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Month: December 2015
I Learned A New “Theological” Term: Baculum (Updated)
Here is my intro to this story via my Facebook page for this site (added to just a tad):
When I first saw the below story… I thought the professor HAD to be a lib! Why? Because progressives have a tendency to sexualize e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g ~ which is why sex-education starts in kindergarten now. Anyhew, here is the “bulk” of the story via The Blaze:
Using the logic from the story I have read… Adam had two??? But I digress… apparently, literally. However… my amateur musings aside, here is the logic of professor Zevit:
- A rib seems like an unlikely origin for Eve because male and female humans have the same number of ribs.
- Ribs also lack “intrinsic generative capacity”, which penises have “in practice, in mythology, and in the popular imagination”.
- Most mammals – and especially primates – have bacula, humans do not.
- It is therefore “probable” that Adam’s baculum was removed to make Eve, and not a rib.
The Hebrew is really just saying “from his side.” That is it. “a “rib” is just a cultural “guess” at what took place, but we really do not know.
So after hanging out at a friends house for his birthday, I mentioned that I think the professor mentioned in the story is liberal. [Plus, as a fan of Dennis Prager… I knew the odds were in my favor. See Prager’s “Explaining Jews, part V: Why are Jews liberal?“] So when I got home, I looked him up. This is his background:
Um… Berkeley… in the seventies?
Bam!
I read an interesting article on Professor Zevit’s piece that I think was helpful. The article is entitled “A Flaccid Interpretation of Eden,” and is by Joseph Ryan Kelly. A very informative piece, I suggest reading it in its entirety.
BTW, “baculum” (Latin) is part of a fallacy in logic:
Islamophobia!? I Think Not
(See more at Twitchy!) Jihad Watch has this:
Moonbattery adds this to the “Hate Hoax List”
And Creeping Sharia:
Divine Feet ~ Philosophical Demarcations
Atheists reject evidence as illusory…
Why?
Because they “have to.”
I put these two ideas from separate fields of study together. Why I didn’t before is a mystery… but like with any field of study, you can go over the same topic again-and-again — you continue to learn. The first example come from biology and the natural sciences. Here are three examples of the beginning of my thinking:
- “The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion. To such people, if a heart (or an eye or a bacterial flagellum) looks designed, that’s proof enough that it is designed.” ~ Richard Dawkins in the Natural History Magazine;
- “So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realize that it is an illusion.” ~ New Scientist Magazine (h/t, Uncommon Dissent)
- “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Richard Dawkins enlarges on this thought: “We may say that a living body or organ is well designed if it has attributes that an intelligent and knowledgeable engineer might have built into it in order to achieve some sensible purpose… any engineer can recognize an object that has been designed, even poorly designed, for a purpose, and he can usually work out what that purpose is just by looking at the structure of the object.” ~ Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1996, pp. 1, and 21.
- “We can’t make sense of an organ like the eye without considering it to have a function, or a purpose – not in a mystical, teleological sense, but in the sense of an illusion of engineering. That illusion, we now know, is a consequence of Darwin’s process of natural selection. Everyone agrees that the eye is a remarkable bit of natural “engineering,” and that may now be explained as a product of natural selection rather than as the handiwork of a cosmic eye-designer or as a massive coincidence in tissue formation.” ~ Steven Pinker, via Edge’s “Is Science Killing the Soul.”
The important point here is that the Judeo-Christian [theistic] view would posit that we (and nature) is designed, and would notice it in ourselves and in nature. The atheist MUST reject design as an illusion because their worldview demands that chance cobbled together what we see… so dumb luck needs to be seen as opposed to design.
Steven Pinker summation:
Daniel Dennett:
Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Kruass, Christopher Hitchens:
Sam Harris:
Stephen Hawkings:
The bottom line is that free-will, self, freedom to be above and distinguish between actions, is all an illusion.
Why?
BECUASE if free-will existed… then this would be an argument f-o-r theism. F-o-r God’s existence. Like the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institutes, Robert Jastrow’s description in his book of a disturbing reaction among his colleagues to the big-bang theory—irritation and anger.
Why, he asked, would scientists, who are supposed to pursue truth and not have an emotional investment in any evidence, be angered by the big-bang theory?
They had an aversion to the Big-Bang.
Because it argued F-O-R theism. F-O-R God’s existence.
Jastrow noted that many scientists do not want to acknowledge anything that may even suggest the existence of God. The big-bang theory, by positing a beginning of the universe, suggests a creator and therefore annoys many astronomers.
This anti-religious bias is hardly confined to astronomers.
As we see, the above persons in rejecting evidence of design in nature and consciousness, are doing so based on an aversion to “God evidence.” Another well-known philosopher John Searle notes this illusion as well:
All these people are misusing science and remaking it into “scientism.” AND, they are “not allowing a divine foot in the door,” as Dinesh D’Souza notes:
“Minds fit into an theistic world, not an atheistic one”
What are intentional states of consciousness? Are states of consciousness plausible on either a theistic or atheistic worldview? This clip shows the exchange between Dr William Lane Craig and Dr Alex Rosenberg on intentional states of consciousness in the world. On February 1st, 2013 at Purdue University, Dr Craig participated in a debate with Dr Rosenberg on the topic, “Is Faith In God Reasonable?” Over 5,000 people watched the event on the Purdue University campus along with tens of thousands streaming it live online from around the world.
For more on this, see my “quotefest” here: Evolution Cannot Account for: Logic, Reasoning, Love, Truth, or Justice
How Quantitative Easing Hurts the Middle-Class
Breitbart has a bang-up article talking about quantitative easing and the affect of government “spreadsheet ‘fixing'” on the middle-class:
Ramadi is Liberated ~ Iraq
(Wall Street Journal) The recapture of Ramadi marks a major turnaround for Iraq’s U.S.-trained military, representing its first success against Islamic State as a mostly independent force.
Iraqi forces claimed victory Monday in the fight for the capital of Anbar province, a success that political leaders hope to replicate in future operations against the insurgents.
To signify their victory, Iraqi soldiers raised the national flag over the government compound in the center of the city which had been the last bastion of an estimated 200 Islamic State fighters, who fled on Sunday. Iraqi security officials said they retreated to the eastern part of the city, which Islamic State still largely controls, according to Iraqi security officials….
A Warm Christmas PROVES Man-Caused Global Warming!
In a recent “conversation,” Timothy mentioned that a warm winter is evidence for man-caused global warming… and you are a “bozo” to deny this:
- Timothy Kershner [said]: Yes, the climate change denial bozos are the worst of the bunch, Des Andrie. Not sure which part they are in denial of the most. Is it the fact that 60 degrees in the mountains of Pennsylvania isn’t normal on Christmas day…
I merely ask if people like Timothy mention Philadelphia in 2014, which CBS notes set records:
When I bring up cold weather I often hear, “you don’t understand ‘weather’ versus ‘climate’.” Likewise, should I say that people like Timothy do not understand weather as opposed to climate?
Bernie Sanders said essentially the same thing, and likewise was torn-up on twitter (Hat-Tip–Weasel):
Young Conservatives notes this disparity between temperatures and global warming activists:
The No Trick Zone gets in on the action:
Meadowlark Lemon ~ R.I.P.
“Meadowlark was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen,” NBA great and former Globetrotter Wilt Chamberlain said shortly before his death in 1999. “People would say it would be Dr. J or even [Michael] Jordan. For me it would be Meadowlark Lemon.” (L.A. Times)
The Virgin Birth Compared to Other Religions (Det. Wallace)
The mother of Horus was believed to be the goddess Isis. Her husband, the god Osiris, was killed by his enemy Seth, the god of the desert, and later dismembered. Isis managed to retrieve all of Osiris’s body parts except for his phallus, which was thrown into the Nile and eaten by catfish. Isis used her goddess powers to temporarily resurrect Osiris and fashion a golden phallus. She was then impregnated due to sexual activity, and Horus was conceived. However this story may be classified, it is not a virgin birth.
Here detective Wallace deals with comparisons of the Virgin Birth found in Christianity compared to statements of similarities to religion prior to Christianity. I deal with the Buddhism aspect if this here, in more depth.
- In this episode of the Cold-Case Christianity Broadcast, J. Warner Wallace continues his series on the virgin conception of Jesus. Was the virgin conception borrowed from ancient pagan myths? Do these ancient mythologies resemble Jesus or offer a similar birth narrative? Would ancient Jews or Christians borrow such a notion? Were the Gospels written so late that no one would have known about the birth of Jesus? (For more information, visit www.ColdCaseChristianity.com)
The THREE BIG LIES of 2015
Gay Patriot lists the three BIG LIES he thinks was most pushed by the media establishment and most referenced by Democrats and their lackeys. The entire article should be read, but here are the three (with some YouTube additions):
- …In 2015, the Democratic Party and its Media Operation collaborated on an unprecdented scale to advance a number of Big Lies in order to advance a sweeping socio-political agenda. Just to name a few:
Here the Factual Feminist (one of my favorite authors on feminism) wieghs in:
Dennis Prager reads from Heather Mac Donald’s article in from The City Journal about the “rape culture.” As usual, the left over-exaggerates… and what parent would put their daughter in AP classes to prepare them for the worse crime wave in human history, which is: one-in-five women are rapped at college. OBVIOUSLY the definition is the issue.
As society gets further away from Judeo-Christian norms… more-and-more regret will rear its head from drunken hook-ups.
A magic 50-minutes with Larry Elder. He weaves the reality that the Left can only weave — and that is this:
- the bankruptcy of and the consequences of the “state” [statist ideology] that came to fruition in Ferguson in the micro via the MACRO application of failed leftist policies! (e.g., the welfare state, subsidizing fatherless-ness, and the funding of programs and pensions via unions and it’s city/state employees.
This third lie is fleshed out well in this article at WUWT, “There Is No Climate Change Disaster Except The One Governments Created.”
Dr. Andrews 4-Part Series on Biblical Inspiration/Inerrancy
Dr. Andrews podcast is a newer find for me. I am currently listening to his series on the inspiration/inerrancy of God’s Word — AKA, the Bible. Enjoy, and be ready to write down some verses for you own study:
Thomas Aquinas Speaks His Mind About Islam
BREITBART has a neat story about Aquinas and his views on Islam… here is a portion of it: