Anti Science Quotes

Each time Olan Chapman comes to life, his anti-quarks remain on the far side of the Time Wall. After his life cycle ends, his quarks collapse back to these roots, and – presto – America's most wanted man is ready for his next adventure.

People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.

This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.

The more it (vaccination) is supported by public authorities, the more will its dangers and disadvantages be concealed or denied.

Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!

Immunization is total nonsense! More than that is what's hidden from people about vaccines. They are dangerous. One child out of five has overwhelming disabilities from vaccines -- neurological problems, seizures.

‎In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy.

Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the "bosh" of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.

It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's disappearance.

It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice.

Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.

Of all the major religions, or lack thereof, the atheist's is one of the best pretenders: his foundation for all existences, as well as moral behaviors for the permanent good of mankind, begins at science but ends at himself, the Napoleon complex of both intelligence and imagination. On the other hand the anti-theist wouldn't survive without a deity beyond himself to hunt. He doesn't pretend, he simply nullifies his own position.

Actually, each mental image of the world system is and remains limited, objectively by the historical situation and subjectively by its author's physical and mental constitution.

By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.

People assume that memory decline is a function of being human, and therefore natural,” he said. “But that is a logical error, because normal is not necessarily natural. The reason for the monitored decline in human memory performance is because we actually do anti-Olympic training. What we do to the brain is the equivalent of sitting someone down to train for the Olympics and making sure he drinks ten cans of beer a day, smokes fifty cigarettes, drives to work, and maybe does some exercise once a month that’s violent and damaging, and spends the rest of the time watching television. And then we wonder why that person doesn’t do well in the Olympics. That’s what we’ve been doing with memory.

Our world is now so complex, our technology and science so powerful, and our problems so global and interconnected that we have come to the limits of individual human intelligence and individual expertise.

It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science—and we men seekers after knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that truth is divine.

Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds.

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.

why is it that that prominent segment of the Left—the same Left that traditionally defended its positions on the modernist grounds of reason, science, fairness for all, and optimism—is now voicing themes of anti-reason, anti-science, all’s-fair-in-love-and-war, and cynicism? 

Such a Zen dialogue is basically a contest, but it’s really an anti-contest. It’s a kind of reverse or paradoxical contest. It works like this: two people talk, and the first one who speaks from the ego loses. The one who wants to win is certainly going to lose.

Enlightenment humanism, then, is far from being a crowd-pleaser. The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don't want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough—we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There's got to be more to life than that!

The position I now favor is that economics is a pre-science, rather like astronomy before Copernicus, Brahe and Galileo. I still hold out hope of better behavior in the future, but given the travesties of logic and anti-empiricism that have been committed in its name, it would be an insult to the other sciences to give economics even a tentative membership of that field.1

Cat Rambo: Where do you think the perennial debate between what is literary fiction and what is genre is sited? Norman Spinrad: I think it’s a load of crap. See my latest column in Asimov’s, particularly re The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I detest the whole concept of genre. A piece of fiction is either a good story well told or it isn’t. The supposed dichotomy between “literary fiction” and “popular fiction” is ridiculous. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, did not have serious literary intent? As writers of serious literary intent, they didn’t want to be “popular,” meaning sell a lot of books? They wanted to be unpopular and have terrible sales figures to prove they were “serious”? I say this is bullshit and I say the hell with it. “Genre,” if it means anything at all, is a restrictive commercial requirement. “Westerns” must be set in the Old West. “Mysteries” must have a detective solving a crime, usually murder. “Nurse Novels” must have a nurse. And so forth. In the strictly literary sense, neither science fiction nor fantasy are “genres.” They are anti-genres. They can be set anywhere and anywhen except in the mimetic here and now or a real historical period. They are the liberation of fiction from the constraints of “genre” in an absolute literary sense.

Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation.

The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth.

Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist.

The rest is abortion and not-yet-science: which is to say metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology.

The dominant knowledge system tends to embrace an anti-pluralism, a lack of receptiveness to alternative epistemologies, to other ways of knowing the world.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

I did not write this work merely with the aim of setting the exegetical record straight. My larger target is those contemporaries who -- in repeated acts of wish-fulfillment -- have appropriated conclusions from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety of social cum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted. Feminists, religious apologists (including "creation scientists"), counterculturalists, neoconservatives, and a host of other curious fellow-travelers have claimed to find crucial grist for their mills in, for instance, the avowed incommensurability and underdetermination of scientific theories. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth.

The Dunning Kruger Effect: Dumb people like Trump don't know how dumb they are. They don't even know how much stuff they don't know. They don't know that other people know the stuff they don't know that they don't know. Dumb people like Trump believe they know everything there is to know.

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn’t we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did—but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn’t matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future.

It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away.

This type of rhetoric is all too common among secularists on the left. They paint a false dichotomy between religion and science. They say that religious people are anti-science, because science makes God irrelevant—therefore, religious people want to stop scientific progress. They point to the fact that many religious people are skeptical about the theory of evolution—as though skepticism of a scientific finding were in and of itself unscientific.

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis. In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.

Morgan State University political science professor Jason Johnson recently wrote on “The Root of our National Anthem,” “It is one of the most racist, pro-slavery, anti-black songs in the American lexicon. . . . ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is as much a patriotic song as it is a diss track to black people who had the audacity to fight for their freedom.

Rise of Science Denialism The problem is, in a world where some people (even in the USA, where someone like Donald Trump was allowed to rise to the level of a serious presidential candidate in 2016) have descended to such levels of ignorance that science itself is dismissed by leaders, political and religious as ‘an agenda’, and frightening numbers of people cling to ignorance and superstition because it suits their conservative anti-human rights views and objectives.

If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war. [Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.]

In the end, then, suffrage for women came down to the vote of one young man, influenced by his mom. It was rumored that “the anti-suffragists were so angry at his decision that they chased him from the chamber, forced him to climb out a window of the Capitol and inch along a ledge to safety.”15 Thus suffrage arrived in the United States, kicking and screaming.

Despite the crapehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.

Innovative technologies such as cold fusion, and radical energy sources, including sonoluminescent-triggered fusion and anti-gravitational propulsion, are either being withheld or blocked by governments, old-fashioned science academia and multinational corporations.

To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most — that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias — 1984, as an example. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a — placid, peaceful one.

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.

Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.54

What would the world be like if you had to develop a power yourself before you could use it? Just as a silly example: How would the comment section on YouTube change if, to use it, you had to have the schooling necessary to have a basic understanding of how computers and the internet work? More seriously, would anyone smart enough to know how to design and build a tank, or a laser guided anti-aircraft missile, or a computer and video editing software be stupid enough to join ISIS? In fact, if such knowledge was required—would it even be possible for there to be standing armies?

In conclusion, I would like to say why I think the question of what constitutes a pseudoscience is important. Unlike the logical positivists, I am not grinding an anti-metaphysical ax, and unlike Popper, I am not grinding an anti-Freudian or anti-Marxian one. My concern is social: society faces the twin problems of lack of public concern with the advancement of science, and lack of public concern with the important ethical issues now arising in science and technology ... One reason for this dual lack of concern is the wide popularity of pseudoscience and the occult among the general public. Elucidation of how science differs from pseudoscience is the philosophical side of an attempt to overcome public neglect of genuine science.

There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare — particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for — that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.

It behoves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalised in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that ‘in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 TAT: No. I don't know anymore than you know they're not. But, I'm talking about boundaries and privacy here. As a therapist working with survivors, I have been harassed by people who claim to be affiliated with the false memory movement. Parents and other family members have called or written me insisting on talking with me about my patients' cases, despite my clearly indicating I can't because of professional confidentiality. I have had other parents and family members investigate me -- look into my professional background -- hoping to find something to discredit me to the patients I was seeing at the time because they disputed their memories. This isn't the kind of sober, scientific discourse you all claim you want.

If the anti-gravity flying machines witnessed by so many in and around Area 51’s airspace are manmade then that confirms the Splinter Civilization are almost light years ahead of known science – and they have technologies the common man could scarcely comprehend. If on the other hand UFO’s are of alien origin, that implies the global elite are collaborating with an ET civilization – and this may explain why classified technology has progressed at such a rapid rate since around the time of Roswell.

I think it reflects the extent to which, although the Renaissance is often considered an era of logic and science, it was easily seduced by ancient practices that didn’t include geometry and anatomy, but rather a belief in oracles and mystical traditions. In some ways it was also very”—I paused—“ anti-science. Broad strokes, of course.

If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality. That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics.

A single gram of antiparticles combined with a gram of normal particles would release more than 40 kilotonnes of explosive force, which is more than twice as powerful as the atomic bombs dropped by the United States in WWII. A normal household raisin weighs about a gram, so a raisin plus anti-raisin combination would be a dehydrated weapon of mass fruitation.

Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare that to Jacinto Convit who saved thousands of lives when he developed the vaccine that protects us from it. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his anti-leprosy vaccine. So, while the promise of Jesus’ healing power is a centerpiece of the Christian myth, the demigod’s results leave something to be desired when compared to the rigor of man’s scientific inquiry.

The backlash against populism typically comes down to us from the citadels of higher learning—from think tanks, university presses, and academic conferences—but it is not a disinterested literature of social science. Although they don’t like to acknowledge it, the anti-populists are combatants in this war, defending themselves against a perceived assault on their authority. Which is to say that anti-populism is an adversary proceeding. Our thought leaders relate to populism not so much as scholars but as a privileged class putting down a challenge to itself.

In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law.

Psychotropic drugs have also been organized according to structure (e.g., tricyclic), mechanism (e.g., monoamine, oxidase inhibitor [MAOI]), history (first generation, traditional), uniqueness (e.g., atypical), or indication (e.g., antidepressant). A further problem is that many drugs used to treat medical and neurological conditions are routinely used to treat psychiatric disorders.

The fact is that in two unhappy years, working in isolation except for Gosling, in a field new to her, she had come within two steps of answering the most exciting question in post-war science. What is more, she, unknowingly, had provided all the essential data for those who took the two brilliant leaps of intuition — to anti-parallel chains and base pairs — that cracked the problem.

The nay-sayers insist loudly that they're "climate sceptics", but this is a calculated misnomer – scientific scepticism is the method of investigating whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence. Climate sceptics, by contrast, persist in ignoring empirical evidence that renders their position untenable. This isn't scepticism, it's unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought.

Also, isolation leads to chronically lowered levels of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin.  It is one of the bizarre ironies of major depression that being depressed causes people to withdraw from the most powerful antidepressant known - rich and varied social contact.  However therein lies a rich lesson also - in some cases one of the quickest and most effective ways to reverse depression is to socialize.

Also, try to limit beans. I know they keep you regular but they're high in carbs and have something crazy in them called an anti-nutrient, which might be one of the most awesome pseudo-science words I've ever read.

That 45 per cent figure really is something of a national educational disgrace. You’d have to travel right past Europe to the theocratic societies around the Middle East before you hit a comparable level of anti-scientific miseducation. It is bafflingly paradoxical that the United States is by far the world’s leading scientific nation while simultaneously housing the most scientifically illiterate populace outside the Third World.

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years—who sought to use science to justify their unbelief—never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation. That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H. L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain —in particular, your right temporal lobe— will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause.

One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead....

Finally, the work of the minister tended to be judged by his success in a single area - the saving of souls in measurable numbers. The local minister was judged either by his charismatic powers or by his ability to prepare his congregation for the preaching of some itinerant ministerial charmer who would really awaken its members. The 'star' system prevailed in religion before it reached the theater. As the evangelical impulse became more widespread and more dominant, the selection and training of ministers was increasingly shaped by the revivalist criterion of ministerial merit. The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter. Theological education itself became more instrumental. Simple dogmatic formulations were considered sufficient. In considerable measure the churches withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone. By 1853 an outstanding clergyman complained that there was 'an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect.

Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. It is said to be about “getting in touch with your feelings” and “not making judgments.” And, yes, it does involve those things. It can let you experience your feelings—anger, love, sorrow, joy—with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before. And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments—that is, you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like. Still, you do this not in order to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights. So what “not making judgments” ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgments for you. And what “getting in touch with your feelings” ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed around by them.

Sonnet of Conspiracy Perhaps there's a monster under the bed, Perhaps there's a boogeyman in the closet. Perhaps they're sterilizing kids with vaccine, Perhaps they're controlling all with a radio set. Yes our science is well advanced, But not advanced enough to control minds. Besides mind-control needs no fancy tech, When people are run by smartphone chimes. Tales like these are good for entertainment, Amongst a bunch of kindergarteners. But being adult requires the use of reason, Without submitting to prehistoric fears. Treating insecurities with common sense, Anyone can manifest civilized sentience.

Freedom does not consist in any dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom.

But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.

science and reason, which has found itself in recent decades under attack on many fronts: right-wing ideologues who do not understand science; religious-right conservatives who fear science; left-wing postmodernists who do not trust science when it doesn’t support progressive tenets about human nature; extreme environmentalists who want to return to a prescientific and preindustrial agrarian society; antivaxxers who wrongly imagine that vaccinations cause autism and other maladies; anti-GMO (genetically modified food) activists who worry about Frankenfoods; and educators of all stripes who cannot articulate why Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) are so vital to a modern democratic nation.

It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.

A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. Aristotle believed that: “The lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.… The slave shares in his master’s life; the artisan is less closely connected with him, and only attains excellence in proportion as he becomes a slave. The meaner sort of mechanic has a special and separate slavery.” Plutarch wrote: “It does not of necessity follow that, if the work delight you with its grace, the one who wrought it is worthy of esteem.” Xenophon’s opinion was: “What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities.” As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years. Without experiment, there is no way to choose among contending hypotheses, no way for science to advance. The anti-empirical taint of the Pythagoreans survives to this day. But why? Where did this distaste for experiment come from? An explanation for the decline of ancient science has been put forward by the historian of science, Benjamin Farrington: The mercantile tradition, which led to Ionian science, also led to a slave economy. The owning of slaves was the road to wealth and power. Polycrates’ fortifications were built by slaves. Athens in the time of Pericles, Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All the brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few. What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders—politely called “gentle-men” in some societies—who have the leisure to do science. Accordingly, almost no one did science. The Ionians were perfectly able to make machines of some elegance. But the availability of slaves undermined the economic motive for the development of technology. Thus the mercantile tradition contributed to the great Ionian awakening around 600 B.C., and, through slavery, may have been the cause of its decline some two centuries later. There are great ironies here.

Suppose someone says, “Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world’s favorite pastime, is starting to decline.” You suspect he is wrong. How do you question the claim? Don’t even think of taking a personal shot like “You’re silly.” That only adds heat, not light. “I don’t think so” only expresses disagreement without delving into why you disagree. “What do you mean?” lowers the emotional temperature with a question but it’s much too vague. Zero in. You might say, “What do you mean by ‘pastime’?” or “What evidence is there that soccer’s popularity is declining? Over what time frame?” The answers to these precise questions won’t settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested. Since Socrates, good teachers have practiced precision questioning, but still it’s often not used when it’s needed most. Imagine how events might have gone if the Kennedy team had engaged in precision questioning when planning the Bay of Pigs invasion: “So what happens if they’re attacked and the plan falls apart?” “They retreat into the Escambray Mountains, where they can meet up with other anti-Castro forces and plan guerrilla operations.” “How far is it from the proposed landing site in the Bay of Pigs to the Escambray Mountains?” “Eighty miles.” “And what’s the terrain?” “Mostly swamp and jungle.” “So the guerrillas have been attacked. The plan has fallen apart. They don’t have helicopters or tanks. But they have to cross eighty miles of swamp and jungle before they can begin to look for shelter in the mountains? Is that correct?” I suspect that this conversation would not have concluded “sounds good!” Questioning like that didn’t happen, so Kennedy’s first major decision as president was a fiasco. The lesson was learned, resulting in the robust but respectful debates of the Cuban missile crisis—which exemplified the spirit we encouraged among our forecasters.

It is the question of "common world". The meaning of this world is not solipsism world, the world of "ego", but the world which can be actualize by my consciousness – according to relation of “ego” and caring for another in everyday life. To care for another means one lets go of self-consciousness and self-awareness and relates. We should consider human is constructed directly in term of their own consciousness and not by contrasting that consciousness with a reality independent of them, on the other hand it is constructed separate of his consciousness. So, we should surely consider the relation of human and the world. It seems that what can link these levels is “life-world” which means the idea of releasing human from worldlessness. Life-world as general sphere of individual experience in the world around (including other persons, objects and events) is a real and concrete phenomenon which has root in everyday life for obtaining its living practical purposes and objectively, considered as the basis of knowledge, interests, benefits and common links between humans. In the realm of life-world, transcendence and consciousness link to individual and group relationship and everyday life. For Heidegger consciousness proceeds from understanding, and this understanding is predicated upon our dealings in the world. Consciousness does not belong to the world. It has a practical relationship with it. What is within consciousness is the exact meaning of the word nothing. Consciousness is nothing but an opening to what they are and can only be talked about in this sense. Consciousness is the relationship we experience in praxis. As for a footballer, bodybuilding and fitness is nothing but the relationship he experiences in act, the day of the race and the subsequent races. Therefore, in this meaning, world without consciousness, intersubjectivity relationships -Alfred Schutz calls this quality as we- pure relation- and everyday life is not imaginable. Because of this matter we can't talk about the world without considering the roles of above items. "As Husserl articulated the life-world can be said to include the world of science and action can’t be without world." Even Architecture is not separate from these issues as the communicative. A part of Professor Pezhman Mosleh speech, “Music, Anti-war, a way to Discourse” Istanbul 2016

Let's say that the God the Christians pray to is real. He actually exists. But this God is the same as the one that the Jews pray to and the same as the one that the Muslims pray to and whatever other religions are praying to a God, He is the one. One God with many faces. Most of these religions contain the myth of the Anti-Christ, a being who will come one day and lead the world astray, lead the world to a place of sin and evil. Who could this Anti-Christ be...Consider the God with many faces. How many wars have been fought in His Name? How many people have been beaten, jailed, and maimed to prove His points. Think of the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Salem, and the Sudan. All of these tragedies carried out in His name. Why is it accepted that He is a force for good? If we were to look for the Anti-Christ just by his accomplishments, wouldn't we clearly suspect the being who is the cause of so much woe?

My four things I care about are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. [...] Sam [Harris] would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. [...] I think about my personal physics hero, Dirac – who was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron, less well-known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful...in order to predict that, he needed a positively-charged and a negatively-charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told the story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the anti-particle of the electron, and Heisenberg pointed out that that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron -- the positron, that is -- was found, I guess by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s and then an anti-proton was created some time later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story...so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein, I could tell it to you with Darwin, who, you know, didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work...not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid! So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the...the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact. And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, 'Look, I want to'...you know, Feynman would say, "If an experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong' and it's a very appealing story to tell to people – but it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature and it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving. Imagine you were innovating in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The first few times might not actually work. But if you told yourself the story, 'No, no, no – this is actually genius and it's working; no, you just lost three consecutive bouts' -- well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up. It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building. And too often, people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth.

The “Muslim speech,” as we took to calling the second major address, was trickier. Beyond the negative portrayals of terrorists and oil sheikhs found on news broadcasts or in the movies, most Americans knew little about Islam. Meanwhile, surveys showed that Muslims around the world believed the United States was hostile toward their religion, and that our Middle East policy was based not on an interest in improving people’s lives but rather on maintaining oil supplies, killing terrorists, and protecting Israel. Given this divide, I told Ben that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other. That meant recognizing the extraordinary contributions of Islamic civilizations in the advancement of mathematics, science, and art and acknowledging the role colonialism had played in some of the Middle East’s ongoing struggles. It meant admitting past U.S. indifference toward corruption and repression in the region, and our complicity in the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government during the Cold War, as well as acknowledging the searing humiliations endured by Palestinians living in occupied territory. Hearing such basic history from the mouth of a U.S. president would catch many people off guard, I figured, and perhaps open their minds to other hard truths: that the Islamic fundamentalism that had come to dominate so much of the Muslim world was incompatible with the openness and tolerance that fueled modern progress; that too often Muslim leaders ginned up grievances against the West in order to distract from their own failures; that a Palestinian state would be delivered only through negotiation and compromise rather than incitements to violence and anti-Semitism; and that no society could truly succeed while systematically repressing its women. —

It is unfortunate that in some places, especially in the United States, people have resisted making choices that will keep them and their families safer. I don’t agree with these choices, but I also think it’s unhelpful to simply label them “anti-science,” as so many people do. In her book On Immunity, Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. For some people, invisible benefits that might materialize in the future are not enough to get them past the worry that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The problem is even worse in periods of severe political polarization, such as the one we’re in now.

The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense—and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them—that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us.

Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets - and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.

Dink, my boy, I'll be a millionaire in ten years. You know what I'm figuring out all this time? I'm going at this scientifically. I'm figuring out the number of fools there are on the top of this globe, classifying 'em, looking out what they want to be fooled on. I'm making an exact science of it." "Go on," said Dink, amused and perplexed, for he was trying to distinguish the serious and the humorous. "What's the principle of a patent medicine?—advertise first, then concoct your medicine. All the science of Foolology is: first, find something all the fools love and enjoy, tell them it's wrong, hammer it into them, give them a substitute and sit back, chuckle, and shovel away the ducats. Bread's wrong, coffee's wrong, beer's wrong. Why, Dink, in the next twenty years all the fools will be feeding on substitutes for everything they want; no salt—denatured sugar—anti-tea—oiloline—peanut butter—whale's milk—et cetera, et ceteray, and blessing the name of the fool-master who fooled them.

They also observed that the amygdala in the vaccinated monkeys didn’t mature with time as it was supposed to. The amygdala, incidentally, plays an important role in social interactions. Maybe it’s not so surprising they also observed that in the vaccinated monkeys the opioid antagonist diprenorphine (DPN) levels never lowered throughout the study. In the placebo group, the DPN levels decreased noticeably. One function of DPN is to block social interaction. What this means is the research showed that the social behavior of those monkeys that received the actual vaccines, where the DPN levels did not decrease, turned anti-social. We found there was at least one more study undertaken to verify the association between DPN and social behavior. Performed in 1981[141]. The authors of that study believe the release of opioids in the brain encourages social interactions. So, when the body fails to decrease the amount of the antagonist DPN, it not only blocks the opioids that encourage social interactions, but it blocks the desire to socially interact.

Christopher’s anti-God campaign was based on a fundamental error reflected in the subtitle of his book: How Religion Poisons Everything. On the contrary, since religion, as practiced, is a human activity, the reverse is true. Human beings poison religion, imposing their prejudices, superstitions, and corruptions onto its rituals and texts, not the other way around. “Pascal Is a Fraud!” When I first became acquainted with Christopher’s crusade, I immediately thought of the seventeenth-century scientist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. In addition to major contributions to scientific knowledge, Pascal produced exquisite reflections on religious themes: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here?4 These are the questions that only a religious faith can attempt to answer. There is no science of the why of our existence, no scientific counsel or solace for our human longings, loneliness, and fear. Without a God to make sense of our existence, Pascal wrote, human life is intolerable: This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there that revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied. . . .5 To resolve this dilemma, Pascal devised his famous “wager,” which, simply stated, is that since we cannot know whether there is a God or not, it is better to wager that there is one, rather than that there is not.

It is the question of "common world". The meaning of this world is not solipsism world, the world of "ego", but the world which can be actualize by my consciousness -according to relation of “ego” and caring for another in everyday life. To care for another means one lets go of self-consciousness and self-awareness and relates. We should consider human is constructed directly in term of their own consciousness and not by contrasting that consciousness with a reality independent of them, on the other hand it is constructed separate of his consciousness. So, we should surely consider the relation of human and the world. It seems that what can link these levels is “life-world” which means the idea of releasing human from worldlessness. Life-world as general sphere of individual experience in the world around (including other persons, objects and events) is a real and concrete phenomenon which has root in everyday life for obtaining its living practical purposes and objectively, considered as the basis of knowledge, interests, benefits and common links between humans. In the realm of life-world, transcendence and consciousness link to individual and group relationship and everyday life. For Heidegger consciousness proceeds from understanding, and this understanding is predicated upon our dealings in the world. Consciousness does not belong to the world, but has a practical relationship with it. What is within consciousness is the exact meaning of the word nothing. Consciousness is nothing but an opening to what they are and can only be talked about in this sense. Consciousness is the relationship we experience in praxis. As for a footballer, bodybuilding and fitness is nothing but the relationship he experiences in act, the day of the race and the subsequent races. Therefore, in this meaning, world without consciousness, intersubjectivity relationships -Alfred Schutz calls this quality as we- pure relation- and everyday life is not imaginable. Because of this matter we can't talk about the world without considering the roles of above items. "As Husserl articulated the life-world can be said to include the world of science and action can’t be without world." We should consider that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings. The artist who continually experiment the possibility of thinking and experience The new, respond to what addressed itself to him, because the new cannot be preconceived. On the other hand The new emerges through process as a shudder that presents itself to us. Even Architecture is not separate from these issues as the communicative. A part of Professor Pezhman Mosleh speech, “Music, Anti-war, a way to Discourse

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

The wonderful science behind taking the chastity pill is to preserve honor, respect, purity and worth. Again, the value of a woman’s future is dependent on how well she blocks any advances, foul balls, interceptions or explorations. It’s no surprise I question everything. What does going to the movies have to do with my vagina? What does going to the grocery store at ten pm at night to pick up a package of brownie mix have to do with my vagina? Why is ok for me not to go to a high school football game? Does wearing a tank top instead of a short sleeve shirt compromise my vagina shield? Do I have an Anti-Vagina Defense security chip installed on me that I’m not aware of, one that only works with loose clothing?

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

Here it is necessary to bring to the fore a major and highly revealing difference, at least in the common sense pervading our historical conjuncture, between the idea of communism and that of democracy. It is sometimes said of communism that it was, in fact, a good idea on paper, but that the reality was a veritable catastrophe. One thereby highlights a discrepancy between political theory and historical reality by insisting on the fact that the idea of communism is perhaps quite simply not realizable. One sometimes adds for good measure that it was precisely faith in the communist idea—a faith that lies beyond the reach of the manifest evidence of concrete experience—that led to the totalitarian turn of actually existing communism. Yet on the other hand, when one speaks of democracy, this type of criticism is no longer operative. One frequently admits that contemporary institutions are not perfect, that actually existing democracy has insufficiencies, that there is still progress to be made, that there is a democratic deficit, or that democracy quite simply remains to come. But despite all the setbacks and all the limitations of contemporary practices, people shout themselves hoarse proclaiming that it is a good idea, or even that it is the sole and unique Idea. In one instance, reality takes precedence over the idea; in the other, the idea gains the upper hand over reality. At base, the same operation is at work, which is a comparison between an ideal system and its historical institution. Yet a revealing discrepancy manifests itself in the criteria of evaluation. In the case of communism, history is capable of refuting the idea, whereas for democracy the idea transcends historical reality and orients it toward something that is perhaps always to come. Whatever the case may be, it is impossible to call into question the democratic idea, for it hovers well above concrete practices. Towering over the real, democratic discourse thereby functions as a pseudo-science, which is to say a discourse that is beyond the reach of material refutations. Illustrating another surreptitious recuperation of vulgar Marxism, faith in the idea—this time democratic—can never be refuted by experience. If this sort of belief was what sustained the misdeeds of Soviet bureaucracy, should not one expect that the liberal recuperation would come full circle and that the icon of democracy would come to allow innumerable “anti-democratic abuses,” and even the development of what Sheldon Wolin has called “inverted totalitarianism”?

It would be a kindness, by the way, and a service to history, if you could please rid yourself of the legend that Christians believed a fairy tale about the origin of the world until forced to think otherwise by the triumph of secular science. Substantially everyone in the Judeo-Christian bits of the planet believed the Genesis account until the early nineteenth century, remember, there being till then no organised alternative. The work of reading the geological record, and thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive swiftness to accommodate the discovery. In the same way, when the Origin of Species was published, most Christians in Britain at least moved with some speed to incorporate evolutionary biology into their catalogue of ordinary facts about the world. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s resistance to Darwinism was an outlier, untypical. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that the ready acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: I see what you're saying but people in psychology don't have a uniform agreement on this issue of the depth of -- I guess the term that was used at the conference was -- "robust repression." TAT: Well, Pamela, there's a whole lot of evidence that people dissociate traumatic things. What's interesting to me is how the concept of "dissociation" is side-stepped in favor of "repression." I don't think it's as much about repression as it is about traumatic amnesia and dissociation. That has been documented in a variety of trauma survivors. Army psychiatrists in the Second World War, for instance, documented that following battles, many soldiers had amnesia for the battles. Often, the memories wouldn't break through until much later when they were in psychotherapy. Freyd: But I think I mentioned Dr. Loren Pankratz. He is a psychologist who was studying veterans for post-traumatic stress in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. They found some people who were admitted to Veteran's hospitals for postrraumatic stress in Vietnam who didn't serve in Vietnam. They found at least one patient who was being treated who wasn't even a veteran. Without external validation, we just can't know -- TAT: -- Well, we have external validation in some of our cases. Freyd: In this field you're going to find people who have all levels of belief, understanding, experience with the area of repression. As I said before it's not an area in which there's any kind of uniform agreement in the field. The full notion of repression has a meaning within a psychoanalytic framework and it's got a meaning to people in everyday use and everyday language. What there is evidence for is that any kind of memory is reconstructed and reinterpreted. It has not been shown to be anything else. Memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted from fragments. Some memories are true and some memories are confabulated and some are downright false. TAT: It is certainly possible for in offender to dissociate a memory. It's possible that some of the people who call you could have done or witnessed some of the things they've been accused of -- maybe in an alcoholic black-out or in a dissociative state -- and truly not remember. I think that's very possible. Freyd: I would say that virtually anything is possible. But when the stories include murdering babies and breeding babies and some of the rather bizarre things that come up, it's mighty puzzling. TAT: I've treated adults with dissociative disorders who were both victimized and victimizers. I've seen previously repressed memories of my clients' earlier sexual offenses coming back to them in therapy. You guys seem to be saying, be skeptical if the person claims to have forgotten previously, especially if it is about something horrible. Should we be equally skeptical if someone says "I'm remembering that I perpetrated and I didn't remember before. It's been repressed for years and now it's surfacing because of therapy." I ask you, should we have the same degree of skepticism for this type of delayed-memory that you have for the other kind? Freyd: Does that happen? TAT: Oh, yes. A lot.

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity.

This book consists not only of my stories of mistakes, rather it’s all our stories of mistakes and heart aches. It’s the plight of all of us who were rebelling, and kicking against the social messes we found ourselves in. Yet there are so many others who are not alive today, and I feel obligated in not allowing the lessons of their mistakes to lie in the grave with them. It was the United States Senator, Al Franken, who stated, “Mistakes are a part of being human. Precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.” I’m revealing all of those mistakes and more, sadly a lot of them are fatal. In an attempt to have these real life lessons obtained in blood, prevent the blood-shedding of so many others. These stories are ones that young people can understand and identify with. While at the same time empowering them, to make better decisions about their choice of friends, the proper use of their time and how one wrong move can be fatal. I guess the major question that we all have to ask ourselves at the end of the day would be: how could I and so many others have been prevented from becoming monsters? You be the judge. I now extend my hand to you, and personally invite you to take a journey with me into the heartlands of innocence to menacing, from a youngster to a monster, and the making of a predator. I will safely walk you down the deserted and darkened street corners which were once my world of crime, gang violence and senseless murders. It’s a different world unto itself, one which could only be observed up close by invitation only. Together we will learn the motivation behind hard-core gangsters, and explore the minds of cold-blooded murderers. You will discover the way they think about their own lives, and why they are so remorseless about the taking of another’s life. So, if you will, please journey with me as we discover together how the fight of our lives were wrapped up in our fathers.