Posts by Kracklite
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to andin,
And most of what he said was waffle not worthy of serious consideration.
My point is that he was prepared to move forward, however mistakenly. Not all theologians are young-earth creationists. Whatever you think of his theology, his paleontological work, particularly in the study of Homo erectus was well-respected.
And in your opinion I havent done that? I find that summary judgement ludicrous.
I am not suggesting that you have not done that, I am emphasising my point that people who have an alternative point of view might have done so too and to be honest, one should ask why first. This topic deserves to be discussed in its nuances, not in broad strokes.
You appear wave your hands in dismissal at any view you don’t like by usually targeting some incidental aspect or association aside from the main point. Maybe it’s simply the implied rule of the blog format that one responds in the briefest way, but your argument style looks shallow and sneering. UNfortunately the clipped form of the media does tend to enforce a kind of brusqueness that may be unintended.
DexterX has been recently bereaved. You don’t have to send flowers, but a dismissal of his argument in such trivialising terms as you did does not win friends and influence people.
Oh get off your high horse would you… Now a lecture on tact, Wow you really do take the cake.
Just a little less cattiness please? I honestly apologised to Lilith for a misunderstanding. I really think we can do without shows of taking offence.
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I can only go by my personal experience,
A lot of cherry-picking and reiteration follows, mostly in the form of pointing and giggling. Other flaws include the argument of the excluded middle.
The claim that people are charitable only within their own religions is demonstrably false if you look worldwide. A friend of mine just spent six years running a charity for people with leprosy in Ethiopia. She didn’t care what faith they practised and din’t try to convert them.
I suggest you broaden your experience, rather than use that as an excuse for narrowing it. I’ve know a lot who do not act in the way that you describe at all.
Moreover, you are depersonalising them, making them one and the same with their institutions. There are no nuances, no appreciation of complexity in your apparent thinking and as a result, you are presenting hollow caricatures to stand for a whole range of people.
I’m sorry that you’ve met unpleasant and silly people, but making sweeping dismissals like “it’s a full on proper delusion” doesn’t show much of the open-mindedness I’d attribute to a liberal person.
In regarding ritual, hymn, liturgy and so forth, for many it is not insincere to go through the motions. Literal belief in the individual words is illogical in many cases, and misses the point. It is the sharing of voice and movement, to establish feeling and concentration, as a mantra frames meditation. If you sing a song, you do not believe the song, but you may want to feel and believe what the song means.
I was reading a while back a book by an anthropologist (Timothy Taylor The Buried Soul FYI) discussing death rituals in a variety of societies, and he looked at what had a couple of decades ago been a very fierce debate, with one side trying to deny completely the existence of institutionalised cannibalism and/or human sacrifice. Those doing the denial (“it only happened in extremes, was only done by crazed individuals, was a fringe activity at best”). In fact, the evidence rapidly accumulated that blew their case out of the water. Cannibalism is and was very widespread and fundamentally ingrained in many cultures for a variety of reasons and the same was true of human sacrifice.
First, they were motivated by the best intentions, but as the author noted, they were trying to strip away the savager” of ancient and extant cultures because cannibalism and/or human sacrifice were “savage”. Now they may be to us, some of whom are vegan, but the fault was that the past had to be rewritten, ostensibly to rehabilitate these people, but in effect, erasing their undesirable characteristics. The subtext, the author commented, was that they could be acceptable to us only on our terms and therefore we had to censor them or convince ourselves to ignore what we did not want to see in order to respect another culture.
Second, as for the consumption of the host, the ritual of saying “this is the blood and the body of christ”, first depends on the Aristotlean separation of form and substance, which is not a part of modern physics obviously, but makes perfect sense on its own terms. Second, it’s a cultural fossil that predates Christianity and is a sublimation of one of the practises for cannibalism, the sharing of the flesh of the illustrious departed among the whole community. As a symbolic activity, it’s no more delusional than the Stanislavsky Method.
Wow, so not all religious people are infinitely stupid sub-humans. Nice argument, for someone who just got done calling mine a straw-man.
You mistake a concluding summary for an argument.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
But evolution itself is not what’s in dispute here, only some of the finer points of its mechanics.
Indeed. In fact, In some commentary I’ve found on that debate, I’ve seen some quite explicit eye-rolling about how things have moved on. Be that as it may, Wilson has been consistently civil and pointed always at the mathematics. His opponents have not.
My problem with sociobiology is that it’s almost always used in a facile way: so much supposed research takes some social norm and works backwards to try and justify it in evolutionary terms… This sort of self-serving nonsense gives social science a bad name
Agreed, absolutely. It’s like my frustration with economics – I’m certain that there’s a phenomenon there, and a theory to describe it, but all too often people leap in with facile postrationalisations. Stephen Jay Gould called a lot of Evo Psych “Just-So Stories”, i.e., tales made up to justify prejudices by what was little more than tautology. In a couple of centuries, we may just have a coherent theory… (actually, I hold less hope for economics).
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to andin,
Thanks Ben & Kracklite you have not enlightened me in the least, but thanks anyway.
You’re welcome. We can agree to disagree. As I find myself saying more often these days, “Ask me in a couple of centuries.”
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to andin,
And how one man lived his life means only something to him and those around him.
Consider “and those around him” if he doesn’t matter to you. It appears to have mattered to those people. Could you consider that?
My observation that religious partisanship makes bad people worse, but I cannot separate the religion from the goodness in good people that I know.
God as fashion consultant! Who knew.
I find that crass and a cheap shot.
It has more to do with an overtly non-anthropomorphic definition of divinity as they see it. What I call “chance” or “providence” they see as “immanent divinity” and they tend to anthropomorphise it in order to articulate their understanding – at least that’s my agnostic view.
I think that I’m probably right, but be that as it may, to get by, I don’t find it necessary to ridicule religious people.
we all know this god thing is a technophobe.
Only if you use a straw man, anthropomorphic caricature of “Old man in a sheet”, but modern theology is far beyond that. Teilhard de Chardin was even beyond anti-Darwinism over half a century ago, so your caricature of theology is irrelevant.
Are people with faith “acceptable targets” for ridicule? Lilith takes her reasoned approach to atheism and consequently her dignity seriously. It took her hard work and serious thought to arrive at her position and I respect her, her seriousness and her integrity for that.
Perhaps you might assume the same right applies to others? You prove my point about SOME self-declared atheists being dicks. If people are going to be sensitive about personal abuse, then perhaps it should be consistent?
Andin, DexterX just went to a funeral. Presumably it was the funeral of a friend or family member. Tact might possibly be appropriate? Maybe? Perhaps?
Which means local religion is a meaningless social clique where membership demands only that no one mention the emperor has no clothes, and even the church officials don’t actually believe in God as anything more than a large common mythological story you can cherry-pick to fill in a sermon.
Tussock, that’s a pretty good example of a straw man argument. Those aren’t the people I know. They’re not insincere, hypocrites, social climbers and cowards and neither are they idiots.
If you’re going to discuss faith, then figure out what faith is first. It’s not just a subscription to a very literal ideology or franchise. It is – as I see it (admittedly as an outsider) - a means of articulating one’s relationship with the cosmos.
I can’t say that I agree, but I try at least to assume that people who think differently from me are not always fools or swine.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Stewart,
extreme religious faith.
Just a note on that - not a criticism, kinda an adjustment or footnote. "Extreme" could be applied to one of the people I mention above who see the hand of God in literally everything, practise their faith arduously, but don't run aloud loudly condemning Godless Darwinism and always seek dialogue. This description fits several of my Christian and Muslim acquaintances and friends. They're people who are quite distinct in attitude and action from a fundamentalist authoritarian like the unlamented Jerry Falwell. The former has a strong belief that could be called "extreme" because it influences every aspect of their lives but it is qualitatively different at a fundamental level from other kinds that get called "extreme" as well. "Pathology" is perhaps useful in discussing dangerous or crooked people (as Falwell was the first and possibly the second and certainly was a hypocrite), but not useful or fair with people who are devout but not compulsively antisocial.
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Except, aha, that it makes a lot of people very angry. :-)
Lilith, I think that ’d really enjoy getting drunk with you. I hope that that doesn’t seem sleazy.
And, FYI, this blogger may interest you. Athena Andreadis is a blogger, feminist and biologist, and as such, sceptic of evo psych.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
You got quotes to back that up?
I’ll point to this. Pay attention to the comments. Several expert commentators point out that Dawkins is not only being excessively emotional, but being a bad scientist in doing so.
There’s also this as an indication of the nature of the fervour.
While not authored by Dawkins, this also in informative as an illustration of certain attitudes.
Now one can say that that is how science works (it’s a myth that it’s a gentleman’s game… except that there is a hell of a lot of ingrained sexism, so yes, it is a "gentleman’s" game)
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
leave the personal abuse out
I wish he would too. Unfortunately he doesn’t, and I’m human enough to think that that matters. His attacks on Edward Wilson are seriously unprofessional.
And evolutionary biology is falsifiable.
I’d like it to be true because it seems logical, but there’s been plenty of criticism of it as being determinist based in very scanty evidence of there being agreement on on how much biology affects human behaviour or the predominance of social organisation – er, “culture” – versus biology.
Anyway, dropping the snark, I agree that – as I said – we’re well-adapted to comprehending the world in a certain way, as evo psych says. Too well, when we start looking beyond the veldt.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Steve Parks,
Hi Steve,
sorry for a late and extremely schematic reply. In fact, it’s a placeholder – I have some major workload issues at the moment.
Um, in no particular order…
Possibly Huxley is my touchstone.
I want to put as much space as possible between myself and self-declared atheists such as Richard Dawkins because (A) he’s acting like a dick and I don’t want to be compared with him and (B) it’s unscientific to make definitive assertions based on information under Empirical strictures, can’t positively prove a negative and blah blah Popper blah blah.
I’m a bit disturbed by the “we believe in what is rationally proven.” “Rational” is a subset of “true”, not its entirety. Coriolanus is “true” as a description and explication of a certain kind of personality but “rational” analysis tells us nothing worthwhile about the play or the person or dramatic character of Caius Martius. Still, I will watch the drama and say to myself, “this is true”. Now only a naive person would not say so, but say “but that’s not what I meant…” We can all agree – I hope – that Coriolanus is true in one way and not other ways, but that is itself significant. “Rational” assessment of facts, data and their significance or utility is not a useful tool for understanding the truth of that drama.
Science, you must remember, is essentially utilitarian, hence its reticence in dealing with imps from the fifth dimension or fairies at the bottom of my garden (or damp, grassy cliff in reality). Rationality, as represented by science has nothing to say about Coriolanus , but to suggest that it should, could or would is absurd… and yet that is surely no indication of the inadequacy of science, instead it’s an assertion of its discipline. It’s truthfulness in the sense that it has discipline.
Oddly, I’m driven very much too by hyper-rationalist writers and philosophers who argue that the brain of a creature well-adapted to the African veldt is not inherently equipped to comprehend the universe as it really is, so that even the most rigorous system of observation and interpretation must be assumed to be merely contingent. That’s not “wrong”, but “best available”.
That’s one angle of it. The other is this. In conversation with my Christian and Muslim acquaintances, I have the impression that their experience of faith is not dependent on being able to see a distinct entity at work in cause and effect (“God exists and he made the world this way”), but as seen by a largely faithless (which is an literal translation of the word “agnostic”) person such as myself as less an expression of empirical belief so much as a way of articulating their understanding of how they sit in the world.
One interpretation of the meaning of “Islam” for example is “submission”, while another is “safety” or “assurance”, which is not assertion, but acceptance. French revolutionaries, while denying the institution of religion (specifically the Catholic religion), used the euphemism “providence” for something that was in effect structurally everything that “God” was, but without the assumption that it was a distinct entity. A Christian friend tells me that God decides what shoes she wears – she doesn’t get emails or texts, but finds that her choices can be found to be open to interpretation not in the immediate utility of her “choice” but in what she was able to derive from it. She might not have been “told” to wear a particular pair of shoes, but she became aware that wearing certain shoes made definite sense one day.
I can’t say that I would agree in any literal way, but I am intrigued by how she is able to function by seeing her choices and consequences of her choices in this way. This is a person who is, in psychoanalytic terms, “high functioning” i.e.., there is no obvious disability. With a record of over a dozen years as a successful aid worker in impoverished parts of the world, I have good reason to take her justifications as at least positive adaptations to her environment. Her epistemology works.
I know that she, as a Christian, believes that there is an distinct God, and I cannot find it in myself to say the same at all, but I would go beyond simply saying that this monkey seems to have adapted well to its environment.
Faith in this context becomes not the belief or assumption that there is a distinct entity but rather an articulation of one’s relationship with a Cosmos (Cosmos in the classical sense meaning a lawful universe). This is something between an existential and an aesthetic stance, not an empirical one.
In practical day-to-day terms, I am always an atheist, but deeply respectful of people who are not atheists. My position could be described as a form of scrupulous reticence, combined with a kind of aestheticism.
I’m sorry if that seems vague and rambling (it’s certainly overlong for a blog), but I insist on ambiguity as a virtue. To quote Yogi Berra, when I see a fork in the road, I take it.