Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

The Purists are losing: How American Catholic are rewriting the rules.

I have yet to hear a Christian Nationalist who is not a just a paltry liar for Jesus while I think Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia is an honorable man.

Do you count?

The phrase “or belief” is not pedantry. It is the legal firewall against turning human rights into religious privilege.

World of Woo: WHO and the Death of Evidence-Based Medicine.

Environment: Buying green can quietly erase its own efficiency gains.

In 1776, the Western world still understood human societies as hierarchies, enforced by authority.

For me, Time is not a river. Nor is it fundamental. It is the comparison between positions, states, and relations we call “flow” once change is observed. So, if nothing happens, nothing changes. If nothing changes, there is no physical distinction between “time passed” and “time did not pass.”

Consciousness may not be a separate faculty at all. It may be what certain information-processing loops feel like from the inside when perception, attention, memory, and action-planning are integrated tightly enough. If we cannot define reliable indicators of consciousness, we risk two opposite errors: granting moral status to sophisticated mimicry or denying moral status to systems or animals that actually have experience.

This experiment does not solve abiogenesis, but it does show that parts of the life process can be assembled from non-living components.

Occam’s Razor is not dead. It has been demoted. It is no longer the supreme judge of scientific truth as Nature may not owe us humans a simple explanation.

AI shows promise in the fight against fake news. What will it do to literature? The long-term gains from AI are the hardest to understand but cognitive warfare is real. We should understand the complex AI Pantheon where diversity and competition may prevent any one system from dominating, without human sacrifices.

“Democracy is always a controversial idea,” Raskin said. “Monarchy is obviously a betrayal of that idea. Aristocracy is a radical betrayal of that idea. Theocracy is just somebody dressing up their pretensions to power and dictatorship in religious garb.”

Sunday Book Club: The Blind Spot.

Some photographs taken last week. Scenes from America’s 250th birthday.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Happy Birthday America!

Celebrating 250 Years of Religious Freedom: The Founders’ Vision for America. 1776, Then and Now…Several videos.

Coffee Break Videos:  AI has hacked the code of human civilization. How consciousness evolved – and why AI can’t have it. Does Religion Poison Everything? Mehdi Hasan is lying to you. Bible lessons for Texas Public School Students.

 

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Nick Fish, President of American Atheists; So, today, in celebration of the Fourth and in honor of the “confirmed infidel” and “howling atheist” who penned our Declaration, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson’s actual words:

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever.”

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God…”

“…in answer to [the] question why the Ten Commandments should not now be a part of the common law of England we may say they are not because they never were.” 

Jefferson’s belief in the absolute separation of church and state was neither incidental nor isolated to a single letter. And that conviction didn’t end with Jefferson. It was carried forward and codified into law by James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, whose own writings make clear he, too, would have regarded the Religious Liberty Commission’s policy recommendations as an affront to the First Amendment.

In Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, Madison rejected public funds for parochial schools:

“…the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation…”

Madison vetoed legislation that would have directed public funds to religious institutions, warning against the precedent of government entanglement with sectarian causes. And he was extremely explicit about chaplains:

“The Constitution of the U.S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion… The establishment of the chaplainship to [Congress] is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles…” 

And on the consequences of entangling religion and government:

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

 

 

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