form is a logical conclusion of the theory of natural selection, as I've pointed out a number of times, that was not lost on the scientist neo-Nazi who wrote the American Mein Kampf, the Turner Diaries who was an ardent Darwinst.

I am in the seemingly odd position of being an enemy of the ideology of natural selection who advocates that people read Darwin seriously but only if they take him at his word that he means what he says as a scientist which cuts through the several often cited self-protective smokescreens that Darwin set up while supporting the depraved claims of Haeckel and Galton and Gregg as the highest of scientific reliability, including the earliest documents in eugenics.  The claim of Haeckel that Darwinism was also a contradiction of democracy, supporting an aristocratic rule in the Prussian style (never forgetting he also advocated genocide) in a book that Darwin said he agreed with completely, as I also pointed out yesterday.  

And that is what even a secularist should realize is true that natural selection is as anti-democratic as it is anti-Christian and for the same reasons.  It is an elitist system, unavoidably so, in which those who are best off are to be considered as biologically and intellectually superior to those who happen to be lower in the social scale.  Darwin, his followers and his sons who carried the torch for him opposed things such as universal vaccination because they suspected it would keep too many of the underclass alive so they could have children.*  They were all in on what in the Trump era would be called "herd immunity" which means people who survive pandemic diseases are believed to have a natural immunity which those who die obviously don't have.  Only with Covid, as with the common cold, the virus seems to be able to change rapidly and thwart any kind of lifetime immunity. Primitive and inadequate conceptions of "primitive organisms" and such things as immunology among those with the power to put their ignorance into governmental practice isn't something only mobster As Seen On TV politicians and their gangster thugs practice, scientists are as capable of that as anyone.

It is obvious that is of political and legal importance, it was the basis of huge swaths of American and other legal policy, eugenics, forced sterilization, ranking children for the purpose of discriminating in favor of the favored and the disfavoring of the un-favored, the denial of opportunities for education, the exclusion of many racial and national groups from immigration into the United States, the discrimination against, especially, Black People, Native Americans, Eastern European Jews, Latin Americans, Asians, Africans, etc.  While those evils certainly have other motives, Darwinism, natural selection, provides them with a pseudo-scientific basis.  That is not surprising because Darwin based his theory on an economic theory of utter depravity, that of Thomas Malthus.  

Those who claim to support democracy as they claim natural selection is the controlling force for evolution - and that inevitably will be read as progress based on inherited biological superiority and inferiority, Darwin and virtually every one of his pre-WWII supporters did so - are as foolish as those liberal Christians who uncritically accept the PBS-BBC post-WWII plaster saint Darwin and the ideology of natural selection.  I would suggest that as well as doing what they've never really done, read Darwin (especially The Descent of Man and the last, the 5 and 6th editions Darwin issued of On The Origin of Species, reading, as well, those he cited as supporting him) and also read the critics of natural selection.  The moral atrocity it was was early realized to be by Frances Cobbe in her admirable essay on the subject is also worth reading.  Her observation are some of those from the time that certainly were supported by the subsequent history of the idea in practice.  I think that the only place that natural selection ever has existed was in the conscious attempts to apply it to the human population, there has never been anything natural about it.

*  As also mentioned yesterday, it is one of the great ironies of the post-WWII Darwin mythology that so many of those, inside of science and in the popularization of its understanding were held by him, whether by the economic class, the nationality, racial grouping, exactly of the generations that Darwin hoped would not be born because he explicitly held they would be inevitably inferior through immutable, irredeemable biological inheritance.

I always think of that when someone who is of color, or through their surname (especially the Irish, or, if you extend it two generations, Eastern European Jews) or whose parents, grandparents, great-grandparents were of the white underclass of Darwin's time presents themselves as the biggest, fattest champions of St. Charles Darwin who ever were. They are absolutely clueless as to what Darwin actually claimed on the basis of his theory, what those he cited with his authority of a famous scientist said.

They should read The Descent of Man, the works of Haeckel and Galton and Gregg he endorsed as reliable science in that book and compare those designated as inrredeemably infrior by them to their family tree.  There's a good chance most of the people who are true believers in natural selection, today, would have been cut off from the present if Darwin and his followers had had their way in the past. As cut off as those unborn to those who were involuntarily sterilized on the basis of natural selection through eugenics, as cut off as those selected by the Nazis murdered on the basis of their applied science. They're just lucky they didn't get around to sterlizing their great-great or great-grandparents as Dr. Perkins in Vermont did to so many Abenaki People in his eugenic campaign in 1930s Vermont, something the Nazis studied as they were getting ready to set up their own solution to the imaginary dangers asserted by Pearson and Moul. Or that they didn't die in things like the British death camps, the work houses that Darwin bemoaned as a dangerous excess of charity as he did medical care and innoculations for the underclass.  I know probably everyone in my family tree on both sides were probably in the cross-hairs of Darwin and his disciples.  Probably in most of yours at least enough were so you'd have been cut off from the present.

It is as great an irony as those who claim to believe in egalitarian democracy who are also great big Darwin fanboys and gals.  There are real alternatives that can't both be true and human equality and natural selection are two of those.  Life proves the truth of equality and the benefit of making that assumption in law and society through the consequences of inequality.  Natural selection cannot be demonstrated to anything like the same extent as the horrors of Darwin's Neo-Malthusian vision.  As a claim of the origin of species, natural selection can't be demonstrated at all it has never been observed to produce a new species, it can't be observed at all.  The denied belief that it is asserted to be a progressive force that produces superior life forms through the deaths of those whose deaths, through the question begging assertion, that their deaths proved their inferiority. The advocacy of human beings "correcting" the charitable aspects of civilization by making sure they died was present in Darwinism almost as soon as On The Origin of Species was published.  It was that aspect of Darwinism which Nazism was based in has coexisted with the claim that that is exactly what it is from the absolute beginning of the theory.  Darwin, himself, did that two step in the Descent of Man, in On The Origin of Species, though in many of his letters his true beliefs expressed to other members of his inner circle and class are more direct in their advocacy of European imperialism and the destruction of other races around the world so they could be replaced, another aspect of Nazi though that was anticipated in Darwin's correspondence.  

Well, Yeah. What About Anal Sex? - Vintage Hate Mail

THE EXPECTATION THAT someone who takes the teachings of Jesus seriously and who has admitted that Paul is one of the major sources of the transmission of that will have to follow the expected line on issues of personal morality is something I have no problem with explaining is not the case with me.  In fact, it's not the case with much of anyone who calls themselves a "Christian" from the most far right to the virtually Unitarian.   I am challenged on the fact that I am a gay man while I advocate Christianity.

Today's Republican-fascist LGBTQ+ basher "christians" have no problem with the florid violation of one of the few things Jesus ever said about sexual morality when he said divorced people who marry again (presumably during the life of the partner they divorced) are guilty of adultery.  That is something which most Protestant denominations have allowed from way back though it couldn't be clearer what Jesus meant by that, it is something that the most right-wing of Catholic Bishops and priests have no problem with when it's someone like the adulterous, thrice married, twice divorced Newt Gingrich and his adulteress present day wife.  The then twice-married Gingrich's affair with her while she was a chorister at the National Cathedral, his subsequent divorce and marriage to her was overlooked by whatever Bishop had jurisdiction over his "conversion" to right-wing Catholicism and her being allowed to remain a Catholic in good standing.  That is hardly the only case among right-wing Republican-fascist Catholics in which the most obvious and plain-worded teaching on divorce and remarriage by Jesus is shoved aside in favor or the rich and famous and fascist.  

I don't know if he has cheated on his third wife as he did the first two but if I were married to him I wouldn't trust him - but, then, I wouldn't have married him to start with.  

The same right-wing Bishops and priests and billionaire fascist-Catholics have no problem with a double standard when it comes to those rich enough to buy an annulment or who have the shamelessness to make the claims necessary to get one are the ones who want to deny communion to even the most sincerely dedicated, faithful Catholics who have remarried after divorces, even in cases when a first  spouse was violently abusive or abandoned their first spouse for another spouse.  

Before I read Luke Timothy Johnson's book The Real Jesus, his criticism of the "historical Jesus" movement, I read article Homosexuality & The Church Scripture & Experience.  He began by making the same point above that I have since the beginning of the arguments about marriage equality, that the majority of sexual immorality is committed in the majority orientation of heterosexuality and the Churches, by and large, have little to nothing to say about that in the 21st century.

Is the present crisis in Christian denominations over homosexuality really about sex? I don’t think so. If it were, there would be no particular reason why homosexuals should be singled out for attention; there is more than enough sexual disorder among heterosexuals to fuel moral outrage. The church could devote its energies to resisting the widespread commodification of sex in our culture, the manipulation of sexual attraction in order to sell products. It could fight the exploitation of women and children caught in a vast web of international prostitution and pornography. It could correct the perceptions that enabled pedophilia to be practiced and protected among clergy. It could name the many ways that straight males enable such distorted and diseased forms of sexuality.

Instead, the relatively small set of same-sex unions gets singled out for moral condemnation, while the vast pandemic of sexual disorder goes ignored. In my view, this scapegoating of homosexuality has less to do with sex than with perceived threats to the authority of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church. For those opposed to the ordination of women priests and bishops, or of married people, deviation from the uniform and steady practice of the church (glossing over the fact that it has rarely been steady or uniform) means starting down the slippery slope toward rejecting church authority altogether. And accepting covenanted love between persons of the same sex represents the same downward spiral with regard to Scripture, since the Bible nowhere speaks positively or even neutrally about same-sex love (glossing over the relationship of Jonathan and David, see 1 Samuel 18–2 Samuel 1). For those who think this way, the world is becoming dangerously depraved; a line must be drawn in the sand somewhere, and homosexuality seems clearly to be the place.

Of course, Christianity as actually practiced has never lived in precise accord with the Scriptures. War stands in tension with Jesus’ command of nonviolence, while divorce, even under another name (annulment), defies Jesus’ clear prohibition. And which Christians have ever observed the exhortation in Leviticus to stone psychics and put adulterers to death? But make this point to those opposed to same-sex unions, and you’re liable to find it turned back against you. See how far down the slippery slope we have already come? many will ask. This has to stop somewhere! For them, the authority of Scripture and tradition resides in a set of commands, and loyalty is a matter of obedience. If the church has always taught that same-sex relations are wrong, and the Bible consistently forbids it, then the question is closed.

Johnson points out that his Lesbian daughter's committed relationship had a large influence on his conclusions.  He expresses no patience for those who he says claims the Scriptures say what they don't say or don't say what they say but he invokes the witness of our personal experience as a valid source of moral discernment outside of what Scripture might say.  He points out the difference between modern thinking on slavery with slavery as it was permitted in Scripture.  I would point out that the original statements on that in the Old Testament seem to mean a far different kind of slavery than was practiced by Europeans and Americans who certainly didn't follow the laws of Moses in that regard and certainly violated the instructions of Paul in the letter to Philemon. 

Much as I value and respect the Scriptures, they are written from the point of view of those who wrote them in the times they lived.  As Johnson points out, whenever they speak about same-sex sexual relations, it is not in the context of faithful love and mutual respect and treating each other as equals and being careful to do no harm, it is in a context of the worst things that sex can be used for such as in the rape of children, adults, the defeated in battle, those conquered, the prostitution of slaves, especially enslaved children, etc.  If that's all I knew about gay sex I'd be against it too.   If that's what same sex marriage was I'd have thought it wasn't anything anyone should bother to try to have recognized by the state.

But every single thing that can be said about the sexual abuse that the authors of the Bible seem to have as their only context for thinking about same-sex sex can be said about other-sex sex.  Which, by the way, the Bible often speaks in both ways about.  The story of the wronged Tamar "playing the whore" (JPS) to trick her asshole of a father-in-law, Judah, into fathering twins by her, thus insuring that she wouldn't lose her place in the family she was united to by marriage to his "wicked" and dead first and second sons. He purposely violated the moral code of the time by keeping his third son from marrying her.  And he was hardly the only total asshole among the Patriarchs who set the great monotheistic tradition going.  Even father Abraham seems to have more or less set up his wife for adultery in the two accounts of when he went to Egypt and pretended she was his sister because he figured the Egyptians would kill him to get her.  Whatever else you can say about the early Hebrew notions of virtue and marriage, some of those old stories show they were real sleeveens.  I will say that when Tamar proved that the guy who was the father of the twins she was expecting was none other than Judah, he admitted that he was far more in the wrong than she is.*  I have yet to hear any of the right-wing accuser adulterers (the list is too long to list), johns (probably that one too), rapers of children (Matt Gaetz, any number of trad-Catholics), fornicators (I'd bet that list would include almost all of them) admit that about themselves as they play The Accuser (the meaning of Satan) for their own political gain.

As a gay man who has always rejected anal sex due to the dangers I knew of when I was young (hepatitis, syphilis, etc.) those which became horrifically manifested in the 1980s (HIV-AIDS, incurable TB, etc.) and things like that much more recent misrepresented Montreal study touted as proving the benefits of heterosexual promiscuity but which, also, indicated the possibility that receptive anal sex in males might lead to a large increase in the chance of prostate cancer, I have always advocated against practicing anal sex.  I wrote a lot about that to both the confusion and anger of people who apparently think of sex outside of the consideration of the immoral uses of it. I remember the first time I addressed the dangers of anal sex at Echidne's blog, someone commented they'd never heard a gay man talk like that before. I could assure them I had been since the 1960s when I first heard an idiot bragging about getting hepatitis in Provincetown.

Considering how morally fraught all sexual practices involving two people can be or, I'd assert, all involving more than two (including possibly conceived children) anyone who doesn't see that sex is full to the top with moral problems as money is, is willfully blind. There are even adult consensual practices that are so fraught with dangers that I would assert they are probably always wrong, I think anal sex likely always is. I would assert that promiscuity always is.  I would say that prostitution and pornography, since they almost inevitably involve promiscuity, are probably always immoral.  

Call me old fashioned, but I think adultery is immoral.  Especially among those who commit adultery while denying same-sex marriage to those who are prepared to be faithful.

There are two-person sexual practices that don't have anywhere near the moral dangers of even vanilla, in-marriage, hetero-sexual intercourse, especially if the husband is a jerk or both of the couple don't intend to have a child they intend to care for but don't use contraception.  By the way, I think modern contraception has probably done more to lessen the moral peril of sex than anything since allowing that women had some rights.  I think the moral consequences of an act are the thing that enables us to know that it is immoral.  As to its morality, that has to be a product of both partners' informed, considered conscience.

I think the safest way to avoid immorality in sex is to have sex only within a loving, faithful relationship, always with consent and always avoiding anything that could harm, or result in an unintended pregnancy, or uses, exploits, degrades or hurts the feelings of either of the participants.  For that, for my fellow LGBTQ+ People, that would be either within such a relationship without legal and/or religious marriage or within a faithful, loving marriage.  So marriage equality should be respected in law and society and practiced by those who marry.  

* By the way, Tamar's second husband, the brother of her first husband, Er, who was wicked and God killed him on her, was the infamous Onan who "wasted his seed" instead of giving her a son who would have taken his place in the inheritance scheme of the time. It was Onan depriving her of what might have likely been her best chance at long-term survival and the possibility of having legitimate children, the injustice to Tamar which was his sin. That was among the wrongs of her asshole Father in Law who, nevertheless, becomes one of the major patriarchs, the father of the nations of Israel and Judea.  Anyone who reads the text to think Onan was masturbating solo so as to condemn probably the least morally fraught sex act there is has to be lying when they use that to say it's a sin.  More likely he was practicing the stupid and ineffective contraception method of "pulling out".   No where in Scripture is masturbation addressed that I know of, no more than abortion is. If someone wants to tell me where that is, I'll issue a correction.

In meditating on the fraught election of yesterday, I thought about the perils of "Christian Democratic" parties and those neo-pagan parties, such as the Republican-fascist one, that pretend to something like that.  I think there is a need for, not a party, but a Christian movement in support of egalitarian democracy which takes actual political stands - no tax-exempt status, best to avoid big donors.  

One of the things I think such a movement should hold to, other than equality and democracy is that the attempt to legislate what mature people choose to do with their own bodies on the basis of alleged morality is outside of the legitimate interest of the state.  As with abortion in which the state's legitimate interest to legislate ends at an individual's skin, so in matter of mutually respectful, consensual adult sexual behavior, the state has no right to legislate on what they choose to do.  I would make an exception when it becomes a matter of money changing hands in a commercial transaction, which I do hold that the state has a responsibility in regulating, the abuses which come with even legal prostitution and the fact that prostitution inevitably involves promiscuous use of one person's body by many (men, usually) and the public health consequences makes it a legitimate area for public regulation if not prohibition, the same with pornography. In the matter of prostitution, given the facts of what it is, I would put all of the legal responsibility and punishment on the buyer, not the frequently desperate seller.  The distribution of pornography is certainly something that can often if not always be legislated because it is commerce.  Certainly anything risking the sexual use of adults against their fully given consent or any minors is something that should be regulated out of existence.

Read Genesis, especially in the Jewish Publications Society Jewish Study Bible (by the way, you can get it from them, online) and in Everett Fox's translation with its own commentary.  If you like most Christians, haven't read the whole thing yet it will knock your socks off, especially considering what it's been claimed to have been for so many centuries.  The last thing it is is a set of moral certitudes, it is murky and even slimy in places, just like all human life and thought has been.  That isn't to say, especially taking into account the culture and world in which it was created, that there aren't glimmers of recognizable moral discernment in it, though I think that really starts getting going in Exodus and Deuteronomy - though they're far from being unproblematic too, especially as latterly interpreted into civil law.

On The Elections And What I Know So Far (Which Is Already Out Of Date)

AS I'M TYPING THIS (in the morning), they still don't know who is going to control the Senate but they seem to think the House is going to flip to Republican-fascist control, I would suspect that is an expression of Republican-fascist legislatures gerrymandering and not the will of the majority of Americans who voted in the election, which is an endemic problem under our failed Constitution.  The Georgia Election between a man of character and substance and a Republican-fascist useful idiot of malignant character is too close to call and will likely be subject to a run-off.  I don't know if there were other people in the race but if they had ranked choice voting that might be obvious within a shorter time than with the clunky contraption of a run-off vote.  Though either is preferable to a person a majority didn't want to win the election gaining office, another of the major defects of our defective Constitutional system.

In my state Janet Mills soundly defeated the bargain-basement Trump, Paul LePage and from what I understand the Democrat I run luke warm on, Jared Golden may be on top but the results will await the tabulation of ranked choice for peoples' second choice added to those whose first choice was Golden.  Though I don't like him much, I'd have voted for him if I lived in his district, I'm voting a straight Democratic ticket from now on, I've only not voted one twice and in one case I regretted it. Though I'll vote for Angus King if he runs again, he caucuses with Democrats and used to be one so I'll consider him one.  Chellie Pingree trounced the Republican.  

In New Hampshire it was nice to see Maggie Hassen won over the Trumpian Bolduc, my brother tells me that Trump whined at his low-energy celebration that if Bolduc had stuck to the lies he started running on instead of running for cover he'd have won.  I doubt that, New Hampshire is still more of a Republican State than a swing state and if anyone denominated Republican loses, it's because they lost it on their demerits.  

Elsewhere the news was mixed, I was glad to see that the Huckster of Oz was seen for the snake oil peddler he is (Oprah sure can pick 'em, can't she).  Mark Kelly may win in Arizona, even with the armed voter intimidation campaign.  Arizona like Florida has too many selfish retirees to have consistently decent politics.  That's my generation, now, you know, the one that was touted as the one that was going to save the world, which I am proud to say I knew was bullshit in the 1960s.  

As of now it looks like under President Biden the number of seats lost by Democrats is a small fraction of those lost under Clinton and Obama in their first mid-term, though that's going by what's being said in the media.  As I said, Democrats are always running an uphill battle against gerrymandering so I'd count that as a positive sign that more voters prefer Biden's policies to those of the Republican-fascists and the media that has been pulling for a big red wave that doesn't seem to have washed over America except in those places that seem to be permanently benighted.  The anti-democratic features embedded into our Constitution (exacerbated by the Supreme Court)  are the overriding fact of American politics along with the Supreme Court permission for the corporate media to lie on behalf of the rich and Republican-fascist.  That is always going to be a truth of American politics until the damned Constitution is amended to remove the anti-democratic features of it and to amend the First Amendment to say that there is no right to lie in politics or about public figures just as there was no right to lie about public figures before 1964.  The Second Amendment needs to be drastically amended too, but that's an issue for another post.

There are some real downers, Grassley in Iowa, Vance in Ohio.  I'm not holding any candle for those states anymore.  I will await more news before I go on with this. I have no more hope for the state that once provided a Tom Harkin than I am the one that provide a George McGovern.  As far as I'm concerned, Ohio is just a sleazy state, Louisiana or Mississippi just a bit upriver.

I hope Kevin McCarthy's life is hell from now on because it sure as hell should be.  If Joe Biden wants to do something, starting as soon as the new Congress starts, he should start issuing very popular executive orders and policies and campaign against the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court as they try to quash them, every chance he gets.  Pretending he can get along with Republicans might be something he does as a pose, but it was exactly trying to do that in fact that made both Clinton and Obama far weaker presidents than they needed to be.  I suspect he knows something about that which those two neophytes didn't from being in the Congress with them for so long.  

He should get as much aid to Ukraine as he possibly can before January, Kevin MaCarthy has already announced he'd try to cut it.  Biden should make speeches in states with large Ukrainian and other Eastern European populations, especially states which have put Republican-fascists in charge.  Democrats should take every chance they can to stick it to Republicans, every single chance they get.  They should tell the Republicans to go back to Russia.  

Catching Up With The Hate Mail - I

IN ONE OF THOSE multi-volume paperback would be historical treatments of Western philosophy published around the mid 1900s, the 20th century was called "The Age of Analysis" and the 19th century, "The Age of Ideology."  At least that's as I recall it. I no longer seem to have the several books of that series I once had. As all such alleged surveys of such a vast topic as Western philosophy is (including those produced as such stars as Bertrand Russell) it was more superficial than really useful. I came to reject the characterizations of the 19th and 20th centuries because analytic philosophy, which was dominant in English language philosophy departments of the time (under the influence of such stars as Russell and Moore) was an ideology all on its own and it was hardly the only one around at the time. I read enough of it, along with such allied cults as logical positivism, to believe it was primarily an ideology.  

The 20th century was as ideological as the 19th and that trend in disunity continues. I doubt there has ever been a decade, never mind a century that can be honestly captured in a single one of those labels.  I don't think diversity in philosophy is a bad thing.  It's preferable to a hegemonic unity of the kind that tends to dominate some academic departments where one ideology gets the upper hand at a particular university and can control hiring and other exercises in power.  I have noticed that the product of some university philosophy departments seem to reflect the narrowness and uniformity of that soft-handed but ruthless intellectual thuggery.  Often professional and para-professional jobs get handed to those who uphold the house ideology, networks of such "philosophers" seem to exist and interact with ideological interest projects. That is often to be seen among the professional atheists and what has become of  would be public intellectualism.   

I think that natural philosophy, or, as it's name has been unfortunately modernized, "science" is as liable to the same professional and personal exclusivity and gangster behavior as philosophy, especially in areas of science which are farthest from the practice of legitimate, rigorous verification in nature.  Theoretical physics and cosmology, for now and perhaps from now on, speculating on things that cannot be verified, have become enmeshed in that same power political scenario.  Biology is rife with it - especially the largely speculative field of evolutionary biology in which most of what would be needed to gain a firm ground is entirely lost in the largely destroyed physical record of life and the fact that much of what would have to be known was a product of actions and interactions that would leave, at most, the rarest and generally most unreadable fossil information. About the thoughts and detailed actions of creatures in the past, what was honestly had is found only in the explicit written documents produced by one species, human beings. All the rest is story telling of unknowable accuracy, indeed, the written record is believed to be literally true at one's own peril.  

The "genetic record," while it, at present, can give some good clues that may well indicate something about the relatedness of individuals and species and maybe some of the more general levels of classification but it is hardly infallible in that and it really can't be read to tell us much else, even many of the most salient and important details.  It is one of the ironies of late 20th century and current biology that that impossibility to discern the past for how organisms acted is filled in with the most perilous of claims about allegedly scientific descriptions of the behavior of living animals drawing some of the most absurdly tenuous conclusions about species as removed in evolutionary history from one another as ants and human beings and other currently living species.

I will remind you that when the idiot Toronto University psych prof. and angry-dork internet cult figure Jordan Peterson wanted to use alleged behavior of lobsters to tell us something about the "natural" roles of male and female human beings (as if we are all uniform and our personal choices mean nothing), really to support a pretty obvious male supremacist claim, I could point out that the same species hundreds of millions of years in the past that we are speculated to have in common with lobsters is the very same species we would have in common with preying mantis in which the females often kill, by decapitation, males that would try to mate with them (eating their heads as the dying headless male copulates with them) and, in fact, black widow spiders.  Psychology has produced some of the biggest idiots to have ever been granted the academic and popular and, most dangerous of all, legal status of "scientists" while never actually doing anything like science. If you want to see nut cases in academia, the psych department is a good place to start the search.  Better than many areas of the humanities.  I would assert that modernism has done nothing to improve on that record in any university department I know of, including such as you would think were relatively immune to that such as applied science and technology.

The late 20th century completion of the Darwinist program of reducing the would be science of evolution to the pseudo-scientific story-telling of psychology is a tragedy the political ramifications of which may be playing out in the resurgence of scientific racism, white supremacy and even the neo-Nazism that has again become actively dangerous.  I think the 1970s predictions of the old Sociobiology Study Group in that regard have come true.  Of course the old scientific racism on the basis of natural selection never did go away, it was always just beneath the surface in academic science as the record, especially in their semi-private professional correspondence and babbling shows, now that those are surfacing.  I have also repeatedly pointed out that overt-neo-Nazi style antisemitism was perfectly acceptable within academic "Evolutionary Psychology" until its exposure forced the "scientists" to newly find out how horrified they were to have elevated it with full academic honors for the scientific antisemite.*  

The logical consequence that natural selection supports aristocratic rule, fascism (by whatever name you want to give it) was articulated by Ernst Haeckel with the unreserved approval of Charles Darwin and the implied support of such Darwinists as Thomas Huxley who wrote an introduction to the English language translation of the book he said it in, "Freedom in Science and Teaching."   

Besides, Darwinism, the theory of natural selection—which Virchow aimed at in his denunciation, much more especially than at transformation, the theory of descent—which is often confounded with it—Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant[93] life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it.

Ernst Haeckel,  Freedom in Science And Teaching, p 93. 

Now, who does that remind you of? 

In the case of both Haeckel and Huxley, and more primly expressed, Charles Darwin, himself, that included claims of the salubrious effects of genocidal murder.  In going on two centuries of the rise and hegemonic domination of natural selection as the required ideology of evolutionary science, that feature of it will inevitably return and return again as long as that hegemony is in place. 

Note:  The number of posts I've done citing and quoting Darwin at length about the inferiority of many Peoples, from the extreme West of Europe (The Irish) to Eastern Europe and Eurasia, perhaps no where as cluelessly as in his statement on the Turkish Peoples, "darker races" in general (putting a lie about that in the mouth of an eminent scientist, many Peoples of the Pacific Islands, Natives of South America, etc.  the number of posts documenting that are too numerous to list.  Maybe I'll try to do the task of collecting all of the Darwinism pieces and put them on a dedicated blog with an index.   I wonder just who else with such an eminent place in the popular culture of science and in science itself, has ever made so many outrageous racist and bigoted claims, claiming that the extinction of so many millions of people would be salubrious for the human species as Charles Darwin.  I doubt there is one who was worse on that account except, perhaps, the far less elevated figure of Ernst Haeckel.  

There is lots of important and valid science that is done, more of it than ever.  But the permission given to consider rank speculation based on either scanty or totally tacit physical evidence to be called science, starting in a serious way in the 19th century especially around the theory of natural selection things have gotten seriously out of hand.  Darwinism's extension into the rank pseudo-science of psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethology etc. is extremely dangerous and entirely dishonest.  

I'm holding the those who claim the mantle of scientific method as a means of obtaining, within logical and honest limits, more reliable knowledge about what can be demonstrated or observed and measured about physical phenomena to their claims.  It is one of the great ironies that some of the most ideological of atheists within and around science and the idiot groupies and poseurs who proclaim their championing of science and their claim to speak for it are some of the worst offenders.  Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, pretty much anyone who has had anything to do with CSI(COP) and the Paul Kurtz's alphabet soup organizations of atheism-"Skepticism" falls in that category.  Some of them produced actual science at one point in their careers, some continued with that even as they made common cause with pseudo-scientists, many of them working in "behavioral science," to further their real interest, their ideological materialist-atheist-scientism.  I think they've done a lot more bad to science, helping to bring it into ideological discredit with many people and confusing many more, than they have done good.   [I sincerely hope that some younger people who might read this have, by now, asked "Carl who?"]

I would point out that a lot of them, like Sagan, have produced a "popular understanding of science" that is far more heavily wedded to "science fiction"** than to science.  That trend continues a quarter of a century after Sagan's death, it's probably worse now than it was then.  I think a lot of theoretical physics and cosmology today is more like sci-fi written in equations than it is science, it has to be, the various warring ideological camps within those can't all be right, at best most of them have to be wrong, creating universes and creation myths that have no counterpart in physical reality, fictitious universes, fictitious multi-verses.  And it's all called "science" and treated as such.  I think it would be far better if the term "natural philosophy" was reimposed on those fields which have left the actual methodology of science behind, though in the case of the "behavioral sciences" it would be far more honest to call their junk what it is "lore" of a particularly low-level sort, keeping in mind much of that lore, such as Dawkins' stuff is not based in observation of the kind that generated the sometimes useful and observable casual lore of yore. What any of it means to the animals that are observed is unknowable because even those who are the most intimate of those can't tell us a thing about their real motives.  That's as true of the "science" as it was the lore.  But, then, we can't even be sure of people reporting on that are accurate or even being honest about it and we know it is impossible to get a valid sample of even a relatively limited but large population, perhaps we will see evidence of that this week.  

* As I was typing that, it occurred to me that I can't recall anyone ever using the phrase "scientific antisemitism" as you will often hear "scientific racism".  That isn't because such scientific literature in support of hatred of Jews isn't there for anyone to find.  As I've pointed out one of the more obvious documents in English is the study asserting the intellectual inferiority of Russian and Polish Jews to Britain produced by one of the brightest of bright lights in late 19th and early 20th century science, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, a warning on the danger of the presence of such Jews for the British nation which was cited in the very scientific textbook used by Hitler and his fellow thugs as they were producing Mein Kampf while in prison. In the study Pearson and Moul note their scientific collaboration with and dependence on one of the authors of that book.  The Nazis produced enormous quantities of scientific antisemitism, as I've pointed out Hitler's second in command for a long period of his ascendancy and rule called Nazism "applied biology" for a reason.  As the career of Kevin MacDonald proves, science in the United States, in the form of evolutionary psychology,  with the full force of the witness to the Nazi genocide of the Jews on full display, nevertheless elevated the author of blatant antisemitism to a full university professorship, editorship of professional journals and the full measure of privileges and honors they bestow.   He was hardly alone in receiving that treatment. Richard Dawkins cited some particularly antisemetic tripe of one of MacDonald's allies in The God Delusion, to little objection among the sci guys of the 00's.  

** That such a phrase, "science fiction" ever was articulated is an indication of how screwy "science" as a popular concept is. And that conception of it is not limited to non-scientists.  If there is one thing that science should should be discernibly not be associated with, it is fiction. Yet most of the "science" that is popularly and even professionally believed and thought of is, in fact, fiction.  The enormous boneyard of discontinued science is vast, especially in such fields as evolutionary biology.  The sections of the "behavioral sciences" includes most of what has been and continues to be the professional holdings of those "sciences".  Yet no one ever considers that as being a problem with what "science" is allowed all the rights and privileges and prestige of science. The unthinking, uncritical acceptance granted to what is claimed to be science.  

And it's not even entirely untrue of what might, with more professional discipline and modesty, be actual science. As Rupert Sheldrake once noted, nutrition science isn't the most successful branch of biology.  Individual organisms considered merely on the physical level are extremely complex entities of related organs and molecules on an individual level, trying to generalize statements about organisms in a universal way is fraught with problems that are likely insoluble. Though some general things might be discovered you're going to have to be really careful about the scope of what you claim if you want to maintain credibility.  I'd bet most people in the United States are pretty skeptical about claims about nutrition after being deluged with that often contradictory and often overturned "science" for decades.  The continual bait-and-switch of scientific announcements about diet and nutrition from nutritional science - often science paid for by industries seeing to use science to their own financial profit - doesn't go entirely unnoticed.  It's about eating, something people do every day.  It's not like evolution for which most people have little to no use for or stake in and in which bullshit flourishes to little notice.