For other questions related to atheism - a new blog

somewhere else

To a man who called me "brother" today (and who reads this blog)

I leave to God whether we are brothers, both in the true Church or not.

When I was Roumanian Orthodox, I did not abjure Roman Catholicism, though I did not believe Papacy. When I went back to Roman Catholicism, I broke no oath. When Benedict XVI ended the supposed excommunication sentence of 1988, that gave me back some confidence Papacy or Tradition where the Popes are was not lost.

I say this to be neither before men, nor before God a liar, nor to be judged by your bishop, whoever he be, as such.

I still think, when we talk of bishops, that the Roumanian one fell short of truth in such a solemn moment as an Easter Pastoral back in 2008. Sin is sin. Temptation is temptation. Error is error. Madness is madness and idiocy is idiocy. Mixing the former three with the latter into a broad category like "sicknesses of the soul" which resembles too much the modern term "mental illness" did scandalise me then, and remains objectionable now.

But brothers or not, I bear you no grudge in your person. Being funny - unless at same time hurting me - and being charitable in a funny way does end grudges where I am concerned. Usually that is. Unless there is an arrière-pensée on your part.

St Thomas Aquinas, St Robert Bellarmine, pray for me, that I loose not my uprightness and Christian freedom to Orientals quicker to anger and error than to charity!

As for you, keep praying and fasting as well as you can, and if God gives you confidence in Papacy, so much the better.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Georges Pompidou
11-III-2011

PS: "brother" I hope to be taken in a general Christian sense. I am opposed to free masons and all their lodges, from Grand Orient to P2, and - despite what seem to me to be rumours to the contrary - I am most certainly not a monk.

Agassiz vs Gray

Louis Agassiz was a zoologist. Asa Gray was a botanist. They were Harvard professors in Darwin's day.

As I have already noted speciation by polyploidy is no problem for plants. Even in animals, variation within chromosomes keeping their number is no problem, but mammalian as well as plant species have differring chromosome numbers. And though slightly decreasing ones might just be feasible, increasing ones is a major problem if not an outright impossibility. I do not reckon there is a real feasible possibility for it. This message as well as this one deal with it.

You have guessed it, Louis Agassiz being a zoologist was anti-Darwin, his arguments are reused by Creationists to this day. Asa Gray, being a botanist was pro-Darwin.

Subsequent major Darwinists in the following decades were more Lamarckist than purely Darwinist not to mention Darwinist Mendelian. They did not come up as much with good explanations, as with mere discoveries -- I think the Dinosaurs were dealt with back then. Though their discoveries bolstered an impression of "once the fauna was different, so probably fauna, including its details the species has evolved", in explanatory and theoretical terms, they did not dare be fully Darwinist. Leaning too much on environment natural selection and adaption edge of the pair natural selection vs variation as they did is in reality saying, as Lamarck did, that adaptions made with a goal during an animals lifetime can be genetically transmitted. Which is an explanation that heredity has blown to pieces.

HGL

What about Dinosaurs?

My main theory about Tyrannosaurs Rex is that it was a mutation or genetical engineering product with far greater size than the ordinary samples of that species. A bit like this:

Papa Smurf tries to create a new fertilizer, but it transforms an ordinary flower into a smurfivore plant. After destroying the plant, two smurfs try to get rid of the fertilizer throwing it in a lonely place. However, a bird swallows it and becomes a huge, destructive monster named the "Howlibird". The Howlibird destroys the smurf village and the smurfs escape to an old tower.

quoted from wiki article

A few weeks or months ago, China had found fossiles of a species like T Rex, but one hundred times smaller. Here. What if T Rex is to this as the Howlibird? I mean, "More than 30 specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex have been identified, some of which are nearly complete skeletons." "More than 30"="less than 40" in language, though that is not quite so in Mathematics. "All three of these latter specimens are smaller than the first.". Nanotyrannus are by some counted as juvenile exemplars (two of them, first only one skull) of T Rex. What if they are right about species being same, but wrong about which is both normal and adult? Teratophoneus ... is known from an incomplete skull and postcranial skeleton recovered from the Kaiparowits Formation. "Alioramus is known from the holotypes of A. remotus and A. altai." A fuller quote from Daspletosaurus is in order:

The type specimen of Daspletosaurus torosus (CMN 8506) is a partial skeleton including the skull, the shoulder, a forelimb, the pelvis, a femur and all of the vertebrae from the neck, torso and hip, as well as the first eleven tail vertebrae. ... Aside from the type, there is only one other well-known specimen, a complete skeleton discovered in 2001. ... The Oldman Formation was deposited during the middle Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, from about 77 to 76 Ma (million years ago).

I quote the last bit, because I think it worth while to note that, as any other young earth creationist would say, I believe there is this Oldman Formation, I am more than doutful about "Campanian stage of Late Cretaceous", and in the 77 to 76 million years ago, I have no faith at all. The no longer living animal itself, of course, is dated from the rock it is found in and thus from this estimate about 77 to 76 million years ago.

Another problem: Spinosaurus:

On the basis of a photograph of the lower jaw and a photograph of the entire specimen as mounted, Smith concluded that Stromer's original 1915 drawings were slightly inaccurate. In 2003, Oliver Rauhut suggested that Stromer's Spinosaurus holotype was a chimera, composed of vertebrae and neural spines from a carcharodontosaurid similar to Acrocanthosaurus and a dentary from Baryonyx or Suchomimus.:35−36 This analysis was rejected in at least one subsequent paper.

All other specimens are partial only. One from leg, some from snout or teeth. I suspect that the rejection of the chimera theory in that subsequent paper was necessary to keep up Paleontology as an Academic and supposedly scientific theory.

I have already touched upon this problem earlier on.

As for this:
link, not image upload - am not into the share alike since my conditions are here - by Franko Fonseca, it seems the teeth are teeth, but I am not as sure the bone is bone.

You see, there are fossils and fossils. Petrified skeletons are one type. Oops. Petrification is not the only kind of fossilisation. There is also Permineralisation:

Permineralized fossils preserve original cell structure, which can help scientists study an organism at the cellular level. These are three-dimensional fossils, which create permanent molds of internal structures. The mineralization process itself helps prevent tissue compaction, which distorts the actual size of organs. A permineralized fossil will also reveal much about the environment an organism lived in and the substances found in it since it preserves soft body parts. This helps researchers investigate the plants, animals, and microbes of different time periods. Examples of permineralization (:) Most dinosaur bones are permineralized. (...)

OK. Seems it might not be an artefact after all then. At least not a human one. Which of course is no guarantee the beast itself was wholly natural in origin.

If modern day weapon developers are going to try to take a cue from what might be the work of pre-flood genetical scientists, let us study the art of dragon-killing, in such literature as we have, it might turn out useful.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris V, Buffon
(appropriately enough!)
22-II-2011

Martin Amis is bad even as evolutionists go.

Here is what he says.

Now, if evolution of society, more precisely medicine, has posed a "problem" like men living "too long", obviously evolution of diseases - resistent bacteria and global pandemies - might be more than he wishes for to deal with the "problem". And dealing with it in other ways - his ways: euthanasia, abortion, contraception, gay liberal agenda - will not help avoiding that klind of thing.

I wonder if people reasoned like that before the Flood of Noah*. After it, God shortened the lifespan of man, and to judge from when Set got his son, and so forth up to Noah, God also hurried puberty. Medicine will not enable us to live as long as Methusalem, and so neither saying puberty comes too soon or saying death comes too late will do any kind of "good" to society. Any kind that is, that God could agree with. It seems what God did was a grim poetic irony on what people weresaying before the Flood. And what Martin Amis seems set on repeating.

OK: the rainbow means there will not be another flood. But provocations like that to the author life ... well, reread Apocalypse* or some prophecy about the Great Chastisement, will you!

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Buffon, Paris V
18-I-2011

*I fear when these kind of naturalists read some supranatural disaster stories, it is more like Babylonic mis-representation of why flood happened (these idolaters thought one of their gods could not stand the hubbub of men, and caused disaster by going mad: God preserve us from idolaters acting like those gods!)

o-x.fr is back

this is about previous post
it was temporarily down, but yesterday it was back again (maybe a day before that, but I did not look)

Was a French URL shortener blocked or destroyed because of linking here?

• a) there used to be an url shortener called http://o-x.fr ;
  
• b) it used to link to two messages here http://o-x.fr/lsf being English index and http://o-x.fr/q2oe being French index concerning messages on another blog, whereas http://o-x.fr/foo linked to a denunciation of transhumanism as evolutionary project (on a previous blogger profile that was disconnected without me doing so);
  
• c) there was also a lot of porn and medication links being shortened on http://o-x.fr but any link going to a bad site that had recently been clicked or shortened could be signalled to webmaster, so it was not a problem of daunting proportions;
  
• d) I had written - among other things - creationist stuff on an MSN Group called Antimodernism too: it was disconnected with all other ones in February 2009: we got a warning and I managed to save some to this blogger profile in time. Unfortunately a man whom I had asked to help me in the saving of messages turned out to be a free mason. When I found out, I unfriended him at LinkedIn. But the damage was done: I had had insufficient access to internet during the interval to save all, he had been trusted and ... done nothing to save a single message as far as I could tell. Parts of my written production is gone. MSN's excuse was that they had found a better technology: I had a minor MSN Group which I tried to transfer, and it worked out miserably.


• e) Now http://o-x.fr has been "not found on this server" since a cache 15 december. No news has been sent to anyone or anything in the media about the disappearance of a major internet utility like this URL shortener. Any one see some kind of pattern?
  HGL