CelticBear’s Musings

Unrelated title topics–I’m just featuring a couple of YouTube videos on the different subjects.
(Although, interestingly, some of the most strident defenders of the war are fundamentally religious conservatives. So I guess a connection can be made.

Anyway, here’s a couple of very poignant videos that I found fascinating, informative, and from one of them–a little bit horrifying and a lot tragic.

This first one is a shocking reminder of what the real costs of this war have been:

Despite how emotionally gripping the beginning is, toward the middle the list starts to become a bit long–which is an oddly mixed message: the alternatives are so many that the waste is sickening when all these alternative could have been made possible, that one may actually stop paying attention and give up on it.
The point is, stick through it to the end as he makes a very thought-provoking point and observation in the last quarter.

Then there’s this one regarding what it means to deny the fact of evolution:

Again, there’s a list of items that actually becomes long enough that you might tune out; but again, stick with it as toward the end he switches it around and lists things that to be a creationist you have to accept–and like the first half, it makes you think.

Finally, there’s this video which explains:

♦ How evolution REALLY works.

Probably one of the best visual representations and explanations of how evolution works and how we know it’s factual and not “just a theory.” (There’s a small part in the middle where he lets the simulation go on its own for a while that you can safely speed through. )

Since I already broke my self-imposed block on religious posts for today, just one more–in the subject of personally affecting issues reason and emotion (two subjects that need not be mutually exclusive!)
Today’s comic from Cectic:

(a near-consistently great comic strip, by the way.)

I’m breaking my embargo on religious criticism for this post, to feature a blog posting that’s one of the most poignant and pointed one I’ve read.
Debunking Christianity has had a lot of posts from its contributors lately on the age-old “question of evil” and the needless existence of suffering and what it means in the context of a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god.

This post is most striking and personally thought-provoking:

♦ Reasonable Doubt About the Problem of Evil/Needless Suffering As A Test

I want to post quotes from it, but it would do the submission little justice. It’s brief; I encourage anyone reading this to please go read that blog entry and consider.

(I need to hire someone to write my title for me. I sux!)

A few posts out on the blags about presidential candidate Huckabee today; thought I’d pass them along.
Let’s start with a brief one found on Bad Astronomer:

♦ Huckabee = very very very bad guy

Phil Plait’s entry is prompted by an also brief post from science blog, Pharyngula:

♦ Huckabee is a raving lunatic

Both bloggers take great insult and not a little concern and fear regarding the state of society and our political leaders, and rightly so, from Huckabee’s evangelically religious views–primarily regarding this quote:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Bad Astronomer Phil makes a rather astute observation:

Actually, he’s not only demented, he’s wrong: the Bible has been rewritten countless times by small groups of men (that’s why there are different versions, Huck)

Indeed, not only are there various English translation which change meaning and intent in each version, but countless versions with different included books. From the current differences between Catholic and Protestant Bibles, all the way back through the King James, the Wycliffe, the Bishop’s Bible, the Vulgate, the versions proceeding from the Nicean Councils, the literally countless versions that existed in the 300 years before Constantine forced some kind of general consensus. Not to mention the various Hebrew/Jewish versions of Torah and Talmud. The history of the Bible is rife with change and versions. The various different versions of the Gospels, such as Mark, with none of them being “the original,” and most of them being somewhat different from each other. The Dead Sea Scrolls showing that nearly every book of the Old Testament has different and varying versions (which was actually known since before the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls–a fact every Jewish Rabbi is aware of).

If there’s one thing that can be asserted with 100% confidence and certainty, is that “The Word of God” is absolutely not immutable and unchanging.

Then there’s this nice post from Mike The Mad Biologist:

♦ Evolution as Policy, Not Symbolism or Critical Thinking

Mike discusses how Huckabee, as one of nearly all of the Republican candidates who doesn’t “believe” in evolution, would be a threat to science policy and advancement. Advancement that couldn’t be possible without understanding the facts of evolution. Mike spends a few wonderful paragraphs explaining how vital and integral an understanding of evolution is in practical science of understanding his work in disease and its cures. In this world in which we owe it to evolution for our medicine and medical treatments, to not “believe” in evolution is like not believing in gravity even while you’re walking around not flying off the face of the earth.

As some of the commentors on these blogs point out, Huckabee has virtually no chance of getting the Republican ticket, and less chance at the Presidency. But as the commentors also say, and I also agree, he is still a symptom of a serious problem in our culture. When nearly half of our presidential candidates don’t “believe” in evolution (or at least cynically say they don’t in order to pander to the faith-based religious base of the Republican Party) despite the fact that most of them have taken medicine or received treatments for diseases as serious as cancer, which wouldn’t be possible without understanding evolution, is absurd and surreal and scary. The social illness is how most of America places faith and belief that are counter to facts and reality first and foremost in their lives–whether that’s fundamental religious beliefs, or homeopathy, or “complimentary medicine,” or alien abduction, or ESP and talking to the dead…. We have a very, dangerously, sick nation of non-thinking people.