Sunday, July 05, 2009
Paul Begala: Sarah Palin Turns Pro
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Summer reading: Killer thrillers | Salon Books
Carrie Fisher, "Wishful Drinking" | Salon Books
Friday, July 03, 2009
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Part of Sarah Palin's irresistible appeal to her fundamentalist base is her ability to look at the camera with utter conviction and declare black to be white.
The ability to lie well is a valuable part of the fundamentalist psychology. My son isn't gay, he just hasn't found the right woman! Those rocks aren't 50 million years old, they just look like it as a test of our faith! My sexless marriage isn't foundering, it is filled with God's spirit! The minister isn't molesting little Maria, they're just very close! It isn't torture, it is being tough on terrorists!
Fundamentalists can recognize a truly audacious and talented liar from miles away. Instead of running the other way, as you might expect, they gather around the powerful liar, for they know that their own lies will be respected and protected by a leader who understands the paramount importance of preserving their whole system of denial.
Science, religion and our shared future | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
which is an unknowing,
it is the way of transparent knowing,
it is the way of unselfconsciousness.
When you learn this,
you can learn everything,
and return to everything,
and praise everything'
translation: if you forget the things you know based on evidence, you will be able to believe in anything, and it will give you the illusion of knowing everything."
Resp:
And if you don't understand the point Eckhart was making about 'transformed knowledge' being an 'unknowing', then it might be a good idea to actually study Eckhart seriously. And I would also point you to the sources of information that I suggested to Foolfodder. Once you've got a good grasp of the subject matter then you might actually be in a position to debate it seriously.
I wouldn't dare to rubbish the fundamental tenets of mathematics or physics because quite frankly my understanding of it is limited. But you feel that it is perfectly valid to throw around cynical, ignorant comments about things you clearly don't grasp.
Quotations
Martha Nussbaum
--Cultivating Humanity"
About Butterflies and Wheels
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
how accommodating can you get? « weird things
The conflict between the two spheres happens when scientists discover something that contradicts religious dogma and the people who rigidly follow their holy texts mount a campaign to defend their worldview from the new information. Do you honestly think that fundamentalists are interested in broadening their horizons when their primary concern is to make sure everyone around them does as they say? In the supposed war between science and religion, the actual facts take a back seat. Rather, the debate is about whether we could pick and choose our personal worldview regardless of the facts. Creationists aren’t mad because they did a study that found major contradictions in evolutionary biology. They’re mad because scientists dare to tell the world about evolution and use facts they passionately want to ignore to teach this knowledge in schools.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Stephen Jay Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," 1997
I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectua] grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth ...
The Censorship Canard, Again | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
I’d be happy to defend the position that science has plenty to tell us about how our actual behavior actually affects other people and ourselves. And how science can help us peer into moral gray areas. And tell us about how we make moral judgments in reality, and how that might contrast with how we think we should be making moral judgments. And how are supposed values line up with how the world actually is. And how knowing how the world actually is can help us make better value judgments, and help set priorities among competing values, and how realistic or arbitrary our values are, and so on."
Metamagician and the Hellfire Club
Seeing and Believing
Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature. There was a time when God was a part of science. Newton thought that his research on physics helped clarify God's celestial plan. So did Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised our current scheme for organizing species. But over centuries of research we have learned that the idea "God did it" has never advanced our understanding of nature an iota, and that is why we abandoned it. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Laplace presented Napoleon with a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the Mechanique Celeste. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon taunted him, "Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace answered, famously and brusquely: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la," "I have had no need of that hypothesis." And scientists have not needed it since.
...
Perhaps what we mean by "religious truths" are "moral truths," such as "Thou shalt not commit adultery." These rules are not subject to empirical testing, but they do comport with our reasoned sense of right and wrong. But for almost every "truth" such as this there is another one believed with equal sincerity, such as "Those who commit adultery should be stoned to death." This dictum appears not only in Islamic religious law, but in the Old Testament as well. (It seems wrong, by the way, to call these truths religious. Beginning with Plato, philosophers have argued convincingly that our ethics come not from religion, but from a secular morality that develops in intelligent, socially interacting creatures, and is simply inserted into religion for convenient citation.)
In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species.Saturday, June 27, 2009
Pharyngula
..
Religion, on the other hand, uses a different body of techniques to explain the nature of the universe. It uses tradition and dogma and authority and revelation, and a detailed legalistic analysis of source texts, to dictate what the nature of reality should be. It's always wrong, from an empirical perspective, although I do have to credit theologians with some of the most amazingly intricate logical exercises as they try to justify their conclusions. The end result of all of this kind of clever wankery, though, is that some people say the world is 6000 years old, that it was inundated with a global flood 4000 years ago, and other people say something completely different, and there is no way within the body of theology to resolve which answers are right. They have to step outside their narrow domain to get an independent confirmation — that is, they rely on science to give them the answers to the Big Questions in which they purport to have expertise.
Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends | Brain Blogger
The Philosophy of Science: Some Verifiable Rational Considerations of Reality
Why A Low Calorie Diet Extends Lifespans: Critical Enzyme Pair Identified
First Image of a Memory Being Made | LiveScience
Friday, June 26, 2009
Sun CTO douses own cloud in cold water • The Register
'I'll pour a little bit of cloud water on this,' Papadopoulos said at the cloud-obsessed Structure 09 conference in San Francisco, California, on Thursday. 'It's generally really hard and expensive and often unwise to be moving your legacy pieces over into something new in computing like this, unless you can really demonstrate what the advantages are."
New chips don't deliver, Facebook says | ITworld
Why Do Atheists Have to Talk About Atheism? | | AlterNet
Obviously, we think it's a mistaken hypothesis: inconsistent with itself, inconsistent with reality, unsupported by any good evidence"
More on accomodationism : Thoughts from Kansas
..
The methods of ascertaining “truth” via faith are either revelation or acceptance of dogma. These methods have produced “truths” like a 6,000-year-old Earth and the Great Flood. Not a very good track record. In fact, I have yet to find a single truth about humans, Earth, or the universe that has come uniquely from faith.
Brain mechanisms of hypnotic paralysis : Neurophilosophy
The Theory of Abominable Befuddlement « The Sensuous Curmudgeon
..
The brain of a creationist is so scrambled that it cannot be the result of natural processes. The Theory of Abominable Befuddlement (AB) holds that certain features of the creationist brain are best explained by an Abominable Befuddler, and not by evolution. It follows as a corollary that ID is the work of AB.
..
Using this creationist-approved method of investigation, a befuddlement theorist studies the output of creationists, and thus is able to determine whether it is the rational product of an evolved brain, or an example of befuddlement.
ScienceDirect - Applied Animal Behaviour Science : Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors
10 Barbecue Restaurants Recommended By Bon Appetit - Travel Getaways News Story - WEWS Cleveland
Denim and Tweed: No room for group selection in disease evolution?
..
trade-off between transmission and virulence [PDF]. Simply put, if it's easy for a disease-causing critter to spread through a host population, it tends to do more damage to its hosts; and if it is less easy to spread,
...
Kin selection takes into account the effect of natural selection on not just the copies of an individual's genes within that individual's body, but also the copies borne by close relatives; if you're a parasite that reproduces inside your host, making more offspring also means making more competitors for your offspring, and thereby reducing the fitness of the genes that you share with the next generation. So, unless it's easy to disperse to new resources -- uninfected hosts -- natural selection can actually favor prudent reproduction by a parasite, which keeps the host alive longer.

