Anonymous Opinion's Politics

Friday, I had the opportunity to see Expelled, hosted by Ben Stein and was interested in what he had to say.

I've been a fan of Stein for a while after reading a few of his articles, and I watched Win Ben Stein's Money whenever I got a chance, since the questions tended to be harder than Jeopardy. I always tended to gravitate toward his dry, deadpan, humor and tone.

Far from presenting ID as the "correct" idea - Stein went into a more crucial issue - why was even speaking of Intelligent Design strictly verboten in academia? Was there a suppression of thought going on? If so, why? Isn't science all about questioning the paradigm? What does it say about our society, about academia, our court system, the media, that it was impossible to even speak about Intelligent Design?

He questioned the intelligent design advocates, he questioned the fired professors and scientists, he questioned the Darwinists, he questioned the atheists, and gave them all their fair share of time to make their case.

The movie is ticking off the right people, even Slashdot and wired took notice.

Despite the constant wringing of hands of academia, intelligent design is not merely fundamentalist creationism tarted up to look respectable.

The detractors libel every rational argument by replacing the term intelligent design with creationism.

The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul

But rather than try to define a "God Spot"/"God gene" or try to say that all spirtual experiences are just the abberant firings of our neurons it goes against the materialism that has so posessed science as of late.

Science has tried to systematically remove free will from the equation of human existance - it has tried to explain away truly human actions like altrusim by saying that individuals that display this kind of behavior are simply wired wrong. There has been a search for a genetic propensity toward obesity (or even viral causes) , addiction, depression, alcoholism, cleptomania, obessive-compulsive disorder, and the frequency and magnitude of any sexual desires to any gender. Science has tried to say that the mind is a figment of the brain.

These authors are still hard scientists and neuropsychologists but are not as faithful those that follow the religion of disbelief. I forgot who said it, but a man found it took more faith to believe that Hamlet was simply the accidental scribblings of a great ape than to believe there is a creator.

Without reading the whole thing - I think that they will say that there are things within us that make us truly human that set us apart from animals, that we do have a soul, and science will never explain away free will.

For the Christian populace, the Bible teaches to be that which separates us from animals - to essentially become more human.

Animals "love" themselves and do all they must to survive. Christians are called to lives of continual selflessness, or to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind - then to love our neighbor as ourselves. There is a scriptual basis to give alms to the poor. The ten commandments are a call to control our jealousy and lust for things that do not belong to us. We must not take the easy path by taking what is not ours simply because we want it now.

It does not surpise me then, that the act which is most honored and revered in our society is the laying down of self, of life and of limb for another. Every day it is firefighters that give their lives to save strangers, policemen who die to protect others, and most of all our soldiers, sailors, and Marines that lay down their lives for our country. Would an animal willingly risk their life for another animal or is the genetic predisposition for self-preservation so strong that they would not? Self-sacrifice is is an act of honor, an act of love, an act only a human could perform. It is, perhaps, the most un-animal and un-evolutionary thing we are capable of.

Does it surprise anyone, then, that the most abhorrant things encompass actions that involve our most base desires gone wrong - murder, incest, rape, kidnapping, theft, the sale of people for their labors or their services like animals for breeding stock, or genocide that equates sections of humanity to no more than vermin. The monstrous animal desire for power and dominance lies not far from human hearts and minds. I only thank God for human willpower. If we were all to give in to our basest desires I doubt that we would last long.

Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior

To be fair to the materialist scientific community - there are arguments that are made to suggest that there are certain sequences within our DNA that cause us to behave in certain ways.

What I think I should like to do is to read the Spiritual Brain with Time, Love, Memory or one after the other.

I picked up Time, Love, Memory back in college. It narrates the connection between genes and behavior by using breakthrough research on a rather simple form of life, Drosophila, or your everyday fruit fly. A scientist created hundreds of mutants - some fickle, others simply without an internal clock, some that loved light, some that loved dark. As much as genes may have some hand in behavior - the genetic code probably has exponentially more influence on a fruitfly than on the will of a human being.

Alas - then I had a finals and never finished it!

I think I may check them out from the library on my Thanksgiving day break and be throuogh about it.

If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we would all be millionaires.

– Abigail Van Buren

I'm in a math-heavy job right now and because of a discussion with a collegue, I have been trying to think in three instead of two dimensions. Not an easy proposition either way, but somehow this image came to mind when I was trying to think about three dimensional models.

Why this? A hexagon honeycomb cell is one of nature's most efficient designs. There is not one unnecessary surface. It's strong, structurally sound, and very light compared with the volume that it is tasked with containing.

A hive of bees, insects about the length of a dime with brains the size of the head of a pin, construct these every day. Bees don't know anything about math, surface area, and temperature. But they know how to build hives, and even in the proper direction (west to east I think) in order to avoid melting in the heat of summer with none of the tools that we have today. All this, and they only live forty days.

How can this be accidental?

Sagan believed that because the vastness of the universe life must have occurred elsewhere before.

But what is the likelihood that the correct amino acids are present in the right volumes and combinations to even become an organism as small as a prion - a random chain of RNA? Even after billions of years, what are the odds?

Surely, we do not live in a vacuum, and the Big Bang theory is akin to that of spontaneous generation that Pasteur was so kind to disprove.

Either way, your thoughts are welcome.

And if you like intelligent design or the very concept, please read Mynym. He's quite good and Anna Venger heartily recommends him.