Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

The University of Arkansas is installing Ten Commandments posters across its campus following a new state law.

Houston atheists to host ‘Secular Lobby Day’ at Texas Capitol.

To celebrate Hamit Coskun winning his appeal for free expression, I will burn an old USB drive that holds 100 copies each of the Quran and Bible to celebrate.

World of Woo:  Apple Cider Vinegar.

Environment: Earth has passed its first climate tipping point.

There was an outbreak of institutional dysfunction at the CDC. It happened when there are now probably at least 5,000 cases of measles across America. When government rot meets biology, biology wins every time.  When you elevate conspiracy over science and discourage physicians from coming to the U.S., this will happen, so HHS, heal thyself. Understanding that endorsing blatantly false claims isn’t just about ignorance or error. It isn’t about the rational evaluation of facts. It’s about identity, symbolism, and perhaps even tribal dynamics.

Long Reads:

The truth about Tyler Henry’s cold reading of Moby.

Emergence explains nothing and is bad science.

Does the news reflect what we die from?

The interplay of genes and physics in shaping life.

The problem in colleges isn’t indoctrination. It’s a lack of ideological diversity.

The deep structural bias that is holding AI back.

Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom.

Secularism, sorting, and Americans’ political knowledge.

Sunday Book Club:  The Identity Trap.

Some photographs taken last week. The 2025 World Photomicrography Top 20 pictures.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Coffee Break Videos:  This is a very good argument. Why do we love morally flawed characters? Sam Harris: Charlie Kirk’s assassination & Ezra Klein’s response. Why we’ll never go to Mars.  The School of Athens by Raphael.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Have a great week!!

I was jogging in the park recently. I passed an older man on a bench for the 3rd time in a row (I do 6 laps – 5k). He quipped….’you are in 4th place’. No, I replied, “I am winning because I am still in the race”. On the next pass he was still grinning. It got me thinking……

Atheism, when treated not as mere disbelief but as a philosophical lens, strips life down to first principles of reality, evidence, consequence.

It clears away the metaphysical clutter so what’s left is the real curriculum:

The finite nature of existence. The moral weight of choice without cosmic referees. The wonder of a universe that doesn’t owe you meaning yet offers the raw material for it.

Once you drop the supernatural scaffolding, what remains is simple, not shallow, but clear. You eat, breathe, love, build, and think. Not to earn an afterlife, but because these things are intrinsically valuable.

Atheism reduces the noise. It hands you back the responsibility and the freedom to make this brief flicker of consciousness worthwhile with no middlemen and no promised sequel. Just you, the cosmos, and the race you’re still running.  Our history will be written in the light.

[StregaModerator]

Thanks Reg!

[jakelafortParticipant]

Reg that was poetic without being poetry.

Got me thinking though how theism and de facto theism (communism, nazism, palestinianism…pick your poison) cause their victims to see through the lens of a kaleidoscope. No opportunity for existentialism and its personal nature. The universe is instead viewed through a fixed kaleidoscope. It is aesthetic and it denies the reality of truth falling anywhere and being not aesthetic. The kaleidoscope obscures reality.

The kaleidoscope also kills our natural empathy and compassion. Take the Khmer Rouge. A few million killed in a few years. And for what? Absurd beliefs. No need to discuss how nazism made Germans want to eliminate an entire ethnic group and idk take over the world. Palestinianism robs the insane adherents of compassion and any grip on understanding. The duped don’t care about Palestinians who are victims of apartheid in other states still living in refugee camps and denied so many rights of citizens. Humanitarian concerns become irrelevant. If you only care about Gazans and ignore rest of the world you don’t have any real empathy. It is a phony compassion. It is orgasmic when you think the Palestinian babies are being bayonetted by the evil IDF zionist entity. Rome burns and yet if only the world can be made judenrein utopia will be upon us.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Re the second long read post above; The word “emergence,” when used uncritically, inherits the same intellectual vice as theism. It offers comfort where explanation is difficult. It sounds plausible, even scientific, but it doesn’t predict, measure, or model anything. It stops being a descriptor and starts being a substitute for understanding, like a “god-of-the-gaps” filler for scientists.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

It sounds plausible, even scientific, but it doesn’t predict, measure, or model anything.

But surely the behaviour of flocks of birds – organisation – emerges from the behaviour of single birds, following a few simple behavioural rules, and the organised behaviour of ant colonies emerge from ants, which have a limited individual consciousness and certainly don’t plan the colony as executives.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Thanks for the comment Jake. I was also thinking that old age is wasted on the not-so-young, to twist G.B. Shaw’s line for when people mistake religiosity for wisdom. Needing a comfort blanket against existential fear doesn’t make you wise; it just means you’re still afraid.

Real wisdom comes from remembering what it felt like to be young — curious, uncertain, and alive to possibility and not hiding from those questions behind faith. I am disappointed with people I meet  who are in my age group and who are still religious. I don’t want to have to debate religion with them because I know I cannot have a meaningful connection with religious people. It’s not so much that they have a faith in something I don’t believe exists, it that such magical thinking pervades their outlook on discussions that should be entered into with an open mind.  All the ‘good’ things in the world are because their god made it so and anything that is ‘bad’ is because there is a fall off in faith. It is so intellectually weak that I can’t be bothered to engage.

I do engage in debates with other “-ism’s”. I am one of the few people I know in Ireland to be happy to be called a Zionist. I have been called it a few times for my opinions on recent events, as if it is an insult. It is because the people using it don’t know what the term means. I explain to them that it means “I support the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland”. I usually hear back some distorted notions about supremacy, expansionism, or exclusion, that deliberately try to weaponize the word.

I will then usually attempt to give them a history lesson (idem). Even if it does not always land, it is still worth the effort. Sometimes their faces gets so contorted as they try not be sound antisemitic. It is pitiful to listen to. But Voltaire’s bacillus of self-importance is never far from the surface.

Anyway, I will away and act my age, even though I am not sure how to, as I have never been this age before. 🙂

 

 

 

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

The problem in colleges isn’t indoctrination. It’s a lack of ideological diversity.

The right seems to be on a mission to expose universities as centers of leftist indoctrination. Too often we professors waved away the charge. We called these assertions naive at best, Trumpy at worst. Students, we rightly noted, are not putty in our hands, to be molded as we see fit. They have their own minds. Plus, we all too often struggle to even get them to do the readings. How could we possibly be indoctrinating them?

From what I can see, some sectors of academia didn’t question the domination of the left purely because they thought it was a right and correct position, and didn’t question that, as if academia should be a vehicle of progressive values.

Now, there is such a thing as progressive academic studies – it can involve being genuinely intellectual.  But in the fields I look at a lot – evolutionary anthropology and moral psychology – they’re not woke at all.  There was a huge stink when Nature magazine went woke, apparently, under a new editor.  I find it sinister because it starts to make certain science not allowed on ideological grounds.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@simon, – The coordinated flight of birds or the efficiency of an ant colony are examples of true emergence. It is complex order arising from simple, local rules. Each agent behaves independently, yet their interactions create a collective intelligence without any central plan or higher consciousness.

It’s legitimate emergence because the mechanism is known and the outcome is predictable (e.g. swarms). It also has an explanatory power in contrast to the pseudo-emergence discussed in the article which does not nothing to reveal any mechanism. We can understand the collective without inventing hidden “executives” or mystical coordination.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Simon says someone says it who didn’t say it but lemme display it.

………….

The problem in colleges isn’t indoctrination. It’s a lack of ideological diversity

The right seems to be on a mission to expose universities as centers of leftist indoctrination. Too often we professors waved away the charge. We called these assertions naive at best, Trumpy at worst. Students, we rightly noted, are not putty in our hands, to be molded as we see fit. They have their own minds. Plus, we all too often struggle to even get them to do the readings. How could we possibly be indoctrinating them?
……

What crap.

As though a lack of ideological diversity isn’t the sine qua non of indoctrination! As though that lack of ideological diversity isn’t in part a reflection of show me the money. Do you suppose Qutar would continue to fatten pockets if there were ideological diversity?

And is it a coincidence that speakers who offer diverse and opposed voices are silenced or banned? is it a coincidence that the faculty of prestigious schools is up to 97 percent lefty? Is it indoctrination when ivy league schools require a course in that oppressor/oppressed bs before enrolling in middle eastern studies?

And then the notion that those kids are free agents who can think for themselves? As though the lack of ideological diversity and the entire lefty milieu is not indoctrination! Included is the tolerance for such blatant hate on campuses and the failure to protect Jewish students. Furthermore it is so clear that the kids are in de facto miniature cults that do in fact make the majority into putty. The shit these kids believe and advocate is so fundamentally retarded that is has indoctrination written all over it.

Anecdotal but i have heard too many stories of how professors who do not abide the lefty BS are chided, shunned or cancelled.

Not directed at you Simon. That was for the author of the article. I am not persuaded.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Many U.S. students will very likely start going to Chinese Universities soon.

[UnseenParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Many U.S. students will very likely start going to Chinese Universities soon.

Might be a good idea for all American schools to start teaching Chinese.

When I was young (I’m 79 now, so a long time ago), the choices were French, German, and Spanish. French was recommended as the language of diplomacy, German for kids wanting to go into technology, and Spanish was for lazy people who wanted an easy-to-learn option. Well, English has become the international default language even in diplomacy and technology.

In retrospect, Spanish would have been the smartest choice for most kids.

As a bit of an aside, have you ever considered how difficult English is to learn vs. most other languages?

Robwords is a great Youtube channel. Positively addicting. Here is his video on how weird English is.

 

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 3 days ago by  Unseen.
• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 3 days ago by  Unseen.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

To celebrate Hamit Coskun winning his appeal for free expression, I will burn an old USB drive that holds 100 copies each of the Quran and Bible to celebrate.

Don’t burn anything to celebrate freedom of expression, especially if you’re concerned about Carbon footprints. Instead. read Al Quran and The Holy Bible out loud on a street corner and highlight their absurdities.

World of Woo: Apple Cider Vinegar.

It does make salad more palpable and is good for pickling vegetables, so there is at least that to help with weight loss. And no “mother” of vinegar is necessarily required.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

As though a lack of ideological diversity isn’t the sine qua non of indoctrination! As though that lack of ideological diversity isn’t in part a reflection of show me the money.

I think that progressive values have a momentum of their own, especially with the young.  The human race has a doctrine of helping the needy and vulnerable – anyone who needs it.  Human welfare is arguably the highest good, since without human welfare, nothing else is possible.  Everything else hinges on it.

So, progressive values have an intuitive and visceral feeling of correctness about them, because of their concern with human welfare.  My question is, taking the assertion of indoctrination at face value, why are the lecturers doing it, and do the students need it at all, since they are primed to believe that way anyway?  If they take it to the nth degree, then that’s just a case of “more is better” or worse, “purer is better”.

Conservative values also have a momentum of their own: the doctrine of looking after me and mine.  It’s not like the conservative and progressive views are opposites: they’re just different in emphasis.

I think that young people tend to be more idealistic, more left-leaning, and more callous, on the whole, than older people.  In progressives, this shows up as callousness towards anyone who disagrees with them.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

As a bit of an aside, have you ever considered how difficult English is to learn vs. most other languages?

Yes. When I am in America I speak Hinglish with my extended family. At home I am currently learning Tamil. Soon I will try to only speak Tamil in my house so it’s now a case of “Hindi theriyathu poda” and I will have to get the t-shirt for that! Happy Diwali all!

I have a smattering of several languages, some to a passable standard, others very basic “tourist” standard. But I am also fluent in the Irish language, or at least I was when I was younger. If I spend a week in (say) Galway, it comes back to me. It is the most difficult language to learn.

Here is the above final paragraph in Gaelic Irish;

Tá roinnt teangacha agam, cuid acu ar chaighdeán passable, cuid eile caighdeán “turasóireachta” an-bhunúsach. Ach tá an Ghaeilge líofa agam chomh maith, nó ar a laghad bhí mé nuair a bhí mé níos óige. Má chaitheann mé seachtain i nGaillimh (abair) tagann sé ar ais chugam. Is í an teanga is deacra a fhoghlaim.

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