Nevertheless, here it is. I have not bothered to post it on the Holes FB, I still believe it would be time wasted to continue the haranguing battle.
Hey Holes in the Foam (Tony?) I have finally found time to
answer you. Thanks for your reply and your “that’s how we roll” honesty. Nevertheless, you could have been a little
less honest and saved me the painful blow to my ego caused by your testosterone
fuelled verbal riposte. Before that last
sentence fires up a male hormonal urge to attack: I am just kidding, pulling
your leg/your chain, tomándote el pelo, i.e. not serious. Moreover, after your initial
reply suggesting that my first excessively long post, which was not
specifically written for your FB, sounded like an overly-serious condescending lecture,
I checked your blog and read your community declaration of intent on FB. I then
thought well maybe it was a bit too much for your venue, but I still thought I
would try to clarify what I had been trying to say the first time. My attempt
to clarify seemed to muddy the waters of
communication even more, as well as driving you to accuse me of positioning
myself to be seen as a “pompous, pseudo-intellectual ass” (obviously, your opinion of me. I will
withhold any opinion of you as I do not know you well enough to have an
opinion, and I really do appreciate what you are doing with your blog and FB, be it juvenile or serious). By the way, I was indulging in “self-deprecatory”,
albeit perhaps to your mind humourless humour, when I wrote “Yes, of course,
you may add …, if I ever deign …to post here again, I will try to be …flippant
and shallow”. Yes, I was joking and poking fun at myself, though you took it as
another loftily intellectual attack on your forum. I swear it was not. Whenever
I have free time I check your FB page and enjoy the posted articles and
cartoons.
Pseudo-atheist apologist? You know not how far from the truth you are. I
have been espousing hardcore unwavering atheism for over 50 years. When I said “a surprising number of highly
intelligent scientists believe in some kind of god”, you countered that with
“care to point out where you get that information”. You will note that I did not say “a majority”
or even “a significant minority”. It is hard to find clear statistics, but I
vaguely remember seeing stats showing that it is a very small minority (less
than 5 to 7%) of scientists that believe in any kind of god and most of those
might be deists rather than believers in a hands-on sky god. For me “the
surprising number” is anything over zero, though having some idea of how cognitive
dissonance inducing faith works, I am not really more than mildly surprised
that an astro-physicist can also believe in something that seems to be nothing
more than a wishful-thinking generated fairy tale promising an eternal happy
hunting ground knee deep in dead parrots. Thus, my reference to Shermer’s “Why Smart
People Believe Weird Things”, given that the belief in the Catholic god seems
to come under the heading of kinda super weird, especially from a scientist
that understands, actively investigates and teaches the current theories in
physics and cosmology. I don’t understand why you thought I was grading
Shermer, Dawkins and NdT. I have read pretty well everything Dawkins has
written directed at the layman, and I listen to NdTs radio show/podcast and
think he is brilliant.
The problem is the Vatican astronomer is also brilliant, as
long as we are only judging him by his knowledge of astro-physics. This type of believer does not eschew science in
general, and would agree that science works , but goes through some weird apologetic
acrobatics to argue that the scientific method and our scientific quest for
knowledge are ways of trying to understand his/her god. What really blows me
away is that the “intellectual” upper echelons of the Catholic Church and the
scientists in the Jesuit universities do not go through a total brain meltdown
due to a does-not-compute cognitive dissonance overload. For example,
transubstantiation + Jesus Christ + 13.7 billion year old universe + 4 plus
billion year old earth +evolution + throw in the “soul” at conception + life
after death +. . . = how the fuck can they add all that together and not start
frothing at the mouth. Faith (whatever
that might be), plus some split brain version of Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA????
