lundi 29 février 2016

A Pretty Vile Attack on "Christian Fundamentalists" - but a Parodic One


1) New blog on the kid : As Someone Said : You Catch More Flies with Honey than with Vinegar, 2) Creation vs. Evolution : A Pretty Vile Attack on "Christian Fundamentalists" - but a Parodic One, 3) Great Bishop of Geneva! : Apostatic Rejection of "Fundamentalism" in 1994, 4) Dwight Makes a Calmer Attack on Catholic Fundies

Quoting:

Christian fundamentalism is the insanity that believes what Bronze Age herders, Iron Age farmers and people in the Roman Empire wrote thousands of years ago in the Bible and ignores what sensible scientists write today.


OK, Bronze age and Iron Age and Roman Empire are of course taken together a shorter time period than today?

And scientists are of course more numerous than farmers and herders and people (whatever category of people that refers to, perhaps the common people?), not just are today, but were back then?

I sense I start feeling ironic when I try to get the things straight from this quote.

In the late 18th Century and 19th Century scholars applied textual criticism to the Bible and found that not all the bible was written by the supposed authors. Some Christians decided that the Bible wasn’t all literally true and inerrant, those became Liberal Christians while others couldn’t face the idea that the Bible isn’t all literally true and they became the Christian fundamentalists.


Ok, in other words, the Fundamentalists are those agreeing with their fathers, right?

What an admission!

Roman Catholics from Augustine in the 4th Century onwards have accepted that parts of the Bible are allegorical. While at same time accepting that all parts of the Bible are literal.


I think the admission is being qualified. And that the qualification in its turn is being qualified. The latter qualification was in fact done by me. Wikias can be edited by anyone.

Some of the sillier Christian fundamentalists even believe that the version of the Bible that King James authorized in 1611 is the only true version. That type of fundy is mostly in the United States. Sensible people who understand History realize that older versions of the Bible that archaeologists have found are closer to the original texts. It's obvious isn't it? Sensible people also realize that modern translations of the Bible taking account of archaeological finds are likely to be more reliable than the King James version.


As a Catholic I am very far from endorsing precisely King James. I stick by Douay Rheims - also a goody.

But no, it is NOT obvious that a different text found in a very old copy is closer to the original.

When people copy by hand (and that still happens, before any printing which isn't a reprint) one can fiddle with the text.

But if very many different copies (made by different copiers!) are there, the odd one out can be corrected - or if it is too late, laid aside and not read.

As you know, reading books will tear and wear them. With paper backs that have no binding, it happens very quickly, even, with such old books less quickly. BUT it certainly happened quicker with copies that were read than with copies that were laid aside.

Which means that it is the odd one out which will be found more than thousand years later.

The Sinaiticus was found in the Sinai monastery. The researchers asked "what is this?" and the monastics answered "we don't know". The researchers thought it meant they couldn't recognise a Bible as such. I think it meant they weren't sure whether to call it a Bible or not, considering it had been laid aside due to scribal errors.

Some of which favour Watchtower Society and other sects denying the divinity of Christ - by missing one extra clear verse.

They forget to mention that Arians also had Bibles and may have left out that verse on purpose.

When they can Christian fundamentalist Schools teach Creationism instead of Evolution and teach a wide range of Science subjects from a Christian fundamentalist, Biblical viewpoint. The Children at these schools don't get the type of Education that will prepare them properly for life outside.


And I agree this is not preparing us to getting harrassed by Evolutionists, as I was when NOT getting taught in a Christian school. Some Evolutionists obviously think they have to start harrassing us earlier. How about outlawing at least certain levels of harrassment?

Other Fundamentalist Christian families Homeschool their children which also doesn't prepare them for life outside their own community.


At least it doesn't prepare them for a life within an Evolutionist community by harrassing them for Creationism early on.

Know what? I enjoyed being home schooled, the few months I had of it. I did NOT enjoy being harrassed outside homeschooling.

Fundy loon is a contraction of the expression "fundamentalist lunatic." A "fundy loon" is someone who is considered, by rationalists, to be absolutely totally stark raving mad by virtue of their primitive beliefs.


Oh, yes, it is RATIONALISTS who consider them such. Doesn't it strike the reader that the rationalist is, if so, somewhat biassed?

Rationalists used to mean people who thought "anything is up for rational debate". Now it means people who stamp people who don't agree with them as people you can't have rational debates with.

And it is a question of being mad because of PRIMITIVE beliefs - in other words for agreeing with what your ancestors thought normal.

Doesn't that strike you (if any reader is that unbiassed!) as a rather strange criterium to judge about madness from?

These unfortunate people have often been so indoctrinated since childhood that no amount of logic or facts can relieve them of their affliction.


I feel more afflicted by harrassment (including but not limited to an ostracism where I live and roam), than by my beliefs. I'd really prefer to be relieved of harrassers (including now mostly people who behind my back contribute to an exclusion, for my being a Creationist) than of my beliefs.

And for the record, I was NOT indoctrinated into Creationism since childhood, I was if anything indoctrinated into Evolution. But not even that in the way some parents indoctrinate children into evolution by pointing fingers at Creationists.

I was just given Evolution first, and only then Creationism - which I preferred, most of the time since tasting it.

I forgot to give the reference:

Christian Fundamentalism
on Liberapaedia
http://liberapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism


This article didn't forget to give the reference. It gave it as, second reference:

Life in a Christian 'fundamentalist' school
By Tim Johns and Emma Hallett BBC News
12 June 2014 From the section England
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-27681560


And BBC is so unbiassed, right? No Marxist or Atheist bias at all?

For 29-year-old Jonny Scaramanga, who attended Victory Christian School in Bath until he was 14, the experience was "horrendous".


Until he was FOURTEEN? That means he left it before school quitting age. And THAT means he left it because he wasn't happy there.

How many NON-Fundy schools come with such saving clauses?

He said that at his school - which closed in 2000 - pupils had to learn and recount sections of Biblical scripture in order to pass any subject.


OK, but perhaps this school is not typical of those which did NOT close in 2000?

Or perhaps Jonny Scaramanga is not the most typical student the school had:

Conversely Ben Medlock, 35, who co-founded the SwiftKey smartphone keyboard app and attended the same school as Mr Scaramanga, said his experience had been "broadly positive".


Now, while BBC article mentions the experience of Ben Medlock, the liberapaedia article referring to the BBC article certainly doesn't.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Monday after III Lord's Day in Lent
29.II.2016

mercredi 24 février 2016

I am Annoyed at My Namesake in Australia Not Having His Name Published in Full

On CMI I read a great article:

CMI : Aping humans
by Carl Wieland
http://creation.com/aping-humans


Under the article, I read a daft comment:

Hans G., Australia, 24 February 2016

So, apes can learn speaking. Did they learn it from other apes, the higher evolved ones I mean, or the ones, who think they are intelligent? Obviously it didn't happen by chance...........


I am sorry to call my namesake Hans, whose other name G. may or may not be a namesake of mine, someone who has made a daft comment (not calling him daft as a person!), but he did.

No, they can NOT learn how to actually speak. Neither in the Parrot way nor in the Human way. A Parrot can repeat the sounds of words, and thereby, if need be, function as a biological cassette recorder, but it can never understand them.

A human might be mute, might not yet know your language, but he might definitely come to understand if he takes the trouble to learn.

But an ape cannot do that.

An ape could come to understand the word peanut, as much as a dog might understand the word "sit". But an ape would take the word peanut as global for "I am offering you a peanut", and would be very disappointed if the human after that was just showing him a picture of a peanut. And not giving a real one.

There are two marks of human language that are absent in any beasts. One was mentioned in article, or rather two were, but confused as one:

Moreover, chimps lack what the article calls the ‘linguistic silver bullet’—the capacity to ‘combine bits of language into larger units’.


No, it is called "double articulation". Since articulating a word means pronouncing a word, usually when we say "apes cannot articulate" we mean "apes don't haver the apparatus of doing speech sounds" (except "hooo, hooo" and "heee, heee", at least one consonant and two vowels, if they only could get it), but there is another sense in which they cannot.

First, simple sounds are meaningless in themselves, but meaningful units are articulated into combinations of them. This is called articulating morphemes into phonemes.

Then these simplest meaningful units are in their turn incomplete as meanings, until combined as syntagms, some of which may be words longer than a morpheme.

This is called articulating morphemes into phonemes.
[A sentence of logical enunciation articulated into subject, copula, predicate:]
= This [pronoun designing here "previously just described thing"]
+ is [verb used as copula]
+ called articulating morphemes into phonemes.

called articulating morphemes into phonemes
[a predicate by copula affirmed about "this"=previous, and divided into verbum dicendi or nominandi and the name given to the process, also a verbal phrase]
= called = call+(e)d [verb stem for a synonym of naming+morpheme designing a form used for passive participle]
+ articulating morphemes into phonemes

articulating morphemes into phonemes
[verb phrase consisting of verb with object which is in turn modified by verb]
= articulating = art+icul+ate+ing [noun stem "art(os)" meaning joint+noun ending(s) -icul(us) for small+verbifier "-ate"+morpheme designing a present participle here used as gerund, i e when synonym to infinitive]
+ morphemes into phonemes

morphemes into phonemes
[the object, a noun, and how it is modified by verb]
= morphemes = morph+eme+s [noun stem "morph" for form+noun ending or nominaliser "eme" for "thingy"+plural s]
+ into phonemes

into phonemes
[modification of object by verb, divided into preposition and a noun which by preposition is "put in resultative case"]
= into = in+to [simple preposition for "inside"+simple preposition for "direction to", here used to "put noun in resultative case"]
+ phonemes = phon+eme+s [noun stem "phon" for sound or voice or sound of the human voice+noun ending or nominaliser "eme" for "thingy"+plural s]

And phoneme "morph-"? In English it is:
= m [labial nasal, no meaning in itself, but distinguishing "morph" from German word "Dorf", if pronounced with an English accent]
+ o: [back rounded mid low vowel, no meaning in itself, but distinguishing "morph" with other difference from "Smurf"]
+ [optional acc to region] r [retroflex voiced fricative, no meaning in itself, but distinguishing from words having here "n", as words beginning with "Monf-"]
+ f [labiodental unvoiced fricative, no meaning in itself, but distinguishing, conveniently, "morph" from "morgue"]

And so on for all the other morphemes in the analysed sentence.

THIS double articulation is then FURTHER combined with recursivity. Or recursion. Which here is fairly accurately described:

This is called ‘recursion’, and is only one of the many skills he thinks are likely to prove to be crucial to real language. Recursion greatly opens up the range of possibilities, and enables the speaker to ‘appreciate the views of others’.

As Marcus indicates, even the most sophisticated chimpanzee would be completely bamboozled by a sentence such as “She knows that I know where the peanut is hidden”.


But it is not defined, since its definition is confused with definition of double articulation.

The definition of recursivity is that each syntagm can be subdivided not only into syntagms of a lower order, until you reach the lowest and then the morphemes, like these can only de subdivided into phonemes, but rather part of what a syntagm like "sentence" can subdivide into can itself be a "sentence".

Part of what a genitive construction can subdivide into can itself be a genitive construction, and what a relative clause can be subdivided into can itself be a relative clause St Luke has one (combined of the two) which is record long in the literature I know: "Jesus was considered to be the son of Joseph, who was of ..., etc, etc, etc ... who was of Adam, who was of God".

Even if each of the morphemes in the sentence had been within the "vocabulary" of a chimp, no chimp could have understood even one sentence of that.

Sad that Carl Wieland, being a doctor, is a bad linguist and either bungles or doesn't supplement what his source has said about the human characteristic.

Obviously, it is about as idiotic to speak of human language as "developing" as of any other irreducible complexity. This is really one.

I read, yesterday, that chimps have 25 sounds. Well, many languages have 25 phonemes or less. But with the chimp the 25 sounds aren't phonemes without own meaning, they are messages. And they are stuck with 25 messages. If the sounds were articulated, that is a "hoo" mentally divided into an "h" part and an "oo" part, and if there were any substitute for "h", as there is for "oo", they might have lots more. An infinity of messages, potentially, like man has.

This human equipment of such complex relations between sound and meaning cannot have developed by human thought or ingenuity, but is rather one of the cornerstones of this. An ape stuck with 25 vocal or 300 sign language messages could not start to work it out.

We must give glory to God for giving Adam a language, and for, at Babel, causing confusion to be still a linguistic confusion, and not just a confusion.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Cergy, France
Wednesday after
Second Lord's Day in Lent
24.II.2016

mardi 16 février 2016

Distant Starlight Problem Complicated by Heliocentric Creationist


Citing John G. Hartnett:

A binary pair of black holes were observed to coalesce—the first time their existence confirmed.

Their distance, determined from luminosity, is about 1.3 billion light-years.

The black holes had masses of 36 M (mass of Sun) and 29 M before coalescence and 62 M after they combined. An equivalent of 3 M was radiated away as gravitational waves.

There is very high confidence that the event seen at two widely separated sites must be real. The quality of the detected signals are high and were the same at each site.

This is, in principle, repeatable (with other binary sources) and therefore is operational science. No fudge factors were invoked.

From What impact does the detection of gravitational waves have on biblical creation?
By John G. Hartnett Published: 16 February 2016 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/detection-of-gravitational-waves-and-biblical-creation


  • 1) No fudge factor involved in identifying the two things coalescing into one as black holes, with the implications that usually carries of ultra high density and gravitational blackouting of light coming to close?

    Has simple absence of stars been ruled out?

    Have angels coming between stars sometimes blackouted by "black holes" and us been ruled out?

    Have angels making halos been ruled out for the famous "halo around black hole" phenomenon?

  • 2) No fudge factor involved in determining distance to them as "about 1.3 billion light-years" and that "determined from luminosity"?

    Luminosity x around a black hole corresponds to red shift y is not a fudge factor?

    And red shift y corresponding to such and such a distance z is very definitely a fudge factor, depending ultimately on step one in "cosmic distance ladder".

  • 3) No fudge factor involved in identifying original "masses of black holes" as 36 and 29 solar masses? No fudge factor involved in identifying new "mass" of new "black hole" as 62 solar masses (rather than expected 65, leaving 3 as radiation, which is of course not a fudge factor, except in guess identifying loss of gravitation with radiation)?

    Measuring densities depend on measuring that of the Sun, hence solar masses as unit (abbreviated M, as per article). But we have no means of directly doing that, we are extrapolating from supposed gravitational only causality of a supposed heliocentric close range of the cosmos. No angels carrying either Sun or Moon or Jupiter or anything around Earth periodically in relation to Zodiac, leaves a gravitational only causality and heliocentrism, leaves a calculation of solar mass.

    This is then compared to other supposedly equally gravitation only caused phenomena, in this case perhaps "how much light is caught" - which depends on how much light there would have passed on to us if there hadn't been that black hole, which is speculation.

    No fudge factors, seriously?

  • 4) I am not really totally confident about the radiation detected being gravitational waves as opposed to other sort. But I am too little familiar with the construction of apparatus to detect where a fudge factor could be in the apparatus. However, gravitation may be a misunderstanding of what happens when things fall to the ground, either of the two main modern ways of describing it, meaning that we are not quite able to rule out that what was measured and what gravitation is supposed to be are two different things, from each other and from what gravitation really is.


Sure, the event was really an event. It was really observed.

It presumably followed natural laws really put in place by God during creation week. Or it certainly did so, since both miracles and ordinary events follow these laws.

But is the understanding of natural laws applied by the scientists coinciding with these natural laws as they really are? Or is it only coinciding partially, where a gross deviation would be grossly detectable at very close hand (like, not light years away from observer and therefore from only one angle) and therefore end the misunderstanding very quickly?

As to the famous "biblical creationist starlight-travel-time problem", Geocentrism and angelic movers take care of it, since they make what is classified as "parallax" (which is first step of cosmic distance ladder) a misclassification of what is really happening and therefore make furthest away verified distances those which can be verified by detecting angle of sunlight on a reflecting object as well as to us and object's angle seen from us (distance to sun giving the famous one distance needed to work out two more in a triangle, with at least three known values).

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Tuesday after
I Lord's Day of Lent
16.II.2016

jeudi 4 février 2016

Medieval Italian Neanderthal?


1) Those REAL Old Jamborees ... , 2) Did Noah suffer like Winston - undefeated?, 3) Medieval Italian Neanderthal?

From CMI today:

More recently it was also revealed that bones and teeth found in San Bernardino Cave, Italy, which had been classified as belonging to Homo neanderthalensis in rock layers thought to be 28,000–59,000 years old, were misidentified and have now been reclassified as belonging to a Medieval Italian male living in the 1400s!


Reference:

Benazzi, S., et al., A reassessment of the presumed Neandertal remains from San Bernardino Cave, Italy, J Hum Evol. 66:89-94, 2014 | doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.09.009; sciencedirect.com, searching which I found it on Academia.edu : Benazzi, S., Peresani, M., Talamo, S., Fu, Q., Mannino, M.A., Richards, M.P., Hublin, J.-J. (2014) A reassessment of the presumed Neandertal remains from San Bernardino Cave, Italy. Journal of Human Evolution. 66:89-94.

Here is the abstract:

In 1986-1987, three human remains were unearthed from macro-unit II of San Bernardino Cave (Berici Hills, Veneto, Italy), a deposit containing a late Mousterian lithic assemblage. The human remains (adistal phalanx, a lower right third molar and a lower right second deciduous incisor) do not showdiagnostic morphological features that could be used to determine whether they were from Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens. Despite being of small size, and thus more similar to recent H. sapiens,the specimens were attributed to Neandertals, primarily because they were found in Mousterian layers. We carried out a taxonomic reassessment of the lower right third molar (LRM3; San Bernardino 4) using digital morphometric analysis of the root, ancient DNA analysis, carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses,and direct accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating of dentine collagen. Mitochondrial DNA analysis and root morphology show that the molar belongs to a modern human and not to a Neandertal. Carbon 14 (14C) dating of the molar attributes it to the end of the Middle Ages (1420-1480 cal AD, 2 sigma). Carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses suggest that the individual in question hada diet similar to that of Medieval Italians. These results show that the molar, as well as the other two human remains, belong to recent H. sapiens and were introduced in the Mousterian levels post-depositionally.

© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


So the previous identification of a Neanderthal living 28 to 59 thousand years ago had nothing to do with radiocarbon dating?

Not directly. Perhaps some "early" Mousterian have been radiocarbon dated as 59 thousand years ago. And perhaps some "late" Mousterian have been radiocarbon dated as 28 thousand years ago - but once this is done, Mousterian is diagnosed on what the deposits look like.

Note that the limit dates for Mousterian are what CMI have sometimes said are acceptable carbon dates for deposits from Flood - this means Mousterian culture might be a pre-Flood stone age.

Other indications of "Stone age" Neanderthals being pre-Flood is that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA differs from that of "modern man". However, the mitochondrial DNA of the three daughters-in-law of Noah should be the one we have now, that meaning they did not have mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthal type. And this means any Neanderthal implication in tribe of Japheth and Sem more than that of Ham would mean that Mrs Japheth had a Neanderthal father, and a non-Neanderthal mother, Mrs Sem too, but perhaps less so.

Since the pre-Flood scenario for pre-historic certainly human stone age remains cannot be "post-Flood Gilligan's Island scenario", this leaves us with two possibilities for the situation of Neanderthals in pre-Flood world, if using Mousterian technology.

  • 1) the one implied by the recent film Noah is that pre-Flood culture was generally a stone age one;
  • 2) one other I have suggested in a post here I am linking back to: stone age people could have been in penitential colonies or some kind of "boy scouts on jamborees" type of voluntary self privation of technological assets.


Supposing Europe was used as some kind of Gulag or New South Wales, and supposing Noah chose the wives for his sons in the last moment, it might make sense, seeing he was facing some kind of Gilligan's Island scenario, to choose at least one or two wives for sons from people having known technological privations.

But perhaps "28 to 59 thousand years ago" for Mousterian has nothing to do with carbon dating, it is all non-carbon methods (all of which are less reliable)?

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Andrea Corsini
4.II.2016