when [Pat] Robertson was asked on ABC's "This Week'' who he thought might make a fine Republican nominee in 2008, he began his answer: "There's an outstanding senator from Kansas ...''Enough said. If Pat Robertson supports this guy for president, all rational people should run like hell the other way.
On this slide, we show a theoretical scheme which several researchers have discovered and used to build simple free energy motors. In this scheme, we drive an ordinary d.c. series motor by a two wire system from an ordinary battery. The motor produces shaft horsepower, at -- say -- some 30 or 40 percent efficiency, compared to the power drained from the battery. This much of the circuit is perfectly ordinary.WTF? Anyway, the technical take-down of all FEDs based on this sort of scheme can be found here by Eric Krieg. Krieg is like the James Randi of "over unity device" skepticism.
The trick here is to get the battery to recharge itself, without furnishing normal power to it, or expending work from the external circuit in the process.
To do this, recall that a charged particle in a "hooking" del-phi river moves itself. This is true for an ion, as well as for an electron. We need only make the del-phi in correct fashion and synchronize it; specifically, we must not release the hose nozzles we utilize to produce our del-phi river or waves.
The inventors who have discovered this have used various variations, but here we show a common one. First, we add an "energizer" (often referred to by various other names) to the circuit. This device makes the del-phi waves we will utilize, but does NOT make currents of electron masses. In other words, it makes pure Ø-dot. It takes a little work to do this, for the energizer circuit must pump a few charges now and then. So the energizer draws a little bit of power from the motor, but not very much.
...not only do media reports coming out of Southern California reveal that the game has received mediocre sales, but a simple look at Left Behind Games Inc (LFBG) stock performance — in the words of DefCon advisory board member and Christian Alliance for Progress director Rev. Tim Simpson “you didn’t think this was a ministry, did you?” — reveals over an 80% drop in the stock’s price since the game was released in November.Sweet. Violent video games "for God" suck.
One-in-five members of Generation Next say they have no religious affiliation or are atheist or agnostic, nearly double the proportion of young people who said that in the late 1980s. And just 4% of Gen Nexters say people in their generation view becoming more spiritual as their most important goal in life.Check out the details here, and some analysis here.
With her unique brand of road-tripping reportage, and driven by an unflagging curiosity and genuine interest in learning about this increasingly influential community, Alexandra Pelosi (whose previous HBO credits include 2000's Emmy®-winning "Journeys with George") embarks on a fast-paced cross-country journey, offering snapshots of a cross-section of evangelical America in Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi.________________
A sassy one-woman show who directs and shoots from the driver's seat, Pelosi ventures out over a year-long period for up-close and personal encounters with some influential members of the evangelical community, from Joel Osteen, the most-watched TV minister in America, to pastor Ron Luce, the founder of "Battle Cry," a concert tour that has drawn more than two million young people to its events nationwide. Pelosi also visits with a spectrum of others who embody a wide range of evangelical experiences, among them visitors at religion-themed parks, a Christian comic, creationist educators, Liberty University students and activists in Washington, D.C.
In her slice-of-life exploration, Pelosi travels to the red states and beyond to meet an array of open and forthright evangelicals who represent a broad sampling of the community. Many are pro-life and against gay marriage, and believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, rebuking Darwinism.
Among them is Pastor Ted Haggard, who recently stepped down as president of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals - the largest evangelical group in the U.S. - following allegations that he had sex with a male prostitute and bought illegal drugs. Before the scandal broke, Haggard welcomed Pelosi to his world, explaining that an evangelical is "a person who believes Jesus is the Son of God, the Bible is the Word of God, and that you must be born again." While mega-churches like his New Life Church in Colorado Springs have replaced the quaint churches of yesteryear, Haggard explains that their sense of community is as strong as ever and this contributes to evangelicals' happy lives.
Says Haggard, "We've settled the issue of eternal life. The Bible is clear about it...we are not afraid of death because of it. We are living in the United States of America; we have representative government; and we have freedom of religion and freedom of the press." He asks, "Why in the world would a person in that environment not be happy?"
During her journey, Pelosi also visits with Rev. Jerry Falwell, leader of The Moral Majority and chancellor and founder of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., who articulates a commitment to change the country and urges his congregation to "vote your values" in elections. "Evangelicals are the largest minority block in this country," he says. "It's not a majority, but I don't think you can win without them. John Kerry learned that. Al Gore learned that. And Hillary will learn that in 2008."
Alexandra Pelosi began her career in TV covering politics in Washington, D.C., and subsequently served as a network news producer for seven years. For her first film, 2000's Emmy®-winning HBO documentary "Journeys with George," she spent 18 months on the campaign trail with future president George Bush. For the 2004 HBO documentary "Diary of a Political Tourist," she spent a year and a half following seven Democratic presidential candidates, including John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean. Pelosi is the daughter of California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who becomes the first female Speaker of the House in history next month.
FRIENDS OF GOD: A ROAD TRIP WITH ALEXANDRA PELOSI was written, directed and produced by Alexandra Pelosi. For HBO: supervising producer, Lisa Heller; executive producer, Sheila Nevins.
sdanielmorgan Says:I thought this long comment worth sharing. I would add that global, unrelenting skepticism falls on its own sword. You can't know what you can't know. But you know that you exist, you know that logic is valid, that 2+2=4...and you cannot make yourself not believe certain things. Plus, the regress problem is typically approached by looking at epistemology -- coherentism and classical foundationalism.
January 24th, 2007 at 1:58 pmI didn’t respond to your later critiques [of Prof. Witmer's paper] due to other priorities at the end of the semester, not out of dejection.
I still haven’t gotten around to sitting down and dealing with a lot of hardcore philosophical issues, because at the moment I’m in the middle of a hardcore chemistry Ph.D. oral candidacy defense. I have, however, made photocopies of some good stuff from Armstrong on universals, including one article called, “Can a Naturalist Believe in Universals?” I also read a book called, “Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?” That lays out a solid case for ethical objectivism and refutes the sort of God-contingent morality you laid out above.
Armstrong’s case I find quite compelling — he argues that particulars have the causal power to “create” universals. His argument is that universals do not have some sort of causal power to instantiate particulars, but vice versa. This really helped me to conceptualize universals a little better (not necessarily that now, I do so quite well) because what plagued me was in imagining something outside of space and time instantiating anything. What is instantiation? An action? A causal connection? How does it interact? This same problem would bother me if these universals were supposedly inside of God’s mind, or whatever. The argument is “Universals arise from particulars, and not the other way around.” And for whatever reason, this is a pill I can better swallow.
It’s a kind of standard issue for any sort of dualism — how do things of different elemental substances interact? How could they cause or affect one another? And these sorts of open-ended questions exist for the theist and the atheist. Saying that, because morality has an intrinsically non-time-space-matter-contingent character (just as logic and mathematical truths and other abstracta do), that this necessitates a Person to nicely “account” for these things.
First, I will tell you that I do not accept the logical validity of any form of relativism or subjectivism. Either good and evil are real properties, just like red and round, or they are not. Our perception of them does not make them so. Neither does God’s. Either logic and mathematical truths and morality constrain the nature of reality (including God’s own definitions), as well as what and who God can be and is, or those things somehow become a contingency of God’s existence, which is not possible. You seem to try to avoid contingency by making a sort of “parallel” argument, but I don’t have the time to deal with it right now.
I will only comment here to say that I don’t buy into “God’s morality” and “man’s morality”. You almost sound like a relativist with such statements. There is only good and evil — transcending personhood. Either moral properties exist, or they do not. Either moral propositions are true, or they are not. They are not made real/true by God’s existence, and virtual/false by God’s nonexistence. Equivalent to, “2+2=4,” so, “Causing harm for fun is evil,” does not depend on God in any way. It is the nature of reality — it is logically necessary…what evil is, and what good is, not what God makes them or what God is.
As Prof. Witmer said in his interview with Gene Cook — it is the nature of what it is to be evil to cause harm for fun. It is a real property of that state of affairs (causing harm for fun). It is the nature of what it is to be good to alleviate suffering whenever possible. In the same way that 2+2=4, it is foundational, self-evident and incorrigible, and it matters not one iota whether God exists or not to make it true. That’s my situation. I stop there. The regress ends there for me.
To me, the sort of person who requires justification for those propositions is the same as the person who says, “But why is blue darker than yellow?” I cannot bring myself to waste time in trying to justify it.
One reason I stopped arguing much with you guys is that you only have one weapon in your arsenal: the one Sextus Empiricus developed long before the days of Jesus — the regress argument. Presuppositionalists want to use the classical regress arguments to destroy the foundation of anyone’s knowledge; excepting, of course, propositions like “God exists,” and “God is all-good, all-powerful…” as valid foundations. But the sort of skepticism you advocate is colored — to the degree you apply it, it undermines the validity of others’ presuppositions. But, you cannot maintain the same degree of global skepticism without self-refuting; turning that skepticism inward on yourself will leave you in the same boat as me.
I haven’t dealt with epistemology as I plan to — I have had one presuppositionalist recommend the book, “Longing to Know” to me as a good one to start out with as a primer on Christian views on epistemic problems. I take certain beliefs for granted, and I would argue strongly that others do too, for the simple reason that they are justified by my own experience and their intuitive, self-evident quality.
For me, armchair philosophy is a hobby, and I really do enjoy it. But, I lose myself sometimes in it, and neglect other things (like getting my Ph.D. finished). It is very hard to be very good at chemistry and at philosophy. Maybe some people can do it; perhaps they have more brilliance or time, or both, than I do.
Anyway, for me this is a sort of process, not some search for a “magic bullet” argument to convince me about God one way or the other. The problem of evil is the single argument that I think renders theism irrational; I would be agnostic if it weren’t for the PoE. If I could find a real solution to it, I’d drop back to agnosticism, rather than believing that the conception of God as all-good and all-powerful is illogical, given the existence of evil. Anyway, I miss our chats, but I also enjoy my newfound productivity. One day, I’ll really try to get around to your latter responses to Prof. Witmer.
I like the new look of the blog.
Best,
D
10 years for 'Dr. Dino'Sorry you pathetic con man, but "thousands" of suckers can't bail you out this time by sending you checks.
Michael Stewart
mstewart@pnj.com
Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on charges of tax fraud.
After a lengthy sentencing hearing that last 5 1/2 hours, U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:
-- Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.
-- Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078.
-- Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.
Hovind’s wife, Jo Hovind, also was scheduled to be sentenced. Rodgers postponed her sentencing until March 1 to allow her defense attorney an opportunity to argue possible discrepancies in sentencing guidelines.
Prior to his sentencing, a tearful Kent Hovind, also known as "Dr. Dino" asked for the court’s leniency.
“If it’s just money the IRS wants, there are thousands of people out there who will help pay the money they want so I can go back out there and preach,” Hovind said.
Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, was found guilty in November of 58 federal counts, including failure to pay $845,000 in employee-related taxes. He faced a maximum of 288 years in prison.
Jo Hovind was charged and convicted in 44 of the counts involving evading bank-reporting requirements and faces a maximum of 225 years in prison.
Kent Hovind, who is incarcerated in the Escambia County Jail, will be assigned to a prison by the Bureau of Prisons. Rodgers recommended Kent Hovind be sent to the prison at Saufley Field in Pensacola so he will be close to his family.
It will be up to the Bureau of Prisons, however, to make that determination.
Horgan: Many people have a hard time believing in God because of the problem of evil. If God loves us, why is life filled with so much suffering?Collins ignores the fact that some suffering brings about no "learning" whatsoever -- suffering that leads to death, animal suffering, senseless random acts of natural disaster...and that this sort of pain and suffering would lead many to learn that this is evidence of either: i) a callous God, ii) a weak God, or iii) a non-existent one.
Collins: That is the most fundamental question that all seekers have to wrestle with. First of all, if our ultimate goal is to grow, learn, and discover things about ourselves and things about God, then unfortunately a life of ease is probably not the way to get there. I know I have learned very little about myself or God when everything is going well. Also, a lot of the pain and suffering in the world we cannot lay at God's feet. God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.
Horgan: Physicist Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist, asks why six million Jews, including his relatives, had to die in the Holocaust so that the Nazis could exercise their free will.Collins ends with the very sticky open question for believers. It isn't just a matter of "having enough trust"; it is a logical question of how one can reconcile the notion of God's goodness with the notion of natural evils.
Collins: If God had to intervene miraculously every time one of us chose to do something evil, it would be a very strange, chaotic, unpredictable world. Free will leads to people doing terrible things to each other. Innocent people die as a result. You can't blame anyone except the evildoers for that. So that's not God's fault. The harder question is when suffering seems to have come about through no human ill action. A child with cancer, a natural disaster, a tornado or tsunami. Why would God not prevent those things from happening?
Horgan: Some philosophers, such as Charles Hartshorne, have suggested that maybe God isn't fully in control of his creation. The poet Annie Dillard expresses this idea in her phrase "God the semi-competent."There could indeed be. But, what would Collins have to do to the term "all-good" and "all-powerful" in order to allow for these sorts of reasons?
Collins: That's delightful—and probably blasphemous! An alternative is the notion of God being outside of nature and time and having a perspective of our blink-of-an-eye existence that goes both far back and far forward. In some admittedly metaphysical way, that allows me to say that the meaning of suffering may not always be apparent to me. There can be reasons for terrible things happening that I cannot know.
P1) The gods either can take away evil from the world and will notThe only rational answer is -- all-powerful and all-good gods do not exist. And, if some other form or version of God exists: say, a weak one; or a morally ambivalent one...then does it deserve our acknowledgment, respect, or adoration? No. Could we be morally obligated to a God which has less compassion than we do? Less power to prevent evil? After all, we are the ones being forced to cure cancer and eradicate starvation.
P2) or, being willing to do so [take away evil from the world] cannot
P3) or, they [gods] neither can nor will [take away evil from the world]
P4) or, they are both able and willing [to take away evil from the world].
C1) If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. (if P2)
C2) If they can, but will not, then they are not omnibenevolent. (if P1)
C3) If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. (if P3)
C4) Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist? (this is a reductio ad absurdum for P4)
Asked to rate how important an array of different goals was to them personally, the biggest group of 2004 Berkeley freshmen chose "raising a family" as essential or very important, 70.9%. That's just a few percentage points less than the 2003 national average: 74.8% of all U.S. freshmen felt similarly about raising a family.It is thus easy to make hasty generalizations about what liberalization, or gay marriage, impact in terms of our culture. However, it seems that liberal, conservative, straight and gay all experience the same humanity, with its desire to engage in loving, committed relationships and raise children. If that part of the equation were focused on a bit more, perhaps we'd all bicker a bit less.
November 7, 2006I think this lack of social networking may be a problem in some geographies and some socioeconomic classes. One would think, though, that is this were some panacea for marriage, that churchgoers would be significantly less likely to divorce, since much social networking occurs at church. But, Barna has shown this not to be the case.
Too Close for Comfort
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Olympia, Wash.
EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”
I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.
A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.
In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.
The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.
St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”
From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.
The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.
By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.
The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.
But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.
“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”
And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.
Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.
This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.
As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.
The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.
Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedigree.
Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”
Anyone who claims to have prescience regarding the future state of man, or the overall effect of religion upon man, would have a heavy burden of evidence to bear.wlotter thoughtfully responded (1/12, 12:25 PM):
I have long wrestled with the idea that religion is entirely bad for mankind. I am not sure that this proposition is true.
I am sure that fundamentalist dogmatism, and especially that which conflicts with scientific knowledge, is dangerous for the progress of mankind. However, part of that very progress is the peaceful spreading of knowledge through education, and not forcing "conversions" or "deconversions" upon people, or ever erecting a state which enforces any sort of religion or irreligion. Freedom of religion is part of our progress. States like the USSR, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, etc., etc., show us the danger of [tyrannical] fascism that attempts to strip from [by force] people the freedom to express and practice religion.
I've commented more on this at length. I have begun to consider that some sorts of religion, and some of its rituals and beliefs, may serve as a sort of "placeholder" for many people who do not have the interest or rigor to critically and seriously examine (exhaustively) philosophical arguments. At some point, the placeholder may be rightfully usurped by the person's own acquisition of beliefs -- rather than inheriting and swallowing wholesale the prepackaged orthodoxy. However, people must have beliefs about morality, and value. If they cannot be bothered to consider, as one alternative, the existential arguments concerning man's freedom to transcend and determine value, or the arguments of virtue theories of ethics, or of utilitarianism...then what will they consider? Is it possible for humans to exist in a sort of vacuum of beliefs? No.
From whence cometh their beliefs? Parents. Schools. Experience.
Some religions would provide a better set of beliefs than some of these 3 sources. For instance, I think that Buddhism would confer and prescribe a better way to live than a child reared in North Korea and educated (indoctrinated) by its schools and their "Great Leader". Ditto with some religious fundamentalism.
Religions have, by time and necessity, evolved. They have dropped off the more primitive aspects (ie blood sacrifices) and adopted humanistic aspects (ie altruism and charity). Therefore, much good comes in the package. Much that intersects with rational thinking can be found in the box that is orthodox religion.
And therefore, I have a hard time feeling the same sort of impetus to deconvert the masses that, say, Sam Harris or Dawkins do. I find myself too skeptical to paint with so wide a brush. However, I do wish that those persons who hold specific religious beliefs that I consider detrimental to progress [and to the person's own mental health] would give an ear and some credence to the arguments against those beliefs. I am frightened by anti-intellectualism, which runs rampant in some religious circles. And that is what compels me to argue against those topics that I do.
nsfl,To which I retorted (as Nelly Furtado, 1/12, 4:21 PM):
You speak often about the "progress of mankind". I am assuming of course that you imply progression towards a somewhat absolute 'scientific' and 'moral' framework shared by all mankind resulting in a utopic existence? And what would that look like? (Or at least a favorable transient step?).
Realistically for you ( personally), meaning of life can only be derived from your interpretation of the progression itself and the part you play/played. (Regardless of how many scientific 'facts' you have within your grasp.)
I wonder if this is less illusionary than a Christian's quest for heaven?
And I am sure you would say would say that a Christian's meaning is derived from a set of myths that they believe.
I wonder sometimes if deep down we are all just searching for heaven. And if we are, why?
You speak often about the "progress of mankind". I am assuming of course that you imply progression towards a somewhat absolute 'scientific' and 'moral' framework shared by all mankind resulting in a utopic existence? And what would that look like? (Or at least a favorable transient step?).I have more thoughts along those lines, and some very general ideas on existentialism, and Sisyphus, in this post.
I like the way Richard Taylor has illustrated aspects of Sisyphus to point out that, even if no cosmic meaning exists, or no objective measure by which to measure progress or significance, we cannot deny that value has intrinsically subjective character. I think this applies well to your question. Let us assume that when the sun expands to swallow the earth, that this is the end of mankind. Does that render the value I have for my own life nonexistent? No. It only renders it cosmically and objectively insignificant.
I have no vision of utopia. Progress may be an end in itself.
Realistically for you ( personally), meaning of life can only be derived from your interpretation of the progression itself and the part you play/played. (Regardless of how many scientific 'facts' you have within your grasp.)
My meaning can be derived from whatever I find valuable -- from the happiness of my spouse to the rolling of my rock up a hill.
I wonder if this is less illusionary than a Christian's quest for heaven?
Perhaps not, in the ultimate sense. Perhaps we are all just shadows and dust, in the cosmic sense, striving against the unstoppable wind which scatters us abroad. But what ought we do? Find no beauty? Find no meaning? Have no values? It is impossible to do otherwise.
And I am sure you would say would say that a Christian's meaning is derived from a set of myths that they believe.
Some. Most of a Christian's meaning is derived from their sense of self and family, much of which is based on experience and reality. So long as the believer thinks that God is happy with them, this equates to their being a good person, and being "on the right path". This gives them the same sort of tranquility that I have in being on that same "right path" and in being "a good person". Myths are not necessarily false, as they can illustrate truths.
I wonder sometimes if deep down we are all just searching for heaven. And if we are, why?
Death is too much for our self-awareness to bear. Futility leads to despair. And that is why every culture throughout history invented religions and religious myths. Neandertals have even been found with the evidence of death rites and rituals at their gravesites.
"I like the way Richard Taylor has illustrated aspects of Sisyphus to point out that, even if no cosmic meaning exists, or no objective measure by which to measure progress or significance, we cannot deny that value has intrinsically subjective character. I think this applies well to your question. Let us assume that when the sun expands to swallow the earth, that this is the end of mankind. Does that render the value I have for my own life nonexistent? No. It only renders it cosmically and objectively insignificant."I called him on it (as Boy George, 1/12, 6:53 PM):
So you subjectively assign value to your life, even though there objectively is none.
Thanks for the admission.
Atheists choose to ignore reality and invent stories for themselves.
But then they complain that Christians invent religion and ignore the scientific finding of "the real world."
At any rate, since it's subjective then there's nothing objectively wrong with the child molester who subjectively assigns his life the value and purpose of "lover of children."
Paul,Paul (1/12, 8:18 PM):
As usual, you commit a non sequitur as you leap from ones sense of self-purpose to the issues surrounding moral duties, obligations, and properties.
I don't feel like chasing off after that red herring. I've had my say.
Boy George,Me again (as Boy George, 1/13, 3:55 AM)
No, I simply said that a child molester could assign the subjective value to his life that he chose to.
You'll note that I said there was nothing objectively wrong with him assigning subjective value to his life.
I never said that the act itself wasn't wrong, just the assignment of value, which the above commenter said in his post.
So, as usual, you forget to even apply critical reading skills to just a few sentences a theist writes, let alone an entire book.
But, to take it further, given the atheist that I responded to, I don't see how any "objective morals" could exist. Remember, he said,
"no cosmic meaning exists, or no objective measure by which to measure progress or significance"
And given this outlook, one would have a defeater for all his beliefs, including his ethical ones. So, even though I'm not guilty if the crime yoiu accuse me of, I wouldn't have been even if I did what you said.
Now, I could go off on a tangent about how careless internet atheists seem to be these days, but I don't feel like chasing that.
I've had my say.
best,
~PM
Paul's last response at the Tblog (1/13, 8:47 AM)Paul,
Actually, she said:
"...even if no cosmic meaning exists, or no objective measure by which to measure progress or significance..."
Very convenient of you to have left off the boldened part.
I didn't need that part in ther Boy George because my point has to do with there actually being no cosmic value and meaning.Then things move to Dusman's blog, following his reply to Paul's post, I wrote:
My point was, *given the view* that meaning and value is subjectively assigned, then what's the problem wioth a molester assigning himself the value of "lover of children?"
So, the "even if" did not affect my point.
Now, if you want to say that there possibily *is* cosmic value and meaning, that is objective, well now we're back to the other problem.
Or, if you just want to remain *agnostic* about our origens, our purpose, etc., then as I said above, you have a defeater for all your beliefs.
glad I could help,
~PM
Isn't it a bit silly to compare the two "camps", since one claims supernatural powers of prescience and the other doesn't?Dusman responded (4:24 PM):
Greetings to our church blog Mr. Morgan!And Paul rejoined (7:21 PM):
Now, to answer your question, I'd say no. This is because (1) Paul Manata never claimed to have supernatural powers of prescience, and (2) since he wrote the article with a different intention than that which you've seemingly superimposed upon it, your above comment which was obviously designed to show that he is making a category error is simply unsubstantiated. Take care and I appreciate you taking the time to post.
nsfl,To which I replied (6:45 AM):
Isn't it a bit silly to be a member of a camp that doesn't claim supernatural powers of prescience, uet still make prophetic predictions? If you have no business predicting future events, then don't do it! So, your post serves to undermine the friends in your "camp."
Anyway, you missed the relevant point of comparison, as Dusman points (literally as well, look at his picture!) out.
I find it odd that you'd be sticking up for a "camp" that has made the predictions I docummented for hundreds of years. I mean, since when does being an atheist give you freedom to just wildly assert things about the future, especially when the assertions consistently fail to come true.
Now, you can think in agreement with the atheists prophets of doom, and predict that Christianity will end once people read a few more science books, but, using induction, it appears that those claims won't be coming true.
Dusman,Paul shot back (2:57 PM):
(1) No, he didn't, but the belief system of Christianity holds within it the intrinsic capability to interpret prophetic, divine, and therefore true accounts of the future. Atheists have no parallel source to go to in order to try to fit the vision of prophecy over the picture of present events.
(2) Paul wanted to point out that people have been wrong about the demise of religion. He's right. It's just silly, though, to compare Christian eschatology [claimed as divinely inspired] to atheist eschatology [admittedly fallible].
Paul,
Every human being bets on the future with each decision they make: you call football games before they're played, you don't enroll in college without the belief that you will complete it, etc., etc. We humans have the capacity to imagine the future, and therefore, we often make predictions.
I mean, since when does being an atheist give you freedom to just wildly assert things about the future, especially when the assertions consistently fail to come true.
I don't quite understand this. Are you claiming that we are not all free to make predictions, if we so choose? Now, the question of taking our predictions seriously, or gaining prestige and authority in the area, is another matter entirely. However, stock market gurus do exist. Certain people seem to be very good at predicting the future (in limited respects). Are you saying that they shouldn't attempt to do so, for their own benefit (and that of others)?
I don't claim to belong to a "camp" of any sort. I certainly share beliefs with other people, just as you do with other people. But I think just as you would distance yourself from, say, the Catholic view of birth control [perhaps], so I would separate myself from anyone who claims to know the future with any degree of certainty.
Was or was not your intent to show that people were wrong in predicting the demise of religion? If so, then you accomplished that, and I agree with you on it. Which leads to the next point:
Now, you can think in agreement with the atheists prophets of doom, and predict that Christianity will end once people read a few more science books, but, using induction, it appears that those claims won't be coming true.
I wrote:
"If people agree that the scientific method establishes knowledge, and that faith is not knowledge, then the bifurcation of science and religion is a deep and meaningful issue. If faith has not suffered, it has certainly adapted as knowledge has been established to contradict the teachings and interpretations of the Bible. Admittedly, theists may always claim that the contradiction lies in the interpretation of their Scriptures, and not in the Scriptures themselves, but the effect of marginalization of faith via scientific progress is a real phenomenon that I think modern theists are quite well-aware of."
Do you agree or disagree that the establishment of knowledge via science (or at least, the belief in this knowledge) has diminished, in some respects, people's reliance upon the Bible? I'm not claiming here that some people don't take the Bible's authority (or belief thereof) over that of scientific evidence. But you must admit that science has forever changed the landscape of Christianity.
I don't think Christianity will die off from science. I think it will continue to evolve. Just as it has for thousands of years.
Around 1 billion (or more) Christians accept many scientific theories that you (and many others) reject, for example. That is a huge impact on the body, is it not?
And, the secularization of Europe is something the Pope has candidly admitted as of late. The global trend of secularization is that modern, technologically-advanced societies are trending that way (with the USA as a stubborn slow holdout), while the 3rd world is expanding in religious belief as Communism fell and missionary efforts have redoubled there: esp. Africa and India.
I think modernization and science don't spell "doom" for Xians or religion in general, but spell "change".
Hi nsfl,My last comment (written 1/17/07, don't know when Dusman will allow it to be posted); Paul words in italics:
So when Bertrand Russell, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, et al. predict the end of faith they're just doing the philosophers equivalent of "calling football" games?
Couldn't have said it better myself. And here we thought the atheological minds that the public hears the most from were actually trying to use reason.
Bottom line: My post pointed out that atheists have their own embarrassing prophets to silence. Before you go picking on Christians, clean up your own back yard. from my perspective, it's pretty messy.
So when Bertrand Russell, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, et al. predict the end of faith they're just doing the philosophers equivalent of "calling football" games?I thought the conversation worth sharing. I hope you agree. Please feel free to comment if you agree, disagree, or anything in between!
Yes, basically.
Couldn't have said it better myself. And here we thought the atheological minds that the public hears the most from were actually trying to use reason.
They are. Just like you do when you call a football game. And my analogy may be a little better than I thought: when you use your brain to calculate probabilities and compare stats, you use reason in calling the game; but, your evaluation will always be a little skewed towards the team you (identify with) like the most. It's hard to be impartial in matters of football or religion, isn't it?
Bottom line: My post pointed out that atheists have their own embarrassing prophets to silence.
I disagree with the concept of silencing people. I disagree with the concept that people aren't free to predict the future all they want. If they garner support for their "prophecies", I think it's absurd. But, just as they are free to do this, so people are free to take their prescient powers seriously. I do not.
Before you go picking on Christians, clean up your own back yard. from my perspective, it's pretty messy.
Perhaps the better way to put it is to say: "If you're really freethinkers, do you need a shepherd around to tell you what the future will be like, or can you judge her/his words and think for yourselves?" I don't have the right or obligation to "silence" anyone, but I could try to persuade persons whom I think put way way way too much stock in, say, Dawkins.
Anyway, I understand your point, but I still think you're trying to parallel two orthogonal lines: you can't compare religion with non-religion in this way, when there is no meaningful basis for comparison of the two camps' self-styled "prophets". People [stupid ones] really believe that Pat Robertson hears from God; no one thinks that of Dennett. Therefore, no one thinks that Dennett has to be right...contrariwise...
Thanks for the civil exchange.
Well, nsfl, people's hearts get the best of them when they "call" football games. I still like the analogy. In fact, it's even closer than we thought. Here we have a bunch of emotional atheists rooting with their heart and not their head. I did that, but the Chargers still lost! I mean, you may think they're applying reason, but if I picked the wrong team for the past few hundred years, I think you'd say that my emotions are getting the best of me. I mean, would you listen to a Vegas Line on the odds is they had been wrong for hundreds of years. No, he'd get fired. And so ther best thing for you guys to do is fire the emotion driven atheists (Dennett, Bawkins, Harris, et al)., and find a new odds maker.Paul basically repeated what I said in a much earlier comment -- that I laugh at people who take anyone's claims to prescience seriously. Thus I can't/don't have to "fire" anyone, since I never employed them to do my thinking or analysis for me. And I'll admit that when it comes to being in a "camp" with others of like mind, it is quite possible to be driven by emotion to defend a fellow camper's position before thinking it through clearly. Thus, I'll admit that many people, me included, may rush to propose something, or defend something, on the basis of emotion alone without considering the merits of the argument. In the case of "predictions/prophecies", this is clearly often the case. But, since I don't typically refer to any of these fellows as idols of mine, and since I have actually distanced myself from two of them (esp. Dawkins), you may not be able to paint me with this broad brush.
I can parallel the two because I think atheism is just as religiously driven and motivated as Christianity is. And, two, I'm comparing the goofballs in our camp with the goofballs in your camp. A wrong prediction is a wrong prediction, no matter which way you slice it. If we're getting mocked, you're getting mocked.
