Unintelligent Design

Kansas is at it again.

*SIGH*

Creationists really _ARE_ evidence of Evolution -- how else would one know that Pithecanthropus Erectus had survived into modern times?

A nice antidote:

Church of the FSM

;-)

I remember 19 cent-a-gallon gas . . .

. . . but that was almost 50 years ago, Since then, everybody has been bitching about how expensive gas is.

In the last couple of months (July and August 2005), the price of gas has gone over $3/gal. I'm making good money, so the price doesn't bother my budget, even if it does bother my German stinginess. I grant that it DOES hurt people who are living at the poverty level, and do need to get to work to earn the few bucks that keep them away from the manipulative nastiness of the Welfare system.

Gas costs over $6/gal. in Europe -- double what it does here -- and the costs of raw material and refining are pretty much the same. Love those European taxes!

Having executed the obligatory gripe about taxes and corproate greed (Stranded Oil & Friends are _NOT_ suffering!), I really want to talk about other sources of energy. Being a Science Fiction buff for about half a century now, one of the things that intrigues me is Fusion Power.

My memory (somewhat leaky around the edges) tells me that roughly every 5 years since 1960, the physics establishment has been saying that we would have on-line fusion power in about 10 years. Well, it didn't happen in 1970 (we could have used it htat year); nor in 1980; nor in 1990; nor in 2000 -- and not n 2005, that I can discover.

Wottinell happened to it? We dropped major change into building Tokamaks -- Russian designed magnetic confinement -- and gigabucks into Lasers -- American-designed inertial confinement. There aren't even any commercial pilot programs that I can discover, for making that Fusion energy that we have been promised faithfully for the last 45 years or so.

I am a little suspicious, in that I haven't heard anything in the last frew years -- have we abandoned it altogether? Are we going to continue to rely on a scarce natural resource that pollutes the air, warms up the planet, and funds terrorism?

A couple of years ago, somebody opined that gas would have to get over $4/gal before American driving habits would change appreciably. If that would get the government and the energy establishment (Stranded Oil...) off thier collective fundaments, maybe we should look forward to it.

Anything that would allow us to tell Hugo Chavez and the various oil magnates world-wide to take their greasy kid stuff and . . . eat it . . . would be a blessing for the whole world. So:

C'mon Fusion! (Hot or Cold :)

I got an email . . .

I have a very simple solution to the entire Cindy Sheehan affair. Let her meet with the President. That's right. I've finally changed my tune. Let her meet with the President who thwarted the United Nations Security Council and made the case for war. Let her meet with the President who hindered the progress of United Nations weapons inspectors. Let her meet with the President who lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction that they'd use on Americans. Let her meet with the President who killed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. Let her meet with the President who came to office in a rigged election, and maintained his grip on power through rigged voting and militaristic patriotism. Let her meet with the President who turned his country's media into a mouthpiece for his fascist and discriminatory policies. Let her meet with the President who transformed his country into a single-party dictatorship, sowing fear and resentment against any who dared to oppose his iron-fisted rule. Let her meet with the President who proved himself a coward by fleeing when his country was attacked. Let her meet with the President who should be brought up on war crimes charges for his dastardly misdeeds. Let her meet with the President who spent billions of dollars on weapons while social welfare programs went unfunded and the poor continue to suffer for it to this day. Let her meet with the President who has a track record of invading Arab Muslim countries for oil. Let her meet with the President who knew full well about the bloodthirsty torture and murderous horrors at Abu Ghraib. That's right. Let her meet with Saddam Hussein. (Attributed to Laurence Simon)

R.I.P. Brother Roger of Taize

The 90+ year-old founder of the Protestant monastic movement in Taize (a town near Lyon, France) was assassinated about 12 hours ago, reportedly by a knife-weilding Romanian woman, who is being held for questioning.

Taize and Brother Roger are of enormous significance in the religious world -- they are the re-discovery of monasticism, the total dedication of life to the Lord -- by Protestantism. Bypassing all of the clever slogans and liberal revisionism, as well as the Fun_DUH_mentalist oddities of the last century, the Taize folk returned to the wellspings of Christian piety -- and generated beautiful music while they were about it -- which sounds to my untutored ear uncommonly like Gregorian Chant.

Interestingly, as of 12 hours after the assassination, no mention is being made of it on the major news outlets -- CNN, Fox News, or Reuters -- on-line editions. Alone of the majors, the BBC has an article on it. I think this says a great deal about what contemporary journalism thinks is "news".

All three have top-to-mid-page headlines about the sentencing of the BTK killer -- who richly deserves to be ignored, and nothing about one of the towering religious figures of the last century. Hunter S. Thompson would have approved. Pfeh!

= = =

Let us then lift Brother Roger up onto our altars, and praise him as one of the heroes of our time for bringing a Christian ideal out of the dungeons of 500 years of Protestant rejection, and enlightening the lives of hundreds of thousands in the midst of a very dark century. Old Catholics have no formal bureacracy for examining and proclaiming saints, so we fall back on the ancient practice of the Church, still followed by Orthodoxy, of proclaiming and acclaiming worthy people.

Let us pray the Lord, that he take Brother Roger swiftly and gloriously into His Presence, and the presence of all the Saints in heaven.

Islamic Reformation?

In today's news, Salmon Rushdie is quoted as saying:

"...the insistence within Islam" that the Quran "is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse all but impossible" and the rigidity "plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists."

I certainly agree with him there.

"If, however, [the Quran] were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the 7th century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities."

I am not usre I agree with him about "must be adapted to altered (secular) realities", however.

We have seen this "adaptation" in the West, and the result is lack of any firm belief in anything, a religious relativism that fades into mere niceness and saccharine sentimentality. "Ecumenism" has come to mean "Let's see how little we can get away with believing."

What Islam needs is a commitment to the world, and to the individual -- to focus the fire of the faith on justice and compassion for each person -- for all of mankind, not just "My brother, my cousin, my tribe, my country, my religion." There is certainly enough positive content in the Quran, to justify a community of justice, education, and interllectual ferment -- as there is negativity to bind them into the satanic tribalism of what Rushdie calls the "Islamofascists" and I would call "Bandits".

Islamic civilization reached its apex in the Caliphate of Haroun al-Rashid in about 800 A.D. Science and literary endeavor reached hights as grand or grander than Classical antiquity. Politically, Haroun and Charlemagne played a game of "Bait the Byzantine Bear" -- when one would be threatened by Constantinople, the other would start trouble on his border, to that the bear could not concentrate its force on either.

Reading the life of Haroun himself, however, reveals that he was as much of a small-minded impulsive barbarian as Charlemagne's sons and grandsons proved to be. He slaugheterd family and courtiers right and left, in fits of adolescent pique. He also set the pattern for islamic despots to this day.

Shortly after Haroun's death, Islamic culture petrified -- the Islamic Universtity at Cairo announced in 932 A.D. that all possible interpretations of the Quran had been issued. Admittedly, Islam was still well ahead of Europe both technically and politically, and stayed that way for half a millennium.

In the years from 932 to the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571, the West developed the idea of allegiance and duty to entities larger than a family or tribe, and took advantage of the industrial and military force which that greater allegiance made possible. Despite individual heroics and occasional genius, Islaic armies have never stood against Western armies in the long run.

Places like the Barbary States lasted as long as they did, because European powers were busy fighting each other, and did not have the time or energy. The comparatively puny United States managed to break their power in the early 19th Century with a few frigates and several companies of Marines.

Islam is badly in need of a Calif -- a Commander of the Faithful -- who will lead them, not into the darkness of 7th-Century bedouin banditry (which is what bin Laden is seeking, after all), but toward the light of the stars -- the 21st and later Centuries. Western science and technology are at the point -- and $66/bbl oil today (11 Aug 2005) is one of the economic forces driving it -- of developing alternative energy sources. The higher the price of oil, the sooner that fusion (or whatever) will come on line.

So here is the dilemma that the 21st Century Mahdi faces: either bring his people joyfully and fruitfully into the 21st Century, or see them descend back into squalor, sitting on oil no one wants.

So what am I doing?

Having delivered myself of some crankiness (warned ya), I figure I should let you-all know what I'm really up to.

I'm working on a book -- tentative title: "Your Metaphysics is Too Small"

The basic idea is that the metaphysics that Christianity has been using since the Year One is that of Aristotle (with a bit of Platonism here & there). It essentially describes the world as being 3-1/2 dimensional (up/down; left/right; in/out -- and one direction [forward] of time). This metaphysics also carries over into Science, and definitely into the Weltanschauung of the "rational humanists" (who are often devotees of Scientism).

Modern Physics talks about up to 11 spatial dimensions, in order to make things work. If we look carefully at the traditional language used to describe God, there are hints that He must be at least a 5-dimensional being, if not a 12-dimensional one. What I plan to do is to work out a metaphysics that describes the world in a manner that science will be comfortable with, and which has room for God -- even if it does not give a recipe for how to _become_ God.

As part of this effort, I am also going to be taking a close look at Aristotelian Logic -- specifically his "Law of the Excluded Mean." What that says is that a proposition may be true or false, but nothing in between. Or that something may be good or bad, but nothing in between.

This is intuitively and obviously false, to every adult person. Binary logic is easy to work with, and children of a certain age love it. It does not, however, adequately describe the real world.

The only propositions whose truth or falsity we can determine unambiguously are trivial ones. On even cursory analysis, every interesting or important proposition reveals itself as a congeries of smaller propositions, each with its own truth-value, or importance. Carried far enough, the analysis will reach simple (and trivial) propositions -- but not necessarily in a finite amount of time.

Having reached the uttermost levels of trivial truth/falsity, it is not obvious how to get back to the original proposition -- and make a useful decision. One of the ways proposed to handle this gaping hole in logic is "Fuzzy Logic" -- to give propositions a real number between 0 and 1 to indicate their truth values.

If one can calculate how "true" (or fast, or important) something we are interested in is, then we have a fighting chance to make a useful decision, without squeezing everything into an artificial duality. It also avoids the problem of being cornered into choosing between two equally unpleasant conclusions -- i.e. we get a "None Of The Above" choice, and can back it up with a consistent logic.

Another viewpoint is that of Buddhist Logic -- which says that, in addition to "True" and "False", there are two more possible truth values: "Neither True nor False" and "Both True and False" In the case of a flipped coin, we usually think that it has two states: Heads or Tails. Actually, it has 4: The two usual ones, which are far and away the most common; the case where the coin lands on its edge, without falling over -- which is equivalent to "Both True and False"; The case where a magpie (who like shiny things) flies by just as the coin goes in the air, grabs it and flies away -- equivalent to "Neither True nor False".

I will frankly admit that I am a conservative and traditionalist Old Catholic clergyman, and that what I am doing is trying to formulate a metaphysical possition that will make sense of God and mankind's relation to Him in language acceptable to modern people. History has shown that, by and large, Aristotelian metaphysics no longer enlightens or uplifts modern, educated people.

Whether I succeed, I will leave tot he judgment of the reader, when the thing gets published.

Emotional Blackmail

I just got bit (in another forum) by a schtick that enrages me -- a snotty putdown intended to silence me, because something I said would offend someone (often the poster, equally often some other party). It is always delivered with a smug superiority, implying that I am some sort of crude barbarian for not paying sufficient heed to the feelings of someone else. Got news for everybody -- I _AM_ a crude barbarian when it comes to that sort of thing.

What this is, is a not-so-subtle form of emotional blackmail -- it is seen in full flower in 4 & 5 year olds: "Don' thay that - I don' wike it!" or "I won't like you if you do/say that." Over the last 25 or 30 years it has risen up the ranks to adults who should know better. It is not an argument with any sort of intellectual or logical sense behind it -- it is sheer, petulant emotion, and one can almost see the extruded lower lip.

If you want to argue with what I have to say -- cool -- let's go. If you want to try to whine me into submission to Politically Correct nonsense, expect to be insulted.