Homogenous Adoption

Here.

Been meaning to link a summary of these stories.

The mysteries of TENS (Theory Of Evolution By Natural Selection)

By Vox Day at Vox Popoli:


 Dr. James M. Tour of Rice University confesses he simply cannot grasp what everyone at Scienceblogs and the Panda's Thumb and Richarddawkins.net just knows to be true. Because science.

I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.

I don’t understand evolution, and I will confess that to you. Is that OK, for me to say, “I don’t understand this”? Is that all right? I know that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand anything about organic synthesis, but they understand evolution. I understand a lot about making molecules; I don’t understand evolution. And you would just say that, wow, I must be really unusual.

Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.

I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”

If you understand evolution, I am fine with that. I’m not going to try to change you – not at all. In fact, I wish I had the understanding that you have.

But about seven or eight years ago I posted on my Web site that I don’t understand. And I said, “I will buy lunch for anyone that will sit with me and explain to me evolution, and I won’t argue with you until I don’t understand something – I will ask you to clarify. But you can’t wave by and say, “This enzyme does that.” You’ve got to get down in the details of where molecules are built, for me. Nobody has come forward.

The Atheist Society contacted me. They said that they will buy the lunch, and they challenged the Atheist Society, “Go down to Houston and have lunch with this guy, and talk to him.” Nobody has come! Now remember, because I’m just going to ask, when I stop understanding what you’re talking about, I will ask. So I sincerely want to know. I would like to believe it. But I just can’t.

Now, I understand microevolution, I really do. We do this all the time in the lab. I understand this. But when you have speciation changes, when you have organs changing, when you have to have concerted lines of evolution, all happening in the same place and time – not just one line – concerted lines, all at the same place, all in the same environment … this is very hard to fathom.

I was in Israel not too long ago, talking with a bio-engineer, and [he was] describing to me the ear, and he was studying the different changes in the modulus of the ear, and I said, “How does this come about?” And he says, “Oh, Jim, you know, we all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.”

Smells like quality science. And before the usual science fetishists leap in to assert the obvious and declare: "yeah, well, that doesn't prove God exists," I will readily admit that it does not. But, (and here is the point), it does prove that there are very rational reasons to doubt the unevidenced assertion that "evolution is a fact".

As I have repeatedly pointed out, I am an evolution skeptic, not an evolution denier. I do not judge the truth of the belief by the behavior of the believer, although if I did, the behavior of the evolutionary true believers would be sufficient to convince me that the existence of unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns combined is considerably more likely than fish magically turning into monkeys over time due to beneficial mutations taking advantage of the multitude of changes in the water.

Has Christianity held back the progress of science? What about Galileo?

By Wintery Knight :

First, here’s an article from the peer-reviewed journal Nature, probably the best peer-reviewed journal on science in the world.

The article is written by James Hannam. He has a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (published in the UK as God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science).

Excerpt:

Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.

Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.

That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.

Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.

I hope this will set the record straight – Judeo-Christian monotheism created the enterprise of experimental science.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory

The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities

The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life

The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information

The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion

Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones

Irreducible complexity in molecular machines

The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation

Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason

Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason

William Lane Craig’s moral argument

The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

Arguments and scientific evidence for non-physical minds

Causes/Reasons For The War Of Southern Independence

One of the major causes of the War Of Southern Independence, and among the chief motivating factors behind the deep Southern commitment to the fight evidenced by the widespread volunteerism of the so-called "Southern yeoman" who owned no slaves and had no stake in slavery, was the smug presumption to moral and even spiritual superiority of so many in the North, abolitionists and New Enlganders in particular. The stench of condescension and hypocrisy was particularly foul to Southerners of the day, which is not surprising since so many of them were of "Scots Irish" descent and within at most three generations of having escaped the grinding poverty and horrific political oppression of a Great Britain which reviled them. So the South as a whole tended to have a chip on its shoulder about anything which smacked of the establishment, entitlement or the upper class. In short, the North. You can't continually insult a man - or a region - and pretend surprise when he wants to step outside with you.

This is a casus belli which has been routinely overlooked by Northern commentators, many of whom today persist in the same offensive, contemptuous behavior which came so naturally to their forbears, particularly academics. As self-identified members of the elite and claimants to membership in the intelligentsia, they were representatives of that entitled class which led the North, and as such were simply incapable of recognizing their own egoism, prejudice and presumption. These representatives of the Northern elites were far more likely to understand Swahili than they were to grasp what it meant to live a Southerner's life, and to understand the factors which formed his character and personality.

As I noted, that same egotistical presumption and condescension is today routinely seen in the intellectual heirs of those elites who were so contemptuous of the South both prior to the North's military invasion and afterwards, when the South was crushed and humiliated for generations, unlike any other foe defeated by the United States. The most smug and condescending attitudes often come from academics, who rely on the same insulting behavior and presumptuous attitudes when speaking of today's South and its inhabitants. Often these academics retain the same smug pretensions of moral superiority as did their forbears. And, just as their forbears, they can exhibit a truly breathtaking hypocrisy and shocking degree of willful moral blindness, by praising as military geniuses and heroes men who intentionally made war on civilians, which included the same acts of barbarism, brutality and outright terrorism for which Nazi and Imperial Japanese generals were ignominiously hanged. Just think of the vanity necessary to accomplish such a neat intellectual trick.
Yes, such attitudes are still encountered today, when the same kind of moral egotists speak in terms of "lies" and "myths" on which Southerners "loudly" "insist". Because Southerners don't just have a different opinion - they're not even merely in error. No, they're perverse. Immoral. Evil. The familiar smug, scornful and patronizing words. And informed by the same narcissism and moral blindness which afflicted those who went before them.

 Via one of the best liberty/Southron aggregate blogs, a multi-daily must read:
 Free North Carolina

Your child belongs to us already…

Battlefield USA posts this often:  

When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already…. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.

 – Adolf Hitler

Nullification - Battlefield USA Compliation

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Battlefield USA

Origin Of The Term Racism

From comments at Western Rifle Shooters Association - Things Fall Apart

On my original post– I had hoped followers of this thread would do a little research on their own to see where this word RACISM originated and why. But I understand most people on this thread work and have lives—so I’ll make it easier for everyone. The first known use of the word racism was coined by LEON TROTSKY the Bolshevik/Marxist leader of the Red Army in the Soviet Union. He first used it in writing in his 1930 History of the Russian Revolution. The term was used numerous times by a Bolshevik Sexologist from Germany known as Magnus Hirschfeld he used the word numerous times to attack his critics. Hirschfeld worked close with the Frankfurt School which is a [sic] Communist Think Tank. The National Socialists deported most of the professors and shut it down. Many of the Marxist professors moved to New York City and set up shop at Columbia University. The Frankfurt School was re-established back in Germany in 1953. The school promotes critical theory, and political correctness in order to destroy traditional western culture and replace it with a Marxist world view. Most the propaganda of a communist nature has entered our society via these college professors and their sympathetic media apparatus. The Soviet KGB used the professors methods to target the US. The method is known as ideological subversion. Ideological Subversion is a four step process; Demoralization of a Nation, Destabilization, Crisis and finally Normalization. The long part is the demoralization phase. The idea is to change the perception of citizens’ reality to such an extent that no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. If you can pump the heads of at least three generations of youth full of Marxist ideas of equality and social justice you can move to the destabilization phase. It doesn’t matter that the USSR no longer exists. Once the poison takes hold its irreversible and must be sorted out in the crisis phase. Labeling your ideological enemies as a RACIST is a weaponized word established and promoted by communist, It is used to immediately shutdown any valid points made by their enemies (Constitutionalists, Libertarians, Traditionalists etc.) Once the label is attached it closes the minds of the masses to those anti-Marxist view points.It has entered our societies vernacular. That even like minded liberty minded people will even target each other with the word without knowledge of its origins.