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PZ open cut quote mines

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PZ has a lot to say. I present some gems below for your education.

I’m sure that I have some irrational beliefs of my own. I have no idea what they are. It’s not holding irrational beliefs that makes you an idiot. It’s holding the irrational beliefs and demanding that those be imposed on everyone else.

Nobody has convinced me that God exists. That’s not going to happen.

Science is the answer. I’m sorry; you may be a very devout religious person, but praying is not going to solve the world’s problems. It never has.  We’re living in an enlightenment, which is fuelled by rational thinking and science. Science is the answer.

I’m buddies with a lot of the big shot new atheists, people like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett. There’s nothing we’re saying that Betrand Russell didn’t say. This is all the same old stuff. The only difference is that we’ve got the primal scream therapy of atheism. New atheists are the people who shout and yell a lot about this stuff. But it’s the same old stuff that atheists have been talking about for years and years.

Atheists tend to be politically liberal, fairly tolerant.  The tolerance part is that there’s no question that nobody is going to deport creationists. Nobody is going to shut down the churches. Nobody is going to do anything like that. What we want to do is put things in a proper perspective.  If you want to believe that in the privacy of your home, if you want to get together in church and talk to people about this, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. That’s the tolerance we’ll give them.

There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science in ways that I cannot forgive. This is not about demonizing the individuals.

I have to single out this man, whom I consider the most contemptable, despicable, cruel, and vicious evil liar in the creationist movement today, yes, he’s a nasty, nasty person. (PZ has never met or talked with this ID proponent.)

Comments
Somebody out there on the other side should have enough sense out there to know that you don't cross a nuke tripwire line. They just did.kairosfocus
July 1, 2011
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Sonfaro: That would be used to feed straight into the "Creationism in a cheap tuxedo" caricature. These folks think they have a pretty good thing going, if you reply they drumbeat their deceptive talking points and smears, also being able to say: see creationism in a cheap tuxedo. If you ignore it, they indulge int he nastiest forms of atmosphere poisoning. If you point out the tactics, they try to turn it about as though you are to blame for their wrong doing. If you correct and point to where serious discussions can be entertained, they ignore it and go back to their drumbeat talking points. I have drawn the conclusion we are going to have to stand hard and take the fight on this hill. Of course, as you saw today, they then try to bust your career, violate your privacy and even threaten your family. But eventually, a critical mass of the public is going to realise that his is a menace to civil society that has to be stopped. And right now, you had better believe I am going to push back hard on this threat to my family. People who threaten innocent children and wives like that would do anything they think they can get away with. Exactly as Plato warned against 2,350 years ago. This has happened before, over and over again. Let's just put it this way: you attack me, I will take it very differently than if you attack those I am sworn or duty-bound to protect. Bydand GEM of TKIkairosfocus
July 1, 2011
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Thanks KF. Not big on long winded Theological defenses on UD either, but what can you do? I wish there was a sub-forum for that kind of thing: "Uncommon Descent - theological implications" or something. Something to keep the main page from getting cluttered with Judeao-Christian apologetics. - SonfaroSonfaro
July 1, 2011
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Sonfaro: Well done, though I am in general most uncomfortable with prolonged theological debates at UD. There are other fora that can take those up without problems and that is where such should really be carried out. In addition, well above, adequate reference was provided. I will give a few footnotes, having had a much more close to home issue to deal with today: 1: Slavery is, as was repeatedly noted but was ignored again and again in haste to try to score debate points, one of the many results of sin and the hardness of hearts that is regulated in the context of the times in the Bible, as is the more classic example, divorce. 2: At the same time, a better way is shown, and of course Paul with Onesimus is a classic example, indeed it is the actual prime textual basis on which English Common law ruled that Christians in their jurisdiction could not be held as slaves. 3: That law was changed under pressure from the slave holding interest once slaves in the West Indies were becoming Christians. And, said interest directly opposed the preaching of the gospel by especially black free dissenter missionaries, starting with George Liele. 4: that alone is diagnostic on what they really were, if people were ignorant of the history of the Evangelical Awakening under Wesley, Whitefield and co, or the sort of objection and persecution Fox and co endured (they almost killed him with the gaol conditions). 5: It has been said seriously that the Wesleyan revival in England averted a form of the French Revolution, and it has also been said that the preaching of the gospel by Whitefield in the American Colonies was a key factor in the formation of an American conscisousness and in grounding the American Revolution. 6: John Newton was indeed a good example in point of what was really going on, and he and Wesley actually counselled Wilberforce, warning him about the horrors he was going to face. I think it was Wesley who told him more or less that every devil in England would be against him so he had better be sure of his calling to end slavery starting with the kidnapping based trade. And, it was the rise of the Evangelical dissenters that tipped the balance in the Parliament in the end. This was of course already pointed out and willfully ignored in the rush to make handy talking points. 7: Your American debates and text-wrenching games came later, in reaction to the Abolitionist movement, in defence of the economic underpinning of the slave region. A sad lesson on how the gospel can be compromised, and how hard it can be to undo the harm, in your case a civil war. And notice 150 years later, we are still seeing he idea thrown in our faces that the scriptures supported slavery. 8: I wonder, if people knew the career of the leading revivalist Finney on that, or the many churches that wrote antislavery provisions into their membership covenants, regarding slave holding under the relevant conditions, rooted in kidnapping as close to or outright incompatible with the claim to have eternal life. Half truths, suppression of material evidence and outright fabrications are here being used to make a smear against the scriptures, the gospel and the Christian faith. 9: When it comes to my homeland, the question cast in my teeth -- as a turnabout accusation used as distractor from a key issue in the thread, notice [and one loaded with the notion that someone wants to control my thinking on the colour of my skin . . .] -- and still being cast in my teeth after I corrected the underlying falsehoods, is how could I be adopting he religion of the oppressor. 10: That's without excuse, at this point where we see willful denial, resistance to and dismissal of well grounded correction; sorry to be direct. I AM FOLLOWING THE RELIGION OF THE LIBERATORS (SOME OF WHOM PAID A TERRIBLE PRICE), AND I AM FOLLOWING IT BECAUSE I HAVE GOOD GROUNDS FOR THINKING IT TRUE AND RIGHT. (Grounds that the atmosphere-poisoning, circumstantial ad hominem rhetoric above, are being used to distract us from. And, I am refraining myself from using some accurate but very unpalatable words here.) 11: When it comes to Hitler, what you are not hearing is that there was a Social Darwinism rooted, semi-mystical myth based on the evolutionary view of man, that the Aryan race was the former advanced race that led the advance of humanity, that needed to be recovered from its remnants (of which the Germans of course were a major part). 12: That backdrop explains a lot of the mixed trends of thought in Hitler. I have already given a key excerpt from Mein Kampf that makes the pattern of thought clear, and pointed to its roots in Darwin's Descent of Man Chs 5 - 7; which can be Googled and read. 13: And, you are right to be suspicious of claims Hitler was Christian in any sense worth knowing -- as opposed to playing at counterfeit games, as the Barmen declarants made clear in 1934 in the teeth of his invention of the German Christian heresy that tried to subvert the gospel. Yet another place where half truths and outright false talking points are twisting the truth into pretzels; to try to discredit the gospel and the Christian faith. 14: And, that is how much it takes to bring us back to the specific point that this distractor was put on the table to lead us away from by poisoning the atmosphere, the inherent amorality of evolutionary materialism. Let me put Hawthorne's remark back on the table, so we will not forget:
Assume (per impossibile) that atheistic naturalism [[= evolutionary materialism] is true. Assume, furthermore, that one can't infer an 'ought' from an 'is' [[the 'is' being in this context physicalist: matter-energy, space- time, chance and mechanical forces]. (Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.) Given our second assumption, there is no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer an 'ought'. And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there's no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action. Add a further uncontroversial assumption: an action is permissible if and only if it's not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action . . . [[We see] therefore, for any action you care to pick, it's permissible to perform that action. If you'd like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan 'if atheism is true, all things are permitted'. For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don't like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time. Now, we all know that at least some actions are really not permissible (for example, racist actions). Since the conclusion of the argument denies this, there must be a problem somewhere in the argument. Could the argument be invalid? No. The argument has not violated a single rule of logic and all inferences were made explicit. Thus we are forced to deny the truth of one of the assumptions we started out with. That means we either deny atheistic naturalism or (the more intuitively appealing) principle that one can't infer 'ought' from [[a material] 'is'.
15: Evolutionary materialism reduces all to matter and energy interacting under chance and necessity in space and time. There is nothing in these that has the strength to bear the weight of ought. 16: Only a worldview founded on the Good Creator has in it an is powerful enough to ground ought, and yet, our very heart's cry that we have rights -- a moral demand on others that they respect us in light of our fundamental dignity -- is strong testimony that ought is real, not a mere figment of imagination or the result of fickle accidents of opinion in communities. 17: I can therefore assure you that without something that could bear the weight of ought, there would have been no successful movement to break slavery through the power of the cry that men have a right to liberty. So, we had better heed the cry of the 100 million ghosts from the secularist and neopagan evolutionism driven regimes over the past 100 years -- whether or not that little lesson of the recent past is palatable to today's evolutionary materialists. 18: Going on, event his is tangential, the key issue in teh blog is inteh original post, where we see from PZM a grim example of the sort of abusive, poisonous incivility that so many leading evolutionary materialism advocates are pushing, something that is particularly pointed for me today, given the unspeakable invasion of my family that was perpetrated through the same arrogant disregard for the dignity of others (and spouting the incendiary, and utterly unexcusably slanderous talking point that to raise a child in a Christian home is "child abuse"), over the past few days. Let me just say that I find it ironic that the one who is so concerned for that "abuse" promptly proceeds to try to violate the privacy of a family, including that of minor children. Shameless! 19: So, let us observe, from PZM, lest we forget:
PZM: Atheists tend to be politically liberal, fairly tolerant. [ --> deny, deny, deny . . . ] The tolerance part is that there’s no question that nobody is going to deport creationists. Nobody is going to shut down the churches. Nobody is going to do anything like that. [ --> And, what does the bloody history of the past century at the hands of atheistical regimes tell us on this?] What we want to do is put things in a proper perspective. If you want to believe that in the privacy of your home, if you want to get together in church and talk to people about this, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. [--> translated, we will censor the public square and the culture's sense of what knowledge is on a priori evolutionary materialism as we have institutional power to do and if you object to the imposition of ideological censorship on origins science, we will come down on you like a ton of bricks, even threatening to hold your children hostage, on the excuse that you can have your little fantasies in quiet and that's "freedom" enough for you; don't you dare expose our censorship of science and science education] That’s the tolerance we’ll give them. There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science [--> translation: they are exposing the use of misleading icons of evolution to indoctrinate the public and school children, starting with Haeckel's frauds, cf the Google Books result here] in ways that I cannot forgive. This is not about demonizing the individuals. [--> the bland denial of what one is about to do . . .] I have to single out this man [--> in context, plainly Jonathan Wells], whom I consider the most contemptable, despicable, cruel, and vicious evil liar in the creationist movement today, yes, he’s a nasty, nasty person. ([editorial comment, OP:] PZ has never met or talked with this ID proponent.)
GEM of TKIkairosfocus
July 1, 2011
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Sonfaro, Well, if he tries to pull you away at any point, just say: "I can't. There's an idiot online." (that's not directed at anyone in particular - just humor, and a quote mine.) ;)CannuckianYankee
July 1, 2011
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@ CannuckianYankee, -"Hitler died in 45 though". So the 40s. Even more hilarious. (To be fair though, RationalWiki is under the impression that ID is creationism in a tux so... wait a minute, how is that fair?) ((also... sorry about the WWII slip up. I just got through shaking my head when a vet told a story about being introduced as a war vet from 'World War Eleven' and I do this. Sign of the times I guess...)) -_- And thanks! Pop wouldn't be so thrilled I'm arguing on the internet but hey, at least I haven't forgotten everything. - SonfaroSonfaro
July 1, 2011
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Sonfaro, Long yes. Well done though. Your pop taught you well. Hitler died in 45 though. :(CannuckianYankee
July 1, 2011
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...dang that was long. :-( - SonfaroSonfaro
July 1, 2011
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Hey again DM, Let’s get to it! ;-) -“This is a reply to Sonfaro in the “You can’t have them, atheists!” thread. I don’t want to contribute to the threadjacking of a second thread.” Understandable. -“Sonfaro at 101 Read in context, Dawkins was saying the universe was unintelligent and thus we shouldn’t expect any morality from it. The moderator seemed to be saying Dawkins was denying the possibility of evil men: “How can someone be “evil” where there is “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference” (Dawkins)? That’s not what Dawkins meant.” Right. Which is why I suggested that the mod was the first to go off topic… unless you consider actually quote mining while off-topic about quote-mining to be on-topic… that hurt my head while writing it. Did that make sense? -“I’m sorry, but if Lev 25:44 was meant only for the Israelis (“when slaves were still considered human”?), and not for us then the same thing must be true for Ex 20:2-17.” How so? Six of the ten commandments are rules that just about every nation had in place already. Super Generic. The ones that would be remotely specific to Israel are the first four, which refer to dealing with God ie, no false images, remember the Sabbath, etc. And seeing as four major religions sort of share these rules still I’m not so sure they’re supposed to be specific either. Not so with Leviticus. Theres a level of specificity towards the jewish people in Leviticus that the ten commandmants (and the ones that follow) just don’t have. -“It would also have been irresponsible not to say somewhere in the Bible that all this slave stuff would become immoral someday.” Why? How would that have helped/hindered the people God was instructing at that point in history? Particularly when slavery was a little different then how it ended up (more on this below). -“That sure would have helped the abolitionists.” Sure. And him mentioning the twin towers falling would have prepped firefighters. I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that. And besides, it wouldn’t have done anything for the people he was talking to – which would have made it all a waste of time in that moment. -“As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t deny that you can go into the Bible and pick and choose verses to make a fairly good moral code, but that moral code rests solely on your human judgment. And then you’d still have to deal with the verses that support slavery in the NT, especially the book of Philemon.” Okay, so I just re-read all of Philemon to see where everyone gets this ‘Paul supports slavery thing’. I’m not seeing it. Paul told Philemon to take Onesimius back as a brother – KJV says: “15For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldest receive him for ever; 16Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord? 17If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him as myself. 18If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account... NIV clears it up a bit for those confused: “15 Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever— 16 no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord. 17 So if you consider me a partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. 18 If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me.” I mean if you squeeze real hard and ignore the first few words in 16 yeah, maybe. But all together it seems to me Paul was sending Onesimius back to Philemon’s home – where he’s lived most of his life before being kidnapped, or run away or whatever happened to him before he met Paul and converted - With the express intent for Philemon to at least treat him as free... if not outright free the man. Moreover, it appears to be what Onesimus WANTED to go back in the first place. “I didn’t claim that only Christians were slavers, I mentioned Muslims and Africans too.” While trying to link their morality into the situation as if it had anything to do with their decision to sell out their rivals. They weren’t thinking about being moral. It was greed all the way. “So far as I know, all of the slave ships that brought slaves to the Americas were captained by Christians.” Nope. Check out John Henry Newton when you get a chance. Also, remember the old stereotype for sailors in those days wasn’t exactly the pious Christian. -“And I’m sure that ALL of the slavers were motivated by greed.” On this we can agree. “Check that kidnapping verses again Deut 24:7 “If someone is caught kidnapping a fellow Israelite and treating or selling them as a slave, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you.” – it only prohibits kidnapping members of your tribe. Lev 25:44 says you can acquire slaves from “the pagan nations that are around you” and Deut 20:10,11 tells you one of the ways you can do it. Most of the Africans sold into slavery were acquired via inter-tribal warfare. This frequently took the form of snatching a lone person, but so long as you weren’t snatching your fellow tribesman, you were OK with the Bible.” Actually, I was referring to this verse: "Exodus 21:16 “Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession." That’s Anyone. Period. Kidnapping was not cool with God. And its not in Leviticus, so it's not just a specific law for the Jews. This is a little after the Ten commandmants. Your first Deut verse just hammers this home as far as the Jews went. As I’ve already said, Leviticus was the book with the specific Jewish laws… now that I think about it Deuteronomy may be too. I’ll have to check with my pops. He’s the bible scholar of mi familia. Anyway The second Deut verse seems fairly standard ancient warefare to me. Like I said. Indentured Servants, Criminals, POWs. All before Christ too. -“Garrison and Wilberforce and the other abolitionists were indeed Christians. But they were always a minority and all of their opponents were Christians.” I’m fairly certain this is also false. Christians weren’t the only slave owning people around at the time and thus wouldn’t have been the only peoples with something to lose if it were abolished. -“Wilberforce finally persuaded his government to force OTHER Christians to give up their slaves and Garrison failed at even that until the Civil War allowed Lincoln to force OTHER Christians to give up their slaves.” Again, wasn’t JUST Christians arguing for slavery. They may have been the loudest though. -“Please watch your use of the word “bigoted”. Pointing out an organization’s undeniable and widely held defects hardly qualifies.” Maybe not. However, making such claims that basically sound like ‘only Christians promoted slavery pre-Civil war’ is both untrue and kinda slanderous as well. -“I DO question why a descendent of slaves wants to base all morals on a book that explicitly allows slavery.” It doesn’t allow for what was happening. It allows for those who willingly give themselves up (indentured servitude), Those who owe a debt to a person or society (IndServ & Criminals) or those who lost a war(POW's). To my knowledge, none of the african slaves captured came willingly, a raid is not a war, and the only crime commited was 'Breathing While Black'. -_- -“The pro-slavery Christians didn’t TRY to justify themselves with the Bible, they DID so and they won all the debates.” But they lost public opinion years later, ne? -“The more decent Christians were reduced to what you’re doing: pointing out general verses like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, “love your neighbor as yourself”, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” etc.” 1 Timothy 1:8-11 lumps Slave Traders with murderors, liars, sexual deviants and a whole slew of 'not goods'. (He also doesn’t happen to like gays which is a whole other issue we can get into later I guess). -_- Anyway, it’s clear Paul, who writes the rest of those points (Which I’ll try to respond to below) on slavery and to my knowledge is the only one to do so, wasn’t fond of slavery but understood it was a way of life at that point in history. “[…]You can’t escape by quoting the New Testament either because you keep running into verses like: EPH 6:5,6 Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ; not by way of eye service, as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” Why’d you stop there? “EPH: 6:9 Masters, in the same way, be good to your slaves. Do not threaten them. Remember that the One who is your Master and their Master is in heaven, and he treats everyone alike.” Does ‘alike’ mean setting people on a post half naked and auctioning them off? Or breeding them like cattle so you can get big black men to work the feilds? Or raping them? Or not regarding them as human period? When he says ‘do not threaten’, does that include whipping? Lynching? Hammering legs so they can’t run away? Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. -“COLOSSIANS 3:22 Slaves, in all things obey those who are your masters on earth, not with external service, as those who merely please men, but with sincerety of heart, fearing the Lord.” From the same book: -“COL 2:25 But remember that anyone who does wrong will be punished for that wrong, and the Lord treats everyone the same.” God sees slave and masters as… the same? Gasp, what a concept! ;-) -“1 TIM 6:1,2 Let all who are under the yoke as slaves regard their own masters as worthy of all honor so that the name of God and our doctrine may not be spoken against. And let those who have believers as their masters not be disrespectful to them because they are brethren, but let them serve them all the more, because those who partake of the benefit are believers and beloved. Teach and preach these principles.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but Paul’s talking to Christian slaves at this point yes? At a time when Christianity wasn’t the majority… or trusted? Should he have said 'riot in the streets instead?' Besides, he gave his stance on slavers and kidnappers already in the letter, which nulls the African Slave Trade from the word go. The idea was for Christians who had slaves (most would have been converts) to treat them like family, not property. This didn’t often happen with the Africans. TITUS 2:9,10 Urge bondslaves to be subject to their own masters in everything, to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect.” Funny thing about that chapter. The entire thing is urging the household to behave. From top down. Including, if you have them, any servants/slaves. It’s not saying ‘It’s okay to let the master beat on you.’ And again, Pauls earlier stance on Slavery was established in 1 Timothy. Later, I said: -SONFARO:“It’s not just that you mentioned it. You basically questioned why a black man would be a Christian period, which is an awkward and frankly ill-conceived thing to ask for numerous reasons.” -DM: “Well, I DO question it. I question why any man who’s descended from people enslaved by people who used their religion to justify their actions adopts the religion of his persecutors.” But you’re assuming their interpretation is the correct one. And when someone suggests to you that you may be wrong you kinda close off on ‘em. -“I also question why the descendents of those persecutors stick to the religion that justified their actions.” Because it doesn’t. Said religion has also done a lot of good for black people. Something that should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the civil rights movement in America. Your response to that has essentially been ‘but look at all this bad stuff Christians did!’ Well, yeah. Some people who said they were Christians did a lot of bad things and tried to justify it by taking scripture out of context or twisting the meaning around completely. Wouldn’t the true culprit there be the men themselves though? Or is it now okay to blame ‘Origin of Species’ for Colombine or Atheism for communist Russia or all the other things ‘non-theists’ don’t like Christians blaming them for? I was always taught to assign blame to the individual. Weren’t you? Oh, and for your ‘number 6’ in your response to KF’s history lesson: most slaves adopted their masters religion (or a version of it) because the masters forced it on them. Doesn’t make the faith any more true or false. Just means a few people who practiced it went about things the wrong way. And, as KF demonstrated (and as history has shown), it certainly helped black folks later didn’t it? -SONFARO: “No, but it is sort of ignorant of what was going on at the time. As I’ve already said, Kidnapping for slavery was a huge no-no for the Jewish people, and if we’re supposed to match up their slavery to ours it should still have been a no-no.” -DM: Kidnapping ISRAELIS was a big no-no. I never heard of any Israeli slaves in the Americas.” Kidnapping ANYONE is a big no-no. Just said that. You’d die for that. Exodus 21:16. You should read the whole thing too, deals with stuff like what should be done to girls whose families sell them. They have to be treated like family to the buyer. Don’t know any family who like being whipped. You? -SONFARO: “pro-slavery Christians used the bible to try and justify what they were already doing, they didn’t do because it was in the bible. It’s not like they read it and went, “Hey, look, it says we can steal negros from their homes… let’s do it!” The slave trade was going strong before the more religious slave owners started cherry picking verses and what not.” -DM: “Nobody says that the Bible gave people the idea for slavery. It existed from pre-historical times. It’s the fact that the Bible condones slavery and the slaveowners could justify themselves through the Bible that counts and also how well they could do it.” It condoned a specific kind of slavery that the African Slave Trade, pardon, ‘evolved’ from that totally went against everything biblical. It did not condone what happened to black people. -“They didn’t have to cherry pick or quote mine to do it.” Yeah they did. Same way you did. -“They had a plethora of verses justifying their behavior in both the Old and New Testaments and their opponents had only general “be nice” verses to oppose them with.” Nope. Kidnapping = death, God sees everyone the same, love your neighbor, slave trading & common sense, should have been more than enough to dissuade Christians from the African Slave Trade. Heck, common sense alone should have been more than enough for everyone not to participate. -SONFARO: “Kinda how the Nazi’s used Darwin to establish their master race thing (note: I AM NOT EQUATING NAZI’S AND EVOLUTION [Seriously, I’m not. They aren’t the same thing. People should stop equating them]). Hitler hated the jews (and everybody else) long before he got hold of Darwin. He just used it to his advantage.” “DM: Contra Weikert, anti-Semitism has about a 2000 year history before Hitler. It started in NT times when proto-Christians were a Jewish sect…[Insert NAZI’S & EVOLUTION explanation + attempt to link Christianity despite missing the point here.] Uh… Okay? -_- My point was Hitler & the Nazi’s picked up something and used it to justify what they were doing, not that they had to believe in it. I used their use of evolution and the beliefs of the time because I figured you’d get the example I was trying to make. They did that for a lot of things. I thought that was pretty common knowledge. I’m sorry if I failed. FTR, Hitler was also using pseudo-christian language and experimenting with occult crap and generally was very weird. I’m fairly certain his unofficial official stance was “I’ll believe anything that helps me win the war.” Either way, while it’s nice information, it doesn’t really help or hurt my statement I don’t think, unless I’ve gotten the time line mixed up (is that what you’re suggesting? That they established the existence of the master race before pulling in Darwin to justify it? 'Cause either way, they used Darwin to justify it.) Anyway, two more Hitler related things just for gits-and-shiggles: 1.) I didn’t even know about Weikert before you mentioned him, so thanks for giving me something to look up. ;-) 2.) From Rationalwiki(whose article on this is HI-LARI-OUS [equating ID to Hitler’s beliefs when ID wasn’t even prominent in the 50’s? HA!]): “In fact Hitler's views on nature seem to be a mixture of the two philosophies (ME: evolution & creationism), and he made some rather muddled statements, confusingly mixing the two concepts. [example given here…] “…Hitler seems to have believed that humanity, and especially the Aryan race, had evolved to become the likeness of God (rather than being created initially in God's image), while other races were closer to humanity's evolutionary ancestors. His comments citing apes or monkeys as the ancestors of humans imply that he believed some creatures had stopped evolving while others evolved on from them. This would account to some extent for his hierarchical conception of higher and lower orders of creatures, and for his belief that some races of humans were more evolved than others.”* *Do forgive if I’ve cited incorrectly. I never did understand how to write a paper... :-( Anyway, that’s my initial response to your bible-thumbing. Nice workout! It’s been a while since I had to look up those verses, so thanks for that. Ciao. - SonfaroSonfaro
July 1, 2011
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DM: "George thought about this and then sent the preacher a note saying he had reconsidered his actions and would no longer attend church on Communion Sundays. Not a very Christian Christian, eh?" George Washington was not a Christian Christian...? "An Appeal to Heaven," was used originally by a squadron of six cruisers commissioned under George Washington's authority as commander in chief of the Continental Army in October 1775." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Tree_Flag DM: "Not Washington, Jefferson, Madison or Franklin." Ben Franklin's famous quote: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God" Thomas Jefferson's bible, after editing what he thought was misrepresentation: "[of Jesus's teaching] There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man." James Madison: James Madison attended St. John's Episcopal Church while he was President. Some sources classify Madison was a deist. He was identified as an Episcopalian by the 1995 Information Please Almanac; A Worthy Company: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution by M. E. Bradford; and the Library of Congress. Memoirs & Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson, IV, page 512 was cited as the source stating explicitly that Madison was a "theist." (Source: Ian Dorion, "Table of the Religious Affiliations of American Founders", 1997). These men seem to be either Christian, or completely influenced top to bottom by the Christian faith. DM: "I DO question why a descendent of slaves wants to base all morals on a book that explicitly allows slavery." It would help to learn a little black history relating to the church, in full context, the good and bad, before you make these types of comments. "The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780 - 1925, documents the growth of the "Black Church" in the American South and how evangelical Christianity was modified by the African-American community to encourage dreams of freedom, the importance of community, and the desire for personal survival. Included are materials that document the conflicts in the church caused by slavery. Also of interest are some slave narratives that document the role of the church in slave communities. The collection was compiled from printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill." http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/church-southern/file.html Are you really trying to manipulate race to support atheism? Martin luther King is his famous letterfrom Birmingham jail: "But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid." http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html Christianity is self correcting exactly for the inherent understanding of the objective moral code. Atheism boasts an absolute zero when it comes to a self correcting moral anchor. Which is why it (atheism's) ideological disciples also boast the number one slot for mayhem on earth.junkdnaforlife
July 1, 2011
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DM: It is plain that you have fixed certain notions and will not be corrected, sadly; not even in the face of evident facts specifically drawn to your attention. If it were not so sad, I would find it amusing to see how my earlier attempt to get this thread to refocus on what is in the original post, is twisted into a false accusation of threadjacking, as in "he hit BACK first." Similarly, even though this was pointed out in citing the proscriptions in the OT on kidnapping into slavery, you have refused to attend to the implications in this context of the explicit Mosaic provision that the law must be consistent for the native Israelite and the foreigner under Israelite jurisdiction [cf here as previously linked and above in the thread]. Not to mention the NT direct statement that kidnapping (in context of that time, into slavery) is contrary to sound doctrine, i.e a Christian profession. All of which were already pointed out and/or linked. I need not reiterate other corrections that have already been made, the underlying closed minded reiteration of refuted objections in the teeth of correction already given is enough demonstration of what is going on. And, just as a parting footnote, you need to severely update your understanding of Nazi Germany and Hitler from that favourite Darwinist clip out of context, in light of the history of ideas in Germany from Haeckel onwards. In that regard, you will find Hitler's explicit statements in Mein Kampf appealing to Social Darwinist thought traceable to Darwin et al, starting with the Descent of Man Chs 5 - 7, will be illuminating. All that stuff in Mein Kampf about:
In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. [--> That is, a social darwinist version of Darwinian natural and sexual selection and survival of the fittest.] And struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development [--> aka descent with improved modification, or evolution]. If the process were different, all further and higher development [--> evolution] would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best [--> NB: this is a specific theme raised in Darwin's discussion of the Irish, the Scots and the English in Descent, chs 5 - 7], if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating [--> differential reproductive success leading to shifting population balances of evolving varieties], the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited [--> a direct allusion to Darwin's appeal to Malthusian struggle for survival and reproduction], and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health [--> AKA survival of the fittest] . . .
. . . does have a known and highly specific root in the history of ideas [--> cf as noted], after all. One hopes that at some future date, you will think again. In the meanwhile, sadly, you have again underscored what currently shapes your thoughts, perceptions and views. Good day GEM of TKIkairosfocus
July 1, 2011
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This is a reply to Sonfaro in the “You can’t have them, atheists!” thread. I don’t want to contribute to the threadjacking of a second thread. Sonfaro at 101 Read in context, Dawkins was saying the universe was unintelligent and thus we shouldn’t expect any morality from it. The moderator seemed to be saying Dawkins was denying the possibility of evil men: “How can someone be “evil” where there is “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference” (Dawkins)? That’s not what Dawkins meant. I’m sorry, but if Lev 25:44 was meant only for the Israelis (“when slaves were still considered human”?), and not for us then the same thing must be true for Ex 20:2-17. It would also have been irresponsible not to say somewhere in the Bible that all this slave stuff would become immoral someday. That sure would have helped the abolitionists. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t deny that you can go into the Bible and pick and choose verses to make a fairly good moral code, but that moral code rests solely on your human judgment. And then you’d still have to deal with the verses that support slavery in the NT, especially the book of Philemon. I didn’t claim that only Christians were slavers, I mentioned Muslims and Africans too. So far as I know, all of the slave ships that brought slaves to the Americas were captained by Christians. And I’m sure that ALL of the slavers were motivated by greed. Check that kidnapping verses again Deut 24:7 “If someone is caught kidnapping a fellow Israelite and treating or selling them as a slave, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you.” – it only prohibits kidnapping members of your tribe. Lev 25:44 says you can acquire slaves from “the pagan nations that are around you” and Deut 20:10,11 tells you one of the ways you can do it. Most of the Africans sold into slavery were acquired via inter-tribal warfare. This frequently took the form of snatching a lone person, but so long as you weren’t snatching your fellow tribesman, you were OK with the Bible. Garrison and Wilberforce and the other abolitionists were indeed Christians. But they were always a minority and all of their opponents were Christians. Wilberforce finally persuaded his government to force OTHER Christians to give up their slaves and Garrison failed at even that until the Civil War allowed Lincoln to force OTHER Christians to give up their slaves. Please watch your use of the word “bigoted”. Pointing out an organization’s undeniable and widely held defects hardly qualifies. I DO question why a descendent of slaves wants to base all morals on a book that explicitly allows slavery. The pro-slavery Christians didn’t TRY to justify themselves with the Bible, they DID so and they won all the debates. The more decent Christians were reduced to what you’re doing: pointing out general verses like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, “love your neighbor as yourself”, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” etc. against Bible verses which explicitly allowed and regulated slavery. You can’t escape by quoting the New Testament either because you keep running into verses like: EPH 6:5,6 Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ; not by way of eye service, as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. and COLOSSIANS 3:22 Slaves, in all things obey those who are your masters on earth, not with external service, as those who merely please men, but with sincerety of heart, fearing the Lord. and 1 TIM 6:1,2 Let all who are under the yoke as slaves regard their own masters as worthy of all honor so that the name of God and our doctrine may not be spoken against. And let those who have believers as their masters not be disrespectful to them because they are brethren, but let them serve them all the more, because those who partake of the benefit are believers and beloved. Teach and preach these principles. and TITUS 2:9,10 Urge bondslaves to be subject to their own masters in everything, to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect. “It’s not just that you mentioned it. You basically questioned why a black man would be a Christian period, which is an awkward and frankly ill-conceived thing to ask for numerous reasons.” Well, I DO question it. I question why any man who’s descended from people enslaved by people who used their religion to justify their actions adopts the religion of his persecutors. I also question why the descendents of those persecutors stick to the religion that justified their actions. “No, but it is sort of ignorant of what was going on at the time. As I’ve already said, Kidnapping for slavery was a huge no-no for the Jewish people, and if we’re supposed to match up their slavery to ours it should still have been a no-no.” Kidnapping ISRAELIS was a big no-no. I never heard of any Israeli slaves in the Americas. “pro-slavery Christians used the bible to try and justify what they were already doing, they didn’t do because it was in the bible. It’s not like they read it and went, “Hey, look, it says we can steal negros from their homes… let’s do it!” The slave trade was going strong before the more religious slave owners started cherry picking verses and what not.” Nobody says that the Bible gave people the idea for slavery. It existed from pre-historical times. It’s the fact that the Bible condones slavery and the slaveowners could justify themselves through the Bible that counts and also how well they could do it. They didn’t have to cherry pick or quote mine to do it. They had a plethora of verses justifying their behavior in both the Old and New Testaments and their opponents had only general “be nice” verses to oppose them with. “Kinda how the Nazi’s used Darwin to establish their master race thing (note: I AM NOT EQUATING NAZI’S AND EVOLUTION -_-). Hitler hated the jews (and everybody else) long before he got hold of Darwin. He just used it to his advantage.” Contra Weikert, anti-Semitism has about a 2000 year history before Hitler. It started in NT times when proto-Christians were a Jewish sect. After the two disastrous revolts, Judaism was persona non grata to the Romans and the new Christians, who had been kicked out of the Synagogue, went out of their way to make sure the Romans knew they were different from the Jews, and they didn’t like them either. Really violent anti-Semitism began with the Crusades when the Crusaders paused on their way to the Holy Land to murder some infidels a little closer to home. Things never got better after that until Hitler died. By the time Hitler came along, anti-Semitism had developed a racial aspect and Hitler believed that Jews were a degenerate race (ala the fall, except just them) who had become animalistic. As he switched his sympathies from Catholic to Protestant, he greatly admired German Martin Luther, especially his book, “On the Jews and Their Lies”, which is available if you Google. This book was proudly featured at the Nuremburg rallies. Some “highlights” (from Wikipedia): Jews are "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.” “full of the devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine,"[2] and the synagogue is an "incorrigible whore and an evil slut". According to Wiki, Luther recommended, “(1) for Jewish synagogues and schools to be burned to the ground, and the remnants buried out of sight; (2) for houses owned by Jews to be likewise razed, and the owners made to live in agricultural outbuildings; (3) for their religious writings to be taken away; (4) for rabbis to be forbidden to preach, and to be executed if they do; (5) for safe conduct on the roads to be abolished for Jews; (6) for usury to be prohibited, and for all silver and gold to be removed and "put aside for safekeeping"; and (7) for the Jewish population to be put to work as agricultural slave labor.” Sounds like a road map to Naziism, doesn't it? I don’t believe Weikert mentions any of this in his book and I’ve yet to hear of any historian that agrees with Weikert on Hitler and evolution. I have heard that Hitler put some of Darwin’s books on the burn list: “6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).” http://sciencenotes.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/whose-books-did-hitler-bur/ Hitler also appeared to believe that humans were NOT the product of evolution: ““Whence do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.” (Hitler’s Table Talk) I think that’s enough of a reply for now.dmullenix
July 1, 2011
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KF at 144: I don’t doubt that you’d like me to post somewhere less conspicuous, but you hijacked this thread and I’m just posting to your posts. I don’t see much to reply to in your last posts, just your third repetition of quote mined PZ with your added comments. KF at 147: “America’s Founders were predominantly Christians and had a Biblical worldview.” Not Washington, Jefferson, Madison or Franklin. I’ve already covered Jefferson and his customized Bible with all the untrue or immoral stuff cut out. A mighty slim volume. Madison was his acolyte and felt the same way about almost everything. Washington was interesting – he attended church regularly with his wife, but whenever Communion was served, he would get up and, along with most of the men, leave the church. George would go home and send the carriage back for Martha, who partook. He got giggled by a preacher once who had the gall to preach a sermon about those who left without partaking of Communion. George thought about this and then sent the preacher a note saying he had reconsidered his actions and would no longer attend church on Communion Sundays. Not a very Christian Christian, eh? And Franklin, of course, was full of good advice on such topics as selecting a good mistress. Of course, that does fit in fairly well with the Old Testament with its God-sanctioned polygamy and its hordes of concubines. But I don’t think that the religious right would approve. “The Bible teaches that slavery, in one form or another (including spiritual, mental, and physical), is always the fruit of disobedience to God and His law/word.” You say that (I’d love some verses to go with it.) and then, in the very next sentence, you print this: “(This is not to say that the enslavement of any one person, or group of people, is due to their sin, for many have been enslaved unjustly, like Joseph and numerous Christians throughout history.)” which completely contradicts the first sentence. Unless you’re trying to slip in a fast one where the “disobedience” was Adam and Eve’s. Sorry, they never existed. KF at 148 Have you noticed that when you don’t have an adequate reply to someone, you just call them names? Mung and CY at 149 & 150 See reply to KF at 148 above. KF at 151 Godwin’s law! You lose.dmullenix
June 27, 2011
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Mung: Part of the story of the triumph of Hitler in Germany was that too many who saw through him assumed that others also saw through him, and/or were unwilling to take up the painful and dangerous struggle required to expose and break the momentum of his movement backed up by the murderous SA Brownshirts. And, too many were so distracted by the danger further to the left [NSDAP = National SOCIALIST German Workers' Party . . . ], the communists, that they did not realise that Hitler was just as dangerous. By the time he seized state power and control of education, media and police forces, it was too late. So, in our day, we have to expose dangerous radicals and the implications of their ideologies and rage. In the case of DM, he has been so programmed -- or is a sock puppet -- that he cannot or will not realise that a Black man can have a very different view of the role and significance of the gospel and the scriptures in our civilisation than he evidently has. And, he brushes aside the relevant history and balancing context, in his haste to make Village Atheist talking points; which seem to give him a sense of moral superiority. Going back to where this all started, he is utterly unable to see that evolutionary materialism has in it no IS that can ground OUGHT, reducing morality to amoral manipulation of a mass delusion that there is good and there is evil. That patent absurdity moves him not at all, and he either willfully or in the impulse of his rages and rhetoric, is busily trying to distract attention form the sobering issue in the original post. He does not even see the racist bigotry implied in his behaviour. But, we must not underestimate such. Nazism was patently absurd, yet it prevailed in Germany at the eventual cost of 60 mn dead and a devastated continent. Prevailed, because people did not take it seriously early enough and/or allowed themselves to be intimidated by the bully boy tactics so beloved of fascists of every stripe. We must never forget, and this is one time we gotta rub the puppy's nose in the mess it has created. Think, seriously, about the comparison between the Nazi book burnings and the way PZM et al -- look at the comments on the linked threads, including the BBC news article -- think it is a laudable thing to steal a communion host, then nail it and throw it into a bin next to a banana peel and coffee grounds (which have very suggestive colour). Then, think about what such en-darkened minds and benumbed consciences would do if they have institutional and national power. Resemblance to what has begun to happen is NOT coincidental! Bydand! GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 25, 2011
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Mung, KF has a tendency to use the screed of trolls to further educate onlookers, which in my view is quite acceptable, and in fact somewhat demanded. Agreed?CannuckianYankee
June 24, 2011
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Some people should be taken seriously, other people should not be taken seriously. David, aka dmullinex, clearly falls into the latter category.Mung
June 24, 2011
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F/N 3: Since it has been buried, my comment in 141 on the story of the gospel and liberation form slavery in Jamaica is as just linked. DM -- never mind his pretence of asking questions above, these are snide false accusations not questions -- has not done the basic courtesy of reading a correction, in a context where he has willfully pushed in a knife. He is plainly a troll and should be treated as such.kairosfocus
June 24, 2011
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F/N 2: Since slavery has been used so much as an atmosphere-poisoning distractor, let me clip this [as it is not a specifically theological reflection -- I have pointed courtesy BA elsewhere for that], as a part of the response DM has refused to seriously interact with: ________________ >> America's Founding Fathers are seen by some people today as unjust and hypocrites, for while they talked of liberty and equality, they at the same time were enslaving hundreds of thousands of Africans. Some allege that the Founders bear most of the blame for the evils of slavery. Consequently, many today have little respect for the Founders and turn their ear from listening to anything they may have to say. And, in their view, to speak of America as founded as a Christian nation is unthinkable (for how could a Christian nation tolerate slavery?) . . . . America's Founders were predominantly Christians and had a Biblical worldview. If that was so, some say, how could they allow slavery, for isn't slavery sin? As the Bible reveals to man what is sin, we need to examine what it has to say about slavery . . . . The Bible teaches that slavery, in one form or another (including spiritual, mental, and physical), is always the fruit of disobedience to God and His law/word. (This is not to say that the enslavement of any one person, or group of people, is due to their sin, for many have been enslaved unjustly, like Joseph and numerous Christians throughout history.) Personal and civil liberty is the result of applying the truth of the Scriptures. As a person or nation more fully applies the principles of Christianity, there will be increasing freedom in every realm of life. Sanctification for a person, or nation, is a gradual process. The fruit of changed thinking and action, which comes from rooting sin out of our lives, may take time to see. This certainly applies historically in removing slavery from the Christian world . . . . Some people suggest today that all early Americans must have been despicable to allow such an evil as slavery. They say early America should be judged as evil and sinful, and anything they have to say should be discounted. But if we were to judge modern America by this same standard, it would be far more wicked - we are not merely enslaving people, but we are murdering tens of millions of innocent unborn children through abortion. These people claim that they would not have allowed slavery if they were alive then. They would speak out and take any measures necessary. But where is their outcry and action to end slavery in the Sudan today? (And slavery there is much worse than that in early America.) Some say we should not listen to the Founders of America because they owned slaves, or at least allowed slavery to exist in the society. However, if we were to cut ourselves off from the history of nations that had slavery in the past we would have to have nothing to do with any people because almost every society has had slavery, including African Americans, for many African societies sold slaves to the Europeans; and up to ten percent of blacks in America owned slaves . . . . [Moreover] after independence the American Founders actually took steps to end slavery. Some could have done more, but as a whole they probably did more than any group of national leaders up until that time in history to deal with the evil of slavery. They took steps toward liberty for the enslaved and believed that the gradual march of liberty would continue, ultimately resulting in the complete death of slavery. The ideas they infused in the foundational civil documents upon which America was founded - such as Creator endowed rights and the equality of all men before the law - eventually prevailed and slavery was abolished. But not without great difficulty because the generations that followed failed to carry out the gradual abolition of slavery in America. [Kindly, read the whole article . . . ] >> ________________ And, again, let us not forget the key focal matter that DM et al are so desperate to distract us from, PZM as clipped by IDNET and commented on by me:
Atheists tend to be politically liberal, fairly tolerant. [ --> deny, deny, deny . . . ] The tolerance part is that there’s no question that nobody is going to deport creationists. Nobody is going to shut down the churches. Nobody is going to do anything like that. [ --> And, what does the bloody history of the past century at the hands of atheistical regimes tell us on this?] What we want to do is put things in a proper perspective. If you want to believe that in the privacy of your home, if you want to get together in church and talk to people about this, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. [--> translated, we will censor the public square and the culture's sense of what knowledge is on a priori evolutionary materialism as we have institutional power to do and if you object to the imposition of ideological censorship on origins science, we will come down on you like a ton of bricks, even threatening to hold your children hostage, on the excuse that you can have your little fantasies in quiet and that's "freedom" enough for you; don't you dare expose our censorship of science and science education] That’s the tolerance we’ll give them. There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science [--> translation: they are exposing the use of misleading icons of evolution to indoctrinate the public and school children, starting with Haeckel's frauds, cf the Google Books result here] in ways that I cannot forgive. This is not about demonizing the individuals. [--> the bland denial of what one is about to do . . .] I have to single out this man [--> in context, plainly Jonathan Wells], whom I consider the most contemptable, despicable, cruel, and vicious evil liar in the creationist movement today, yes, he’s a nasty, nasty person. ([editorial comment, OP:] PZ has never met or talked with this ID proponent.)
Do you want to put serious state or institutional power into hands like this? That would be patent folly, and where such have usurped power, it is time to stand up under interposing magistrates and first correct then if they refuse, remove them. GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 24, 2011
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F/N: The Dutch DOI under William The Silent of Orange, 1581, is well worth citing, being the first state paper to incorporate the points in Vindiciae. You will see that ti is a clear idea-context for the better known US DOI of 1776, and indeed I have seen hints in remarks by members of the drafting committee that suggest they looked to the Dutch antecedents: ________________ >> . . . a prince is constituted by God to be ruler of a people, to defend them from oppression and violence as the shepherd his sheep; and whereas God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects (without which he could be no prince), to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them. And when he does not behave thus, but, on the contrary, oppresses them, seeking opportunities to infringe their ancient customs and privileges . . . then he is no longer a prince, but a tyrant, and the subjects are to consider him in no other view . . . This is the only method left for subjects whose humble petitions and remonstrances could never soften their prince or dissuade him from his tyrannical proceedings; and this is what the law of nature dictates for the defense of liberty, which we ought to transmit to posterity, even at the hazard of our lives . . . . . So, having no hope of reconciliation, and finding no other remedy, we have, agreeable to the law of nature in our own defense, and for maintaining the rights, privileges, and liberties of our countrymen, wives, and children, and latest posterity from being enslaved by the Spaniards, been constrained to renounce allegiance to the King of Spain, and pursue such methods as appear to us most likely to secure our ancient liberties and privileges. >> ____________ DM et al have been robbed of the true history, and are programmed with a propagandistic, twisted view of the world. That is why they take a twisted view of the scriptures, regardless of correction. (And BTW, note that in the midst of the discussion on government under God I have linked several times, there is a section on the slavery issue, which DM gives no indication of having seriously read or understood with an open mind. But, he feels free to imagine that he can dictate to me as a black Jamaican, how I should think about the scriptures, based on my blackness. For shame!)kairosfocus
June 24, 2011
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Onlookers: Plainly, and ever so sadly, the MG tactic of closed-minded drumbeat repetition of long since corrected talking points, brazenly brushing aside all further correction, is spreading like wildfire across the darwinist fever swamps. All I can say on that is that such behaviour as we have now seen for some months, is willfully deceptive, and when one crosses that threshold, s/he is now a willful deceiver. There is a shorter word for that, L * * * , but let us focus on the action involved rather than the label: willful deceit, once one has enough education and basic intelligence to know better than one insists on speaking. Given the events of the past days, this sort of action is intended to distract us from following up on "dangerous" issues. Let us therefore remind ourselves of exactly what DM et al are ever so desperate that we not take up seriously and discuss. Here is my markup IDNET's cluster of clips on PZM and the "tolerance" of evo mat ideologues, noting that the context and links are addressed in the thread here: ________________ >> Atheists tend to be politically liberal, fairly tolerant. [ --> deny, deny, deny . . . ] The tolerance part is that there’s no question that nobody is going to deport creationists. Nobody is going to shut down the churches. Nobody is going to do anything like that. [ --> And, what does the bloody history of the past century at the hands of atheistical regimes tell us on this?] What we want to do is put things in a proper perspective. If you want to believe that in the privacy of your home, if you want to get together in church and talk to people about this, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. [--> translated, we will censor the public square and the culture's sense of what knowledge is on a priori evolutionary materialism as we have institutional power to do and if you object to the imposition of ideological censorship on origins science, we will come down on you like a ton of bricks, even threatening to hold your children hostage, on the excuse that you can have your little fantasies in quiet and that's "freedom" enough for you; don't you dare expose our censorship of science and science education] That’s the tolerance we’ll give them. There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science [--> translation: they are exposing the use of misleading icons of evolution to indoctrinate the public and school children, starting with Haeckel's frauds, cf the Google Books result here] in ways that I cannot forgive. This is not about demonizing the individuals. [--> the bland denial of what one is about to do . . .] I have to single out this man [--> in context, plainly Jonathan Wells], whom I consider the most contemptable, despicable, cruel, and vicious evil liar in the creationist movement today, yes, he’s a nasty, nasty person. ([editorial comment, OP:] PZ has never met or talked with this ID proponent.) >> _______________ If DM is like this when he is a guest in a blog, what would he be like in a Tenure or thesis committee? Or in a Courtroom, or a Parliament? W@hat about PZM and co? Do we see the implications of this behaviour and attitude for liberty and justice? GEM of TKI PS: Let me take one slice to show how unresponsive DM is to correction based on mere facts and logic. If you are troubled by DM's highlighted reference to George III, an Enlightenment era ruler with a mental challenge, as though he were trying to rule by Divine Right of Kings, simply note that he was working in partnership with Parliament; indeed a crucial part of the issue was that London was trying to make law for the colonies who were supposed to have had charters making them separate as the Channel Islands and Man are separate realms to this day; hence "no taxation without representation" as a popular slogan on this complex issue. As, over 100 years previously, the last British King to try to rule by claimed divine right, lost his head by sentence of death backed up by said parliament. For, the theological teachings in Lex, Rex on the dual covenant of nationhood and government under God had prevailed; as pointed out, tyranny is a forfeit of legitimacy, and the doctrine of interposition first exemplified by Moshe himself (as the context for the 10 commandments Paul alludes to in Rom 13:1 - 10 -- i.e Divine right of kings always was a case of scripture twisting), obtains. And behind Lex Rex, we can trace back to Duplessis-Mornay's Vindiciae, and even the Dutch Declaration of Independence of 1581. So, DM is plainly ignorant on the history involved. related points are explored in the already linked, here. DM is just repeating propagandiastic talking points without sound knowledge, and in the process is falling afoul of Peter's solemn warning:
2 Pet 3: 15And consider that the long-suffering of our Lord [[e]His slowness in avenging wrongs and judging the world] is salvation ([f]that which is conducive to the soul's safety), even as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the spiritual insight given him, 16Speaking of this as he does in all of his letters. There are some things in those [epistles of Paul] that are difficult to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist and misconstrue to their own [g]utter destruction, just as [they distort and misinterpret] the rest of the Scriptures. 17Let me warn you therefore, beloved, that knowing these things beforehand, you should be on your guard, lest you be carried away by the error of lawless and wicked [persons and] fall from your own [present] firm condition [your own steadfastness of mind]. 18But grow in grace (undeserved favor, spiritual strength) and [h]recognition and knowledge and understanding of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (the Messiah). To Him [be] glory (honor, majesty, and splendor) both now and to the day of eternity. Amen (so be it)! [AMP]
kairosfocus
June 24, 2011
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DM: it is quite evident that you are utterly unwilling to go to the fora where a theological discussion of the issues you keep on pushing would be appropriate. (Onlookers, he was long since pointed to resources and venues where his concerns would be more than adequately answered by those with time and energy for it, in a forum where such a discussion would be appropriate. He insists instead on trying to raise a village atheist style litany of clips out of context and to push talking points in the teeth of any and all correction. He is therefore not a participant in a civil discussion on reasonable terms, he is intentionally disruptive and propagandistic; frankly, since he has had ample opportunity to correct his claims in light of a sounder view, he is willfully pushing what he should know is false and misleading, in an agenda to promote that which is demonstrably indefensible. That speaks for itself. I need not speak further on his implicit racism, presuming to know how a black Jamaican man should think. There is a word for that: RACISM. Now backed up by every species of insistence on rejecting correction.) So, the motivation of threadjacking to distract form the indefensible as exposed in the original post is obvious. It is further plain that you have no broughtupcy or common decency. You are therefore to be viewed and treated as a troll. Good day GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 24, 2011
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CY at 133 Me: “There’s nothing insulting in pointing out that a book someone mistakenly thinks promotes a good morality was actually complicit in enslaving millions of human beings, and in particular, his own ancestors.” CY “Well excuse me, but it is when you’re completely wrong about said book.” Why … why …. gasp! You’re right! All those verses that say you can buy foreigners for slaves and buy the children of foreigners living in your country as slaves and keep a slave’s wife and children if you release him and beat a slave to death so long as he/she lives a day or two after the beating – why they don’t say that at all! Except that they DO say that and if you went into any church in the US slave states you would have heard those lines quoted to you and the slave owners felt utterly justified because they had the Word of God squarely on their side. And when they went to war to fight for slavery, they quoted those Bible verses as justification for their deeds. And for that matter, when Wilberforce was trying to bring modern morality to the world, those verses were thrown back at him. You’re completely wrong about said book. KF at 134 The topic of this thread was set in the OP, you hijacked it to morality in #33 and now you’re trying to pretend you didn’t do that while you bury the thread in verbiage, ad homs and distractions. I can see why since you plainly don’t understand the meaning of the phrase “quote mining”. It means quoting out of context – taking somebody’s words and leaving off their context in order to make it look like they meant something other than what they said and usually without giving unsuspecting readers any hint of their skullduggery. Which is exactly what the OP did. I provided some of the text that aussie left out in #3. The problem is not that he didn’t use “proper” academic conventions, it’s that he quote mined AND he didn’t show any trace of his deletions whatsoever! But no fear, you went him one better by adding your own text to the quote-mined PZ text and then criticizing PZ for what YOU wrote! And now you hijack the thread a second time by bringing up the Cracker Incident. It may surprise you, but I agree that PZ should not have dissed the Communion Wafer. It would have offended many of my friends if they’d heard about it and, frankly, it smells way too much like Koran Burning. Bad PZ, Bad! “he needs to be sharply corrected and curbed by decent people, not celebrated like a rock star.” He was, by his secular university. KF at 135 “I am sure that no Christian in his right mind would countenance death threats..” And no True Scotsman would either. (For those who don’t know, that’s the name of a common logical fallacy, not a reference to KF’s ancestry.) “Mr Myers’ communion wafer stunt gives the lie to any claims of tolerance or respect on his part.” Disrespect is not intolerance. Respect has to be earned and when it’s not earned, anything but disrespect is immoral. “Further to all this, over the past 24 hours, you have shown that you cannot keep civil fingers on your keyboard, and show no compunction or remorse for the most nasty and unwarranted, racially tinged of personal attacks, nor willingness to make amends; nor, can you face the response to your attempts to discredit the historic foundation of moral thought in our civilisation.” Why don’t you let your keyboard cool down for a while and go back through your hundreds of posts here on UD. If you do that honestly, you’re going to see a pattern: you almost invariably resort to personal attacks whenever your arguments receive the slightest criticism. Accusing people of slinging ad hominems, red herrings, and strawmen, mis-characterizing their opponents arguments, making personal attacks, making unwarranted attacks, having no compunction or remorse – these are all standard charges for you. I urge anyone who doubts this to search UD for “herring” or “strawmen” or one of your other pet words and phrases and see how often and unjustly you resort to this tactic. I urge you to mend your ways for, as you say, “… attitudes that lead to intemperate and contempt-filled rhetoric [cf 61 ff and 117 ff and your most recent fulminations], lend themselves to a spiritual acid that eats away the mutual respect that is the basis for sustaining the civil peace of justice. Not to mention, what it does to our souls.” only substitute most of your postings for 61 and 117. Your three main “debating” tactics seem to be heaping abuse on your opponents, constructing fantastically verbose arguments with numbered and lettered subparts that are so long and tedious that few people bother to root through them for their inevitable errors and just plain talking people to death. This thread is a good example of the latter tactic. So far, you’ve made 47 posts (out of a total of 142) and many of them are repetitive. I’ve made 18 and most of them are in reply to your posts. In 61 I said I didn’t know much about that is-ought stuff. I had it in philosophy classes maybe 40 years ago when we were studying Hume and I’ve run into it a few times since, mostly from people promoting the Bible as the basis for an Absolute Morality. The “is” I start from is the question, “What does a sentient creature need and desire” combined with “What is the best way of attaining those needs and desires without frustrating other sentient beings’ needs and desires?” The Golden Rule is the best start I’ve seen towards that goal. If we start with the Bible, we can kidnap people and own them. Or just kill the infidels for worshiping other gods or being witches. Or sell our daughters. Not a good basis for a system of morality! KF at 137 “. . . if I cannot but wish to receive good, even as much at every man’s hands, as any man can wish unto his own soul, how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire which is undoubtedly in other men . . . my desire, therefore, to be loved of my equals in Nature, as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to themward fully the like affection. From which relation of equality between ourselves and them that are as ourselves, what several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn for direction of life no man is ignorant.” The Golden Rule in action. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, [cf Rom 1:18 - 21, 2:14 - 15 [these give the idea rots of this concept in our civilisation]], that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” The Declaration of Independence was written to King George III, who believed he ruled by divine right! That was Jefferson’s polite way of saying, “No you don’t.” Jefferson was a Deist. He believed that some God or gods had created the universe and then more or less ignored it thereafter and let nature take its course. He specifically believed that Jesus was mortal and as for the Bible, he bought a cheap one, cut out the parts he thought were bogus and bound the rest into “Jefferson’s Bible”, which you can buy on Amazon. He tossed out the entire Old Testament and about 90% of the new. One version on Amazon is only 96 pages long and I imagine there’s at least a modern introduction adding to what little Jefferson kept. allanius at 120 “Please prove to us, based on ancient texts—not Wilberforce and Garrison, who, in case you didn’t know, were 19th century politicians—that slavery is immoral.” allanius at 140: “My dear Mullenix: The emphasis in my comment was on “19th century,” not “politician.” Riiight! Howard Zinn was not a nihilist nor is Chomsky. When you make your charges of “moral vanity”, “self-congratuatory”, “negate all of being as if it had no value”, “high-order subjectivism”, “utterly devoid of any sense of context or balance”, “postmodernism”, etc., you remind me very much of KF in his first mode of response to those who disagree with him. “After all, not everyone is willing to throw over all of history and all that is valuable in being for the sake of the moral pieties of dmullenix.” I don’t think I’ve typed a single original thought in this thread, so don’t try to flatter me. I’m willing to throw over that large part of history that is indecent and anti human. Do you want to bring back slavery and selling daughters and killing witches and those who worship other gods? Because we’ve thrown over that part of history and good riddance, even if the Bible says you can do it. Kf at 141 Man, you do go on and on! Read what you’ve written about George Liele again and answer these questions: 1: WHO wanted to hang William Knibb and what was their religion? 2: Who established the slavery that was finally abolished on Aug 1, 1834 and what was their religion? 3: What was the religion of those who intimidated and smeared those who stood up to slavery? 4: Who burned down those 13 dissenter chapels? Hint: “Established Church”. 5: What was the religion of those West India planters and merchants who fattened themselves off the blood, sweat, toil and tears of the slaves? Bonus question: If the Bible explicity allows them to be enslaved and serverely beaten, almost to death and the Bible is the basis of Absolute Morality, can we criticize them? 6: Why did your ancestors adopt the religion of their oppressors? I hope you’ll actually read and answer those questions, especially #6. KF at 142 You’ve posted this one dozens of times. It’s still wrong. What are you going to do? If you want morals, you can’t get them from the Bible unless you go in, roll up your sleeves and dump most of it (see Jefferson’s Bible). And if you do that, the result has only your authority. It’s human, it’s not absolute. So if you’re stuck with human invented morality, why not forget the Bible and start with the Golden Rule. Talk to you Monday, by which time I am resigned to seeing a dozen or more replies, mostly repetitive and none of which answer any of the questions above or any other of the questions I’ve asked of you and which you’ve been ignoring.dmullenix
June 24, 2011
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F/N 4: I need to also point out, again, the force of Will Hawthorne's rebuke to evolutionary materialism on morality -- and no Dr Liddle, this is not a fallacious playing of the Hitler card, it is pointing out through an apt example the self-evident absurdities of a false system of thought. For, we dare not forget this: ____________ >> Assume (per impossibile) that atheistic naturalism [[= evolutionary materialism] is true. Assume, furthermore, that one can't infer an 'ought' from an 'is' [[the 'is' being in this context physicalist: matter-energy, space- time, chance and mechanical forces]. (Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.) Given our second assumption, there is no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer an 'ought'. And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there's no description of anything in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action. Add a further uncontroversial assumption: an action is permissible if and only if it's not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action . . . [[We see] therefore, for any action you care to pick, it's permissible to perform that action. If you'd like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan 'if atheism is true, all things are permitted'. For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don't like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time. Now, we all know that at least some actions are really not permissible (for example, racist actions). Since the conclusion of the argument denies this, there must be a problem somewhere in the argument. Could the argument be invalid? No. The argument has not violated a single rule of logic and all inferences were made explicit. Thus we are forced to deny the truth of one of the assumptions we started out with. That means we either deny atheistic naturalism or (the more intuitively appealing) principle that one can't infer 'ought' from [[a material] 'is'. >> ______________ Unfortunately (and as already shown), PZM's behaviour, attitude and words -- which no appeal to context can ever excuse, underscore the force of this warning. GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 23, 2011
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F/N 3: And, on the slavery question, DM plainly shows that he has refused to even begin to address the corrections given to him, starting here at 64 above; so tempting to him is an inexcusable racially tinged ad hominem circumstantial. FYI, DM, so you can begin to appreciate just how wrong headed and wrong hearted your notion that a black man should not be a Christian because of slavery is: 1: The Christian faith was first seriously brought to my ancestors in my homeland, Jamaica, by a black, former slave and missionary from Georgia [who is also significant in the history of the Black and Cherokee Indian churches in the USA], George Liele. 2: He and others founded, starting in 1782, the Native Baptist churches that were the founding institution of modern Jamaica, giving to the land three of seven acknowledged national heroes, all martyrs to liberty. (And there should be a fourth, William Knibb; a second generation Missionary from England, one of those who came out when the colonial authorities tried to shut down the voice of the black baptist leaders from preaching the evangelical faith. He was not martyred, but only escaped the noose because the slaves spoke up for him when he and other missionaries were unjustly accused of fomenting rebellion.) 3: In just over 50 years from the date of that founding, on the night of Aug 1 1834, the slaves -- Christian and animist alike -- crowded into the Baptist and other dissenter churches on the night that slavery was abolished. 4: In Falmouth, said William Knibb, began the seconds count-down to midnight, with the announcement that the monster was dying, then counted down seconds to midnight, triumphantly announcing that "the monster is dead." 5: After the Christmas 1831 uprising, which had started out as an intended sit-down strike for pay, Knibb had been sent to England, and had sworn, in the Baptist Missionary Meeting, to walk from one end of England to the other to let the Christian people of England know what their BRETHREN in Jamaica -- the slaves -- were suffering. (Yes, like other abuses and deception, slavery thrived in the dark, and lived off intimidation and smearing those who stood up to question it.) 6: No-one could withstand his facts, his citations of law he had investigated in light of abuse of members of his church who were slaves, and he ended up before parliament. 7: When in the midst of a crisis in England in which the dissenter [Evangelical] districts were pivotal, the Governor's report on the uprising arrived, and showed how a so-called Colonial Church Union, affiliated with the Established Church, had burned to the ground 13 dissenter chapels, on the flimsy excuse and patent slander that these were the sources of rebellion. 8: With that telling echo of the issues over freedom of conscience and worship in the reformation era, and in the face of a crisis -- remembering how it was not that long before that the Scots had last marched on London -- the establishment threw overboard the West India planters and merchants who fattened themselves off the blood, sweat, toil and tears of the slaves. 9: That is how after some final delays, in 1833 abolition was passed, and was set for that famous August 1, 1834. yes, there was an unwise compromise that meant full free was August 1838, but that is a secondary matter. 10: For on that night, my ancestors, knowing who had stood up in the face of fire and noose for liberation, made my homeland a Covenant, Christian, Evangelical nation under God. (The present sufferings are in large measure because to many, sadly, have forgotten their covenant.) 11: And in this context, that history is written into my name, which includes that of a national hero and family member, martyred in the next generation for standing up and speaking out for the plight of the peasants in the face of drought, depression and war in America. ___________ I hope you have the decency to be utterly ashamed, DM.kairosfocus
June 23, 2011
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My dear Mullenix: The emphasis in my comment was on “19th century,” not “politician.” But I’m not surprised at the misdirection; it’s all you’ve got. You are a Nihilist in the, er, tradition of Zinn and Chomsky. You desperately want to be Zarathustra, the moral prophet, but in order for you to support your moral vanity, your self-congratulatory pose of saeve indignatio, you must negate all of being as if it had no value. The result is high-order subjectivism. The valuations you make in your moral prophet role are utterly devoid of any sense of context or balance. This is the landscape of Postmodernism. There has been a frightful forgetting of history as the past is condemned and negated on the basis of modern moral pieties. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone if you are incapable of seeing that these pieties have no grounding—no objective correlative—other than your own personal tastes and preferences. You say Christians “desperately want to believe” the Bible is “moral.” That’s interesting. I know a good many Christians and I’m pretty sure not a single one of them is “desperate” about this matter. You seem unaware of the fact that there are intelligent, sensitive Christians who can read the very same passages you cite and see them quite differently from you. This is a symptom of moral vanity—the inability to acknowledge the existence or validity of conflicting views. You assure us you are not like other Nihilists. You are not a Hitler, or a Mao, a Stalin. All right; we believe you. The problem with your moral pieties is not so much that they are evil as that they are trite. Being is complex. The trite subjectivism that produces the absolutes seen among Nihilists is the order of the day, but its extreme self-absorption is also leading to its own demise. After all, not everyone is willing to throw over all of history and all that is valuable in being for the sake of the moral pieties of dmullenix.allanius
June 23, 2011
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F/N 2: On self-evident truth.kairosfocus
June 23, 2011
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Oops, left off a link: The discussion from here on.kairosfocus
June 23, 2011
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F/N 2: Had DM troubled himself to read the discussion from here on, he would have come across the point in Ch 2 sec 5 where John Locke, in his famed second essay on civil govt, grounds principles of civil liberty and government by citing "the judicious [Canon, Rev'd Richard] Hooker," in his 1594+ Ecclesiastical Polity, as follows -- in yet another of those classic references that somehow do not make it into today's secular humanist, evolutionary materialism censored public education (so called, but in fact, plainly, indoctrination into a false, endarkening Plato's Cave mentality):
. . . if I cannot but wish to receive good, even as much at every man's hands, as any man can wish unto his own soul, how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire which is undoubtedly in other men . . . my desire, therefore, to be loved of my equals in Nature, as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to themward fully the like affection. From which relation of equality between ourselves and them that are as ourselves, what several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn for direction of life no man is ignorant.
This is the immediate history of ideas context for the following, from the US Declaration of Independence, 1776 [which should also be read in light of the May 1776 call to prayer and penitence as already cited above]:
When . . . it becomes necessary for one people . . . to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, [cf Rom 1:18 - 21, 2:14 - 15 [these give the idea rots of this concept in our civilisation]], that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government [i.e. the right of reformation and if resisted, of just and orderly revolution under interposed magistrates, who per Vindiciae citing OT examples, may be popular and emergent as were Moses, David etc], laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security . . . . We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions [Cf. Judges 11:27 and discussion in Locke], do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
this of course lays out an objective -- notice the strawman "absolute" above -- basis for morality as foundation of law and justice, rooted in the only worldview foundational IS sufficiently strong to sustain OUGHT, the Good eternal Creator God who makes a cosmos in accordance with his nature. And, as evolutionary materialist secular humanism aptly illustrates, the attempted substitution of other, amoral bases does in fact end in precisely the sort of patent absurdity that "self-evident" implies.kairosfocus
June 23, 2011
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F/N: For those genuinely concerned on the grounding of morality and its significance for our civilisation, I point to the course lecture note here, the public lecture paper here and the PDF of a PPT presenting the paper in a public lecture here. the policy primer here will show how it can be put to work on the ground, using the key concepts of sustainable development -- this is fundamentally an ethical challenge -- and the ideas-link between the Categorical Imperative and the classic Mosaic- Christian- Pauline form [yes, Rom 13:8 - 10 is a version of the golden rule . . . ] of the classic Golden Rule.kairosfocus
June 23, 2011
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In that context of PZM's disrespect, contempt and stirring up of hate through guilt by false association [and I am sure that no Christian in his right mind would countenance death threats, so the attempt to characterise the response by a few lunatics, is an even worse form of guilt by false association . . . ], let us now hear his words from his radio interview, giving a little more than was clipped in the OP above:
Myers: Well, there’s a subtle difference here that what I try to do is promote a conversation that is tolerant. I mean, we do. Think literally about the meaning of the word. We tolerate them, but we do not do is give them a false respect. What this is all about is eroding this unwarranted respect that’s given to religion and foolishness like creationism in this country. We back off so much from this and we refuse to confront it. We cover it over with manners and nice words. We shouldn’t be doing that. We should be openly dismissing a lot of these bad ideas and doing it loudly and proudly. That’s what we do. But of course the tolerance part is that there’s no question that nobody is going to deport creationists. Nobody is going to shut down the churches. Nobody is going to do anything like that. What we want to do is put things in a proper perspective. Things like religion and creationism do not belong in government. They do not belong in the public schools. If you want to believe that in the privacy of your home, if you want to get together in church and talk to people about this, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. That’s the tolerance we’ll give them. But if you’re telling me that the earth is 6,000 years old, I’m going to call you an idiot.
Mr Myers' communion wafer stunt gives the lie to any claims of tolerance or respect on his part. His behaviour, attitude, words and deeds are indefensible and inexcusable, period. he needs to be sharply corrected and curbed by decent people, not celebrated like a rock star. But that is not what we have seen above. Instead, we have seen several -- including yourself, DM, who have sought to divert the thread from its focus on a serious matter, probably as the matter is so patently indefensible. Now you wish to falsely accuse me of thread jacking for pointing that inconvenient fact out. Further to all this, over the past 24 hours, you have shown that you cannot keep civil fingers on your keyboard, and show no compunction or remorse for the most nasty and unwarranted, racially tinged of personal attacks, nor willingness to make amends; nor, can you face the response to your attempts to discredit the historic foundation of moral thought in our civilisation. All of this began when in 61 above, you -- admitting that you do not understand the relevant philosophy -- sought to dismiss the well established challenge that evolutionary materialist atheism (advocated by Mr Myers) is inherently amoral and thus faces the problem that it cannot ground morality, which is a fact of our existence. That, by itself -- something pointed out on the record as long ago as in Plato's The Laws, Bk X in 360 BC, is more than enough to utterly discredit such views to anyone who understands the significance of morality vs machiavellian amorality for the sustainability of any civilisation. But, we plainly have much more on the table this morning, for we can see the signs of a clearly rising cloud of danger, in the form of precisely the sort of radically amoral evolutionary materialist factions Plato warned against in the passage as just linked, based on the havoc they and their mentors wreaked in Athens in the generation just previous to his writing:
[[The avant garde philosophers, teachers and artists c. 400 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [[i.e the classical "material" elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art, and that as to the bodies which come next in order-earth, and sun, and moon, and stars-they have been created by means of these absolutely inanimate existences. The elements are severally moved by chance and some inherent force according to certain affinities among them-of hot with cold, or of dry with moist, or of soft with hard, and according to all the other accidental admixtures of opposites which have been formed by necessity. After this fashion and in this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only . . . . [[T]hese people would say that the Gods exist not by nature, but by art, and by the laws of states, which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them; and that the honourable is one thing by nature and another thing by law, and that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.- [[Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT. (Cf. here for Locke's views and sources on a very different base for grounding liberty as opposed to license and resulting anarchistic "every man does what is right in his own eyes" chaos leading to tyranny.)] These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might [[ Evolutionary materialism leads to the promotion of amorality], and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [[Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality "naturally" leads to continual contentions and power struggles; cf. dramatisation here], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others [[such amoral factions, if they gain power, "naturally" tend towards ruthless tyranny; here, too, Plato hints at the career of Alcibiades], and not in legal subjection to them . . .[NB: onward links are at the linked page . . . there is a links limit for posts at UD . . . ]
What is happening in our civlisation is no mystery, nor is it anything novel. It has happened before, over and over again. So, we must now take courage to recognise a rising cloud of mortal danger, and have the determination to stand, exposing it and correcting it lest it bring us all down to ruin. Bydand GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 23, 2011
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