Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts

Friday, February 22, 2019

Posts From the Past: A Scientific Perspective (43)


When Pop Sci Turns Toxic


Ancient Greek Science: Or How Not to Report an Experiment

Turtles All The Way Down: Deep Fractal Zoom

TTT: TED Talk Twaddle

Would You Like Lithium in Your Drinking Water?

Medically Induced Mental Illness

Minerals and Madness: Magnesium Deficiency and the Western Epidemic of Mental Illness

Misunderstanding Evolution, Or Evolutionary Theorists May Be Wrong, But Fred Reed Is Wronger

Brilliant Billionaires, No 49: Mark Zuckerberg:"Crazy brain research" will let users [sic] send thoughts telepathically — That'll Be Great For Those Who Can't Speak, Read or Write

Brilliant Billioniaires No. 17: Elon Musk's Pipedream, Shooting People Down Tubes

Dumb Ideas From Academia, No. 23: How Computer Technology Will Enable Brain to Brain Communication

Is Pop Psychology Mostly Bunk?

Dumb Intelligence Tests: Or Why IQ Testers Need to Improve Their Understanding of Intelligence


Why Are We So Smart? Or Perhaps We're Not



The Mis-Measure of Human Rationality


Homo sapiens: the Ape With Nukes. Or Are We Really the Smartest Animals Alive?

Human Intelligence Versus AI

Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Part I: Carbon Dioxide Is Not a Greenhouse Gas

Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Part II: Ecosystem Disruption

Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Part III: Induced Stupidity and the Decline of the West

Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Part IV: Reversing the Trend


Some Climate Warming Skeptics Ready to Ditch the Second Law of Thermodynamics

More Climate Skeptic Physics Nonsense

The Nature of Physical Reality, Part I: Time

The Nature of Physical Reality, Part II: Space

Time Is Neither Absolute Nor Does It Flow Equably, But It Does Flow

Free Will Versus Determinism

Why Electric Cars Will Replace Gas-powered Cars — And Improve the Environment

Why the All-Electric Family Car Is Something the Average Family Will Likely Never Own

Charles Darwin and the Demise of the European Peoples

Per ardua ad astra: Why not?

Liberal Racial Science

The Causes of War

Birth Control, Canadian Style: Or how one Western nation is committing suicide

How the West destroys its own

In Praise of Diversity

Should We “Bring Back” the Tasmanian Tiger, or the Tasmanian Aborigines

Population: Explosion and Implosion

Liberalism, Realpolitik and How It Is That People Murder One Another By the Million, But Feel Badly About Doing So

What Jews Got Right

Is "Bad Science" an Oxymoron?

The Trashing of Tim Hunt, FRS, Nobel Laureate: a Breach of the Social Contract, the Death of a Civilization

Tim Hunt, the Kind, Unworldly Nobel-Prize-Winner, Brought Down By a Report of Disputed Veracity By a Twittering, Anglophobic, Black-Privileged, Resumé-padding, Lecturer in Journalism and the Lies of Professor Michael Arthur, Provost of University College London, a Man Unable to Acknowledge an Error of Judgment, and Under the Sway of the Odious Morality of a Stuffed Corpse


Thursday, December 1, 2016

Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part I

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Franz de Waal is a distinguished ethologist and author of several best-selling accounts of primate behavior. As de Waal reports at length in the Atheist and the Bonobo, and other works, a key feature of the behavior of apes and to a greater or lesser degree other social animals, is sharing, helping, commiserating, comforting and demanding fairness. 

From this reality of animal social existence, de Waal concludes that morality is neither unique to humans nor dependent on religion, but is inherent in mammalian biology. Furthermore, he contends, that religion is, though difficult and perhaps impossible to eradicate, superfluous to the good society.

Thus, de Waal writes:
This brings me back to my bottom-up view of morality. The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there from the beginning of time.
In this, however, de Waal is sadly confused. The constructive, cooperative, fairness-demanding and mutually beneficial behavior of social animals is not evidence of morality, natural or otherwise. It is merely the rational, self-serving behavior of the small business owner who refrains from swindling his customers in the hope that they will return for more. It is the principle of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. By helping one another, social animals achieve a level of well-being beyond that attainable were they to live independent, uncooperative lives.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Christianity and the Death of the West

There are five things you need to know about a religion to understand its present and future role in shaping a civilization.

First, what is the moral code that it teaches?

Second, what is the way of life that it teaches?

Third, what are the beliefs that compel acceptance of its teachings?

Fourth, what support do the justifying beliefs of the faith receive from non-religious institutions?

Fifth, what are the consequences of the faith for society as a whole?

Atheist detractors of religion would like to add a sixth item to the list; namely, what is the truth of the justifying beliefs of the faith. But that is to misunderstand the role of religion in the foundation and survival of a civilization. Religion is founded on myths not historical truth, and its value is to be judged by its fruits; namely, the civilization to which it gives rise.

Here I consider the five key questions about Christianity as the foundation and defender of Western civilization.

1. The Moral Code of a Christian

The moral code of a Christian is nowhere fully and explicitly stated. Jesus was a Jew preaching to Jews and his teachings stemmed from a deep knowledge of the Jewish religious tradition. But Jesus was not a literate man and left no written account of his ideas. Jesus's disciples were, likewise, not literate, and left no record of their life in the company of Jesus. Thus, the only record we have of Jesus`s teachings are by persons unknown, the gospel authors who wrote a generation or more after the death of Jesus and who thus had no direct knowledge of what he said or did, and who in all probability had axes of their own to grind.

What we can say, however, given his Jewish roots and hist adherence to the Jewish faith, is that Jesus accepted the Mosaic law, known to Christians as the Ten Commandments. Moreover, it is uncontroversial to say that the Commandments constitute the bedrock of the Christian moral code.

Beyond the Commandments, Jesus taught the virtues of charity, modesty, forgiveness, and love, particularly love for the poor, the sick, the lame and those who have transgressed the moral law.

Last, but not least, Jesus taught the virtue of martyrdom, seeking for himself  a cruel death by crucifixion thereby enabling the miracle of the resurrection, which proved the divine inspiration of his teaching.

2, The Life of a Christian

Jesus was no recluse and he had no time for empty religious formality. He mixed with the common working people, sinners and tax gatherers. To Jesus, then, religion was not about ritual and religious ceremony, but about how life is to be lived by ordinary people.

In his preaching, which was to the common people and in his conversation with the disciples, Jesus redefined the concept of God. God, Jesus taught, was not a being in the mold of an oriental despot of whom one should be greatly afraid, but a loving and forgiving spirit, who knows one's most intimate thoughts and, like a father, is ever attentive to the needs of those who turn to him for help.

Psychologically, this redefinition of God is a profoundly important development in religious practice. It compels the believer to consider his problems with complete honesty for, in praying about them to God, he speaks with a being that sees his every thought and knows the truth of every word he utters. Prayer, as Jesus prescribed it, thus becomes an exercise requiring complete honesty in confronting dilemmas and difficulties, an approach that opens the mind to new possibilities. Thus, as the atheistic Winston Churchill remarked, "in times of fear or perplexity, I pray to God and it helps. It helps a lot."

In the Sermon on the Mount, surely the most unorthodox statement in Jesus's ministry, Jesus urged the forgiveness of enemies, the loving of enemies, and the doing good to enemies. Such a teaching seems to fly in the face of all practical reality.

If a mugger demands your Rolex, give him your wallet too? Yeah, suuuuuure.

But Jesus well knew the limits and frailty of human goodness. By demanding extreme tolerance of those who take advantage of us, Jesus taught that we should not be quick to anger, and that we should not show forbearance for kith and kin alone? As such, the message of the Sermon on the Mount conveyed a lesson of profound importance for the future of Western civilization, expanding the range of human sympathy, and thus creating scope for productive collaboration among strangers in an ever expanding social world.

In laying down his own life for the instruction of humanity, Jesus inspired the deaths of a multitude of Christian matyrs, soldiers, and an even greater number of those who, while not making the ultimate sacrifice, nevertheless devoted much of their life's work to the benefit of others.

3. The Beliefs that Justify Adherence to the Christian Code and Way of Life

The beliefs that Justify adherence to the Christian moral code and way of life are various, but most include a belief in (i) the existence of God, the creator of the World who takes a loving interest in human affairs; and (ii) a life after death, the nature of which, happy or hideous, depends on the way we have led our lives here on earth. [Technically, according to the great Christian churches, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran, hope of a heavenly afterlife does not require virtue here on Earth, only belief in the risen Christ, but that idea is surely only for the very simple minded.]

4. The Support Christian Faith Receives From Non-Religious Institutions in the West

Today, Christian faith in the West receives essentially no support from any public institutions, but rather is under continual attack from academia, broadcasters both public and private, the media in general, Hollywood and the the book publishing industry, the latter having a profitable line in atheistic propaganda from the Hitchens's to the Dawkins's, and all the other pseudo-intellectuals who offer a pathetically adolescent critique of religion.

5. What Has Been the Chief Influence of Christianity on Western Society

The influence of Christian faith on Western civilization has been fundamental. Christian ideas underpin the Western tradition of an open society in which people interact cooperatively and productively based on a mutually understood moral code requiring adherence to basic decency in dealing not only with family and friends but with everyone. It was thus Christianity that enabled the emergence of an open meritocratic society that proved to be the most scientifically and artistically creative and industrially productive civilization the World has yet witnessed.

To answer the questions posed in the title of this piece, it is evident that organized Christianity has been a vital institution of Western civilization and that its deliberate destruction by the forces of Political Correctness and globalist interests in the service of the international Money Power means the destruction of the West, a process already evident in widespread decline, decadence, depravity and despair.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Damn Fool Atheists

Atheists pride themselves on their rationality. Most claim that God has been debunked by science and, in particular, by Darwin's theory of evolution. There is no need for a creator, they say, mankind was not created, humanity simply emerged from the slime by the process of natural selection among random variants of earlier life forms.

And if you ask these rationalists where the primeval slime came from they tell you it arose through the chemical and physical processes that in the course of billions of years shaped the earth, its climate and oceans.

And if you ask them where the earth came from they tell you it arose through evolutionary processes in the galaxy, involving star formation and supernova explosions and stellar nucleosynthesis and other events occurring over the 14 billion years since the birth of the universe in the Big Bang.

And if you ask them who set off the Big Bang, they tell you it was the result of a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum.

And if you ask them who created the vacuum and who wrote the rules that caused this Mother-of-All quantum fluctuations to occur in said vacuum they tell you, um, well, we've not yet worked that out, but obviously it wasn't a being in the form of a man with a gray beard, who set the thing going solely for the purpose of creating Planet Earth and its residents amazingly evolved in the image of the Creator.

So the atheist boasting of their scientific rationality and their evolutionism can tell you nothing whatever about the ultimate origins of the World or, therefore, of humanity. Or as Stephen Hawking wrote in a moment of candor about the physicists' Holy Grail, "the theory of everything," we don't know what it is "that breathes fire into the equations" or why "the universe goes to all the bother of existing."

Which means that for all their scientism, the atheists have no more idea than anyone else about why the universe, or hence humanity, exists. In reality, therefore, the position of the atheists is simply this: they reject as meaningless and worthless rubbish the Bible, the Koran and the Gitas and other Holy writings of the World's religious faiths because they are not founded on science, which as we've just established, has nothing to say about the creation of the world.

But there's no reason for intellectual conceit in rejecting the truth of the Holy books. Obviously, as a literal account of the origin of the World, Genesis is bunk. Equally, as the portrait of an omniscient and benevolent creator, the Old Testament fails totally. On any objective reading of the Bible, Yahweh is a vain, ignorant, sadistic racist. But so what? Who's claiming the Bible represents historical truth, or the morality of America's new religion of Political Correctness? Well some ignorant people exploited by television evangelists may believe the former, and some crackpot liberal Christians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, may try to believe the latter. But any half educated person or reasonable intelligence knows that Holy scripture is neither history nor an old fashioned version of political correctness. Rather, it is a collection of myths, rules of conduct, songs, poetry and words of wisdom that promote group survival and facilitate collaboration among strangers within a faith community. The great religions embody the codes of conduct that created the moral framework within which the World's great civilizations have survived over the course of the last several thousand years.

But atheists, apparently, cannot tolerate the telling of myths, or they hate moral rules, or they have no ear for poetry, or they loath to hear words of wisdom from a former time. More seriously, they fail to grasp, or they seek to deny, that religious narratives are neither historical nor scientific, but simply part of a vital mechanism of social organization. Anti-religious atheism is thus based on the failure to understand two fundamental features of human society; namely, the universality of religious belief, and the necessity of religion as the basis of a society-wide ethical code upon which the prosperity and the survival of a human community depends.

The universality of religion arises from the human propensity to endow moral rules with great emotional significance. This propensity is undoubtedly the result of Darwinian selection. Groups unable to uphold a system of moral rules were wiped out by better adapted groups, which is to say groups more susceptible to religious faith. By exploiting the human susceptibility to religious faith and the moral rules that religion embodies, the institutions of religion imbue all members of a society with the same moral values. It is the sharing of a moral code that ensures social cohesion and provides a basis for collaboration among strangers, rather than merely among immediate relatives and acquaintances as in the pre-civilizational mode of human existence. The importance of myths, music, poetry, prayer, fasting, etc. is that they add to the emotional significance of the moral code that the faith imbues.

In their contribution to the well-being of society, not all religions are equal. Many have failed, their adherents destroyed or converted to other faiths by groups with better religious institutions. Moreover, there is nothing universal about the myths and rituals of religion. God is not necessary to religion as the Communists demonstrated following the Russian revolution. Instead, as in Ancient Rome, people may be expected to worship an all powerful human ruler, a Caligula, a Stalin, or an Obama. In general, however, godless religions serve their adherents poorly. Rome under the divine-emperors became decadent and fell to the barbarians; Communism became decadent and fell to the Americans; and today, the American empire and its vassal states, which in accordance with the godless and supposedly rational religion of Political Correctness are committed to the destruction of their own peoples and cultures through the suppression of reproduction of the native population, the mass killing of the unborn, combined with the promotion of immigration of more fertile aliens of a different race and religion, are both decadent and apparently on the brink of implosion.

So, of course, God, as portrayed in Holy scripture of this or that religious faith, does not exist. But the myth of God the lawgiver still exists for the majority of the World’s population. Moreover it will be those of the more robust, god-fearing religious faiths who will inherit the earth, not the damn fool atheists and their brainwashed politically correct followers who take pride in destroying the religious faith of their own community.