jehovah's witnesses seem to have drifted toward the political notion of "intelligent design" in recent years.
several times since 1996 their literature has referenced the book darwin's black box by michael behe, which book has become a kind of bible for iders.
the book introduces the notion of "irreducible complexity" in a formal way as disprove of evolution.
What seems to be most curious is the lack of interest Behe is generating among creationists. John Lynch addresses this topic here. Once you're profiled in Awake!, it seems like no one will take you seriously anymore...
I recall variations on "IDiot" going around for a while: at least since October 2005. (See here and here, for example.) It's fairly common on science-related blogs-- in fact, you'll see it used in comment #13 in the Lynch link, above.
http://www.cfpf.org.uk/.
a very interesting site.
i'm not sure it answers all my questions but if this subject interests you, it's.
By all means let's call dredging up the disproved frauds of 130 years ago "a rational case."
From The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom's pamphlet, "THE SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF SURVIVAL AFTER DEATH" by The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom, Michael Roll:
THE EXPERIMENTAL PROOF OF SURVIVAL AFTER DEATHWe have had the experimental proof of survival after death ever since Sir William Crookes published the results of his experiments in the leading scientific journal of his day - The Quarterly Journal of Science - in 1874. These were repeatable experiments under laboratory conditions. International teams of scientists then repeated the experiments and obtained the same results. People who had once lived on earth came back and proved to these scientific teams that they had conquered death and were still very much alive.
From Wikipedia's William Crooke entry
spiritualismin 1870 crookes decided that science had a duty to study the preternatural phenomena associated with spiritualism (crookes 1870). judging from family letters, crookes had developed a favorable view of spiritualism already by 1869 (Doyle 1926: volume 1, 232–233). Nevertheless, he was determined to conduct his inquiry impartially and described the conditions he imposed on mediums as follows: "It must be at my own house, and my own selection of friends and spectators, under my own conditions, and I may do whatever I like as regards apparatus" (Doyle 1926: volume 1, 177). Among the mediums he studied were Kate Fox, Florence Cook, and Daniel Dunglas Home (Doyle 1926: volume 1, 230-251). Among the phenomena he witnessed were movement of bodies at a distance, rappings, changes in the weights of bodies, levitation, appearance of luminous objects, appearance of phantom figures, appearance of writing without human agency, and circumstances which "point to the agency of an outside intelligence" (Crookes 1874).
To take just the most audacious example of the frauds perpetrated on Crooke, Florence Cook, (see also the book The Medium and the Scientist: The Story of Florence Cook and William Crookes, by Trevor Hall).
From Wikipedia's Florence Cook entry:
A 15 year old Cook, alone in Crookes' house with Crookes' friends and family as witnesses, was said to have materialized the spirit of Katie King, who walked about, talked, allowed herself to be weighed and measured, and even held the family's baby (Doyle 1926: volume 1, 241). The sessions were held in the dark, because Spiritualists believe that materialization requires very dim surroundings to succeed, though occasionally some red light was used and some photographs were taken. As is apparently typical of materialized spirits, Katie's exact height and weight varied, though Katie was always taller than Florence Cook, with a larger face, and different hair and skin. According to those present, the two were both visible at the same moments, so that Florence could not have assumed the role of the spirit (Doyle 1926: volume 1, 235-240).Crookes' report, published in 1874, contained his assertion that Florence Cook, as well as the mediums Kate Fox and Daniel Dunglas Home, were producing genuine preternatural phenomena (Crookes 1874). The publication caused an uproar, and his testimony about Katie King was considered the most outrageous and sensational part of the report. Crookes very nearly lost his Fellowship at the Royal Society, and did not again engage in Spiritualist research (Doyle 1926: volume 1, 169).
From Florence Cook & Katie King, a fuller online account, (with pictures!):
William Crookes was stunned by the overwhelming criticism from his fellow scientists over his investigations of Florence Cook and he soon gave up active investigations, although he remained a staunch supporter of psychical research until his death. He was knighted some 20 years after his work with Florence for during his long and distinguished career he discovered the element thallium and his experiments with vacuums led to the discovery of the cathode ray tube and x-rays.Of course, anyone with access to the Internet could have found these items in far less time that it takes to read Mr Roll's pamphlet. Thanks for making my rather small joke funnier, though.
Dilaceratus::...fundamentalists (and other crackpots who have yet to join the "reality-based" nineteenth century).
with the recent tv.
show ghost hunters 7 hours long shown live and on the internet with web cams planted all over the place from east pennslyvania pentitentiary on friday evening from 8pm to 3am, there were many responses from all over the country about people seeing images, ghosts etc.
for those who watched it, was this real or is it a great hoax.. i read that when it comes with dealing with hard evidence of life after death it's been shown that there are three classes of people.. there are those that ridicule idea of anything beyond the grave.. then there are those who have already accepted the evidence of continued existence beyond physical death.. the third group is often thrown offtrack when trying to get at the truth by the folks in the metaphysical camp.. which group do you belong to and why?
Metatron: If you really have outstanding critical ability, why aren't you making money with it?
This is just outrageous. Rather than baselessly attempting to lure others in with dreams of mysterious knowledge and idle, ever-changing fantasies of wealth, longevity, and power, what AlanF, Abaddon, and a few other regular posters consistently offer to readers of this forum is the applied methodology of sustained, careful research and analysis by which any sort of claims may be weighed for honesty, reproducibility, and factual value-- whether these claims are the uninformed speculation and unprovable assertions of the WTB&TS and other creationists, or get-rich-quick schemers.
That this approach requires focus and investment in time and energy from both the authors and the readers, and cannot be communicated in sound bites, aphoristic analogy, anecdote, or leading questions, is useful not only to understanding the very bases of the topics they address, but as general lessons especially applicable to those who have spent significant time in the company of fundamentalists (and other crackpots who have yet to join the "reality-based" nineteenth century).
That rationality and science are not panaceas may be disappointing to those hoping to swap one speculative faith for another, but exactly to the point.
people who speak non-tonal languages are more likely to have a more recently evolve form of the genes aspm and microcephalin.. this raises an interesting idea.. possibly no non-tonal languages were spoken at the time of the towers of babel.. how would a jw explain?.
The New Scientist article from a few days ago is here, but of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the Tower of Babel.
Dediu and Ladd do not think the genes' link to tonality could be the answer. "There is absolutely no reason to think that non-tonal languages are in any way more fit for purpose than tonal languages," says Ladd. "Chinese society developed advanced technology, politics and philosophy with a tonal language just as successfully as roughly contemporary eastern Mediterranean societies with non-tonal languages."
http://britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php?t=416709 .
i don't know how to turn the above into a link.
this article was printed in the walled street journal on 1-3-07. this article criticizes a study that found that the bear population had declined by 25% in western hudson bay in the last decade.
New Scientist's "Climate change: A guide for the perplexed", twenty-six articles on the most common climate change myths. (Read polar bear article with links, here.)
Climate myths: Polar bear numbers are increasing* 17:00 16 May 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Phil McKenna
Polar bears have become the poster children of global warming. The bears spend most or all of the year living and hunting on sea ice, and the accelerating shrinking of this ice appears to pose a serious threat. The issue has even become politically sensitive.
Yet recently there have been claims that polar bear populations are increasing. So what's going on? There are thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears in 19 population groups around the Arctic. While polar bear numbers are increasing in two of these populations, two others are definitely in decline. We don't really know how the rest of the populations are faring, so the truth is that no one can say for sure how overall numbers are changing.
The two populations that are increasing, both in north-eastern Canada, were severely reduced by hunting in the past and are recovering thanks to the protection they and their prey now enjoy.
The best-studied population, in Canada’s western Hudson Bay, fell by 22% from 1194 animals in 1987 to 935 in 2004, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. A second group in the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska’s north coast, is now experiencing the same pattern of reduced adult weights and cub survival as the Hudson Bay group.
A comprehensive review (pdf) by the US Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that shrinking sea ice is the primary cause for the decline seen in these populations, and it recently proposed listing polar bears as threatened (pdf) under the Endangered Species Act. The International Conservation Union projects the bears' numbers will drop by 30% by 2050 (pdf) due to continued loss of Arctic sea ice.
people who speak non-tonal languages are more likely to have a more recently evolve form of the genes aspm and microcephalin.. this raises an interesting idea.. possibly no non-tonal languages were spoken at the time of the towers of babel.. how would a jw explain?.
I think Badboy is talking about the work of Bruce Lahn, and for some reason or another (he lacks ASPM?) trying to tie that science to a speculative history.
John Hawks had a nice rundown at the time. As the articles point out, one of the interesting aspects of the story is that it demonstrates that human evolution is still occurring.
On the potential racial overtones of the findings, follow the links here.
the current heated "(monotheist) believers vs. atheists" threads tends to overlook, imo, this rather commonplace but relevant issue: how modern atheism continues (and thus is tributary to) a line of religious, philosophical and scientific thought which runs from ancient polytheism through monotheism, both in greek and jewish traditions (which are the two main sources of western culture).. in the greek-speaking world, homeric-like polytheism went out of fashion, and although political authorities stood for the conservation of popular worship of the gods (atheism being a capital offence, ask socrates), an intellectual monotheism came to the fore, especially in platonic tradition, along with more or less "underground" forms of early atheism (democritus, epicurus).. in judea, for mainly political reasons ("one god, one temple, one priesthood, one king") the "deuteronomistic reform" of the 7th century bc promoted the active rejection (1) of all other gods than yhwh, and (2) of any representation of yhwh himself, henceforth branded as "idolatry".
it also (3) reinterpreted most "natural" features in older israelite religion (linking yhwh, just as baal, with the cycle of seasons, especially the rain and dry seasons, vegetal and animal fertility) into historical (or pseudo-historical) celebrations: the feast of spring became the celebration of the national foundation in the exodus from egypt, etc.
(4) the development of a doctrine of creation, increasingly construed as creatio ex nihilo -- mere "fabrication" of the world out of nothing instead of the older theomachy (struggle between the gods) wrestling for order out of chaos contributed to emptying "nature" of its numinous, sacred or divine presences: the sun, the moon, the stars, vegetables, animals and humans became mere "objects," vessels designed and made by a master craftsman, but devoid of intrinsic divinity.
Narkissos: I very much agree that monotheism is not a necessary stepping stone between polytheism and atheism. That's why I mentioned the underground tradition of practical if not overt atheism running parallel to philosophical monotheism in the Greek world. And we can suspect that "atheism" was not unthought of in the Jewish sphere either. The motto "there is no god" ascribed to the "fool" in Psalms may well express (as well as try to repress) a very serious question, which most Bible commentaries (taking for granted that "atheism" was unthinkable to the Ancients) explain away by making it a purely practical or moral stance.
Having long admired your thoughtful and informed posts, I didn't really suppose you were suggesting some sort of historical necessity to the ordering. My comments to that end were more of a preface.
Even as historical descriptions, though, I think the succession you propose is muddied by Catholicism having arguably moved in some important ways away from a tightly formatted monotheistic structure, which would seem to imply a retrograde historical sequencing, prior to the Enlightenment. (Although this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that most post-Enlightenment atheism was the product of regions with strong Protestant populations-- again, the tendency to iconoclasm.)
More importantly, I question whether the genuine intellectual premise of modern atheism has any more connection to a-, mono-, or polytheistic notions of the ancients than modern neuroscience does to Aristotle's take on the function of the brain, and therefore whether there is any justifiable sequence there at all. Not that there is not some sympathy and genesis in ideation between ancient ideas and modern, but that they are, at heart, more different in their foundations than they are alike.
It's been a long while, but I believe that it's in the first chapter of The Blind Watchmaker that Dawkins offers his argument that there wasn't a genuinely rational, evidentiary case for atheism prior to Darwin, a position I favor. The ideas expressed (and, very good, repressed) prior to Darwin are developmentally interesting to the growth of Western individualist thought, and, although tending towards reason and away from the supernatural, in point of testable fact, these epistemological and metaphysical atheistic claims rested on no more than a philosophical preference-- the same as theistic claims. (Unlike the heterodox or skeptically analytical materialist readings of Christianity and its tenets, which informed atheistic rationale, but are not a basis for a logical rejection of any creator, per se.)
I would therefore suggest for discussion that modern atheism has its underpinnings in the revolution in Western views of evidentiary, materialist science, rather than any ancient knowledge, or counter-knowledge. I also suggest that the philosophical roots of this Western science might be arguably traced to the dualistic iconoclasm that came up through the Abrahamic traditions.
I'd very much welcome comments on this topic from a theistic standpoint.
I think the modern theistic position is laid out ably here...
John Dryden, Religio laici, or, A laymans faith...
Thus man by his own strength to Heaven would soar:
And would not be oblig'd to God for more.
Vain, wretched creature, how art thou misled
To think thy wit these god-like notions bred!
These truths are not the product of thy mind,
But dropt from Heaven, and of a nobler kind.
Reveal'd religion first inform'd thy sight,
And reason saw not, till faith sprung the light.
Hence all thy natural worship takes the source:
'Tis revelation what thou think'st discourse.
Else how com'st thou to see these truths so clear,
Which so obscure to heathens did appear?
Not Plato these, nor Aristotle found:
Nor he whose wisdom oracles renown'd.
Hast thou a wit so deep, or so sublime,
Or canst thou lower dive, or higher climb?
Canst thou, by reason, more of God-head know
Than Plutarch, Seneca, or Cicero?
Those giant wits, in happier ages born,
(When arms, and arts did Greece and Rome adorn)
Knew no such system; no such piles could raise
Of natural worship, built on pray'r and praise,
To one sole God.
...
unfortunately, it's from 1682.
[Notice that in this snippet Dryden is actually arguing against the Deists, but I think it still works.]
the current heated "(monotheist) believers vs. atheists" threads tends to overlook, imo, this rather commonplace but relevant issue: how modern atheism continues (and thus is tributary to) a line of religious, philosophical and scientific thought which runs from ancient polytheism through monotheism, both in greek and jewish traditions (which are the two main sources of western culture).. in the greek-speaking world, homeric-like polytheism went out of fashion, and although political authorities stood for the conservation of popular worship of the gods (atheism being a capital offence, ask socrates), an intellectual monotheism came to the fore, especially in platonic tradition, along with more or less "underground" forms of early atheism (democritus, epicurus).. in judea, for mainly political reasons ("one god, one temple, one priesthood, one king") the "deuteronomistic reform" of the 7th century bc promoted the active rejection (1) of all other gods than yhwh, and (2) of any representation of yhwh himself, henceforth branded as "idolatry".
it also (3) reinterpreted most "natural" features in older israelite religion (linking yhwh, just as baal, with the cycle of seasons, especially the rain and dry seasons, vegetal and animal fertility) into historical (or pseudo-historical) celebrations: the feast of spring became the celebration of the national foundation in the exodus from egypt, etc.
(4) the development of a doctrine of creation, increasingly construed as creatio ex nihilo -- mere "fabrication" of the world out of nothing instead of the older theomachy (struggle between the gods) wrestling for order out of chaos contributed to emptying "nature" of its numinous, sacred or divine presences: the sun, the moon, the stars, vegetables, animals and humans became mere "objects," vessels designed and made by a master craftsman, but devoid of intrinsic divinity.
To argue against the rational necessity of a god or gods is to make the same argument-- There needn't be any logical line of casting off the old superstitions by, say, first denying the local harvest god, then the rain god, etc. A modern polytheist might move to a scientific atheism in one fell swoop, without a transitional monotheism.
It's the willingness to cast away the old that marks the important change, not the quantity of deity-objects.
The tendency from rigid Zoroastrian (or Aten cult?) dualism towards iconoclasm seems to me the most important psychological and historical element in developing Western ideals, and, ultimately, scientific thought (oh...and Internet message boards).
<!-- .style1 { font-family: arial; font-size: 18px; } .style2 { font-family: arial; font-size: 16px; } .style3 { font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; } .style5 {color: #0000cc} .style6 {color: #000000} --> does a school yard bully attitude take over this discussion board?growing up, i can recall such times when a rival would want to pick a fight .
with me and when we met, he would bring along two of his friends and i .
sometimes, i would knock their block off and sometimes, it was the other.
"Hello, I am Wanderer, I have a degree in advertising"
Of course this is a bit hyperbolic-- One who went around saying this sort of thing in public would soon find that it was taken by others as though they'd heard "I have a degree in Homeopathy" or "I am a Theta Clear."
(Naturally, anyone with the slightest "respect" for the power and complexity of language would object violently when they see words being raped of context, beauty, and meaning by salesmen-- be they politicians, evangelizers, bureaucrats, advertisers, or any other form of pornographer.)
a staunch critic of the climate change debate says al gore's oscar for his film an inconvenient truth makes a mockery of the awards.. http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/423466/1005652.
a top hurricane forecaster called al gore "a gross alarmist" friday for making an oscar-winning documentary about global warming.. .
"he's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things.
ANewLeif: "I only state that the exercise is explained as an attempt to save the environment and to save the earth while the fact is the exercise is for the salvation of our species."
Once again, your overly limited definitions are used to artificially bifurcate ideas which share a more complicated interconnection. Which parts of the environment and earth are superfluous to a continuation of humanity? While your core argument is certainly true (that humanity is not necessary to the continuation of earth), you seem to believe that, by choice, humans could take up some other support system. What genuine difference is there, then, between attempting to continue the species, and its Maslow list?
As far as the broader effects, do you suspect that drastic climate change would be something akin to the loss of television, of interest only to one particular, self-selecting group?
ANewLeif: "That tens of thousands of scientists can agree to anything related to this issue in significant numbers may indicate they are humans first and scientists second."
This is just a silly (and again, trivial) sloganeering, unless you are prepared to demonstrate how the scientific method has been independently dropped in favor of sentimentalism by these tens of thousands of individual scientists, their oversight groups, their peer associations, and their respective governments.
