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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Whalley - The Maroon Cortina

 The Maroon Cortina

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

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

Directed by Philip Martin BBC Birmingham

What do you mean by a naive concept of genetics?

I'M ESPECIALLY PRESSED for time so here goes. 

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

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

Dr. Denis Nobel on Physiology And Evolution. 

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

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

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

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

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Zack Akers - Limetown

Limetown 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which leads to my most important refutation of your contentions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting back to the shoddy internal criticism of science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Night Radio Drama - David Zane Mairowitz. - James's Story

 James's Story

 

James’s Story is a new play written and directed by the internationally acclaimed author, David Zane Mairowitz.

In James’s Story, an Englishman remembers a holiday to Dingle in 1968, while his memories are revised and re-animated by his friend, the Story Poacher.

Two episodes haunt James’s memory: A chance meeting with an old man; and a tense encounter in a local pub, coloured by legacies of the War of Independence. Only the Story Poacher can connect both events.

The play stars Stephen Rea as the Story Poacher.

James of the title is James Rooke himself, who reads his own story.

The drama was partially recorded on location in Dingle and features a host of local actors and musicians including Páidí Mharthain Mac Gearailt, Noel Ó Maoileoin, Pádraig Ó’Sé (Box Accordion) and dancer Tomás Ó’Sé.

The programme was funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the Television Licence Fee

James’s Story – Production Credits

Writer/Director David Zane Mairowitz

Stephen Rea (The Story Poacher)

James Rooke (as Himself)

Tom Macqueen (James as a Young Man)

Páidí Mharthain Mac Gearailt (The Old Farmer)

Richard Smallwood (The Lighthouse Keeper)

Róisín Dalby, (The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter)

Cristín de Mordha (The Barmaid)

Antaine Ó Séaghdha (The Young Boy)

Tomás Ó’Sé (Dancer)

Pádraig Ó’ Sé (Accordion)

Singers: Páidí Mharthain Mac Gearailt, Noel Ó Maoileoin, Maitias MacCárthaigh, Iarfhlaith Ó’Murchú, Boscó Ó’Conchúir, Pádraig Ó’Sé, and Marcus Mac Domhnaill

Contributors to the Documentary Sequences:

Jannette Uí Shúilleabhain, daughter of Eileen O’Connor,

Boscó Ó’Conchúir,

Sinead Joy, author of The IRA in Kerry 1916-192

Pádraig Ó Héalaí , former Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish at NUI, Galway

And from the archives, the voice of Rebel Leader Frank Thornton.

Translation was by Tristan Rosenstock and Kevin Reynolds

Sound supervision and Sound Design were by Damian Chennells.

Broadcast Co-ordinator: Jarlath Holland.

Producer: Kevin Brew

Series Producer, Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds.

Special thanks to, Áine Delaney, and Séamus Ó’Súilleabháin for participating in recordings for the programme.

This is one of the best original radio plays I've posted here, I thought it could do with another posting. 

"brain-only" dogma in regard to even the simplest level of the experience of human consciousness is a grotesque absurdity - Couldn't Resist The Temptation To Answer Again

YOUR OBJECTION TO MY apparently unanswerable questions (you don't answer them) as to how, according to the materialist-atheist-scientistic "brain only" dogma,

a. brains would even begin to "know" that they needed to build a new structure to be a specific idea not already in such brains since there would be nothing in the brain before such a structure was there to give it such an idea.  The idea that it needed to make the structure in the first place IS AN IDEA,

b. how brains would know what elaborate structure they needed to build to be that idea which by MAS dogma COULD NOT  already in there to inform it,

c. how brains would know how to build that novel structure,

d. how they would know that whatever resulted from it making something was the right structure to place that idea in such a "brain-only" brain- if it was not the right structure then the right idea could not be inside the head even then, and,

e. HOW ALL OF THAT COULD HAPPEN IN THE TIME TO ACCOUNT FOR OUR EXPERIENCE OF HAVING NEW IDEAS, and to account for the obvious general correctness of most of the most exigent of new ideas we need to avoid catastrophic injury or accidents before we've been awake for even two hours any day.  Many of the imaginary leisurely cogitations of scientists and philosophers, in real life which is conducted in real time, could be said to be life-threatening if they were too late or wrong.  We have scores or hundreds of novel ideas any given day which, too late or inaccurate, would end up with us injured or dead.  

and such a materialist brain-only mind would have to do all of those while staying within the rigid monistic materialist ideological framing that their atheist faith depends on.

Without an explanation of how all of those happen which accounts for a thinking person's experience of how their own consciousness works, no rational person of any honesty could possibly accept the materialist framing or, even more stupidly, debunking our conscious experience.  To accept that model would be about the stupidest thing anyone could possibly believe in their ideologically addled mind.  Materialists are generally just that stupid.

I have been posing those questions, off and on, for years and I've never had a materialist-atheist-devotee of scientism come up with anything that was at all plausible except if you accept just throwing words at the problem without any care to their actual meaning.  I have found that on such habits the entire, required modern allegedly thinking class orthodoxy seems to stand.*  There was a time not that long ago when I would have exempted "real science" from that but I've come to see that pretty much the entire culture of science, world-wide, though perhaps especially acutely in the English language, is saturated with exactly that habit of uncritical inspection of even its most outlandish creedal statements.

"DNA" is a perfect example of that kind of dogmatic slogan which, even within those deemed to be scientists it is a non-explanation constructed to be used polemically in the most incompetent ways. DNA is a molecule that functions in a complete cell as part of an extremely elaborate molecular level operation which produces proteins, on its own it does nothing.  It relies on other molecules in cells to function, some of which are certainly not, themselves, encoded with in DNA such as lipids.  And after the construction of a long chain of atoms and component molecules there is the time consuming issue of correct protein folding which in itself takes too long to have that as a credible explanation of our experience of consciousness, not to mention the even more difficult issue of how the resulting molecules become part of biologically active structures in the brain.  If there is one thing that is obvious, it doesn't all happen by random chance or trial and error.  I don't think it's credible to believe if it happened through those life jackets for materialist ideology, I'd love to get someone to give an honest estimate as to how even any single cell organism could reproduce within its lifetime if it happened by trial and error.  Not to mention the enormously more complex lives and reproduction of us multicellular organisms.

The cartoonish view of how DNA "works" that you may have absorbed if you were paying attention in 10th grade Biology is just that, a cartoon that is now considered entirely unrealistic, as science has looked more closely at how cells actually work. But, then, so much of the high school and, possibly worse, university level biology my age cohort learned has been superseded.  In other words, it was wrong.  That is, I suspect, the pattern when science is done about such complex and often unobservable phenomena.**  DNA can tell you a lot of things but the idea that it, in itself, could possibly do what would have to be done to support the MAS ideology of "brain-only" dogma in regard to even the simplest level of the experience of human consciousness is a grotesque absurdity.

I will break in to ask a question I've never heard asked before, how the various component molecules of that elaborate cellular "machinery" "know" how to do their functions with such precision, where is the information needed to make them do what they do within them?  I would like to know if there is any such complex chemical reaction that has ever been observed outside of living cells. I'm not aware that's ever been adequately explained in material terms that could withstand skeptical criticism.  It would require a lot of information that I doubt can be located within the molecules, themselves.  As to how any of it would know what to do to "make" the substrate of a novel idea they'd never synthesized before - some of our ideas certainly never having existed in the natural world before a human had them and certainly not within our own brains, it would seem not to be able to account for.  Which indicates the depth of folly that bottom up reductionism of the kind such "brain-only" ideology depends on is.

The answer "Natural Selection" is even more incompetent for a myriad of other reasons, my favorite right now being that there is absolutely no evidence that there is any such a thing as natural selection, it is an ideological construct which, problematically enough for any materialist, not to mention an atheist who would want to grab on to it as a universal explanation of everything THERE IS NOT THE SLIGHTEST EVIDENCE IN THE WORLD THAT NATURAL SELECTION HAS ANY KIND OF MATERIAL EXISTENCE. If you want to claim that it is a "law of nature" such as those considered to be the foundation of physics, is natural selection supposed to have come about at the Big Bang, as currently the "laws of nature" are supposed to have come into existence.  Did the Big Bang anticipate the rise of life and provide it with such a "fundamental law of nature" in anticipation for the rise of life, perhaps billions of years after that came about?  Just where is it supposed to have come from?  I would point out that in that case Big Bang would have to have the same attributes as God is believed to have under theism.  

If you want to posit that such a thing is in control of our conscious experience which you want to insist is an epiphenomenon of physical structures in brains leaves you with exactly the same problem that Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia posed to Descartes, how does a non-physical entity move the physical brain.  Darwinism has a ghost in the theory, it just doesn't admit that it does. So does every other expression of materialist-atheism I've ever examined.  What the atheists who tried to answer me did was put up "DNA" or "natural selection" or "computers" as creator gods without having the self-critical honesty to admit that is what they did.  Atheists are always setting up gods and they don't even know that they're doing it.

We know from our own experience of everything, including the physical world, that consciousness is the most fundamental reality of anyone's lived experience. You have to believe in and trust your own conscious experience to even begin to operate as an observing, measuring, analyzing and reasoning creature, despite what some of the most ideologically stupid of current university based philosophers would like to have it.  Any philosopher who doesn't believe that consciousness is real would be drummed out of the profession if it had any kind of intellectual honesty in late 20th and 21st century academics. Though if you've got a PhD and an interest in upholding a decadent ideology, you can simply choose to ignore that fact and you'll seldom or never get called on it within academia or science.

Far from being a foundation of our experience and so thinking, Natural selection is something made up by British scientists on the ideology of entirely artificial 18th and 19th century British class-system economics.  It was probably the most serious introduction of materialist ideology directly into the mainstream of science in its history, the subsequent permissions of allowing similar ideology resulted in some of the rankest of pseudo-science being granted the same status as physics and chemistry and actual scientific biology had.  And, unsurprisingly given its substance, it was almost immediately in need of major patching to maintain its viability within the even such ideologized science.  The most serious of those patch-jobs was the "modern synthesis" in which the naive view of genetics around 90 years ago was rather artificially attached to it.  That synthesis, as most human made synthetics, seems to be seriously degraded, especially due to new observations about living organisms and the cells they are embodied in.  One of the most serious problems, from what I see, for the "modern synthesis" is that it is now pretty obvious that as Darwin believed, in addition to genetic inheritance, epigenetic inheritance based on acquired "traits" is a real thing.  That, in itself, along with other theorized and more explanatorily sound "forces" such as genetic drift, would seem to me to pretty much refute that synthesis. As H. Allen Orr pointed out in his refutation of the Darwinist fundamentalism of the meat-headed Daniel Dennett in the 1990s,  without strict particulate inheritance as classical genetics posited, natural selection has serious problems.  So, along with the enormously more complex reality of how genetic structures operate in living cells, genetics seems to me to be another huge source of trouble for Darwinism, which is the theory of natural selection, not evolution which I certainly haven't questioned as a fact while admitting that the enormous percentage of forever-lost information about it, is questionable as a rigorous science.

The rest of those things atheists have clung onto like "computers," "probability" and "random chance" are more incompetent than the two out of biology.  Computers are human made models that can simulate a rather narrow conception of what our experience of conscious activity is imagined by some of us to be.  It is no more a "brain" than the stuffing in the head of a dummy is. If it looks like it's doing something our minds do, well, that was the idea behind them all along but the analogy only goes one way, computers can't tell us anything about how our minds work, certainly not our brains.   We stupidly attribute intelligence to computers through some of the most naive misuses of language in the modern period.  That was, I am certain, largely a product of materialist-atheist-scientistic reductionism which started out with a stripped down definition of consciousness and, especially, intellectual activity which like the absurdities of classical "abiogenesis" is entirely motivated in ideology, though as computers quickly became real and profitable, making money seems to be a major motive in the area of computer science.  

Probability and random chance are practical opposites of what our experience of consciousness is, what our thinking and acting are. Both are posited and calculated to test for conscious or "unconscious" bias in experimental science, random probabilities or chances being taken as having no consciousness behind them and so were a basis for measuring the possibility of something happening aside from human volition or accidental bias.

As its theoretical opposite, how they could account for consciousness is a question I'd like to find out if anyone has asked of such "science." The hypothesized natural forces being looked for are certainly defined as excluding the products of our conscious choice in many instances. If you had to depend on probability or random chance to control your mind you probably would never have never survived early childhood.  You'd have eaten something that would have killed you long ago or died in an accident as your brain sifted through a fatally sufficient number of the probabilities it would have to go to to recognize a car you'd never experienced before it appears on some side of you and that you should get out of the way.  

I'm coming to doubt that there is such a THING as "random chance."  The more I think about it, the less I think it's possible to even define what it means. If it is truly random, how could you possibly define what it is at any given point?  Does it have predictable, testable or definable qualities, is it in some sense uniform?  If it is uniform how could it be random?  Does it exist in the physical universe or is it just a mathematical concept?  If it doesn't have a material or physical basis, that would leave its use in science rather up in the air in the same way that Princess Elizabeth's question to Descartes left his dualism in.  If I had the time I'd like to research the history of it as a human concept.  And if that's true, even just that it's undefinable, the implications of that for even math are worth considering.  It could be a real thing and entirely escape the possibility of genuine human thinking due to its being, well, random. Though I'd suspect that if pressed hard, they'd come up with some novel definition of "randomness," so much of this game is based in just such convenient redefinition of words.

I doubt it's that materialist-atheist-devotees of scientism think slowly enough to match their experience of consciousness with their idiotic attachment to "brain-only" schemes that all fall apart when they are looked at with even the kind of informal criticism I've brought to them.  Though in the hard cases, Dennett, the Churchlands, maybe that is why they don't see the problems with it. Perhaps their desperation to prop up their ideology takes up time which would be better spent on thinking more critically.  But I think it's more probable that they are so emotionally attached to their hatred of the idea of God or religion or specific religions that that short circuits any of the critical activities that are necessary to separate ideas that work from those that don't whenever they sense that God may be a viable explanation for something.  They simply hate religion, they hate God, they hate anything that violates their absurd ideology of materialism - I can say absurd exactly because of the materialist insistence that consciousness is either a mere secretion of brains (as Darwin's bull dog, Thomas Huxley had it) or, that having not exactly worked, that consciousness is a delusion, as that puddin' head Dennett and the even weirder Churchlands have it.  Any ideology that negates the foundational basis of that ideology, whether it is materialism or atheism or scientism or any combination of them, which are all dependent on human consciousness must be obliterated in their minds and as a topic of consideration in their professional and social milieu, including consciousness, itself. Such materialist-atheism is an example of the ultimate in intellectual decadence.

We can see that modernism, exactly from its materialist basis, is just such an example of intellectual decadence.  I think it's an inescapable conclusion that the alleged "scientific" and most murderous of human political regimes, the Marxists, the fascists, the Nazis, etc. are a product of exactly that ideology.  When you believe as Trump does, that People are just objects there to be used or discarded, People get killed, often in large numbers.  Trump probably killed half-a million American in order to try to win the 2020 election through Covid inaction and that has been just AOK with his vulgar materialist supporters.  Even the "Christians" among Trumpzis are materialists, as the implosion of a nightclub mega-church franchise based in New Hampshire shows, that is how degraded Christianity is under the forces of modernism.

The way out of that decadence isn't into some past, you can't get the past back, it's done, gone and certainly not much like you imagine it to be - especially if you depend on fiction and movies to form your idea of it.  The only way out of the decadence of modernism is to move on into the future.  You can learn from the past a lot of what is recorded of the past is very useful, you can't possibly revive the past and you shouldn't want to.  It's cowardly and unrealistic.  The modern period is over, it is in its dying throws, its death rattle is in the mouths of the materialists as they spout such stuff.  I think either materialism as the dominant ideology dies, or we, as a species, very likely will.

* You're right but not so much as you think you are.  I am somewhat familiar with Michael Behe who seems to me to be considered to be a working scientist. I haven't looked at his publications record or his CV but he has long been employed as a scientist in an accredited University.  I don't think his somewhat extra-scientific thinking in regard to the appearance of intelligent design in living organisms and their genetic and molecular foundations is any more illegitimate than the ideology of materialist-atheism which is regularly inserted directly into the literature, the teaching and the intellectual practice of science.  From the pseudo-sciences such as psychology to the quasi-pseudo sciences that make pretty fMRI pictures of brains and make ridiculous assertions about them (generally in line with the ideological preferences of those making them and, if not them, then the general ideology of their field) to the quicksands of evolutionary speculation and even into some of the more solid life sciences, that ideology rules and is inserted directly into its literature.  It is beyond the competence of science to introduce God into the literature of science but it is certainly as beyond it to insist that there is no God who directed things to be as they are.  One of those has certainly been excluded, to the extent that, as I pointed out, cosmologists and ideological editors of preeminent science journals have been insisting that the "Big Bang" wasn't as valid a scientific theory as the seemingly unworkable "steady state" universe that materialist-atheists preferred because of that gol-durned  Genesis account and things like the cosmological argument for a Creator.  

I think anyone who regularly gets published in reputable journals of science has to be taken to be a working scientist.  That's not to say that whatever they get published has to be believed, lots of the stuff published in such journals turn out to be wrong and not a little of it gets through even when it turns out to be rather transparently fraudulent.  Though I'm sure someone who has the intellectual cooties that Behe has been declared to have, his publications get probably the highest level of critical review, something that is generally true of the controlled research into psychic phenomena, which is certainly more valid scientifically than anything else that gets published on the topic of human consciousness.  It is one of the most startling things about science which I learned by reading the ideologues of the Jeffrey Epstein- Ghislaine Maxwell financed Science Blogs is how many of them act like they're 12 in the mean boy and gal gang in jr. high.  I think spending a lifetime in school isn't necessarily a guarantee of emotional maturity.  

Anyone who doubts that science is shot through with the ideological preferences of those who produce science is ignorant of or uncritical of the history of science.  Considering the topic of this post, it is a supreme irony for the scientism of the reductive materialist, devotees of scientism to a person, that human minds are the only known location of science.  Science is a product of human consciousness.  If you debunk or even demote human consciousness, you impeach the validity of science.  Even Charles Darwin openly worried that that would be a consequence of his theory, though he had a particularly crude, Brit-Victorian view of the minds of animals behind his worry.  In the case of such speculative fields as the theories about evolution and cosmology, I think those alleged sciences could use a lot more impeaching than they get.  I've come to be entirely skeptical of the scientific character of any science which cannot actually see and observe what they are allegedly studying. I think that the actual foundation of the study of evolution has more in common with lore than it does science and cosmology is not much less tied to faith than it was in the middle-ages, only it's atheist faith it's tied to these days.  Physics is a lot less finished than physicists like to believe it is.  

** What If Michael Behe Is Right That Life Is Intelligently Designed?  

It is worth asking just how much faith anyone should put into the science surrounding these ideologically fraught areas, how much of what even those at the top of their field is actual knowledge and how much of it will be, soon or later, overthrown, often by actual observations and measurements and analysis that shows that it was anything from slightly to fundamentally wrong.  When even a good science program such as NOVA presents things as definite knowledge they are often overlooking the critics of them within the profession of science, itself.  

Since you brought up Michael Behe, I didn't, it might be a fun exercise to consider if he's right that life was intelligently designed by God then science, as the rules of it stand now, COULD NEVER GET CLOSE TO AN EXPLANATION OF MANY ASPECTS OF BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION.  By the rules you are not allowed to make that speculation within science but if he is right, and I think he has given many plausible examples to think it's not unreasonable to think he might be at least on a better track than the materialists, then the rules of science would be as much an inhibition of making progress in accurate knowledge as laws against teaching evolution would inhibit making progress in places where such laws are enforced.  Of course, the science around evolution in the 1920s was in many instances entirely wrong, it was thoroughly steeped in racism, ethnic, class and gender bigotry.  I have pointed out that the very textbook that John Scopes was accused of teaching evolution out of (he didn't, actually, as even some of the kids who were witnessed in the trial admitted) was saturated with all kinds of stuff that if a scientist held them today would get them laughed out of the profession.  It is about as accurate as flat-earth geography.  Yet it is the science championed on screen, on stage and in many a BBC-PBS style sci-costume drama which constitutes the sum total ersatz knowledge of so many of those credentialed by colleges.  

Just how does the "public understanding of science" such as Richard Dawkins was assigned with lording over deal with that scandalous reality, that much of that understanding is overturned, though the worst of it, such as the mythology surrounding Darwinism, is so embedded in the culture of the ruling class that even anti-evolutionists spout ideas founded in On the Origin of Species and, from bad to worse, The Descent of Man.

Since you slam it, theology, these days, is generally far more modest about its claims.  If there's an area of Western culture that has been through the critical wringer, it's Christianity and Judaism.

Afterword: I had a discussion with a young LGBTQ+ person the other day in which I told them about having lived through the AIDS epidemic among Gay men in the 1980s which, despite whatever some ass like Andrew Sullivan will tell you, has hardly ended.  The area of promiscuity was a sore point, I had to tell them that whatever anyone wanted to think, promiscuity was the main reason that the virus spread so rapidly and widely among gay men, through unprotected sex with those who had been infected by someone else.  

I have mentioned before how when that was addressed by public health officials, including someone I truly consider a saint, Dr. Fauci, that the angry, infuriated response by many Gay activists and just other Gay men was like a prelude to Trumpzi responses to what he said about Covid-19 so recently.  Much of what they said at the time was speculative, though it was certainly much less speculative than probably most of the "new scientific findings" in the news is.  The issue of authority in science is as fraught as it is an any other area but we frequently have no choice but to provisionally accept what they think is best to deal with a crisis.  That is when such science is not under pressure from ideologues such as those who pressured scientists or administrators in the Reagan-Bush I administrations or the Bush II and Trump regimes.  And the science of those at the CDC or the WHO are often far more based in actual observation and analysis than the bullshit surrounding materialist motivated cognative or neuro science.

I hold it as enormously ironic that one of the most ideological of biologists at the time, the inventor of Hamiltonian "altruism," a creation of materialist ideology as pseudo-science if there ever was one, died as a result of his quest to prove that such scientists as actually looked at HIV without an ideological bias were wrong as to its etiology.  I have recently found out that Lynn Margulis, who, though a critic of Darwinism could be pretty ideological, herself, had another rather wrong theory of its origin.  I don't know as much about that as Hamilton's folly.  

Our faith in science is not always rational or reasonable but automatic distrust of science is catastrophic, as well. We need to proceed with caution, looking at the quality of the science but, also, the knowable ideological biases of those claiming to find them.  I mean those that can be known on a better basis than the lies told by Republican-fascists in the media and in governments.  

"otherness is the essential gift"

AS A REMINDER, the talk by Cheryl Anderson that I'm basing this on can be heard in its entirety with a very important question and answer session after it.

I love The Color Purple, the book, the movie, the musical.  In fact I saw the musical for probably the fifth time just in August and there is a line where Celie who's the poor Black Woman living in the South who's talking to Shug who's a nightclub singer and free spirit and she tells her that "If God ever listened to poor colored women, the world would be a different place, I can tell you." And I thought what does it mean when you thing God doesn't' listen to you?  

Now, this doesn't take away from "God made a way out of no way," or, you know, "God brought me through," that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about it systemically.  What about removing the racism, the sexism that made life difficult to live from the beginning?  That's what I'm talking about. Something that's more systemic. What if we could imagine these obstacles didn't exist and that part of what is our Christian responsibility is to help bring that about.  

So, I've gone through why I do this work, it's because of what I see happening with this mythical norm in a number of arenas.  But I want to talk now  about the strategies.  And I started the strategies looking at how Jesus and Paul interpreted the Bible.

I'll break here because this gets into a longer section that I want to deal with by itself.

The points that those held to be "others" other than affluent, straight white males is to have the experience of being other than the official authentic culture.  That's as true of the elite, professional-class, academically ordained to be legitimate culture as it was in previous eras.  It is certainly the case in those professional fields that remain largely the preserve of affluent, straight-or passing for straight, white men. In many if not most cases, those from outside that group have to adopt the thinking and, even more, attitudes of the "norm" of affluent, straight, white males or they will be anything from disadvantaged to excluded.  That is certainly true in the legal professions and in the high priesthood of that, what it is obvious has become the judging racket.  It's certainly the case in the Supreme Court majority in the United States who at any given time define what the Constitution means, overturning previous courts in even the longest of enduring rulings.  Just wait to see what they'll do to the struggle for equality in June if you want to see the dire consequences of that.

In The Color Purple, as I recall the book, the stratification cuts across racial and other lines exactly on the issue of gender.  Among many white gay men, it's certainly the case that there are those who want to maintain a hierarchy, racial or other aspects of identity held up as better than others.

Of course, someone like a Lindsay Graham has been known to be gay and has been allowed to be a part of the ruling class because he is a slobbering, slavish servant of the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite, especially those who are most powerful who are primarily those in the "norm" that Cheryl Anderson talks about.  

Christianity, if it had followed the teachings of Jesus and Paul and James, etc. could never have accommodated itself to that system because even Paul, the source of several of the worst lines in the New Testament, radically cuts apart that norm in his more important statements.  Jesus certainly didn't fit into any norm of its kind. He'd have certainly been the subject of American racism and bigotry due to his skin color and religion, his way of life and his statements are not supportive of such a thing.  His economics, the most radical of any economics, would have had him excluded from respectable intellectual circles.  

But I think it's better than for me to go on to add to what Cheryl Anderson said, this passage from the talk by Luke Timothy Johnson that I've been neglecting in this series.

The third conviction [about how we are to read Scripture]. We have only one vocation as humans and that is to be faithfully obedient to The Living God.  Our vocation in life is to be faithfully obedient     to The Living God.

This means that we discern how God is speaking to us in our world.  And we are called to discern the shape of the world that God speaks to us.  And we are called to faithfully respond. Now the premise of that understanding of faithful obedience is that we are responding to The Living God, meaning God's self disclosure to the world continues. That we cannot respond faithfully to God if we close our eyes to our experience or the experience of others.   Because it is in our experience and the experience of others. It is in our story and the stories of others that God discloses God's self. This is the way God speaks to us, through our world. Creation is ongoing, God creates the world new at every moment and every single thing that is existing and not non-existing speaks God's creative power. Therefore every moment of every day, every office hour, every visit, every meeting in the hall way bears the potential of revelation, a call from God to our creative response to what?

That's why otherness is the essential gift. Because if we never encounter the other, we fashion idols. We fashion God in our own image, our own projects, our own desires, it's when the other intersects us, interrupts us, that we know that God's confronting us.

That comes before that quote I did use earlier in which Johnson said that the Bible should be taken as authoritative but that it can't always be held to be normative in us deciding how to live our lives, not any more than the other human thinking that is encountered in our daily interactions with other people. In the same talk he said that the experience of The Living God "trumps Scripture" even as he has said that Scripture is "authoritative."  That certainly takes into account one of the most obvious things that is almost never admitted about Scripture, that it is a long series of People recording their experience, personal and communal, of The Living God.*

One of the problems in this is the fear that if we are all to rely on what we take to be our experience of God as supreme it seems to invite the dangerous nonsense of the TV hallelujah peddlers and their ilk, but of the even more obviously deadly dangerous cults such as led to the recent starvation murders in a cult in Uganda or the kinds of AK mass murders that we never wonder at the role the Bill of Rights as recreated under Republican-fascist courts in the secular realm.

Of course there isn't a lying, distorting pseudo-religious huckster on TV who doesn't claim, in line with that most Protestant of traditions of "sola scriptura," that they are presenting the literal "truth" of scripture, even as it especially overturns the words of the man they will then pretend they believe is the actual presence of The Living God on Earth, Jesus.  I'll interject here that in United States secularism Thomas Jefferson and/or James Madison or more vaguely "the founders" plays a far less convincing role as the same.

Paula White or the soon to fall leader of a show-biz nightclub variety show TV mininstrelsy scam would certainly not want their suckers to take their life's experience seriously enough to give it the level of self-questioning, critical discernment that would lead them closer to the kinds of experience that Jesus taught and embodied.  

There is a parallel danger in official Catholicism to the extent that the rather less definable "magisterium" can be held to have a place like that of Scripture within traditional forms of Protestantism.  The neo-fascist American "traditional Catholicism," financed by multi-millionaire and billionaire Mammonists and trading on a fake history of neo-medievalism encouraged by cheap fiction and show biz and papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI is part of a long and grimy effort to make the teaching authority something like that.  Which is certainly what Vatican II faced and critiqued and sought to overturn as it was present since the counter-reformation period and is always a danger in a centralized, hierarchical church as much as it is in the anarchic chaos of Pentecostalism and Evangelical Protestantism.

In the rise of LGBTQ+ expressions of Christianity I hope that those kinds of things can be avoided.  I think that it might be possible to do that because as long as we construct our community out of the diversity of that ever expanding acronym, there may be no dangerous construction of the kind of "norm" that Cheryl Anderson talks about. LGBTQ+ is all about including "the other" and with them their experiences of The Living God, the extent to which such entities as The Reformation Project or The Roman Catholic Womenpriests continue to practice "all are welcome" they enhance their likelihood of following the word of Scripture through the ever changing record of the testimony of The Living God.


If the famous construction of Paul, no Jew or Greek, no free or slave, no male or female, (etc.) had ever been taken as seriously as it should, there should never have been any question of a white, affluent, male norm in Christianity.  If the words of Jesus about doing unto others and loving each other as he did were taken seriously, there would have been no straight, white, affluent, . . . norm either.  The extent to which "traditional" Christianity is stuck in that norm helps measure the extent to which it has not achieved even basic adherence to the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc.  Christianity has a way out of that through applying those egalitarian teachings.

Secularism has no such authoritative way out of it, it has crackpot "scientists" like Jordan Peterson and Richard Herrnstein and the Darwinists and economists telling us equality is "unnatural" with implications of dysgenisis and an impediment to "progress" instead.  And judges unsurprisingly finding the same in the Constitution written by slave-holders, land stealing genocidalists and financiers even dishonestly reconstructing the words added to it to overturn the inequality from the friggin' founders because they suckered everyone into accepting their Marbury self-given powers and that's what good lawyers were taught in law school. The secular rule of government by judiciary is held in place by the cowardice of lawyers, lower judges and politicians and the credulous faith of those trained to uphold that, knowing they'd risk their credibility in their professions and in wider popular culture.  Jefferson and Madison, no matter what they said, certainly didn't live as if they believed even their excuse for breaking with Britain that "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights."  Of course, once their independence had been bought with the blood, mostly, of people of less affluence, they dropped that kind of talk in the Constitution.

There is no hope for those in the underclass in secularism, the overturning of the very brief Warren-Kennedy-Johnson era under the secular government of the United States should put to rest any such notion of it happening under the Constitution.  The very, very few who tried to live like that in that "founders" period were complete oddballs in religion like William Blake or a few of the Quakers or Shakers, etc.  And not even all of them really did it.  I think it helps if your experience is as "the other" and you don't have much of a stake in the "norm."  The earliest Christians either were others or they radically and heroically rejected the norms they could benefit from.

I'd rather take my chances with an honest attempt to discern The Living God than in Scripture idolatry, neo-baroque costume drama Catholicism or "originalist-textualist" legal casuistry or in any of the other secular ideologies I've looked at.