THE BRITISH THREAD II

That's a form of secular praying. The hope for some millenarium consumation of an unspecified nature which will take place if only we would accept your word and which makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view which looks backwards to common ancestors, missing links, higher animals, the amoeba, inorganic matter, the primal particle and to Nothing, and forwards to a cosmic conflagration. Within such a process we individuals shrink and, to all intents, disappear. And from it we can draw no moral or ethical lessons.

The genealogies in Genesis and the mere 70 generations since Jesus are not the "unimaginable" periods of time Darwin refers to often enough. We can retain a sense of personal validation in such an episode which begins with God creating the world and ends with His curse. And we can draw lessons from it.

Your "heaven" is derived from merely substituting Nature for God and because it is intra-mundane a hopeless mission as it assumes the perfectabilty of man which implies evolution stops.

Evolutionism is thus a religion as, like Christianity, it can't be verfied by stepping out of it to inspect it.

But we do have the intellectual tools and the information to step outside of our industrialism episode which is self-evidently a unique event we know has happened. Within the logic of this neo-episodic event we can envisage "progress" which we can't with entelechy theories or with theories involving magical starts and an apocalypse.

My feet are firmly on sociological ground. And that's a science.

What?

I find it eminently risible, hence joyful, the way you leave the conventional path of the conversation to get to your pet subject: ID vs evolution.

May I note that never, ever did I talk about that subject?

But I'll make an exception right now.

I do believe that less suffering is embedded in evolution.

Pain avoiding strategies work from an evolutionary point of view, even though it sometimes fail in life..

Feet firmly on a sociological ground or not..

But it's the slower antelope which is eaten by the lion, is it not?

The antelope, running away from the lion, was applying pain avoiding strategies.

As I said, this sometimes fails in life but not in the long run (npi..)

It's quite a complex theory Francis and I know I didn't explain it properly. But when all your mental habits are conditioned inside the unique industrialisation transition your idea of progress will be from within that transition and thus other progress theories are irrelevant except as tools for it to employ. Ideas regarding pain avoidance are obviously anti-Calvin and thus anti-transition. Many trillions of units of pain were involved in the first centuries of the transition to industrialisation and are only now being reduced. Evolution itself has nothing to say about pain and the religious ascetic actively seeks pain to prove the carnal appetites can be overcome in the service of a higher being. Or future benefits.

Veils are for keeping out the desert dust over 3,000 years ago....they sort of hung on past their use by date .

I'm in favour of veils. They are sexy. A hint of Eastern promise. Wrinkle cream without the chemic. The abolition of body fascism.

Have you noticed that many muslim women who wear the veil, although showing their eyes, take care to have full eye makeup applied?

Odd, that. And quite sexy.

Abbottabad:

"It takes its name from British Major James Abbott, who founded it in 1853 after he annexed the Punjab area."

How about that, then?

So the Premiership will have another Scottish manager next year, Paul Lambert of Norwich City.

What makes us so good?

The approval of masochism I should think. Apart from rare exceptions like Alf Ramsey Englishmen are easy going.

Yes, you see that in examples like Neil Warnock, Brian Clough or Don Revie.

No--they weren't so bad on the asceticism. For football managers I mean. Your lot are presbyterians aren't they. A particularly po-faced branch of Protestantism.

So are you easy or going ?

not just full eye makeup - full makeup. full stop. and some crazy sexy clothes and serious bling under some of the modesty robes.

Wide of the mark, Spenders old bean.

Owen Coyle, David Moyes, Paul Lambert, all played for Celtic and are cafflix.

Alex McLeish I'm not sure about. Kenny Dalglish played for Celtic but only married a caflik.

Not many po-faced protestants there.

I don't rate the ballroom dancer in the AVIVA advert. Do you think it is based on the tightfistedness of your race of men? That if a tightfisted Jock twat uses AVIVA our market research need go no further. Value for money being a perfected art north of the border. We needn't read the fine print of our insurance policies. He has done it for us.

It can hardly be based on his talents or his mean looking fissog.

Eh- that's Paul Whitehouse, a gifted English character actor. It was Sir Harry Lauder who developed the much-loved stereotype of the tightfisted Jock, for laughs on the variety stage. He probably took a Yorkshireman for his model.

Everyone knows the Jocks as warm-hearted gregarious generous salt of the earth types.