Re: [asa] The Old Testament God is ..

At 04:01 PM and 07:13 PM 10/1/2006, respectively, Iain Strachan wrote:

"Rather than give my own views on this typical
Dawkins vitriolic passage that no-doubt will have
choir-fulls of atheists in raptures, I shall do
the school examination question. Discuss. Any
future contributions from Janice would be much
appreciated if they contain at least 50% of words
actually written by her." ~ Iain

@ Like the kids who didn't list "Pluto" on their
exam as a "planet", I know I would still get a
failing grade in your class room no matter how many of my own words I used.

In actual fact -- when certain people are playing
teacher, I am even MORE apt to let others whose
opinions I esteem, speak for me.

For instance, it is much more entertaining for
serious-minded science/theology readers on the
internet to see the self-appointed teachers du
jour - who are among those (in the 5 items I
referenced - copied below) who are sympathetic to
Dawkins' , and his "memes" scienTISM
- attempting to refute the thoughts / words of
Alister McGrath on the subject, rather than mine.

So far, there have been no takers. The silence is
deafening. Which is the total opposite of what
would have occurred had I expressed the same thoughts using my own words. :)

Instead - once again - the red herring has been
dragged across the trail and the subject has been
changed to "me". Those who are easily distracted
by such tactics will change their focus as is
expected of those who lack critical thinking skills.

It is really funny to watch. :)

~ Janice

On Sun, 01 Oct 2006 17:22:06 -0400 Janice Matchett wrote:

At 04:01 PM 10/1/2006, Iain Strachan wrote:

>"arguably the most unpleasant character in all
>fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty,
>unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive,
>bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic,
>homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
>filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
>sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully"
>- Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion".
>
>Rather than give my own views on this typical
>Dawkins vitriolic passage that no-doubt will
>have choir-fulls of atheists in raptures, I
>shall do the school examination question. Discuss. ~ Iain

@ Birds of a feather flock together... (in 5 items referenced below):

[1] Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life by Alister McGrath
        http://www.amazon.com/Dawkins-God-Genes-Memes-Meaning/dp/1405125381

"...The replicators of ideas and beliefs - what
Dawkins calls memes - the cultural equivalent of
genes, are also critiqued by McGrath.

The truth is, they are not the fruit of
scientific discovery but philosophical postulation.

Dawkins says people believe in God, not because
he exists, but because of God memes. The idea of
God, says Dawkins, like a virus, is passed along
and replicated in culture, just as physical
traits (in the form of DNA) are passed along by means of genes.

But as McGrath rightly points out, is this God
meme concept just another meme, another virus,
another false belief being passed along? And if
there is a God meme, could there not be an
atheist meme as well? ..." ~ Reviewer: William Muehlenberg

*

[2] McGrath argues that Dawkins’ arguments fall
far short of the logical and evidence-based
reasoning that Dawkins himself espouses.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawkins'_God:_Genes,_Memes,_and_the_Meaning_of_Life

*
[3] ..Memetics, the study of memes, remains a
controversial field among many scientists and
skeptics. Memetics originated when Richard
Dawkins reduced the process of biological genetic
evolution to its most fundamental unit: the
replicator (or gene). Dawkins, in a search for
parallels and other things that he might classify
as replicators, suggested that the information
and ideas in brains ­ culture, for example ­
could function as replicators as well.

In 1981 biologists Charles J. Lumsden and Edward
Osborne Wilson published a theory of gene/culture
co-evolution in the book Genes, Mind, and
Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. They pointed
out that the fundamental biological units of
culture must correspond to neuronal networks that
function as nodes of semantic memory. Wilson
later adopted the term 'meme' as the best
existing name for the fundamental unit of
cultural inheritance and elaborated upon the
fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural
and social sciences in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

"..Memetics often takes concepts from the theory
of evolution (especially population genetics) and
applies them to human culture. Memetics also uses
mathematical models to try to explain many very
controversial subjects such as religion and [the "p" - word] systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memes

*
[4] "...In the discipline of theology, mimetic
theory has laid a strong challenge to previously
held Christian orientations. On the website Jeff
Krantz and I host, www.preachingpeace.org, we
have utilized the many and wonderful publications
of the ‘Girardians *[18] .’ Christian theology,
for the most part, has been exposed as the
emperor with no clothes. But there are reasons
for this, not the least of which is the covert
influence of negative mimesis and its effects on
early Christian theology and church practice [19]
. We can no longer afford to simply parrot the
ecclesial party line. It is important to apply
mimetic theory across the board to the science of
religion in all of its multitudinous sub-disciplines.

What we find when we apply mimetic theory to
Christian theology is that there is a deep and
lasting influence of dualism that runs through
virtually all Western Christian
theology. Christian dualists or Gnostics, as is
well known, denigrate the material world and
exalt the spiritual or inner man. They are
anti-creation. They perceive the creation to be
flawed. Who is to blame? A lesser god, a
demiurge, and there you have it, the creator and
the creation are rejected as unworthy of
respect. Philip Lee has clearly and coherently
articulated the thesis that modern American
Protestantism and ancient Gnosticism are
virtually identical [20] . It is the
contemporary Babylonian captivity of the
Church. It is also true, in one degree or
another, for the greater part of Christian
theology and history, both orthodox and heretical [21] .

The effects of dualism can be found virtually
everywhere in Christian theology not the least in
that we attribute to the Creator a malice that is
not really there at all. This malice is all over
the western doctrine of election and can be found
especially in certain atonement theories as
Anthony Bartlett has shown **[22] . The malice of
God becomes translated into ‘acts of God’ (a
disputable actuarial category) and the creation
is seen as dark, foreboding, untamed, something
to be conquered. Yes, the church has contributed
to western culture’s devaluation of
creation. And look what we have done to
Her. Environmentalists are not doomsday
forecasters. They are prophets. The human
species is dealing a mortal wound to the earth.
Humans have become a plague on the earth. And
Christian theology has been a major contributor
to our pillaging of the planet. It need not be
so. ..." ~Michael Hardin “EcoSpirituality”
http://www.preachingpeace.org/ecospirit.htm November 2003

*[18] ...the role of mimetic theory in biblical
interpretation and its hermeneutical application, ...

**[22] Cross Purposes (Harrisburg: Trinity Press,
2001). We might note here that there are
discussions of the relationship between mimetic
theory and the atonement at
<http://www.preachingpeace.org/>www.preachingpeace.org
. ... Jesus is either our Saviour or our
Example.” This either/or need not be imported
into atonement theory if the atonement is
coordinated with the incarnation as suggested by
Robin Collins “Girard and Atonement: An
Incarnational Theory of Mimetic Participation” in
Willard Swartley ed., Violence Renounced (Telford: Pandora Press, 2000).

*
[5] Nature as a Source of Positive Desire - Robin Collins, Copyright May 2006
<http://web.ustpaul.uottawa.ca/covr2006/Document/RobinCollins.pdf>http://web.ustpaul.uottawa.ca/covr2006/Document/RobinCollins.pdf.

"...As an example of morphic resonance,
Scheldrake claims that experiments show that if
rats learn a to navigate a certain type of maze
in the USA, rats in other far away places, such
as Australia, will subsequently learn to navigate
the maze much more quickly. His explanation is
that the first rats that learned the maze
modified their collective information fields.
Subsequent rats picked up this new information by
what he calls morphic resonance, a non-local
mimetic process of information transfer.

Other examples Scheldrake uses are birds in
Europe learning to open milk bottles: when a few
birds learned, it seemed to spread
extraordinarily quickly through the bird
population. Scheldrake proposes that this morphic
resonance is a pervasive phenomenon in nature,
occurring all the way from protein folding to
human society. Since these morphic fields evolve,
his hypothesis can be thought of as claiming that
there is a form of universal creative mimesis in
nature and animal and human societies.

One major difference between his hypothesis and
those discussed in the religious and
philosophical traditions above, is that it is
subject to scientific development and testing,
though of course it runs completely counter to
the reductionism that is falsely associated with
science--where science is viewed more as an ideology than a method.

If something like his hypothesis turns out to be
true, it has the potential of offering a powerful
basis within science itself of the idea that
creative mimesis is pervasive in nature, and for
the idea that human beings can participate in this process. ..." [snip]

Ding! Ding!

~ Janice

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Received on Mon Oct 2 09:03:50 2006