Posted on 10/20/2006 8:52:20 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Let's all stop beating Basil's car
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
It’s something to think about ; )
....an article by Crick entitled "Why I study Biology." He gives a call for full genetic engineering at once and tells us what is his basic motive for studying biology:This is common problem for the evolutionist, Dawkins does the same thing. As Crick personalizes his own impersonal universe when he called chance "clever" and says chance "thinks", Dawkins does the exact same thing when he calls chance a "Blind Watchmaker". Chance isn't a watchmaker at all, but the personal language of a watchmaker takes the pressure off.My own motivation, which I have only touched on up to now, is rather elsewhere. It is difficult to say it in a few words. If you had to find a simple description of why I do what I do biological research, it is for philosophical and what you might call religious reasons.A crucial part of the view of the life that he expounds, as we can clearly see from what he writes, is the ideas that man can be essentially reduced to the chemical and physical properties that go to make up the DNA template. Philosophically, therefore, Francis Crick is a reductionist, that is, one who would reduce man to an electrochemical machine. Such a view soon leads to the idea that man can and should be manipulated and even controlled....
....Francis Crick continues:"The major conclusion which one draws from the present day biology is the importance of natural selection. The essence of natural selection, and this is the thing that people find very hard to accept, is that it's motivated by chance events. It is not preprogrammed but is driven by chance events. You can make an argument that chance is the only real source of true novelty."Natural selection is not programmed; it is generated by chance. A little further on in the article, however, Dr. Crick says,"You cannot lay down a general trend [for the course of evolution]; natural selection is cleverer then that. It will think of combinations and ways of doing things which haven't been foreseen"In the Origin of the Genetic Code (1968) Crick begins to spell nature with a capital N about halfway through the book and in Of Molecules and Men he refers to nature as a "she." In other words, he personalizes what by definition is impersonal implications of impersonality, and because this kind of semantic mysticism gives relief to people caught in the web of the impersonal. By his own definition Crick lives in an impersonal universe, but by the connotation of the language he uses, Crick personalizes the impersonal universe and calls natural selection "clever" and says it will "think". Such language takes the pressure off, and people fail to understand what they have read....
…. and on the 3 billionth day, clever Nature guided only be chance which also happens to think accidentally shude forth chemicals and looked upon it without saying or thinking, “this is neither good or bad, it’s just chemicals, and I, the Blind Watchmaker [who really isn't personal in any way], shall form these chemicals in no specific image and without intelligence”. Then plants, insects, fish, and man evolved from this shude without intelligence, each according to its own inane kind.Fridays are funky indeed and were definitely created for fun.
evos are truly remarkable creatures for their ability to ascribe to their TOE the ability to use cogent thought and "cleverness" in the ascention of life on this planet. If, as they claim, nature just "happened" and then evolved, where does thought and cleverness come in to play.
They want to have their cake and eat it too. We must not allow them to eat the cake, as they will only become fatter in their inanity.
So murderes are not evil, they are just rocks that have fallen in the wrong direction. This is the ultimate end of evolutionists. To prove that men are nothing more than random chemicals and have no more intrinsic value or responsibility than rocks or water.
If an Islamic terrorist blows up a bus full of children then he should no more be punished than if he was a boulder who fell on the bus on a mountain road.
At least this guy is willing to admit where evolutionary theory is taking all of us. It is the road to hell.
Bravo... excellent logic.. Exposes liberals of several types.. and democrats of most any stripe.. And pretty much boils down what this next election cycle is all about.. Which attitude will control Congress?..
Evidently Crick (and Dawkins) fail to notice the self-contradictions implicit in their statements, probably because they are blinded by their own ideology. They evidently have constructed alternative realities which are essentially irrational: What is the point of personalizing the impersonal? You cannot enter into rational discourse with such folks. By way of supporting evidence, let me cite the recent (most regrettable) "meltdown" WRT the evo/crevo debate at FR....
Thanks for the great post, FreedomProtector! And thank you Heartlander for your essay re: the "shude!" LOLOL!
What a concept.. "blinded by personal ideology"...
Reminds me of a quote from Reagan..
"How do you tell a Socialist:- It's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an Anti-Socialist someone who understands Marx and Lenin" -Ronald Reagan
No . . . not at all. Although I must admit to some surprise at what happens when I push the right button, please feel free to ‘digress’ anytime it fits your inclination. In the meantime I’m sure that Dawkins and those of a like mind regard as mere irrelevant sentiment the observation of Adam Smith that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”
What ever else it has done, or not done, the Dawkins article has surely made it clear that this little ongoing controversy in which we’ve been indulging with our positivist friends, is about more than the difference between Christianity and Materialism or the relative virtues of raptor bones vs philosophy. It must be the case that many of his fraternity find Dawkins an acute embarrassment – for prematurely giving the game away, if nothing else – if not downright horrifying because of some of the ideas he advocates. Just the same, The Masters of the Universe agree with Dawkins that it is just a matter of time before they will know enough about ‘matter in all its motions’ to understand and treat any criminal pathology without resort to actions based on what they regard to be little better that a savage morality. Maybe so, but I can wait until the day actually arrives. In the meantime, ‘betting on the come’ is bad gambling policy, and likewise for extracting premature sociological conclusions from raw scientific data. Facts without Truth will fare no better than Truth without Facts (another tautology?).
”And so I give you a tautology”
Uhhh . . . what tautology is this? Excuse me, but I’ve not identified any tautology (not in the context of your discussion). I cannot accept as tautological, not even in a technical sense, something that is manifestly true. Restating something manifestly true in other words to the same effect, might be tautological, but that does not somehow alter the manifestly true into a lesser article. Sometimes ‘A’ is not only not ‘B’; it is also not a tautology. Puts me in mind of the Marshall Court. When the court found the Tenth Amendment an inconvenience, they were able to remove the obstruction by declaring the Amendment a ‘mere tautology’. And so it has remained, an emasculated tautology, to this day. Gee, I wish I could get things to work that way for me. Anything I don’t like, just call it a tautology.
Don’t count on a cessation of ‘food fights’ any time soon. Dawkins has made it clear that the heat is going to be ratcheted up. Not that he’s opposed to the right of conscience, mind you, just to any effective expression of the right.
When I entered FR this pm I saw that you’ve shifted the issue to another thread. Guess I’ll have to hurry over there and see what else new I can learn.
If we are mistaken, and what awaits us is the eternal oblivion Materialists are certain our fate is to be, then we will never know that we were mistaken, and it will not matter. Otherwise, we will come to know our fate in the fullness of time, when it is our time to know, and included in that new knowledge may well be the understanding that time itself is no longer relevant.
Meanwhile, let us strive to do more good than harm. Not for any benefit we might receive, but simply because it is what we feel compelled to do.
Thank you for your witness in msg #238. It was a literal revelation to me.
A very good point, Heartlander. Outstanding.
Thanks for the kind words however undeserved they are in my case.
Meanwhile: "If you go out tonight you best go in disguise." { 8^)
See you over on the Pearcey thread. I think you'll like that one. It picks up on some of the themes/observations you made in the post I'm replying to here.
Was to me too..(the stroke experience)..
One day, After considering the telephone metaphor in more depth..
I was looking in a mirror(shaving/whatever).. and considered that I was looking at my spirits transportation on this planet(my body in the mirror) BUT my spirit (thru my eyes, I guess) was looking back at me.. Made me see that this body was not ME, the ME part was something else.. that OWNED(controlled) this body..
I must confess that thought filled me with some sort of JOY... that made me look forward to a 1Cor 2;9 experience.. Know what I mean?..
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