Good morning everyone! I am a huge fan of the online video revolution. I found some good videos last night I want to share with the new DKos video sharing syntax thingy.
I know there is a great spirtual battle going on these days between the believer and the non-believer, with the booms, snapping, and screaming sounds of the front lines coming from the area of evolution. I am one who has always maintained there is no direct conflict between evolution and the Bible. Whatever side of the line you start on, I believe it is in everyone's best interests to educate themselves as completely as possible to the matter of the debate. Know your enemy as they say, if you want to get that passionate about it. I don't.
I have always had a great interest in science. And for some reason that interest has deepened greatly these past few years. I believe Google, DailyKos, Wikipedia, and YouTube combining to give me instant gratification for my curiousity are some of the best places to look for answers as to why. I am content that intellectualism is being reborn. And I am making a commitment to nuturing intellectualism's growth this year.
I am starting with some video lectures I found with Richard Dawkins (personal home page). Richard Dawkins (Wikipedia link) "is a British ethologist (a sophisticated kind of animal behaviorist), evolutionary biologist and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University". He is at the center of the debate, one of the Field Marshalls in the war, of evolutionary science vs Creationism, now cloaked as "Intelligent Design".
Dawkins is also perhaps more known as the World's most outspoken atheist (link to his foundation for spreading reason). Where I not aligned with him in his disbelief in the existence of God, I am completely aligned with him in his desire to tamper down the belief in creationist mythology. And I can tell you plainly and clearly why here.
I was raised as a Christian, in a family with a Methodist background, and attended Sunday School for years in an Assembly of God. I have even experienced the event of being born again and was very devout and with the Holy Spirit from when I was in 3rd grade. But that is all I am going to say about that, because being born again or not has nothing to do with evolution. Thats just background noise. This diary is not about that.
It doesn't matter how long it took for the Earth to actually come into the form we see with our own eyes today because no man was there to see it. It's not relevant to our behavior. Too many people are concerned about the things that they cannot see and never will, like what other people are doing with their private parts and in their bodies, and not what is right before them, like the suffering of others through war, corruption, or natural misfortune. There is far more greater sin that we can see with our own eyes, yet most of us cannot see. Jesus never talked about abortion or gays, not to mention condemning them, but he did warn condemnation for the rich man who cant get his camel through the eye of the needle (which contrary to popular knowledge was a small door in the side of a city wall instead of going through the main gate).
I also don't believe that God interferes with the happenings of this earth. I am basically a Deist, with a deep understanding of Jesus and what he meant, as well as a deep understanding of the contradictions in those that claim to follow him and how they flail about in almost every direction imaginable, all claiming to be in the direction he told them to work in. My understanding, my belief, which has not evaporated - it's not even down to a singularity with all that I know about science - in God, and even Jesus and the Holy Spirit, is not challenged by the failings of others. It is also unlikely that most people could reveal to me something that I have not had thoughts about already. Like many, I think about these things very often, and I am not idle in my exploration of knowledge about them, especially these last few years. You could say my faith has evolved. (Sorry, there is no closet here. WYSIWYG)
So I have no qualms about giving you links to a very old 1991 Richard Dawkins series that I found called "Waking Up in the Universe". I figure what the hell, now that DKos allows video links! :) I figure older is better because technology has moved so fast its interesting to take a look back first. There are many other Dawkins videos to be found out there.
Although I thought alot while watching this, I only have three thoughts to share right now. First, I think pointing out where we now trust science, like the swinging pendulum example you'll see in the video, in our everyday lives is very essential to getting the value, the impact on our realities, across about science. We take far far too much for granted now, which is the way our intellectualism was lost recently in the first place. To get the point across there should be many more examples of where else we completely trust specifically our safety, even our lives, to science that was unthinkable a few short centuries ago. Jesus probably won't help you if you think you can jump out of an airplane without a parachute and survive. That sort of thing.
It's like how recently Republicans responded to a jab at their pocketbooks in relation to minimum wage. Pinch them where they feel it!
Second, refering again to video content, whenever I have had that hunch that someone would call, and they did, I knew they were going to call. Other similar events were they same. I'm just not prone to random guesses on events like that because I have no evidence for ESP scientifically. None-the-less they do happen, and I knew they were going to when they did, when I usually think nothing. I have had a few other strange (para-normal) events in my life, and while I am aware of the possible psychiatric explanations for them, they are on my logbooks as simple matter of fact. So there is a slight twist to my Deism.
Third, Dawkins and others often take the wrong approach to getting converts. I think what they are asking is too much to ask for the average human's conciousness. Usually the unconcious leads, and the concious mind is dragged along kicking and screaming when it knows its being dragged, or quitely in the wagon sucking a passifier when it hasn't been told. Republican propagandizing types know this (as well as some advertisers, and it is a more sophisticated field than most would ever suspect). Evolution supporters tend to expect nothing but a complete conversion to their way of thinking, and they can be quite unforgiving, as evidence in the subtleties of their additudes, which is very frequently picked up by timid sensitive types. I can understand the frustration. But understand even going the other way is a monumental event for a person.
To use Dawkin's word, there is a meme out there about being able to lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. They aught to look at the problem the same way, and it can be expressed mathematically. The model they should take into account for this measure is one where they can see that they should try to bring people as close to the line, the propper function, as they can get. But rather than attempting to reach x, they should only attempt to approach x as close as possible without ever actually reaching it.
Here is another way of looking at it. A person being watched approaching a black hole is never going to cross the event horizon all at once, but rather he is going to spaghetify almost atom for atom, spinning around the black hole in a long thread over and over again until he disappears (or appears to disapear).
Yet from that persons perspective he may experience... nothing. There may be nothing that tells him he is even near a black hole.
You only need to change the vector and give him a little push. Let the black hole do the work. (Let Jesus do the rest, eh?)
See, thinking in parables has it's advantages (metaphorically speaking).
I believe that the topic of Evolution is something we have to get past as a country because if so many people are clinging to biological mythology they may never quite get it when it comes to global climate change and be able to see even beyond the 100 year predictions for what we are responsible for.
So here is lecture 1 of a 5 lecture series:
Richard Dawkins
Royal Institute of Christmas Lectures:
Lecture 1: Waking Up in the Universe.
(7 parts, roughly 9 minutes each):
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7: