Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

spendi, You do not have any talent at "reading between the lines." You misinterpret too many writers basic thesis to take you seriously. It's not nit-picking; it's basic Q&A. You make a claim, and all I ask is you provide the evidence - in simple English; name of book, page number, and paragraph will do.

And if it is the Spendius Show I may as well strut the boards. There's not much point in having an accusation like that levelled at one and not fulfilling it. That would be a real no-brainer. Being blamed for something you haven't done is out the other side of "mug".

So- You see-

I know that I am in debate, if you can call the other side debaters, with the living representitives of the New Order. They are the men in whom all the hopes of the end-timers are pinned. Megalopolitan Man- the rootless city man cut off from the soil and destined life-forms. Fossils-in-a-glass-case Man.

They are our equivalent of the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome whose prevlance presaged the doom of those cultures. The newspaper readers and television watchers with their cult of intellectual mediocrity and their religion of advertising. The man of the theatres and places of amusement and of sport and best sellers.

New Order Man is the object of socialist propaganda. They can do sod all with Pagan peasants who know which way up is. The Urban democrat and the rural republican. City v Backwoods. The very same man, Stoic Man, from the Classical end-times. They appear in other end-time periods. There's nothing new under the sun. Deliverance depicted him patronising the hill people for a "theme" holiday.

This man, the New Order Man, Stoic Man, is characterised by the "diatribe", a vituperative harangue usually to no purpose. We have seen plenty of evidence of that on this thread. Materialistic, proletarian disputation with the vein at the side of the head standing out and visibly pumping. All trivial and street-smart. Ready with the dumb quip followed by the LOL-ing. Yes- they even laugh at their own dumb quips.

They have only aims. They have no ideas. They have programs and no symbols except maybe a perfect set of evenly spaced blinding white teeth
and breath freshened courtesy of a chemical plant. The active ingredient also featuring in toilet cleansing products and hotel-room rehab systems.

They seek to expand the space they are in with travel and exploration whilst the inner spiritual space withers and shrivels like wounded flowers hanging on the vine and they want the rest of us to be like them. They replace quality with quantity and hence the smoking bans they have imposed upon us. They go in for spreading, like a grease stain, rather than deepening like a bottomless pool of meltwater. They would plumb that pool with a lump of lead on a string and lose all the poetry of the image. On a grant of course out of sight of the granters.

With New Order Man the creative inner life has belly-flopped, as Mr Warhol showed, and he was a religious man, and existence can only be tolerated materialistically with consumerism to which we are all now addicted through the Dow and the FTSE. NOM appeals to the most and not the best. Votes decide issues and votes can swing on a illicit blow-job(from a Christian point of view I mean- not a Darwinian one) or a nice suit
and courteous bedside manners. The floating voter is a city phenomenom. Any means which work are valued. And NOM can be lied to with impunity. They just tell him what he wants to hear.

As Spengler has it-



The rhetorical schools of the Classical end-times have their modern equivalents in journalism, kitchen-sink morality drama, and deeply concerned issue-campaigning. The Dover defence was entirely megalopolitan in that way as is most fundamentalist propaganda. Such things owe more to Paul than they ever could to Jesus who was a peasant and steeped in rural ways. Paul devoted himself to the noisy, dusty, urban demagogic style of publicity conscious Rome. The Sermon of the Soap Box far from the mountains.

The "diatribe" appeared in the 19th Century when the passionate Faustianism of Boniface had aged into a world based on the town and city and the teeming, seething, swaying masses within them who have now banned fox hunting and demand food so cheap they are in psychotherapy
on the subject of self-disgust. Religious people as well. Addicted to that as well.

All NOM can now do is see life as a biological fact and in terms of the causality principle although he tends to baulk at discussing the act which initiated his own existence.

The philosophies of diet and digestion and nutrition and hygiene are his major concern. Eating, drinking, shagging and child rearing are treated with a religious passion and earnestness and surrounded by spices, cookery rituals and fore-play and after-play techniques involving stimulants and fragrant unguents. These are the principle problems obsessing NOM as anyone can easily see. Any self-respecting grub, had it the powers, would have the same obsessions. No-one in the springtime of our culture would have given a flying fornication for such matters. They are predictable and time-worn features of the autumn and up-coming winter. What would have seemed degrading to our forbears is now a model for emulation and admiration.

A significant difference between the Classical end-times, where even Aristotle had a go at alcohol, is that their Cynics scrutinised their own digestion processes whereas our NOMs scrutinise everybody's.

The New Order Man is socialist, dictatorial, interventionist, assertive and stupid. He even attends at birth as if he can steal some of the magic which belongs entirely to Womanhood.

What does it matter to me if I have 500 opponents. They are all the same. They've seen and read the same things and everybody they meet has done the same thing. They run off otherwise. It's a choir of cock-a-doodle-dooers.

How's that for a diatribe?

Not bad...

I'd give it five.

x

c.i. wrote-



That's pure NOM-speak. The next time I come across something that carries the gist of the idea I'll put it on. But Plato has it in essence in his "philosopher king" idea and I've seen quotes on A2K to the effect that it's better for the population if they don't know the intricacies of how they are managed. A good few times. And I have already cited Joubert.

I'm not a airline timetable.

Thanks smorgsie. Five is pretty good for starters eh. Leaves room for improvement. I once got a grudging 8 off a lady and I had to wheedle for that.

Imagine smorgsie that c.i. had had the chutz to put on the bottom of his last post-



Would you have replied? (xxx)

spendi: Imagine smorgsie that c.i. had had the chutz to put on the bottom of his last post-

Quote:
How's that for a smart answer dummie?


Would you have replied? (xxx)

spendi old boy, you have that one wrong too! That's not my quote. That doesn't even come close.

I only asked her to imagine it. You might have done it. It's only a fancy version of LOL after all.

smorgsie does has a vivid imagination so she could easily imagine a simple thing like that.

Actually "Oil give it foive" is an English expression for a top mark. It constitutes a Foist Cless 'onours Degree don't you know. And I really rate ladies awarding me those. Academic authorities I can take or leave. They are usually just having an ego jack-off on their own account and selling useless parchment and videos of the ceremonies in which they are looking good. At top prices too. And getting at a free piss-up.

I never attempted to "come close" to your bag of tricks c.i.

There were some NOMs in the pub tonight. It was pathetic. There was an act on called "Bad Love" which is not the sort of name I would give a group I was fronting up. They were terrible as one might expect. I asked the landlord how much they were paying to inflict themselves upon us and he grinned sheepishly. That was in a short interval between the whining "where's mi Mum gone?" songs they were trying to play. You couldn't have a conversation at any other time which is why that sort of thing is popular with NOMs.

NOMs like distractions. The stink of the smegma was appalling now that the absence of fag smoke has focussed all our attention upon it.

I think that people who go outside to smoke a fag should be quarantined for ten minutes and made to do some deep breathing before being allowed to re-enter the pub. I don't believe there are no dangers from their breath otherwise. Passive French kissing is not something to be treated lightly. Nor mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Spendi, you suggest that the "500" people arguing against you are all the same, but they're only the same in the respect that you don't bother to get to know any of us.

Betcha spendi knows all the patrons at the local pub, the bartender, and the waitresses by name, their families, and "knows" who they are.

I'm one of those sad people who think that one can never "know" another person in that way Socrates enjoined that one should know oneself. I think that anyone who believes he knows another person probably does not know him/her self.

Psychoanalysis is a process where one is attempting to know oneself with the aid of an expert. Rattling the skeletons one might say.

It is the same with knowing about life processes.

If, as a result of an A2K meeting, say, people believe they know those at the meeting, I think they are using the word superficially which they are obviously perfectly entitled to do.

The best literary fiction is to do with being taught how to know oneself and learning how to know something about others from how they communicate.

It's a tricky subject. In Local Hero the Lancaster character eventually orders his analyst to be shot.

An interesting literature question would be- To what extent did Shakespeare know the female psyche.

"Shakespeare's in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells,
He's speaking to some French girl who says she knows me well."

Bob Dylan. He's pretty naked.

Right, this superficial use of the word is called gossip...

One technical term is "contactless sociability". But that is like "know" too.

It flatters the self to say one knows a lot of people or that one has a lot of friends.

Francis- Do you think Wanda knew Severin? Or did Severin know Wanda?

Spendi - Yes, Wanda knew Severin much more than Severin knew Wanda and as much as Leopold knew Aurora...

And we're not talking about whether people know eachother, we're talking about whether you have the credibility to say that all of your debate opponents are the same. You make assumptions about us, that we're NOM or whatever other label you'd like to slap on us, based only on the fact that we disagree with you.

Vengo-

I know you're not "all the same" in any pedantic sense. But if one lives according to scientific materialism then the facts of existence determine an identical way of thinking. Any data that scientists don't agree on is obviously not yet an established fact.

Assuming that the pleasure/pain principle is an established fact, which I think is agreed, how could scientific materialism disturb that mechanism in order to discipline a population to feel it has duties which are contrary to sensual appetites and even self preservation considerations.

Maybe with carrots and sticks but then with the former you have conditioning and with the latter fear. Isn't it more efficient to induce a sense of rightness and wrongness on moral grounds. Whenever you see a horse being used by men there is a whip involved somewhere. The horse has to be "broken".

The concept of NOM is, of course, a moving frontier just as it is with many other labels.

My debate opponents all seem the same to me I can assure you. They even go so far as to avoid criticising each other and often hand out trite compliments which are undeserved. That is normal team game tactics which I understand and accept.

On the basis of this debate all my opponents come from the same place. The difficulty they have as I see it is that their Christian values restrict them from making the scientific, materialistic case properly as de Sade, La Mettrie, William Burroughs and others I have mentioned do. They are simply not up for the logic of their own position. Which suggests to me that they are happy to accept Christian morality and take advantage of it but wish also to be the odd man out by challenging it for whatever reason.

If a full-blown scientific materialist came on the thread I could not dispute with him in principle but only on the social consequences. If he lived those principles in private and broke no laws I would have no argument with him. If he preaches them it is another matter because they are popular ideas which could easily catch on.

BTW- my side had to put up with the label ID-iot for months on end. It's odd how anti-IDers soon start squeaking when they are labelled unfairly as I accept I indulged in. It is difficult to write about the grey areas. One needs polarised ideal-types to clarify thinking. They are not to be taken literally.

spendi, "IDiot" was a word created by Timberlanko (RIP). You haven't seen that word used by anyone else, or if so, very few - maybe one or two..

Francis wrote-



I'll admit to not having read Sacher-Masoch. I only know about that stuff from references in other books; Joyce's use of the man's work in the Circe episode in Ulysses for example and Mr Ellmann's discussion of that influence in his monumental biography of Joyce.

In that book Mr Ellmann quotes from Venus in Furs this passage-



Which seems to me that previously she had not known herself and only Severin's sacrifices taught her what she actually was and that allows for the possibility that Severin underwent his indignities for that very purpose and that he suspected her true nature and sought to engage with her on that level. Which interpretation makes him more of a gentleman than I ever could be.

So I would say that Severin knew Wanda and that Wanda didn't even know her own nature let alone his.

I don't know anything about Leopold and Aurora except that Joyce used Leopold for his adult self in Ulysses and Truffaut used Aurora for the lady on the telephone for Bernard's early call and gave her a voice which had a similar effect upon him as the Sirens were reputed to have on men and which caused Ulysses to have himself tied to the mast and the crew to have their ears stopped up.

Pretty funny really eh?

What was the name of the brain in the bottle in The Man with Two Brains? She had a voice similar to Truffaut's Aurora and when Steve Martin (Dr Harfurfarahfar or whatever) went looking for a body to give it to he let upon a right beaut with a voice like a knife being scraped on a tin plate which I think had an American accent.

Lempriere has this to say about Aurora-



Don't you just love a-empricism and superstitious mumbo-jumbo and trying to tease out its meaning? Waving it away is just too easy I think and so very convenient.

BTW Francis- what does "Le Manteau de Tanit" mean. Isn't Tanit the goddess in Salammbo? Is that the zaimph?

The Greeks called her Eos.

And the word "eros" was thus created.

Well, I beg to differ, Spendi. It's only the beginning of the story. Later on, it prooves me right. But if you know the book only from quotes...




Exactly, Spendi, it's the Zaimph...

c.i. wrote-



I only said it was used for months on end. I didn't say anything about who used it. It was used a lot and was subject to no criticism by anti-IDers which it should have been. Part of your bonding procedures I expect.

And- " very few - maybe one or two" means very little to me. Have you forgotten I'm a scientist? I can spot slippery phrases from a long way off.

On the subject of theology being the over-arching science the muzzling question looms large. Anti-IDers have never answered Lola's reasonable question as I did. One presumes therefore that they accept that science should be muzzled even if only to prevent scientists creating females with two heads so that they can halve the number of telephonists required without increasing the number of stomachs.

"Other ideas considered on Form *%+*%$£$. We think outside the box."

It is theology that does the muzzling. In which case theology, Christian theology and not necessarily all others, is the over-arching science. QED.

Francis wrote-



I certainly wouldn't go to the wire on a book I haven't read. I bow to your superior knowledge.

Can you explain how the quote I gave from the book is overturned. It might save mankind. Are you suggesting that Wanda knew Severin was engaged in a scientific exploration of the female soul and that he was missing what she really wanted in good old Darwinian fashion which I could put into words but will refrain on this occasion.

I'm assuming Francis that you don't think this subject is "off topic".