I occasionally interfere in the perpetual misconception that science is
somehow more than a quasi-objective reality check. The other day a
questioner postulated that the continued existence of homosexuality
effectively disproves “survival of the fittest” I give the fellow credit
for understanding that homosexuality is more than a lifestyle choice.
Nonetheless, I left a steaming pile for the questioner to ponder. I’ll go
back next week and vote for myself.
Survival of the Fittest applies at the population level, not at an individual level. It isn’t a “rule” in the way you’d think of a rule, it is about how environmental factors affect the diversity in a population. For instance, there has been an upsurge in asthma deaths since the US has relaxed air pollution standards.
Homosexuality is a continuum of desires whose expression is modulated largely by social forces. (I’m purposely leaving out the nature-vs.-nurture aspect. The jury is still out on genetics and in-utero exposure to hormones.) At one low point in our history, there was wholesale witch burning using homosexuals as faggots to light the fire.
For all you know, you are completely surrounded by homosexuals who are maintaining heterosexual relationships and reproducing just to “fit in.” You’re familiar with the concept of a “beard,” right?
I think this is a perfect adaptation, one that Evolution would be proud of if Evolution had intelligence. What intelligence is killing asthmatic children, again?
Modern women often prefer sensitive guys. Who knows? Maybe homosexuality confers a great breeding advantage on men who carry the trait.
Recently an acquaintance tried to convince me that the Witch Trials were totally due to social forces. Of course there were social forces at work, but in the end the Evils that occurred during that time frame were the final chapter in the Church’s 600-year war on Serpent Knowledge. She had been completely blinded to some very important concepts.
First, this was Christians murdering people, not “social forces” in the abstract. Read the Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous “Hammer of Witches” that the Inquisitors used to determine whether a person was a witch and what to do when the Inquisitors found out they were. It was written by two Dominican priests.
In predomininantly Catholic areas, the Inquisitors killed Protestants. In countries that were about equally Catholic and Protestant, they killed Jews. There was a huge collaboration between kings and the Church to get rid of anyone who was inconvenient. This is a good argument for the separation of church and state.
The witchcraft scare followed 600 years of torture and murder in the name of Love. You’ve probably heard of the Inquisition. It wasn’t until around the 16th century that they were burning more witches than heretics.
England was Anglican by the time the witch-burnings rolled around, by the way.
The first victims of the Inquisition were not witches but scientists, usually Christian. The Inquisition was used to suppress scientific advancement. Church dogma mandated belief in a flat earth and in Creationism. Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian astronomer and physicist, was one of those tried for heresy. He recanted his scientific views in order to avoid being murdered by his own Church.
A lot of cultists are re-writing history, probably in preparation for a new generation of Inquisitors. Next they’ll be burning the Harry Potter books.
As for the social forces, the switch from heresy to witchcraft started with some cults with strict behavioral requirements. They used the witchcraft accusation to get rid of people who didn’t meet their prudish standards, then started throwing in dissidents, subversive herbalists and the occasional adulterer just for kicks. Fortunately there was already a tradition of torture and murder so they hitched a ride on that.
There’s an interesting article about misogeny and homophobia and witch burning called “The Kindling Effect.” It explains why we call homosexuals “bundles of sticks.”
Speaking of the screwfly, remember the big push to eradicate the screwfly back in the 60s or 70s? This fly lays its eggs on an open sore, the maggots hatch and go through a series of instars, pupate and become flies. The flesh is further damaged by this activity, making more open sores for more flies. Screwflies can devour an infested animal in a matter of days. They also infest babies eyes, so there was a huge effort to control them. This is a fascinating story about using pheromones to exterminate a species.
Ok, since you asked… The screwfly gets its name by its mating habits. When screwflies mate, they line up head-to-tail. The female emits a pheromone that triggers the male to turn around - hence screwfly - and then they mate. To control screwflies, entomologists came up with a chemical that interfered with the female’s chemical message. Instead of turning around, the male happily mated with her head. Sounds like some guys I’ve known.
This sort of thing was the basis of an interesting sci-fi story in which aliens who wanted to colonize the Earth sprayed something that brought out the aggressive component of male sexual desire and suppressed the sexual component. All of the women were killed, of course. Too bad it didn’t turn the women into human Preying Mantises instead.
Here’s a fun parasite: the Guinea worm. These 3-foot-long parasites have been with us for so long that some Egyptian mummies have them. They feed only upon humans.
You get guinea worms by drinking contaminated water. The worms then chew their way out and orient themselves so that their genitals dangle outside the flesh, usually the flesh of the foot, but they can really show up in any part of the body. The lesion burns like mad, so sufferers douse it with cold water to ease the pain. In the parts of the world where the Guinea worm is found, the sufferers recontaminate the water supply.
So now you have a three-foot long worm embedded in your body. The locals used to burn the exposed parts with cigarettes to try to kill the worm. Unfortunately, this often resulted in infection or even a massive allergic reaction when the three-foot long worm died. The worms are more safely removed by wrapping the exposed parts around a small stick then slowly drawing the worm out over days or weeks. The medical symbol the Rod of Asclepius may represent this procedure.
The caduceus with its two snakes is similar to the Rod of Asclepius, but is probably a symbol of wisdom rather than of medicine in particular.
The snake is a symbol of wisdom in cultures where knowledge is encouraged. In cultures where Blind Faith is enforced, the snake is Evil Incarnate. Serpent knowledge is the source of Original Sin, and it is knowledge that brings about the Fall. In this mythology, our progenitor Adam is infested with guinea worms. They can’t possibly have evolved into human parasites from something else, right?
Damn, there I go spouting heresy again. Burn the witch!
As a psychiatric patient^w^w shaman wannabe^w^w armchair anthropologist, I am very interested in the varieties of religious experience, to steal a title from psychologist William James. More precisely, I’m interested in different paths to epiphany just as much as I am interested in the content of the epiphanies. The content, you see, is determined by your cultural expectations. (Boring.) The fact that we are wired for bliss amazes me.
But I’m totally off-topic here, aren’t I?
I wanted to put in a plug for Rivers Source Botanicals. They have an excellent selection of heritage plants and seeds to help you create that special healing garden.
The flower pictured here is St. John’s Wort, a plant that is still used medicinally in Europe to treat depression. We can get it in health food stores, but your doctor isn’t likely to prescribe it. RSB often has SJW seeds in stock, along with echinacea, several types of cactus, and many beautiful flowers that you aren’t likely to find in the Home Despot. The prices are astonishingly low, too.
I order some heritage seeds from RSB just about every year. I highly recommend them for all your ethnobotanical needs.
Now you know why China frightens me…and why “I, Robot” may not be so far off…
It’s mind boggling — almost incomprehensible for me.
Hugs…
Mind-boggling? Robots? What is this fellow yammering about?
Technology isn’t the Latest Big Thing. Technology is what we have been using for millennia to enhance our senses and increase our capabilities. Technology is a fancy way of saying “tools.” Any sufficiently advanced human can distinguish technology from witchcraft. Witchcraft? Burn the Witch! (Damn, burning witches again… apologies to my Wiccan friends.)
Globalization happened already. It’s done, it’s over. We’re now in the phase where we carefully adjust Americans’ salaries to match Chinese and Indian salaries - and lifestyles. If they do it right - well, you know, like boiling a frog slowly from cold water. Maybe they’ll find new career paths for everyone whose job description is now outsourced to India. Maybe we’ll learn to downsize our lifestyles to accommodate our globalized pay rates. Maybe the U.S. economy won’t collapse. We have to get all this done before China gets into full production.
You can get off your high horse and join the rest of the world, or you can outfit your army with bibles, flags and guns and send them out to stop human evolution. I’m more afraid of one ignorant, neurologically stagnant American politician than I am of all of Asia.
The US is very backward technologically. To put new technologies in place requires the regulatory equivalent of an Act of God. The people themselves are psychologically and neurologically resistant to change, so much so that a large percentage of Americans deny that something as basic as evolution can occur. At the personal level, this means most Americans believe that self-improvement is a fallacy. Well, I don’t accept that adults can’t learn.
The recent movie “I, Robot” is an abomination, intended only to reinforce the average American’s fear of innovation. Please read the book by Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of the 20th century. The hard-wired personalities of the robots in it started with three laws that prevented them from harming a human or even, through inaction, allowing us to be harmed. Any attempt to break those laws resulted in a mechanical breakdown. I wish humans were wired this way.
Innovation… in parts of Asia you can walk up to a vending machine and call its number on your cell phone to get a soda or an instant-heating boxed meal. I can’t even get cellphone service at my sister’s house on the Delmarva peninsula, much less dial up a soda.
China is going to need about 10 times the oil we need when they get up to speed. That’s 10 times the pollution, 10 times the greenhouse gases. No, more than 10 times the pollution, as they don’t have strict air quality standards. The cloud of pollution over China is clearly visible on NASA satellite photos. We’ve know about Global Warming since the ’50s.
As larger purchasers, India and China will shape what products are available in the entire world. An example of this economic inevitability, the state of Texas is the largest textbook purchaser in the U.S and for that reason Texas creationists influence public education by asking for textbooks promoting their point of view. Every bookseller wants Texas as a customer - you stock what your best customer wants. These are then made available to all American schools. You can find a number of links on this topic on Constitution.org. I hope y’all can use chopsticks.
Why do we ignore problems instead of dealing with them? I bet you’ve heard at least one person say, “Don’t bring that into my universe” or “ERASE ERASE ERASE” - with a cute little crossing and recrossing the arms - to avoid talking about Global issues. Like a little kid putting his hands over his ears so that he can’t hear you asking him to take out the trash.
The video mentioned new books - how many books have you read this month? Not magazines, not graphic novels, but real paper and ink books? How about this year? Were any of them non-fiction?
I’m interested in what you really thought about the video. I thought it was trite. It’s rather startling to me that any citizen of the world could respond with anything other than “tell me something I don’t already know.”
I agree that public funds shouldn’t be used to create foot baths for the Muslims to use before their five-times-a-day prayers. I’m also against the use of public funds to install sexist urinals for males who are perfectly capable of peeing in the general vicinity of the toilet. :-/ We could kill two birds with one stone by installing troughs with running water like they have in some parts of the world. =:-o And where are the bidets?
That was humor, in case any stereotypically humor-challenged schizoaffectives or lesbians are reading this. (You dykes all know I’m bi, right?)
I’m also against the policy of the colleges and universities that I personally have attended of having a small chapel on campus for the Christians. If you have to pray every day, you know where it is. If you don’t, then a) you probably don’t worship with the other Christians who stop into the chapel every day, and b) you probably think you are somehow *entitled* to use publicly-funded college facilities for the purpose.
Have I failed to offend anyone yet? Ok, then, I’ll keep going.
The ACLU hasn’t gotten involved because the university, after public hearings on the topic, decided to use the student-funded college maintenance fund to include the foot baths in new construction, NOT public funding. We’re talking about new construction that includes urinals, baby-changing stations, and other accommodations in the unisex bathrooms, I might add. The Moslems were accidentally pulling the sinks away from the wall and splashing water on the floor, so the foot baths are about safety and saving money, NOT about encouraging heresy.
The students on campus are mostly ok with this, so why are a bunch of conservative think-tanks getting all huffy about it? I don’t feel that it is my business. You don’t like it, don’t wash your feet in the sink. The other Christians have to pee in there!
This was brought to my attention by a Catholic, of all people. A good Catholic education includes a lot of reading about other religions, unlike that of the Fundamentalists. Some of these people wouldn’t read at all if they weren’t pressured by their friends and family to read the bible. Simplistic.
I don’t see the Christians being prevented from praying. What I do see is the flat-earth Fundamentalists demanding that the rest of us learn their simplistic, literal interpretation of a text that was originally intended to simplify the facts of cosmology, geology and evolution for a Semitic tribe of uneducated wandering goat-herders. Simplistic.
There were great civilizations in nearby parts of the world at that time, civilizations whose religions quickly incorporated new discoveries in the temporal world, things like the ptolemiac model of the solar system - you know, that the earth rotates around the sun? Maybe you don’t…
You’d know more about it if the Christians didn’t burn down the library at Alexandria in the 4th century A.D., *pretending* it was a pagan temple. A millennium-long Dark Ages followed. Millenia later, in the 17th century A.D., Galileo was threatened with death if he didn’t recant similar heretic theories about the motion of the earth.
They’re up to their same old tricks in the U.S., apparently trying to create another thousand-year Dark Ages. Next they’ll be burning books.
Personally I think it’s time for every world religion to start policing its extremists. Extremists balance out their hate by cashing in on the good works of the majority of their fellow worshippers, using threats of damnation or worse. Now there’s a sin for you.
I have no problem if the student body at UMich wants to fund foot baths themselves. The alternative is to ban them from washing their feet before engaging in private prayer, and that’s xenophobic nonsense.
There is this thing called the [tag]religious experience[/tag]. This is where you feel the presence of something larger than yourself, and know your place in the grand scheme. Sometimes you only get a glimpse of it, but it’s enough to change your opinions completely. Uh, [tag]epiphany[/tag], that’s what it’s called. Epiphanies are associated with the [tag]amygdala[/tag] and certain brain chemicals which I don’t care to look up right this instant.
Organized religions cannot allow their laypeople to have religious epiphanies. Why? Because they are exploiting that [tag]divine revelations[/tag] to exert power over us. What if Dog told one of *us* to stop following the kosher laws or to take down the graven images in the church, or whatever your particular religion requires?
I can hear the Elders now: “What’s that? Dog told you that the church must allow rape victims to obtain abortions if they want so that they aren’t troubled by the life-long trigger of a child with the face of their rapist? Hmmm, he didn’t tell *us* about it! Heresy! BURN THE WITCH!!!”
I seem to burn a lot of witches in this blog. Apologies to my [tag]Wiccan[/tag] friends. I am not condoning witch hunts, I am raling against them.
There’s another problem. In certain [tag]mental disorders[/tag] the patient finds change very distressing. In the case where the patient is incapable of seeing others’ points of view, and is in a position of power, it can get very ugly. Since the patient doesn’t acknowledge other points of view, he perceives that his own dysfunctional ideas fill the entire universe - are intrinsic to it, are the Word of Dog. This has a lot of useful side-effects. One of them is that the patient, in externalizing his own faults, can deny them and even project them onto others! If another opinion ever impinged up the patient, he would believe that it threatens his very existance, that it threatens the order of his universe, that it is Blasphemy. He will label other opinions as [tag]Evil[/tag] and then try to destroy them.
I believe that this is precisely why so many people in power use [tag]organized religion[/tag] to control the populace.
Anyone who foists their particular flavor of religion on another person is, by definition, trying to control them. It has absolutely nothing to do with “saving” them or helping them “attain [tag]enlightenment[/tag]” whatever the [tag]Big Idea[/tag] in their particular religion might be. It is all about pathology and projection and POWER.
So don’t even think about proselytizing. Why should *I* follow instructions that were meant only for you? If I want to talk to Dog I’ll do it myself, thankyouverymuch.
I’m told that besides bipolars and schizophrenic visionaries, political dissidents and “subversive herbalists” were also tortured and burned at the stake. Let’s add Lesbians to the list. It makes sense that a single woman might make her living from herbalism. Which she may have learned from a lesbian mentor. Which was part of that Old Time Religion, not Christianity. Herbalism, that is, not lesbianism!
Hallucinogenic plants are very effective in treating certain kinds of ailments. Sort of like early transpersonal psychology. Until one of the Good Townsfolk took the belladonna and had a bad trip. She’s a witch! Burn the witch!
According to the infamous “Hammer of Witches” gay men were to be thrown in with the bundles of sticks as kindling, hence faggot. It was so prevalent that the word for kindling became applied to gay men as a pejorative.
The mentally ill are *still* seen as being demon-possessed in some places, even in the US. I have talked to folks who have been forced to undergo exorcisms. Of course, there was that unfortunate incident in Romania where the Romanian Orthodox church crucified a schizophrenic nun.
On the other hand, you could see an exorcism as an extreme form of psychosocial therapy. I mean, the whole family had to commit themselves to the new, well person. If you think about it, you spend years in therapy and your family still bears a grudge for the things you did in episodes 15 years ago. You can never live it down, not ever. It would be nice to make believe that some demon left and took my sins with it.
books.
Witch+Trials
social+forces
Hammer+of+Witches
Catholic
heretics
Creationism
Galileo
The+Pope
homophobia
faggot
ethnobotanical
shaman
cactus
St+Johns+Wort
religious+experience
William+James
Information age
technology
magic
Arthur C. Clarke
Globalization
China
I, Robot
tools
witchcraft
global economy
evolution
politician
Asia
self-improvement
Isaac Asimov
Innovation
Delmarva peninsula
Zero Population Growth
ZPG
One-child Policy
greenhouse gases
Global Warming
creationists
public education
Harry Potter
Muslims
prayer in school
Christian
Dark Ages
publicly funded
book burning
conservative think-tanks
urinals
Fundamentalists
schizophrenic
schizophrenic nun
burned at the stake
Christianity
lesbianism
hallucinogenic
transpersonal+psychology
exorcism
demon
demon-possessed
psychosocial therapy
