Letters to the Editor
-
Primates
connected with an oceanic intelligence when they began ingesting psychedelics. Period. (Interested readers are referred to Terrence McKenna's Food of the Gods, as well as various ruminations by Robert Anton Wilson and the early works of Andrew Weil. These fellows prove nothing conclusively, of course; inference is all we really have when it comes to the history of consciousness.)
They don't call me Godmonkey for nothing.
-
What makes people controlling and judgmental?
This is a trait that annoys me in both atheists and believers.
I understand where religious people get the idea that their natural job is "mind police."
But how in the hell do atheists come to believe that THEY have the right to that job themselves?
Can any atheist here explain to me -- where do you people get YOUR judgmental fury from, since it's not religion?
Where do atheists get the idea they can tell other people how to think?
Religious people learn this behavior from the Bible. But where do atheists learn it from?
Atheists -- please explain.
-
God and gorillas..............
Ebook review: The Final Freedoms
On the horizon appears an approaching confrontation so contentious, any clash of civilizations may have to wait its turn. On one side, a manuscript titled: The Final Freedoms, against all the gravitas religious tradition can bring to bear.
This, the first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Jesus the Christ focuses specifically on marriage and human sexuality, overturning all natural law theory and theology. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history, not to mention evolution, cosmology, all sexual psychology and theories on the nature of consciousness.
What at first appears an utterly preposterous challenge to the religious status quo rewards those who persevere in closer examination, for it carries within its pages an idea both subtle and sublime, what the theological history of religion either ignored, were unable to imagine or dismissed as impossible. An error of presumption which could now leave 'tradition' staring into the abyss and even humble the heights of scientific speculation. For if this material is confirmed, and there appears to be both the means and a concerted effort to authenticate it, the greatest unresolved questions of human existence may finally have been untangled.
Published [at the moment] only on the web as a free [1.4meg] pdf download, this new teaching has nothing whatsoever to do with any existing religious conception known to history. It is unique in every respect.
Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls,The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle and offers its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds to an act of perfect faith with a direct, individual intervention into the natural world; making a correction to human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception; transforming sexual energy into spiritual enlightenment.
This new teaching is pure ethics. It requires no institutional framework, no churches, no priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, no dogma or doctrine, costs nothing and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single moral imperative and then the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.
This new interpretation identifies the moral foundation of all human thought and conduct and finds expression within a new covenant of human spiritual union, the marriage between one man and one woman. It resolves the most intractable questions and issues of human sexuality. Offering the potential for resolving the most pressing health issues facing the world, including AIDs.
As the first ever religious teaching able to demonstrate its own efficacy, the first ever religious claim of knowledge that meets the criteria of the most rigourous, testable scientific method, this teaching enters the public domain as a reality entirely new to human history.
The beginnings of an intellectual and moral revolution are unfolding on the web and available for anyone to test, discover and explore for themselves, and what might very well define the nature and future of humanity itself!
http://www.energon.uklinux.net
http://thefinalfreedoms.bulldoghome.com
http://dunwanderinpress.org
-
An annoying interview
Barbara King is a scientist who speaks like a non-scientist, and it is grating.
What the hell is "meaning-making," and how is it recognized? Why is exchanging messages not a part of it? When you have a large enough "degree," does it not become a "kind"-- or is merely semantic nonsense anyway?
Nothing is an evolutionary "mistake," because mistakes are only made by agents. Evolution does not have intention, and anybody who presumes to study evolution and speak about it publically should not pretend otherwise. Byproduct theories of religion does not mean that religion is false, and neither do adaptation theories. Understanding how we became able, even likely to believe in something says nothing about the truth or falsity of that belief. Believing true things is sometimes adaptative, and sometimes believing false things is (to give an example, there are theories of how overconfidence can be adaptive in war). Saying that a belief or disposition evolved does not make it good or bad, desireable or undesireable. That's the naturalistic fallacy rearing its ugly head.
King may not want to admit her theological committments, but that doesn't mean that Dawkins and Dennett are bad or uncredible people for choosing otherwise (atheological, I suppose, in their case). They have a desire to understand religion coupled with a desire for "atheist" to cease being a dirty word. Perhaps it would've been better to separate the two missions in their recent books, but I don't think they should have to hide one or both of them.
And by the way, Dennett doesn't just believe that religion is a meme-- he believes that all ideas, elements of information, are memes. Memes exist in the same sense that words do. And some memes may be beneficial, others not. Being catchy doesn't make an idea worthy or right. That's his main point-- to stop us from thinking that religion is necessarily a good thing because it's popular or long-lasting; but rather it may just be serving its own ends. May.
"We are not controlled by our genes or our memes or our brains," says King. We are not controlled by any one of those things (and neither Dennett, nor Dawkins, nor anybody else is saying otherwise)....however those are the things that make us who we are which scientists can study. If you want to study God, take up theology. If you want to study how humans think, feel, and "emote" (nice term there, King) about God, be a scientist.