1. Spanish parliament to extend rights to apes

Comment #200290 by lbq on June 27, 2008 at 9:02 am

In Sweden ALL vertebrates are protected, unless there's a statutory season on them (like moose e.g.) And there's no season on chimps ... I think all animals (including us) should have all the human rights they can understand and use.

2. How to reconcile Richard Dawkins?

Comment #172231 by lbq on April 29, 2008 at 11:16 am

It has already been said before, but I say it again. The statement that "Marxism itself acts something like a religion in its appeal to a higher power -- the Party, rather than God" is false. Pseudo-religions have indeed been created utilising some Marxian terminology, but you cannot find even the slightest adulation of any higher power, either a party or a hypostasised history, in his writings. And mind you, I am one of the probably few people who have read practically ALL of Marx, and ALL of Darwin! Karl Marx was an even more consistent disbeliever than Prof. Dawkins ...

But I know of course that it is considered perfectly good form to write at length about Marx without ever having read a line by him. Just the way creationists treat Darwin, in fact.

3. Religion a figment of human imagination

Comment #171798 by lbq on April 28, 2008 at 8:46 pm

Bloch is wrong. First, a belief in the afterlife is a very recent phenomenon. A belief in an after-death paradise arose first with the Hellenistic mystery cults, so it's not integral to religion.

Second, his timing is wrong. At the time when he thinks religion arose (40,000 years ago, when modern man arrived in Europe, needless to say) modern humans had already spread to nearly all corners of the Old World. And all their descendants have religion. So it is a common derived character and must be older than the split into local groups (there is no molecular evidence for a late replacement). Does he think that the Cro-Magnon sent a group of missionaries to Australia by Quantas?

4. My quest to get de-baptised

Comment #153703 by lbq on April 1, 2008 at 9:28 pm

I was routinely baptized in the Church of Sweden (Lutheran) in 1936. In 1950 Sweden changed the law so you could leve the CoS without entering another community authorized by the Royal Majesty. In 1951 I went to the Parish Office and seceded. No problems. Now being baptized is a historical fact and cannot be undone, but by my leaving the church, its religious consequences were. At that time the CoS was still tending the population registers so I remained in them - now the Revenue Office does. Give unto Caesar ... Needless to say, my children and grandchildren are not baptised.

5. The coming religious peace

Comment #132871 by lbq on February 25, 2008 at 10:51 am

The reason why the US is so religious is that a nation once founded by Enlightenment fathers was swamped by immigrants from the European backwoods who had never left the Middle Ages (in many cases the Dark Ages).

My worry is that in times of economic and poliical adversity and desperation, people usually fall back on ideological primitivity. This is what happend in Germany during the early 1930's. If Americans perceive that the economic base of their lives, and also the status of the USA in the world, are coming unstuck, the result can easily be a wave of political and religious fanaticism - and a new Iran, this time with proven weapons of mass destruction sufficient to blow us all to Kingdom None. That will be a brave new future.

6. The Dog Allusion

Comment #128534 by lbq on February 17, 2008 at 10:21 am

There is one somewhat important difference between gods and dogs. Dogs exist.

And cats.

7. Study: Religion colors Americans' views of nanotechnology

Comment #128532 by lbq on February 17, 2008 at 10:17 am

If nanotech is offensive because it does not exist in nature, then not only plastic and other synthetics, but alloyed metals (including even carbon steel and bronze) must be prohibited as evil Meaning that religious Americans have to go back to the Stone Age where they indeed belong.

USA and Afghanistan (possibly with Iran) constitute the Fifth World - the Heart of Darkness.

8. The Mind of the Market

Comment #109843 by lbq on January 9, 2008 at 10:38 pm

Virtue? In advertising, maybe. Google says 'don't be evil'. But they help the Chinese government to block critical sites and to nab dissidents. The market is founded on greed - the simplest form of short-term selfish greed.

9. Could there be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?

Comment #104973 by lbq on December 30, 2007 at 8:09 am

A propos of the amazing geometry of the honeycomb, Karl Marx once remarked that "the crucial difference between the worst of architects, and the best of bees, is that the human architect raised his building in his imagination, before he raised it in reality."

10. Blair converts to Catholicism

Comment #102577 by lbq on December 23, 2007 at 8:57 am

To revert to the language of the Vatican: Asinus asinum fricat - meaning that one ass rubs itself against the other one.

11. Clegg 'does not believe in God'

Comment #101917 by lbq on December 21, 2007 at 6:54 am

"I'd rather be a child in the Clegg household than one brought up by two parents who were both fundamentalist Christian, Fascist, Communist or Atheist."
I take the strongest exception possible to this. I and my wife are both Communists (or at least Marxists), none of us is a fundamentalist, and my children grew up as sane, balanced non-believers, except in human decency. Yes, I have seen (and fought) some fundamentalist self-appointed commies - and also a considerably larger number of fundamentalist Liberals.

12. Sorry to disappoint, but it's nonsense to suggest we want to ban Christmas

Comment #101907 by lbq on December 21, 2007 at 6:24 am

We do not have this discussion in Sweden, because there is no Christmas to steal. If it ever existed, the retail trade stole it long ago. - Also, Sunday turnout in the churches is now down below 1%. And we have in fact never celebrated Christmas. It is Jul (Yule), the old winter solstice festival, and if it ever had any Christian varnish, it is long gone.

13. Happy Newton Day!

Comment #99023 by lbq on December 15, 2007 at 8:55 am

Very amusing contortions, these. We Scandinavians do not celebrate Christmas, but Jul (Yule), the old pagan solstice festival. Attempts to christianise it have not been too successful, it remains essentially the Great Pagan Pork-Eating Festival. No way you could assimilate that to either Chanukkah or Ramadan! And we do not have Santa or Father Christmas either, but Tomten - a sanitised and dressed up version of the old farmstead gnome, originally the spirit of the ancestral founder. If you did not put out a nice bowl of porridge to him on Julafton (Christmas Eve) he might get pissed off and burn the place down. God Jul to you all!

14. Poll finds more Americans believe in devil than Darwin

Comment #93884 by lbq on December 4, 2007 at 11:42 am

I suspect that what the American majority wants is the Middle Ages with modern conveniences, and that this is what they will have - until the conveniences begin to deteriorate due to deteriorating science. In other words, just like Iran.

15. The absurd world of Martin Amis

Comment #90493 by lbq on November 25, 2007 at 10:34 am

Show me one single revealed religion which is not totalitarian. The reason why some Christians today can accept things like tolerance, democracy and respect for other people is that they live in societies that have, up till now, been so economically successful that people have got more diverting things on their minds than the public burning of heretics. All holy writs of revealed religion contain commandments to commit genocide, homicide and general unspeakable atrocities. Even now, there are Christians that are ready to put these things into practice. One brand of madness is not appreciably saner than the other.

16. Taking Science on Faith

Comment #90485 by lbq on November 25, 2007 at 9:48 am

Of course science is ultimately based on certain assumptions about the universe being at least largely understandable by reason, etc. But this is not 'faith', but something like a working hypothesis. The fact that you can have working, heuristic and even applicable science on this basis, is very good evidence that the hypothesis is a good one.

Faith on the other hand does not lead to anything even remotely like rational understanding, and the only application coming out of it seems to be fundamentalistic mayhem. This is why there are no separate but equal 'magisteria' for science and religion, as Gould thought. Religion is not a magisterium. It won't be able to tell us anything without acquiring some rational credibility first.

17. Neanderthals May Have Had Gene for Speech

Comment #80091 by lbq on October 19, 2007 at 11:31 pm

Certain paleoanthropologists, not least of them Dr. Ian Tattersall, have been spreading a theory that language ability in its entirely arose suddenly through a mutation in archaic Homo sapiens (i.e. very late). In other words, Neanderthal, Erectus and all other hominids were dumb. I always found this saltationist theory to border on the miraculistic—it reminds me of God and Adam in the roof of the Sixtine Chapel! I am happy if mounting evidence brings this theory into disrepute, which I am sure will happen. Congrats, Dr. Pääbo.

18. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams criticizes popular atheist writers

Comment #78662 by lbq on October 14, 2007 at 6:39 am

The Church of England (like the Church of Sweden, which I was nominally baptized into) has never been known for believing in anything particular, except the established order, including itself of course. So it is not really possible to accuse it of being religious. It is simply the Royal Board of Ceremonies.—The C. of Sweden was disestablished, more or less, in 2000, and its membership is going down precipitously. This would undoubtedly happen in Britain too, if the British should have a fit of religious freedom.

19. Ban teachers from religious dress, Quebec group says

Comment #77661 by lbq on October 10, 2007 at 3:23 am

To my mind, this is extremely simple: religious freedom. This means that PUPILS, if they choose, must be allowed to wear religios symbols in school, though a niqab of course may have to be banned as it creates severe problems in class. Who IS that girl really?
But at the same time, religious freedom demands that at least publicly funded schools must be secular. This means that they must not try to impose religious belief on the pupils, either directly or indirectly, by the flaunting of religious symbols. (And religious schools should not be permitted, as they force religion on defenceless children.) Though frankly, I see the Sikh turban as more ethnic than really religious. Especially as Sikhism does not proselytize.
So all in all, I see the Council's stance as completely consistent.

20. I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

Comment #76934 by lbq on October 7, 2007 at 9:49 pm

My objection is not to what Mr Venter did, but to his language. Chromosome? Bacteria don't have chromosomes. Only eukaryotes do, in the nucleus that prokaryotes don't have. They have their genes strung in a loop swimming in the cell plasm. If that is what Mr Venter created, he should say so. What he has created is in fact a new genome (if this is all the genes that the new bacrerium has) and this to me sounds just as impressive.

21. Why are we Muslims so self-destructive?

Comment #73965 by lbq on September 26, 2007 at 11:59 pm

Islam is a kind of early Protestantism, i.e. a fundamentalist reaction to a Chrisrtianity which had already compromised very deeply with the general Oriental-Post-Hellenistic religious thinking of the time. Protestantism too is essentially fundamentalistic (the Roman church did actually regard a literal reading of the Bible as heretical) and it was originally equally violent and fanatical.
Incredibly, you could still be prosecuted for blasphemy in Sweden as late as the 1960's. In Western Europe, fundamentalism had its teeth pulled, one by one, by modernism but most of all by economic development. People did find other and more rewarding uses for their time than burning witches. This is starting to happen in the Moslem world too, which explains the stridency and general panic of the Islamist demagogues. In the West too, there are demagogues and hate-mongers on both sides who incite to sectarian violence. Like in ex-Yugoslavia, it's a cheap and direct route to political power — at least in your own "community".

22. Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal

Comment #73490 by lbq on September 25, 2007 at 5:13 am

Protestantism is of course a fundamentalist movement (just as Islam was, a thousand years before). Nobody in his right mind at any Medieval university would have insisted on a literal reading of the Scripture. Not even the most obnoxious of the Fathers of the Church did, and the Roman Church does not, today. But America was basically settled by screaming, illiterate witch-burning Protestant fanatics from the boondocks of Europe. And this is why the American situation is what it is. Here in Europe, we educated our peasantry, and encouraged them to educate themselves. I understand that in the U.S.A., this would have been regarded as impolitic.

23. Root and Branch

Comment #73481 by lbq on September 25, 2007 at 4:35 am

Mr. Hacking does I presume 'believe' in evolution, evidence and rationality in general. Whatever 'believe' might mean in this connexion. But there is clearly something he believes in even more, and that is Politeness.

Being polite means that you must never sound as if you believed in whatever you are saying. It means never sounding as if you were serious about anything. This being the case, he must of necessity prefer any mealy-mouthed, well-oiled charlatan to anybody who is impolite enough to use such vulgar words as 'reason', 'evidence' or (God forbid!) 'truth'.

This nice person who Mr. Hacking prefers, is "professor" Behe.

If anybody ever threatened Mr. Hacking with a meat cleaver, I am certain that he would be careful to protest, if at all, only in the most polite manner. Impolite defense would be out of the question. Sometime around 1940 some people in the M.I.6 proposed that a good way to end the unpleasantness would be to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The idea was firmly turned down as "not cricket". As if Herr Hitler had ever played cricket in his life!

Polite noises are wasted on the enemies of reason, because they are not very polite themselves. I carry no special torch for Richard Dawkins – he entertains some distinctly strange ideas about species, speciation (basically, like Calvin Coolidge's pastor on Sin, he seems to be against it) and evolution in general. But he is fully rational, he is not, like Mr. Hacking, ashamed of it, and he dares call superstition superstition. To me, this is more important, in these days, than mere politeness.