Fundamentalism According to Silly Atheists

 Oh good grief, there's no end to it.  I guess I have to comment on dawkins' conflation of Christianity, Christian fundamentalism that is, with Islam.  He just can't seem to make meaninful distinctions no matter what he's talking about.  So he talks and talks and talks and talks about the strocities committed by Islam ahnd then just adds Christianity into the fundamentalist grab bag without evidence for it.  Just that it's logical, he says, tht if you believe your god is the only God then you must feel you have a right to kill other people who ave other gods.    Well, no we don't. 

Old Testmaent religion is not New Testament religion and that's bwcause Old Testametn religion was about a single nation, a single people, a theocratic state chosen by god to be His own people.  They ghad vowed to obey their God, they had willingly put themselves under covenatn with Him.  None of that applies to anyone else.    What we see in the Old Testament does teach us a lot about God's character, His Law, His role in history, and particularly His plan of recemption which he was to bring to the whole wrold thorough His chosen people.  

But silly atheists like Dawkins are always trying to make us reposnble to boey llaws that there given to the Jesws and only to the Jews.  And they get all indignant at our supposed hypocrisy when we claim not to be under those laws while at the same time we revere the Old Testament as a revelation of the mind of God, the character of the God we worship.

No,k Christianity is not a theocraxcy, it's not a single nation, it's a collection of people scattered throughout the world united by our belief in Jesus for salvartion for starters.  We are not bound by the laws of the Old Testament both because they are mostly aimed at Israel, but also because being crucified with Christ we are set free from the Law altotehr.  Of cousree we want to live by the Ten Commandments, but with the understanding that we cannot do it perfectly and that our salvation is not dependent on our obedience.  

dawkins doesn't know what he's talkinga botu.

And he doesn't understand natural selection either.  So there.

More Dawkins: Ethnocentrism in the Stupid Hatred of the Old Testament by Today's Atheists

 Skimming through the books of moses I found the law of the Sabbath which plainly says that anyone who does work on the sabbath, or spetcifically kindles a fire on th Sabbath, will be put to death.  That certainly makes the man who picked up sticks on the Sbbath guilty of the death penalty.  Silly people who have no idea of the culture of the times or the Law that had alreayd been given loudly and carefully to the whole cogreegation imagine something trivial about the act of picking oup sticks.  That's really what most if not all of the objections of Atheists to the God of the Old Testament amounts to in the end, just culturebound ignorance.

I also rand across the very brief episode of the Midianite woman being brought into the tent of an Isaelite man somewhere in the book of Numbers, which linked that act with the secuctions of the Moabites to their own gos through their women.  That suggests to me that it was the participation in that corruption of the Israelites that brought the dire punishemnt on the Midianites that the atheists swo self righteously decry today.  Again a case of context blindness.

why Christians object to evolution

 I wuld certainly like to be able to prove Dawkis wrong about evolution as well as religion and sometimes it's hard not to get angry about someto f hte things he says although I think I'mve managed to aoid letting loose with it so far.  I tis distressing however when he reads a bunch of hate mail he gets from people who identify as Christians.  Of course those are the ones he would read, and maybe he doesn't get mail from Christians otherwise, i wouldn't know, but that sort of namecalling rnacor shouldn't be coming from Christians.  mabr they arn'et really Christians.  Actually they probably aren't really though they may think they are.  Oh well, it's distressing but what else can be said, nothing I can do about it.H  He got

he got asked the question why religious people get so upset about evolution and he says he doesn't know.  Well, of course I don't care about all the toehr religions since I consider them all to be fakes anyway, but it sould be pclear, I would tbhink, why Christians object, ral Christians I mean, th ones who take the Bible as God's word.  There is no death in the created wsorld and there is certainly death in the theory of evolution.  And of course the world is only a few thousand years old acording to the Bible, laughable though that may see it's nevertheless the truth, while evolution requires billions of years.   Both those elements of evolutionary theory contradict the Bible and that's the meain reason to object to it.  Then there is the fact that the different kinds of creatures are clearly shown in scripture to have been created separately from each other.  Much more but mostly things that an ehetheist would wave off anywyay so I won't bother.

I wonder what he would do with the observation I make about the strata or the fact that selection reduces genetic vriability.  Probably wouldn't even bother to tr to thijnk about it.

Ity is harfd to accept of course, that scientiest have been working with this stuff for centuries and never dealt with these questions.  They've written tones on stratigraphy for instance.  how can they go on thinking they represent time periods when they work so closely with them?  

I guess I can make the case even fairly well and nobody will take it seriously.

Dawkins makes much of his believing in something only because it is true and not for any other reason that others sometimes claim for their beliefs, such as that it's comforting and that sort of thing.  Well, I believed in Christianity because I believe it is true, that's how I came to it, So I can say I share tht with him.  I don't think I gave much if any thought to the promise of eternal life ujtiol I was well into my belief and had to deal with the question of salvation which had also escaped me ot that point.  I was enamored of the reality of God, smitten you could say with Goedd, in love with God whom I had come to know is real, really real.  I couldn't love a hypothesis or a myth, I had to know He is real and then I was reduced to a kind of swooning if you will at the very thought of this omnipresent omnipotent omniscient Being.  Who said what I thought were , are, very lovable things in the Old Testament.  Yes tht book that Dawkins hates so much.

So I'm sure Dawkins genuinely believes that evolution is true and has been proved by evidence just as he is convinced that the God of the Bible, or anyh god at all for that matter, is not true, not real but a figent of human imagination.  I'm sure he believes it all.

But I can't find this evidence he thinks exists for evolution.  I really can't.  It seems to me to be nothing but a plausible hypothesis, an idea, a way of imagining how it could work if it were true, but that it has absolutely no real evidence for it.  None.  He claims it over and over but hasn't succeeded in showing it to me.

Seems to me all the variation in living things is attribuable to what is sometimes called microevolution, the built in variability of each genome.  The human geneome contains potential variations in skin colr, hair type and color, eye color, size, height, type of musculature and things like tht so that we all differ from each other and whole populations differnt enormously from other populations.  But that is microevolution, variabiles built into the genome.  The Theory of Evolution would have human beings change into something that is not human over bazillions of yers and there is abolutly no evidence for that, not even little hints of the possibility in present time.  Microevolution can make races and breeds but it hhas an end point beyond which no further change is possible when all the variables in tht given line of "evlution" are played out and the final population is characterized by a great number of fixed or homozygous genes.  If it can't change further then that is the end point of evolution, period.  There are plenty of other lines of evolutiont ht could still be pursued in any given large poulation, but each of those will eventually meet the same end point.  if it's "evolving" then it will reach that point eventually.  Of course much of a population may not be changing much t all.  The vast herd of wildebeests can probably stay genetically the same for thousands of years.  It has to do with the great numbers and the constant intermixing among them.  Once yhou have a small group isolated from the main herd it will begin got develop new characteristics over somje number of bgenerations and will eventually produce its own very different look to set it apart from the original population.  And a very small number, which is where we see the biggest amonunt of phenotypic change, would rapidly reach the point beyond which no further change is possible.  Which is the point that has been reached by the cheetah and the elephant seal and no doubt other endangered species.   Selection does not fuel evolution in the Darwininan sense.  it fuels, or some kind of sleection which is rally tjust the isolation of a portion of a larger population, fuels microevolution and the devleopment of new populationj characteristics, but microevolution reaches the end point beyond which no further change is possible, at least the treand is always in that direction even if that actual pointis not reached.

The evidence is against Dawkins.  What evidence is anuway.

And then there is the fossil record.  Al the fossil record is is an imagined sequence, period.  Imagined.  You can't prove that one fossil is the descendant of a previousait is merely assumed, imagined.  but they call it a fact anyway.  It seems reasonable to them, plausible, and that's all it tkae sto make it a fact.

So once again I simply poinmt out tht those strata they are found in are flat slabs of sedimentary rock that culdn't possibly ever have been the surface of the earth in some time period.  The Jurassic or Devonian or whatnot could not have been characterized by thousands of square miles of sedimentary rock.  

Oh well.

The God Delusion on the argument from scripture

 I don't think I got it quite said what I wanted to say about the evolution examples in the previous post, but I'm going to leave it for now anyway and say a few words about Dawkins' God Delusion, specifically where he addresses the Argument from Scripture.

He proceeds to rip scripture apart based on some modern critics he apparently chooses to believe over the traditional histories of the Bible.  gfosh I wonder why h woudl do that.  So he has the gospels written long after Jesus' death and even after Paul's epistles, just because those crticis got themselves convinced of that.  And that's the only reason even if Dawkins himself doesn't say wso.  Two thousand years of scholarship isn't enough any more, we have to shred it with a few decades' worth of modern criticism.  

of course he claims that Jesus didn't claim to be God, a least not in any convincing way.  I have no idea what would convince himb tu I suspect there may not be anything tht would.  I know some have been able to identify hundreds of places where He puts HImself in the position of God but I'm not good at that, I can only mention a few that come to mind.  When He claims to forgive hins, just as Pharisees' said, He is claiming to be God.  Where He says "Before Abraham was, I AM" He is claiming to be God not onlyu by saying He pre-existed Abaham, but by using the nName for God, I AM.  Then in John Seventeen in what is known as His priestly prayer, He asks God to "Glorify Me with the glory I had with You before the beginning of the world"  I'm not sure about the last few words but that I believe is the gist of it.  To be glorified that way is definitely to claim to be God.  And there is also external testimony to His identity as God, as when Thomas, famously known as "doubting" Thomas, calls Him "My Lord and My God."    And of course there is the virgin birth, which means His actual Father is God the Father while He is human through Mary His mother.

But of course he takes on that favorite of the debunkers the way the word "Almah" is translated in the Old Testmeament.  They, and therefore he, claims it doesn't mean "virgin" although that is of course how the New testament writers understood it.  No, it just means "young woman."    Yeah a young woman who has a child, apparently without benefit of a husband but oh well.  Anyway, the answer to this one is that when the Jews a coupole hundred years before Christ translated their Hebrew scriptures into Greek, the word they chose to translate "almah" into Greek was the Greek word for "virgin."  

Then there is the claim that the text was corrupted by having been copied so many times by scribes, corrupted to the degree that it isn't really trustworthy at all to hear them go on about it.  But this is sheer ignorance of the science invovled in studying old manuscriptures which is assiduously applied to the Bible to some five thousand fragments of the Bible in all languages that go back to the tenth century.  TGhey are bable to identify and correct errors in the copying and trance them through lines of manuscriptures copied from one sourcew and the number for such errors is really quite minimal and for the most part trivial and does not affect the meaning, but in any case because they are on top of these errors they are in a position to recognxtrct the manuscirpture quite well so that the text we possess now is thoroughly reliable.

Oh he hates the God of the Old Testament.  So what else is new.  People who react that way have no idea what theyu are talking about.  They don't bother to ask why God did what He did and how millions of us regard His acts as justice and not benocide or whatever horror they want to imjpose on them.  They haven't read closely enough to understand why a particular drastic execution of a tribe was the only just thing to do.  And it's there to warn us that God's justice is severe.  But the debunkers aren't going to olearn anything.

There is that one about how drastically the ma n who picked up tickes on the Sabbath was punished since they can't think of picking up ticks as anuything but trivial, having no interest in asking why on earth God thought it was and the Israelites accepted it as a just punishement.  Well, the peopl ehad been taught quite carefully about the meaning of the Sabbath and how no work was to be done on that day.  it was a soluemn charge to them to be rigorouslyh enforced, and it has not only meaning for the present but a prophetic significance looking ahead to the coming of the Messiah.  It is a profundly important observance they are to obey absolutely strictly.  Picking up sticks is what they would do when they arewere about to start a fire to cook food, that is the issinificance of picking up sticks.  It is work in itself but it is a preliminary to a kind of work they were forbidden to do on the Sabbath, cooking.  Did the man no t know?  How dould he not have sknown?  But then what possessed hims to defy God?  I'm not sure that question is answered, but his act was certainly deserving of death for treating so casually such a high priority command, whichn would have had the effect of undermining God's authoirty and the importance of the observnace throughout the whole populationm if it had not been pusnished by death.\\

And the crazy idea that the gospels in the canon were "arbitrarily" chosen from a whole collection of gospsls.  No they wrern't.  The many writings about Jesus were circulated among all the churches that were growing up all over the Roman world during the warly centuries, copied and passed around, iand it ws those that the churches thesmeves, the people, the bishops but also just the people who were born again and had th Holy Spirit for guidance, recognized to be inspired, tosing out those that were clearly fraudulent such as the "Gnostic" gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene and the rest of them.  The four chosen were deemed by the true Church to be inspired, rightly so.  Take it or leave it Dawkins.  You don't have the HOly Spirit and you have no kidea. You can only act from your fallen huma n nature in judging these things, as can those whose authirity you preer over the ones Christians know to be the true ones.  

That's how the whole canon was finally determined.  There were dsome disputes but in the end the majority opinion of the churches as a whole body was determinate.

actually thinks the gospels are fictin.  What a dullwitted man he must be to come to such a conclusion.  Matthew and Luke have different stories about Jesus' birth he says.  No they do't.  Oh how dtiresom.  \\\And then the claim that the stories wer eborrowed from toerh religions.  Only if you turn yourself into a pretzel to make it so.  The gosplesz are built ioon the Old Testament.  if outher religions copied some of it that's because Satan was busily in the world doing his best to create just this wsort of confusion in themind so fthose inclined to prefer such debunkery over the trutyh.  There is no real virgin birth anywhere else for instance.  go read the original accounts.  

So I just went back and heard him mocking the translation of Almah int o the Greek Parthenos.  Oh dear.  I take that as proof that the word really is properly translated as virgin but oh no, apparently you can make it mean something else completely.  Oh just a mistake, a mistranslation.  Hardly.  The Greek translation was done by Jewish scholars in their own scriptures, not mean who would make a silly mistake.  they would know the Greek word for virgin and they would know the Hebrew word for virgin ande they obviously got it right.  And there's nothing ridiculous about it.  jeswus identiy as God is defined by the virtin birth and the whole story revolves around this fact.  Of course Dawkins is free to believe the lie if he wants to but unfortunately he's influencing others and that makes him culpable of some pretty horrific crimes against humanity in my opinion.  

There is nothing arbitary or whimsical about the virgin birth, it isn't just a piece fo lore emeant to dazzle and add a glitter to the stgory.

I keep forgetting to emphasize that "almah" means "young unmarried woman"   UNMARRIED woman, and the context of that certainly implies a virgin or as amother she'd be guilty of adultery and not have found a place in the cscripture at all.And remember that the Jews who reject Jesus as messiah have reason to defame Mary, as hey did in her time too, as an adulteress, so they are going to try to convince you that "almah" means young woman and doesn't mean virgin.

Later:  More stuff.  dawkins has the effeontery to correct C S Lweis' famous statement that anyone who said the outlandish things about Himsrlf that Jesus said could only be a liar, a lunatic or Lord.  Dawkins thinks he should have known better, that of course He could have been mrerely mistaken.  Groan.  But that was Lewis' whole point, Professor Dawkins, his WHOLE POINT, Mr. Dawkins, tht He could NOT have been merely mistaken about callibng Himself God, Dr. Dakins, that was his WHOLE point, Mr. Dawkins, that He could NOIT be mistaken, He HAD tro be at least a lunatic, Mr. Dawkins.  Yikes.

Dawkins and The Improbable Stages of Evolution

 Surprised to find myself actually listening to some Richard Dawkins stuff, his book the TBGod Delusion which is available online as an audio book, and a talk he gave to a small group titled Climbing Mount Improbable.  So far.  I'm only up to Chapter three of the oobook so far.  I guess it's good to know what arguments he used.  It's the usual stuff and I'm not up to answering much of it but I think I'll probably come back to some of it eventually that I think I can answer here.

But first it's the Climbing Mount Improbable talk I'm thinking about.  He's dealing with the creati nist argument that you can't get evolution by small steps as is the evo idea because heach step has to be functioninal aod confer some benefit to the creature in order to be selected and that isn't going to happen.  You can't see with half an eye and all that.   I myself came up with that same kind of argument yearsx ago when I was about twenty and contemplating a set of huge anglers mounted over a fireplace in a hunting lodge I happened to be visiting with friends.  I remember sitting there for a long time trying to imagine how they could have evolved step by step from a small stubby bit of bone to this huge branching crown.   I reallyh coultn' see how it was possible.\

But as I watched Dawkins contructing a path of rhte evolution of the human eye, then the wings of an eagle and the bombardier beetle's explosive technique for warding off predators, I can easily enough guess how he'd deal with this antler situation too.  Once you've got a stub the male elk or whatever ti was could use to butt heads with another male el,kk you can see how it would be an davantage for the butubby little antler to fgrow into larger and larger versions because each would be even more useful to the comtabive elk.  \\

OK so much for that.  But as I was watching I realized that there is another and even more basic problwem with his reasoning that it swseems to bme very odd he doesn't address, nor anyone else that I know of either and I can't understand whyu as it seems so obvious at the moment.  I \  That is, each step in this evolutionary path depends on a mutation to produce the logical next stage from the small stubby wing to the eagle's wing, or the barely warm chemical to the explosive beetle's mixture, or the many differnt eye qualities that each confer some benefit to the possessor of them although the benefit is minimal compare d to the final result in our sophsitcated complex eyesj.

The question is how can he by counting on mutation to produce exactly the next stage in this sequence?  Why should mutation do anything useful at all for the eye or the wing or the beetle"  Why shouldn't it make a dent three inches below the eye that has no visual capacity whatever?  Why shouldn't it put a knob on the stubby wing that makes it even less sueful for flight?  In fact I had already thought along whthese lines some hyears ago at EvC forum when I was dealing with the claim that mammals evolved from repitiles as shown in the fossil record, and particularly that tyhe mammalian ear evolved from the reptilian ear.  Well, the reptilinan ear is sort of similar but quite different from the mammalian as I recall, and I can't look it up now so I have to remember it and may not be remembering too accurately, but as I recall the repitilian ear has three parts to it and the mammalian four, a different number of chanblers and they are in different positions in relation to one another.  Now I can certainly imagine Dawkins picture the necessary stages of repositioning and growth of an extra chambler over millions of years in perfect order to bgget from the one to the other, but as I was thinking about it at the time I couldn't imagine that you could even get to stage two, or tstage one ofr that matter because there is no way to adsssume that mutation is goinmg to produce anyhthing like that necessary stage.  Why if you get a mutation shouldn't it make a chamber smaller, or put an ear part an inch beneath the actuall ear or something else that renders its hearing functioni useless?    Why shouldn't mutation do anything BUT produce a useful stage from one type of ear to another?  

Dawkins is assuming that mutation is just about omniscioent and knows what stage is needed next to get from one functing part to the next.  But mtuation doesn't behave in usch a rational way.  And in fact it doesn't behave at ll as he is imaginging it moving from trait to trait.

Mutation operates on the DNA, it changes the sequence of chemicals in a gene, changes their order in some part of the gene that is.  Sometimes this doesn't affect the proteint produce t of the gene, in fact I think that itn most cases it doesn't.  But in other cases it may produce a discease process of some sort.  There are thousands of genetic diseases brought about by mutations.  It's almos just a matter of wishful thinking that it ever produces anything beneficial to the creature at all but I suppose once ina gagreat great while it does.  But such a great graeat while it hardly seems like it could every every;   ever qualify as the engine of evolution Dawkins and others think it is.  And then again even if it's benefitical it isn't beneficial in the sense that it builds on some previous mutation or previous condition, it just produces something else tentirelyh unrelated to that previous condition that happens to be beneficial.  I'm thinking of a cse where an advanctage in proitecitng the heart in some way was produced by a mtuation but in a gene that otherwise had not produced anting along the lines of that kind of heart protection to that point.    Where is Dawkins getting his idea that mtuations can produce stage after stage of anyitng at all?  Purely wishful thinking.

I've made a horrendous number of typos in this post, I wonder if it's readable at all.  I hope so but I'll have to stop now and see if I can find out wby sitening to it.

Dawkins again, gradual change delusion and no afterlife delusion

 Some people actually think that becus e they had no existence for an eternity before their birth that they will therefore have no existence when they die.  How does that compute?  How is that logical?  Yet it seems to be what Dawkins is saying in another interview I just happened to get on my screen, the host not being known to me.  Some famous philosophers apparently had such a silly idea.    And Dawkins calls the idea of an afterlife simpley a lie, he's that confivinced.  And pparently he's that convinced becaue he is convinced by evolution.  Which is a good enough explanation.  

He thinks of course that evolution is gradual, that we are descended from fish but that the evolution is so slow and gradual you can never detect any change from species to species at any particular point in the evolutionary process.  Well, that's perfectly locial but not really possible.  I keep trying to find ways to wsay it clearly and it's hard, maybe not possible in the end.  I just know you can't evolve from one genome to another, you are stuck in your genome, your descendants all inherit that genome, that genome does not become some other genome although there mayh be some anomalies from time to time that make it look like there could be such a change.    Of course you can get away with not having to prove anything if you juist insist that it's so gradual it can never be detected.  There's no way to answer that sort of claim.

But I reall y do think that the process of evolution, specifically selection, natural selection or random selection, any kind of seleciton that isolates a new set ofgene fraquencies, from population to population tends to a reduction in genetic diversity which really means a n increse in homozygosity or a decrease in genes with two different alleles.  That's where the variety comes from.  Once you have a pure berreed or "species" ofif you are talking about nature, at a certain distance from the original population anyway, you will have too many homozygous genes for further change to be possible.  Thast's a trend that may not very often reach that drastic condition through say a series of population isolations, but is demonstrated in the cdrastic examples of the endangered species creted bgy bottlenecks.  The trend is always in that direction through series of selections but you may only really see it in the bottleneck cases.  Maybe in ring species although people have denied that when I've brought it up.  I reallyh think it must ultimately be the end result of a long series of geographic isolations from a previous population.  Each would bring out new phenotypes and do so at the cost of genetic verity, with greater homoszygosity for certain traits and oso on and so forth.  I don't think this is wrong, I think it is a real trend and it is the proof needed that evolution is impossible.  

There simply is no oopenended evolution as Dawkins imagines.

As for life after death, doesn't it just seem unlikely that such a complexz cretaure as a human being could just go out like a light?  Doesn't it?

Oh well.