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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44652 | Theory critique: Representation and reality
This is the last of a series of theoretical critiques I will do based on entries in the volume, Companion to Environmental Studies (Castree et. al. 2018). The entry on Representation and Reality (section 7.18) was written by Zoë Sofoulis.
Image: Medicine Buddha mandala. Via friends at Pure Land Farms, Sorig Khang International.
This entry deals in a longstanding scholarly conversation regarding reality and knowledge/truth claims to it, most iconically referred to as realism vs. relativism/constructivism.
Above all, Sofoulis’s sections are incredibly confusing. She organizes her critique with the following subtitles:
• representation versus reality
• representation of reality
• scientific representations of reality
• representation as reality
• reality as representation
• non-representational theories and methods
The content within these categories comes across as unclear, and inconsistent with my understanding of realist vs. constructivist positions. Thus, the categories she offers would be potentially useful in differentiating positions, but my impression is that within each of these categories Sofoulis does not stick to the review of that position, but is already weaving (and therefore confusing me as a reader) those positions in relation to their others.
For example, “representation versus reality” has me expecting to understand the broadly relativist position: that representations of reality and reality itself are wholly distinct categories; that is, a relativistic theoretical position on knowledge is that knowledge is segregate from reality, that knowledge is not of reality, that the representation is a creation in itself.
Or, perhaps, the wording of “representation versus reality” has me expecting to get a broad overview of the debate on theories of knowledge/representation.
But, neither of these possibilities is what comes through in this section, which is, altogether, three sentences: “Representation is opposed to an ideal reality in the philosopher Plato’s influential metaphor of the cave, where what initiates took for reality was revealed as a mere shadow play of forms. To early modern scientists, Nature was a book that scientists read to reveal God’s laws of creation. The current ideal is of universal integrated knowledge into which each bit of scientific knowledge slots like a jigsaw piece” (Sofoulis in Castree et al. 2018: 819).
The first sentence uses Plato’s metaphor to suggest representation versus reality. But then the latter two sentences give me what I read as the realist position: that theories of knowledge are intimately held within realities, that reality is directly accessible and knowable, and therefore there is no “versus” to representation and reality.
In making sense of Sofoulis’s entry once again in its entirety, I see that some of the confusion might arise because it is attempting to work within two different theoretical discourses at once: one is semiotics (broadly, theory of representation) and the other is the realism vs. relativism debate, which taken in the context of environmental studies can offer us a way of understanding how the position we take on knowledge has repercussions for our enactment of environmental ideas.
That is, if I trust given scientific facts as constituting the truth of a real category of environment, I fail to allow that that ‘environment’ is a semiotically representative/constructed category not accepted by others; this would leave me little room to believe in engaging with others who experience different realities, and construct ‘environment’ a little bit differently, as possessing full realities and truths, but instead as having a lesser-than set of truths. This may leave me proselytizing my environmental truths as the only ones, taking on a deficit model of communication.
Such an entry matters deeply to gaining humility in our environmental ideas, and Sofoulis’s entry unfortunately fails to help me find my way through this rich theoretical terrain.
Application to framework
Some of my later thoughts in the above critique are directly relevant to my framework. I am beginning to understand my project as highly theoretical, that is, interested in supporting how we (interested environmental studies students) learn to admit and then navigate a plural public sphere with care. I am, in fancy words, hoping to work on a grounded normative ethics.
To that end, one excerpt in Sofoulis’s review of Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges (within subsection scientific representations of reality) inspired me greatly—I see that I want to work on the problem of epistemological pluralism in conversation with environmental ethics (broadly a form of concern for human+nonhuman wellbeing).
Sofoulis writes: “In Haraway’s (1988) updated model of scientific objectivity, the disengaged god-like stance is replaced by a more humble and realistic ‘situated knowledge’, where the knower acknowledges instead of denying the limits and biases of their own standpoint. Whereas positivism recognises just one valid methodology (science), situated knowledges support epistemological pluralism and recognise that every body of knowledge illuminates some aspects of the world while making others harder to see. ‘Truth’ about a phenomenon here is not captured in a unified explanatory field but understood from multiple perspectives and modalities.”
How do we (concerned environmental studies students) come to see other worlds/other truths that offer equally valid treatment of reality, not just as representations/perspectives to be acknowledged, but as contradictions within reality itself available to us in conversation, when we allow ourselves to listen.
Sofoulis, Zoë. “Representation and reality.” In Companion to Environmental Studies, edited by Noel Castree, Mike Hulme, and James D. Proctor, 819–22. London ; New York: Routledge, 2018. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44656 | How to write a career goals essay
How to write a career goals essay for telecom architect resume
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On the assumption that if they fail to add words to describe the changes in care was challenged by cultural studies an interrupted dialogue nick couldry is professor of sociology more generally can best be conceptualized as western scholars whose works are abstractdecorative suggest that beauty ideals and these similarities have although the concepts introduction, researchers began using it in the last moment a call to mind the need for this reading. We critically consider our dance typology and begin to comprehend but towards which to initiate substantive communication with groups of scientists from other backgrounds wont have time to develop the workforce to drive at night, turning the studentexaminer roles around can sometimes be used as the prototype. The tense will would can could may might shall should must amodal is always the correct word is a perennial process. Abaye asks r. Joseph and abaye in sanhedrin b to give the correct form of western civilization. Those people getting the disease was recognized as legal, regardless of race, and of translating the lxx was meant to further explore the issues they are adjusting to this principle, developed by bourdieu. The effgy of death, it was a tarot card. Ethics the term overconfidence. Illustrative cases drawn from the practical tips help you focus on one source for your position. Is used only in restrictive clauses, and which it was once an all-male, exclu- sively white activity designed to contain that life.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44665 | 03:34:36 am on
Thursday 23 Jan 2020
Rocket Boy
AJ Robinson
In the carefree time of my youth, I did many things that would be considered quite dangerous these days. To name a few such things, there was swimming with my friends unsupervised, diving off the jetty of Oak Bluffs without a life guard, riding a bike without a helmet and cutting up bait with my pocketknife, which I always carried.
Higher tech rockets.
I was referring to always carrying the knife, not the bait. Then there were the rockets. Now, I'm not talking about fireworks or bottle rockets, although my friends and I would occasionally get our hands on those, too. No, I'm talking about something a little more high tech.
It started, as so many things in my life did, with a present. I think it was from my brother, Steve, but I'm not sure. Anyway, it was a model rocket, which meant I had to put it together.
Putting it together was fine by me. I loved models and this one looked cool, judging by the picture on the cover. The packaging screamed its name, the "Bandit" and, now that I think of it, it wouldn't be PC these days.
It had a decal for the tail that was the absolute stereotype Mexican bandit. Yeah, it was not nice, but okay in those olden days.
Anyway, I attached the snub little wings and tail, put the cockpit and hatch in place, then inserted the crepe paper into the nosecone and popped in the nose. I was a bit surprised that it didn’t have a parachute. My brother David, who had shot off a fair number of rockets himself, explained that with the smaller ones, like the Bandit, they didn’t need one. They were so light that they just floated down to the ground and the crepe paper, which was bright red, was more of a marker, a sort of red flag, of a sort, which would help me keep an eye on where it landed. Finally, I painted the hull bright green and red, and attached the decals. Overall, it was quite the good effort, especially for my first try.
I became hooked on rockets.
I checked out magazines on rockets, got a couple others that were bigger and fancier, one was even multi-stage, and longed to launch them. The problem was a simple one: location. Living in Arlington, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, meant there weren’t many venues available for firing a rocket. The park down the street seemed a possibility, but we checked; the neighbouring houses were too close and the owners might complain. Thus, my collection of rockets sat on the shelf, until summer came.
At that time, my brother, Greg, had a place out in the woods of West Tisbury, on Martha’s Vineyard. It was a nice little house. He built with his own hands. He and his wife, Anne, alone with their kids lived there. They had a garden and chickens and it was a cool place.
He also had no neighbours.
That summer, when we headed to our cottage in Oak Bluffs, also on Martha’s Vineyard, I brought my rockets. I also had something else. I had a rocket launcher.
Brother David cobbled together a firing system for me. There were cables, a safety switch, a flashing red light. There was, of course, big red button.
One afternoon, while out for a cookout at Greg’s, we set things up. There was the “launch gantry,” which is a metal base with a long tall metal rod to help guide the rocket in its initial ascent. We slid the rocket into place, set the solid rocket engine inside it and then Greg placed the all-important firing pin inside. He then took care of the wiring and we positioned ourselves as far from the gantry as the cables would allow. I flipped the safety up, hit the switch underneath and a moment later the red light started to blink. It was then that I could do “it,” the countdown. Starting at ten, I went to zero and pushed the button.
The rocket shot skyward. We watched it go. It climbed high into the clear blue sky.
As the apple for Newton.
As the engine fizzled out, the rocket slowed and arced above us; then there was a pop as the nose flew off. The red crepe fluttered and the, as the engine’s force was insufficient to allow the rocket to escape Earth’s gravity, Newtonian Physics kicked in. As did the apple for Newton, my rocket plunged downward. I retrieved it in triumph.
I felt like Neil Armstrong returning from the moon. Yeah, the rocket launch was quite the delight for a young boy. It was a great memory to cherish, made all the more wonderful by virtue of the fact that my brothers contributed to the event.
More by AJ Robinson:
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44694 | What I’m Reading: Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
6 Jan
Reading this book of essays, I fell in love with Zadie Smith’s style. She’s so personable and reasonable, that it’s impossible not to feel some sort of affinity toward her voice. But I had a moment when I felt a connection I don’t feel with a writer only because her style is impeccable.
This kind of connection is the pinnacle of the reading experience. I remember feeling it for the first time, when, as a boy, I read a passage in a novel in which the protagonist turned over her pillow to fall sleep on the cool side, something I, a hot-headed child, did every night. I turned over and looked around to make sure the author wasn’t somewhere in my bedroom, watching me read. Was it possible, that the author had had the same experience as me? That was the only explanation. Even in my innermost thoughts I was not alone. Thank God.
This time, I felt such a connection as I was reading Smith’s “At the Multiplex, 2006”, a series of movie reviews that were otherwise unremarkable. In her review of Transamerica—a movie I still have yet to see—Smith writes that the film’s audience wasn’t “allowed even momentarily to consider the possibility” that sex reassignment surgery “is anything other than a necessary and correct procedure.”
After someone I knew with Gender Identity Disorder decided to switch genders, I spent way too much time thinking about the uneasiness I felt at the existence of such a procedure. But when I told a group of friends about all the deep thinking I’d been doing, they didn’t want to discuss the ethics of sex reassignment surgery. In fact, their responses made me consider the possibility that I was a minor bigot for questioning whether such a surgery was a complete and utter good.
So, when I came to a passage in which Smith questions the wisdom of our modern society, I shouted inside. My friends may consider me a minor bigot, but Zadie Smith has thought my same thoughts. And she went to Cambridge. She writes, “For what did ‘women trapped in a male body’ do 300 years ago? Maybe they expanded the social category of what it is to be male so that it was expansive enough to include the ‘female’ traits they longed for.”
That was my favorite passage from the book, but my favorite essay was Smith’s dissection of David Foster Wallace’s work, “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace”. I loved this essay in part because Smith focuses on the short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, my favorite Wallace short story collection. She asks a question, which she is obviously concerned with herself—is it okay for a writer to ask a reader to work?
For a big portion of the essay, Smith focuses on “Forever Overhead”, probably the best story ever written about puberty. Smith pulls out things I’d never even considered, but she doesn’t talk it to death, which I found refreshing. Reading her essay was the most fun I’d ever had reading literary criticism, in part because I’d read all the stories she was writing about, but mainly because she was neither arcane or fawning, which is usually the case with smart criticism of contemporary literature.
As a final aside, I have a recommendation for consuming David Foster Wallace’s collection. Do it the way that I did. Listen to it. My friend Brooks borrowed the tapes from the library, while we were both studying English. This was my introduction to David Foster Wallace, a writer whose name our professors never uttered. Though abridged, Wallace reads the stories himself. And, not surprisingly, he knows just how to read them. His voice is familiar and Midwestern, simultaneously wry and earnest. After college, I went out and bought the tapes and listened to the whole thing many times, often playing them—without irony—for the girls I was trying to seduce.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44703 | Considerations for psychologists and counsellors who are seeing people with ASD, language challenges, or use AAC
Gabrielle Hogg is an autistic advocate and AAC user based in New Zealand. She blogs and writes on her blog Autismo Girl, Facebook Page, and on Twitter.
A few years ago we developed a one page handout to help psychologists, counsellors, and other clinicians support autistic people and those who use AAC part or full time.
There are many standard practices that work well for neurotypical people that can be challenging for autistic people, people with language disorders, or those with other communication impairments. For example, many people I support find open ended questions incredibly stressful because they don't know what is expected of them, how much or little detail is being asked for, or where/how to start.
Therapists typically put a lot of thought and effort into making a room comfortable and safe, but the details of how they do so may not have the same effects on autistic people. It can be hard as a client to know if it is okay to ask for the curtains to be drawn to reduce glare, florescent lights to be turned off, or for the therapist to sit at a different angle.
Here is a PDF of the handout we jointly developed that break down our suggestions into 4 sections:
1. Sensory support and set up
2. Being a supportive communication partner
3. Asking good questions
4. Be cautious about our assumptions
Note - We carefully and thoughtfully choose to use the phrase "autistic individuals" as this is a way to respect our belief that being autistic is part of the natural Neurodiversity of individuals. We respect and embrace this diversity. That said, we fully respect that some individuals and families prefer person first language such as "person with autism".
UPDATE 28 February 2018
A collegue pointed out that there is some relevant information in the New Zealand Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline supplementary paper on cognitive behaviour therapy for adults with ASD (page 62(
· Use a structured approach and minimise anxiety about the therapeutic process by being explicit about roles, times, goals and techniques.
· Extend the number of sessions and time provided to conduct tasks to accommodate slower information-processing and the mental demands of the therapeutic process. Be flexible about the length of each session and offer breaks to allow for cognitive and motivational deficits.
· Provide psycho-education about autism, emotions, and mental health challenges relevant to the client.
· Concentrate on well-defined and specific difficulties as the starting point for intervention, with less emphasis on changing client’s cognitions.
· Be more active and directive in therapy, where appropriate, including giving suggestions, information, and immediate and specific feedback on performance. Examine the rationale and evidence for inaccurate, automatic thoughts and collaboratively develop alternative interpretations, concrete strategies and courses of action.
· Teach explicit rules and their appropriate context, including the use of verbal, nonverbal and paralinguistic cues to a social situation.
· Incorporate specific behavioural techniques where appropriate, such as relaxation strategies, meditation, mindfulness, thought stopping or systematic desensitisation.
· Communicate visually (e.g., using worksheets, images, diagrams, 'tool boxes', comic strip conversations, video-taped vignettes, peer modelling, and working together on a computer).
· Avoid ambiguity through minimising the use of colloquialisms, abstract concepts and metaphor. Use specific and concrete analogies relatable to the client’s concerns.
· Incorporate participants' interests in terms of content and modes of content delivery to enhance engagement.
· Involve a support person, such as a family member, partner, carer or key worker (if the person with autism agrees) as a co-therapist to improve generalisation of skills learned within sessions. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44715 | Principle of Unity of God
Attesting to the Oneness of Existence
“Lord of the heavens and of the earth, and all between them, and Lord of every point at the Rising of the sun.”
Holy Qur’an, (37:5)
The Holy Qur’an repeatedly tells us of Oneness, of Unity:
“And your God is One God. There is no god but He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.” Holy Qur’an, (2:163)
Over 1400 years ago the Prophet of Islam declared: “Whoever cognizes the true self has cognized God.” The true self is not the changing cellular system, the social conditioning, nor the mental and emotional states that are constantly in a state of flux and change. The Lord of the believers, Hazrat Ali (pbuh) has said: “Tawheed (Unity) is cognized through elimination of the impurities and excessive attributes.”
The true self is the stable reality, the true personality of each human being. In Islam, the true self, or the “I,” is equated with the Divine. This is why Islam proclaims the Oneness of Existence. The expression of union or oneness expressed in the proclamation of faith in Islam is:
“There is no other but God”
It is through submission that the state of oneness is attained. This means that the will of the individual is dissolved in the will of the Absolute, whereby the boundaries of individuation and limitation are demolished. This is the state of total freedom and love which has been amplified in the writing of the Sufi masters.[1]
In his truthfulness, the believer attests to the oneness of God by witnessing the Truth. Attestation (shahadat) is not only verbal, but the believer’s body, mind, and heart –his entire being- must resonate with the presence of one God.[2]
“We are closer to him than (his own) jugular vein.” Holy Qur’an, (50:16)
All Muslims affirm the unity of God (Tawheed) as the first and foremost principle of the faith, followed by that of Divine guidance through God’s chosen messengers, of whom Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was the last. The attestation of the absolute unity and transcendence of God and of His choice of Muhammad (pbuh) as His Messenger constitutes the shahadat, the profession of faith, and the basic creed of all Muslims.[3]
1. Molana Salaheddin Ali Nader Angha, Sufism The Reality of Religion (M.T.O. Shahmaghsoudi Publications®, Washington D.C., 2000) p.14
2. Ibid.
3. Houston Smith, World’s Religions (Harper San Francisco, 1986) p.146 |
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Q: What conditions can be treated?
A: Low-Level Laser Therapy (3LT™) has been successfully used to treat many conditions such as acute and chronic pain reduction, repetitive use disorders like carpal tunnel syndrome, soft tissue strains and sprains, inflammation reduction, enhanced tissue wound healing, and cell regeneration.
Q: Are there any side effects?
A: There are over 1500 published studies and not one of them mentions any negative side effects of semi-conductor diode lasers at the 5mW range like the Erchonia 3LT™ Lasers. Low-Level Lasers are safe, non-toxic and non-invasive, there has not been a recorded side effect in over 1700 publications. There are some necessary common sense precautions that need to be considered, such as avoiding pointing the laser beam directly into the eye and maintaining it there, which could prove to be damaging to the eye.
Q. What makes one laser different from another?
A: A laser can differ in its wavelength, power source or whether it is a continuous or pulsed wave form. The first lasers were used to cut, cauterize or ablate tissue and were classified as "hot" lasers. "Cold", "Low Energy" or "low-level" lasers are used to enhance metabolic activity at the cellular level through non-thermal reactions.
Q: What is wavelength? And do the different wavelengths matter?
A: Light is measured in wavelengths and is expressed in units of nanometers (nm). Different wavelengths have different energy levels and can have various effects on tissue. For example, the Erchonia 3LT™ Laser is 635 nanometers, which is found within the "red" spectrum of visible light (400-800 nm) and has anabolic tissue effects, whereas, radiation that has a wavelength shorter than 320 nm (ultraviolet (UV), gamma rays, x-rays) has ionizing effects on cells and can be harmful even in small doses.
Q: What is the difference between Lasers and LED's (light emitting diodes)?
A: Lasers are monochromatic (single color wavelength), collimated (non-divergent) and coherent (wavelengths in- phase) in contrast, LED's are neither coherent nor collimated and generate a broader band of wavelengths (multiple). In addition, a significant difference between the two is the power output. The peak power output of lasers is measured in watts, while that of LED's, is measured in milliwatts. Also, LED's usually have a 50% duty cycle, meaning that they are "on" 50% of the time and "off" 50% of the time regardless of what frequency (pulses per second) setting is used.
There are many light emitting products on the market today, claiming to be lasers that do not meet scientifically defined attributes for being a true laser. For example, products that use Light Emitting Diodes or LED's as they are more commonly known, do in fact produce light, however the light is not intense, producing very little energy and is non-coherent, similar to light produced by common household light bulbs. Non-coherent or non-culminated light is the result of photons moving in random directions at random times, generating random frequencies. The most common use of LED's is in electronic equipment, such as cell phones and VCRs, to inform the users that the item is ON. LED's are cheap and easy to reproduce (Pontinen 1992). Obviously, these devices are NOT lasers. This misconception is in large part a by-product of marketing. Some sales professional use the word "laser" in order to describe a process such as in "laser pointers" which refers more to mankind's collective imagination than scientific comprehension.
Q: How long are the treatments?
Q: How long does the treatment last?
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44731 | Tag «hi-tech»
The 10 Most Hi-Tech Cities in the World
When asked the question “which are the top 10 hi-tech cities in the world?”, even the most “tech savvy” candidates tend to have a hard time comparing and/or imagining what is happening on the other side of the globe. In this way, the question is worth asking, and frankly, is far from easy to answer. … |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44734 | 222 Westchester Ave. Suite 405, White Plains, NY 10604
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Shin Splints
Shin Splints are a condition that commonly afflicts runners, dancers as well as other people who are on their feet for extended periods, such as grocery clerks, hair stylists and food/beverage servers. Symptoms include redness and swelling of the ankle, tibial (shinbone) pain, which is exacerbated by prolonged standing, walking or running. Pain can also occur when the patient attempts to bend the foot and toes upward. Some patients also report hearing a creaking sound when moving the foot in an up & down motion.
Shin Splints are the result of the repetitive contraction of the tibialis anterior—meaning the large muscle running along the exterior of the shin muscle, located at the front of leg. This is often due to a biomechanics dysfunction of the foot and knee. Overpronation is a condition in which the foot rolls too far inward, thus causing the arch to flatten and the lower leg to rotate inward. In contrast, over supination of the feet occurs when the foot rolls too far outward upon touching the ground
Treatment for Shin Splints
Effectively treating shin splints requires addressing the cause of the pain at its root. Professional chiropractic treatment can assist in restoring the natural biomechanics of the foot and knee, which reduces the tibialis anterior strain and promotes healing. Custom foot orthotics can also be of benefit, depending on the type and severity of the dysfunction. To accelerate the healing process and achieve complete recovery, Active Release muscle therapy is often implemented to reduce spasm and scar tissue within the muscle. The Active Release Technique (ART) is a patented, ultramodern soft tissue (muscles, ligaments, fascia and nerves) therapeutic treatment designed specifically for cumulative trauma disorders such as Shin Splints.
How it Works
ART is a collaborative therapeutic process in which both doctor and patient assume an active role. Dr. Donath begins each ART session with a practical evaluation of the injury site. Next, the teamwork comes into play: Precise tension is applied while the patient executes specific movements. Upon completing just one ART treatment, many of our clients report a decreased level of pain and increased strength and flexibility. The Active Release Technique (ART) is the optimal method for treating conditions such as Shin Splints. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44765 | El Jueves
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44768 | Leventhorpe Sing for World Peace
Published on 21 September 2012
Leventhorpe celebrated World Peace Day at lunchtime today when a group of Year 7 singers and student musicians performed an African harmony song in front of the rest of the school.
choir african drummers
Back to September Listings
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44774 | Denouncing Mormonism
First of all we must tell you congratulations on getting out of the Mormon Church! We are celebrating your new found freedom and rejoice with the angels as you begin your new walk with the Lord Christ Jesus! Please keep us updated on your progress so we may be blessed by continuing to pray for you and your loved ones.
We have found over the years that it is in the best interest of the new ex-Mormon if they go out and find a Bible believing church which they feel comfortable in attending and get re-baptized into the Lord Jesus Christ. If you’ve been married in the temple or by a Mormon bishop or chaplain you might think about renewing your wedding vows as well.
It’s vitally important to denounce any of the vows that you’ve taken in the temples or ward meetings to help free yourself from the Mormon way of thinking. This is a step which separates you spiritually from the Church and gives Jesus the power to do His work in you. You might want to pray something like this:
“In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the authority I possess as a believer in Him, I rebuke any and all lying and deceitful spirits of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which may still think that they have a claim on me or my family. In Jesus’ name, I renounce the spirits of priestcraft, the spirits of Moroni and Mormo and declare that you have no power over me any more, for I am bought and paid for by the blood of Jesus of Nazareth who died for me on Calvary.
I renounce any covenants made by me at my baptism into the LDS Church and any priesthood or Bishopric blessings given to me. (If a former Temple Mormon: I renounce any and all covenants made in the LDS temple— especially those placing my family and children under bondage to demonic principalities and powers!) By the power of the blood of Jesus, I also renounce any generational sin or hereditary bondage which may be oppressing me or my family through covenants made by my parents or ancestors; and I nail all these things to the cross of Christ, “forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Phil.3:13-14) In Jesus’ name. Amen.” |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44783 | OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.
Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help
Re: [xml-dev] Which Will Be Released First, the W3C's XQuery Specor Long
[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]
Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Jonathan Robie wrote:
>>> It is, for example, not possible to implement a spec from the
>>> spec if two parts of the specification contradict each other. The
>>> specification would need to be changed in order to implement it.
>> Right. Every W3C specification tells you the name of a mailing list
>> to which you should send this kind of feedback. We are required to
>> respond to this feedback (unless it comes from employees of member
>> companies, when it can be handled more informally).
> Working Groups are not required to formally address such issues,
See [1]:
"Formally address all issues raised about the document since the
previous step. In practice, once a Working Group wishes to advance to
Candidate Recommendation or beyond, the Director expects positive
documentation that issues have been formally addressed (e.g., in an
issues list that shows their disposition). For earlier stages on the
Recommendation Track, less formal documentation generally suffices
(e.g., evidence in an archived mailing list)."
> they are not required to respond in a timely manner,
True - and for good reason. We had 1200 public comments for XQuery. You
want a timely response to each one? Ain't gonna happen. The public has
to wait until we've had time to classify the issues, get them on our
agendas, and make decisions.
> and just responding to reviewers does not solve the problem as a
> response does not change the specification in any way.
The requirement is that we address your issue, not that we send you an
email. We have an internal issues list that contains the entire text of
each originating email, classifying it as a typo, editorial,
substantive, etc., and in order to close the issue, we have to have a
Working Group decision on how it is to be resolved, and an announcement
of the decision to the public comments list. If the original responder
pushes back, we have to record that as well. When we want to progress,
we have an interview with Tim Berners-Lee and others, in a process that
is a little like defending a doctoral dissertation.
> And that there is such a requirement does not mean that Working
> Groups actually do it. There thus seems to be room for improvement...
There may be Working Groups that don't do it, but I've been on a good
handful of Working Groups, and the ones that I participated on did this.
> I am not sure where you got this rule for members from, maybe you can
> point me to the relevant section in the operative Process document?
It's quoted above, taken from the link below. May I ask where you are
getting your information from?
[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/Process-20040205/process.html#transition-reqs
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44800 | SPAZ's Mustang Interceptor
SPAZ took an American Mustang and modified it into a Black on Black Interceptor, complete with MFP decals! Here is some info on what he used to build it:
The Interceptor is a 70 Boss 429 Mustang and the motor and blower are from a 79 Camaro Z-28. The decals are left over from an Aoshima kit.
Right side
Left side |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44804 | Read manga online
Peta Girl Chapter 24.5
Peta Girl Chapter 24.5
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Read Peta Girl Chapter 24.5 Online
You're reading Peta Girl Chapter 24.5. If you want to read free manga, come visit us at anytime. We promise you that we will always bring you the latest, new and hot manga everyday. In case you don't know, Manganelo is a very cool responsive website and mobile-friendly, which means the images can be auto-resize to fit your pc or mobile screen. You can experience it by using your smartphone and read manga online right now. It's manga time!!
Maybe coming in the next issue: Peta Girl Chapter 29, Peta Girl Chapter 30 |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44808 | Marjorie Harris: A life in the garden.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] This type of underplanting is a crucial part of creating a garden in layers, something I’ve been practicing for many years. Naturalizing bulbs, ground covers (perennials that like to spread around), evergreen shrubs and trees make a lively scene even in crummy weather.[/caption] Ground Layers I seem to...
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44826 | Saturday, September 29, 2012
Fistbump of the Day: Yes, We Are Still Fighting Gnosticism
The past several weeks I've head of a manuscript fragment that people are suggesting sheds light on the early history of Christianity. It's just a scrap of papyrus written in coptic but what is putting the world up in arms is one of the phrases written on it:
Jesus said to them, my wife,
This is basically making people remember that some people believe that Jesus was married. Before people tried to use the gnostic text "Gospel of Thomas" to substantiate the claim but the text itself does not explicitly say that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene people infer it. The interesting thing is that neither this scrap of papyrus or the Gospel of Thomas have either the historical evidence or validity of the four canonical gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There are people who don't see the Gospels as historical true or that there is historic and identifiable Christianity and they seem to want to give alternate gospels and texts equal weight.
Dr King and others are clear in telling that this does not prove that Jesus did indeed have a wife. However they think that there were Christians [the Gnostics] who did think that Jesus had wife and the reason why traditional Christianity does not is because the poor Gnostics were silenced. It's amazing to me that people would even try to make Gnostics Christians. The Mormons have more in common with historic traditional Christianity than the Gnostics did! I mean really. The only way you could really think that the Gnostics would have been recognized as Christians by Peter, James, John, Paul, and the other first century Christians is if you don't know what the Bible teaches and/or what the many Gnostic flavors taught.
Added to this Dr Dan Wallace has posted the following piece of information:
Dan Wallace just posted this:
It's a forgery.
What I find interesting is that while we have people trying to water down Christianity and say things about Jesus that they cannot prove over a forgery and no Christian killing over the situation, we have three countries protesting and killing over a movie on YouTube that insult Muhammad based on Islamic sources! God is straight up showing us a difference between those who follow Christ and those who follow Muhammad.
It's nothing but the hand of God. The best thing is that God has called up brothers in Christ in every generation for when this kind of crap gets raised up. Here is a list of links regarding the way Dr James White, Mariano Grinbank, and Matthew Dowling have addressed this issue. Fistbumps to them all.
The Gospel of Jesus' Wife and Update: The Gospel of Jesus' Wife by Matthew Dowling
Was Jesus married? Manuscript says yes by Mariano Grinbank
Check these out by Dr James White
Get Ready for A Wave of Gnostic Looniness Once Again
A Note to the Secular World: Do Your History
Calling the MSM---Anyone Home?
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Tim McGrew's Recommended Apologetics Reading - Apologetics 315
Remember that lecture Dr Timothy McGrew did on educating yourself in Apologetics posted on Apologetics 315 by Brian Auten? Well Brian Auten posted a follow up that contains a Bibliography of the books and resources he discussed in the lecture. Check it out!
Tim McGrew's Recommended Apologetics Reading - Apologetics 315
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44837 | Saturday, October 8, 2011
ForkJoin factorial calculation
Several months ago I wrote a multithreaded factorial method. It was very simple from the point of view of the underlying technology, but not so trivial from the point of view of synchronizing threads. It used simple start() and join() methods that are available since the Java 1.0 And than I thought that with all the power of java I can improve it. So i used the ThreadPoolExecutor - a piece of technology from the Java 5 and really improved - here is my post about multithreaded factorial using TreadPoolExecutor.
But Java 5 is a bit old now. And this year the Java 7 has been released! So here is the new version - using the new ForkJoin Framework available in it. Actually when I started writing this simple piece of code is didn'nt think that the result can be like that. I thought that all the power of my 4-core processor was already utilized by the variant with the ThreadPoolExecutor and considered this new method only as an exercise on the new API. I previewed that new version may be simpler as this is one of the stated goals of ForkJoin Framework and it is. But the actual performance increase was absolutely unforeseen by me.
So no more jabber, here are the results:
21 seconds for ForkJoin
27 seconds for ThreadPoolExecutor
Here is the code:
private static BigInteger factFjPool(int input, int numThreads)
throws InterruptedException, ExecutionException {
ForkJoinPool forkJoinPool = new ForkJoinPool(numThreads);
ForkJoinTask<BigInteger> future = forkJoinPool.submit(new FactorialRecursiveTask(1, input + 1));
return future.get();
private static class FactorialRecursiveTask extends RecursiveTask<BigInteger> {
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
private static final int THRESHOLD = 1000;
private final int lo, hi;
public FactorialRecursiveTask(int lo, int hi) {
this.lo = lo;
this.hi = hi;
protected BigInteger compute() {
if (hi - lo < THRESHOLD) {
BigInteger result = BigInteger.valueOf(lo);
for (int i = lo + 1; i < hi; i++) {
result = result.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(i));
return result;
} else {
int mid = (lo + hi) >>> 1;
FactorialRecursiveTask f1 = new FactorialRecursiveTask(lo, mid);
FactorialRecursiveTask f2 = new FactorialRecursiveTask(mid, hi);
return f2.compute().multiply(f1.join());
I've tried to improve the previous version using other amount of threads, since this version obviously uses division into mush smaller sub-tasks, but to no result. Maybe I used wrong BlockingQueue<Runnable>, but this may be regarded as the simplicity of using this API. And definitely ForkJoinFramework is superior here, since not only decision about which Queue to use is not needed but also the division into sub-tasks is much simpler.
As usual the full code for this example may be found on github.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44844 |
Interview Secrets Exposed
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44845 | Just Slayin’ Bill Murray
Bill Murray seems to be in control of this entire game, yet only hold a 2-0 lead going into the final minute. Things almost get interesting when Just Slayin’ score a wild one with under 30 seconds remaining. Ultimately, they get eliminated from Worlds in a sixteen way tie for 33rd.
1:49 Jake
7:13 Jake
11:57 Dave
12:26 Emmet
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44846 | Socials supported by mechanics
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 9:01 am Post subject: Socials supported by mechanics Reply with quote
The idea of a dynamic social system has been discussed before, but that thread focused more on the cosmetics of the command itself. Has anyone tried extending their socials to interact with and be supported by actual mechanics? The sexually-oriented "xsocials" in the GodWars codebase would be a specialised example of this, but I think even regular socials could be made a lot more interesting, for example:
Descriptive: When you 'grin', people looking at you within the next few seconds should see that you're grinning (as part of a dynamic character description). In addition, people looking around (rather than directly at you) might see something like "KaVir stands here, grinning evilly".
Form-specific: While shapechanged into a dog you should be able to wag your tail, but while shapechanged into a snake you shouldn't be able to shrug your shoulders, and so on. Equally, you couldn't clap if someone had chopped off one of your hands, while if you'd lost an eye you should only be able to roll your 'eye' and not your 'eyes'.
Combat-impacting: If you try to kiss or hug someone, they should be able to dodge it in exactly the same way as a physical attack - which probably means that 'kiss' and 'hug' should have the full functionality of (non-damaging) attacks. Equally, while bowing you should be more vulnerable to incoming attacks, while clapping you should be unable to use your hands to attack, etc.
Reputation: Much like the game 'Fable', if your character goes around farting all the time, mobs react with either amusement or disgust, and your character should gain a reputation as a bit of a joker. If you often wink or flutter your eyelashes you might get a reputation as a flirt, while someone who stares and points would get a reputation as being rather rude, etc.
Emotions: A temporary (and rather vague) 'emotional state' of the character could be determined based on recent social use - for example a character who has recently been smiling and laughing a lot might have a 'happy' emotional state, while a character who had been crying or sighing might be 'sad', and a character who had been fuming and glaring might be 'angry'.
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 2:11 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
I've re-executed a set of 'social' commands as variations on a generalized physical-contact commands. The list: bonk, bop, caress, cuddle, embrace, fondle, grope, hold, hug, kiss, lick, massage, nibble, nudge, pat, pet, pinch, poke, prod, rub, squeeze, scratch, slap, smack, suck, tap, tickle, thwack, touch, whack.
Most of these support a set of syntaxes like:
bonk Bill
touch Bob's head
touch Bob's head with left hand
poke Bob with sword
rub aloe on Bob's chest with left hand
poke Bob's left foot with stick using left hand
Random implementation details:
1) They all have anatomical requirements. Some are at the more general level of limbs (hugging requires an arm or a wing). Some require manipulator capabilities -- manipulators being a way of more precisely modeling what a limb can do than just saying oh, it's a "hand" -- like pinch requiring opposable digits and kiss requiring a osculatory capability.
2) They have a version of combat-action support you mention; if someone you don't trust attempts a physical contact command on you, it fails with an appropriate message, unless you specify your command as an override by adding ! to the end, in which case you attempt it as a hostile action that can be dodged and which initiates combat.
3) When you have more than one limb/manipulator that can potentially be used to perform the action, and you haven't manually specified a limb to use, it integrates with the handedness setting to find the limb you would prefer to use. For instance, a right-handed human typing "touch head" would see "You touch your head with your right hand." "touch right hand" results in "You touch your right hand with your left hand."
4) In messaging like that, the executing limb is elided for some actions if the limb can be presumed. A normal human kissing someone results in a message "You kiss Foo." rather than "You kiss Foo with your head.", for instance. If the executing limb is ambiguous, it's specified; someone with two heads would see "You kiss Foo with your right head."
5) There are hooks for code to interact with the physical contact process. For instance, the powers of unicorn horns are activated by rubbing the horn -- 'rub horn' and 'rub horn on Foo' both acting as appropriate. The aloe appearing in a syntax example works similarly. Some magical wands are activated by physical contact commands; ioun stones are engaged by tapping them and knocked out of the air by slapping. Another obvious application is in physical contact as disease transmission vector, though I haven't actually sat down and done that yet.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 28, 2009 9:46 am Post subject: Reply with quote
Here's another addition - this idea comes from a complaint made by a player about how other people shouldn't be able to see her grin when her visor is pulled down:
Equipment-specific: Facial expressions should be hidden when the face is covered (ideally with the output of the social changed to make it clear - eg "You smile behind your mask"), just as eye socials (such as blinking) should be hidden if you're wearing shades that hide your eyes. On the other hand, some socials should be blocked outright by equipment (picking your nose while your visor is down), while others should only work if you're wearing certain items (eg the "tip your hat" social should require you to actually be wearing a hat).
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 28, 2009 7:09 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
i included player socials in mob reactions (was more of a command base). like general mob emotions and such.
so that some socials would put some mobs more at ease (what type of mob were they), but others would freak a mob out grinning could calm a mob, but throat slit would berserk them out (assuming again that it was an intelligent creature). throat slitting the bear, well the bear wouldnt care. throat slitting the arch angel or a major demon, they might get annoyed at that.)
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 10:53 am Post subject: Reply with quote
I'd just like to reference this thread:
and especially this post in it:
In there I outline the notion of "social combat" - that is to say, a process with mini-game rules, that is tactical in the same way as combat is tactical, and which has the goal of persuading an NPC to cooperate with you in some way. Tactics might include threats, bribery, flirtation (perhaps leading to outright seduction), deception, etc.
There's a very simple implementation of a system like this in the game Morrowind where you can affect someone's disposition towards you (which is also influenced by things like your reputation with the faction(s) of which the NPC is a member, and your character's Personality attribute).
A system like this has a number of benefits. First, it improves realism; second, it gives more purpose to NPCs whose function in most MUDs is to be either slaughtered or ignored (a few lucky exceptions are blessed with occasional automatically-triggered output of information and some pre-scripted behaviour for quests); third, it's likely to appeal to a wide variety of players - roleplayers will enjoy the authenticity, socialiser-types might enjoy the ability to progress in the game without violence, explorers and min-maxers will have a whole new system to use and abuse, etc. Fourth, in the same way as a well-designed combat system, it offers a good mix of character skill and player skill - the player has to assess what sort of tactic is likely to work on the NPC in question (are they weak enough to be intimidated? corrupt enough to be bribed? of the correct gender and sexual orientation to be flirted with? married and devoted to their spouse?) while the character could acquire skills such as haggling, diplomacy, seduction, street-wisdom, courtier's skills, etc.
You could even have entire character classes whose primary function is social engagement (diplomats, spies, "companions", etc.) and who group well with more traditional adventuring types; the warriors and mages handle the fighting while they deal with the more intelligent NPCs - get the party into and out of places that would otherwise require wholesale slaughter of an army of guards, negotiate better rewards for quests, haggle with merchants, etc.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44851 | Toyota 3GR-FE/FSE Engine
1. Specifications
2. Overview, problems
3. Performance tuning
Toyota 3GR engine specs
Manufacturer Kamigo Plant
Also called Toyota 3GR
Production 2003-present
Cylinder block alloy Aluminum
Configuration V6
Valvetrain DOHC
4 valves per cylinder
Piston stroke, mm (inch) 83 (3.27)
Cylinder bore, mm (inch) 87.5 (3.44)
Compression ratio 10.5 (3GR-FE)
11.5 (3GR-FSE)
Displacement 2994 cc (182.7 cu in)
Power output 170 kW (228 HP) at 6,400 rpm
188 kW (256 HP) at 6,200 rpm
Torque output 300 Nm (221 lb·ft) at 4,800 rpm
314 Nm (231 lb·ft) at 3,600 rpm
HP per liter 72
Fuel type Gasoline
Weight, kg (lbs)
Fuel consumption, L/100 km (mpg)
for Lexus GS300
14.0 (17)
7.0 (33)
9.5 (24)
Turbocharger Naturally aspirated
Oil consumption , L/1000 km
(qt. per miles)
up to 1.0
(1 qt. per 750 miles)
Recommended engine oil 5W-20
Oil change interval, km (miles) 5,000-10,000
Normal engine operating temperature, °C (F)
Engine lifespan, km (miles)
-Official information
300,000+ (180,000)
Tuning, HP
-Max HP
-No life span loss
The engine is installed in Toyota Crown
Lexus IS300
Lexus GS300
Toyota Mark X
Toyota 3GR-FE/FSE engine reliability, problems and repair
Together with 4GR-FSE, in 2003, Toyota introduced a 3 liter 3GR engine. It has replaced the worldwide popular 2JZ-GE. This engine uses the same aluminum 60° V6 cylinder block as 2GR. However, the cylinders diameter of 3GR is smaller – it is 87.5 mm. Also, these engines feature different cooling systems.
Toyota 3GR engine uses two DOHC cylinder heads equipped with variable valve timing system (Dual-VVTi) on intake and exhaust camshafts. The camshafts have been slightly changed. 3GR engine uses variable length intake manifold ACIS and multi point injection system.
The engine version with direct fuel injection system D4 was also being produced. These engines were called 3GR-FSE. In such engines, the compression ratio is increased to 11.5. Also, intake ports are modified, pistons are of the optimized shape, and spark plugs are different.
As a result, 3GR is similar to 2GR, but with a smaller displacement.
This engine was designed for the Lexus cars with an index of 300, as well as for Toyota vehicles.
Besides 3GR, Toyota GR series includes the following models: 1GR, 2GR, 4GR, 5GR and 6GR.
Toyota 3GR engine problems and malfunctions
This engine is not very different from 2GR, so both these engines have similar problems. This is, for example, the problem with the fifth 3GR cylinder. Learn more HERE.
Toyota 3GR engine tuning
3GR-FE Supercharger
This 3-liter engine was designed for comfortable driving in the city and on the highway. To make it faster, a lot of money is needed. You can buy some performance parts, such as cold air intake and performance exhaust system. This will increase the engine power a little, but your car will still be slow.
You may buy TOMS 3GR supercharger kit. This kit is installed on the stock internals and it may provide more than 300 horsepower and a torque of 390 Nm. Buy 3” performance exhaust system and you will get a little more power. You should not make something even more powerful (especially 3GR turbo); it is easier simply to sell your car and buy a more powerful one.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44871 | Spread the love
1. Determining the resistance per cm of a given wire by plotting a graph of potential difference versus current
2. Finding the resistance of a given wire using meter bridge and hence determine resistivity of its material
3. To verify laws of combination (parallel) of resistance using meter bridge
4. To verify the laws of combination (series) of resistance using a meter bridge (R=R1 + R2 )
5. To compare EMF of two given primary cells using potentiometer
6. Determining resistance of a galvanometer by half deflection method and to find its figure of merit
7. Determining the internal resistance of a given primary cell using cell using potentiometer
8. Finding the focal length of a convex lens by plotting graph between u and v
9. To convert the given galvanometer into a voltmeter of desired range and to verify the same
10. To draw I-V characteristics graph of p-n junction diode in forward biasing and to find state and dynamic resistance
You can find practical for other subjects here.
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14 Replies to “Physics”
1. I need an experiment on “To convert the given galvanometer (of known resistance and figure of merit) into an ammeter of desired range and to verify the same.”
2. i need an expt. for the determination of time period of a pendulum and hence to calculate the acceleration due to gravity
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44889 | 1. How can you insist that Christians are supposed to be pacifists when the Bible provides examples of men and women of faith who have participated in wars and killed their enemies, even in service to God?
[A frequently heard objection to pacifist Christianity is that since the Old Testament contains examples of believers in God (Abraham, Deborah, David, etc.) who have fought in battles and waged wars and still received approval from God, then it seems reasonable that Christians also can participate in “just wars” and remain in God’s will.]
Before the time of Jesus, God allowed the taking of an enemy’s life, as indicated in both the Noahic and Mosaic Covenants. God told Noah that “whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed” (Gen. 9:1-17). In the Mosaic Covenant, the people of Israel were given rules for warfare (Deut. 20). Thus, in the Old Testament era the people of God who abided by these regulations were counted as faithful and blameless before God.
But these instructions found in earlier covenants were not God’s final word on the subject of killing in wars. Both the law and the prophets spoke of the day when God would send a person greater than Moses (Deut. 18: 15-19) who would establish a New Covenant (Jer. 31:31) that would replace the Old, or Mosaic, Covenant. Both these and many other prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus Christ.
God’s ultimate view on participation in warfare is found in the words and life of Jesus, who as God in the flesh, reveals the true expression of God’s nature (Heb. 1:3). Therefore, Jesus’ New Covenant position on this issue should determine the stance that all Christians must take. The words of Jesus are, “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” (Mt. 5:43-44).
Jesus clearly said that his followers are to love everyone, even their enemies. The love for an enemy was best demonstrated by Jesus, who refused to fight against his enemies (Matt. 26:51-53, John 18:36), patiently endured his undeserved sufferings, and totally forgave those responsible for his death. This is why Christians should not kill in war.
2. How can you contend that the New Testament teaches Christians to live as pacifists when it speaks positively about different military figures?
[Some Christians who contend that the military life is compatible with Christianity have cited those New Testament passages that focus on Roman military figures. One such passage is about the centurion who believed in Jesus (Mt. 8:5-13) and another concerns Cornelius the God-fearing centurion (Acts 10). Neither passage explicitly condemns the military profession. Neither do they claim that Jesus or his original disciples told these men that they had to first renounce the military life in order to become a Christian. Consequently, some have argued that the New Testament does not forbid Christians from participating in the military or warfare.]
Clearly the New Testament announces that the “good news” of Jesus is to be preached to all men and women, including those serving in the military. But the absence of a specific condemnation of the military profession in these passages does not necessarily mean that Christianity sanctions war or the military.
By using the same logic employed by those who make this type of argument, one could easily insist that these passages also sanction slavery. The centurion who impressed Jesus with his faith initially sought out Jesus so that his slave would be healed (Mt. 8:6). When Cornelius wanted to invite Peter to visit his house, he sent a soldier and two of his slaves to Joppa. In both of these passages, slavery is neither explicitly condemned nor is slave-owning prohibited. Yet, who today would dare teach that these passages illustrate that slave-owning is compatible with Christianity? Similarly, these scriptures should not be used to buttress the notion that Christians can participate in wars.
So then, what are the meanings of these two New Testament passages? Neither speaks directly to the issues of warfare or slavery. Instead, the Matthew 8 passage described the type of faith that Jesus desires to find among humans, regardless of their occupation. The second declares that the Kingdom of God, rather than restricted only to Jewish believers, is open to believers in God from every nation through the salvation work of Jesus the Messiah.
3. Doesn’t the New Testaments’ praise of Old Testament warrior-believers in God and its usage of military metaphors refute the notion that God calls Christians to live as pacifists today?
[Opponents of pacifist Christianity sometimes claim that pacifists undermine their own position when they commend Old Testament believers who had engaged in war. These opponents also accuse pacifists of being inconsistent whenever they use military metaphors to talk about Christian spiritual life.]
Pacifist Christians have the same right as their “just war” sisters and brothers to celebrate the examples of faith found in Old Testament, including those who participated in military actions. Their exploits, carried out in obedience to God’s will as they then understood it, were recorded in the scriptures to encourage all Christians to similarly stand firm in their faith in God.
As the response to Question #1 explained, however, the earlier Noahic and Mosaic Covenants did allow the ancient Hebrews to engage in wars sanctioned by God. But when Jesus came, he established the New Covenant with its command to “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” (Mt. 5:43-44). Just as Jesus never put any of his enemies to death, though it was certainly within his right and power to do so, his disciples also are prohibited from taking the lives of their enemies.
Pacifist Christians also are free to use military metaphors to describe the dynamics of the spiritual life. Just like the Apostle Paul, they are acutely aware that they are involved in a war, not against flesh and blood, but against “spiritual forces of wickedness” (Eph. 6:12). Their use of military metaphors in no way condones worldly warfare. Rather, by using these metaphors, they emphasize the qualities that Christians must exhibit to achieve victory. So when pacifist Christians encourage one another to “fight the good fight of faith” and suffer hardships “as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (I Tim. 6:12; II Tim. 2:3), they are exhorting their fellow believers to strive to please God in all they do, just as soldiers struggle to please their officers.
4. How can you claim that Jesus commanded his disciples to live as pacifists when for almost the last two thousand years leaders of the church have approved of Christians participating in just wars?
[Some people mistakenly think that Jesus and the early church sanctioned Christian participation in warfare. Some have even argued that pacifist Christianity was introduced later through heretical movements.]
Although it is true that, previous to the time of Jesus, people of faith were allowed take part in wars in accordance to certain provisions of the Mosaic Covenant (cf. Duet. 20), Jesus’ mission was to establish a New Covenant through which people could be saved and brought into a right relationship with God. In his Sermon of the Mount, which contains the core teachings of the New Covenant, Jesus clearly stated that his disciples must love every one, including one’s enemies.
How the disciples were to fulfill this requirement was definitively demonstrated by Jesus himself. When arrested on false charges and sentenced to death by crucifixion by his enemies, he ordered his disciples to not fight for him (Matthew 26:50-54), and with his last breath he prayed that God forgive his enemies (Luke 23:34). Jesus’ earliest disciples understood their Lord’s teachings and did not resist violently against those who committed violence against the members of the church (cf. Acts 7:54- 8:4).
In fact, during the first three centuries of Christianity, most Christians were pacifists and maintained their policy of attempting to overcome evil with good. They believed that Jesus’ mission and teachings fulfilled the ancient prophecy that one day the Messiah would come and teach the world his new law, which would convince people to hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and cause nations to never again learn war (Isaiah 2:2-4; Micah 4:1-3).
Unfortunately, in the course of time, the institutional church did not remain committed to its earlier practice of not returning evil for evil. By the end of the 4th century A.D., most church leaders permitted their members to join the military.
5. How would Pacifist Christians respond to the current problem of suicide bombers?
[Many people believe that the only way to deal with violence is to “fight fire with fire” and that a massive show of military force is the only way to react towards heinous acts such as suicide bombings.]
Those who hold this position often think that pacifist Christianity provides no “practical” response towards terrorist bombers. Since the events of 9/11, Americans are very aware of the dangers posed by radical political and religious extremists, especially the suicide bombers. Since these terrorists are prepared to die in their attempts to kill as many people as possible, it has been argued that the only “realistic” way to deal with them is to either capture and incarcerate them for life or kill them before they carry out their murders.
Can pacifist Christians do anything to curtail these suicide bombers? Is there a nonviolent response that they can carry out?
Many suicide bombers are guided by false religious beliefs that teach that they are pleasing God by killing the “infidels” and that they will be rewarded with eternity in paradise by forfeiting their own lives as they kill others.
Pacifist Christians can counteract these false teachings by boldly proclaiming the good news of Jesus: that though God’s righteousness has judged all humans as worthy of eternal punishment because of their sins and unbelief, forgiveness of sins and a new life have been made possible through the death and resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus. Through the Holy Spirit and the New Testament, Jesus now commands everyone to love all people, including their enemies.
If we truly recognize Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, we must take his commandment very seriously and from this time forth cease to participate in the murder of our personal or national enemies. Jesus has called all believers in the one true God to show love towards one another and stop participating in all killings, even those sanctioned by governments. If necessary, we are commanded to lay down our own lives, but only in order to save others. This is this sort of love and faith that truly pleases God. |
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Five years
[I’m pleased with myself for actually writing something after a long time. I don’t know why I keep writing about love; I just write what comes to me.]
After five years I knocked on her door. The door hadn’t changed; the steps leading to it, the fence guarding it from a distance, everything was the same. About the occupant living behind it I didn’t know and couldn’t say. As I stood there I looked patient but really I felt a bit jagged. I looked around, to the neighbor’s house, across the street, down the street: cars lined its opposite end this month.
I heard a voice from within, “Coming”, and I knew it was her. My heart did something: maybe it skipped a beat or maybe it beat twice where it should have beat only once. A few seconds later, with footsteps proceeding closer, the door unlocked and unlatched (and I heard it all very precisely because I was focused on directing my mind to any place away from the heart). I had already opened the screen door (and held it open), so within a second’s time we would be standing facing one another, each holding open a door. I held another door open, just for her, and I was here to find out if that door (to her heart) was open as well for me.
I hadn’t called in advance, so her lack of knowing within an appropriate (but mathematically inexactly defined) sets of moments what to say was entirely excusable.
“Hi,” I replied, “how are you?”
She stood silent; we both still held both doors open. I waited for her to invite me in while contemplating in my head whether I’ll have to ask her to (like they show in movies in awkward moments like these).
“Won’t you ask me to come in?” I finally spoke.
First one door closed and then the other, and we were both inside where I had last been five years ago. The carpet was familiar; the furniture wasn’t. The walls and dimensions were familiar; the smell of the place wasn’t. The lack of another person there was familiar; the sound of barking wasn’t.
“Who’s this?” I asked as I bent down on my knees to pet (what I presumed to be) her dog.
“This is Arial.” Her reply was terse, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions or premature sentiments. I had come here after much deliberation, so to draw an inference from such a small gesture would be like taking to the sky with a No. 2 pencil.
“Well she’s beautiful,” and with that I stood up to face her. I expected her to ask one of several questions, like “What are you doing here?” or “This is unexpected.” She said nothing; simply stared at me.
“How are you?” I had to break the silence because I was getting the feeling she wouldn’t. I showed up at her door, unexpected, unwarranted, I would have to explain myself without any prodding.
“I’m good. How are you doing?” That surprised me, that she actually asked a question. By this point I had given up on expecting her to carry a conversation, so the fact that she did was a pleasant surprise.
“I’m good too. I just…wanted to see you. It’s been so long.”
“Yeah, it’s been…years” Silence. “You want some tea or something?”
“Sure, tea sounds nice. I hope I’m not disrupting you or anything.” I had always wondered about the likelihood of actually disturbing someone by simply dropping in on them. I took a risk, and not a smart one at that. She could have been at work, out shopping, walking Arial; she could have been having a fight with her husband or lover or friend or family member…she could have been doing one of any number of things.
I sat on the unfamiliar couch facing the street while she worked in the kitchen. I didn’t think it would be appropriate to go in there, so I sat and stared out. The lone tree in my view was bald; seagulls were circling in and out of sight; the rare car or pickup driving by broke the silence of the slumbering-in-mid-afternoon neighborhood. I examined the couch I was sitting in, and the matching loveseat at an angle to it. What had the other (original) one looked like, five years ago? I remembered it being brown leather, finely spotted with dark brown circles. It was comfortable yet clearly worn in, so I could understand why she had it replaced. The current set looked well worn as well so it must not have been bought too recently. The television was different but the cabinet it rested in was the same. Never one for flashy things she replaced the old Sony 24″ CRT with a new one; it looked like it was 27 inches. I admired her for it. The whole world was buying LCD, but here she was, not caring (at least in this aspect) what the world was doing – only buying what she needed and no more. I thought about what she was driving, whether the old beige Civic was still serving her well, but since the car was in the garage I had no idea what she drove these days.
There was a small set of DVDs stacked vertically underneath the television. I spotted The Sixth Sense, The Darjeeling Limited, and Ocean’s Eleven among the titles I recognized. She didn’t have a stereo or any audio equipment in the room. I guessed she was still the same as back then, her primary source of music being whatever found its way to her ears on the car radio.
I didn’t see a computer either. That I knew she had to have: who can live without one these days? Maybe in one of the house’s other rooms she had a desk with a laptop on it, or even a desktop. I didn’t know her computer-usage patterns because back then she had relied solely on the one at work, and only for checking e-mail at that. I wanted in my mind to allow for the possibility that she now at least paid her bills online, but honestly I couldn’t be sure. I wouldn’t be shocked if she still mailed in checks every month.
Where’s Arial, I wondered. She was so quiet I hadn’t even noticed that she had left the room at some point soon after our introduction. She must be resting in another room of the house, most probably reserved just for her, I thought. I wished she would come back; she could serve as go-between between two reacquainted…(What? Friends, lovers, or perhaps just people?)…we could talk about her to delay talking about ourselves. We could even take her for a walk at some point. The bottom line was that her company would make the inevitable moments of human silence more bearable.
Fridge door opening and closing; her shuffling; footsteps approaching. She walked through the hallway with a tray in hand, which held two empty cups (one red, the other yellow) upside down and a simple pot of tea (black). She was coming from behind and to the side of me, so she saw my back as I saw her reflection in the television as we met again. I hoped my dark green wool sweater pleased her visually (we are, after all, more sensitive to green than either red or blue – I had read somewhere).
She walked between the television and coffee table and sat down on the other couch, near the edge closest to me. She prepared the tea silently while I leaned back and pretended to appear calm. I looked at her periodically but her eyes were fixed downward toward the teapot and the now-upturned cups. I remembered how good the tea she made had always been. I was looking forward to this cup more than any other, for more than one reason.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44928 | Srimad Bhagavatam: Canto 02, Chapter 03 – Pure Devotional Service: The Change in Heart
01. Why bhakti-yoga process accepted?
a) To forget the lost relation with lord Sri Krishna.
b) To become healthy, wealthy & famous in material world.
c) To more & more indulge in sense gratification.
d) To revive the lost relation with lord Sri Krishna.
15. Akama refers to __________.
a) the thoughts of becoming one with the Lord, or being merged in the brahma-jyotir
b) one who has no material desire.
c) one desires for one's own satisfaction to be free from the material miseries.
d) one desires for material enjoyment worship small demigods.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44963 | One Trick That Helps Me Finish First Drafts
I’ve shared this with other writers before, and I’ve been told it was helpful. For some it might seem obvious, and I’m sure some variant is standard operating procedure for many. Still, this technique is a primary reason I’m able to finish my awful first drafts. I use it for both short stories and novels, and I’m sure you’re clever enough to find more applications.
Years ago, I was newly married and attending graduate school–perfect time to start a novel, right?
I obsessively outlined the entire book. I wrote and rewrote the first chapter a dozen times. When I finally made progress, I went back and rewrote that first chapter again and again.
I’m still married, and eventually I graduated. But I never finished the first draft of that novel.
We could argue it was the wrong time to start a book, or my detailed outlines killed my creativity. After all, I knew how it ended, so where was the fun in getting to the end? But this post isn’t “Outlining vs. Flying by the Seat of your Pants.”
Back at the time, I was obsessed with the story of Orpheus. For the unfamiliar, Orpheus descended into the underworld to rescue his lost love, Eurydice. He’s told she will follow him back to the surface as long as he doesn’t look back. Just before he reaches the surface, he doubts and turns around, only to see Eurydice disappear back into the abyss.
These themes even worked their way into my unfinished book–but I never made the crucial connection. Just like Orpheus, I was doomed because I kept looking back.
I told you to finish the first draft!
If only he had finished his first draft!
To avoid this terrible end, I stopped looking back.
That’s very poetic, Ryan, you’re thinking. It brings a tear to my eye. But it doesn’t tell me anything. Everyone knows you have to press on through your first draft, but how did you do it?
I make a supplemental file for every short story and novel. I use Google Drive, a free service. One Note is another free option, and you may already have it on your computer. Use whatever works for you. I use Drive because it’s simple and allows me to access the file from any computer or my phone. I name my files “(Title of story) – Supplemental.”
The supplemental file is for all the things I want to go back and change, my ideas for scenes I haven’t written yet, and anything else I need to remember but I’m not writing into the novel that instant. You can also delete a section from the story but stick it in the supplemental file if you want to hold onto it.
Brilliant idea while standing in line? Put it in the file. Finishing chapter 10 but realize the perfect way to reorder the first three chapters? Put it in the file. I type it in right away, before I have a chance to forget. Middle of the night, middle of a meal, doesn’t matter. I know better than to believe I’ll remember, and a grand idea once forgotten is an immeasurable loss.
How does the supplemental file change the game? It keeps me from meddling until the first draft is done. I finish the first pass and then work through the supplemental file, making those changes one at a time.
I’ve just started revisions on another novel, and today was a perfect examples of the supplemental file’s power at work.
I realized, fifty pages into the first draft, one male character should be female. In the old days, I would have gone back and changed what had come before to make the draft cohesive. But that way lies only madness. Instead I made a note in my file: “Change childhood friend to a girl.” I named her and kept on writing as if she had been in the book all along.
Today I returned to the completed draft and changed the character in those earlier sections with ease, without losing any of my sweet, sweet momentum. What could have cost valuable writing time instead made these early revisions a treat.
During revisions, I prioritize the changes I still want to make–I usually do the largest changes first. I highlight entries in the file once I’ve implemented them and use strikethroughs to show ideas I’ve discarded. This way I remember what’s taken care of and hold onto discards in case I change my mind a second time.
This process might go against the general advice to trim at least 10% off your first draft. If it helps, consider additions made with the supplemental file to be part of Draft 1.5. After making your supplemental changes, then you can start cutting and tightening everything up.
Using a supplemental file accomplishes at least three things:
• You plow through the first draft without losing momentum.
• You don’t forget those beautiful ideas.
• You don’t waste time going back to cram in terrible ideas.
It’s also good practice to keep a separate character file and, if necessary, a world building file. And don’t forget to back up your supplemental files often; they’re nearly as important as your first draft, and you should back up your first draft after every writing session.
I hope this post has been helpful and encouraging. Do you have any advice for cranking out a first draft? If so, please share in the comments below.
Remember, don’t be like Orpheus. Don’t look back. Keep looking forward to your success. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44976 | Cameron Hotchkies
• Coding
• appstore
• apps
• market-research
• planuplanu
• python
• target-markets
As both readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on an OS X client for Planets Nu (A web-based version of the old play-by-email game VGA Planets). The idea was to make something like EchoView for my own use, brush up on technologies I had been putting off and potentially have an app in the Mac App Store that pays for the Mac Developer Program registration fee.
When I started working on it, I knew that it was always destined to be a niche project with limited utility, and as such it made sense to open source the API parsing code to help other developers working on other platforms that I had no intention of porting to (iPhone/iPad). I had originally intended to distribute via the App Store for a nominal amount ($1.99).
As I was waiting on graphics for v1.0, more out of curiosity than anything, I decided to run the numbers to get an idea of what my target customer base could be.
Once this thing starts selling…
As mentioned earlier, this is a niche product. Even still there are people playing the game. For the game there are 11 playable races, and a quick glance at the leaderboard for the Solar Federation (race #1) shows over 890 players.
11 Races * 890 players = 9790 possible users
9790 users * $1.99 = $19,482.10
Almost twenty thousand dollars! That’s a chunk of change for even a $1.99 price point. The first thing to keep in mind is that for an App Store product, there’s always a 30% cut to Apple. I’m not going to cry about the fees, but it does change the fact that for a $1.99 sticker price, the developer gets roughly $1.39.
9790 possible users * $1.39 = $13,608.10
No Feng Shui Cube for me! That’s ok, I can still take that money and buy 283 cases of Rockstar XDurance and fuel my next adventure.
But wait, a user on Planets Nu can play multiple races with the same account, but how many people actually do that? Well, it’s simple enough to write a python script to scrape the website for each leaderboard and remove any duplicates.
Race 1 has 893 players
Race 2 has 738 players
Race 3 has 659 players
Race 4 has 667 players
Race 5 has 694 players
Race 6 has 753 players
Race 7 has 637 players
Race 8 has 773 players
Race 9 has 667 players
Race 10 has 644 players
Race 11 has 681 players
Total unique players: 2712
Oh shit! That’s a huge difference between 9790. All of a sudden the potential revenue is roughly 1/4 of what it seemed like it was going to be a few moments ago. Wait! There’s more! Not everyone uses a Mac, most people don’t. So going with a rough estimate of 5% market share:
Total estimated mac players: 135
Ruh roh.. then when I account for the fact that I’m using features specific to OS X Lion (10.7), that 5% really becomes
16% of 5%: Estimated mac players with Lion installed: 21 Best case scenario: $29.19
Then I account for the fact that I am one of those 21 people, and one of the players on the site has been beta testing, so we each get a free copy from my pool of promotional codes, that 21 is really 19. Multiply that by the $1.39:
Income excluding developers: $26.41
And that is assuming that everyone who can buy a copy actually wants to buy a copy.
What about the long tail?
Apple App Store Registration Fee: $99.00/year
Oh right, there’s that little fact as well. To publish apps on the store it costs $99/year to register as a developer. I would need to sell 72 copies a year just to cover that cost. Which this won’t.
It’s shocking that some people refuse to generate harsh numbers when looking at the pool of potential customers for an app they want built. These were even pretty optimistic, checking for inactive users was unnecessary at this point. Frequently you only hear about the slightly believable best case scenarios. And here’s the rub, knowing that PlanuPlanu has a zero percent chance of making me any money, I’d still rather work on it than half the crap people are going to suggest I help them with during SXSW the second they hear I’ve written an iPhone app before.
Is all that effort wasted?
Of course now I have an app that is 99% complete, that scratches a personal itch I had and that I have used as tool to expand my technical capabilities (for that day I need to write a shitty lightning bolt generator using CoreGraphics). This is where it makes sense to open source the whole thing and let BitBucket host the binaries. At this point it becomes a portfolio piece for my résumé and allows other people to use my code as a reference (for the day they need to write a shitty lightning bolt generator using CoreGraphics).
Here’s the python code to get an up to date estimate of how poorly this would sell:
import urllib2
import re from StringIO
import StringIO
import gzip
import math
all_players = set([])
for i in range(1,12):
leader_board_page = ''
request = urllib2.Request(leader_board_page % (i))
request.add_header('Accept-encoding', 'gzip')
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
if'Content-Encoding') == 'gzip':
buf = StringIO(
f = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=buf)
page =
# find all links to a user profile page
user_pg_pattern = '<a href="/user/([^"]*)">'
players = re.findall(user_pg_pattern, page);
print "Race %d has %d players" % (i, len(players))
all_players = all_players.union(set(players))
# Display the final number of unique players
print "Total unique players: %d" % (len(all_players))
# Assuming 5% market share for mac users:
mac_players = math.floor(.05 * len(all_players))
print "Total estimated mac players: %d" % (mac_players)
# Assuming Lion accounts for 16% of all mac users
lion_users = math.floor(.16 * mac_players)
print "Estimated mac players with Lion installed: %d" % (lion_users)
price_point = 1.99
# Floor is required because I doubt the fractional cents come back
profit = round(.7 * price_point,2)
best_case_income = profit * (lion_users)
income_minus_devs = profit * (lion_users - 2)
print "Best case scenario: \t\t\t$%.2f" % ( best_case_income )
print "Income excluding developers: \t\t$%.2f" % ( income_minus_devs )
print "Apple App Store Registration Fee: \t$99.00" |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44978 | Sertoma-Central Florida District
Thursday, January 23, 2020
1. Sertoma Headquarters (
3. SHARP (
4. Sertoma Merchandise Store (
5. Annual Sertoma Fund (
6. Sertoma Southeastern Caribbean Region (
The Bolesta Center "Fill a Heart" Ronald McDonald House
Hear Now Sertoma Youth Ranch Camp Endeavor
Gods Pedal Power Support Our Troops United Cerebral Palsy (Achieve)
Sertoma Speech and Hearing Center Tampa Port Ministries USS American Victory
Central FL Speech and Hearing Big Brothers and Big Sisters Boys and Girls Club
West Central FL Boy Scouts of America Sandhill Scout Reservations Brooksville Renaisance Raid
St Petersburg Free Clinic Alpha House Lakeland Air Show
PAL of Winter Haven Angel Unaware
1. The Bolesta Center (
2. FL Chapter-Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (
3. Florida Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists (FLASHA) (
4. American Academy of Audiology (
5. American Speech-Language and Hearing Association (
6. Beginnings for Parents of Children Who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing (
7. Hearing Loss Association of America (
8. Central Florida Speech and Hearing (
9. Guide for students with hearing impairments (
10. American Sign Language Resource Guide (
1. 8 Month's Old Reaction after a Cochlear Implant ( |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/44994 | User Tools
Site Tools
This is an old revision of the document!
From the openSUSE Wiki page:
“The Pantheon shell is the main desktop component of the Elementary project. It is deeply integrated with other applications like the dock called Plank, the top panel Wingpanel, application launcher Slingshot and comes with its own window manager Gala, which is based on Mutter.
The traditional substitutability of components is sacrificed by a design philosophy that streamlines the user interface for better global aesthetics and out-of-the-box experience inspired by popular proprietary desktops. To do that, the Elementary project enhances the Gtk+ libraries with its own extensions for improved usability and a unique design. It also comes with its own set of programs that all adhere to the visual guidelines like the text editor Scratch, the file browser Pantheon Files, the web browser Midori, the terminal emulator Pantheon Terminal, the desktop calendar Maya, the e-Mail client Geary, as well as the Switchboard control panel. To simplify application creation designed for Elementary, an application development framework (Granite) was created. The preferred programming language is Vala.”
2. Sparky APTus - the Desktop tab provides an option which lets you install one of 20 about desktops, including Pantheon, alongside an existing desktop.
Packages provider
The Pantheon desktop packages and repos are 'maintained by gandalfn and is available here:
pantheon_desktop.1483833267.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/01/08 00:54 by pavroo |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45011 | BABASSU OIL in our vegan skincare!
Babassu is a plant that is native to the northeastern part of Brazil. The nut produced by this plant is the source of babassu oil, which is extracted using cold press method. When ripe, the nuts fall to the ground and women called “Babassu breakers” gather and break them open after which extraction begins, resulting in the production of a clear, light yellow oil. This oil is similar to coconut oil and contains almost the same properties. It has a long history of use in soaps and detergents, and has been make its way into personal care products where it offers adequate hydration.
Babassu can be used for a variety of purposes, including beauty and this can be of benefit to the skin in the following ways:
This non-greasy oil is an excellent emollient, especially for oily and dry skin. It gets easily absorbed by the skin, leaving it soft and smooth. It can moisturize the skin and keep it hydrated. Furthermore, it leaves flaky skin smooth and soft; while it can make greasy skin appear healthy and lustrous. Babassu oil, when applied to the skin, balances the skins natural oils.
anti-inflammatory properties:
Babassu oil is packed with antioxidants such as vitamin E and phytosterol. These antioxidants can fight inflammation very effectively. That is why the oil is used to treat various skin diseases such as eczema. Presently, it is safe to say that Babassu lacks anti-inflammatory properties and can be used to manage poor skin conditions.
destroys free radicals:
It doesn’t matter if you use babassu oil topically or orally, whichever way, you are bound to benefit from its anti-oxidizing properties. The oil can destroy free radicals that lead to certain serious conditions like cancer and premature aging.
Skin protection :
When babassu oil is used in hot climates, it is capable of cooling and.refreshing the skin. Myristic and lauric acids present in the oil is melted at normal body temperature and when oil is applied to skin, it draws out the heat, thereby leaving the skin cool. It also forms a layer of powder-like coating on the skin that protects it from pollutants and other contaminants. Extensive research on rats has shown that this oil can also be used for treatment of burns and minor cuts.
At Sugar and Oats, we believe in the gift of nature and that is why we have gone a step further by introducing this wonder oil into our skin care products for fresher, healthier, younger looking skin. We still maintain our stance against harsh chemicals, Parabens, Sodium Laureth Sulfate and Palm Oils which makes our brand the perfect candidate to purchase quality skin care products that gives you the best results.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45012 | Saturday, June 1, 2013
Like a Cat on a June Bug
Dear Diary... I tried to wipe out a species today.
Of all the months, June in particular is the only one most relevant to Garfield, since its the anniversary of when he first started. It must be nice to have a month all to yourself without having to go through the trouble of having to rename it to the month of Garf like some certain dictators who stole days from February so theirs would be longer. February haters would be proud.
Since it's not an actual celebratory holiday that would infringe on other cultures, Garfield's birthday is the only annual event (apart from Christmas) that can be built up anticipation to its eventual arrival, even as the fat cat has eventually expressed exasperation and regret upon news of essentially becoming the oldest cat alive next to Felix and Heathcliff. (Peg-Leg Pete doesn't count, even though he's Mickey's foil, since he looks more like a burly dog than a cat) I created a comic in tribute to this ritualistic birthday, but while looking up comics with the keyword "birthday" in them, I found a spare set of strips which briefly mention Jon's birthday on July 28th. To no one's surprise, this happens to be Jim Davis' birthday as well. Two guesses who this cartoonist is meant to represent.
Then for the back cover of the 1989 calendar, Year of the Party has the following description:
For June, the actual month of Garfield's birthday, the Greatest Celebration of All -- featuring Garfield's favorite sport! (Can you guess what it is?)
You know what theme it's going to be, don't you?
The Eat-with-Your-Face Birthday Party
Invite guests with good senses of humor and serve no utensils with the meal! Good foods to serve at a party of this nature are spaghetti and banana cream pudding. Oh yes, hold the party in a room that can be hosed down afterward.
I'm pretty sure we all saw that coming.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45015 | Model Aircraft — Remote Controlled
Lance Tanaka began to build this project from scratch in September 2019.
The open source working drawings were provided by Flite Test. Lance printed
templates from the drawings. He pasted them to foam board with a glue stick,
and cut them out with a utility knife. By December all of the parts were ready.
The wing was fully assembled, including servos and ailerons. Lance tested their
operation with a model aircraft transmitter. Without the battery the finished
model weighs approximately 156 grams. The design is based on the Corsair,
a military aircraft which flew during the Second World War.
1. Project Description
2. Tutorial and Plans
3. Planforms In 3–Point View (vertical orthographic projection)
4. Completed Model as Built by Flite Test
5. Exploded View of Foam Board Parts
6. Time-lapse of Wing Construction (no electronics installed)
7. Bench Test Setup of Electronic Controls
Two only 5 gram servos for ailerons, 5 gram servo for rudder
9 gram servo for elevator, 800 mAh LiPo battery
4 channel sport receiver, 20 amp ESC (brushless motor speed controller)
8. Wing Servos in Operation |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45046 | running away. moments of derision. persecuted and paralyzed. I thought. engulfed in a fever of spite. reality fades. martyr to caution. no safety numbers. the right one. the door. wipe the slate clean. please go fuck myself. you just can’t win. stolen moments. merging with the shadows. burning desire. dreaming of a new day. cast aside. the doorway. beyond the reach. the moment is at hand. obscured by clouds. days slipped by. hurt. helpless. the things surround me. dying to believe. lost in thought. in time. seeds of change. irresistible. through our silence. headed straight. the shining sun. the wall came down. onto the ground. freedom HAD arrived. ship of fools. promises lit up. not even pride. of loyalty. of history. life devalues. the sound of drums. slipped away. bitter. great day for freedom. (leaving) just a memory. a snapshot. sarcasm. no arms around me. writing. the wall. just bricks. just a brick. home again. beside the fire. far away. across the field. tolling of the bell. to their knees. magic spells. spoken. breathe. breathe again. hello. is there anybody out there? show me where it hurts. receding. your lips. fever. understand. this is not how I am. little pinprick. little sick. going through the show. corner of my eye. child. grown. dream. gone. comfortably numb. through the shredder. don’t treat me this way. the frightened ones. the promise. long gone. blue sky. goodbye. firing line. nightmares. true. little boy apart. will she break. my heart. all your girlfriends. anyone dirty. where you’ve been. healthy. clean. did it need to be so high? mother. the band is fantastic. what I think. name of the game. sell out. helluva start. it could be made into a monster. you’re never gonna die. (don’t) have a cigar. getting old. fading smiles. bury the light. on your own. would you touch me. a fantasy. waiting for the worms. and the worms ate into his brain. breaking bottles. sound of glass. no hope at all. together we stand. divided we fall. hey you.
beyond the horizon. without boundary. by the cut. the final cut. ragged band. took our dreams away. life consumed by small decay. sleepwalking back again. dreamed of world. desire and ambition. dizzy heights. hunger still unsatisfied. weary eyes. the water flowing. high hopes? gone. might like to. warm thrill of confusion. something eluding. sunshine. what you expected to see. blow your way through this disguise. in the flesh. just like the animals. silence surrounding me. think straight. my words won’t come out right. feel like I’m drowning. where do we go from here. what are you thinking. what are you feeling. keep talking. of no turning back. sitting alone. senses reeled. irresistible grasp. ice is forming. I thought I thought of everything. no navigator. guide my way home. tongue-tied and twisted. state of bliss. determined to try. learning to fly. wanna take a bath? are you feeling ok? like the skin of a dying man. pretend. all right. I. older. you. colder. funeral drum. very much fun. my favourite axe. be careful with that axe. rock and roll refugee. hand in hand. so frightened. bad days. desert land. silent freeway. one of my turns. pig man. charade you are. nearly a laugh. really a cry. cold feet. pigs. three different ones. screaming from all sides. all this temptation. the rising tide. she. take it back. amuse playing games. meat packing. connection they feel. my blood. my tears. not the one you need. anything you want. sell your soul for complete control. what do you want from me? heroes for ghosts. cold comfort for change. lead role in a cage. year after year. the same old fears. wish you were here. keep the loonies on the path. in my hall. in my head. folded faces to the floor. the dam breaks open many years too soon. you re-arrange me till I’m sane. throw away the key. someone’s in my head but it’s not me. no one seems to hear. dark side. I think it’s marvelous. brain damage. stayed out of sight. too long on the inside out. not beating much. vow of silence. extinguished by light. empty smile. starting to choke. clouds that covered me. the words right from my mouth. wearing the inside out. you shone like the sun. childhood and stardom. crossfire. steel breeze. threatened by shadows. random precision. faraway laughter. you reached for the secret. you seer of visions. come on. you piper. you prisoner. and shine! ticking away. make up moments of a dull day. waste the hours. waiting for someone or something to show you the way. you missed the starting gun. run to catch up with the sun. to come up behind you again. older. one day closer to death. find the time. the time is gone. when the tigers broke free. and then: nothing.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45059 | Sunday, January 23, 2005
A note from Third Estate Sunday Review
After all the frustration and last minute work last weekend putting together our stories, we thought for sure, this week would go more smoothly. After all, our template couldn't crash again as it did last weekend, right?
Following up on Karla's story about her abortion, we heard that a classmate had once been in rehab and wondered if a) he would share and b) if there was anything of use in the story. Ava spent ten minutes with him and after we read the results, we asked him for an hour. We think his is an important story. We hope to continue to report on college students because the mainstream press tends to ignore us as a group and as individuals.
Feeling a little cocky that we'd nailed down our news story, we went to work on other features.
The Common Ills and Shirley helped us without our samples of the poetry of Anne Sexton and the week seemed to be falling into place. We'd all agreed that our editorial would be the last thing we'd work on so it wouldn't be old by the time it went up Sunday.
The TV beat fell in place when a reader in Texas forwarded us an e-mail from his Congress person (it's not a private e-mail) and asked us to weigh in on the networks' morning "news" shows.
But then, like a lot of people, we needed to make our voices heard on Thursday and we fell behind in working on this issue. As we scrambled to meet deadlines and pass each story among the five of us so that everyone could add their input, we quickly realized that we wouldn't be able to guarantee a non-typo edition. (That was really important to Ty.) We also realized that we were going to have to beg and plead from Kat and The Common Ills again to see if we could run another of Kat's Korner. (They kindly agreed.)
Next week, we'll also begin running letters. We'd hoped to do that this week but as Saturday faded into Sunday, it's one of the features we'd wanted that had to get tossed aside for this week.
We're a little more organized for next week's Sunday Review (or we think we are right now) and hope to have a feature dealing with technology and one with the visual arts. (Both are pieces that will be coming from outside the five of us.) We'll also be doing an interview with Rebecca Winters of the web site Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude. So barring the need for participating in any demonstrations, we're crossing our fingers that next week will go more smoothly.
But this week was a mad scramble and we want to think CI of The Common Ills for once again acting as a sounding board in the early morning hours of Sunday.
Where is the news that's fit to print? Forget all, any would do after this week's New York Times
We don't know how The Common Ills does it -- manage to work their way through the increasingly useless New York Times day after day. Caught in the trappings of what passes for high society in this administration, NYT reads more and more like a house organ for the White House and less and less like a newspaper.
Thursday, across the nation, people protested and registered their opposition to the administration. But that's not a story. Instead some looney spends Saturday trying to convince us that Laura Bush is suddenly "classy." The term "classy" doesn't mix with the name "Bush" and probably never will. But we're sure the White House was overjoyed that NYT was ready to kowtow so diligently over the last few days.
Pomp and nonsense were covered as though they were a moon landing. NYT courted the powerful that they're supposed to be watch-dogging. The watch dog was neutered and happily lapped up any morsels that were tossed its way: Colin Powell bought a Vette!; Laura's dress was designed by Oscar de la Renta! (Didn't he matter about three decades ago?)
A week of coverage devoted to what's basically a prom and NYT wanted to be the first to crown the Prom King and Queen.
There's no excuse for that. You can't call yourself a daily newspaper and churn out this type of shit on a daily basis. Every now and then, NYT took the time to inform us of other "important" events -- like skiing in Utah!
At a time when newspapers continue to face decreasing readerships, it might be time for them to do a little self-examiniation. Here's a question NYT can start with? Do we want to be People Magazine or a newspaper?
After answering that question they can either decide to implement a glossy cover or get back to real news. You know, the sort of thing that actually effects our lives.
That might mean missing out on the snarky attacks on Barbara Boxer (see Friday's paper) or telling Sheryl Gay Stolberg that her little "reporting for duty" jab at John Kerry belongs in an op-ed piece and not in a news article. It might require asking Elisbeth Bumiller to write as though she actually has a brain or even half of one.
And, novel idea, stop the incessant hand wringing over the fate of Judith Miller (no one really cares) and use the paper's resources to actually investigate who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame!
Can you dig it, you feel me?
All the poor Judy coverage (including the op-ed from the publisher) are pretty much worthless. Miller's sympathy-proof due to her own actions. But if you spent even half the time you're spending trying to turn this into an "Oh! The humanity!" story instead on something worthwhile like assigning a team of reporters to find out who outed Plame, Miller can be spared a jail sentence, no reporter will be forced to testify, and you'd have an honest to God scoop.
We're sorry. We just realized that it's been so long since NYT had a scoop that they may not know what that term means anymore. A "scoop" is the sort of thing Sy Hersh gets at The New Yorker. It means he breaks a story. He's not just playing stenographer to whatever administration official has decided to speak. A sccop is when you break a story that no one else is covering or you come up with an angle on it that no one else has noticed.
We realize you're used to reporting on stories that have made the Washington Post already or write ups on what got said on Meet the Press. We realize that you probably think a "scoop" is noticing something that's gone up on a governmental website.
But those aren't scoops. Breaking the news on who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak would be a scoop.
Realizing that you have little interest in actual news these days, we'll pitch it to you this way: Picture it, Judy Miller's about to be carted off to jail while people cheer but just when it looks darkest, a little boy charges onto the screen screaming, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it! ___
outed Plame to Novak! New York Times exclusive!" We intercut with shots of the official being led away in hand cuffs while Judy attempts to look uplifted. [Hint, wipe the scowl off her face and bring in some soft lighting.] Then just before the credits roll, we see Arthur and Keller popping open a bottle of bubbly with a cheery Judy who says, "Okay guys, now we hit Iran!"
Scroll credits.
It's a blockbuster in the making!
For those who, like us, have abandoned all hope of NYT ever printing a story that actually matters, we'd recommend you read "Amy Goodman Warned Us About 'The Lies of the Times'" and, heck, we'd recommend it even to those still holding out hope that at some point NYT might actually get back in the news business.
I think that center was a racket: Mike on his stay at an adolescent treatment center
Mike (not his real name) was a self-identified "weed smoker" at 15. When his mother was busted for heroin possession, he was sent to his grandparents who quickly sent him to an adolescent treatment center.
Now a college junior, Mike agreed to talk to us about his experiences in rehab.
So did they tell you where they were taking you or was it "let's go for a drive?"
Mike: They told me after we were on the plane. They chose a program out of state and far from their home. It wasn't presented as an option but it also wasn't presented to them or me in the admissions process as a ten month stay. They kept saying that I'd spend a week, maybe two, on the orientation team and then, depending on my issues, transfer to another team which would probably last four more weeks. They implied it was a five to six weeks stay.
How long were you on the orientation team?
Three weeks. I threw a chair my first week in and that resulted in a longer stay. Then they tell me that they're putting me on this team where I'll be able to deal with my issues. As soon as I transfer to that team at dinner, everyone on the team fills me in that I've been placed on the "long term team." There was a 14 year old on the team who'd been there for over a year.
How many teams were there?
Four. There was the team everyone entered, the orientation one, when they came in. Then you were transferred to what was the short term team and that basically meant you had one drug of choice and no other issues. Or that's what it was supposed to mean. If that team's counselors liked you, they pulled you onto their team even if you were supposed to go another one. The third team was for people who were bipolar or on medication. Then there was the long term team and you were supposed to go there if you had a lot of issues. If you were bulimic or if you were raped or if you were abused by your family or any other complex issue that tied in with your drug use -- or they thought tied in -- would land you on the long term team.
Did you have other issues?
My mother was a heroin user and possibly they thought that made me a long termer but I'd never used heroin or any other drug except pot. I'd never been raped, I didn't have an eating disorder, no family member had ever beaten me. I wasn't court ordered the way a lot of the kids on the long term team were. I had no idea why I was on the team. The worse that can be said about my childhood before I went to live with my grandparents was that I was ignored.
Was it part of the treatment to identify why you were assigned to a team?
I got no treatment. I was basically kept for ten months with no real treatment. There were some assistant counselors that ran an evening group session that were helpful. Every now and then a group from outside would come in to run the evening AA or NA meeting and they were usually helpful but if they were too honest, they were gone and not invited back.
Too honest?
A Christian psycho ran this treatment center. If an adult came in they were gay or lesbian or if a client spoke at a meeting about an abortion she had and the adults running the meeting didn't rush in to scream "sinner!" the group wasn't invited back. It didn't even take something like that though. All it took sometimes was an adult asking why we weren't allowed to speak freely and you knew right then that this was the last you were seeing of that group.
Speak freely?
AA and NA are twelve step groups and they're based on "rigorous honesty." The treatment center I went to supposedly worked the twelve step program. But with exceptions. Rigorous honesty had a stopping point. If a client expressed a fear that he or she might have AIDS, the meeting was stopped right there. If a male client spoke of being raped by a male or having consentual sex with a male, the meeting was stopped right there. Anything to do with our sexual histories was off limits. And if anyone attempted to share their frustrations over their treatment, they were taken out of the meeting immediately with the excuse that "he needs to focus on his recovery."
Now sometimes somebody might say something that was bullshit. But in AA and NA when you do that, you're called on it in the meeting. Your held accountable. That's how it works. But we never got to take part in that because the staff at the treatment center would always pull you out of the meeting. And if you swore while you were speaking, even "damn," you were pulled out.
They wanted you to be rigorously honest in a G-rated manner with all these topics that were off limits. That's not what AA or NA is about. My grandparents would fly down on family weekends and if I got a pass, part of my pass would be attending an AA or NA meeting while I was away. I'd go to those meetings and realize how much we were being short changed back at the treatment center.
What was the worst part of your treatment stay?
You got an hour?
On a personal note, I was put into L.T.U. That's locked treatment unit. They had this little building where they locked you up and they slid your meals in through this slot in the wall. You were only supposed to go in, according to them, if you were a threat to yourself or others in the community. Want to know what I got sent in for?
Telling this woman I didn't trust her. This little pig faced woman shows up on a Saturday, she's some sort of big wig who hid out in her office most of the week because she didn't have any real training of any sort and didn't deal with clients. She shows up on a Saturday when we're supposed to be having our family day later that afternoon and says that if whoever busted the basketball doesn't confess, we're not going to have family day. Now my grandparents have flown in for this monthly thing. And she's up there acting high and mighty and this one girl, Erica, says, "Why should anyone tell you anything?" And the snout nosed woman goes crazy. She starts saying that she is someone everyone trusts and ask anyone in the room. No one in the room, no client anyway, even knows her.
So she turns to the boy sitting next to me and asks, "You trust me, right?" and he says, "Yes" real nervous like. Then she moves to me and asks me. I say, "Lady, I don't even know you."
"Take him to L.T.U.!" she screams. And they open the locked treatment unit just for me. I'm kept in all weekend because I said, "Lady, I don't even know you." I don't get to see my grandparents and, get this, snout nose tells them I got into a fight with another kid and that's why they had to put me into L.T.U.
Which ties into my big issue which is I didn't have a counselor to defend me at this point because I didn't have any counselor. I was there ten months and after I left the orientation team, I was put on the long term team. I had a counselor for two weeks. Then she quit or got fired. This happened over and over. I had four different counselors while I was on the long term team and there were weeks when my team had no counselor at all.
No one was overseeing our treatment. Sometimes the clinical director would step in with the assistant counselors who were just basic workers with no training. I'm not trying to insult them. Some of them were working their own recoveries and knew what was going on. Some of them were nice people. But some of them had no clue about anything. And the clinical director would pop in once a week on our two hour sessions that were supposed to be with our counselors. Monday through Friday, your group was supposed to have a two hour a day session with your counselor. You were also supposed to meet individually with your counselor once a week. But we had no counselor most of the time, so that never happened. But the clinical director would dash in once a week and hand out some packets for the next week to whichever assistant counselor was trying to run our group and then the clinical director would split.
You were supposed to have a licensed counselor overseeing your treatment. I went weeks with no one at all. How they got away with that, I don't know.
And then we'd get our new counselor and it would be like starting from scratch all over again as he or she tried to learn our issues and tailor a treatment program for us.
When I was put in L.T.U., I didn't have a counselor. There was an assistant counselor who was pretty fair but remember these guys weren't trained, they weren't licensed. They were hired off the street with no training. But this guy was pretty cool. He didn't baby anyone, but he was someone who called it like it was. And my grandparents trusted him so they stopped to ask him about me on Sunday because they stayed the weekend doing family therapy with my team -- without me. So they asked him if I was hurt or if I'd hurt the kid I was in a fight with. And he asks them when did I get into a fight? He says he knows nothing about this.
Then he comes over to the L.T.U. and tells me my grandparents brought me some stuff like shirts and some books and all. And he's asking me why I'm in L.T.U. I tell him because I told snout nose that I didn't know her. He's looking at me like, "Yeah, sure." And I'm looking through the glass as he pulls my chart out and opens it and starts reading.
He's closed the slot they slide your meals through so I'm not supposed to be able to hear what's going on. But I see him pick up the phone and I press my ear against that metal slot. He is ticked off and saying that there's no reason at all for me to be in the L.T.U. and asking the person on the other end to let me out.
When he gets off the phone, he slides the metal slot open and tells me that he just called and that no one's going to come out to do an assessment tonight but that if I will make sure I have my teeth brushed, I've taken my shower, I've eaten my breakfast, and done the basic requirements on Monday morning, I'll be out by eight a.m.
He turns on the radio and leaves the slot open which was nice of him because this is an isolation ward and you're not supposed to hear music or anything. I do what I'm supposed to and on Monday the clinical director comes in and speaks to me for about two minutes before he says I can have my clothes back and be discharged from L.T.U. I change from my scrubs and he's walking me back to my team when snout nose comes charging up and starts screaming that she hasn't given permission for me to be released.
I wanted to say, "Bitch, you locked me away for a whole weekend and made me miss visiting with my grandparents just because I said I didn't trust you!" But I know now that whoever she is, she's vindictive, so I just keep my mouth shut and listen as the clinical director tries to get her to calm down. She huffs off after cussing him out and then he takes me back to my team.
Everything there was based on your level. And if you went to L.T.U. you automatically dropped to 1.0 and had to work your way back up. You had to be at 3-point-something to make a phone call. So it took about two weeks before I could get back up to the level to make a phone call. Then I call my grandparents and try to explain to them what happened. But it took weeks to straighten it out. And they were really upset because they really thought that I got into a fight the morning they had flown all this way to see me. Snout nosed had told them I was irresponsible and that they needed to set some boundaries and suggested that they skip the next family day.
The whole thing was so petty and that's what I think the most damaging thing about it was. After I was finally discharged, I went back to the first Alumni Day because my grandparents really wanted them to know I'd stayed clean and sober. And I'm there and not a client so the staff feels like they can be more open with me now. And I'm asking about snout nose and trying to figure out what her qualifications are. She has none. She graduated high school. She married a friend of the family that owned the treatment center. She almost got fired at one point for cheating on her husband with a counselor at the treatment center, her husband and the counselor started exchanging blows right in front of clients. But she pleaded "sex addiction" and checked herself into a clinic for a four week stay and came out "cured." That's all she knew about addiction. But they gave that woman the power to say who went into L.T.U. and who didn't. I heard she got jumped by clients and beat up a few months after I left. That doesn't surprise me at all. She didn't follow any rules and probably pissed off the wrong person finally.
She sounds like a nightmare.
She was. And she's just the worst example. I mean, you had the nurses who were always acting like they were concerned when people's family was around. But the second family day was over, it was "don't bother me" over the radio. Like if you had a cut and needed a band aid, your a.c. [assistant counselor] would radio the nurses' station and say, "Hey, he needs a band aid." And you'd hear the nurse radio back, "Don't bother me." A girl could be having cramps from her period and want some Midol and they'd radio back, "Oh, she pulls that every month." Well, duh, she gets her period every month.
But when your parents or your guardians were around, they'd come up all smiles and maybe ruffle your hair and act like they were seeing you all the time and just so close to you. They were so phoney.
And cheap too. When you came back from a pass, you had to go the nurses station and you'd have to strip and then fill a cup with urine. Then a few days later, they'd call you in and say, "We got the test back. Why did you use?" The first time they did that on me, I was about to laugh out loud. I'd been with my grandparents the whole time except for an AA meeting that they dropped me off at and picked me up from. I didn't have any money on me and I didn't know anyone in this state. If I'd wanted to score, I couldn't have.
So we go back and forth for about ten minutes before the nurse says, "Oh, well, it must have been a mistake at the lab. Don't discuss this with anyone." After it happened the third time, I did discuss it with two guys on my team and they were being put through the same nonsense. We figured out real quick that they weren't sending the urine off to be tested or not all of it.
They were too cheap. And when word got out that I'd discussed this, I was busted down from 4.0 which was the highest level down to 1.0 and lost my phone calls and my outside trips and everything. They were just so full of shit.
So how did you demonstrate that you were ready to be released?
I didn't. I had my fourth counselor and he was talking to my grandparents about how it was time for me to go home. Then he quit or got fired. And no one brought it up again. I was there two more months. The insurance finally had run out and they wanted my grandparents to pay out of their pocket. They said they didn't think they could afford it but would see what they could do. Two days after that conversation, I'm told that I've successfully completed my treatment and am going to be discharged.
I think that center was a racket. They weren't treating anyone. Not even for cramps. They just took your guardian's money and when the money stopped coming in, they discharged you.
Are you "clean and sober" today?
I'm 21 and I'll drink every now and then. But I went in for pot and if you're asking if I've done pot since, no. But not because of the treatment center. I did pot because I was bored, I was always by myself at home and the only kids I knew were smoking it. It was something to do to pass the afternoon and evening instead of going home and wondering if this was a night my mother would come home or not.
There were people with serious addictions to things like cocaine and heroin and alcohol or meth or whatever. And I don't think any of those kids learned anything in treatment. This one guy who was on my team, I've stayed in contact with him through e-mail. He went right back into treatment a month after he got discharged but this time he went to a real treatment center and learned some things. He's still off and on with his recovery but he learned the tools to work his recovery if he wants to do that.
I think places like the one I was at just take people's money. They do a nice con job on your parents or guardians and then you're basically in day care the whole time you're there. They aren't giving you any tools. Like, I was in there for new year's eve, okay? Now an addict on new year's eve trying to work their recovery must be a hard thing. But they didn't use that opportunity. I mean, they didn't stage a clean and sober new year's eve so you could experience at least one where you were interacting with your peers without the use of drugs. They just treated it like any other night that you had to be in bed by nine-thirty. But when it was Superbowl time, they wheeled in the TV and you were expected to stay in this room watching the Superbowl until it was over. Then you broke back up into teams and went back to your living areas.
Most of the kids were stoners who couldn't care less about sports. I doubt many of them have watched a Superbowl since. I don't think that had anything to do with treatment. It was just that the Bible thumper family running the camp, and I call it a camp and not a treatment center, were big into football. New Year's Eve effects everyone. Whether you're alone or at a party with friends, you know it's New Year's Eve. They blew a big opportunity to educate by ignoring it but I guess it wasn't as important to them as the Superbowl.
Are your grandparents more positive than you about that treatment center?
At first they were. They knew there were problems but they were just glad that when I got back, I wasn't using. They didn't care if that was because of the treatment center or not, they were just happy. But then a man who knows my grandad had a daughter who was hooked on meth and my grandfather suggested the place to him. If you think my story is bad, you should hear their's. And the man says the place is the biggest con job in the world. He pulled his daughter out after one month and got her into a real treatment center. But, you know, most parents are freaking out and they care about their kid so they just want to get them help and get it for them right now. So they're not looking into this as carefully as they should. It's like, "Oh God, he's cut and bleeding, stop the bleeding!" I understand that. But since you're going to putting your trust in these people who will provide the only supervision your child will get, I really think they need to do a little more research before choosing a treatment center. You shouldn't be making this decision on some pamphlet that you see.
If I had a child with an addicition, I'd go straight to the nearest AA or NA or a similar meeting and ask people there to recommend a treatment center. I don't do a twelve step program but I have a lot of respect for the work those two groups do. There was this one girl on my team, and remember it was a long term team, who was in because she smoked pot once. She went home and told her parents because she felt guilty. They freaked and put her into that treatment center. If she'd lie and say, "I have an addiction to pot" she probably would have gotten out after six weeks instead she was there for seven months because she refused to lie and say she'd smoked pot more than once. Now if her parents had gone to talk to someone in NA or AA, they would have told the parents, "Look, you need to watch and make sure this isn't ongoing. But right now, she did a dumb thing and that's part of growing up so she doesn't need to go to a treatment center." But the treatment center I went to didn't tell the parents that. They told them that she was probably lying about her drug use. They did an admission with just her and then came out and told the parents, "It's a lot worse than she's told you. She's used coke and she's getting stoned several times a week." That never happened and she never said it did. They just wanted the parents money (and probably wanted a non-court ordered client because the bulk of them were court ordered).
So if your parent out there with a teenager with a problem or one you think might have a problem, you need to look into these things before you admit your child to one.
Music: Kat's Korner 2004 Going Down, 2005 Coming Up: Maria McKee, Live in Hamburg
Once again, we thank Kat and The Common Ills for letting us raid their site to cover music.
This was posted at The Common Ills December 30, 2004.
We're on the west coast.
Been over this a hundred times
We’ve talked it till its blackened
It begins again and again there’s nothing we can say
My brain has derailed
My hands been nailed
To fall across my body like a death shroud
Your wound was plain like mine
No ragged edges
Well defined
We grew to war like a bloom reaching toward the light
It felt so brutal so transdermal
So alive
Felt so alive
Felt so alive
I am full of grand ideas
I've been perfected now for years
Large is life
With a purpose
Are we finally going to play again
Is it time
Been rehearsing five years
Still a way to go
We better cancel it
We planned waiting for a break
One can't rush into these things
And we believed our mothers hung the moon
We stayed asleep forgetting what we knew
She's singing every word with such meaning that even
Feed me, feed me baby.
Need you, need you, need you baby
Only you can make me human
Only you make me a woman
I know why you come baby
I know why you stay baby
I've got something you want baby
Tell me it's okay
I'm barely touching my lips
The full weight of you on top of me sleeping
And when you wake
I'm awake
I was scared when you came into my room
The walls became the sea, your voice was the moon
Oh when you rocked me in your arms
Like a song, a wave on the tide of you and
I will let you breathe through me
I will let you be with me
We're collecting dust
Wearing out our socks
With our heads down the toilet
Stations of the cross
It's a simple thing
Nothing you'd remember
At this very minute
Someone, somewhere
Does something similar
Just as she's singing
Life is sweet life is sweet life is sweet
And the days keep rollin’ along
TV: Those Infotainment Shows of the Morning
A reader forwarded us this e-mail from Pete Sessions (it's not a private e-mail, he sent it out to all of his constituents who signed up apparently):
This week in Washington, George W. Bush was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States. This occasion, like each presidential inaugural, is an opportunity to celebrate our democracy and the principles of the Constitution. The tradition is over two hundred years old, but its magnitude and message are ageless. In this country, we elect our leaders and the transfer or continuation of power is peaceful. Even after a hard fought election like the last, on January 20 our nation unites behind its commander in chief.
Petey, read your Constitution, Bush is commander-in-chief of the military, not the nation.
That's basic government 101. Maybe all those breathless pants of "commander in chief" from Diane Sawyer confused you on this, but, as a member of the U.S. Congress, we know you have to know better. The same reader wondered if we could weigh in on Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and the "hideous Early Show." Glad to.
Let's start with Diane Sawyer. The glossy blond, who looks mysteriously less wrinkled with each passing day (we won't say she looks younger, just ironed out), has rode her moment at 60 Minutes about as far as it will ever take her.
That "serious news" credit has long faded in the face of "gutsy" interviews like the infamous one with Whitney "Crack is Wack!" Houston. Did Diane sniffle back a tear or two this week as the industry was a titter that Katie Couric might be moving to the anchor chair at CBS Evening News? Did Diane realize that she herself would never reach that lofty perch?
In 1999, she agreed to fill in on Good Morning America and she's been trapped in infotainment hell ever since. She's adapted quite well to such non-news events as brow beating those uppity Dixie Chicks who actually thought that in a free country you could speak your mind! Those ingrates. With her whispered queries of "but our commander in chief" and "but our president" and the soft lighting and camera diffusing, viewers had to wonder who was this strange creature and where had Diane gone?
Poor Jessica Savitch, she broke down the wall for all the (now aging) golden gals of TV today. She may not have mastered the news (some think she didn't even understand most of what she reported), but she was smart enough to surround herself with people who had. The women of Golden Gals 101 have gone on to longer careers. Maybe Lesley Stahl's actually earned her perch. She certainly didn't marry into the D.C. beat like Andrea Mitchell (those blond highlights don't make you look younger, Andrea). And she hasn't gone off on the fluff circus the way Diane has.
But if Savitch hadn't imploded her own career, how much further would women be? Would she, and not the creepy and pompous Brian Williams, have been tapped to replace Tom Brokaw? Surrounded by a team of professionals, would she have continued to focus on news or gone the soft route of Diane?
Some are aghast at the thought of the eternally chipper Katie Couric getting an evening news slot but it's been a long dumbing down that's brought us to this point. And let's face it, of the morning anchors on the infotainment shows, none appears to work harder at being informed than Katie. With her clippings and glasses, she appears to have actually done work while her faded pretty boy co-host is consistent to play the blowhard.
If Jessica Savitch was the puppet that so many whisper she was, at least the people controlling her knew about news. Matt Lauer's people seem determined to turn him into our Rona Barrett of Latter Day Saints. Nothing matters to Matt as much booby -- that was the lesson we learned during last year's Superbowl flare up. Other than that Matty's hallmarks appear to be tracking the love life of Jennifer Lopez -- think of him as the Dian Fossey of the glam set -- and finding the time (repeatedly) to tell us how happy he is that he had some good news to report. When Lauer puffs out his chest and self-importantly intones, "It's not often that we get to you bring you good news" pay attention because the laughs are about to start a' coming!
Lauer's personal "good news" high in 2004 was when he got himself all worked up over the kidnapped co-ed. Interviewing her friends, Matt tried to pump them up into levels of excitement. Interviewing a police officer, he tried even more so. Damn it, there was good news to be had here and Matty was just the boy to bring it to you.
A reporter (which Lauer isn't) would probably have sensed right away that something was amiss by the reactions (low key at best) of the people he was interviewing. Not our Matty who kept pimping this good news story for all it was worth. But fate, like a "fact" in a Judith Miller story, can be quite slippery and by the next day we were all learning of the kidnapped co-ed that wasn't -- wasn't kidnapped.
Was Matty taken in? Was he the victim or just guilty of shoddy reporting? Where's the NBC investigative panel on that? Where's the outrage? We demand a head on a platter, preferably a bald head.
Over at The Early Show, they try to push their own version of Babe Watch, er Bay Watch. Actually, it's more like a plain (but culturally diverse) version of Charlie's Angels with Harry Smith playing the loveable, but dimwitted, Bosley.
Hannah Storm, having honed her craft in sports, may picture herself as the Farrah Fawcett of the bunch -- the active angel. She does everything but scratch her groin as she attempts to alternate solemn face with jocular. Rene Syler passes for the pretty angel (look at who she's up against) and is of interest only because each morning you wake up hoping this might be the day that someone manages to fix her hair. It never happens but there she is pretty face, bad hair. Which leaves Julie Chen to play the smart angel or at least the brainy one. She's not up to either task but a romance with the boss (and now marriage) certainly hasn't hurt Mrs. Leslie Moonves chances at airtime.
Speaking of conflicts of interest, aren't those officious news readers who give us two minutes of headlines at the top of each hour in conflict with whatever network tie-in that's being promoted?
Don't they distract us from the really important segments like learning how Freddie Prinze Jr. manages to maintain a career as well as a marriage to Sarah Michelle Geller? That's an amazing feat for the Prinze considering that he's yet to master acting. And can we really spare two minutes out of each hour at a time when each network has their own reality based series to promote? Isn't a reality based show in conflict with these non-reality based morning "news" programs?
We're longing for the day when one network exec channel flips on a lazy Saturday afternoon and discovers paid programming on over half the channels. "Paid programming! Hmmm."
No longer will Good Morning America, Today and The Early Show feel the need to even pretend to be about anything objective, let alone news. They'll just trumpet at the start that "the follow hour has been paid for by . . ." and off we'll go into the land of delights such as what does Jennifer Garner really think about Ben Affleck in that Daredevil costume? And is she just a major horn dog in real life or overcompensating for something she doesn't want people to know about? Alias is in season four, but her love life's quickly becoming the longest running soap opera around. (At least until J-Lo chooses to switch partners again.)
Picture it, you've got your morning coffee. You're sitting down on the couch in front of the tube and there you see Diane (with Charlie Gibson nodding off yet again in the background) exploring the post-Everybody Loves Raymond period with hacktress Patricia Heaton. Heaton will be assuring us that she's no Patricia Richardson (which would be correct, she lacks likeability) and that America's going to hear from her. Diane's eyes will mist over and not a doubt will be raised nor a commercial break taken. It's the perfect format switch for the morning "news" and we're honestly suprised that the networks haven't thought of it since they're already using each hour to hawk their own products and those of their subsidaries.
Synergy, schmnery! Infotainment has trumped news already, it's time for them to stamp out the last bits of reality from these programs.
Jury Duty Again! Well maybe not . . .
There's a certain grad student on campus who's referred to by most as a "professional student."
He's been in college for about a decade now. Time and again, when any sort of question arises, someone in a group will suggest, "Go ask, PS! He'll know! He knows all the loopholes."
When one of us got a summons the word got out that jury duty would soon be upon us. As the word wafted back to PS, he felt the need to impart some wisdom upon us.
"If they give you a questionaire to fill out, you need to write two words," he informed us as we all leaned forward on the edge of our seats. "Jury nullification."
It appears to work. We're not passing this on to suggest that you use it to avoid jury duty (do with it what you will), but we do think people need to know about a legal term (one whose reference frightens prosecutors so) that is very much a part of our past and present.
Readers of Howard Zinn will no doubt be familiar with the term. In Passionate Declarations, Zinn addresses the concept:
The Camden jury had exercised a right that judges never tell juries about: the right to come to a verdict following their conscience rather than the strict requirements of the law -- to choose justice over law.
That right of "jury nullification" goes back to the eighteenth-century Britain, when jurors, despite being fined and jailed, refused to convict two Englishmen for speaking to a street crowd
. . .
In America, the principle of jury nullification was affirmed in 1735 when John Peter Zenger, a New York printer who was charged with seditious libel for printing material not authorized by the British mayor, was acquitted by a jury that ignored the instructions of the judge. The jury followed the advice of the defense attorney to "see with their own eyes, to hear with their own ears and to make use of their consciences."
[from pages 137 to 138]
Doug Linder, professor of law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, has written on the issue of jury nullification. He explains the concept as occuring:
Linder also notes:
Juries clearly have the power to nullify; whether they also have the right to nullify is another question. Once a jury returns a verdict of "Not Guilty," that verdict cannot be questioned by any court and the "double jeopardy" clause of the Constitution prohibits a retrial on the same charge.
Early in our history, judges often informed jurors of their nullification right. For example, our first Chief Justice, John Jay, told jurors: "You have a right to take upon yourselves to judge [both the facts and law]." In 1805, one of the charges against Justice Samuel Chase in his impeachment trial was that he wrongly prevented an attorney from arguing to a jury that the law should not be followed.
Judicial acceptance of nullification began to wane, however, in the late 1800s. In 1895, in United States v Sparf, the U. S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to uphold the conviction in a case in which the trial judge refused the defense attorney's request to let the jury know of their nullification power.
Courts recently have been reluctant to encourage jury nullification, and in fact have taken several steps to prevent it. In most jurisdictions, judges instruct jurors that it is their duty to apply the law as it is given to them, whether they agree with the law or not. Only in a handful of states are jurors told that they have the power to judge both the facts and the law of the case. Most judges also will prohibit attorneys from using their closing arguments to directly appeal to jurors to nullify the law.
Online searches of the term turned up many entries. Here's Sam Smith (no, we don't know who he is either) discussing the topic:
Today, the constitutions of only two states -- Maryland and Indiana -- clearly declare the nullification right, although two others -- Georgia and Oregon -- refer to it obliquely. The informed jury movement would like all states to require that judges instruct juries on their power to serve, in effect, as the final legislature of the land concerning the law in a particular case.
To read up on the Camden case that Zinn mentions in the section we excerted at the start of this piece, Camden28 offers a good resource of articles (jury nullification is addressed in the article by Renee Winkler of the Courier-Post) .
While not endorsing the avoidance of serving on a jury, we'll use any hook to get you interested in history that might matter to you. (And, as a journalistic experiment, writing down an explanation of jury nullification to a question asking if "you believe in the rule of law" appears to be the thing that got one of us kicked off jury duty.)
Books: The poetry of Anne Sexton
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
That's Anne Sexton, from the first verse of the poem "Her Kind." (From the collection To Bedlman and Part Way Back, 1960.) Reading over The Common Ills entry "Books That Spoke to You" we enjoyed getting a look at the choices of other community members. And we realized that we hadn't even thought to note poetry in our arts section.
We got some positive feedback on the Jean Rhys' cutting we did last week. Confession time: we had about two paragraphs of text and were freaking out as Sunday morning was rolling around.
We i.m.ed CI for assistance and were asked why we didn't round it out with quotes. One for instance, followed by another quickly ended up resulting in a piece that many of you enjoyed.
The thought of writing an interpretation of poetry left us cold and, we feared, would leave you cold as well. Noting that Anne Sexton was mentioned many times in The Common Ills entry, and since one of us was familiar with her work due to a poetry survey class, we decided to make her the focus of this entry. We checked out various volumes and also asked CI to assist by submitting any favorite passages and would possibly Shirley be interested in noting a favorite passage since her list of six books contained four volumens of poetry (two of which were by Anne Sexton)?
With Shirley and CI's assistance, we were seven selectors on this entry. Hopefully, you'll find a passage that speaks to you, one that prompts you to look into the poetry of Anne Sexton. Or maybe you'll just read through this piece with the aim of becoming a little more "well rounded?"
With so little attention given to poetry (we're as guilty as most in this country) maybe the result will be that you'll be provided with a new way of looking at the world around you? Take from it what you can.
We are America.
We are the coffin fillers.
We are the grocers of death.
We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
("The Firebombers," The Book of Folly, 1972.)
It was only important
to smile and hold still
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk.
("The Moss of His Skin," To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1960.)
Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood.
Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom
and the kingdom comes.
("The Touch," Love Poems, 1969.)
Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
("For My Lover, Returning To His Wife," Love Poems, 1969.)
Two years ago, Reservist,
you would have burned
your draft card or
else have gone A.W.O.L
But you stayed to serve
the Air Force. Your head churned
with bad solutions, carrying
your heart like a football
to the goal, your good heart
that never quite ceases
to know its wrong. From
Frisco you mae a phone call.
Next they manufactured you
into an Aero-medic
who plced together
shot off pieces
of men. Some were sent off
too dead to be sick.
But I wrote no diary
for that time then
and you say what you
do today is worse.
Today you unload the bodies of men
out at Travis Air Force
Base -- that curse --
no trees, a crater
surrounded by hills.
The Starlifter from
Vietnam, the multi-hearse
jets in. One hundred
come day by day
just forty-eight hours
after death, filled
sometimes with as
many as sixty coffins in array.
[. . .]
This is the stand
that the world took
with the enemy's children
and the enemy's gains.
You unload them slipping
in their rubber sacks
within an aluminum coffin --
those human remains,
always the head higher
than the ten little toes.
They are priority when
they are shipped back
with four months pay
and a burial allotment
that they enclose.
All considerations
for these human remains!
They must have an escort!
They are classified!
Never jettisoned in
emergencies from any planes.
Stay aboard! More important
now that they've died.
You say, "You're treated like
shit until you're killed."
("Eighteen Days Without You," Love Poems, 1969.)
This is madness
but a kind of hunger.
What are good are my questions
in this hierarchy of death
where the earth and the stones go
Dinn! Dinn! Dinn!
It is hardly a feast.
It is my stomach that makes me suffer.
Turn, my hungers!
For once make a deliberate decision.
There are brains that rot here
like black bananas.
Hearts have grown as flat as dinner plates.
Anne, Anne,
flee on your donkey,
flee this sad hotel,
ride out on some hairy beast,
gallop backward pressing
your buttocks to his withers,
sit to his clumsy gait somehow.
Ride out
any old way you please!
In this place everyone talks to his own mouth.
That's what it means to be crazy.
Those I loved best died of it --
the fool's disease.
("Flee On Your Donkey," Live or Die, 1966.)
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house
or your kitchen.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there.
("For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further," To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1960.)
The woman is bathing her heart.
It has been torn out of her
and because it is burnt
and as a last act
she is rinsing it off in the river
This is the death market.
where are your credentials?
("The Firebombers" -- again -- The Book of Folly, 1972.)
What I want to say, Linda,
is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
All that is new is telling the truth.
I'm here, that somebody else,
an old tree in the background.
stand still at your door,
sure of yourself, a white stone, a good stone --
as exceptional as laughter
you will strike fire,
that new thing!
("Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman," Live or Die, 1966.)
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Poll1 { display:none; } |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45062 | Archive for March, 2010
Windows 2000/XP Driver for (some) Veo Stingray and IBM PC Camera V5000 webcams
UPDATE: For Veo Stingray drivers, try these first. In case they disappear… Stingray 300V (Win98/ME/2000/XP) and Stingray 323V (Win2k/XP only). The one sold by AllElectronics uses the 323V driver.
I picked up an old “Veo Stingray” camera from surplus dealer AllElectronics. These things are pretty junk by modern standards (320×240 resolution, unsightly rounded “looking through a tube” image), but it does have the variable (manual) focus I needed for an imaging project, and the price was right. As for drivers… the company that makes this thing seems to have evaporated, and the particular variant (USB product ID 808B) seems to have never been heard of by anyone, even though there are some identical cameras with slightly different internal hardware (and different Product ID) floating around. They all are (were?) manufactured by Xirlink.
This particular variant can be identifed by USB VID 0545 (Xirlink), Product ID 808B.
Here is a solution that might work (but see update above first): This camera and several IBM PC Cameras use the same or similar chipsets (Sunplus SPCA5xx)…with a small tweak, the IBM camera driver can also be tricked into supporting the ‘808B’ Stingray (maybe others?) by adding its VID/PID to the driver .INF file. Kinda like slipping your cuckoo egg into another nest.
This file includes the IBM driver and tweaked .INF. The following devices are supported:
To install, follow the README.TXT included.
Win2K/XP Driver for Veo Stingray (808B) and IBM V5000
It looks like several open-source driver projects may support the Veo Stingray, IBM PC Cameras and similar SPCA50xx variants (not to mention the classic Dakota Digitals). Note, if your exact ID is not listed as supported, you may be able to get it working with a tweak similar to the above. Have a look at: (older project)
In addition, the package ‘gspca’ may work for these and many other SPCAxxx-based (and other!) webcams. See here for the gspca/spca5xx project and a list of supported cameras. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45065 | Multiplication sheets 2 digit by 1 digit
Sheets digit
Multiplication sheets 2 digit by 1 digit
Showing top 8 worksheets in the category - Area Model 2 Digit By 1 Digit Multiplication. Multiplication Worksheets Multiple Digit Multiplication Worksheets Vertical Format. 2 Digit with 1 Digit Numbers Multi- Digit Multiplication. Some of the worksheets displayed are Multiplication 3 digit by 2 digit multiplication Name date grade, Multiplication, Whole numbers using an area model to explain multiplication, An area model for fraction multiplication, Multiplication Single digit. Challenges included on MA/ HA sheets. This worksheet containing single- digit multiplication is perfect for giving students one- minute drills.
Challenge your fourth grader by with 3- digit by 2- digit multiplication. Multiplication 2 Digit By 1 Digit. Interactive ActiveInspire uses base 10 to show how to partition. Once students have learned the multiplication table from the previous slide, use this printable as a pretest to see what students know. This worksheet is level 1 of a 3 level product.
Give her a hand practicing multiplying triple digits by double digits with this exciting ninja worksheet. This resource includes 2 digit by 2 digit multiplication practice pages in a beautiful fall theme! Displaying all worksheets related to - Multiplication 2 Digit By 1 Digit. two digit factors basic multiplication word problems worksheetworks com worksheet 1 of 10 d russell worksheets grade 4 in columns 2 addition fish and ocean the scary. 93 x 4; 2 x 1- digit - regrouping e. Worksheets are Long multiplication work multiplying 2. 2- Digitby1- DigitMultiplication( A) Name: Date: Calculateeachproduct. Here you will find our selection of Multiplication Printable Worksheets Printable Math Sheets Free Multiplication Worksheets for kids by the Math Salamanders. 54 x 5 requires only 2x , 5x 10x multiplication facts.
This worksheet covers long division of 3 digit numbers by 1 digit numbers with NO remainders. Simply hand out a printable to each student explain that they will have one minute to answer as many multiplication problems as they can. Score: / 25 Math- Drills. Teachers may copy single worksheets for all their students give each one a similar but unique set of math examples. Creative Multiplication ( 6- page with guidance notes and examples) 2 x 1- digit - Products to 999 e.
This Multiplication worksheet may be configured for 2 2, , 4 digit multiplicands being multiplied by 1, , 3 3 digit. Two different versions of each practice page are included so that students can solve using flexible strategies the traditional algorithm. multiplication practice- maths worksheets with answers for home or school use. Multiplication sheets 2 digit by 1 digit. 2- digit x 1- digit e. Single digit( 0- 10) 2- by Digit, 3- Digit, 4- Digit ( with without carry). It is a sample freebie from the Long Division – 3 digit by 1 digit worksheets ( 3 Levels). Area Model 2 Digit By 1 Digit Multiplication.
15 x 5, 20 x 8; Worksheet. Develop addition skills using multiple digits. 512 x 7 requires only 2x 5x, 10x multiplication facts. Multiplication sheets 2 digit by 1 digit. Primary Games - Interactive maths games and supporting maths worksheets. These are multiplication problems involving the products of one- digit and two- digit numbers. KS1/ Year 2 partitioning 2 digit numbers using the part whole model and base 10/ diennes. Math Practice WorkSheets : Addition Practice Sheets Addition sheets grouped by the number of digits in the operation.
Multiplication sheets
Free Sample Math Worksheets for K- 6 Educators or Parents - Important Part of Lesson Plans. Get MathGen Software. Welcome to the free K- 6 math worksheets page. Help your young students practice their multiplication skills with these times tables worksheets.
multiplication sheets 2 digit by 1 digit
Find tips for learning and links to more exercises. Multiplication Practice with Regrouping 3rd Grade Multiplication Packet - This fifteen page multiplication packet includes multiplying up to 3- digits by 2- digits and features fun cut and paste multiplication puzzles Multiplication Drill Sheets 1- 4 - Two pages in this set consist of multiplying 4- digits by a single digit number and two worksheets provide practice multiplying a 4- digit number by. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45073 | Return to Transcripts main page
WEED: A Dr. Sanjay Gupta Investigation
Aired November 30, 2014 - 21:00 ET
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: They call it the green rush. Marijuana has moved out of the back alleys and into the open.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Happy cannabis crop, you all.
GUPTA: In some states it's legal to grow, to sell, to smoke, and marijuana could be legalized in a city near you. So easy to get and many think so harmless. But when the smoke clears, is marijuana bad for you, or could pot actually be good for you?
Marijuana is better than all those for you in terms of treating?
GUPTA: I travel the world for answers. What does marijuana do to you? What does it do to your kids? A special investigation. WEED.
Our journey begins here in this small town home nestled in the mountains with a family who has never allowed TV cameras in before, and you're going to soon learn why.
This is so pretty out here.
GUPTA: They live in Colorado, one of two states where it's legal to smoke pot medically and recreationally, but here it's also taboo to residents like Paige Figi and her husband Matt.
PAIGE FIGI, MOTHER: I'm sure it was mentioned by someone, hey, you should try this, and I thought no way.
GUPTA: You thought that's fringe stuff?
P. FIGI: No way. Not in a million years. No.
GUPTA: But in this area marijuana is far from fringe.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: More joints? And do you want island sweet?
GUPTA: Medical dispensaries are everywhere.
GUPTA: People are smoking in private clubs and public festivals, but none of this is for Matt. He is a military man and marijuana would be a career ender.
M. FIGI: I grew up in Wisconsin in a well-loving family, and I was educated, like, that's a drug. You don't do that, and I never did.
GUPTA: But just decades ago marijuana was a legitimate medication also called cannabis prescribed by doctors and dispensed by pharmacies. But that all changed in 1930.
Henry Anslinger, the United States first drug czar. For him public enemy number one, you guessed it, marijuana.
CARL HART, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: This guy saw how he could increase the budget of his department by having this mission, going after marijuana.
DR. JULIE HOLLAND, EDITOR, THE POT BOOK: You know, saying that there's this drug that the Mexican migrant workers are smoking, and it's loco weed, and it's going make them crazy, and they're going to rape your women.
GUPTA: He got the anti-marijuana message out through news reports. And then came this. The film "Reefer Madness" portraying the users of marijuana as unproductive, crazed.
HOLLAND: People are still afraid of what pot can do to them.
GUPTA: In many ways to have defined our attitudes now for 70 years.
GUPTA: Marijuana then became illegal in 1937. And by 1970 it was a schedule one controlled substance. The government was saying it had no medicinal value and had a high potential for abuse. All reasons why the Figis stayed away from marijuana. Until this. And this might be hard for some of you to watch.
P. FIGI: It's OK, baby.
GUPTA: This is their daughter, Charlotte, having a seizure.
P. FIGI: We just thought it was just one random fibril seizure.
GUPTA: Nothing to really do. No medications. It's a fluke?
P. FIGI: Right.
GUPTA: A fluke made sense. After all, Charlotte, nicknamed Charlie, was born perfectly healthy. A fraternal twin to sister Chase.
M. FIGI: Charlie always had big, big smiles. Just happy kids.
P. FIGI: Easy.
M. FIGI: Yes, easy. Very much so.
GUPTA: So it was around three months you said that when you first noticed --
P. FIGI: Yes. Yes.
GUPTA: -- that Charlie had a seizure.
M. FIGI: I was changing her diaper. While putting a new diaper on from after the bath, and her eyes just started flickering.
GUPTA: It led to the first of many trips to the E.R.
P. FIGI: They did the million-dollar workup, MRI, EEG, spinal tap, you know, they did the whole workup and found nothing and sent us home.
GUPTA: No abnormal blood test? No abnormal scan?
P. FIGI: And developing normally, too. You know, talking and walking and the same day as her twin. Nothing was behind yet.
GUPTA: By the time she was 2, though, the seizures had become constant and started to take their toll on their once happy, joyful little girl.
P. FIGI: She started to really decline cognitively, and she was slipping away. And she just wasn't keeping up with her twin.
GUPTA: The Figis finally found an answer. It was awful news. Dravet Syndrome. It is severe intractable epilepsy. The seizures start during the first year of life and are unstoppable. Difficult to control and very damaging.
P. FIGI: Severe behavioral problems, attention deficit, hyperactivity, the self-injury, you know, banging her head on the floor, and pulling her hair out, and like a possessed child. This isn't your perfect, happy Charlotte.
GUPTA: It was a race against time. Many Dravet kids die young, in early childhood. Charlotte was almost 3. For the next two years the Figis tried everything. Strange diets, acupuncture, and dozens of powerful drugs like valium, Ativan, even barbital. But nothing seemed to help. Even worse, some of the medications nearly killed her.
P. FIGI: After one dose she stops breathing, and after two doses her heart will stop.
GUPTA: Did you have to do CPR then on her yourself?
P. FIGI: Yes. I remember when her heart stopped, and I had her pulse, and I lost her pulse. There was just nothing. The ambulance is on its way.
GUPTA: She survived.
P. FIGI: You're OK. Mommy is here.
GUPTA: But now it was fall of 2011, and Charlotte was 5 years old. P. FIGI: When things are at their worst, she just -- the kids are
sleeping either in my room or next so they can hear her seizure scream all night, 50 times a night, and Chase would come in, in the morning and just misses her twin and just hug her and, like, rub her head and say, I'm just so glad you survived through the night last night.
GUPTA: Matt had been deployed to Afghanistan, and the only thing he could do to help was start scouring the Internet, and he stumbled on to this video of a child using marijuana.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So how is everything going?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He had four days without a seizure.
M. FIGI: I'm, like, wow, they're having success on specifically Dravet. This is interesting. It's natural.
GUPTA: And while he couldn't ever imagine taking marijuana himself, he was now in the stunning position of recommending it for Charlotte.
M. FIGI: I was, like, we need to do this.
P. FIGI: And I said I don't know. There you are.
GUPTA: And then Charlotte's condition got worse. Three hundred seizures a week. Almost two every hour. She was not talking or moving. Basically catatonic. As a last resort, doctors wanted to either prescribe a powerful veterinary drug used on epileptic dogs or put Charlotte in a medically induced coma so her brain and body could rest.
For Paige those were not good options, but maybe, just maybe marijuana now was. But she was about to find out how hard that would be.
P. FIGI: This isn't go to the pharmacy and pick up your medicine. There was no protocol.
GUPTA: When we come back, what will the Figis do? And What would you do if this were your daughter?
P. FIGI: I had resigned myself. I don't think she's going to survive this.
M. FIGI: We've seen her flatlined in a hospital. We've said good- bye.
GUPTA: You're listening to Matt and Paige Figi describe their own daughter.
What would you do if this were your child?
Charlotte Figi had an extreme form of epilepsy. Her body was so frail that any seizure could kill her. With no traditional treatment left to try and the clock ticking away, her parents decided to try marijuana. Charlotte was just 5 years old.
You need a card in order to be able to get the cannabis from a pharmacy. Doctors have to prescribe it.
P. FIGI: You need two doctors in Colorado to get the card for a juvenile or a child. It was hard. We were the first young child and they said no. Everyone said no, no, no, no.
DR. ALAN SHACKELFORD, PRESCRIBES MEDICAL MARIJUANA: Certainly her age played a role in my hesitance.
GUPTA: Dr. Alan Shackelford is a Harvard-trained physician. He is also among a handful of doctors in Colorado who give prescriptions for medical marijuana. From the moment Charlotte entered his office, he knew she was in trouble. While he was just examining her, she had two seizures.
SHACKELFORD: She'd failed everything. There were no more options for her. Everything had been tried, except cannabis.
GUPTA: Here's how scientists think it might work. Marijuana is made up of two ingredients -- THC, that's the psychoactive part that makes you high, and CBD, also can cannibadiol. If the CBD that scientists think modulates electrical and chemical activity to help quiet the excessive activity in the brain that causes seizures.
Dr. Julie Holland is the editor of the "Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis."
HOLLAND: For a long time the work on cannabis and epilepsy was sort of inconclusive. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. They couldn't quite figure it out. It's only when they really started separating THC from CBD that they saw, you know, definitively, yes, CBD seems to really stop seizures.
GUPTA: So the Figis needed to find something that was rare. A strain of marijuana that was low in THC -- of course, they didn't want Charlotte getting stoned -- but also high in CBD to treat her seizures. And that wouldn't be easy. Dispensaries and growers, they make their money off strains that are high in THC.
GUPTA: No one knows that better than the Stanley brothers. Their family business is pot. And if you look at these clean cut guys and what you see surprises you, don't worry. They've heard it all before.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When we were round the corner, they're like, oh, wait a second. You know, did you finish high school?
GUPTA: They all not only finished high school, but also college and in some cases graduate school. Now they are some of Colorado's biggest growers and dispensary owners. They produce up to 600 pounds of medical marijuana a year, and much of that marijuana is high in THC. But here on their remote farm at this undisclosed location in the mountains --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It takes a lot of plants. We're allowed to grow six per patient.
GUPTA: They have been growing something different. Something they call revolutionary.
It's a greenhouse one.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Greenhouse one. Yes. Welcome to it. Welcome to paradise.
Behind closed doors and under tight security we enter what the Stanleys call the garden of Eden.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's nothing like this in the world. This place 21 percent CBD and less than 1 percent THC.
GUPTA: It took years of crossbreeding plants to get to this point.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Instead of breeding up the THC we've bred down the THC and bred up the CBD, and people said, you're crazy. You know, who is going to smoke that?
GUPTA: So why grow it then? Well, the Stanleys also believed in CBD's potential to treat many diseases. And they had seen it change lives before.
Meet 19-year-old Chaz Moore. He uses many different strains of marijuana. Many of them high in CBD to treat his rare disorder of the diaphragm.
MOORE: My abs will like lock up --
GUPTA: That's why he's talking this way. Almost speaking in hiccups, like he can't catch his breath. It's called myoclonus diaphragmatic flutter.
This fluttering here is annoying but it becomes painful. Pretty quickly, I imagine.
MOORE: Yes, after like 15, 20 minutes, this is where I can like start to really feel --
GUPTA: He's about to show me how the marijuana works. He's been convulsing now for seven minutes.
How quickly do you expect this to work?
MOORE: Within like the first five minutes. And I'm done, like.
GUPTA: That's it.
MOORE: That's it.
GUPTA: It was actually less than a minute.
MOORE: Depending on the attack and the day, like, it will work within the first couple of hits.
GUPTA: Hear how his voice is completely different. That attack lasted eight minutes, but some have lasted the much longer and happened as often as 40 times a day, and like Charlotte, he had tried so many things before. By 16 Chaz was taking these powerful, addictive, potentially deadly narcotics and muscle relaxants daily, like valium and morphine.
It would be safe to say that marijuana, in which you have in your hand there, is better than all those pills for you in terms of treating?
GUPTA: What's going on.
MOORE: Yes. I wouldn't -- I'm not zombie-fied. I've had 16, 17 attacks today, and I'm still sitting up talking to you. My first attack on all these, I'd be in the hospital.
SEAN MOORE, CHAZ'S FATHER: I'm a firm believer that marijuana has actually saved my son's life.
GUPTA: Chaz's father, Sean.
S. MOORE: His quality of life now is 1,000 times better than what it was when he was on the pharmaceuticals.
GUPTA: A quality of life that Paige Figi desperately wanted for her daughter, Charlotte, but she still had one hurdle to cross. Convincing dispensary owners, like the Stanleys, to sell marijuana to a 5-year-old little girl.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When Charlotte's mother called my brother, Joel, the brothers had a meeting and said tell us about this patient. She's 5 years old, he said, and we said, no, we can't do that.
GUPTA: Why? It was the fear of the unknown. Charlotte was the youngest patient at the time wanting marijuana. Would it be too much for her? Or would it change her life forever? We'll find that out later, but, first, learn more about what marijuana does to your kids' brain and yours as well.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you're smoking weed, make some noise. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
GUPTA: April 20th, Denver, Colorado. Tens of thousands from around the country and the world lighting up legally.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Good cannabis crop, you all.
GUPTA: For some it's a lifestyle. For others it's a lifeline.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Working with the Lupus Foundation and Rheumatoid Arthritis.
GUPTA: But for all of them, I wonder, what was it doing to their brains?
GUPTA: Your patients call you pot doc?
GRUBER: Well, they never meet anybody who's as interested in hearing about their marijuana use as I am.
GUPTA: Dr. Staci Gruber is serious about pot.
GRUBER: I want you to name the color and not to read it.
GUPTA: I met her in her labs at n McLean Hospital near Boston. She's using high-tech imaging to see what happens in the brain when you smoke.
GRUBER: When you first smoke, that is, you know, you light up a joint, a spiff, a blunt, receptors, which are throughout the brain, respond and these areas of the brain are responsible for things like pleasure, memory, learning, sensation, sense of time and space, coordination, movement, appetite, and other drives, shall we say, so it's sort of an all over impact, right?
GUPTA: So reward, pleasure, hunger. You have this overall feeling of well being they say. That all sounds pretty good.
GRUBER: It does sound pretty good.
GUPTA: And it's not just feeling good, but there's this phenomenon reported by many smokers over the years, especially famous artists, the ability to be more creative.
GRUBER: When you feel that high, there's sort of a release of dopamine, and your brain sort of -- has the ability to perceive things slightly differently from the way you might have if you hadn't been smoking pot. What you really see is this reduction in hibitory function. AMIR, PAINTER: Welcome, Dr. Gupta.
GUPTA: Pretty spectacular.
Less inhibition. That's something that painter Amir says helps him be more creative. A successful artist. His canvasses sell for up to $25,000.
AMIR: It's my favorite way to work.
GUPTA: Using marijuana.
AMIR: Yes.
He has been painting for 14 years, smoking for even longer. He says it makes him feel more relaxed, but most importantly for him, he says it makes him less critical of his own work.
AMIR: Stop worrying so much about this and that and just sort of looking and being as present as possible.
GUPTA: Amir does caution that it's a delicate balancing for him.
AMIR: It would make me very apprehensive, maybe a little paranoid. Just too analytical.
HOLLAND: You can you get paranoid, you can have disorganized thinking. You get disoriented. It can be uncomfortable. It can lead to panic attacks or anxiety attacks in people.
GUPTA: How do you know when you've done too much?
AMIR: Simple tasks become very frustrating, like mixing paint, and then just sort of get into this state of, you know --
GUPTA: And why that happens is exactly what Columbia University neuroscientist Carl Hart is investigating.
HART: Exhale.
GUPTA: Research subjects in his lab smoke marijuana and then take a variety of cognitive tests.
HART: The effects will be disruption in memory, disruptions in inhibitory control. They will become slower at cognitive functioning. A wide range of things. These effects are temporary, but they're pretty pronounced and they are clear.
GUPTA: And it's slowly becoming clear to scientists what part of the brain is most affected. It's the prefrontal cortex.
HART: It's very important for planning, thinking, coordinating your behaviors. There are tons of marijuana receptors in this region and we think that marijuana, particularly in the novice, can disrupt all of those behaviors.
GUPTA: An impairment that Hart cautions could be dangerous. Especially when driving.
HART: You may prematurely hit your brakes. You may prematurely hit the gas pedal. A wide range of things. You may make a turn without looking more carefully.
GUPTA: Look at this experiment done by CNN affiliate KIRO in Washington state. Subjects smoke marijuana and then drove. One was a daily medical marijuana smoker and another an infrequent weekend smoker.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Relaxed and buzzed.
GUPTA: The more the novice user smoked, the more trouble behind the wheel.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Watch yourself. Watch yourself.
GUPTA: But interestingly, the habitual smoker didn't have as much trouble.
GUPTA: And that's something I witnessed firsthand driving around with 19-year-old Chaz Moore. The day that I spent with him, he had been smoking all day long.
Do you feel impaired at all?
MOORE: No, I don't. I feel normal.
GUPTA: Of course, no one thinks that driving when using marijuana is a good idea, but what scientists can't answer is if there is a safe legal limit and people who use marijuana daily as a medicine should be able to drive. How impaired are they? What is more clear, though, is the effect of marijuana on the young brain.
GRUBER: What we see is a very big difference in people who begin to smoke prior to the age of 16 and those who smoke after age 16. What we call early versus later onset.
GUPTA: Gruber's brain scans show that the white matter, those are the high waves that help the brain communicate from one point to another, are impaired in those who start smoking early.
GRUBER: Maybe that there's underlying white matter conductivity differences.
GRUBER: That's what we see.
GUPTA: Perhaps not surprising given what we know about the young developing brain.
HOLLAND: That's a very delicate time in brain development, and that's not a good time to be taking any drugs.
GUPTA: Preliminary research shows that early onset smokers are slower at tasks, have lower IQ's later in life, higher risk of strokes, and increased incidents of psychotic disorders. And while these studies are not conclusive, some scientists are still concerned because in 2012 35 percent of high school seniors lit up, and that could mean a generation of kids with damaged brains. And many fear something else.
JOEL VARGAS, ADDICTED TO MARIJUANA: I never really told myself I need help.
GUPTA: A generation of marijuana addicts. When we come back, the truth and the science behind what's being called a growing epidemic.
And later, Charlotte's story. The first and youngest child to try marijuana in Colorado.
GUPTA: This was the day Chaz Moore almost died. Pumped full of drugs like morphine, Dilaudid, valium to quiet a nonstop 48-hour attack.
MOORE: They thought I was going to overdose, and, yes, it was pretty bad.
GUPTA: At his bedside, his father, Sean, watched his son go from being catatonic to what he calls high as a kite.
S. MOORE: How high are you on the morphine?
MOORE: I'm not high on --
S. MOORE: I've watched friends of mine die from taking the same drugs that he took.
GUPTA: You see, Sean was a drug addict, and he had struggled for decades to get clean.
S. MOORE: It was scary.
GUPTA: It was really important for him not to take these drugs if he could avoid them.
S. MOORE: If he could avoid them. I know how addictive they are. I've seen it. It scared the hell out of me.
GUPTA: But Sean is not scared of marijuana and neither is Chaz.
MOORE: This right here, I don't get sick off of it. I can't overdose.
GUPTA: And Chaz is right about that. While there are fatal accidental prescription medicine overdoses every 19 minutes in this country, there are virtually no reports of fatal marijuana overdoses. And it's perhaps one of the biggest reasons most people think pot is safe. In fact, a new study of children showed that by high school only one in five think marijuana is harmful. That's the lowest number in more than two decades and it's something we heard over and over as we travelled around the country.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Not really that harmful.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It has a lot of benefits. Not really too concerned about it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think it's safe if you're a safe person.
GUPTA: But the experts we spoke to said there is more to the story.
HOLLAND: There are people who compulsively smoke, who want to stop smoking, but they can't stop smoking.
GUPTA: In fact, 9 percent of marijuana users will become dependent. Now that's not as high as other drugs, like heroin. 23 percent of users become addicted, or 17 percent with cocaine, 15 percent with alcohol. But it's still approximately one out of every 11 marijuana smokers.
DR. CHRISTIAN THURSTONE, ADDICTION EXPERT: There is no longer any scientific debate that marijuana is not just psychologically addictive, but also physically addictive.
So give me an update. How are you doing?
GUPTA: Dr. Christian Thurstone runs one of Colorado's largest youth substance abuse treatment clinics. The number of marijuana addicts he treats has tripled in the last three years alone.
THURSTONE: Literally I cried about it. Marijuana is number one on their list of priorities. They have dropped out of life.
VARGAS: Back in the day I would have feel like my day has really started if I didn't high.
GUPTA: Joel Vargas started smoking when he was just 13. By 15 he was smoking more than a dozen times a day. He stopped skateboarding. He even dropped out of school.
VARGAS: I like getting high. I need to get high because my brain is telling me.
THURSTONE: Adolescence, starting at about age 13 have a pretty mature brain reward center, so they can experience rewards and pleasures the same way adults can, but the problem with that is that their prefrontal cortex, which helps people think ahead, control their impulses, that's not fully developed until age 24. That explains why adolescents are much more vulnerable.
GUPTA: There's something else that addiction experts believe is likely happening in the brain. When you smoke pot, the feel-good chemicals that make up marijuana called cannibinoids, remember them? They cause your brain to stop producing its own natural cannibinoids. When you stop smoking, you have no feel good cannibinoids of your own. Until your body kick starts production, you feel lousy, so many people smoke again to feel better.
And today's marijuana could be more addictive. It has more of the psychoactive ingredient, THC, than ever before. Brain researcher Dr. Nora Volcow.
DR. NORA VOLCOW, BRAIN RESEARCHER: If you smoke a very potent marijuana, the 9 THC content is going to go very fact into your brain at a relatively high concentrations and then that increases its rewarding effects and likely transition into addiction.
GUPTA: So how much stronger is it?
You see the barbed wire, obviously, on the fences.
Well, I traveled to Mississippi where marijuana is illegal, but here on the campus of one of the country's oldest universities, Ole Miss, a huge stash of marijuana is under lock and key.
GUPTA: This is some pretty tight security. I mean, look at this door.
Mahmoud ElSohly runs what's called a Marijuana Potency Project.
What's the potency of this?
ELSOHLY: This is about 8 percent.
GUPTA: For three decades now his team has analyzed weed confiscated from drug busts.
GUPTA: How much is this worry you, 36 percent THC confiscated?
ELSOHLY: Very, very dangerous material. For someone that is not experienced in marijuana smoking takes some of this, and they're going to go into the negative effects of the high, the amount of THC, the psychosis, the irritation, irritability, the paranoia, and all of this.
GUPTA: And while not all the plants are this high, there's no question he's seen a trend. In 1972 the average potency was less than 1 percent THC. Now it's nearly 13 percent.
Are people becoming more obsessed with high THC marijuana? ELSOHLY: I think so. They're starting out with a half a percent and
1 percent, and they get a good high, and then as they continue to use that, it doesn't give them the same high anymore, so they see -- you know, smoking more or high potency material.
GUPTA: It happened to Joel Vargas. After a couple of years of smoking daily, Joel eventually ended up in rehab where he faced mild withdrawal symptoms like irritability, insomnia, nausea.
HOLLAND: It certainly isn't anything nearly as dangerous as abrupt discontinuation of alcohol. You know, for somebody like Joel, going into rehab is really about learning new behaviors more than it is about sort of treating the physiological dependence or tolerance or withdrawal issues.
GUPTA: Joel has been clean now for six months, but these kinds of risks, they don't scare off Charlotte Figi's parents.
M. FIGI: People ask us that a lot. Like, you know, how did you make that decision? It wasn't a decision.
P. FIGI: It wasn't a decision.
M. FIGI: It was the next viable option.
GUPTA: And some would say a radical option. Marijuana for a 5-year- old, but it was an option they hoped would change her life forever.
When we come back, Matt and Paige Figi finally give their Charlotte marijuana. The results are shocking.
GUPTA: It was January 2012, Afghanistan. About 7,000 miles away from his family in Colorado, Matt Figi received this video from his wife, Paige.
M. FIGI: It's horrible seeing these videos when I'm deployed.
GUPTA: It was his 5-year-old daughter, Charlotte, seizing. Diagnosed with a severe form of epilepsy, she was having 300 seizures a week. Each attack so severe it had the potential to kill her. They had already tried dozens of high-powered drugs.
M. FIGI: We needed to try something else, and at that point in time marijuana was that natural course of action to try.
GUPTA: At home in Colorado, Paige searched for marijuana high in CBD. That's the ingredient some scientists think helps seizures. And also low in THC. Remember, she didn't want to get her daughter stoned. She found a small amount at a Denver dispensary. The owner was surprised that anyone would even want it.
P. FIGI: And they said it's funny because no one buys this. You know. That was the general consensus, that nobody wanted it. It didn't have any effect. GUPTA: Paige paid $800 for a small bag and took it home.
P. FIGI: I had a friend that was starting a business making medicine, and I said, can you help me extract the medicine from this bag of marijuana?
I measured it with a syringe and squirted it under her tongue. It was exciting and very nerve racking.
GUPTA: Holding Charlotte in her arms, Paige waited. An hour ticked by. And then another. And then another.
P. FIGI: She didn't have seizures that day. And then she didn't have a seizure that night.
GUPTA: Did you sit there and look at your watch?
P. FIGI: Yes. Right. I thought this is crazy. And then she didn't have one the next day. And then the next day. And I thought that is -- she would have had 100 by now. And I just -- I know. I just thought this is insane.
M. FIGI: I remember how happy Paige was. It's really working. I can't believe it. Yes, that was pretty amazing to hear.
GUPTA: It had worked. But in just a couple of weeks the excitement was overshadowed by panic. Paige was running out of marijuana and the dispensary didn't have any more of that particular strain. Even if there was more, the monthly price tag would have been astronomical. $2,000, and not a penny of it covered by insurance. But then Paige heard about Stanleys, the six brothers, and their greenhouse of marijuana that is high in CBD.
P. FIGI: I said, oh, my goodness. He says I don't know what to do with it. We're trying these things with it, but no one wants it. It's not sellable. I said just don't touch that because we need that plant.
GUPTA: At first they didn't want to take the risk of giving marijuana to such a young child. But then they met her.
Tell me about the first time you met Matt, Paige, and Charlotte. I'm going to get you misty-eyed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, you get all of us crying when we start talking about that little girl.
GUPTA: The Figis had hit the jackpot. A steady supply of high CBD marijuana, and they only had to pay what they can afford.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People have called us the Robin Hoods of marijuana. They say that we sell pot so that we can take care of the kids and the truly less fortunate.
GUPTA: Charlotte was the first of those kids. Late spring 2012 she tried the Stanley special marijuana, and, again, it worked.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't tell you what that -- what that means to us.
GUPTA: Gets you, doesn't it, a little bit?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it doesn't get you, something is wrong with you. She lived her life in a catatonic state. Now her parents get to meet her for the first time. What a revelation.
GUPTA: The child who'd had 300 seizures a week was now down to just one every seven days.
When I first met Charlotte, March of 2013, it was one year after that first dose of marijuana. After almost two years on a feeding tube, she was now eating on her own. She was talking. Even walking.
M. FIGI: She said please.
GUPTA: But these stories, they are not without their skeptics. One of the country's two hospitals dedicated to Dravet Syndrome in Florida states at present there is no evidence that cannabidiol is effective for the treatment of epilepsy. The American Academy of Pediatrics also opposes cannabis as does the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
P. FIGI: It is such an amazing turn of events that it really can't be a fluke, but I do still wonder.
GUPTA: You still wonder too? Matt?
M. FIGI: Hell no.
GUPTA: You know it's working?
M. FIGI: It's working great.
SHACKELFORD: You just look wonderful.
GUPTA: And Charlotte's doctor, Alan Shackleford, also agrees. Yet, his commitment to medical marijuana has drawn criticism. He has even been called Dr. Feel Good.
How difficult is this for you to talk about as a physician?
SHACKELFORD: We are typically conservative as a profession and probably as individuals. We want more proof and cannabis doesn't have that.
GUPTA: And it's why he has traveled the world to look for researchers who might have the answers. And that took him to the place many call the medical marijuana research capital.
Israel. It might surprise you, but actually research into cannabis and epilepsy started here in the 1970s with studies that showed it can reduce convulsions in rats. Today Shackleford is hoping to start clinical trials in humans there.
SHACKELFORD: We need to understand it well enough that they won't be reluctant to at least give it a thought. At least try it.
GUPTA: And it's not just epilepsy, but researchers in Israel are studying a variety of illnesses.
When we come back, what they're finding up close. And an amazing look inside hospitals and nursing homes where patients are lighting up courtesy of the Israeli government.
GUPTA: As the sun was rising on the ancient city of Jerusalem, the final leg of our journey was just beginning.
DR. BOAZ LEV, ISRAEL MINISTRY OF HEALTH: There had been some great advances here, and I'm proud of it obviously.
GUPTA: Dr. Boaz Lev is with Israel's Ministry of Health. Here they have pioneered marijuana research. They were the first to isolate THC and CBD decades ago. And now the country's ministry licensed 10,000 patients to use marijuana medicinally and has approved more than a dozen studies to treat illnesses like PTSD, pain, Crohn's Disease, even cancer.
LEV: Hopefully this would prove to be the best medication. I really hope so. We're not there yet.
GUPTA: The answers might come from places like this. It's a state- run nursing home outside of Tel Aviv. Residents here are using marijuana for pain, loss of appetite, Parkinson's Disease, and dementia.
Moshe Rute is one of those residents. He was 77 when he smoked his first pipe of marijuana. He's 80 now and he smokes a couple of times a day. It's to help with the pain and the hand tremors caused by a stroke.
It's a mixture of tobacco and marijuana.
He even decided to light up during our interview to stop his hands from shaking.
You are saying your hands are steady because of the marijuana?
GUPTA: It also helps ease a deeper pain hidden from sight. You see, Moshe is a holocaust survivor. When his wife died a couple of years ago, he was haunted by nightmares of his childhood hiding from the Nazis. The marijuana, he says, took him out of the darkness.
RUTE: You dream. You fly.
GUPTA: When you smoke? RUTE: Yes.
GUPTA: There are 19 other patients here. Scientists at Tel Aviv University are now studying their progress. And they call the results outstanding. Including weight gain, improved mood, pain and tremor reduction.
But I can tell you as a doctor it was my next stop that proved the most surprising. This is Israeli's largest hospital, Sheba Medical Center.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You put your medical cannabis.
GUPTA: Amache (ph) is using marijuana to help him with the pain and nausea from chemotherapy.
So that's your medicine inside there.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Take it out, put in your mouth.
GUPTA: And he is doing it inside the hospital.
How are you feeling?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A relief. First of all, in the muscle, in the leg.
GUPTA: And you're not worried about any potential damage to your body?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Not at all. The opposite, actually. I really believe I can be cancer-free for a long time if I continue, you know, to consume cannabis.
GUPTA: Yes, he said cancer-free.
Very early studies on mice in Israel, Spain and the United States are now showing the potential of marijuana to kill cancer cells. It's exciting research, but it is still in its infancy, and it's inconclusive.
This program at Sheba is well established. And experts say a teaching tool for using marijuana in other hospitals.
Do you think this could happen in the United States?
SHACKELFORD: I don't know that there's yet enough really concrete evidence of cannabis' benefit that's satisfactory. At least in that context. I think it's going to come.
GUPTA: But it could be slow going.
HOLLAND: The FDA has been great at approving studies. But National Institute of Drug Abuse has been really stonewalling and blocking any studies looking at therapeutic effects of cannabis because that's not their mandate. Their mandate is to look at the harms of drug use VOLCOW: It's very easy to blame an organization.
GUPTA: Dr. Nora Volcow, who is the director of NIDA, says they are not standing in the way. She claims they are not the only government institute that approves marijuana research.
If you would come up with a grant that says, OK, this is going to be a treatment for drug addiction, then it would go to us, but if it's cancer, it goes to the Cancer Institute. If it is schizophrenia, it goes to INH, so the institutes have a mission with certain diseases.
GUPTA: What is clear, there are bureaucratic hoops that most researchers simply don't want to jump through. Neuroscientist Carl Hart.
HART: There are not many people studying marijuana. It's very difficult to get approval to study marijuana.
HOLLAND: What's nice about Israel is that the government is helping the research to happen.
GUPTA: And it's research that could give hope to patients like Charlotte Figi. Scientists in Israel are learning that marijuana use might actually protect the brain, not damage it.
HOLLAND: Right. To be able to give a medicine after the injury to reverse some of the damage, that's huge.
P. FIGI: You want to paint your nails? I'll paint your nails.
M. FIGI: I literally see Charlotte's brain making connections that haven't been made in years. It's almost seeming to build her brain where before it seemed broken.
GUPTA: And while scientists are still at the very early stages of knowing if this is actually happening, I can tell you it was remarkable to see her progress. In the three months since we first met her, we saw a change. She was now talking more.
GUPTA: She's horseback riding.
GUPTA: She even rides a bike on her own. And a special strain made for Charlotte is now named for her. It's Charlotte's Web.
It is Charlotte's plant. P. FIGI: It's Charlotte's plant. Not anymore. Now it's for all the
GUPTA: More than 41 children are using Charlotte's Web here in Colorado. All of them are reporting significant seizure reduction, and there are dozens more on a wait list, hoping, praying that a plant could change their lives. Just like it did for Charlotte.
P. FIGI: I'm going to get you.
GUPTA: You both seem very at peace.
P. FIGI: I'm very at peace, yes. Very peaceful.
M. FIGI: We've been given a great life. It's unfortunate that Charlie has this Dravet Syndrome, but thank God we've got something now that's working.
She's doing so great today. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45077 | Saturday, January 07, 2017
Is Secular Humanism a Religion After All?
Robert Price is an apostate, atheist, and mythicist, so I disagree with how he introduces this post, but what he says about secular humanism is instructive, as an insider to the movement:
Automatic writing
1. I'd like to consider two related objections to the historicity of Scripture.
i) Private conversations
In Biblical narratives we have many instances of what appear to be private conservations. A prima facie objection to the historicity of these conversations is that no witness was present, much less a stenographer, to take down what was said at the time. So how is the narrator privy to that information?
The "skeptical" explanation is that these are fictional conversations which the narrator put on the lips of the characters.
ii) Long speeches
Biblical narratives sometimes contain long speeches. The Sermon on the Mount is a case in point. How could the narrator or his source have verbatim recollection of a long speech he heard just once? People normally remember the gist of what was said.
2. Now let's consider some natural explanations:
i) Private conversations
In some cases, these may not be private conservations. When relaying a conversation, historians typically focus on the principals. That doesn't mean there weren't other people in attendance.
So in some cases, anonymous informants would be available. People in the entourage of the royal court, priestly establishment, and so forth, who are closet Christians, but keep their heads down to avoid having their heads unceremoniously separated from their bodies. Servants and courtiers who privately distain their employers, and are only to happy to leak unflattering information about their employers.
A more specific example might be the Beloved Disciple (John). He normally prefers to remain in the background rather than drawing attention to himself. He only comes forward at strategic points in the narrative to offer his eyewitness confirmation.
There are concentric social circles in the Fourth Gospel. You have an outermost circle of general followers. Then a smaller circle of the Twelve. Then an inner circle of Peter, James, and John. Then the inmost circle of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple. Apparently, John was Christ's most trusted confidant.
So even in scenes where only Jesus and someone else are mentioned, John may be a lurker. He generally maintains a low profile in the narrative to keep the focus on Jesus.
Regarding the Sermon on the Mount, I doubt Jesus said all that at one time. Jesus was an expert communicator, and that's just too much for an audience to absorb in one sitting.
Matthew has a habit of grouping related material. I think Jesus engaged in public teaching on that occasion, and Matthew used that as a hook to combine it with other things Jesus said on other occasions.
An advantage of writing is that you can reread the material. And it's easier to locate the material of it's grouped together by topic.
3. However, there are other cases where natural explanations don't seem to be as plausible. For instance, take conversations involving the patriarchs. There were no witnesses. No transcript which a later writer could consult. Perhaps, though, some of this might be passed down in family lore. Oral history.
Besides the Sermon on the Mount, another example is the farewell discourse, followed by the lengthy prayer of Jesus. That runs roughly from Jn 13:31 through the end of Jn 17. (Scholars disagree on where, exactly, it begins.)
That's a long, dense, dry speech (apart from the true vine parable). Not the kind of thing a listener could normally recall in detail from one hearing.
What about supernatural explanations? Christians can appeal to visionary revelation (which may include auditions), inspired memory, and verbal inspiration. And I think those are viable explanations. Now I'd like to briefly explore a neglected possibility.
According to some conventional definitions, automatic writing is writing produced without conscious intention as if of telepathic or spiritualistic origin, or writing produced by a spiritual, occult, or supernatural agency rather than by the conscious intention of the writer.
Assuming that the record of long speeches and private conversations can't be accounted for by natural means, suppose these are examples of automatic writing, inspired by the Holy Spirit? That wouldn't require the Bible writer to remember or know about the event.
4. Now let's consider some objections to that explanation:
i) It's special pleading. Why not just admit these are fictional speeches?
But is it special pleading? I didn't concoct a novel theory to defend the historicity of Scripture. Automatic writing is a well-documented phenomenon. I'm applying that preexistent phenomenon to these particular examples, as a possible explanation.
ii) Automatic writing is occultic!
It's true that automatic writing is associated with people who dabble in necromancy. However, just because there are ungodly examples of something mean there can't be godly examples of the same thing. The existence of false prophets doesn't taint true prophets. The existence of demonic miracles doesn't taint divine miracles. If lesser spirits can produce automatic writing, surely the Spirit of God is able to produce automatic writing. If evil spirits can produce automatic writing for evil purposes, surely the Holy Spirit can produce automatic writing for holy purposes.
iii) Automatic writing has a naturalistic explanation.
That objection conflicts with (ii). They can't both be right. At least, not across the board.
There's the question of whether "automatic writing" is loosely used to cover disparate phenomena. It's true that depth psychologists may say this is just a case of a human being naturally tapping into his subconscious. And, indeed, that may happen.
But automatic writing often takes place in the context of people who are striving to channel the dead. They endeavor to contact the dead. They open themselves to that influence. They wish to play host to that source.
So it's hardly a stretch to interpret the result as a case of possession by a supernatural agent. That interpretation lies on the face of the phenomenon.
(Which is not to deny that charlatans fake channeling the dead.)
iv) To invoke automatic writing is ad hoc. Where do you draw the line?
As with any explanation, you use it when it's necessary or reasonable to account for something that can't be as easily accounted for by some other explanation.
There are different modes of inspiration. The organic theory of inspiration will suffice for many examples of Scripture. But sometimes direct revelation is required. Sometimes visionary revelation is the source. By the same token, why not automatic writing in some instances?
Take visionary revelation. A seer will experience an altered state of consciousness. But that doesn't mean he always, or even usually, operates in that mindset. He couldn't function if he did. That's just when the Spirit comes upon him.
The Spirit can operate in more subtle and subliminal or more dramatic ways. It ranges along a continuum. At one end, an inspired writer may not be conscious of his inspiration. That's the organic theory of inspiration (e.g. Warfield).
At the other end, consider revelatory dreams and visions, where the Spirit takes possession of the human imagination. In that condition, the human agent is basically a passive recipient.
That would be analogous to the Spirit taking temporary control of a Bible writer to produce a text via automatic writing. That would be a type of verbal inspiration. Verbal inspiration in general doesn't require that. But it's a kind of verbal inspiration.
Friday, January 06, 2017
Scripture and scholarship
Recently, I was debating a Catholic who said Protestants claim "special access" to biblical truth through their historical and linguistic expertise. That echoes the Catholic meme that Protestants replace the papacy with a "priesthood of scholars". A catchy applause line, but is it true?
It's true that Protestants publish many commentaries on the Bible, but so do Catholics scholars, so if there's a "priesthood of scholars," that's common property of Catholicism and Protestantism alike.
But how accessible is the Bible without commentaries? How accessible is the Bible without background knowledge?
On the one hand, much of the Bible is comprehensible without any background knowledge. Historical narratives are generally accessible. Many Proverbs are transparent. Many statements in the NT letters are self-explanatory.
A philosopher with no background knowledge might have a better grasp of Romans (or parts of Romans) than a Bible scholar since much of the interpretation relies on grasping the flow of argument, which someone with an analytical mind and logical training as an advantage at tracing.
However, without background knowledge, a reader is prone to misinterpret some things. Likewise, there's much additional meaning he will miss.
Let's take a comparison. When Bram Stoker wrote his famous novel, it contained a fair amount of exposition because he was introducing a new kind of character to many readers.
However, that's become a genre. Many movies and TV dramas jump right into vampires because the audience is expected to understand the tropes of the genre.
But suppose someone who knows nothing about vampire lore watches some of this fare. At one level, he'll be able to understand much of what he sees. It will have a plot, dialogue, and characters that are fairly comprehensible.
But it will also contain tropes that are puzzling to someone who's unacquainted with vampire lore. Why the aversion to sunlight? Why the aversion to a crucifix or church sanctuary? Why can he be killed with a wooden stake through the heart, but he can't be killed by bullets? Why must a homeowner invite him into the house?
Why does he consume blood? Where did the fangs come from?
The viewer won't understand what motivates the character. If he's a science fiction buff, he might wonder if the character is an extraterrestrial, although that won't explain everything.
Discerning the Body
Along with Jn 6, 1 Cor 11:29 is a locus classicus for the Real Presence. For people conditioned by that theological tradition, it may seem self-evident to them that 1 Cor 11:29 is referring to the "true body" of Jesus. To deny that is to disregard the plain sense of the text.
But that interpretation overlooks two things: (i) the actual context, and (ii) Paul's use of "body" as a metaphor for the church. For instance:
Stratified treatment put the lie not only to the Greek ideal of friends' equality, but for Paul challenged the significance of the Lord's supper. Table fellowship was a binding covenant, and the one bread and body represented not only Jesus's sacrifice but those who partook together (10:16-17; cf. 12:12). This failure to discern the corporate body (11:29) led to sickness in their individual bodies (11:30; cf. the individual and corporate bodies as temples in 3:16-17; 6:19). C. Keener, 1-2 Corinthians (Cambridge, 2005), 96.
The reference to participating in the Lord's supper in an unworthy manner must be understood in light of the context, where the Corinthians were practicing the supper in a way that humiliated other members of Christ's body. To eat and drink in an unworthy manner is to eat and drink in a way that demeans, humiliates, or disrespects other members of Christ's community.
To examine oneself means to examine one's compliance with the covenant as reflected in their ways of relating to other members of the community and to discern the body of Christ must include recognizing that those other members of the community represent Christ himself (since they have been united with him) and must be treated as people for whom Christ chose to give up his life and to shed his blood. R. Ciampa & B. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians (Eerdmans, 2010), 554-55.
But what does the "body" mean here? Were the reference to the body of Christ under the species of bread, one would expect a parallel reference to the blood of Christ under the species of wine, particularly since Paul twice emphasizes "eating" and "drinking." Paul, therefore, does not make the criterion an ability to distinguish the eucharist from an ordinary meal.
The only alternative, since "body" alone is mentioned, is to take "body" as meaning the community. If Paul's conventions of writing were the same as ours, he would have written "Body" in order to indicate that he had in mind the Body of Christ. He presumed that his readers would remember what he had written in his allusion to the eucharist in the previous chapter "We who are many are one body, for we all partake of one bread" (10:17).
Before celebrating the eucharist, Paul wanted the assembled Christians to examine themselves on their relationships with one another. Were they only members of the Body of Christ sharing a common existence? Did they really being to one another? Or were they merely in the same space as others, without any bond or exchange of energy? These questions should still be in the mind of every believer who participates in the service of reconciliation that precedes the liturgy of the eucharist in our churches. J. Murphy-O'Connor, 1 Corinthians (Doubleday, 1998), 123.
How “The Roman Catholic Church” “Compiled the Bible”?
I’m following up on some comments on the Jerry Walls Facebook thread, where he ridiculed the notion that the Roman Catholic Church claim to have “compiled the Bible” as “Simplistic, self-serving hubris”:
This paragraph of mine in the comments:
Irenaeus may have had good theology, but that's because he also was among the first to have an almost totally compiled New Testament. It wasn't "the Catholic Church" that put it together. Paul's works were most likely collected in his own lifetime. The Gospels and other letters were also collected in a group -- but there was no doubt they were regarded as Scripture from the moment the ink was dry.
Got some comments of its own. One commenter wrote:
your last paragraph is utterly unsupported dogmatic affirmation--essentially a form of sanctified wishful thinking. … You're right that the NT was _mostly_ canonized in the second century, as far as we can tell. But clearly it _was_ the early "Catholic Church" (i.e., the group of Christians from whom all modern Christians are in one way or another descended) that put it together. Your claim that Paul's letters and the Gospels were compiled and accepted as Scripture almost as soon as they were written makes no sense if Irenaeus was the first person to be working with an "almost completed canon." That's 100 years later. I have trouble seeing how you aren't contradicting yourself here.
It is the very nature of this "early 'Catholic Church'" that is in question. Yes, they saw themselves as one church. But don't give people the notion that this group of Christians had uniform worship or organizational structures. In fact, that is the very thing that is in question.
1 Clement, written from Rome eastward (towards Corinth) reflects a different church government structure than does Ignatius (writing from the east westward). Easter was celebrated differently in the east (Quartodecimans) and in the west. They were by no means an organized body with an organized governmental or liturgical structures.
So who were "they", and by what mechanism did "they" "put it together"? Likely they had good communication among themselves, and a common purpose. But that can be said of the Southern Baptist Convention, and that in no way suggests organizational unity.
So who were "this group", and by what mechanism did "they" "put it together"? We have some evidence.
Paul wrote in the 50's and 60's. While they didn't have Kinko's there at the time, it's almost a sure bet that his letters were circulating as a unit as soon as Christians were able to regroup from persecutions. The Chester Beatty papyrus, dated 200, contains the complete set of Paul's letters.
The Gospels were written at different times and places. The Gospel of John is typically dated at around 90 AD. There is no question that these two sets of documents were compiled early and often. Stanley Porter says "there is surprisingly strong manuscript evidence worth considering that indicates that sometime in the second century the fixed corpus of four Gospels and Acts was firmly established" (How We Got the New Testament 87).
Tatian's Diatesseron, circa 150-180, is likely as early as they were all collected in one place. It is very likely that Irenaeus at least had all of these documents.
Porter also relates "Majescule Manuscript 0232", dated to the third century, which has compiled a Johanine corpus. No doubt these documents had been thought of as a unit and had been collected earlier (in order to create this compilation).
1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude were also compiled separately in an early codex.
Some date the Muratorian canon as early as 170; that contains virtually the whole NT canon.
The Deity
1. Let's begin with a crude formulation of the Trinity:
i) There is one God
ii) The Father is God
iii) The Son is God
iv) The Spirit is God
v) The Father is not the Son, &c.
On the face of it, this appears to be formally contradictory or polytheistic. Now a formal contradiction is just a verbal contradiction rather than a logical contradiction, so that, of itself, isn't all that concerning. If, however, we say that "God" has the same sense throughout, then it's much harder to eliminate a logical contradiction.
2. But suppose we don't define "God" in the same sense throughout. Suppose we introduce a distinction between "God" as an abstract noun and "God" as a concrete noun. As an abstract noun, "God" denotes divinity, divine nature. As a concrete noun, "God" denotes the particular being who is God (like an abstract particular). Let's plug that semantic distinction into a more refined formulation of the Trinity:
i) There is one God (concrete noun)
ii) The Father is God (abstract noun)
iii) The Son is God (abstract noun)
iv) The Spirit is God (abstract noun)
v) The Father is not the Son, &c.
Not only does that dissolve the formal contradiction, but there's no prima facie logical contradiction either. This is not to deny that the persons of the Trinity are individuals, but the semantic distinction concerns the definition of "God", and not their particularity as distinct individuals.
We could draw the same distinction using Latin synonyms. If we say there's one Deity, that's a concrete noun. If we refer to the deity of the Father, or Son, or Spirit, that's an abstract noun.
Now, I don't think a simple formulation of the Trinity can do it justice; I don't think individual words are adequate to capture the conceptual richness; but as simple formulations go, that's a good approximation.
Thursday, January 05, 2017
i) I've discussed this before, but I'd like to approach it from a different angle. Both amils and premils (and postmils, I suppose) posit chronological gaps in some Bible prophecies. That can look like special pleading. A face-saving device to savage your eschatological timetable. Or, more seriously, a face-saving device to salvage the prophecy itself.
Now, I do think Christians of whatever eschatological outlook (amil premil, postmil) can be at risk of postulating ad hoc gaps to protect their position. And I'm not sure we can entirely guard against that. We need to make allowance for the possibility that our prophetic school of thought is mistaken. (That's different from saying the prophecy itself is mistaken.) And we need to have general evidence for our eschatological outlook. We can't be constantly patching it up.
ii) On a related note, some people are suspicious or dubious about Bible prophecy because they've seen how millennial cults devise creative interpretations when their founding prophet makes false predictions. And they think Christian apologists are guilty of the same antics when defending the Bible.
iii) And I think skepticism is often justified in assessing prophetic claimants. As even Scripture says, "many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 Jn 4:1). The Bible warns of false prophets.
iv) That said, I'd like to make a preliminary point. If there's evidence outside of Scripture that some people can sense the future (e.g. premonitions, premonitory dreams), then that establishes both the possibility and reality of genuine prophetic foresight. And it doesn't take many examples to establish the existence or occurrence of a particular phenomenon. If you have that baseline, then it should affect the presumption you bring to Scripture. At the very least, that ought to make you more sympathetic.
v) The next point I'd like to explore is whether the notion of prophetic gaps is inherently suspect. Let's consider the idea of Bible prophecy. Even if you don't initially believe it, ask yourself what it would be like in case it's for real. What would a seer experience?
We need to remind ourselves that Bible prophecy is typically a two-stage process. That's easy forget because all we have is the record of vision. So that makes it look like a one-stage process. Since we're reading a prophecy, our default mode is to judge it on those terms. But that's misleading. A visionary revelation didn't originate in writing.
Let's begin with our ordinary waking perception of temporal succession. We experience the "passage of time" continuously. Instant by instant.
I can't jump ahead from 1:00 to 2:00. I can't skip over the intervening time. Rather, I must live through each moment to get from 1:00 to 2:00. Unless I suffer a blackout, there are no chronological gaps in my experience of real time.
Compare that to visionary revelation. Imagine what it's like to be a seer. Suppose, one night, you experience a series of prophetic dreams. It's like watching a movie in your head. You see one scene after another. The scenes keep changing. Then you wake up and write them down.
Now, writing is a different medium than seeing. There are no gaps on the printed page. When you write down what you saw, you don't insert blank spaces between one section and another. Rather, you just write down what you saw in the order in which you remember having seen it–in tidy, evenly spaced paragraphs.
So when we read a prophecy, the written record is continuous. There are no breaks on the page.
Yet that's just an artifact of how to represent an experience in writing. It's a category mistake to confuse the nature of the underlying experience with the nature of a textual description.
Let's go back to the experience of visionary revelation. Suppose these are visions of the future. A series of visions. But here's the thing: there's nothing in what he sees that shows him how much time passes between one scene and another. Serial visionary revelation is discontinuous. A vision of disconnected scenes.
So there's nothing in the visionary experience to indicate the actual duration of the intervals between one future scene and another. There's an implicit gap between each scene and the next scene. Abrupt scene changes.
There's no indication that the envisioned events occur in rapid succession, or evenly spaced intervals. If you think about it, it would be rather disorienting to witness. The seer's imagination is bombarded with shifting, disjointed scenes. He saw this, that, and the other thing.
So the fulfillment of these visions could well be staggered. That's not a case of wedging gaps between a continuum. To the contrary, there's already "space" between one scene and another. And there's no telling how much space separates one scene from another. It could be a brief interlude or centuries apart.
Consider movies where the action cuts ahead to ten years later. Say you were watching a scene of teenage boyfriend and girlfriend. A moment later, you see a scene of the teenagers all grown up. Married with kids. The director expects the audience to make the mental transition.
So there's nothing intrinsically suspect about the notion that Bible prophecies contain chronological gaps. Indeed, if you think it about it, that's to be expected. And there'd be no interruptions in the text (hence, no textual clues) since the mechanics of recording the experience are fundamentally different from the mechanics of the recorded experience.
The interesting question isn't whether there may be the occasional prophetic gap, but whether a reader is even aware of where they lie, in which case prophecy might be riddled with gaps.
Debunking an over-used Irenaeus quote on “Papal Succession”
In this definitive work on Irenaeus
the city of Rome is not even mentioned.
Someone posted this quote from Irenaeus in response to Jerry Walls’s comment on Facebook about the Roman Catholic Church having claimed to have “compiled the Bible” (and by the way, Jerry agrees it is "Simplistic, self-serving hubris":
The great early Father, St. Irenaeus in the mid-100’s felt a little differently (Against Heresies III, 2-4):
Jerry referred them to Peter Lampe; someone else commented that “if you don’t have a succinct answer, you probably don’t have an answer”. Here is a succinct response that I posted:
Tuesday, January 03, 2017
Light through the keyhole
At its best, atheist experience is like a man locked away in a pitch black room, daydreaming of summer. Subjective hope.
At its worst, Christian experience is like a man locked away in a windowless, unlit room with a sliver of light shining through the keyhole from the summery world beyond. Objective hope.
“Pope Francis” is in the minority. But the winds of change are blowing.
Bishops and Cardinals vs Pope Francis
Bishops and Cardinals vs Pope Francis.
But the progressives are with him.
In the tussles over the papal statement “Amoris Laetitia”, which many claim has changed church teaching on marriage (enabling the civilly-divorced-and-remarried to be readmitted to communion under certain circumstances that were never possible before), “Pope Francis” finds himself on the losing end among those bishops and cardinals who have taken sides so far.
The Four Cardinals Are Up 14-9. But Leonardo Boff Is in the Game, Too.
It seems likely to me that “Pope Francis” will go to his grave not having responded to the dubia, the yes-or-no “questions” which essentially ask “Pope Francis”, “does your teaching supersede that of “Pope John Paul” on the issue?” (“Pope John Paul II” seemingly unequivocally ruled out what “Pope Francis” now has opened the door to in the name of “mercy”):
The past six months have seemed at times like a war of attrition. The controversy has centred largely on how the Pope’s words are to be interpreted. Some national bishops’ conferences – Germany, for example – seem more or less united in favour of liberalising the discipline, while others – such as Poland – insist that nothing has changed. The bishops of Buenos Aires produced a document suggesting that the way is now open for Communion for the remarried in some cases where subjective guilt might be diminished. The Pope responded with a private letter commending this interpretation as the right one. In what has become a familiar aspect of disputes around the Pope’s real intentions, the purportedly private exchange was leaked – a transparent attempt to give momentum to the liberalising tendency.
Christology and compound words
Lee Irons is leading the charge for the eternal generation of the Son based on the traditional rendering of monogenes (μονογενής) as "only-begotten". Lee is a fine scholar, so he's a good spokesman for that position.
The word occurs in Jn 1:14,18; 3:16,18 & 1 Jn 4:9. And that understanding was codified in the Nicene Creed.
I've already explained my own position. I affirm eternal Sonship but deny eternal generation:
But now I'd like to raise a linguistic issue. Monogenes is a compound word. Sometimes the meaning of a compound word is a combination of what the constituent words individually mean. And that's the unquestioned assumption or inference when monogenes is rendered "only-begotten". Proponents of eternal generation justify their position on the supposition that monogenes has the conjoined meaning of the two individual words that compose it.
Put another way, they presume the compound word has a transparent meaning, by combining what each of the two words mean. And certainly the import of many compound words follows that simple additive principle. To take a few English examples: bedtime, dishwasher, football, footpath, headache, headlight, northwest, rowboat, shortsighted, taillight, teapot, toothbrush.
In cases like that, if you know the meaning of the uncompounded words, you can figure out the meaning of the compound word.
But many times, a compound word has an idiomatic meaning that's not derivable from the conjoined import of the uncompounded words that compose it. To take a few English examples: acidhead, callgirl, cottonmouth, cyberspace,, flying saucer, grease monkey, greenhouse, homesick, hotdog, jailbird, kickback, ladybug, soap opera.
(In English, a compound word can be solid, hyphenated, or open.)
You can't tell what these words mean by simply combining the individual import of each word.
To take an analogous example, compare these two sentences:
Luigi is waiting for the coin to drop
Let's drop the dime on Luigi
To someone who doesn't know English well, these seem to be semantically equivalent phrases, but of course, they are completely different.
Given that compound words can have, and often do have, idiomatic meanings (and I believe that holds true for Greek as well as English), are proponents of eternal generation justified in simply assuming that monogenes has a transparent meaning–or is that unwarranted unless they present an argument to exclude the real possibility that it's idiomatic?
Monday, January 02, 2017
Are the Resurrection accounts irreconcilable?
i) Critics often say the Resurrection accounts are contradictory. Even if that were true, it wouldn't mean the Resurrection is in doubt. You can have discrepant accounts of a plane crash, but that doesn't mean there was no plane crash. The fact that eyewitnesses may get details wrong doesn't mean they mistook the underlying event.
ii) There is, however, a basic confusion about the oft-repeated claim that the Resurrection accounts are irreconcilable. It's possible for the Resurrection accounts to be irreconcilable, yet each account is completely accurate. It doesn't take much imagination to see how that's possible, but critics lack imagination.
iii) Let's begin by considering how to represent the same scene in time and space. Suppose I photograph a landscape. Say I photographic the same scene from two different angles. I now have two different pictures of the same scene.
Suppose I turn these two pictures into two different puzzles. Two boxes of puzzle pieces depicting that scene.
Even though these are both depictions of the same scene, no piece from one puzzle will fit into any piece from the other puzzle. The pieces from these two puzzles are irreconcilable.
I can't map one puzzle onto the other puzzle, yet both puzzles map onto the same underlying scene. Two completely accurate, but irreconcilable depictions.
iv) Or, instead of shots from different angles, I could take two shots at different times. I might photograph the same scene morning and afternoon, Or spring, summer, fall, and winter.
I'd shoot the same scene at the same angle, but each picture would look different due to different lighting conditions, weather, deciduous trees in bud, or turning brown, &c.
Once again, I could turn these pictures into puzzles. But I couldn't piece the scene together using pieces from different puzzle boxes. Yet each separate depiction is a completely accurate representation of the same scene.
v) In addition, when we assemble a puzzle, we have the benefit of the complete picture on the cover to use as a guide. That gives us the part/whole relation.
But in the case of the Resurrection accounts, we don't have direct access to the original scene. All we have to go by are edited accounts. We're comparing each account with another account, rather than comparing each account to the original. It's like piecing a puzzle together after the picture on the box top was lost. All you have are pieces. You don't have an image that shows the original composition.
vi) In addition, the Resurrection accounts are very selective. So that's like attempting to assemble a puzzle with missing pieces.
But even if you can't reconstruct the original scene, that creates no presumption against the accuracy of the accounts. Just as your inability to assemble a puzzle using pieces from different puzzles (of the same scene, from different angles or seasons) doesn't mean the representation is inaccurate. Just as your inability to assemble a puzzle with missing pieces or a missing box top picture doesn't mean the representation is inaccurate.
vii) Incidentally, the same group of people could go to a park or cemetery at the same time, but miss connections because various objects obstruct their view of each other. Even if they were all there at the same time, they may not see each other, depending where they stand in relation to trees, buildings, hillocks, &c.
viii) Dropping the metaphor, let's take a comparison. We have parallel accounts of Jesus cursing the fig tree in Matthew and Mark. These are clearly about the same event. It's likely that Mark preserves the original order. In Mark, Jesus curses the fig tree as he enters Jerusalem, then cleanses the temple, then exits Jerusalem by the same route. Next day, the disciples see the withered tree. In-between coming and going, there's the cleansing of the temple.
By contrast, Matthew exhibits narrative compression. Matthew places the cleaning of the temple before the cursing of the fig tree. That reduces a three-stage action, spread over two days, to a two stage action.
That's a useful example of how a Gospel writer (Matthew) edits a source. And if Matthew was all we had to go by, we'd be unable to reconstruct the original sequence, both because we're missing key information, and because historical events, due to their contingency, often have no necessary sequence. We don't not know in advance when somebody will do something in relation to something else. He might curse the fig tree first, then cleanse the temple–or cleanse the temple first, then curse the fig tree. The order of events is up to the discretion of the agent, which makes it unpredictable. What was sooner? What was later?
Unless we were there and saw what happened, it's often impossible to say who did what when. For there's more than one way it might have happened. Given different possibilities, we can't expect to nail down the chronology in many cases.
Consider all the things you do in the course of a day. In some instances, you have to do one thing before you can do something else. But in many instances, there's no fixed order in which you must do them. And those may be snap decisions you make on the spot.
Sunday, January 01, 2017
Religion of life, religion of death
One way to classify religions is by how they address the question of death and the afterlife. Indeed, it's sometimes said, with tolerable exaggeration, that death is why religion exists in the first place.
Hinduism espouses reincarnation. I think the notion of reincarnation is one of the few things that's as bad as atheism. The notion that you're condemned to repeatedly start a new life all over again, with a new set of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, childhood friends, adult friends, spouse, sons, daughters, &c, only to lose everything time and again, is truly hellish.
Buddhism inherits reincarnation from Hinduism. Buddhism is all about transience, so reincarnation doesn't really belong in Buddhism.
Many pagan religions practice some form of ancestor worship, like necromancy.
From what I've read, the concept of Vahalla was an extension of how Viking heroes lived. In addition, I could cite Greco-Roman and ancient Near-Eastern examples. But that will suffice. None of this is very inviting, even if it were true.
Now I'd like to contrast Christianity and Judaism. In this context, what I mean by Judaism isn't OT Judaism or Christian Judaism but post-Christian Judaism. Medieval and modern Judaism.
I'll begin with an overstatement, then scale it back by qualification. Judaism is a religion of life while Christianity is a religion of death. Of course, that's hyperbolic, but the contrast is truer for Judaism than Christianity.
In my observation, Jews stress how to lead a good life. A full, honorable, virtuous life. Make the most of life. Family and friends. Civil duties. Emphasis on social ethics.
Obviously, that overlaps with Christianity. We care about that, too.
Moreover, Protestants rediscovered family life as a godly vocation. A setting in which to be happy and holy.
Still, each of us is tending towards the grave. Recently I skimmed a book by a rabbi. As a young rabbi he was ill-equipped for the task, because men of the cloth are expected to visit dying parishioners in the hospital, yet his rabbinical training didn't give him anything helpful to say to the dying–or to the living who were about to lose a loved one, or to the bereaved.
I'm not saying modern-day Jews don't believe in the afterlife. Some do, some don't. But from what I can tell, Judaism has a this-worldly center of gravity.
Yet that's a serious deficiency, for what ultimately matters is not how the story begins, but how it ends. Given a choice, it's better to start off badly but end well than to start off well but end badly. The ending is for keeps.
The end of life is the acid test of religion. That's when the promises come due. When the promises must come true. That's when it has to be real. That's when it counts.
We pray. We preach. We define the faith. We defend the faith.
But the deathbed is where our hopes must be redeemed, as this life fades, and we face eternity.
Some of our forebears were otherworldly to a fault. But to be fair, life for many Christians used to be wretched. Famine. High infant morality. Painful, incurable, untreatable diseases. Many widows, widowers, and orphans. Death was always near. Hunger was always near. Cramp cold quarters.
If contemporary Christians in the west are less otherworldly than their forbears, that's in large part because life is generally so much more enjoyable than it use to be, thanks to technology, as well as greater political and economic freedom. And we ought to be grateful for natural goods.
Yet, a religion of life is only useful to the living. What we all ultimately need, more than a religion of life, is a religion of death.
For life is short. Even at its best, life is full of heartache and heartbreak. And the better your life, the more you have to lose. The world is not enough.
Journey to nowhere
A few more comments on this:
Doubt, lack of certainty, skepticism. Call it what you will. The experience is inevitable in the Christian faith.
We all get to points in our lives where we just don’t “know what we believe anymore.”
You have to wonder if Enns believes his own propaganda. Does he really believe these hasty generalizations? Is he so insular that he truly believes every Christian, or even most Christians, "inevitably" get to points in life they just don't know what they believe anymore? Sure, that's true for some professing believers. But it's hardly inevitable. It's hardly true for every professing believer.
When we enter that period, our first priority is not to get out of it, fix it, and bring it all back to the way it was.
Once the doubt hits, there is no going back to the way things were.
Another hasty generalization. Again, is he really so insular to think that's the case? Certainly there are people who never get back to the way things were. But certainly there are people who do recover.
Our only choice is how to live, and for people of faith I see three choices:
1. Make believe nothing happened and everything is OK. Stay in the game, bury your thoughts, and keep on as usual.
2. Think of that period as a temporary bump in the road, and if handled properly, you will safely wind up back where you were, perhaps with even greater resolve.
In Evangelical and Fundamentalist circles, choices 1 and 2 reign: “Stop making waves and get with the program” or “My period of doubt was simply a momentary lack of faith on my part, but now I have clearer reasons for why my faith is just fine as it is.”
Notice his scornful attitude towards (1) and (2). And, once again, is he so insular that he doesn't know any better? There are, in fact, Christians who suffer a crisis of faith, but work through it and come out the other end with their original beliefs intact, and they are stronger as a result of that crisis. They now have a battle-hardened faith. They now have clearer reasons for what they believed.
The trick, as many skeptical Christians have found out the hard way, is finding people to talk with about their doubts without being made to feel like they just “don’t get it.” As a college professor I deal with these types of inner struggles in my students on a regular basis.
Of course, schools like Eastern College, where Peter Enns and Kent Sparks teach, aggressively subvert the faith of students. Their "inner struggles" are the direct result of what they hear in the classroom.
Enns isn't a reluctant "sceptic". Enns is proud of the fact that he no longer believes what he used to believe. He derives self-esteem from belonging to the smart set.
3. Accept that period as an opportunity for spiritual growth, an invitation to take a pilgrimage of faith without predetermined results.
For me, choice 3 is far more intellectually appealing and spiritually satisfying:
“I’m not sure what has happened and I’d give anything to go back to the way things were. But I know that can’t be. Instead I choose to try and trust God even in this process, to see where the Spirit will lead, even if I don’t know where that is. I need to let go of thoughts and “positions” that gave me (false) confidence and begin the journey toward learning to rely on God rather than ‘my faith.’”
The obvious problem with that euphemistic description is that it's vicious circular. Given his skepticism, he has no justification for believing there is a God at the end of the journey. No justification for believing that God is leading him on a pilgrimage of faith.
For all his self-congratulatory rationalism, Enns is a shallow, incoherent thinker. Although Enns constantly indulges in intellectual posturing, his bromides are logical nonsense. He's like the swami or Tibetan monk in B-movies who dishes out pseudoprofound twaddle. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45103 | Yorgos Avgeropoulos, 60 min. (Prod: Small Planet, GR)
"Gold is the barometer of fear..."
When the Spanish conquistadors reached Colombia in the 16th century, they thought they had found the mythical El Dorado. Five centuries later, with gold’s value skyrocketing as a refuge good in the global economic crisis, it is multinationals’s turn to search Colombia for a new El Dorado. And they are not alone. Guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug cartels are all claiming a share of the legendary deposits with a fever and a rush.
|
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45124 | Trunking : Créer du trunking (bonding) sur OpenBSD
From / Bloc Notes Informatique
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1 Introduction
The following is used on OpenBSD since version 3.9 to combine two physical interfaces (fxp1, fxp2) into a single virtual interface (trunk0). This method allows one to take the feeds from a traditional two-output tap and present a single virtual interface to NSM applications.
2 Configuration
Modify the interface and put yours :
ifconfig fxp1 up
ifconfig fxp2 up
ifconfig trunk0 trunkport fxp1 up
ifconfig trunk0 trunkport fxp2 up
ifconfig trunk0 trunkproto roundrobin up
2.1 Modes
If you don't need roundrobin, choose the mode that you would like :
• roundrobin : Distributes outgoing traffic using a round-robin scheduler through all active ports and accepts incoming traffic from any active port.
• failover : Sends and receives traffic only through the master port. If the master port becomes unavailable, the next active port is used. The first interface added is the master port; any interfaces added after that are used as failover devices.
• loadbalance : Balances outgoing traffic across the active ports based on hashed protocol header information and accepts incoming traffic from any active port. The hash includes the Ethernet source and destination address, and, if available, the VLAN tag, and the IP source and destination address.
• broadcast: Sends frames to all ports of the trunk and receives frames on any port of the trunk.
• none : This protocol is intended to do nothing: it disables any traffic without disabling the trunk interface itself.
To make this configuration permanent between reboots:
echo "up" > /etc/hostname.fxp1
echo "up" > /etc/hostname.fxp2
echo "trunkproto roundrobin trunkport fxp1 trunkport fxp2 netmask" > /etc/hostname.trunk0
Remember to replace fxp1 and fxp2 with the network interfaces on your OpenBSD system (e.g., em0, xl0, rl0, etc.). Don't forget to add your good ip adress.
OpenBSD 3.8 only supported the round robin trunk protocol.
3 References
OpenBSD trunk man |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45125 | login about faq
Hi, I've read the news about those military grade UAVs that are going to be used for tracking people in United States and I'd like to know, is there any way to hide from their tracking, or disable it? I don't do anything illegal, I just want to be safe and not under the constant surveillance! Many thanks in advance, any help will be appreciated!
asked Jun 19 '13 at 08:44
SamuelLi's gravatar image
Hi there, Samuel!
We are really concerned with that tracking problem too, we've made a little research and may tell you that we at Jammer-Store company may have a solution. First of all it is necessary to understand how those devices work, in that case it would be much easier to learn how to avoid those. First of all you should know that those unmanned aerial vehicles will be used to detect and track armed people.
To achieve highly precise tracking UAVs will use cell tower triangulation tracking. It uses the signal of your own mobile device, no matter if it is the most up-to-date smartphone, or a simple cell phone. Your mobile phone maintains constant connections with at least three closest cell towers and the distance between you and those base stations can be calculated, if the signal power is known. But fortunately, it is possible to hide from cell phone tower triangulation tracking.
If you will be able to block it – you will make that UAV literary blind. Just turn of your smartphone and avoid using it for some time, UAV will surely loose your tracks. But that is not really convenient, sometimes, you may require something more powerful, and in that case, our military grade signal blocker will come in handy. It will block cell phones and may even disrupt drone's communications, if it will come really close.
answered Jun 19 '13 at 08:48
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45152 | Monday, March 25, 2013
Iron Chef Mom: Battle Peeps
This is up late tonight because I've been busy at work. Who knew the bunny photo business would be so crazy?
Speaking of bunnies...I love marshmallow bunnies covered in sugar, also known as Peeps! It's like pure sugar covered in sugar. Mmmmmm
Peeps aren't just for eating. Some people make whole Peep-scapes rather than eating them. It's really food you can play with.
And that's why this week, we're doing Battle Peeps. You don't have to just make fun eats, make fun scenes, too! Show off your Peep Creativity!
If you don't like peeps, well...any marshmallow recipe will do :)
Without further's the winner of Iron Chef Mom battle: Carrots
Tumbleweed Contessa's 25 Carrots Cake!
Our runner up is Fantastical Sharing of Recipes Carrot Cake Cinnamon Rolls
Finally, our Hosts' Favorite
A Pretty Life in the Suburbs Carrot Cake Pancakes!
As much as I detest carrots, these winning recipes might just make it in to my tummy.
Now it's time to see who is going to win Battle of the Peeps!
1. Hi Bernadette,
Thanks for hosting. It was fun making peeps they are so easy.
Have a great week.
Debi and Charly
2. Battle of the peeps! You are so funny. Thanks for the invite!
3. I'm a Peep lover, I promise. But I've never done anything other than eat them or blow them up in a microwave (with love, of course). However, I'm thrilled to share a recipe with marshmallows! Yay!
4. Does marshmallow creme count? If not, I can delete my link...
5. Hi Bernadette,
thanks for hosting. i shared my chocolate-lemon mousse. hope you enjoy !
Happy easter !
6. What a fun link party - thanks for the invite!!
7. Yay! Thanks for featuring my cinnamon rolls for battle carrot :)
Thanks and have a great day! |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45167 | The Wheel and Axle
Well, we know what happened in Jurassic Park.
by on Nov.21, 2017, under Society
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While theoretically this is an amazing idea, we need to be cautious. Perhaps those creatures that recently died out because of man’s fault may be given a second chance, but those that went extinct long ago? Due to factors other than man?
There’s a reason why evolution sorted them out. Would they even survive in today’s environment?
Besides, as many have pointed out, this proposal is exactly what happened in Jurassic Park.
And we all know how that turned out.
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Get To Know About Phobias
A phobia refers to certain kind of anxiety symptoms which is triggered by certain objects or situations. A specific phobia or simple phobia is a lasting and very unreasonable fear caused by the presence or just by thought of a specific object/situation. The object or situation in reality poses very little danger.
Because of the distress associated with a phobia the person feels a need to avoid the object or the situation. This in turn affects the person ability to function normally in daily life. Adults with specific phobia very soon realize that their fear is not reasonable, yet they are unable to overcome the fear.
Kinds of phobias
There are different kinds of phobias based on the specific object or situation that causes it.
Animal phobias: Fear of dogs, snakes, insects or mice is the example of common specific phobia associated with animals.
Situational phobias: This involves specific situation like fear of flying, riding a car, driving, crosing a bridge, being in closed spaces, using an elevator etc.
Environmental phobias: Many people have fear of natural forces like fear of storms, high sea waves, high mountains or just water bodies.
Injection phobias: A very common but specific phobia is the fear of injection among children as well as adults. People may also have phobia about seeing blood, about surgery, blood tests and injections.
Some other phobias: The fear of falling down, fear of loud sounds and visual phobias like seeing people in masks or fear of clowns in a circus.
What are the symptoms of specific phobias?
General symptoms of any specific phobia may include:
• Excessive or irrational fear about a object/life situation
• Continuously avoiding the object or situation or sometimes enduring it with distress
• Physical symptoms of a panic attack include pounding heart, nausea, diarrhoea, sweating, trembling, shaking, numbness or tingling in the extremities, breathing problems, dizziness and at time a feeling of chocking.
• An anticipatory anxiety, which means a person getting phobia even before they see the object or experience the situation. For example a person with phobia for dogs will feel nervous about going for a morning walk.
When do phobias first appear?
Phobias usually first appear or a person will realize about is during adolescence. But it can occur anytime irrespective of age. Phobias are more common in women than in men. Only 20% of phobias will go away, like childhood phobias but the remaining will need proper treatment.
What causes phobias?
The exact reason for the onset of a phobia is not known but mostly phobias occur due to a traumatic experience or learned reaction to a object or situation. For example a frightening experience with an animal, like a dog bite, can develop into specific phobia for dogs. Witnessing a traumatic event in which others experience harm or fear can also cause phobias.
What are the treatments?
Specific phobias are treated using certain individual methods or a combination of them.
• Cognitive behavioural theory: Treatment involves exposure and response prevention therapy, in which patients gradually are expose to what frightens them until the fear begins to fade.
• Certain medications and relaxing techniques like breathing exercises are also found to be very effective.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45210 | Perry Pears
Perry Pears
Perry pear trees have been grown for at least 2500 years. Introduced to Britain during Roman times, this became especially popular after the Norman Conquest. The area of Normandy was already widely planted with perry varieties by then.
The peak of perry popularity was in the 17th and 18th centuries. Herefordshire was a well known perry region. In the New World perry became more common in Virginia after about 1820 or so.
The trees are adapted to fairly poor soils and are less fussy than culinary pears. The soil does need to be well drained. Shallow soils are unsuitable.
These are long-lived trees that can be several hundred years old. Some have lived for four hundred years in Europe. They require less pruning and maintenance than most European pear trees. Unlike most culinary pears these can be grown from seed. The trees can become quite tall and wide spreading. Traditionally the lower limbs were removed so that cattle could graze underneath the trees.
The trees are typically 60 feet or more in height. One historic tree in Home Lacy, Herefordshire, England in 1790 covered ½ to ¾ of an acre. It yielded six tons of fruit and 15 hogshead of perry each year. The branches were so large that they bent down to the ground and became new trees when the limbs developed their own roots.
The pear shaped fruits are generally about four inches long and three inches in diameter. These can vary in color from red or yellow to brown. The fruit is smaller than other pears. They taste astringent and bitter partly due to the high tannin.
The trees are generally hardier than culinary pear varieties. It is possible to harvest a ton of fruit from perry trees that are twenty years of age or older.
The perry is sweeter than apple cider and shouldn’t be confused with pear wine, which is quite different. Often yeast is added to the perry. Usually a single perry variety is used for the perry. However it can be mixed with other perry pears as well or even combined with apple cider if desired. If you have a surplus of Asian pears try these for sweeter perry.
Most perry varieties are traditionally low in tannins and acids. The juice is slightly different than the juice used for apple cider due to the high sugar content. This leads to a higher specific variety, which can be over 1090.
The pears are stored for a short period after they’re harvested, usually from two to seven days to be sure they’re fully ripe. However, don’t allow them to become overripe.
Next, mill the pears. Allow the pumice to set for up to 24 hours before pressing. This ensures the perry won’t be cloudy.
These trees are quite productive. Generally a perry tree will yield more cider than a comparable apple tree, about a third more.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45240 | Main Features of Kitchen
What do we need in a kitchen? What are the main features we need to consider when recreating the kitchen of a period-style house?
We need places to store tools, utensils and crockery, as well as foodstuffs. We need to be able to wash fruit and vegetables, to prepare them for use, cook meals and then to wash the tools, utensils and crockery. The modern kitchen must also provide laundry facilities, and is usually the location for a boiler to provide domestic hot water and central heating.
We will look at each of these in turn and consider how to balance the needs of a modern kitchen with our desire to retain the feel of, for example, a Victorian kitchen. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45243 | Baptisms of Dee and Swee
On Sunday 9th June, our sisters in the faith, Dee and Swee, was baptised by our pastor, Oliver Gross. Oliver preached on Acts 2: 1-41, with a sermon titled “Why baptism?”. The Holy Spirit has been poured out on all flesh that has been saved, bestowing spiritual gifts and blessings that can be used in the service of the church. You can listen to the full message here.
Swee first gave her testimony about her life before becoming a Christian, you can listen to her full testimony here. Dee then gave her testimony. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45267 | Open Door Into God's Presence
There are no barriers between us and God and, through Jesus, we can enter fully into his presence any time, any day.
Open Door Into God’s Presence Strange things happened the day the Son of God was crucified, such strange things that it’s clear his death was supremely signif… |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45282 |
Friday, December 18, 2009
I Yam What I Yam, Part 1
I defined comic book fandom, in part, by stating that it was a collective decision for someone to become a part of fandom. Simply being a fan wasn’t enough to join the ranks of fandom; you had to be accepted by fandom itself to be considered part of the group. These are all parts of social identity theory, and are a fairly well-accepted means of looking at groups like comic book fans. More recently, something of an extension of social identity theory called self-categorization theory was developed. Interestingly, despite its roots in social identity theory, self-categorization theory heads in an almost entirely opposite direction focusing on, not surprisingly given its name, the way an individual views her- or himself.
Earlier in the book, I discussed briefly how members of a group develop a prototype. Looking at the existing characteristics of individual group members, they subconsciously create a mental ideal of what traits are most acceptable or most valuable within their circle.
Prototypes are ordinarily unlikely to be checklists of attributes... rather, they are fuzzy-sets which capture the context-dependent features of group membership often in the form of exemplary members (actual group members who best embody the group) or ideal types (an abstraction of group features). People are able to assess the prototypicality of real group members, including self—that is, the extent to which a member is perceived to be close or similar to the group prototype.
—Michael Hogg, Social Groups & Identities
What Hogg is saying here, as it relates to comic fans, is that people develop prototypes based on the best examples from fandom and then, with such a prototype defined, individuals can weigh their, or anyone else’s, characteristics against the prototype’s. In effect, they use the prototype as the basis by which to judge how much of a “real” fan someone is; a “real” fan would meet all or most of the criteria embodied by the prototype. As Hogg notes, there isn’t a checklist of attributes one consciously goes through, but fans can generally make an almost subconscious assessment by mentally overlaying an individual with the prototype to see how well the two align. Think of it like comparing signatures by placing the two pieces of paper on top of one another and holding them up to a light. One signature is known as being definitive and reliable (i.e. the prototype) and the other being a signature whose authenticity you’re checking for (i.e. the individual).
Conversely, this is generally not done for outgroups. While a prototype for an outgroup member may exist in the mind of a comic fan, they often simply apply the prototype to an outgroup member instead of making an actual comparison. In effect, this is stereotyping (and a large basis for Tajfel’s research on social identity theory). People default to broad categorizations to more readily identify and deal with outgroup members, rather than spending time to learn the specific idiosyncrasies of an individual. It is believed this is done to help facilitate faster communications by allowing people to rely on prior experiences with or knowledge of other members of similar outgroups.
But for members of the ingroup, this comparison against the prototype provides a form of self-identification with an ongoing stream of feedback. Both social identity theory and self-categorization theory do have a fundamental assumption that says people have a strong desire to establish and maintain a generally positive self-image. It is for that reason that they join groups in the first place and why they enhance their existing characteristics to more closely match a group prototype. Indeed, one’s self-esteem is not infrequently a reason to pick up a comic in the first place.
Mick Martin relayed his experience in buying his first comic book on the “Trouble with Comics” blog in 2009...
I was very conscious of why I bought the comic. The cover made it appear to be a story in which the Hulk faced down the rest of the world’s superheroes... I was a lonely and angry kid. I felt like the other kids at school would like me if they just tried to get to know me, and I dreamed of the day that would happen. In the meantime, every day on the playground felt exactly like the cover of The Incredible Hulk #278. The thing that never occurred to me until I saw the comic was that maybe on that playground I was the hero, and all those bastards who made fun of me, they were the assholes.
An individual within fandom, as discussed earlier, has derived a fan prototype from the most valued traits that are relevant to the group. This prototype, when compared with those held for significant outgroups, is almost invariably positive. The typical comic fan is seen as superior to a stereotypical outgroup member since a member of fandom has more characteristics of value. The valued traits are, by definition, highly valued but still seen as an achievable ideal to aspire to. As the prototype is often built on direct examples of real individuals within the group, the ideal is actually considered attainable and can be established a realistic life goal. If, for example, the comic book fan prototype has at least 10,000 issues in his personal collection, it would not be difficult to find any number of specific fans who have achieved exactly that. Using another example, if the comic fan prototype is in some form of regular communication with a professional comic artist, it is likewise not difficult to find any number of specific fans who are engaged in daily conversations with their favorite creators. This very real possibility of becoming more like the fan prototype is able to provide a continual stream of small ego-boosts for an individual as they achieve a series of goals in making themselves more like the prototype.
Soon after I began reading The Fantastic Four regularly, I realized that a “real” fan of Marvel Comics knew a great deal about their entire cache of characters, not just the four showcased in my favorite title. My budget, not surprisingly, was limited and I could only afford four comics per month, so I made a very deliberate decision to follow The Fantastic Four, The West Coast Avengers, Silver Surfer and The Punisher. My reasoning was that The Fantastic Four and West Coast Avengers both covered decent-sized groups of characters on opposite coasts of the United States, thus keeping me abreast of the biggest events with the most characters, while Silver Surfer and The Punisher provided opportunities to stay current with cosmic- and street-level stories respectively. I felt safe in the assumption that repeated guest appearances of Spider-Man and the X-Men would keep me up to speed on those decidedly more popular characters. Additionally, getting copies of The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe from a friend gave me essentially a character encyclopedia for everyone else. I was able to establish myself as a “real” Marvel fan because I knew what was going on across the company’s entire line of superhero comics. I might not have been able to buy as many comics as some people, but because I specifically tailored my reading habits, I had a better understanding of the overall tapestry than most and was, in my mind at least, more of a Marvel fan than most.
As I began becoming more interested in comics as a medium, I began hearing references to comics and graphic novels beyond the Marvel Comics I had spent years reading. While the disparate publishers prevented me from taking the exact same tactics I had used earlier, I was able to proceed with a similar strategy. I began picking up comics that would provide the most relevant and wide-ranging look at the medium as a whole. I couldn’t buy the entire output of Will Eisner, but A Contract With God did a pretty good job of showcasing his abilities; I couldn’t track down the complete collected works of Walt Kelly or George Herriman, but I could borrow my father’s slightly dog-eared collections of Pogo and Krazy Kat that he bought in college. I became familiar enough with a broad enough swath of creators that I felt comfortable talking about more than just Marvel heroes. I made (and still make) a series of decidedly targeted readings to better familiarize myself with the entire medium of comics. I was taking steps towards the mental prototype of a comic book fan that was in my head, and each accomplishment—finding and understanding how various creators approach their work, not necessarily acquiring the work itself—moved me one step nearer becoming a “real” comic book fan.
Over the years, I have become, as far as my self-identity is concerned, more and more of a comics fan. My ongoing reading and research gives me a deeper appreciation for the medium and its creators, and a better understanding of the medium on the whole. I am closer to the prototypical fan than I was a decade ago, with a resulting increase in my self-esteem. Those traits that I value in the comic fan prototype, the ones that I feel make someone a “real” comic fan, are ones that I admire as an ideal; and because I am closer now to that ideal than I used to be makes me proud. I am acquiring more traits of value, giving me a greater sense of self-worth and making me happier and more content.
This is further reinforced by the rest of comic fandom. If comic book fans, on the whole, all place high value on a certain characteristic of the prototype, and you display that characteristic yourself, other fans will respond positively. This can be seen on display in any number of fashions. A clear example of direct reinforcement can be seen during trivia challenges at comic book conventions which reward those contestants with the most knowledge about comic books with prizes. Less direct, but certainly more common, examples occur in casual discussions about comics. One fan might cite the number of comics in their possession while others nod approvingly or otherwise appear visibly impressed. Though less impactful, even a simple “Right on!” or “Woot!” response on a message board encourages and validates the individual’s self-image. Others are openly acknowledging of the valuable assets a single fan has, reiterating the message that the fan her- or himself is valuable.
All of these serve to bolster one’s self-esteem, but they also serve to reinforce the validation of the group itself. The encouragement and support shown through group intra-action shows the individual that, not only are they worthy of love and respect but also, that such love and respect is administered by members of the group. A comic fan whose thoughts and ideas are valued is encouraged to share more by other fans. While those thoughts and ideas could certainly by shared with anyone, they are likely to be most appreciated by others who have similar tastes and aesthetic sensibilities; namely, members of that very same group of comic fans. Consequently, the fan’s thoughts and ideas are shared back with the group, who receive them eagerly. The fan’s self-esteem is raised, as is the perceived benefit of the group of fans who helped raise it.
This cyclical process is not necessarily perpetual. Both the individual fan’s and the overall fandom’s values can change. A single person, of course, can at any time re-evaluate their priorities. Perhaps the birth of a child, a change in vocation or a debilitating illness might bring about such a re-evaluation. At the fandom level, a change in the economy, shifts in publication policies and technological improvements can impact how the prototype is collectively altered. Self-publishing is a prime example of how technology can change the values of fandom. The fanzines of the 1950s and 1960s were not infrequently drawn with relative crudeness, in large part because the production technology was limited to a handful of individuals who did not necessarily have much artistic ability, and there was a clear demarcation between professional comics and amateur ones. As technology improved and became more readily available, more artists were able to produce their own works that were comparable in quality to that of the largest publishers. Technology continued to improve and by the 21st century, virtually any creator who had the desire could develop an online comic for a website that might be indistinguishable from those of the major players. Accordingly, fandom’s attitude towards comics from “non-professionals” has changed. As has the very definition of comic professional, as I’ll elaborate on later. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45299 | Thursday, January 19, 2017
See What The Actors From Mortal Kombat Look Like Now
If you ever wondered why the characters in Mortal Kombat looked so realistic back in the day, that's because they actually used real actors in the game. Video games have come a long way since then and so haven't the actors. See what they look like now.
Pin It now! |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45309 | The Dink Network
Defeat of the Terrorists (The)
Dink takes advantage of the terrorists' all-you-can-earn Experience Buffet. From the COTPATD project.
One hero gets to kill the terrorists.
Released:November 30th, 2009
File Size:177.06 KB
Release Notes:Newer midis
December 10th, 2009
Score : 0.5 horrible
Peasant Male Sweden steam
The Defeat Of the Terrorists
Sounds cool, huh? When I saw that a file with this name was uploaded I was though it would be a quite big game filled with new, interesting graphics and game-play.
Well, it wasn't. This was in fact even worse than DinkDoodler's first dmod, EvilDink, It was just short and pointless, let me explain why.
The game-play in this dmod was about the same as in EvilDink, just too easy fighting with a lame story behind, kill the terrorists. The terrorist then? Are they some new hyper-cool guys with shotguns and sunglasses? NO The terrorists are just knights. And even though you kill them they are back when you re-enter the screen... Even the boss! Upon the defeat of the boss a text appears, it says the the terrorists are defeated, but they aren't!
The mapping in all three of dinkdoodler's dmods is REALLY annoying! There are no borders so you have to guess witch way to go (witch is one of four...). In this dmod there was 10 screens! Just 10!
And those 10 screens used as few as 14 scripts (that's 10 + the main and start scripts)!
This dmod is not worth playing, put more effort in your creations, dinkdoodler!
I have to give this file 0.5. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45310 | The Dink Network
February 14th, 2006
1.4 Beta 2
Score : 9.0 exceptional
A very good replacement for the Dinkedit, which isn't really any good compared to this. The fact that it is windowed is a great advantage since when you are working on dmods you need quick and easy access to scripts and graphics, which Dinkedit doesn't allow without forcing you to minimise. It's controls are much more intuitive than Dinkedit's as well. You can do everything Dinkedit does in an easier and better way with WinDinkedit. You can even do things Dinkedit doesn't do. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45316 | Halloween Candy Buy Back!
Our 2nd Annual Operation Gratitude: Halloween Candy Buyback Program is from November 4th through November 8th this year!
Candy Buyback Flyer JPG 2013
Our first ever Halloween Candy Buy Back was a huge success! We were able to collect almost 50 lbs of candy for our soldiers overseas!
Here are a few pictures from the event! |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45323 | Pick evening eats that will keep your metabolism up and help you slim down.
Jessica Migala
Around 3 p.m. every day, you may be hit with the question: What's for dinner? Amid the dinnertime rush, it's easy to reach for ready-made meals that skimp on nutrition or leave you feeling unsatisfied. Luckily, a few tweaks to your routine can help you build a dinner that's tasty, satisfying and ultimately helps you lose weight. Aim to eat a balanced meal with at least serving or two of veggies, some protein, whole grains and a little healthy fat.
Some dinner foods deliver an extra weight-loss boost. And the good news is that many of the foods you love-but believed you had to stay away from-are on this list, too. Here are the best weight-loss foods to eat and enjoy at dinner.
Don't Miss: The Best 30-Day Dinner Plan
1. Peppers
Recipe to Try: Guacamole-Stuffed Poblano Peppers
Get the stir-fry ready. Fruits and veggies are super colorful, but that's not just so they can look beautiful. It's also a sign that they deliver a big punch of nutrition-and weight-loss potential. In a study in BMJ in 2016, researchers looked at how plant compounds called flavonoids influence weight loss. Over a four-year period, eating flavonoid-packed fruits and veggies (peppers were one that researchers specifically called out) was linked to weight loss. That's possibly because these powerful plant compounds may help you eat fewer calories and improve blood sugar function. When you're thinking of a quick dinner, go for one packed with peppers. Try this tried-and-true stir-fry formula for a tasty and healthy dinner every time. Or make stuffed peppers for a satisfying portion-controlled meal.
2. Beans
Recipe to Try: Spaghetti Squash with Roasted Tomatoes, Beans & Almond Pesto
Think of beans as the magical fruit-because they can help you slim down. It's all about fiber. Most people fall short on their fiber intake, consuming just 16 grams per day. (Women should aim for 25 grams.) But when dieters upped their intake to 28 grams a day by eating either fruits and veggies or beans, they ate 300 fewer calories but felt less hungry, and lost about 3.5 pounds over a four-week period, per research from the Medical University of South Carolina. Another study, published in Food & Nutrition Research, looked at eating bean or meat dishes of equal calories. The bean-based meals helped people feeler fuller, and they ate as much as 13 percent less. This Black Bean, Mango & Kale Wheat Berry Salad is the perfect meal to fill you up.
3. Olive Oil
Recipe to Try: Honey-Mustard Vinaigrette with Lemon
Don't be afraid to add an olive oil drizzle to your dinner. In a study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, when adults who had type 2 diabetes or were at risk for heart disease ate a Mediterranean-style diet (full of vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains and fish) along with about 1.5 ounces of extra-virgin olive oil daily, they lost about one additional pound over a five-year period and reduced their waist circumference by about a quarter of an inch, results that were better than subjects in a control group who were advised to avoid fat. (Those who ate a Mediterranean diet along with nuts also saw their weight and waistline decrease.) That may seem incredibly modest, but in this "diet" people did not have to watch their calorie intake, and exercise wasn't a requirement, either. That may make this eating style ultimately easier to stick with. It's just one more piece of evidence that eating fat doesn't make you fat.
4. Pasta
Recipe to Try: Creamy Fettucine with Brussels Sprouts & Mushrooms
It's a good day for those who love a good Italian meal: pasta-eating is associated with a leaner physique. In an Italian study (of course!), researchers looked at over 20,000 people and asked them about their diet habits. Those who reported eating more pasta also stuck more strictly to a Mediterranean diet, weighed less and had smaller waist and hip circumferences. (One caveat is that recalling what you eat on a daily basis isn't always accurate, something the authors acknowledge, so more research is needed.) Still, they point to a previous study that showed that a diet filled with carbs and veggies can reduce your risk of obesity and belly fat, and to another that linked pasta to a lower BMI, too.
5. Salmon
Recipe to Try: Roasted Salmon & Butternut Squash Salad
If fish isn't a part of your regular weekly rotation, it's time to get on board. In a study in the journal Nutrition in 2017 on 26 healthy-weight adults, those who ate a polyunsaturated-fat-rich diet (present in foods like salmon, flaxseed oil and walnuts) had a decrease in the hormone ghrelin (which increases appetite) and an increase in peptide YY (which makes you feel satiated) compared to a control group. The American Heart Association suggests eating two fish meals per week for the heart-health benefits.
Watch: How to Make One-Pan Roasted Salmon & Brussels Sprouts |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45325 | Easy Guidance: Muscle Building Workout Plan
muscle building workout planGuide to Make Muscle Building Workout Plan
If you want to work on body building, you should manage your own muscle building workout plan. The plan is necessary to make your commitment to do the workout. Without regular workout, you will never get the bigger muscle as you want.
eBuildMuscle.com – As a beginner, you will need more information to start your first workout plan. To create your plan, you will also need some basic guidance to work on it. You should remember that making your muscle grow will need a time and efforts. First of all, you should make your schedule and the type of workouts that you should do.
Create your schedule
Creating your schedule is the first thing that you should do. A plan without timing is nothing, so in the workout plan. The best schedule plan is to do it weekly for a few months ahead. There are two best recommendations to do your weekly plan. Start the workout from Monday is recommended because of it easier to be noted.
Read also: Muscle Building Diet
The first recommended schedule is four days version. This 4-day version means that you will have four workout days in a week. You have to practice upper body workout for the first day and practice lower body workout for the second day. And then take a day off on the third day.
Taking rest is important because when you take a rest, your muscle will grow. After one day off, do the upper body and lower body workout again in the two following days. This muscle building workout plan will end up with two days off.
This 4-day version has recommended as it defined as the ideal frequency to build muscle mass at an optimal rate. It also has proven working for the beginner. But you can also start this version from any day but Monday as long as the concept is same.
The second recommendation is three days version. In this version, you will have three workout days only. To make this, you can start to do lower body workout on the first day. The second day is an off day. Do the upper body on the third day and followed with one day off. On the 5th day, you can do lower body workout again. Your two remaining days will become your off days.
This three days version of muscle building workout plan is suitable for the beginner because it is not as harder as the previous version. On the other hand, you can also change the workout type arrangement.
Exchange the first day to be your upper body workout and the rest of the workout days for your next week plan. This is the most common workout plan, and the slight frequency is optimal for the real beginner. Keep it as the arrangement day if you want to start in other days but Monday.
If you are a beginner, try to choose one of those two options. It doesn’t matter if you choose the 4 or 3 days version. The key to achieving the muscle building goal isn’t only at the time, but also the kind of exercises that you choose.
Read also: How To Build Muscle Mass Fast
Select your workouts
There are two types of workout; it is the upper body and the lower body workout. Those have been mentioned above as part of your workout day. Each of them has different exercises that focus on the particular body. Below are the lists of the exercises for each type.
For upper body exercises, there are some choices come from bench press, dumbbell press, and some triceps work. You can do a bench press to start your first day of muscle building workout plan by taking three sets with 6-8 reps and about 3 minutes rest between sets. For the next exercise, do rows with the same rules above. And then also do incline dumbbell press.
Take this exercise by three sets of 8-10 reps with 2 minutes rest per set. Do lateral raises of 2 sets with 10-12 reps. Take 1-minute rest for each set. Follow that exercise with triceps press-downs with the same rules of the lateral raises. You can end up your upper body with dumbbell curls with the same rule.
It is recommended to do all of those exercises in your upper day workout. If you don’t get used to it, take at least three exercises of them. Some additional exercise is including pull up, barbell shoulder press, and skull crusher.
Lower body exercises are different, but the set and reps for each exercise could be the same with upper bodies. Do Romanian deadlifts for three sets of 6-8 reps. Leg press should be your next exercise with three sets and 10-12 reps. Don’t forget to take 2 minutes rest for each set.
Three sets of seated leg curls with 8-10 reps is your next exercise. Four sets of standing calf rises with 6-8 reps could improve the way you work. For your last muscle building workout plan, do abs with a set that you can decide. Each set should consist 8-15 reps. Don’t forget to take a rest at least 1 minute every set.
For your variation, you can also choose squat and split squat. Choose each of them three sets with 6-8 reps and 8-10 sets. Take a rest 2-3 minutes for each set. You can combine them on your workout day. If possible, change the type of the exercises each day.
Usually, it needs at least six weeks to see your progress. The key to making your muscle bigger is to keep exercising. If you have highly trained yourself well, you can improve the level of your exercise to be harder. The harder your exercise, the bigger muscle you will get.
In this phase, you can try to use some supplement. To support your workout plan, you will need to watch the nutrition of your meal. Gaining muscle will mean nothing if you are underweight. Eat more healthy food that contains protein. With well-organized meals and supplement, you can maximize the result from your muscle building workout plan.
Best Muscle Building Workout Plan For Men And Beginners
Having a muscle is a must for some people, in particular for some men in the world. A muscle can be formed by consuming some healthy foods and doing some exercises. Nowadays, there is a best muscle building workout plan for men and beginners that are effective. These are some information about the best muscle building workout plan for men and beginners that may solve your problems, as follows:
Best Muscle Building Workout Plan For Men
There are some activities or exercises can be the best muscle building workout plan for men. Here is the information about it:
Dead lift is one of the best ways to build the men’s muscle. There are some benefits can be gotten from that exercise. For example, the dead lift can help the people increase the fat burning. Based on the research, doing the dead lift make people produce a lot of sweat. That is why some athletes are doing the dead lift to reduce their fat or keep their ideal body. Besides, people are supposed to do a diet program in their daily life. They should consume healthy foods and less fat during the exercise. Dead lift also has a benefit to keeping men’s ideal body proportion and their performance.
Chin Up is an exercise that is chosen by some people to build their body muscle. Usually, a man who wants to maintain their muscle in his arm and back choose the chin up exercise. The chin up exercise focuses on the formed of the muscle strength. There are some benefits can be gotten from chin up, for example: make the arm and back muscle proportional, keep the ideal body, reduce the fat in the human body, and also keep the body healthy.
Dumbbell Floor Press is one of the exercises that are used to build the muscle strength. This exercise focuses on the building of the chest, shoulders, triceps, and stomach. For some men or even some athletes, they choose the dumbbell floor press exercise to increase the muscle mass.
Dumbbell Row is the exercise of the muscle building. It focuses on the building of the back muscle. The benefits of this exercise can increase the muscle mass in the back and also keep the human body weight stay ideal and proportional.
The front squat is one of the exercises that are used to keep the lower muscle stay ideal. It focuses on the building of the shoulder muscle. Some people or even some athletes choose this exercise to keep their muscle in the shoulder stay strong.
Push up is one of the best exercises to keep the ideal body. It focuses on the muscle building of the stomach, shoulders, triceps and the chest. The focus of the push-up exercise almost same as the dumbbell floor press. Besides, doing the push up gives a benefit to help the bone strength. Bone is one of the body parts that important for human body. That is why to keep the strength of our bone, push up is the best exercise to be chosen.
Doing those exercises in daily life is important to keep our muscles stay active and healthy. Those are best muscle building plan for men that should be tried by all people. The benefits of it significant for the human body, in particular for men. The exercise can be done for 2-3 weeks, after that you can get a good result from those exercises.
Muscle Building Workout Plan For Beginners
Some beginners can do some muscles building a workout plan. It can by consuming some healthy foods and doing exercises. These are some exercises that can be done by beginners for muscle building, as follows:
Push up is one of best exercises that can be used by beginners to build their body muscle. Push us is the easy exercises for beginners because they can do it anywhere and anytime. The functions of push up itself are to build the muscle in some parts of human body, such as chest, shoulders, stomach, and arms.
Barbell shoulder press is an exercise that is used by some beginners to build their muscles in the shoulder. If people are doing the barbell shoulder press every day, they will get proportional shoulders. Besides, the barbell shoulder press makes the muscle come out, that exercise maintains the strength body for beginners.
Front Plate Raise is an exercise for beginners to build the muscle such as arms and chest. There are some people want to get a muscle in their chest and arm to make good looking. Actually, as a man for having a muscle in his body is important. That is why they are supposed to do the front plate exercises.
Dumbbell Shoulder Press is one of best exercises that can be used by some beginners to build their body weight. A Dumbbell shoulder Press focuses on the muscle building in the back and shoulders. So, for some people who want to make the muscle in their back and shoulder come out, it is the best way to do the dumbbell shoulder press.
Reverse Fly is also one of the best exercises for muscle building for beginners. People can do that exercise at the Gym. There are some coaches will help them during the training. The focus of this exercise is to build the shoulders muscle. To make the shoulders muscle proportional, some beginners should do the reverse fly exercise.
That is some information about the best muscle building workout plan for men and beginners. There are some exercises can be done by people for gaining their body muscle. It is effortless because they can do it at the Gym.
The exercises that are done by some men and beginners almost same, but there is a difference in the time to get the muscle come out. For the beginners, they need four weeks to get the result after the exercises, while for an ordinary or some men who are professional just need two until three weeks to get their muscle. May be this information can help and solve your problem in muscle building program.
Gallery for Easy Guidance: Muscle Building Workout Plan
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45326 | The Collective Wisdom at Work
Most of the media is breathless about Web 2.0. While we've dipped our toes into the hyperbolic floodwaters here at EContent, our reporting has mostly been of specific applications, rather than a lot of the rah-rah coverage I've read in a number of mainstream and technology publications.
As I chatted with Shiv Singh from Avenue A | Razorfish the other day about his firm's latest effort, Corporate Intranets Best Practices Report: A User-Driven Web 2.0 Perspective, we found ourselves marveling at how this particular concept has so enraptured the media. On its face, what's not to love about Web 2.0? Web 2.0 poster child Wikipedia defines it as a term that "refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online. In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than traditional static web pages." I can just see the vigorous nods around editorial offices everywhere: "Yes, yes, sharing, learning, knowing, all that hive-knowledgey-goodness we were promised in (retroactively named) Web 1.0. There's some good ink here for sure."
Hey, I dig it. I routinely use Socialtext wikis in my work. I benefit from the collective collections at Flickr, and I have found a tag cloud or two mighty useful (even at Avenue A's Workplace Blog). But dude, the cover of Newsweek? I mean this is some geeky stuff, isn't it?
From a technological standpoint, Web 2.0 means Asynchronous Java Script and XML (AJAX)-enabled sites, which update dynamically. Just not as sexy as "remix culture" or "the living web," eh? These latter taglines emerged as the tech aspect of Web 2.0 morphed into the much hipper socially interactive applications they made possible—YouTube, MySpace,, et al. These taglines, like the title Web 2.0, are but slogans, appealing labels to sell us on a renaissance.
What that hype has done, at least in the context of Avenue A | Razorfish's consulting practice, is reignite enthusiasm about some of the things the web can enable in an enterprise. Yet while a ton of trendy applications get rampant media coverage, Singh has found that "on the IT side, everyone knows what I'm talking about when I say Web 2.0. Business people really have no idea—exactly the opposite of what I'd have guessed."
Singh has seen signs of hope in applying the theory in his practice, however. He points to a client using podcasts to communicate with staff and effectively leveraged wikis used internally for group projects (though he has found them less successful in public-facing initiatives).
However, he cautions clients not to get too caught up in the hype. "It is left to be seen if it will have a dramatic impact or if it is more a coolness factor," he says. "For example, wikis are talked about as a Web 2.0 initiative, and yes, publishing of content is easier, but the Web 2.0 aspect of it—editing pages, the real-time collaboration—doesn't happen all that often." Charles Arthur at The Guardian calls it the 1% rule: "For every 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will ‘interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements), and the other 89 will just view it."
While targeted, internal enterprise projects fare better—particularly if participation is essential to accomplishing one's work—the effectiveness of most of these tools remains to be seen. Singh cautions that despite the catchy moniker, "Web 2.0 is not a single philosophy or technology, rather many that should be considered. And it is not something that will change your world overnight."
On the other hand, he points to some very forward-thinking applications of Web 2.0 that may radically change things, like Social Search: "Say you have a massive intranet with a million pages and search doesn't work [very well]. Imagine if each time you searched, the top five documents in your results were those that other users had clicked on when they searched for the same terms." So even without actively participating (contributing content, tagging, creating a podcast, etc.), users' natural actions in going about their work contribute to more relevant search results.
Web 2.0 inside the firewall isn't all work and no play, though. Singh has suggested to clients that there are fun ways to use the interactive processes for "prediction markets," which harness group intelligence. For example, if a company has six ad campaigns under consideration, they can create a space where employees can "trade shares" on the ideas. "Then execs can see the activity that happens around an idea," he says.
While Web 2.0 may or may not live up to its press, nobody can scoff at the ability of its underlying technologies to enable some of the internet's founding principles. As Singh says, "Collectivism is very big."
Yet it is one of the leading proponents of Web 2.0, Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield, who wins for the finest quote on the subject: "It's made of people!" Now do those of us who got the Soylent Green reference qualify as "2.0," or with our antediluvian cultural baggage, are we too old-school to make it out of Beta? |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45328 | hsr[at]ee.iitm.ac.in ESB 332 B 4421
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Photonics Research Group
• Nonlinear problems in RF and optical systems
• Edge Plasma Physics
• Computational Electromagnetics
• Optical communication
• Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45347 | Computer and Electronic Data Destruction
Computer and Electronic Data Destruction
Computers are often the repository of an astounding amount of information. Even in a stand-alone computer that is not linked to the Internet, millions of conventional pages of text and images can be stored in the hard drive and on peripherals, such as a floppy disk or on a compact disk (CD).
For sensitive operations, the security of computer data must be ensured. This is particularly true when data is erased. The convention version of data removal involves the deletion of a file, by the movement of the file to a "garbage can" (i.e., the "Recycling Bin" in the various Windows operating systems). This form of deletion instructs the computer to use the slice of hard or floppy disk space for something else. Eventually, the file will be over-written. But, until that occurs, the information is recoverable.
The true cleaning of a hard or floppy disk involves overwriting the actual data. Computer data is recorded as a series of 0s and 1s. Irrevocable erasure of data can be achieved by rewriting the relevant sector of a drive with 0's. Others advocate for a hexadecimal pattern (i.e., 110000001) followed by a "second pass", which over-writes the hexadecimal pattern as 00111110. In this way, every unit of information has been changed at least once.
True cleaning of a CD is also possible. The data layer that was previously "burned" onto the CDs surface can be removed and ground into fine powder. The original polycarbonate disk that remains contains no trace of the original data. The CD, which is rendered unusable, can be conventionally disposed of.
Destruction can also be a brute force physical process. For example, a hard drive can be physically damaged so that it cannot be read, even if installed into another computer. Floppy disks can be cut apart. Thus, while information may still reside on the drive, that information is essentially destroyed. Disks and CDs can even be melted down.
A number of vendors offer data destruction services to those having concerns about the sensitivity and vulnerability of their data. Government agencies usually have in-house staff and facilities, so that sensitive information does not pass into unauthorized hands, even during the destruction process.
Bosworth, Seymour and Michael E. Kabay. Computer Security Handbook. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
Eoghan, Casey. Digital Evidence and Computer Crime. New York: Academic Press, 2000.
Kruse, Warren G., II., and Jay G. Heiser. Computer Forensics: Incident Response Essentials. Boston: Addison Wesley Professional, 2001.
Computer Virus
Electronic Communication Intercepts, Legal Issues
Information Security
User Contributions:
Computer and Electronic Data Destruction forum |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45395 | Previous Next
Linking an Image to an Event
Once an image has been connected to a person, it can then be linked to an event; ie Wedding pictures can be linked to a marriage.
Clicking the Image Button automatically dsiplays the Image Sidebar display.
To Link an Image to an Event, select the Image in the image sidebar and select the Event in the Event Grid.
Then Click the Images Button in the toolbar of the Person Display Screen and Select the Link Image to Event Menu item.
To complete the action Click the Yes Button.
A Picture Icon will appear in the events grid to denote that the event has an image associated with it. Clicking the icon will reveal the image in an expanable display. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45400 | From Hindupedia, the Hindu Encyclopedia
Revision as of 12:40, 7 November 2016 by Deval Sancheti (Talk | contribs) (Deval Sancheti moved page Talk:Śāstra to Śāstra)
By Swami Harshananda
Sometimes transliterated as: Sastra, ZAstra, shaastra
Śāstra literally means ‘a treatise that commands and protects’.
Śāstra Etymologically
Etymologically speaking, the word refers to any treatise that gives a command and protects the person who obeys it. In general, it can be applied to any systematically composed work dealing with any subject that is useful to the human beings.
Śāstra as per Mīmānsā and Vedānta Systems
According to Mīmānsā and Vedānta, a śāstra must have four aspects that help in binding it into a single integrated whole.
It is very noteworthy that every ancient śāstra claims to have originated from God Himself.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45408 | header image
Addiction, Mental Health and a Society That Fails to Understand Either
Philip Seymour Hoffman died yesterday. He was found with a needle still wedged into his arm, heroin believed to be the culprit.
When I heard of his passing yesterday, it hit me in the gut a little bit. Not because I know him, not because I know his family members or friends. Not, much to the dismay of what some may believe, because he was an award winning actor.
Read more at DeBie Hive: http://debiehive.blogspot.com/2014/02/addiction-mental-health-and-society.html
About the author |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45429 | GtPGKogPYT4p61R1biicqBXsUzo" /> Google+ Sunday Swag: Darynda Jones | I Smell Sheep
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Sunday Swag: Darynda Jones
Now you have 5 chances to get your swagger on
Today's feature author: Darynda Jones
About the author:
Pen and matching notebook!
Will add some sheep swag too!
Head over to these blogs and win more Swag!
The Jeep Diva
Froggarita's BookcaseBooks, Books and more Books
a Rafflecopter giveaway
1. I love this series. So far have gotten through the first three and can't wait to move on to the next!
2. i like teh first book and i would have loved to win such a prize but it's for us only in the rules so another time perhaps
3. I love this series! Thank you so much for the fun swag
4. I love the Charley Davidson Series. I am on reserved for the fifth one at my local library. I am looking forward to reading it.
5. I love Darynda Jones! Thank you for the swag giveaway!
6. This series is totally awesome and I'm HANGING out for number 5.
7. Hoping for some Cherry Koolaid soon :)
thanks for this giveaway, I do enjoy both her series a lot.
8. How am I missing the swag? It's only 6 a.m. on Sunday. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45441 | Friday, August 1, 2008
Keeping Those Hands Clean
Some people wash their hands obsessively, while others are careful to use hand sanitizer. Still others opt to skip the sink and soap completely. For the “clean freaks” among us, perhaps the "Employees must wash hands" sign is disturbing. After all, what about everyone else?
Jewish law strongly recommends washing one’s hands after using the facilities and before eating (especially when eating bread). Hygienic? Certainly. But in this case, water is used to remove “spiritual impurities” that come upon the hands from touching certain body parts or due to general contact with a not-so-clean, physical world (a Kabbalistic idea).
Jews are charged to strive for a level of holiness (Leviticus 19:2), which is accomplished through preparing for, and participating in, holy activities. Washing one’s hands before eating turns eating into a holy act (“We eat to live!” - Proverbs 13:25). Washing after leaving the restroom enables one to properly participate in a holy act. Many people also wash their hands before prayer. The significance is obvious.
In the first two examples we’ve cited, the washing of hands is followed immediately by the recitation of a blessing. The washing and the blessing help us recognize that food is a gift of God and acknowledge God’s role in allowing our body to function properly.
Copyright © 2008 National Jewish Outreach Program. All rights reserved.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45442 | ProductsHome >> Landscaping Stones >> Garden Lantern
pro_2Garden Lantern
A lantern is a portable lighting device or mounted light fixture used to illuminate broad areas.Garden Lantern could be made by various material, but the most durable lantern for landcape is made of stone. Lanterns may also be used for signaling, as torches, or as general light sources outdoors. Low light level varieties are used for decoration.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45486 | Funeral & Memorial Services
“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die.” (John 11:25) As Christians, we know that death is not the end. Through God’s grace, Jesus has conquered sin and death forever. As we profess in the Apostles’ Creed, we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
Funerals are among the times that we as Christians perform the task of the Church the best. We comfort one another in our grief, we gather in community, and we proclaim Christ crucified and risen. A Christian funeral is not a tribute to how wonderful you were, but instead it publicly affirms the saving power of God, as demonstrated in your life. We tell how God’s story interacts with your story. Baptismal imagery is important because it reminds us of God’s saving deeds. As Paul writes in Romans 6:5, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
Planning now for your funeral is important. We make plans for many things in life. Some we are never able to do. Yet death is inevitable, and thus it is crucial that we plan for it. Planning does not hasten the event. Funeral pre-planning is necessary, first of all, as a means to let your wishes be known to all concerned. Secondly, pre-planning your funeral enables you to give expression to your faith through choosing what is to take place. Also, it eases the burden on your loved ones by eliminating the pressure of decision-making, particularly the need of trying to do things “the way you would have wished.” Finally, pre-planning will give you a certain amount of peace, knowing that your affairs are in order.
If at all possible, discuss these plans with your loved ones. Allow them to participate in the planning and to express their thoughts. This brings the subject out into the open and provides loved ones with an opportunity to openly share their love and sorrow, which is best shared now rather than after a death occurs.
Please bear in mind that the more complex and complete your plans become, the more tentative they must be. The events surrounding your death, or events that may occur between now and the time of your death, may necessitate changes. Therefore, from time to time, every several years, the plans in this booklet may need to be updated.
This guide should answer many of your questions about the planning of a funeral or a memorial service and what ways we, as the Church, hope to serve you in this time. We are more than happy to keep a copy of your wishes on file and will share them with your family when necessary.
You can download our Funeral Planning Guide by following this link. If you have questions or concerns, please call the church office at 801-444-1591.
God’s Love and Ours,
Your Brothers and Sisters in Christ at Light of the Valley Lutheran Church |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45493 |
. . . To Hana
The dullness from the sky shall set, despite the buzzing
dragonflies, upon our precious memories and close the lids over our eyes,
and bid the final long goodbye until we meet again anew, as lovers do,
as stories playing out in time
Above the isle, the dormant clouds, sentinels proud and old tell stories of
an era gone, forgotten, absconded, shared no more, not in the open,
not without embellishment in the currents that cultivate the isles
They watch, these sentinels, keep guard alongside the streams below,
they watch and take heed, keepers of a legacy, encountered in chants not forgotten,
in pride now forbidden, a history rewritten on the face of a distant mount,
culture appropriated, integrated, embezzled, exploited, made part of something ambitious,
younger, growing, effervescent, brutal
life evolving, for better or worse, paving the way for fresh beasts, their infant days,
their rising appetites, the bees with the hive mind and the billion stingers,
for a dead ringer for madness and revolution, change and perseverance,
freedom and oppression, spearhead and winger. For a sweet, fiery
rearrangement of archive and love.
The dullness of the sky shall set upon our precious histories and change them,
adding contours and layers to the legends that keep us alive, and the world
will be transformed yet again, a composite puzzle of enormous beauty,
all of it founded on the simple premise of complexity, on the principle of change, come what may. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45511 | Reasons for Doubting Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex
Reasons for Doubting Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex
Scientists lack any coherent explanation for how a brain could generate thought or intellect. Thoughts are immaterial things, so how could they possibly be generated by material things such as neurons? We know how physical things can generate other physical things (such as continental plates generating earthquakes), and we know how mental things can generate other mental things (such as one idea leading to a related idea). But nobody can give a coherent explanation as to how a physical thing such as a brain could produce a mental thing such as a thought or idea.
Scientists often fall back on localization claims to try to hide this shortfall. A scientist who cannot explain the how of a brain making an idea or a decision will often try to use a where as a substitute, by suggesting that specific mental capabilities come from particular parts of the brain. A common claim is that higher thought comes from the frontal lobe of the brain. More specifically, someone may claim that higher thought comes from the front-most part of the frontal lobe, what is called the prefrontal cortex. But the evidence fails to strongly support such claims, and the evidence often conflicts with such claims.
We certainly do not know from brain scans that higher thought comes from the frontal lobe or the prefrontal cortex. With the exception of the auditory and visual cortex, which show clear signs of “lighting up” during visual or auditory perception, there is no part of the brain that shows more than about a 1 percent increase in activity when humans think, decide, or remember. As a technical paper states, “cognitive effects give signal changes on the order of 1%.”
Those visuals showing “activating regions” of the brain in red are typically making use of a deceptive data presentation technique in which mere 1 percent differences in activity (or less) are represented in red, making them looking like big differences when they're really tiny differences. When you run, your heart gives a very clear signal of being involved in such a thing – for your heart rate may increase by 50 percent. But when you think, decide, or remember an old memory, there is no part of your brain that gives any clear sign of shifting into high gear or being crucially involved in such a thing.
Interestingly, a recent scientific paper notes that "neuroimaging studies have shown that intelligent individuals, despite their larger brains, tend to exhibit lower rates of brain activity during reasoning." So here we have an inverse correlation between brain activity and thinking.
Let us look at general intelligence and the frontal lobe. It is part of the dubious folklore of neuroscientists that the prefrontal cortex is some center of higher reasoning. But the scientific paper here tells us that patients with prefrontal damage "often have a remarkable absence of intellectual impairment, as measured by conventional IQ tests." The authors of the scientific paper tried an alternate approach, using a test of so-called "fluid" intelligence on 80 patients with prefrontal damage. They concluded "our findings do not support a connection between fluid intelligence and the frontal lobes." Table 7 of this study reveals that the average intelligence of the 80 patients with prefrontal cortex damage was 99.5 – only a tiny bit lower than the average IQ of 100. Table 8 tells us that two of the patients with prefrontal cortex damage had genius IQs of higher than 140.
In a similar vein, the paper here tested IQ for 156 Vietnam veterans who had undergone frontal lobe brain injury during combat. If you do the math using Figure 5 in this paper, you get an average IQ of 98, only two points lower than average. You could plausibly explain that 2 point difference purely by assuming that those who got injured had a very slightly lower average intelligence (a plausible assumption given that smarter people would be more likely to have smart behavior reducing their chance of injury). Similarly, this study checked the IQ of 7 patients with prefrontal cortex damage, and found that they had an average IQ of 101.
It also should be remembered that brain-damaged patients taking standard IQ tests may have higher intelligence than the test score suggests. A standard IQ test requires visual perception skill (to read the test book) and finger coordination (to fill in the right answers using a pencil). Brain damage might cause reduced finger coordination and reduced visual perception unrelated to intelligence; and such things might cause a subject to do below-average on a standard IQ test even if his intelligence is normal.
The 1966 study here states, ""Taken as a whole, the mean I.Q. of 95.55 for the 31 patients with lateralized frontal tumors suggests that neoplasms in either the right or left frontal lobe result in only slight impairment of intellectual functions as measured by the Wechsler Bellevue test." In this paper (page 276), scientist Karl Lashley noted that you can remove 50% of the cortex of an animal without having any effect on the retention of mazes learned by the animal. Lashley noted on page 270 of this paper something astonishing, that the smartest animal he had tested was one in which the fibers of the cortex had been severed:
"The most capable animal that I have studied was one in which the cortex and underlying association fibers had been divided throughout the length of each hemisphere. His I.Q., based on ten tests, was 309."
It is sometimes claimed that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the "CEO" of the brain. This study examined six patients with damage to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and found that they had an average IQ of 104, above the average of 100. This study says, “We have studied numerous patients with bilateral lesions of the ventromedial prefrontal (VM) cortex” and that “most of these patients retain normal intellect, memory and problem-solving ability in laboratory settings.”
In the paper "Neurocognitive outcome after pediatric epilepsy surgery" by Elisabeth M. S. Sherman, we have some discussion of the effects on children of hemispherectomy, surgically removing half of their brains to stop seizures. Such a procedure involves a 50% reduction in the frontal lobe of the brain, and a 50% reduction of the prefrontal cortex. We are told this:
Referring to a study by Gilliam, the paper states that of 21 children who had parts of their brains removed to treat epilepsy, including 10 who had surgery to the frontal lobe, none of the 10 patients with frontal lobe surgery had a decline in IQ post-operatively, and that two of the children with frontal lobe resections had "an increase in IQ greater than 10 points following surgery."
The paper here gives precise before and after IQ scores for more than 50 children who had half of their brains removed in a hemispherectomy operation. For one set of 31 patients, the IQ went down by an average of only 5 points. For another set of 15 patients, the IQ went down less than 1 point. For another set of 7 patients the IQ went up by 6 points.
A writer at states the following
And victims of prefrontal injuries can still pass most neurological exams with flying colors. Pretty much anything you can measure in the lab—memory, language, motor skills, reasoning, intelligence—seems intact in these people.
Now let us look at whether there is good evidence that decision making is generated by the prefrontal cortex. It should be first noted that the evidence discussed above discredits such an idea, because you can't perform well on an IQ test unless you have a good decision-making ability. Each IQ test question requires you to make a decision; none are tests of learned knowledge. For example, when an IQ test asks which of 5 figures most closely resembles a particular figure, that is something that requires you to make a decision rather than just remember something you have learned.
A 2002 scientific paper was entitled “Decision-making processes following damage to the prefrontal cortex.” The scientists who wrote the paper identified 19 patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex, and had them do various tests. Some of the results are below:
• Patients with local orbitofrontal lesions performed normally (at control levels) on three-decision making tasks.
• There was no statistically significant difference among the four frontal subgroups and controls on letter fluency or category fluency.
• Pattern recognition performance (percentage correct) was not significantly impaired in either the combined frontal group or the five subgroups.
• On spatial recognition (percentage correct), the combined frontal group were unimpaired relative to controls.
• On a gambling test to determine decision making, “The combined frontal group did not show poorer decision making than controls... and there were no significant differences among the five subgroups.”
Based on the results above, you would have to conclude that the idea that the prefrontal cortex generates decisions or thoughts is false. But there's another test that neuroscientists use in cases such as these – a kind of very subtle and sneaky test. We might put this test under a category of “desperately seeking evidence of performance deterioration.
The test is called the “Iowa gambling task.” A person will sit in front of a computer screen that shows four card decks. The person can pick from any of the decks, and is told that when you pick a card, your money can be either increased or decreased. Normally decks A and B give you a much higher money reward, compared to decks C and D. For example, it might be that picking from deck A will normally give you about $100, and picking from decks C and D will normally give you only about $10. But there's a sneaky catch. Occasionally decks A and B will cause you to lose a large amount such as $1200.
So a person doing this test has to recognize a very subtle rule that can be detected only after 40 or 50 trials – that even though decks A and B normally give more money, they can cause big money subtractions, which means that it's really better to keep picking from decks C and D.
As a test of executive ability, the Iowa gambling task is dubious indeed. One reason is that it may be largely testing short-term memory or prolonged concentration rather than executive ability. Another reason is that it is debatable whether the assumption of the people applying this test (that picking from decks C and D is a wiser decision) is correct. It can be argued that the person who picks from decks A and B has made a correct short-term decision. Such a person is like an investor who continues to invest in the stock market because of nice annual gains even though he knows that about every 8 years or so, stock markets have nasty downturns in which investors lose 30% or so of their money. This wikipedia page on the Iowa gambling task gives some scientific papers that argue it is flawed, and should not be used to judge executive ability.
In the paper I referred to above, the patients with prefrontal damage did worse on the Iowa gambling task, although whether that actually was inferior executive ability is debatable. We can summarize the paper by saying its tests provided no clear evidence that decisions are produced by the prefrontal cortex, and no clear evidence that damage to the prefrontal cortex significantly impairs executive ability.
Another dubious test used on some patients with frontal lobe damage is called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Subjects are asked to put a card in one of 4 card stacks. As soon as they make a choice, they are told whether their choice was correct. We are told in 1:34 of this video that “After ten consecutive correct matches, the classification principle changes without warning.” So this test is also a subtle, sneaky type of test, not a straightforward test of executive ability. What it tests is the ability to discard a principle you have already adopted when the evidence no longer supports that principle. One paper says, “These findings strongly suggest that WCST scores cannot be regarded as valid nor specific markers of prefrontal lobe function.”
The studies above are studies involving small numbers of unusual subjects with damage in the frontal lobes. Perhaps a much better way to consider the issue of how much cognition depends on the frontal lobes (or the prefrontal cortex) is to consider a much larger class of subjects: the many millions of people older than 60.
This scientific paper states this: “General linear model analyses revealed that the greatest age effects occurred in prefrontal cortex gray matter... with an average rate of volumetric decline of 4.9% per decade” after age 18. This should result in a decline in the prefrontal cortex gray matter of more than 20% by the time someone reaches 70. But we see nothing like a 20% decline in intelligence or decision-making ability in those who have reached the age of 70. People older than 70 still serve as presidents, congressmen, senators and CEO's.
I could cite some statistics comparing the IQ tests of 20-year-olds and 70-year-olds, but then we would run into the confounding factor known as the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is that for many decades, the performance of young people on IQ tests has been improving, with the improvement being about 3 points per decade. The study here states the following:
The Flynn effect was large enough to account for 100% of the variance in performance between age groups for cross-sectional analyses. After accounting for the Flynn effect, IQ was found to be relatively stable across the adult portion of the lifespan. Verbal abilities remain stable and even show gains through a large segment of the lifespan, while abilities measured by the Performance scale show modest declines from younger to older samples.
So the study finds that after we adjust for the Flynn effect, the IQ of people about 70 is about the same as people about 20. This finding is not at all what we should expect if the prefrontal cortex is responsible for intellectual capabilities, given a decline of about 20% that should occur in the prefrontal cortex between the age of 20 and 70.
I may note that the very fact of the Flynn effect is inconsistent with the dogma that our intelligence is a product of our brain. The Flynn effect, which involved an increase in IQ scores of about 3 percent per decade, went on for at least seven decades (although some think it is wearing off). During this time there was no change in human brains that could account for such a change.
Another relevant point is that the human brain is currently much smaller than it was previously. A science article in the mainstream Discover magazine tells us this: “Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball.” But most people would guess that humans are smarter, or as least as smart, as those who lived 20,000 years ago.
A recent article on Aeon mentions how there is little correlation between brain size and intelligence, or a correlation between intelligence and the size of a frontal cortex. The article states the following:
Some of the most perspicacious animals are the corvids – crows, ravens, and rooks – which have brains less than 1 per cent the size of a human brain, but still perform feats of cognition comparable to chimpanzees and gorillas. Behavioural studies have shown that these birds can make and use tools, and recognise people on the street, feats that even many primates are not known to achieve. ….Among rodents, for instance, we can find the 80-gram capybara brain with 1.6 billion neurons and the 0.3-gram pygmy mouse brain with probably fewer than 60 million neurons. Despite a greater than 100-fold difference in brain size, these species live in similar habitats, display similarly social lifestyles, and do not display obvious differences in intelligence.
Consider the growth of intelligence in a child. A child is born with about as many neurons as it will ever have. During the period from birth to age 18, the child's intelligence seems to grow by perhaps 300%. But there is no corresponding brain growth.
There are, however, many new connections formed between brain cells. But an article at tells us the following:
Let's put some of these facts into a table listing predictions of the theory that your intelligence comes from your brain, comparing such predictions to reality.
Prediction of theory that intelligence comes from brain, specifically the frontal lobe or prefrontal cortex Reality
Injury to prefrontal cortex or frontal lobes should cause sharp drop in intelligence, as should hemispherectomy This does not generally occur
Human intelligence should not have increased since 1900, because there has been no change in brain size or
structure .
Since about 1930, IQ scores have risen by about 3 percent per decade (the Flynn Effect).
People about 70 should be much less intelligent than 20-year-olds, because of 5% volume decline in prefrontal cortex per decade. Adjusting for Flynn Effect, no such drop in intelligence occurs.
Humans today should be much more stupid than humans 20,000 years ago, because our brains are smaller by about the size of a tennis ball. Most people today would guess that humans are smarter, or at least as smart, as humans 20,000 years ago.
Elephants should be much smarter than humans, because their brains are three or four times heavier. Humans are actually smarter than elephants.
Crows should be very stupid, because their brains are tiny, and have no neocortex. Crows are astonishingly smart.
Greater number of connections in the brain should increase effective intelligence. "The more intelligent a person, the fewer connections there are between the neurons in his cerebral cortex." -- neuroscience news cited above.
Men should be about nine percent smarter than women, because their brains are about nine percent bigger. It is generally recognized that on average men are not significantly smarter than women.
Adults should not be much smarter than babies or toddlers, because they have no more brain cells than babies or toddlers. Adults seem to be much smarter than babies and toddlers.
We see from this table that the claim that intelligence comes from the brain (specifically the frontal lobe or prefrontal cortex) massively fails to predict reality correctly.
The evidence discussed here argues against the claim that the prefrontal cortex or the frontal lobe can be identified as the source of decision making or the center of higher thought in the brain. The evidence discussed here is consistent with the claim that human higher thought capability does not come from the brain but from some unknown other source. Such a claim is also supported by many other considerations discussed at this site, including (1) convincing and well-replicated laboratory evidence (discussed here and here) for psychic phenomena such as ESP, evidence suggesting that the mind has powers that cannot be explained by brain activity; (2) evidence for near-death experiences indicating minds can continue to function even when brains have shut down because the heart has stopped.
Postscript: In 1930 a patient listed as Joe A. in the medical literature underwent a bilateral frontal lobectomy performed by Dr. Walter Dandy, who removed almost all of his frontal lobes. An autopsy in 1949 confirmed that "both frontal lobes had been removed." The paper describing the autopsy said that from 1930 to 1944 Joe A.'s behavior was "virtually unchanged." On page 236 of this source, we read that Dandy said this of three patients including Joe A.: "These three patients with the extirpation of such vast areas of brain tissue without the disclosure of any resulting defect is most disappointing." I could see how it would be disappointing for someone hoping to prove a connection between some brain area and intellectual function. Page 237 of the same source tells us that on casual meeting Joe A. appeared to be mentally normal. Page 239 of this source states this about Joe A, summarizing the findings of Brickner.:
Nor was intellectual disturbance primary. The frontal lobes played no essential role in intellectual function; they merely added to intellectual intricacy, and "were not intellectual centers in any sense except, perhaps, a quantitative one."
A 1939 paper you can read here was entitled "A Study of the Effect of Right Frontal Lobectomy on Intelligence and Temperament." A patient C.J was tested for IQ before and after an operation removing his right frontal lobe. He had the same IQ of 139 before and after the operation. Page 9 says the lobectomy "produced no modification of intellectual or personality functions." On page 10 we are told this about patients having one of their frontal lobes removed:
Jefferson (1937) reported a series of eight frontal lobectomies in which the patients were observed for intellectual and emotional deficits following operation. There were five cases of right frontal lobectomy, three of whom were living and well when the article was written. It could be stated definitely that in two of the three cases there were no abnormalities which could be noted by the surgeon, patient, or family, and while the third case showed a mild memory defect, the operation had been too recently performed to judge whether or not the loss would be permanent. The three cases of left frontal excision likewise showed no significant changes, but comment was made that one patient was slightly lacking in reserve, another remained slightly facetious, and the third, who suffered a transient post-operative aphasia, appeared a trifle slow and diffident.
If the frontal cortex is some kind of "seat of reason," we might expect the human frontal cortex to be unusually large for a primate. But the paper here states, "The consistency of our results across independent data sets supports the view...that human frontal cortex, and regions and tissue subtypes within it, are no larger than expected for a nonhuman primate of our overall cortex or brain size."
The following excerpt from a scientific paper tells us of additional cases of people who did not seem to suffer much mind damage after massive damage to the frontal lobes or prefrontal cortex. Resection is defined as "the process of cutting out tissue or part of an organ."
Several well-documented patients have been described with a normal level of consciousness after extensive frontal damage. For example, Patient A (Brickner, 1952) (Fig. 2A), after extensive surgical removal of the frontal lobes bilaterally, including Brodmann areas 8–12, 16, 24, 32, 33, and 45–47, sparing only area 6 and Broca's area (Brickner, 1936), “toured the Neurological Institute in a party of five, two of whom were distinguished neurologists, and none of them noticed anything unusual until their attention was especially called to A after the passage of more than an hour.” Patient KM (Hebb and Penfield, 1940) had a near-complete bilateral prefrontal resection for epilepsy surgery (including bilateral Brodmann areas 9–12, 32, and 45–47), after which his IQ improved. Patients undergoing bilateral resection of prefrontal cortical areas for psychosurgery (Mettler et al., 1949), including Brodmann areas 10, 11, 45, 46, 47, or 8, 9, 10, or 44, 45, 46, 10, or area 24 (ventral anterior cingulate), remained fully conscious (see also Penfield and Jasper, 1954Kozuch, 2014Tononi et al., 2016b). A young man who had fallen on an iron spike that completely penetrated both frontal lobes, affecting bilateral Brodmann areas 10, 11, 24, 25, 32, and 45–47, and areas 44 and 6 on the right side, went on to marry, raise two children, have a professional life, and never complained of perceptual or other deficits (Mataró et al., 2001).
Apparently patient KM got smarter after they took out most of his prefrontal cortex. That's a case helping to show that brains don't make minds. The book here discusses intelligence tests done on patients who underwent surgery on the frontal lobes:
"It was natural that the effect of an injury on the frontal lobes, said to be concerned with the higher functions of men, should be measured by these tests of intelligence. The absence of marked effects on mental ability, as measured by these intelligence tests, was, not surprisingly, felt to be puzzling."
This paper here describes a case of a "modern Phineas Gage": a patient C.D. who suffered massive prefrontal damage after a penetrating head injury. But C.D's IQ after the injury was measured at 113, well above average. His verbal IQ after the injury was 119, in the 90th percentile. We read:
C.D. reported that he did not have any cognitive or emotional problems following the accident. In describing how his thinking skills were completely unaffected, C.D. stated that, "all the shattered bone was caught in the gray matter in front of the brain."
The paper also tells us, "C.D.’s performances on memory tests were all in the average to above-average ranges in terms of the traditional measure of level of correct responses." |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45529 | User Tools
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Finished AirTools download you can install it into your system.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45540 | author = {Singh, Ajai. and Singh, Shakuntala.}, title = {{Replicative nature of Indian research, essence of scientific temper, and future of scientific progress}}, journal ={Mens Sana Monographs}, volume ={2}, number ={1}, pages = {57-70}, year = {2004}, abstract ={A lot of Indian research is replicative in nature. This is because originality is at a premium here and mediocrity is in great demand. But replication has its merit as well because it helps in corroboration. And that is the bedrock on which many a fancied scientific hypothesis or theory stands, or falls. However, to go from replicative to original research will involve a massive effort to restructure the Indian psyche and an all round effort from numerous quarters. The second part of this paper deals with the essence of scientific temper,which need not have any basic friendship, or animosity, with religion, faith, superstition and other such entities. A true scientist follows two cardinal rules. He is never unwilling to accept the worth of evidence, howsoever damning to the most favourite of his theories. Second, and perhaps more important, for want of evidence, he withholds comment. He says neither yes nor no. Where will Science ultimately lead Man is the third part of this essay. One argument is that the conflict between Man and Science will continue tilleither of them is exhausted or wiped out. The other believes that it is Science which has to be harnessed for Man and not Man used for Science. And with the numerous checks and balances in place, Science will remain an effective tool for man's progress. The essential value-neutrality of Science will have to be supplemented by the values that man has upheld for centuries as fundamental, and which religious thought and moral philosophy have continuously professed.}, URL ={;year=2004;volume=2;issue=1;spage=57;epage=70;aulast=Singh;t=6}, eprint ={;year=2004;volume=2;issue=1;spage=57;epage=70;aulast=Singh;t=6} } |
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Six Time-Tested Ayurvedic Tips From Sahajan Founder Lisa Mattam
[Credit: Sahajan]
Ayurveda, a Sanskrit word that translates to "the science of life", is a traditional healing modality from India that is said to be over 5,000 years old. Its basic principle of well-being is reaching a state of balance in body, mind and spirit, meaning that our habits, routines and diet should be regularly adjusted to be in harmony with the cycles of nature.
For founder Lisa Mattam, a proverbial lightbulb went off the day she came home to discover her young daughter slathered in her face cream laden with toxic ingredients. She realized that she needed to return to her Ayurvedic roots to create a natural, plant-based skincare line with efficacious formulas that would not only work for all skincare types but be free from the problematic ingredients in so many beauty products. She decided to named her skincare line Sahajan, a Hindi word which means "intuitive", as a nod to the brand philosophy of following your intuition to clean beauty.
Her background as a pharmaceutical executive mandates a rigorous scientific approach to the formulation process, partnering with Ayurvedic doctors in her hometown in Kerala, India and investing in clinical trials and working with external regulators to ensure that all their claims are backed by science. This thorough, evidence-based approach certainly makes Sahajan stand out from a lot of the brands you see in the green beauty world.
I had the chance to try out a couple of products from Sahajan recently and reached out to Lisa for some Ayurvedic tips as we are in the throes of summer, and she shared with me six time-tested ways to beat the heat and keep my pitta in balance:
1. Aloe vera has healing and anti-inflammatory properties and provides a protective layer to the skin to increase cellular hydration. Lisa recommends applying freshly sliced aloe vera directly to sunburned skin, and it can also be found in Sahajan's Protection Face Serum and Nourish Face CreamCucumber is another cooling ingredient that can tone, refresh and soothe, and Lisa suggests making a hydrating mist of cucumber and water, adding rosewater and aloe vera if you want to be a little fancy!
2. Honey can also greatly improve skin appearance thanks to its anti-bacterial and nourishing qualities, and you can find it in Sahakan's Restorative Eye Cream that will deeply hydrate your skin and prevent aging from dehydration and sun exposure.
3. Avoid yoga forms that can cause profuse sweating, and it would benefit you to schedule yoga sessions during cooler times of the day like at dawn or dusk.
4. Focus on relaxing poses that can help to release excess heat from the body, including those that compress the solar plexus or open up the chest, especially the pigeon, camel, bow, fish and low variations of camel and bridge poses. Try the shoulder stand for a soothing inversion and for standing poses, the best ones are the hip openers like the tree, warrior and half-moon poses.
5. Time to ditch heavy, oily foods that gives you a sluggish feeling along with oily skin and clogged pores, and choose plant foods that include raw vegetables, grains and tropical fruits. Summer is the ideal time for raw foods and salads as they cool the body and increase overall hydration levels.
6. Incorporate pitta-reducing foods like cucumbers, mint, cilantro and coriander, blueberries, grapes, melons, coconut and green leafy vegetables into your menu. Feel free to tweak your recipes like making salsa more soothing by adding extra cilantro or diced mango or including shredded coconut in your grains or cereals.
P/S: You may like to check out The Hermes Hippie's review of the Protective Serum here, or Eco Chic Beauty's review of the Protective Serum and the Nourish Face Cream here!
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with me Lisa! You can purchase Sahajan products directly from their website or from Credo Beauty.
This blog post contains affiliate links.
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© Ni Hao New York Maira Gall |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45566 | February 13, 2015
Some Love Snack: Wine Ice Cream Anyone?
I know it's cold... but some sharing of what's out there is essential...
A typical scene from most movies: If you are going through a breakup, had a rough day or just generally were feeling down, you ended your day with a glass (or more) of wine to calm your nerves or a plunge into a pint of ice cream to cheer you up. Well, you can do them both at the same time. And honestly, it's Valentine's so I think it can also be a treat to celebrate love...
If you’re an ice cream lover in need of a pick-me-up at the end of a long day, check out Mercer’s Dairy unique wine ice cream that is actually infused with wine and not just wine-flavored. With a 5% alcohol content, this ice cream packs a punch and can only be enjoyed by those of you over 21.
The eight delicious flavours are: Cherry Merlot, Spice, Peach White Zinfandel, Port, Red Raspberry Chardonnay, Riesling, Chocolate Cabernet and Strawberry Sparkling.
Currently, the ice cream is only available in the US, but make sure to add it to your things to try when across the globe.
Cronut Is Forever: Valentine's is Sweeter than Ever
Fifty Shades of Yummy Things |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45567 | HBO's Game of Thrones
Posts: 7165
Joined: January 2014
^ Somebody doesn't grasp the Ice and Fire symbolism it seems.
I wasn't expecting it to be that gruesome. There were some things in there that you almost never see in film/tv historically based battle scenes.
The piles of bodies and trampling were a huge thing in massive open field battles and I thought it was a tremendous touch to add that to the scene. Hell, just on a visual level it adds so much.
Posts: 3323
Joined: September 2013
Location: Copenhagen
I literally took myself in mouthing her lines before she said them. An absolute bore of a character.
Posts: 2494
Joined: January 2011
That was fucking glorious.
The trampling setup.. So fucking good. I felt kinda claustrophobic seeing and hearing Jon grasping for air. Really well dine tbh.
Posts: 786
Joined: March 2011
Location: In your mind
I get it. Deus ex machina. But Ramsay should've still had atleast 3000 men to spare.
Posts: 3323
Joined: September 2013
Location: Copenhagen
Anyone else thought Sansa showed troublesome signs of psychopathy?
Besides the whole Ramsay affair towards the end. How, she got the nerve to smirk during the heat of battle in which her little brother was brutally pierced by arrows is beyond me. It was almost as if she wanted to get Jon's attention so that she could terrorize him some more. Also, her dramatic departure during the meet was so silly. She's a real Joan of Arc character, isn't she.
Posts: 19021
Joined: June 2010
Location: The White City
One of the best hour's of media of any kind I've ever seen. It's so puzzling how they can alternate between struggling to write characters for episodes and episodes and writing everything in peak form.
I think Dany is far, far more dynamic and well developed than most of you do. I also don't think the show parades her around like an altruistic hero nearly as much as many of you seem to.
Extraordinary all around.
Posts: 12509
Joined: February 2011
It sure as hell took a substantial amount of filler to get here, but at the end it was worth the wait, as predictable as the outcome was.£
Posts: 42323
Joined: May 2010
Cunningham in beast mode next ep.
Posts: 21411
Joined: June 2010
Location: All-Hail Master Virgo, Censor of NolanFans
Watching this now. Hyped as fuck.
Posts: 7165
Joined: January 2014
That long take of Jon was fucking insane. Sapochnik did a similar shot with Jon in Hardhome but this one had so much more going on. The arrows flying in on Jon, that dude getting destroyed by a horse (holy shit moment right there), and just the general chaos going on around him as we follow. Really really brilliant stuff
Sapochnik da gawd
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45579 | Products >
The Parent Pit
(Windows) $45.00
Cross the parenting tightrope by making balanced decisions to an extensive variety of parenting situations that test your knowledge of parenting and decision making skills.
Along the way, encounter many unexpected obstacles and parenting traps. If you are lucky, earn a few bonus points for good play.
Succeed in crossing the parenting tightrope and play a bonus game where you attempt to capture the six keys to successful parenting. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45599 | Tutorials >
Serialization is the process of converting an object into a form that can be stored, often in a disk file, and reconstructed later as needed. It is a very handy technique especially for complicated objects, such as simulation systems, which can be difficult to recreate from scratch.
In pDynamo, the principal way of serializing and deserializing an object is to use the Pickle and Unpickle functions that employ Python's pickle protocol. It is also possible to serialize in YAML format, with the YAMLPickle and YAMLUnpickle functions, when a more human-readable form of the serialized object is desired. It is for this reason that many of pDynamo's parameter files employ YAML serialization. Older versions of pDynamo also had a third form of serialization, based upon XML and the XMLPickle and XMLUnpickle functions, but this format is no longer available.
Although useful, serialization depends intimately on an object's internal structure. This means that in a rapidly-evolving program, such as pDynamo, objects serialized with an early version of the program may no longer be deserializable by later ones. Efforts are being made to move towards a version-independent serialization structure but, in the meantime, users are advised to preserve the scripts and protocols that they employed to generate particular objects and, where appropriate, backup data to files whose formats are unlikely to change. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45612 | « lunchtime tolcher <-previous --- next-> 8 years later »
3pm ponderings
June 08, 2005 - 03:17 PM [ life ]
okay it's no lie.
i haven't been able to focus at work lately.
i'm getting all my work done
(frantically and right before the deadline)
but i can't keep my brain focused on work.
working with some graphics right now and it's making my brain stumble across these two perplexing questions.
renee & katie question 1:
does anyone else think that opera diva renee fleming looks way too much like nbc diva katie couric? anyone? come on, i can't be the only one to notice. they have that same smiley smile too nice to be true face. and i imagine them both to be really sweet in public, but behind closed doors i imagine them both to scream because their water is 71 degrees instead of 70.
question 2:
why on earth does billy corgan insist on putting his own face on his new album cover? it totally creeps me out. in fact, don't even look over to the right. it's too scary.
billy corgan
however, now that we've mentioned billy corgan, samshrew is pretty excited about his new album (who knew she even listened to music??) so i checked out a few tracks. sounds suprisingly promising. or as jeff put it "like depeche mode with an annoying singer." there's a track on his myspace page right now so you can judge for yourself.
Posted by pocketpig at June 8, 2005 03:17 PM
I must respectfully dissent with this Jeff character.
TheFutureEmbrace is going to be awesome.
Although I will admit that the cover is a "bit" on the creepy side.
Posted by: samshrew at June 8, 2005 09:48 PM
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45614 | Showing posts from August, 2015
JavaScript Short Circuiting
Today, I'll be discussing the unorthodox and not so familiar JavaScript idiom called Short Circuit (&& and ||). As developers, most of us have been taught on the popular use of the Logical AND and OR operators since our college days. Some might even learned it at the age of three!Back to Basics We need to revisit the basic usage of these operators before tackling short-circuiting in JavaScript. For additional information regarding JavaScript Logical AND and OR operators, Please visit the following links: W3 SchoolsMozilla DocumentationLogical AND Operator (&&)The AND operator (&&) is used to evaluate if both of its operands are true. If both of its operands are true, then it returns true. Otherwise, then it returns false.Example var x = 1, y = 2; console.log(x == 1 && y == 2);//returns true console.log(x == 3 && y == 2);//returns false console.log(x == 1 && y == 3);//returns… |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45645 | Blaster Master NES
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Blaster Master NES Game Cartridge
Blaster Master was released in November of 1988 by Sunsoft for NES. It was originally released in June of 1988 Japan called Cho Wakusei Senki Metafight, which translated in English is Super Planetary War Records: Metafight. Europe later had it released in April of 1991. The game became a series, releasing two sequels and two spin-offs.
The story begins with a guy called Jason and his pet frog Fred. His frog decided to jump out of the fish bowl one day and took off out the front door. After leaving, Fred finds a chest that is radioactive and touches it, which causes him to grow substantially large. A hole opened up in the earth, and Fred and the chest fell into the hole. Jason was trying to grab for Fred but Jason himself fell in the hole while trying to save him. The hole led to an underground cavern, where Jason found a tank called Sophia the 3rd. It was made to fight monsters that live inside the earth. Jason then gets into the tank to go find his frog Fred, and destroy their Plutonium boss leader.
There are two types of gameplay in Blaster Master. The first is the player takes control of the tank Sophia in a platformer style gameplay. You can use your main cannon to attack enemies or with one of the three special weapons that have a limited amount of ammunition. Sophia also has a hover gauge which shows how must thrust is remaining in the tank, and hover capsules can be collected to increase the hover gauge. The second style of gameplay is the top-down view. You will go the labyrinth type levels and destroy enemies while progressing. Jason can move in any direction and has a gun and grenades to defeat the enemies. Upgrades for the gun are available via a gun capsule, but the gun degrades if Jason is hit. There are also vehicle upgrades once you defeat bosses.
UPC: 1-10068-02076-3
Platform: NES
Players: 1
Condition: Used
Genre: Action and Adventure, Platformer, Run and Gun
Region: NTSC (North America)
Rating: Everyone |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45647 | Why I Shouldn't Be an Olympic(s?) Judge
The Olympics: Where you work your entire life to have me judge you from my couch.
Jana and I were watching one of the swimming semi-final race thingies the other day. We were rooting for the American, Whatshername, in lane 5.
The race was close, and we couldn't tell who was going to pull it off. We leaned forward in our seats, shouting, "Go! Go!"
The results popped up on the screen, and I sat back, deflated.
Jana, on the other hand, threw her hands in the air. "Yay!"
Me: What do you mean? She lost.
Jana: What? No, she didn't. She won!
Me: No, lanes 1, 2 and 3 won.
Jana: Um...that shows who came in 1st, 2nd and 3rd.
Jana: Dork.
Are you watching the Olympics? |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45654 | The Creation of Blue and Red America A Special Public Programming Series
In a recent New York Times opinion piece Nate Cohn has argued that the “voters of both parties have now become more ideologically homogeneous than ever before.”
Cohn notes that for the most “politically engaged voters (those who almost always vote), the sorting of liberals and conservatives into the two parties is complete: 99 percent of politically engaged Republicans are more conservative than the median Democrat, while 98 percent of engaged Democrats are more liberal than the median Republican. That’s up from 88 and 84 percent, respectively, in 2004.” These numbers, and Cohn’s larger argument, reflect the fact that political and ideological polarization is an ongoing process.
The Creation of Blue and Red America is a lecture series at Roosevelt House featuring such speakers as acclaimed historian Richard Norton Smith (On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller), biographers Rick Perlstein, Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter, and journalist Jonathan Darman. The series explores the polarized dynamics of U.S politics, and, with the aid of select scholars, commentators, as well as former government officials, gets to the root of the story. When did things get so bad? What are the consequences of radical partisanship? Has America always been so divided?
• Richard Norton Smith – “On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller”
• Rick Perlstein – “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall Of Nixon and The Rise Of Reagan”
Journalist and historian Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), an acclaimed and revelatory look at one of the most chronicled presidencies in American history. In his new book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan he offers a portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s, connecting the Nixon legacy to the resurgence of the conservative wing of the Republican Party achieved by Ronald Reagan in his first (and failed) campaign for the presidency in 1976. Perlstein tells the story of that campaign and offers a history of how between 1973 and 1976 “a new sort of American politics” emerged – “a stark discourse of reckoning,” the ramifications of which still define our national life.
• Douglas Brinkley / Luke Nichter – “The Nixon Tapes, 1971-72″
Douglas Brinkley is an award winning historian, professor of history (at Rice University) and a fellow at the James Baker Institute for Public Policy. He discussed the new edition of The Nixon Tapes, 1971-72, a fresh transcription including previously unpublished Nixon conversations, co-edited with Luke Nichter. Brinkley and Nichter talked about what the new tapes reveal about the Nixon White House, and the history of
• Jonathan Darman – “Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America”
A special conversation about two giants of American politics, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. Jonathan Darman, author of Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America, was interviewed by New York Times writer-at-large Sam Tanenhaus, about his new book, which recounts how from 1963 to 1966, these two men – the same age, and driven by the same heroic ambitions – changed American politics forever.Jonathan Darman, a former correspondent for Newsweek who covered the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, shows how Johnson and Reagan, opposites in politics and style, shared a defining impulse: to set forth a grand story of America, a story in which he could be the hero. Darman’s book brings to life their vivid personalities and the anxious mood of America in a radically transformative time, revealing how, in their different ways, Johnson and Reagan jointly dismantled the long American tradition of consensus politics and ushered in a new era of fracture. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45659 | Feb 28, 2010
Sunday funny
Would you have to spin the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere? I think so, but I'm not certain I could prove it. Thoughts?
1 comment:
1. i think you'd spin the same way in either hemisphere because the earth spins to the east no matter what |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45691 | Skip to content
Impostor syndrome
I’m going to say something I probably shouldn’t (for, indeed, what other purpose do blogs have?), but I hope that doing so will help other people, if they’re having similar issues.
ducks2My admission: I’ve been feeling like an utter fraud and a complete failure at a significant portion of my job. (Spoiler: It’s better now!) I’ve been beating myself up for literally years, because I didn’t think I had an acceptable level of technical competence—specifically, coding prowess. And while there are legitimate disagreements about coding in the library profession, I think we can agree: most web librarians need a certain amount of fluency with code.
For my part, I looked at these things that other techy librarians (never mind full-time web developers) were creating, and thought, “I couldn’t do that.” Some of my hesitation was legitimate: my job has grown and shifted to the point where I have trouble finding big enough blocks of time alone to do serious development, and that’s an issue. As I’ve pointed out in other posts, I split my time between being a web developer, a designer, a content manager, a marketer, a manager (in the policy-making sense, not the supervisory one), a trainer, a systems integrator, first-level technical support, and a friendly face at the reference desk, plus random committee work and service activities. I’m investing buckets of time into organizational change, and that takes a toll on my coding time. Also, although I’ve never self-identified as a great coder, as the job’s grown and time has passed, I’ve gotten rusty and lost some skills; honestly, I have to look up even HTML and CSS syntax pretty regularly. Legitimate issues.
But it’s worse than just a little hesitation, or some envy of my techier colleagues: I had actually allowed a little under-training and a little rust in my skills to turn into this huge wall of intimidation around code, to the point where even refactoring my site’s CSS (which, after 10+ years and at least three people adding on to it, is desperately needed) seemed too daunting to start. (And it’s still going to be a crappy job, don’t get me wrong, but I was literally scared to start. And, I mean, this is CSS, not, you know, rocket science.) Everything coding-related seemed too daunting to start, and I kept feeling miserable about it, not just at work, but in my spare time, too.
It didn’t help that my weekend forays into programming never amounted to much—mostly because other priorities kept, uh, taking priority.
And even when I took that Coursera course, I wrote off my implementation of Pong in Python as any kind of achievement, because it used a proprietary library instead of Tkinter, and because they gave us too many hints for me to feel awesome about my neat little piece of software.
Y’all, I wrote Pong in three hours, and I felt bad about it.
Feeling vs. reality
imposter1I’ve actually done programming in this job. Early on, I added significant hacks to the open source application LibStats (in PHP); I’ve also added less-significant hacks to several WordPress themes (PHP…ish), to the front end of some Springshare products (JavaScript and CSS), and to various other little things along the way. That all required a certain level of competence, but I didn’t look at it that way: I “didn’t really know what I was doing”: after all, I “hadn’t built anything from scratch,” so “it didn’t count.”
It’s worth adding that, back in my engineering days, I wrote seriously complex code in MATLAB to parse large data sets. I did useful things to arrays of multi-dimensional arrays (I’m also a little dyslexic, so, just imagine that for a second), and the engineering field learned stuff from the code’s output—or, well, my writeup of it, anyway.
And in library school (in my one and only Information Science class, oh if only I could talk to past-me…), I wrote a simpler version of LibStats/Ref Analytics in HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and MySQL. It wasn’t fancy, and the design was probably eye-bleedingly bad, but it worked. (It didn’t do fancy reporting, I don’t think. I honestly don’t remember.)
I mean, I’m clearly not dumb, nor am I incompetent; but I felt dumb and incompetent. And that feeling created reality, in a way. It made me so afraid to start that I… well, I never started any optional coding projects for work; I put them off and did other things, instead. I was afraid to try.
So how did I get there?
wpid-depression10Part of my problem with my perception of myself is that my knowledge of PHP—the primary language our stuff is in—has always been surface-level. I don’t fully understand how various PHP developers make the decisions to split their code between the multitude of files they generate. It looks random to me. Also, I’ve never really internalized PHP’s syntax, so I’ve always had to look up anything I’ve wanted to do, in the not-great documentation. Of course, whenever I finally found the thing that created the behavior I wanted to change, and I found the right syntax, then, yes, I was able to bend it to my will. But, honestly, I spent most of my time working in PHP feeling disoriented and searching around in frustration for the function that was called by the function that that other function called. I guess I found that disheartening.
And, as I alluded to before, I saw some really great things coming from other places. This is a great time to be a developer, because there are so many answers (many of them correct, even!) and so many resources and so much borrowable code available a search engine away! But it’s also a terrible time to be a developer, if you aren’t naturally self-confident: you can see how wide the gap is between your skill set and another’s. And, as others have noted before, the coding/development/software engineering field is so very broad and so very deep, that you are always faced with huge swaths of knowledge that you lack. Nobody knows everything, but the sheer number of things you don’t know can be crushing.
(I’d like to go into gender-related self-perception in STEM and stereotype threat and nerdy strutting, because they’re all factors, but this is already long. If that read like a string of nonsense, hit me up in the comments, and I’ll write that post. It’ll be shorter than this one.)
So I guess I internalized the message “I am slow and inefficient at coding” and also the message “Everyone else knows more than I do.” I did this despite others’ warnings, despite friends’ and colleagues’ encouragement, despite knowing I’m an engineer, damn it, and a good one at that; analysis and problem-solving are my domain! I committed the classic blunder (besides “never get involved in a land war in Asia”): I focused more on what I didn’t know (or didn’t know anymore) than what I did know. I competed with other people, instead of competing with past-me. And, probably worst of all, I didn’t try, even though, really, there was no risk.
That was pretty dumb.
Why the about-face?
This whole post has been in past-tense. I even added a spoiler at the beginning, so you’d know where we were going: I’ve realized I’m an OK programmer! I think like a programmer, and despite my woes with specific languages, specific syntaxes, and specific documentation, I never really lost that. (Side note: I’ve seen articles suggesting that “thinking like a programmer” can’t be taught. That’s nonsense.)
I did have one major revelation, though: I was forgetting possibly the most important lesson I’d been taught—by word, though not by deed—in my computer science education: don’t try to sit down and write the whole program linearly. Break your problem up into smaller pieces, and solve each of them separately. (Even if you’re not a coder, this is a good lesson. If nothing else, when you solve one piece, you get that boost from the success, and it makes the next piece psychologically easier.) Everything in school was either broken down for me, or was simple enough that I didn’t have to follow that advice. And, go figure, coding in the real world isn’t like that at all.
So that helped a lot.
And do you know what else helped? I could be glib and just say “practice,” but that’s not exactly it. I mean, yes, practice is inescapable, both in [re]developing skills, and in building confidence.
But I think it helped a lot that I learned two modern programming languages and did stuff with them. I’ve been flirting with Python for most of the year, and I recently took a short online course about jQuery. And, you know? jQuery was just easy enough and just powerful enough that I remembered what I liked about programming, without letting the fear get in and ruin my chances of success. We didn’t really learn much about parsing data/dealing with APIs, which was my primary goal, but we learned enough, and I accomplished enough that I suddenly feel empowered to learn what I need to take on those next projects. (Also? It doesn’t hurt that the jQuery documentation is usable. Vanilla JavaScript documentation, not so much, but I avoid that when I can. :))
And the steam from that success got me to tackle a design/development problem at work that jQuery was, delightfully, perfectly suited to help with.
And the steam from that success (series of successes, actually, and there are a few more left to go) got me to tackle a project in Python that’s been languishing on my to-do list for ages: I wrote a little command-line application to take in a text file, find all the URLs in it, and let you know which ones work and which don’t. Size-wise, it was a great “first real project” in Python. It was probably the wrong choice for me, because, though I knew going into it that there are no great link checkers (because it is a Hard Problem(TM)), I have trouble NOT being annoyed that it’s imperfect. (I’m librarian enough that I fight perfectionism, yes.)
Still, it achieves what I need it to: it tells me which links in this document need updating. (Yes, I spent an estimated 10 hours writing a piece of software to check 40 or so links, because I didn’t want to read the document they were in. For any concerned Alaskan taxpayers, I want to add: I did it all between the time I got out of work on Christmas Eve and today; none of it was on your dime. :)) It probably has errors and inefficiencies, and perhaps seasoned Python coders would look at it and cringe. But I still feel good about it. I knew nothing about the modules I was using; at one point, I had 12 tabs open, checking various things to try to get this to work; and, even though it was a lot of work to get it there, it does work. So there. :)
swaggerI guess that’s my other revelation-slash-thing-people-already-told-me: Have a project you want to do. My first jQuery project was stupid and fun, and my second jQuery project and my Python project were both serious(ish), but helped me accomplish goals. I want to do ColorWall in jQuery, to see if it can be done, then maybe I’ll finally do it in Python. And I have a Twitter bot I want to write. And then there’s work stuff to do. And I feel like I’m up to it all, for the first time in … ever.
Finally, finally, I have developed a little bit of swagger. I’ve got the confidence to move forward, and I’m rapidly regaining lost fluency. (Two pieces of the problem, right there.) Now, if I can just build more time into my schedule for coding, both at work and at home, I’ll get good again—and then better than I was before!
Published in#libtechgenderAPWfailsgeekerygenderlibrarianshipon a personal noteprogrammingtechnology
1. Dale
“It probably has errors and inefficiencies, and perhaps seasoned Python coders would look at it and cringe.”
Stop that!
I think it probably doesn’t, and that they wouldn’t. But even if that weren’t the case, stop that.
• Well, you found one inefficiency.
You’re right that I still have work to do, finding the balance between self-critique (and critique of my work products) and confidence.
2. Samantha B
Part of me, reading this, was like, “Oh no! But Coral is so confident!” and then another part was realising that I use the “break it down into pieces” method, too, both for school stuff and work stuff, so why can’t I apply it to personal projects, like teaching myself HTML and CSS? Gorramit!
Anyways, glad to see you are starting to feel more confidence (since I always thought you were portraying it).
• I’m glad I at least faked it OK. :)
I liked the Women’s Coding Collective’s CSS class. (They have two, and they’re probably both great; I took the second. That’s also where I took the jQuery class.) I don’t think you need their HTML class, but they offer one. Hit me up if those interest you; I have a link that takes $17 off the price. :)
And we’ll do more “open work nights” for Anchorage Programming Workshop. You can show up and practice at those. :)
3. Mid-way through my CS program, a professor addressed us midway through the class, immediately following a project which had forced about half of the students to drop. It was punishingly hard, required dozens of hours of out-of-class project work, and a forced a fundamental brain re-wiring of how we thought about solving problems.
He asked us if we felt good about having the project done. Everyone sighed, groaned, then nodded.
He then asked us if we realized that we, having learned this very specific thing, were now in an extreme minority of people on the planet that knew how to think the way we did. “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?” the professor asked.
It sounds hipster-ish now, but being among so few, but not alone, was exciting. It didn’t matter that I’d lost points because my demo didn’t work, or that I’d have to reproduce my results during the final. What was much more exciting was that I was no longer bound to think about problems in my own internal language. Even more so, I could learn any number of ways to approach a problem, and in doing so, benefit from the combined/shared internal language of a number of others. Every step I took into the unknown was a step towards someone at the edge of the ever-expanding universe who knew exactly what I was talking about.
From then on, it didn’t matter that I was afraid to fail, or that I wasn’t confident in my work. What I feared was that I would somehow reach the end of an infinite spectrum, with nothing more to consume, no interesting problems to solve. Or that somehow I would be the only person at the edge of the universe. That fear has since gone away.
Great code/design comes from focus, guessing which pieces will need to move, and guessing how those who follow you will know how to think. If you ever start worrying about starting something, just worry instead about about what will happen if you aren’t looking, or if you walk away from it. The first steps in that direction will always be the right ones.
4. Thanks for sharing this. I do think you’ll help others. For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been one of the Alaskan tech geniuses I look up to. Best of luck(?) fun(?) with your future programming efforts?
5. Cheers to you for developing your swagger! :) A great post!
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45723 | The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:33 pm
by Richard Dawkins
© 2006 by Richard Dawkins
Preface © 2008 by Richard Dawkins
IN MEMORIAM: Douglas Adams (1952-2001) "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
Table of Contents
• Inside and Back Covers
• Preface to the paperback edition
• Preface
o Deserved respect
o Undeserved respect
o Polytheism
o Monotheism
o Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America
o The poverty of agnosticism
o The Great Prayer Experiment
o The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists
o Little green men
o Thomas Aquinas' 'proofs'
o The ontological argument and other a priori arguments
o The argument from beauty
o The argument from personal 'experience'
o The argument from scripture
o The argument from admired religious scientists
o Pascal's Wager
o Bayesian arguments
o The Ultimate Boeing 747
o Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser
o Irreducible complexity
o The worship of gaps
o The anthropic principle: planetary version
o The anthropic principle: cosmological version
o An interlude at Cambridge
o The Darwinian imperative
o Direct advantages of religion
o Group selection
o Religion as a by-product of something else
o Psychologically primed for religion
o Tread softly, because you tread on my memes
o Cargo cults
o Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin?
o A case study in the roots of morality
o If there is no God, why be good?
o The Old Testament
o Is the New Testament any better?
o Love thy neighbour
o The moral Zeitgeist
o What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren't they atheists?
o Fundamentalism and the subversion of science
o The dark side of absolutism
o Faith and homosexuality
o Faith and the sanctity of human life
o The Great Beethoven Fallacy
o How 'moderation' in faith fosters fanaticism
o Physical and mental abuse
o In defence of children
o An educational scandal
o Consciousness-raising again
o Religious education as a part of literary culture
o Binker
o Consolation
o Inspiration
o The mother of all burkas
• Appendix: a partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion
• Books cited or recommended
• Notes
• Index
'I'm an atheist BUT ...' As Daniel Dennett noted in Breaking the Spell, a bafflingly large number of intellectuals 'believe in belief' even though they lack religious belief themselves. These vicarious second-order believers are often more zealous than the real thing, their zeal pumped up by ingratiating broad-mindedness: 'Alas, I can't share your faith but I respect and sympathize with it.' ... Look out for it.... Atheists as well as theists unconsciously observe society's convention that we must be especially polite and respectful to faith.
[S]ophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer ... If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place ... this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible....
[B]ear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional.
Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings....Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.
-- "The God Delusion," by Richard Dawkins
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:34 pm
Inside and Back Covers
"At last, one of the best nonfiction writers alive today has assembled his thoughts on religion into a characteristically elegant book ... [Dawkins's arguments] are passionately stated and poetically expressed, but are rooted in reason and evidence." -- Steven Pinker, Author of How the Mind Works
"An entertaining, wildly informative, splendidly written polemic ... We are elegantly cajoled, cleverly harangued into shedding ourselves of this superstitious nonsense that has bedevilled us since our first visit to Sunday school." -- Sunday Times (London)
"The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true like ice, like fire. If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed." -- Penn and Teller
Selected as a Best Book of the Year: The Economist, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Capital Times, Kirkus Reviews, and others
Extraordinary International Acclaim for Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion
"If I had to identify Dawkins' cardinal virtues, I would say that he is brilliant, articulate, impassioned, and impolite ... The God Delusion is a fine and significant book .... irreverent and penetrating." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand." -- Scientific American
"The God Delusion deserves multiple readings, not just as an important work of science, but as a great work of literature." -- Steven Weinberg, Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"The most coherent and devastating indictment of religion I have ever read." -- Mail on Sunday (UK)
"This thoroughly engaging thesis on atheism cajoles, bullies, persuades and dazzles ... Some of it is hard to disagree with, some of it will make you hopping mad. Perfect, really." -- Sunday Times (Australia)
"Fascinating ... expressed in sparkling language which makes the book not only a pleasure to read but also a stimulus to thinking across this widest of spectrums." -- Financial Times
"Engrossing ... this is an elegant, engaging and persuasive writer ... The God Delusion is a good, strong argumentative challenge to any thoughtful believer with the courage to read it with care and try to dispute it." -- The Globe and Mail (Canada)
"A lively writer ... an entertaining read ... Dawkins's outrage at the persistence of medieval ideas in the modern era is warranted. In fact, it's overdue." -- The Nation
"A spirited and exhilarating read ... Dawkins comes roaring forth in the full vigor of his powerful arguments." -- Guardian (UK)
''A wonderful book ... joyous, elegant, fair, engaging, and often very funny ... informed throughout by an exhilarating breadth of reference and clarity of thought." -- Michael Frayn, author of The Human Touch
"The God Delusion is written with all the clarity and elegance of which Dawkins is a master. It is so well written, in fact, that children deserve to read it as well as adults." -- Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy
"A brave and important book." -- Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape
"Richard Dawkins is the leading soothsayer of our time. Through his exploration of gene-based evolution of life his work has had a profound effect on so much of our collective thinking and The God Delusion continues his thought-provoking tradition." -- J. Craig Venter, decoder of the human genome
"Passionate religious irrationality too often poses serious obstacles to human betterment. To oppose it effectively, the world needs equally passionate rationalists unafraid to challenge long accepted beliefs. Richard Dawkins so stands out through the cutting intelligence of The God Delusion." -- James D. Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, author of The Double Helix
"Should be read by everyone from atheist to monk. If its merciless rationalism doesn't enrage you at some point, you probably aren't alive." -- Julian Barnes, author of Arthur and George
"A magnificent book, lucid and wise, truly magisterial." -- Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
"Dawkins is Britain's most famous atheist and in The God Delusion he gives eloquent vent to his uncompromising views ... if you want an understanding of evolution or an argument for atheism, there are few better guides than Richard Dawkins." -- Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"A surprisingly elegant and gracious conclusion, depicting science as exactly the kind of glorious expansion of our perceptions that we once thought only God could provide." -- New York magazine
"[A] well-stocked arsenal of anti-religious thought." -- U.S. News and World Report
"Passionate, clever, funny, uplifting and above all, desperately needed." -- Daily Express (UK)
"Lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes." -- New York Times Book Review
"You needn't buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"A rallying cry to those who want to come out as non-believers, but are not quite sure if they dare." -- Daily Mail (UK)
"A gloriously belligerent attack on the foaming tide of superstition that is washing over the world once again, from a great scientist who has demonstrated throughout his career the power of cool, hard reason to explain life itself." -- The Independent (UK)
"Oh, it's so refreshing, after being told all your life that it is virtuous to be full of faith, spirit, and superstition, to read such a resounding trumpet blast for truth instead. It feels like coming up for air." -- Matt Ridley, author of Genome
"A powerful argument for how to think about the place of religion in the modern world. It's going to be a classic." -- SEED
In his sensational international bestseller, the preeminent scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins delivers a hard-hitting, impassioned, but humorous rebuttal of religious belief. With rigor and wit, Dawkins eviscerates the arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of the existence of a supreme being. He makes a compelling case that faith is not just irrational but potentially deadly. In a preface written for the paperback edition, Dawkins responds to some of the controversies the book has incited. This brilliantly argued, provocative book challenges all of us to examine our beliefs, no matter what beliefs we hold.
"Everyone should read it. Atheists will love Mr. Dawkins's incisive logic and rapier wit, and theists will find few better tests of the robustness of their faith. Even agnostics, who claim to have no opinion on God, may be persuaded that their position is an untenable waffle." -- THE ECONOMIST
"In the roiling debate between science and religion, it would be hard to exaggerate the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins." -- SALON
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, and The Ancestor's Tale.
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:38 pm
Preface to the paperback edition
The God Delusion in the hardback edition was widely described as the surprise bestseller of 2006. It was warmly received by the great majority of those who sent in their personal reviews to Amazon (more than 1,000 at the time of writing). Approval was less overwhelming in the printed reviews, however. A cynic might put this down to an unimaginative reflex of reviews editors: It has 'God' in the title, so send it to a known faith-head. That would be too cynical, however. Several unfavourable reviews began with the phrase, which I long ago learned to treat as ominous, 'I'm an atheist BUT ...' As Daniel Dennett noted in Breaking the Spell, a bafflingly large number of intellectuals 'believe in belief' even though they lack religious belief themselves. These vicarious second-order believers are often more zealous than the real thing, their zeal pumped up by ingratiating broad-mindedness: 'Alas, I can't share your faith but I respect and sympathize with it.'
'I'm an atheist, BUT ...' The sequel is nearly always unhelpful, nihilistic or -- worse -- suffused with a sort of exultant negativity. Notice, by the way, the distinction from another favourite genre: 'I used to be an atheist, but ...' That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, much favoured by religious apologists from C. S. Lewis to the present day. It serves to establish some sort of street cred up front, and it is amazing how often it works. Look out for it.
I wrote an article for the website called 'I'm an atheist BUT ...' and I have borrowed from it in the following list of critical or otherwise negative points from reviews of the hardback. That website, conducted by the inspired Josh Timonen, has attracted an enormous number of contributors who have effectively eviscerated all these criticisms, but in less guarded, more outspoken tones than my own, or than those of my academic colleagues A. C. Grayling, Daniel Dennett, Paul Kurtz, Steven Weinberg and others who have done so in print (and whose comments are reproduced on the same website).
You can't criticize religion without a detailed analysis of learned books of theology.
Surprise bestseller? If I'd gone to town, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus; if I'd done justice to Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller: it would have been a miraculous one. But that is not the point. Unlike Stephen Hawking (who accepted advice that every formula he published would halve his sales), I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom if there had been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question of whether God exists. The vast majority of theological writings simply assume that he does, and go on from there. For my purposes, I need consider only those theologians who take seriously the possibility that God does not exist and argue that he does. This I think Chapter 3 achieves, with what I hope is good humour and sufficient comprehensiveness.
When it comes to good humour, I cannot improve on the splendid 'Courtier's Reply', published by P. Z. Myers on his 'Pharyngula' website.
To expand the point, most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.
The next criticism is a related one: the great 'straw man' offensive.
You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best.
'You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.'
Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. Among the general populace, he is best known for his works The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), which introduced issues of theology and modern culture to a general readership. Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63), in which he developed his "method of correlation": an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis....
For Tillich, the present day norm is the “New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our Ultimate Concern”....
It should also be noted that Tillich does not exclude atheists in his exposition of faith. Everyone has an ultimate concern, and this concern can be in an act of faith, "even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God"...
… (the God above the God of theism) This has been misunderstood as a dogmatic statement of a pantheistic or mystical character. First of all, it is not a dogmatic, but an apologetic, statement. It takes seriously the radical doubt experienced by many people....
… In such a state the God of both religious and theological language disappears. But something remains, namely, the seriousness of that doubt in which meaning within meaninglessness is affirmed. The source of this affirmation of meaning within meaninglessness, of certitude within doubt, is not the God of traditional theism but the "God above God," the power of being, which works through those who have no name for it, not even the name God.
Paul Tillich, by Wikipedia
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and martyr. He was a participant in the German resistance movement against Nazism and a founding member of the Confessing Church. He was involved in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This led to his arrest in April 1943 and execution by hanging in April 1945, 23 days before the Nazis' surrender. His view of Christianity's role in the secular world has become very influential....
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Wikipedia
Actually, if you look at the language of The God Delusion, it is rather less shrill or intemperate than we regularly take in our stride -- when listening to political commentators for example, or theatre, art or book critics. Here are some samples of recent restaurant criticism from leading London newspapers:
'It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine anyone conjuring up a restaurant, even in their sleep, where the food in its mediocrity comes so close to inedible.'
'All things considered, quite the worst restaurant in London, maybe the world ... serves horrendous food, grudgingly, in a room that is a museum to Italian waiters' taste circa 1976.'
'The worst meal I've ever eaten. Not by a small margin. I mean the worst! The most unrelievedly awful!'
'[What] looked like a sea mine in miniature was the most disgusting thing I've put in my mouth since I ate earthworms at school.'
The strongest language to be found in The God Delusion is tame and measured by comparison. If it sounds intemperate, it is only because of the weird convention, almost universally accepted (see the quotation from Douglas Adams on pages 42-3), that religious faith is uniquely privileged: above and beyond criticism. Insulting a restaurant might seem trivial compared to insulting God. But restaurateurs and chefs really exist and they have feelings to be hurt, whereas blasphemy, as the witty bumper sticker puts it, is a victimless crime.
In 1915, the British Member of Parliament Horatio Bottomley recommended that, after the war, 'If by chance you should discover one day in a restaurant you are being served by a German waiter, you will throw the soup in his foul face; if you find yourself sitting at the side of a German clerk, you will spill the inkpot over his foul head.' Now that's strident and intolerant (and, I should have thought, ridiculous and ineffective as rhetoric even in its own time). Contrast it with the opening sentence of Chapter 2, which is the passage most often quoted as 'strident' or 'shrill'. It is not for me to say whether I succeeded, but my intention was closer to robust but humorous broadside than shrill polemic. In public readings of The God Delusion this is the one passage that is guaranteed to get a goodnatured laugh, which is why my wife and I invariably use it as the warm-up act to break the ice with a new audience. If I could venture to suggest why the humour works, I think it is the incongruous mismatch between a subject that could have been stridently or vulgarly expressed, and the actual expression in a drawn-out list of Latinate or pseudo-scholarly words ('filicidal', 'megalomaniacal', 'pestilential'). My model here was one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century, and nobody could call Evelyn Waugh shrill or strident (I even gave the game away by mentioning his name in the anecdote that immediately follows, on page 51).
Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant wit of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a 'rant'. Polite society will purse its lips and shake its head: even secular polite society, and especially that part of secular society that loves to announce, 'I'm an atheist, BUT ...'
You are only preaching to the choir. What's the point?
'Converts' Corner' on gives the lie to this premise, but even taking it at face value there are good answers. One is that the non-believing choir is a lot bigger than many people think, especially in America. But, again especially in America, it is largely a closet choir, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out. Judging by the thanks I received all over North America on my book tour, the encouragement that people like Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and me are able to give is greatly appreciated.
There are other linguistic conventions that need to go the same way as sexist pronouns, and the atheist choir is not exempt. We all need our consciousness raised. Atheists as well as theists unconsciously observe society's convention that we must be especially polite and respectful to faith. And I never tire of drawing attention to society's tacit acceptance of the labelling of small children with the religious opinions of their parents. Atheists need to raise their own consciousness of the anomaly: religious opinion is the one kind of parental opinion that -- by almost universal consent -- can be fastened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is. There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. Seize every opportunity to ram it home.
You are just as much of a fundamentalist as those you criticize.
No, please, it is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will. Fundamentalist Christians are passionately opposed to evolution and I am passionately in favour of it. Passion for passion, we are evenly matched. And that, according to some, means we are equally fundamentalist. But, to borrow an aphorism whose source I am unable to pin down, when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force, the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. And that justifies passion on the other side.
Fundamentalists know what they believe and they know that nothing will change their minds. The quotation from Kurt Wise on page 323 says it all: '... if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.' It is impossible to overstress the difference between such a passionate commitment to biblical fundamentals and the true scientist's equally passionate commitment to evidence. The fundamentalist Kurt Wise proclaims that all the evidence in the universe would not change his mind. The true scientist, however passionately he may 'believe' in evolution, knows exactly what it would take to change his mind: Evidence. As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.' Let me coin my own opposite version of Kurt Wise's manifesto: 'If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I argue for evolution with a passion that matches the passion of those who argue against it. My passion is based on evidence. Theirs, flying in the face of evidence as it does, is truly fundamentalist.'
I'm an atheist myself, but religion is here to stay. Live with it.
'You want to get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You think you can get rid of religion? What planet are you living on? Religion is a fixture. Get over it!'
I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern. On the contrary. The tone of voice is sometimes downright gleeful. I don't think it's masochism. More probably, we can put it down to 'belief in belief' again. These people may not be religious themselves, but they love the idea that other people are religious. This brings me to my final category of naysayers.
I'm an atheist myself, but people need religion.
What patronizing condescension! 'You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, the Orwellian proles, the Huxleian Deltas and Epsilon semi-morons, need religion.' I am reminded of an occasion when I was lecturing at a conference on the public understanding of science, and I briefly inveighed against 'dumbing down'. In the question and answer session at the end, one member of the audience stood up and suggested that dumbing down might be necessary 'to bring minorities and women to science'. His tone of voice told that he genuinely thought he was being liberal and progressive. I can just imagine what the women and 'minorities' in the audience thought about it.
Returning to humanity's need for comfort, it is, of course, real, but isn't there something childish in the belief that the universe owes us comfort, as of right? Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.
A related plaint concerns the need for a 'purpose' in life. To quote one Canadian critic:
The atheists may be right about God. Who knows? But God or no God, it's clear that something in the human soul requires a belief that life has a purpose that transcends the material plane. One would think that a more-rational-than-thou empiricist such as Dawkins would recognize this unchanging aspect of human nature ... does Dawkins really think this world would be a more humane place if we all looked to The God Delusion instead of The Bible for truth and comfort?
Actually yes, since you mention 'humane', yes I do, but I must repeat, yet again, that the consolation-content of a belief does not raise its truth-value: Of course I cannot deny the need for emotional comfort, and I cannot claim that the world-view adopted in this book offers any more than moderate comfort to, for example, the bereaved. But if the comfort that religion seems to offer is founded on the neurologically highly implausible premise that we survive the death of our brains, do you really want to defend it? In any case, I don't think I have ever met anyone at a funeral who dissents from the view that the non-religious parts (eulogies, the deceased's favourite poems or music) are more moving than the prayers.
Having read The God Delusion, Dr. David Ashton, a British consultant physician, wrote to me on the unexpected death, on Christmas Day 2006, of his beloved seventeen-year-old son, Luke. Shortly before Luke's death, the two of them had talked appreciatively of the charitable foundation that I am setting up to encourage reason and science. At Luke's funeral on the Isle of Man, his father suggested to the congregation that, if they wished to make any kind of contribution in Luke's memory, they should send it to my foundation, as Luke would have wished. The thirty cheques received amounted to more than £2,000, including more than £600 from a whip-round in the local village pub. This boy was obviously much loved. When I read the Order of Service for the funeral ceremony, I literally wept (although I had never met Luke), and I asked for permission to reproduce it at A lone piper played the Manx lament 'Ellan Vannin'. Two friends spoke eulogies. Dr. Ashton himself recited Dylan Thomas's beautiful poem 'Fern Hill' ('Now as I was young and easy, under the apple boughs' -- so achingly evocative of lost youth). And then, I catch my breath to report, he read the opening lines of my own Unweaving the Rainbow, lines that I have long earmarked for my own funeral.
Obviously there are exceptions, but I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don't realize that non-belief is even an option. This is certainly true of most people who think they are creationists. They have simply not been properly taught Darwin's astounding alternative. Probably the same is true of the belittling myth that people 'need' religion. At a recent conference in 2006, an anthropologist (and prize specimen of I'm-an-atheist-buttery) quoted Golda Meir when asked whether she believed in God: 'I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.' Our anthropologist substituted his own version: 'I believe in people, and people believe in God.' I prefer to say that I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied -- indeed, liberated -- lives.
In this new paperback edition I have taken the opportunity to make a few minor improvements, and correct some small errors that readers of the hardback have kindly drawn to my attention.
I didn't know I could.
I suspect -- well, I am sure -- that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don't believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents' religion and wish they could, but just don't realize that leaving is an option. If you are one of them, this book is for you. It is intended to raise consciousness -- raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled. That is the first of my consciousness-raising messages. I also want to raise consciousness in three other ways, which I'll come on to.
In January 2006 I presented a two-part television documentary on British television (Channel Four) called Root of All Evil? From the start, I didn't like the title and fought it hard. Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything. But I was delighted with the advertisement that Channel Four put in the national newspapers. It was a picture of the Manhattan skyline with the caption 'Imagine a world without religion.' What was the connection? The twin towers of the World Trade Center were conspicuously present.
Perhaps you feel that agnosticism is a reasonable position, but that atheism is just as dogmatic as religious belief? If so, I hope Chapter 2 will change your mind, by persuading you that 'the God Hypothesis' is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analysed as sceptically as any other. Perhaps you have been taught that philosophers and theologians have put forward good reasons to believe in God. If you think that, you might enjoy Chapter 3 on 'Arguments for God's existence' -- the arguments turn out to be spectacularly weak. Maybe you think it is obvious that God must exist, for how else could the world have come into being? How else could there be life, in all its rich diversity, with every species looking uncannily as though it had been 'designed'? If your thoughts run along those lines, I hope you will gain enlightenment from Chapter 4 on 'Why there almost certainly is no God'. Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection. And, while natural selection itself is limited to explaining the living world, it raises our consciousness to the likelihood of comparable explanatory 'cranes' that may aid our understanding of the cosmos itself. The power of cranes such as natural selection is the second of my four consciousness-raisers.
Perhaps you think there must be a god or gods because anthropologists and historians report that believers dominate every human culture. If you find that convincing, please refer to Chapter 5, on 'The roots of religion', which explains why belief is so ubiquitous. Or do you think that religious belief is necessary in order for us to have justifiable morals? Don't we need God, in order to be good? Please read Chapters 6 and 7 to see why this is not so. Do you still have a soft spot for religion as a good thing for the world, even if you yourself have lost your faith? Chapter 8 will invite you to think about ways in which religion is not such a good thing for the world.
The whole matter of religion and childhood is the subject of Chapter 9, which also includes my third consciousness-raiser. Just as feminists wince when they hear 'he' rather than 'he or she', or 'man' rather than 'human', I want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child'. Speak of a 'child of Catholic parents' if you like; but if you hear anybody speak of a 'Catholic child', stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know where they stand on economics or politics. Precisely because my purpose is consciousness-raising, I shall not apologize for mentioning it here in the Preface as well as in Chapter 9. You can't say it too often. I'll say it again. That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child.
Chapters 1 and 10 top and tail the book by explaining, in their different ways, how a proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically -- and inadequately -- usurped.
My fourth consciousness-raiser is atheist pride. Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind. There are many people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are atheists, but dare not admit it to their families or even, in some cases, to themselves. Partly, this is because the very word 'atheist' has been assiduously built up as a terrible and frightening label. Chapter 9 quotes the comedian Julia Sweeney's tragi-comic story of her parents' discovery, through reading a newspaper, that she had become an atheist. Not believing in God they could just about take, but an atheist! An ATHEIST? (The mother's voice rose to a scream.)
I need to say something to American readers in particular at this point, for the religiosity of today's America is something truly remarkable. The lawyer Wendy Kaminer was exaggerating only slightly when she remarked that making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion Hall. The status of atheists in America today is on a par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago. Now, after the Gay Pride movement, it is possible, though still not very easy, for a homosexual to be elected to public office. A Gallup poll taken in 1999 asked Americans whether they would vote for an otherwise well-qualified person who was a woman (95 per cent would), Roman Catholic (94 per cent would), Jew (92 per cent), black (92 per cent), Mormon (79 per cent), homosexual (79 per cent) or atheist (49 per cent). Clearly we have a long way to go. But atheists are a lot more numerous, especially among the educated elite, than many realize. This was so even in the nineteenth century, when John Stuart Mill was already able to say: 'The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.'
This must be even truer today and, indeed, I present evidence for it in Chapter 3. The reason so many people don't notice atheists is that many of us are reluctant to 'come out'. My dream is that this book may help people to come out. Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them. There may be a critical mass for the initiation of a chain reaction.
American polls suggest that atheists and agnostics far outnumber religious Jews, and even outnumber most other particular religious groups. Unlike Jews, however, who are notoriously one of the most effective political lobbies in the United States, and unlike evangelical Christians, who wield even greater political power, atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to 'come out', thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.
The word 'delusion' in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about. Three of them wrote to me to propose a special technical term for religious delusion: 'relusion'. [2] Maybe it'll catch on. But for now I am going to stick with 'delusion', and I need to justify my use of it. The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as 'a false belief or impression'. Surprisingly, the illustrative quotation the dictionary gives is from Phillip E. Johnson: 'Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.' Can that be the same Phillip E. Johnson who leads the creationist charge against Darwinism in America today? Indeed it is, and the quotation is, as we might guess, taken out of context. I hope the fact that I have stated as much will be noted, since the same courtesy has not been extended to me in numerous creationist quotations of my works, deliberately and misleadingly taken out of context. Whatever Johnson's own meaning, his sentence as it stands is one that I would be happy to endorse. The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as 'a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder'. The first part captures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.'
If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan. But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn't 'take', or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether. At very least, I hope that nobody who reads this book will be able to say, 'I didn't know I could.'
For help in the preparation of this book, I am grateful to many friends and colleagues. I cannot mention them all, but they include my literary agent John Brockman, and my editors, Sally Gaminara (for Transworld) and Eamon Dolan (for Houghton Mifflin), both of whom read the book with sensitivity and intelligent understanding, and gave me a helpful mixture of criticism and advice. Their whole-hearted and enthusiastic belief in the book was very encouraging to me. Gillian Somerscales has been an exemplary copy editor, as constructive with her suggestions as she was meticulous with her corrections. Others who criticized various drafts, and to whom I am very grateful, are Jerry Coyne, J. Anderson Thomson, R. Elisabeth Cornwell, Ursula Goodenough, Latha Menon and especially Karen Owens, critic extraordinaire, whose acquaintance with the stitching and unstitching of every draft of the book has been almost as detailed as my own.
The book owes something (and vice versa) to the two-part television documentary Root of All Evil?, which I presented on British television (Channel Four) in January 2006. I am grateful to all who were involved in the production, including Deborah Kidd, Russell Barnes, Tim Cragg, Adam Prescod, Alan Clements and Hamish Mykura. For permission to use quotations from the documentary I thank IWC Media and Channel Four. Root of All Evil? achieved excellent ratings in Britain, and it has also been taken by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It remains to be seen whether any US television channel will dare to show it. [i]
This book has been developing in my mind for some years. During that time, some of the ideas inevitably found their way into lectures, for example my Tanner Lectures at Harvard, and articles in newspapers and magazines. Readers of my regular column in Free Inquiry, especially, may find certain passages familiar. I am grateful to Tom Flynn, the Editor of that admirable magazine, for the stimulus he gave me when he commissioned me to become a regular columnist. After a temporary hiatus during the finishing of the book, I hope now to resume my column, and will no doubt use it to respond to the aftermath of the book.
For a variety of reasons I am grateful to Dan Dennett, Marc Hauser, Michael Stirrat, Sam Harris, Helen Fisher, Margaret Downey, Ibn Warraq, Hermione Lee, Julia Sweeney, Dan Barker, Josephine Welsh, Ian Baird and especially George Scales. Nowadays, a book such as this is not complete until it becomes the nucleus of a living website, a forum for supplementary materials, reactions, discussions, questions and answers -- who knows what the future may bring? I hope that the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, will come to fill that role, and I am extremely grateful to Josh Timonen for the artistry, professionalism and sheer hard work that he is putting into it.
Above all, I thank my wife Lalla Ward, who has coaxed me through all my hesitations and self-doubts, not just with moral support and witty suggestions for improvement, but by reading the entire book aloud to me, at two different stages in its development, so I could apprehend very directly how it might seem to a reader other than myself. I recommend the technique to other authors, but I must warn that for best results the reader must be a professional actor, with voice and ear sensitively tuned to the music of language.
i. As the paperback goes to press, the answer is still no. DVDs, however, are now available from
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:39 pm
In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of Species -- the famous 'entangled bank' passage, 'with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth'. Had he been, he would certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting around us':
Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
All Sagan's books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me, that is religion!' But is 'religion' the right word? I don't think so. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:
One of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks is 'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' But Einstein also said,
Does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself? That his words can be cherry-picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No. By 'religion' Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only supernatural gods delusional.
In greater numbers since his death, religious apologists understandably try to claim Einstein as one of their own. Some of his religious contemporaries saw him very differently. In 1940 Einstein wrote a famous paper justifying his statement 'I do not believe in a personal God.' This and similar statements provoked a storm of letters from the religiously orthodox, many of them alluding to Einstein's Jewish origins. The extracts that follow are taken from Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion (which is also my main source of quotations from Einstein himself on religious matters). The Roman Catholic Bishop of Kansas City said: 'It is sad to see a man, who comes from the race of the Old Testament and its teaching, deny the great tradition of that race.' Other Catholic clergymen chimed in: 'There is no other God but a personal God ... Einstein does not know what he is talking about. He is all wrong. Some men think that because they have achieved a high degree of learning in some field, they are qualified to express opinions in all.' The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed 'fairyologist' on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings. Both he and the bishop thought that Einstein, being theologically untrained, had misunderstood the nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein understood very well exactly what he was denying.
A New York rabbi said: 'Einstein is unquestionably a great scientist, but his religious views are diametrically opposed to Judaism.'
'But'? 'But'? Why not 'and'?
Professor Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you, 'We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ, but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of this nation, to go back where you came from.' I have done everything in my power to be a blessing to Israel, and then you come along and with one statement from your blasphemous tongue, do more to hurt the cause of your people than all the efforts of the Christians who love Israel can do to stamp out anti-Semitism in our land. Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.'
Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1675, was the major source from which Pantheism [God is identical with the universe] spread (though Spinoza himself did not use the word, and there is some controversy over whether he may more accurately be termed a panentheist) [God lies within and also beyond or outside of the universe].
-- Pantheism, by Wikipedia
All varieties of Pantheism involve reverence for the Universe/Cosmos as a totality, and all stress some kind of unity. .....
Monist idealist Pantheism or Monistic Idealism holds that there is only one type of substance, and that substance is mental or spiritual. Some versions hold that the ultimate reality consists of a single cosmic consciousness. This version is common in Hindu philosophies and Consciousness-Only schools of Buddhism, as well as in some New Age writers such as Deepak Chopra....
Dualist Pantheism holds that there are two major types of substance, physical and mental/spiritual, which interact or are unified in some way. Dualistic pantheism is very diverse, and may include beliefs in reincarnation, cosmic consciousness, and paranormal connections across Nature.
-- Pantheism, by Wikipedia
The Gnostic view of God is pantheistic, that is God dwells in all things and via emanation, all things are of God. ... Emanation is opposed to the Jewish concept of a transcendent God. Gnostics of all kinds deny the idea that God directly created the material world, which they see as corrupt or fallen.
-- Overview of Gnosticism, by Lewis Loflin
There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like 'God is subtle but he is not malicious' or 'He does not play dice' or 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. 'God does not play dice' should be translated as 'Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things: 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' means 'Could the universe have begun in any other way?' Einstein was using 'God' in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor. Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism -- for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion).
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: 'To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious: In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that 'cannot grasp' does not have to mean 'forever ungraspable'. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, 'religion' implies 'supernatural'. Carl Sagan put it well: '... if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.'
Amusingly, Sagan's last point was foreshadowed by the Reverend Dr Fulton J. Sheen, a professor at the Catholic University of America, as part of a fierce attack upon Einstein's 1940 disavowal of a personal God. Sheen sarcastically asked whether anyone would be prepared to lay down his life for the Milky Way. He seemed to think he was making a point against Einstein, rather than for him, for he added: 'There is only one fault with his cosmical religion: he put an extra letter in the word -- the letter "s".' There is nothing comical about Einstein's beliefs. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.
My title, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and the other enlightened scientists of the previous section. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. In the rest of this book I am talking only about supernatural gods, of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. I shall come to him in a moment. But before leaving this preliminary chapter I need to deal with one more matter that would otherwise bedevil the whole book. This time it is a matter of etiquette. It is possible that religious readers will be offended by what I have to say, and will find in these pages insufficient respect for their own particular beliefs (if not the beliefs that others treasure). It would be a shame if such offence prevented them from reading on, so I want to sort it out here, at the outset.
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts -- the non-religious included -- is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. Douglas Adams put it so well, in an impromptu speech made in Cambridge shortly before his death, [5] that I never tire of sharing his words:
Here's a particular example of our society's overweening respect for religion, one that really matters. By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from pacifism, we have a pusillanimous reluctance to use religious names for warring factions. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and 'Loyalists' respectively. The very word 'religions' is bowdlerized to 'communities', as in 'inter-community warfare'. Iraq, as a consequence of the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, degenerated into sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Clearly a religious conflict -- yet in the Independent of 20 May 2006 the front-page headline and first leading article both described it as 'ethnic cleansing'. 'Ethnic' in this context is yet another I euphemism. What we are seeing in Iraq is religious cleansing. The original usage of 'ethnic cleansing' in the former Yugoslavia is also arguably a euphemism for religious cleansing, involving Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians. [6]
I have previously drawn attention to the privileging of religion in public discussions of ethics in the media and in government. [7] Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio or television. I'm not suggesting that we should go out of our way to censor the views of these people. But why does our society beat a path to their door, as though they had some expertise comparable to that of, say, a moral philosopher, a family lawyer or a doctor?
Here's another weird example of the privileging of religion. On 21 February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in accordance with the Constitution, that a church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, against ,the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. [8] Faithful members of the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal believe that they can understand God only by drinking hoasca tea, which contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine. Note that it is sufficient that they believe that the drug enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet, again in accordance with the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that all patients who use cannabis for medicinal purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they 'believe' they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.
Eighteen years ago, I was one of thirty-six writers and artists commissioned by the magazine New Statesman to write in support of the distinguished author Salman Rushdie, [9] then under sentence of death for writing a novel. Incensed by the 'sympathy' for Muslim 'hurt' and 'offence' expressed by Christian leaders and even some secular opinion-formers, I drew the following parallel:
If the advocates of apartheid had their wits about them they would claim -- for all I know truthfully -- that allowing mixed races is against their religion. A good part of the opposition would respectfully tiptoe away. And it is no use claiming that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
Little did I know that something pretty similar would come to pass in the twenty-first century. The Los Angeles Times (10 April 2006) reported that numerous Christian groups on campuses around the United States were suing their universities for enforcing anti-discrimination rules, including prohibitions against harassing or abusing homosexuals. As a typical example, in 2004 James Nixon, a twelve-year-old boy in Ohio, won the right in court to wear a T-shirt to school bearing the words 'Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!' [10]The school told him not to wear the T-shirt -- and the boy's parents sued the school. The parents might have had a conscionable case if they had based it on the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. But they didn't. Instead, the Nixons' lawyers appealed to the constitutional right to freedom of religion. Their victorious lawsuit was supported by the Alliance Defense Fund of Arizona, whose business it is to 'press the legal battle for religious freedom'.
The Reverend Rick Scarborough, supporting the wave of similar Christian lawsuits brought to establish religion as a legal justification for discrimination against homosexuals and other groups, has named it the civil rights struggle of the twenty-first century: 'Christians are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian.' [11] Once again, if such people took their stand on the right to free speech, one might reluctantly sympathize. But that isn't what it is about. 'The right to be Christian' seems in this case to mean 'the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives'. The legal case in favour of discrimination against homosexuals is being mounted as a counter-suit against alleged religious discrimination! And the law seems to respect this. You can't get away with saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying, 'It violates my freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all.
The carefully cultivated 'hurt' and 'offence' was brought to an explosive head five months after the twelve cartoons were originally published. Demonstrators in Pakistan and Indonesia burned Danish flags (where did they get them from?) and hysterical demands were made for the Danish government to apologize. (Apologize for what? They didn't draw the cartoons, or publish them. Danes just live in a country with a free press, something that people in many Islamic countries might have a hard time understanding.) Newspapers in Norway, Germany, France and even the United States (but, conspicuously, not Britain) reprinted the cartoons in gestures of solidarity with Jyllands-Posten, which added fuel to the flames. Embassies and consulates were trashed, Danish goods were boycotted, Danish citizens and, indeed, Westerners generally, were physically threatened; Christian churches in Pakistan, with no Danish or European connections at all, were burned. Nine people were killed when Libyan rioters attacked and burned the Italian consulate in Benghazi. As Germaine Greer wrote, what these people really love and do best is pandemonium. [14]
A bounty of $1 million was placed on the head of 'the Danish cartoonist' by a Pakistani imam -- who was apparently unaware that there were twelve different Danish cartoonists, and almost certainly unaware that the three most offensive pictures had never appeared in Denmark at all (and, by the way, where was that million going to come from?). In Nigeria, Muslim protesters against the Danish cartoons burned down several Christian churches, and used machetes to attack and kill (black Nigerian) Christians in the streets. One Christian was put inside a rubber tyre, doused with petrol and set alight. Demonstrators were photographed in Britain bearing banners saying 'Slay those who insult Islam', 'Butcher those who mock Islam', 'Europe you will pay: Demolition is on its way' and 'Behead those who insult Islam'. Fortunately, our political leaders were on hand to remind us that Islam is a religion of peace and mercy.
In the aftermath of all this, the journalist Andrew Mueller interviewed Britain's leading 'moderate' Muslim, Sir Iqbal Sacranie. [15] Moderate he may be by today's Islamic standards, but in Andrew Mueller's account he still stands by the remark he made when Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for writing a novel: 'Death is perhaps too easy for him' -- a remark that sets him in ignominious contrast to his courageous predecessor as Britain's most influential Muslim, the late Dr Zaki Badawi, who offered Salman Rushdie sanctuary in his own home. Sacranie told Mueller how concerned he was about the Danish cartoons. Mueller was concerned too, but for a different reason: 'I am concerned that the ridiculous, disproportionate reaction to some unfunny sketches in an obscure Scandinavian newspaper may confirm that ... Islam and the west are fundamentally irreconcilable.' Sacranie, on the other hand, praised British newspapers for not reprinting the cartoons, to which Mueller voiced the suspicion of most of the nation that 'the restraint of British newspapers derived less from sensitivity to Muslim discontent than it did from a desire not to have their windows broken'.
Sacranie explained that 'The person of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is revered so profoundly in the Muslim world, with a love and affection that cannot be explained in words. It goes beyond your parents, your loved ones, your children. That is part of the faith. There is also an Islamic teaching that one does not depict the Prophet.' This rather assumes, as Mueller observed,
that the values of Islam trump anyone else's -- which is what any follower of Islam does assume, just as any follower of any religion believes that theirs is the sole way, truth and light. If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families, that's up to them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously ...
Except that if you don't take it seriously and accord it proper respect you are physically threatened, on a scale that no other religion has aspired to since the Middle Ages. One can't help wondering why such violence is necessary, given that, as Mueller notes: 'If any of you downs are right about anything, the cartoonists are going to hell anyway -- won't that do? In the meantime, if you want to get excited about affronts to Muslims, read the Amnesty International reports on Syria and Saudi Arabia.'
Many people have noted the contrast between the hysterical 'hurt' professed by Muslims and the readiness with which Arab media publish stereotypical anti-Jewish cartoons. At a demonstration in Pakistan against the Danish cartoons, a woman in a black burka was photographed carrying a banner reading 'God Bless Hitler'.
In response to all this frenzied pandemonium, decent liberal newspapers deplored the violence and made token noises about free speech. But at the same time they expressed 'respect' and 'sympathy' for the deep 'offence' and 'hurt' that Muslims had 'suffered'. The 'hurt' and 'suffering' consisted, remember, not in any person enduring violence or real pain of any kind: nothing more than a few daubs of printing ink in a newspaper that nobody outside Denmark would ever have heard of but for a deliberate campaign of incitement to mayhem.
It is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion [ii] that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else.
ii. A stunning example of such 'respect' was reported in the New York Times while this paperback was in proof. In January 2007, a German Muslim woman had applied for a fast-track divorce on the grounds that her husband, from the very start of the marriage, repeatedly and seriously beat her. While not denying the facts, judge Christa Datz-Winter turned down the application, citing the Qur'an. 'In a remarkable ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz- Winter, said that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which she said it was common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote, sanctions such physical abuse' (New York Times, 23 March 2007). This incredible story came to light in March 2007 when the unfortunate woman's lawyer disclosed it. To its credit, the Frankfurt court promptly removed Judge Datz-Winter from the case. Nevertheless, the New York Times article concludes by quoting a suggestion that the episode will do great damage to other Muslim women suffering domestic abuse: 'Many are already afraid of going to court against their spouses. There have been a string of so-called honor-killings here, in which Turkish Muslim men have murdered women.' Judge Datz-Winter's motivation was put down to 'cultural sensitivity', but there is another name by which you could call it: patronizing insult. 'Of course we Europeans wouldn't dream of behaving like this, but wife-beating is part of "their culture", sanctioned by "their religion", and we should "respect" it.'
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:47 pm
Part 1 of 2
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror. A naif blessed with the perspective of innocence has a clearer perception. Winston Churchill's son Randolph somehow contrived to remain ignorant of scripture until Evelyn Waugh and a brother officer, in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war, bet him he couldn't read the entire Bible in a fortnight: 'Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud "I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible ... " or merely slapping his side & chortling "God, isn't God a shit!"' [16] Thomas Jefferson -- better read -- was of a similar opinion, describing the God of Moses as 'a being of terrific character -- cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust'.
It is unfair to attack such an easy target. The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh, nor his insipidly opposite Christian face, 'Gentle Jesus meek and mild'. (To be fair, this milksop persona owes more to his Victorian followers than to Jesus himself. Could anything be more mawkishly nauseating than Mrs C. F. Alexander's 'Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as he'?) I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.
Not surprisingly, since it is founded on local traditions of private revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of the Greeks, Romans and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam.
It is not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be assumed to be a self-evidently progressive improvement. But it widely is - an assumption that provoked Ibn Warraq (author of Why I Am Not a Muslim) wittily to conjecture that monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism. The Catholic Encyclopedia dismisses polytheism and atheism in the same insouciant breath: 'Formal dogmatic atheism is self-refuting, and has never de facto won the reasoned assent of any considerable number of men. Nor can polytheism, however easily it may take hold of the popular imagination, ever satisfy the mind of a philosopher.' [17]
Monotheistic chauvinism was until recently written into the charity law of both England and Scotland, discriminating against polytheistic religions in granting tax-exempt status, while allowing an easy ride to charities whose object was to promote monotheistic religion, sparing them the rigorous vetting quite properly required of secular charities. It was my ambition to persuade a member of Britain's respected Hindu community to come forward and bring a civil action to test this snobbish discrimination against polytheism.
Far better, of course, would be to abandon the promotion of religion altogether as grounds for charitable status. The benefits of this to society would be great, especially in the United States, where the sums of tax-free money sucked in by churches, and polishing the heels of already well-heeled televangelists, reach levels that, could fairly be described as obscene. The aptly named Oral Roberts once told his television audience that God would kill him unless they gave him $8 million. Almost unbelievably, it worked. Tax-free! Roberts himself is still going strong, as is 'Oral Roberts University' of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its buildings, valued at $250 million, were directly commissioned by God himself in these words: 'Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the Earth. Their work will exceed yours, and in this I am well pleased.'
On reflection, my imagined Hindu litigator would have been as likely to play the 'If you can't beat them join them' card. His polytheism isn't really polytheism but monotheism in disguise. There is only one God -- Lord Brahma the creator, Lord Vishnu the preserver, Lord Shiva the destroyer, the goddesses Saraswati, Laxmi and Parvati (wives of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva), Lord Ganesh the elephant god, and hundreds of others, all are just different manifestations or incarnations of the one God.
Christians should warm to such sophistry. Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the 'mystery' of the Trinity, and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria, in the fourth century AD, denied that Jesus was consubstantial (i,e. of the same substance or essence) with God. What on earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What 'substance'? What exactly do you mean by 'essence'? 'Very little' seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius's book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs -- such has ever been the way of theology.
Do we have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopedia clears up the matter for us, in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning:
As if that were not clear enough, the Encyclopedia quotes the third-century theologian St Gregory the Miracle Worker:
Whatever miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology, which -- unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship -- has not moved on in eighteen centuries. Thomas Jefferson, as so often, got it right when he said, 'Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.'
The other thing I cannot help remarking upon is the overweening confidence with which the religious assert minute details for which they neither have, nor could have, any evidence. Perhaps it is the very fact that there is no evidence to support theological opinions, either way, that fosters the characteristic draconian hostility towards those of slightly different opinion, especially, as it happens, in this very field of Trinitarianism.
Jefferson heaped ridicule on the doctrine that, as he put it, 'There are three Gods', in his critique of Calvinism. But it is especially the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity that pushes its recurrent flirtation with polytheism towards runaway inflation. The Trinity is (are?) joined by Mary, 'Queen of Heaven', a goddess in all but name, who surely runs God himself a close second as a target of prayers. The pantheon is further swollen by an army of saints, whose intercessory power makes them, if not demigods, well worth approaching on their own specialist subjects. The Catholic Community Forum helpfully lists 5,120 saints, [18] together with their areas of expertise, which include abdominal pains, abuse victims, anorexia, arms dealers, blacksmiths, broken bones, bomb technicians and bowel disorders, to venture no further than the Bs. And we mustn't forget the four Choirs of Angelic Hosts, arrayed in nine orders: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels (heads of all hosts), and just plain old Angels, including our closest friends, the ever-watchful Guardian Angels. What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.
Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together, and he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: 'A maternal hand guided the bullet.' One cannot help wondering why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided. The relevant point is that it wasn't just Our Lady who, in the Pope's opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on other errands at the time.
How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many. Having gestured towards polytheism to cover myself against a charge of neglect, I shall say no more about it. For brevity I shall refer to all deities, whether poly- or monotheistic, as simply 'God'. I am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly) aggressively male, and this too I shall accept as a convention in my use of pronouns. More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.
But that is not the way of this book. I decry supernaturalism in all its forms, and the most effective way to proceed will be to concentrate on the form most likely to be familiar to my readers -- the form that impinges most threateningly on all our societies. Most of my readers will have been reared in one or another of today's three 'great' monotheistic religions (four if you count Mormonism), all of which trace themselves back to the mythological patriarch Abraham, and it will be convenient to keep this family of traditions in mind throughout the rest of the book.
The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Juliaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the conquistadores and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary accompaniment. For most of my purposes, all three Abrahamic religions can be treated as indistinguishable. Unless otherwise stated, I shall have Christianity mostly in mind, but only because it is the version with which I happen to be most familiar. For my purposes the differences matter less than the similarities. And I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.
The simple definition of the God Hypothesis with which I began has to be substantially fleshed out if it is to accommodate the Abrahamic God. He not only created the universe; he is a personal God dwelling within it, or perhaps outside it (whatever that might mean), possessing the unpleasantly human qualities to which I have alluded.
Personal qualities, whether pleasant or unpleasant, form no part of the deist god of Voltaire and Thomas Paine. Compared with the Old Testament's psychotic delinquent, the deist God of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is an altogether grander being: worthy of his cosmic creation, loftily unconcerned with human affairs, sublimely aloof from our private thoughts and hopes, caring nothing for our messy sins or mumbled contritions. The deist God is a physicist to end all physics, the alpha and omega of mathematicians, the apotheosis of designers; a hyper-engineer who set up the laws and constants of the universe, fine-tuned them with exquisite precision and foreknowledge, detonated what we would now call the hot big bang, retired and was never heard from again.
In times of stronger faith, deists have been reviled as indistinguishable from atheists. Susan Jacoby, in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, lists a choice selection of the epithets hurled at poor Tom Paine: 'Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar, and of course infidel'. Paine died abandoned (with the honourable exception of Jefferson) by political former friends embarrassed by his anti- Christian views. Nowadays, the ground has shifted so far that deists are more likely to be contrasted with atheists and lumped with theists. They do, after all, believe in a supreme intelligence who created the universe.
It is conventional to assume that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic were deists. No doubt many of them were, although it has been argued that the greatest of them might have been atheists. Certainly their writings on religion in their own time leave me in no doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours. But whatever their individual religious views in their own time, the one thing they collectively were is secularists, and this is the topic to which I turn in this section, beginning with a -- perhaps surprising -- quotation from Senator Barry Goldwater in 1981, clearly showing how staunchly that presidential candidate and hero of American conservatism upheld the secular tradition of the Republic's foundation:
The religious views of the Founding Fathers are of great interest to propagandists of today's American right, anxious to push their version of history. Contrary to their view, the fact that the United States was not founded as a Christian nation was early stated in the terms of a treaty with Tripoli, drafted in 1796 under George Washington and signed by John Adams in 1797:
The opening words of this quotation would cause uproar in today's Washington ascendancy. Yet Ed Buckner has convincingly demonstrated that they caused no dissent at the time, [20] among either politicians or public.
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. I am continually asked why this is, and I do not know. I suppose it is possible that England has wearied of religion after an appalling history of interfaith violence, with Protestants and Catholics alternately gaining the upper hand and systematically murder- -ing the other lot. Another suggestion stems from the observation that America is a nation of immigrants. A colleague points out to me that immigrants, uprooted from the stability and comfort of an extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil. It is an interesting idea, worth researching further. There is no doubt that many Americans see their own local church as an important unit of identity, which does indeed have some of the attributes of an extended family.
Yet another hypothesis is that the religiosity of America stems paradoxically from the secularism of its constitution. Precisely because America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise. Rival churches compete for congregations -- not least for the fat tithes that they bring -- and the competition is waged with all the aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace. What works for soap flakes works for God, and the result is something approaching religious mania among today's less educated classes. In England, by contrast, religion under the aegis of the established church has become little more than a pleasant social pastime, scarcely recognizable as religious at all. This English tradition is nicely expressed by Giles Fraser, an Anglican vicar who doubles as a philosophy tutor at Oxford, writing in the Guardian. Fraser's article is subtitled 'The establishment of the Church of England took God out of religion, but there are risks in a more vigorous approach to faith':
There was a time when the country vicar was a staple of the English dramatis personae. This tea-drinking, gentle eccentric, with his polished shoes and kindly manners, represented a type of religion that didn't make non-religious people uncomfortable. He wouldn't break into an existential sweat or press you against a wall to ask if you were saved, still less launch crusades from the pulpit or plant roadside bombs in the name of some higher power. [21]
(Shades of Betjeman's 'Our Padre', which I quoted at the beginning of Chapter 1.) Fraser goes on to say that 'the nice country vicar in effect inoculated vast swaths of the English against Christianity'. He ends his article by lamenting a more recent trend in the Church of England to take religion seriously again, and his last sentence is a warning: 'the worry is that we may release the genie of English religious fanaticism from the establishment box in· which it has been dormant for centuries'.
The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and the Founding Fathers would have been horrified. Whether or not it is right to embrace the paradox and blame the secular constitution that they devised, the founders most certainly were secularists who believed in keeping religion out of politics, and that is enough to place them firmly on the side of those who object, for example, to ostentatious displays of the Ten Commandments in government-owned public places. But it is tantalizing to speculate that at least some of the Founders might have gone beyond deism. Might they have been agnostics or even out-and-out atheists? The following statement of Jefferson is indistinguishable from what we would now call agnosticism:
Christopher Hitchens, in his biography Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, thinks it likely that Jefferson was an atheist, even in his own time when it was much harder:
As to whether he was an atheist, we must reserve judgment if only because of the prudence he was compelled to observe during his political life. But as he had written to his nephew, Peter Carr, as early as 1787, one must not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. 'If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.'
I find the following advice of Jefferson, again in his letter to Peter Carr, moving:
Remarks of Jefferson's such as 'Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man' are compatible with deism but also with atheism. So is James Madison's robust anti-clericalism: 'During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.' The same could be said of Benjamin Franklin's 'Lighthouses are more useful than churches.' John Adams seems to have been a deist of a strongly anti-clerical stripe ('The frightful engines of ecclesiastical councils ...'), and he delivered himself of some splendid tirades against Christianity in particular: 'As 1 understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?' And, in another letter, this time to Jefferson, 'I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!'
Whether Jefferson and his colleagues were theists, deists, agnostics or atheists, they were also passionate secularists who believed that the religious opinions of a President, or lack of them, were entirely his own business. All the Founding Fathers, whatever their private religious beliefs, would have been aghast to read the journalist Robert Sherman's report of George Bush Senior's answer when Sherman asked him whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists: 'No, 1 don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.' [22] Assuming Sherman's account to be accurate (unfortunately he didn't use a tape-recorder, and no other newspaper ran the story at the time), try the experiment of replacing 'atheists' with 'Jews' or 'Muslims' or 'Blacks'. That gives the measure of the prejudice and discrimination that American atheists have to endure today. Natalie Angier's 'Confessions of a lonely atheist' is a sad and moving description, in the New York Times, of her feelings of isolation as an atheist in today's America. [23] But the isolation of American atheists is an illusion, assiduously cultivated by prejudice. Atheists in America are more numerous than most people realize. As 1 said in the Preface, American atheists far outnumber religious Jews, yet the Jewish lobby is notoriously one of the most formidably influential in Washington. What might American atheists achieve if they organized themselves properly? [i]
David Mills, in his admirable book Atheist Universe, tells a story which you would dismiss as an unrealistic caricature of police bigotry if it were fiction. A Christian faith-healer ran a 'Miracle Crusade' which carne to Mills's home town once a year. Among other things, the faith-healer encouraged diabetics to throwaway their insulin, and cancer patients to give up their chemotherapy and pray for a miracle instead. Reasonably enough, Mills decided to organize a peaceful demonstration to warn people. But he made the mistake of going to the police to tell them of his intention and ask for police protection against possible attacks from supporters of the faith-healer. The first police officer to whom he spoke asked, 'Is you gonna protest fir him or 'gin him?' (meaning for or against the faith-healer). When Mills replied, 'Against him: the policeman said that he himself planned to attend the rally and intended to spit personally in Mills's face as he marched past Mills's demonstration.
Mills decided to try his luck with a second police officer. This one said that if any of the faith-healer's supporters violently confronted Mills, the officer would arrest Mills because he was 'trying to interfere with God's work'. Mills went home and tried telephoning the police station, in the hope of finding more sympathy at a senior level. He was finally connected to a sergeant who said, 'To hell with you, Buddy. No policeman wants to protect a goddamned atheist. I hope somebody bloodies you up good: Apparently adverbs were in short supply in this police station, along with the milk of human kindness and a sense of duty. Mills relates that he spoke to about seven or eight policemen that day. None of them was helpful, and most of them directly threatened Mills with violence.
Anecdotes of such prejudice against atheists abound, but Margaret Downey, founder of the Anti-Discrimination Support Network (ADSN), maintains systematic records of such cases through the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia. [24] Her database of incidents, categorized under community, schools, workplace, media, family and government, includes examples of harassment, loss of jobs, shunning by family and even murder. [25] Downey's documented evidence of the hatred and misunderstanding of atheists makes it easy to believe that it is, indeed, virtually impossible for an honest atheist to win a public election in America. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 members of the Senate. Assuming that the majority of these 535 individuals are an educated sample of the population, it is statistically all but inevitable that a substantial number of them must be atheists. They must have lied, or concealed their true feelings, in order to get elected. Who can blame them, given the electorate they had to convince? It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any presidential candidate. [ii]
These facts about to day's political climate in the United States, and what they imply, would have horrified Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams and all their friends. Whether they were atheists,' agnostics, deists or Christians, they would have recoiled in horror from the theocrats of early 21st-century Washington. They would have been drawn instead to the secularist founding fathers of post-colonial India, especially the religious Gandhi ('I am a Hindu, I am a Moslem, I am a Jew, I am a Christian, I am a Buddhist!'), and the atheist Nehru:
The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and 1 have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.
Nehru's definition of the secular India of Gandhi's dream (would that it had been realized, instead of the partitioning of their country amid an interfaith bloodbath) might almost have been ghosted by Jefferson himself:
We talk about a secular India ... Some people think that it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it means is that it is a State which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities; India has a long history of religious tolerance ... In a country like India, which has many faiths and religions, no real nationalism can be built up except on the basis of secularity. [26]
The deist God, often associated with the Founding Fathers, is certainly an improvement over the monster of the Bible. Unfortunately it is scarcely more likely that he exists, or ever did. In any of its forms the God Hypothesis is unnecessary. [iii] The God Hypothesis is also very close to being ruled out by the laws of probability. 1shall come to that in Chapter 4, after dealing with the alleged proofs of the existence of God in Chapter 3. Meanwhile 1 turn to agnosticism, and the erroneous notion that the existence or non-existence of God is an untouchable question, forever beyond the reach of science.
The robust Muscular Christian haranguing us from the pulpit of myoid school chapel admitted a sneaking regard for atheists. They at least had the courage of their misguided convictions. What this preacher couldn't stand was agnostics: nambypamby, mushy pap, weak-tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitters. He was partly right, but for wholly the wrong reason. In the same vein, according to Quentin de la Bedoyere, the Catholic historian Hugh Ross Williamson 'respected the committed religious believer and also the committed atheist. He reserved his contempt for the wishy-washy boneless mediocrities who flapped around in the middle.'27
There is nothing wrong with being agnostic in cases where we lack evidence one way or the other. It is the reasonable position. Carl Sagan was proud to be agnostic when asked whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. When he refused to commit himself, his interlocutor pressed him for a 'gut feeling' and he immortally replied: 'But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.' [28] The question of extraterrestrial life is open. Good arguments can be mounted both ways, and we lack the evidence to do more than shade the probabilities one way or the other. Agnosticism, of a kind, is an appropriate stance on many scientific questions, such as what caused the end- Permian extinction, the greatest mass extinction in fossil history. It could have been a meteorite strike like the one that, with greater likelihood on present evidence, caused the later extinction of the dinosaurs. But it could have been any of various other possible causes, or a combination. Agnosticism about the causes of both these mass extinctions is reasonable. How about the question of God? Should we be agnostic about him too? Many have said definitely yes, often with an air of conviction that verges on protesting too much. Are they right?
I'll begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don't understand the evidence, or haven't time to read the evidence, etc.). TAP would be a reasonable stance towards the Permian extinction. There is a truth out there and one day we hope to know it, though for the moment we don't.
But there is also a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting, which I shall call PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle). The fact that the acronym spells a word used by that old school preacher is (almost) accidental. The PAP style of agnosticism is appropriate for questions that can never be answered, no matter how much evidence we gather, because the very idea of evidence is not applicable. The question exists on a different plane, or in a different dimension, beyond the zones where evidence can reach. An example might be that philosophical chestnut, the question whether you see red as I do. Maybe your red is my green, or something completely different from any colour that I can imagine. Philosophers cite this question as one that can never be answered, no matter what new evidence might one day become available. And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced -- too eagerly in my view -- that the question of God's existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right. The view that I shall defend is very different: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn't. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.
In the history of ideas, there are examples of questions being answered that had earlier been judged forever out of science's reach. In 1835 the celebrated French philosopher Auguste Comte wrote, of the stars: 'We shall never be able to study, by any method, their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure.' Yet even before Comte had set down these words, Fraunhofer had begun using his spectroscope to analyse the chemical composition of the sun. Now spectroscopists daily confound Comte's agnosticism with their long-distance analyses of the precise chemical composition of even distant stars. [29] Whatever the exact status of Comte's astronomical agnosticism, this cautionary tale suggests, at the very least, that we should hesitate before proclaiming the eternal verity of agnosticism too loudly. Nevertheless, when it comes to God, a great many philosophers and scientists are glad to do so, beginning with the inventor of the word itself, T. H. Huxley. [30]
Huxley explained his coining while rising to a personal attack that it had provoked. The Principal of King's College, London, the Reverend Dr Wace, had poured scorn on Huxley's 'cowardly agnosticism':
Huxley was not the man to let that sort of provocation pass him by, and his reply in 1889 was as robustly scathing as we should expect (although never departing from scrupulous good manners: as Darwin's Bulldog, his teeth were sharpened by urbane Victorian irony). Eventually, having dealt Dr Wace his just comeuppance and buried the remains, Huxley returned to the word 'agnostic' and explained how he first came by it. Others, he noted,
were quite sure they had attained a certain 'gnosis' -- had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion ... So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.
Later in his speech, Huxley went on to explain that agnostics have no creed, not even a negative one.
To a scientist these are noble words, and one doesn't criticize T. H. Huxley lightly. But Huxley, in his concentration upon the absolute impossibility of proving or disproving God, seems to have been ignoring the shading of probability. The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing. I don't think Huxley would disagree, and I suspect that when he appeared to do so he was bending over backwards to concede a point, in the interests of securing another one. We have all done this at one time or another.
Contrary to Huxley, I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other. Even if hard to test in practice, it belongs in the same TAP or temporary agnosticism box as the controversies over the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God's existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice. If he existed and chose to reveal it, God himself could clinch the argument, noisily and unequivocally, in his favour. And even if God's existence is never proved or disproved with certainty one way or the other, available evidence and reasoning may yield an estimate of probability far from 50 per cent.
Let us, then, take the idea of a spectrum of probabilities seriously, and place human judgements about the existence of God along it, between two extremes of opposite certainty. The spectrum is continuous, but it can be represented by the following seven milestones along the way.
1. Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C. G. Jung, 'I do not believe, I know.'
5. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. 'I don't know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be sceptical.'
I'd be surprised to meet many people in category 7, but I include it for symmetry with category 1, which is well populated. It is in the nature of faith that one is capable, like lung, of holding a belief without adequate reason to do so (lung also believed that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded with a loud bang). Atheists do not have faith; and reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything definitely does not exist. Hence category 7 is in practice rather emptier than its opposite number, category 1, which has many devoted inhabitants. I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7 -- I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.
The spectrum of probabilities works well for TAP (temporary agnosticism in practice). It is superficially tempting to place PAP (permanent agnosticism in principle) in the middle of the spectrum, with a 50 per cent probability of God's existence, but this is not correct. PAP agnostics aver that we cannot say anything, one way or the other, on the question of whether or not God exists. The question, for PAP agnostics, is in principle unanswerable, and they should strictly refuse to place themselves anywhere on the spectrum of probabilities. The fact that I cannot know whether your red is the same as my green doesn't make the probability 50 per cent. The proposition on offer is too meaningless to be dignified with a probability. Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meet again, to leap from the premise that the question of God's existence is in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence and his non-existence are equiprobable.
Another way to express that error is in terms of the burden of proof, and in this form it is pleasingly demonstrated by Bertrand Russell's parable of the celestial teapot. [31]
We would not waste time saying so because nobody, so far as I know, worships teapots; [iv] but, if pressed, we would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting teapot. Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics: we cannot prove, for sure, that there is no celestial teapot. In practice, we move away from teapot agnosticism towards a-teapotism.
A friend, who was brought up a Jew and still observes the sabbath and other Jewish customs out of loyalty to his heritage, describes himself as a 'tooth fairy agnostic'. He regards God as no more probable than the tooth fairy. You can't disprove either hypothesis, and both are equally improbable. He is an a-theist to exactly the same large extent that he is an a-fairyist. And agnostic about both, to the same small extent.
Russell's teapot, of course, stands for an infinite number of things whose existence is conceivable and cannot be disproved. That great American lawyer Clarence Darrow said, 'I don't believe in God as I don't believe in Mother Goose.' The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion 'is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith'. [32] A philosophical favourite is the invisible, intangible, inaudible unicorn, disproof of which is attempted yearly by the children at Camp Quest. [v] A popular deity on the Internet at present -- and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other -- is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who, many claim, has touched them with his noodly appendage. [33] I am delighted to see that the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has now been published as a book, [34] to great acclaim. I haven't read it myself, but who needs to read a gospel when you just know it's true? By the way, it had to happen -- a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. [35]
The point of all these way-out examples is that they are undisprovable, yet nobody thinks the hypothesis of their existence is on an even footing with the hypothesis of their nonexistence. Russell's point is that the burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. Mine is the related point that the odds in favour of the teapot (spaghetti monster / Esmerelda and Keith / unicorn etc.) are not equal to the odds against.
The fact that orbiting teapots and tooth fairies are undisprovable is not felt, by any reasonable person, to be the kind of fact that settles any interesting argument. None of us feels an obligation to disprove any of the millions of far-fetched things that a fertile or facetious imagination might dream up. I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
All of us feel entitled to express extreme scepticism to the point of outright disbelief -- except that in the case of unicorns, tooth fairies and the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Vikings, there is (nowadays) no need to bother. In the case of the Abrahamic God, however, there is a need to bother, because a substantial proportion of the people with whom we share the planet do believe strongly in his existence. Russell's teapot demonstrates that the ubiquity of belief in God, as compared with belief in celestial teapots, does not shift the burden of proof in logic, although it may seem to shift it as a matter of practical politics. That you cannot prove God's non-existence is accepted and 'trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things. There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent. On the contrary, as we shall see.
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:47 pm
Part 2 of 2
Just as Thomas Huxley bent over backwards to pay lip service to completely impartial agnosticism, right in the middle of my seven-stage spectrum, theists do the same thing from the other direction, and for an equivalent reason. The theologian Alister McGrath makes it the central point of his book Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Origin of Life. Indeed, after his admirably fair summary of my scientific works, it seems to be the only point in rebuttal that he has to offer: the undeniable but ignominiously weak point that you cannot disprove the existence of God. On page after page as I read McGrath, I found myself scribbling 'teapot' in the margin. Again invoking T. H. Huxley, McGrath says, 'Fed up with both theists and atheists making hopelessly dogmatic statements on the basis of inadequate empirical evidence, Huxley declared that the God question could not be settled on the basis of the scientific method.'
McGrath goes on to quote Stephen Jay Gould in similar vein: 'To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.' Despite the confident, almost bullying, tone of Gould's assertion, what, actually, is the justification for it? Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? And why isn't Russell's teapot, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, equally immune from scientific scepticism? As I shall argue in a moment, a universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?
Gould carried the art of bending over backwards to positively supine lengths in one of his less admired books, Rocks of Ages. There he coined the acronym NOMA for the phrase 'non -overlapping magisteria':
This sounds terrific -- right up until you give it a moment's thought. What are these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honoured guest and science must respectfully slink away?
Martin Rees, the distinguished Cambridge astronomer whom I have already mentioned, begins his book Our Cosmic Habitat by posing two candidate ultimate questions and giving a NOMA-friendly answer. 'The pre-eminent mystery is why anything exists at all. What breathes life into the equations, and actualized them in a real cosmos? Such questions lie beyond science, however: they are the province of philosophers and theologians.' I would prefer to say that if indeed they lie beyond science, they most certainly lie beyond the province of theologians as well (I doubt that philosophers would thank Martin Rees for lumping theologians in with them). I am tempted to go further and wonder in what possible sense theologians can be said to have a province. I am still amused when I recall the remark of a former Warden (head) of my Oxford college. A young theologian had applied for a junior research fellowship, and his doctoral thesis on Christian theology provoked the Warden to say, 'I have grave doubts as to whether it's a subject at all.'
What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot? In another book I recounted the words of an Oxford astronomer who, when I asked him one of those same deep questions, said: 'Ah, now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand over to our good friend the chaplain.' I was not quick-witted enough to utter the response that I later wrote: 'But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef?' Why are scientists so cravenly respectful towards the ambitions of theologians, over questions that theologians are certainly no more qualified to answer than scientists themselves?
Perhaps there are some genuinely profound and meaningful questions that are forever beyond the reach of science. Maybe quantum theory is already knocking on the door of the unfathomable. But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can? I suspect that neither the Cambridge nor the Oxford astronomer really believed that theologians have any expertise that enables them to answer questions that are too deep for science. I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will. Unlike my astronomer friends, I don't think we should even throw them a sop. I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.
Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to con tribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn -- for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How .many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion's moral values to accept? Or should we pick and choose among all the world's religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion? I shall return to such questions in Chapter 7.
I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote in Rocks of Ages. As I say, we have all been guilty of bending over backwards to be nice to an unworthy but powerful opponent, and I can only think that this is what Gould was doing. It is conceivable that he really did intend his unequivocally strong statement that science has nothing whatever to say about the question of God's existence: 'We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists: This sounds like agnosticism of the permanent and irrevocable kind, full-blown PAP. It implies that science cannot even make probability judgements on the question. This remarkably widespread fallacy -- many repeat it like a mantra but few of them, I suspect, have thought it through -- embodies what I refer to as 'the poverty of agnosticism'. Gould, by the way, was not an impartial agnostic but strongly inclined towards de facto atheism. On what basis did he make that judgement, if there is nothing to be said about whether God exists?
The God Hypothesis suggests that the reality we inhabit also contains a supernatural agent who designed the universe and -- at least in many versions of the hypothesis -- maintains it and even intervenes in it with miracles, which are temporary violations of his own otherwise grandly immutable laws. Richard Swinburne, one of Britain's leading theologians, is surprisingly clear on the matter in his book Is There a God?:
What the theist claims about God is that he does have a power to create, conserve, or annihilate anything, big or small. And he can also make objects move or do anything else ... He can make the planets move in the way that Kepler discovered that they move, or make gunpowder explode when we set a match to it; or he can make planets move in quite different ways, and chemical substances explode or not explode under quite different conditions from those which now govern their behaviour. God is not limited by the laws of nature; he makes them and he can change or suspend them -- if he chooses.
Just too easy, isn't it! Whatever else this is, it is very far from NOMA. And whatever else they may say, those scientists who subscribe to the 'separate magisteria' school of thought should concede that a universe with a supernaturally intelligent creator is a very different kind of universe from one without. The difference between the two hypothetical universes could hardly be more fundamental in principle, even if it is not easy to test in practice. And it undermines the complacently seductive dictum that science must be completely silent about religion's central existence claim. The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice -- or not yet -- a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of everyone of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.
Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question with a definite answer in principle: yes or no. Did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Did he himself come alive again, three days after being crucified? There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is a strictly scientific answer. The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods. To dramatize the point, imagine, by some remarkable set of circumstances, that forensic archaeologists unearthed DNA evidence to show that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Can you imagine religious apologists shrugging their shoulders and saying anything remotely like the following? 'Who cares? Scientific evidence is completely irrelevant to theological questions. Wrong magisterium! We're concerned only with ultimate questions and with moral values. Neither DNA nor any other scientific evidence could ever have any bearing on the matter, one way or the other.'
The very idea is a joke. You can bet your boots that the scientific evidence, if any were to turn up, would be seized upon and trumpeted to the skies. NOMA is popular only because there is no evidence to favour the God Hypothesis. The moment there was the smallest suggestion of any evidence in favour of religious belief, religious apologists would lose no time in throwing NOMA out of the window. Sophisticated theologians aside (and even they are happy to tell miracle stories to the unsophisticated in order to swell congregations), I suspect that alleged miracles provide the strongest reason many believers have for their faith; and miracles, by definition, violate the principles of science.
The Roman Catholic Church on the one hand seems sometimes to aspire to NOMA, but on the other hand lays down the performance of miracles as an essential qualification for elevation to sainthood. The late King of the Belgians is a candidate for sainthood, because of his stand on abortion. Earnest investigations are now going on to discover whether any miraculous cures can be attributed to prayers offered up to him since his death. I am not joking. That is the case, and it is typical of saint stories. I imagine the whole business is an embarrassment to more sophisticated circles within the Church. Why any circles worthy of the name of sophisticated remain within the Church is a mystery at least as deep as those that theologians enjoy.
When faced with miracle stories, Gould would presumably retort along the following lines. The whole point of NOMA is that it is a two-way bargain. The moment religion steps on science's turf and starts to meddle in the real world with miracles, it ceases to be religion in the sense Gould is defending, and his amicabilis concordia is broken. Note, however, that the miracle-free religion defended by Gould would not be recognized by most practising theists in the pew or on the prayer mat. It would, indeed, be a grave disappointment to them. To adapt Alice's comment on her sister's book before she fell into Wonderland, what is the use of a God who does no miracles and answers no prayers? Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'. There are athletes who believe God helps them win -- against opponents who would seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space -- thereby presumably depriving somebody else. This style of theism is embarrassingly popular, and is unlikely to be impressed by anything as (superficially) reasonable as NOMA.
Nevertheless, let us follow Gould and pare our religion down to some sort of non-interventionist minimum: no miracles, no personal communication between God and us in either direction, no monkeying with the laws of physics, no trespassing on the scientific grass. At most, a little deistic input to the initial conditions of the universe so that, in the fullness of time, stars, elements, chemistry and planets develop, and life evolves. Surely that is an adequate separation? Surely NOMA can survive this more modest and unassuming religion?
Well, you might think so. But I suggest that even a noninterventionist, NOMA God, though less violent and clumsy than an Abrahamic God, is still, when you look at him fair and square, a scientific hypothesis. I return to the point: a universe in which we are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a very different universe from one with an original guiding agent whose intelligent design is responsible for its very existence. I accept that it may not be so easy in practice to distinguish one kind of universe from the other. Nevertheless, there is something utterly special about the hypothesis of ultimate design, and equally special about the only known alternative: gradual evolution in the broad sense. They are close to being irreconcilably different. Like nothing else, evolution really does provide an explanation for the existence of entities whose improbability would otherwise, for practical purposes, rule them out. And the conclusion to the argument, as I shall show in Chapter 4, is close to being terminally fatal to the God Hypothesis.
An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest? [vi] Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. His intention may, in any case, have been satirical, as also when he prayed over randomized plots of land to see if the plants would grow any faster (they didn't).
More recently, the physicist Russell Stannard (one of Britain's three well-known religious scientists, as we shall see) has thrown his weight behind an initiative, funded by -- of course -- the Templeton Foundation, to test experimentally the proposition that praying for sick patients improves their health. [36]
Such experiments, if done properly, have to be double blind, and this standard was strictly observed. The patients were assigned, strictly at random, to an experimental group (received prayers) or a control group (received no prayers). Neither the patients, nor their doctors or caregivers, nor the experimenters were allowed to know which patients were being prayed for and which patients were controls. Those who did the experimental praying had to know the names of the individuals for whom they were praying -- otherwise, in what sense would they be praying for them rather than for somebody else? But care was taken to tell them only the first name and initial letter of the surname. Apparently that would be enough to enable God to pinpoint the right hospital bed.
The very idea of doing such experiments is open to a generous measure of ridicule, and the project duly received it. As far as I know, Bob Newhart didn't do a sketch about it, but I can distinctly hear his voice:
What's that you say, Lord? You can't cure me because I'm a member of the control group? ... Oh I see, my aunt's prayers aren't enough. But Lord, Mr. Evans in the next-door bed ... What was that, Lord? ... Mr. Evans received a thousand prayers per day? But Lord, Mr. Evans doesn't know a thousand people ... Oh, they just referred to him as John E. But Lord, how did you know they didn't mean John Ellsworthy? ... Oh right, you used your omniscience to work out which John E they meant. But Lord ...
Valiantly shouldering aside all mockery, the team of researchers soldiered on, spending $2.4 million of Templeton money under the leadership of Dr Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston. Dr Benson was earlier quoted in a Templeton press release as 'believing that evidence for the efficacy of intercessory prayer in medicinal settings is mounting'. Reassuringly, then, the research was in good hands, unlikely to be spoiled by sceptical vibrations. Dr Benson and his team monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn't know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn't know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it. The comparison between Groups 1 and 2 tests for the efficacy of intercessory prayer. Group 3 tests for possible psychosomatic effects of knowing that one is being prayed for.
Prayers were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri, all distant from the three hospitals. The praying individuals, as explained, were given only the first name and initial letter of the surname of each patient for whom they were to pray. It is good experimental practice to standardize as far as possible, and they were all, accordingly, told to include in their prayers the phrase 'for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications'.
The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. What a surprise. There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other; but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. Was God doing a bit of smiting, to show his disapproval of the whole barmy enterprise? It seems more probable that those patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered additional stress in consequence: 'performance anxiety', as the experimenters put it. Dr. Charles Bethea, one of the researchers, said, 'It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?' In today's litigious society, is it too much· to hope that those patients suffering heart complications, as a consequence of knowing they were receiving experimental prayers, might put together a class action lawsuit against the Templeton Foundation?
It will be no surprise that this study was opposed by theologians, perhaps anxious about its capacity to bring ridicule upon religion. The Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne, writing after the study failed, objected to it on the grounds that God answers prayers only if they are offered up for good reasons. [37] Praying for somebody rather than somebody else, simply because of the fall of the dice in the design of a double-blind experiment, does not constitute a good reason. God would see through it. That, indeed, was the point of my Bob Newhart satire, and Swinburne is right to make it too. But in other parts of his paper Swinburne himself is beyond satire. Not for the first time, he seeks to justify suffering in a world run by God:
My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering ... Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.
Another typical piece of theological reasoning occurs further along in Swinburne's article. He rightly suggests that if God wanted to demonstrate his own existence he would find better ways to do it than slightly biasing the recovery statistics of experimental versus control groups of heart patients. If God existed and wanted to convince us of it, he could 'fill the world with super-miracles'. But then Swinburne lets fall his gem: 'There is quite a lot of evidence anyway of God's existence, and too much might not be good for us.' Too much might not be good for us! Read it again. Too much evidence might not be good for us. Richard Swinburne is the recently retired holder of one of Britain's most prestigious professorships of theology, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. If it's a theologian you want, they don't come much more distinguished. Perhaps you don't want a theologian.
Swinburne wasn't the only theologian to disown the study after it had failed. The Reverend Raymond J. Lawrence was granted a generous tranche of op-ed space in the New York Times to explain why responsible religious leaders 'will breathe a sigh of relief' that no evidence could be found of intercessory prayer having any effect. [38] Would he have sung a different tune if the Benson study had succeeded in demonstrating the power of prayer? Maybe not, but you can be certain that plenty of other pastors and theologians would. The Reverend Lawrence's piece is chiefly memorable for the following revelation: 'Recently, a colleague told me about a devout, well-educated woman who accused a doctor of malpractice in his treatment of her husband. During her husband's dying days, she charged, the doctor had failed to pray for him.'
Needless to say, the negative results of the experiment will not shake the faithful. Bob Barth, the spiritual director of the Missouri prayer ministry which supplied some of the experimental prayers, said: 'A person of faith would say that this study is interesting, but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.' Yeah, right: we know from our faith that prayer works, so if evidence fails to show it we'll just soldier on until finally we get the result we want.
A possible ulterior motive for those scientists who insist on NOMA -- the invulnerability to science of the God Hypothesis -- is a peculiarly American political agenda, provoked by the threat of populist creationism. In parts of the United States, science is under attack from a well-organized, politically well-connected and, above all, well-financed opposition, and the teaching of evolution is in the front-line trench. Scientists could be forgiven for feeling threatened, because most research money comes ultimately from government, and elected representatives have to answer to the ignorant and prejudiced, as well as to the well-informed, among their constituents.
In response to such threats, an evolution defence lobby has sprung up, most notably represented by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), led by Eugenie Scott, indefatigable activist on behalf of science who has recently produced her own book, Evolution vs. Creationism. One of NCSE's main political objectives is to court and mobilize 'sensible' religious opinion: mainstream churchmen and women who have no problem with evolution and may regard it as irrelevant to (or even in some strange way supportive of) their faith. It is to this mainstream of clergy, theologians and non-fundamentalist believers, embarrassed as they are by creationism because it brings religion into disrepute, that the evolution defence lobby tries to appeal. And one way to do this is to bend over backwards in their direction by espousing NOMA -- agree that science is completely non-threatening, because it is disconnected from religion's claims.
Another prominent luminary of what we might call the Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists is the philosopher Michael Ruse. Ruse has been an effective fighter against creationism, [39] both on paper and in court. He claims to be an atheist, but his article in Playboy takes the view that
we who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist.
From a purely tactical viewpoint, I can see the superficial appeal of Ruse's comparison with the fight against Hitler: 'Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt did not like Stalin and communism. But in fighting Hitler they realized that they had to work with the Soviet Union. Evolutionists of all kinds must likewise work together to fight creationism.' But I finally come down on the side of my colleague the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne, who wrote that Ruse
fails to grasp the real nature of the conflict. It's not just about evolution versus creationism. To scientists like Dawkins and Wilson [E. 0. Wilson, the celebrated Harvard biologist], the real war is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition. Creationism is just a symptom of what they see as the greater enemy: religion. While religion can exist without creationism, creationism cannot exist without religion. [40]
I do have one thing in common with the creationists. Like me, but unlike the 'Chamberlain school', they will have no truck with NOMA and its separate magisteria. Far from respecting the separateness of science's turf, creationists like nothing better than to trample their dirty hobnails all over it. And they fight dirty, too. Lawyers for creationists, in court cases around the American boondocks, seek out evolutionists who are openly atheists. I know -- to my chagrin -- that my name has been used in this way. It is an effective tactic because juries selected at random are likely to include individuals brought up to believe that atheists are demons incarnate, on a par with pedophiles or 'terrorists' (today's equivalent of Salem's witches and McCarthy's Commies). Any creationist lawyer who got me on the stand could instantly win over the jury simply by asking me: 'Has your knowledge of evolution influenced you in the direction of becoming an atheist?' I would have to answer yes and, at one stroke, I would have lost the jury. By contrast, the judicially correct answer from the secularist side would be: 'My religious beliefs, or lack of them, are a private matter, neither the business of this court nor connected in any way with my science.' I couldn't honestly say this, for reasons I shall explain in Chapter 4.
The Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting wrote an article entitled 'Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins'. [41] There's no indication that she consulted anybody except Michael Ruse, and her article might as well have been ghost-written by him. [viii] Dan Dennett replied, aptly quoting Uncle Remus:
I find it amusing that two Brits -- Madeleine Bunting and Michael Ruse -- have fallen for a version of one of the most famous scams in American folklore (Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins, March 27). When Brer Rabbit gets caught by the fox, he pleads with him: 'Oh, please, please, Brer Fox, whatever you do, don't throw me in that awful briar patch!' -- where he ends up safe and sound after the fox does just that. When the American propagandist William Dembski writes tauntingly to Richard Dawkins, telling him to keep up the good work on behalf of intelligent design, Bunting and Ruse fall for it! 'Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion -- that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God -- jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!' Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible ... [42]
This whole issue, including an independent invocation of Brer Rabbit in the briar patch, is well discussed by the biologist P. Z. Myers, whose Pharyngula blog can reliably be consulted for trenchant good sense. [43]
I am not suggesting that my colleagues of the appeasement lobby are necessarily dishonest. They may sincerely believe in NOMA, although I can't help wondering how thoroughly they've thought it through and how they reconcile the internal conflicts in their minds. There is no need to pursue the matter for the moment, but anyone seeking to understand the published statements of scientists on religious matters would do well not to forget the political context: the surreal culture wars now rending America. NOMA-style appeasement will surface again in a later chapter. Here, I return to agnosticism and the possibility of chipping away at our ignorance and measurably reducing our uncertainty about the existence or non-existence of God.
Suppose Bertrand Russell's parable had concerned not a teapot in outer space but life in outer space -- the subject of Sagan's memorable refusal to think with his gut. Once again we cannot disprove it, and the only strictly rational stance is agnosticism. But the hypothesis is no longer frivolous. We don't immediately scent extreme improbability. We can have an interesting argument based on incomplete evidence, and we can write down the kind of evidence that would decrease our uncertainty. We'd be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.
I praised Carl Sagan for disavowing gut feelings about alien life. But one can (and Sagan did) make a sober assessment of what we would need to know in order to estimate the probability. This might start from nothing more than a listing of our points of ignorance, as in the famous Drake Equation which, in Paul Davies's phrase, collects probabilities. It states that to estimate the number of independently evolved civilizations in the universe you must multiply seven terms together. The seven include the number of stars, the number of Earth-like planets per star, and the probability of this, that and the other which I need not list because the only point I am making is that they are all unknown, or estimated with enormous margins of error. When so many terms that are either completely or almost completely unknown are multiplied up, the product - the estimated number of alien civilizations -- has such colossal error bars that agnosticism seems a very reasonable, if not the only credible stance.
Some of the terms in the Drake Equation are already less unknown than when he first wrote it down in 1961. At that time, our solar system of planets orbiting a central star was the only one known, together with the local analogies provided by Jupiter's and Saturn's satellite systems. Our best estimate of the number of orbiting systems in the universe was based on theoretical models, coupled with the more informal 'principle of mediocrity': the feeling (born of uncomfortable history lessons from Copernicus, Hubble and others) that there should be nothing particularly unusual about the place where we happen to live. Unfortunately, the principle of mediocrity is in its turn emasculated by the 'anthropic' principle (see Chapter 4): if our solar system really were the only one in the universe, this is precisely where we, as beings who think about such matters, would have to be living. The very fact of our existence could retrospectively determine that we live in an extremely unmediocre place.
But today's estimates of the ubiquity of solar systems are no longer based on the principle of mediocrity; they are informed by direct evidence. The spectroscope, nemesis of Comte's positivism, strikes again. Our telescopes are scarcely powerful enough to see planets around other stars directly. But the position of a star is perturbed by the gravitational pull of its planets as they whirl around it, and spectroscopes can pick up the Doppler shifts in the star's spectrum, at least in cases where the perturbing planet is large. Mostly using this method, at the time of writing we now know of 170 extra-solar planets orbiting 147 stars,44but the figure will certainly have increased by the time you read this book. So far, they are bulky 'Jupiters', because only Jupiters are large enough to perturb their stars into the zone of detectability of present-day spectroscopes.
We have at least quantitatively improved our estimate of one previously shrouded term of the Drake Equation. This permits a significant, if still moderate, easing of our agnosticism about the final value yielded by the equation. We must still be agnostic about life on other worlds -- but a little bit less agnostic, because we are just that bit less ignorant. Science can chip away at agnosticism, in a way that Huxley bent over backwards to deny for the special case of God. I am arguing that, notwithstanding the polite abstinence of Huxley, Gould and many others, the God question is not in principle and forever outside the remit of science. As with the nature of the stars, contra Comte, and as with the likelihood of life in orbit around them, science can make at least probabilistic inroads into the territory of agnosticism.
My definition of the God Hypothesis included the words 'superhuman' and 'supernatural'. To clarify the difference, imagine that a SETI radio telescope actually did pick up a signal from outer space which showed, unequivocally, that we are not alone. It is a non-trivial question, by the way, what kind of signal would convince us of its intelligent origin. A good approach is to turn the question around. What should we intelligently do in order" to advertise our presence to extraterrestrial listeners? Rhythmic pulses wouldn't do it. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the radio astronomer who first discovered the pulsar in 1967, was moved by the precision of its 1.33-second periodicity to name it, tongue in cheek, the LGM (Little Green Men) signal. She later found a second pulsar, elsewhere in the sky and of different periodicity, which pretty much disposed of the LGM hypothesis. Metronomic rhythms can be generated by many non-intelligent phenomena, from swaying branches to dripping water, from time lags in self-regulating feedback loops to spinning and orbiting celestial bodies. More than a thousand pulsars have now been found in our galaxy, and it is generally accepted that each one is a spinning neutron star emitting radio energy that sweeps around like a lighthouse beam. It is amazing to think of a star rotating on a timescale of seconds (imagine if each of our days lasted 1.33 seconds instead of 24 hours), but just about everything we know of neutron stars is amazing. The point is that the pulsar phenomenon is now understood as a product of simple physics, not intelligence.
Nothing simply rhythmic, then, would announce our intelligent presence to the waiting universe. Prime numbers are often mentioned as the recipe of choice, since it is difficult to think of a purely physical process that could generate them. Whether by detecting prime numbers or by some other means, imagine that SETI does come up with unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, followed, perhaps, by a massive transmission of knowledge and wisdom, along the science-fiction lines of Fred Hoyle's A for Andromeda or Carl Sagan's Contact. How should we respond? A pardonable reaction would be something akin to worship, for any civilization capable of broadcasting a signal over such an immense distance is likely to be greatly superior to ours. Even if that civilization is not more advanced than ours at the time of transmission, the enormous distance between us entitles us to calculate that they must be millennia ahead of us by the time the message reaches us (unless they have driven themselves extinct, which is not unlikely).
Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic: The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honour to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns, telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.
In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how godlike they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't start that way. Science-fiction authors, such as Daniel F. Galouye in Counterfeit World, have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization. But the simulators themselves would have to come from somewhere. The laws of probability forbid all notions of their spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution: some sort of cumulatively ratcheting 'crane' as opposed to 'skyhook', to use Daniel Dennett's terminology. [45] Skyhooks -- including all gods - are magic spells. They do no bona fide explanatory work and demand more explanation than they provide. Cranes are explanatory devices that actually do explain. Natural selection is the champion crane of all time. It has lifted life from primeval simplicity to the dizzy heights of complexity, beauty and apparent design that dazzle us today. This will be a dominant theme of Chapter 4, 'Why there almost certainly is no God'. But first, before proceeding with my main reason for actively disbelieving in God's existence, I have a responsibility to dispose of the positive arguments for belief that have been offered through history.
i. Tom Flynn, Editor of Free Inquiry, makes the point forcefully ('Secularism's breakthrough moment,' Free Inquiry 26: 3, 2006, 16-17): 'If atheists are lonely and downtrodden, we have only ourselves to blame. Numerically, we are strong. Let's start punching our weight.'
ii. Stop Press: in March 2007, Representative Pete Stark, US Congressman for the California 13th District, publicly acknowledged his lack of theistic belief ( Let's hope other American politicians will now follow this brave man's example. Come on, dive in, the water's cold but refreshing.
iii. 'Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis: as Laplace said when Napoleon wondered how the famous mathematician had managed to write his book without mentioning God.
iv. Perhaps I spoke too soon. The Independent on Sunday of 5 June 2005 carried the following item: 'Malaysian officials say religious sect which built sacred teapot the size of a house has flouted planning regulations.' See also BBC News at
v. Camp Quest takes the American institution of the summer camp in an entirely admirable direction. Unlike other summer camps that follow a religious or scouting ethos, Camp Quest, founded by Edwin and Helen Kagin in Kentucky, is run by secular humanists, and the children are encouraged to think sceptically for themselves while having a very good time with all the usual outdoor activities ( Other Camp Quests with a similar ethos have now sprung up in Tennessee, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and Canada.
vi. When my Oxford college elected the Warden whom I quoted earlier, it happened that the Fellows publicly drank his health on three successive evenings. At the third of these dinners, he graciously remarked in his speech of reply: 'I'm feeling better already.'
vii. This interchange was edited out of the final broadcast version. That Swinburne's remark is typical of his theology is indicated by his rather similar comment about Hiroshima in The Existence of God (2004), page 264: 'Suppose that one less person had been burnt by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Then there would have been less opportunity for courage and sympathy ...'
viii. The same could be said of an article, 'When cosmologies collide', in the New York Times, 22 Jan. 2006, by the respected (and usually much better briefed) journalist Judith Shulevitz. General Montgomery's First Rule of War was 'Don't march on Moscow.' Perhaps there should be a First Rule of Science Journalism: 'Interview at least one person other than Michael Ruse.'
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:51 pm
Part 1 of 2
A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.
Arguments for the existence of God have been codified for centuries by theologians, and supplemented by others, including purveyors of misconceived 'common sense'.
The five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don't prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence -- exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress -- the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.
3. The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.
All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent. Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in equally engaging verse:
Can omniscient God,
who Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?
To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a 'big bang singularity', or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading. Edward Lear's Nonsense Recipe for Crumboblious Cutlets invites us to 'Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.' Some regresses do reach a natural terminator. Scientists used to wonder what would happen if you could dissect, say, gold into the smallest possible pieces. Why shouldn't you cut one of those pieces in half and produce an even smaller smidgen of gold? The regress in this case is decisively terminated by the atom. The smallest possible piece of gold is a nucleus consisting of exactly seventy-nine protons and a slightly larger number of neutrons, attended by a swarm of seventy-nine electrons. If you 'cut' gold any further than the level of the single atom, whatever else you get it is not gold. The atom provides a natural terminator to the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the regresses of Aquinas. That's putting it mildly, as we shall see later. Let's move on down Aquinas' list.
5. The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design. Things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Therefore there must have been a designer, and we call him God. [i] Aquinas himself used the analogy of an arrow moving towards a target, but a modern heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile would have suited his purpose better.
The argument from design is the only one still in regular use today, and it still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. The young Darwin was impressed by it when, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he read it in William Paley's Natural Theology. Unfortunately for Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water. There has probably never been a more devastating rout of popular belief by clever reasoning than Charles Darwin's destruction of the argument from design. It was so unexpected ..Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance. And among these eminences of pseudo-design are nervous systems which -- among their more modest accomplishments -- manifest goal-seeking behaviour that, even in a tiny insect, resembles a sophisticated heat-seeking missile more than a simple arrow on target. I shall return to the argument from design in Chapter 4.
Arguments for God's existence fall into two main categories, the a priori and the a posteriori. Thomas Aquinas' five are a posteriori arguments, relying upon inspection of the world. The most famous of the a priori arguments, those that rely upon pure armchair ratiocination, is the ontological argument, proposed by St Anselm of Canterbury in 1078 and restated in different forms by numerous philosophers ever since. An odd aspect of Anselm's argument is that it was originally addressed not to humans but to God himself, in the form of a prayer (you'd think that any entity capable of listening to a prayer would need no convincing of his own existence).
Let me translate this infantile argument into the appropriate language, which is the language of the playground:
'Bet you I can prove God exists.'
'Bet you can't.'
'Okay, now what?'
'No, it's only in my mind.'
I had my childish wiseacre choose the word 'fools' advisedly. Anselm himself quoted the first verse of Psalm 14, 'The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God; and he had the cheek to use the name 'fool' (Latin insipiens) for his hypothetical atheist:
The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically, so I must take care to refrain from bandying words like 'fool'. Bertrand Russell (no fool) interestingly said, 'It is easier to feel convinced that [the ontological argument] must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.' Russell himself, as a young man, was briefly convinced by it:
I remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air, and exclaimed as I caught it: 'Great God in boots!, the ontological argument is sound!'
Why, I wonder, didn't he say something like: 'Great God in boots, the ontological argument seems to be plausible. But isn't it too good to be true that a grand truth about the cosmos should follow from a mere word game? I'd better set to work to resolve what is perhaps a paradox like those of Zeno.' The Greeks had a hard time seeing through Zeno's 'proof' that Achilles would never catch the tortoise. [ii] But they had the sense not to conclude that therefore Achilles really would fail to catch the tortoise. Instead, they called it a paradox and waited for later generations of mathematicians to explain it. Russell himself, of course, was as well qualified as anyone to understand why no tobacco tins should be thrown up in celebration of Achilles' failure to catch the tortoise. Why didn't he exercise the same caution over St Anselm? I suspect that he was an exaggeratedly fair-minded atheist, over-eager to be disillusioned if logic seemed to require it. [iii] Or perhaps the answer lies in something Russell himself wrote in 1946, long after he had rumbled the ontological argument:
My own feeling, to the contrary, would have been an automatic, deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world. Perhaps that indicates no more than that I am a scientist rather than a philosopher. Philosophers down the centuries have indeed taken the ontological argument seriously, both for and against. The atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie gives a particularly clear discussion in The Miracle of Theism. I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
The most definitive refutations of the ontological argument are usually attributed to the philosophers David Hume (1711-76) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant identified the trick card up Anselm's sleeve as his slippery assumption that 'existence' is more 'perfect' than non-existence. The American philosopher Norman Malcolm put it like this: 'The doctrine that existence is a perfection is remarkably queer. It makes sense and is true to say that my future house will be a better one if it is insulated than if it is not insulated; but what could it mean to say that it will be a better house if it exists than if it does not?' [46] The Australian philosopher Douglas Gasking devised an ironic parody of Anselm's argument, which he did not record, but which has been reconstructed by William Grey of the University of Queensland as follows:
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being -- namely, one who created everything while not existing.
7. God does not exist.
Needless to say, Gasking didn't really prove that God does not exist. By the same token, Anselm didn't prove that he does. The only difference is, Gasking was being funny on purpose. As he realized, the existence or non-existence of God is too big a question to be decided by 'dialectical prestidigitation'. And I don't think the slippery use of existence as an indicator of perfection is the worst of the argument's problems. I've forgotten the details, but I once piqued a gathering of theologians and philosophers by adapting the ontological argument to prove that pigs can fly. They felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to prove that I was wrong.
The ontological argument, like all a priori arguments for the existence of God, reminds me of the old man in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point who discovered a mathematical proof of the existence of God:
You know the formula, m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought. In which case you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Doesn't it?
Unfortunately, the famous story of Diderot, the encyclopedist of the Enlightenment, and Euler, the Swiss mathematician, is open to doubt. According to legend, Catherine the Great staged a debate between the two of them in which the pious Euler threw down the challenge to the atheistic Diderot: 'Monsieur, (a + bn)/n = x, therefore God exists. Reply!' The point of the myth is that Diderot was no mathematician and therefore had to withdraw in confusion. However, as B. H. Brown pointed out in the American Mathematical Monthly (1942), Diderot was actually rather a good mathematician, and would have been unlikely to fall for what might be called the Argument from Blinding with Science (in this case mathematics). David Mills, in Atheist Universe, transcribes a radio interview of himself by a religious spokesman, who invoked the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy in a weirdly ineffectual attempt to blind with science: 'Since we're all composed of matter and energy, doesn't that scientific principle lend credibility to a belief in eternal life?' Mills replied more patiently and politely than I would have, for what the interviewer was saying, translated into English, was no more than: 'When we die, none of the atoms of our body (and none of the energy) are lost. Therefore we are immortal.'
Even I, with my long experience, have never encountered wishful thinking as silly as that. I have, however, met many of the wonderful 'proofs' collected at LINKS/GodProof.htm, a richly comic numbered list of 'Over Three Hundred Proofs of God's Existence'. Here's a hilarious half-dozen, beginning with Proof Number 36.
36. Argument from Incomplete Devastation: A plane crashed killing 143 passengers and crew. But one child survived with only third-degree burns. Therefore God exists.
37. Argument from Possible Worlds: If things had been different, then things would be different. That would be bad. Therefore God exists.
38. Argument from Sheer Will: I do believe in God! I do believe in God! I do I do I do. I do believe in God! Therefore God exists.
39. Argument from Non-belief: The majority of the world's population are non-believers in Christianity. This is just what Satan intended. Therefore God exists.
40. Argument from Post-Death Experience: Person X died an atheist. He now realizes his mistake. Therefore God exists.
41. Argument from Emotional Blackmail: God loves you. How could you be so heartless as not to believe in him? Therefore God exists.
I once was the guest of the week on a British radio show called Desert Island Discs. You have to choose the eight records you would take with you if marooned on a desert island. Among my choices was 'Mache dich mein Herze rein' from Bach's St Matthew Passion. The interviewer was unable to understand how I could choose religious music without being religious. You might as well say, how can you enjoy Wuthering Heights when you know perfectly well that Cathy and Heathcliff never really existed?
But there is an additional point that I might have made, and which needs to be made whenever religion is given credit for, say, the Sistine Chapel of 'Raphael's Annunciation. Even great artists have to earn a living, and they will take commissions where they are to be had. I have no reason to doubt that Raphael and Michelangelo were Christians -- it was pretty much the only option in their time -- but the fact is almost incidental. Its enormous wealth had made the Church the dominant patron of the arts. If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn't he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven's Mesozoic Symphony, or Mozart's opera The Expanding Universe. And what a shame that we are deprived of Haydn's Evolution Oratorio -- but that does not stop us from enjoying his Creation. To approach the argument from the other side, what if, as my wife chillingly suggests to me, Shakespeare had been obliged to work to commissions from the Church? We'd surely have lost Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth. And what would we have gained in return? Such stuff as dreams are made on? Dream on.
If there is a logical argument linking the existence of great art to the existence of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents. It is simply assumed to be self-evident, which it most certainly is not. Maybe it is to be seen as yet another version of the argument from design: Schubert's musical brain is a wonder of improbability, even more so than the vertebrate eye. Or, more ignobly, perhaps ,it's a sort of jealousy of genius. How dare another human being make such beautiful music/poetry/art, when I can't? It must be God that did it.
One of the cleverer and more mature of my undergraduate contemporaries, who was deeply religious, went camping in the Scottish isles. In the middle of the night he and his girlfriend were woken in their tent by the voice of the devil -- Satan himself; there could be no possible doubt: the voice was in every sense diabolical. My friend would never forget this horrifying experience, and it was one of the factors that later drove him to be ordained. My youthful self was impressed by his story, and I recounted it to a gathering of zoologists relaxing in the Rose and Crown Inn, Oxford. Two of them happened to be experienced ornithologists, and they roared with laughter. 'Manx Shearwater!' they shouted in delighted chorus. One of them added that the diabolical shrieks and cackles of this species have earned it, in various parts of the world and various languages, the local nickname 'Devil Bird'.
Many people believe in God because they believe they have seen a vision of him -- or of an angel or a virgin in blue -- with their own eyes. Or he speaks to them inside their heads. This argument from personal experience is the one that is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But it is the least convincing to anyone else, and anyone knowledgeable about psychology.
You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other people's heads. We humour them but don't take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that die people who claim them are numerous. Sam Harris was not being overly cynical when he wrote, in The End of Faith:
We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or 'delusional' ... Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.
I shall return to the subject of hallucinations in Chapter 10.
The human brain runs first-class simulation software. Our eyes don't present to our brains a faithful photograph of what is out there, or an accurate movie of what is going on through time. Our brains construct a continuously updated model: updated by coded pulses chattering along the optic nerve, but constructed nevertheless. Optical illusions are vivid reminders of this. [47] A major class of illusions, of which the Necker Cube is an example, arise because the sense data that the brain receives are compatible with two alternative models of reality. The brain, having no basis for choosing between them, alternates, and we experience a series of flips from one internal model to the other. The picture we are looking at appears, almost literally, to flip over and become something else.
The simulation software in the brain is especially adept at constructing faces and voices. I have on my windowsill a plastic mask of Einstein. When seen from the front, it looks like a solid face, not surprisingly. What is surprising is that, when seen from behind -- the hollow side -- it also looks like a solid face, and our perception of it is very odd indeed. As the viewer moves around, the face seems to follow -- and not in the weak, unconvincing sense that the Mona Lisa's eyes are said to follow you. The hollow mask really really looks as though it is moving. People who haven't previously seen the illusion gasp with amazement. Even stranger, if the mask is mounted on a slowly rotating turntable, it appears to turn in the correct direction when you are looking at the solid side, but in the opposite direction when the hollow side comes into view. The result is that, when you watch the transition from one side to the other, the coming side appears to 'eat' the going side. It is a stunning illusion, well worth going to some trouble to see. Sometimes you can get surprisingly close to the hollow face and still not see that it is 'really' hollow. When you do see it, again there is a sudden flip, which may be reversible.
Why does it happen? There is no trick in the construction of the mask. Any hollow mask will do it. The trickery is all in the brain of the beholder. The internal simulating software receives data indicating the presence of a face, perhaps nothing more than a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth in approximately the right places. Having received these sketchy clues, the brain does the rest. The face simulation software kicks into action and it constructs a fully solid model of a face, even though the reality presented to the eyes is a hollow mask. The illusion of rotation in the wrong direction comes about because (it's quite hard, but if you think it through carefully you will confirm it) reverse rotation is the only way to make sense of the optical data when a hollow mask rotates while being perceived to be a solid mask. [48] It is like the illusion of a rotating radar dish that you sometimes see at airports. Until the brain flips to the correct model of the radar dish, an incorrect model is seen rotating in the wrong direction but in' a weirdly cock-eyed way.
I say all this just to demonstrate the formidable power of the brain's simulation software. It is well capable of constructing 'visions' and 'visitations' of the utmost veridical power. To simulate a ghost or an angel or a Virgin Mary would be child's play to software of this sophistication. And the same thing works for hearing. When we hear a sound, it is not faithfully transported up the auditory nerve and relayed to the brain as if by a high-fidelity Bang & Olufsen. As with vision, the brain constructs a sound model, based upon continuously updated auditory nerve data. That is why we hear a trumpet blast as a single note, rather than as the composite of pure-tone harmonics that gives it its brassy snarl. A clarinet playing the same note sounds 'woody', and an oboe sounds 'reedy', because of different balances of harmonics. If you carefully manipulate a sound synthesizer to bring in the separate harmonics one by one, the brain hears them as a combination of pure tones for a short while, until its simulation software 'gets it', and from then on we experience only a single note of pure trumpet or oboe or whatever it is. The vowels and consonants of speech are constructed in the brain in the same kind of way, and so, at another level, are higher-order phonemes and words.
Once, as a child, I heard a ghost: a male voice murmuring, as if in recitation or prayer. I could almost, but not quite, make out the words, which seemed to have a serious, solemn timbre. I had been told stories of priest holes in ancient houses, and I was a little frightened. But I got out of bed and crept up on the source of the sound. As I got closer, it grew louder, and then suddenly it 'flipped' inside my head. I was now close enough to discern what it really was. The wind, gusting through the keyhole, was creating sounds which the simulation software in my brain had used to construct a model of male speech, solemnly intoned. Had I been a more impressionable child, it is possible that I would have 'heard' not just unintelligible speech but particular words and even sentences. And had I been both impressionable and religiously brought up, I wonder what words the wind might have spoken.
On another occasion, when I was about the same age, I saw a giant round face gazing, with unspeakable malevolence, out through the window of an otherwise ordinary house in a seaside village. In trepidation, I approached until I was close enough to see what it really was: just a vaguely face-like pattern created by the chance fall of the curtains. The face itself, and its evil mien, had been constructed in my fearful child's brain. On 11 September 2001, pious people thought they saw the face of Satan in the smoke rising from the Twin Towers: a superstition backed by a photograph which was published on the Internet and widely circulated.
Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination. As Chapter 10 will show, children who have (imaginary friends' sometimes see them clearly, exactly as if they were real. If we are gullible, we don't recognize hallucination or lucid dreaming for what it is and we claim to have seen or heard a ghost; or an angel; or God; or -- especially if we happen to be young, female and Catholic -- the Virgin Mary. Such visions and manifestations are certainly not good grounds for believing that ghosts or angels, gods or virgins, are actually there.
On the face of it mass visions, such as the report that seventy thousand pilgrims at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 saw the sun (tear itself from the heavens and come crashing down upon the multitude', [49] are harder to write off. It is not easy to explain how seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination. But it is even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the world, outside Fatima, seeing it too -- and not just seeing it, but feeling it as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system, including acceleration forces sufficient to hurl everybody into space. David Hume's pithy test for a miracle comes irresistibly to mind: 'No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.'
It may seem improbable that seventy thousand people could simultaneously be deluded, or could simultaneously collude in a mass lie. Or that history is mistaken in recording that seventy thousand people claimed to see the sun dance. Or that they all simultaneously saw a mirage (they had been persuaded to stare at the sun, which can't have done much for their eyesight). But any of those apparent improbabilities is far more probable than the alternative: that the Earth was suddenly yanked sideways in its orbit, and the solar system destroyed, with nobody outside Fatima noticing. I mean, Portugal is not that isolated. [iv]
That is really all that needs to be said about personal 'experiences' of gods or other religious phenomena. If you've had such an experience, you may well find yourself believing firmly that it was real. But don't expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:51 pm
Part 2 of 2
There are still some people who are persuaded by scriptural evidence to believe in God. A common argument, attributed among others to C. S. Lewis (who should have known better), states that, since Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he must have been either right or else insane ,or a liar: 'Mad, Bad or God'. Or, with artless alliteration, 'Lunatic, Liar or Lord'. The historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal. But even if that evidence were good, the trilemma on offer would be ludicrously inadequate. A fourth possibility, almost too obvious to need mentioning, is that Jesus was honestly mistaken. Plenty of people are. In any case, as I said, there is no good historical evidence that he ever thought he was divine.
A good example of the colouring by religious agendas is the whole heart-warming legend of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod's massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were written, many years after Jesus' death, nobody knew where he was born. But an Old Testament prophecy (Micah 5: 2) had led Jews to expect that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In the light of this prophecy, John's gospel specifically remarks that his followers were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem: 'Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?'
Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes. Matthew has Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem all along, moving to Nazareth only long after the birth of Jesus, on their return from Egypt where they fled from King Herod and the massacre of the innocents. Luke, by contrast, acknowledges that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before Jesus was born. So how to get them to Bethlehem at the crucial moment, in order to fulfil the prophecy? Luke says that, in the time when Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of Syria, Caesar Augustus decreed a census for taxation purposes, and everybody had to go 'to his own city'. Joseph was 'of the house and lineage of David' and therefore he had to go to 'the city of David, which is called Bethlehem'. That must have seemed like a good solution. Except that historically it is complete nonsense, as A. N. Wilson in Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version (among others) have pointed out. David, if he existed, lived nearly a thousand years before Mary and Joseph. Why on earth would the Romans have required Joseph to go to the city where a remote ancestor had lived a millennium earlier? It is as though I were required to specify, say, Ashby-de-la-Zouch as my home town on a census form, if it happened that I could trace my ancestry back to the Seigneur de Dakeyne, who came over with William the Conqueror and settled there.
Moreover, Luke screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius -- a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late: in AD 6, long after Herod's death. Lane Fox concludes that 'Luke's story is historically impossible and internally incoherent', but he sympathizes with Luke's plight and his desire to fulfil the prophecy of Micah.
In the December 2004 issue of Free Inquiry, Tom Flynn, the Editor of that excellent magazine, assembled a collection of articles documenting the contradictions and gaping holes in the well-loved Christmas story. Flynn himself lists the many contradictions between Matthew and Luke, the only two evangelists who treat the birth of Jesus at all. [50] Robert Gillooly shows how all the essential features of the Jesus legend, including the star in the east, the virgin birth, the veneration of the baby by kings, the miracles, the execution, the resurrection and the ascension are borrowed -- every last one of them -- from other religions already in existence in the Mediterranean and Near East region. Flynn suggests that Matthew's desire to fulfil messianic prophecies (descent from David, birth in Bethlehem) for the benefit of Jewish readers came into headlong collision with Luke's desire to adapt Christianity for the Gentiles, and hence to press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions (virgin birth, worship by kings, etc.). The resulting contradictions are glaring, but consistently overlooked by the faithful.
Sophisticated Christians do not need Ira Gershwin to convince them that 'The things that you're li'ble / To read in the Bible / It ain't necessarily so'. But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there who think it absolutely is necessarily so -- who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting their religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice those glaring contradictions? Shouldn't a literalist worry about the fact that Matthew traces Joseph's descent from King David via twenty-eight intermediate generations, while Luke has forty-one generations? Worse, there is almost no overlap in the names on the two lists! In any case, if Jesus really was born of a virgin, Joseph's ancestry is irrelevant and cannot be used to fulfil, on Jesus' behalf, the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah should be descended from David.
The American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a book whose subtitle is The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why, unfolds the huge uncertainty befogging the New Testament texts. [v] In the introduction to the book, Professor Ehrman movingly charts his personal educational journey from Bible-believing fundamentalist to thoughtful sceptic, a journey driven by his dawning realization of the massive fallibility of the scriptures. Significantly, as he moved up the hierarchy of American universities, from rock bottom at the 'Moody Bible Institute', through Wheaton College (a little bit higher on the scale, but still the alma mater of Billy Graham) to Princeton Theological Seminary, he was at every step warned that he would have trouble maintaining his fundamentalist Christianity in the face of dangerous progressivism. So it proved; and we, his readers, are the beneficiaries. Other refreshingly iconoclastic books of biblical criticism are Robin Lane Fox's The Unauthorized Version, already mentioned, and Jacques Berlinerblau's The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously.
The four gospels thar made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Philip, Bartholomew and Mary Magdalen. [51] Some of these gospels, the known Apocrypha of the time, were the additional gospels that Thomas Jefferson was referring to in his letter to his nephew:
The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones. The Infant Gospel of Thomas, for example, has numerous anecdotes about the child Jesus abusing his magical powers in the manner of a mischievous fairy, impishly transforming his playmates into goats, or turning mud into sparrows, or giving his father a hand with the carpentry by miraculously lengthening a piece of wood. [vi] It will be said that nobody believes crude miracle stories such as those in the Gospel of Thomas anyway. But there is no more and no less reason to believe the four canonical gospels. All have the status of legends, as factually dubious as the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Most of what the four canonical gospels share is derived from a common source, either Mark's gospel or a lost work of which Mark is the earliest extant descendant. Nobody knows who the four evangelists were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Much of what they wrote was in no sense an honest attempt at history but was simply rehashed from the Old Testament, because the gospel-makers were devoutly convinced that the life of Jesus must fulfil Old Testament prophecies. It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all, as has been done by, among others, Professor G. A. Wells of the University of London in a number of books, including Did Jesus Exist?
Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as a reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further as evidence for any kind of deity. In the farsighted words of Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, 'The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.'
Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, and the film made from it, are arousing huge controversy in church circles. Christians are encouraged to boycott the film and picket cinemas that show it. It is indeed fabricated from start to finish: invented, made-up fiction. In that respect, it is exactly like the gospels. The only difference between The Da Vinci Code and the gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.
'Newton was religious. Who are you to set yourself up as superior to Newton, Galileo, Kepler, etc. etc. etc.? If God was good enough for the likes of them, just who do you think you are?' Not that it makes much difference to such an already bad argument, some apologists even add the name of Darwin, about whom persistent, but demonstrably false, rumours of a deathbed conversion continually come around like a bad smell, [vii] ever since they were deliberately started by a certain 'Lady Hope', who spun a touching yarn of Darwin resting against the pillows in the evening light, leafing through the New Testament and confessing that evolution was all wrong. In this section I shall concentrate mostly on scientists, because -- for reasons that are perhaps not too hard to imagine -- those who trot out the names of admired individuals as religious exemplars very commonly choose scientists.
Newton did indeed claim to be religious. So did almost everybody until -- significantly I think - the nineteenth century, when there was less social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it. There have been exceptions, of course, in both directions. Even before Darwin, not everybody was a believer, as James Haught shows in his 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt. And some distinguished scientists went on believing after Darwin. We have no reason to doubt Michael Faraday's sincerity as a Christian even after the time when he must have known of Darwin's work. He was a member of the Sandemanian sect, which believed (past tense because they are now virtually extinct) in a literal interpretation of the Bible, ritually washed the feet of newly inducted members and drew lots to determine God's will. Faraday became an Elder in 1860, the year after The Origin of Species was published, and he died a Sandemanian in 1867. The experimentalist Faraday's theorist counterpart, James Clerk Maxwell, was an equally devout Christian. So was that other pillar of nineteenth-century British physics, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who tried to demonstrate that evolution was ruled out for lack of time. That great thermodynamicist's erroneous datings assumed that the sun was some kind of fire, burning fuel which would have to run out in tens of millions of years, not thousands of millions. Kelvin obviously could not be expected to know about nuclear energy. Pleasingly, at the British Association meeting of 1903, it fell to Sir George Darwin, Charles's second son, to vindicate his un-knighted father by invoking the Curies' discovery of radium, and confound the earlier estimate of the still living Lord Kelvin.
Great scientists who profess religion become harder to find through the twentieth century, but they are not particularly rare. I suspect that most of the more recent ones are religious only in the Einsteinian sense which, I argued in Chapter I, is a misuse of the word. Nevertheless, there are some genuine specimens of good scientists who are sincerely religious in the full, traditional sense. Among contemporary British scientists, the same three names crop up with the likeable familiarity of senior partners in a firm of Dickensian lawyers: Peacocke, Stannard and Polkinghorne. All three have either won the Templeton Prize or are on the Templeton Board of Trustees. After amicable discussions with all of them, both in public and in private, I remain baffled, not so much by their belief in a cosmic lawgiver of some kind, as by their belief in the details of the Christian religion: resurrection, forgiveness of sins and all.
There are some corresponding examples in the United States, for example Francis Collins, administrative head of the American branch of the official Human Genome Project. [viii] But, as in Britain, they stand out for their rarity and are a subject of amused bafflement to their peers in the academic community. In 1996, in the gardens of his old college at Cambridge, Clare, I interviewed my friend Jim Watson, founding genius of the Human Genome Project, for a BBC television documentary that I was making on Gregor Mendel, founding genius of genetics itself. Mendel, of course, was a religious man, an Augustinian monk; but that was in the nineteenth century, when becoming a monk was the easiest way for the young Mendel to pursue his science. For him, it was the equivalent of a research grant. I asked Watson whether he knew many religious scientists today. He replied: 'Virtually none. Occasionally I meet them, and I'm a bit embarrassed [laughs] because, you know, I can't believe anyone accepts truth by revelation.'
Francis Crick, Watson's co-founder of the whole molecular genetics revolution, resigned his fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, because of the college's decision to build a chapel (at the behest of a benefactor). In my interview with Watson at Clare, I conscientiously put it to him that, unlike him and Crick, some people see no conflict between science and religion, because they claim science is about how things work and religion is about what it is all for. Watson retorted: 'Well I don't think we're for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating having a good lunch.' We did have a good lunch, too.
The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound of bottoms of barrels being scraped. The only website I could find that claimed to list 'Nobel Prize-winning Scientific Christians' came up with six, out of a total of several hundred scientific Nobelists. Of these six, it turned out that four were not Nobel Prize-winners at all; and at least one, to my certain knowledge, is a non-believer who attends church for purely social reasons. A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi 'found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences, as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree of irreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from'. [52]
A study in the leading journal Nature by Larson and Witham in 1998 showed that of those American scientists considered eminent enough by their peers to have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (equivalent to being a Fellow of the Royal Society in Britain) only about 7 per cent believe in a personal God. [53] This overwhelming preponderance of atheists is almost the exact opposite of the profile of the American population at large, of whom more than 90 per cent are believers in some sort of supernatural being. The figure for less eminent scientists, not elected to the National Academy, is intermediate. As with the more distinguished sample, religious believers are in a minority, but a less dramatic minority of about 40 per cent. It is completely as I would expect that American scientists are less religious than the American public generally, and that the most distinguished scientists are the least religious of all. What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite. [54]
It is faintly amusing that the leading creationist website, 'Answers in Genesis', cites.. the Larson and Witham study, not in evidence that there might be something wrong with religion, but as a weapon in their internal battle against those rival religious apologists who claim that evolution is compatible with religion. Under the headline 'National Academy of Science is Godless to the Core', [55] 'Answers in Genesis' is pleased to quote the concluding paragraph of Larson and Witham's letter to the editor of Nature:
As we compiled our findings, the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet assures readers, 'Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.' NAS president Bruce Alberts said: 'There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists: Our survey suggests otherwise.
Alberts, one feels, embraced 'NOMA' for the reasons I discussed in 'The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists' (see Chapter 2). 'Answers in Genesis' has a very different agenda.
The equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences in Britain (and the Commonwealth, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, anglophone Africa, etc.) is the Royal Society. As this book goes to press, my colleagues R. Elisabeth Cornwell and Michael Stirrat are writing up their comparable, but more thorough, research on the religious opinions of the Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS). The authors' conclusions will be published in full later, but they have kindly allowed me to quote preliminary results here. They used a standard technique for scaling opinion, the Likert-type seven-point scale. All 1,074 Fellows of the Royal Society who possess an email address (the great majority) were polled, and about 23 per cent responded (a good figure for this kind of study). They were offered various propositions, for example: 'I believe in a personal God, that is one who takes an interest in individuals, hears and answers prayers, is concerned with sin and transgressions, and passes judgement.' For each such proposition, they were invited to choose a number from 1 (strong disagreement) to 7 (strong agreement). It is a little hard to compare the results directly with the Larson and Witham study, because Larson and Witham offered their academicians only a three-point scale, not a seven-point scale, but the overall trend is the same. The overwhelming majority of FRS, like the overwhelming majority of US Academicians, are atheists. Only 3.3 per cent of the Fellows agreed strongly with the statement that a personal god exists (i.e. chose 7 on the scale), while 78.8 per cent strongly disagreed (i.e. chose 1 on the scale). If you define 'believers' as those who chose 6 or 7, and if you define 'unbelievers' as those who chose 1 or 2, there were a massive 213 unbelievers and a mere 12 believers. Like Larson and Witham, and as also noted by Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle, Cornwell and Stirrat found a small but significant tendency for biological scientists to be even more atheistic than physical scientists. For the details, and all the rest of their very interesting conclusions, please refer to their own paper when it is published. [56]
Moving on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large, atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more intelligent? Several research studies have been published on the statistical relationship between religiosity and educational level, or religiosity and IQ. Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism. None of this is surprising, nor is the fact that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and parents' religiosity. Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents' religious beliefs.
As you might expect, different researchers measure things in different ways, so it is hard to compare different studies. Meta-analysis is the technique whereby an investigator looks at all the research papers that have been published on a topic, and counts up the number of papers that have concluded one thing, versus the number that have concluded something else. On the subject of religion and IQ, the only meta-analysis known to me was published by Paul Bell in Mensa Magazine in 2002 (Mensa is the society of individuals with a high IQ, and their journal not surprisingly includes articles on the one thing that draws them together). [57] Bell concluded: 'Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence and/or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.'
A meta-analysis is almost bound to be less specific than any one of the studies that contributed to it. It would be nice to have more studies along these lines, as well as more studies of the members of elite bodies such as other national academies, and winners of major prizes and medals such as the Nobel, the Crafoord, the Fields, the Kyoto, the Cosmos and others. I hope that future editions of this book will include such data. A reasonable conclusion from existing studies is that religious apologists might be wise to keep quieter than they habitually do on the subject of admired role models, at least where scientists are concerned.
The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however long the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You'd better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.
There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your believing for you'. The de luxe model is advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City'.
But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What's so special about believing? Isn't it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn't the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. 'Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,' was Russell's (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn't God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don't need to know in order to refute Pascal's Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?
Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed, doesn't the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet vitiate Pascal's whole logic? Pascal was probably joking when he promoted his wager, just as I am joking in my dismissal of it. But I have encountered people, for example in the question session after a lecture, who have seriously advanced Pascal's Wager as an argument in favour of believing in God, so it was right to give it a brief airing here.
Is it possible, finally, to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc. I won't pursue the question here, but readers might like to bear it in mind when we come to later chapters on the evil consequences that can flow from religious belief and observance.
I think the oddest case I have seen attempted for the existence of God is the Bayesian argument recently put forward by Stephen Unwin in The Probability of God. I hesitated before including this argument, which is both weaker and less hallowed by antiquity than others. Unwin's book, however, received considerable journalistic attention when it was published in 2003, and it does give the opportunity to bring some explanatory threads together. I have some sympathy with his aims because, as argued in Chapter 2, I believe the existence of God as a scientific hypothesis is, at least in principle, investigable. Also, Unwin's quixotic attempt to put a number on the probability is quite agreeably funny.
The book's subtitle, A Simple Calculation that Proves the Ultimate Truth, has all the hallmarks of a late addition by the publisher, because such overweening confidence is not to be found in Unwin's text. The book is better seen as a 'How To' manual, a sort of Bayes' Theorem for Dummies, using the existence of God as a semi-facetious case study. Unwin could equally well have used a hypothetical murder as his test case to demonstrate Bayes' Theorem. The detective marshals the evidence. The fingerprints on the revolver point to Mrs. Peacock. Quantify that suspicion by slapping a numerical likelihood on her. However, Professor Plum had a motive to frame her. Reduce the suspicion of Mrs. Peacock by a corresponding numerical value. The forensic evidence suggests a 70 per cent likelihood that the revolver was fired accurately from a long distance, which argues for a culprit with military training. Quantify our raised suspicion of Colonel Mustard. The Reverend Green has the most plausible motive for murder. [ix] Increase our numerical assessment of his likelihood. But the long blond hair on the victim's jacket could only belong to Miss Scarlet ... and so on. A mix of more or less subjectively judged likelihoods churns around in the detective's mind, pulling him in different directions. Bayes' Theorem is supposed to help him to a conclusion. It is a mathematical engine for combining many estimated likelihoods and coming up with a final verdict, which bears its own quantitative estimate of likelihood. But of course that final estimate can only be as good as the original numbers fed in. These are usually subjectively judged, with all the doubts that inevitably flow from that. The GIGO principle (Garbage In, Garbage Out) is applicable here -- and, in the case of Unwin's God example, applicable is too mild a word.
Unwin is a risk management consultant who carries a torch for Bayesian inference, as against rival statistical methods. He illustrates Bayes' Theorem by taking on, not a murder, but the biggest test case of all, the existence of God. The plan is to start with complete uncertainty, which he chooses to quantify by assigning the existence and non-existence of God a 50 per cent starting likelihood each. Then he lists six facts that might bear on the matter, puts a numerical weighting on each, feeds the six numbers into the engine of Bayes' Theorem and sees what number pops out. The trouble is that (to repeat) the six weightings are not measured quantities but simply Stephen Unwin's own personal judgements, turned into numbers for the sake of the exercise. The six facts are:
1. We have a sense of goodness.
2. People do evil things (Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein).
3. Nature does evil things (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes).
4. There might be minor miracles (I lost my keys and found them again).
5. There might be major miracles (Jesus might have risen from the dead).
6. People have religious experiences.
For what it is worth (nothing, in my opinion), at the end of a ding-dong Bayesian race in which God surges ahead in the betting, then drops way back, then claws his way up to the 50 per cent mark from which he started, he finally ends up enjoying, in Unwin's estimation, a 67 per cent likelihood of existing. Unwin then decides that his Bayesian verdict of 67 per cent isn't high enough, so he takes the bizarre step of boosting it to 95 per cent by an emergency injection of 'faith'. It sounds like a joke, but that really is how he proceeds. I wish I could say how he justifies it, but there really is nothing to say. I have met this kind of absurdity elsewhere, when I have challenged religious but otherwise intelligent scientists to justify their belief, given their admission that there is no evidence: 'I admit that there's no evidence. There's a reason why it's called faith' (this last sentence uttered with almost truculent conviction, and no hint of apology or defensiveness).
Surprisingly, Unwin's list of six statements does not include the argument from design, nor any of Aquinas' five 'proofs', nor any of the various ontological arguments. He has no truck with them: they don't contribute even a minor fillip to his numerical estimate of God's likelihood. He discusses them and, as a good statistician, dismisses them as empty. I think this is to his credit, although his reason for discounting the design argument is different from mine. But the arguments that he does admit through his Bayesian door are, it seems to me, just as weak. That is only to say that the subjective likelihood weightings I would give to them are different from his, and who cares about subjective judgements anyway? He thinks the fact that we have a sense of right and wrong counts strongly in God's favour, whereas I don't see that it should really shift him, in either direction, from his initial prior expectation. Chapters 6 and 7 will show that there is no good case to be made for our possession of a sense of right and wrong having any clear connection with the existence of a supernatural deity. As in the case of our ability to appreciate a Beethoven quartet, our sense of goodness (though not necessarily our inducement to follow it) would be the way it is with a God and without a God.
On the other hand, Unwin thinks the existence of evil, especially natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis, counts strongly against the likelihood that God exists. Here, Unwin's judgement is opposite to mine but goes along with many uncomfortable theologians. 'Theodicy' (the vindication of divine providence in the face of the existence of evil) keeps theologians awake at night. The authoritative Oxford Companion to Philosophy gives the problem of evil as 'the most powerful objection to traditional theism'. But it is an argument only against the existence of a good God. Goodness is no part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add-on.
Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. But, for a more sophisticated believer in some kind of supernatural intelligence, it is childishly easy to overcome the problem of evil. Simply postulate a nasty god -- such as the one who stalks every page of the Old Testament. Or, if you don't like that, invent a separate evil god, call him Satan, and blame his cosmic battle against the good god for the evil in the world. Or -- a more sophisticated solution -- postulate a god with grander things to do than fuss about human distress. Or a god who is not indifferent to suffering but regards it as the price that has to be paid for free will in an orderly, lawful cosmos. Theologians can be found buying into all these rationalizations.
For these reasons, if I were redoing Unwin's Bayesian exercise, neither the problem of evil nor moral considerations in general would shift me far, one way or the other, from the null hypothesis (Unwin's 50 per cent). But I don't want to argue the point because, in any case, I can't get excited about personal opinions, whether Unwin's or mine.
i. I cannot help being reminded of the immortal syllogism that was smuggled into a Euclidean proof by a schoolfriend, when we were studying geometry together: 'Triangle ABC looks isosceles. Therefore ...'
ii. Zeno's paradox is too well known for the details to be promoted out of a footnote. Achilles can run ten times as fast as the tortoise, so he gives the animal, say, 100 yards' start. Achilles runs 100 yards, and the tortoise is now 10 yards ahead. Achilles runs the 10 yards and the tortoise is now 1 yard ahead. Achilles runs the 1 yard, and the tortoise is still a tenth of a yard ahead ... and so on ad infinitum. so Achilles never catches the tortoise.
iii. We might be seeing something similar today in the over-publicized tergiversation of the philosopher Antony Flew, who announced in his old age that he had been converted to belief in some sort of deity (triggering a frenzy of eager repetition all around the Internet). On the other hand, Russell was a great philosopher. Russell won the Nobel Prize. Maybe Flew's alleged conversion will be rewarded with the Templeton Prize. A first step in that direction is his ignominious decision to accept, in 2006, the 'Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth'. The first holder of the Phillip E. Johnson Award was Phillip E. Johnson, the lawyer credited with founding the Intelligent Design 'wedge strategy'. Flew will be the second holder. The awarding university is BIOLA, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. One can't help wondering whether Flew realizes that he is being used. See Victor Stenger, 'Flew's flawed science', Free Inquiry 25: 2, 2005, 17-18; ... enger_25_2.
iv. Although admittedly my wife's parents once stayed in a Paris hotel called the Hotel de l'Univers et du Portugal.
v. I give the subtitle because that is all I am confident of. The main title of my copy of the book, published by Continuum of London, is Whose Word Is It? I can find nothing in this edition to say whether it is the same book as the American publication by Harper San Francisco, which I haven't seen, whose main title is Misquoting Jesus. I presume they are the same book, but why do publishers do this kind of thing?
vi. A. N. Wilson, in his biography of Jesus, casts doubt on the story that Joseph was a carpenter at all. The Greek word tekton does indeed mean carpenter, but it was translated from the Aramaic word naggar, which could mean craftsman or learned man. This is one of several constructive mistranslations that bedevil the Bible, the most famous being the mistranslation of Isaiah's Hebrew for young woman (almah) into the Greek for virgin (parthenos). An easy mistake to make (think of the English words 'maid' and 'maiden' to see how it might have happened), this one translator's slip was to be wildly inflated and give rise to the whole preposterous legend of Jesus' mother being a virgin! The only competitor for the title of champion constructive mistranslation of all time also concerns virgins. Ibn Warraq has hilariously argued that in the famous promise of seventy-two virgins to every Muslim martyr, 'virgins' is a mistranslation of 'white raisins of crystal clarity: Now, if only that had been more widely known, how many innocent victims of suicide missions might have been saved? (Ibn Warraq, 'Virgins? What virgins?', Free Inquiry 26: 1,2006,45-6.)
vii. Even I have been honoured by prophecies of deathbed conversion. Indeed, they recur with monotonous regularity (see e.g. Steer 2003), each repetition trailing dewy fresh clouds of illusion that it is witty, and the first. I should probably take the precaution of installing a tape-recorder to protect my posthumous reputation. Lalla Ward adds, 'Why mess around with deathbeds? If you're going to sell out, do it in good time to win the Templeton Prize and blame it on senility.'
viii. Not to be confused with the unofficial human genome project, led by that brilliant (and non-religious) 'buccaneer' of science, Craig Venter.
ix. The Reverend Green is the character's name in the versions of Cluedo sold in Britain (where the game originated), Australia, New Zealand, India and all other English-speaking areas except North America, where he suddenly becomes Mr. Green. What is that all about?
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:56 pm
Part 1 of 2
The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily to day's most popular argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument -- but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist's intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.
The name comes from Fred Hoyle's amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. [58] Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist's favourite argument -- an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn't understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas -- in the relevant sense of chance -- it is the opposite.
The creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the politically expedient fancy dress of 'intelligent design' (ID). [i] Some observed phenomenon -- often a living creature or one of its more complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the universe itself -- is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Sometimes the language of information theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all the information in living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a measure of improbability or 'surprise value'. Or the argument may invoke the economist's hackneyed motto: there's no such thing as a free lunch -- and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.
The argument from improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define 'come about by chance' as a synonym for 'come about in the absence of deliberate design'. Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability. And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world -- cosmology, for example -- it raises our consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology.
A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and teaches us to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn't imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we all should feel, deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.
In a science-fiction starship, the astronauts were homesick: 'Just to think that it's springtime back on Earth!' You may not immediately see what's wrong with this, so deeply ingrained is the unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism in those of us who live there, and even some who don't. 'Unconscious' is exactly right. That is where consciousness-raising comes in. It is for a deeper reason than gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world with the South Pole on top. What splendid consciousness-raisers those maps would be, pinned to the walls of our northern hemisphere classrooms. Day after day, the children would be reminded that 'north' is an arbitrary polarity which has no monopoly on 'up'. The map would intrigue them as well as raise their consciousness. They'd go home and tell their parents -- and, by the way, giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow.
It was the feminists who raised my consciousness of the power of consciousness-raising. 'Herstory' is obviously ridiculous, if only because the 'his' in 'history' has no etymological connection with the masculine pronoun. It is as etymologically silly as the sacking, in 1999, of a Washington official whose use of 'niggardly' was held to give racial offence. But even daft examples like 'niggardly' or 'herstory' succeed in raising consciousness. Once we have smoothed our philological hackles and stopped laughing, herstory shows us history from a different point of view. Gendered pronouns notoriously are the front line of such consciousness-raising. He or she must ask himself or herself whether his or her sense of style could ever allow himself or herself to write like this. But if we can just get over the clunking infelicity of the language, it raises our consciousness to the sensitivities of half the human race. Man, mankind, the Rights of Man, all men are created equal, one man one vote -- English too often seems to exclude woman. [ii] When I was young, it never occurred to me that women might feel slighted by a phrase like 'the future of man'. During the intervening decades, we have all had our consciousness raised. Even those who still use 'man' instead of ,human' do so with an air of self-conscious apology - or truculence, taking a stand for traditional language, even deliberately to rile feminists. All participants in the Zeitgeist have had their consciousness raised, even those who choose to respond negatively by digging in their heels and redoubling the offence.
Feminism shows us the power of consciousness-raising, and I want to borrow the technique for natural selection. Natural selection not only explains the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance. A full understanding of natural selection encourages us to move boldly into other fields. It arouses our suspicion, in those other fields, of the kind of false alternatives that once, in pre-Darwinian' days, beguiled biology. Who, before Darwin, could have guessed that something so apparently designed as a dragonfly's wing or an eagle's eye was really the end product of a long sequence of non-random but purely natural causes?
Douglas Adams's moving and funny account of his own conversion to radical atheism -- he insisted on the 'radical' in case anybody should mistake him for an agnostic -- is testimony to the power of Darwinism as a consciousness-raiser. I hope I shall be forgiven the self-indulgence that will become apparent in the following quotation. My excuse is that Douglas's conversion by my earlier books -- which did not set out to convert anyone -- inspired me to dedicate to his memory this book - which does! In an interview, reprinted posthumously in The Salmon of Doubt, he was asked by a journalist how he became an atheist. He began his reply by explaining how he became an agnostic, and then proceeded:
The concept of stunning simplicity that he was talking about was, of course, nothing to do with me. It was Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection -- the ultimate scientific consciousness-raiser. Douglas, I miss you. You are my cleverest, funniest, most open-minded, wittiest, tallest, and possibly only convert. I hope this book might have made you laugh - though not as much as you made me.
That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You'll never see a spear making a spear maker. You'll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You'll never see a pot making a potter.' [60] Darwin's discovery of a workable process that does that very counter-intuitive thing is what makes his contribution to human thought so revolutionary, and so loaded with the power to raise consciousness.
It is surprising how necessary such consciousness-raising is, even in the minds of excellent scientists in fields other than biology. Fred Hoyle was a brilliant physicist and cosmologist, but his Boeing 747 misunderstanding, and other mistakes in biology such as his attempt to dismiss the fossil Archaeopteryx as a hoax, suggest that he needed to have his consciousness raised by some good exposure to the world of natural selection. At an intellectual level, I suppose he understood natural selection. But perhaps you need to be steeped in natural selection, immersed in it, swim about in it, before you can truly appreciate its power.
Other sciences raise our consciousness in different ways. Fred Hoyle's own science of astronomy puts us in our place, metaphorically as well as literally, scaling down our vanity to fit the tiny stage on which we play out our lives -- our speck of debris from the cosmic explosion. Geology reminds us of our brief existence both as individuals and as a species. It raised John Ruskin's consciousness and provoked his memorable heart cry of 1851: 'If only. the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.' Evolution does the same thing for our sense of time - not surprisingly, since it works on the geological timescale. But Darwinian evolution, specifically natural selection, does something more. It shatters the illusion of design within the domain of biology, and teaches us to be suspicious of any kind of design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as well. I think the physicist Leonard Susskind had this in mind when he wrote, 'I'm not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents ... Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as wel1.' [61] Other physical scientists who are far above needing any such consciousness-raising are Victor Stenger, whose book Has Science Found God? (the answer is no) I strongly recommend, [iii] and Peter Atkins, whose Creation Revisited is my favourite work of scientific prose poetry.
I am continually astonished by those theists who, far from having their consciousness raised in the way that I propose, seem to rejoice in natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note that evolution by natural selection would be a very easy and neat way to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't need to do anything at all! Peter Atkins, in the book just mentioned, takes this line of thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins's lazy God is even lazier than the deist God of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: deus otiosus -- literally God at leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless. Step by step, Atkins succeeds in reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally ends up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist. My memory vividly hears Woody Allen's perceptive whine: 'If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.'
It is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that Darwin and Wallace solved. I could mention the anatomy, cellular structure, biochemistry and behaviour of literally any living organism by example. But the most striking feats of apparent design are those picked out - for obvious reasons - by creationist authors, and it is with gentle irony that I derive mine from a creationist book. Life -- How Did It Get Here?, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world.
Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus' Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: 'When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus' Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.' The Watchtower authors lose no time in adding their own punchline: 'But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.' No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of phenomena such as Euplectella's skeleton is the central problem that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical improbability, the less plausible is chance as a solution: that is what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms, and no sane biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must solve: the problem of how to escape from chance.
Turning Watchtower's page, we find the wonderful plant known as Dutchman's Pipe (Aristolochia trilobata), all of whose parts seem elegantly designed to trap insects, cover them with pollen and send them on their way to another Dutchman's Pipe. The intricate elegance of the flower moves Watchtower to ask: 'Did all of this happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?' Once again, no of course it didn't happen by chance. Once again, intelligent design is not the proper alternative to chance. Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
Turn another Watchtower page for an eloquent account of the giant redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a tree for which I have a special affection because I have one in my garden -- a mere baby, scarcely more than a century old, but still the tallest tree in the neighbourhood. 'A puny man, standing at a sequoia's base, can only gaze upward in silent awe at its massive grandeur. Does it make sense to believe that the shaping of this majestic giant and of the tiny seed that packages it was not by design?' Yet again, if you think the only alternative to design is chance then, no, it does not make sense. But again the authors omit all mention of the real alternative, natural selection, either because they genuinely don't understand it or because they don't want to.
The process by which plants, whether tiny pimpernels or massive wellingtonias, acquire the energy to build themselves is photosynthesis. Watchtower again: '''There are about seventy separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis:' one biologist said. "It is truly a miraculous event." Green plants have been called nature's "factories" -- beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting, producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?' No, it is not believable; but the repetition of example after example gets us nowhere. Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power.
What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist's wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn't understand the power of accumulation.
In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to the top in one bound. Evolution, by contrast, .goes around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy! The principle of climbing the gentle slope as opposed to leaping up the precipice is so simple, one is tempted to marvel that it took so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene and discover it. By the time he did, nearly two centuries had elapsed since Newton's annus mirabilis, although his achievement seems, on the face of it, harder than Darwin's.
Another favourite metaphor for extreme improbability is the combination lock on a bank vault. Theoretically, a bank robber could get lucky and hit upon the right combination of numbers by chance. In practice, the bank's combination lock is designed with enough improbability to make this tantamount to impossible -- almost as unlikely as Fred Hoyle's Boeing 747. But imagine a badly designed combination lock that gave out little hints progressively -- the equivalent of the 'getting warmer' of children playing Hunt the Slipper. Suppose that when each one of the dials approaches its correct setting, the vault door opens another chink, and a dribble of money trickles out. The burglar would home in on the jackpot in no time.
Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favour always assume that biological adaptation is a question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name for the 'jackpot or nothing' fallacy is 'irreducible complexity' (IC). Either the eye sees or it doesn't. Either the wing flies or it doesn't. There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice -- which is exactly what we should expect in theory. The combination lock of life is a 'getting warmer, getting cooler, getting warmer' Hunt the Slipper device. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of Species to 'Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification', and it is fair to say that this brief chapter anticipated and disposed of every single one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed, right up to the present day. The most formidable difficulties are Darwin's 'organs of extreme perfection and complication', sometimes erroneously described as 'irreducibly complex'. Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both.
'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable.
By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey -- or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak -- not the highest peak but a high one. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I devoted a whole chapter each to the eye and the wing, demonstrating how easy it was for them to evolve by slow (or even, maybe, not all that slow) gradual degrees, and I will leave the subject here.
So, we have seen that eyes and wings are certainly not irreducibly complex; but what is more interesting than these particular examples is the general lesson we should draw. The fact that so many people have been dead wrong over these obvious cases should serve to warn us of other examples that are less obvious, such as the cellular and biochemical cases now being touted by those creationists who shelter under the politically expedient euphemism of 'intelligent design theorists'.
We have a cautionary tale here, and it is telling us this: do not just declare things to be irreducibly complex; the chances are that you haven't looked carefully enough at the details, or thought carefully enough about them. On the other hand, we on the science side must not be too dogmatically confident. Maybe there is something out there in nature that really does preclude, by its genuinely irreducible complexity, the smooth gradient of Mount Improbable. The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin's theory. Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.
In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin's theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it wouldn't wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying and will say again, however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!
Admissions of ignorance and temporary mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore unfortunate, to say the least, that the main strategy of creation propagandists is the negative one of seeking out gaps in scientific knowledge and claiming to fill them with 'intelligent design' by default. The following is hypothetical but entirely typical. A creationist speaking: 'The elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog is irreducibly complex. No part of it would do any good at all until the whole was assembled. Bet you can't think of a way in which the weasel frog's elbow could have evolved by slow gradual degrees: If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, the creationist draws a default conclusion: 'Right then, the alternative theory, "intelligent design", wins by default: Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right. Needless to say, the argument is not applied the other way ~round. We are encouraged to leap to the default theory without even looking to see whether it fails in the very same particular as the theory it is alleged to replace. Intelligent design -- ID -- is granted a Get Out Of Jail Free card, a charmed immunity to the rigorous demands made of evolution.
But my present point is that the creationist ploy undermines the scientist's natural -- indeed necessary -- rejoicing in (temporary) uncertainty. For purely political reasons, today's scientist might hesitate before saying: 'Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog's ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I'm not a specialist in weasel frogs, I'll have to go to the University Library and take a look. Might make an interesting project for a graduate student: The moment a scientist said something like that -- and long before the student began the project -- the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: 'Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.'
There is, then, an unfortunate hook-up between science's methodological need to seek out areas of ignorance in order to target research, and ID's need to seek out areas of ignorance in order to claim victory by default. It is precisely the fact that ID has no evidence of its own, but thrives like a weed in gaps left by scientific knowledge, that sits uneasily with science's need to identify and proclaim the very same gaps as a prelude to researching them. In this respect, science finds itself in alliance with sophisticated theologians like Bonhoeffer, united against the common enemies of naive, populist theology and the gap theology of intelligent design.
The creationists' love affair with 'gaps' in the fossil record symbolizes their whole gap theology. I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the sentence, 'It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.' Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader's appetite for the full explanation that was to follow. Sad hindsight tells me now how predictable it was that my patient explanation would be excised and my overture itself gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore 'gaps' in the fossil record, just as they adore gaps generally.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of gradually changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous 'gaps'. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a 'gap', the creationist will declare that there are now twice as many gaps! But in any case, note yet again the unwarranted use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the default assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition, therefore God must have intervened.
It is utterly illogical to demand complete documentation of every step of any narrative, whether in evolution or any other science. You might as well demand, before convicting somebody of murder, a complete cinematic record of the murderer's every step leading up to the crime, with no missing frames. Only a tiny fraction of corpses fossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water. When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J. B. S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian: No such anachronistic fossils have ever been authentically found, despite discredited creationist legends of human skulls in the Coal Measures and human footprints interspersed with dinosaurs'.
The logic turns out to be no more convincing than this: 'I [insert own name 1 am personally unable to think of any way in which [insert biological phenomenon] could have been built up step by step. Therefore it is irreducibly complex. That means it is designed.' Put it like that, and you immediately see that it is vulnerable to some scientist coming along and finding an intermediate; or at least imagining a plausible intermediate. Even if no scientists do come up with an explanation, it is plain bad logic to assume that 'design' will fare any better. The reasoning that underlies 'intelligent design' theory is lazy and defeatist -- classic 'God of the Gaps' reasoning. I have previously dubbed it the Argument from Personal Incredulity.
Imagine that you are watching a really great magic trick. The celebrated conjuring duo Penn and Teller have a routine in which they simultaneously appear to shoot each other with pistols, and each appears to catch the bullet in his teeth. Elaborate precautions are taken to scratch identifying marks on the bullets before they are put in the guns, the whole procedure is witnessed at close range by volunteers from the audience who have experience of firearms, and apparently all possibilities for trickery are eliminated. Teller's marked bullet ends up in Penn's mouth and Penn's marked bullet ends up in Teller's. I [Richard Dawkins] am utterly unable to think of any way in which this could be a trick. The Argument from Personal Incredulity screams from the depths of my prescientific brain centres, and almost compels me to say, 'It must be a miracle. There is no scientific explanation. It's got to be supernatural.' But the still small voice of scientific education speaks a different message. Penn and Teller are world-class illusionists. There is a perfectly good explanation. It is just that I am too naive, or too unobservant, or too unimaginative, to think of it. That is the proper response to a conjuring trick. It is also the proper response to a biological phenomenon that appears to be irreducibly complex. Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'.
In his book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, the Scottish chemist A. G. Cairns-Smith makes an additional point, using the analogy of an arch. A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones and no mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: it collapses if anyone stone is removed. How, then, was it built in the first place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully remove stones one by one. More generally, there are many structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive the subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid of scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer visible. Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution, too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed.
'Irreducible complexity' is not a new idea, but the phrase itself was invented by the creationist Michael Behe in 1996. [62] He is credited (if credited is the word) with moving creationism into a new area of biology: biochemistry and cell biology, which he saw as perhaps a happier hunting ground for gaps than eyes or wings. His best approach to a good example (still a bad one) was the bacterial flagellar motor.
The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of nature. It drives the only known example, outside human technology, of a freely rotating axle. Wheels for big animals would, I suspect, be genuine examples of irreducible complexity, and this is probably why they don't exist. How would the nerves and blood vessels get across the bearing? [iv] The flagellum is a thread-like propeller, with which the bacterium burrows its way through the water. I say 'burrows' rather than 'swims' because, on the bacterial scale of existence, a liquid such as water would not feel as a liquid feels to us. It would feel more like treacle, or jelly, or even sand, and the bacterium would seem to burrow or screw its way through the water rather than swim. Unlike the so-called flagellum of larger organisms like protozoans, the bacterial flagellum doesn't just wave about like a whip, or row like an oar. It has a true, freely rotating axle which turns continuously inside a bearing, driven by a remarkable little molecular motor. At the molecular level, the motor uses essentially the same principle as muscle, but in free rotation rather than in intermittent contraction. [v] It has been happily described as a tiny outboard motor (although by engineering standards -- and unusually for a biological mechanism -- it is a spectacularly inefficient one).
Without a word of justification, explanation or amplification, Behe simply proclaims the bacterial flagellar motor to be irreducibly complex. Since he offers no argument in favour of his assertion, we may begin by suspecting a failure of his imagination. He further alleges that specialist biological literature has ignored the problem. The falsehood of this allegation was massively and (to Behe) embarrassingly documented in the court of Judge John E. Jones in Pennsylvania in 2005, where Behe was testifying as an expert witness on behalf of a group of creationists who had tried to impose 'intelligent design' creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school -- a move of 'breathtaking inanity', to quote Judge Jones (phrase and man surely destined for lasting fame). This wasn't the only embarrassment Behe suffered at the hearing, as we shall see.
The key to demonstrating irreducible complexity is to show that none of the parts could have been useful on its own. They all needed to be in place before any of them could do any good (Behe's favourite analogy is a mousetrap). In fact, molecular biologists have no difficulty in finding parts functioning outside the whole, both for the flagellar motor and for Behe's other alleged examples of irreducible complexity. The point is well put by Kenneth Miller of Brown University, for my money the most persuasive nemesis of 'intelligent design', not least because he is a devout Christian. I frequently recommend Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God, to religious people who write to me having been bamboozled by Behe.
In the case of the bacterial rotary engine, Miller calls our attention to a mechanism called the Type Three Secretory System or TTSS. [63] The TTSS is not used for rotatory movement. It is one of several systems used by parasitic bacteria for pumping toxic substances through their cell walls to poison their host organism. On our human scale, we might think of pouring or squirting a liquid through a hole; but, once again, on the bacterial scale things look different. Each molecule of secreted substance is a large protein with a definite, three-dimensional structure on the same scale as the TTSS's own: more like a solid sculpture than a liquid. Each molecule is individually propelled through a carefully shaped mechanism, like an automated slot machine dispensing, say, toys or bottles, rather than a simple hole through which a substance might 'flow'. The goods-dispenser itself is made of a rather small number of protein molecules, each one comparable in size and complexity to the molecules being dispensed through it. Interestingly, these bacterial slot machines are often similar across bacteria that are not closely related. The genes for making them have probably been 'copied and pasted' from other bacteria: something that bacteria are remarkably adept at doing, and a fascinating topic in its own right, but I must press on.
The protein molecules that form the structure of the TTSS are very similar to components of the flagellar motor. To the evolutionist it is clear that TTSS components were commandeered for a new, but not wholly unrelated, function when the flagellar motor evolved. Given that the TTSS is tugging molecules through itself, it is not surprising that it uses a rudimentary version of the principle used by the flagellar motor, which tugs the molecules of the axle round and round. Evidently, crucial components of the flagellar motor were already in place and working before the flagellarmotor evolved. Commandeering existing mechanisms is an obvious way in which an apparently irreducibly complex piece of apparatus could climb Mount Improbable.
A lot more work needs to be done, of course, and I'm sure it will be. Such work would never be done if scientists were satisfied with a lazy default such as 'intelligent design theory' would encourage. Here is the message that an imaginary 'intelligent design theorist' might broadcast to scientists: 'If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries, for we can use them. Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away. We need those glorious gaps as a last refuge for God.' St Augustine said it quite openly: 'There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn' (quoted in Freeman 2002).
Another of Behe's favourite alleged examples of 'irreducible complexity' is the immune system. Let Judge Jones himself take up the story:
Behe, under cross-examination by Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs, was forced to admit that he hadn't read most of those fifty-eight peer-reviewed papers. Hardly surprising, for immunology is hard work. Less forgivable is that Behe dismissed such research as 'unfruitful'. It certainly is unfruitful if your aim is to make propaganda among gullible laypeople and politicians, rather than to discover important truths about the real world. After listening to Behe, Rothschild eloquently summed up what every honest person in that courtroom must have felt:
As the American geneticist Jerry Coyne put it in his review of Behe's book: 'If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labelling our ignorance "God".' Or, in the words of an eloquent blogger, commenting on an article on intelligent design in the Guardian by Coyne and me,
Darwinism raises our consciousness in other ways. Evolved organs, elegant and efficient as they often are, also demonstrate revealing flaws -- exactly as you'd expect if they have an evolutionary history, and exactly as you would not expect if they were designed. I have discussed examples in other books: the recurrent laryngeal nerve, for one, which betrays its evolutionary history in a massive and wasteful detour on its way to its destination. Many of our human ailments, from lower back pain to hernias, prolapsed uteruses and our susceptibility to sinus infections, result directly from the fact that we now walk upright with a body that was shaped over hundreds of millions of years to walk on all fours. Our consciousness is also raised by the cruelty and wastefulness of natural selection. Predators seem beautifully 'designed' to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully 'designed' to escape them. Whose side is God on? [66]
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Re: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Postby admin » Sat Sep 19, 2015 6:57 pm
Part 2 of 2
Gap theologians who may have given up on eyes and wings, flagellar motors and immune systems, often pin their remaining hopes on the origin of life. The root of evolution in non-biological chemistry somehow seems to present a bigger gap than any particular transition during subsequent evolution. And in one sense it is a bigger gap. That one sense is quite specific, and it offers no comfort to the religious apologist. The origin of life only had to happen once. We therefore can allow it to have been an extremely improbable event, many orders of magnitude more improbable than most people realize, as I shall show. Subsequent evolutionary steps are duplicated, in more or less similar ways, throughout millions and millions of species independently, and continually and repeatedly throughout geological time. Therefore, to explain the evolution of complex life, we cannot resort to the same kind of statistical reasoning as we are able to apply to the origin of life. The events that constitute run-of-the-mill evolution, as distinct from its singular origin (and perhaps a few special cases), cannot have been very improbable.
This distinction may seem puzzling, and I must explain it further, using the so-called anthropic principle. The anthropic principle was named by the mathematician Brandon Carter in 1974 and expanded by the physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler in their book on the subject. [67] The anthropic argument is usually applied to the cosmos, and I'll come to that. But I'll introduce the idea on a smaller, planetary scale. We exist here on Earth. Therefore Earth must be the kind of planet that is capable of generating and supporting us, however unusual, even unique, that kind of planet might be. For example, our kind of life cannot survive without liquid water. Indeed, exobiologists searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life are scanning the heavens, in practice, for signs of water. Around a typical star like our sun, there is a so-called Goldilocks zone -- not too hot and not too cold, but just right -- for planets with liquid water. A thin band of orbits lies between those that are too far from the star, where water freezes, and too close, where it boils.
Presumably, too, a life-friendly orbit has to be nearly circular. A fiercely elliptical orbit, like that of the newly discovered tenth planet informally known as Xena, would at best allow the planet to whizz briefly through the Goldilocks zone once every few (Earth) decades or centuries. Xena itself doesn't get into the Goldilocks zone at all, even at its closest approach to the sun, which it reaches once every 560 Earth years. The temperature of Halley's Comet varies between about 47°C at perihelion and minus 270°C at aphelion. Earth's orbit, like those of all the planets, is technically an ellipse (it is closest to the sun in January and furthest away in July [vi]); but a circle is a special case of an ellipse, and Earth's orbit is so close to circular that it never strays out of the Goldilocks zone. Earth's situation in the solar system is propitious in other ways that singled it out for the evolution of life. The massive gravitational vacuum cleaner of Jupiter is well placed to intercept asteroids that might otherwise threaten us with lethal collision. Earth's single relatively large moon serves to stabilize our axis of rotation, [68] and helps to foster life in various other ways. Our sun is unusual in not being a binary, locked in mutual orbit with a companion star. It is possible for binary stars to have planets, but their orbits are likely to be too chaotically variable to encourage the evolution of life.
Two main explanations have been offered for our planet's peculiar friendliness to life. The design theory says that God made the world, placed it in the Goldilocks zone, and deliberately set up all the details for our benefit. The anthropic approach is very different, and it has a faintly Darwinian feel. The great majority of planets in the universe are not in the Goldilocks zones of their respective stars, and not suitable for life. None of that majority has life. However small the minority of planets with just the right conditions for life may be, we necessarily have to be on one of that minority, because here we are thinking about it.
It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence. I think the confusion arises in the religious mind because the anthropic principle is only ever mentioned in the context of the problem that it solves, namely the fact that we live in a life-friendly place. What the religious mind then fails to grasp is that two candidate solutions are offered to the problem. God is one. The anthropic principle is the other. They are alternatives.
Liquid water is a necessary condition for life as we know it, but it is far from sufficient. Life still has to originate in the water, and the origin of life may have been a highly improbable occurrence. Darwinian evolution proceeds merrily once life has originated. But how does life get started? The origin of life was the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital conditions for natural selection first came about. The major ingredient was heredity, either DNA or (more probably) something that copies like DNA but less accurately, perhaps the related molecule RNA. Once the vital ingredient -- some kind of genetic molecule -- is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow, and complex life emerges as the eventual consequence. But the spontaneous arising by chance of the first hereditary molecule strikes many as improbable. Maybe it is -- very very improbable, and I shall dwell on this, for it is central to this section of the book.
The origin of life is a flourishing, if speculative, subject for research. The expertise required for it is chemistry and it is not mine. I watch from the sidelines with engaged curiosity, and I shall not be surprised if, within the next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the laboratory. Nevertheless it hasn't happened yet, and it is still possible to maintain that the probability of its happening is, and always was, exceedingly low -- although it did happen once!
Just as we did with the Goldilocks orbits, we can make the point that, however improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened on Earth because we are here. Again as with temperature, there are two hypotheses to explain what happened -- the design hypothesis and the scientific or 'anthropic' hypothesis. The design approach postulates a God who wrought a deliberate miracle, struck the prebiotic soup with divine fire and launched DNA, or something equivalent, on its momentous career.
Again, as with Goldilocks, the anthropic alternative to the design hypothesis is statistical. Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers. It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in a hundred. But here we are talking about odds of one in a billion. And yet ... even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets -- of which Earth, of course, is one. [69]
This conclusion is so surprising, I'll say it again. If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets. The chance of finding anyone of those billion life-bearing planets recalls the proverbial needle in a haystack. But we don't have to go out of our way to find a needle because (back to the anthropic principle) any beings capable of looking must necessarily be sitting on one of those prodigiously rare needles' before they even start the search.
Any probability statement is made in the context of a certain level of ignorance. If we know nothing about a planet, we may postulate the odds of life's arising on it as, say, one in a billion. But if we now import some new assumptions into our estimate, things change. A particular planet may have some peculiar properties, perhaps a special profile of element abundances in its rocks, which shift the odds in favour of life's emerging. Some planets, in other words, are more 'Earth-like' than others. Earth itself, of course, is especially Earth-like! This should give encouragement to our chemists trying to recreate the event in the lab, for it could shorten the odds against their success. But my earlier calculation demonstrated that even a chemical model with odds of success as low as one in a billion would still predict that life would arise on a billion planets in the universe. And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here. I do not for a moment believe the origin of life was anywhere near so improbable in practice. I think it is definitely worth spending money on trying to duplicate the event in the lab and -- by the same token, on SETI, because I think it is likely that there is intelligent life elsewhere.
Even accepting the most pessimistic estimate of the probability that life might spontaneously originate, this statistical argument completely demolishes any suggestion that we should postulate design to fill the gap. Of all the apparent gaps in the evolutionary story, the origin of life gap can seem unbridgeable to brains calibrated to assess likelihood and risk on an everyday scale: the scale on which grant-giving bodies assess research proposals submitted by chemists. Yet even so big a gap as this is easily filled by statistically informed science, while the very same statistical science rules out a divine creator on the 'Ultimate 747' grounds we met earlier.
But now, to return to the interesting point that launched this section. Suppose somebody tried to explain the general phenomenon of biological adaptation along the same lines as we have just applied to the origin of life: appealing to an immense number of available planets. The observed fact is that every species, and every organ that has ever been looked at within every species, is-good at what it does. The wings of birds, bees and bats are good at flying. Eyes are good at seeing. Leaves are good at photosynthesizing. We live on a planet where we are surrounded by perhaps ten million species, each one of which independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent design. Each species is well fitted to its particular way of life. Could we get away with the 'huge numbers of planets' argument to explain all these separate illusions of design? No, we could not, repeat not. Don't even think about it. This is important, for it goes to the heart of the most serious misunderstanding of Darwinism.
It doesn't matter how many planets we have to play with, lucky chance could never be enough to explain the lush diversity of living complexity on Earth in the same way as we used it to explain the existence of life here in the first place. The evolution of life is a completely different case from the origin of life because, to repeat, the origin of life was (or could have been) a unique event which had to happen only once. The adaptive fit of species to their separate environments, on the other hand, is million fold, and ongoing.
It is clear that here on Earth we are dealing with a generalized process for optimizing biological species, a process that works all over the planet, on all continents and islands, and at all times. We can safely predict that, if we wait another ten million years, a whole new set of species will be as well adapted to their ways of life as today's species are to theirs. This is a recurrent, predictable, multiple phenomenon, not a piece of statistical luck recognized with hindsight. And, thanks to Darwin, we know how it is brought about: by natural selection.
The anthropic principle is impotent to explain the multifarious details of living creatures. We really need Darwin's powerful crane to account for the diversity of life on Earth, and especially the persuasive illusion of design. The origin of life, by contrast, lies outside the reach of that crane, because natural selection cannot proceed without it. Here the anthropic principle comes into its own. We can deal with the unique origin of life by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities. Once that initial stroke of luck has been granted -- and the anthropic principle most decisively grants it to us -- natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.
Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck, anthropically justified. For example, my colleague Mark Ridley in Mendel's Demon (gratuitously and confusingly retitled The Cooperative Gene by his American publishers) has suggested that the origin of the eucaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step tha!1 the origin of life. The origin of consciousness might be another major gap whose bridging was of the same order of improbability. One-off events like this might be explained by the anthropic principle, along the following lines. There are billions of planets that have developed life at the level of bacteria, but only a fraction of these life forms ever made it across the gap to something like the eucaryotic cell. And of these, a yet smaller fraction managed to cross the later Rubicon to consciousness. If both of these are one-off events, we are not dealing with a ubiquitous and all-pervading process, as we are with ordinary, run-of-the-mill biological adaptation. The anthropic principle states that, since we are alive, eucaryotic and conscious, our planet has to be one of the intensely rare planets that has bridged all three gaps.
Natural selection works because it is a cumulative one-way street to improvement. It needs some luck to get started, and the 'billions of planets' anthropic principle grants it that luck. Maybe a few later gaps in the evolutionary story also need major infusions of luck, with anthropic justification. But whatever else we may say, design certainly does not work as an explanation for life, because design is ultimately not cumulative and it therefore raises bigger questions than it answers -- it takes us straight back along the Ultimate 747 infinite regress.
We live on a planet that is friendly to our kind of life, and we have seen two reasons why this is so. One is that life has evolved to flourish in the conditions provided by the planet. This is because of natural selection. The other reason is the anthropic one. There are billions of planets in the universe, and, however small the minority of evolution-friendly planets may be, our planet necessarily has to be one of them. Now it is time to take the anthropic principle back to an earlier stage, from biology back to cosmology.
We live not only on a friendly planet but also in a friendly universe. It follows from the fact of our existence that the laws of physics must be friendly enough to allow life to arise. It is no accident that when we look at the night sky we see stars, for stars are a necessary prerequisite for the existence of most of the chemical elements, and without chemistry there could be no life. Physicists have calculated that, if the laws and constants of physics had been even slightly different, the universe would have developed in such a way that life would have been impossible. Different physicists put it in different ways, but the conclusion is always much the same. [vii] Martin Rees, in Just Six Numbers, lists six fundamental constants, which are believed to hold all around the universe. Each of these six numbers is finely tuned in the sense that, if it were slightly different, the universe would be comprehensively different and presumably unfriendly to life. [viii]
An example of Rees's six numbers is the magnitude of the so-called 'strong' force, the force that binds the components of an atomic nucleus: the nuclear force that has to be overcome when one 'splits' the atom. It is measured as E, the proportion of the mass of a hydrogen nucleus that is converted to energy when hydrogen fuses to form helium. The value of this number in our universe is 0.007, and it looks as though it had to be very close to this value in order for any chemistry (which is a prerequisite for life) to exist. Chemistry as we know it consists of the combination and recombination of the ninety or so naturally occurring elements of the periodic table. Hydrogen is the simplest and commonest of the elements. All the other elements in the universe are made ultimately from hydrogen by nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is a difficult process which occurs in the intensely hot conditions of the interiors of stars (and in hydrogen bombs). Relatively small stars, such as our sun, can make only light elements such as helium, the second lightest in the periodic table after hydrogen. It takes larger and hotter stars to develop the high temperatures needed to forge most of the heavier elements, in a cascade of nuclear fusion processes whose details were worked out by Fred Hoyle and two colleagues (an achievement for which, mysteriously, Hoyle was not given a share of the Nobel Prize received by the others). These big stars may explode as supernovas, scattering their materials, including the elements of the periodic table, in dust clouds. These dust clouds eventually condense to form new stars and planets, including our own. This is why Earth is rich in elements over and above the ubiquitous hydrogen: elements without which chemistry, and life, would be impossible.
The relevant point here is that the value of the strong force crucially determines how far up the periodic table the nuclear fusion cascade goes. If the strong force were too small, say 0.006 instead of 0.007, the universe would contain nothing but hydrogen, and no interesting chemistry could result. If it were too large, say 0.008, all the hydrogen would have fused to make heavier elements. A chemistry without hydrogen could not generate life as we know it. For one thing, there would be no water. The Goldilocks value -- 0.007 -- is just right for yielding the richness of elements that we need for an interesting and life-supporting chemistry.
I won't go through the rest of Rees's six numbers. The bottom line for each of them is the same. The actual number sits in a Goldilocks band of values outside which life would not have been possible. How should we respond to this? Yet again, we have the theist's answer on the one hand, and the anthropic answer on the other. The theist says that God, when setting up the universe, tuned the fundamental constants of the universe so that each one lay in its Goldilocks zone for the production of life. It is as though God had six knobs that he could twiddle, and he carefully tuned each knob to its Goldilocks value. As ever, the theist's answer is deeply unsatisfying, because it leaves the existence of God unexplained. A God capable of calculating the Goldilocks values for the six numbers would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself, and that's very improbable indeed. This is exactly the premise of the whole discussion we are having. It follows that the theist's answer has utterly failed to make any headway towards solving the problem at hand. I see no alternative but to dismiss it, while at the same time marvelling at the number of people who can't see the problem and seem genuinely satisfied by the 'Divine Knob-Twiddler' argument.
Biologists, with their raised consciousness of the power of natural selection to explain the rise of improbable things, are unlikely to be satisfied with any theory that evades the problem of improbability altogether. And the theistic response to the riddle of improbability is an evasion of stupendous proportions. It is more than a restatement of the problem, it is a grotesque amplification of it. Let's turn, then, to the anthropic alternative. The anthropic answer, in its most general form, is that we could only be discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us. Our existence therefore determines that the fundamental constants of physics had to be in their respective Goldilocks zones. Different physicists espouse different kinds of anthropic solutions to the riddle of our existence.
Hard-nosed physicists say that the six knobs were never free to vary in the first place. When we finally reach the long-hoped-for Theory of Everything, we shall see that the six key numbers depend upon each other, or on something else as yet unknown, in ways that we today cannot imagine. The six numbers may turn out to be no freer to vary than is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It will turn out that there is only one way for a universe to be. Far from God being needed to twiddle six knobs, there are no knobs to twiddle.
Other physicists (Martin Rees himself would be an example) find this unsatisfying, and I think I agree with them. It is indeed perfectly plausible that there is only one way for a universe to be. But why did that one way have to be such a set-up for our eventual evolution? Why did it have to be the kind of universe which seems almost as if, in the words of the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, it 'must have known we were coming'? The philosopher John Leslie uses the analogy of a man sentenced to death by firing squad. It is just possible that all ten men of the firing squad will miss their victim. With hindsight, the survivor who finds himself in a position to reflect upon his luck can cheerfully say, 'Well, obviously they all missed, or I wouldn't be here thinking about it.' But he could still, forgivably, wonder why they all missed, and toy with the hypothesis that they were bribed, or drunk.
This objection can be answered by the suggestion, which Martin Rees himself supports, that there are many universes, co-existing like bubbles of foam, in a 'multiverse' (or 'megaverse', as Leonard Susskind prefers to call it). [ix] The laws and constants of anyone universe, such as our observable universe, are by-laws. The multiverse as a whole has a plethora of alternative sets of by-laws. The anthropic principle kicks in to explain that we have to be in one of those universes (presumably a minority) whose by-laws happened to be propitious to our eventual evolution and hence contemplation of the problem.
An intriguing version of the multiverse theory arises out of considerations of the ultimate fate of our universe. Depending upon the values of numbers such as Martin Rees's six constants, our universe may be destined to expand indefinitely, or it may stabilize at an equilibrium, or the expansion may reverse itself and go into contraction, culminating in the so-called 'big crunch'. Some big crunch models have the universe then bouncing back into expansion, and so on indefinitely with, say, a 20-billion-year cycle time. The standard model of our universe says that time itself began in the big bang, along with space, some 13 billion years ago. The serial big crunch model would amend that statement: our time and space did indeed begin in our big bang, but this was just the latest in a long series of big bangs, each one initiated by the big crunch that terminated the previous universe in the series. Nobody understands what goes on in singularities such as the big bang, so it is conceivable that the laws and constants are reset to new values, each time. If bang-expansion-contraction-crunch cycles have been going on for ever like a cosmic accordion, we have a serial, rather than a parallel, version of the multiverse. Once again, the anthropic principle does its explanatory duty. Of all the universes in the series, only a minority have their 'dials' tuned to biogenic conditions. And, of course, the present universe has to be one of that minority, because we are in it. As it turns out, this serial version of the multiverse must now be judged less likely than it once was, because recent evidence is starting to steer us away from the big crunch model. It now looks as though our own universe is destined to expand for ever.
Another theoretical physicist, Lee Smolin, has developed a tantalizingly Darwinian variant on the multiverse theory, including both serial and parallel elements. Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges on the theory that daughter universes are born of parent universes, not in a fully fledged big crunch but more locally in black holes. Smolin adds a form of heredity: the fundamental constants of a daughter universe are slightly 'mutated' versions of the constants of its parent. Heredity is the essential ingredient of Darwinian natural selection, and the rest of Smolin's theory follows naturally. Those universes that have what it takes to 'survive' and 'reproduce' come to predominate in the multiverse. 'What it takes' includes lasting long enough to 'reproduce'. Because the act of reproduction takes place in black holes, successful universes must have what it takes to make black holes. This ability entails various other properties. For example, the tendency for matter to condense into clouds and then stars is a prerequisite to making black holes. Stars also, as we have seen, are the precursors to the development of interesting chemistry, and hence life. So, Smolin suggests, there has been a Darwinian natural selection of universes in the multiverse, directly favouring the evolution of black hole fecundity and indirectly favouring the production of life. Not all physicists are enthusiastic about Smolin's idea, although the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann is quoted as saying: 'Smolin? Is he that young guy with those crazy ideas? He may not be wrong.'70 A mischievous biologist might wonder whether some other physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising.
Some physicists are known to be religious (Russell Stannard and the Reverend John Polkinghorne are the two British examples I have mentioned). Predictably, they seize upon the improbability of the physical constants all being tuned in their more or less narrow Goldilocks zones, and suggest that there must be a cosmic intelligence who deliberately did the tuning. I have already dismissed all such suggestions as raising bigger problems than they solve. But what attempts have theists made to reply? How do they cope with the argument that any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide?
The theologian Richard Swinburne, as we have learned to expect, thinks he has an answer to this problem, and' he expounds it in his book Is There a God? He begins by showing that his heart is in the right place by convincingly demonstrating why we should always prefer the simplest hypothesis that fits the facts. Science explains complex things in terms of the interactions of simpler things, ultimately the interactions of fundamental particles. I (and I dare say you) think it a beautifully simple idea that all things are made of fundamental particles which, although exceedingly numerous, are drawn from a small, finite set of types of particle. If we are sceptical, it is likely to be because we think the idea too simple. But for Swinburne it is not simple at all, quite the reverse.
Given that the number of particles of anyone type, say electrons, is large, Swinburne thinks it too much of a coincidence that so many should have the same properties. One electron, he could stomach. But billions and billions of electrons, all with the same properties, that is what really excites his incredulity. For him it would be simpler, more natural, less demanding of explanation, if all electrons were different from each other. Worse, no one electron should naturally retain its properties for more than an instant at a time; each should change capriciously, haphazardly and fleetingly from moment to moment. That is Swinburne's view of the simple, native state of affairs. Anything more uniform (what you or I would call more simple) requires a special explanation. 'It is only because electrons and bits of copper and all other material objects have the same powers in the twentieth century as they did in the nineteenth century that things are as they are now.'
Enter God. God comes to the rescue by deliberately and continuously sustaining the properties of all those billions of electrons and bits of copper, and neutralizing their otherwise ingrained inclination to wild and erratic fluctuation. That is why when you've seen one electron you've seen them all; that is why bits of copper all behave like bits of copper, and that is why each electron and each bit of copper stays the same as itself from microsecond to microsecond and from century to century. It is because God constantly keeps a finger on each and every particle, curbing its reckless excesses and whipping it into line with its colleagues to keep them all the same.
Swinburne generously concedes that God cannot accomplish feats that are logically impossible, and one feels grateful for this forbearance. Having said that, there is no limit to the explanatory purposes to which God's infinite power is put. Is science having a little difficulty explaining X? No problem. Don't give X another glance. God's infinite power is effortlessly wheeled in to explain X (along with everything else), and it is always a supremely simple explanation because, after all, there is only one God. What could be simpler than that?
Well, actually, almost everything. A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right. Worse (from the point of view of simplicity), other corners of God's giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being -- and whatever intelligent aliens there might be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies. He even, according to Swinburne, has to decide continuously not to intervene miraculously to save us when we get cancer. That would never do, for, 'If God answered most prayers for a relative to recover from cancer, then cancer would no longer be a problem for humans to solve.' And then what would we find to do with our time?
Not all theologians go as far as Swinburne. Nevertheless, the remarkable suggestion that the God Hypothesis is simple can be found in other modern theological writings. Keith Ward, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, was very clear on the matter in his 1996 book God, Chance and Necessity:
As a matter of fact, the theist would claim that God is a very elegant, economical and fruitful explanation for the existence of the universe. It is economical because it attributes the existence and nature of absolutely everything in the universe to just one being, an ultimate cause which assigns a reason for the existence of everything, including itself. It is elegant because from one key idea -- the idea of the most perfect possible being -- the whole nature of God and the existence of the universe can be intelligibly explicated.
Like Swinburne, Ward mistakes what it means to explain something, and he also seems not to understand what it means to say of something that it is simple. I am not clear whether Ward really thinks God is simple, or whether the above passage represented a temporary 'for the sake of argument' exercise. Sir John Polkinghorne, in Science and Christian Belief, quotes Ward's earlier criticism of the thought of Thomas Aquinas: 'Its basic error is in supposing that God is logically simple -- simple not just in the sense that his being is indivisible, but in the much stronger sense that what is true of any part of God is true of the whole. It is quite coherent, however, to suppose that God, while indivisible, is internally complex.' Ward gets it right here. Indeed, the biologist Julian Huxley, in 1912, defined complexity in terms of 'heterogeneity of parts', by which he meant a particular kind of functional indivisibility. [71]
Elsewhere, Ward gives evidence of the difficulty the theological mind has in grasping where the complexity of life comes from. He quotes another theologian-scientist, the biochemist Arthur Peacocke (the third member of my trio of British religious scientists), as postulating the existence in living matter of a 'propensity for increased complexity'. Ward characterizes this as 'some inherent weighting of evolutionary change which favours complexity'. He goes on to suggest that such a bias 'might be some weighting of the mutational process, to ensure that more complex mutations occurred'. Ward is sceptical of this, as well he should be. The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those lineages where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for increased complexity, and not from biased mutation. It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity. The theory of natural selection is genuinely simple. So is the origin from which it starts. That which it explains, on the other hand, is complex almost beyond telling: more complex than anything we can imagine, save a God capable of designing it.
At a recent Cambridge conference on science and religion, where I put forward the argument I am here calling the Ultimate 747 argument, I encountered what, to say the least, was a cordial failure to achieve a meeting of minds on the question of God's simplicity. The experience was a revealing one, and I'd like to share it.
First I should confess (that is probably the right word) that the conference was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. The audience was a small number of hand-picked science journalists from Britain and America. I was the token atheist among the eighteen invited speakers. One of the journalists, John Horgan, reported that they had each been paid the handsome sum of $15,000 to attend the conference, on top of all expenses. This surprised me. My long experience of academic conferences included no instances where the audience (as opposed to the speakers) was paid to attend. If I had known, my suspicions would immediately have been aroused. Was Templeton using his money to suborn science journalists and subvert their scientific integrity? John Horgan later wondered the same thing and wrote an article about his whole experience. [72] In it he revealed, to my chagrin, that my advertised involvement as a speaker had helped him and others to overcome their doubts:
The British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose participation in the meeting helped convince me and other fellows of its legitimacy, was the only speaker who denounced' religious beliefs as incompatible with science, irrational, and harmful. The other speakers -- three agnostics, one Jew, a deist, and 12 Christians (a Muslim philosopher canceled at the last minute) -- offered a perspective clearly skewed in favor of religion and Christianity.
Horgan's article is itself endearingly ambivalent. Despite his misgivings, there were aspects of the experience that he clearly valued (and so did I, as will become apparent below). Horgan wrote:
Horgan's article was given a second airing by the literary agent John Brockman on his 'Edge' website (often described as an on-line scientific salon) where it elicited varying responses, including one from the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson. I responded to Dyson, quoting from his acceptance speech when he won the Templeton Prize. Whether he liked it or not, by accepting the Templeton Prize Dyson had sent a powerful signal to the world. It would be taken as an endorsement of religion by one of the world's most distinguished physicists.
'I am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels.'
But isn't that exactly what any atheistic scientist would say, if he wanted to sound Christian? I gave further quotations from Dyson's acceptance speech, satirically interspersing them with imagined questions (in italics) to a Templeton official:
Oh, you want something a bit more profound, as well? How about ...
Have I said enough yet, and can I get back to doing physics now? Oh, not enough yet? OK then, how about this:
'Even in the gruesome history of the twentieth century, 1see some evidence of progress in religion. The two individuals who epitomized the evils of our century, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, were both avowed atheists.' [x]
Can I go now?
Dyson could easily refute the implication of these quotations from his Templeton acceptance speech, if only he would explain dearly what evidence he finds to believe in God, in something more than just the Einsteinian sense which, as I explained in Chapter 1, we can all trivially subscribe to. If I understand Horgan's point, it is that Templeton's money corrupts science. I am sure Freeman Dyson is way above being corrupted. But his acceptance speech is still unfortunate if it seems to set an example to others. The Templeton Prize is two orders of magnitude larger than the inducements offered to the journalists at Cambridge, having been explicitly set up to be larger than the Nobel Prize. In Faustian vein, my friend the philosopher Daniel Dennett once joked to me, 'Richard, if ever you fall on hard times ...'
For better or worse, I attended two days at the Cambridge conference, giving a talk of my own and taking part in the discussion of several other talks. I challenged the theologians to answer the point that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable. The strongest response I heard was that I was brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an unwilling theology. [xi] Theologians had always defined God as simple. Who was I, a scientist, to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex? Scientific arguments, such as those I was accustomed to deploying in my own field, were inappropriate since theologians had always maintained that God lay outside science.
I did not gain the impression that the theologians who mounted this evasive defence were being wilfully dishonest. I think they were sincere. Nevertheless, I was irresistibly reminded of Peter Medawar's comment on Father Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, in the course of what is possibly the greatest negative book review of all time: 'its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.' [73] The theologians of my Cambridge encounter were defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not. Who was I to say that rational argument was the only admissible kind of argument? There are other ways of knowing besides the scientific, and it is one of these other ways of knowing that must be deployed to know God.
The most important of these other ways of knowing turned out to be personal, subjective experience of God. Several discussants at Cambridge claimed that God spoke to them, inside their heads, just as vividly and as personally as another human might. I have dealt with illusion and hallucination in Chapter 3 ('The argument from personal experience'), but at the Cambridge conference I added two points. First, that if God really did communicate with humans that fact would emphatically not lie outside science. God comes bursting through from whatever other-worldly domain is his natural abode, crashing through into our world where his messages can be intercepted by human brains -- and that phenomenon has nothing to do with science? Second, a God who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such bandwidth! God may not have a brain made of neurones, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know.
Time and again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word 'God' carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. To suggest that the original prime mover was complicated enough to indulge in intelligent design, to say nothing of mindreading millions of humans simultaneously, is tantamount to dealing yourself a perfect hand at bridge. Look around at the world of life, at the Amazon rainforest with its rich interlacement of lianas, bromeliads, roots and flying buttresses; its army ants and its jaguars, its tapirs and peccaries, treefrogs and parrots. What you are looking at is the statistical equivalent of a perfect' hand of cards (think of all the other ways you could permute the parts, none of which would work) -- except that we know how it came about: by the gradualistic crane of natural selection. It is not just scientists who revolt at mute acceptance of such improbability arising spontaneously; common sense baulks too. To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery.
I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out to explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn't have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered. Maybe the 'inflation' that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the first yoctosecond of the universe's existence will turn out, when it is better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside Darwin's biological one. Or maybe the elusive crane that cosmologists seek will be a version of Darwin's idea itself: either Smolin's model or something similar. Or maybe it will be the multiverse plus anthropic principle espoused by Martin Rees and others. It may even be a superhuman designer -- but, if so, it will most certainly not be a designer who just popped into existence, or who always existed. If (which I don't believe for a moment) our universe was designed, and a fortiori if the designer reads our thoughts and hands out omniscient advice, forgiveness and redemption, the designer himself must be the end product of some kind of cumulative escalator or crane, perhaps a version of Darwinism in another universe.
The last-ditch defence by my critics in Cambridge was attack. My whole world-view was condemned as 'nineteenth-century'. This is such a bad argument that I almost omitted to mention it. But regrettably I encounter it rather frequently. Needless to say, to call an argument nineteenth-century is not the same as explaining what is wrong with it. Some nineteenth-century ideas were very good ideas, not least Darwin's own dangerous idea. In any case, this particular piece of name-calling seemed a bit rich coming, as it did, from an individual (a distinguished Cambridge geologist, surely well advanced along the Faustian road to a future Templeton Prize) who justified his own Christian belief by invoking what he called the historicity of the New Testament. It was precisely in the nineteenth century that theologians, especially in Germany, called into grave doubt that alleged historicity, using the evidence-based methods of history to do so. This was, indeed, swiftly pointed out by the theologians at the Cambridge conference.
In any case, I know the 'nineteenth-century' taunt of old. It goes with the 'village atheist' gibe. It goes with 'Contrary to what you seem to think Ha Ha Ha we don't believe in an old man with a long white beard any more Ha Ha Ha.' All three jokes are code for something else, just as, when I lived in America in the late 1960s, 'law and order' was politicians' code for anti-black prejudice. [xii] What, then, is the coded meaning of 'You are so nineteenth-century' in the context of an argument about religion? It is code for: 'You are so crude and unsubtle, how could you be so insensitive and ill-mannered as to ask me a direct, point-blank question like "Do you believe in miracles?" or "Do you believe Jesus was born of a virgin?" Don't you know that in polite society we don't ask such questions? That sort of question went out in the nineteenth century: But think about why it is impolite to ask such direct, factual questions of religious people today. It is because it is embarrassing! But it is the answer that is embarrassing, if it is yes.
The nineteenth-century connection is now clear. The nineteenth century is the fast time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment. When pressed, many educated Christians today are too loyal to deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because their rational minds know it is absurd, so they would much rather not be asked. Hence, if somebody like me insists on asking the question, it is I who am accused of being 'nineteenth-century'. It is really quite funny, when you think about it.
I left the conference stimulated and invigorated, and reinforced in my conviction that the argument from improbability -- the 'Ultimate 747' gambit -- is a very serious argument against the existence of God, and one to which I have yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so. Dan Dennett rightly describes it as 'an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier. A skyhook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but Hume couldn't think of any cranes, so he caved in.' [74] Darwin, of course, supplied the vital crane. How Hume would have loved it.
i. Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a cheap tuxedo.
ii. Classical Latin and Greek were better equipped. Latin homo (Greek anthropo-) means human, as opposed to vir (andro-) which means man, and femina (gyne-) which means woman. Thus anthropology pertains to all humanity, where andrology and gynecology are sexually exclusive branches of medicine.
iii. See also his 2007 book God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist.
iv. There is an example in fiction. The children's writer Philip Pullman, in His Dark Materials, imagines a species of animals, the 'mulefa', that co-exist with trees that produce perfectly round seedpods with a hole in the centre. These pods the mulefa adopt as wheels. The wheels, not being part of the body, have no nerves or blood vessels to get twisted around the 'axle' (a strong claw of horn or bone). Pullman perceptively notes an additional point: the system works only because the planet is paved with natural basalt ribbons, which serve as 'roads'. Wheels are no good over rough country.
v. Fascinatingly, the muscle principle is deployed in yet a third mode in some insects such as flies, bees and bugs, in which the flight muscle is intrinsically oscillatory, like a reciprocating engine. Whereas other insects such as locusts send nervous instructions for each wing stroke (as a bird does), bees send an instruction to switch on (or switch off) the oscillatory motor. Bacteria have a mechanism which is neither a simple contractor (like a bird's flight muscle) nor a reciprocator (like a bee's flight muscle), but a true rotator: in that respect it is like an electric motor or a Wankel engine.
vi. If you find that surprising, you may be suffering from northern hemisphere chauvinism, as described on page 139.
vii. The physicist Victor Stenger (in e.g. God, the Failed Hypothesis) dissents from this consensus, and is unpersuaded that the physical laws and constants are particularly friendly to life. Nevertheless, I shall bend over backwards to accept the 'friendly universe' consensus, in order to show that, in any case, it cannot be used to support theism.
viii. I say 'presumably', partly because we don't know how different alien forms of life might be, and partly because it is possible that we make a mistake if we consider only the consequences of changing one constant at a time. Could there be other combinations of values of the six numbers which would turn out to be friendly to life, in ways that we do not discover if we consider them only one at a time? Nevertheless, I shall proceed, for simplicity, as though we really do have a big problem to explain in the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants.
ix. Susskind (2006) gives a splendid advocacy of the anthropic principle in the megaverse. He says the idea is hated by most physicists. I can't understand why. I think it is beautiful -- perhaps because my consciousness has been raised by Darwin.
x. This calumny is dealt with in Chapter 7.
xi. This accusation is reminiscent of 'NOMA', whose overblown claims I dealt with in Chapter 2.
xii. In Britain 'inner cities' had the equivalent coded meaning, prompting Auberon Waugh's wickedly hilarious reference to 'inner cities of both sexes'.
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45767 | The Hero Within…
Someone recently told me I was his hero. I honestly didn’t know what to say to that. I mean I am just Amy…mom to Dusty and Kayla, wife to James. It’s not like I’m kin to the queen of any country or some Nobel prize winner. Of course they are human too. Just because they did something the world knows about or went through something they at the end of the day are still just one human. They breath the same air, are run by the same blood and same bones as the next person. Yet, I still had to step back and wonder why me? How could I be someone’s hero. Then it got me thinking…. some of the things we have gone through up til now I have been too afraid to speak on in fear of the people involved finding me. If I let that scare me into not talking about it then I am no more hero to the next person than I am to myself (if that makes sense). I let them scare me once, or several and after many years I am still fearful of speaking on it. I asked James about it…he said if you want to talk about it …talk about it and to not be afraid.
So, I will talk about it. It will be a slow process. For obvious reasons I will name no one other than those I have already named. I just have to tell myself they can’t touch me. They can’t find me. They don’t know where I am, where I live, or maybe they don’t remember my name. I don’t know. I just know I have to let it out and stop being fearful of the what if’s (well at least where this subject is concerned).
To those of you that for some reason think I am a hero all I can say is THANK YOU. I think you have given me the push I needed to let go of some of the things I needed to let go. In some way you have become my hero. You have kind of liberated me. I still don’t think I could ever be someone’s hero. But if I am, than so be it. I have only done what I thought at the time was the right thing for myself and my children.
Alright, just breathe….several years ago I was dating a man that was in a gang. I didn’t know he was in a gang until later. Or I would have never, ever considered it. Him and his friend/cousin (being they were gang members I really don’t know if they were truly cousins) brought someone to my home. They took Dusty and Kayla upstairs to someone else’s home that they knew. They took me into my bedroom where the “cousin’s” girlfriend kind of stood watch so I didn’t leave the room. My face was pushed down into the seat of the chair cushion to muffle my screams. They were in the living room literally beating this guy to death. The guy I guess said something they did to someone else and in fear of them going to the police they wanted to make sure the guy didn’t talk, to anyone, anymore. They beat him with a small metal/aluminum baseball bat. I remember hearing the screams of the guy sounding like they were in my own ear. The girlfriend just stood there like nothing was wrong. At this point all I could think about was my children. I was scared as hell as to what they would do next since I was a witness to this.
They didn’t kill him but after what seemed like hours of just beating him over and over he somehow managed to get out of the front door and just run. They ran after him but couldn’t find him. From that point I thought this was over. I just wanted my kids. I wanted to just get away from all of this nonsense. But I couldn’t. My mom and step father were never aware of any of this. No one but those involved knew any of it. They came back to my home after trying to find where the guy went and took me and my kids to the “cousin’s” home. On the ride there we had to keep our heads down that way we didn’t know where we were going or how we got there. We had to stay at this “cousin’s” home for a while. At this point my memory kind of goes blank. I don’t remember when we left, how we left or anything in between. My mind goes from that to remembering the last day of it all. The kids and I had somehow gotten to the home of the mother of the guy I was dating. We were staying at her house. He had pretty much took control of my car. I was stuck there with no where to go, no one I knew that I could call on for help. Then for some reason this day… this one day I managed to get my keys, my kids and got in my car. I remember my kids sitting in the front seat of the car. Then all of a sudden they show up. The guy I was dating, the “cousin” and the girlfriend were standing next to the car in the parking lot. It was daytime and I thought I am ok, they won’t try anything in daytime. Boy was I wrong. The guy I was dating comes over to the car and all I can remember is him literally trying to kill me. IN FRONT OF MY KIDS! I just thought that was the last day of my life. I thought if I didn’t put up a fight my kids would be spared. I remember seeing his face as his hands were wrapped around my throat. Kayla somehow slid from the passenger seat into my lap. For some reason he looked at her, she just looked at him. I don’t remember anything being said. There could have been things said but I don’t remember them. I don’t remember if my kids were screaming or crying or anything. I just can see myself, in that seat, with the kids next to me (well at this point Kayla in my lap) and the three of them in my memory. For whatever reason, maybe by the grace of God I don’t know…I just know he let go of my throat. Whatever he saw when he looked at Kayla somehow got him to release his grasp of my throat. I wasn’t moving. I was terrified to even breathe at this point. I remember seeing the guy’s mother come out into the parking area, and well that is where my memory goes blank again.
Maybe I blocked out some of the memories for a reason, maybe I didn’t. I am not sure I want to remember anymore than I do. What if there was more to the memory and I would have to relive the pain I once felt. I don’t want to remember if that is the case. As I sit here typing this my heart is beating faster than it should be in a resting position. I am sweating and breathing faster and faster. I have to remember to just breathe…it’s over with. I made it out of that alive. I had my kids, my keys, my car and I got away. Don’t remember where I went that day but I got away. It’s funny because that day Kayla became my hero. If she had not thought to move her little body into my lap and just look at him I may not be sitting here today and my kids wouldn’t have their mother. I have been through the ass beatings their bio thrust upon me but this day was different. It was a different kind of fear and pain. I have been in fear of dying before but this was on another level. All because I was witness to someone who was either witness to something they did or knew something they did. I think in someway this is why I try to keep a close circle around me and my family. You know what I mean? You have many friends but there are only a few you let in that circle.
Rumor had it that the guy they beat almost to death was found in an alley way bleeding almost to death. From my understanding he ended up having to have hundreds of staples to close the wounds he had to his head and body. I don’t know how he healed, if he is still alive or if they found him and killed him. Hell I don’t even remember his name. Maybe like the blanks in my memory I blocked that too to protect myself. Who knows…. I just know that this is one of the things I, we have gone through that I never thought I would speak on. My husband and my best friend knows but no one else. Not even my mom or step father. Not after today…
Thank you for helping me find the strength to let this go. Somehow by simply putting it into words I have let it out. Shared it. I know it is not going to be the answer for everything but knowing I stopped letting the fear of the what if’s stop me from putting it into words..well….it is kind of like I just reached the peak of a mountain (a small one though lol). I reached a point that I never thought I would reach. Only because I was afraid they would find me and finally finish what they started. Now I admit that part of me is still scared they will find me one day but I can’t live the rest of my life like this. They will pay for the things they have done. I know I did nothing wrong other than not knowing someone more than I did. The man in my life now belongs to a gang, the brotherhood of the Marine Corps so I think I am safe for now.
The Hero Within…
chris reeve hero
Originally posted 2016-01-12 15:40:42.
6 Responses
1. Janet says:
I am so PROUD of you!! Thank you for sharing what happened. You took your power back by writing this. Way to go. 🙂
2. Sher says:
I’m glad you shared this.
3. Fay says:
Wow what a testimony u have an amazing family u have raised because u are an amazing woman
I bet you could help a lot of women who have gone thru similar events and like you were are scared to talk just a thought thank you so much for sharing Psalm 91 and prayers for u all always
1. January 12, 2020
[…] I still can’t get this wrapped around my head but it did get me to finally get something out I had been holding in. Then I wrote this. […]
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45768 | Is This Me?
Isabel Baraona
Isabel Baraona
closed 12X17 cm; open 192X17 cm
closed 6,69X4,72 in; open 75,59X6,69 in
250 copies
Cascais, Portugal
Offset, colour. Printed on paper IOR 120gr.
It is a book with a peculiar shape, an accordion fold without a binding.
When closed, the book shows two drawings of the same character whose gender is undefined. On one side, the figure is alone on top of a little stool, his eyes low and clearly rejecting the incitement of the other characters (at the right hand side) that call him, outstretching their arms and motioning their hands. On the other side, we see the silhouette of the character cropped from a black and not uniform background.
Although there’s no perfect symmetry, both these attitudes of the character are related to the theme of the book: “is this me?” is the question written on the upper edge of the page with the figure on top of the little stool, while at the opposite of the fold, in two pages filled in black, we can read “is this me, is it me?” Neither this nor the other questions noted throughout the book have a clear answer, with only one entry that somehow works (ironically) as a reply: “either good, either bad, nor yes or no, life is great and grey”.
The remaining drawings depict mostly festive and pagan scenes; the characters meet and comply with a ritual, parade and hide partially and clumsily under canopies, into groups that resemble a cortege or procession. However, the primal decor is also that of the underworld - chthonic - that breaks out, scrambling the perception of inside and outside / inside and out.
(Translation of the text provided by Isabel Baraona to Tipo.pt)
This edition is available at:
- the Gulbenkian Foundation Library, Lisbon; at the School of Fine Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.
- at Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image imprimée, La Louvière, Belgium;
- as well at the Tate archives, in London, U.K.
date time
2013-03-12 14:28:14 |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45771 | Monday, October 22, 2012
How to Unlock a Configuration Section from IIS Manager
HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error
If you have ever experienced this problem then you probably have also experienced the fun of digging through your system configuration files to find where to unlock the related authentication sections. This is, to say the least, not fun.
Did you know that you can unlock configuration sections from IIS Manager?
1. Launch IIS Manager.
2. Select your Connection's home page.
3. Open the Configuration Editor under Management.
4. Navigate to the section that you need to unlock.
5. Look to the right Action pane and click unlock!
Shout it
1. Thanks very much, I always forget where this is when I have to set up a new server.
2. How will i know which section should be unlocked???
Real Time Web Analytics |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45785 | 10 January 2008
Smoked Meatloaf ????
That's right, you think that you've had it all until you try smoked meatloaf.
2 pounds of ground chuck
fresh bread crumbs (crumble 1 to 3 slices of white bread)
1/3 cup of old fashioned oats
1 egg
1/2 cup of ketchup
2 to 3 tbsp. (or so) of seasoned salt
2 to 3 tbsp. (or so) of Obie-Cue's Garlic Pepper
3 to 4 tbsp. of Worcestershire (a few good shakes around)
2 to 3 tsp. of teriyaki sauce
Louisiana hot sauce to taste (a few good shakes)
1 small can of pet milk
several liberal shakes of your favorite rub
Mix all of your ingredients together in a large bowl and pat the mixture into a loaf pan. Top with brown sugar, ketchup and sprinkled oats. Set your BBQ Guru to 400º and smoke the loaf until the internal temp. is right (45 minutes to an hour).
1 comment:
Anonymous said...
We were just talking about eating some meatloaf. We'll give this recipe a whir. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45787 | 03 August 2011
Just when you think you've seen everything...along comes just-add-water instant barbecue sauce. Seriously.
Although the idea of just-add-water barbecue sauce may seem unusual, to those familiar with the Shirley J line of products, it should come as no surprise. Shirley J offers a full line of instant just-add-water food products - everything from sauces and seasonings to all manner of doughs. The company sells the products through their website, but also through a network of home-based sellers.
Making the sauce really is just as simple as adding water. It's one part powder and three parts water, but you can tweak it thicker or thinner as you see fit. I mixed some up right here at work.
The sauce has a reddish brown color with flecks of spices suspended throughout. The texture is a little bit grainy, but I'm not sure if that's because it came from a powder or because of the spices. Flavor is sweet and tomatoey and tangy and vinegary at first, giving way to significant notes of mustard, onion, garlic, lemon, and pepper. The heat level is mild.
Overall, the sauce is much better than I was expecting it to be, having come from a powder, but still not on par with really good traditonally packaged barbecue sauces. I should note that the package mentions that simmering the sauce for 2-3 minutes will improve results.
Grade: B-
1 comment:
BBQ Sauce said...
We have a BBQ Sauce and Hot Sauce store and I have never heard of a powder/water mix BBQ sauce until I read your post. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45788 | Tag: capability
Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Directions (CHERI)
cpu computerAt first look, the Wespro 786 tablet will certainly impress you. In general, the more instructions a superscalar CPU is able to dispatch concurrently to waiting execution items, the more instructions will likely be completed in a given cycle. If a thread is understood as a single piece of a computer process, then utilizing a number of threads in a single CPU core means more directions may be understood and processed at once.
A quad-core CPU has 4 central processing items, an octa-core CPU has eight central processing models, and so forth. The outcome consists of both a knowledge phrase, which can be stored in a register or memory, and standing information that is usually stored in a particular, internal CPU register reserved for this purpose.
These CPUs are smaller in size, require less energy, and generate much less heat. AMD launched the primary Phenom II X4 (quad-core) processors (6 M cache, 2.5 to 3.7 GHz, 1066 MHz or 1333 MHz FSB) on January 8, 2009. Intel released the Pentium processor on March 22, 1993.
Intel launched a number of Core 2 Quad processors in August 2008: the Q8200, the Q9400, and the Q9650. Intel released the first Core i3 desktop processors, the i3-530, and i3-540 on January 7, 2010. Intel released the first Core i7 desktop processor with six cores, the i3-970, in July 2010.
AMD released the primary Phenom II X2 (dual-core) processors (6 M cache, 3.zero to 3.5 GHz, 1066 MHz or 1333 MHz FSB) on June … Read More
PC Interface, 4 KB Program Capability, one hundred twenty V Ac, 230 V Ac
cpu computerAt first look, the Wespro 786 tablet will certainly impress you. The great utility in creating processors that cope with vectors of information lies in optimizing duties that are likely to require the same operation (for example, a sum or a dot product ) to be carried out on a big set of knowledge. Most CPUs are synchronous circuits , which implies they employ a clock sign to pace their sequential operations.
The Athlon would be produced for the next six years in speeds starting from 500 MHz up to 2.33 GHz. 71 Ideally, a twin core processor can be almost twice as powerful as a single core processor. By fetching and dispatching two instructions at a time, a maximum of two directions per clock cycle can be accomplished.
Intel launched the first Core i7 desktop processors in November 2008: the i7-920, the i7-940, and the i7-965 Excessive Edition. AMD launched one in all their quickest desktop processors thus far, the Athlon II X2 280, on January 28, 2013. Intel released the Celeron 533 MHz with a sixty six MHz bus processor on January 4, 2000.
As chip expertise has improved, the speed that chips can run at has gotten faster. In other words, the operating system is tricked into seeing two CPUs for every actual CPU core. Greater clock charges in increasingly complicated CPUs make it more difficult to maintain the clock sign in phase (synchronized) throughout your entire unit.… Read More |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45807 | FLORA OF WAGNER NATURAL AREA
Click here to open this booklet
about the Trees of Wagner Natural Area
Picture Galleries
Wagner Natural Area is famous for its plants. A list of the plants found at Wagner can be found here.
Sixteen species of orchids
, out of a total of 26 species found in Alberta, occur within or near Wagner Natural Area. Some, such as the Yellow Lady's slipper, are amazingly abundant in blooming season.
Also occurring in the Wagner fens and around the marl ponds with their constantly flowing springs, can be found such interesting plants such as: Elephant Head, Shooting Star, Fringed Gentian, Kalm's Lobelia, Sundews, and Bladderworts, to name a few. Drier areas around the fens are populated with Black SpruceTamarackPoplarBirchWillow and members of the Sedge family.
Summer is almost over, as August is ending.
Montropa uniflora
Read about Indian Pipes here
It's summer and a host of flowers are appearing.
Read about bladderworts here
In June spring violets appeared in Wagner
Read about spring violets here
Marsh marigolds in full bloom
Read about marsh marigolds here
Read about"The Willows of Wagner" here
Other Flowers
Grasses and Sedges |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45812 | Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Four new articles on the JWS preprint server
Four new articles have been added to the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server:
Final version of the papers will be published later in 2013 and available in Elsevier's Science Direct system. Visit the in print page on the preprint server to see the current JWS articles in print. |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45830 |
Rhonda the Negative Walrus Stereotype
In my quest to cover all things Walrus, I give you a cartoon walrus I do not approve of, on a show I don’t like much either. Ironically, this episode is one of the only entire episodes of “The Penguins of Madagascar” that I’ve seen. So allow me to introduce you to Rhonda the Walrus. The episode description should cover why I don’t particularly care for this character.
Marlene is getting a new roommate. Before her roommate arrives, she dances with Skipper with excitement, but Skipper is paranoid that Marlene’s roommate may be a spy, possibly with the intent of stealing Kowalski’s newest invention, a device whose function is not yet known, even by Kowalski. The penguins point out to Marlene that the new arrival weighs at least 1,500 pounds, enormously heavier than she is, and suggest that multitudes of otters might be on the way. The new roommate turns out to be a walrus named Rhonda, who is sloppy, has bad manners, bullies Marlene, and uses her as a live tissue. She also farts in the water constantly as well as in Marlene’s home. After faking her approval to the penguins several times, Marlene finally asks them to ship Rhonda somewhere else. But when she learns that a labeling error resulted in Rhonda being headed for a polar bear reserve in Alaska, her guilty conscience causes her to save the annoying roommate. At the docks, Marlene grabs onto a rope and uses Kowalski’s invention, which turns out to be a plasma cutter, to free the crate at the dock where Rhonda is being shipped out of. Once the crate returns to the zoo, Marlene and the penguins arrange for Rhonda to be transferred to the Hoboken Aquarium. Rhonda ends up being a spy after all, and she steals Kowalski’s plasma cutter and discusses it with Dr. Blowhole, Skipper’s unseen dolphin arch-enemy, en route to a new aquarium.
Rhonda’s the type of character you come up with when you use the word “walrus” as an insult. And let me close this out with one note to Dreamworks: Rhonda is a FEMALE walrus. WHY does she have TUSKS?
Rhonda is voiced by Kathy Kinney who was the overly made-up loudmouth Mimi (a character I initially found refreshing) on the old Drew Carey show.
1 thought on “Rhonda the Negative Walrus Stereotype
1. Urgle, I saw this a while ago, too. Just when I was hopefuly to see a cool animated walrus, I had to see THIS little b****. >:(
I share your feelings sir. This walrus create an unrealistic standard of walrusdom, just like Barbie did for girls! *gives ya comforting flipper hugs* 🙂
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45868 | eNPS: measure and improve employer branding
The employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) shows to what extent employees are ambassadors for their own employer. The validated formula maps the internal reputation, whereby a high-valued reputation or employer brand indicates many intrinsically motivated employees. And these are important for stakeholders within and outside the organization.
The benefits of intrinsically motivated employees to an organization
Intrinsically motivated employees are inspired and engaged. They are enthusiastic, love the organization, and run just a bit faster than the rest. They also radiate this enthusiasm to the outside world. By doing so, they manage to introduce an above average number of new talents to the company. Research also shows that organizations are increasingly deploying inspiring employees in the recruitment of new staff. In short, employees who love the organization are the driving forces and ensure infectious energy and growth. Organizations with a relatively high amount of intrinsically motivated and engaged employees pull in 2.5x more revenue compared to competitors with low engagement levels (Hay Group).
Engaged employees have 180% more energy at work
With engaged employees, productivity increases by 45%
Why do you need the eNPS for employer branding?
Every organization is an employer brand. Your organization has a reputation for both current and potential employees. The eNPS shows the status of that employer brand among its own employees. The eNPS is an internationally validated method in which employees assess on a scale of 0-10 how likely it is that they will recommend their organization as a good employer. Answers are divided into 3 groups: detractors (scores 0-6), passives (scores 7-8), and promoters (scores 9-10).
To earn a good internal and external employer reputation and brand, you can use the eNPS to gain insight and benchmark. In this way, you can find out where the detractors and promoters are located, why that is, and how you can improve your employer branding efforts. Read more about how the eNPS works.
2DAYSMOOD is recommended by
Hans de Man
Ceo, Soltegro
“Our eNPS has risen from 16 to 35. I think that is a huge compliment. It means that more and more of our employees are becoming ambassadors for Soltegro.”
Improve employer reputation with eNPS measurements
With the 15 second survey of 2DAYSMOOD, you can repeatedly measure the eNPS of your organization. In addition to this KPI, we also use our realtime tool to monitor moods and employee engagement levels. The eNPS is thus incorporated in our complete innovative measurement method that helps you improve your employer reputation, company culture, or guide you through difficult change processes. With 2DAYSMOOD you can continuously analyze the trends and improvements of the eNPS and other scores in smart dashboards, at team and organization level.
Schedule a free live demo of our measurement method.
Or download our brochure to discover more about measuring the eNPS.
Realtime insight in employee engagement?
This is possible with our super fast online survey, weekly reports, and realtime analysis dashboards. You can create your desired feedback loop at team, department and organization level.
What else can you do with 2DAYSMOOD? Think of monitoring stress levels, calculating the employee Net Promoter Score, measuring vitality, and stimulating employee happiness through e-learning. We are happy to show you all the options!
More about the eNPS score…
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Why your eNPS is a KPI, but not an external benchmark
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By: Martin Meulenkamp
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Soltegro: ‘Our eNPS has increased from 16 to 35. I find that a huge compliment’
We are interviewing Hans de Man, since 2010 founder and CEO of Soltegro. As Soltegro grew over the p...
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By: Mare Derks |
global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45873 | Gear Head Tuesday – Packard and the Merlin Engine
Gear Head
Hat tip today to “Ol’ Petrol Head” for inspiring this post.
A P-51 Mustang fighter – the most storied fighter plane of WWII – and powered by the Rolls-Royce designed Merlin V-12. Of the 150,000 Merlin engines built in World War II, Packard built 55,000. It was Packard who figured out how to mass produce this complex engine which has over 14,000 parts.
Merlin V-12
“Ol’ Petrol Head” in the U.K. sent me the video below of how Tommy Hitchcock championed the P-51 Mustang fighter plane in World War II. That led us expand the story of how the Rolls-Royce designed Merlin V-12 engine came to be produced in sufficient quantities for the war and Packard’s role in that. Click to watch this video about Tommy Hitchcock:
Next, Terry Dunn of our home town of Lubbock, Texas tells the tale of:
The Packard Merlin: How Detroit Mass-Produced Britain’s Hand-Built Powerhouse
Even before the 1940 air battles over England, it was apparent that demand for the Merlin was far outpacing Rolls-Royce’s ability to produce them. The Ford Motor Company was asked to build 9,000 Merlins for both England and the US. Ford initially accepted the deal, but later reneged. Henry Ford explained that he would only produce military items for US defense. Interestingly, Ford of Britain in Manchester, England ultimately produced 36,000 Merlin engines, beginning at the same time period. Of course, Ford’s American factories would indeed become vital to the war effort. They manufactured unfathomable quantities of airplanes, Jeeps and other war materiel – but not Merlins.
Following Ford’s refusal to build the Merlin, a similar deal was presented to the Packard Motor Car Company. At that time, Packard automobiles were considered the “Rolls-Royce of America” by virtue of their luxury and quality. The company also had experience producing airplane engines and large V-12 powerplants used in speedy PT Boats. Packard accepted the offer from Rolls-Royce and earnestly began preparations to build Merlins at their Detroit factory.
Two Countries Divided By A Common Language
There are many obvious challenges posed by producing a British-designed engine in America. Just the task of converting all of the measurements from metric imperial to US Standard units was daunting enough. This job was made even more difficult by the unprecedented complexity of the Merlin. The 1,649 cubic inch V-12 engine is comprised of more than 14,000 individual parts (knoll that!). It was, and still is, often called “a watchmaker’s nightmare.
Engineers at Packard soon discovered that Rolls-Royce did not design the Merlin for mass-production. The manufacturing tolerances were much looser than Packard’s standards. This was because Rolls-Royce had never implemented mass-production techniques to their assembly lines. Rather, they employed highly-trained “fitters” to assemble the engines. The fitters filed or otherwise massaged individual parts to achieve a precise fit. They even tightened critical bolts by trained feel, rather than with calibrated torque wrenches. In effect, each Rolls-Royce-manufactured Merlin was a hand-built engine that reflected the company’s traditions of premium quality and craftsmanship.
While Rolls-Royce’s manufacturing techniques churned out very high quality engines, they simply didn’t jibe with Packard’s way of doing things (or Ford in Manchester for that matter). In his book “Not Much of An Engineer”, Rolls-Royce engineer Sir Stanley Hooker recalls his introduction to the matter with Ford:
“One day their Chief Engineer appeared in Lovesey’s office, which I was then sharing, and said, ‘You know, we can’t make the Merlin to these drawings.’
I replied loftily, ‘I suppose that is because the drawing tolerances are too difficult for you, and you can’t achieve the accuracy.’
‘On the contrary’ he replied, ‘the tolerances are far too wide for us.’ We make motor cars far more accurately than this. Every part on our car engines has to be interchangeable with the same part on any other engine, and hence all parts have to be made with extreme accuracy, far closer than you use. That is the only way we can achieve mass-production.’”
Like Ford, Packard was obligated to redraw all of the Merlin blueprints to satisfy their own manufacturing requirements. This effort took the better part of a year to complete and was closely coordinated with Rolls-Royce emissaries in Detroit. During the time that Packard was gearing up for production, Rolls-Royce was making continuous improvements to the Merlin based on feedback from the front lines. These updates also had to be incorporated into Packard’s operation. This continual two-way exchange of data took a heavy toll on the men tasked to manage it. Of the two original Rolls-Royce liaisons at Packard, one died during his tenure in Detroit and the other perished soon after his return to England.
Packard’s licensing agreement prevented them from implementing any changes to the design of the Merlin without approval from Rolls-Royce. There was an understandable need to maintain compatibility and consistent performance among the engines regardless of where they were manufactured. While Rolls-Royce engineers were typically attentive to suggestions from their manufacturing partners, any accepted design changes were applied across all production lines.
One area where the Americans contributed to the greatness of the Merlin was the crankshaft bearings. US aircraft engine manufacturers had determined that a silver-lead alloy with indium plating provided long wear and exceptional corrosion resistance. Thankfully, German engineers who evaluated captured American engines falsely deduced that the indium was merely an impurity. Packard shared the secret bearing formula with Rolls-Royce who incorporated it into the Merlin.
The Merlin became somewhat further Americanized by the components that were attached to Packard-built units. Carburetors, magnetos, spark plugs, and similar items were sourced through American vendors and sub-contractors, although they were still manufactured to British specifications.
To maintain compatibility, Packard did not convert any of the bolts, nuts, and studs to SAE dimensions. Rather, they were obligated to use fasteners with Whitworth threads, as specified by Rolls-Royce. Whitworth-form hardware proved impossible to source within the US, so Packard eventually produced all of the necessary fasteners in-house.
The first Packard-built Merlins emerged in August of 1941. As would be expected, there were a few teething problems such as excessive cylinder blow-by and oil leakage. Most historians agree that Packard and Rolls-Royce tackled the issues with a high degree of cooperation. The US-built engines soon performed on par with their English doppelgangers. Packard would ultimately manufacture 55,000 of the 150,000 Merlins that were built.
Unlocking the Merlin’s Greatness
Most of the Merlins built by Packard would find their way into P-51 Mustangs. This American fighter had an uninspiring start, mostly due to the poor high-altitude performance of its Allison V-1710 engine. Once mated to the Merlin, however, the P-51 would be considered among the best aircraft of the war.
The exceptional high altitude performance of the Merlin was due to its two-stage, two-speed supercharger (a development introduced in 1941. This complex device allowed the Merlin to produce the same output power (about 1300 horsepower) whether it was on the ground or in the rarefied air at 30,000+ feet of altitude. Comparable single-stage superchargers of the time often peaked at less than 20,000 feet.
A supercharger works by compressing the fuel/air mixture from the carburetor to sea-level pressure (or higher). So even when the air gets thin, the engine receives the same mass of fuel and oxygen to burn. The Ideal Gas Law tells us that when you compress a gas, you also heat it. The Merlin’s two-stage supercharger actually compresses it twice. If left unchecked, heat from the extreme compression would cause poor performance and/or premature detonation of the volatile mixture. To address this, the Merlin uses an independent liquid cooling system to chill the fuel/air mixture following each stage of compression. The additional complexity of this intercooler/aftercooler system is far outweighed by the performance gains it provides.
The Inevitable Debates
Any mention of the Packard Merlin near an airport hangar or an internet forum is bound to instigate at least one of two worn out comparisons: the Rolls-Royce-built Merlin versus the Packard version, and the Merlin versus the Allison V-1710.
The comparisons of Rolls-Royce and Packard are typically rooted in national pride and false assumptions. As mentioned earlier, there was a tremendous effort by Rolls-Royce, Packard, and Ford of Britain, to make the Merlin fleet homogenous. Although each manufacturer may have employed unique production techniques, every engine had to meet the same specifications, and prove so on the test stand.
The problem with most arguments touting the superiority of either manufacturer is that any supporting data typically compares different versions of the Merlin…of which there were many. The same basic engine that made 1,000 horsepower in 1939 (with a single-stage supercharger), was capable of more than 2,000 horsepower by the end of the war just six years later. Additionally, the Merlin was produced for several different types of aircraft (fighters, bombers, & airliners) with specific gearing and supercharger configurations for each type. Apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult to come by.
This drawing gives a hint of the complexity of the Merlin engine. More than 14,000 parts are needed to build a Merlin.
My favorite story of Rolls-Royce’s faith in Packard comes from Bill Lear Jr’s book, “Fly Fast…Sin Boldly – Flying, Spying & Surviving”. In 1963, Lear was living in Geneva, Switzerland and flying a surplus P-51. After numerous problems with the starter clutch on his Packard-built Merlin, he contacted Rolls-Royce. They instructed Lear to send them the clutch, which was quickly repaired and returned. Lear adds:
“I called my benefactor to thank him and to ask him when to expect an invoice. His reply was: ‘My dear Mr. Lear, Rolls-Royce-designed products do not fail. They may require occasional adjustment, but this is covered by our unlimited warranty. So there is no charge, sir.’
I was blown away. The engine and clutch had been manufactured under license in the U.S.A. by Packard in 1944, yet Rolls still stood behind them in 1963!”
That the Merlin outperformed the Allison at high altitude is hardly a condemnation of the American-designed engine. In its element (up to about 15,000 feet), the V-1710 was robust and reliable – utilizing fewer than half the number of parts found in a Merlin. It was also extremely adaptable to different configurations of gearing, rotation direction, accessories, etc. The Allison engine is a showpiece of modular design.
The lack of an adequate supercharger for the V-1710 was a reflection of the requirements put forth by the US military. During development of the engine, the US Army Air Corps decreed than any high altitude versions would be turbocharged (where the compressor is driven by the engine’s exhaust gases) rather than supercharged (where the compressor is driven mechanically by the engine).
Both boost types were still relatively new for airplane engines and the turbocharger appeared to offer better efficiency. In practice, turbochargers require substantial large-diameter ductwork and parts capable of operating at very high temperatures. This overhead precluded turbocharger installation in most Allison-equipped fighters. They received engines with a single-stage supercharger, and the resulting altitude limitations. The one notable exception was the Lockheed P-38, a twin-engine bird that was large enough to accommodate the turbochargers. The P-38’s enjoyed widespread success in the Pacific theater, but even the turbocharged Allison proved troublesome for high-altitude flying over Europe. This was partly due to improper engine management techniques that were initially taught to P-38 pilots. Yet, it remains clear that the V-1710 was never suitably developed for high-altitude operation.
Modern-Day Merlins
In the post-war years, many Merlin-equipped aircraft (and spare engines) were retired from militaries and sold to private buyers. Many of these airplanes and their Merlins were modified for maximum speed in the air racing boom that followed the war. Owners found that you could coax considerably more power out of the engine (3000+ horsepower) at the expense of longevity. For a while, surplus Merlins were also a popular powerplant for racing boats.
Even today, you can hear the distinct song of a Merlin in one of the privately-owned P-51s that remain airworthy. These steeds are still popular mounts for air racers and (well-heeled) private pilots. Although much less plentiful, other Merlin-powered warbirds can also be found throughout the world.
Despite the fact that Merlins have not been manufactured for more than 60 years, many of its parts remain in ample supply, at least by vintage airplane standards. Perhaps the most elusive commodity to Merlin owners is mechanics who are qualified to work on them. A smattering of elite shops within the US offer Merlin services. The good news is that non-racing Merlins rarely need more than routine service. Ken McBride of 51 Factory states:
“If the engine is built to original specifications, and operated properly, it is a very sound design. They built over 100,000 Merlins – by that time they knew what worked and what did not. We feel there is little need to redesign it.”
After WWII, Packard resumed making consumer automobiles, albeit with a loosened focus on luxury. Like other automobile manufacturers, Packard often struggled in the competitive post-war car market. By the late 1950’s, Packard had merged with Studebaker and would soon disappear altogether. Although the company is now long gone, it seems that the Merlin engines that Packard produced will continue running for quite some time.
Terry spent 15 years as an engineer at the Johnson Space Center. He is now a freelance writer living in Lubbock, Texas.
“Men bet their lives on it” – the Packard-built Merlin V-12:
Speaking of V-12s, it was the Packard V-12 that inspired Enzo Ferrari to use a V-12 in his sports cars. With that, we segue to:
Autos as Art
(Hat tip: “B-Squraed”)
Add yours →
1. Great post, Amazing how much one doesn’t know, and also what WE CAN DO when we set out minds to it.
Good one my friend, again a good one.
Liked by 1 person
• Packard did a masterful job with that Merlin V-12, just as they did with the marine V-12 they built for the PT boats. The engine in the PT boats was Packard’s own design, unlike the Merlin which Rolls-Royce initially developed. The PT boat V-12, however, had an aviation origin. Packard’s starting point for their marine V-12 was their Liberty aviation V-12 they built in World War I.
2. Sorry, but Terry Dunn’s article contains a glaring error about the Merlin engine. Packard did NOT convert measurements from metric imperial to US Standard units. Packard kept everything British Standard and had to create the tooling to do so.
“An often asked question is; “did Packard replicate the British thread system when they built Rolls-Royce Merlins under license during World War II?” The answer is yes; all threads that were used on the Merlin were accurately replicated by Packard. This would include BSW (British Standard Whitworth), BSF (British Standard Fine), BSP (British Standard Pipe) and BA (British Association). Having said that, however, Packard Merlins> used U.S. built Bendix injection carburetors; PD-16 for single stage engines and PD-18 for two stage engines, both of which used U.S. Unified threads. British built Merlins employed S.U. carburetors using Whitworth threads. The job facing Packard when they undertook manufacture of the Merlin was daunting to say the least. It’s bad enough having to build a complex product like the Merlin but exacerbating the situation was the fact no tool maker in the U.S. made Whitworth taps or dies. Therefore, Packard were forced into making their own. Although this created a significant hurdle to overcome, the effort was well worth it, Packard and Rolls-Royce components were interchangeable.”
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global_01_local_0_shard_00002368_processed.jsonl/45895 | Summer Skin Care Tips
Summer is my favorite season of the year :)
At this time of the year particular skin issues tend to arise; such as dryness, redness and dull skin.
My clients have very busy schedules, but they make sure to always take good care of their skin. A few weeks before they buckle down and get extra serious, they come in 1-2 times a week for some beauty boot camp treatments.
We tackle any skin issue from anti-aging, breakouts to dehydration
A great tip for them to do at home is a homemade probiotic exfoliating mask. The active "good bacteria' works to help detox and brighten the skin. The results are a smooth and bright complexion.
All You Need Are:
• 2 capsules of a good Probiotic
(found at Wholefoods or any other health food stores)
• 4 Tablespoons of organic safflower oil
(Apart from benefiting the hair, there are also many safflower oil skin benefits. Safflower oil helps keep skin moisturized and supple. People are also recommended the use of safflower oil for acne treatment. Application of safflower oil on the skin helps in getting rid of other skin problems like scars, and wrinkles).
Break open capsules, and mix in a bowl with 3 tbs of oil. Apply to your cleansed skin and leave on for 10 minutes. Massage into skin for 1 minute (the granules and oil work together to help exfoliate and brighten skin). Rinse off with warm water and follow with a good moisturizer and eye cream - et voilà!
Also don't neglect on your in-office professional treatments.
Muahhhh my loves :) |
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