Posted on 05/01/2011 7:24:18 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
The squabble between Darwin lobbyists who openly hate religion and those who only quietly disdain it grows ever more personal, bitter and pathetic. On one side, evangelizing New or "Gnu" (ha ha) Atheists like Jerry Coyne and his acolytes at Why Evolution Is True. Dr. Coyne is a biologist who teaches and ostensibly researches at the University of Chicago but has a heck of a lot of free time on his hands for blogging and posting pictures of cute cats.
On the other side, so-called accommodationists like the crowd at the National Center for Science Education, who attack the New Atheists for the political offense of being rude to religious believers and supposedly messing up the alliance between religious and irreligious Darwinists.
I say "supposedly" because there's no evidence any substantial body of opinion is actually being changed on religion or evolution by anything the open haters or the quiet disdainers say. Everyone seems to seriously think they're either going to defeat religion, or merely "creationism," or both by blogging for an audience of fellow Darwinists.
Want to see what I mean? This is all pretty strictly a battle of stinkbugs in a bottle. Try to follow it without getting a headache.
Coyne recently drew excited applause from fellow biologist-atheist-blogger PZ Myers for Coyne's "open letter" (published on his blog) to the NCSE and its British equivalent, the British Centre for Science Education. In the letter, Coyne took umbrage at criticism of the New Atheists, mostly on blogs, emanating from the two accommodationist organizations. He vowed that,
We will continue to answer the misguided attacks [on the New Atheists] by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks.Like the NCSE, the BCSE seeks to pump up Darwin in the public mind without scaring religious people. This guy called Stanyard at the BCSE complains of losing a night's sleep over the nastiness of the rhetoric on Coyne's blog. Coyne in turn complained that Stanyard complained that a blog commenter complained that Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE, is like "vermin." Coyne also hit out at blogger Jason Rosenhouse for an "epic"-length blog post complaining of New Atheist "incivility." In the blog, Rosenhouse, who teaches math at James Madison University, wrote an update about how he had revised an insulting comment about the NCSE's Josh Rosenau that he, Rosenhouse, made in a previous version of the post.
That last bit briefly confused me. In occasionally skimming the writings of Jason Rosenhouse and Josh Rosenau in the past, I realized now I had been assuming they were the same person. They are not!
It goes on and on. In the course of his own blog post, Professor Coyne disavowed name-calling and berated Stanyard (remember him? The British guy) for "glomming onto" the Matzke-vermin insult like "white on rice, or Kwok on a Leica." What's a Kwok? Not a what but a who -- John Kwok, presumably a pseudonym, one of the most tirelessly obsessive commenters on Darwinist blog sites. Besides lashing at intelligent design, he often writes of his interest in photographic gear such as a camera by Leica. I have the impression that Kwok irritates even fellow Darwinists.
There's no need to keep all the names straight in your head. I certainly can't. I'm only taking your time, recounting just a small part of one confused exchange, to illustrate the culture of these Darwinists who write so impassionedly about religion, whether for abolishing it or befriending it. Writes Coyne in reply to Stanyard,
I'd suggest, then, that you lay off telling us what to do until you've read about our goals. The fact is that we'll always be fighting creationism until religion goes away, and when it does the fight will be over, as it is in Scandinavia.A skeptic might suggest that turning America into Scandinavia, as far as religion goes, is an outsized goal, more like a delusion, for this group as they sit hunched over their computers shooting intemperate comments back and forth at each other all day. Or in poor Stanyard's case, all night.
There's a feverish, terrarium-like and oxygen-starved quality to this world of online Darwinists and atheists. It could only be sustained by the isolation of the Internet. They don't seem to realize that the public accepts Darwinism to the extent it does -- which is not much -- primarily because of what William James would call the sheer, simple "prestige" that the opinion grants. Arguments and evidence have little to do with it.
The prestige of Darwinism is not going to be affected by how the battle between Jerry Coyne and the NCSE turns out. New Atheist arguments are hobbled by the same isolation from what people think and feel. I have not yet read anything by any of these gentlemen or ladies, whether the open haters or the quiet disdainers, that conveys anything like a real comprehension of religious feeling or thought.
Even as they fight over the most effective way to relate to "religion," the open atheists and the accomodationists speak of an abstraction, a cartoon, that no actual religious person would recognize. No one is going to be persuaded if he doesn't already wish to be persuaded for other personal reasons. No faith is under threat from the likes of Jerry Coyne.
But that Source isn't God, eh?
Personal life from impersonal life?
I have played with dolphins in the wild. They are as aware of life and their existence as I am.
Well, I at least agree with you that personal awareness is greater than impersonal "isness" -- metaphysics.
But then so many atheists go off full-cocked on things and claim the personality of people, mammals & animals all emerged from single, or "if not one, then a few single sources" -- and most of the time that's postulated by naturalists and atheists to be impersonal sources.
The "it" -- the source of faith for such naturalists and atheists -- which isn't aware of life -- is somehow greater than those entities that are personally aware?
Wow! What faith!
Wrong again you can not adequately understand either the new testament nor the old testament on their own. The Bible [sola scriptura] is it’s own interpreter and no words of mere mortals can act as a substitute. The last chapter of the last book contains a warning to not add nor subtract anything to the Holy Word. Furthermore Jesus said the law and the sacrifices were there only to show the Jewish people the law is inadequate for salvation nor could be secured on their own good deeds or atonement.
Hey, at least stop oblitering and revising historical Christianity as depicted in the New Testament and reinforced in the early church fathers' writings.
Those writings don't compartmentalize Jesus as you've just done...BOTH man...and God.
If YOU personally want to separate who Jesus is, that's one thing. To superimpose your view over that of the early church fathers and the NT and then call that "Christian orthodoxy," you have overblown hubris to do that.
No doubt you also believe that dolphins get jokes and understand baseball, too.
You wrote: "Life, in all its forms, is the same and it all traces back to if not one, then a few single sources."
Hilary of Poitiers (315-367) was best known for his stands vs. the Arian sect. He was apppointed as a bishop.
He wrote: "We have declared REPEATEDLY AND WITHOUT CEASE that it was the only-begotten Son of God who was crucified, and that He was condemned to death...it must be understood that He underwent the passion not from any natural necessity, but for the sake of the mystery of man's salvation; and that His submitting to the passion was not from His being compelled thereto, but of Hiw own will. God suffered, therefore, because He voluntarily submitted Himself to the passion." (Hilary's commentary on the Psalms, commenting on Psalm 53-54)
Another bishop, Cyril of Jerusalem (310-386), likewise emphasized how Jesus "did not give up His life by compulsion...except it were voluntary. Hear what He says: 'I have the power to lay down My life, and I have the power to take it up again. Willingly do I yield it to My enemies...'"(Cyril's Catechetical Lectures)
This was clearly 4th-century expositional pronouncements of the historic Christian church.
For you to then waltz in via the 21st century and suppose what "basic Christian theology" -- clearing all that disagrees with you via some wave of a keyboard hand -- is the height of superimposed arrogance and ignorance combined into one poster.
Congrats!
If you do, then you are mixing and confusing the divine and human natures...
Do I need to quote you DOZENS and DOZENS and DOZENS of entries where the early church fathers supposedly "mixed" these natures?
They wrote about how the MAN Jesus Christ is to be adored (worshiped) -- something only we are to do for God. (And JEWISH writers like Matthew highlighted that as well)
They wrote about how Christ was free from both original and personal sin...repeatedly in the New Testament AND the early church writers. Tell us, Kosta, are you saying Jesus was sinful? Yes? Do you think mere man alone since Adam's fall can be free from sin as Jesus was?
They wrote on ALL kinds of occasions about how Christ, the Son of God, had a body capable of suffering...a body subject to human infirmities...a body subject to human passions.
Lg won't. He's not really, sincerely interested in fulfilled prophecies. Many have been over this road with him before and all he has to add is mockery and derision.
He has already decided that there is no fulfilled prophecies in the Bible. Facts won't change his claimed, allegedly objective mind.
Remember, even if someone rises from the dead, those who won't believe, won't.
Yay!!! More bean-counter thinking from our friend LeGrande, dogmatic fundie-atheist. As is typical of this breed, rather than tell us why he thinks "innocent ignorance" is a putative "misnomer," he simply takes the opportunity to smear "the so called Christian posters on this thread" as ignoramuses. All heat, no light....
Thank you, dear Matchett-PI, for the link to a website that promulgates fundamentalist-atheist dogma. This dogma is the total inversion of reality, dumped into a sewer. It is moreover relentlessly irrational bordering on the totally insane. One hears the howlings of Lucifer in its texts, particularly the line about "ye shall be as gods."
Lucifer's specialty is the total inversion of reality. He so detests and reviles God and His Creation — especially man — that he tirelessly works to destroy Creation's meaning by changing the way a man thinks about it; i.e., about God's Great Hierarchy of Being — God–Man–World–Society — and man's place in it. He knows he cannot destroy any part of God's works directly; but he can mislead, "tempt," man's proper understanding of them. Once man is disordered, he will disorder his world. Satan doesn't need a wrecking ball when he can get man to do his dirty work for him.
In man's case, the "inversion" consists in the defacement of the image of God in his soul — which is what makes us truly human, and unique among all the creatures that God made.
What I find most fascinating about atheists is their seemingly unshakable confidence that God does not exist, that He is a "fiction" or a hallucination in a man's mind. Or so they keep saying....
But note this precious fact: Satan himself has never made that claim. On the contrary, Satan very well knows that God exists. He even hangs out with Him from time to time; e.g., the Book of Job, the Gospel of John.
Rather than deny God (which he knows he cannot do without destroying the ground of his own existence), this passage from P.D. Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe suggests what he's up to (paraphrasing):
I am Satan, the Father of Lies; and the greatest Lie I ever told was that I do not exist.That is, objective evil does not exist. Questions of Good and Evil are really meaningless, because they only have subjective answers, opinions; and one man's opinion is just as good (or bad) as another's. I do believe that this is the view of kosta, JCB, and LG; and thus indubitably they self-identify as dogmatic fundie-atheists.
But 'nuff said. Back to "innocent ignorance." James C. Bennett gives us a fascinating example of the moral inversion so characteristic of fundie-atheists:
Since belief in your deity’s dogma allows for the forgiving of sins, however grave they may be, what is to stop you from committing the worst of atrocities, and then begging forgiveness after the fact? To know you will be forgiven, allows you to do whatever you want, and then beg forgiveness.But this is the total inversion of "innocent ignorance." The fact of premeditation proves it is, not innocent, but entirely, indelibly, lastingly culpable.
"Innocent ignorance" refers to a person who has no knowledge or understanding of the wrongness of his contemplated action before it is committed. If one truly does not understand the "wrong" of an action, one cannot be held "guilty" for it. (In criminal trials, one does not send an incompetent person to the death chamber, even if that incompetent committed mass murder.) But once the man understands the wrongness of the action, he is culpably responsible if he repeats it.
But JCB is arguing the very inverse of this, that the consequence of the evil premeditation is cancelled out by invoking the proper forms of "I'm sorry" before God later on. But this is to make a mockery of God. (No surprise there, coming from an atheist.)
I would simply remind JCB that God will not be mocked....
In closing, it seems to me JCB's — and kosta's, and LG's — woeful "ignorance" of God is entirely willful, not "innocent."
JMHO, FWIW.
What is God's relationship to the Jews, except for prophecy? And that is demonstrably false.
Been there, done countless times. Jesus fulfilled dozens during the course of his life here. Next lame bleat.
Please, just name one specific, accurate, verifiable prophecy that Christ fulfilled? Yes we have gone down this road many times and Adam bruising the heal of the Serpent isn't an accurate prophecy of Christ. Sorry.
Methinks some fundie atheists got pwnd....
But that said,
In before the mockery and derision of your post.
If you have any actual evidence at all of higher worlds I will accept it.
Imagine a dog trying to explain the concept of pointing to a wolf. The wolf would just look dumbly and say: 'It's a hand. No matter how it moves, it is still just a hand. Can we eat it already?'"
How funny. You obviously have zero experience with hunting dogs. Ignorance must be sweet bliss. (Ignoramus example Betty Boop) Hunting and herding dogs certainly do teach each other how to obey my pointing and whistle commands. But don't take my word for it ask any dog trainer.
Destruction of the Temple Mount where not one stone was left atop another.
Elsie, Elsie, Elsie. Even the scriptures contradict this simple observation. Don't the scriptures say that Christ raised Lazurus from the dead? Or do you believe that Lazurus is still alive? Highlander?
But JCB is arguing the very inverse of this, that the consequence of the evil premeditation is cancelled out by invoking the proper forms of "I'm sorry" before God later on. But this is to make a mockery of God. (No surprise there, coming from an atheist.)
I would simply remind JCB that God will not be mocked....
Psalm 22:20 Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.
Let's see, did Christ die of a sword? No. Did his 'darling' get saved from a dog? I have no idea. Do you?
Clearly a false prophecy, but that is redundant isn't it?
What is the Dome of the Rock built upon? Clearly another failed prophecy. Astrology has a much better track record than the Bible.
Monkey Babble Mockery. Pure and simple. But why the preposterous confidence about what an ape can know of reality? But timelessness takes time. You can't just tell a snake to get some legs, nor can you tell a troll to get a clue. Some men crawl on their bellies and others walk upright. Some say we should give them a break. Me? I'll give them a banana. :)
Actually I can. Just look at the DNA records the entirely different species have in common. The DNA records are very clear. Especially the Virus records.
Personal life from impersonal life?
Yep, Quantum foam.
The "it" -- the source of faith for such naturalists and atheists -- which isn't aware of life -- is somehow greater than those entities that are personally aware?
Consciousness is Quantum tunneling at the synapses.
Baseball is a stretch, but dolphins certainly communicate and play. I have seen a silverback gorilla pinch a female gorilla and then pretend that it wasn't him. Clearly a sense of humor.
LeGrande responded: "How funny. You obviously have zero experience with hunting dogs. Hunting and herding dogs certainly do teach each other how to obey my pointing and whistle commands."
They can "explain the concept"? WOW! Maybe you should have them explain it to you:
The obligatory atheist is essentially fixated on the finger while barking at the moon.
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