But WHICH god?

This defense of Robespierre is fascinating, illustrating as it does that one of the architects of the French Revolution was very different than he is commonly portrayed today. He was certainly much more sound than the average intellectual today on atheists and atheism. But I am not so certain as the author of the article that the god of which he was speaking was necessarily the Christian God.

Robespierre castigated the irreligion that prevailed in the aristocracy and the high clergy, with bishops like Talleyrand openly boasting of lying every Sunday. A gap had widened between the clerical hierarchy and the country priests. Among the latter, many were responsible for drafting the peasants’ cahiers de doléances. The counter-revolutionary bishop Charles de Coucy, of La Rochelle, said in 1797 that the Revolution was “started by the bad priests.” For Robespierre, they were the “good priests” whom the people of the countryside needed.

Robespierre was inflexible against the priests who submitted to the pope by refusing to take an oath on the Civil Constitution (voted July 12, 1790). But he also opposed, until his last breath, any plan to abolish the funds allocated to Catholic worship under the same Civil Constitution. He also opposed, but in vain, the new Republican calendar, with its ten-day week aimed at “suppressing Sunday,” by the admission of its inventor Charles-Gilbert Romme.

Robespierre’s worst enemies were the militant atheists, the Enragés like Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette or Jacques-René Hébert, who unleashed the movement for dechristianization in November 1793, and started closing the churches in Paris or transforming them into “Temples of Reason”, with the slogan “death is an eternal sleep” posted on the gates of cemeteries. Robespierre condemned “those men who have no other merit than that of adorning themselves with an anti-religious zeal,” and who “throw trouble and discord among us” (Club des Jacobins, November 21 1793). In his speech to the National Convention of December 5, 1793, he accused the dechristianizers of acting secretly for the counter-revolution. Indeed, “hostile foreign powers support the dechristianization of France as a policy pushing rural France into conflict with the Republic for religious reasons and thus recruiting armies against the Republic in Vendée and in Belgium.” By exploiting the violence of militant atheist extremists, these foreign powers have two aims: “the first to recruit the Vendée, to alienate the peoples of the French nation and to use philosophy for the destruction of freedom; the second, to disturb public tranquility in the interior, and to distract all minds, when it is necessary to collect them to lay the unshakable foundations of the Revolution.”

Again in his “Report against Philosophism and for the Freedom of Worship” (November 21, 1793), Robespierre again castigated the grotesque cults of Reason instituted in churches by atheist fanatics:

“By what right do they come to disturb the freedom of worship, in the name of freedom, and attack fanaticism with a new fanaticism? By what right do they degenerate the solemn tributes paid to pure truth, in eternal and ridiculous pranks? Why should they be allowed to play with the dignity of the people in this way, and to tie the bells of madness to the very scepter of philosophy?”

Anyhow, it's a very good article that is well worth reading in its entirety.

"Easter" means "Resurrection"

A poster asked about Easter on SocialGalactic:

Why do churches say Easter? Isn’t Easter a pagan holiday? I’ve started to say Resurrection Sunday at church and ppl ignore me.

Easter is not a pagan holiday. That’s atheist nonsense that requires an almost-complete ignorance of literally every foreign language but one. While there is a possible etymological link to the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre for whom there is absolutely no evidence outside of the writings of the venerable, but inventive Bede, but since the Germans use "Easter" too and English is partially derived from German, the word is much more likely linked to the old German word for resurrection, which is Erstehen.

One of the earliest appearances of "Easter" in English is in the Tyndale Bible, which actually refers to Ester. Remember, the conventional accusation about Easter being a pagan holiday concerned Ishtar, an Akkadian goddess of love and war, but that was never a viable explanation because none of the other European languages have any possible etymological link to a pagan holiday. Their Paschae, Pasqua, Pâques, Pascua, etc. all trace back to Passover.

So, the usual suspects dug around the history books and came up with Eostre, who was not a German goddess and for whom there is no evidence in the German linguistic record. But they did posit - or to put more clearly, made up - a nonexistent precursor goddess to a probably-invented goddess, whose nonexistent holiday could theoretically have been coopted by English and German Christians in the Sixteenth Century while celebrating the Erstehen on Paschae.

Needless to say, this makes absolutely no sense to anyone who is capable of understanding the conventional ordering of cause and effect. Note in particular that the first and only known reference to Eostre is in 725 AD, and the first known references to Ester and Passover, both of which are English neologisms popularized, if not necessarily coined by Tyndale, were in 1526 AD, centuries after Paskha (πάσχα) was first celebrated by Christians.

From Infogalactic's Eostre page: a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various Indo-European groups... all of this evidence permits us to posit a Proto-Indo-European *haéusōs 'goddess of dawn' who was characterized as a "reluctant" bringer of light for which she is punished.

Since Easter most likely means Resurrection, it is unnecessary, redundant, and more than a little spergish to make a point of trying to force "Resurrection Sunday" on others.

Atheism is genetic

Or is, at the very least, a developmental disorder linked to genetic causes:

The largest genetic sequencing study of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) ever conducted has found 102 genes associated with autism, a major step towards an eventual cure, which may involve genetic manipulation. Most of these 102 genes were expressed in the brain, and affect synapses or regulate other genes. This means they have important roles in switching other genes on and off.

Furthermore, 49 of these genes are also linked to other developmental disorders, underlining the fact that the neurobiology of many such conditions are likely to overlap.

I first postulated my hypothesis concerning a link between the autism spectrum and atheism back in  2007 in response to a post by PZ Myers at Pharyngula in which he and other atheists were bragging about their relatively high Asperger's Quotient scores. I wrote: "Obviously, more comprehensive and scientific tests would be advised before any definite conclusion can be reached, but these initial observations do appear to indicate a possibility that atheism could be nothing more than a minor mental disorder."

Since then, at least two scientific studies that were directly inspired by my hypothesis have found that there is a statistical correlation between atheism and the autism spectrum.

This new study indicates - it does not yet prove, but it indicates - that scientists will eventually be able to find a link between those 102 genes and atheism, which suggests that it is atheism, not religion, that will one day be cured by science. One should note that this genetic link also explains why atheism has never propagated very successfully from one generation to the next, as atheists tend to be very unfit in the evolutionary sense of natural and sexual selection.

So, don't be bothered by your shower-averse, science-loving, fedora-sporting acquaintance who insists on quoting Richard Dawkins at everyone apropos of nothing. Just assure him that he does well to trust in science, as one day science will cure his genetic developmental disorder.

A choice of method

I was asked to provide the quote from TS Eliot's introduction to Blaise Pascal's Pensées, to which referred in a recent Darkstream. I thought was intriguing in light of how perfectly it foreshadowed my own approach to The Irrational Atheist as well as the arguments presented by the New Atheists themselves.

To understand the method which Pascal employs, the reader must be prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer. The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminated in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory; among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by what Newman calls "powerful and concurrent" reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation.

To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse; for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to "preserve values." He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called "saintliness" are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the "reality" of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no great value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter.

Now Pascal's method is, on the whole, the method natural and right for the Christian; and the opposite method is that taken by Voltaire. It is worthwhile to remember that Voltaire, in his attempt to refute Pascal, has given once and for all the type of such refutation; and that later opponents of Pascal's Apology for the Christian Faith have contributed little beyond psychological irrelevancies. For Voltaire has presented, better than any one since, what is the unbelieving point of view; and in the end we must all choose for ourselves between one point of view and another.

Mailvox: atheist biology

Richard Dawkins's logic is not only flawed, but as Warkicker, an accomplished surgeon, notes, his grasp of animal and human biology is also nonexistent.

MORE ATHEIST LOGIC: You can trust atheists. Because evolutionary biologists don't understand how biological functions work.

What a curious argument Dawkins gives regarding the "poor design" of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. Is he not aware that the nerve does more than innervate the larynx? It gives branches to the cardiac plexus, esophagus and trachea in addition to the muscles of the larynx. Hence its circuitous route is necessary and not inefficient. I do thyroidectomies all the time and have to be careful not to injure any part of the nerve during the dissection, not just the branches that serve the larynx. Also, the superior laryngeal nerve does give a direct connection to the larynx, and complements the recurrent laryngeal nerve and provides redundancy in function, so a more direct pathway already exists.

There are unusual conditions in which either the right or left recurrent laryngeal nerves do not loop around in the chest but rather directly innervate the larynx. In such individuals, there is the potential for significant problems in swallowing and breathing. Ironically, if you subscribe to the evolutionary paradigm, such conditions may represent example of mutations that regularly occur but yet evolution "chooses" not to select out for the more direct route!

Additionally, the long route the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes into the thoracic cavity before looping back up to the neck may have saved the lives of many of my patients. They will present with hoarseness prompting me to look at their vocal cords. If I see paralysis of one of the vocal cords, I evaluate their chest and often with find a tumor in their mediastinum, usually early enough to still be treatable. Dr. Michael Egnor, a well-known neurosurgeon, has noticed and commented on this as well.

Outgrowing logic

Scientists can't do logic. Especially not atheist ex-scientists:

Thankfully, though, the farther this book gets from God, the better it gets. A chapter on the increasing niceness of humanity is neatly presented, contrasting popular support for attacking enemy civilians in the Second World War with condemnation of even accidental civilian casualties in the two Gulf wars. By the time we get to part two, which focuses on his first passion of evolution, the bitterness has evaporated. Instead we have delight at the way a cheetah can accelerate faster than a Tesla and five pages on what goes on with a chameleon’s tongue. The skin of an octopus, we learn, changes colour according to the same principles as a TV screen, to the extent that if we could hook an octopus brain to a computer, “we could play Charlie Chaplin movies on its skin”.

We hear about goosebumps being a leftover from the days we were hairier, and about the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which loops down into the chest of a mammal, then loops back up to where it is needed, in the throat. In a giraffe it is metres longer than it would need to be if the damn creatures had been designed properly. In other words, it offers irrefutable proof that they, like us, evolved from something else.

It should be noted that almost none of this is new, and especially not for the readers of Dawkins. The laryngeal-nerve stuff, for example, is lifted almost wholesale from his 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth. For the earlier, more cantankerous anti-religious stuff, you might as well just read The God Delusion, where you’ll find most of the same arguments, and usually with the same examples too.

It's rather amusing the way scientists attempt to convey a permanent status on themselves. For example, no one describes me as "a chart-topping techno band member" because my band no longer records music or hits the Billboard club charts. But Richard Dawkins's most recent science paper is nearly as old as Welcome to My Mind.

Anyhow, scientist or ex-scientist, logic has always been well beyond Richard Dawkins. Consider the logic of his 2009 argument about the giraffe in syllogistic form.

Major premise: That which is designed is perfectly efficient.
Minor premise: The giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve is not perfectly efficient.
Conclusion: The giraffe was not designed.

As I pointed out when he first wrote The Greatest Show on Earth, this logic is not merely based on a false major premise, but the false premise requires almost complete ignorance about engineering and design. No one who has ever seen a prototype computer board would fall for such nonsense, and indeed, the core concept that underlies this false logic is obviously ridiculous from a philosophical perspective, as it could be used to logically disprove the existence of the material world.

Major premise: That which is not its Platonic Form does not exist.
Minor premise: The world is not ideal (i.e. we can imagine a more perfect world)
Conclusion: The world does not exist.

It's the reverse ontological argument for the nonexistence of God, the universe, and everything. And then, of course, even if we ignore the incorrect initial logic and simply grant the assumption that the giraffe was not designed, that does not mean that the giraffe must have evolved, much less that the giraffe evolved by natural selection as per Darwin by way of Mendel.

Another atheist shooter

Interesting that the low-status atheist angle doesn't seem to come up often amidst all the theatrics and diagnostics that have been performed over the years concerning mass shooters. Notice the patch on the right side of the Dayton shooter's chest.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that says Against all Gods. The primary pattern to be recognized here is low-status white male atheist. Perhaps they make the best wind-up toys.

The illogic of atheism

Miles Mathis explains why he finds atheism to be illogical:

A modern skeptic is like an agnostic, and he or she is likely to lean to a “no” answer every time. Are there gods? Probably not. Are there unicorns? Probably not. Is there a Bigfoot? Probably not. And so on. I resist this “skeptic” tag because leaning toward a “no” answer is a prejudice itself. It is unscientific. Beyond that, the so-called skeptic societies are stiff with atheists and agnostics and cynics and other faux-scientists, and I prefer to remain as far away from all that as possible.

Of course, with the existence of Bigfoot and unicorns and so on we do have a great deal of information. We have made searches. The Earth is a limited environment and we have populated it widely and heavily and long. Even so, the mountain gorilla was not discovered until 1902, and huge populations of lowland gorillas were only recently discovered in the Congo (this very decade). Which is to say that we may lean a bit to a “no” answer for existence of larger beings in smaller areas we have scoured quite thoroughly, but even then we may be wrong.

But in looking for proof of gods, our search is pathetically limited. By definition, a god is a being whose powers are far greater than ours, who we cannot comprehend, and whose form we cannot predict. This would make our failure to locate a god quite understandable. A very large or small god would be above or below our notice, and a distant god would also evade our sensors. Not to mention we only have five senses. If we are manipulated by gods, as the hypothesis goes, then it would be quite easy for them to deny us the eyes to see them. Only a god of near-human size in the near environs would be possible to detect.

Again, this does not mean I believe in gods, any more than I believe in aliens or unicorns. I only point out that, as a matter of logic and science, a hypothesis that has not been proved is not the same as a hypothesis that has been disproved. I agree with the atheists and agnostics that the existence of gods has not been proved, but I do not agree that the existence of gods has been disproved. It would require a much more thorough search of the universe than has so far been completed to even begin to lean. As it is, our data is near-zero.

For this reason, I find atheists to be just as sanctimonious, illogical, and tiresome as the deists and theists, if not moreso. Because the atheists are often more highly educated and often better able to argue (in limited ways), they use this education and argument to prop themselves up in the ugliest ways. They blow apart the beliefs of religious people and imagine this solidifies their own beliefs in some way. But it never does. People of faith are actually more consistent in their views, since they never claim to believe in science anyway. They are not immediately hypocritical, at least, since it is possible for them create a closed system of illogic that circles back in a self-affirming way. The search for truth is no part of their system, so it is no failure when they find none. But atheists cannot say the same. They base their system on science, so that the very first instant they fail to act scientifically, they are back to zero. Yes, it is the same zero as the theists' zero, but the theists aren't measuring and the atheists are. A theist at zero is just a theist, and no harm done. But an atheist at zero has had a fall, and must be damaged.

I would go farther, of course, as I observe most atheists to be not only illogical, but irrational. And thank God for that! It's the rational atheists who are by far the most problematic.

Demolishing the atheist myths

This is a usefully thorough debunking of the oft-referenced myth concerning the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria:

If there is a story that forms the heart of New Atheist bad history, it’s the tale of the Great Library of Alexandria and its destruction by a Christian mob.  It’s the central moral fable of the Draper-White Thesis, where wise and rational Greeks and Romans store up all the wisdom of the pre-Christian ancient world in a single library, treasuring science and reason and bringing western civilisation to the brink of a technological and industrial revolution.  But then a screaming mob of irrational Christian zealots puts this treasure of science and learning to the torch, thus ushering in the Dark Ages and setting back technology by one thousand years.  It’s certainly a great story, retold in Carl Sagan’s seminal Cosmos TV series (1980) and in Alejandro Amenabar’s film Agora (2009).  The only problem is … it never happened.

So where are these people getting all this stuff that makes them so angry?  Unfortunately, this is another case where the average New Atheist’s grasp of history has been informed not by a historian, but by a scientist and where the scientist has, yet again, got pretty much everything wrong.  The main culprit here is, unfortunately, the late Carl Sagan.... It was his 1980 TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage that made him a household name.  It became the most widely watched public television series of the 1980s and virtually single-handedly established a new kind of public science education.  Sagan took a wide-ranging theme of the history of the cosmos and how we humans have come to understand it, using science and reason.  It was the way he used the history of science to explain scientific concepts that intrigued me as a teenager, though I was later to learn that Sagan was a much better scientist and presenter than he was a historian.

Sagan wrote the series and its accompanying best-selling book in 1978-79, in the shadow of the Cold War, the era of Apartheid and the wake of the Iranian Revolution and years of radical terrorism.  The final episode of the series, “Who Speaks for Earth?”, was a reflection on the future of humanity and a plea for sanity in the face of increasing threats to our civilisation.  And it’s in this context that Sagan tells a moral fable of the Great Library of Alexandria and its fall to the forces of irrationality and superstition:

The story that Sagan tells is a fine one and the morals he draws from it are admirable, but as a historical account it’s absolutely terrible.  He makes a number of dubious claims, presents speculation as fact and makes several flat out factual errors – true history pedants can find a detailed analysis everything he gets wrong or overstates in this post to the Reddit /r/badhistory group.  While he also makes the weird claim that Greco-Roman civilisation collapsed because of slavery, it’s the nineteenth century cliches about “the Dark Ages” that were finally relieved by the glorious “Renaissance” that form the basis of his depiction of western intellectual history.  In a weird inversion of the actual chronology, somehow Sagan puts the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria before the “abject surrender to mysticism”  which he says led to ” the mob [that] came to burn the [Great Library] down”.  The influence of his account of the murder of Hypatia is a topic for another article, but it’s his heartfelt paean to the Great Library, his allusions to the advances it could have inspired if it had survived, followed by his condemnation of the forces of “stagnation … pessimism …. [and] mysticism” which caused this jewel to be burned down that continue to inspire anger in many people.  Most of the expressions of outrage and hatred against the “religious barbarians” quoted above draw, directly or indirectly, on Sagan’s account.

It never ceases to amuse me how completely and utterly wrong the New Atheists have repeatedly proven to be about everything, from philosophy and theology to history and science. No wonder no one takes them seriously anymore.

Think about how embarrassing it must be to look upon the antics of the buffoons of the Intellectual Dork Web and realize that they are nevertheless considered to be an improvement on you by your globalist masters.

BOOKSTREAM: Do we need God?

The extended audio sample for DO WE NEED GOD TO BE GOOD? by anthropologist Christopher Hallpike. If you'd like to listen to the whole thing, the audiobook+ is available at Arkhaven.

The end of atheism

The Z-Man explains why atheism is on the decline in parallel with the retreat of Christianity from the public space:

The central defect of atheism, old and new, is it is an entirely negative western identity and entirely dependent on Christianity. Specifically, it requires people of some status to defend Christianity and the Christian belief in the super natural. Atheism has always been the oxpecker of mass movements. Everything about it relies on its host both tolerating it and thriving on its own. It’s why atheism has had its spasms of success when Christianity in America has had a revival, as in the 80’s and the 2000’s.

Atheists will deny this, of course. They will argue, as Dennett often does, that the steep decline of Christianity is proof their arguments were superior. The reason they no longer talk about their thing is they won and their enemy is dead. The fact that there are plenty of Muslims and crackpot feminist airheads around spouting magical oogily-boogily never seems to get their attention for some reason. The only guy to venture into this area was Dawkins, but the Prog quickly reminded him who pays his bills.

That’s always been the tell with atheism. Belief in something as insane as male privilege or implicit whiteness should get their attention. After all, these are not just beliefs in the supernatural, they are primitive beliefs in the supernatural. Men of the classical period had more plausible and complex beliefs than people like Amy Harmon. She is a click away from demanding human sacrifice. Yet, the new atheists were never much interest in those magical beliefs. They were too busy hounding the last Christians.

That’s another tell. Atheism has always been a popular pose on the Left, because it was a useful signal. The bad whites loved their boom sticks and sky gods. The good whites rejected all those crazy beliefs. It’s why atheists tended to focus on the mainstream of Christianity, like Catholics and mainline Protestant churches. Mormons were always an easy target. They avoided the Jews and black Baptists. Sure, once in while a zinger against the tribe would be tossed in, but the enemy was always white Christians.

The decline on atheism is a good example of the perils of negative identity. When you define yourself as being in opposition to someone or something, you inevitably become a slave to it. Your very existence depends on it. As the main Christian churches collapse in scandal and bizarre attempts to move Left, the enemies for atheists to attack are getting more difficult to find.

What I find interesting is how many people now understand that atheism is not what it etymologically purports to be, a lack of belief in gods, or even a lack of belief in the supernatural, but what it has observably been since the Abbe Jean Meslier posthumously published his Memoir of the Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World in 1729, mere Western anti-Christianity.

That's all very well and good. But now apply precisely the same historical observation and logic to the concepts of free speech, freedom of thought, and the Enlightenment. What you find yourself concluding may very well surprise, if not dismay, you, depending upon your allegiance to the aforementioned dogmas.

TIA extended audio

I expect most of the Dread Ilk will have read TIA in one form or another given the fact that it's been out for over a decade, but if you haven't, I've posted a two-hour audio sample that consists of the first three chapters on the Darkstream. If that inspires you to pick up the whole audiobook, you can do so at Arkhaven.

TIA (audio) at Arkhaven

On one side of the argument is a collection of godless academics with doctorates from the finest universities in England, France, and the United States. On the other is THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST author Vox Day, armed with nothing more than historical and statistical facts.

Day strips away the pseudo-scientific pretensions of New Atheism with his intelligent application of logic, history, military science, political economy, and well-documented research. The arguments of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray are all methodically exposed and discredited as Day provides extensive evidence proving, among other things, that:

- More than 93 percent of all the wars in human history had no relation to religion
- The Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction over professing Jews, Muslims, or atheists, and executed fewer people on an annual basis than the state of Texas
- Atheists are almost four times more likely to be imprisoned than Christians
- "Red" state crime is primarily in "blue" counties
- Contra Richard Dawkins, sexually abused girls are 55 times more likely to commit suicide than girls raised Catholic
- In the twentieth century, atheistic regimes killed three times more people in peacetime than those killed in all the wars and individual crimes combined. 

THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST provides the rational thinker with empirical proof that atheism's claims against religion are unfounded in logic, fact, and science. Now available at Arkhaven for $14.99 in DRM-free MP4 format, TIA clocks in at 9 hours and 51 minutes and is narrated by Jon Mollison.

"The best blogger"

This is very flattering, particularly as the designation comes from an intellectual for whom I have a considerable amount of respect, and to whom I really should link more often:

Blogs are clearly on the way out, and many of the best bloggers have gone - but let's just express our opinion on who is - overall - the best blogger... Leaving-out myself (!) and also my co-bloggers at Albion Awakening and Junior Ganymede (because we are really the best :) - then who do you think is the best?

My vote goes to Vox Day (Theodore Beale) - whose blog is quite remarkable in terms of posting very frequently, across a wide range, and with great 'originality' - in the sense that he is so inventive and so good at discovering, elaborating and refining ideas.

Read the rest of it there. And also read this post, which should demonstrate why I have a high opinion of Prof. Charlton's perspicacity beyond his excellent taste in bloggers.

What makes modern people 'naturally' disbelieve in God?

(My answer; speaking from the experience of several decades of living as an atheist...)

The fact that all modern public discourse excludes the divine.

As a modern child grows up, he becomes socialised, he becomes trained in modern public discourse of many kinds: school work, everything to do with the mass media, sports, pastimes, hobbies... and all of these exclude the divine.

It Just Isn't There. The lexicon of objects that function in the system  exclude the divine; the causality of the system excludes the divine.

As the child reaches adolescence - these modes of thought become more dominant, and they become habitual to the extent of being simply taken for granted; and eventually they become so habitual as to be extremely difficult to break out from.

Culture matters and the globos know it. That's why they have been relentlessly campaigning to force Christianity out of the public spaces, by hook, crook, and Christmas carol, for generations.

Fake IQ tests

25/25. You are a GENIUS!
Way to go! Only people with an IQ score of 153-161 aced this general knowledge test. 

I can personally attest that you don't need an IQ of 153, much less 161, to score 25/25 on this general knowledge test. Especially since it took me less than 30 seconds to take it. Frankly, I'd be astonished if anyone reading this blog got less than 22 of the answers right.

As a general rule, Internet IQ tests are, like this one, completely fake and meant to flatter the test-taker. Knowledge can serve as a partial proxy for IQ, but it can never provide any sort of quantitative measure because storage is not processing power. Also, genius is not measured in capability or IQ, but in unique historical achievement.

But there is one intriguing thing about this clickbaitery, which is the notion that only people with IQs under 161 can get a perfect score. Are they suggesting that 4SD minds tend to overcomplicate straightforward questions? Or, as is much more likely the case, are they just playing the scientistic game of selling credibility through false claims of precision?

If so, they're hardly alone. For as Daniel Dennett has assured us, you can trust biologists because physicists get amazingly accurate results.

He's not wrong

Richard Dawkins appears to be rethinking the consequences of his decades-long assault on Christianity.

Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing?

To paraphrase my previous assertion, never bring a philosophy to a religious war.

Dawkins Syndrome

Apparently my hypothesis that atheism is a mild form of autism was correct, but didn't go anywhere nearly far enough. Scientists are determining that atheists are mutants who are literally unfit in a variety of ways.

Until the Industrial Revolution, we were under harsh conditions of Darwinian Selection, meaning that about 40% of children died before they reached adulthood. These children would have been those who had mutant genes, leading to poor immune systems and death from childhood diseases. But they would also have had mutant genes affecting the mind. This is because the brain, home to 84% of the genome, is extraordinarily sensitive to mutation, so mental and physical mutation robustly correlate. If these children had grown up, they might have had autism, schizophrenia, depression… but they had poor immune systems, so they never had the chance.

Under these conditions, prevalent until the nineteenth century, we were individually selected for but we were also “group selected” for. Ethnic groups are simply a genetic extended family and some groups fared better against the environment and enemy groups than others did, due to the kind of partly genetic psychological adaptations they developed.

Among these, the authors argue, was a very specific kind of religiosity which developed in all complex societies: the collective worship of gods concerned with morality. Belief in these kinds of gods was selected for, they maintain, because once we developed cities we had to deal with strangers—people who weren’t part of our extended family. By conceiving of a god who demanded moral behaviour towards other believers, people were compelled to cooperate with these strangers, meaning that large, highly cooperative groups could develop.

Computer models have proven that the more internally cooperative group—which is also hostile to infidel outsiders—wins the battle of group selection [The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation by Max Hartshorn, June 2013]. This very specific kind of religiousness was selected for and, indeed, it correlates with positive and negative ethnocentrism even today.

The authors demonstrate that this kind of religiousness has clearly been selected for in itself. It is about 40% genetic according to twin studies, it is associated with strongly elevated fertility, it can be traced to activity in specific regions of the brain, and it is associated with elevated health: all the key markers that something has been selected for.

And it is from here that the authors make the leap that has made SJW blood boil. Drawing on research by Michael Woodley of Menie and his team (see here and here)they argue that conditions of Darwinian selection have now massively weakened, leading to a huge rise in people with damaging mutations. This is evidenced in increasing rates of autism, schizophrenia, homosexuality, sex-dysmorphia, left-handedness, asymmetrical bodies and much else. These are all indicators of mutant genes.

Woodley suggests that weakened Darwinian selection would have led to the spread of “spiteful mutations” of the mind, which would help to destroy the increasingly physically and mentally sick group, even influencing the non-carriers to behave against their genetic interests, as carriers would help undermine the structures through which members learnt adaptive behaviour.

This is exactly what happened in the infamous Mouse Utopia experiment in the late 1960s, where a colony of mice was placed in conditions of zero Darwinian selection and eventually died out. [Death squared: The explosive growth and demise of a mouse population. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, January 1973(PDF)].

So Dutton and his team argue that, this being the case, deviation from this very specific form of religiousness—the collective worship of moral gods in which almost everyone engaged in 1800—should be associated with these markers of mutation. In other words, both atheists and those interested in spirituality with no moral gods (such as the paranormal) should be disproportionately mutants.

And this is precisely what they show. Poor physical and mental health are both significantly genetic and imply high mutational load. Dutton and his team demonstrate that this specific form of religiousness, when controlling for key factors such as SES, predicts much better objective mental and physical health, recovery from illness, and longevity than atheism.

It’s generally believed that religiousness makes you healthier because it makes you worry less and elevates your mood, but they turn this view on its head, showing that religious worshippers are more likely to carry gene forms associated with being low in anxiety. Schizophrenia, they show, is associated with extreme and anti-social religiosity, rather than collective worship. Similarly, belief in the paranormal is predicted by schizophrenia, and this is a marker of genetic mutation.

Next, they test autism, another widely accepted marker of mutation, as evidenced by the fact that it’s more common among the children of older men, whose fathers are prone to mutant sperm. Autism predicts atheism.

The good news is that once times get difficult again, atheism will again recede in both quantities and virulence. The bad news is that we are going to have to try to treat people born with what I suggest we call "Dawkins Syndrome" with a little more sympathy, since they probably can't help their lack of belief or behavior much more than those born with Downe's Syndrome.

How fortunate that those born with Dawkins Syndrome are so highly rational and inclined to put perfect faith in science. Surely they will accept these new scientific discoveries about their condition with grace and aplomb.

Mailvox: atheist copypasta

I usually just delete and ignore my daily hate mail, but this was right up there with the classic Navy SEAL copypasta.

Dear Pale Nigger with a Tiny Head

After encountering you and being within the confines of your sniveling shithole called "vox popoli" I have attempted to give my own honest and humble opinions and recommendations to anyone willing to listen. In hindsight I cannot imagine why I even paid attention to a lowly fool who believes wholeheartedly in the lie of jebus chris. Being the ultimate seeker of history beyond anyone I have ever seen I judge such books as 'Ecclesiastes' 'Luke' 'Deuteronomy' 'Genesis' 'Exodus' and other filth to be paltry, petty gibberish totally unfit for future generations to read. Unlike yourself, I am a reader of ALL known ancient languages and scripts. There are but few who could beat me in this field and most of them are dead. I have read the 'bible' from beginning to end and in all its earliest iterations. I know ALL of its flaws and the crude excuses of translations in its intricate fallacies. I am also aware of the seemingly endless archeological evidence and alternative historical records that ultimately crush the [ill]legitimacy of the Tanakh/Old testament and its synthesised bastard spawn the greco-roman 'new' testament. In the area of 'gawd's word' I am superior in knowledge to anything you 'know'.

Being as high as I am, and you as low as a mite, your censure of my deductions and articulations is quite the appalling breach of natural law. In the purely truthful sense of law it is only fitting that 'eye for an eye' to be meted on those equal and in this particular scenario you are not an equal on any level. The logical conclusion of this is to have you banned from employment and your entire well-being seized for the benefit of your betters as well as any belonging you claim to possess. You can retaliate but in the end it shall mean nothing. The tiny-brained mulatto wogs that dwell in that shitpit known as Italy are absolutely incapable of halting your punishment and any call to stop my righteousness shall only end in their demise. Any police found aiding your escape shall be executed as the repugnant criminals that they are.

I have noticed for a while that you have consistently deleted my infinitely righteous messages of truth on your site. As this crime is utterly irredeemable, I am forced to conclude that you have joined the ranks of the various cockroaches who have denigrated and insulted me for no better reason than to hide your own weak, pathetic, life-unworthy-of-life selves. As such, you shall be executed without dignity and any and every wog cop you call upon to hide yourself with shall also be judged guilty of the crime of preventing justice and tortured to death for this transgression.

You have been condemned and there is no redemption. No cry of mercy, no display of repentance to me or my Lord shall be accepted. Your existence shall be nothing but pain, misery and eventually suicide. May the disgusting thing you call "faith in christ" be expunged from your very being and your assets of "castalia house" be seized for the benefit of your betters.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this gentleman has asymmetrical features, objectively bad skin, and does not go out on a lot of dates. Can you even imagine how he would respond to getting shot down by a woman? I used to wonder why girls are so cruel to gammas, but now I understand.

Of course, it's so over the top that one tends to suspect it is one of the Dread Ilk trolling.

Physiognomy is more than real

It is science. And Martin Luther King's dream remains just that, a dream that is not based on reality:

Unless it involves mocking President Trump’s supposedly “small hands,” there is nothing that horrifies our multiculturalist masters more than judging by appearances.

It is impossible, they claim, to infer anything about how someone is likely to behave by their gender or because they are from a particular ethnic group. Everyone is unique (but also, somehow, equal). Judging by appearances is not just superficial but plain evil.

It will be fascinating to see what they’ll make of the recently-published book by British academic Dr. Edward Dutton titled How To Judge People By What They Look Like, which argues that even within races and sexes you can, with a fair degree of accuracy, infer people’s personalities from appearances. You may even get an inside track on how smart they are by taking a good look at their physical characteristics, according to Dutton.

“You can’t judge people by what they look like! It’s drummed into us as children,” writes Dutton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Oulu University in northern Finland. “It is utterly false.”

But Dutton makes a provocative case for resurrecting the ancient art of physiognomy—judging character from the face. He argues it should never have been dismissed as pseudo-science. Indeed, his research goes way beyond making inferences from the face. He writes:

We are evolved to judge people’s psychology from what they look like; we can accurately work out people’s personality and intelligence from how they look, and (quite often) we have to if we want to survive. Body shape, hairiness, eye width, finger length, even how big a woman’s breasts are . . . these and much else are windows into personality, intelligence or both.

So many people fail to understand that when I say the Alt-Right is inevitable, I am not merely engaging in rhetoric. I mean that quite literally and I am speaking in unvarnished dialectic. Just as communism is unviable because it denies economics and feminism is unviable because it denies biology, conservatism is unviable because it denies inequality. All of these unviable political identities have set themselves against science, history, and observable reality.

Remember, the red pill is reality.

As Dutton says in his book, the relevant research has been published in top psychology journals, such as Intelligence, Personality and Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychological Science, as has his own research. This includes a study asserting that atheists tend to be less physically attractive and more likely to be left-handed than religious people and that they have objectively worse skin. Dutton, ever the evolutionist, opines that this is because we have been selected to be religious over thousands of years of evolution. Hence, those who are atheists reflect mutant genes in the brain and people with mental mutations are more likely to have physical ones. This explains their asymmetrical features and asymmetrical brains, leading to left-handedness.

You may recall that I was among the first to observe that atheists are neurologically atypical and that atheism is essentially a particular characteristic of being on the autism spectrum. It's not a coincidence that you can often pick out an atheist by his appearance.

However, the link between psychology, personality, and intelligence on the one hand and appearance on the other involves considerably more than our genes, it also involves our choices and behavior. When we see a man who is slender and clear-eyed at 60, we can safely conclude that he is both intelligent and self-disciplined, just as we can reliably reach the opposite conclusion of a child who is obese at the age of 12.

No longer the media's darling

Sam Harris learns what happens when the media's Narrative moves on and you are no longer one of its favorites:

In April of 2017, I published a podcast with Charles Murray, coauthor of the controversial (and endlessly misrepresented) book The Bell Curve. These are the most provocative claims in the book:

• Human “general intelligence” is a scientifically valid concept.
• IQ tests do a pretty good job of measuring it.
• A person’s IQ is highly predictive of his/her success in life.
• Mean IQ differs across populations (blacks < whites < Asians).
• It isn’t known to what degree differences in IQ are genetically determined, but it seems safe to say that genes play a role (and also safe to say that environment does too).

At the time Murray wrote The Bell Curve, these claims were not scientifically controversial—though taken together, they proved devastating to his reputation among nonscientists. That remains the case today. When I spoke with Murray last year, he had just been de-platformed at Middlebury College, a quarter century after his book was first published, and his host had been physically assaulted while leaving the hall. So I decided to invite him on my podcast to discuss the episode, along with the mischaracterizations of his research that gave rise to it.

Needless to say, I knew that having a friendly conversation with Murray might draw some fire my way. But that was, in part, the point. Given the viciousness with which he continues to be scapegoated—and, indeed, my own careful avoidance of him up to that moment—I felt a moral imperative to provide him some cover.

In the aftermath of our conversation, many people have sought to paint me as a racist—but few have tried quite so hard as Ezra Klein, Editor-at-Large of Vox. In response to my podcast, Klein published a disingenuous hit piece that pretended to represent the scientific consensus on human intelligence while vilifying me as, at best, Murray’s dupe. More likely, readers unfamiliar with my work came away believing that I’m a racist pseudoscientist in my own right.

After Klein published that article, and amplified its effects on social media, I reached out to him in the hope of appealing to his editorial conscience. I found none. The ethic that governs Klein’s brand of journalism appears to be: Accuse a person with a large platform of something terrible, and then monetize the resulting controversy. If he complains, invite him to respond in your magazine so that he will drive his audience your way and you can further profit from his doomed effort to undo the damage you’ve done to his reputation.

It's mildly amusing that Harris is only discovering now that the media in general, and Ezra Klein in particular, is disingenuous and utilizes character assassination as its stock tool-in-trade. Imagine what it is like for those who can be disemployed as well as discredited, Sam!

Well, you do not cease to amaze… “Junk science” is in the title of the article, and I “fell for it” (subtitle), because I didn’t do my homework (the thrust of the entire piece). Whereas in reality, you have been shown ample evidence that the science is mainstream, that I represented it accurately, and that your authors were cherry-picking it for ideological reasons.

Unfortunately for Sam, he has discovered how little interest those on the Left have in either the truth or in science, whether they are editors, reporters, or readers. The Narrative has moved on and Sam has been left behind, much to his surprise.

Judging from the response to this post on social media, my decision to publish these emails appears to have backfired. I was relying on readers to follow the plot and notice Ezra’s evasiveness and gaslighting (e.g. his denial of misrepresentations and slurs that are in the very article he published). Many people seem to have judged from his politeness that Ezra was the one behaving honestly and ethically. This is frustrating, to say the least.

Many readers seem mystified by the anger I expressed in this email exchange. Why care so much about “criticism” or even “insults”? But this has nothing to do with criticism and insults. What has been accomplished in Murray’s case, and is being attempted in mine, is nothing less than the total destruction of a person’s reputation for the crime of honestly discussing scientific data. Klein published fringe, ideologically-driven, and cherry-picked science as though it were the consensus of experts in the field and declined to publish a far more mainstream opinion in my and Murray’s defense—all to the purpose of tarring us as racists and enablers of racists. This comes at immense personal and social cost. It is also dishonest.

It sounds like Sam very much needs to read SJWs Always Lie.