Fedrz left this comment in reply to the “A Rational Cost/Benefit Analysis of Marriage”, and I thought it was too good to let stay buried in the comments because he hits on some of the major issues that men have to resolve before we can move forward. (image nipped from The Critical Thinker blog, from a very thought-provoking post on Thomas Aquinas)
The Church stuff is pretty interesting, and of course, is tied into all of this. It is pretty difficult subject to discuss dispassionately, which is what is required, but is difficult to do.
Harvard was actually originally mandated to be “Protectors of the Truth.†And at the time, they felt they could actually identify truth, because during that age, they used the Bible as an anchor of “Absolute Truth†to identify what was true and what was not.
When Hegel came out with “The Truth is Relativeâ€, it set the whole system into the shitter, because it got rid of the “anchor†of Absolute Truth. The concept of God is “black and white.†God’s word is “Truth.â€
However, of course, we are able to recognize that truth often does change, or, truth often is relative.
And herein lies the entire problem, I think. Human nature, and the need to control it.
In many ways, I agree with Hegel & Marx that indeed, the Truth is Relative. But, from a position of what works for a civilization? Well… that must have elements of an Absolute Truth to it, or cultural hegemony will never arise, and civilization will never occur.
The human brain is enormously malleable, and it naturally tends to lean towards “Relative Truth.†We often use our brains to justify what we would like to be true, rather than what actually is true. Jail is full of innocent people. Morality is forever malleable unless attached to an absolute truth.
From an anthropological sense, human beings naturally create religions. Every civilization that has ever existed has adhered to some form of religion. It seems to be a necessity for the human condition. And, look at how different morality can develop in different ways. Think about the typical movie scene of the virgin tied to a stone slab, about to be sacrificed to the Volcano God or whatever. The people that lived in such civilizations thought nothing immoral of such a situation, yet, when other civilizations encountered them, they were horrified by their “lack of morality.â€
Morality can go in many different ways, and indicates that indeed, from a big perspective, “truth is relative.â€
But even if it is, it is not a good thing for civilization to not have any absolutes. It’s for similar reasons that we have the Rule of Law and a Legal/Court system. You and I can argue and argue, and both of us will create a belief system for ourselves, justifying our position to ourselves, and creating a reality in each of our own minds – that will forever contradict the other’s view of reality. Therefore we must have a court system to decide, hopefully with impartiality, what is right and what is not. An absolute. Without it, things would never function.
A civilization needs a religion in the same way.
And all things considered, Christianity was not the worst one we could have wound up with. The way I look at it is, when everyone points out how hypocritical and evil it has been in the past… well, that is not Christianity, per se, but rather, it is the nature of humans that is trying break free from the bounds that Christianity tried to place upon them. It doesn’t matter whether Christian or Marxist or Muslim or the Hoobie Joobie Mumbo Spirit, it is human nature to try and manipulate and force one’s will upon others. In that sense, Christianity has been not too bad, because it is firmly based in the concept of Absolute Truth, and can be used to pull us back from the brink of La La Land when we get a little too insane. It is an anchor. I think the history of the West would have been a lot worse without the Bible, than it was with it.
If you want to know why most Communist countries abolish Christianity, it is because it is firmly rooted in the concept of “Absolute Truth†which is directly at odds with dialectical manipulation. The Bible zaps it into oblivion, as the two cannot exist in the same philosophical space.
It is for this reason as well, that the lefties are so adamant about Evolution. And again, one has to look at the Evolution debate dispassionately.
Marx and Engels were extremely excited when Darwin came out with his theory, because it was the “science†that supported their political philosophy – namely, that the Truth is Relative. Evolution indicates that the truth is forever changing. What was true yesterday, is no longer true today. And therefore, what is true today, does not neccessarily have to be true tomorrow.
This was great for Marx because he is preaching the political philosophy that man’s condition can be “alteredâ€, basically, by use of force. One can therefore “force an evolutionary direction†upon mankind. Kinda like how an arborist prunes a tree to control how it grows and shapes itself.
Whether one believes in Evolution or not, this very important political aspect rarely gets mentioned in the debate, but it is core to the importance of a lot of philosophy about “truth.â€
This is why the leftists pee their pants so quickly whenever someone begins to discuss intelligent design. If intelligent design were to be proven, it would indicate a “plan,†which would indicate the existence of Absolute Truth… and the entire political philosophy of the left would fall to bits. They need evolution to be true for more reasons than what they… so does the Creationist side… the Intelligent Design side doesn’t, however, because it is dispassionate.
Much of Anthropology has been shattered by insistence on adherence to this as well, and anyone trying to suggest that those “primitive†people from the past were perhaps a helluva lot smarter than we give them credit for, is automatically drummed out of the business and called a loon. And yet, the ancient Sumerians had the knowledge to “weld†gemstones together, which is something we still can’t replicate today.
The religion debate is interesting, because it is about Absolute vs. Relative Truth.
If a society always tends to “create†a religion, would you rather have one based in Absolutes, or would you prefer one that is forever malleable.
It has elements that come down to the similar situation as, would you rather live under a government that was ruled by whim and emotion (Democracy), or would you rather live under The Rule of Law? (Republic)
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{ 151 comments… read them below or add one }
The reason I pulled this comment out and put it on the front page is because fedrz has summarized here the primary stumbling block preventing us from moving forward as men.
We currently have little more to unite us than a vague sense of a common enemy, which when we get down to trying to define we find is far too vague and contentious for us to agree.
I believe that the underlying issue in the cultural chaos of the past half century has been a loss of morality – of those absolute truths fedrz mentions. The wholesale slaughter of unborn children using the misleading euphemisms of “choice” and “reproductive health” is a loss of morality of the highest order.
The ability of either party in the covenant of marriage to simply change his or her mind and walk away from it, leaving an abandoned partner and children, is a monumental loss of morality.
Unfortunately, the moment we set one foot into the minefield of discussing religion and morality we run into the fundamental conflict and distinction between “the religion” and “the church.” Churches can and do become corrupt, and followers of the religion have a moral dilemma on their hands when they have to decide between supporting a corrupt and immoral church, simply because it carries the same label as their religion, and holding out for what they sincerely believe is Absolute Truth.
How many Christians have the convictions to follow their own savior and throw the money changers out of the temple?
How are the guardians of this “Absolute Truth” chosen, and what qualifications must they bring to the job?
And, perhaps more importantly, can believers in the same “Absolute Truth” find common ground as men that transcends which particular religious “Team” that the man is a fan of?
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Even within Christianity, one needs to appeal to some overriding standard that goes beyond opinion. That is why the concept of Sola Scriptura is so important. Too many people who call themselves Christians rely on the opinions of their leaders or their subjective feelings, but not on what the Word of God clearly reveals. That’s why when I talk about manhood and Christianity, you are going to see a good bit of unapologetic Bible-thumpin’ at my blog. We can talk about methodologies and responsible hermeneutics, but at the end of the day, it the Christian’s Rule Book or it ain’t.
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I can not quite see ‘religion’ as being based on ‘absolute’. I write as a non religious person but it appears to me that many Christians do not believe in any sort of absolute truth. I often hear them say that the Bible must be only understood as a book of its time and be re-understood in terms of the what they call the modern world.
Am I mistaken in this observation? Certainly it is a view I hear from Christians on a regular basis, and they would denounce those who do believe in the Bible as ‘an absolute’ as fundamentalists. This is not a term used to flatter but denigrate. So that is how Christians argue amongst themselves.
I honestly can not comment on any other religion except to hazard a guess that they too are divided.
Living in the West I can not say for sure that we are better for our Christian heritage. I can say with passion that I don’t like where we are now. Being an anti feminist and all round opposer of female supremacy I can not say that these things came from outside western culture. They are just as much a product of it as anything else. They did not emerge amongst us because of invaders from Mars. So to my view Christian Western Culture gave us feminism just as certainly as it gave us all the other things we have and believe.
I know there are those amongst us who like to divide the culture up and assign bits they like to the inside and bits they dislike to the outside. But how can this be since all emerged from the same shared history? Pick and choose which bits of the culture you think are authentic, but all you are doing is showing a certain amount of ego and a lot of prejudice.
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“the Intelligent Design side doesn’t, however, because it is dispassionate”
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Well, most religions differ in the theoretical Truth, but there is an ALMOST universal agreement about the practical Truth.
For example, the status of the Virgin Mary or the Holy Trinity divide the different brands of Christianity. This is only important for the theologian scholars. 99% of Christian people don’t give a damn about the Holy Trinity, about if the Father is equal to the Son or things like that. It is stuff that does not intersect with their lives.
What is common is the practical Truth. You should not lie. You should not murder. You should not commit adultery. You should pray (which is good for the peace of soul). That is, the religious practice or how a man should live.
If you examine the different religions, they have a lot in common in this regard. Maybe some sexual and dietetic rules are different, but there is not one religion which says that murdering is good or that you must treat your neighbor with evil. There is no religion that says that woman is equal to man. Eve brought the sin to the world in Judaism, Christianism and Islam. Pandora plays the same role in Greek myths. There is no religion that says that a family is a mother and their children. All religions say that a family needs a father.
This common set of practical Truths is what has substained the civilization since the Neolithic times . I call them the “patriarchal religion”, because they can be regarded as different brands of the religion who built the Patriarchy and therefore, the civilization. Religions who favor the nuclear family and make the father the head of household so fathers are motivated to work for their children, producing the civilization through their work.
We know very little about the Paleolithic religion, but some scholars thinks it was matriarchal, the same way they think the Paleolithic family was matriarchal (that is, a mom with their children, probably from different fathers). Men were not motivated to work those times for children that they didn’t know they were theirs. With mothers raising children and men taking it easy, it is not strange that the culture did not progress throughout tens of thousands of years. There was no incentive.
Feminism is a attempt to return to this matriarchal religion, which is deeply ingrained in human nature. So black ghettos are returning to the Stone Age. All this is sold as a “progress”, because we have forgot where we came from.
Poverty is natural. Hunting-gathering is natural. Matriarchy is natural. Being without civilization is natural. If human beings are left to their own devices return to this primal state, which was ingrained in human nature by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution (while civilization is only 10000 years old in the Middle East, 3000 or so in Europe, 500 years in some parts of America and very recent in some parts of Africa).
Development is artificial. Patriarchy is artificial. Civilization is artificial. The patriarchal family was the best invention of the humanity, because all other inventions would have not been possible without it. To make the artificial civilization possible, we need a cultural artifact that is STRONG and runs against our natural impulses. This cultural artifact is the patriarchal religion. When religion decays (as in the ancient Rome or in our times), Matriarchy fills the void.
This is why an Absolute Practical Truth is needed. If God tells you “You shall not commit adultery”, this is absolute, this is immune to the rationalizations. When absolute practical truths disappear, all is left is a bunch of rationalizations such as woman telling “I committed adultery because my husband does not fulfill me emotionally” or “I deserve to be happy and, besides no one was harmed because everything was secret, and this made me be a better mother and wife”. In the old times, we would have answered “God told you shall not commit adultery. Period. No excuses”. Now we bent the rules to fit our wishes. This means the practical disappearance of morality and, therefore, the decay of civilization until a more demographically efficient patriarchal culture displaces us (Europe will be Islamic in one century).
In summary, everybody does what he wants and then rationalize it to convince himself that they are following a moral compass when they are only following their selfishness or instincts. This is why , when somebody says “I create my own moral rules”, I feel like laughing. How naive.
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many Christians do not believe in any sort of absolute truth. I often hear them say that the Bible must be only understood as a book of its time and be re-understood in terms of the what they call the modern world.
The Bible is not a book of it’s time. I don’t know any true Christian that believes that. The Bible is called the Book of Truth for a reason. The difference between those who believe in Biblical Inerrancy (theorists) and those who believe in Biblical Infallibility (literalists) is that literalists think that the Bible can be used as a Science and History text and theorists (such as I) think that the Bible is supposed to teach us about higher truths and that the stories are used to teach us those truths.
So to my view Christian Western Culture gave us feminism just as certainly as it gave us all the other things we have and believe.
Christianity is inherently anti-feminist. There is a reason that most feminists are not religious. Christianity teaches that we should be humble and submissive. That’s hardly feminist. In fact, I was a feminist until I read a Bible for myself. I was shocked at what it contained.
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A civilization, any civilization, cannot survive without some absolute truths.
Malleable doesn’t work. If there are no absolutes, then the sociopaths get the advantage (they tend to anyway) and people start to realize there is no justice. Which is why religion and an after life are so important because it gives people the feeling that even if there is no justice here, there is in the next life.
If there is no justice here or there, then there is no reason to abide by anything other than self interest which leads to selfish behavior and hedonism, which leads to decay in your society, a lack of faith in its institutions, an attempt to use the law to enforce stability (that never ultimately works) which leads to more and more regulation until ultimately there is a collapse, or utter tyranny.
Likewise, a civilization must believe, absolutely in its destiny, goodness and superiority. Once you believe that it is all relative, or that every civilization is equal, again you sow the seeds of the civilization’s collapse.
You do not need a lot of absolutes, but you need some and they can be quite simple:
1) Killing is wrong except in the defense of self, others or country.
2) Fraud of any kind is wrong.
3) Honesty is valued, dishonesty and bearing false witness are evil.
4) Nepotism is bad. (I put that in there because it really does undermine merit and the stability of civilization.
There are a few more. Once you start seeing these rules as relativistic, your society is screwed and there is no saving it.
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Even if we accept the Biblical premises, Christianity does not offer an absolute truth that we would all agree on. Kierkegaard has shown in Fear and Trembling how a life of faith needs to be answered by a personal faith and truth.
I also do not see how Christianity enables a republic. The concept of a republic existed before the Christian event happened. The early Christian church does not discuss the concept of a republic.
The neoconservatives have created a substitute religion. Their crusade for freedom could be seen as such a noble lie or religion. How could we create such a religion to prevent libertinism?
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Anyone who has actually read the Bible objectively and spent some time studying different Christian traditions objectively would have to conclude that while Christianity claims an Absolute Truth, every different sect of Christianity views that truth differently. Often radically so. Link-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations
Every single one of these denominations can point to a teaching of the Bible and argue their interpretation represents the Absolute Truth. Or as Paul mentions above, claim there is no absolute truth.
There are the Pacifist Quakers and the violence-embracing Dominionist Evangelicals. There are megachurches preaching God Wants You To Be RICH and churches that follow the teachings of Christ to forego earthly posessions. There are Christian denominations marrying homosexuals and Christian denominations calling for homosexuals to be thrown in jail. And so on.
Are you going to say they’re all following Absolute Truth? Or will you pick and choose who is, based on your personal views? Sounds like “Truth is Relative” to me.
If a Christian were to actually read the New Testament and take the teachings of Christ to heart, they should be doing everything they can to end the Capitalist economic system. Jesus instructed his followers to sell all their possessions, give it to the poor, and follow Christ. “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” To the rich he said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,” and “go, sell what you have, and give to the poor.” How many so-called Christians are following Christ’s teachings in this regard? How many so-called Christians follow any of Christ’s teachings? The economic example is just one example.
Given a preponderance of evidence that the vast majority of so-called Christians do not follow the teachings of Christ, and instead follow some other self-selected version of Absolute Truth, they are following the “Truth is Relative” doctrine, and therefore have no right to accuse anyone else of relativism.
Given Christianity’s embrace of “Truth is Relative,” Intelligent Design and the potential existence of a “plan” do not threaten anyone else’s political, scientific, or cosmological worldviews, because Christians themselves aren’t even following the same plan, and cannot claim Absolute Truth.
If anything, the teachings of Christ and the teachings of Intelligent Design should cause someone to run headlong into Socialist and Environmentalist political ideology, unless you’d like to claim that Jesus was a Capitalist and God created the Earth so we could hamhandedly wreck it.
I simply do not have the mental or the emotional capacity to show empathy or gratitude to a religion that wholeheartedly embraces hypocrisy, ignores the teachings of it’s stated Deity, and then tries to beat their asinine beliefs into everyone else’s skull.
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Black&German:
“Christianity is inherently anti-feminist. There is a reason that most feminists are not religious. Christianity teaches that we should be humble and submissive. That’s hardly feminist. In fact, I was a feminist until I read a Bible for myself. I was shocked at what it contained.”
Most religions are, although I would say that Christianity has become more feminine in outlook. It has become more loving and forgiving (the mother side) and far less the stern patriarch of Thou shalt not.
“The Bible is not a book of it’s time. I don’t know any true Christian that believes that.”
This is where there’s a problem, define “true Christian” there are many that say they are and undermine the religion.
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“I simply do not have the mental or the emotional capacity to show empathy or gratitude to a religion that wholeheartedly embraces hypocrisy, ignores the teachings of it’s stated Deity, and then tries to beat their asinine beliefs into everyone else’s skull.”
Yjos is human nature and will be a problem with any religion.
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Talleyrand-
I actually think that religion can be valuable to society, but claiming an Absolute Truth is the poison pill. As you say, human nature…
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The idea of Absolute Truth does not have to be Christian for a civilization to occur.
What needs to occur is cultural hegemony. A large group of people have to become “similar enough” in moral values, in order to function together as a unit that will create a civilization, or functioning society.
If everyone adheres to different truths, there will be no larger sense of co-operation, and without that co-operation, no civilization will occur.
Much of this cultural hegemony is created by religion. Whether it is Christianity or not does not really matter for this particular debate. It is why one must look at it from a distance. Civilization is like a machine, and without certain parts, the machine never will start working. What matters to civilization is a similar overall belief system. In our particular case, this was created by Christianity. But, it could have been another religion that united our basic moral values as well – it is just that in the West, our religion was Christianity. It works best to just take Christianity out of it, and to talk in the more vague concept of “religion” – except to point out that it appears the religions with more “absolutes” are more successful than those without them.
It’s difficult to separate them though, because religion is such a hot button topic.
I often ponder if Absolute Truth could also be based upon mathematics, if one wanted to get away from religion.
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It has become more loving and forgiving (the mother side) and far less the stern patriarch of Thou shalt not.
But even though Christ taught forgiveness he also taught us to “Go, and from now on do not sin any more”. Forgiveness is not an excuse for wrongdoing. A feminist reading of the Bible would have to ignore 99.5% of it and focus on Jesus blessing babies and the sick. I’m convinced that a lot of self-professed Christians have never read the Bible and do not know what it truly contains.
As for what makes a Christian, I’ll quote Novaseeker’s excellent recent post on that one:
Christianity is about the personal and corporate deliverance from death by the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, through whom the world itself was made, and the ongoing process of sanctification, or growth in holiness, which comes through union with Christ in baptism and subsequently “walking with Him†in the newness of life, having “put on Christâ€.
Attending religious ceremonies, believing in an afterlife or deity, and doing good works is not enough to make a Christian. You have to sign on to the whole thing.
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Much of this cultural hegemony is created by religion. Whether it is Christianity or not does not really matter for this particular debate.
I agree. As long as the religion professes the practical absolutes that allow civilization to flourish, it doesn’t really matter which one it is. My preference is Christianity, obviously, but I’ve found that I get along remarkably well with Jews and Muslims and less well with agnostics and atheists. I find it difficult to deal with people whose moral compass depends on what they’ve had for lunch. Although there are many self-professed Christians who fit in that latter category, as well, and atheists that are of such fine stuff that they don’t fit into it. But it’s easier with religion, I think.
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What a bunch of shit November 21, 2009 at 12:04 pm:
“Talleyrand-
I actually think that religion can be valuable to society, but claiming an Absolute Truth is the poison pill. As you say, human nature…”
While I see the lack of any absolutes as being a far more dangerous poison.
B&G,
I don’t disagree, my point was that the poison that has infected Christianity is that many of the churches point to the forgiveness part, embrace forgiveness, tolerance and loving without demanding the change in behavior or some recompense for the wrong doing.
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I really like this article. I don’t agree with the author’s opinion that the truth IS relative, but his analysis of the negative consequences of that opinion is very solid.
I especially like his analysis of the link between Marxism and Darwinism. Back in February, I wrote a piece about how those ideologies are essentially “feel-good pseudo-sciences”…
http://mustardseednovel.blogspot.com/2009/02/marx-freud-and-darwin-feel-good-science.html
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Zed: I believe that the underlying issue in the cultural chaos of the past half century has been a loss of morality – of those absolute truths fedrz mentions.
TW: Yes, I agree.
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I don’t disagree, my point was that the poison that has infected Christianity is that many of the churches point to the forgiveness part, embrace forgiveness, tolerance and loving without demanding the change in behavior or some recompense for the wrong doing.
Agree. It’s feel-good instead of be-good religion.
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Oh dear, I think I now get some of the thought underlying all this civilization is decaying stuff. It’s religious people afraid of a world that is getting more secular.
Read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.
Religion still has its uses for the cognitive underclass.
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“This is why the leftists pee their pants so quickly whenever someone begins to discuss intelligent design.”
I’m no leftist, but the undermining of science by religious “teach the controversy” people bothers me. Not a fan of theocracy, supporter of the divide between church and state.
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Kohlberg’s stages of moral development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development
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For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t mind if the world became more secular as I am, essentially, a libertarian. What bothers me is that it seems that we are incapable of sustaining civilization without absolute truths and religion is the best system for that. If you know of a better PROVEN system then I’m all ears…
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What has the system you so want to support done for you lately?
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Yes, Icaros, I see this argument lots. “I can create my own morality.” It’s not just 27 stages though – more like 500,000,027 stages, because after the 27 stages, you now have to convince everyone else in Western Civilization to do the same thing as you just did, or it won’t really matter very much that you’ve created a wonderful morality for yourself.
And how are you gonna convince them all to do it, when they can just flip around and say to you, “what makes your truth anymore truthful than my truth? Therefore, I don’t care about your method for morality.”
It is a tightrope to walk… a dilema.
What good does it do me to be the best hockey player in Canada, if, when I take to the ice, my rightwinger showed up in football gear, cause that’s what game he is playing, and my leftwinger is there to play baseball. My defencemen are holding a tennis racquet and a golf club, and my goalie is bouncing a soccer ball on his knee? There’s no game that’s gonna be happening here today. Might as well take my puck and go home.
I am not religious, btw, although I was born and raised in a religious family. I certainly don’t approach this subject with a religious viewpoint.
However, it ought to be noted, that “Christian Haters” behave about as irrationally batshit insane as Religious Fanatics. It is fair to point out that both sides seem to be incapable of detaching themselves emotionally from the subject enough to examine the subject from a purely mechanical point of view.
There is PCism involved, I suspect, when a person merely sees the word “Christian” and like Pavlov’s dog, a bunch of spewing of cliched lines come out. It is really not much different than the “Not All Women Are Like That” line.
Both sides are kinda irritating, lol, but I don’t know which is worse. The Born Again or the PCist. Both sides have that “nails on a chalkboard” kinda effect.
Christianity itself is under attack in much the same way as men are – by rampant PCism. There is a reason for both, and the reason is pretty close to the same. We should be able to recognize this and ally with eachother, but Christianity itself has just as hard of a time recognizing that we are their natural allies as well – for many of the same reasons. Lol! What a freakin’ mess!
I do find Christianity to be interesting to study though, because I enjoy studying Culture, and I also enjoy reading about past civilizations and such. It is kinda hard to study even ourselves without looking at one of the most defining features of “us,” which is our religion.
The first thing that most anthropologists look for when studying a culture is the religion, because it deciphers so much of the culture. To study ourselves, we therefore must study Christianity and how it helped to form what we have.
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Advocatus Diaboli,
Sir,
are you asking me, asking the entire group, speaking rhetorically, or quoting Janet Jackson? (I just couldn’t help adding that last one because I immediately heard the song in my head when I read your post.)
If it was me you’ll have to wait until Monday for my response. Cheers!
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The best study samples you can find for this, btw, are on the internet.
We currently have little more to unite us than a vague sense of a common enemy, which when we get down to trying to define we find is far too vague and contentious for us to agree. — Zed.
The internet is the wild west of ideas, and there is very little regulation.
How many forums have you seen blow to bits? Lol! Quite a few. In fact, so many, that some have made it into an observable science. A forum runs fairly smoothly until it gets to about 300 members… after that, things start to get warbly, and louder, and angrier, and then BOOM, everything blows to bits.
The places on the internet that work the best are the ones that rather tend to create a set of rules for discourse, and then actively enforces those rules in an impartial manner. This set of rules becomes “the culture” of that particular board or site. If a good set of rules is created, a good culture will be the result, and the size of the forum now has much more chance of growing in size – and effectiveness.
The same is true for society at large.
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I think the religions have stressed family and shame on those lifestyles that werent family based. This was obviously the basis of civilization. Today’s morality only allows shame to be used to extort wealth from disinterested 3rd parties via the political process.
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Thinking about these things makes me want to ask -Whose absolute true should we be following? Do you all want to fallow my absolute truth? That would be fine. I would rather not follow your absolute truth if you don’t mind.
Shall we look for a book and then agree on what it means and call that absolute truth? Can I choose the book this year and someone else choose another book next year?
I will give you my choice for now ‘Complex Analysis’ by Whitaker and Watson. That’s absolute truth to me.
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Religion provides an absolute truth? Really? Using what, the bible? Let me ask you this. Do you interpret the bible literally? I mean, exactly every single word? If yes, then you perhaps have an absolute truth. But then you have to admit to adhering to some pretty horrible things; like murdering people because of their sexuality or even their choice of clothes. Oh, but you say, I don’t believe in *that* part of the bible. Well, then you have demonstrated a belief system outside of the bible. Therefore, the bible is no longer your absolute truth.
The bottom line is that even religion is interpreted differently and has a relative aspect to it, regardless of what you may want to claim. There are countless religions, countless Gods, countless translations of the bible or whatever holy book that religion happens to subscribe to. Which one should I follow? Why should I reject the others? People tell me all the time that they believe in the New Testament and not the Old Testament, etc, etc.
If you need a religion in your life to help guide you, I have no real problem with that as long as you keep it personal and out of other’s public life. But please don’t sit here and try to tell me that religion provides an absolute truth.
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1. There isn’t really any precedent for having consensus moral rules (beyond a few least common denominators) without these rules being based on some consensus transcendent reality – a higher purpose, at the very least. This is missing in our current society because almost all of the contemporary philosophy rejects transcendent reality as a concept, and instead has embraced relativism in one form or another. In a very real way, relativism is the inevitable philosophical outcome of a society which places individual autonomic freedom as its core value – as ours does. The “price†of having that as the core social value is that there are no other consensus values beyond a few common denominators, and even there, there is no consensus (murder would seem to be a consensus moral rule at first blush, but the abortion debate demonstrates how easily even the most baseline consensus moral rule can crumble in the face of the absolute value of personal autonomic freedom).
2. It’s for this kind of reason that the idea that there can be wide-consensus moral rules outside a wide consensus about the content of faith is, while understandable, rather far-fetched and misplaced. A division, therefore, between “theoretical truth†and “practical truth†is not workable, in practice, and is incoherent even in theory when viewed from the perspective of someone standing inside any of the main faith traditions. The reason for that is, again, the reality that relativism acts as an acid that dissolves consensus moral rules – and there is nothing more relativistic than the notion that “all faith traditions are basically the sameâ€. In fact, this is a fantastically contemporary notion which has no basis in history, and is incoherent in its perception of reality.
3. The trouble with the West at the moment is that it has literally lost its faith. It has been tried (and some are still trying) to cobble together a secularized, non-transcendent “practical faithâ€, but of course this doesn’t work, because there truly is no reason for consensus to emerge. A society simply cannot extol individual autonomic freedom as its core value while at the same time having consensus moral rules – for consensus moral rules will always act to suppress individual autonomic freedom to some degree. So our thinkers have lost their faith in Western religion (mainly Christianity), but try though they might, they have been unsuccessful in “replicating†what they consider to be the “good parts†of Christianity, in order to forge some kind of a socio-moral consensus – but this will never work without a religion as the glue. And religion is outright rejected by our contemporary thinkers, for the most part. That is the crux of the issue.
4. It’s always humorous when someone tries to portray Jesus Christ as some kind of democratic national committee chairman or something like that. The notion that is often lost is that Christ did not advocate “social justice†– rather he advocated “personal justiceâ€. His admonitions to feed the poor and tend to the sick and so on were directed at individual persons, and not at the state apparatus. In fact, when pressed by his followers about the political issue (and the pressing need to rebel against the Romans who were “oppressing†the Jews of the age), he famously responded that they should pay their taxes, rejecting the notion that the faith he was preaching was a socio-political movement, or one which was directed at uprooting the oppression of the state. It was nothing of the sort.
5. As far as “sola scriptura†goes, that idea is part of the core problem we face today. But of course the issue goes back much further than that. To me, the beginning of the problem was the alienation of the Eastern and Western empires, which eventually led to a separation of the Eastern and Western churches. That separation created problems for both Eastern and Western Christians. For the East, it meant being cut off from the rising West, a gradual shrinking in power, and eventual conquest by Arabs and Turks, and later, communists. Cut off from the Western church, the Eastern church suffered as a result of its weakness and isolation. For the West, it meant being cut off from much of the tradition of the early church fathers, merely for the reason that Greek became largely unknown in the West, and few Greek texts made their way there. This paved the way for the development of scholastic theology in the West (based as it was, on the translation into Latin of Aristotle by Arab scholars in Spain). Scholasticism developed the way that it did in many ways, I think, because of the “newness†of the encounter of the Christian West with Greek philosophy. The Greek fathers of the first millenium were of course quite familiar with Aristotle and the rest of the Greek canon, and had never pursued a scholastic approach based on them, but, as I note, the heritage of the Greek fathers was not available in the West at this time, and so the scholastic movement created its own momentum, reinterpreting anew the proper relationship between philosophy and faith in a way that the early church would not have recognized. There were a few contacts in this period between the rising Scholasticism in the West and the continuing tradition in the East, and they were not particularly cordial. But, in any case Scholasticism led directly to the Protestant Reformation, because in many ways the reformers were reacting against the Aristotelian-esque soteriology that had developed in the wake of scholasticism in the church. The battle cry of “sola scriptura†was quite understandable seen in this context, because it was a rallying of theology away from the winding paths of scholastic theology and back towards the core elements of the Christian faith. However, sola scriptura led to its own problems as time moved forward, as Protestant and Reformed Christianity splintered again and again and again over different interpretations of the Bible – a process that continues today. For while in theory it is attractive to hold that the text of the Bible is a baseline criterion of shared truth, in reality a text like the Bible is subject to many different interpretations, and so while the text is authoritative for all Protestant Christians, the text itself does not serve to unite them, but rather serves to divide them, because there is nothing other than the text itself (which, again, can be interpreted differently) which can resolve a conflict of interpretations. As a practical matter, we know what this has resulted in: a splintering of Protestant/Reformed Christianity into a sea of “denominations†and, now, “non-denominational churchesâ€. But, more importantly for the purposes of what I am discussing here, this way of thinking about absolute truth led inexorably and directly to the relativism we see around us today.
Why is that? There are a few reasons. The main one is that once one claims that the text of the Bible is the sole criterion for truth, yet one observes that this “truth†is disagreed about in seemingly endless ways even among those Christians who also hold that the text is the sole criterion – you end up with a crisis of “faithâ€, because what constitutes the substantive content of the truth appears to be “relative†→ that is, some people think it means “A†and others think it means “Bâ€. Yet both the A partisans and the B partisans are, according to themselves, using the same sole criterion of truth. This leads an observer to conclude that this sole criterion can in fact be “interpreted†in different ways – leading to the conclusion that the truth given by such criterion is, in fact, relative, and dependent on interpretation, even though, of course, neither Partisan A nor Partisan B would agree, each seeing their own interpretation as more or less exclusively true. In other words, to an outside observer, it begins to appear that the absolute truth claim based on sola scriptura is, in fact, a relative truth claim, because others use the same criterion to reach a different “truthâ€.
The second, and related, reason is that because sola scriptura relies on textual interpretation, with no higher authority to interpret authoritatively, the resulting approach to thinking about absolutes tends to become increasingly anarchic, precisely because authority beyond textual interpretation has been eradicated. In other words, while it is true that Christians from the beginning disagreed about the meaning of the scriptural texts, they did devise means of “breaking†these disagreements – of authoritatively picking an interpretation as definitive and, importantly, binding. The reformers understandably rebelled against this as an idea, because they perceived the church authority of their time and place as having made incorrect decisions about such interpretation. However, following the wake of reformation, the lack of such a “breaking†authority – indeed, the lack of any authority above the interpretation of the scriptural texts, something which can, in fact, be a very individual thing and which characteristically has been so in post-reformation Protestant/Reformed Christianity – led to the splintering mentioned above, rather than the coalescing of Protestant/Reformed Christianity into one main tradition. The broader impact of this was even more pernicious, and would eventually undo Christianity in general in the West: namely, the conclusion that the “truth interpreting†authoritativeness of the individual was primatial, and not in need of any higher “human†authority in order for the truth to be authoritatively grasped. While the reformed churches eventually did institute discipline inside the churches, the dangerous idea itself was already out of the bottle. The broader significance of the depth and breadth of this rejection of authority beyond the individual led, quite apart from the churches and in terms of philosophy, directly to the enlightenment, and the philosophical and political worldviews of our contemporary culture. After all, if there is no authority needed beyond the human ability to interpret reality – based as it must be on human reason – there can also be no “checks†on that ability, either. In other words, once authority beyond the individual was trashed as being a necessary criterion for determining truth, it was only a matter of time until the Bible itself was rejected as a criterion once it, itself, started to act as a kind of constraint on the power of the individual mind to authoritatively define reality and truth. These ideas led directly to the rise of the primacy of the individual and the ideas of the enlightenment, which bit by bit crept away from religion in favor of unlimited, untrammeled human reason free from any external authority whatsoever. And hence, indeed, the importance placed by our culture on untrammeled individual autonomic freedom as the core political and moral value of our age.
The core problem we face today is, again, the fact that this entire enterprise of exercising human reason without the constraints of a truly “breaking†external authority (rather than a text which can be variously interpreted) has led to a society where the ability to have shared moral rules is drastically impeded. In short, it has led to a culture which is inherently relativist. It’s true that people like Wright and Armstrong and others recognize this as a problem for the society as a whole, but it’s also true that you can’t concoct a religion, and a moral system based on that, out of a relativist stew, and particularly not when so many of our thinkers over the past 200 years have so assiduously and relentlessly attacked the very concept of religion and absolute truth – whether moral or otherwise. Relativism, as the contemporary practical belief system of the West, does not admit of many moral absolutes, and at the same time is not a system without rather deep roots in our ways of thinking at this point in time. We can see the strength of that system of thought reflected in many of the comments on this thread, it seems to me.
Note that my intention here is not to “knock” Protestant/Reformed Christianity any more than it is to “knock” the Catholics and the Orthodox for bungling their ecclesial relations 1000 years ago (the event which started the train running down the wrong track, in my opinion), but rather to point out what I see as causes and continuities in terms of how our own Western history in this area has played itself out.
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I am unsure if morality does need a consensual transcendental reality. Is not mutual shared interests sufficient for what might pass as morality. So there is a sort of understanding that I don’t rob and kill you because you will not rob and kill me. When that mutuality does break down indeed people will rob and kill each other.
Of course morality goes way beyond this and invades even private thoughts. With a transcendental reality we have sins of entirely a private nature. Lustful thoughts are then immoral, masturbation is a sin etc. I am not sure such a situation is to be wanted at all. A transcendental reality that is interested in my fantasies is rather a pathetic ‘reality’. Can the creator of the universe be so petty as to be angry with my adolescent lusts. Well when I was such a person I thought so.
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Amazing, novaseeker. I have always know that the Reform paved the way to the Enlightnement and to our current world but you have such a clear and rational vision and summarize it very well.
Can you point one or more books to learn more about this subject? Thanks in advance.
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So there is a sort of understanding that I don’t rob and kill you because you will not rob and kill me. When that mutuality does break down indeed people will rob and kill each other.
Your definition is workable in theory, but not in practice, because human nature is selfish. I don’t give a damn about you and I will try to rob you while taking measure for everybody not to rob me.
I have seen this in most computer programmers: they use pirated software while taking measures for the software they develop not to be pirated. Man who cheat are the most jealous people because they don’t want their wives to cheat on them.
In fact, the rational decision for an individual is to break the rules while trying everybody else not to break them.
In order to work, this understanding that you mention must be followed by everybody. But if a group of people breaks this understanding, this becomes useless. In fact, you are proposing a version of the prisoner’s dilemma, which is a fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner‘s_dilemma). Instead of two people, your understanding is a prisoner’s dillemma with millions of people. Not possible.
No moral understanding can depend on the other people following it. It must be an individual decision.
This is why law exists: I don’t rob you not because you don’t rob me but because I am afraid of being caught and send to prison. This is an individual rational choice and doesn’t depend about the others doing the same in order to work.
But law is not enough. You cannot put a police for every person. There are matters that are private. God is the ultimate policeman. You are alone, in your bedroom, you know that you have done evil (for example, stealing something or treating women in a bad way). The police does not nothing about it, nobody knows but God knows and you will burn in hell. So you try not to do nothing who gives you ethernal punishment.
I speak this as someone who does not believe in eternal punishment: I am a son of my time. But I can really see why this is needed for morality to work.
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Another question for novaseeker. If your theory is true, why Muslim people have not followed the same development you have summarized? There is no higher authority in Islam and there a lot of currents and interpretations of the Quran, like in Protestant/Reformed Christianity. But Muslim people have not become relativist.
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finsalscollons –
There’s a book called “Mesolithic Europe”, edited by Geoff Bailey and Penny Spikins which goes into this in a fair amount of depth. A lot of the more developed hunter-gatherer societies were likely matriarchal and matrilocal (it’s hard to make guesses about cultures which left very little material remains, but some cultures in Scandinavia and the Danube appeared to be patriarchal).
One of the theories for the spread of Neolithic culture within the Mediterranean involves the women of these Mesolithic communities trading with Neolithic ones, and importing their men who subsequently began restructuring Mesolithic communities.
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Wow! Incredible knowledge on this subject, Nova.
I have always found it kind of interesting that the only real answer to God’s “riddles” is Absolute Truth.
I am who I am. I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the One True Way.
The answer is Absolute Truth. And it fits in every way.
The Absolute Truth is pure. It is never wrong. It is all knowing. It never changes. It was here before us, and it will be here after us. The Absolute Truth does not change because of our understanding of it, it exists totally separate of us. It need not explain itself to us to be true. It doesn’t need us to be true – we exist on different planes in the Universe.
We most likely never will know the answers to the origin of the Universe. But, just because we don’t know, or will never find out, does not mean that a truthful answer does not exist – there IS an answer to that question, and it doesn’t particularly need us to understand for that truthful answer to exist. 10 Million years after mankind is gone from the earth, the answer to what the origin of the Universe is will still be the same – it doesn’t need us.
It makes me wonder, how much does the acknowledgement that Absolute Truth exists change our philosophical ideas, even if we can’t particularly identify “what” is Absolute Truth?
Does the mere acknowledgement that Absolute Truth is real, change how we view the world around us, even when we are mired neck deep in Relativism? Or, does this make no difference at all? It certainly doesn’t do much in creating a unified voice… but it does lead to the notion of “higher power,” and also, that not everything can be explained by man.
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The US Founding Fathers also devised their political system to allow for both Absolute Truth and Relative Truth, based upon the ideas of John Locke which includes both inductive and deductive reasoning, and they acknowledge both forms of truth exist – but place them on a hierarchy like this:
1 – God’s Law
2 – Natural Law
3 – Civil Law
Each one must fit into the other, like those little Russian dolls that go inside of eachother. If a civil law contradicts natural law, it is false. And if a natural law contradicts God’s law, then it is false too.
After Hegel, we were left with this:
1 – Relative Truth
2 – Relative Truth
3 – Relative Truth
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I think that there are a few reasons for this. The first is that although there are many different interpretations of Islam, Islam, as compared with Western Christianity (and Christianity in general) is more “orthoprax” than it is “orthodox”. In other words, while there might be (and in fact, are) fairly distinct ways of interpreting the Qur’an in the context of global Islam, the actual practice of the faith (five times a day prayer in virtually the same formula and fashion everywhere in the Islamic world, alms-giving, pilgrimage, dietary restrictions and so on) is rather similar across most Islamic traditions — the biggest exception to that being the Shi’a, who have their own practices (but who also have a “higher authority” in the form of the Shi’a clergy). So despite various interpretations, the sense of “one-ness” among Muslims remains very strong, and precisely because despite various Qur’anic interpretations, most religious Muslims adhere to a very similar “orthopraxy” — this acts as a glue which prevents things from careening apart, and keeps the sense of the global “ummah”, despite the differences in interpretation locally.
Christianity, by contrast, is much more “orthodox”-oriented rather than “orthoprax”-oriented, and always has been, because of the importance of theology to the Christian message — the soteriological content, if you will, of Christianity. Having the “wrong” theology has been viewed in Christianity since the very beginning as being spiritually dangerous — a viewpoint that few Muslims would share to anything like the degree that believing Christians of whatever tradition would. As a result, the rebellion against a “breaking” theological authority in the West led to inevitable splintering into different perspectives, which in turn gives rise to relativism — precisely because Christianity holds the “truth” about these issues to be of primary importance — if having a theological proposition or biblical interpretation be true is of primary importance, yet party A and party B both disagree about that based on the same truth criterion, that leads to a relativistic attitude developing in the observer. If, by contrast, party A and party B both have different interpretations of the Qur’an, yet attend mosque together and follow pretty much the same orthopraxis, the observer is not going to see that as relativist, because the one-ness, the continuity of the faith is preserved — precisely because the system as a whole is based much more on orthopraxy than orthodoxy. If you have a faith system like Christianity that is much more based on orthodoxy, when you have disagreements about the content of that orthodoxy based on the same truth criterion — that leads to a crisis, and to relativism. In a faith such as Islam which is much more “orthoprax”-oriented, differences in theology are easier to tolerate and are ultimately less divisive precisely because the defining orthopraxy is shared in common.
There isn’t really one I think that has the entire argument, but a good recent one that has a good amount of it is David Bentley Hart’s book “Atheist Delusions”, which touches, in various places, the way that Western thought has developed over the past few centuries and the underlying bases for that from the earlier part of the second millenium.
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In mathematics once you get passed the trivial then the starting point is a set of axioms. Each mathematical discipline has its own axioms. So say group theory has one set of axioms while Hamiltonian mechanics will have another. Well that’s the way I studied the subject. Axioms do not have the status of an absolute truth but rather a staring point from which all subsequent ‘truth’ follow on from.
So I wonder if what we need is not absolute truth but a better set of axioms. Remember once the axioms have been set then although all that follows must still be proved the result must stem from the axioms.
Now I would hazard a guess that feminists think they have an absolute truth. I am certain that they feel unique in the whole of history in having discovered absolute truth which all previous generations had failed to find and that now will hold for all time. Frightening isn’t it?
What they have is a rough set of axioms and they have been extraordinarily successful in ensuring that all subsequent ‘results’ must conform to these axioms.
Any way enough of the mathematical analogy.
It is not my practice to comment too much on other comments. However can I just say briefly to finsalscolloms that I was not really making a theory but just circling the question. But that’s not why I want to make a response. You but say that God is needed to police us in case we threat a woman badly. I have to tell you I have no such concept of treating a woman badly.
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Christianity was needed as a moral compass that put all men and all woman on the right path (that being the path that made civilization keep moving). When stopped doing that of fear of being deemed irrelevant (that being around the Hippie ages) and become the soft, fluffy paragon of tolerance, it become something worse than irrelevant, it become just a useless duty that nobody cares if you follow.
The irony is that many of their believers emigrated to either less faggy religions: The Evangelism/Jehovah’s Witness sects and, in the UK, it went to the Muslims or to religions that allowed all the decivilization anyways, like all forms of Paganism.
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There is another aspect to Absolute Truth, that goes right back to the very origins of Judaism itself – right back to Abram, when he was living in Ur.
Ur was part of the Sumerian/Babylonian Civilization. Sumeria was the first civilization that existed, and later it morphed into other civilizations such as Babylon – more or less like how Western Civilization has morphed from Britain to America. It is not really a different civilization as much as it has simply transfered it power center.
The reasons why the Sumerians became so successful was because once they conquered other peoples, they adopted their gods into their culture. In fact, the new gods were often given a position of honor right away, and this was quite agreeable to those who had been conquered.
The result of this was that the Sumerians had many gods, and therefore, they followed many truths. They had gods for freakin’ near everything. Sun gods, rain gods, thunder gods, love gods, the god of broccoli… you name it, they had a god for it. They also, therefore, worshipped multiple truths. Most people chose to live under one main god, but also acknowledged the existence of other gods – they just place them down further in importance according to their beliefs. The people also kinda made their gods into a soap opera. They were screwing eachothers wives, getting divorced and remarried, raping eachother and so on. Lol! The Epic of Gilgamesh has porn in it! And I mean PORN! Most versions have the porn written in Latin, so as not to offend our sensibilities, but there is a version that translated it in the 50′s, where the translator held true to the word, and laid it out flat. I have not read this – yet – but, from what I understand, the internet had nothing on these guys – all the perversions you could find on the internet, has existed for looooong time already, lol.
Anyway, with all of the bed hopping of the gods, people were also chasing after different truths all the time. Especially if your house worshipped the broccoli god, and then got married to the rain goddess… suddenly the rain goddess became more important to you… and then they divorced, and she was not so important anymore.
I tend to view each god as a “truth” to the people. And because they had many, many, many gods, there were many truths which they followed. Btw, it is interesting that they lived in a totalitarian styled state, and developed over time such practices as divorce/alimony/child support – and that women physically belonged to the state. The King Gilgamesh was thought to be a half-god half-human, and was a mighty warrior – but something he did what got people pissed at him, was he took his right to hump people’s wives, and often rode around screwing people’s women at his whim. They were a highly sexualized people.
Now, in this caucaphony of gods, our God also existed. Whereas Gilgamesh was of the line of Ham (his grandson), the son of Noah, Abram was of the line of Shem, another son of Noah. The house of Shem followed the god known as “El.” El is the singular, and Elohim is the plural. In this ancient time, El was the god of Shem, and the god of Noah. El was the god that brought the flood. Ham’s descendents were the line that rejected El, in fact, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he hates the god who brought the flood, and swears to avenge his ancestors who were destroyed, by destroying the god of the flood.
Interestingly, most people at the time didn’t take very well to El, because he had no wife. That pissed people off, because there was no sex worship with El like there was amongst the other gods.
Anywho, when Abram left Ur and went into the wilderness, he took with him the God of Shem, and it is when Abram leaves the wickedness of civilization and becomes the first Man Going His Own Way, that God makes a covenant with him.
This to me is the establishment of “Absolute Truth.”
As Abram left the land of “many gods” and thus, “many truths,” God makes a covenant with him, but demands that HE is number one. Abram is not to follow any other gods except for God. No other gods (truths) are to be put before God (Absolute Truth). This is a fundamental change, considering where Abram originated from.
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Absolutely, Rob. The same confrontation happened in the very early period of Christianity, which is why the Romans often dubbed Christians as “atheists” — atheists in the sense that they rejected the many gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, and were “atheistic” with respect to these gods and their various cults and so on. It was a fundamental break with the kind of multi-god religions that were common in the ancient world.
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“Christianity itself is under attack in much the same way as men are – by rampant PCism. There is a reason for both, and the reason is pretty close to the same. We should be able to recognize this and ally with eachother, but Christianity itself has just as hard of a time recognizing that we are their natural allies as well.”
it’s revealing that the “spearhead” of that attack was/is male sexuality — corrosion via moral relativism is a distant second
intellectual arguments don’t stick in the mass consciousness, but pictures of madeleine mccann do, and so do endless articles on rihanna
etc
why was hillary recently touring africa, decrying the “epidemic of rape and sexual violence” while the countryside is full of dead males?
the laws soon follow — women make them, men merely pass them
catholicism has been crumbling for a century, flailing about pronouncing mary as co-redemptrix (LOL!) and trotting out the pope to decry the global “oppression” of women (twice in one speech this year!)
but as with the building of Der Homeland Security, the limbic-reactive excuse for the re-institution of matriarchy, as with the trashing of catholicism, is the Great Looming Boogeyman of male sexuality . . . works every time, no matter the millennium
modern christianity is a kind of social club, and career, for persons sharing general right-wing ideopolitical beliefs and economic interests — christianity is now a major plank in the matriarchal state, got nada to do with jesus
thus the inceptive men’s movement, to fill the void left by both church and state having been coopted by the enemies of christ (satanic matriarchy, oops that’s redundant)
that’s why christianity has “a hard time recognizing that we [MRAs] are their natural allies”
because we aren’t
tho we should be
the men’s movement, confused and disorganized and small though it be, is far closer to christ than any modern denomination, and will become closer still in the future
much closer
“Feminism is a attempt to return to this matriarchal religion, which is deeply ingrained in human nature.”
right . . . humanity’s first object of worship was Woman . . . and still is
woman worships herself, like america gazing into the lake of the sky and seeing only . . . her own reflection as heavenly queen
tis A Woman’s Nation! Mother Maria said so!
all valid religions are attempts to mitigate, however slightly, the collective power of the female, especially in alliance with the pack tyrannos (modernly, the presidents, senators, generals, corporate execs, etc)
the old testament chronicles god’s attempt to carve out an oasis of masculinity in a world dominated by the alliance between evil (serpent) and the collective feminine — and it chronicles the endless backsliding of the hebrews to their pagan gyno-roots . . . finding new ‘n creative ways to piss god off, especially reversion to the human-sacrificial ceremonies attendant to ALL goddess cults, astarte and ashtoreth and the baals etc . . . the same idolatry we see all around the modern west, worship of the feminine and of wealth/power, with a heavy dollop of state-sanctified violence (overwhelmingly inflicted on males, such a coincidence)
WHY, at one time, did judeochristianity focus so intently on the father and son? why did jesus constantly yak about the father this and the father that? and indeed made himself subject to that father? why were the OT prophets perennially at war with their own governments and people?
the “gender war” is not new, and certainly neither is feminism, nor did feminism arise from the ground up in the twentieth (or even mid-nineteenth) century based upon the modern “realization” by females that they were/are “oppressed”
our rising (and largely accomplished) global gynogulag, rather, represents the penultimate realization, or capstone, of a very very old enterprise
the ultimate realization, of course, is to then spread the global matriarchy to the heavens
what chance will little boys have in a universe composed of, say, six billion matriarchal planets, not just one?
that’s why the gynogulag must be stopped here, and stopped forever
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Thank you, Novaseeker.
@Paul
So I wonder if what we need is not absolute truth but a better set of axioms. Remember once the axioms have been set then although all that follows must still be proved the result must stem from the axioms.
Well, I know that this is a metaphor because Mathematics is very different than ordinary life. In Math, you can choose the set of axioms that you want (you can choose between Euclidean geometries or non-Euclidean ones). Axioms have consequences but only in the limited world of Math. In the real life, if you choose the axiom “German people are more valuable than other people and need more lebensraum”, the consequence is millions of people killed in WWII. There is not the freedom of Math, which is a virtual world and, ultimately, only a game (with practical applications in science).
Feminists were successful in their set of axioms because they were preaching self-interest for women (sexual liberation) or what women thought it was self-interest (economic independence). People don’t need incentive to get more sex.
The set of axioms of traditional morality are AGAINST self-interest. It is the kind of axioms that, are against our rational self-interest, but, if THE VAST MAJORITY of people follow them, produce a better society. So it is difficult to enforce them at individual level, but if you got to enforce them, the results are good.
This is why the Ten Commandments were, for example, “Thou shalt not steal” but not “Thou shalt eat” or “Thou shalt reproduce” (It is not needed to preach for self-interest, you only let human nature do its jo).
This is why it requires something strong to enforce them. How do you plan to enforce axioms that go against self-interest? It is like millions of traders trying to agree to sell some commodity at exactly the same price. The incentive not to follow this agreement and get a personal gain by selling with another price is very hard. It is the prisoner’s dilemma.
In the old times, people were taught from the early age that their bad actions had consequences, even if they didn’t see it in this world. This was an incentive to behave well. Morality was founded on self-interest (I d0n’t want to be tortured for all the eternity). Of course, it would be nice that everybody behaves well because they want the common good (and some people do that but not everybody). But expecting to have that is against human nature.
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FYI, I made part of this essay my “Quote of the Day”…
http://mustardseednovel.blogspot.com/2009/11/quote-of-day_22.html
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Link:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/11/fake-fact-america-is-not-secularizing.php
When did the religion started to fall in BIG? Oh yeah, it was when the baby boomers, the sons and daughters of the hippie movement in the 60′s reached adulthood. It was because they weren’t raised with a Church that gave Absolute Truth, so there’s no reason to stick to it. A Church that doesn’t work as a moral compass has no purpose, no reason to exist.
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I have been lurking for some time, mainly because I did not have anything intelligent to say.
But I need to correct one thing in the article. Leftists do not “pee their pants” when someone mentions intelligent design. They destroy it. They know that ID has no basis in science and they would not care but the IDers are trying to get it taught in schools alongside evolution. That is when the leftists start ripping into ID.
It is not that ID implies an absolute truth, it is that there is no scientific reasoning behind it. None.
Also, leftists do not need evolution. If evolution were to be proven false most(probably all) scientists who work in the field would immediately stop believing in it. That is not need. The only reason that so many biologists believe in evolution is because there are thousands of facts supporting it, it explains otherwise unexplainable phenomena around us and it has passed every test set before it.
One last bit. Intelligent design is not dispassionate. They are more steeped in ideology than the radical feminists. Or they are just liars (See Berlinski). They are trying desperately to get their religion taught in schools. They are not the middle ground. It has been proven time and time again that they are creationists in a cheap tuxedo.
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Fedrz, I’m awfully curious as to where you got that info about the various ties between these mythologies…
I didn’t know that Gilgamesh was related to Noah (when I read the Epic of Gilgamesh…) Unless this was from some other source.
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Juggling Buffoon,
Well, neither one of the three positions really means too much difference to me. I often think about such things, and like reading about such things from the distant past, and my mind at times wanders in and out of accepting any of the positions as “relatively true” as I ponder certain scenarios in my mind. Quite frankly, I do think that the mathematical possibility of intelligent is no more of a stretch than saying the entire Laws of Physics were different back then, such as energy being created without an outside force. and they just have to be… because. OK, it’s a mathematical possibility. I can accept that it might be true. But, mathematically, it ought to be just as true that there are other planets, or systems, in the infinity of the universe, that is capable of life, or intelligence. So, we don’t know what’s out there, either. And it is foolish to simply dismiss it. I can accept both arguments as interesting, and I do. Creationists I don’t mind listening too either, because just since they are religious, does not mean they are stupid. Although, I am not so stupid either, to realize that in the Creationist’s side, to conceed defeat is pretty near impossible, psychologically.
Quite frankly, I enjoy all three positions.
But, I notice right away, that those defending Evolution come screaming in with an ideologically driven passionate vengeance that goes way beyond what ought to be justified on what is technically still a theory. And even if evolution were proven to be absolutely true, we still have to go beyond that to prove it is attributable to mere randomness, rather than according to a plan, or grander scheme of things that perhaps we are not privy to yet.
And so, I don’t think it wrong to point out that there is also a political and philosophical aspect to evolution, that bears some importance, and it is just as fair to point it out as it is when it gets pointed out that the Creationist have other motivations than merely the scientific. Plus, the zealousness of Evolution overides intelligent thought in other fields of study besides their own – often in a manner similar to what a religion would do. It goes beyond what is justified for all that it really is.
Me, however, I accept that both Intelligent Design could be true, or that Evolution could be true, or the two could be mixed, or it could even be something else. I think the possibility is there for many scenarios. And it wouldn’t bug me at all to have it either way, except that I could finally say, “OK, that has been solved 100%. Cool.”
But I do kinda like taking potshots at Leftists… and sometimes it’s fun to poke fun of the Right too… but, Leftists are better, because they have no sense of humour, so it’s got the added bonus of watching them sputter and turn red in the face.
Lol, but who gives a shit, really?
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Clearac,
Yeah, I have read a lot of different stuff, from a lot of different places – and sources, and ideological viewpoints.
In fact, there is even some speculation that Gilgamesh was chasing Abram out of Ur, and Abram was fleeing for his life.
I really like it! Lol! It’s like reading a London newspaper from 1944, and a Berlin newspaper from 1944, and seeing how the two sides talk about eachother.
In fact, “Noah” was a god, on the other side.
There is an argument going on of whether “Nimrod” of the Bible – of the Tower of Bable fame, is actually Gilgamesh himself. Nimrod means “Rebel”. And there is the argument that what it really means is as an insult. They refuse to do him the honour of calling him by his name. Kinda like how I sometimes call Nobama “Big Ears.” From the otherside, though, there is an argument that they refused to call Jehovah by his name as well (Or… was it that it was unpronounceable? as is alluded to in other circles?). The god Huwawa has sometimes been linked to Jehovah.
But of course, who can be sure of anything from back then?
There are also many different time frames of “Gilgamesh.” Gilgamesh went through a flood too… and there is no doubt that both the Noah story, and the Gilgamesh story are directly related. Even the Catholics have acknowledged this, and it does not particularly cause a crisis of faith for them that the story predates the Biblical writing by at least 500 years. Nor should it, really.
There is also the question of was he real, or was he a legend-myth, or, was he a legend built on a real man… and also, was Abram a real man, or was he a legend.
The copies that they have found, are only a few thousand years old, really, and could not have possibly been written near enough to the time of Noah.
But, they are pretty sure that despite the age of the copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh that have been discovered, the Oral Tradition of the story most certainly predates them… the question is, of course, how far did the oral tradition predate that particular story? 1,000 years? 3,000 years? 5,000 years? There are significant implications.
There are also other references which have been found in regard to him, outside of the Epic. It is one of those things that 50 different theories seem to spring out of, none of them particularly proveable.
Also, things like the “confounding of the languages”, like what the story of the Tower of Bable describes, is also found in Sumeria.
As well, the Sumerian King List shows the dates of the reigns of the Kings of Sumeria… and they count down in lifespan length the same way the Bible does after the Flood. It says in the Bible, when they got off the Ark, that God would limit man’s days to 120 years. But, Noah still lived to be around 900 something, his sons lived to be around 600, his grandsons to around 400 (I’ve seen one estimation that Gilgamesh lived to be around 450), Abraham lived to be 175… and so on. Moses lived to be 120. Abraham and Noah were alive together for about 50 years, Accordign to the Bible. I remember reading once. What you get is a lot of pulling out of the story is ”
The Sumerian King List counts down the reigns in the same manner of a shortening lifespan.
Interestingly. I have heard that the atmospheric conditions of the earth during the Pleistoscene Ice Age was likely different that we have now, and such a change in atmosphere very likely would have not only made most living things bigger, but also, lol, they would have had longer lifespans. There is a guy that was doing studies on some kind of fish, and he raises them in a pressurized tank at the estimated atmosphere during the Pleistoscene, and surprisingly, these fish are starting to grow bigger… and live longer.
Aaaaaaaand, there actually was a major flood once. The Pleistoscene ended about 12,000 years ago, back when the mammoths and sabre tooth tigers died out… and, Modern Man came down through this and appeared on the stage. When all of that ice melted, the ocean levels rose dramatically, something like 400 feet. If there was any human settlement back then, they would have likely lived near to the sea, as even today, most humans live near to the sea.
So, if there was settlement back then, it most likely would have been on all of these continental shelves, as many of them are currently far less than 400 feet beneath the sea… and, during that time, I’ll betcha they were wondering what’s with the water that keeps creeping up here? It would have been cataclysmic, actually, when you think of all the pressure from the oceans getting more mass… having it shift around the earth like that, a ball full of molten lava, with volcanoes as release valves which would have been spewing off most likely at a far accelerated rate than what they do today…
Who knows what all happened back then?
It’s fun to dig around though.
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Oops, I forgot to say, it seems that the real enigma of Sumeria is its spontaneous appearance.
Nobody can really explain it.
The first real settlement was at Jericho, but that is just a little village, not a civilization.
But, really quickly, bang, there was a civilization, with tradesmen, arts & crafts, government, religions, educational systems, language, commerce, trade… civilization!
It kinda goes against the theory that man stumbled along slowly, accidentally discovering fire, thousands of years later figuring out the wheel, or agriculture etc. etc.
It is one of the riddles.
But, kinda off-topic, I guess.
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Wow, that is very interesting. I can easily believe that there was a flood way back in history (most religions have a flood story.) I’m probably going to be looking up the Pleistoscene Ice Age for a good while…
About the human life spans… If the life spans of Noah and his descendants exceeded 120 years (average lifespan,) does that have any connection to the studies that the scientist performed on the fish? (or the question being: Were Noah and his descendants much larger than us?) I would probably imagine that there are too many variables to connect one with the other, but still, had to ask.
Do you have a few links or sources for me to check out? I would love to read all of this various info (Sumeria, Gilgamesh, Abram, etc.)
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Wow. Fascinating stuff, and so well written. It was interesting to see how one post grew off another.
Just had to address this:
pope to decry the global “oppression†of women
The oppression of women goes against Christianity. He is right to decry it. He’s not talking about alimony payments here. There are places where women are enslaved, raped, beaten, kept ignorant, forced to have abortions, etc. Radical feminism and it’s accouterments are also a way to oppress women as they seek to deny the fundamental dignity and nature of woman. By directly or indirectly turning women into mere sex-objects they lead to their abuse and denigration.
In the same speech (The Good Friday Stations of the Cross) he says, “Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard…Wherever there is unconcern for the future, through the over-use of resources, the degradation of the environment, the oppression of women, the neglect of family values, the ignoring of ethical norms, the abandonment of religious traditions, Jesus must be telling people: ‘Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves’.”
And isn’t that what this discussion is really about?
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Cleararc,
You might enjoy going through some of these, although, you have to take a deep breath and realize that many people on this subject might come from a biased viewpoint:
On Nimrod:
http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/nimrod.html
http://www.ancientdays.net/nimrod.htm
http://www.balaams-ass.com/alhaj/page12.htm
On the Biblical Generations:
http://www.halexandria.org/dward192.htm
And the following website can keep you busy for a couple of weeks, and deals with the Pleistoscene quite a bit, however, it is done in regard to Atlantis, and is about his particular theory of Atlantis – namely that it is a “universal paradise” that is found in all religions and myths – that Atlantis and Eden, and Egyptian Punt, Jason and the Argonauts etc are all of the same. Don’t write this guy off as some nut just because he talks about Atlantis, he spent around 20 years compiling data comparing all of the “Fall of Man” stories around the world, and relating them to his search for Atlantis, so there is gobs of info in here that links all of the past religions together – but biased in his direction, of course, which is reasonable, I find. It is just a shame that it is all linked to Atlantis, because there so much glitz with that subject. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it though, and actually read it twice: http://www.atlan.org/articles/
The fish guy I seen on Discovery Channel – no link, sorry.
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Looks like I have alot of reading to do!
Thank you very much Fedrz.
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No problem, Cleararc.
I guess I might talk kinda confusingly about Gilgamesh, and I am probably misquoting myself a bit, because the speculation around him, and this general story, covers several different concepts and characters by different name – and of different times than the exact literal, lol, you kinda start calling him by one name, and that is probably unfair in a purely accurate sense , that of several of the concepts about him possibly link him to other historical/mythological characters.
The fish thing would be interesting though, eh? And it could explain a lot, as well as how a civilization could spring up so fast. I mean, Noah still lived for a few centuries yet after the flood, and God told him to go forth and multiply like a little bunny rabbit.
How many kids could you pop out in 300 years or so? It would truly be paradise for Roissy, eh?
I read somewhere that the Abraham’s house, or tribe, that went out, was possibly around 2,000 people. That’s a pretty decent sized little tribe. But, you know, there is talk of giants in the Bible – Goliath. And when Joshua and them are sneaking around spying, the spies keep reporting back that the enemy were giants, or larger people, and they were scared like the dickens of them. And these are who they went and not just defeated, but smote and stomped and wiped out, and often destroyed every last one of them. Yikes!
If, in some areas of the past, Gilgamesh is thought of to be the king that was half-god and half human… hmmm, yeah, he might really have seemed as one if you lived for 400 years or so, and were three feet taller, and maybe 40% stronger.
Maybe that’s what they were all talking about, who knows?
There seems to be some constant “message” or some kind of “primal memory” that reverberates from out of the past, that is described in a remarkably similar pattern from many different sources. Perhaps there was far more intelligence during the Pleistoscene than we imagined, and it somehow managed to survive through the few thousand years of cataclysmic events until the earth stopped shaking. When all that ice melted, even if it took quite a while, it would have been pretty hard to survive with all of the earthquakes and tsunamis and volconic activity – including the residual damage of volcanic ash and its effects on vegetation. It would have been cataclysmic-like over time, to be constantly bombarded by this, as mammoths and sabre tooth tigers found out… but not everything died. And after a while, things would have calmed down – but the world would certainly have been different after that. Maybe there was some intelligence that passed through it. If you knew what that intelligence was, how what you pass it forward into the thousands of years that will go forward?
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finsolcollons I take your point. I think my post way above was just trying to compare the idea of an axiom with that of an absolute truth. In fact neither can be imposed. For sure axioms are made up and can not be imposed. But similarly absolute truths are only absolute in the minds of those who believe them absolutely. For the rest of us they are just another idea.
I think what I am arguing against is that there can be something called absolute truth that once revealed then everyone else will see the light and follow. I think there are those who do think this and believe they know what it is and that it is only the ignorance and stupidity of others that prevent them from seeing it themselves.
The mathematics analogy was only intended to help me describe what I was trying to say. However you do stimulate some thought when you say mathematics is ‘virtual’. Yes this is certainly so as it is a construction of the imagination. But how much more abstract is the is idea of truth and absolute truth even more abstract. To those who feel they do possess truth then I suspect they do experience it as though it was real, but it is not real to the others.
I was thinking about ‘relativism’ which has been discussed above and considering the influence of Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity has on such a notion. It might seem disjoint but my thoughts ran along these lines.
Although the details of the theory are beyond most of us, some of the ideas are not. I suspect that a lot of people have some notion that in the Universe there is no absolute reference frame. They will also perhaps be aware that time itself is is not an absolute phenomena but a relative one. Now these ideas themselves only apply to the physical universe but they do impart the understanding that within this universe there nothing absolute as far as this theory is concerned. So having transmitted the idea that things are not absolute in the physical universe does it then not become a simpler matter to extend this notion to the realm of ideas where things are very much more insubstantial?
Actually Special relativity encourages such a development as it is expressed in the language of observers in different reference frames.
One more point about relativism. Those who look down on it better be careful. If we don’t have relativism then we will mimic an hierarchy. Don’t be certain that it will be you or your ideas that are at the top. If you want the level field to disappear then there is to be no complaint if you find yourselves pushed off the field altogether.
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Truth is rarely black or white, although it is sometimes, it is most often grey. But the vast majority of the time it is grey, it is easily discernable to be more towards the white end of the spectrum, or more towards the black end of the spectrum. It is very rare indeed for something to be perfectly grey, exactly between black and white, more rare I believe than something being purely black or white.
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This happens anyway. It has already happened in the West, as the ideology of personal autonomic freedom has pushed everything else off the field in terms of cultural and legal influence. From the perspective of a Christian, I am fine with this, because I think that the Church is simply going back to the way it existed prior to the conversion of Constantine — a counter-cultural movement. In many ways, this is quite proper to the Church and is healthy for it as well.
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I’m a little late to the party here but just one clarifying thought…
I see a tendency in some of the comments here to equate moral or religious relativism and relativism as it relates to the sciences. There’s a temptation to paint them both with the same brush of analysis–and conclusion. Yet I’m not certain this needs be the case.
On the science side, it’s hard for me to observe the stutter steps of scientific progress and not see support for a relativistic argument. An in depth study of the search for gravity waves, neutrinos, cold fusion, etc. reveals that the establishment of scientific theory is, is in large part, a social construction. Or take as an example the shift of opinion from the Ptolemic system, to the Copernican one, to the Newtonian, to the one of Einstein and beyond. The progression is not ordered. It’s truly not a case of the older theories simply being a more narrow or limited view of newer ones. Older theories don’t approximate newer ones if one just “blurs one’s eyes” while examining the data. Rather, the newer theories toss out the old ones as wholesale rubbish. Or examine the history behind the acceptance of tectonic plates and continental drift vs. the previously accepted geosyncline theory. These are opposite theories entirely. Or to put it in bare bones terms, the advancement of science appears to be a replacement of false theories by yet other false theories. Where’s the realism in that? Scientific progress seems entirely relativistic.
Over against scientific relativism, there is the question of metaphysical relativism or moral relativism. While it’s tempting to claim the historic progression of moral values and scientific theories are equally relativistic, that they each adapt or reflect the age at hand, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Instead we’re now dealing in different realms and in a different currency. In the religious realm, there is an entirely different path towards knowledge.
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“On the science side, it’s hard for me to observe the stutter steps of scientific progress and not see support for a relativistic argument. An in depth study of the search for gravity waves, neutrinos, cold fusion, etc. reveals that the establishment of scientific theory is, is in large part, a social construction. Or take as an example the shift of opinion from the Ptolemic system, to the Copernican one, to the Newtonian, to the one of Einstein and beyond. The progression is not ordered. It’s truly not a case of the older theories simply being a more narrow or limited view of newer ones. Older theories don’t approximate newer ones if one just “blurs one’s eyes†while examining the data. Rather, the newer theories toss out the old ones as wholesale rubbish. Or examine the history behind the acceptance of tectonic plates and continental drift vs. the previously accepted geosyncline theory. These are opposite theories entirely. Or to put it in bare bones terms, the advancement of science appears to be a replacement of false theories by yet other false theories. Where’s the realism in that? Scientific progress seems entirely relativistic. ”
Science is self correcting. You’ve pointed out the times its corrected itself. There are more times when it hasn’t. When was the last time the theory of photogenisis was thrown out, or the math behind physics disregarded. Science is relative in that it is an aproximation of truth, but it constantly refines and hones in on an absolute truth. Science would admit everything is not completely understood yet. If it was, there would be no point to science.
In other words, science attempts to not be relative, but rather absolute. Just because it isn’t 100% correct yet, shouldn’t discount it. I’d take humanities greatest minds best guess, over an unsubstantiated conjecture.
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I agree with this. Both truths are necessary – or, at the very least, the concept of both truths are necessary.
Science, because it is inquisitive by nature, ought to maybe defined as the used of Relative Truth to seek Absolute Truth.
I think that this is sometimes the problem with humans – it is something that has to find a proper balance. There is both an inherent necessity, and an equal danger to too much adherence to either truth.
It, Relative Truth, is really what “human” is, isn’t it?
What else is it that makes us human except this feature?
An animal lives on instinct – that is more living in absolutes, from the animals perspective anyways. Things just “are” for animals.
Zed uses that saying once in a while that I always keep forgetting… to paraphrase, “In nature, mistakes are a capital crime. The judgement is immediate, and there are no appeals.”
It is not that animals don’t have emotion, because many of them do – like mammals. But, for each living thing that is on earth, each has a talent to help it survive, and ours is, apparently, the ability to bend, or imagine alternate, ways of things in our brains.
But, I think there is a danger in letting our brains get too carried away with relative truth as well… and that is what needs to be done with “the human condition”, our ability to use Relative Truth must be, I don’t know how to describe it, “bridled” maybe, by still being anchored to certain “absolutes”, to make sure we don’t veer too far off the path with this unique ability of ours. It appears that often, we let the Relative Truth get too far out of control, and it makes us loose focus of the big, or bigger, pictures out there… and that can be dangerous. Maybe it makes us like lemmings, but on a longer cycle or something, lol.
You know, if you ask me, “the message” that I think we keep getting sent to us from the past is about “the two truths”. Most of the stories of “the Fall” are about making the wrong choice… often to “breaking the big rule.” Think about Iccarus flying too close to the sun. It says to me, “Don’t get too cocky with the relative truth, because it can get away on you, and then the absolute truth will come and smack you dead.”
Isn’t this what happens in the Garden of Eden? Isn’t it a battle between Absolute and Relative Truth? Could the story about “The Fall” even be about man getting a consciousness – the ability to question? In Paradise, we were one with the world about us, and all things worked in perfect order and harmony. There was only one rule – and don’t break it!
And, you know, when the Serpent approached Eve to tempt her, did he not question the truth – expanding it relatively? “Will you surely die?” (Well, not right away, anyway, but eventually, yes.) Would the tree give her knowledge? Yup, it did. And so on.
And, when you read the Bible, look at what Eve does: She rationalizes to herself why she should do so. She saw that it was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and useful for gaining knowledge.
Sounds like the use of Relative Truth to override the Absolute Truth to me.
From a philosophical stance, could this be the original sin? Putting the lesser truth in front of the greater truth? It certainly has the potential to get very deadly, it seems to me. And yet, this Relative Truth seems to be “us.” But I think it can be like a knife – both useful and dangerous, and it must be used responsibly – certain rules must be adhered to. Absolutes. “Keep your eye out for the absolutes… they can be wickedly deadly if you take your eye of off them,” is the message I think we keep getting sent.
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And, what the hell, since we are on the subject of Eden and “the truths,” and since I think that “gender is a social construct” is complete crap… pull your misogyny toque on tight!
The Garden of Eden Story illustrates a difference in male and female “reasoning” that coincides exactly with what many of the philosophers, from Ancient times to modern, keep trying to tell us about the nature of male and female: The female is deeper into Relative Truth by her nature than the male but he tends to be an idiot because he actually listens to her.
If you look at the story of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve entered into sin in different ways.
Eve was deceived, and in fact, when God curses her, He outright tells her that it is because she was deceived.
But remember, when Eve walked up to Adam with the fruit, and offered it to him, Adam was still without sin – but he knew that Eve already had. Adam still had a choice – and Adam was not deceived at all. Adam sinned knowingly. Like a stupid dumbass mangina, when Eve walked up to him and ask him to sin with her, Adam rolled over like a pussy and said, “Yes Dear.” Adam chose to be a sinner simply because Eve asked him.
And, when God kicks Adam out of the Garden, he begins his curse with Because you listened to your wife and ate of the tree of which I commanded you…”
Pretty clear. Eve sinned because she was decieved. Adam sinned because he listened to her crap talk.
It clearly indicates the same kinds of sex-differences between men and women that we point out so often in other areas: There are differences in how men’s and women’s brains work… and in how men react to females.
Women are far more relative – they tend to be led around more by the relative truth. They have that “herd instinct”, and this is what makes them more prone to fashion, and further, more prone to seek the definition of “right and wrong” from the consensus of the herd, which is by itself mired in relativity.
Men are mired in much relativity too, for certain, but a feature of the male brain is that it still, more than women anyways, tries to seek out principles to define things, rather than relying on “unity and feeling.” That makes “man” closer to God (Absolute Truth) than woman, and thus, man should lead, because it is improper to put the Relative Truth before the Absolute Truth. It’s not that man is the absolute truth, because he is not. But, because of the nature of his brain, odds are that he will be closer to it than the woman, and thus there ought to be a hierarchy of which leads the other…
Eve, interestingly, is the only thing that is not created directly from God. God made Adam in his image, and when he made Eve, he took from Adam to create her. So, she is a copy of the image… further from Absolute Truth than Adam.
This coincides with many philosophers, such as Hegel, when describing the difference between men and women:
Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy, and certain forms of artistic production. Women may have happy ideas, taste, and elegance, but they cannot attain to the ideal. The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions. Women are educated — who knows how? — as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion.
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oops, forgot a tag in there.
Ed: Fixed.
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German Chocolate wrote:
Just had to address this:
pope to decry the global “oppression†of women
The oppression of women goes against Christianity. He is right to decry it. He’s not talking about alimony payments here. There are places where women are enslaved, raped, beaten, kept ignorant, forced to have abortions, etc. Radical feminism and it’s accouterments are also a way to oppress women as they seek to deny the fundamental dignity and nature of woman. By directly or indirectly turning women into mere sex-objects they lead to their abuse and denigration.
In the same speech (The Good Friday Stations of the Cross) he says, “Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard…Wherever there is unconcern for the future, through the over-use of resources, the degradation of the environment, the oppression of women, the neglect of family values, the ignoring of ethical norms, the abandonment of religious traditions, Jesus must be telling people: ‘Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves’.â€
And isn’t that what this discussion is really about?
________
i posted about this on my site last april, so i was paraphrasing from memory
here’s one of the sources i used
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1169030/Pope-warns-desert-godlessness-Good-Friday-address.html
and here’s the second reference to the oppression of women i mentioned, that you managed to leave out:
‘May we never question or mock serious things in life like a cynic,’ he added. He also condemned the oppression of women, saying there were ‘many societies in the world where women fail to receive a fair deal.’
‘Christ must be weeping for them,’ he said.
it was that last assumption, in which benedict presumes not only to channel christ’s emotions, but utilizes the presumption to further matriarchal victim-propaganda — to fan the fires of feminism, and convince folks that the world is a hothouse of female oppression, that particularly sandpapered my brain
so that’s two references to the raw deal women receive on this planet in one speech, with the first reference placed in a generalized context, along with environmental degradation etc., implying to the listener/reader that the oppression of women is likewise a dire condition planet-wide
Black German, why dont you go ahead right here and list all those nations where women are “enslaved, raped, beaten” etc. as a matter of state or cultural policy, and then i’ll list all those nations where boys and men are TRULY enslaved by their cultures, demeaned for being male, raped in prisons, conscripted, and treated as fourth-class citizens generally, while women and girls in fact are treated as de facto goddesses, with first-class-citizen rights
your list will be VERY short, with lots of internal inconsistencies and exceptions
my list, unfortunately, will be vast, and mostly global
benedict was, and is, acting as a shill for the pauline “powers and authorities” who are behind the imposition of matriarchy throughout the western world, and for him to chatter on about the “oppression of women” under such extant conditions of male-hatred is deceitful, propagandistic, and pleasing to satan
where’s benedict’s “compassion” for the “many societies in the world” where MEN “fail to receive a fair deal”?
eh?
WHEN are we going to hear THAT speech? it’d be the FIRST TIME any world leader took off the rosy-marie colored glasses and confronted the planet as it is
but christ isn’t weeping about THAT, because . . . well, christ only weeps for the TRULY OPPRESSED doncha know, and as benedict assured us, that’s WOMEN
that’s the boohooing, emasculated “jesus” sold to pathetic pussified western congregations, full of weak “elders,” weak men, and spoiled empowered women who want, as always, to hear about how a world run for their benefit is, somehow, still against them
the systemic scope of mistreatment of boys and men on this planet is vast; the systemic mistreatment of girls and women is comparatively small and regionalized, and a true servant of christ would point this out in a major speech, on the day remembering jesus’ crucifixion, no less — not shill for feminism like he’s joe biden or the fucking dilly llama
benedict gave his speech in the Roman Colosseum — how very appropriate, some things around here never change
i can only hope benedict is as deceived as many others in the west, and is innocent of willfully supporting and disseminating matriarchal/satanic propaganda around the world
otherwise i’d have to say plainly that he’s an enemy of christ, a traitor to god, and an enabler of the New Woman Order plans of that crawling twotongued little shitsnake
oh yeah . . . and as for mary being co-redemptrix with christ, that’s more Belial Bullshit, any church or church leader pushing that is already lost — the catholic hierarchy made their bargain long ago, but that doesn’t mean god-loving catholics must go along with it
they best start putting god BEFORE their social-club “churches”
benedict had better be blameless in this, otherwise have a head start, be seein’ ya baby
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“Science is self correcting. You’ve pointed out the times its corrected itself. There are more times when it hasn’t. When was the last time the theory of photogenisis was thrown out, or the math behind physics disregarded. Science is relative in that it is an aproximation of truth, but it constantly refines and hones in on an absolute truth.”
This is slippery because we can’t point out in advance which theories will stand the test of time and which won’t and will yet need to be corrected (and have their corrections in turn corrected). I think about it this way: if a particular scientific theory were, in fact, finally found to be absolutely true, how would we know it? What clothes would it wear? How would it announce itself such that we could rest and pursue it no longer?
I know if feels like science continues to refine or hone in on the truth–as if the truth were in fact “out there” in a single statement, place, or point in time. In fact, while I’m no physicist, I suspect we landed a man on the moon relying entirely upon Newtonian physics and without the need to call in Einstein for help. But could we do the same under Potemy’s? Perhaps not. So, Newton’s view is called more accurate (or more accurately called “instrumental”) than the Ptolemaic. But where does this train stop? If you lived before the 1920′s and prior to Einstein, you’d think that advances is physics had ended before then and there. …But then again with Einstein the train started up again. Einstein’s view didn’t just refine Newton’s; it upended it. It spawned a whole new set of questions.
On the one hand, it feels like successive scientific theories are like different windows to a house. The view inside the house (and of the thing to be explained) from each window gives a different vantage point. Furthermore, each new view gives us an ever closer or sharper picture of the thing we’re trying to explain. And if the current view isn’t quite right, be patient; keep looking. That right window to finally box-in the phenomena is just around the corner.
However, the radical succession of scientific theories, their element of social construction, makes the reverse to me seem to me more appropriate. It seems more appropriate to imagine that WE’RE the ones inside the house. We’re the ones stuck inside, looking out at the world to be explained from an infinite potential number of frames and windows (theories) of our own construction. Each new view of the horizon serving a different set of goals and needs that are continually evolving.
It rather hurts my head to think about.
So, back to the topic at hand… I think this all says very little about moral relativism or moral absolutes. Religious or moral knowledge isn’t gained or lost in the same way that scientific theories are demonstrated or disproven. Religious experience isn’t objectively measurable and wasn’t mean to be proven using the scientific method. Religious or moral conviction is found in the heart and soul; it isn’t falsifiable.
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Great post Fedrz. You nailed another one.
@MNL-
I understand your perspective. It simply isn’t exactly mine. Sometimes you have to place a bet, and science I believe gives me the best odds. We will have to agree to continue to look out two different windows, and continue to think we each have the better view. We’re both looking outside at the larger world however, so we’ll call this a tie.
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“I think about it this way: if a particular scientific theory were, in fact, finally found to be absolutely true, how would we know it?”
We won’t.
Would 99.999428973047613% sure be good enough for you?
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I think that the Church is simply going back to the way it existed prior to the conversion of Constantine — a counter-cultural movement. In many ways, this is quite proper to the Church and is healthy for it as well.
I agree. I think the Church is going through a cleansing period where they have to stop squabbling over minutiae and get back to basics and their main message. You see this in the fact that the Vatican has repeatedly refused to settle the last two Marian dogmas; I see that as a pragmatic, ecumenical move.
Fedrz,
I like what you wrote about Adam and Eve. That was very interesting. Strangely, most feminists would probably agree with you. I don’t think the argument is “what are men versus women like” but rather that you (and I) assume that man’s qualities qualify him for leadership whereas feminists would say the opposite.
Ray,
Firstly,
The Pope speaks about injustice where he sees it. The Church has affirmed again and again in recent times that women and men are both created in God’s image and therefore of equal worth and deserve equal opportunity as befits their natural disposition. While wives are meant to be submissive to their husbands, women are not subordinate to men — they are merely different. Men are called to lead because that is their natural disposition, not because they are considered “better”.
Secondly,
Marian devotion has been a key aspect of Catholic faith from the earliest days of Christianity. There’s a reason why the Church used to be called “The Cult of Mary” by the Romans. The Church has always grown by adapting the traditions of those they are evangelizing, that is nothing new.
As it stands now she’s actually been demoted to merely the greatest of the Saints. There is a feminist effort to push her back up again (as you mention) but it hasn’t won yet.
And, no, this doesn’t shake my faith. There have always been changes, adaptations, and reviews in the Roman Catholic Church. That is one of it’s strengths. Religions have to either be so pared-down that they fit any and all situations (like the Pentecostals) or they have to be flexible with a solid core (such as the catholic Nicene Creed).
Thirdly,
Don’t call me “baby” or “Chocolate”.
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My Dear Chocolate:
“The Church has affirmed again and again in recent times that women and men are both created in God’s image and therefore of equal worth and deserve equal opportunity as befits their natural disposition.”
read the book again (or for the first time) — adam was created from god’s essence (“spirit and breath”) and eve was created, later, from adam
man was created from god, woman was created from man — tho woman retains an aspect of god, it is not the aspect man retains (and that’s why, overwhelmingly, it is MAN and not WOMAN who thirsts for justice, righteousness, truth, etc)
it’s why MAN runs TOWARD the burning building, instead of away
there’s is nothing in the bible, or in god’s word via his prophets, about “equal opportunity” — it’s a slippery-slope, post-enlightenment abstraction that, as we’ve witnessed, sounds Ever So Wonderful In Theory, but ends up being buzzworded as mass social-engineering to destroy fatherhood, masculinity, and the connection between human beings and their creator
hell and good intentions
god LOVES the female and male equally, but they are NOT equal creations
Goddess Equality is just another lie from the BeLiar
like her sister Goddess Libertas, Egalitee is a product of the masonic “Enlightenment” that drove the French and American revolutions — revolutions against god, with high-sounding ideas and ideals that, in practice, have led to our current matriarchies, which become more evil and totalitarian by the day
that’s what happens when humans get Enlightened by the princeling of light
“While wives are meant to be submissive to their husbands, women are not subordinate to men — they are merely different.”
yeah, so i’ve noticed, with “different” in practice equalling “supreme” across the western world
“… the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God” (1 cor. 11)
also, same cite:
“A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man”
women WERE created subordinate to men, and ARE meant to obey their husbands, and righteous male authority in general — and we’re witnessing exactly what happens when they obey no-one except themselves and their ever-present Advisor . . . with the coercive aid of our matriarchal cultures and their idols of Equality and Libertas
i hear “pastors” from “conservative” or “evangelical” churches preaching from corinthians, citing these verses, then telling their congregations, wink wink, “but we really know who runs things” while the females in the congregations chuckle
the “pastors” blather on about jesus this and the father that, then ignore paul’s warning and send their flock out into the world with the wink-wink instruction that men obey women, and that servants of god obey their gyno-nations
despicable, cowardly, weak
look, if you don’t like god’s word and don’t want to follow it, fine, follow the beest, and change the words to mean whatever you need them to mean — but dont try to pretend you’re a part of god’s church
“Marian devotion has been a key aspect of Catholic faith from the earliest days of Christianity.”
catholicism didnt exist in “the earliest days of Christianity,” there, Chocolate Historian – – but it’s certainly true that whenever god attempts to limit collective female/demonic power on this planet through the instrument of religion, that religion — no matter how inceptive — will quickly be infiltrated by women (and weak men) demanding female idols to worship
you might try reading about the hebrews in the old testament for, oh, about a thousand examples
“As it stands now she’s actually been demoted to merely the greatest of the Saints.”
and who decided that?
the same interests who decided she’s Co-Redemptrix with christ, no doubt
i haven’t heard the pope RETRACTING the silly claim that mary is co-redemptrix with christ, maybe i missed that speech, he must have delivered it at a Womans Nation Luncheon with oprah, hillary, and maria shriver
still waiting for your global list of nations where “women are enslaved, raped, beaten, kept ignorant, forced to have abortions, etc.” as a matter of national or cultural policy, in the same way that countless nations now formally and “legally” disenfranchise, demean, and oppress their boys and men
it shouldnt take very long to compose your list….
you also tried to ignore the pope’s matriarchal comment:
“He also condemned the oppression of women, saying there were ‘many societies in the world where women fail to receive a fair deal.’
“‘Christ must be weeping for them,’ he said.”
instead, you tried to pass this off as some sort of general comment, in which christ was supposed to be weeping for ALL humanity
but it seems your church is giving us, as ever, the Official Authorized (read: neutered and fake) Version of christ, who feeeeels for the Pore Oppressed Women of our Horrible Patriarchal World, but is silent about how your governments and churches treat this planet’s boys and men
“And, no, this doesn’t shake my faith”
well you need to have it shaken, not to mention stirred and overturned
but you’re too proud and intelligent for that, like the leader you follow
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My dear Vanilla,
I’ve read the Bible in entirety numerous times. I’m currently concentrating on Catholic teachings but I can still remember quite a bit. I’ll quote the King James versions for clarity.
There are two parallel Creation stories:
Genesis 1. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Genesis 5. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; 2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
And in 1Corinthians 11 (which you quote) it says:
Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things, and keep the ordinances, as I delivered them to you. 3 But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. 4 Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. 5 But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven. 6 For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered. 7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. 8 For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man. 9 Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. 10 For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels. 11 Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. 12 For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God. 13 Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered? 14 Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? 15 But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. 16 But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.
In this letter Paul was admonishing women to be subordinate to their male heads. At the time, the Corinthian women were taking the Christian message of spiritual equality and applying it in their homes in practical matters. They assumed that if they were equal to men that meant that they didn’t have to listen to their personal heads anymore and could do whatever they wanted. That was Paul’s message: yes you are equal before the Lord, but you still live in this fallen world where you are required to be submissive to your head. By doing so you fulfill your Christian calling and show your faith in Christ. Just as a man shows his faith in Christ by submitting to Christ directly (and loving his wife as Christ loved the Church). That is why men are called to be leaders in their homes.
Paul message was not that all women are submissive to all men. That would create anarchy. Or situations where women could be indiscriminately abused in public places. The leadership role rests with a woman’s personal head, not with all men. If my husband wishes for me to wear pants and another man says I should wear a skirt, who do I follow? My husband, of course. If my husband wishes for me to work outside of the home and another feels that all women should stay home, whom do I follow? My husband, of course. If a father wishes for his daughter to be educated and others wish to keep her ignorant, whom does she follow? Her father, of course. Most men want their women to enjoy suffrage, education, and professional freedom, so why should they be stymied just because their society says that women should remain in the dark?
The Bible goes on and on about women submitting to their husbands:
1 Corinthians 14:34-36
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
Ephesians 5:22-24
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Colossians 3:18
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
1 Timothy 2:11-15
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing.
1 Peter 3:1
Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands.
I also noted that their opportunities should be limited to their natural disposition. There are some opportunities that are not appropriate for women. But that is for her head to decide, not some random man who bears no responsibility and feels no love for her. Remember that, although very hierarchical, the Catholic Church also strongly emphasizes subsidiarity.
i hear “pastors†from “conservative†or “evangelical†churches preaching from corinthians, citing these verses, then telling their congregations, wink wink, “but we really know who runs things†while the females in the congregations chuckle
Obviously, I don’t belong to such a church. And don’t confuse conservative and evangelical. They can co-exist but can also be mutually-exclusive.
For what it’s worth, my husband will also tell anyone who asks that I “wear the pants in the house”, but it’s just a sop to my ego.
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never rely solely on the KJV, it’s the bible masonically revised, with a light but subtile hand
“For what it’s worth, my husband will also tell anyone who asks that I “wear the pants in the houseâ€, but it’s just a sop to my ego.”
yup thats exactly what these “career pastors” are telling men in church, just cant understand why guys dont go….
your husband is likewise in error, and he’d probably want to pound anybody who told him that — and thats a big part of the problem, the falsification of chivalry that lets men who call themselves “christians” off the hook from the disagreeable task of standing up to their wives, mothers, girlfriends, daughters etc
not to mention their matriarchal nations
not to mention their matriarchal pope
as for sopping female egos, thats a huge factor in what got us into this mess (with plenty of help from your Advisor) — hubby’s subservience in sopping your ego, and yours in needing it sopped
still waiting on that list from you and your pope of female-oppressing countries “where women are enslaved, raped, beaten, kept ignorant, forced to have abortions, etc.”
no need to hurry on that countess choco, take all the time you need, i’ll be around
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How about China for starters? But that’s such a small, irrelevant country…
Strange that you think our Pope is so matriarchal. Most feminists see him as their nemesis.
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@ Jabherwochie
Yes, we’re re-playing the endless Realism vs. Relativism debate in the philosophy of science literature. …Carry on folks. Nothing to look at here.
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@Fedrz
I believe that this is not the place to discuss evolution vs. creationism. It will unnecessarily divide members of a group that needs all the support it can get.
Can we discuss it somewhere else? There are numerous corrections I have to make to your post.
If not, would you be okay if I posted my rebuttal here?
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Jugglingbuffoon,
Feel free to post it here. I am by no means an expert on Evolution, nor do I claim to be.
What I do claim is that Marx and Engels were excited about Darwin’s theory, and in fact even contacted Darwin to try and associate themselves with him, but Darwin declined the honor. There was a reason they were excited, and the reason I gave was why: Darwin came up with the science that supported their political philosophy.
I do find the whole thing interesting, though. But certainly not enough to make an issue about it… and, since the pro-evolution crowd really has no religious or emotional stake in the theory, one really has to question why they are so often as fanatical as Creationists, who I actually can understand why they behave that way.
I do, for the most part, believe in Evolution, btw. I do believe that we evolve to better ourselves by genetic selection. In other words, sharks will evolve to become more efficient swimmers because the better swimmers will be more “alpha”, and thus more selected in the breeding chain. It is my understanding that this about the only kind of evolution that can really stand up to any test – as in, the shark ain’t ever gonna start to evolve webbed feet and then toes, because such a thing would be hindrance rather than a benefit. Otherwise, why don’t we have two heads? I’ve always heard they are better than one. However, our spines are not a product of betterment, or we wouldn’t have chronic back pain as a common human problem… nor would males have testicles on the outside of their bodies – tell me the benefit.
I suspect that there are a lot of things that are somewhat correct, but not completely.
For example: What says, for certain, that evolution took place over millions of years?
What if, like the Bible or the Sumerian King List indicates by the decscending lifespan length, that could possibly mean that mankind, after being 95% wiped out during the end of the Pleistoscene, evolved in a rather fast fashion – perhaps due to some sort of global change, like maybe the one that caused the Ice Age to end, or the atmosphere to change… and during this rather brief (geologically) transition period of the earth, humans evolved during only perhaps 5 or 10 generations, as they adapted to new conditions on earth? Could it be possible? Cro Magnon Man disappeared towards the end of the Pleistoscene and Modern Man came forth out of it… still… can’t… find… missing… link… How about that Neanderthal Man and Cro Magnon Man, who I understand did actually share the earth for a while… what if they bumped uglies once, and just like horses humping donkeys and creating mules, what if humans are also a hybrid?
I mean, there are endless possibilities that could work into a bazillion different scenarios. None of them proving or disproving anything, except perhaps altering them.
But, while it is a fun subject, I am by no means an expert on it. I’m certainly no physicist nor a biologist. And, it’s not that I care even all that much… but, I’ll play the game if you would like.
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” perhaps due to some sort of global change, like maybe the one that caused the Ice Age to end, or the atmosphere to change… and during this rather brief (geologically) transition period of the earth, humans evolved during only perhaps 5 or 10 generations, as they adapted to new conditions on earth? Could it be possible?’
Evolution generally happens in bursts.
“However, our spines are not a product of betterment, or we wouldn’t have chronic back pain as a common human problem… nor would males have testicles on the outside of their bodies – tell me the benefit. ”
We are not intended to live to old age, so our spines and other stuff gives out. If we lived to long, we would get stuck in one way of thinking and doing things. Having children earlier speeds up cultural and societal evolution. Young people have a better chance of thinking in new thought paradigms. Plus, even the most effecient organism will have weak spots.
Testicles hang on the outside for two reasons. One is temperature control, and two, since we walk upright, they’re not going to get snagged on a bush when we run. Thats why many four legged mammals testicles remain inside. They’re low to the ground.
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The more you study evolution, the more it makes sense. It is such a slow, brutal and inherently random process that it boggles the mind, but once you break it down into observable components, it can explain everything, even maladaptive things like a peacocks feathers.
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Jabherwochie,
I once heard an interesting theory that perhaps our ancestors were an amphibious type of humanoid – thus, our hairless bodies, except for head, for ease in walking through water, and our upright stance and thus backbone structure being weaker because of the support water would have given our bodies. Interesting theory… contradicts conventional evolution though, and so doesn’t get paid attention to – kind of my point. It is almost a frigging religion, that the theory can hardly even question itself, which is what any honest scientist would encourage, rather than discourage, which is the case on this particular subject. Reminds me of Globaloney Warming, to be honest.
Also, while I have not actually done the math myself, I suspect that “randomness” is not as random as one might suspect – factor in the law of averages, and you can begin to predict randomness’s results, can’t you? And wouldn’t that indicate a pattern, or a plan?
I think we run the danger of being a little tribe, on some little spec out in the Pacific Ocean, and demanding that the whole perspective of the world is being dictated to us by the conditions found on this tiny, isolated little island that doesn’t even know how to comprehend something like Mt. Everest on the other side of the world.
Btw, throughout history, it has always been academics who have provided the most hindrance to development. Check out how Louis Pastuer was humiliated by the main stream of academia for suggesting something as ludicrous as invisible germs, or consider the fate of Socrates, or Jesus, or Galileo or Copernicus. It was not the “church” doing these kinds of things, but rather, the church was where you went if you had academic inclinations. Academics, by percentage of their population, have traditionally been mostly closed minded people who try to prevent other people from challenging their percieved wisdom. Check around our Stalinist universities… not much has changed.
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Another thing to keep in mind is that we are not even sure, nor most likely have we, even discovered all of the “elements.” The ones we have discovered are ones we have merely found on earth.
Think about the difference that the discovery of something like uranium had upon human beings.
Now think that the moon has been identified as coming from the earth, and what a big chunk of rock that is… who is to say that there are not another 15 elements present there? Some of the elements we have discovered are only present in limited quantities on certain geological areas on Earth. It is possible there are more elements found on the moon, or buried beneath the depths of the ocean, or found on the sun, or the other planets, or outside of our solar system, or beyond, that factor into our development and we just haven’t discovered them yet.
I often think that the best reason to go back to the Moon or to Mars, is for mining and exploration – to seek more elements – because one of these new elements might be “the key” – either to explaining our own past, or to discovering a new element that, perhaps, enables us to defeat the problems identified with travelling out of our solar system – ie. the speed of light, and all that jazz.
There are endless variables we might not have factored in yet, because we live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, and have never even seen the mainland of a continent yet, nor can even conceive that the earth is round yet.
In the endless expanse that is the universe – both macro and micro (the solar system resembles an atom – and maybe that’s what we are on, in God’s big toe maybe), if someone asks me to expand my brain to allow for the possibilities… I will… but, that means that I will expand it, and not necessarily follow along the direction the demander of that which I expand, wishes it to go. Evolutionists demand I only follow along expanding my mind in the direction they wish, while still closing my mind to the other possibilities presented when asked to “detach” in such a way – and that is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion.
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“I once heard an interesting theory that perhaps our ancestors were an amphibious type of humanoid – thus, our hairless bodies, except for head, for ease in walking through water,”
I’m familiar with it, and give it some credence of possibility. Several species have shuffled from an aquatic life to a land life and back again.
“Also, while I have not actually done the math myself, I suspect that “randomness†is not as random as one might suspect – factor in the law of averages, and you can begin to predict randomness’s results, can’t you? And wouldn’t that indicate a pattern, or a plan?
I agree completely. Nothing is truely random. Just too complex to easily predict. Well, you can argue that…but in general, outside of physics. I just didn’t feel like getting into the whole nature of how it appears random, but is more a system for orderly harvesting the usefullness of chaos. It is random like a dice roll, but not random in that dice play to percentages over the long term. Once again, another grey area.
“Btw, throughout history, it has always been academics who have provided the most hindrance to development. Check out how Louis Pastuer was humiliated by the main stream of academia for suggesting something as ludicrous as invisible germs, or consider the fate of Socrates, or Jesus, or Galileo or Copernicus. It was not the “church†doing these kinds of things, but rather, the church was where you went if you had academic inclinations. Academics, by percentage of their population, have traditionally been mostly closed minded people who try to prevent other people from challenging their percieved wisdom. Check around our Stalinist universities… not much has changed.”
I agree. Many academics are just book smart, not creative problem solvers.
“Another thing to keep in mind is that we are not even sure, nor most likely have we, even discovered all of the “elements.†The ones we have discovered are ones we have merely found on earth.”
We have predicted and made elements. I predict some exist out there, but we will have an idea as to their composition due to the nature of atomic laws. Exceptions might be find. I’m open minded.
“Evolutionists demand I only follow along expanding my mind in the direction they wish, while still closing my mind to the other possibilities presented when asked to “detach†in such a way – and that is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion.”
I agree completely. I don’t demand you follow my belief system. In fact it is more useful for me for you to argue against it. I want a better more clear understanding of it, and when flaws are pointed out, it helps me expand my understanding of it. I am always interested in opposing theories, just might not agree with them, and depending on the emotional state I’m in, I may mock weaker ideas to cater to my ego. I’m not proud of that, I’m just human.
What would you say the counter force to entropy is?
I believe it is evolution. I think of it as a direction on the map. We may debate all day what the map looks like, and what it looks like off the map, I’m just pointing towards a driving force and the direction it points to, whether it is physical evolution (big bang), organic evolution (life), biological evolution (speciation), cultural evolution (society), technological evolution (science), or meta-evolution (who knows what that trancendent period will look like).
I shouldn’t say that I think it answers everything, just points us to the answer?
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Feel free to look in the other direction. I’m sure useful wisdom is found everywhere.
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Elements are distinguished by having differing atomic number…the number of protons in their nucleus. Any further elements not yet discovered would have extremely large nuclei, making them not particularly stable…indeed, stability for new elements being observed is set by the standard of lasting on the order of microseconds.
New [em]compounds[/em] are discovered all the time; efforts are currently under way to examine the properties of all possible substances created with 4 elements (my understanding is that the task for three elements has been essentially completed). At 5 elements, using current methods, the problem is entirely intractable.
Regarding the question of “randomness” in evolution. Genetic mutations occur (in addition to a few other, less important, methods) due to so called “copying errors” in the genome. These in turn occur because of thermodynamic effects resulting in occasional occupation of unfavorable energy states (basically, sometimes an unusual state where there is a mismatch on the genome occurs because an unusually energetic nucleotide gets snapped into place along the copied strand). Thermodynamic systems of this sort are chaotic–that is, small changes in initial conditions result in divergent behaviors. But, because of quantum mechanics, measurements of such systems are limited in the amount that they can tell you (this is the infamous uncertainty at work). The upshot of this is that mutations really are random…it may be possible to make some measurements to predict some changes to some degree, but this is limited in time and extent of prediction. God, not being limited by the need to take measurements within the universe, would face no such restriction, of course.
Note that (as mentioned at the beginning) this discussion deals with the introduction of new traits in populations with little selective pressure. In populations with high selective pressure, it is trivial to predict that the traits that improve long-term reproduction will triumph–although it may not be trivial to determine what those traits will be.
“What would you say the counter force to entropy is?”
There isn’t one. Entropy is not a force. It’s a measured tendency of the universe to tend towards structures with the greatest number of available possible states at a given energy level. Imagine flipping 10,000 fair coins. Any given result (the coins each have their own serial number) is equally likely. But you expect about half of the coins to come up heads and half to come up tails. This is because there are more possible outcomes–more states–where around half of the coins are heads and half are tails. Entropy represents the tendency that, if we start with a bunch of “coins” all in the same state, that have a chance of flipping over at intervals, they will eventually tend to be split into some particular fraction (depending on how the probabilities and time intervals for flipping are set up) heads up, with the remainder tails-up.
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Oh, I agree, Jabherwochie,
My point all along has been that it is pretty hard to discredit opposing opinions of Intelligent Design, because it is very difficult to prove many of the things they are assuming are “proof.” My biggest beef with Evolution is that they instantly try to discredit Intelligent Design with the PC-ness of discrediting Christianity. It appears to be that there are, indeed, many political ties with evolution… it is not merely a scientific theory, as is so often claimed. This theory has vast political and philosophical ties, which polute it and make it more than merely scientific. Black Holes or the Theory of Relativity don’t generate such emotional responses from their defenders as Evolution does… it lends to ask the question, why is Evolution such a hot button issue – we can understand the Creationist point of view and relate further why they defend their point of view, but what of the irrational zealousness to discredit Intelligent Design, which is basically only saying “there are variables which cannot be proven certainly, and therefore ruling out certain things is an invalid conclusion.”
I am not saying necessarily, that I don’t agree with Evolution, except that those defending Evolution seem to regard the inclusion of Intelligent Design as absurd, when in reality, it is not. It is often merely people saying that this is far too complicated to be attributed to mere randomness, or to say that the science of randomness is settled is crazy talk, because there are as of yet, far too many unexplainable variables which, most likely, we cannot even begin to concieve.
In the future, I suspect that it will be regarded as the height of intellectual stupidity when we purported that we could explain the origins of the universe 100 billion years ago, and began to demand the end of inquiry into it, while at the same time not even knowing for sure where eliptically patterned comets bugger off to, only to return to us. That should give us some perspective about how little we can actually explain about the structure of the universe, and the absurdity of us trying to explain the origins of the universe, for certain, from our little island that can’t even see over the horizon.
I would like to point out that there are several devout Christians following along on this thread… And I have said some things in this thread that completely question the Bible’s story and futher, the foundations of their faith, and yet, it is interesting to note that it is not actually they that are adamant other people adhere to their world view, but rather, it is almost universally the Evolutionists themselves that come charging in as if this matter is of the utmost importance. (Not here, specifically – but, in general when the argument arises, the Evolutionists are the most vicious of positions, and seem to be the most emotionally involved). Makes you ask if what we believe is because of PCness, and because of what is actually proveably true.
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en⋅tro⋅py  /ˈɛntrəpi/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [en-truh-pee] Show IPA
Use entropy in a Sentence
See web results for entropy
See images of entropy
–noun 1. Thermodynamics. a. (on a macroscopic scale) a function of thermodynamic variables, as temperature, pressure, or composition, that is a measure of the energy that is not available for work during a thermodynamic process. A closed system evolves toward a state of maximum entropy.
b. (in statistical mechanics) a measure of the randomness of the microscopic constituents of a thermodynamic system. Symbol: S
2. (in data transmission and information theory) a measure of the loss of information in a transmitted signal or message.
3. (in cosmology) a hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity in which all matter is at a uniform temperature (heat death).
4. a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.
I meant in the standard of definition #3. I don’t believe the universe will achieve heat-death due to evolution.
(this is why I always say words are slippery)
My views could equally be applied to definition #4.
I really don’t understand quantum-thermal dynamics except in the most vague sense.
And I use the word force here in a poetic sense, like the force of someones beauty, or the force of their personality. I guess a better word would have been “principle”;
2. a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived: the principles of modern physics.
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The above is directed towards Arbitrary’s last paragraph, just to clarify.
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@fedrz-
I get what your saying. I agree with you.
And I hope I don’t bash creationist per se, as I believe that evolution is the hand of God. We may argue about the details, but I believe in God. I’m no atheist. Atheists to me are irrational because they don’t see a hierarchy of life. If we can accept that reality exists all the way from a void to dirt to bacteria to humans, why is it so hard to believe that from human, we go to advanced aliens maybe, to something else, to God. God to me is a logical conclusion.
And on a related note, I love Jesus, and believe he was a man who had an intuitive understanding of the universe around him. Every direct quote from the big J is solid in my book. I think he’s been misused, but who doesn’t?
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I don’t claim I’m certain of anything, just pretty sure often enough, but we (and I mean humanity) will never reach the truth without debate. I would argue Jesus shook up the truth. If it has happened before, why can’t it happen again. We exist in less than a blink of God’s eye. I don’t think he would have laid all the answers out that quickly. The movie isn’t good if you already know the ending.
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I have sometimes wondered, since it is similar to the “universal message” that descends from all religions, if evolution is a “pattern” to perfection.
As in, all religions have a similar theme: Once we existed in Paradise, and all things were perfect. We screwed up, and now we must endure imperfection… but if we endure, we will again be restored to our position in Paradise. (All religions offer the hope of man’s return to Paradise = Perfection).
If, as it appears, that evolution is constantly “perfecting” its creations by genetic selection creating ever better and more efficient creatures… is this really so much different? Could we say that evolution is the endless process of “betterment?” Eventually, perfection has to be the end result, no? And what is the perfectly evolved being? What will happen when evolution makes everything “perfect?”
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My point in saying that entropy isn’t a force wasn’t just to say that it isn’t a force in the physics sense, but also to say that it isn’t something that is “balanced” by anything.
I understand the desire to say that people/evolution/something will find a way around the heat death of the universe (which, while listed as a separate definition here, follows directly from the meaning in the first definition, assuming that our approximate understanding of the universe is sufficiently accurate), but the bad news is that–assuming the theory itself is reasonably accurate–there is none. The good news is that the heat death of the universe isn’t predicted to occur for a [strong]VERY[/strong] long time; in theory, it could take an infinite amount of time (spent constantly approaching it), but after a while we reach the point where there is essentially no interaction between particles beyond random thermal behaviors. There are other cosmological catastrophes that are much more close at hand (the sun burning out, for example) and that are in some sense avoidable catastrophes (at the very least, we could reduce our dependence on their continual delay). If the numbers are tweaked ever so slightly (from our current understanding), the universe may collapse back down to a single point instead of expanding forever, so the heat death might never occur. And, of course, the ever present danger that we might be hit by some large object from space wiping us all out looms over us as something that could happen in a matter of millions of years (a much shorter time frame than the rest of this stuff). So even if you don’t believe in an afterlife, there’s still plenty of time for your good works in this world to help countless future generations.
Knowing that the universe will eventually end is like knowing you will eventually die. It doesn’t stop what you’re doing from mattering somehow, to someone, in between. Nor should you inherently take either ending for granted; but all evidence points towards both eventually occurring.
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This is from a previous post on the article “A Rational Cost/Benifit Analysis of Marriage”.
Sorry to spam, but it covers that question (eventually).
————————————————————————-
Jabherwochie November 20, 2009 at 1:45 pm
“however back in the 80’s when I was extremely close-minded there was an article in Omni magazine about becoming aware in and controlling dreams. I was intrigued, and after some practice was able to (once) intentionally become aware in a dream–I enjoyed myself tremendously.â€
Dude! No fucking way! When I was little, my nightmares where so bad I had to teach my self how to do that. I think I knew it later as Lucent Dreaming. I would literally have to make myself indestructable to fight off the monsters. It created an inner persona that existed in my dreams for a decade at least. I built a whole world eventually. Now, I hardly remember my dreams without putting effort into it. Depressing. I used to enjoy going to sleep just to dream.
“If I were a being who could do anything and know everything, I would be very bored–so how would I create a challenging experience for myself? Perhaps what we are experiencing is the result of that.â€
Fucking exaclty dude!!! The big bang was God hitting the reset button. In the end, that stangnent perfection the universe evolves into, God so to speak, is not enjoyable. With out pain, their is no pleasure, etc. etc.
Of course our big bang might just be a little bubble, like a bubble of a carbonation drink, in a much bigger multi-verse, but I still think the multi-verse would be reflected by our universe, and therefore it cycles and the big-big-bang would the starting point. Man, I could go on forever about this…
Jabherwochie November 20, 2009 at 1:50 pm
“A side note of this is that I wonder if my son has had similar experiences which he cannot verbalize but would be far better equipped to understand given his comparatively extremely advanced perceptions as demonstrated by his ability with puzzles, hence my aversion to using labels such as ‘disabled’ â€
Yes, I believe you are probably as close to the truth as we can get. His entire understanding of reality is inherently different from ours. Others are as strange to him, as he is to others.
Einstein was a visual-spatial thinker, and the part of his brain devoted to visual spatial thought was measurably larger than a normal persons and showed more connections to the part of the brain the does analytical computations. (google that, its been a while) But regardless, Einstein visualized himself riding on a beam of light when he had his epiphany of relativity. (again, google that, its been a while)
Jabherwochie November 20, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Let me put this out there, because I dwelled on the nature of God my whole adolescence, and this is my conclusion.
God is everything, everything is a process of evolution, at the end of that process, when God is complete, he destroys himself, and the process starts over again.
I have a concept of evil and good too, that goes like this.
Everything has a balancing force, an opposite.
Entropy is the opposite of evolution.
Evolution is the hand of God at work.
If God is good, Entropy is evil. Evil is still necessary mind you. Destruction gives birth to life (like the big bang).
Pain is our evolved way of fighting against entropy. Its our way of maintaining structural and psychological order.
I’ll stop. I started a book, but it didn’t go very far. I’m lazy. Maybe I’ll work it up into an article. Zed- The yin-yang was a catalyst for my visualization of the universe by the way. It obviously is overly simple, but thats the point of a symbol. Therefore, it was martial arts that indirectly led to my personal understanding of God. Appropriate for people who see martial arts as more than just fighting. It is physical “game†in a way. It was the arrows around the yin-yang of Jeet Kune Do that made me focus on the dynamic nature of cycles, and how they are necessary for evolution.
Jabherwochie November 20, 2009 at 2:18 pm
God is a process; through our minds we witness a point on that continuum and extrapolate the forces at work and the direction they drive the universe. The forces at work are physical, biological, cultural, technological, and eventually meta-evolution. The direction they drive the universe is towards perfection. Perfection is God whole again, at rest, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. Stagnant. He then destroys himself in something like the big-bang to start the process over again.
Sorry, sorry….its over…can’t help myself..just trying to find the perfect words…leaving computer now for Modern Warfare II….must not annoy people….
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@Jabherwochie
“Atheists to me are irrational because they don’t see a hierarchy of life. If we can accept that reality exists all the way from a void to dirt to bacteria to humans, why is it so hard to believe that from human, we go to advanced aliens maybe, to something else, to God. God to me is a logical conclusion.”
Why is that a logical conclusion?
If your logic is correct, then why stop with God? If everything must be created, then who created God? Oops, I see your problem – your logic creates an infinite regression.
If not, then why not end your hierarchy before reaching a “God”.
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fedrz, evolution is not constantly “perfecting” things. It’s a back and forth between competing forces and interests; the trees need to be taller to have leaves out of reach of the giraffes, the giraffes need longer necks in order to eat more leaves (and, at the same time, both want to be shorter to conserve more resources and to have an easier time circulating nutrients on the interior).
There neither is, nor can be, a “perfectly” evolved being. Only one well suited to its ecological niche.
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Thinker, the point of positing a God for this argument is to counterbalance an opposite to “void”. The idea of asking for something higher than God is like asking for something lower than “void”.
I don’t accept the validity of the argument, but this objection is not especially well-formed.
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“My point in saying that entropy isn’t a force wasn’t just to say that it isn’t a force in the physics sense, but also to say that it isn’t something that is “balanced†by anything.”
Most everything has an opposing side, a “balance”. The few things that don’t self balance, like a shovel. It digs a hole, it fills in a hole.
Many things have a trianglular or multi-dimensional balance. Most opposites are not perfect opposites by any means. Some things share opposites. Some things have more than one opposite. Some are perfectly diametrically opposed.
opposites-
man = nature
good= bad
circle=square
tree=fire
leaf=mushroom
rock=wind
Name something and I’ll give you a potential opposite. It will be a fun game.
“I understand the desire to say that people/evolution/something will find a way around the heat death of the universe”
I am avante garde on this. It is my own idea. I hope I get credit for it one day if it becomes a recognized theory. I don’t see how self-replicating order, ie life, can’t stop heat death. It is opposed to it inherently. It is why evolution is the natural counter force to entropy.
Someone had to be the first to say the world is round. I don’t have proof, I just see it in my mind’s eye. I believe proof will be discovered, but first people have to look for it. I hope to be the catalyst for that.
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I also believe in theistic evolution. It doesn’t really bother me to read about creationism or non-theistic evolution. I just find it interesting. I’ve actually been fascinated by the whole Noah/Gilgamesh discussion. I’ve read both but never associated them with each other.
And I have said some things in this thread that completely question the Bible’s story
The Bible is the primary source of my religion, but not the only one. There are things that are inconsistent in it (such as two Creation stories) but it is still inerrant. It is our interpretations that are fallible, which is why there are so many conflicting opinions about what it says. There are also parts which correlate with actual historical events but their telling is supposed to inform us of a higher truth, not serve as a history text. There are even events told by multiple authors and depicted slightly differently by each. Each author is trying to communicate a specific message and is telling us how he experienced the event, or how it was relayed to him. Even the Old Testament has different voices.
I’m always wary of people who assume the Bible fell out of the sky in finished form. I’m also skeptical of people who attempt to re-align history or science to fit the Bible. The Bible is supposed to communicate truths about God and our relationship with him. It is not an encyclopedia or a geophysics text.
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“If your logic is correct, then why stop with God? If everything must be created, then who created God? Oops, I see your problem – your logic creates an infinite regression.”
See above post for the cycle of God. It is an infinite loop so to speak.
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Since this is a Fedrz (aka Rob Fedders) piece, I just wanted to highlight something he wrote a while back:
http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2008/08/ok-winston-start-your-two-minutes-of.html
In my opinion, and seeing as the Spearhead is a great place for discussion, I would like to see Rob’s above article as a new topic of discussion asap (if the admins or Rob himself would be so kind that is). In fact, I’d go so far as to say that was THE single most important (but yet rarely explored) piece I have ever read on his blog, and would like to see it featured here and/or elaborated on further.
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“There neither is, nor can be, a “perfectly†evolved being. Only one well suited to its ecological niche.”
Are humans more perfect than dogs. If you accept this, extrapalate it out further. We have a very long way to go, and what perfection looks like cannot be known for sure. I don’t see the whole picture, just the direction the movie is going.
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Entropy is a measurement. This measurement is expected, based on theory for the last century and a half or so, to get bigger. Heat death is when it can’t keep getting bigger. Looking for an opposite to entropy is like looking for an opposite to “mile”.
Life, in fact, does locally decrease entropy, but it does so by increasing entropy outside of its body (in fact, this is a not-completely-unreasonable definition of life). The net entropy of the universe still increases over time.
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@Arbitrary
“Thinker, the point of positing a God for this argument is to counterbalance an opposite to “voidâ€. The idea of asking for something higher than God is like asking for something lower than “voidâ€.”
There is a difference between positing “something” as an opposite to “nothing”, and positing the necessity of a hierarchy that ends in an arbitrary and inconsistent way.
“… but this objection is not especially well-formed.”
At least you didn’t accuse me of having a small penis.
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And we don’t evolve into God, we will just evolve into a part of him. The universe, which includes life and technology, which already is God scattered, evolves back into a perfect state. That is what I consider God. The process, the cycle, of everything moving from perfection, to chaos, to perfection again.
Your disbelief is valid. I wouldn’t believe me if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes (my mind’s eye). I’d just like the idea out into the culture for it to be debated and dissected.
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Humans are only “more perfectly evolved” than dogs if some natural disaster comes along that kills them but not us.
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Thinker, the proper opposite to “nothing” being posited by this argument is “everything” (rather than “something”). This is called God.
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“There neither is, nor can be, a “perfectly†evolved being. Only one well suited to its ecological niche.â€
And the niche for God would not exist, as much as all niches would exist in God. If you had to label his position in the evolutionary hierarchy, you could call it the God niche. The niche for all other niches. I know this is circular logic, but God is a circle. Thats one of my points. Alpha-Omega, all that.
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“Arbitrary November 25, 2009 at 9:55 am
Humans are only “more perfectly evolved†than dogs if some natural disaster comes along that kills them but not us.”
Then what will the dogs evolve into? Who fills the human niche.
Do you agree there is a nevolutionary hierarchy. Are people not better than bacteria?
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mile=inch
I said many opposites are not perfect.
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However,
evolution=entropy
isn’t perfect either, because one side wins out. That means one side is stronger. Guess which one?
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I’m not trying to be glib. Just trying to stoke the debate.
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“Life, in fact, does locally decrease entropy, but it does so by increasing entropy outside of its body (in fact, this is a not-completely-unreasonable definition of life). The net entropy of the universe still increases over time.”
Ah, now this is a good argument. Let me try to reply. I’ll post in a second.
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The sun is in an entropic state, photogenisis capture the entropic release of light energy, and converts it back into order. It is a net gain of order, and a net loss for entropy, when you factor out all the light that gets released into space and wasted. Right now, you are correct, entropy is kicking the universes ass. Its running wild. There is not enough life. Eventually we will recycle stars, use black holes for disposal sites, and then possibly harvest the power of black holes as a universal “green energy”. I’m just spouting off BS about the black holes and stuff, just putting out possibilites, because how we overwhelm entropy is not for certain, but just as science and technology has seen an exponential growth in the past 200 years, imagine what we will be capable of in a million years. Like I said, I don’t see the whole picture, I’ve just noticed the direction it’s headed. The details can be debated. I would just argue the certainty of the direction.
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If things get better and better, won’t we eventually reach perfection?
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People are only better than bacteria in the evolutionary sense as long as we are better able to propagate our DNA than bacteria are. Evolution doesn’t care about knowledge. Evolution doesn’t care about aesthetics. Evolution doesn’t care about morals, or even moral agency.
God may care about these things…I certainly believe God does, at any rate. But evolution is just the effects of selective pressures on a population of individuals that occasionally develop mutations; it admits no sense of perfection.
You say the opposite of a mile is an inch. But this is only because you think of a mile as a long distance and an inch as a short distance. In astronomical terms, a mile is a tiny distance, and an “opposite” in this sense would be, perhaps, a lightyear. To a bacteria, a mile is a huge distance, and an “opposite” in this sense would be, perhaps, a nanometer (or even smaller). What is really going on is that you are saying that “long” is the opposite of “short”; a mile only has an opposite because you have decided to think of it as being long.
Fianlly, regarding an ecological niche for God, I don’t try to posit one. God is not a “perfectly evolved” being. To be “perfectly evolved” it would have to be possible for God to reproduce (other entities of the hypothetical God-species, not just making people and planets and so forth), and to die, so that selective pressures could exist. I accept neither such requirement.
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@Jabherwochie
“And we don’t evolve into God, we will just evolve into a part of him. …”
I don’t think that an atheist disagrees with the concepts that we know little, and that we can become more. And you cycles could very well be part of that.
The nature of true science is to create new models that account for new data in the simplest but encompassing way (Occam’s razor).
The nature of religion, as demonstrated through history, is to say that since everything isn’t known, whatever religion claims must be true.
And “God” seems like a particularly bad and baggage-laden label to foist on the simple idea that there may be something more, such as your cycles.
This is because it encourages this type of argument: it is not impossible that there is something more; this is called God; and then off we go trying to use this God (now morphed into however we choose to anthropomorphize it) in the fallacy of Proof by Authority, of whatever self-serving “truths” we choose to pull out of our ass.
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“People are only better than bacteria in the evolutionary sense as long as we are better able to propagate our DNA than bacteria are. Evolution doesn’t care about knowledge. Evolution doesn’t care about aesthetics. Evolution doesn’t care about morals, or even moral agency.”
This is viewing evolution only from a biological state, which is the frame most of this debate has taken place in, but evolution is a multi-faceted process to me. There is biological evolution that goes hand in hand with cultural evolution that is connected to spiritual evolution that has a link to scientific evolution, etc. etc. It all evolves together, influencing one another. So evolution, the way I view it, does care about morals and aesthetics, and everything really. Very much so.
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“You say the opposite of a mile is an inch. But this is only because you think of a mile as a long distance and an inch as a short distance. In astronomical terms, a mile is a tiny distance, and an “opposite†in this sense would be, perhaps, a lightyear. To a bacteria, a mile is a huge distance, and an “opposite†in this sense would be, perhaps, a nanometer (or even smaller). What is really going on is that you are saying that “long†is the opposite of “shortâ€; a mile only has an opposite because you have decided to think of it as being long.”
Correct. Opposites aren’t perfect.
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“Fianlly, regarding an ecological niche for God, I don’t try to posit one. God is not a “perfectly evolved†being. To be “perfectly evolved†it would have to be possible for God to reproduce (other entities of the hypothetical God-species, not just making people and planets and so forth), and to die, so that selective pressures could exist. I accept neither such requirement.”
Again, think outside the frame of just biological evolution. God doesn’t reproduce because he is the pinnacle, acme, climax of life. Their is nothing beyond him, just as their is nothing beyond a void.
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God would not be born in a biological sense. He would “form” from all the puzzle pieces of the universe coming together. I can’t be more specific than that, because my understanding of God is highly symbolic. A human mind can’t fully comprehend God. I’m just getting as close as I can by thinking in symbols and metaphors.
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“And “God†seems like a particularly bad and baggage-laden label to foist on the simple idea that there may be something more, such as your cycles.”
You are perhaps correct. The word has too much baggage and connantation. I will consider that.
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I just believe the end state will be sentient, hence the label God.
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“(now morphed into however we choose to anthropomorphize it)”
I haven’t anthromophized it. God is phantasmagorical to say the least. He would posess all things, even contradictory things, all at once. That would include self-awareness, and its opposite, instinct. Self-awareness is the more powerful of the two, hence he would be sentient.
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This has been great fun. I need to do some work (I am at work). I’ll be back in an hour our two. I hope I’m not annoying anyone.
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@Jabherwochie
And I don’t disagree with many of the concepts of morality on this thread.
I just think that they should be defined in an objective way.
For example, “people should be monogamous because [...]“. (And note that I didn’t say that all or many people “are” monogamous.)
Then the “because” part can be debated, and if it is shown to lead to a specific outcome, those who desire that outcome will adopt it.
And if it is shown to lead to a broadly relevant outcome, it will ultimately be enforced, or not, in the same way as “people should not steal”.
I find this to be more effective with rational people than “The Mystic Pizza said that people should …”
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You only think that the plants are decreasing the net entropy (even ignoring the light that misses them) because you can’t see that, in order to generate the light, the sun itself is increasing in entropy, and it’s doing so more than the plants are decreasing in entropy. Eventually, all the stars will burn out and either particles will be so far apart that they no longer interact with each other in any meaningful way (if the universe expands forever), except on the inside of black holes, or the world collapses back to a single point, the entropy clock gets reset, and the universe is back to a pre-big-bang superheated state (ready to begin again?).
The reversal of entropy, like faster than light travel, while a convenient science fiction plot device, is actively inconsistent with essentially our entire understanding of physical reality. This doesn’t make it impossible, but there’s no evidence pointing in that direction.
Evolution, by natural selection, is a theory to understand a biological phenomenon. Cultural, social, and scientific evolution may follow similar (or even the same) rules. But this is not the point of the theory; the point of the theory of evolution by natural selection is the same as any other theory within science:
(1) It should explain data that has already been measured.
(2) It should predict future measurements.
That it succeeded in the first category, and has not yet fully failed in the second is why the theory has not yet been rejected.
Any resemblance the biological theory of evolution may have to these other evolutions is thus, to at least some degree, coincidental. That said, we can try to use the methods of evolution to better understand and predict changes in these other categories, but it will again be a question of “What is the entity best at reproducing itself?” rather than a question of perfection. “Progress” towards what exists now is not an inexorable march. Rather it is the result of the things less well suited to the conditions at the time dying off. This doesn’t mean things from now are “more perfect” than things were (although they mostly, usually, are).
I unfortunately don’t have time to continue this for right now, but I’ll be around again in several hours, for what I hope will be the exciting conclusion.
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@Jabherwochie
“I haven’t anthromophized it.”
Wasn’t directing that at you. Should have been more clear. Sorry.
I was thinking about some of the “my book is better than your book” people, above.
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I find this to be more effective with rational people than “The Mystic Pizza said that people should …â€
The point of the thread is to debate if it’s possible to even have a moral consensus without religion. The dogma stuff was just going off on a tangent. I generally try to be pragmatic in my arguments. The truth is that moral behavior generally makes sense even without religion, but it’s hard to maintain that without faith.
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Black & German,
Re: Noah & “The Story”
I have read one interesting theory once (of which most of these things are, of course), that because “Noah’s Wife” is only referred to as specifically that – not by an actual name, that possibly “Noah” could mean a reference to “the people who survived the flood,” or, that period.
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Although women generally weren’t referred to by name in the Old Testament unless they played a pivotal role in the story.
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The issue arises when biologists like Richard Dawkins don’t stick to biological science, but instead *use* science to go on a crusade against religion — effectively what Dawkins now does, more or less full time. It’s a joke, really, because while Dawkins may have his merits as a biologist, he isn’t trained in either metaphysics or theology, and it’s embarassingly obvious if you read one of his books attacking religion. There is a lack of respect from “scientists” about what the actual boundaries of science are, and there are a lot of scientists masquerading as priests of a new science-religion or science-meptahysics — things that are not properly the subject of science.
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thinker November 25, 2009 at 10:47 am
“@Jabherwochie
And I don’t disagree with many of the concepts of morality on this thread.
I just think that they should be defined in an objective way.
For example, “people should be monogamous because [...]“. (And note that I didn’t say that all or many people “are†monogamous.)
Then the “because†part can be debated, and if it is shown to lead to a specific outcome, those who desire that outcome will adopt it.
And if it is shown to lead to a broadly relevant outcome, it will ultimately be enforced, or not, in the same way as “people should not stealâ€.
I find this to be more effective with rational people than “The Mystic Pizza said that people should …â€
I totally concur.
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@Novaseeker
“There is a lack of respect from “scientists†about what the actual boundaries of science are, and there are a lot of scientists masquerading as priests of a new science-religion or science-meptahysics — things that are not properly the subject of science.”
What are the boundaries of religion?
What do the priests of religion respect when they insist that, since religion has no objective basis, it should also have no boundaries?
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Nope, my post was about science. Science has established boundaries — namely what can be demonstrated by the scientific method. Therefore, by virtue of its own method, it has no application to either metaphysics or theology.
And in any case, your question is overbroad. I doubt you’ll find any believers in this thread who are interested in defending “religion” in general, or whatever strawman-du-jour is trotted out to represent “religion” in general (preferably the most extreme sort, so as to make it easier to attack — Sam Harris likes to do that, but it just makes him look stupid).
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“Any resemblance the biological theory of evolution may have to these other evolutions is thus, to at least some degree, coincidental.”
It is a loose metaphor. I believe, in general, that just as evolution allows for more advanced and complex organisms, cultural evolution allows for more advanced and complex cultures, scientific evolution allows ..etc. etc.
Now, just as in biology, a simpler more refined species, say a virus, can come along and wipe out a more advanced animal, just as a simpler more refined culture, say Islam, might come along and wipe out western culture.
However, when that happens, the “entity” left behind, Islam in this example, will continue to grow and diverge (speciation) and therefore become more complex.
The end result of evolution is animals fitting into niches, but there will always be a niche for the super-predator, ie humans. If aliens more advanced came along and wiped us out or enslaved us, they would fill the super-predator niche. If a virus came along and wiped out people, the virus would not fill the super-predator niche, but would leave it open for the next animal in line to take over that niche, a la, planet of the apes.
Is western culture the super-predator culture, or is Islam nipping at our heels.
I can make similiar anologies with science, spirtuality, government, anything Angry Harry would call an “Organism”.
Keep in mind that my theory of a God cycle reflects the theories of cycles present in several other religions. I took much inspiration from Buddhism and the Yin-Yang symbol. I’m just further extrapolating what wise ancients understood by using what I know about science. I don’t think its that far fetched. I’m sure I’m getting some stuff wrong, and totally overlooked other stuff, but I feel like my ideas are headed in the right direction.
“You only think that the plants are decreasing the net entropy (even ignoring the light that misses them) because you can’t see that, in order to generate the light, the sun itself is increasing in entropy, and it’s doing so more than the plants are decreasing in entropy. Eventually, all the stars will burn out and either particles will be so far apart that they no longer interact with each other in any meaningful way (if the universe expands forever), except on the inside of black holes, or the world collapses back to a single point, the entropy clock gets reset, and the universe is back to a pre-big-bang superheated state (ready to begin again?).”
Like I said, entropy is kicking our ass right now. More plants would only be like a band-aid to a wound that pierces the heart. One day we may have supra-planet size organisms with advanced super intelligent human/computer hybrids running along the surface of them in a symbiotic fashion. Those ginormous sentient planets may be able to consume suns in their entirity, and all waste would be recycled. If evolution is a process that evolves the universe into God, then we are in the embryonic cell state. We haven’t even been born yet.
Take no offense to this, as I may be wrong in general, but my imagination is apparantly larger than yours. You envision a wall, I envision a ladder. You say we can’t go faster then light, I say we bend space-time and don’t have to. You say, what we can’t see yet and can’t understand fully must not exist, I say lots of things we can’t see and don’t understand exists, why not take an educated guess.
Arbitrary-
You are one of the most respected minds here, and I value your opinion a lot. I appreciate you just taking my ideas into consideration, even so much as to disagree with them. If there is something worthy to debate, maybe, just maybe, I’m on to something. As there is obviously no way to prove what I say, or to condense such a complex perspective in an easy to understand thought paradigm, the fact that you understand what I’m arguing enough to point out the inherent flaws in it is satisfactory enough for now. Obviously, I believe my ideas will evolve. This debate, this deconstruction, is necessary for new, better ideas to flourish. Hopefully, at the least, and even if I am wrong, it will open up ideas in other areas for you or anyone else reading this. It is never useless knowledge to understand the perspective of someone else, even if you disagree with them, hell, even if you hate them for their perspective. Thanks for giving my ideas your time and consideration. Given who you are, I take that as a compliment.
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Several points to ponder in all this, but I do have a couple of things to bring up.
1) Contra Paul, we cannot derive all the truths of mathematics from any set of axioms. This is the meaning of the major intellectual development of the 20th century, Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. Goedel proved that there was at least one thing that was demonstrably true in mathematics that was also not derivable from any of the existing truths.
2) There was a book a few years back called “Noah’s Flood.” It describes the common features of the flood stories of the Middle East. The authors traced the flood stories to an event 8000 years ago when the ocean flooded through the Bosporus, causing a catastrophic flood where the sea began flooding what had been a freshwater lake; meanwhile, hundreds of miles away the water would have simply continued to rise, day after day, an event that would have displaced many people (like those of the “first” city, Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia, modern Turkey) and been recorded in myth and collective consciousness.
3) If you want to start to counter “moral relativism” in the sciences, a good place to start is with David Stove, who is absolutely unstinting in his criticism of “Jazz Age” philosophy of science, especially Popper and Kuhn. “Against the idols of the age” also includes his philosophical bodyslam against Darwin (who he appreciates as a great thinker) and Richard Dawkins, who he despises, despite sharing atheism with him.
4) Science teaches us that the human female has the greatest difficulty giving birth because of the size of the human head. That human head size is large to accommodate the human brain, required for our intelligence as a species. As a different writer put it: “woman shall give birth in pain” because “she ate of the tree of knowledge.”
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@Novaseeker
“Nope, my post was about science. Science has established boundaries — namely what can be demonstrated by the scientific method. Therefore, by virtue of its own method, it has no application to either metaphysics or theology.”
“The issue arises when biologists like Richard Dawkins don’t stick to biological science, but instead *use* science to go on a crusade against religion — effectively what Dawkins now does, more or less full time.”
It was my understanding that Dawkins’ crusades focus on those areas where religion tries to intrude on the real world, which is the domain of science.
Please give me some examples of where Dawkins attacked religion as theology.
On the other hand, religion makes itself fair game when it demands belief contrary to evidence, or when it insists that anything beyond some self-inconsistent explanation is unknowable.
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This has gone out of my league, but, I’m selling popcorn for $2.50/bag.
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Well, don’t stop arguing! Who’s gonna buy my popcorn?
Besides, I was really enjoying this debate!
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@Fedrz
Part 1 deals with your first comment
1. A scientific theory is different than a theory in the vernacular. In science, a theory is something that explains a number of observed facts. Common theories are the atomic theory, the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity and so on. In science there is no implication of a less secure footing when the word “theory” is used.
2. I do not understand what you mean when you say “…even if evolution were proven to be absolutely true…” It has been proven true to the best of our means (outside of math and some parts of logic. It is as true as gravity. I also do not understand why you believe that some people say that evolution is attributable entirely to randomness. I have not heard anyone say that.
3. Evolution says nothing about a grand, intelligent being that may have guided it. It ignores it the same way that it ignores the possibility of green monkeys secretly giving birth to every single species. There is no evidence to support such a view. We do not have to prove that there is no hand of god in evolution. The people who believe that must prove it. Otherwise they are arguing from ignorance.
4. I do not understand why you are talking about the political and philosophical sides of evolution. They have nothing to do with the scientific side. I have also never seen any evidence of “the zealousness of Evolution overides intelligent thought in other fields of study besides their own – often in a manner similar to what a religion would do. It goes beyond what is justified for all that it really is.” Can you provide evidence of an evolutionary biologist doing such a thing?
5. One side has been proven absolutely true. There is no debate other than one manufactured for religious goals.
Thank you,
Jugglingbuffoon
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And I’m back…though possibly too late to continue any back and forth this evening.
I’m not saying that progress hasn’t occurred, or that we are not now a better species for having developed morality, science, and art. But none of these outcomes are inevitable results of evolution–the only inevitable result of evolution is that the next generation of organisms will be better suited to the current environment, on average, than the previous generation of organisms. 65 million years ago, that meant that the organisms that could meaningfully support being as large as possible were largely the victors. Were it not for the KT extinction event, the “evolutionary progress” of human intellect might never have occurred. Or it might have occurred sooner. The point is that it isn’t correct to view the biological process of evolution through natural selection as inherently a path of progress towards today. Rather, the point of the theory is to say that, through individual competition and sexual selection, together with the random introduction of mutations, species have changed, diverged, and died out. These changes can make a species better or worse with respect to essentially any other measurement; aesthetics, intelligence, morality of behavior, complexity, and so forth–change in these measures is fundamentally unrelated to the evolutionary cause of change in species, the fact that the organisms that reproduce more, propagate more of their own genetics to the next generation.
I contrast this with scientific evolution. Science “evolves” by having a corpus of ideas accepted as the consensus view for their ability to explain the data. New ideas are considered (largely at random, although what sort of ideas might be considered can, to an extent, be predicted) with respect to their ability to explain existing holes in the consensus (data disagreeing with the current theory), and their ability to predict new results (a theory unable to do this is not science at all, although sometimes something can masquerade as science while failing to be predictive, such as string theory). This is not evolution by natural selection; there is no question of “reproductive fitness” of a scientific idea–either it fits the data, or it doesn’t. The only sort of “mutation” occurring is the introduction of new hypotheses, but this doesn’t result in some kind of aberrant organism whose reproductive fitness is measured against the rest of the population by the environment. In short, the evolutionary model does not really reflect the way in which science progresses.
Cultural development falls somewhere in between these two ideas of biological evolution and scientific advance; indeed there is a significant and meaningful movement to try to describe the spread of some ideas in biological terms–hence the coining of the word “meme”. That said, memetic reproduction is very much unlike biological reproduction, and the boundaries between cultural organisms are much more complex and ill-defined than biological ones (which are themselves complex and ill-defined to begin with).
All of this, however, is straying from my point. There is nothing inherent about the process of evolution that it should necessarily result in any particular kind of “progress” other than to say that the next generation will be better suited, on average, in the reproductive sense, to the environment of the parents than the parents themselves were. Sometimes this may result in some particular kind of “progress” or increase in complexity or order. Other times, such as when dolphins went back to being aquatic animals, this “progress” may be reversed.
As regards entropy, I cannot guarantee that there is no way to decrease the entropy of a closed system, at least not in the sense that I can guarantee that 1+1=2. I can say that anything capable of decreasing the entropy of a closed system, in a very literal sense, reverses the passage of time (if you are confronted with a physical process, but don’t know which way time flows, the right answer so far is to say that it flows in the direction that entropy increases). One can certainly imagine a neg-entropy wand one could point at a roomful of gas and suddenly all the particles would restrict themselves to a single tiny corner of the room. But all known processes–gravitational, chemical, nuclear, and beyond–do not behave in this way, regardless of whether they were discovered before or after the concept of entropy.
As a final note, I am honored to hear that you think so highly of me Jabherwockie, but not nearly as much as I am heartened to know that you continue to challenge my claims even when you think so much of my intelligence. Even Newton was capable of being wrong, and even a mild-mannered patent office worker is capable of being right.
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ElectricAngel
Regarding Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem: this is thrown around a lot with an eye towards trying to claim that even mathematical truths are uncertain. This is not an accurate assessment of the actual claims of Godel’s Theorem, which literally states that any axiomatization of the theory (in the mathematical logic sense of the term) of Peano arithmetic is undecidable. Translating that back to English, we basically have this: we can’t make a finite list of axioms (or even an infinite but easily predictable one) that allow us to prove all the true statements about regular arithmetic (adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing regular integers). This means that we can’t ever prove all true statements, but it doesn’t mean that there is any reason to doubt the statements we can prove to be true.
Stated another way (that may be somewhat more familiar), any decidable set of axioms powerful enough to represent number theory are inconsistent (that is, self-contradictory), or incomplete (that is, can’t prove all true statements, vis-a-vis the above).
That said, mathematics is still the highest order of truth–it is the only knowledge not dependent on the axiom “the world exists” that you can possibly have. Godel just guarantees that you can never prove all of it. (Tangentially, in simpler systems–those incapable of describing even basic arithmetic–it often is possible to prove all true statements.)
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“There are things that are inconsistent in it (such as two Creation stories) but it is still inerrant”
genesis isnt a story, its a condensation, big difference
what inconsistency?
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Arbitrary,
My understanding of the incompleteness theorem lies almost entirely in its use in the Church-Turing thesis; my layman’s understanding is Goedel’s use of diagonalization to produce a statement that essentially says: “I am not provable in Principia Mathematica.” If the statement is true, then PM is incomplete, and not every true statement in mathematics can be proved from axioms; if it is false, then PM is inconsistent, and any logical statement can be assumed to be vacuously true (a much worse development!).
Now, on simpler systems, as you write, you can derive everything from the axioms. What I have been looking for is a book on “scientific socialism” that describes the set of axioms (laws) that rule society. It would seem that either that set is trivially simple, and thus not really usable, or incomplete. I slogged through Marxism, the Science of Society to try and find the “laws” therein, but did not (interesting book, written in 1985, by someone clearly not able to see the onrushing collapse of Marxism in the East.)
In your opinion, would the Incompleteness Theorem invalidate any claim by socialism to be the complete descriptor of society?
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It turns out that even very weak axiom sets (Peano Arithmetic is based on nine axioms…) are usually enough for describing number theory…all you need to be able to do is define integers, add, subtract, multiply, and divide (and have these operations work as intended). However, given how small these axiom sets are, the idea that they might be inconsistent is somewhat ridiculous–but they often cannot be shown to be consistent (proven by another important theorem of first order logic). Incompleteness is therefore taken for granted as the probable conclusion; but even if this were not the case, there would be no problem with my claim that mathematical truths are fundamentally unquestionable. A proof of a statement from a collection of givens is equivalent to a proof that the collection of the givens used in the proof (which must be finite) implies the statement. But this is a proof with no givens; in this way, we can structure all of mathematics to depend only on the string manipulations inherent in first order logic–namely, that there can be finite sequences of statements, and that we can use modus ponens. If you disbelieve the former, you can never have any truths or falsehoods at all. If you disbelieve the latter, you have a static system without the ability to construct implications. Everything else follows directly.
That said, your layman’s characterization is roughly accurate, Mathematics is incomplete or inconsistent; either not all true statements can be proven, or all statements can be proven.
In answer to your question, it’s inherently a sticky issue, because trying to describe society in a formal language is not a well-defined proposition. It seems trivial to me that arithmetic should be embeddable in any description of society, so that not all true statements about society could be proven by a decidable axiom scheme (basically, a scheme of givens where you could sit down and construct a list on which any particular axiom would eventually show up). This fact is of limited practical application however, since it is not necessary to prove all true statements about society in order to effectively predict future behaviors. Rather, the reason that effective central prediction of future behaviors has been historically ineffective has more to do with the fact that the society, as a system, is chaotic–societies with similar but not identical initial conditions will tend to diverge in behavior. If societies were not, then the sort of central planning in Communist societies of the mid-20th century might have been effective.
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Ray, after I read your post, I re-read the stories and you’re right. There is no inconsistency.
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Neither men. We know Moses but we don’t know the name of the average Israelian men.
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That’s true. Only the pivotal characters are named. Usually when reading the Bible, if I see someone mentioned by name I note it because I know they’re going to be important later.
The only exception are those long lists of names where one blends into the other in my mind and are unimportant to remember. So-and-so begat so-and-so and he begat so-and-so… I usually just skip over those, to tell the truth. They’re interesting from a genealogical perspective but most lay-persons don’t really care.
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Have any of you read The Genesis of Justice?
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In regard to “Noah”, and the reference to “Noah’s Wife”, I recall reading once that from “the other side,” (Sumeria/Babylon) that in their reference to Noah, it meant both of them, as in the semi-god/god Noah, was the name for both the man and woman as one… and I believe that is how the theory has been connected, possibly, to “the people”, in that specific situation.
Many of these are cross-cultural as people attempt to decode the past. Much of the story what I have been referring to, for example, comes from multiple cultures: Sumerian/Babylonian Cultural Discoveries, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Studies of Islam, the Bible, and Hebrew Texts – as well, when some people are trying to establish certain things, they are also pulling out archaeological facts from various other Semitic cultures – such as the Moabites, or the Hittites etc. etc.
The ancient Hebrew texts and such things also sometimes go further in their meaning than what we read in the Bible in English. For example: Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Hebrew language, are distinctly identified as “feminine,” (like how there is feminine and masculine in regard to languages – like in French, “le” is masculine, “la” is feminine). In fact, of all of the cities in the entire region, the only two that are feminine, are Sodom and Gomorrah… and how does this follow along with what we are learning about the nature of out of control sexuality? It is feminine in nature, isn’t it? It worships the feminine. As well, most of the ancient texts, when they refer to demons and things – the most dangerous of the demons are females.
There certainly is a lot of misogyny in this ancient stuff, from Judaism. Of course, it is always pointed out that this is because of men’s inherent tendency to wish to oppress women out of some wickedness which is innate to male nature… but, anyone with half a brain ought to be able to look around and realize that this cannot be the natural inclination of males – just the opposite. Personally, I think they displayed misogyny like that, because they recognized the dangers of society by “the feminine principle”, and it scared them silly, and so they tried to stamp out the tendency to live that way.
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Yeah, you’re right fedrz. Men were scared of women’s wild sexuality. That explains chastity belts and female seclusion. They aren’t doing that to oppress them but because they were realistic enough to know that if they let their women run around free and unfettered they’d act like…. Americans. LOL. We’ve done the experiment and… they were right.
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fedrz not just among Hebrews but also among the Romans that feeling existed.
Here is an interesting quote I found floating around:
“Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is useless to let go the reins and then expect her not to kick over the traces. You must keep her on a tight rein . . . Women want total freedom or rather – to call things by their names – total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .†— Cato the Elder 234-149 B.C. quoted in Livy’s ‘History of Rome’.
How much of it is true, you can each decide for yourself.
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