AronRa Trying to Grasp "Evolutionism is a Religion"

Evolutionism
AronRa | 31.X.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROYEXefmJJA

I

1:10 Where do you get "a complete trust independent of evidence" as definition for "faith"?

Creation vs. Evolution : Went to "My" Topic, Ignored My Work
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2018/10/went-to-my-topic-ignored-my-work.html

I just had that little link on the "pasteboard" or whatever it is you paste from after you have copied or cut something onto it.

1:41 - 1:45 "because faith is all about citing facts that are not facts and pretending to know what no one even can't know"

Like in the Walt Disney version of why witchcraft was prosecuted in the Middle Ages?

1:56 "which no religion can do"

So far, Evolutionism is going along with that side of "religion" as far as I have seen.

Recall that Myers guy, PZ?

Creation vs. Evolution : Letter to Nature on Karyotype Evolution in Mammals
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html

So far he hasn't shown that chromosome fission (in a stable and therefore hereditable form, not as an early or accumulated stage of cancer cells) is even possible.

But since Catholicism is often counted as a religion, and indeed uses this word of itself as well as of other religions, here is what evidence we have in a very short nutshell:

somewhere else : Faith and Evidence
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2018/10/faith-and-evidence.html

II

3:15 You cited Miller as "devout Bible believing Christian"?

I came across this modernist pseudo-Catholic bc of your mentioning him in context of ... wait ... Dover vs Kitzmiller or Kitzmiller vs Dover and we are not talking of the Dover across Calais, but an American one?

OK, I looked him up.

He is "canonically" (if you can speak of canon law with modernist adherents of Vatican II at all) "Catholic", but, he deviates from standard Catholic belief, as does obviously the bishop allowing him access to Sacraments.

Here is about how I looked him up:

Two one sided articles:

New blog on the kid : Responding to Miller, Staying with Father Murphy's God, part 1
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/02/responding-to-miller-staying-with.html

New blog on the kid : Staying with Father Murphy's God, part 2
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/02/staying-with-father-murphys-god-part-2.html

Two correspondence posts of correspondence with him:

Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : Staying with Father Murphy's God, part 3 - Correspondence with Ken Miller
http://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2014/02/staying-with-father-murphys-god-part-3.html

Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : Correspondence with Ken Miller (part 4 of Staying with Father Murphy's God)
http://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2014/02/correspondence-with-ken-miller-part-4.html

The give-away is, he believes the priest - father Murphy - who gave his class catechism back when he was a preteen or sth child or youth was wrong.

I had to look up the two other ones:

Robert T Bakker
"As a Pentecostal,[9] Ecumenical Christian minister, Bakker has said there is no real conflict between religion and science, and that evolution of species and geologic history is compatible with religious belief"

Pentecostalism, while in some ways preferrable to Calvinism or Lutheranism, is not real Christianity and especially it is more than one instance sloppy on theology.

"He has advised non-believers and creationists to read the views put forward by Saint Augustine, who argued against a literal understanding of the Book of Genesis."

Except I actually read De Genesi ad Literam Libri XII over book five and into book VI (these being where he goes into the famous "one moment creation" where he varies - I won't say deviates from of a Church Father - the standard "six day creation").

Apart from that one issue, he is definitely as much of a Fundie as the Creationists Bakker "took on".

Did Bakker even read him in extenso, or did he just use a "well chosen" extract?

Francis Collins
"In his 2006 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins wrote that scientific discoveries were an "opportunity to worship" and that he rejected both Young Earth creationism and intelligent design."

Why?

Well, I'll have to take a look, but as he is a geneticist, I don't see he has any reason for rejecting either.

"They all share the religion as these Christians"

Kent Hovind, Ken Ham - would the third be Pence?

Yes, Pence, Mike.

None of these a Catholic, let alone one rejecting Vatican II. Just my two pence ...

III

3:53 People like yourself would be an Atheist religion related to Protestantism in a way similar to how Theravada Buddhism is one related to Hinduism.

I refer to it as Western Atheism.

It's kind of reverting what Luther did.

He started with some Catholic credenda which he kept after rejecting other Catholic credenda, then came to a rejection of these latter ones.

Western Atheism starts with letting the rejection go one further, rejecting also many of the Catholic credenda that Luther, Calvin, Cranmer and a few more kept.

THEN you start filling in the gaps of an initially very empty religious protest and adding credenda by supposed "scientific discoveries" one of the first you adopted being ... Heliocentrism.

3:57 "who don't believe anything supernatural, because we don't believe anything on faith"

What definition of "supernatural" would fit what Theravada Buddhists believe?

And not believing anything on faith (except for your earlier caricatured definition of it) obviously has to refer to not believing anything "supernatural" on faith.

You seem for instance happy enough to believe Geological Column on faith, not just as to rocks, but as to Palaeontology too ...

Creation vs. Evolution : Archaeology vs Vertabrate Palaeontology in Geology
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2016/06/archaeology-vs-vertabrate-palaeontology.html

I refused to take that on faith ...

4:21 You are NOT classifying Theravada Buddhism as a religion?

They specifically endorse scepticism and own investigation, and can hardly be said to divide extant entities into natural (created) and supernatural (God).

Their brand of naturalism may involve entities you don't consider as extant, but gthere is no such division of reality into natural and supernatural as is at the heart of Catholicism.

"survives the death of the physical body"

Oh, you are classifying "mental and therefore not physical" as "supernatural woo woo" ... that would explain the classification.

Lots of things in New Age neither described as "religion" by adherents nor by all opponents do this too.

Or lots, I specifically think of their studies of Near Death Experiences. Or, for that matter, hypnotic regression into earlier lives. Or, for that matter, astral journeys during lucid dreaming.

And, JW do NOT believe anything survives death in you, they believe God will reconstitute your life, a bit like after cryo "whatever it is called" when someone is frozen to incorruptible and then thawed back to life.

Required beliefs in Evolutionism:

• Earth orbits the Sun
• Geological layers correspond to Millions of Years
• All or nearly all organisms alive today (I think all eucaryotes) descend from one common ancestor.

Prohibited beliefs in Atheism:

• Theistic God
• immaterial soul being what really is thinking, even if using brain to obtain imagery from surroundings and memory
• miracles (real, not faked or misunderstood)
• Divine revelation.

Now, there is no clergy who will pronounce an excommunication, but in many cases you will be treated as a kind of apostate for leaving these criteria.

4:55 "atheism is typically associated with free thought"

Not how I found it in Sweden, nor in France now, and not too much what I find on internet either.

Oh, thanks for mentioning the "clergy" that will emulate and reverse Catholic Inquisitorial Censorship.

"You had better not mention it in the papers you submit" ...

Candid.

IV

6:16 Your list from screen (with some comments) : Evolution + atheism + abiogeneis + cosmogeny + paleontology [meaning evolutionist version of it] + plate tectonics [meaning deep time interpretation of modern rate of movement projected back over all times past] + genomics and maybe even geosphericity too.

You missed Heliocentrism.

How is it, people who want to argue against Geocentrism so often mix it was Flat-Earth?

Replace Geosphericity with Heliocentrism involving Geosphericity, I think you have described faiirly well enough the credenda of a modern religion.

6:29 Would you need door to door canvassing as long as modern esp state run schools (aptly recalled Kitzmiller) are doing it for you? When a fact book about science facts I just started reviewing has one fifth heliocentrism, big universe, deep time or evolution and also naturalism in it?

And yet all of it is considered as a neutral non-partisan fact book?

New blog on the kid : Vous avez lu 100 infos insolites sur Les Sciences?
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2018/10/vous-avez-lu-100-infos-insolites-sur.html

6:45 "violent religious conflicts between different denominations of unbelievers"

As Nazis and Communists in WW-II?

As Cold war between increasingly Darwinist US and state sponsored Darwinist Soviet Union, plus a few of the wars during Cold War, like Vietnam or Korea?

I think your friend missed some obvious examples!

7:35 In Germany and Austria, state funded schools have sectarian, as you would put it, catechism.

This or that "land" and your parents chose whether your catechism is (fullest list, I think):

• Catholic
• Protestant
• Jewish
• Humanistic-Atheistic
• Muslim

And before that, state schools were back in the days of Thirty Years War (before general school compulsion, not before bourgeois and statefunded schools) systematically either exclusively Catholic or exclusively Protestant.

Precisely as in many countries now they are systematically exclusively Evolutionist or exclusively Muslim, depending on country and régime.

Your point starts to look like "it can't be a religion, it's too well integrated, religions are marginal" ... duh ....

V

8:21 Glad you mentioned Epicurus.

It is as distinct from modern Western Atheism as it is from Buddhism.

Along with Buddhism, it would think nothing is totally without consciousness, and therefore even corpses have some kind of remaining sensations.

Hence - vampires.

And that is about a much afterlife as animists accord to spirits of the dead that aren't gods or protective spirits.

VI

8:42 "look at the evidence yourself" and earlier "we don't believe a thing just because a professor says it"

Sounds like some religions have mantras.

Sacred hymns.

Phrases that are not always too well connected to actual behaviour.

Swedish schools produce people who would be capable (some exaggeration) of saying in choir:

"I think for myself, and I don't believe what I do because someone else does"

9:00 Your caricature of what atheist-evolutionist clergy would do sounds a bit like a Protestant (that is a religion, right?) speaking of Catholicism.

And when it comes to "every aspect of morality" - have you heard of Japan, where very many have certain aspects of morality, like weddings, Shinto, and certain others, like afterlife related and burials and dealing with ghosts, Buddhist?

So, a secular morality exists too ... check what Clinton priorised.

Look how shocked he was in 1995 when a girl in SC succeeded in opting out of school at 12 by marrying an old man.

Or what Kennedy priorised, at Cape Canaveral (Disney being on his side) : progress and high enterprises in the name of progress.

Look at what Star Trek promoted and promotes. How much of it is considered as "common sense" when it is in fact wildly polemical against traditional lifestyles, starting with Catholic European, in many ways.

9:05 "wear dresses, silly hats"

You sound like an Evangelical Protestant when describing Catholicism.

Here is a guy who avoids that Catholic behaviour as studiously as you do:

About Pastor Steve Cioccolanti
https://discover.org.au/about/steve

By the way, there really was a schism in Positivism over the issue. Spencer was against (he was a Protestant heredity Englishman) Auguste Comte was for it (as was his disciple Maurras).

VII

9:39 "If you have faith, you don't need evidence.
If you have evidence, you don't want faith"

You are about as good at misrepresenting Thomism as some Protestants are for roughly speaking same principle.

9:47 "make believe whatever we want to just because we want to"

Every religion?

You think you have shown a superior ethics of research than Catholics or Jews, you have shown your ignorance of both.

10:30 What you just said about science shows how scientists live in a religiously oppressive environment, in which certain answers can't be looked into because SOMEONE (nobody knows who anymore) has decided "there is no evidence for it" or "that kind of answer can't be researched" or "even if such an answer were true, it can't be exclusive of the type we investigate by excluding that type of answer".

11:24 I don't know what your personal experience of discarding what you call a religion is, but what you outlined as a general "experience" (perhaps not yours) seems to correspond much better to my experience on Catholic conversion, than your parody about changing hair styles.

Let book x chapter y verse z be such that I don't understand it immediately, or I see how it could mean two clearly different things. Protestants won't tell me how to decide, just either way is fine as long as I "believe it is true". Catholicism actually has a method of verifying how it is meant.

Just as I trace Lord of the Rings back to a good fabulist called Tolkien, by following the tradition from 1954 to present, also noting absence of references to it in earlier traces of tradition, so also I trace Gospels back to when disciples wrote down what happened (directly as with Matthew or John, via intermediaries as with Luke and Mark) and it is not just the choice of history vs fiction, but quite a lot of other questions of interpretation that can be decided that same way - and in fact must be decided like that.

For instance, St Augustine - he never said Genesis should not be taken literally in an overall way or even just referring to chapters 1 and 2, and he is in a minority in not taking "day" in the usual sense.

This means, six days are probably true, special creation in order (chronological or of one supporting other) outlined there, and deep time is NOT true.

Both one moment creationists were also clearly pro-Biblical chronology as opposed to e g Egyptian or Babylonian timelines of history. These two are Origen and St Augustine.

If Bakker wants to know where St Augustine says creation was recent, refer him to De Civitate Dei, a k a City of God.

VIII

I wrote:

My comment series, which forms a whole review of what you said, is in one spot here:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : AronRa Trying to Grasp "Evolutionism is a Religion"
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2018/11/aronra-trying-to-grasp-evolutionism-is.html

This happened

So, now I write

It seems that one more trait with religious people is fulfilled here.

They like silencing a strong opposition.

I wrote above notification 18 hours ago, and 17 hours ago several people started commenting, so my comment was hid.

About same thing as happened with my previous comments, when posting singly or in separate thread I to VII ...