The editorial of the AAAS Journal Science, 13 May 2016, is considerately written by a couple of religious nuts. Heavy duty religious men. Not that I dispute the good intentions of the Pope's representatives, but there is a limit as to where science should allow the invasion of hocus pocus in its domain. Religion is hocus pocus, whether it is charitably oriented, human rights friendly or not. 

 

The editorial has come about because the United Nations is convening its first World Humanitarian Summit, in Istanbul of all places. I suppose there is a historical relationship here (Constantinople) when Emperor Constantine delivered the first synod of the Catholic church. As I said before, it is easier to control sheep than deal with a variety of intelligent people, in which an emperor would become one of the dumb crowd. 

This new Summit is dedicated to every person's safety, dignity and freedom — and the right to thrive at the heart of decision-making. It's there, included in the scientific magazine, as a "social sciences" section and headed as: "Pursuit of integral ecology".... 

There is nothing scientific in social sciences. It's only a conglomerate of decisions which statistically can help people live better lives versus other decisions which will not do so — like war, slavery and exploitation. To include religions in these decision shows there is nil scientific rigour in this process — only stats about poverty, toilet days and rich getting richer. It's politics. There is nothing scientific about politics, just manipulation of people's mind to accept being controlled within certain parameters, while protecting the planet or not.

This summit is charitably laudable indeed, but impractical without getting embroiled with the murky politics of "free-trade", commercialisation, consumerism and application thereof like Empire brand suppositories. 

The end paragraph of this editorial by Monsignor Marcello Sanchez  Sorondo — the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences — and by Veerabhadran Ramanathan — a council member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and a distinguished professor of climate sciences at the University of California, San Diego — is telling of the intent of the piece:

Pope Francis effort to unify sciences, policy, and religion towards an integral ecology approach is just a start. We hope that other religions and moral and political leaders will join this new synergy and nudge society towards equitable solutions to ecological and social justice problems without loosing sight of the value of the human person and the common good.

Not a bad effort. But zero for religious hubris.

Anyone having read my rants on the religion and the science dichotomy would know that science and religion cannot be used in the same sentence (don't tell me, I just did). Religions are dogmatic. Sciences ask questions and provide relative answers. In more general terms, religions have been anchored on fairy tales while sciences look at entrails of birds in regard to their functions, not so much to predict the future — though looking at weather patterns past and present, can give us an inkling of what to expect next from global warming. It's not even rocket science.

Having had to adapt to a more intelligent debate, since the Galileo inquisition, the Catholic church has tried hard to highjack and morally control the new discoveries of sciences. The one big quandary left still to discuss for the Church is our origin as monkeys rather than fallen angels. But this aspect is often swiped under the carpet by the religious pundits, including the scientific Monsignors. 

Now we call again on our rabid evangelical, Eric Metaxas, for providing us with some religious furphific comparisons.
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There's a reason you wake up every morning instead of booting up. And why you probably processed bites of cereal this morning, not bytes of data.

A few years ago, Rebecca Lawson at the University of Liverpool asked men and women from different backgrounds to draw a bicycle from memory. Simple, right?

Well, not only could the average person not draw a functionally accurate bicycle, but some of the contraptions they did draw were hilariously impractical. Most of these "bicycles" were missing fundamental parts, and many participants couldn't even remember where the chain or pedals went.

So, why can so few people recall what something as basic as a bicycle looks like?

Writing in Aeon, psychologist Robert Epstein from the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology has the answer: "We are organisms, not computers. Get over it."

"For more than half a century," he writes, "psychologists, linguists, [and] neuroscientists … have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer."

But this just isn't the case. Our brains do not operate based on innate programming or create digital representations of stimuli. They lack memory buffers or long-term storage, and they don't process via algorithms or "write" and "retrieve" data from neurons.

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I agree, we are not booting up when we wake up, though sometimes I feel in my old age that I have been booted out of bed... But I have news for Metaxas. People are working on developing "artificial" intelligence that can work like an "organism". Actually this has been done for yonks: It's called brainwashing and religious nuts are very good at the process. All you need is to tell people — with constant reinforcing repeats ad nauseam — people from a very young age to believe in god or they will go to hell. It works a treat for the majority of uncomputerised minds. Most of us people are like Pavlov dogs. Under the spell of this brainwashing, people believe they'll get a treat when they die and salivate accordingly. Bullshit.

In regard to the bicycle, the "test" does not show that people are not able to draw a bicycle, it only shows that people never had the occasion to think about it before hand. I explain: most "ordinary people" are not trained to be observant, nor mechanically minded, nor self-reliant, nor designed to be intelligent. This would defeat the purpose of "control".  They are designed to follow simple beliefs (like they'll get a treat when they die should they "believe"), most of which are wrong or unverifiable, including the concept of work and read the Daily Telegraph.

Keeping people in a level of managed ignorance has been the purpose of their controller in a Ponzi scheme of control. This scheme is called hierarchy. Would you have asked a king, a queen or a president to draw a functional bicycle, there is 99.99 per cent chances they would have flunked the test as well.

Drawing a bicycle is a piece of cake, really, including doing the sprockets, though for time restraint we could forget about the gear changes.

Now the trick would be being asked to draw a functional digital watch. There could be less than 1000 specialists on the entire planet who could actually do it, including draw the intricate schematics of the semi-conductors network keeping the rhythm and the tabulator transcribing this into portions of recognisable time — hundredth of seconds, tens of seconds and so forth. For example the rhythm on an atomic clock runs at 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation per seconds. Some precise mechanism has to transcribe this measurement into useful time to loaf about for. This enormous accuracy can lead us to observe "time dilation" or, to put it bicycle terms, tyre deflation in space. 

So, Metaxas think that we are clever because we can ride a bicycle and robots can't yet. Hey, I've seen dogs, monkeys and an elephant — and clowns as well — riding bikes. I don't think Jesus ever rode a bicycle. 

And this is the crux of Metaxas stupid rant is to conclude with:

But if we want to progress in our understanding, let's drop figurative language that trains us to think of ourselves as things, rather than as persons who bear the divine image.

The divine image? Boy, god must be ugly. The mention of god is actually the most figurative language ever. So to follow Metaxas crooked logic, let's drop the divine figurative lingo. Forget god. The point is that billions of years of evolution (4 point something to be exact) has developed the brain as we used it — badly use it at that considering we lie, fudge and misunderstand most things. We could do so much better — including not to believe in a very spurious story that tells us of "one GUY, his pop, and a holy ghost who TOGETHER, as one, designed the gigahuge universe just for us, bad sinners, dropped on a small bit, so we could nail him to a cross so he could save us from these sins till the time they (him, his pop and the holy ghost, as one) decide “game over” and those who are still sinning go to a Belzeebub fire and suffer for eternity without redemption — while if you pay cash and believe, you go to an eternal banquet full of blessed virgins... "

Blimey. And this is what the two writers of the Science editorial believe in, except for the exact number of blessed virgins.

It is an idiotic story with no science in it, but the storytellers have wrapped up the contained ludicrousness with an enormous amount of obscure details and historical fiction, including biblical floods, that make as much sense as the flat earth theory. A story as fake as the picture at top...

But they stick by it. We should not allow these guys to be part of science.