Book of Matthew - the short version.

Most people desire to know more about what lies beyond our perception than they will ever understand. Many people claim to know more than they really do. Too many people believe them without reason or question. And when those imaginative tails come in to conflict, far too many people are willing to fight and die over them.

No Guff Chet

My aunt forwarded one of those inane "funny" emails deriding the Democratic party today. I don't read political blogs so I avoid writing them. It is muttering against the dark and I find my energy better placed in dozens of other tasks. I'm not a member of either party but I couldn't help but rant a bit. This was one of many asinine items in the email.

I am 42 years old,

I love the outdoors,

I hunt,

I am a Republican reformer,

I have taken on the Republican Party establishment,

I have five children,

I have a spot on the national ticket as vice president with less than two years in the governor's office.

Did you guess?

....

I am Teddy Roosevelt in 1900

My response to her and some of my "republican" family members:

If you're going to send this over-generalized, half-truth nuttery, don't expect us all to laugh. I don't have the time to sit down and pick apart all of the silly fallacies in this email and I doubt you would care to read even if I did but I can't let one item slide. Drawing a parallel between Gov Palin and T. Roosevelt is insanity. The debate about Palin's experience and ability to lead her way out of a box is a non-starter. I won't even go there. Teddy was a progressive reformer who, after McKinley was assassinated, protected the environment, pushed for universal healthcare and dissolved corrupt monopolies. Mostly though, you must concede that the Republican parties of 1900 and today have almost nothing in common. Back then, the party was actually fiscally conservative, reduced federal and executive power in favor of state power and observed a hard line between church and state. The neo-Republican party in office right now cares for none of those ideals and is unable to see the hypocrisy that they are socially conservative but governmental liberals. The opposite of what they were back then. I'd like to think McCain might hold some of those old ideals but I know Palin does not and as long as the party plans on pissing away my tax dollars on a futile war, expanding executive power and reducing civil liberties, they are far more harmful than any socialist agenda. Palin's extemporaneous interviews make her appear even less aware and intelligent than our current commander in chief. The thought that she could be president scares the bejeebus out of me to the point I might actually vote within the two parties for a lesser-of-two-evils Democrat or move to Europe.

End rant...

Clarifying "Theory" -- Evolution

To the the intellectual bankrupt among us who downplay evolution as a "just a theory" in favor of some intelligent design. Never mind the flaws in the intelligent design rational (e.g. The laptop is so fantastic and complex that it must have had an intelligent creator, Man -- Man is so fantastic and complex it must have had an intelligent creator, a god -- God is so fantastic and complex, he must have had a creator...). I'm simply sick of the mindless, broken record, pejorative misuse of the word "Theory". The following are both FACT and THEORY:

Gravity

Evolution

Electromagnetism

These are facts, we know that they happen, there is abundant evidence of them and no real evidence against them. Facts indeed by any definition of the word.

They are also theories. We KNOW that they happen. We don't know exactly all the details of how. This is the theory part.

Evolution is really a scientific consensus. Not every scientist agrees with the theory, but the vast majority do. That is, by definition, what the word "consensus" means: majority of opinion.

The assertion that a number of scientists have been "blackballed" from the scientific community is a rehash of the argument most recently put forth in the pseudo-documentary "Expelled," starring Ben Stein. This documentary, incidentally, has been refuted at length in all of its claims by Scientific American (a widely regarded publication) and several journals, including Science.

But you really demonstrate your ignorance of science when you say "So, until honestly proven, it remains theory, despite what the NAS chooses to call it." Here's a news flash: In science, you can never "prove" a theory. And the theory of evolution has just as much evidence to support it as the theory of universal gravitation. Yes, gravity and evolution are in the same realm when it comes to the amount and quality of supporting evidence. With theories, you can devise experiments based on predictions that theories make. These experiments are devised to falsify the theory. If the falsification does not occur, the theory survives. If the theory is falsified (disproven), it is thrown out or revised to account for new facts.

That's the scientific method, and your ignorance proves you do not understand science. Please, stop using the word theory as a pejorative. Calling something "just a theory" is simply asinine. If gravity is "just a theory," would you jump off a 20-story building because you might not fall to your death? If evolution is "just a theory," then would you withdraw funding from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) because they research disease pathogens and rely on evolutionary models to predict how some organisms become more virulent over time?

And please, stop spreading this claptrap that scientists only support evolution because they fear losing their jobs. That's conspiracy theory nuttery, and most "cases" cited by anti-evolution propaganda (such as "Expelled") don't stand up to independent scrutiny. Scientific American debunked those claims too.

Respect our democratically ratified constitution and do not put 'intelligent design' in to scientific ciriculum. Contrary to some opinion, real, honest science and religion can not go hand in hand. Science is a pursuit of knowledge based on hypothesizing the unknown and working to disprove the hypothesis. Any assertion taken on faith is conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits and outrages reason. But I digress. Stop regurgitating this nonsense of dismissing rational thought labeled with the word 'Theory'.

Thank you,

Matt

"Man got to tell himself he understand"

Gotta say goodbye to one of the greatest post modern authors and brilliant minds of our time. Thanks for the entertainment and laughing so hard it hurts, thanks for the provocation of thought and deriding of those that would do harm in this world, thank you for your bottomless humility and character. Thanks for a body of work that will echo through the generations and make the world a better place. I know you'd disagree but I hope, at least, you are somewhere laughing at us thinking, feeling, slabs of meat.

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic."

"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."

"Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself."

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."

Persistence of love after life

Do we persist after or wiring stops to function and our gears cease to mesh?
Should the microscopic details surrounding our parting circumstances be grieved upon? Or, as time persistently marches on, should we love the impact and impressions a person has left on the lives around him. Of course, there is time for grief and inspection. Like a mighty boulder, cast in to a river, a turbulent, gaping hole is wrought and the water is projected in all directions. The river will eventually calm. Ripples from the disruption continue but the observer downstream cannot make sense of them amongst ripples made by the wind and the rain and soon signs of the disruption all but disappear. One cannot avoid thinking about the gaping whole in life and how it might project in the future. Life does not stop though. When curiosity defeats thought of self, we learn. When acts of preservation for others are not reflected, we rejoice in the deed and weep for the response. But the important thing is to love what was loved, cherish the values we admired in those lost and let those memories ripple through our lives and in to others.
There are those that dwell on changing the past, in the darkness to expiate mistakes. I don't know that all people have the same problem with death. People are not all alike. Would it be, that if I were truly a good person, that death would sometimes be a blessing? Verily, I say no. Death is like the rain; and the rain falls on both the good and the wicked.
So now, I shall go out and toil in the world. Expense reports, contracts, schedules, bugs. To some unknown end. With the other life forms, fraught with troubles, full of "sound and fury." When confronted with their passions and their human nature I often feel "ordinary, and not up to the task." But I know I love and I am loved by those that surround me.
Grant me the serenity to see some of the blessings already granted. It is no comfort that things are worse for so many other people. But it forces me to consider that the significant possessions in life are the ones who we know and love, and the opportunities that are given us to affirm that gift. Life and labor make so many competing demands, and time seems to be too much in short supply. If this is the fabric with which we must work, let us work diligently to weave in the strong threads of family and friendship so that it will last and be a blessing to ourselves, our children, and, in times to come, our children's children.


Nick, your calmness and kindness, your intelligence and curiosity, the love you gave to your friends and family, they will carry on and that is enough. Thank you.


"Success is to laugh often and much.
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children.
To gain the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends.
To appreciate beauty.
To find the best in others.
To leave the world a little bit better
whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition.
To know one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
That is to have succeeded."

-R.W.E.

Freedom of the will

A prescient deity would be fixed in the timeline just like us. Seeing ahead means being behind. But the center of time is outside the line.
All things all at once. And yet.
What difference could anything we do possibly make?
Unless there's layers there too.
And what we're taught to see as God is an impostor.
A little impostor.
A little desperate impostor who depends on belief and obedience to exist.
The closed system of our choices means we act out the inevitable. So that choosing isn't any more than bud and bloom. This much sun, that much rain, and there you go.
Unless there's more.
Unless there's a lot more.
A quick glance around shows opportunists in every nook and cranny pretending to be this, pretending to be that, in order to procure the energy of the credulous.
And for the credulous, the safety and security of pretending not to see, as well.
The givens always give it away.
The assumption is the Biblical God is what's there. Because he says so, or rather because the Bible says he says so. The tautology of mightiness. The chain of command arcs with lightning from a roiling sky. The unknowable has no advocacy in the arena of forensic publicity.
This life matters, this life is meaningless.
Would that choosing alone could make it so.
What is it all by itself? Without our prejudice, without our propaganda and cunning?
Ask a cow stumbling toward the ramp.
The answer's in the twinkling fractals of the micro-infinite. I really believe that.
Negative proof in the persistence of identity below the nominative threshold. I am sort of, in a way that's not stuck in the mirror of name and face. And my being proves something, you too. I think. We are. There's proof in that.
And in the scornful snorts of the priest/scientists confronting the childlike wonder of the uninitiated questioning and contemplating that one observable infinity we all can point toward.
The stars below us.

Dear South Dakota, you're fired.

It is called a grey area. You religious twits insist on making it a black and white issue for everyone and pushing your moral agenda in to law. I don't believe what you believe but I allow you to make descisions for yourself. All I ask is that same courtesy in return. You keep your personal hang ups out of my business and government.
We can all agree that killing a new born baby is murder. The baby is alive. Its autonomic nervous system is firing, it lungs can process the air that fills them, the heart pumps that air and nutrients around the body. That is life.
Most of us can agree that everytime a woman has her period instead of getting fertilized or every time a guy jerks off in to a sock instead of a woman, they aren't committing murder (except you Catholics and your Onan story but by your logic, God should be striking me down every damn day. Still here). Everything in between is subject to grey areas of religion and basic human morality -- do un to others and all that jazz. Leave it alone. Not everyone believes a soul enters the cells as soon as the mitotic cells join up. I think people who go around killing animals when there are other perfectly good food sources around are violent hypocrits but I don't get in anyones face about it. Wouldn't you be pissed off if I got the government involved and made eating meat illegal? Yes, people who get abortions are irrisponsible for needing one (for reasons other than personal health or rape) but those people have to live with there actions. It doesn't affect anyone outside of the two people who screwed up and got pregnant.
So, South Dakota. You push the supreme court to overturn Roe V Wade. I will make it my peronsal mission to remove every religious symbol from every piece of public property starting with the money in my wallet. To borrow from Steven Colbert; South Dakota, you are dead to me.

Would that choosing alone could make it so

The issue of theism and a-theism is concealed by waste products and the debris of confusion. It's a desperate thing.

We are alone. Or we're in the belly of the whale of the mother. Or we're in the hands of God, who is like an insurance agent, faceless and exacting; promising great reward for our investment or at least our protection. What we know is a good place to start but we know so much, about so little. The catalog consumes whole lives of scholarship just to print. We do know these simple things:

All organic life on this planet is driven by the sun's engine. All life is composed of matter that, for all its transforming, is the same stuff of which all the rest of the visible universe is composed. The amount of sunlight that powers our lives is so small I hesitate to estimate it. Very tiny amounts of sunlight are the motivation of all living things. Very very tiny and for only half of time; the rest we turn toward the infinite reach of seemingly dark space but that darkness is itself another illusion. All we know of life comes from tiny bits of sunlight and that life is made from the same stuff as stars.

Jump to the sun's context and you have a vast number of stars out there, all spilling this wonderful powerful stuff. Keep in mind that a tiny bit runs all our doing. And there's billions of billions of those stars, each one pushing full-bore.

Now look at the self. These little neurons and synaptic connectors and the winking of electric bursts inside the brain. That's where we live, that's how we work, that's our minds and our selves; and the amount of distributed solar power that goes to that working is an almost immeasurable bit of an almost immeasurable bit of the power of the mass of stars. A mass likely to be an immeasurable bit on a higher order of something still further. And so on... It is certainly possible, even likely, that the organization and consciousness within us, may be a miniaturization of the order beyond us. The teaching of organized religions, which all appear to think they have a trademark copyright on the concept of God, is mostly brute muttering against the dark, and thuggish seduction and promises of security. To a lot of people the idea of theos (or God) is too closely associated with the powers that be, cowards, and ignorant, unquestioning people. This leads to nonsensical debates and directly away from what is purports to lead toward.

You may believe that the moon doesn't spin in its orbit, and you may believe that the stars are small objects just beyond Jupiter and that all heavenly bodies circle Earth. I may not listen to you about anything else once I know how wrong you are about what's going on with the sun and the stars, but that doesn't mean you're wrong about the moon.

ID

So I got in to it with God boy... This is an old and tired debate to me but I indulged a bit.
I'm still dumbfounded and waiting for his (mcgrew's) response. My nick is panZ in this...

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Theism (4.00 / 2) (..403)
by mcgrew

I believe in God mainly because He has manifested Himself to me. I have witnessed miracles. I know God. Perhaps I am insane.

However, there are questions that, for now, only religion can answer.

What is consciousness? What is sentience? Why is it there? How can a being that can even ask these questions exist? Does it really seem likely to anyone that the pyramids, skyscrapers, automobiles, laptop computers, are only accidents of entropy?

The aformentioned laptop, which was fashioned by humans, is incredibly complex, with millions of microscopic transistors (each an accident of entropy, in the athiest's view). But compared to the humans who designed and built them, they are laughingly simple. Yet they are fashioned by a consciousness, and we are not?

The very idea is so mind boggling as to be laughable.

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laughable? (none / 0) (..694)
by panZ on Sat <--------------- Me

Why is the idea that your laptop is a result of entropy laughable? Please note that I'm not even discussing the existence of a god or personification of the universe and what consciousness is. Assigning human emotions and consciousness to the intangible needs of your mind is not critical to this debate. Only looking at the smaller parts of the big picture.

Is it laughable that, in the vast, nearly infinite expanse of our universe, that on some planet, some molecules formed amino acids, and that some amino acids formed a symbiotic relationship and became proteins, and that over time, these proteins also developed symbiotic relationships and made cells; then multi cell organisms; then specialized cells formed in small creatures; then larger creatures with even more highly specialized cells became efficient; developing clusters of organs and becoming mobile and interacting with their environment our; then creatures that created simple tools, then used simple tools to make more complex tools? Tools, like biology are a reaction of specialization which breads symbiotic dependency, efficiency and survivability. Is it so laughable that your laptop evolved from very simple tools and an organism's need just like a biological organism could have evolved from something very simple?

I'm not saying it did or didn't happened, just that the idea isn't laughable.

Moving on to the bigger picture; you argue that the laptop is so complex that is must have been designed by a conscious, intelligence. And you say that man is so complex that it must have been created by a conscious intelligence. By that reasoning, your god is so complex that he must have been created by some conscious intelligence. What created your god then? The "Intelligent Design" people out there have a recursive argument that is wholly fallacious once you think beyond the second iteration. The trouble is, none of them do. So who created your god? You did.

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

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The problem.. (5.00 / 2) (..702)
by kitten

Is it laughable that, in the vast, nearly infinite expanse of our universe, that on some planet, some molecules formed amino acids, and that some amino acids formed a symbiotic relationship and became proteins, and that over time, these proteins also developed symbiotic relationships and made cells...

The problem with explaining this is that theists with a beef, and more specifically creationists, see the word "random" and absolutely latch onto it like a pitbull on a poodle. "How could the human body have formed 'randomly'?" they ask, all smirking, as though the postulation was that atoms sort of swirled together out of the void and "just so happened" to "randomly" arrange themselves into human form.

That very idea is what's laughable. Add that to the notion that interactions of matter are, by definition, not random, and it quickly becomes apparent that they literally do not have any idea what they're talking about.

C'est la vie...

I had to say goodbye to one of my best friends today. My childhood puppy Sebastian walked a good 14 years on this earth; half of my life. 90lbs of fur and unconditional love made a lot of people happy. My mom went from never wanting a dog to calling him my brother and that is sorta what it feels like. We all knew his last tail wag would be soon though. The spirit was more than willing, the body simply wasn't able anymore.

Along with all the stress and the mundane things that compete unceasingly for our time and energy, we are granted an essential element. We have the gift to love. That gift helps to weave some threads of sense and meaning into this place that we call the universe. It is a big universe. I think that it is going to take a lot of threads and a lot of weaving to get the job done.

Have a great weekend, if you go for a nice walk in the sun, wag your tails in memory of Sebastian.