The power of the hard men of God is one of the great political puzzles of this country. They are the only opponents of equal marriage. They don’t remotely have the numbers. But they have log-jammed reform.

I’ve been tracking the power of these people most of my professional life. It’s no wonder. When I was a kid journalist, sex for men like me was a crime nearly everywhere in Australia.

Kissing was assault. One year in the early 1980s, a Sydney magistrate fined a man $50 for tongue-kissing another on the dance floor of an Oxford Street club. Fucking carried a prison sentence of 14 years.

In that lost world, hardly anyone was thrown behind bars. The point was the threat and the shame. The upshot was corruption and violence. Lives were ruined.

And just as they are fighting today against equal marriage, warriors of the cloth battled with everything they had to keep it that way.

read more of David Marr: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/11/gods-warriors-are-locked-in-a-barbaric-futile-battle-against-marriage-equality

 

Here, we need to quickly debunk some intellectual crap on the ABC. What Richard Colledge writes — posted at the ABC Religion and Ethics department — in his faint condemnation of Nick Trakakis, is immeasurable crap:

"I am referring to the perplexing phenomenon that thinkers of great ability and integrity can fundamentally disagree about a general matter such as the compatibility of faith and reason, and specific issues arising from it. How is it that well-informed and intelligent people can come to very different conclusions on the basis of apparently extremely similar or identical evidence?" 

The feeble point made here by Leonisky or Gus-the-Idiot, is that "apparently extremely similar or identical evidence" is a very poor (and deceitful) argument from a Christians and of other religious groups perspective in relation to reason and philosophy. The evidence, upon which religious people place their faith rather than reason, are extremely faulty, have been manipulated to suit the argument since most such "evidence" extracted from the bible have been forgeries — and above all, the reasoning is completely faulty. 

Some other dude, Robin Shumacker, tells us, in this religious festive nativity,  "not to claim that Jesus was a myth"... Why not? We would not be the first ones. The Jews actually reject the concept of Jesus being "the" prophet. 

Accepting a-priori propositions, including Genesis or the Original Sin, as evidence is not very clever. That one is a thinker of great ability would be shot down in flame by the wrong choice of references and thus go in circles around the same broken pot.
One can argue brilliantly with one foot nailed to the ground, should one uses such frames of reference that are obscure (or already accepted through brainwashing — i.e: unquestioned values) to the average punter, and most average punters would fall for the trick — while your below average thinker who has studied the erroneous evidence and compared it to reality, would not fall for the trick.

One does not have to be a genius to note that the association of Emperor Constantine and of the Christian religion was a fourth century system designed to codify the way people were going to "believe" while becoming useful to the Emperor's conquests under the banner of the "unifying" new god.

The same happened with the prophet Mohammed, except he decided himself to be the last prophet, that all others would be punished and that non-believers had to be eradicated. It is to be noted that, even then, there was dissent but the dissenters were brutally punished. No love of the"others", there.

Back under Constantine, the concept of the Trinity was invented to tidy up some loose ends which did not make sense in the new Christian religious sophistry — loose ends and solution that still do not make sense to any proper philosophical analysis through reason. 

There was a lot of swatted subterranean dissent till the renaissance (including banned street theatre), when a few intellectuals managed to get a few rich kings interested in a revival of ideas and style. The Church followed the trend with more glorious decorations to stay in the game.

The age of the apocalyptic threats with the eternal brimstone of hell had become a bit stale, though the fire was still burning. Gold and glorification was de religious rigeur. And stealing the old Nordic and Roman pagan concepts to corner the entire spiritual market was a must, including Santa Claus.

By the 18th century, new proper thinkers could see that the evidence used by the religious peddlars did not stack up. 

The war of religion had also exposed the contrary interpretation of "evidence" and some people could see that this evidence of religious belief was a big swamp of invented lies. No need to go through the warped "evidence" in this dissertation yet again here, but the list long — and each item can be debunked one by one — as long as the bible itself. The codification of human behaviour is not divine, even in Quran.

Nick Trakakis still has to walk the extra mile to reach this conclusion that many before him have reached: god is an invention of men (mostly men). His views are unfortunately still religious, but towards individual belief in god than belief in god through religious organisations.

In regard to the non-existence of god, people like Bruno Bauer and Friedrich Engels can be mentioned. They rationally explained in detail why religious evidence was (is) bunkum.

Colledge goes on and on and on:
"This question concerning what has come to be known as "the epistemology of disagreement" is currently an area of active debate in philosophical circles, though not often, in my judgement, in ways that break through to the key matters that deserve attention. In my view, fundamental disagreements - such as those we see in the whole network of debates around faith and reason - are at least as much about affective and "gut-intuitional" aspects of intellectual assent as much as they are about the validity and soundness of specific arguments."

The "epistemology of disagreement" is not a philosophical argument, despite being a big association of big words. It is only a circle only for believers who dab into pseudo-philosophy. Colledge goes on and his arguments get more than suspect when he mentions "gut-intuitional aspect of intellectual assent". This proposition is twisted like a knotted Christmas-light decoration that has been used too often and badly repacked. 

On this level, for all we know, global warming is not happening should we base our "gut-instinctive intuition" on our desire to accept fossil fuel comforts and be unable to gauge any change in the climatic conditions by using our bio-senses, including our nose and pointing a spittled-finger in the wind. In order to make a strong argument in regard to the reality of climatic changes, aka global warming, we need scientific evidence of facts and figures provided by precise instrumentation which cannot be disputed — though there still some ignoramuses who prefer to reject the idea because "it is inconvenient" and is counter-intuitive. 

Colledge goes on and on and on:
"This insistence is perhaps also a reason for my begging to differ with Nick in his claim that organised religious structures are "incompatible with the pursuit of truth and wisdom." Nick's point seems to be that organised religions are the Jerusalem to philosophy's Athens. As will be obvious from what I have already argued, I consider this to vastly overstate the gap between what we sometimes (potentially misleadingly) refer to as faith and reason, a pairing that can be understood to set up a disjunction rather than a relationship of inter-penetration."

What a loot of hot poop. Having faith is not a philosophy, because it accepts structured absolutism a-priory from the start. The rest is just waffle. But here, Colledge is annoyed that Nick is loosing his attachment to the teat of comfortable organised religion, that which is taught as a fake philosophic roundabout in order to have strength in number (the Jerusalem option of belief). Suddenly Nick has become a freely-accepting religious person, with a compact made directly between him and god, without the rituals, the organisation and the cash collection attached.

This freedom to seek god independently would send enormous alarm bells to religious institution and I would not be surprised if the rector of the Australian Catholic University discreetly asked some of his subordinates to swat the flame of dissent, including Colledge who continues:

It remains the perpetual role of religious systems of thought, through their most skilled thinkers, to provide not just elaborate expressions of doctrinal belief and rational arguments for their truth, but first and foremost holistic grounds for viewing their traditions as live options. For once this basic feasibility is lost, and with it that ineffable quality by which individuals already care, rational arguments lose their power to move and to convince.

Translation: It remains the perpetual role of religious systems of thought, through their most skilled spruikers, to brainwash you. These self-deluded grand-standing priests of belief, still want to convince you that you need them, that you should part from some cash to support them and their organisations, and that, still living in the dark ages, punishment from the original sin can only be sorted by redeption should you believe, through Jesus. 

This is crap. Gloriously managed crap. As one old glorious advertisement used to say: Bring your cash along and save. Cash is the main motivator of organised religions. Without cash, organised religious beliefs would die in the bum... No philosophy in this.

Gus Leonisky
Your local prophet.

 

The article by Paola Totaro in The Australian today (26/12/15) called Vatileaks: Vatican Confidential is interesting and is confirming with samples (evidence?) of what Gus-the-Elder mentions above:

 

"As one old glorious advertisement used to say: Bring your cash along and save. Cash is the main motivator of organised religions. Without cash, organised religious beliefs would die in the bum... No philosophy in this."

 

Systematic Theology as "Theologie Totale"

My further suggestion is correlative to this, and concerns how systematic theology is to be written and promulgated given the need to link it tightly now to political conversations which "borrow" from its various systematic loci. The urgency here is keep what was formerly the disconnected and depotentiated "pastoral theology" tightly linked to the heart of the systematic project.

But this, as I argue in my own systematic work, can only be done well if systematic theology knows itself to be necessarily embedded in the "field," and to have its doctrines tested and purified as much through an analysis of the prayer and worship that sustains it as in its outworkings in the world, and particularly in the state institutions of healing and punishment.

This is a large task, to be sure.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/07/24/4706747.htm

 

 

I read a lot of scientific books and articles. Most of them are complex, extremely complicated by the sheer number of relationships and could appear obscure unless one read them with a very dedicated attention, reference the unknown words or concepts to original ideas and develop an understanding of why we can now explore the Control of species-dependent cortico-motoneuronal connections underlying manual dexterity... or Chiral Majorana fermion modes in a quantum anomalous Hall insulator-superconductor structure...

Here in this article "Can Systematic Theology become 'Pastoral' Again, and Pastoral Theology 'Theological'?" by Sarah Coakley, one average bod can be assured that to understand it is a task beyond what mere mortals can chew. As an atheist, a fierce one at that, I cannot find a fault in the development of the theothingy idea since I have no clue as to what is being talked about. So there can be no argument from me, except a chortle... 

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