The Religious FreedomTo Persecute

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/mississippi-wedding-venue-refuses-to-rent-to-engaged-interracial-couple-because-the-owners-say-its-against-our-christian-beliefs-to-do-mixed-race-and-gay-weddings/ar-AAGEPUL

ME:  We knew this was coming. Conservative Christianity is an now an excuse to break the law and deny people their human rights. Thank you Republican Party.  Back when Ronald Reagan was president I referred to Republican Party as the New World Hezbollah, the American Party of God.

     I was predicting the future more than describing the current reality at that time. And I was right.

S:  Uh oh. Shades of Hitler.  Many of Germany’s 30,000 Roma (Gypsies) were eventually sterilized and prohibited, along with Blacks, from intermarrying with Germans. About 500 children of mixed African-German backgrounds were also sterilized. New laws combined traditional prejudices with the racism of the Nazis.

ME:  We must remember that from the very beginning many have pointed out it’s not make America great again, it’s make America white again.

S:  True, true, true.

S:  Another consequence of Hitler’s ruthless dictatorship in the 1930s was the arrest of political opponents and trade unionists and others whom the Nazis labeled “undesirables” and “enemies of the state.” The mere denunciation of a man as “homosexual” could result in arrest, trial, and conviction. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who numbered at least 25,000 in Germany, were banned as an organization as early as April 1933, because the beliefs of this religious group prohibited them from swearing any oath to the state or serving in the German military.

ME:  Auschwitz was started as a camp for political prisoners, including journalists, who, of course, were enemies of the people.

S:  Could it happen here?

ME:  Not by that incompetent dolt, Trump. 

     Just as back in the days of Ronald Reagan I was seeing where the Republican Party was headed and was deeply worried about it, I can see that as Reagan laid the groundwork for what’s happening today, what Trump is doing today is laying the groundwork for what could very well be the turning of the United States into a fascist-theocratic dictatorship.  Back then I was saying the danger was of these fundamentalists turning America into a Third World country, just as they did to China, just as they did to the great Islamic empire. These once technological and cultural leaders of the world degenerated once they turned inward and began believing in their own superiority and purity and the fundamentalist beliefs of their religions.  Science is not at war with religion, with the exception of a few fundamentalist evangelical atheists. Neither is religion at war with science, except for a few fundamentalist evangelical Christians.  

     In spite of the minority status,they are a very powerful group in the United States.  Courts are being packed all across the country up to the Supreme Court with ultra conservative judges who believe in their theology. Elections are being rigged in favor of the ultra conservative and religious fanatics. And behind it all, of course, are the ultra wealthy. Those who wish to turn us into Mexico — a tiny ruling class of the Dons  and all the rest of us their peons, barely more than an other herd of cattle or sheep for them to exploit.

     I knew then that I was regarded back then by many as being foolish and extreme in making this prediction, but time has borne me out.

     There are times you really don’t want to be right. Even when you are certain that you are.

On Abiogenisis And Creationism

Philosophers comprise a group in which I feel I belong. Having said that, It should be noted that I think that not all philosophers were terribly wise. In fact, I must conclude that a great many were willfully, and quite deliberately, self-deluded. One can only conclude that they are, after all, merely human.

For example:

"Let's say you're walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn't think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too."

So declared William Paley in one of the most famous procreationist arguments in all of human history.  These words are used again and again today, indeed, ad nauseam,as an acid test, an undeniable proof that abiogenesis and evolution could not possibly be correct, that science itself must be merely a religion -- and a foolish one at that.

But it should be noted that Mr. Paley missed a few points. This is what he should have said:

"If you're walking along and see a watch, you know it must have had a creator. Looking how complicated it is! See how it has exactingly machined parts...it had to be carefully manufactured. This is especially confirmed when you see the watch having sex with a female watch. Then, when she has a litter of little baby watches, you see how they are preyed upon by…Grandfather clocks? Only a few of them survive…Oh, that's right. Living things are very, very different from watches."

 How odd that  Mr. Paley never noticed these details.

William Paley was an idiot.

After thoughts on creationism.

I know I can be quite sharp, even acerbic, in my criticisms of creationists, but it should be noted that what I am primarily opposing is the hypocrisy, intellectual deceit, and spiritual failures of so many in that community.

Again and again one is presented with an endless series of individuals who first proclaim that the one and only test of truth is the Bible. Then they proceed to torture, chop up, and superglue together a hideous Frankenstein Monster of “evidence” and “facts” to support their positions.  The resulting creation is so pitiful that it cannot even be brought to life. It can only lie there and rot.

I've listed three points that I find particularly offensive; hypocrisy, intellectual deceit, and spiritual failure. I will take a look at each one of these individually.

Hypocrisy.  

We are presented time and again with a declaration that the only the test of truth which is acceptable is absolute faith in the Bible. Blind, unquestioning faith in the Bible. Then the individual attempts to create a whole network of physical evidence to support their supposedly faith based position.  

Epistemology is a philosophic term which relates to the nature of human knowledge. That is to say, what can we humans know, and how can we know it? If your epistemology is faith, then it is faith which is relevant to any discussion. The facts are irrelevant.  Either your faith is complete and sufficient or it isn’t.  This both begins and ends any and all discussions. You have declared that the truth has been revealed to you by a higher authority, that you accept that, and that is all there is to say.  

To add a series of complicated and deeply flawed arguments regarding objective reality to this argument is to say that you lied, and were in fact being profoundly hypocritical, when you said that faith was all that mattered.

Intellectual deceit.

The supposed facts and evidences which are presented are ludicrous, when they are or are not outright lies and deliberate falsehoods.  Endless ridiculous exaggerations and other distortions of what scientists and students of science actually believe constitute a mainstay of creationist apologists.  One particular extreme individual reported on his website that Darwin thought that men and women lived side-by-side as separate species for millions of years before they finally evolved sex. He declared “Darwinists” thought that men and women prior to that reproduced by fission.  When this error was pointed out to him in no uncertain  terms by a critic, he pulled that statement off his website and then posted another one declaring “Darwinists” believe that elephant males and females had lived for millions of years… Etc. etc.

Maliciously and deliberately misstating your opponents’ positions in order to make your opponent sound ridiculous is intellectual dishonesty in its most blatant form.  There are many more examples of deliberate lies and deceit spread by these individuals, but I don’t care to go into them in great length at this point. If you are interested go to YouTube, type in creationists and debunkers, and you will find an amazing list which is stunning in its breadth.

Spiritual failure.

This may sound identical to the first point, but it differs in that hypocrisy is to be found in your relationship to others (“I say this, but do that.“) while spiritual failure is deeply personal.  The individual claims that faith is all that matters to him, yet feels he must desperately thrash about to create some mishmash supposedly empirical evidence to shore up his shaky position.  He does this because he knows his own position is not believable—not even to himself.  Having loudly declared himself to be a man of faith, he then demonstrates that he has no real faith at all.

I will never agree with creationism. I think it’s silly superstition. I think it’s a serious misinterpretation of the meaning and purpose of the Bible and religion in general. Nevertheless, I will respect the moral, intellectual, and spiritual honesty of an individual that says faith is what I have, faith is all I need, that is the end of the discussion.

As I have been watching creationists on YouTube I did see one for whom I have this respect. He said flatly that he knows all the evidence shows that he is wrong.   He then went on to say that he believed in creationism because the Bible said so and his test of truth was faith in the Bible.

I think he is terribly wrong and very misguided, but I am compelled respect his honesty.

Slice Of Life (Mine)

Hey Bobby. Why make a Facebook post that you won't notice? I'll just text you. I'm really worn out today, of course, because I have to pay for everything I do but the price is small compared to the benefits. I'm still feeling really happy and steady. Being with people makes life so much more endurable. Not to mention I had a really great time with all the discussions we had -- some really interesting stuff came through. Katy is really interesting I like her.

Glad you brought her. Yesterday was specially great because James stopped by and spent time with us.

You said I should let you know if any interesting anime came by here are a few, none of them deep and serious but I do find them fun. They're all on Netflix.

NeoyokioStrange look at a future? alternate? world. In spite of its seemingly silly storyline it is really a social commentary and it can be quite biting here and there. If you like it you'll love it, if you don't, you will find it really weird.

SaikiK. This one's fun but it's also a little odd. It's subtitled and everyone in it talks so fast sometimes I have to rewind in order to read the subtitles. But I enjoy it. What if you had superpowers, hated that fact, just wanted to be a reclusive loner but the world seems to keep conspiring to out you and force you to be involved with people?

Agretsuko. I told you about this one, not fluff but not serious either. I just find it a lot of fun.  Slice of life for a red panda salary slave.

Violet Evergarden.  This one is really good. The storyline gets serious here and there but it's a much more interesting as a view of an alternative world with some deep emotional context.

Children of the Whales. Interesting story with interesting characters. Creates a strange alternate world. Awfully violent. But still I found the story intriguing.

Fate Zero. Very popular and with good reason. No depth, no great meaning, but an interesting storyline. Any exposition would be a real spoiler. However, for what it's worth, extremely popular. But then again so are Dragon Ball Z and  One Piece and  a lot of  other animes I simply cannot stand.

Saw an interesting show on Ayn Rand. I know you remember her. Who could forget the mighty rallying cry of her adoring cult members , "Eine volk!  Eine reich! Ayn Rand!"

I enjoyed this video from C-SPAN:  

https://www.c-span.org/video/?461916-1/mean-girl

And here's a quote from one website that I found very telling:

>She allowed him to run the Nathaniel Branden Institute, a small society dedicated to promoting Objectivism through lectures, therapy sessions, and social activities. The courses, he later wrote, began with the premises that “Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived” and “Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world.”  <

How very individualistic. How very non-collective. I mean how very mind controlling and cult of the personality.

I'm really worn out I think I'm going to go back to sleep. I slept really well last night but I'm still tired. I'll probably post this on my blog because it's got some interesting points. I do so little posting these days it won't hurt.  

I'm glad you're my friend and I appreciate your being here for me in this very difficult time.

Holidays/Holy Days?

Juneteenth should be a national holiday. I know, do we really need another holiday?  Agreed,  we may have too many but there are some I would happily give up in order to include it.  I would also love to see a national Day of Atonement. Not a day off. Because then people would use it to get drunk and party. Instead, a day in which the nation recognizes the need to consider our own personal failings as well as our social and national failings.  Ideally it would be a day off today to be spent in the kind of thoughtful contemplation the Puritans recognized as essential to what they regarded as a true Thanksgiving. Of course a Puritan Thanksgiving was extremely depressing, but a national Day of Atonement would be intended for internal contemplation and for a reaffirmation of the need to better ourselves as individuals and as a people.

Either of these becoming a reality may be extremely unlikely, but not impossible. I can hope.

Self-destruction: An Overview

From The Atlantic.  This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

I hope people will find the bits I have quoted from this article sufficiently intriguing and provoking to go to the source and read it in its entirety.   It is well worth the time for both right and left wingers.   

Unlike the author of this article, I loved 1984 much more than Brave New World from the beginning.  I have always realized that the answer to the question, “How did he know?” lies in an error in the question itself. It’s not how did he know what would happen in politics, it’s how did he know the nature of human beings.   There is so much that is so very obvious if you step outside of your culture and your society for even a moment or two. But doing so is profoundly difficult for the vast majority of people.  >“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote.<

Today it doesn’t take much to make either the right or the left surrender their freedom and even their intelligence.  Rationality is not a valued commodity under any circumstances and in today’s fetid atmosphere of passions it has almost entirely vanished from public discourse. >Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.<

>Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”<

While the right wing’s abandonment of sanity is based almost entirely on fear and the resultant rage and so is easy to understand, the left wing’s movement in this direction is rooted in the desire for a perfect utopian justice. >Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value.<

The articles author points out that today >...intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police<

Finally,  I must agree with his conclusion that >Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. ...Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

Again, I suggest you read the original article, Conservative or Liberal, it is well worth your time.  As for me, to quote an old and rather silly parody song about the days of the Troubles in Ireland, “Me, being strictly neutral, I bashed everyone in sight.”

Note: my apologies for the poor proofreading. My health is really not good at the moment and I’m just not up to the effort.

Notes: On Victims And Self Victimization

https://quillette.com/2018/12/07/take-it-from-someone-who-has-suffered-real-physical-abuse-words-arent-violence/

While I do grow tired of Quillett's excessively repetitious nature, every now and then there's an article worth reading which is why I continue keeping an eye on the site.  This article is an excellent one. It points out that the difference between being a lifelong victim and being a person who was once victimized lies in the way you see yourself afterwards.  The victim is for ever being victimized and can never escape, while the individual who was once a victim takes responsibility for their own healing and adaptation.

> Self-pity is an addictive drug; and students who come to campus looking for ways to avoid stress, instead of deal with it, will find dealers in every office and classroom.  We can’t force students to fight their demons. But at the very least, we shouldn’t be encouraging a policy of immediate surrender. <

Notes: Extremism And the Left

Quillette Is doing well this week! Here's another article I found compelling and interesting. The first point of the article makes it I found most in need of sharing Is that the extreme left is growing and, unless it is reigned in, will become as extreme and anti-intellectual as the extreme right.

>Those on the right once were the main enemies of evolutionary theory, but today, as Colin Wright argues, those on the extreme left are the “new evolution deniers.”<

And in answer to all those extremist you choose to throw science into the garbage can:

 > But science should be in the business of advancing knowledge of the world and its inhabitants rather than advancing certain groups or sides over others. Like any discipline of science, evolutionary psychology has not been untouched by prejudice and ridiculous theories. But most of them were either unfalsifiable and thus unscientific or were falsifiable and subsequently refuted by experimental tests. <