…and this is a 
The government of the UK has officially apologized for its past abuse of Alan Turing. Here is the full statement.
2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain's fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of 'gross indecency' - in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan's status as one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind's darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate - by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices - that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Posted by: Joel | September 10, 2009 7:44 PM
As someone who makes a living based on his and von Neumann's ideas, hear, hear.
As a gay man living in the USA, I say, what about all the other people who were tortured and abused for who they love.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 10, 2009 7:51 PM
*wipes away tears* Very well said. I'm astonished at this part:
That was very big of the United Kingdom to recognize the legal terrorism that all gay men had to go through, including Alan Turing.Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 10, 2009 7:52 PM
Well, its about time. No, actually this apology is far overdue.
Does it strike anyone else as a particularly bitter irony that, although Turing was persecuted for the then 'crime' of homosexuality, which is to say threatening the cherished monolith of conventional socially constructed masculinity by being insufficiently 'manly' in the eyes of the bigots of the period, he was chemically castrated by the injection of female hormones?
This was a truly monstrous practice that attacked the very essence of its victims' sexual lives. It is something I would not endorse even as a punishment for the most vile of pedophiles, still less inflict upon an innocent man simply because he chooses to love differently. We should all be very glad that such things belong to a paticularly dark chapter of the benighted past of Europe.
Posted by: Pharyngulette | September 10, 2009 7:55 PM
Hmm. Seems a kind of tepid apology for such appalling treatment of Turing. At least to me.
I'd've liked to see more outrage, personally.
Posted by: Itspiningforthefjords
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September 10, 2009 7:57 PM
It means nothing to Turing, of course, but it means a lot to a lot of people today. Turing was evidently quite a character, and quite a mathematician. And quite a patriot, in the best sense of that often empty or abused word.
I think that the USA, in the same situation, would have apologized many years earlier, but - horrifyingly - might NOT be able to do so right now, or would do so only after the most appallingly disgusting "debate": the Great Ugly that poses as "conservative" and "Republican" has no other purpose or craving, and an absurdly over-weighted power of veto.
Posted by: chuckgoecke
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September 10, 2009 7:57 PM
Outstanding! And its about time! Hopefully this will be the start of a wave of apologies, across the world. Perhaps, since I'm near the top, we could all list all the deserving people, down through the ages, that deserve official apologies.
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky | September 10, 2009 8:00 PM
There's an excellent short story by Greg Egan about what might have happened if Turing's life had gone a bit differently (ok, a bit differently involved intervention by a time traveling robot but still...). The story is entitled Oracle and can be found at: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html
Posted by: Itspiningforthefjords
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September 10, 2009 8:00 PM
Um, #6 (Ha!), did you have a real point to make under all that sarcasm, or did you just want to be the first stupid arsehole to troll this thread?
Posted by: Mike Wagner | September 10, 2009 8:01 PM
So once we invent a time machine to go back and kill Hitler, make sure you've got some properly dated cash on hand so you can track down Mr. Turing and take him out for a pint.
Posted by: Grook | September 10, 2009 8:02 PM
I'm very glad to see this. Alan Turing is a hero for his part in cracking the Enigma code, and an inspiration for computer science students like me. I'm also glad to see that they extend the apology to all of the other gay men who were treated so horribly.
Posted by: Jeeves | September 10, 2009 8:03 PM
I'm not sure how Number 10 could do that, or why they should considering that the law is both long gone and not the fault of any serving member of the government. IMHO It is a fitting apology to and recognition of Alan Turing and all the other people who suffered under that awful law after all no amount of apologising will bring back the people who died.
I hope that that's just poorly worded on your part.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | September 10, 2009 8:05 PM
Well, at least they did better than the Catholic Church, who waited nearly four centuries to apologize for Galileo.
Posted by: Cujo359 | September 10, 2009 8:07 PM
It would be nice if we could behave in such a way that we wouldn't have to apply to people posthumously. We don't seem to be there yet, though.
Posted by: chuckgoecke
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September 10, 2009 8:08 PM
Itspiningforthefjords, I was serious, I don't know how you got that idea, unless it is yourself that is the troll.
Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 10, 2009 8:08 PM
Jeeves @ 11;
Sorry, That was exceptionally poor wording on my part. What I meant to say was; 'simply because he loved differently'.
I apologise for any offence my slip may have given. I understand that sexual orientation is not a choice, but rather an aspect of a person that they are born with.
Posted by: Kapitano | September 10, 2009 8:09 PM
Alan Turing is one of my heroes.
* A gay man who simply refused to hide it. He honestly couldn't see the point.
* A brilliant inventor with minimal social skills, who was absolutely hopeless with anything mechanical. In short: a nerd!
* One of the half dozen people who could genuinely be called "Inventor of the Computer".
* Pioneer of artificial intelligence, and the kind of philosopher who doesn't call himself a philosopher.
Did he really kill himself? The evidence is inconclusive to say the least. Either way, the man is still an inspiration.
Posted by: Cujo359 | September 10, 2009 8:09 PM
Re: my #13 "apologize", not "apply".
Posted by: Trumpeter | September 10, 2009 8:09 PM
Here here.
Posted by: Itspiningforthefjords
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September 10, 2009 8:16 PM
Chuchgoeke,
Before I write you off entirely, would you explain what this means?
"Perhaps, since I'm near the top, we could all list all the deserving people, down through the ages, that deserve official apologies."
It reeks of sarcasm even on the fourth reading, so lower yourself enough to parse it for me.
What "official apology" are you "near the top" in deserving? What bad thing did which bad government do to you?
Posted by: chuckgoecke
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September 10, 2009 8:20 PM
Itspiningforthefjords: Sorry for your confusion. I simply meant, that I was one of the first posters.
Posted by: Jim Harrison | September 10, 2009 8:21 PM
It's not so valuable to apologize fifty years later. What would really help is to not act badly in the present for transient political advantage as the New Labor government did when it lied the Brits into going into Iraq and our government is still doing by refusing to prosecute our torturers and their political masters. Are we going to apologize for that fifty years from now too?
Posted by: Teddydeedodu | September 10, 2009 8:24 PM
Finally...
And like John Waters said in an episode of the Simpsons
"Homer, I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now, if every gay man could just do the same, you'd be set."
Posted by: Gilgamesh | September 10, 2009 8:24 PM
Good deal, however, I hear the voices of bigots in the US snorting their disapproval.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 10, 2009 8:24 PM
I think that the USA, in the same situation, would have apologized many years earlier, but - horrifyingly - might NOT be able to do so right now, or would do so only after the most appallingly disgusting "debate": the Great Ugly that poses as "conservative" and "Republican" has no other purpose or craving, and an absurdly over-weighted power of veto.
What makes you think the US would have apologized earlier? The United States officially barred homosexuals from entering the country until 1990. It wasn't until 2003 that the Supreme Court said, "You know what? You can't throw people in jail for having sex with members of the same sex."
And believe me, the United States openly persecuted gay folks. During the McCarthy era, more people were kicked out of government for being gay than for being Communist. (And it's still happening in the military....) The situation was incredibly similar.
Posted by: Itspiningforthefjords
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September 10, 2009 8:24 PM
Ok. I'm glad to get it straight. Thank you.
Posted by: Ernst Hot | September 10, 2009 8:24 PM
Itspiningforthefjords,
His post was near the top of the thread... I certainly read no sarcasm in it. In fact I was wondering if the original post at #6 had been removed.
Posted by: Mus | September 10, 2009 8:26 PM
Even though that is the apology of someone who had nothing to do with the crime, it's still nice to hear. It was a very nice and eloquent apology.
I honestly don't know much about Alan Turing, but would like to know more. Does anyone know of any good biographies done? movies?
Posted by: Dahan | September 10, 2009 8:26 PM
About. Damn. Time.
Posted by: Killua | September 10, 2009 8:30 PM
A very long overdue apology but well written and an important symbol against intolerance.
Posted by: Jeeves | September 10, 2009 8:32 PM
@27 Mus
Breaking the Code is a decent film.
Posted by: Itspiningforthefjords
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September 10, 2009 8:35 PM
Wow, I'm honored to have you notice me MAJ (and I am entirely sincere - you are one of my favorites here).
I am well aware of the US attitude toward gays historically. When I wrote about an "earlier" apology I was thinking of the mid-1990s. And a bit wishfully, perhaps.
I knew the history you refer to quite well (I was a San Francisco liberal working in a flower shop, listening to local public radio and KPFK, marching in the Parade, etc.), but I had forgotten entirely about the official ban being lifted only in 1990.
Oh, and the failure of President Clinton to open the military to openly serving gays & lesbians.
[sigh] Yep. Wishful thinking.
Posted by: SEF | September 10, 2009 8:35 PM
@ Gregory Greenwood #3:
No, because you've got it wrong. Perhaps you're just too young (and ignorant of the relevant bit of history). Back then, the psychobabbling medical authorities had the ill-conceived notion that gayness was down to the person being too male, so that they'd even go for anything in trousers. Fixing them would therefore have to involve reducing their maleness - hence the chemical castration. Much like creationists, medics didn't bother their silly heads with the contradictory evidence that such men weren't attracted to females. (It's the same story over and over in the medical profession.)
It's a modern thing to concentrate instead on effeminacy and hence label gay men as not man enough.
Posted by: Jeeves | September 10, 2009 8:35 PM
Gregory Greenwood @15
I guessed it was a mistake, anything other than that wouldn't have fitted in with the rest of your post.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
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September 10, 2009 8:37 PM
It won't bring Turing back but the apology is a sincere gesture by a political leader who didn't actually have to do it. Gordon Brown hasn't impressed me too much, but he does with this apology. Well done, sir.
Posted by: John Swindle | September 10, 2009 8:38 PM
I think the Prime Minister did a fine job. He recognised the real issues and took no refuge in excuses. It does no good to complain that the apology is too little and too late. He is not really addressing Dr. Turing - he is telling his fellow citizens that good and valuable people were treated horribly, and that it is necessary to do better.
Posted by: Happy Kiwi | September 10, 2009 8:39 PM
I like this. It's elegant and unequivocal, and entirely appropriate. There's nothing shrill about it, and the careful linking of homosexual suffering to the broader evil of the holocaust places the discrimination against people like Turing in its proper context.
Sure bigots will fulminate about it, but the fact a government can produce such a detailed and considered apology that both corrects a wrong and sets a standard for popular thought gives me hope for the future.
What amazes me almost as much as the fact of the extreme prejudice towards people with sexual orientations outside the mainstream, is that so many of them still managed to function and contribute greatly to a society that demonised and criminalised something as fundamental as their sexuality.
Here's to Alan Turing, and others who suffered as he did.
Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 10, 2009 8:39 PM
I would like to think that this apology signifies the final victory in the battle for sexual orientation equality in the UK. Unfortunately, the hydra of homophobic bigotry is unlikely to be so easily slain. Even today, how many people lose jobs or social standing or are ostracised from their own families when they 'come out'? How often do the commenters here encounter statements of casual homophobia expressed as if the attitude is still socially acceptable? How often is the term 'gay' employed as a prejorative in day to day speech?
I myself made a glaringly obvious mistake when I posted at number 3 without even noticing the fact until Jeeves kindly pointed it out to me.
I fear we still have a long way to travel before our society is truly equal in respect to many societal groups, including the LGTB community.
Posted by: kamaka | September 10, 2009 8:40 PM
Apology recognised as relevant to the facts.
Posted by: CodyR | September 10, 2009 8:40 PM
I thought this was a very moving, and more importantly, genuine apology. We can't change the past, but we can do the right thing now, which is make ammends for past horrors best we can, and to never repeat them again.
@Chuckgoeke, that is an intresting thought experiment. You'll have to give me some time to think of some that deserve apologies for our past that haven't recieved them, but I'm sure there are many.
Posted by: Mus | September 10, 2009 8:41 PM
@ Jeeves, #30
Oh, excellent! I was hoping for a movie! Thanks :)
Posted by: Margaret | September 10, 2009 8:42 PM
Good stuff. And from someone who grew up in a manse too. Maybe, just maybe we humans are getting somewhere. Slow but sure.
Posted by: cameron | September 10, 2009 8:44 PM
@Mus, #27
Also check out Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And not just because it features a fictionalized Alan Turing, but because it's really good.
Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 10, 2009 8:45 PM
Jeeves @ 33;
Yes, it was a mistake. The trouble is that mistakes like this help to perpetuate innaccurate and harmful stereotypes about homosexuality and can even contribute to the slowing of the delegitimisation of homophobic attitudes.
Thanks again for pointing out my error. I appreciate it.
Incidentally, I like your username. I am a huge Jeeves and Wooster fan. Stephen Fry is a genius of the first water.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 10, 2009 8:47 PM
Despite being neither a maths nor a computer enthusiast (beyond the latter's use for things like blogging, obviously) I have read a few books about the code-breaking in WWII and know what Alan Turing achieved.
Apart from it being a monstrous injustice born out of ignorant bigotry it was a collossally stupid thing to do; does anyone believe he wouldn't have continued to be a world leader in his field? He might have brought the computer revolution around much sooner had he lived.
Posted by: Gregory Greenwood | September 10, 2009 8:51 PM
I am a little surprised to actually find myself admiring Gordon Brown. Usually he is a politician that I cannot stick, but today he took an eloquent stand on a noble point of principle. An important apology well said.
Perhaps I misjudged him. It's almost enough to make me consider voting for him come next May.
Posted by: DreamDevil | September 10, 2009 8:52 PM
Humanity's darkest hour?
Just read up on Gengis Khan and you will find even more horrible stuff.
I'm not saying the Holocaust wasn't bad (duh!) but as far as horrible acts done in a human vs.human setting, the holocaust is only one nightmare of the horror.
Posted by: Last Hussar | September 10, 2009 8:52 PM
Even now the 'Daily Mail' and 'Sun' type rags will be wondering how to snort their derision while trying not to be (too overtly) homophobic. It will be "Our boys are dying while the PM make politically correct statements about history"
We can't change history, but we can affirm our desire not to repeat it.
Posted by: Samantha | September 10, 2009 8:52 PM
I think it was well written overall and certainly adeptly handled why Turing in particular was being named individually and all the other victims weren't. I certainly hope this acknowledgement (I hesitate to call it an apology) leads the way for better education regarding equality.
Posted by: kamaka | September 10, 2009 8:53 PM
How often do the commenters here encounter statements of casual homophobia expressed as if the attitude is still socially acceptable?
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A., circa 1975... the guy's a nigger...perfectly acceptable thing to say out loud, and said presupposing the listener is of a like mind.
It's gotten better, but Milwaukee was a racist hell-hole back in the day.
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/results.asp?keyword1=groppi
Posted by: JefFlyingV, Samba Pa Ti | September 10, 2009 9:00 PM
Glad to see some of the post war European (sexual) Fascism has been addressed by the inclusive apology. Next stop U.S.A.?
Posted by: hje | September 10, 2009 9:01 PM
Turing rules! He also contributed to developmental biology in 1952 with his reaction-diffusion model for pattern formation.
Let's see if anyone even remembers the Weasel-obsessed "Isaac Newton of Information Theory" 50 years hence.
Posted by: Ivence | September 10, 2009 9:03 PM
@42 Aww you beat me to it! That was where I first learned of him in any way other than just that he was the guy behind the Turing Test and it inspired me to read more about it. After I learned of the details surrounding his death I've never been able to think of him without tearing up a little.
We all lost a great man, and...well this doesn't bring him back but I will second the eariler statements:
Here, here.
Posted by: kamaka | September 10, 2009 9:05 PM
JefFlyingV, Samba Pa Ti @ 50
Next stop U.S.A.?
You're dreaming.
Posted by: Roameo
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September 10, 2009 9:08 PM
Great news.
Turing's case was certainly not rare. Its a pity that it took someone as great as him being persecuted for this to be publicly recognised, and that it took so long. But its certainly a step in the right direction.
Posted by: Nemo | September 10, 2009 9:20 PM
Have they apologized to Oscar Wilde yet?
Posted by: Insightful Ape | September 10, 2009 9:21 PM
Late better than never.
The British government beats the so called Holy Sea 60 to 300.
Posted by: Mus | September 10, 2009 9:22 PM
@ cameron #42- Hmm... I think I'll watch breaking the code first, and then read cryptonomicon. That way I'll get a better idea of what parts were fictionalized. Thanks for the suggestion!
Posted by: Canuck | September 10, 2009 9:22 PM
As a middle-aged, heterosexual white male who is still with his first and only wife and our children, I say "about fucking time". I don't "get" what it means to be gay, and I can't possibly relate to the desires of gay people, but prosecuting people for being gay is insane. As insane as that fuckwit from Iran (Ahmadinejad) saying that there were no gay people in his country. Gay people are born as a percentage of the normal spectrum of humankind, and no amount of moralizing by any group will change that. Religious conservatives just have to get the fuck over it. But then I guess gay people are mostly liberal, so the conservatives would hate them doubly.
Imagine what Turing would have done had he lived a full life, and not been persecuted.
But I have met a few gays who really did annoy me. They were the ones who implied that the rest of us are "gay too, but won't admit it". Or "try it and you might find you're gay too". Sorry. We are what we are too. Most of us guys are just drawn to women like a duck to water. I'd love to get graphic about this, but we don't want to go there.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 10, 2009 9:29 PM
@Canuck
Gays have to go through this very thing every fucking day, but you're right, those people should not have done that to you.Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 10, 2009 9:34 PM
How often do the commenters here encounter statements of casual homophobia expressed as if the attitude is still socially acceptable?
Dunno if this fits the question, but I got called "Homo" while walking home from a bar two weeks ago.
Posted by: RobertDW | September 10, 2009 9:38 PM
Pharyngulette@4:
The last thing you should want to see in an apology is outrage. If a person is apologising, that means they are absorbing responsibility onto themselves. Outrage means that they are externalising that responsibility - the apologiser may well be very sorry the event occurred, but it was somebody else's fault.
All the people who set the policies and enforced them are dead or retired. Gordon Brown was a child when this occurred. His party wasn't even in charge, I believe. Despite this, he stood up as the representative of the British Government, and apologised on behalf of the British Government, and by extension the British people of the time who supported that government. He could not have apologised sincerely, accepting that responsibility, if he'd projected outrage instead.
Posted by: Paco | September 10, 2009 10:02 PM
I find it a very nice apology. Not that apologies can undo the horrible mistreatment of Alan Turing and so many others. But it is refreshingly devoid of excuses and of minimization of the suffering caused or of the base motives for it.
What would make it better, though, is restitution (well, partial compensation) for the suffering of others victimized under the same laws, and legal pardons for any lingering criminal convictions based on those laws or resisting inhumane treatment based on them. (As was done in the U.S. law apologizing for the internment of citizens with Japanese ancestry.)
Yes, the U.S. needs to do some apologizing and restitution on these issues as well.
Posted by: Brock | September 10, 2009 10:02 PM
Wow, I was starting to think this apology wouldn't happen in my lifetime. Some of it seemed a bit understated, but overall it was well-written. This in particular was good:
"It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present."
It's nice to see the UK government finally catch up with decades' worth of computer science text books in their appreciation of Turing. What a goddamn genius, and what a tragedy...
Posted by: Aquaria | September 10, 2009 10:05 PM
I'm trying to imagine an American politician even attempting an apology this eloquent.
I don't think Obama could manage it. He'd spend too much time licking homophobe boots first, to "accommodate" them, rather than telling them, in so many words, "Homophobia is no longer acceptable. Get over it."
Another reason why accommodation is a bankrupt dogma.
Posted by: Aleks Saul | September 10, 2009 10:06 PM
You get to blog on trophy wife's birthday???
Posted by: Eidolon
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September 10, 2009 10:08 PM
How often do the commenters here encounter statements of casual homophobia expressed as if the attitude is still socially acceptable?
In middle and high school and beyond, the expression "that's gay" has become common with younger groups. "Fag" and "queer" are considered worthy insults. This is not taking into account the vast body of lies put forth by the fundies on the subject. With this group, almost any statement on the subjects links gays with "Immoral".
Posted by: Ellie | September 10, 2009 10:08 PM
@#5 rtt#24
I would also like to add gay marriage to the long list of ways the USA lags behind the UK on gay rights. It may not be called "marriage" (something that many still take issue with) but civil partnerships, which are marriage in everything but name, have been legal in the UK since 2005. California meanwhile has just revoked the law that made same-sex marriage legal. Wishful thinking indeed, sorry.
@Gregory @45
For more Gordon actually being a human being, check out his recent talk on www.TED.com I've always felt that inside the awful public persona there was a good guy trying to get out, and if he could just learn to ignore the PR people and be himself he might actually do a lot better. This is the second time in a relatively short period I've seen what I think is a glimmer of the real Gordon, maybe there is still hope?
Posted by: Don Rowe | September 10, 2009 10:15 PM
How often do the commenters here encounter statements of casual homophobia expressed as if the attitude is still socially acceptable?
Modern colloquia (is that the right word?) abounds with casual homophobia, particularly when passing insult:
Fag(got), cock-sucker, butt-munch, poo-stabber, arse-bandit; the list goes on. I think you'll find that even the most enlightened amongst us will laugh off a quip such as this on a regular basis.
P.S. My personal favourite (read: most annoying of all) in interwebland is "Your ghey".
Posted by: Diego | September 10, 2009 10:18 PM
That was a good speech. I am glad to see that the petition had suck a positive result.
Posted by: atomjack | September 10, 2009 10:22 PM
MAJeff, OM,
I see that happening to guys who may be well dressed and/or slim (though I don't know what you look like), and I say to the perp: "How do you know?". I've gotten in fights and/or heated words and balled fists (at me) over it, but I've managed to smooth most of them over, while leaving the bigot maybe thinking a little. A little confrontation works wonders when the bigot knows deep down he's actually wrong. A lot of that is just a bully's aggression and the disgusting willingness of the general population to tolerate it since it is aimed at a minority (and not them). btw, I'm not gay either, and I realize, has to do with my genetic makeup. Besides, how can a guy not admire the way all those woman curves flow into each other? j/k, obviously I'm hetero. But I think that the people of other gender identification should be left the hell ALONE to be who they are.
Posted by: foxfire | September 10, 2009 10:37 PM
This is good and it did acknowledge others who suffered the same abuse for being born natural. It would be nice to think we could see such an attitude in the U.S. I won't hold my breath.
However, I can do something:
To every gay, lesbian and transgender individual in my country, including those who are no longer living, I would like to apologize for the terrible things that have taken place and are currently in operation in this country.
I am a heterosexual, married female who feels no threat whatsoever to my marriage or "family values" if gay. lesbian and transgender people get married and/or choose to adopt children. I will help support efforts to make this a reality and will not hesitate whatsoever to make my opinion clear to others.
Posted by: Lsuoma | September 10, 2009 10:47 PM
Mus@27
The DEFINITIVE biography of Turing is Alan Turing: The Enigma, sadly not available in print in the US.One of its advantages is that the author, Andrew Hodges, is himself gay, and so has insights and empathy not necessarily available to straights. He does not, however, belabor the point, and the books is not informed by an aggressive gay agenda: it is quite simply an outstanding biography.
Hodges also maintains several interesting web sites.
Posted by: kamaka | September 10, 2009 10:48 PM
I got called "Homo" while walking home from a bar two weeks ago.
So you were "walking gay", huh?
Crap, I thought GF was a little better than that.
Posted by: ihateaphids | September 10, 2009 10:48 PM
To be honest, Cryptonomicon was my first introduction to Alan Turing, and it 'tur'ned me into a huge fan...this is unfortunately a posthumously insufficient apology...it is also unfortunate that there is a large minority that will find such an apology unnecessary.
Posted by: ReneV | September 10, 2009 10:59 PM
@Jeeves, #11
>> simply because he chooses to love differently.
> I hope that that's just poorly worded on your part.
I beg your pardon?! Are you saying that, somehow, it is important to distinguish between homosexuality-by-choice and homosexuality-by-chemistry when assessing whether discrimination is appropriate or even how a particular type of (homo-)sexuality is viewed more generally?
How can any of this be anyone's business, other than those directly involved?
Posted by: Nic Nicholson | September 10, 2009 11:00 PM
That's nearly as good as John Cleese's apology in "Wanda"!
Posted by: Margaret | September 10, 2009 11:04 PM
Ellie #67
If it was down to acting ability for the PM job, then Blair and Cameron on the other hand, should both concentrate on panto season! Brown seems to have dumped the acting coaches, thankfully. The press ask stupid questions and Brown just finds that an unbearable sufferance.
Wish I hadn't thought of that now. Cameron as one of the seven dwarfs...Dopey!
Posted by: Rowan Malin
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September 10, 2009 11:06 PM
Good! I'm glad he finally got an apology.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | September 10, 2009 11:15 PM
Oscar Wilde would have had something deliciously apropos to say.
Posted by: dev | September 10, 2009 11:16 PM
@Mus #27: "Alan Turing: The Enigma" by Andrew Hodges was the first major biography of Turing; it's quite excellent. The play "Breaking the Code" by Hugh Whitemore was based on Hodge's book, and the movie was basically a filmed version of the play. The play/film is a moving human interest story, with a great performance by Derek Jacobi, but no more than that.
If you really want to understand Turing's achievements, read Hodge's biography. I think it's out of print but you should be able to get a copy online or at your local library. Hodges is both gay and a mathematician, and the book is truly a labor of love. It also contains understandable explanations of the particular mathematical/logical problem Turing solved and how the Enigma code was cracked. Hodges also maintains a Turing web site at www.turing.org.uk.
David Leavitt (of "Lost Language of Cranes" fame) also did a Turing biography; I haven't read it but reviews for it are less positive.
Posted by: Tony | September 10, 2009 11:29 PM
Truly one of the great unsung figures of history. And one of the most tragic. I'm glad to see the UK uphold its and Turing's dignity with such a heartfelt apology.
The only thing Turing doesn't have among his many posthumous honors is some kind of official state award for his work. That would certainly be a nice gesture.
Posted by: Nentuaby
|
September 10, 2009 11:44 PM
About time.
It's far too late to matter to Dr. Turing personally, but for us the living, who remember his genius and the senseless, horrible tragedy of his early death, this is a powerful symbolic gesture.
Posted by: Lsuoma | September 10, 2009 11:59 PM
@Tony, #81
He may not have been the recipient of any major awards, but what is indubitably the most prestigious international award in CS is the Turing Award, bestowed by the Association for Computing Machinery. I believe it is much more fitting recognition than him being the merely the recipient of an award of some sort.
Posted by: Mus | September 11, 2009 12:13 AM
To Lsuoma #72, dev #80, and anyone else who follows (I don't want to keep cluttering the comments with "thank you" posts), thanks! Alan Turing has interested me for a while, so I'm happy to see that there's apparently a lot of stuff out there about him.
Posted by: PixelFish | September 11, 2009 12:33 AM
Long overdue, but welcome nonetheless. I choked up a little reading that. It's true that we can not turn the clocks back, but here's hoping that the world is brighter and better and that injustice is being beaten back, even if it comes in small increments.
Posted by: Alex Deam | September 11, 2009 12:49 AM
I read this a couple of hours ago, and a tear came to my eye. About time.
But the fight against discrimination of those who are somehow "different" goes on. You may already know this, but the athlete Caster Semenya has reputedly been found to be intersex, as an anonymous source has leaked this to the Daily Telegraph of Australia. What's more, the athlete herself did not even know when this was leaked, so it's highly likely she found/will find out about this from the raging hordes of the mass media.
By reporting this leak, this journalist, Mike Hurst, has crossed the line, turned around, pissed on the line, raped the line, and just altogether eradicated the line.
I know there isn't anything much we Pharyngulites can do to help Caster, but there are at least two polls we can take down beside that report:
At least the second is going in the right direction.
There's also the comments on the article, some of which are grotesque.
This saga seems to illustrate perfectly everything that's wrong with the media. Sensationalism. Titillation. Abuse of medical science and statistics. Controversy. Someone who's "different". A complete lack of journalistic ethics. 24/7 updates. Bigotry.
When will these liars, these smear merchants, these PR peddlers, these scaremongers, these anti-scientific sophists, these shysters, the majority of journalists, when will they stop undermining our democracies?
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/semenya-has-no-womb-or-ovaries/story-e6frexni-1225771672245
Posted by: Cath the Canberra Cook | September 11, 2009 12:55 AM
I'll second the recommendation of Hodges' biography. It's a very good read. Actually, I think I may reread it in honour of this event.
BTW, I see the choice question as a bit of a furphy. It's a very helpful line to persuade the not-very-bigotted. Most decent people can see that it's very wrong to be hateful about something the recipient has no choice in. But even if it is a choice, it's still not anybody else's business. I would say for many bisexuals there's a choice.
Posted by: Mark | September 11, 2009 1:28 AM
About time. Now for that knighthood...
Sort of offtopic, but I was finally checking out the newest Andrew Bird album yesterday, and this song made me think of Alan Turing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0awudx4SlE
(I don't know whether the song is actually supposed to be about him, though.)
Posted by: Yeah, gay rights and that - but I'm not gay, ya know! I sex with gorgeous ladies and I love it! | September 11, 2009 1:35 AM
@Canuck #58
This is one of the weirdest things I've ever read on Pharyngula. A totally bizarre non-sequitur. It has nothing to do with Turing or this apology, but seems to just be the poster publicly airing some private, unrelated neurosis.
Posted by: clamboy | September 11, 2009 1:39 AM
"While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him."
All very well and good, but where is the official pardon? Has the government sought out and made reparations to others who faced the same fate "under the law of the time"? "Sorry" just isn't enough.
Posted by: Andrew | September 11, 2009 1:40 AM
@86.
This has been reported world wide so I'm not sure why you're singling out one reporter.
Regardless, this outcome was inevitable and to my mind, all blame lies with South African Athletics. From what I've read the IAF requested that South African Athletics not enter Caster in the world champs. Obviously there were suspicions about Castor and the IAF wanted to quietly do the relevant tests away from prying eyes. Everything could have been done discretely and no one would have been any the wiser. Regrettably SAA chased a gold medal ignoring the well being of the athlete. Any harm that come to Caster as a result is on the heads of those officials.
As for taking the medal away. My understanding is that the rules are clear, people who are intersex are not allowed to compete as women.
Posted by: Citizen of the Cosmos | September 11, 2009 2:00 AM
Good show. Jolly good show! I am glad he included everyone else who were treated the same way for the same thing. Let us learn about this so that we never ever do it again. We have to move forward, away from the darker times.
Posted by: SC, OM | September 11, 2009 2:05 AM
Damn straight! (And White!) (And breeding!)
Oooooooo-oklahoma...
o_O
Er...Oh, dear...
Stick around here. It's a great community. Seriously. You're cool.
Posted by: Alex Deam | September 11, 2009 2:07 AM
Erm, because he was the one that reported the leaked result of the test. I thought that was obvious from my comment.
Don't get me wrong though: the other journalists who have jumped on the bandwagon by reporting the result are still acting disgracefully.
Then why did the IAAF tell the MSM just before she was going to run in the 800m final that she was going to undergo a test of her sex??!
If those are the rules, well then the rules truly are shit.
Posted by: JoshS, Official SpokesGay | September 11, 2009 2:12 AM
Fuck you, Downing Street, for hiding behind the passive voice, the last refuge of scoundrels.
There. Fixed it for you, bastards.
Posted by: JoshS, Official SpokesGay | September 11, 2009 2:20 AM
To all of you who thought this was a nice, eloquent apology - read it again, and read my comment. I'm not directing anger at any of you; you're all great people. But there's something sick and sad - and just not right - when we accept a tepid, passive, weaselly statement like this and laud it as "honest," "sensitive" and "unequivocal." A nice gesture, but not good enough. Not good enough by a long shot. Not good enough until the culture changes to the point where ordinary people of good will say, "How dare you use such slippery language? Just apologize in direct terms, for goodness' sake."
Posted by: DLC | September 11, 2009 2:21 AM
I want to say first that I'm glad the British government
(through the PM) got around to doing this. It's high time.
You know, until I read about Turing's being gay and that he was 'chemically fixed' with estrogen(?), I thought he had killed himself over not being recognized for his work with Colossus. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer )
But, would a single injection of hormones actually achieve the "chemical castration", or would it not wear off as his hormone levels returned to normal ? Or would he have been forcibly dosed with the stuff on a regular basis ?
Whichever, it would have made life fairly hellish for the man, and it shouldn't have been done.
Posted by: Clemens | September 11, 2009 2:23 AM
So when are the tsunamis and hurricanes to hit the UK? The people of Dover might have expertise on this.
Posted by: Midnight Rambler | September 11, 2009 2:23 AM
Eidolon @66:
When I was in elementary school (over 25 years ago now - sheesh), "faggot" was a widely-used generic insult. I had no idea what it actually meant, and I'd bet that most of the other kids didn't either. I remember looking it up in the dictionary once and finding the only definition was "a bundle of sticks", and being very puzzled by that.
Posted by: Janus | September 11, 2009 2:26 AM
Thanks for posting a link to that Egan story, Joshua (#7), it's a good one.
Posted by: Tony | September 11, 2009 2:26 AM
@Lsuoma #83
Thanks for your reply. I am aware of the Turing Award and the countless other honors bestowed upon later (and future) giants in computing. I agree: they are absolutely fitting honors for someone of Turing's stature.
I see now that after doing some more reading, he has recieved OBE honors, though I think a less diluted civilian award would be a thoughtful gesture. An apology is not an accolade after all.
Posted by: bric | September 11, 2009 2:32 AM
@Canuck #58
But I have met a few gays who really did annoy me. They were the ones who implied that the rest of us are "gay too, but won't admit it". Or "try it and you might find you're gay too". Sorry. We are what we are too. Most of us guys are just drawn to women like a duck to water. I'd love to get graphic about this, but we don't want to go there.
You know what? I'd love to get graphic with some of the (hah!) 'normals' who have told me I just do gay to be different, or made their arguments more eloquent by kicking and spitting at me when I marched for equality in the 70s and 80s. And the ones who beat my partner up for not only being gay but a bloody foreigner too. My heart bleeds for your poor outraged sensibilities; turn the other cheek and take it like a man.
Posted by: JoshS, Official SpokesGay | September 11, 2009 2:38 AM
@canuck, #58
I've met a few straight people who annoy me, too. They were the ones who had to derail a serious thread by complaining about the gay people they don't like, or who make them "uncomfortable", or who they erroneously fantasize were hitting on them, and then try to act like this was an appropriate conversational segue.
Stuff a corn cob up your straight ass, and have a nice day:)
Posted by: Happy Tentacles
|
September 11, 2009 2:50 AM
Whilst it can't change history, this is an honourable acknowlegement of the cruelty and injustice with which this brilliant man (and so many others) were treated.
Posted by: Kel, OM | September 11, 2009 3:07 AM
It's about time!
Posted by: Citizen of the Cosmos | September 11, 2009 3:08 AM
I notice someone brought up the whole "fag" and "queer" being acceptable insults among young people, and the expression "that's gay" as if being gay is bad. It seems like some people really and truly think they are being funny or witty when using such insults, but they only look like mentally lazy bigots.
Anyone else being a fan of Kids in the Hall? They have a skit related to all this, follow this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxMrWSTlvgg
It's satisfying to watch it :)
Posted by: Midnight Rambler | September 11, 2009 3:09 AM
Josh @95 & 96: I read your comments, and after considering both them and the apology I think they reflect more that you are a pedantic whinger than anything about Gordon Brown.
And yes, I too have met plenty of people, both gay and straight, who annoy me. People with a stick up their ass (regardless of sexual orientation) who will find anything to pick on are high among them.
Posted by: SEF | September 11, 2009 3:46 AM
@ DLC #97:
It was a repeated (mis-)treatment forced upon him and, as well as the fact of being persecuted at all, he didn't like growing breasts.
Posted by: Arwen | September 11, 2009 3:48 AM
Turing's suicide was a tragedy - imagine what he could have contributed to the world with his genius. And all for some ancient hatred enshrined in holy books that some people can't let go of. It's too late for him, but when I hear of things like this apology, to me it seems like another small step towards a world where we as a society no longer accept hatred in the name of religious beliefs.
Posted by: Midnight Rambler | September 11, 2009 3:50 AM
Actually Josh, I should qualify that comment; if you're not familiar with Gordon Brown, he's tepid and passive on everything, so coming from him this is a pretty strongly worded apology.
Posted by: Xenithrys | September 11, 2009 3:52 AM
I wish I could share Gordon Brown's optimism that the dark days are behind us for ever.
Posted by: Arwen | September 11, 2009 3:55 AM
Sorry, that should have read 'imagine what else he could have contributed'. Because winning WWII is pretty noteworthy.
Posted by: squirrelly | September 11, 2009 3:59 AM
@ #4: I wholly agree. I sent a message to Downing Street conveying my dismay and outrage over the flippant way this was addressed.
Hello:
I'm not expecting a response, but I have questions that should be answered by those in charge. Regarding the apology to Alan Turing, why did it take the British government so long to do it? Why did it take a petition? Why did it take the LGBT community and others to persuade you to make a formal apology? Was his work and his genius not quite good enough until others pointed it out recently? How can a posthumous apology even be worthy of what he did for his country, nee the world? The man killed himself due to the barbaric treatment into which he was forced . Prison would have found the same outcome. You cannot hide brilliance behind bars, either iron or hormonal.
Your apology to his legacy is laughable: "So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alans work I am very proud to say: were sorry, you deserved so much better."
Did you really need to say that? How about something a little more worthy of what he did to ensure that you grew up, period?
I suppose we're just supposed to be thankful Turing has been exonerated of his sins by the same government that forced him to kill himself.
You're right. He deserved so much better.
Posted by: SEF | September 11, 2009 4:07 AM
@ #111:
... but the evidence keeps contradicting such a position. Eg this example.
Posted by: travc | September 11, 2009 4:08 AM
A bit more about Turing's incredible contributions to science would have been nice. Without Turing, the 'digital' revolution would have been very different or non-existent.
Overall though, pretty good and a lot faster than I expected. I sent the petition to some English colleagues to sign ;)
PS: I have a t-shirt with just a big picture of AM Turing on it. The first time I wore it to around my collaborators (Computer Science) lab, some of the grad students asked "who is that". The reaction to those questions from other students (and a prof in one case) was priceless.
Posted by: Geoff Coupe | September 11, 2009 4:18 AM
@ JoshS re #95 and #96
Well, I have read the apology again, and I don't think that your rewriting of it improves it. Brown is offering an apology on behalf of the present government to Turing (and others) who suffered, not just at the hands of the government, but as a result of the attitudes of UK society and the legal system of the time.
Brown's apology, to this aging pair of queer British ears, sounds honest and measured.
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 4:43 AM
This is one of the very few things Gordon Brown's done right in his entire political career.
Posted by: ernieball | September 11, 2009 4:56 AM
Damn, I could almost weep a little.
This makes me feel really good, though.
Posted by: shonny | September 11, 2009 4:57 AM
There are one helluva lot of apologies and rewritings of history to be done:
Australia has at long last apologised to the Aborigines. But when will it be properly recognised in Aussie history books?
The UK now apologises to Turing. If there ever was one who deserved recognition it was him. Politicians and other ratbags get their commemorative stuff, but the really great ones are often forgotten.
When will the US. and in particular the US Army, rectify and apologise for its atrocious past, with a brief interlude of relative correctness during WW2?
And also rewrite the Army's history to show the genocidal bigotry they really represented towards all the First Americans, and of late the atrocities in Vietnam and Iraq (plus all the other we don't hear much about)?
Sadly, "big' nations are seldom great, but mostly self-righteous.
Posted by: Coryat | September 11, 2009 5:05 AM
I thought it was a brilliant apology, calm but unequivocal. Obviously it's a terrible pity Gordon didn't self flagellate and foam at the mouth as he apologised for his own deep personal responsbility as some nuts on this thread would like. Still, can't please everyone.
Posted by: shonny | September 11, 2009 5:07 AM
Posted by: Itspiningforthefjords Author Profile Page | September 10, 2009 7:57 PM
I think that the USA, in the same situation, would have apologized many years earlier, but -
You mean to say that there is more than one official USA?
Real AmericansTM don't apologise, they exterminate or obliterate.
Posted by: Fil | September 11, 2009 5:08 AM
This is one, if not the only, petition that I have signed where I know, without doubt, that a positive outcome has evolved in part because of my small contribution.
My parents were English and my mother was a WWII hero, who received an award for her duties as a nurse, caring for injured sailors trapped in ICU during the Blitz, as the hospital ward collapsed around them.
So I used my dual English/Australian citizenship for the first time to legally sign a petition, to honour the memory of a man who helped save the very lads my mother stood by, as her ward was shattered by bombs from the Nazi regime.
Turing was not just one of humanity's greatest mathematicians. He was not just a gay person who was denied his place in the sun. He was someone who represented the very best that we all strive for.
Thank you, Alan.
Posted by: mpatter | September 11, 2009 5:19 AM
It's a shame that the current UK government (and particularly Brown himself) are only willing to do nice things like this because they're losing a votes battle, and desperate for good PR.
Still, today I feel taller.
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 5:22 AM
That's a highly offensive statement.
Posted by: Louis | September 11, 2009 5:28 AM
I am always bemused by these sorts of apologies, like this (much deserved) apology to Turing (and LGBT folks past, present and future) and the recent apology for slavery. On the one hand I see them as a valuable recognition of past evils, a reaching out to members of affected groups* in society now, and an acknowledgement that the government of the time was culpable (at least). On the other hand I see them as convenient PR friendly ways to do very little/nothing whilst giving the appearance of doing something.
Take for example the gay "marriage" issue. In the UK we have gay "marriage" not gay marriage. The reason for the scare quotes is that while, to all legal intents and purposes UK gay "marriage" is indistinguishable from straight marriage, the institution languishes under the term "civil partnership" which demonstrates it absolutely isn't regarded as the same thing socially. Personally I think these "apologies" would benefit from a little additional meat. A little more clarity of wording (perhaps not the precise words Josh chose at #95, but not a million miles away) coupled to something more concrete. How about removing the reasons for the scare quotes around "marriage" in gay "marriage"? How about recognising not merely legally but socially that gay marriage needs no scare quotes, nor the prefix "gay", it is merely marriage? How about altering the wordings of policies and laws to reflect that?
OK that's one example. There are still plenty of inequalities that LGBT people suffer in the UK, why not, at the same time as the apology, release some modification of the law books, or stronger statement of action? That at least would be, in the words of Extreme, more than words!
Louis
*I hate "them vs us". There is no "them", there is only "us". I hate this perpetual division of humanity into ever smaller segments. Whatever bell curve, whatever distribution, whatever spectrum you or I are on, our common humanity unites us vastly more than any division you can name. I long for equality, when all are treated fairly under the law and by society. I loathe this persistent rhetorical and social focus on what divides people rather than what unites them.
Oh and before that is misunderstood, nothing in the above is opposed to recognising, loving, embracing and providing for those very real differences between people.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 11, 2009 5:35 AM
It is hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than politicians and public figures striking poses and 'apologising' for what others have done in the past. What is the point? Who benefits? It is all utterly puerile. Wiki:
It is sad that a man with such talent was addicted to such risky behaviour. But having made such a poor choice of ... errr ... companion, why did he involve the police? It seems almost as foolish as Wilde's decision to sue for libel.
I had a homosexual friend. He contracted AIDS before it was fashionable to do so. So he never got to watch Tom Hanks in 'Philadelphia' to discover what a heart-warming and life enhancing experience it could be.
Posted by: Coryat | September 11, 2009 5:40 AM
Do Not Feed The Troll.
Posted by: Robert Synnott | September 11, 2009 5:42 AM
#5
> "I think that the USA, in the same situation, would have apologized many years earlier"
Hmm, this would be the same USA which only legalised homosexuality nationwide in 2003 and only apologised for genocide of the Native Americans and for slavery relatively recently? I think it's rather optimistic to imagine it would have apologised at all.
Posted by: Citizen of the Cosmos | September 11, 2009 5:43 AM
Wow. You are such an awesome person, aren't you?
Posted by: Richard Eis | September 11, 2009 5:52 AM
A fun PR exercise for the government. Still better than nothing I suppose.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | September 11, 2009 5:52 AM
Long overdue, but I'm really happy about this apology. Even though I think you can't really apologize for someone else's actions, in situations as these it's appropriate to voice your regret of what happened. And I think this is an important signal to anyone who is homosexual, or has homosexual friends, or who is simply a fan of Turing's work. Not that long ago an apology such as this would have been unthinkable; I'm so glad times have changed.
>>61 (and >>95 in a way)
If you read carefully, Gordon Brown does externalise what happened, and rightly so. After all, it wasn't his, or any of his colleagues', fault what happened. But I think more outrage would have been unbelievably out of character for Gordon Brown.
Posted by: shonny | September 11, 2009 6:02 AM
Yeah, reality is often harsh, and to the perpetrators offensive when someone points out that they are not what they want to be perceived as.
Much like the RCC doesn't like to be shown for its bigotry.
Posted by: ernieball | September 11, 2009 6:06 AM
Josh@ #95, #96.
Yes, I see your point (it may hav stood out more clearly to you since this apology probably concerns you more directly) and in a sense I completely agree with you.
But since Brown apologizes on behalf of a government he wasn't personally a part of, I still read the apology as sincere, and I believe it is.
Posted by: Bernard Bumner
|
September 11, 2009 6:11 AM
The present government's policies have done much to correct the institutional inequalities faced by non-heterosexuals; the lifting of the ban on homosexuals in the armed forces, stronger anti-discrimination and hate-crime legislation, the abolition of Clause 28, and the introduction of Civil Partnerships.
At the same time, any government is forced to pander, to some degree, to the large conservative element in society, which is why much less progress has been made towards changing cultural and religious attitudes.
It is certainly a shame, but I think we should recognise the positives, even as we address the negatives.
This statement is quite strongly worded, for a government release. I actually think that it is a fairly dignified and purposeful composition. At least, it is a starting point.
I'm not sure that a much stronger statement would have seemed sincere delivered by an alpha-male, heterosexual, professional politician, who is Prime Minister. He has very little right to ownership of either the guilt or the anger.
Unfortunately, the road to real equality is a long one. Perhaps the younger generations who have grown up with civil partnerships will see the artificial distinction, the accomodation of conservatives, for the foolishness that it is.
Hopefully, the real and palpable benefits to homosexual partnerships outweighs any cultural damage done by the disingenuity of the title.
Posted by: Cheb Ghobbi | September 11, 2009 6:27 AM
"I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan's status as one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue."
Strikes me as an attempt to cash in and make Labour look good, seeing as they're almost certainly on the way out in next year's election.
Posted by: Knockgoats | September 11, 2009 6:47 AM
I had a homosexual friend. He contracted AIDS before it was fashionable to do so. So he never got to watch Tom Hanks in 'Philadelphia' to discover what a heart-warming and life enhancing experience it could be. - help ma boab
I've been trying to find an appropriate epithet for help ma boab. Scumbag? Pusbucket? Shithead? They all seem totally inadequate. In future, I'll simply refer to any particularly disgusting individual stinking up a thread with their poisonous bigotry and invincible ignorance as a "help ma boab".
Posted by: Coryat | September 11, 2009 6:54 AM
'Cretin'? Cretin is quite a good term for a help ma boab.
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 6:58 AM
help ma boab,
That's the most tasteless and offensive "joke" I've seen in a while. Indeed, you've just outdone Shonny in the offensiveness stakes on this thread (and that's saying something).
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 7:00 AM
Yep. But it's still a decision to be welcomed.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 7:07 AM
I doubt that help ma boab, proud bigot and hater of gay people, gives two shits about being tasteless and offensive.
And given that your standard of offensiveness includes noting the fact that the United States Army has committed atrocities in Iraq, Vietnam, and against Native Americans, it's hardly worth paying attention to.
Posted by: CannibalSmith | September 11, 2009 7:12 AM
TOO LATE!
Posted by: Lisa | September 11, 2009 7:12 AM
@91
'As for taking the medal away. My understanding is that the rules are clear, people who are intersex are not allowed to compete as women'
Your understanding is wrong. People with intersex can compete as women, depending on the exact conditions of their intersex. A good place to read about this is www.sportsscientists.com
Anyway, regarding the actual topic of the post, I think it's great that Gordon Brown has apologised. However I think it's sad that people will quibble about the wording of the apology, rather than the intent behind it.
Posted by: Marc Abian | September 11, 2009 7:24 AM
Non sequitur? It's clear enough to me that he's saying people don't choose what they're attracted to and anyone thinking so is wrong. It fits.
Posted by: Andrew Skegg | September 11, 2009 7:38 AM
As a signatory to the petition, I am deeply gladdened by the British Governments heart felt apology. Now, what about the rest of the world?
Posted by: Carlie | September 11, 2009 7:42 AM
With regard to the use of "gay" as an insult, there is a whole ad campaign designed to try and stamp it out: http://www.thinkb4youspeak.com/. When my older son had a friend over who said "that's so gay!" about a hundred damned times in the two hours he was here, I immediately sat him down and made him watch all the commercials. He loved the Wanda Sykes one. Hopefully it made some impression.
Posted by: Knockgoats | September 11, 2009 7:55 AM
Strikes me as an attempt to cash in and make Labour look good, seeing as they're almost certainly on the way out in next year's election.
I doubt there are any votes in this. It may be to do with Labour Party internal politics - Brown could be in trouble at the Party conference. Whatever, it's welcome.
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 11, 2009 7:56 AM
help me boab reveals xyr true Christian self:
Why do bigoted Xian trolls feel the need to stink up threads with their shitty egos? help me boab, go hug a pillar under the altar of Christ.Posted by: Dr Benway | September 11, 2009 7:58 AM
How to argue with creationists: hold up a pic of Alan Turing. 'Nuf said.
Posted by: John Morales | September 11, 2009 8:09 AM
Carlie @145,
Sigh. I'm firmly of the opinion that it's pointless to go after terminology — the true target should be the connotation represented by the terminology — which I like to think is occurring.
I've more than once referred to the concept of the euphemism treadmill, to which I subscribe (I independently came up with it before I saw it in print).
Posted by: John Morales | September 11, 2009 8:14 AM
hmb is the epitome of a troll; only seeks to disrupt threads with flame-bait.
I find hmb despicable.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 8:15 AM
But many people will not admit to holding any such connotation. People would much rather lie and protect their egos than admit to anything controversial. Pointing out that "you used 'gay' as an insult, and that means something to you" is a way to get around the defense.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1673
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 8:17 AM
Also, John, your advice amounts to saying that gay people should silently endure the insults until all homophobia can be eradicated.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
September 11, 2009 8:17 AM
HMB hasn't made a worthwhile post since he first arrived. Such is the problem with godbots. Thinking about imaginary deities and fictional holy books drains their brains of all thought. However, they think they are being cogent and pertinent. Such is the delusional life.
Posted by: Carlie | September 11, 2009 8:25 AM
John - I think it does both. At least one of the commercials does go into the rationale that it's not nice to say because there's nothing wrong with being gay. In the Sykes one, her counter to the kid is "How would you like it if I said 'that's so sixteen year old with a cheesy moustache'?"
Posted by: Carlie | September 11, 2009 8:27 AM
John cont'd. - Although the web site has a board up for kids to put alternatives to "That's so gay", and one of the most common ones I saw when I first looked at the site was "That's so lame". Talk about missing the point.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 11, 2009 8:27 AM
Thank you. I like that. You hear that, hmb? A gay man stopped you and your family of fascists from taking over the world.Posted by: Kel, OM | September 11, 2009 8:34 AM
hmb typifies why I'm so anti-theist. I realise that most religious people are decent people, and even at times religion can help people find their moral compass. But if someone wants to justify their hate and prejudice, there's go greater tool out there than appealing to ones god. Even more hilarious is this same intolerant bigot is held up as the symbol for compassion and love. God loves you, except if you're a faggot...
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 8:37 AM
'bout effing time! Talk about a bunch of ingrates (in 1952.) It's the least the UK can do at this point.
This is OT; but I was listening to NPR the other morning and they were interviewing a bunch (coven? murder?) of libertarians regarding the proposed health care reforms. One woman was incredulous about having to cover pre-existing conditions. "It's insurance ya know! I can't crash my car and then go looking for car insurance!"
I wish I had been there. The next question should have been, "So we throw Mama off the train then? If you get laid off and happen to have a health condition, then you get to go bankrupt and die in the street without care? That's the best we, the wealthiest nation in the world, can do?"
(Obviously, some controls on pre-existing conditions are needed to prevent the crashed car scenario. But the bottom line is: Those people are going to get care and we as a society will be paying for it. Right now, we pay for it through emergency room care, costing 10X what typical care costs. Emergency rooms don't get to turn people away, generally speaking. Makes no sense.)
Posted by: Riaan Moll | September 11, 2009 8:39 AM
I regard this whole thing as an appeal to dead authority on the part of the GLTG contingent.
Alan Turing was a great man, but he was gay. You could also say he was a gay man, who happened to be great as well.
The guy is dead. Stone cold deader-than-a-doornail DEAD. And the circumstance surrounding his dead were tragic. Nevertheless, no amount of apologising is going to undo it.
So I can only ponder at the rationale behind the demand for this apology. Basically, my stance is, who the fuck do the gay community think they are for demanding this apology? The apology isn't for Alan Turing - it's for THEM and (what appears to me to be) the chip on their collective shoulder.
You don't pay homage to Alan Turing by demanding an apology from someone else. You pay homage to him by telling the world what a brilliant man he was. The fact that he was brilliant, had nothing to do with the fact that he was gay.
Only the fact that he died before his time, did.
The gay community is conflating his genius with his gayness, and are using his credentials as ammunition. If Alan Turing had been a nobody, we wouldn't be having this discussion...
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 8:42 AM
HMB: The Christian love you exude just warms my heart. (Sarcasm warning: for all you Xians.)
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 8:44 AM
Riaan Moll, what's with the chip on your shoulder?
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 8:47 AM
Crap, I thought GF was a little better than that.
Please, it ain't GF. I've been called a faggot on the streets of Minneapolis and Boston. I sat in a bar in Mankato for an hour taking shit from a group of guys (I simply refused to give up my right to public space.)
Apparently, I'm easy to peg.
Posted by: John Morales | September 11, 2009 8:48 AM
Carlie @154, agreed, I think so too.
@155, wow. Does it what!
--
SGBM,
Does it? It was not my intent, nor do I see how it follows.
Did you read the article segment I linked to?
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 8:51 AM
While hmb is a piece of shit, Philadelphia also was. It's a story, not about Tom Hanks, but about Denzel Washington. It's a story about straight America saying, "OK, we get it now. Everything's cool" and excusing itself for its willful, hostile neglect prior to that point.
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 8:51 AM
Midnight Rambler @99:
"I remember looking it up in the dictionary once and finding the only definition was "a bundle of sticks", and being very puzzled by that."
It was a taunt. The taunt was/is: We are going to burn you alive for your "deviancy." That's what people did to gays when that taunt was invented. Replace "faggot!" with "I'm going to torture you to death!' and you get the picture. Not nice in any way whatsoever. Not cute. Not OK.
Ah, for those good old days, when we had a good auto da fe every week or so! (The Taliban would have been proud!)
Posted by: help ma boab | September 11, 2009 8:52 AM
strange gods before me
That hurts. I don't lie. I said he was my friend. I wish he were still alive. I have had other homosexual friends. Some of my heroes and favourite writers are homosexual.
But you are right that I care little if my opinions offend. I have that in common with most here.
(btw I don't get your USA atrocities point. Or should I just ignore it as ad hominem?)
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 8:55 AM
That's a highly offensive statement.
And Walton, again shows he has nothing but a cartoon image of America.
Posted by: daveau | September 11, 2009 8:58 AM
Eloquent and moving, and yes, I teared up a little.
But upon further review, JoshS@95 has a point that the language denies responsibility for the original tragedy. However, it goes a lot further than you would ever get in the US. Good thing we're perfect, so we never have to apologize to anyone.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 8:58 AM
John, I'm aware of the concept of the euphemism treadmill. It fails to address the experience of the subject. It doesn't hurt me to hear someone say "I hate gay people." I know those people exist, and I know how to crush their dreams. It does hurt me to be called a "fucking faggot." That will always recall violence, and make me cringe.
We can't make certain people stop hating. We can make them afraid to use their most hateful language in public. And that fear, that self-censorship, even when strained, does send a message to the next generation that it is not normal to be so hateful.
But we can't make them just stop hating. Knowing that, if we aren't to speak out against insulting language either, then there simply is nothing to do. That is why I think your advice amounts to a counsel of despair.
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 9:01 AM
MA Jeff:
"I've been called a faggot on the streets of Minneapolis and Boston. I sat in a bar in Mankato for an hour taking shit from a group of guys (I simply refused to give up my right to public space.)"
That makes me ashamed of my fellow Minnesotans. Although I'm not too surprised about Mankato: Minneapolis and St. Paul are a small island of tolerance in a sea of intolerance from Madison to ... maybe Denver? Out-state MMN is not tolerant with the exception of a few college towns (I know, Mankato is a college town ...) and artist communities.
But, like an Australian woman told me once, "yeah, they's dickheads everywhere!" Even in Minneapolis. Plenty of knuckle-draggers to go around. Probably from Edina or Egan or North Oaks (wealthy 'burbs.)
I have a gay son in high school. I fear that he has a too-rosy view of the life a gay man in the US (where we live, there's very little risk and his high school has good policies against bullying, harrassment) and takes insufficient notice of those around him to protect himself against the types you encountered. We talk to him about it; but ... I just hope he gets more street-smart before he learns a real-life hard lesson. I say to him, "It completely sucks and is unfair; but the reality is, you must be careful."
Posted by: Matt Penfold | September 11, 2009 9:02 AM
If you had bothered to do any checking you would find one of the people behind campaigning for this apology was not doing so as part of the GLBT community, but as someone who greatly admired the work done by Turing and his colleagues at BP during the war.
Posted by: Carlie | September 11, 2009 9:02 AM
Riann Moll, I'm not sure where you're coming from by criticizing the apology, but I'll assume it's an honest question, as I've heard it before from other people.
No, of course this doesn't help Turing himself. But it is still important. It's important to recognize when people have done something wrong, and it's important to make it clear that we will not do something like that again. Otherwise, one would never know when they might do something like that again. By your reasoning, it wouldn't matter if all history books about slavery erased any mention of it being a bad thing, because hey, there aren't any slaves around any more, so why bother? It's important for a society to declare what values they hold to be important, and apologizing for past atrocities is a part of that declaration.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 9:03 AM
The old "but some of my best friends are gay" line does not change the fact that you are a homophobic bigot who hates gay people. You were actively working against your "friend's" human rights, and you still do. That's no way to treat a friend.
It quite clearly wasn't addressed to you, you stupid fuck.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 9:06 AM
That hurts. I don't lie. I said he was my friend. I wish he were still alive. I have had other homosexual friends. Some of my heroes and favourite writers are homosexual.
The old "but some of my best friends are gay" line does not change the fact that you are a homophobic bigot who hates gay people. You were actively working against your "friend's" human rights, and you still do. That's no way to treat a friend.
Well, after the funeral hmb went home to masturbate over the thought of his "friend" undergoing torture in hell.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 11, 2009 9:11 AM
@Riaan Moll
You have it backwards. Alan Turing was a somebody and he was forgotten in the dustbins of history because he was gay. We have only begun to uncover all the lesbians and gays who have contributed immensely to scientific knowledge.Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 9:12 AM
I'm not sure about that.
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 9:14 AM
"How often do the commenters here encounter statements of casual homophobia expressed as if the attitude is still socially acceptable?"
I'm not gay; but it seems to me that this is still very common. Anti-gay epithets are still frequently heard. I'm afraid it will be a long time before they draw the kind of social sanction that "nigger" does now. It's still socially OK to be homophobic in many circles it seems to me. (You can bet the tea-party people and the birthers, the disrupters of townhall meetings, etc. all would find it normal.)
I do feel a little progress in the passing of gay marriage bills in several states recently.
I always say: How can anybody else's marriage possibly, in any way, diminish my own? It makes no sense. I have gay friends who have to have spearate phone lines and voice mail so that their workplaces won't find out. I find this intolerable. It makes me grind my teeth in anger. I agitate at every possibility for full equality for GLBT people. it's the only logical and moral choice.
Posted by: Harry | September 11, 2009 9:16 AM
The man who started the petition, John Graham-Cumming, is a straight computer programmer, and as far as I can tell most of the momentum on the issue has come from the geek community more than the gay community. Is it so hard to believe that people might support this out of a sense of basic human decency rather than some kind of political agenda?
Posted by: Endor | September 11, 2009 9:18 AM
"How often do the commenters here encounter statements of casual homophobia expressed as if the attitude is still socially acceptable?"
Frequently. My younger brother still refers to everything he doesn't like as "that's so gay", as one example.
I don't know if I just live in a particularly ignorant area or what, but I frequently encounter causal homophobia, racism, sexism, classism, etc ad nauseum. it seems people around here live in some hermetically sealed bigot bubble that prevents any common decency from sinking in.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 11, 2009 9:29 AM
strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 9:03 AM
MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 9:06 AM
Is it just me or is there a suspicious sounding echo in here?
Coryat
If that was intended for me, I am on point and these are my genuine opinions.
John Morales
I have noticed that any expression of dissent here starts a flame war. It seems you only want to stroke each other. Maybe someone should make this site private.
The xian idea is to love the sinner, yet hate the sin. It is pretty standard xian doctrine.
Posted by: Riaan Moll
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September 11, 2009 9:30 AM
Riaan Moll, what's with the chip on your shoulder?
Nothing, but thanks for your touching concern. Maybe if you dealt with specifics, I could give you a specific answer?
The man who started the petition, John Graham-Cumming, is a straight computer programmer, and as far as I can tell most of the momentum on the issue has come from the geek community more than the gay community. Is it so hard to believe that people might support this out of a sense of basic human decency rather than some kind of political agenda?
I wasn't aware of this and I apologise - the initial reports I read about this painted a different picture.
You have it backwards. Alan Turing was a somebody and he was forgotten in the dustbins of history because he was gay. We have only begun to uncover all the lesbians and gays who have contributed immensely to scientific knowledge.
Every WWII history book I own (and there
s plenty, mentions not only Alan Turing's genius but also discusses the circumstances around his death, so I'm not so sure how you can say his was forgotten.
Thanks for proving my point, though, with your last sentence. What difference does their sexual orientation make?
That's what's annoying me about this - people care more about the apology and what it means for modern socio-politicking than the tribulations of gay individuals.
Posted by: Knockgoats | September 11, 2009 9:31 AM
That hurts. I don't lie. I said he was my friend. - help ma boab
I don't believe you for a moment. But if I'm wrong, how do you think this friend would have felt about you using him as an example to justify your homophobic bigotry?
Posted by: John Morales | September 11, 2009 9:31 AM
sgbm @169, thanks.
I've just spent 20 minutes writing and rewriting a response, but I'm tired and about to crash, and I can't seem to express what I intend clearly.
I wanted to make a point to the effect that it's the intent and connotation, not the terminology per se, that is offensive, and that it is that which should be the focus.
I did not intend to advocate acquiescence, fatalism or despair; quite the contrary.
Good night.
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 9:31 AM
sgbm:
I'm not 100% sure about it either: Having not been around then. However, it is a taunt, it does have that connotation, it was used against those who deviated as a burn-at-the-stake threat. The other possible etymologies don't suggest a threat or derogation, so it's hard to see from where else it may have come as a derogatory name. That said, English is a strange language; and sometimes words originated in inobvious ways.
I can highly recommend Word Origins by Anatoly Liberman.
Posted by: Riaan Moll
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September 11, 2009 9:37 AM
No, of course this doesn't help Turing himself. But it is still important. It's important to recognize when people have done something wrong, and it's important to make it clear that we will not do something like that again. Otherwise, one would never know when they might do something like that again.
I think you're overstating the issue. We don't demand apologies to dead people to serve as some sort of paranoia-borne warning to future regimes.
The world has come a long way in recognising the rights of gay people, and I doubt that we'll backslip. If the world backslides into that sort of unethical, inhumane nonsense, it wouldn't be due to the actions of statesmen.
That, of course, is the root of the issue. Everybody expects the British government to apologise, when pretty much every conservative or religiously-minded Brit was just as responsible for creating and maintaining the status quo that gay people were verboten.
I think it's highly unrealistic to lay the blame at the footsteps of parliament.
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 9:38 AM
"The xian idea is to love the sinner, yet hate the sin. It is pretty standard xian doctrine."
It's pretty standard Xian doctrine to invent new meanings for words. This is interpreted by others as: Dishonesty.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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September 11, 2009 9:40 AM
The only echo here is the small thoughts boucing around in your empty mind. Idea-ea-a. Then they fade to nothingness, like you should into the bandwidth. You add nothing here.Posted by: SC, OM | September 11, 2009 9:40 AM
No, you idiot. MAJeff just made a mistake with the tags when quoting sgbm.
Posted by: Knockgoats | September 11, 2009 9:44 AM
Is it just me or is there a suspicious sounding echo in here? - help ma boab, the Nazi's lightly
You twerp, MAJeff was quoting sgbm, but failed to indicate it. It happens.
I have noticed that any expression of dissent here starts a flame war. It seems you only want to stroke each other. - help ma boab, the Nazi's lightly
You're a liar. Disagreements between atheist regulars, ranging from the friendly to the vitriolic, are common. As for flame wars - it tends to be stinking bigots like you that provoke those. You are loathsome, and people are honest enough to say so. Don't like it? Become less loathsome or fuck off.
The xian idea is to love the sinner, yet hate the sin. - help ma boab, the Nazi's lightly
By parading their misfortune to justify your bigotry. Riiight.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 9:45 AM
That, of course, is the root of the issue. Everybody expects the British government to apologise, when pretty much every conservative or religiously-minded Brit was just as responsible for creating and maintaining the status quo that gay people were verboten.
.
Here's the thing, though. It wasn't just conservative and religious, it was society-wide. From the 1930s through the 1960s there were, as legal scholar William Eskridge has noted, anti-gay kulturkampfen waging throughout the cosmopolitan core. It was in the UK, the US, and continental Europe. The NAZIs were more extreme than most, but what Turing suffered was at that hands of the state, which was expressing the will of these issues. The repressive powers of the state were brought to bare in the lives of queer folk everywhere. I noted above the purges within the US government.
I think it's highly unrealistic to lay the blame at the footsteps of parliament
Parliament passed the laws that led to Turing's suicide.
Yes, the state, in particular, has a burden here. The state--be it American, German, or British--destroyed lives.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 11, 2009 9:50 AM
I don't lie - help ma boab.
You certainly lie to yourself - as demonstrated by nearly every post you've made on this site. Such is the power of faith.
Posted by: SC, OM | September 11, 2009 9:51 AM
The hell they are! You don't know what you're talking about.
(I, for example, never disagree with any of the other regulars. ;))
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 9:52 AM
John Morales, thank you for clarifying. Well, I agree that it's the connotation that needs to be addressed. I am gay. I want people to feel comfortable saying "my gay friend, strange gods". I don't want people using gay as an insult. I think it's useful to point out when people do, that they're doing something harmful; not all of them care either way, but some do. I think the TV campaign is a decent attempt at this.
Posted by: Riaan Moll
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September 11, 2009 9:54 AM
Yes, the state, in particular, has a burden here. The state--be it American, German, or British--destroyed lives.
That's a fallacy of composition.
Homophobes enacted those laws with popular homophobic support from the electorate. It doesn't suddenly make the state responsible while absolving individuals.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 9:56 AM
It's an incoherent lie and an obvious retcon.
You cannot love and respect a person while fighting against their human rights.
If that's what you believe love is, then I can only conclude that your brand of Christianity has deliberately destroyed the entire idea of love in its followers' minds.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 11, 2009 9:58 AM
JBlilie
No, these are the usual meanings of the words 'sin' and 'sinner' and I am pretty sure that I am using them correctly.
------------------------------
Just to check, I have just googled it to discover that it has become a slogan that is bandied about in the current homosexuality debate. But I can assure you that the principle applies to any sort of sinner. As the guy said, "love your enemies".
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 9:58 AM
Or in other words, the state does not exist.
Sure.
Riaan Moll, just for clarification, are you a libertarian?
Posted by: Eddie Janssen | September 11, 2009 9:59 AM
Next step:
Sir Alan Turing
Posted by: Riaan Moll
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September 11, 2009 10:05 AM
Riaan Moll, just for clarification, are you a libertarian?
The e-tests I've done on the web indicate "Libertarian humanist". Not so sure about that though - it strikes me as a very American thing to pigeonhole personal ideologies. :-D
Why do you ask?
Posted by: Riaan Moll
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September 11, 2009 10:08 AM
One more thing. There's a contradiction inherent in all of this.
Is the state the voice of the people or isn't it?
You want to eat your cake and have it, too. You love to portray the state as the bad guy here, but expect it to be the voice of an apology on your behalf.
So which is it?
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 11, 2009 10:09 AM
These days it's more standard for them to reinterpret scripture in such a way that they can claim to have instigated liberal social changes when in reality they were at the forefront of opposing them.
But when they say things like this:
...they're definitely using the words in a different way, unless 'love' means using shame and guilt and threats of persecution and eternal damnation against a person for being attracted to members of the same sex in the hope that they'll repress those feelings in order to live a lie.Because that always works out so well - just ask Ted Haggard.
Posted by: Riaan Moll
|
September 11, 2009 10:10 AM
One more thing. There's a contradiction inherent in all of this.
Is the state the voice of the people or isn't it?
You want to eat your cake and have it, too. You love to portray the state as the bad guy here, but expect it to be the voice of an apology on your behalf.
So which is it?
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 10:13 AM
You want to eat your cake and have it, too. You love to portray the state as the bad guy here, but expect it to be the voice of an apology on your behalf.
So, the state destroying lives, and then years later saying, "Our bad. We shouldn't have destroyed those lives and we've learned our lesson." is contradictory?
Posted by: Riaan Moll
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September 11, 2009 10:17 AM
The state's laws at the time was an embodiment of the will of the prevailing culture. Why is that so hard to grasp?
If anything, the Church of England (and all of its drooling titheing idiots) needs to step up to the plate here.
If there's blame to be laid, blame the source, not the messenger.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 11, 2009 10:28 AM
What kind of history books? Is the fact that he was gay discussed in those books? Do they reflect on how despicable it was to treat a man who helped win WWII as a criminal, similar to how the Nazis who had just been defeated would have treated a person like Turing, because of his sexual orientation? We are seeing these facts incorporated in discussions about Turing, but they have not reached the level of public school discourse yet. An apology from the United Kingdom to Turing and all other gay men of that era is now done; it will be standard in all educational textbooks written hereafter that about Turing.Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 10:30 AM
And the state's response now is an expression of the current prevailing culture.
It appears you are just pissy that it's being publicly acknowledged that "Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly."
You obviously have a chip on your shoulder, as was evidenced immediately when you began talking about gay people and a "chip on their collective shoulder."
Because libertarians typically say stupid things in a particularly idiosyncratic way.
Posted by: JBlilie | September 11, 2009 10:34 AM
hmb: It was a generalized statement and stands.
Sin is an offense against an imaginary entity, as opposed to an individual, and therefore, rightly, has no standing in law. (At least in the US, at this moment. I'm sure Xians such as yourself would like to change that.) Sin is a concept I don't acknowledge, since I don't acknowledge any imaginary entities (as real). (Although I recognize that Xians do and what they mean by it, being a former Xian.)
It's common for Xians to redefine words such as "good." As in: God's good is not the same as human good. Again, others interpret this simply as: Dishonesty. Or perhaps absurdity.
Posted by: Happy Kiwi | September 11, 2009 10:35 AM
Riaan Moll
The state is never the voice of all the people. It's the voice of a consensus. In the fifties, the consensus was that people with Turing's sexual orientation had no rights. He might have had the genius to shorten a war and play an instrumental role in saving his country from defeat and likely catastrophe, but he had no right to normal legal protection against crime if his sexuality was somehow implicated. That was the consensus then—those who shared it "might" have saved their Jewish neighbors had the Nazi's invaded, but they'd probably have handed Turing over for a final solution to his gayness (I say "might" because bigots like help ma boab usually have a long list of fellow humans they'd like to see punished for perversity).
When the contemporary state apologises for the historical state's sanctioned injustice, its apology carries a symbolic and moral force that has nothing to do with materially compensating Turing. It is a moral compensation, one that sets a tone for contemporary thought on the issue. For example, if the contemporary German state regrets the Holocaust, it doesn't change what the nation's past rulers did, but it says to the present that the consensus we represent reviles this aspect of our state's history, and that in this age such behavior isn't countenanced.
If we don't learn from past mistakes we are doomed to repeat them. This apology is one of the ways of ensuring people learn from past mistakes. You might ridicule it, but many thousands of people who knew nothing about Turing, will now be able to admire his life and regret his senseless death. If as you seem to be suggesting the past only has relevance for the past, we might as well discard every great work of literature, every founding document, every development that now benefits us or gives us pleasure.
Shakespeare who??
Posted by: rgz | September 11, 2009 10:40 AM
Beautiful words.
Posted by: Dawn | September 11, 2009 10:46 AM
I'm actually very happy that the British government stepped up and admitted that they had made a big mistake, even if it was 50 years ago. It generally takes the American government a lot longer.
I am just hoping that I will still be alive in the days when a family member, friend, or neighbor will feel safe and secure to introduce me to their same-sex spouse without having to apologize or be afraid of my reaction due to previous negative experiences from others.
I would love for my cousin and his spouse to not have to write all sorts of legal documents that my husband and I didn't have to write so they can visit each other in a hospital. I would love for my best friend to feel free bring his spouse out to dinner with us and not feel the need to identify him as his "friend" (he apologized to me later, after I tore him a new one for not trusting me, but he'd had a very bad experience with another old friend not too previous to our dinner together).
Utopic view, maybe, but if we have been able to do it with bi-racial couples, maybe there is hope for the US yet. Maybe one day we will catch up with most of Europe as far as health insurance, civil marriages, guaranteed vacation time are concerned.
Posted by: Happy Kiwi | September 11, 2009 10:46 AM
Oh yes, one more thing I find useful about such apologies. The screeching opposition that inevitably follows one, reminds us that such attitudes persist and that we need to remain vigilant against bigotry and prejudice.
While it's not the intention of the apology, the resulting turning-over of society's rock to expose to the light the disgusting things that crawl beneath it, is a salutary reminder that the religious haters like help ma boab and libertarian haters like Riann Moll need always to be resisted. If we don't there might be more victims like Turing, and they could be good people we love whose fortune it was to be born unique.
Posted by: Mariana | September 11, 2009 10:59 AM
I became a fan of Turing's work at uni. I had only general information about his biography back then. It was when I read Cryptonomicon that I went and researched the details, and even now, when I think about it, I cannot come to terms with the sheer stupidity and cruelty of it. Maybe because of the book I have this idealised version of him in my head, but I really adore him to bits and get all teary whenever his life story is mentioned.
As for the apology, I have mixed feelings. There is a sense of pointlessness to it, and of its being far too little, but I guess it's because an apology is what it is - just an acknowledgment of an error, not in any way capable of fixing or even attenuating the damage that was done. So we're left with that frustration, as though there were an irrational part of us that expected to get something more out of it.
Posted by: Endor | September 11, 2009 11:00 AM
HappyKiwi - 100% correct. The handy thing about such apologies is their ability to help bigots out themselves. Which they do, without fail, every single time.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 11:13 AM
Just
because he'll whine if no one noticesto be fair, not all the libertarians are being complete haters about this. At the very least, the topic of Alan Turing's suicide provides an excellent segue to shit on Gordon Brown.Posted by: Steven Mading | September 11, 2009 11:13 AM
I think gay rights advocates make a huge mistake when they try to pin gay rights on whether or not being gay is inborn or a choice. I think it's a mistake for two reasons:1 - The moral question has nothing to do with whether or not it's a choice. As long as it's consenting adults involved, the religious jerks have no right to condemn it whether it's inborn or not. Forcing people to only be allowed heterosexual relations is wrong for exactly the same reason that forcing heterosexual people to only use the missionary position and nothing else is wrong. The argument should not be "we don't care whether or not it's immoral, we don't have a choice and just can't help ourselves." The argument should be "It's not immoral, so it doesn't matter whether or not we have a choice." To a person who has the mistaken notion that homosexuality is immoral, the claim "laws discriminating against homosexuality are unfair - just let us be because we can't help ourselves and have no choice" is going to seem a lot like the claim "the law against assault is unfair - we violent sociopaths have a brain disorder that makes us beat people up and it's not our fault!" Whether it's a choice or not has nothing to do with the moral question of what the law should say, and shouldn't be brought up in the debate because it sounds like making excuses for immoral behavior. The real target of the debate should be to get people to stop thinking it's immoral in the first place.
2 - The argument "it's natural therefore it's okay" is a failure from the start, given how many other things we as a species do to avoid things that are natural. Getting angry enough with someone to commit violence is natural - just look at any Chimpanzee documentary. But that doesn't mean we structure laws that say it's okay. Tooth decay is natural, but we use toothpaste anyway to thwart nature as long as possible. Body odor is natural, but we use soap anyway. A crooked, misshappen limb that is somewhat crippled by having a sharp bend in the bone is the natural result of a broken bone that heals on its own, and yet we set bones and use casts to make them grow straight anyway, saying, "screw nature, I want my arm to work properly". "It's natural to do X" is not a way to win the argument "It's okay to do X."
The purely scientific question of whether or not homosexuality is a choice should be entirely divorced from the moral argument of whether it should be legal. Keeping the two intertwined hinders the ability to look at the science of it objectively, because any scientist working on the question now knows that people's human rights hang on the issue.
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 11:15 AM
HappyKiwi,
If you're insinuating that libertarians in general are "haters", then that's rather unfair. I'm a libertarian, and I strongly support this apology. As I've said on numerous occasions, Alan Turing was a great man who served his country, helped defeat Hitler, and contributed substantially to the advance of computer technology. It was wrong that the British criminal justice system punished him under a pointless and archaic law. And it is right that he is now getting the posthumous apology and recognition that he deserves.
Libertarians are among the strongest defenders of individual freedom, including individual sexual freedom. Anti-gay laws are anathema to libertarian principles; and virtually all libertarians would agree that the laws under which Turing was prosecuted were pointless, immoral and barbaric, and that he deserves this apology. So talking about "libertarian haters" is entirely unfair.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 11:26 AM
Ha! Walton, you never fail to disappoint.
Posted by: Happy Kiwi | September 11, 2009 11:27 AM
Fair point Walton, I didn't mean to tar all libertarians with the Riann Moll brush, just as I don't think for a moment that all Christians would endorse hmb's bigotry. That's why I said 'like' in both examples.
Now what if instead of being dead, Turing was old and poor and needed state funded health care?
Posted by: Matt Penfold | September 11, 2009 11:31 AM
In Walton's Britian had Turing not been able to pay for his own chemical castration he would just have had to go to prison instead. No way could Walton have allowed the taxpayer to fund the castration.
Posted by: JefFlyingV, ...I was Cool | September 11, 2009 11:32 AM
mboab, to me as an American it comes down to: do we believe in equality under the law for all of our citizens?
If we add exceptions to the equality rules under the law based on gender or religion (or other criteria), then it calls out the fact that many people do not believe in equality. Is the American ideal of equality a farce?
Posted by: OneHandClapping | September 11, 2009 11:37 AM
This
made me LOL! Especially in response to L-word drivel.Posted by: kamaka | September 11, 2009 11:46 AM
Steven Mading @ 215
Posted by: toby | September 11, 2009 11:48 AM
As well as a genius, Turing was a war hero who used his science to defeat tyranny.
He is probably among the top ten 10 British citizens who helped win the war (along with Churchill, Montgomery, Watson-Watt (radar) and others ...).
I can't help but think that if was a General or an Admiral, it would all have been hushed up, and he would just have been cautioned by the police.
He was partly a victim of the contempt the Establishment had for "boffins" and "eggheads".
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 11:49 AM
HappyKiwi,
As I've said elsewhere, I endorse the existence of healthcare subsidies for the very poor; Medicaid and similar ideas are fine with me. I just don't think government should be managing the provision of health services (as it does in Britain) or forcing everyone to pay into a comprehensive public insurance fund (as it does in Canada and many European countries). But I won't say anything further about healthcare, since I will inevitably be accused of derailing the thread (notwithstanding that it was you who brought up healthcare).
Posted by: Matt Penfold | September 11, 2009 11:51 AM
You need to keep in mind that at the time of his arrest most people knew nothing of the work done by Turing and others during the war.
Posted by: daveau
|
September 11, 2009 12:03 PM
Or royalty...
Posted by: bernarda | September 11, 2009 12:05 PM
I am surprised that no one, not even the geeks, has mentioned the universal Turing machine, unless I missed it
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 11, 2009 12:09 PM
The science is already in. There are highly influential genetic and gestational components to sexual orientation. There are plenty of details to be worked out, but this much has been obvious for well over a decade, and the general consensus that it's largely genetic will not be overturned.
This is true, and this needs to be increasingly emphasized. Much of the scientific research in the future will be about the extent of the influence of environmental factors, and this research will be distorted by homophobic organizations to claim that it's all a choice.
Logically, this is true, but politically, it doesn't matter. People are highly susceptible to the naturalistic fallacy, and it will be with us for centuries more after homophobia is defeated.
It is better that gay people should gain their rights sooner rather than later. There will inevitably be misunderstandings involved in that process. We have to accept this reality.
There are people right now using "it's not natural" as an argument against homosexuality. These people are already too stupid to understand the naturalistic fallacy. Eight syllables! It's better that they learn to accept a bad argument in favor of gay rights than a bad argument against gay rights.
Posted by: NelC | September 11, 2009 12:16 PM
To complicate things, Turing wasn't forgotten only because he was gay, but also because his contribution to the war effort was Top Secret until the late '70s. No-one who was at Bletchley Park was allowed to discuss what they did there until it was declassified. Histories of the war written up to that time simply had no mention of Enigma, ULTRA, Shark or Colossus. Turing got an OBE in 1945, but the reason for it was left out of the citation.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | September 11, 2009 12:26 PM
ReneV (@75, re the byplay between Jeeves and Gregory around choice):
I agree. That is, I absolutely accept that most, if not all, gay people are living out an indwelling, inherent aspect of their personality, rather than some casual choice... but I also wonder why it should matter? As you say, it's nobody's business what kind of sex anyone has (or dreams about, or looks at pictures of), nor with whom, as long as their behavior doesn't infringe on other citizens' rights or threaten the stability of society in very narrow, specific ways (i.e., something concrete; not atmospheric handwringing about our "moral" underpinnings).
This priniciple applies, BTW, not only to gay rights, but generally to freedom of sexual expression, and even more generally to all the ways in which we privately pursue happiness: Nobody should be required to fall back on "I can't help it; I was born this way" to justify behavior that rationally requires no justification... even when they really were "born this way."
Alex (@75, et seq.):
I agree with you that the whole Caster Semenya affair has been shamefully handled; virtually everyone involve (except Semenya herself) should hang their heads. That said, though, I don't think the issue of whether she should be disqualified, and her medals stripped, is really an intersex rights issue. As near as I can tell from the coverage, nobody is accusing her of cheating (and in fact, several folks have been quoted as specifically declaring there's no such accusation in question), but testosterone is unquestionably a performance-enhancing substance: If she truly has, as has been reported, three times the testosterone level of a typical female runner, then the races she won at the World Championships were not fair contests. That's not her fault, and shouldn't reflect badly on her moral character, nor on the character of intersex people generally... but the organizers of a sporting event do have an interest in protecting the competitive integrity of their events.
So all the people who leaked or blathered or said ignorant and insensitive things about her case are deserving of censure... but if her biology gives her a competitive advantage over non-intersex women athletes, it's really not unreasonable to exclude her from women's sporting events, just as men are excluded from them.
Posted by: Geoff | September 11, 2009 12:34 PM
LSUOMA @ 72
I'm a bit baffled at you discovering that the Hodges biography is not available in the USA.
I have a copy of the first edition (1983) and it's published by Touchstone Books (a division of Simon and Schuster) as a trade paperback. Bought in Canada but I'm sure it was available south of the border.
Posted by: Knockgoats | September 11, 2009 12:39 PM
I am surprised that no one, not even the geeks, has mentioned the universal Turing machine, unless I missed it- bernarda
I had one of those, but it was so unreliable I threw it away: in general, you couldn't even tell whether it was going to halt or not!
Posted by: Vole | September 11, 2009 12:47 PM
This apology is one of the most graceful things Brown has done since becoming PM - perhaps the only graceful thing. But I don't see that it means very much.
The current fashion for countries apologising for things seems strange. We in the UK are expected to apologise for the slave trade. The media over here were concerned a while ago as to whether the banks were going to apologise for causing the current financial crisis. I don't know whether they did or not, but the value of my pension won't have increased even if they did. I don't know whether Germany has ever formally apologised for Hitler, whether we expect Cambodia to eventually apologise for Pol Pot, or whether we are expected to apologise to the aborigines for dumping all our convicts on them, or to the dodos for killing them all. Isn't it all a bit silly?
Posted by: SEF | September 11, 2009 12:48 PM
@ aratina cage #175:
No. He hasn't been forgotten. I learned about his work decades ago. He is major text-book stuff and probably a lot less forgotten than Rosalind Franklin (discriminated against for being a competent woman while outnumbered by incompetent and dishonest men) about whom I also learned (initially from someone who was in the same place at the same time).
It was the secrecy of the code-breaking work during the war which led to Alan Turing not getting as much fame or wider recognition as he should have done for his work while he was doing it. Being homosexual was irrelevant to that.
I haven't seen any evidence (in the UK) that it has been a significant factor afterwards either. It's just that most non-geeks are disgustingly ignorant of just about everything scientific or even more broadly academic - including who did what during the invention of computers, despite many of them using (and abusing) the products.
You can test that for yourself with the names of significant people in any such technical field. They'll only be known by most of the (non-geek) public if they're TV celebrities - and then still probably not for their actual work, let alone the quality of it.
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 1:00 PM
I learned about Turing quite a while ago, too; I was very interested in computers as a kid and read some books on the history of computing, and, as I live in the same part of the country as Bletchley Park, I visited a few years ago (it's now open to the public as a museum).
Posted by: bsk | September 11, 2009 1:05 PM
As official apologies go, this came across as eloquent and sincere. Of course it means nothing to Turing, but the symbolic value is huge.
For once: Well done, Mr Brown.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | September 11, 2009 1:29 PM
sgbm (@228):
This is a thorny question, isn't it?
As a matter of both practical politics and simple human compassion, I agree. But in addition to my concern for seeing the end of the suffering of my fellow humans who happen to be gay, my interest in gay rights also exists in the context of a broader interest in freedom of sexual expression, and, even more broadly, freedom of personal expression (i.e., the alternative ways people pursue happiness that are not explicitly sexual in nature). I worry that basing the political case for gay rights on the "born that way" argument may damage the case for the freedom to pursue interests, and behave in ways, that are not inborn (or at least, not obviously, provably so). I can imagine the reactionary perckerwood response: "Well, I guess we cain't avoid givin' the f... er, qu..., er gays some rights, 'cuz they cain't help whut they are... but dang it, nobody's born likin' to be tied up, or a swanger, or needin' one a' them dill-dos."
Admittedly, society's attempts to proscribe these forms of personal expression are nowhere near as universal or consequential as the persecution faced by the LGBT community... but I'd hate to see a human rights campaign become the predicate for denial of other human rights.
In addition, while I absolutely accept that gay people are, in fact, "born that way," I also suspect that as (FSM willing) the social constraints are lifted, sexuality and sexual behavior will turn out to be naturally far more fluid than it has historically been allowed to be... including the likelihood that many nominally straight people (i.e., those who weren't "born that way") will incorporate some sort of same-sex interaction into their range of sexual expression. Therein lies the risk of backlash, if the stupid people you refer to end up feeling that they've been "tricked" into acceeding to gay rights on what might appear to them to have been false pretenses.
Ultimately, the right answer is for all of us to accept, in a broadbased, philosophical way, that what our neighbors do with their bodies in private is none of our business. But you're right that we'd be in serious trouble if we were waiting underwater for that evolution in our current society, and you're also right that it's inconceivable to ask persecuted gay citizens to wait for the perfect solution.
'Tis a puzzlement, eh?
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 11, 2009 1:30 PM
@SEF
The machine was not forgotten, it was the man who had been forgotten. Only in the past few decades with the rise of the gay civil rights movement do we see his full biography being fleshed out, his crime becoming a crime of justice, and his death a tragedy for humanity. Riann Moll put it out there that Turing's being gay was nothing to talk about, his accomplishments preceding his personage in value and his homosexuality just another statistic. Having seen the prejudice cast upon Turing in educational discussions and texts, I disagree. His sexual orientation was hushed up by history and it still surprises the homophobes when they find out the freedom from dictatorships we cherish today and the digital revolution we all participate in can be attributed in a large part to a gay man.Posted by: Mariana | September 11, 2009 2:03 PM
Bill @# 237
In addition, while I absolutely accept that gay people are, in fact, "born that way," I also suspect that as (FSM willing) the social constraints are lifted, sexuality and sexual behavior will turn out to be naturally far more fluid than it has historically been allowed to be... including the likelihood that many nominally straight people (i.e., those who weren't "born that way") will incorporate some sort of same-sex interaction into their range of sexual expression.
I agree with that, and the idea that sexuality is much more fluid than what we currently see it as has always been something I've given a lot of thought. It's not the whole "everybody is bisexual" talk that I believe in, but that if people are raised without the constraint of associating shame or wrongness to same-sex interactions, they will be open to engaging in it if they ever have the opportunity or the curiosity.
I see it happening with women - men are a bit behind, I guess, because they've been culturally allowed much less elbow room in terms of what is "masculine". Personally, having been raised in a milieu with a large number of homosexual men and never having heard from my parents that is was anything less than normal, I don't discard the possibility of one day feeling attracted to a woman (it might never have happened simply because I don't get out enough, being slightly socially phobic).
So I understand the urgency, but I hope that somehow we can incorporate the idea that people must be accepted and respected because it is moral to do so, regardless of it being an innate preference.
Posted by: SEF | September 11, 2009 2:17 PM
@ aratina cage #238:
No, he really, really wasn't. It's not my fault that you personally hadn't heard of him. Those of us in the right situation to do so (eg polymath geeks in the UK) had no trouble at all hearing of him. Are you one of those parochial UnSAnians who think no-one knows stuff (or that the stuff doesn't even exist!) if you yourself haven't been force-fed it? Argument from ignorance much!
Posted by: Vole | September 11, 2009 2:44 PM
SEF @#240 is 100% right.
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 11, 2009 2:48 PM
@SEF
It looks to me like the argument from ignorance is coming from your end, then. Yes, the USA is now far behind the United Kingdom in terms of how it treats LGBT people. That is factual. Quoth Riaan Moll: Do you agree much? Are you saying this apology was unnecessary, too, because you had special access to knowledge about Turing's life?Posted by: Emily | September 11, 2009 2:59 PM
Yay! Just found the full text of this in my email as well (as I was able to sign the petition, as a 'local').
Shame this is going on less than a mile from my London home today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8251598.stm
"It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present."
Posted by: SEF | September 11, 2009 3:14 PM
@ aratina cage #242:
So now you're moving the goalposts too. That wasn't at all the point you were previously flailing at making. Are you a creationist or do you merely play at being one on the internet?
Anyhow, the apology is completely pointless as far as Alan Turing personally is concerned (what with him being dead and all) and it doesn't even have any noticeable point from the point of view of his legacy, even in the sense of getting him into text-books - since he already is (in a big way)!
The significant aspect to the "apology" is that it's a public statement of what now is and isn't acceptable (according to the "authorities" of the society). It's like education-lite in morals for the unwashed, soap-watching masses. It's an implicit rejection of the evil (and the religions which embody that evil). It's a (non-binding) promise not to be bad at innocent people again. The "apology" itself is a sop but it's still better than it not happening or not even being able to happen. Had it turned out to be something which was still unable to happen, that would be a very, very scary indication about the current state of UK society.
The scum, eg homophobes in this case, are still out there but they do now know they are officially regarded as scum by enough people, backed by enough of the power structure, to make such a statement possible. They may be somewhat discouraged from acting out their scumminess and any proto-scum they're raising will have a counter-example to suggest that the bigotry of their parents is not the only way, is not acceptable and may not even be normal.
Posted by: Endor | September 11, 2009 4:12 PM
"His sexual orientation was hushed up by history and it still surprises the homophobes when they find out the freedom from dictatorships we cherish today and the digital revolution we all participate in can be attributed in a large part to a gay man. "
That is certainly the case some of the time. Rather like other bigots who claim America was built only white men only, inventors are only male, etc, etc. Obviously, if someone did something productive, good or useful to society, they must have been just like them!
I'd heard of Turing before, but never about this. No mention of his being gay or what he was subjected to because of it.
An eye-opening post for me.
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 11, 2009 4:17 PM
@SEF
Not responding to flaming is not moving the goalposts.My original point was that the apology is beautiful. Then we had some people come on and say it was pointless that Turing was gay and the apology ridiculous. I do not think it is pointless, at least at this point in history it is not pointless that he was gay and legally treated as less than human. It is hugely significant in terms of how Turing will be portrayed in textbooks, and here I should have been clearer — I am thinking of books where he is not the primary subject, ones that touch briefly on his life. In the textbooks I read, they dismissed him as a mad genius basket case. I noticed how nobody came away from those mini-biographies knowing Turing was gay or that he had done nothing wrong other than love another man. It did seem like it was covered up to me, at least tiptoed around.
If LGBT people were treated equally, then it would have already be clear in every textbook that Turing did nothing wrong and was the victim of a gay witch hunt by the British government.
Yes. It is raising the bar on what must be said about Turing and thus all gay men from possible degeneracy to certain victimhood.Posted by: landru | September 11, 2009 4:20 PM
Can anyone confirm that the logo for Apple computers is a tribute to Turing? I've come across rumour and conjecture, but nothing definitive.
Posted by: Crewvy
|
September 11, 2009 4:32 PM
There is a poll that should probably be pharyngulated,
http://timesnews.typepad.com/news/2009/09/alan-turing-apology.html
60/30 at the moment ,whether or not Brown should have apologized.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin | September 11, 2009 4:32 PM
landru (@247):
Apparently not.
Posted by: SEF | September 11, 2009 4:39 PM
@ Endor #245:
Are you American? This really is not news in the UK - and not remotely plausibly among anyone who has ever studied computing and surrounding subjects (and no-one much else can seriously be counted as ever having cared enough to stand a chance of acquiring the knowledge). It wasn't a big secret. It wasn't a factor in how many column inches he got in school/college text-books (unless there were some obscure religious cult ones somewhere which deliberately left him out).
@ aratina cage #246:
Nonsense - pretty much literally.
Posted by: landru | September 11, 2009 5:00 PM
Bill Dauphin (@249)
I suppose it is too interesting to be true. Thanks for the link.
Posted by: Carlie | September 11, 2009 5:11 PM
I'm always amazed that no matter what the gesture, be it universal health care or equal marriage rights or accessibility accommodations or something as infinitesimally simple and symbolic as apologizing for something or refraining to use a term that hurts someone, that there are so many people who will take the effort to stand up and scream "NO, I do not want to be nice to people. It's stupid, and I would rather be mean and selfish and cruel."
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 11, 2009 5:15 PM
@SEF
Anyone can say something is nonsense when they are ignorant about it.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | September 11, 2009 5:27 PM
Carlie (@252):
It is crazy, isn't it? Somewhat like people who can't seem to find it within themselves to sit quietly through a speech they don't agree with, but feel compelled instead to yell "YOU LIE!" at the speaker, no?
Posted by: Walton | September 11, 2009 5:38 PM
I wouldn't say "far behind". Although homosexuality was legalised in England and Wales in 1967, it was not legalised in Scotland until 1981, or in Northern Ireland until 1982 (and even then, only in response to a European Court of Human Rights decision). The age of consent for homosexual practices was not equalised with that for heterosexual practices until 2000. Homosexuality also remained illegal in the British military until 2000. And sexually active gay men (though not women) are still banned from donating blood in the UK. Adoption of children by gay couples is also still a controversial issue in British politics.
There is certainly less organised religious opposition in the UK to gay rights. (Indeed, in 1967 the then-Archbishop of Canterbury spoke out in favour of legalisation.) However, there have been a few socially conservative (mostly Catholic) politicians who've fought bitterly against gay rights legislation, the leading example being the late Baroness Young (who died in 2002).
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | September 11, 2009 5:53 PM
I wouldn't say "far behind"
Again, because you're utterly ignorant about the US.
We still got cops raiding gay bars. Stonewall? What's that?
http://www.sovo.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=27142
Posted by: D | September 11, 2009 6:05 PM
OK, trying to be stealthy at work; at 256 comments, I ctrl+F'ed "mtf," "ftm," "tran," "hrt," and "bt," returning no results, so I don't think anyone's said this yet. I checked because it strikes me as really obvious.
I knew Turing was criminalized for being gay. I had no idea he was forcibly injected with hormones. What freaks me out about this is that there are people who would kill for government-sponsored hormone replacement therapy. This does not lessen Turing's suffering; in fact, I find the horror of this story increased beyond reckoning (and it was damn horrifying to begin with!).
Still, better late than never. One cannot demonstrate that one has learned from monstrous mistakes without acknowledging that one was once monstrous. That kind of humility and commitment to moral improvement is irreplaceable.
Posted by: SimonG | September 11, 2009 6:55 PM
I had reservations about the request for an apology. I don't like the idea of my government appologising on my behalf for something I didn't do.
However, I've mostly changed my mind. I was pleasantly surprised to see the other homosexuals affected got a mention, too, which helped. But the main thing is the message it sends out, that this sort of discrimination is no longer something that our society supports.
Some people have remarked that if the government is to appologise to Turing and the other homosexual men of the C20th why not all the other victims of what we now think of as horrible treatment, such as the supposed witches fo the middle ages, and sundry others throughout history. But I think the case of Turing is different in a couple of respects. It's something that happened quite recently, and the attitudes associated with it are still too common.
Having someone who gave great service to Britain during the war, especially near this anniversary, presented an opportunity to send a message to the bigots of today's Britain that their attitudes are no longer acceptable. If we'd waited until homophobia had been (mostly) eliminated then there really wouldn't have been much point to the appology.
Just as a slight aside, I'm not sure that Gordon Brown has done this as a PR exercise. I am not at all convinced that it will go down well; certainly not across the board. At least, having Turing associated with it will make it hard for the less enlightened press to complain much. All they can get away with will be tedious criticism of Brown's alleged grandstanding, and that petty-minded twaddle about witches.
Posted by: Carlie | September 11, 2009 7:18 PM
Some people have remarked that if the government is to appologise to Turing and the other homosexual men of the C20th why not all the other victims of what we now think of as horrible treatment, such as the supposed witches fo the middle ages, and sundry others throughout history.
Well, my question to them would be why not? I hardly think a good argument against issuing a state apology is "But then we'll have to apologize for everyone else we persecuted and murdered!"
Posted by: RyogaM | September 11, 2009 7:55 PM
I am very glad this apology came out if for no other reason than to get people talking about Alan Turing. Because he deserves to be better known. And, I confess, until very recently I had no idea who Turing was, what he did and what became of him. Yes, I am an American. I think a good percentage of Americans are ignorant of Turing and his contributions to computing and the war effort.
Think of this: in America, we've been arguing about gays in the military for the past 17 years or so, and I have never, in all the debates about the subject, heard anyone say,as pointed out above, "You know, we won World War II because of a gay man." It's simplistic, a bit exaggerated, but, hell, what political argument isn't?
Posted by: D | September 12, 2009 3:47 AM
@ Carlie (259): Oh, you're awesome! Just because a project looks overwhelming at first doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
@ SimonG (260): I think you made a generally good point, but the start of your post sticks in my craw a bit. I think I would rather like my government apologizing for things I didn't do, as well as for things I wouldn't do, precisely because that's not what I would have done and my government is supposed to represent me. Even if this guy went through with the apology only as a shrewd PR move, he still alienated a whole bunch of bigots who need to be alienated. And at the same time, I would like to apologize on behalf of my government (though they will not) for a big ol' list of things.
I dunno, maybe we're coming at this from different perspectives. If your government does wrong by you, and you'd have no part in such shenanigans, how would you expect the situation to be righted? Perhaps by a formal denunciation of the guilty parties? I can see how that could make more sense than an apology. Maybe something of the form, "Look, I know I didn't do this awful thing, so it makes no sense for me to apologize for it. But I feel really bad that this happened, regardless, and I'm utterly ashamed that these events are a part of my nation's history; accordingly, I'm also disgusted by the monster who did such things." Is that more to your way of thinking?
Posted by: Not crazy | September 12, 2009 11:15 AM
I think few American politicians would freely say that perhaps America didn't single handedly win WW2. For starters that would entail noting the massive sacrifice of the Red Army. Obama already gets called a socialist enough as it is. Not to mention all the stupid "death panel" stuff. What's the betting the crazies hear Obama praise the work of Turing and reply with "Obama calls for an American Holocaust!!!111"?
Posted by: Vole | September 12, 2009 2:43 PM
Is it possible that the main reason Turing is so little known in the US is not that he was gay, but that he was British?
Posted by: Roman | September 12, 2009 4:42 PM
I have signed the petition and I am very glad that it succeeded. I think the PM's answer was written in a fine way. It is not emotional, but this is Britain...
Posted by: help ma boab | September 13, 2009 7:47 AM
I never cease to be amazed at the ease with which the folk here resort to ad hominem and straw man arguments. I was shocked at first but now I am accustomed to it. I regard it as a sign of something. Here is a beauty parade:
Knockgoats
strange gods before me
aratina cage
John Morales
aratina cage
MAJeff,
strange gods before me
The comment was addressed to me by name.
Knockgoats
and
Loaded question?
You seem to be mistaking 'consequence' for 'misfortune'. Do you think that shooting yourself during a game of Russian Roulette is mere 'misfortune'?
Wowbagger
How can I tell?
strange gods before me
What are these 'human rights' of which you speak? I have never seen one. Do they really exist? Or are they just euphemisms for 'what I want'. Do you only bring out materialistic reductionism when it suits you (arguing against God)?
JefFlyingV
Everyone is equal before the law. They are entitled to marry a person of the opposite sex. Don't pretend you are not redefining 'marriage'. You are.
Happy Kiwi
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 13, 2009 8:10 AM
At a guess it's when your lips are moving - or, in this medium, when your fingers are typing.
You also need to learn to distinguish between an ad hominem and an insult. For example, 'your arguments are pathetic because you're a fucking clown shoe' is an ad hominem. 'You're a fucking clown shoe and your arguments are pathetic' is not.
You can guess which one applies to you.
Posted by: Carlie | September 13, 2009 8:18 AM
Yep, just like Henry Ford said. "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 13, 2009 8:32 AM
Stupid fuck, this comment is addressed to you.
This one is not:
It is talking about you. Do you see? Do you see the context, in which it comes right after Walton's comment to you? If you had any sense at all, you'd understand it was a comment in reply to Walton.
Why are you so stupid? Why would anyone want to be like you?
Hey look, another Christian who believes that humans have no rights. You could try looking that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for an example, but since the United Nations is a communist conspiracy, I'm sure that just proves to you that human rights in general are an affront to the sovereignty of God.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 13, 2009 8:35 AM
Let's make a simple change to illustrate help ma boab's bigotry:
'Everyone is equal before the law. They are entitled to marry a person of the
opposite sexsame race. Don't pretend you are not redefining 'marriage'. You are.'Posted by: strange gods before me | September 13, 2009 8:37 AM
This was the argument made by the state of Virginia in Loving v Virginia:
Everyone was equal before the law. They were entitled to marry a person of the same race.
Is anyone surprised that conservative Christians are still using arguments that they learned from white supremacists?
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 13, 2009 8:39 AM
Damn your quick fingers, Wowbagger. :)
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
September 13, 2009 9:02 AM
HMB, another excellent "well meaning fool" post. You are definitely our present front runner for the job. Remember, we look at your inane opinions to see that our opinion should be the opposite.
Posted by: Roman | September 13, 2009 2:19 PM
@HMB
"What are these 'human rights' of which you speak? I have never seen one. Do they really exist? Or are they just euphemisms for 'what I want'."
They are an euphemism for "what the prevailing opinion at a given point of time is". FYI, more and more people are of the opinion that homosexual relationships are as deserving of state protection as heterosexual ones. Homophobes are losing this battle.
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 13, 2009 2:53 PM
@help me boab
Give a little, get a little.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 13, 2009 3:24 PM
strange gods before me
I'm guessing this is appeal to authority or argumentum ad populum? Please keep me right here, guys, I am new to all this. Anyway, I think we are agreed that there is no hard, physical, scientific evidence of the existence of fairies or 'rights'.
I'll have to take your word for this, I live in a country that has never had laws against mixed race marriage. When I say 'never', I mean I am only going back 2000 years. And the 'white supremacist' thing isn't in the bible anyway. It is an Asian religion so Whitey has little to boast about.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 13, 2009 3:36 PM
Christian says there is no evidence that laws exist.
I urge you to test your hypothesis by shoplifting in a large, well-lit supermarket in front of the surveillance cameras.
Hopefully your jail won't have internet access for inmates, and we can be spared your inane bullshit for a few months.
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 3:38 PM
Knockgoats @136:
Well said, Knockgoats. hmb's little story about his friend who died of aids before the Tom Hanks movie came out, was just gag-inducing.
I wish I could introduce hmb to my brother's former girlfriend. She once said, "I'm not a bigot. I don't hate gays, I just know that they are perverted." (Exact quote.)
Posted by: help ma boab | September 13, 2009 3:53 PM
strange gods before me
Argumentum ad baculum?
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 13, 2009 3:59 PM
No, bigot, I don't wish prison rape upon you.
Are you too stupid to address the argument? Human rights are upheld in laws. So if you're wondering whether human rights exist, you can test whether laws exist.
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 13, 2009 4:00 PM
Isn't it time to just expose His majesties Boob to simple Shakespearean insults and have done with it?
Boob, Thou caluminous flap-mouthed clotpole!
Posted by: help ma boab | September 13, 2009 4:05 PM
Lynna, she sounds like my kinda gal (sorry, I am already taken). But on the 'perverted' thing, seeing as you seem to know something about this subject, what is that homosexual chaps actually actually do?
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 13, 2009 4:09 PM
what is that homosexual chaps actually actually do?
"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!"
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
September 13, 2009 4:09 PM
HMB, you are now officially our "Well Meaning Fool". I suggest that everyone call HMB by his new title whenever applicable. Which means most every post.
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 13, 2009 4:17 PM
Well meaning fool hasn't yet learned about the birds and the bees?
Posted by: help ma boab | September 13, 2009 4:25 PM
strange gods before me
My Argumentum ad baculum? still stands.
This is a non sequitur. As you say, "Human rights are upheld in laws." so they are not actually laws. So the test for their existence is not the same as the test for the existence of laws. Try this thought experiment: did 'gay rights' exist before the legalisation of homosexuality? Or was it at that time 'Gay Wrong'. On what basis did campaigners call for a change in the law? 'Gay Rights'? But the law said Gay was wrong. Is there a difference between law and morality?
If there is no difference, then the law may never change. The law is morality. If there is a difference, then what is the evidence of the existence of 'morality' or 'rights'?
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 13, 2009 4:32 PM
The law is morality.
Thou mammering fly-bitten maggot-pie!
Posted by: Gyeong Hwa Pak | September 13, 2009 4:50 PM
Yes. Laws are not always moral. Sharia Laws for example is unmoral but law nonetheless in some countries.
On the subject of homosexuality, there are some ancient and non western society that accepted homosexuality to a certain degree (the Ancient Greeks for example thought it was acceptable). They were never made into law but they were accepted. It wasn't until bigoted religious folks decided to make homosexuality a crime. Laws can be made, but it doesn't mean that they are moral laws.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 13, 2009 4:55 PM
Ichthyic
Try to follow my argument.
is a rhetorical statement following from the previous sentence/assertion. I do not actually believe that. I am treating you as an adult. Or trying to. That may be a mistake.
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 13, 2009 5:01 PM
Try to follow my argument.
try to follow mine:
Thou craven ill-breeding blind-worm!
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
September 13, 2009 5:09 PM
You, HMB, an adult? Bwahahaahhahahaha. You are working on "total fool" status. That means you aren't well meaning, just mean.Posted by: help ma boab | September 13, 2009 5:11 PM
Ichthyic
May the fleas of a thousand camels infest thine crotch.
Nighty night.
Posted by: Smoggy Batzrubble OM4Jesus | September 13, 2009 5:15 PM
Poetic insult's Itchy! Good enough to be Shakespearean.
Here's my effort:
Thou saddle-sniffing frog-munting whore-licker.
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 13, 2009 5:27 PM
Thou saddle-sniffing frog-munting whore-licker.
ah, but mine are actually quotes.
try this on for size:
http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/index.html
it will actually inform you w
hattip to Kseniya, wherever she is.
@Boob:
Nighty night.
I will most humbly take my leave of you. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will not more willingly part withal.
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 13, 2009 5:30 PM
it will actually inform you where they come from
*sigh*
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 13, 2009 5:32 PM
Some of them are. Is this really so hard to understand? I have the right to free expression, and in my country the law also ensures that my right is protected.
You and your hateful kind have been trying to take rights away from people who already have these rights protected under the law, and you've temporarily succeeded in California. This is why you are a loathsome death cultist.
You've also been trying to keep people from having their rights recognized under the law where they are not yet recognized; you are trying to keep people from gaining their rights. This is why you are an enemy of humanity.
Posted by: Smoggy Batzrubble OM4Jesus | September 13, 2009 5:40 PM
Dear Brother Itchy,
I am a long-time fan of the Shakespearean insult generator, although I now attempt to emulate the bardic tone where possible.
I also prefer the DIY kit:
http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/shake_rule.html
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 6:22 PM
The hmb lackwit @281 wrote
Oh, unholy union that didst mate a woman with that braying ass hmb. And now he thinks the über bigot from mormonfemaledom who puts the crown of "Perverted" on the heads of our gay men should also be ripe for him!?
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 6:39 PM
That bit of slime that slithers into threads, that hmb, @281 wrote:
Oh, snappeth! He hath insulted me (or so he thinks) by pairing me with "the perverted thing" and with knowledge thereof -- whilst also begging to be pummeled with the intricate details of the aforementioned perversion.
You are well and truly outted now, hmb. You are too bloated in your righteousness to hide from the truth, no rock on this earth would deign to cover you. You insult the very foundations of the spinning globe. Not the rocks on the highest peaks, nor the black smokers at the bottom of the sea will give you shelter. All cast you out.
You would make all things that touch your thought a perversion; and then would you beg to have it served to you on a heaping plate. Go and dwell alone, with your grimy paws in your pockets; and touch no keyboard, nor send your slime by fibre optic cable to any terminal. Be gone you foul stench, you rotten tennis shoe slow-baked.
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 7:49 PM
Smoggy
Ahh, thanks for the link. I hadn't seen that one before. Excellent source for insulting the swag-bellied, whey-faced, droning vassals of the Churches that pick our pockets.
Posted by: JefFlyingV, Picture This | September 13, 2009 8:04 PM
Boab, at ya.
Marriage is a contract, pretty simple really. I don't see it as a redefinition of marriage if there is gay marriage. If you get married in a church you still have a state marriage. If you get married at a court house it is still a marriage. If you cohabitate for a certain amount of time it is a common law marriage.
As I posted in my original post, either you belive in equal rights for citizens or you don't.
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 8:43 PM
The state of Idaho has some well-organized anti-gay groups. Some of our local news stations do at least carry stories about the difficulties that gay and lesbian couples encounter. Idaho News 8, for example:
Posted by: Smoggy Batzrubble OM4Jesus | September 13, 2009 9:15 PM
Dear brother help ma boab,
Finally we're getting to the nub of your prejudice. Like all extreme homophobes, you're really in it for the guilty fascination. Why ask Lynna "what is it that homosexual chaps actually actually do"? Why not just go to a good gay porn site and satisfy your secret needs there? No need to keep on oppressing other people because your deep desires are oppressing you.
Good homosexual lovers do what any other good lovers do. They find compatible partners and they give and receive pleasure. Of course, for you, that boils down to one thing, doesn't it? SODOMY! Like all homophobes you think that's all homosexuality is about. You can't conceive that two people of the same sex might have intimacy, romance, foreplay, and erotic variation. You can't get past your fascination with a penis entering an anus, can you? Well I have a close gay friend in his eighties, who was very sexually active but never once had anal sex. Think creatively and you might come up with some scenarios as to how this might have been achieved. Of much greater offense than any sex act, is your conclusion that you have any right imposing your narrow view on two people who love each other and wish to be together. There's a severe shortage of love in this world, and your sort of hating only adds to that.
Get over yourself hmb. Your prejudices are a stinking offence to heaven. Actually, if your own arsehole is feeling so neglected, my friend Floyd Rubber says he'll come and ram you up the spine for Jesus. He's big, thick, pierced and circumcised and he'll have you singing with the angelic choir in no time.
Yours in Christian contempt
Smoggy
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 9:24 PM
Excellent take-down of help ma boab, Smoggy. And you have my thanks, because I was feeling rather assaulted by his attempt to implant his attitude in my brain. Ewww.
Feeling rather better now. Smoggy as antidote.
Posted by: Smoggy Batzrubble OM4Jesus | September 13, 2009 9:39 PM
Dearest Lynna,
Like all good Christians I like to lend a helping hand to those feeling persecuted and oppressed. The fact that the Christian faith is often the reason why people feel persecuted and oppressed is far too big a disconnect for me to deal with.
BTW Floyd sends his love and wonders whether you'd like him to send you one of his used body waxing strips as a gesture of friendship.
Smoggles
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 9:45 PM
Thanks, Smoggles, for relaying Floyd's offer. (I know from experience that Floyd's fingers are too thick to master a keyboard.)
Please tell Floyd that I could use a new entry-way rug. Winter is coming on soon in Idaho, and it would be nice to have a bit of rug coarse enough to scrape the snow off one's boots.
Lynnacious
Posted by: Smoggy Batzrubble OM4Jesus | September 13, 2009 9:51 PM
Dear Lynnacious
Floyd's rug is coarse enough to scrape off both snow and boots, so use it carefully.
Smoggles
PS It's not that Floyd's admittedly thick fingers make using a keyboard difficult. It's because his keyboard is completely gunked up since he discovered porn tube.
He says he spilled coffee...
Posted by: Lynna | September 13, 2009 9:58 PM
Floyd, Floyd. Sigh. What am I going to do with him? He doesn't write, he doesn't email -- and then he comes up with this lame excuse. I should have known.
Posted by: Riaan Moll
|
September 14, 2009 1:37 AM
"Libertarians are haters. Riaan Moll is a 'libertarian' (whatever the fuck that means), therefore Riaan Moll is a hater."
Magnificent strawman, folks. Good job. You ought to be proud.
Posted by: Riaan Moll
|
September 14, 2009 2:10 AM
It looks to me like the argument from ignorance is coming from your end, then. Yes, the USA is now far behind the United Kingdom in terms of how it treats LGBT people. That is factual. Quoth Riaan Moll:
"Basically, my stance is, who the fuck do the gay community think they are for demanding this apology? The apology isn't for Alan Turing - it's for THEM and (what appears to me to be) the chip on their collective shoulder."[/i]
I'm not American, so don't make the mistake of misrepresenting my posts, or using them as representative of the viewpoint of an entire nation. You ought to know better than that. Besides, even if I were a yank, you're making a claim that my post represents argument from ignorance, and you haven't demonstrated how it does.
Moving on, problems with this apology:
1) It's pointless as an "apology". Who is the government apologising to?
2) Every homophobe living at the time was to blame. Some of them were in government. So what?. Some of them worked as garbage collectors. Shall we extend the scope of the demand? :rolleyes:
3) I can buy the argument that the "apology" sets the tone for contemporary discussion and awareness of GLTG issues and human rights. However, a demand for an "apology" is akin to "When last did you beat your wife?". It places the government in an untenable situation where it has to apologise for something that has pretty much nothing to do with contemporary law and official government policy. The lawmakers from that era are likely as dead as Mr. Turing.
In that sense, the request is misguided, because while Alan certainly deserved an apology, restitution and recognition of his great achievements, there's no apology to be had, because he is dead and the state that prosecuted him is dead (literally, for individuals, and figuratively, from a legislative perspective). What would have been more appropriate is a request to honour Alan with an official statement about his amazing contributions (and whatever else sugar you'd like to sprinkle over it, like a knighthood?), while reinforcing the government's position on GLTG rights.
Of course, the government can't win, because the whole thing is contradictory. If the government must apologise, then the implicit accusation being made is that the gov't is the bad guy here. And if the gov't is the bad guy, then what is the aim of the apology? To honour Alan Turing or to have the government say something it doesn't believe? Is the government at fault or isn't it? (It's the bad guy, remember?).
At the moment, demanding an apology is nothing but a knee-jerk out of a sense of entitlement. While the rationale behind it is noble (and I approve of the sentiment), demanding an apology is idiotic, but unfortunately somebody would still piss their panties if the government merely made a statement of policy, because objecting to an illogical demand for an apology is supposedly non-pc and homophobic and supportive of the erstwhile government's anti-gay laws, isn't it? :rolleyes:
Posted by: help maq boab | September 14, 2009 4:00 AM
strange gods before me
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 14, 2009 4:15 AM
nor by being adopted as law (appeal to authority)
your continuing misapplication of various logical fallacy labels is quite amusing.
*psst*
(you can file this one under an appeal to ridicule, if you want to continue your trend)
trust me, though, playing logical fallacy bingo isn't your forte.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 14, 2009 7:03 AM
Ichthyic
What is a 'right'?
Make sure your definition includes those claimed but not yet enshrined in law. Just because a legislature 'recognises' such rights does not mean that they have any scientific existence. So do you have any scientific proof of their existence? And don't bother me with a social construct (the beliefs and actions of the populus or authority).
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 14, 2009 8:30 AM
@Riaan Moll
I noticed you are using GLTG for Gay, Lesbian, and TransGender, but don't forget the B for Bisexuals who face the same discrimination and homophobia.
This is a plainly factual statement and slightly positive in its wording (except for the part about a nineteen-year-old being a boy — it probably should say "young man"). However, it does not say that Britain was morally wrong for what it did to him and does not clarify that Turing was a victim of a morally repugnant law.Back on the topic of why the apology is helpful (and in my opinion necessary), I thought we should all read the end of the Alan Turing mini-bio provided in the story linked to by Bill Dauphin (#249):
As stated, the mini-bio still gives ammo to haters of gays who read it smugly and come away with "evidence" that being gay is criminal. An updated version would probably include a statement like, "The British government officially apologized to Turing on September 10, 2009 for treating him unfairly like a criminal because of his sexual orientation." The way I think of it, the apology delineates that it was Britain and not Turing who was morally wrong, revoking the ability for Turing's arrest to be used disparagingly against him and gays.
Posted by: strange gods before me | September 14, 2009 8:40 AM
Thank you, help ma boab. I just wanted to get you on record as a Christian saying that humans have no rights.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 14, 2009 8:58 AM
Always happy to oblige SG. But are we talking about the same things?
What is a 'human right'?
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
September 14, 2009 9:15 AM
I see HMB, our "well meaning fool", is now really working on his "total fool" status. Questioning what is human rights? Total and absolute crazy.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 14, 2009 9:35 AM
help ma
boabbigot wrote:Something Christians deny to people they believe their imaginary deity doesn't like - like gay people, women, people of races other than their own and so forth.
Posted by: Trip the Space Parasite | September 14, 2009 8:17 PM
Re: Lynna @ #298
Excellent! It will definitely be your brain I devour next time I need the ability to lay the smack down on some deserving slow-baked rotten tennis shoe!
Posted by: Lynna | September 14, 2009 9:26 PM
Trip the Space Parasite @318
Thank you so much ... I think. I will look forward to my brain being devoured by a discerning Space Parasite.
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 14, 2009 9:35 PM
So do you have any scientific proof of their existence?
in keeping with your education regarding the use of logical fallacies, I believe this one would come under at least the realm of red herring, if not also intended as an example of burden of proof.
perhaps could even be regarded as a case of special pleading?
still, I'm going with red herring, since it has fuck all to do with anything I've posted in response to your drivel.
In fact, it rather seems that all you've done since you started is toss out one red herring after another.
which, of course, is why it appears more than prudent to me to go back to pure insult:
Out of my sight! Thou dost infect my eyes.
Posted by: Lynna | September 14, 2009 10:24 PM
Good definition of "human rights" @317.
Per Ichthyic's infected eyes: Showing that infectious, malodorous hmb the door, eh? Good move. I think he has maggots for brains.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 15, 2009 5:46 AM
Ichthyic
Then perhaps you should not butt into other peoples' conversation. SG appealed to 'human rights'. I have challenged him and he has neglected to answer my questions.
(BTW, sgbm, that is a non sequitur if I believe that his claimed 'right' would be harmful to him. And if you saw the way he died, I think you would agree.)
This is the situation:
"People have 'human rights'. Bare assertion fallacy. He who asserts must prove.
"Some rights are generally recognised" Argumentum ad populum
"Some rights are enshrined in Law" Appeal to authority
Wowbagger
I kinda guessed that you would not know what 'rights' were either. You didn't have to tell us.
Lynna
No.
strange gods before me
Just noticed this. "insulting language"? Spoing!
Doc
Dear, sweet, dear, dear, loveable, sweet Nerd. You don't believe in God because there is no scientific evidence. But now you believe in the 'Rights Fairy'.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 15, 2009 6:02 AM
help ma
You keep using the term 'appeal to authority'. It does not mean what you think it means.boabbigot wrote:Posted by: help ma boab | September 15, 2009 8:13 AM
Wiki, 'appeal to authority':
Source A says that p.
Source A is authoritative.
Therefore, p is true.
P= "there are human rights"
Source A = Legislatures, Courts, UN.
Anyway, Wowbagger, even if I am missing this point (and I could be), how are you coming along with your definition of 'rights'? You seem to know your way around Wiki, you could try there. What's wrong? Cat got your tongue?
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
September 15, 2009 8:17 AM
HMB, your foolish attitude keeps shining through your posts. Human rights is a self evident term. Just like you and foolish. Once you recognize you are full of shit and apologize to everyone here for your stupidity, we might be able to have a conversation. Until then, you talk to yourself.
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 15, 2009 8:20 AM
Well, well, well... Look what help me boab admitted:
Theists willingly burn down their own houses to make their points.@help me boab
As you are so adept at proving, your god is only an excuse to do evil things and then beg for forgiveness from other humans. The existence of a rights-giver would be a hideous prospect, indeed. We would have no use for 'human rights' at all in that case; all we would need to do is tickle the rights-giver until it daubs us with its rights-honey. That is not at all how it works.
Human rights are the tangible expression of human solidarity, the equality of the experience of being human. Human rights are how your needs are as necessary as another person's needs, how no person should be deprived of life's necessities, how no person should be privileged over others based on their unalterable and biological traits or beliefs, and how we would do better to save our families and our neighbors just as we would save ourselves in times of danger. There is no rights-giver; there is only us.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 15, 2009 9:51 AM
help ma
boabbigot wrote:Of course you are. But if I were to sit here elaborate on the points you've missed I'd be here all day. How about I list the points you've grasped instead?
[crickets]
Okay, maybe not.
I think I'll just point to what aratina cage wrote in post #326, since that's close enough to my own opinion.
Do you need me to explain what the big words - like 'solidarity', 'equality' and 'biological' mean? You do seem to struggle with basic concepts; I wouldn't want you to get even more confused than you already are.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 15, 2009 9:54 AM
Nerd
Bare assertion fallacy.
Sweet! At last!
aratina cage
Never said there was. Gould got it more or less right with NOMA. Historical and anecdotal evidence, yes.
I loved your speech. It was heart-warming, uplifting, poetic, noble, inspiring, edifying, full of the milk of human kindness. I don't mind telling you that a lump came to my throat.
My guess is that materialistic determinism has given you the trait of evolutionary infra-species co-operation. But it was not given to me. That is just the hand I was dealt in the evolutionary lottery. I will lie, cheat, manipulate, rape, kill, rob, dissemble, anything to give me the slightest advantage. Or even just because it makes me feel good because feeling good is a biological indicator that I am doing something that benefits my 'selfish genes'. Do you have a problem with that?
Or perhaps making your speech make you 'feel good' too? Do you make the same speech wherever you feel it will earn you kudos? Earn you admiring glances? Gain you admittance to your circle?
Just because I ruthlessly and mercilessly compete and exploit doesn't make me a bad person, does it?
Posted by: help ma boab | September 15, 2009 10:09 AM
Wowbagger
Sooooo, no scientific evidence then. Who'd have thunk? You should have stuck at #317. After a while you will find the demands for 'scientific evidence' a bit irritating. I certainly do. That is because 98% of human life is non-scientific. It is to do with values, relationship, meaning, beauty, true fulfilment.
I suppose you thought that materialistic reductionism was only to be used against the God botherers?
Posted by: Stephen Wells | September 15, 2009 10:21 AM
helpy, human rights exist in a society which recognises them; that's what rights are. Not graven into the fabric of the universe. And your cute little speech about what a big bad noncooperator you are- rowr- was totally wrong in all respects except one; you do lie.
Posted by: aratina cage
|
September 15, 2009 10:44 AM
@help me boab
Yes, that is problematic and ghastly psychotic. I take it you are the kind of person who violates the human rights of others and then expects your own to be upheld.*
Yes, it does.
Anecdotal historical evidence, you mean. Stories relayed through time by followers of Christ — nothing more, nothing less. Archeological evidence? Nada. Corroborative historical evidence? Nada. But you are claiming that there is such a thing as the supernatural in pinning your deity down to NOMA, correct?
I wrote it to show how terribly pointless it would be to have human rights handed to us by a deity. After I wrote it, I felt good enough about it to post it. But we could pull the same stunt on you: tell us, help me boab, do you make your speeches to feel better about yourself? Do you hope to earn your wings by opining here on Pharyngula? Are you drawing God's eye onto your bosom with your incessant tomfoolery? Is this all a scheme to get past the Pearly Gates?* Just kidding! I know you are only trolling for Christ.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 15, 2009 10:55 AM
Stephen Wells
Your definition discounts 'rights' which are not yet 'recognised' so will not satisfy sgbm (#295). Your position also fails to provide criteria to indicate which rights should be recognised and which should not. As I argued above, this means that 'rights' usually reduces to 'what I want'.
But you appear to have called me a liar. I am putting you in my 'ignore folder' along with the others who have called me a liar or racist.
Posted by: Janine, Ignorant Slut, OM | September 15, 2009 10:58 AM
I am putting you in my 'ignore folder' along with the others who have called me a liar or racist.
Do yourself a favor and place this entire fucking blog on your ignore list.
Posted by: Stephen Wells | September 15, 2009 11:01 AM
Woot, it's so easy to yank helpy's chain, isn't it? He lies, we call him a liar, he has a hissy fit. Silly boy.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 15, 2009 12:18 PM
aratina cage
I'm getting a bit of cognitive dissonance here. You admire these qualities when you see them in chimps, amoeba, lions and Galapagos finches, right? Or are humans supposed to be higher in some way?
"Blowfly rights are the tangible expression of blowfly solidarity, the equality of the experience of being a blowfly. Blowfly rights are how your needs are as necessary as another blowfly's needs, how no blowfly should be deprived of life's necessities, how no blowfly should be privileged over others based on their unalterable and biological traits or beliefs, and how we would do better to save our maggots and our neighbor blowflies just as we would save ourselves in times of danger. There is no rights-giver; there is only us blowflies."
Substitute 'moose', 'chicken', 'bacterium' in the above if it helps.
Is there any other kind? And four independent biographies (OK three and a half) plus an independent commentary is four or five steps up the historical ladder.
Not sure what you mean, I guess God must be supernatural. He cannot be detected by any scientific instrument. He created the whole of nature (and more beside) so he cannot be a part of nature. And we, as part of nature, cannot even examine the nature/super-nature interface. Don't have the tools.
It is quite interesting here, I learn some of the stuff that has been going on in evolutionary circles since I last reconsidered the issue (it can't all be as drossy as Dawkins), no, you can't earn kudos with God, and no, I am not trying to attract his attention, he might notice how little work I am getting done.
Posted by: Janine, Vile Bitch, OM | September 15, 2009 12:22 PM
I'm getting a bit of cognitive dissonance here. You admire these qualities when you see them in chimps, amoeba, lions and Galapagos finches, right? Or are humans supposed to be higher in some way?
Amazing what arguments one can win when one makes up shit about what one's foes has to say.
Yes, you are a liar of the lowest form.
Fuck you and everything you stand for. You do not argue in good faith.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 15, 2009 1:02 PM
@help me boab
Admire? Hmmm... Probably not the right word for every one of those organisms, but taken in a loose way, I suppose so. It is more an admiration of life finding temporary respites of peace in the struggle that all organisms must go through. In human terms, it would be like admiring a nation, a leader, or a soldier who stood up to fight to protect those around them. One thing that makes us different from other organisms is our capacity to question the reason we do things (the basis for morality). That stark cognitive difference between us and other organism should resonate within you.
They are not independent. They build on a central story arc which ties them together. Some of them could even be based on the others, or at least parts of the others. As far as evidence goes, they provide none other than that the story was known. Independent commentary by people partial to the story is hardly supportive of a story being nonfiction.
Right then (except for the creation part, which is pretend). God being not part of nature is equivalent to God not existing in reality. The historical books about God could not possibly have come from the supernatural realm since we cannot examine it and since it is wholly separate from the natural realm. Therefore, they are fictional — made up by people for people. You lack the tools and the knowledge to show otherwise. By your very definition, it is impossible to prove anything about God, but don't let that stop you from trying.
Me, too. I also find theism is severely lacking in that respect. Instead of going on, theism is going down.Posted by: CJO | September 15, 2009 1:23 PM
Is there any other kind? And four independent biographies (OK three and a half) plus an independent commentary is four or five steps up the historical ladder.
Ridiculous. The gospels are not independent in the least. Matthew and Luke are based substantially on Mark. John's tradition is obviously incorporating other sources, but what is "independent" (that is, dependent, just on other traditions) in John is nigh irreconcilable with the synoptics. I have no idea what you mean by the "half" but by the "independent commentary" you must mean the letters of Paul. Well, funny how in this "commentary" he doesn't actually comment on any of the salient elements in the nominally historical portions of the gospels --the healings, the miracles, the entirety of the teaching material, even when it would have perfectly served his rhetorical purposes to do so. Almost seems like that whole tradition was invented after Paul wrote, doesn't it?
And calling the gospels biographies or histories prior to any analysis is begging the question. The synoptics borrow some tropes from the genre known as the Hellenistic biography, it is true, but they do not follow the overall form (they lean on the Hellenistic novel too). And the impression one gets of any attempt toward historiography is largely an artifact of imitating the pseudo-historiography of the Hebrew scriptures as it came to the authors in Greek translation. Pseudo-history parroting older pseudo-history does not a history make.
In short, your "steps up the historical ladder" are nothing of the sort. The gospels are reworkings of older mythical traditions, through and through. Given the lack of any actual historical corroboration, they are best regarded as theological fictions. If there was such a person as Jesus, and we have absolutely no historical warrant to say there was, the authors of the New Testament texts knew nothing about it.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | September 15, 2009 7:00 PM
help ma
boabbigot seems to be going down the 'you believe in abstract concepts (such as human rights) for which there is no naturalistic explanation; I'll therefore criticise this because of the lack of scientific evidence for my god - misrepresenting my belief in god as an abstract concept as I do so, since I still fully believe that said god created the earth and can perform miracles (i.e scientifically verfiable claims).'I hope your folder's large enough for all of us,
boabbigot - because there aren't going to be too many posters who won't be pointing out that you're a liar.Posted by: Ichthyic | September 15, 2009 7:06 PM
Then perhaps you should not butt into other peoples' conversation.
I'm flipping you off right now, you just can't see it.
Thou unmuzzled unchin-snouted nut-hook!
Posted by: Ichthyic | September 15, 2009 7:09 PM
"Some rights are generally recognised"
Argumentum ad populum
nope.
"Some rights are enshrined in Law"
Appeal to authority
nope.
damn you're dumb.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
September 15, 2009 7:10 PM
I think we need a round or two of Survivor Pharyngula. Just enough rounds to give HMB as well deserved trip to the dungeon...
Posted by: Owlmirror | September 15, 2009 7:20 PM
@#328:
@#330:
@#332:
Wait a minute. As we can clearly see @#328, you said “I will lie”. Stephen acknowledged that what you wrote there was true. After all, if you told the truth when you said you would lie, then you're a liar, and if you didn't tell the truth when you said you're a liar, well, that would be a lie, making you a liar. So either way, it works out that you're a self-confessed liar.
I'm not calling you a liar, though. I'm just following the logic.
Of course, maybe you just ignore people who call you a liar, regardless of whether or not that's true. In which case, given that you called yourself a liar, shouldn't you be putting yourself in your 'ignore folder'?
I ask only for information.
Of course, if you are ignoring yourself, then you can't post a response, so I will take your silence for confirmation.
Posted by: Stephen Wells | September 16, 2009 5:09 AM
Epimenides the Cretan, please come to the courtesy phone; help ma boab has just self-destructed and we require paradox cleanup. Epimenides the Cretan to the phone, please!
Posted by: help ma boab | September 16, 2009 5:53 AM
Ichthyic .
damn you're dumb
Bare assertion fallacy.?Owlmirror.
That's not bad I shall ignore myself forthwith.
(Or shall I?)
Anyway, did any of you who are clutching your pearls and throwing dust in the air notice my question @ #315? It always helps when we know we are talking about the same thing. Otherwise folk get confused between 'legal rights' (which may, in fact be immoral {or 'human wrongs}) and which can easily be identified by an appeal to authority, and 'human rights' which do not exist other than as a euphemism for 'what I want' or as a screen for an agenda.
What is a 'human right'?
Posted by: John Morales | September 16, 2009 6:28 AM
hmb:
It is one of a set of human rights — a societally-based minimal version of the Golden Rule, and one of the achievements of modern civilisations.
The concept of human rights is one of the better illustrations of the principle of enlightened self-interest, in my opinion.
--
Ichthyic is quite right, too. You're dumb because you try to troll with sophistry, yet fail each time.
For example, there is no difference in the basis for human rights and that for legal rights, contrary to your claim. The only real difference is that the former are considered by some to be universal, whilst the latter are considered to be jurisdictional.
Posted by: viverravid | September 16, 2009 9:47 PM
hmb is woefully wrong on some points - like NOMA and "three and a half independent biographies" (of which two contain large sections word-for-word copied from another, and all describing incidents which the earlier writers in the same tradition are inexplicably completely unaware of - CJO explains the real situation well).
However he is right that no-one in this thread has yet clearly articulated how to distinguish true from false human rights, or how to clearly identify rights which exist but aren't recognized by law.
I really think ethical theory is something the atheist community needs to address. Let me pimp again the atheist ethicists' desire utilitarianism theory. He may be wrong but as yet I haven't been able to work out where or why.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 17, 2009 12:46 AM
@viverravid
You're not getting off that easy ;) Please come back here and tell us how you would do it. Seriously, I'd love to hear more about true vs. false human rights. HMB seems to only think rights are god-given, which gets us nowhere (and is arbitrary based on who you accept as an authoritative prophet of the divine).Posted by: viverravid | September 17, 2009 4:46 AM
aratina cage:
I didn't say how because I don't know how. It's clear hmb's concept of rights and morals from god is faulty, as he has such poor and contradictory evidence for determining what his god's opinion actually is.
But I'm still struggling with the issue of a rational, provably real basis for ethics. As I said above, I think desire utilitarianism is the best I've come across so far, but it still has unresolved problems (e.g. an issue raised by AI - what is the difference between a humans' desire and a thermostats' 'desire' for a particular temperature?).
We can safely say that hmb is wrong, we can clearly determine our own ethical prefences based on empathy and reason, but putting ethics on a sounder basis than 'current social consensus in my part of world' is not a nut that has truly been cracked at this point, IMO.
Would totally love to be proved wrong on that point.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 17, 2009 5:42 PM
Ratty, "HMB seems to only think rights are god-given".
I am trying to think of an example of a God-given right, but none immediately spring to mind. I shall get back to you.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 17, 2009 8:54 PM
@Me Boaby in Need of Help
You wrote: which tells us that you don't think 'rights' have a this-worldly existence, implying that your position is that rights (if there are any) would have to come from an other-worldly existence. So far, you have flat-out denied the existence of 'human rights' in this world even though, as Nerd told you right from the beginning, human rights are self-evident: Wowbagger put it even more starkly: Strange gods before me got you to flat-out admit denial of human rights: So really, I'm not sure what to think of your elusive position anymore. Think about it: did the Jews have any legal rights under the Nazis? Not really, and actually they had less rights than dogs have in the U.S.A. today. But you wouldn't want to go down the "it was legal so it was OK" route concerning how the Nazis legally treated the Jews, now, would you?
Posted by: help ma boab | September 18, 2009 3:15 AM
aratina cage
Now, now! I hope you are not smuggling in values like 'peace' (bad news for the lions if they are to maintain peace with the zebras) or altruism that you expect me to approve without substantiation. Of course a Christian may well approve of peace etc, but that such values are 'natural' is very questionable.
Questioning and reasoning (if effective) would only lead us to the more efficient application of pre-existing motives. We would develop better weapons and more efficient ways of eliminating competitors and exploiting resources. You can't get an 'ought' from as 'is' no matter how much reason you apply to it.
Yes. The bible aces that in the first few sentences. We are made in the image of God (though now spoiled).
That is correct. That is why I only counted the three synoptic gospels as 2 1/2 since they have material in common (the fourth gospel ,John, is quite different). But they also have material special to each. You hear the same old criticisms. Where the Gospels have material in common people squeal 'Copying!'. Where the Gospels have different material (or even different perspectives on the same event) people squeal 'Contradictions!' or 'Why did A mention X if B didn't mention it?'
Yes, that is called 'The life of Jesus'.
That xianity spread so quickly across the empire and that, in the face of severe persecution, people were willing to die for this story means that the story was not only known but believed and believed with conviction.
Correct-ish. But God may intervene in the natural world at any time that suits his purposes. These interventions often have effects on the natural world and where they are observable they can then be narrated.
I don't try. The 'message' of the bible is God's 'revelation' to man. It is called a revelation since the message has to be 'revealed'. It cannot be observed or deduced. We can only know as much about God and the spiritual world as God chooses to reveal. The boundary is impenetrable and even unobservable from our side. Miracles, or interventions, can sometimes be persuasive to those who actually observe them and also to those who read the reports if they think the narrator is truthful and accurate.
Yes, caution is advised.
I read the moral code of the Bible as consisting of imposed responsibilities and prohibitions. I still can't think of any 'human rights' in the Bible. Property rights are implied since the narrative accepts the then current contract law and custom.
Mmmm. They have only become 'self-evident' quite recently. For most of human history their 'self-evident' qualities went unnoticed, at least by legislators who preferred Positive Law. Perhaps 'fashionable' would describe them better.
No, (assuming your illustration as accurate) it was not OK. If it was legal in German law then it was merely legal in German law. But note that the supposed possession of assorted 'human rights' did absolutely nothing to protect these people. What did finally protect the few survivors was an invading army killing the Nazis. The Allies tripped over their own feet trying to find a legal basis for punishing the actions of the Germans. I can't remember which option they chose, probably retrospective legislation mixed with 'human rights' and a spoonful of Natural Law.
CJO
Paul wrote his letters to people who were already believers and who had accepted his oral gospel. He had no need to repeat the details of Jesus' life. When you then consider the purpose of the letters: church management; the application of the Christo-Judaean ethic and spirituality to Greeks (and remembering that for Paul the spirituality was several orders of magnitude more important than the ethic); and encouragement, it is clear that he will be focussed on current issues rather than reworking what they already know. Note how often he appeals to his readers that they be more like Christ. He clearly assumes that they know about the 'Christ' that they are supposed to be more like.
No. Count the number of times that he refers to the death and resurrection and divinity of Jesus. By your analysis this was accepted by Paul and his audience at a very early stage. And if we/they accept the death and resurrection and divinity of Jesus then the Gospel narratives are entirely consistent with that. Why should they have neglected and discarded the 'true' story of Jesus life as he walked as the Son of God on earth in anticipation of his death and resurrection.
So, no. There is no need for a 'whole tradition was invented after Paul wrote'. The true account would have been startling enough.
'And calling the gospels
biographies or histories, err, pseudo-histories prior to any analysis is begging the question.'Thanks for the notes on literary form. That the Hebrews and Hellenised Jews that we find mentioned in Acts would utilise pre-existent Hebrew and Greek literary forms (with some adaptation) is a shocking and startling revelation. If word of this gets out, then Christianity is finished.
I am glad that you regard them as pseudo-historiography. Pseudo-historiography differs from true historiography, and Wiki confirms this, only in content but not in form. This implies that they are indeed historiographies, which you assert are falsified or 'pseudo'. you will need to substantiate this assertion.
viverravid
I have Wikied 'Gould' and the NOMA chapter is still there. There is one drossy quibble against it by Dawkins which I think rather counts in its favour.
Don't fret yourself, I feel I am managing quite alright, thanks.
I missed some of the steps on your closely worded argument.
Take your time, there is no rush. We have waited quite a while, a little longer won't raise a blister.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 18, 2009 8:26 AM
@help me boab
The kind of peace you are speaking of is only relevant to human civilizations. For animals, there is a period most days where they are satiated and restful, or where they recover after escaping the jaws of death, or where they bask in a fresh kill. But please, don't make me laugh so hard about your unhinged approval. Just look at what you subsequently write: How is that bit of fluff substantial enough for your approval? Remember, you have to believe with conviction in Tinkerbell or she goes POOF!
How do you know all that? You previously said this: I don't understand how you can reconcile divine revelation with not having the tools to even begin to examine the supernatural. It's like you've imagined a third intermediary realm that can be examined sometimes but have kept knowledge of this third realm hidden from us.
Which ones are imposed and which ones are "culturally historical" and irrelevant to modern society, according to you? Isn't it backwards to limit yourself to moral practices of antiquity in the first place.
Oh, I see. It was fashionable of abolitionists to protest slavery. It was fashionable for Schindler to create his famous list. Noticing the iniquity, unfairness, irrationality and cruelty of slavery and the Holocaust and caring about other people's freedom, equality, and lives had nothing to do with those things — they were just fashionable at the time.
In the enforcement of what is good and just, it all comes down to who has the biggest stick on their side. Luckily, the better people, the ones with a conception of human rights, won that battle.Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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September 18, 2009 8:31 AM
Yawn, HMB is now our "total fool" . Nothing he says is to be believed. He is so dense neutronium seems lightweight by comparison. His god doesn't exist and his babble is fiction. What a bore.
Posted by: CJO | September 18, 2009 2:40 PM
Yeah, I shouldn't have bothered. There's only one apologetic line on this one, and you've aped it perfectly. A+ for karaoke. You do know the words.
But what we want to see in Paul is not some long litany "repeating" the details of Jesus' life, we want any indication, just one, stray mention, made in passing, that Paul is in the least familiar with the idea of Jesus as a near contemporary who was martyred under Pilate in the very recent past, or just one unambiguous reference to the teaching tradition. And note what you do here. You have no warrant to pretend you know what the content of Paul's "oral gospel" was. You're reading the NT backwards in time, and sneaking the assumption in that Paul's "oral gospel" must have been a cribbed version of the synoptics' narratives, without ever once justifying this belief.
And again: justify the assumption that his readers "already know" stories that haven't been written yet.
Well, here I am remembering that for Paul the spirituality was several orders of magnitude more important than the ethic, and wondering why he would exhort his readers so often to adhere to the ethic that he doesn't explain, because they already know that which is orders of magnitude less important. Do you realize how incoherent all this is? How do they know about the 'Christ' if not from Paul? And if it's not from Paul, how can he assume anything about what they know? Again, just one unambiguous reference to a logion found in the synoptics would be sufficient; the burden is not high.
My point exactly, and I'm not sure what you think you gain by stressing it. That's ALL Paul refers to, because it's all he knows. Jesus as an earthly figure is a mythological figure, an anonymous everyman, as in Second Isaiah's song of the suffering servant. The details are unimportant, and unknowable anyway, lost as they are in the mythic past. The current reality for Paul and his converts is that the resurrected Christ is come to usher in the Kingdom.
Yes. Accretion of fictional detail around a nebulous mythological figure is how we would expect the tradition to develop.
Who is 'they'? Nobody could have neglected or discarded a story that hadn't been written yet.
Don't play dumb. You asserted, without argument, that the gospels represent "histories or biographies." The question is which pre-existent Hebrew and Greek literary forms did the NT authors utilize. You assert without analysis. My "notes on form" correct your naive confidence that the gospels can meaningfully be said to represent either of the genres you offer. Since you respond with disingenuous sarcasm, I will take it that the point stands.
Okay: The archaeology of the region amply confirms that the historiography of the Pentateuch, Judges, and 1 Samuel through 2 Chronicles is a pious fiction. There is no archaeological evidence for bondage in Egypt, the wandering in the wilderness, or the conquest of Canaan. The so-called Unified Monarchy of Saul, David and Solomon is a myth: there is precious little evidence that Jerusalem was even occupied in the 10th c. BCE, and, in any case, the southern highlands supposed to be the territory of Judah at this time was sparsely populated and simply could not have supported the kind of advanced state structures that feature in the biblical narratives. Lachish to the south was a vastly more important population center than Jerusalem all the way through the Assyrian and Babylonian periods, and was not eclipsed by Jerusalem until the Seleucid dynasty gained control of Palestine and razed and depopulated Lachish in the Hellenistic period.
Posted by: viverravid | September 19, 2009 2:00 AM
@hmb
I suggest you widen your reading. BTW, do I get this right - A guy who believes in the historicity of the bible is arguing for NOMA? In what way are 'historical' gospels not claims about the real world within the remit of science?
That would be because knowledge of the problems with scriptural and personal revelation as means of knowing god are rather well-known on atheist forums, it's not normally considered necessary to repeat them.
From the above two it seems you claim to have a foolproof method of determining god's will from scriptural (or possibly personal) sources?
BTW, I notice you didn't address my attacks of your point about biographies, but don't reply, CJO is better equipped to handle that argument than I.
Of course there's no rush, it's not like people using your foolproof method are causing any harm in the world, is it?
Posted by: viverravid | September 19, 2009 3:14 AM
@aratina cage
I'll have a go - a quick desire utilitarianism primer:
Desire utilitarianism preserves moral realism by claiming the value exists in the relationship between a state of affairs and human desires. Human desires are brain states, that is they are actual properties of the real world, and statements about desires can be provably true or false.
If you desire that P, then the desire is fulfilled if P is a true statement about the real world.
Desire fulfilment is better than desire thwarting, fulfilling more and stronger desires is better than fulfilling fewer and weaker desires. Harm is the thwarting of desires.
Some desires are malleable - they can be changed. Only malleable desires attract value judgements - if you 'ought' to do something, it must be the case that you 'can' do something. If you can't alter a desire then it is neither good nor bad, it just is. (that doesn't mean you should always be permitted to fulfil it, just that trying to change it isn't a part of morality)
Good desires are desires that tend to fulfill other desires, bad desires are desires that tend to thwart other desires. (this is how strong desires for destructive or futile things get judged bad in desire utilitarianism, by their effect on the other desires of all people involved)
Good acts are those that a person with good desires would perform.
Morality is about using praise, blame, punishment and reward to affect peoples malleable desires by promoting good desires and retarding bad ones.
All the above is pretty much straight from the source, below is personal interpretation:
Rights in desire utilitarianism are the flipside of obligations. You have an obligation to do something in a particular situation if a person with good desires would always do that thing in that situation. We have a right to do X if people have an obligation to allow us to do X.
In the situation that started this whole thread off, as homosexuality doesn't involve any harm (thwarting of desires) for anyone then prohibiting and punishing it is wrong. A person with good desires wouldn't stop people from expressing their homosexuality, so we have an obligation not to stop people from expressing their homosexuality.
This is the case regardless of what the law or prevailing opinion is. The homophobe may desire not to see or be reminded of something they find distasteful, but this is a bad desire as it thwarts the greater desires of the homosexuals for self expression. Also, we have evidence that a homophobes aversion to homosexuals is a rather malleable desire (as not all human cultures have this aversion), while a homosexuals attraction to others of the same sex is less malleable (as all human cultures have homosexuals). Promoting this aversion to homosexuals will continue to cause harm to homosexuals (as they will continue to exist regardless), but eradicating the aversion to homosexuals will lead to less harm to homosexuals and less offended people. Acknowledging a 'right' to practice homosexuality free of prejudice is a way of trying to retard the aversion to homosexuality.
Alonzo Fyfe (the guy who came up with the theories I used above) has a little about the immorality of an aversion to homosexual relationships here
Posted by: CJO | September 19, 2009 3:52 AM
I fucked up the last bit of that, but in an inconsequential way that doesn't affect the core of the argument. Lachish was destroyed by the Assyrians, much earlier than I said.
Posted by: help ma boab | September 19, 2009 9:13 AM
CJO
If you say so. I have never read any 'apologetic line' on this neither have I counted them. It is merely obvious to a casual reader.
If you say so. But I am baffled how a "mythological figure" can be 'resurrected'? Unless he actually 'died' first? Perhaps he only mythically died and mythically resurrected? But if the whole shooting match is 'mythical' then 'Christ' will be in no fit state to usher anything in never mind a 'reality' style kingdom. But we both know that Paul taught that Jesus' physical resurrection and the bodily resurrection of believers were both of the same kind. And you need to explain why Paul's "mythological figure" imported from some pagan goodness knows where was in the slightest way attractive to his Jewish converts, never mind sufficiently substantial to induce them to abandon the Temple and the Law. And you need to explain why Paul's teachings on bodily resurrection were in the slightest way attractive to the Greek mindset of his gentile converts to whom the idea of bodily resurrection was utterly ridiculous. And you need to explain why all Paul's converts believed his "resurrected Christ ... come to usher in the Kingdom" when the "resurrected Christ" and "the Kingdom" are both nowhere to be seen.
I assume that Paul is referring here to the same Jesus Christ that he elsewhere describes as crucified and resurrected. And Pontius Pilate was indeed in Paul's very recent past. I'm glad we got that settled.
I'm not sure who you are aping here, but at no time does Paul describe Jesus a 'mythological figure', you are just making shit up. He repeatedly describes him as a 'man' and who was definitely not anonymous.
Don't care. You can use any literary form you like. You can relate any incident in a poem, play, story, correspondence or whatever you like. Take the passage through the Red Sea. Firstly, Moses describes it in a plain narrative. Then he repeats it in a song. Then he records Miriam's song and dance. Those are three expressly different 'genres' but the substance is the same. It baffles me that you seem to think that the genre chosen by the NT authors has any bearing on the veracity of the content. It matters little to me if, when communicating a Gospel, you use Hellenistic biography, Hellenistic novel (you say), Luke's 'carefully investigated account from eyewitnesses', song, poem, drama, marionettes, passion plays, stained glass windows, paintings, film, comic books, stop motion, feltograph, cartoons, CGI, Brick Testament or sock puppets.
Should someone now represent the story of Jesus as a 'toon, I am not going to listen to questions about "which pre-existent Toon literary forms did the authors utilize?" and use that to draw some equivalence between Jesus and Popeye the Sailor Man.
OK, enlighten me as to which is written in which genre. Then when I read:
then I can keep in mind your ideas of the form and genre and not get the crazy notion that Luke is attempting one of those "histories or biographies." Piquant that Luke, Paul's sometime companion, is supplying a written Gospel expressly to confim some previous oral one.
Logion. Did you see my comment above?
You moan when Bible materials are similar and you moan when they are different. Paul knows or assumes that his hearers heard 'a' gospel. He knows the content that he has delivered to 'his' churches. He assumes that other churches (Rome) have heard a similar gospel. In neither case does he feel the need to rehearse the content when dealing with current issues, but that is normal even today. I am sorry if that does not meet your fancy. I am even sorrier that you are attempting to make a federal case out of it. But I find sufficient internal consistency between the Synoptics, John, Acts, Paul, Hebrews and the others to accept a general unity and to regard the various attempts to discern alternative religions buried in the text as quite ridiculous. There have been several such attempts. The best one that I heard was that the original Gospel Hebrew Jesus was wholly within Jewish tradition and that Paul, in conflict with the Judaisers, Peter and the Temple/circumcision party, was perverting the Jesus message to invent his new Hellenised 'Christianity' religion. Your approach seems to be quite incompatible with that. Then more recently there is the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus is a crypto-Gnostic and Judas is the good guy who nobly orchestrates Jesus' departure to some astral plane. You couldn't make it up! Errr, no, my mistake. They are making stuff up all the time. The only consolation is that they soon pass. So, what is your position? You sound a bit neo-Gnostic with your ill defined 'mythical Christ'.
And never mind my 'karaoke'. Your harp has only one string on it: 'mythology!' and its twanging is starting to grate. It is an allegation easily made and tiresome to refute. Everything is mythology when it suits. If I have time I shall prepare a list of historical points which were related in the Bible long before they were known to history. Perhaps I should also check in Pilate's records for the account of Jesus' trial and the historical confirmation you desire. Or does the fact that there are no extant official records of Pilate's administration mean that your demands for historical confirmation are just a little bit ridiculous?
I would hardly have expected any. Slave labour leaves no record other than the buildings of the oppressor. Are there any mud brick buildings in Egypt? Who made the bricks? Is there any archaeological evidence who made the bricks? And Bronze Age goat herders wandering in the desert leave no monuments.
We have time to bust one of your Myths:
Wiki:
NYT:
viverravid
OK, I will.
I opined Gould got it more or less right. I'm not minded to 'argue' for it. It is just a pleasant surprise to find an (atheist?) evolutionary scientist who can see that it is stupidly futile to attempt to 'prove' or 'disprove' God using the likes of thermometers, spectroscopes, anemometers, or indeed any scientific instrument. His is a point worth noting.
Because History is history and Science is science. Science is (or should) be interested in repeatable stuff. History only happened once. It doesn't repeat for our entertainment. If any time you rig up a scientific experiment in the lab that disproves some claim in the gospels, give me a shout and I will pop round to see it. Or email me and I will try to run it myself. It should be repeatable.
OK. Got that. Bible is rubbish. But I sometimes feel that it is useful if someone comes on to an atheist website from time to time to interrupt the scoffing with a reminder of what the bible actually says, where it would be relevant. Sometimes atheists can be woefully ignorant of the content. Maybe they prefer being woefully ignorant. I feel that it is useful to point out stuff like the absence of 'human rights' (as I argued above), (or even determinism or socialism) in the Bible. Saves people making fools of themselves. Whether you regard that as indicative of God's approach to human governance or an insight to into the "mythological figure" religion that CJO imagines is up to you (BTW, "mythological figure", talk about christians 'reading stuff into' the bible that isn't actually there!)
Get to the back of the queue, you are not the only one here clamouring for my attention. Multi-part questions from multiple bloggers don't help.
Firstly, don't import arbitrary values like 'harm'. Your 'harm' is my 'weakest-not-surviving-so-sad-but-hey!-life-goes-on'.
Secondly, don't blame me for anybody who can't understand 'Love your neighbour as yourself'.
Thirdly, this isn't the atheists strongest suit. The last century saw the out-workings of two political philosophies that expressly adopted atheism, evolution, statist selection for eugenics, and moral relativism as major planks in their rationales and policies. I didn't like it and neither did the scores and scores of millions who suffered and died during those progressive experiments.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | September 19, 2009 9:18 AM
Yawn, another foolish post by HMB. His god doesn't exist and his babble is a work of fiction. He just can't grasp that concept.
Posted by: DingoJack | September 19, 2009 9:58 AM
Help me Booby - "Thou ratcatcher! Wilt thou walk?";
"[yo mama's a] rump-fed runyon". "ditch delivered by a drab" ... & etc.
Since you're having difficulty, here's a link to get you started: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/.
Here I give you the Countercheck Quarrelsome* - DingoJack
________________
*For my own part: "Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poorhouse;
as your pearl in your foul oyster."
PS This is a re-posting of post number 358.5, which was deleted for reasons unknown.
"if we shadows have offended think but this (and all is mended); that you have but slumbered here..."
Posted by: help ma boab | September 19, 2009 12:09 PM
DJ, I saw your persiflage and appreciated it. It appears that deleted comments reorder the following comment numbers.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 19, 2009 3:39 PM
@help me boab
And where exactly have you done that? Nothing you have pointed out has been relevant or useful except in how it has pigeonholed you as a Bible-thumper.Posted by: Owlmirror | September 19, 2009 6:30 PM
Why would it have been 'utterly ridiculous'?
Hm. Do you believe the Book of Mormon?
Nothing that Joseph Smith spoke of was seen, yet hundreds, then thousands believed him then, and there are millions of Mormons now.
Religious people are gullible. Or perhaps rather, gullible people are religious.
Yes -- it would be fiction no matter what the 'genre' was.
Yes, the bible is made up.
Oh, as long as people are gullible, religion will probably be around.
The only way to refute it is with evidence.
Like Genesis, and Exodus, and Leviticus, and Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and Joshua, and...
How about all the points in the bible that were conclusively refuted?
If God were real, rather than a fake, made-up, fictional being, it could provide evidence of its existence here and now.
Only because you are utterly ignorant about archaeology, and have given no thought whatsoever to the matter.
The Israelites were described as living in an entire city in Egypt. Contrary to your pathetic expectations, cities are not evanescent things indistinguishable from undisturbed earth. Where people live, they leave behind evidence of their existence: Inscriptions, distinctive pottery, broken tools, graves, middens, and entire buildings of a notable style and contents.
Recently, the city that was built to house and feed the laborers of the Great Pyramid were uncovered. It was, of course, absolutely huge.
There is no evidence for a city of a population of slaves numbering at least 600,000.
Given that the oppressors were literate and bureaucratic, they would have written somewhere about this population of slaves, or the slaves would have written about themselves.We have Ancient Egyptian records of prisoners-of-war being enslaved, inscriptions of work gangs, and records of taxes, storehouse receipts, and crop assessments for example. There are Semitic inscriptions and records, but nothing that connects specifically to an entire city of slaves.
The Egyptians have many records of Canaan/Israel: The country was on their border (and was sometimes within their borders), after all, and is mentioned during military campaigns and with regards to nomads, and conquests of and by the peoples of that land.
There are no records of an entire population of people in Egypt, formerly with good relations with the king, being decreed to be slaves; having their sons decreed to be murdered; and something about this population connected to also unrecorded devastating plagues in Egypt, and the population all up and leaving suddenly, and later showing up as resettling/conquering Canaan. Canaan was not just a border state at the time of the alleged conquest, it was a vassal state. Egypt was just going to ignore the sudden loss of income from next door?
It isn't even recorded in the bible what the names of any of the Pharaohs were, who were involved. Given that later Pharaohs were indeed named, this is strange and suspicious.
A population of 600,000 people wandering around in the desert for forty years leaves evidence of their passing -- even if that evidence is just a lot of shit.
I suppose you don't have the time to read this, either.
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/otarch.html
You've busted nothing. The assertion was that there was "precious little evidence that Jerusalem was even occupied in the 10th c. BCE"; you have pointed to the little evidence. Congratulations.
The official was mentioned in the book of Jeremiah because he dates to the time of Jeremiah -- about 600BCE, not 10th Cent BCE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_ben_Neriah#Historicity
I agree that scientific instruments cannot prove the existence of a nonexistent immaterial being.
Your disingenuous hypocrisy in writing this directly after citing evidence from archaeology is noted.
Either events from the historical past leave evidence of their occurrence, or they don't. If they don't, no-one can possibly know anything whatsoever about the past. Is that what you're claiming?
If they do leave evidence, then archaeology is indeed a science, in that it can examine this evidence and repeatably correlate new evidence with the older evidence.
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 21, 2009 9:27 AM
aratina cage
That hurts man. I try not to use the Bible as an authority while I am blogging. So I am not a "Bible-thumper".
CJO, thank you for your interest.
Owlmirror
I could take the easy route and quote the Bible account of Paul's visit to the Areopagus:
Firstly, resurrection is 'utterly ridiculous' because a dead body deteriorates and rots away. There is no reason to believe that it can come back to life again and every reason to believe that it won't.
Secondly such an idea is contrary to the Greek world-view. Wiki:
Religion
Stoics:
Epicureans:
Neoplatonists:
So you can see that the idea of 'resurrection' would have rubbed against the Greek grain. But you could have found this out yourself, you lazy slug-a-bed.
No. The bible relates many struggles with false religions. You can't stop the crackpots. But it cuts both ways. Just because a load of flaky scientists get bogged down in irrelevant historical schemas, that does not mean that the rest of Science is rubbish. At least that is the way I view it.
I wondered aloud on another post if anyone had any objections to the Bible outside Genesis. The post is still running, but there aren't as many "points in the bible that were conclusively refuted" as you might think.
Jesus provided full evidence of his status as God's son. He has left us his instructions. They were not particularly onerous. Now the cat is away. Now the mice can play. Soon the cat will come back. Then the naughty mice will be sorry. (the mice only play because they think the cat will not come bask {God is dead- dontcha know?})
No, the israelite lived in a territory named 'Goshen' and were drafted to build several different Egyptian cities.
The Israelite slaves were not invited to share the benefits of Egyptian civilisation. They would not have lived in the cities they constructed. They were eventually held in conditions designed to ensure their genocide. Living in or at the delta, their houses would have been constructed of reed bundles in the Egyptian delta peasant style. These houses would have been at risk of destruction during Nile or delta flooding (btw, one of the cities, Goshen, is now lost. So cities can be 'evanescent' despite what you think. And slave accommodation or encampments even more so).
Wiki appears not to know about the use of reeds in construction:
Slaves do not get to leave inscriptions. Egyptian inscriptions almost never mention foreigners except when noting their subjugation. After their defeat at the Red Sea the Egyptians would have defaced any possible (and extremely unlikely) inscription mentioning those involved in their humiliation (this defacement is common in Egypt).
The Israelites did not have a distinct culture. Later in Canaan they adopted the standard ANE pottery style. I guess that in Egypt they would have used the pottery of their captors.
Ditto, they used the tools of their captors.
As above, they used the building materials, mud brick and reed bundles as used by the Egyptians. The Israelites immediate ancestors: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, lived in tents and did not develop an architectural style, nor would they have developed a culture. They would just have bought the oil lamps etc that were available in the shops.
I am not sure that Israelite skeletons are materially different from Egyptians'. The Israelites did not do grave goods but if they did they would not have differed from the Egyptians'. Besides, bodies do not preserve well in the moist delta, unlike the dry south.
A distinctive 'Israelite poo'?
This figure includes Egyptians that took the opportunity to leave Egypt with their Israelite neighbours. It was not just the Israelites that were sick of Pharaoh.
Egyptian records are fragmentary and relatively very, very, very minuscule. Do not forget that Pithom, one of the cities that the Israelite slaves built, is now lost. The records of that city (if they ever existed) are rotting beneath the Nile delta mud.
I am suspicious of the current view of Egyptian history and chronology. We know that Manetho's 'history' is a crock (30,000 years !!!?). Yet a C19th re-interpretation of Manetho in the light of the then current knowledge is accepted as true today. This is questionable. I would regard any attempt to correlate Egyptian history with the Israelite narrative as problematic.
As I have noted, the Egyptians did not erect monuments to their defeats and humiliations. I am surprised that you even expected this.
There are no records of Hitler ordering something similar. This certainly indicates the weakness of your:
The records you are demanding are two and a half millennia older.
The Pharaohs named later in the bible are referred to by their Hebrew appellation. No Pharaoh can be directly identified by name.
Shit dries up and blows away. Otherwise the desert would be knee deep in camel and goat dung today. The Israelites lived at below subsistence level. The bible narrative indicated that they required constant miraculous provision of food, water and clothing to barely survive in the wilderness. They had neither crops to cook nor pots to cook them in nor fuel to cook them with. They had neither lamps nor oil to light them. Every tiny scrap of metal was a treasure. They lived in bio-degradable tents. They would have left very little trace behind. Besides, they are looking for evidence of the Israelites wanderings in entirely the wrong place.
The existence of a large municipal building is not "precious little evidence that Jerusalem was even occupied in the 10th c. BCE". It knocks the 'unoccupied' crock out of the ball park.
Generally (and this is a complex question), a building is dated by its earliest associated artefact and its lifespan determined by its latest associated artefact. A lifespan of 400 yrs continuous use for a building made of Jerusalem limestone is not outrageous. Though, if you have been brought up in one of our colonies, these ages may be hard to comprehend. Many 2,000 yo structures are visible in Jerusalem today and many buildings over 1,000 yo are still in occupation.
But on the 'Baruch ben Neriah' point, I am delighted that you acknowledge yet another instance of archaeology confirming the Bible narrative. Thanks.
No. But you need to be clear in your mind that the scientific method is quite different from the historical method. The appraisal of evidence is different and the certainty of any conclusion drawn is very different.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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September 21, 2009 9:38 AM
@help me boab
Please, don't play the persecuted Christian card. Sans Bible, where is your belief grounded?Posted by: Aratina Cage
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September 21, 2009 11:11 AM
@help me boab
That sounds unfortunately like something I would expect to hear from a Holocaust denier. Hitler mentioned his platform of getting rid of the Jews on multiple occasions in texts and speeches; the Holocaust was indeed an underlying premise for his entire governing plan. I really don't think you can compare the lack of an extant direct order from Hitler for the Holocaust (especially the Final Solution) to the authorization of enslavement of a neighboring population or the authorization of extermination of a conquered nation's sons. Egypt did not exist to wipe out the Jews as Nazi Germany did.Posted by: strange gods before me
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September 21, 2009 11:26 AM
"help ma boab, the Nazi's lightly," in another thread said he did not think Pat Buchanan's claim that Hitler didn't want war amounted to Nazi apologetics.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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September 21, 2009 11:35 AM
If anyone is any doubt over Hitler's role in the holocaust I suggest they read Ian Kershaw's wonderful two volume biography of the man. He lays to rest the idea the holocaust was carried without Hitler's knowledge or consent.
Actually I recommend to the book to everyone, not just the brain dead.
Posted by: Drosera
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September 21, 2009 3:39 PM
help ma boab @366,
In other words, the whole account is pure fiction. QED.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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September 21, 2009 3:55 PM
Yawn, another long, boring, inane, and pointless post by our "total fool", HMB. His god doesn't exist, and his babble is a work of fiction. He is showning absolutely no hard core evidence to show otherwise.
He really needs to ask himself two questions? 1) What do I hope to accomplish by posting here? and 2) Am I really accomplishing that goal?
Posted by: Drosera
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September 21, 2009 4:58 PM
Talking about Exodus; I have always wondered which deranged mind thought up the second plague of Egypt:
I can't help it, but with me this evokes images of a version of The Ten Commandments with John Cleese playing Moses —
Moses to pharao: "Let my people go, or Egypt will be struck with ... the Silly Plagues."
pharao: "Oh no, not the Silly Plagues..."
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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September 21, 2009 5:08 PM
Bwahahaha! Thanks Drosera. So the Bible is still good for a laugh.Posted by: Drosera
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September 21, 2009 5:47 PM
I guess the prophets were getting tired of all the stories about god-approved murder, rape, incest, plunder and genocide, and wanted to show that He did have a sense of humor, now and then.
The funniest thing is that gullible people like help ma boab actually believe this nonsense. To think that the creator of the universe had such a special interest in an obscure group of peasants that he came to their rescue by ... striking Egypt with frogs, is ludicrous to the extreme.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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September 21, 2009 6:08 PM
My favourite passage:
Not only did David buy a wife with foreskins, but her father originally only asked for one hundred (1 Samuel 18: 25)and David threw in an extra hundred for free.
For funny bible verses look here. Looking at passages just involving donkeys you can find: Samson killing a thousand men with only a jawbone of an ass, a talking donkey and a woman fantasying about lovers "whose genitals were like those of donkeys"(Ezekiel 23:20).
Posted by: CJO
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September 21, 2009 6:46 PM
The funniest thing is that gullible people like help ma boab actually believe this nonsense.
Yes, but what isn't so funny is that the modern literalist is asking us to believe that the ancient scribes who transmitted these stories, and the people who read and heard them, were somehow also incapable of recognizing stories for what they are. Legends and tall tales about the mythic past served largely the same functions for the people of the ancient Levant that they have for people in all times and places. If an author of any one of these could see the silly contortions apologists go through to pretend they were intended as literal history (a concept that would be difficult even to represent in an ancient Semitic language), he wouldn't know whether to laugh at the absurdity or cry at the total misunderstanding of his literary craft.
Posted by: Drosera
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September 21, 2009 7:16 PM
Feynmaniac,
And when the father wondered what he should do with all those foreskins he invented the rubber band.
Posted by: Drosera
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September 21, 2009 7:20 PM
CJO,
Seems highly plausible to me.
Posted by: CJO
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September 21, 2009 7:23 PM
David threw in an extra hundred for free.
"...once you get locked into a serious foreskin collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."
--Fear and Loathing in Jerusalem
Posted by: Owlmirror
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September 21, 2009 9:36 PM
Only if you don't believe in magic and miracles, and cannot be convinced that magic and miracles can be performed. Some of the Greeks did disbelieve in magic and miracles, but huge numbers of them were as superstitious and gullible as, well, your average Christian.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/kooks.html
Actually, I had a bet with myself that you would ignorantly attribute the sophisticated and educated philosophies of the Hellenic elite to the entire population of the Hellenic world.
And I won.
How do you tell a false religion from a true one? Fancier dress? Weirder stories and theology? What's the methodology, and why doesn't it apply to what you believe?
Exactly. All religions are nothing but the result of crackpots convincing people that they are not crackpots. But it doesn't make the crackpots not crackpots.
And it doesn't make you not a crackpot.
Your false equivalence and continued failure to understand science are noted. The scientific method is applied to all parts of science, not just the ones you reject and call 'flaky'.
Yes, but you're just another crackpot.
And you just ignore everything that refutes the bible.
Only crackpots would call that "evidence".
Obviously not, since there are so many crackpots around teaching what you call "false religion".
God is a cat, an animal that plays with its prey, and then devours it? God is "away", where? In the loo?
All the mice will be sorry, if God is a cat. Cats do not judge mice by their behavior, but by their flavour.
Revelation 3:16
[...to be continued...]
Posted by: Owlmirror
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September 21, 2009 11:48 PM
How imaginative you are! So imaginative that you contradict the bible itself!
Exodus explicitly refers to the "sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses", not anything about "reed bundles".
As you so conveniently forget, the Israelites originally lived in Egypt as immigrants for centuries, in normal houses, presumably not too near the river. There's nothing about them being relocated when thy were enslaved.
Thank you for contradicting yourself and supporting my original assertion.
Why not? Even slaves are not worked 24/7.
And besides, you're conveniently forgetting that there were centuries when they were not slaves.
And what do you call this, anyway?
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/10/ancient-sinai-irrigation-sinai.html
And what do you know of Egyptian inscriptions, and the frequency and situations in which they mention foreigners?
Or are you just pulling that out of your arse, like the "reed bundle" houses?
How convenient. Yes, I know that sometimes inscriptions were defaced, but somehow, we managed to find out something about who they were referencing anyway.
Come on. The Israelites were supposedly in Egypt for centuries. Not a single thing survived from the time when relations between them and the Egyptians were friendly?
How anti-Semitic of you. What made them distinctive enough to enslave, then?
And not a single ostrakon with Semitic writing survives? Not even from before they were enslaved?
Where's the pottery from the years in the desert? Come on. Hundreds of thousands of people wandering around for 40 years are going to need pots, and they're going to break some of them.
Ditto -- where's the evidence of these tools in the desert?
As above, your "reed bundles" are refuted by the bible.
Hello, centuries of living in Egypt but worshipping Yahweh and maintaining a tribal system? No sign of this showing up anywhere?
C'mon, one inscription to Yahweh in Egypt in the appropriate time period. Just one.
And what the fuck does "no culture" even mean? And how does an ignoranamus like you know whether the Israelites had culture or not? You weren't there; you don't know anything at all about archaeology or history or sociology or science; heck, you don't even know the bible very well.
So where does this 'no culture' come from?
No memorials or designs or headstones or grave decorations or anything to indicate that a skeleton with an Israelite name, of a particular Israelite tribe, and the child of Israelite parents, rests in a particular grave?
No tombs for the wealthier Israelites before they were enslaved?
Do you intend to be put in an anonymous grave? Just curious.
Only an ignorant moron would say so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketef_Hinnom
No prayers to Yahweh, as above?
Bodies are less important than the things signifying that Israelites were buried there ...
Middens also contain the remnants of food eaten, such as bones, so it could be known if they ate kosher. Not to mention ostrakons -- which could have Israelite names and words -- and other distinctive junk.
Wrong again. That number just happens to be the sum of the tribal census of adult males, 20 years old and over -- it doesn't even include the women and children, let alone any putative non-Israelite "extras"!
http://niv.scripturetext.com/numbers/1.htm
Man, you are stupidly ignorant of your own damn bible.
We have heaps and mounds of papyrus and carved stone. "Relatively minuscule" compared to what?
The hell they are. You wouldn't know Pithom if you suddenly tripped and smacked your nose on the ruins.
And what does that have to do with Canaan/Israel?
We know that the Bible history is a crock. Yet a C19th re-interpretation of the bible in the light of the then current knowledge is accepted as true today. This is completely fucking absurd.
Of course it is problematic. Because the "Israelite narrative" is false. It did not happen.
Who expects monuments? I expect evidence. Like, lots of graves containing dead people. Lots of people mourning their dead at the same time, recorded in grave inscriptions. Prayers to the gods, saying please end these terrible things. Tax records saying that people cannot pay because their animals have died, or their family members have died.
Something.
Not silence.
You're a Holocaust denier, on top of everything else? Or just stupid and ignorant, as usual, and pulling stuff out of your arse, even about something easy to actually check?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution
[...still more to be continued...]
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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September 22, 2009 12:02 AM
@Feynmaniac, Drosera, & CJO - Ah yes, I had forgotten about the iron chariots and foreskins collecting. I think we can safely add "comedy" as one of the genres in the holy babble.
@Owlmirror - To be continued? Nooooo! I'm on the edge of my seat in anticipation of the next installment. Your responses to hmb just keep getting better and better.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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September 22, 2009 12:14 AM
If I didn't know HMB I might actually feel sorry that he's getting so crushed by Owlmirror (great posts btw!).
A question for HMB: how did 600,000 people survive in the desert for 40 years with primitive technology?
Posted by: Owlmirror
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September 22, 2009 12:44 AM
Why are you such a moron?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_Pharaohs
You mean, they left their shit on the ground? What happened to the vaunted biblical hygiene?
Deut. 23:13 -- As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.
Yet they had weapons to fight with, and all of the materials for an enormous damn golden calf, and for an enormous damn tabernacle to their god, and enough goats, sheep, and cattle to make sacrifices.
Again, you don't even know your own damn bible.
Lev. 6:28 -- The clay pot the meat is cooked in must be broken; but if it is cooked in a bronze pot, the pot is to be scoured and rinsed with water.
Clay pots, which not only could be broken, but must be broken? Bronze pots, and water to rinse them with?
Lev. 6:12 -- The fire on the altar must be kept burning; it must not go out. Every morning the priest is to add firewood and arrange the burnt offering on the fire and burn the fat of the fellowship offerings on it.
Firewood? Fat from a sacrifice every single day?
Where is this poverty spoken of? Oh, let me guess. You're pulling more crap out your arse!
Yeah, sometimes the Israelites whined about wanting more water or a change in diet.
But they weren't too weak and poor to carry out genocide: Read Numbers 31 again. Or don't. Facts won't change your mind, right?
You haven't even read the bible, have you? And you sure as hell have no idea what hundreds of thousands of people will leave behind.
You still haven't read this essay on exactly where archaeologists have been looking, some of them desperate to find proof of the bible? Of course not. Facts won't change your mind, will they?
It is indeed "precious little evidence" if the building does not date to the 10th century BCE (note tentative date), nor is it actually Jerusalem (Ophel may or may not have been the City of David -- but it is certainly not where Jerusalem was reconstructed)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Stone_Structure
But I guess you don't actually care about facts, right?
And yet, you reject the same methodology used to date geological petroleum surveys, or anything else in any other science which gives answers you don't like. Hypocrite.
Wrong, again. It's all the same damn method.
Posted by: Drosera
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September 22, 2009 4:08 AM
Thumbs up for Owlmirror. No, make that two thumbs up.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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September 22, 2009 5:28 AM
I mentioned absurdities in the bible earlier, well here is a list with 1337 of them! (How leet!)
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/abs/long.htm
Some highlights:
57. Abraham feeds God and three angels. (Genesis 18:1-4)
77. Esau and Jacob were already fighting each other in the womb. (Genesis 25:22)
90. Jacob wrestles with god and wins. God changes Jacob's name to Israel to signify that he wrestled with God and "prevailed." (Genesis 32:24-30)
154. God has feet. (Exodus 24:10)
176. Moses goes without food or water for 40 days and 40 nights. (Exodus 34:28)
The first nine chapter of Leviticus are detailed instructions on animal sacrifice.
391. Talking trees. (Judges 9:8-15)
Posted by: Ragutis
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September 22, 2009 5:50 AM
More fantastic posts from Owlmirror.
*yawn*
When are you going to post something stupid for a change? Oh, nevermind, help ma boab has that covered... continue.
Anyway, i got bored earlier and messed around with the numbers a bit. If the Israelites somehow only managed one mile a day, 6 days a week, for 40 years, it comes out to more than 12,000 miles. They were about 300 miles from where they wanted to go, and walked enough to take them halfway around the planet.
Posted by: Kitty
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September 22, 2009 6:39 AM
(my emphasis)Er, no.
To give an accurate earliest date the artefact (preferably more than one) must be demonstrably sealed below the earliest building phase, as in a foundation trench or under an intact floor, and indicates a date which is the same or earlier than that phase. It enables the statement - the building was constructed around or after xxxxBCE.
If the artefact only had to be associated with the building this would introduce too many variables and could lead to the nonsense statement - the museum was built in the palaeolithic (hand axe) and continued in use until the present day (computer). The devil is in the detail!
Finding evidence of the Israelites in a desert (based on the biblical account) is more likely than finding evidence from the British Isles of Mesolithic man. The physical conditions are more conducive to preservation and there has been much less disturbance because of agriculture.
Yet we have good evidence for man re-inhabiting Britain at the end of the last ice age - for example Burry Holms. What's more, this is just one small family group setting up a seasonal camp, not hundreds of thousands of people plodding around the same area for 40 years*.
*Small note - an ancient midden contains all human generated rubbish and even if the hordes of Israelites just scattered their rubbish and moved on every single day (love your figures Ragutis) vast amounts of detritus would have been deposited - not to mention the dead which we'd expect to be associated with a population the size of a small city.
Wonderful stuff Owlmirror. More?
Posted by: Knockgoats
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September 22, 2009 7:56 AM
Shit dries up and blows away. Otherwise the desert would be knee deep in camel and goat dung today. The Israelites lived at below subsistence level. The bible narrative indicated that they required constant miraculous provision of food, water and clothing to barely survive in the wilderness. They had neither crops to cook nor pots to cook them in nor fuel to cook them with. They had neither lamps nor oil to light them. Every tiny scrap of metal was a treasure. They lived in bio-degradable tents. They would have left very little trace behind. Besides, they are looking for evidence of the Israelites wanderings in entirely the wrong place. - help ma boab [my emphasis]
With that last sentence, hmb reveals that even he is not stupid enough to believe all the crap that preceded it.
you need to be clear in your mind that the scientific method is quite different from the historical method. The appraisal of evidence is different and the certainty of any conclusion drawn is very different. - help ma boab
You have made this claim numerous times, but never, AFAIK, tried to support it. The obvious reason for that being that it cannot be supported. Both science and history rely on the careful collection of evidence, and the construction and testing of explanations (theories) for that evidence, which testing includes gathering further evidence. In both, theories can be and are disproved by that evidence. Both use the (defeasible) assumption that relevant fundamental physical processes have remained unchanged - so, 600,000 people roaming about for 40 years would inevitably leave traces, just as would the biochemical reactions expected (but generally not directly observed) in an experiment in genetics. The issue of repeatability is also a red herring: exact repeatability is unattainable to any scientist, while a historian, archaeologist, geologist, evolutionary biologist, palaeontologist or astronomer can invite others to repeat the tests they have carried out on material, and to look in other places where corroborative evidence is likely to be found. If such invitations to retest are not given, and no corroborating material is found despite systematic searching, the original evidence will come to be doubted - just as would be the case in a genetics experiment.
HMB, you have claimed that your disagreement is with "flaky" scientists, not science itself. Yet rejecting the fact of evolution requires you to classify huge swathes of biology, geology, nuclear physics, astronomy and cosmology as "flaky" - and all these sciences are intimately connected to adjacent areas. It would be much more honest and straightforward of you simply to denounce science as the work of Satan.
Posted by: Bobber
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September 22, 2009 8:30 AM
I had to jump on this deceased equine.
Excuse me? This will come as a surprise to all the history professors I studied under, who expected a whole lot of supporting evidence to back up my assertions. The major difference between science and history is the nature of the evidence itself. But there's not much difference between Josephus relating fourth-hand stories about some guy named Jesus and Collin telling me that a friend of a friend saw the Loch Ness Monster. There has to be more, both for the historian and the scientist. When it comes to certain topics - as to whether or not Hitler ordered the Final Solution - we have to rely on documents and (fallible) human interpretation, unless Hitler himself, with an iron chisel, carved his commands into a stone tablet in front of a half-dozen movie cameras. On the other hand, when faced with an event recorded as part of a story or myth, the historian requires physical evidence, just as a scientist would. Ancient writers recorded both the existence of a city called Troy and the mass-movement of hundreds of thousands of people through a desert. We have valid evidence for the former; we have none - absolutely zero - valid evidence for the latter.
(Even so, no one believes that the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece actually exist, just because Troy was discovered, eh?)
History, like science, is open to constant revision as new evidence comes to light. When valid evidence for the "Exodus" is found, then it will have entered the realm of historical fact* - like Troy. Otherwise, you need to keep combing Sinai like the Spaceballs did on MoonaVega. (And leave your industrial-strength hair dryer at home. Trust me on this.)
*Again, with the caveat that in history, "facts" are changeable.
Posted by: Drosera
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September 22, 2009 9:49 AM
Ragutis,
Isn't that a good metaphor for what happens when you take your guidance from a sky fairy?
At first all went fine:
No way they could get lost.
But things turned sour when Moses sent spies into the 'land of milk and honey,' Canaan. They returned less than enthousiastic about the promised land. The people of Israel started 'murmering.' This made their god very angry, and he said:
And that's why they had to stay in the desert for forty years, because the sky fairy got upset and broke his pledge.
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 23, 2009 10:19 AM
owlmirror
Sorry for my error but you should have noticed that I had already described it as "a territory named 'Goshen'." You should know this from your Bible readings anyway. But perhaps you don't know the bible and are getting all your quibbles from BibleIsRubbish.com. In this case you should go to AnswersToDumbQuibbles.com. I am right, you are a lazy slug-a-bed. Anyway some of what you wrote has intrigued me so I will attempt a few replies.
Sorry, didn't know I was contradicting the bible. Reed houses survive the Nile inundations much better than mud brick. They lend themselves to being put on stilts. Don't get hung up on the reed thing, it was only an aside. If you want mud brick, have mud brick, one kiss of Nile flood-water and they are toast. BTW reed houses do have reed walls and roofs though, so I'm not sure what you were thinking of. As with mud brick, if you want a door you need wood for the door and frame. Or use a reed mat curtain?
Looks like Proto-Siniatic to me. The ox head aleph is a giveaway (though I always find the 'shin' shape of the 'K' counter-intuitive). I usually find the links given to me here to be a drossy waste of time, but I quite enjoyed this, thanks. BTW I searched the page for any reference to 'slaves' but couldn't find anything close.
How anti-Semitic of you. What made them distinctive enough to enslave, then?
Anti-semitic! I love it! I notice that some have identified me as a holocaust denier! Sweet! I shall take care never to refute them so I can poke them through the bars with a stick and watch them rant and fume. Ya gotta have a hobby.
'Kosher'? I suppose you were kicking yourself after you hit the send button at this glaring anachronism. Never mind, it is an easy mistake to make. It is traditional on this site to greet your opponents errors with screeches of 'moron', 'Man, you are stupidly ignorant', 'You're... just stupid and ignorant, as usual, and pulling stuff out of your arse, even about something easy to actually check?' and 'Hypocrite'. But I shall not. It lends me a certain air of gravitas, don't you think?
BTW your 'Yahweh' wasn't much better.
And further to your demand for anachronistic 'Yahweh' inscriptions, please note that the Israelites abandoned their worship of the Lord to the extent that when Moses brought the message from the Burning Bush to the elders they had largely lost the knowledge of the god of their fathers and demanded to know the name of Moses' god. I suppose that they wondered if he might have been one of the Egyptian gods they had adopted.
When I was in the Nile delta it was a flat featureless alluvial plain as far as the eye could see. Every year the delta gained another layer of Nile mud. I wasn't particularly looking out for stones on which to carve inscriptions but I would guess that they would be at a premium and the Egyptians would have first dibs. Google 'nile delta' for some pix to get the idea.
Wiki:
As I said, the Israelites adopted the surrounding culture. AFAIK.
Unsupported allegation. Cattle and sheep herders may have been quite low on the social scale in Egypt.
I could be wrong. Link?
It used to be that all the OT narrative was 'false'. Slowly confirmation came from other sources, the Israel stele, the Moabite stone, Assyrian records, etc. This recent scepticism would not be the first wave of criticism that has broken on the rock of the Bible.
Pick one you like. There are only a limited number of books that claim to be God's message to Man. I chose the Bible. You can choose between the book of Mormon and the Koran.
???
Exodus relates that a significant increase in their numbers occurred after they were enslaved. The bible does not state the proportion of free/enslaved centuries.
The Israelites were only given a few hours notice to depart Egypt. They could only take what they could carry. I don't know about you, but If I had to trek across deserts and wildernesses for a few weeks I would only take the bare essentials and valuables. Clay pots are not valuable and are heavy. Do the math. Further; when they realised that they were staying in the wilderness longer than expected there were no handy outlets of Pots-R-Us nor, really, any need for pots to eat manna.
These instructions were intended for the promised land which was only a few days away. People could easily make clay pots there. Not in the wilderness. If anyone had carried pots from Egypt they would only have been expensive bronze ones. So I do not suppose that many clays were broken in this ritual. Also, I have nothing that leads me to believe that the Israelites were diligent in obeying this command
It was you who brought up 'rock'. Tell me what you think 'rock' means.
Spoing! Is this the guy who wrote:
I get ya. The elite say one thing and the plebs pay little attention. It could happen. However, I seem to recall that this dung rule applies only within the camp. Nothing against dumping it outside. I must look it up.
You didn't notice when you were collecting your bet that as well as the "the sophisticated and educated philosophies of the Hellenic elite" I included a reference to Greek religion? You lost the bet.
This is interesting, Where do you place the Ophel? And what do you mean by 'reconstructed?
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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September 23, 2009 10:30 AM
Another helping of mental diarrhea from our "total fool". HMB aboslutely cannot acknowledge his lack of facilities to cope with continually being totally and utterly refuted by evidence, and still thinks he has something of interest to say. What a crashing insipid bore.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 23, 2009 10:48 AM
You are clearly not here to engage us but only to troll. However, that doesn't excuse you from being a Hitler apologist.Posted by: Janine, She Wolf Of Pharyngula, OM
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September 23, 2009 11:13 AM
Pick one you like. There are only a limited number of books that claim to be God's message to Man. I chose the Bible. You can choose between the book of Mormon and the Koran.
It seems that HMB is using his superior historical methodology to dismiss every other religion that claims to have some deity's communication to humanity.
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 23, 2009 11:35 AM
Missed a few bits.
owlmirror
No, stratigraphy is OK. It's just that I don't see the need for an evolutionary context. I don't require potsherds in lower stata to have actually given birth (with adaptation) to potsherds in higher strata. Josh puts my position quite well:
(Although perhaps I didn't actually say 'biostratigraphic', I was only talking about mineral prospecting. I don't know if that makes any difference.)
So I don't care if a layer of artefacts come from entirely 'unrelated' sources. Plain correlation is enough for me (and archaeologists too, I think).
Don't think so. Let's ask Professor Armand Marie Leroi. Wiki:
Yep. He's got the idea. You need that predictive element before a theory can be tested. The scientific method. Evolution is a branch of history, not science.
Not sure what your point is here. The Israelites were quite wealthy, they had taken goodbye gifts from their Egyptian neighbours and had a lot of gold and stuff.
That manna must have been quite nourishing even though it got a bit repetitive. Who says God is a poor dietitian?
As I said, they relieved the Egyptians of a lot of gold and they might just have brought some weapons if they intended to fight their way into Canaan.
Feynmaniac
Never mind feeling sorry, I'm not ready to blub to Oprah quite yet,
"how did 600,000 people survive in the desert for 40 years" I do not imagine that even one thousandth of that figure could have made that journey and survived (as someone has pointed out, that 600k does not include dependants). There is no naturalistic explanation. There were a constant series of interventions by God from the Burning Bush till the parting of the waters of the Jordan. Plagues, Red Sea, Pillar of Fire, manna, springs of water, preservation of clothing, various smitings- all miracles. The journey was quite impossible otherwise. It was a demonstration of God's power.
Kitty
Thanks for that. You handled it well. Though you could have highlighted my
Anyway:
What like? They only took out of Egypt what they could carry across a desert. And there weren't any shops.
OK. Let's mention the dead. What do you suppose the Israelites did with their dead in the desert or wilderness? Support your answer with references.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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September 23, 2009 11:53 AM
More mental diarrhea by HMB, the "total fool". HMB, you are going to need more that one quote from a self acknowledged agitator in order to show that evolution isn't a science. Especially since we have demonstrated to you the predictive power of the thoery, in essence refuting the agitator. A proclamation by the Nation Academy of Sciences stating evolution is not a science would be conclusive. Until then, you remain an utter and total fool.
Posted by: Josh
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September 23, 2009 12:22 PM
It's really an aside to the overall discussion, but this statement, as written, isn't right. First, neither the Nile Delta nor the "dry south" (Nile Valley? Western Desert? Eastern Desert? I don't really know what you're referring to here, but my comment applies to all of them) represent a single depositional environment, and no statement about preservation potential means anything much if it's applied beyond a given depositional environment. Second, depending on which facies we're talking about interring bodies in, the delta has a much better preservation potential than various areas I can think of in the "dry south."
We were talking about oil prospecting rather than mineral prospecting, which is quite different, and the whole point was about biostratigraphy.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 23, 2009 1:00 PM
How rich of help ma boab to ask for sources while denying a wealth of evidence on just about every topic from AIDS to the Holocaust to Christianity.
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 23, 2009 2:21 PM
Oh help ma boab ! Yoo-hoo! Look what I found with a quick google:
....He does, you don't.Posted by: Drosera
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September 23, 2009 5:09 PM
HMB,
Remember the plague of the frogs? Did you know that according to the Bible the Egyptian magicians were able to duplicate this feat?
So, even the Egyptians were able to perform miracles. That is stretching the imagination way beyond breaking point, I'd say.
Any sane person would conclude that it is all fantasy. Not HMB.
Posted by: CJO
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September 23, 2009 6:56 PM
There is no naturalistic explanation. There were a constant series of interventions by God from the Burning Bush till the parting of the waters of the Jordan. Plagues, Red Sea, Pillar of Fire, manna, springs of water, preservation of clothing, various smitings- all miracles. The journey was quite impossible otherwise. It was a demonstration of God's power.
And there you go. As clear a rationale as you could want for exactly why the narratives found in the Bible cannot be considered history. And it's not about skepticism, or an atheist bias, or any of that, which would be the likes of hmb's knee-jerk response. "Interventions by God" and "God's power" are theological concepts. They simply cannot feature in a historical explanation, whether one believes in god or not.
Posted by: Owlmirror
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September 23, 2009 7:25 PM
Indeed? Do you promise to stop making them?
Indeed. Will you stop contradicting the bible? Looks like the answer is "NO".
And you know this... because? Do you have any evidence at all for these supposed stilt-reed-houses on the Nile Delta, or are you pulling them out of your arse?
You're probably putting your proctologist's children through college, the way you're going.
Doing a quick Google finds that the only reed-bundle houses in archaeology or anthropology of the past few thousand years are in the marshes of Iraq. News flash: Iraq is not on the Nile Delta!
Then why are you sill banging on about it?
You know, I am pretty sure that the Egyptians managed to figure out where to build there houses, and out of what materials, for thousands of years without your arse-pulled advice.
Really, why do you insist on making stuff up all the damn time? You don't actually know anything about the Nile river, or Egyptian building materials or the conditions in which they were used, or anything really.
How astonishing! You're actually capable of reading!
Exactly my point: The Israelites could have made similar inscriptions before they were enslaved.
I see that you are incapable of defending your argument. Good job blowing smoke, though.
What mistake?
The Bible Unearthed By Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman:
The point being that there are animal remains that demonstrate that Israelites had a diet distinct from their neighbors. Are you saying that it's impossible for the Israelites in Egypt to have had such dietary taboos before they had it written down for them?
Ibid:
Not to mention Gen. 46:34. If Egyptians feel about sheep the way that Jews feel about pork, then there would be collections of sheep bones that would signify the presence of sheep-eaters who were not Egyptians.
Why do you persist in making a fool of yourself?
Well, you certainly deserve all of those insults, and far more and far worse. You are an utter disgrace to scholarship and intellectual honesty.
Maybe you subconsciously realize that you are wrong and I am right?
Not pulling stuff out of your arse would lend you gravitas.
Because every single Israelite had forgotten the God of their forefather Israel?
Which bible do you use? The Proctologist's Fortune bible?
Ex 4:29-31 -- And Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel, and Aaron told them everything the LORD had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, and they believed. And when they heard that the LORD was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped.
Your proctological fantasy that the Israelites ever lived on the mud-flats themselves is, once again, in contradiction to the bible.
Gen. 47:5-6 -- Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Your father and your brothers have come to you, and the land of Egypt is before you; settle your father and your brothers in the best part of the land. Let them live in Goshen.
Sigh. You don't actually know what ostraka are, do you?
How do you know? More proctological fantasy? Of course.
I agree that it is empirically unsupported, since there is no evidence that the Israelites ever lived in Egypt. But it is not unsupported in your own damn bible. Read all of Genesis 47. Or don't. You don't actually care about facts, right?
So low that the king of Egypt and his retinue would have nothing to do with them, eh?
Gen. 50:7-9 -- So Joseph went up to bury his father. All Pharaoh's officials accompanied him -- the dignitaries of his court and all the dignitaries of Egypt-- besides all the members of Joseph's household and his brothers and those belonging to his father's household. Only their children and their flocks and herds were left in Goshen. Chariots and horsemen also went up with him. It was a very large company.
How do you graze flocks on a damn mud-flat, anyway?
And what would "low status" have to do with how they buried their own dead, if they could afford to buy a tomb or have one constructed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pithom
"Rotting beneath the Nile delta mud", your arse.
Wrong, again. It was actually assumed to be more-or-less true. Then all of the conflicting stuff came to light.
Yes, that the kingdoms of Israel and Judea had indeed existed as nations before being conquered by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. That's not in dispute.
It's a rock pulled out of people's arses.
Pick one out of your arse, pretty much. That's not a methodology to distinguish true from false, you crackpot.
It also doesn't clarify different interpretations of the same book. You call the JW's false; they call you false. You're using the same damn book, you moron! So is it also "pick the interpretation you like"?
Gen. 50:26 states that Joseph lived to 110. So that's one putative century, at the very least.
I hope you realize that you are arguing that the Israelites could not possibly have had materials that they are described as having. But hey, feel free to shoot yourself in the feet.
Ex 16:33 -- So Moses said to Aaron, "Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it. Then place it before the LORD to be kept for the generations to come."
Where'd that jar come from?
More from out of your Proctologist's Dream bible.
Nice to see you contradicting your earlier statement, again.
Of course they weren't. Because they were never a huge population of people wandering in the desert.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. The elite had good hygiene and the plebs shat where they wished? I mean, what?
Lazy-arse moron.
Deut. 23:12-13 -- Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.
I won, because you failed, as usual, to read the damned linked essay.
Read the damn linked Wiki page.
The current Old City of Jerusalem.
----
Yes, because you ignored Josh's clear explanations of why an evolutionary context was necessary. We know you're a disingenuous moron.
Who is an evolutionary developmental biologist...
Let's find the sentences that come right after that, shall we?
[snip the rest of what that quote was mined from, since aratina got there first..]
According to a proctological crackpot like you, anyway.
Glad to see you contradicting yourself yet again, three times over.
Says the fraud whose only reference is his own lazy arse.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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September 23, 2009 7:30 PM
hmb,
Huh? That God allowed 99.9% of them to die shows his power? What about the fact that there no evidence of massive grave pits with thousands of bodies? Did God make them miraculously disappear? Also, as others have asked, why did it take them 40 years to cross a few hundred miles. That's incredibly slow even by the standards of ancient times.
It's funny when you get right to it you admit your explanation is "magic man done it".
Fundies and postmodernists have always made strange bedfellows.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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September 23, 2009 7:40 PM
'The Nile' isn't just a psychological coping mechanism used to reject overwhelming evidence.....
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM
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September 23, 2009 7:59 PM
Owlmirror asked (of help ma
boabbigot):I can only guess that it's a desire to alleviate the enormous amounts of cognitive dissonance he feels as a result of trying to use reason to justify a belief based wholly on unreason - which he then attempts to rationalise with post hoc sophistry.
Once I again I thank the gods I'm an atheist...
Posted by: Drosera
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September 24, 2009 3:06 AM
Owlmirror,
I could be mistaken, but methinks you are getting a bit impatient with HMB. I wonder why.
Feynmaniac @404,
Hey, you are supposed to read the thread, the whole thread, and nothing but the thread before you comment on it :)
I answered your question above @391.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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September 24, 2009 3:45 AM
Arghh, I somehow missed that!
I also should have known the answer would take the form of "
magic manGod did it". Condemning a generation to live and die (emphasis on the die) in a desert shows how merciful their God is! However, one is left wondering: where are all those carcasses?Posted by: wowbaggerau
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September 24, 2009 4:13 AM
Feynmaniac wrote:
Sure - if you have the same kind of inconsistent definition of God that Christians are required to have when defending their belief system. Like how he's able to inspire the bible in such a way that the stories alternate between genres (such as a story including scientific facts and poetic metaphor never, ever, ever intended to be taken seriously by anyone*) - sometimes within the same passage.
And how, amongst other Christians, God can intervene in the real world and perform miracles but when arguing with atheists is beyond all scientific understanding.
*Telling the difference is easy - those parts supported by modern science are the parts their god meant to be taken literally; those parts that aren't are the poetic/metaphor/apocalyptic literature/poor translations/copying errors and so forth.
Posted by: Drosera
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September 24, 2009 10:01 AM
*breaking news*
“Sensational archeological discovery supports Exodus narrative”
“Bible scholars elated”
“Second plague of Egypt no longer embarrassment to believers, expert says”
Cairo. A stunningly well-preserved mural in a hitherto unopened tomb in the Valley of Kings was revealed yesterday by Egyptologist and Bible-scholar Dr. Pienaar from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. The mural and its accompanying hieroglyphs describe in detail what has become known as the Second Plague of Egypt. As told in Exodus 8:2-7, this plague, attributed to the God of Israel, consisted of a sudden infestation of frogs, the animals becoming so numerous that they even swarmed into bedrooms and kitchens, causing general consternation. To demonstrate that they were not impressed, Egyptian magicians at the Pharao’s court performed the same miracle in reply. Until now scientist have generally dismissed this story as mythical, or even nonsensical, stating that there is not the slightest evidence that anything in Exodus ever took place, let alone the plagues and other miracles.
But as Dr. Pienaar says, this position is now no longer tenable, since the mural in question is unmistakable evidence to the contrary.
“It's a sensational find,” Dr. Pienaar says. “We can no longer dismiss the plagues of Egypt as an embarassment to reason. The painting is from the right period, and it tells us exactly what happened during the Second Plague."
Here we publish for the first time an image of this remarkable mural (see below). Photo courtesy of Dr. Pienaar.
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 24, 2009 10:57 AM
Josh, thanks for that. The oldest found bodies in Egypt were buried in desert sand near Gabelein in the Nile valley. I called the South 'dry' because any house built above the reach if the annual inundation is typically only a very short distance from a burning desert climate and desiccating grave conditions:
Bodies buried on the delta or floodplain proper would have to endure an annual immersion due to groundwater or as the water table rose after every inundation. I don't know about bodies, but I do know that wooden artefacts have great difficulty resisting the assault of cyclical wetting and drying with sweet-water unless the species is carefully chosen, and even then destruction is inevitable.
Yes, few minerals share petroleum's wanderlust. I included oil as a 'mineral' since I often buy 'mineral oil' and assumed the expression was used generally.
----------------------------------------
Perhaps, if you have leisure, you could help me identify some teeth. On a recent family visit to a Cretaceous sandstone outcrop I searched for the sharks' teeth that a website had promised me. I found a good selection of what I assumed were teeth but which were quite small, 4-9mm long, some thin and nearly conical, others nearly triangular, flattened with more pronounced sharp edges. Most were slightly curved but none had any significant root structure. I have not been able to find any pix on the Web that have satisfied me. Could you point me to a suitable website?
Posted by: Drosera
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September 24, 2009 12:36 PM
Isn't it typical for help ma boab that he happily believes the most incredible nonsense for which there is no evidence, and yet, when almost miraculously some evidence does turn up (see my post @410), he choses to ignore it?
Posted by: Josh
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September 24, 2009 12:48 PM
*pops in quick*
I'll dig around tonight if get a chance and see what I can come up with. Thoughts on the rest of your comment later. Facing a deadline.
*pops out*
Posted by: aratina cage
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September 24, 2009 1:26 PM
@Drosera
I had no idea that by "frogs" the holy babble meant "Stargate frogs"! Yikes!
Posted by: Drosera
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September 24, 2009 1:52 PM
aratina cage,
I also had no idea. But we have to follow the evidence here. It certainly makes the second plague seem less whimsical, doesn't it?
Posted by: Drosera
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September 24, 2009 2:02 PM
By the way, the picture as displayed above is cropped on the right side. To see the whole image, click here.
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 24, 2009 3:08 PM
I'm not ignoring it, I've been staring at it in a trance for a few hours and have only just come out of a 'visitation'. I had doubts before but now I know there is a god. The pic has inspired me to open a whole new campaign of heathen-smiting and now, armed with this irrefutable proof, nothing shall stand in my way.
Posted by: Owlmirror
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September 24, 2009 7:10 PM
...And you're him, right?
I shall look forward, with interest, to your religious career.
Posted by: Josh
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September 24, 2009 8:33 PM
Can you give me a location? If I know where the outcrop was, then I can perhaps figure out what unit you were in. If I can do that, then I can probably figure out what the likely candidate taxa are.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
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September 24, 2009 9:31 PM
That picture proves that Erik von Däniken was right. Aliens visited ancient Egypt and built the pyramids.
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 25, 2009 12:43 AM
Josh, unfortunately I have used my usual screen name here so cannot give out location details. My other blog is attended by a malicious stalker who only purpose in life is to investigate and threaten others and I am near the top his 'favourites' list. He is almost certainly lurking here.
I have just checked, a google search lists my comments here as the 76th result which is well within the scope of his sick obsession.
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 25, 2009 1:48 AM
Surveys classify it as Cenomanian–Santonian, it overlies Hettangian clay unconformably and is overlain by very hard Santonian chalk.
Posted by: Kitty
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September 25, 2009 3:14 AM
HMB
You're the one insisting the Israelites spent 40 years wandering and expiring in the desert so it's up to you to provide me with evidence they were there not the other way round.
Posted by: Drosera
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September 25, 2009 4:17 AM
HMB,
You know the saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? You seem to operate on a slightly different principle: extraordinary claims require fictional evidence (yes, I realize you were joking here).
Let's forget for a moment all the discussions about facts and non-facts in the Bible. Let's look at the bigger picture, which is that the creator of the universe ('heaven and earth') adopted an obscure Middle-Eastern people of goat herders for his special protection scheme*, at the expense of the Canaanites, the Midianites, the Egyptians, etc., while completely neglecting to reveal himself to the Greeks, the Indians, the Chinese, the people living in the Americas, New Guinea, Australia, etc., etc.
This is in itself already extremely implausible, but then consider the fact that we only know about this because of a document based on the oral traditions of these very same 'chosen' people. Doesn't that make you think? Do you never entertain the possibility that it could all be a myth?
Of course it's a myth. You have admitted yourself that the account of Exodus can only be true if the miracles actually happened. At the same time, you have to go out of your way to explain why there is no physical evidence for anything in it. It is almost painful to see the mental contortions you subject yourself to, only to avoid facing the truth.
* A scheme that he seems to have abandoned by the time the Romans came to oppress his people — and ever since.
Posted by: Zetetic
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September 26, 2009 1:03 AM
So HMB still doesn't get that a lack of evidence is a problem for his/her position? Not surprising.
HMB also seems to be unaware that in the pyramids (and other ancient Egyptian constructions) that is plenty of evidence of "graffiti" left by the workers (usually in small hard to notice areas), yet curiously none of it seems to be be Jewish in nature. (Apologies if someone had already pointed this out, and I missed it.)
What was it you were saying HMB on the "Problem" thread about how we shouldn't take the Bible literally? (Don't worry just being rhetorical there.) You seem to be in need of being more consistent with your position(s).
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 29, 2009 9:22 AM
Sorry, Drosera, I seem to be ignoring you.
On the ‘chug’ thing there are a few issues.
In translation there is rarely a direct equivalence between one word and another (chug=circle). In their respective languages each word has a penumbra of meaning and even alternative meanings. We are separated from the Hebrews by a few thousand years, several thousand miles, a continent or two, and innumerable linguistic, political, educational and social differences. A good concordance gives chug as circle, arch, vault or compass. Personally, I would lean towards 'vault'. So the passage:
would read "God sits enthroned above the 'vault of the earth' (=above the heavens)". This idea is repeated elsewhere in the OT. It could alternately refer to the visible horizon. Or since 'vault' (3D) is a possible translation could it be referring to the curvature of the Earth? But it little matters. The verse is teaching about the supremacy of God, not geometry.
Therefore the translations that you have consulted are not 'mistranslating' chug, but rather you are pressing the word beyond what was originally intended.
Fiction is easy to spot. 'How do I know where to draw the line between fact and allegory?' Very difficult, don't know. I'm doubtful that anyone here will be able to assist me on this matter.
The account of the conflict (and its reasons) with the Midian/Moabite confederation is a bit sketchy. It was intended that Israel should pass through both territories without doing any harm. It is not at all clear why such harsh measures were taken against Midian but not Moab for their actions to seduce Israel. The preservation of the girls was an act of mercy. The idea of 'rape' is not implied, nor need it be inferred.
On the contrary, there is a common outlook that 'The end justifies the means', and all these evils may be perpetrated if the 'cause' is right. This is exemplified in Marxism where morality is regarded as part of the 'superstructure' riding on the base of economics. If you study the implementation of Marxism in somewhere like Russia you will see that no moral scruple was ever allowed to impede the 'will of the proletariat'. I do not know which country you reside in but I dare say that the leaders of your country have engaged in a bit of breaking your above rules and people either don't mind or can't actually do anything about it. So absolute rules are a helpful reminder.
This is a common problem for some. It need not be. The bible asserts that God made Heaven and Earth. This means that the whole of creation is 'other' than God. You cannot detect nor observe God by any naturalistic means. If Gould's NOMA has any value this is it. On the other hand God may intervene in the natural world as much or as little as he chooses though there are limits to the sorts of things he can achieve.
Think of the universe as an aquarium. The fish cannot understand what goes on outside. They cannot escape and enter the outside world. All they can do is busy themselves with their own little existence. But the Aquarist may intervene and adjust the arrangements in the tank as much as he wishes.
It is the same with us. The supernatural world is much more 'real' than our limited existence. But we cannot see it nor understand it. We cannot penetrate the interface between nature and super-nature, we cannot even detect the interface itself without the greatest difficulty. Just as the fish bumps its nose on the glass, so we bump off the interface with puzzlement and incomprehension.
So once you accept God as creator, then every possible intervention is 'possible', even though, when viewed naturalisticly, such miracles are 'impossible'. If you can think of a lab experiment that demonstrates the impossibility of a supernatural spirit creator intervening in the natural world, then do let me know.
Dawkins seems to misunderstand this completely. In the Wiki entry for Gould, Dawkins criticises NOMA:
This is just silly. The 'Laws' of nature have no police force to enforce them. They are merely generalisations of accumulated observations. Should God intervene then 'Nature' seamlessly accepts the results of his intervention and flows smoothly on. Should Jesus walk on water, heal a sick person, change water into wine or calm a storm, then you may summon a scientist: a physicist, a medic, a biochemist or a meteorologist. But it is too late. The scientist can merely confirm that: the water seems to be its normal unresisting self; the person is indeed well; the liquid is indeed wine and the weather is, at present, calm. Nature just flows on. Miracles do not 'impinge' on anything except on the experience of the subject or observers.
And I have heard it asserted here that 'studies' have been done to 'prove' that prayer 'does not work'. This is beyond ridicule. Of course prayer does not 'work'. It is only words. What does 'work' is when God answers. And no possible scientific methodology will dupe God into behaving like a laboratory rat. The bible repeatedly warns us not to put God to the test. He will cut up rough. And he is omniscient:
So God can spot any attempt to entrap him.
Anyway, once you have seen a real miracle, there is no going back. And they happen today more often than you would think.
Didn't know that.
I don't know why you repeat the word 'obscure'. Are you a follower of the cult of celebrity? Do you admire big important people? If so, despising 'obscure' groups might come naturally to you. Not so with God. He seems to love 'obscure' people. Little people. He doesn't despise 'peasants'. The theme of God taking such 'a special interest in an obscure group of peasants that he came to their rescue' is a recurring theme in the Bible. So not 'ludicrous'.
And frogs aren't so bad. If God smites you with frogs it is time to pay attention, lest he smite thee with something a little more heavy duty.
No. Many people make the mistake that God's promises are unconditional. Nothing could be further from the truth. Conditions are often express, but always implied. The same is true, and important, in the xian life today.
I have always assumed that these were conjuring tricks. It was their trade. Turning staffs into bunches of flowers. Pulling
frogsrabbits out of hats. Witch doctors. I suggest that you use a modern translation and a good concordance when it turns out that your argument turns on the meaning of a single word (enchantment, circle). Those KJV guys were a bit ... imaginative?We've done that above, God has no prejudice against goat herders, the oppressed, poor or oppressed. In fact he has a special liking for such people.
The Egyptians and Midianites were expressly invited to join in. Many did so. The Canaanites once enjoyed a knowledge of El but descended into the paganism and gross sin for which God decided to drive them from Canaan.
God had to start somewhere, to build a nation that would be a light to the others. The bible says that all men have had a measure of understanding of God. When you look at the stinking religions that some have adopted, it is clear that this little light is commonly rejected.
'Oral'? Make up your minds guys. Are they illiterate and determined not to make a single note of important events in their lives or are they busy carving inscriptions and scribbling trivia on potsherds as some here demand?
Quite regularly.
There are long periods of time in the Bible where no miracles are recorded. The Exodus story is furnished with many miracles. I suppose that God chose this method to make a nation out of obscure slaves. He can intervene if he wishes. If he does so, that does not make it a myth.
My short answer is that on reading the Mosaic account I would not have expected much in the way of archaeological evidence. Their lives and mode of existence was transient. Owl makes many detailed points. I will try to answer them.
Too complex to go into here.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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September 29, 2009 9:40 AM
Yawn, more inane preaching, but no hard evidence by HMB. Another wasted post by our total fool.
Posted by: Stephen Wells
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September 29, 2009 9:52 AM
The Mosaic account has regular points where (i) people express doubts about yahweh and (ii) they get demonstratively toasted for it. We need an explanation for how and why Yahweh changed his policy to hiding in the shadows and pretending not to exist. An especially neat trick was devastating Egypt in a way that left no record whatsoever in Egypt.
Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula
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September 29, 2009 9:58 AM
help ma boab wrote:
Indeed - if one is intellectually honest and capable of critical thought divorced from emotions. Sadly, you aren't; instead of seeing your religion for the baseless, superstitious nonsense it is you spend hours attempting to concoct absurd post-hoc rationalisations (like the one in the post above) for your emotionally-founded belief - all in order to alleviate the cognitive dissonance.
You believe because you want to believe, not because you can support your belief with reason. Why can't you admit that? I believe it was Martin Luther who said that reason was the enemy of faith; there's a Christian who knew what he was talking about.
Posted by: strange gods before me
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September 29, 2009 10:01 AM
What a tedious and long-winded way of saying "God hates fags."
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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September 29, 2009 10:54 AM
HMB,
You seem to be asserting that miracles have no effect beyond their immediate occurrence. And yet this cannot be. If Jesus turns water (H2O) into wine, which includes ethyl alcohol (C2H5OH), sugars, etc., then the carbon must come from somewhere. It is not interacting with its former surroundings. Or do you contend that it is merely created--in which case the mass of the planet changes. All occurrences have consequences beyond their immediate time and place. Or, put another way, there were probably some pretty unhappy fish when/if God parted the water for the Israwlites.
There's a bigger issue, though. The tremendous success of science implies that God intervenes only rarely if at all. This raises the question of what criteria said deity uses in such decisions. Do you think science is possible at all if we must consider whether our experimental results could be the product of a miracle?
Posted by: Zetetic
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September 30, 2009 6:41 AM
HMB @ #426:
Hint HMB: Facts tend to have evidence supporting them (unlike Exodus for example).
Yet curiously Christian history is full of such examples as well. I also noticed that you failed to note that every non-Christian civilization on the planet tends to have rules about not murdering or raping (at least those within the same civilization). Funny isn't it how so many cultures have similar rules without believing in the Judeo-Christian god? So why exactly is the Bible needed again? Oh that's right, it's not really about morality, it's about attempting to justify your personal religious beliefs through an Appeal to Consequences.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Says the person that thinks that every species in history was just magically "poofed" into being and that his god parted an entire sea. Any obvious interaction with reality that did so while outside of the natural processes (like parting a sea, killing every first born son at the same time, etc.) would by definition be a an observation through naturalistic means.
Funny how god never intervenes on the scale claimed in the Bible any more, even for far worse atrocities. Did God "pull a hammy" while parting the Red Sea? Why not even help an amputee grow a new arm or leg? Funny how a god that never intervenes in any detectable way is indistinguishable from one that doesn't exist, isn't it?
Analogy Fail... An aquarium has to be maintained by artificial means on a periodic basis. Such actions would be detectable by the fish. I can quite assure you that fish can be aware of their owners presence (knowing when they're about to be feed for example). Again the facts are that the world doesn't seem to experiencing divine intervention. Please show credible evidence to the contrary, and no, old Bible stories that have no factual basis don't count.
Baseless assertion... Prove it.
Then by definition you don't really know that it's there. You're just baselessly assuming it because you want to.
Now you just asserted that it can be detected, after claiming that it can't be. Why can't you make up your mind? Also, what credible evidence do you have for this claim?
Analogy Fail again. The fish may not understand what it is that they are encountering, but they can still detect it, test it, and prove that it's there. They accept it's reality even if they don't understand it since they can test it, use it, and interact with it.
Why even assume your god, and not another one? Why "accept God as creator" in the first place, when there is no credible evidence to that effect? All you've provided so far is one baseless assertion after another.
Shifting the Burden of Proof fallacy: You're the one asserting that your particular god exists, with providing evidence to that effect. It's up to you to prove that your god does exist. The absence of a god is the "null hypothesis", it's up to you to provide evidence otherwise.With you defining your god in such a vague and untestable manner, you deliberately make it impossible to test against the existence of your god. After all it your god was testable, you might be proven wrong. You know perfectly well that no one can disprove such a vaguely defined entity any more than you can "disprove" that there isn't a magical trans-dimensional dragon living in my garage. Does that make believing in magical trans-dimensional dragons a reasonable belief? Of course it doesn't, but the same can also be said about your god.
Think that's being unfair? Then provide us with a test that can prove that there is no such think as a magical trans-dimensional dragon. Please... Do let us know when you have such a test.
Comprehension fail again....Read the article again.Here is what you left out (Funny how you seem to do that a lot isn't it, HMB? Leaving out the parts that refute your own position.)[emphasis added]....
Dawkins was clearly stating that if miracles actually happened then science would be able to detect it and realize that something we don't understand is happening. (Honestly I can't fathom the level of mental compartmentalization you must maintain, HMB, to miss such an obvious point.) As soon as you claim that a deity has a physical effect in the real world, then becomes a physical effect, and thereby detectable. Therefore, any claims of miracles on the part of religious groups violates NOMA, by Gould's own definition of NOMA. You though, are trying to justify miracles as either god is so subtle that it might as well not even be here, or it's as though people wouldn't take notice of amputees suddenly sprouting limbs for no apparent reason, the sun stopping, or oceans parting.
Now, who's being silly?
Which is exactly what the tests try to detect, "god" answering the prayers. It's not about trying to "dupe God into behaving like a laboratory rat" it's about trying to find any proof that you god has any effect on the real world at all.
How very convenient! This exactly what I would tell anybody that I was trying to fool into accepting a made-up belief system. It's so much easier to deal with your failures to provide evidence, when you can just assert that the act of testing you invalidates any test in the first place! By the way HMB...I have some lovely ocean side property to sell you in Utah. Really, it's a steal!Seriously though, it's odd how that's exactly the opposite of what a being that supposedly wants people to believe in it would actually do. It also means that god is deliberately letting innocent people suffer just to avoid providing evidence for it's own existence.
Curiously, your excuse mongering is also exactly what would be expected if your god didn't exist. How exactly is a god that doesn't intervenes any any detectable manner really any different from one that doesn't exist, and how do you know it exists if it's not detectable? Again your just baselessly asserting what you want to believe.
Great! Then you should have no trouble providing a testable example of one that can't be explained by mundane means. Oh that's right, God is very shy....Maybe this nice little video on logic might help you see why your claims are self contradicting and nonsensical.
Putting faith in its place by QualiaSoup
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It's not about celebrity. It just seems odd that your god only seems to intervene in one relatively small group in the world at the time. Why not take the lead for the bigger, more powerful societies, where more good could have been done?Speaking of obscurity...why no mention of Jewish slaves (by Egypt) from the other cultures in the time? Other cultures had no problem with mentioning the other slaves the Egyptians captured/traded. Why no mention of just the Jewish ones if Exodus was true?
So how could an omniscient god not know what would happen before he made the promise? Why make a promise in the first place if it already knew that the deal would "fall through"?
Funny that you should mention that! Turning water into wine (a variation of the "Magic Water Jug" trick) and producing large quantities of food (can you say "false bottom"?) were also common magic tricks, at that time in that region of the world. I figure that pulling off a walking on water trick wouldn't have been to hard to pull off back then either (just needs some preparation).
Except for when they are being oppressed in "his" name apparently.
Nice example of "tolerance" and "sensitivity" for the beliefs of others. What about those that weren't quite so "stinking"? Why didn't your god try and change them too? Why didn't god smite the others that were especially bad, and didn't listen? Your god had no trouble smiting entire civilizations before.
Did it ever occur to you that first they shared them by talking, and then later wrote them down as they gathered more influence from other cultures?
Your comments so far seem to lend a great deal of doubt to that claim.
Yet curiously the only part of it that is demonstrably true is that there were Jews and there was a civilization in Egypt. The rest of the story is curiously missing in any evidence at all.
Lets see...1) There were ancient Hebrews (True)
2) There were ancient Egyptians (True)
3) The Egyptians kept the Jews as slaves. (Unsupported claim, no evidence in Egypt, or any other countries that the claim is true.)
4) The Egyptians were hit with 10 plagues (Unsupported claim, no evidence for the Biblical Plagues. You would think that at least the ancient Egyptians would have noticed every first born male child dying at the same time!)
5) The ancient Hebrews wandered the desert for 40 years. (Unsupported claim.)
and...Since you're fond of quoting Wikipedia HMB how about this from them?
Wikipedia entry on the Book of Exodus
Since you may not read it I'll just quote some of it. {emphasis added}
It's rather funny how something well documented by several lines of independent evidence (such as evolution) is just a "historical schema" to you, but a claim (like Exodus) that has zero facts supporting its version of history is asserted by you to be factual.
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Well good night for now.
;-)
Posted by: help ma boab
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September 30, 2009 7:34 AM
Is someone being moderated?
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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September 30, 2009 2:26 PM
Boy oh boy, you're a masochist, aren't you? And who are you talking about being moderated?Posted by: Zetetic
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September 30, 2009 3:42 PM
HMB @ #433:
Perhaps I've misunderstood you HMB, but if that was a reference to my pasting the text into my comments, no it wasn't to avoid moderation. It was because you've already made it quite clear that you almost certainly won't click on any links we provide, instead you'd rather insist that we provide the text in the conversation. Since the sections I needed to quote weren't too long I decided to do so in this case. That way you have a harder time avoiding the point they made. Also, I figured that since you were the one quoting Wikipedia on Gould that you didn't actually need the link to the Wikipedia entry.Plus, this way people get to see the sections that you deliberately left out from your comment on Dawkins, without their having to locate it themselves.
On the other hand, maybe I've overestimated you (yet again) and you never actually read the Wikipedia entry on Gould. Maybe you're just quoting what someone else had said, and never looked it up for yourself to judge it's accuracy. That would be consistent with your behavior so far.
So, just to help you out HMB (since you seem to have trouble looking things up yourself) here is link for you, straight to the relevant section....
Stephen Jay Gould
There now...is that better for you? Or, do you need us to hold your hand some more?
;-)
Posted by: Drosera
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October 1, 2009 2:04 PM
HMB @ 426,
A miracle! It seems that you have resurrected this thread, I didn’t realize that until today.
Zetetic has given you excellent replies to many of your points, so it would be overkill to go over these again. Just a few leftovers, then.
Possibly, but that was only in response to someone who believed that the authors of the Bible knew that the earth is a sphere. They didn't.
Yes, but not for you, since you seem to believe that the Isrealites actually escaped from slavery in Egypt and wandered through the desert for forty years, helped by numerous divine interventions. Now that’s what I would call fiction.
Murdering children is never justified, wouldn’t you say? Your god sounds no better than Atilla the Hun, if we are to believe the Bible.
The brutes who had just slaughtered men, women, and children were literally told that they could keep the virgin girls for themselves. Do you think they were going to take them to Sunday school?
I live in the Netherlands. Let me tell you a small anecdote. One of our prime ministers just before WWII, a Mr. Colijn, had a few decades earlier, somewhere in Indonesia (then a Dutch colony), ordered the slaying of women and children who had been taken prisoner after a rebellion. And you know what? Mr. Colijn was a member of one of the Christian parties (the reformed-protestant ARP). It wouldn’t surprise me if he had justified his war crimes for himself by thinking that Moses had done the same thing, just on a bigger scale, with god’s consent. He was evidently someone who had taken his morals from the Bible. (Regrettably, Colijn never had to answer for his crimes.)
Most, if not all of the mass murderers and slave-traders in my country’s past would have considered themselves good Christians. I fear that the Bible never stopped Christians from being thugs and murderers, it just made them hypocrites on top of that.
In other words, god is playing hide-and-seek with us. Except when he is performing his tricks in front of an audience of unappreciative bronze-age peasants. Of course, one can not disprove this; that is a trivial observation. But let me tell you, if I were god, and wanted all people to know me and to love me, I would have done a better job.
Example?
Enchantments, magic spells, sorceries, it all comes down to the same thing. Funny that you would call the KJV translators ‘imaginative,’ for that is precisely an adjective that fits you like a glove.
That must have included lots of babies and young children. They were all guilty of paganism and ‘gross sin,’ of course.
This is ridiculous. The Creator of the Universe couldn’t have arranged anything that he wished at a snap of his fingers? Not to mention the fact that he failed miserably in building ‘a nation that would be a light to the others.’
You are not only imaginative, but you are extremely gullible too. That’s clearly not a combination that is particularly conductive to rational thought.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM
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October 1, 2009 2:08 PM
I live in the Netherlands. Let me tell you a small anecdote. One of our prime ministers just before WWII, a Mr. Colijn, had a few decades earlier, somewhere in Indonesia (then a Dutch colony), ordered the slaying of women and children who had been taken prisoner after a rebellion. And you know what? Mr. Colijn was a member of one of the Christian parties (the reformed-protestant ARP). It wouldn’t surprise me if he had justified his war crimes for himself by thinking that Moses had done the same thing, just on a bigger scale, with god’s consent. He was evidently someone who had taken his morals from the Bible. (Regrettably, Colijn never had to answer for his crimes.)
He's Reformed; it was predestined.
Posted by: help ma boab
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October 1, 2009 2:53 PM
So sad. Can't post.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM
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October 1, 2009 2:55 PM
So sad. Can't post.
Not for us, it isn't.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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October 1, 2009 3:10 PM
Amen Brother, the farce is strong in this one.Posted by: Aratina Cage
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October 1, 2009 3:23 PM
Who can't post?Posted by: Zetetic
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October 1, 2009 3:45 PM
@ HMB:
Ah! Now I think I understand what you were trying to say.
If there are links in your post, you can't go over a certain amount (aprox. 3 links, I think) before it goes into moderation. When it goes into moderation, it may or may not ever be posted (sometimes it's just very delayed). That's why on one of the other threads I mentioned for you to Google some terms, since I didn't want my post to go into moderation.
If you're not posting a bunch of links, than I don't know what the problem would be since you can obviously make shorter posts.
Posted by: help ma boab
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October 1, 2009 4:26 PM
Owlmirror
Some have accused me of 'contortions' here, but as long as you continue to make your points, I will continue to reply to them.
Three Pharaohs are mentioned in the OT by name: Necho, Shishak and Hophra. Your Wiki link identifies one as Shoshenq. Ignoring the difference in spelling in the one attempt, please confirm the reliability of this identification by identifying the other two names.
What more do you want?
The Israelites did not do grave goods because they did not consider that they had to provide for any afterlife or journey. They regarded God as their provider. If they went to be with God, then he would provide any necessary vittles, like any good host. I understand that the silver scrolls are exceptional.
If the Israelites had used grave goods in Egypt it would have been an indicator of their apostasy (mentioned in the Bible) and they would have used Egyptian artefacts. As I keep having to tell you the Israelites did not have their own culture.
Sweet that you mention Ketef Hinnom. These scrolls cetainly put a hole in those dopey theories that Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are late pseudo-histories:
And even if faithful Hebrews in Egypt wanted to carry scrolls to the grave they couldn't have because ... err ... Exodus etc hadn't been written yet.
Second hand quotations (with discrepancies) of some supposed 'private speech', by those with an interest in covering their own back? It would hardly have been admissible at Nuremburg. Tsk. Yet you expected Pharaoh's instructions to have survived 3,500 years?
I didn't say I could read it. But it is fairly recognisable.
You don't recover from a glaring anachronism by compounding it with another. The 'Israelite' villages to which you refer date to after the Exodus and Moses'Law.
I note that you refer to Finkelstein and Silberman. They repeat that old 'late composition' shtick. I hope you are not appealing to them and their assertions that Exodus is a late fiction to prove that Exodus is a late fiction? I'm sure there is a name or two for this in Drosera's list of fallacies.
I can tell them why they are puzzled about the reasons for not eating pork: because Moses told them not to.
It is not only possible that an occupation be regarded as 'unclean' yet the produce of that occupation be acceptable, but I can think of at least one other example in the Bible.
Err, no... But are you saying that you wish to pull this assertion out of your arse?
You have lost me here, what is incompatible with my comment?
No, because the name 'Yahweh' was only confided at the Burning Bush. It's use in Egypt would have been a glaring anachronism.
And they did indeed adopt Egyptian gods and did demand to know the name of Moses' god.
The delta is the best land in Egypt. It is part of the rationale for placing Goshen in or at the delta. The delta is not 'mudflats'. You are pulling this out of your arse. I instructed you to google pix of the delta. You obviously haven't done this or you would know it is excellent farmland.
Is it a kind of pickle? I like pickles.
Posted by: help ma boab
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October 1, 2009 4:39 PM
Thanks Z. I had C&Ped Owls links
Owlmirror
When Abraham left Mesopotamia he would have used cuneiform script. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would have been exposed to Canaanite script before the descent to Egypt. Later, when the Israelites entered Canaan they used the Canaanite script. They never had their own script until the formation of recognisably modern Hebrew letters which are merely a derivation of the Canaanite.
Which script would they have used in Egypt? Don't know. Cuneiform doesn't help them communicate with their new neighbours. Neither does Canaanite. Hieroglyphs could have been handy. One thing we do know- that they didn't develop their own script. Similar considerations apply to other aspects of their culture. There is no distinctive Israelite pottery style. They just adopted the evolving styles of the Canaanites. Let me guess that they did the same in Egypt.
You appear to have noticed that Joseph had risen to the rank of 2IC. Well done.
You are just going to have to Google those pix of the Nile delta. Excellent farmland. I can't really help you otherwise.
Nothing, it's just that we don't know that herding was a real money-spinner in Egypt.
I clicked your link. It seems that they don't know where Pithom is either.
Not quite. The JWs felt the need to sponsor their own translation of the Bible to 'help' their theology. The scholarship is poor in places.
You have picked a poor example. When Joseph's very own brothers met him and spoke to him they were utterly convinced that he was an Egyptian. Not even his accent betrayed him. Had he been buried in Egypt and his tomb discovered today the bone kickers would be identifying it as ... Egyptian. The Patriarchs buried their dead in caves. What sort of burials would the Hebrew have adopted in Egypt? You tell me.
You'll need to be more specific.But if all of the 600,000 had brought two Krugerrands each, they would have had 41 tons of gold to dedicate to the construction of the Tabernacle.
I think I have argued that it would have made sense, when faced with a trek across a desert, that the Hebrews would have brought high value items and essentials and would have abandoned low value or heavy items. This stands. Clay pots are not a good choice for such a journey. When Moses sought a 'jar' I'm sure that there would have been one or two high value jars of gold, silver, electrum, bronze, wood, or stone among the 600,000 followers to choose from. The tabernacle deserved the best. There might even have been the odd high value clay oil or perfume flasks. Something tasteful would do. Try not to think of what I say as 'statements'. I wasn't there. But I am just replying with common sense and a slight knowledge of the bible to your quibbles.
I am just reminding you that What Moses said was only poorly observed by the rank and file. His commands on circumcision were more or less ignored. Don't assume that the Hebrews were all good little Yahwists. There is a stack of evidence pointing the other way.
Thanks for saving me the bother ("I seem to recall ... I must look it up").
I did read the link. I'm afraid that a few kooky exceptions does not deflect from the general character of Greek beliefs detailed by Wiki. You lose.
I have read the "damn linked Wiki page." Mazar appears to place the Ophel in David's city, the Wiki page 'Ophel' is not so certain. I thought that since you said:
that you might have an opinion. I'm not saying you are wrong.
Posted by: help ma boab
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October 1, 2009 5:00 PM
Owlmirror
That is hardly relevant to questions about the city plan of 2,500 years before. Legend has it that Suleiman was quite upset that his architect had not enclosed the City of David. But this is not a big issue. I have heard many interesting attempts to locate the Ophel.
Not that I ignored him. I just couldn't follow him. Maybe I'll come back to that sometime.
You'll need to be a bit more explicit. What contradictions?
Apparently not. Romer's 'Testament':
Whole towns swept away? Who'd have thunk it? I hope Pithom was safe. Seeing as now we can only guess where it is.
It is not! So that's where I have been going wrong!
But if you google 'stilt house nile' you will find that the Sudanese (Western Nilotic peoples) have been using stilt construction for over 5,000 years (hint: Sudan is the next door country to Egypt just up the river). Maybe they kept it a secret from the next door Egyptians who also had to cope with Nile floods.
In this matter I shall be guided by Dr A.R. David who in her book 'Ancient Egypt' details the use of reed construction in the earliest temples which were huts set amongst the village huts (doesn't actually say that village huts were reed too, but you get my drift) and how the bundled reed effect was integrated into Egyptian architecture. She even provides a picture of reed effects carved into the masonry of a later stone built temple. This form of decoration persists in the West to this day. It can be seen on buildings and furniture where it is called ... err ... 'reeding'.
Or you could cast your eye over 'Ancient Egyptian construction and architecture' by Somers Clarke, Reginald Engelbach, which details the construction of habitable reed huts, ancient and modern.
No, it appears not. Not at least as far as 'reed construction' is concerned. But you have little regard for the effect your words have on innocent people. My proctologist booked a cruise holiday on the strength of your comments here. Now he has had to cancel and he won't get his deposit back. It's OK for you, you don't have to face his tearful wife and weeping children. Oh no. YOU JUST DON'T CARE.
Posted by: CJO
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October 1, 2009 6:24 PM
Sweet that you mention Ketef Hinnom. These scrolls cetainly put a hole in those dopey theories that Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are late pseudo-histories
They do no such thing, and you know it. I cannot fathom why you continue to lie about matters of fact, which many here are more knowledgable about than you are, and in any case, that anyone can just check up on for themselves.
The amulets found at Ketef Hinnom containing silver scrolls have inscribed on them a brief prayer in praise of YHWH and affirming a covenant with him. The same prayer finds its way into the bible in Numbers 6, and is known as the Priestly Blessing. The fact that a liturgical fragment of this sort would be included in a late pseudo-history says nothing about the unrelated narrative content of the later text.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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October 1, 2009 6:39 PM
Yawn, HMB, your god exists only between your ears, and your babble is a work of fiction. For you to pretend otherwise, at the length you have, says everything bad about your intelligence and delusional state. Your opinion is not evidence. Never has been, never will be.
Reality without imaginary deities, where hard evidence prevails, is the place to be. Cast off your irrationality and look at the evidence--or rather lack thereof.
Posted by: Zetetic
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October 2, 2009 7:21 AM
HMB @ #443:
Is that really the best excuse you can make for the complete and utter lack of evidence that Exodus really happened? Wow! Really HMB, that's pretty feeble excuse making.Analogy fail, again...
You are quite correct that there are no written records (at least none surviving, as far as we know) of Hitler ordering the Holocaust, but there are several very important differences that you conveniently leave out.
1) Unlike Jewish slavery in Ancient Egypt, we have extensive records of recent Jews being arrested, transported, put in death camps, and murdered by the Nazi regime. There are no records Jews being used as slaves in Egypt at all even after a period of decades (maybe centuries) of enslavement. Nor are there any records of their presence before they were enslaved.
2) Unlike Jewish slavery in Ancient Egypt, we have extensive evidence of recent Jews being arrested, transported, put in death camps, and murdered.
3) Unlike Jewish slavery in Ancient Egypt, we have extensive evidence that there were recent Jews actually living in areas under Nazi control. There is no such evidence for the ancient Jews in Egypt.
4) Unlike Jewish slavery in Ancient Egypt, we have extensive evidence of recent Jews being rescued from the death camps, and relocated elsewhere. There is no evidence of the ancient Jews leaving Egypt, or moving elsewhere as described by the Bible.
5) Unlike Jewish slavery in Ancient Egypt, we have extensive evidence of Jews being arrested, transported, put in death camps, and murdered. We have no evidence of any slave quarters for the Jews. No rubbish dumps with any items that correspond to the ancient Jews. Nothing.
6) The Jews under Nazi controlled territories left written evidence of happened to them in diaries, carving walls and furniture, etc. Ancient Egyptian constructions frequently have "graffiti" hidden in them, yet none of it seems to imply any Jewish origin at all.
7) Other countries (besides Germany) documented what had happened to there Jewish populations. Strangely, none of the other countries mention Egypt having Jewish slaves, or the Pharaoh's army being defeated by a miracle.
8) The Jews that were killed in the Holocaust left behind bodies that could be examined and provided evidence consistent with systematic murder. Were are the ancient Jewish burials? We have found finds from some of the more poor Egyptians, but nothing that can be in any way be identified as Jewish. Even if the ancient Jews were denied burial while slaves, they were supposedly in Egypt before they became slaves after Joseph's death, why no evidence of their deaths from before enslavement? Nothing from even when before they might have assimilated to the local culture? Cultural assimilation doesn't exactly happen overnight you know.
Are you seeing a pattern to this yet?
Have you ever been to the King Tut exhibition HMB? I highly recommend it. One of the displays I remember was where the Pharaoh that followed King Tutankhamen had tried to destroy Tut's name from their history. He failed though because in addition to the tomb their were several hieroglyphic inscriptions were they tried to chisel out the name, but could only do so partly, it left traces where you could tell that something was removed (and could sort of make it out, even without modern analysis). So here we have an example of where a Pharaoh was unsuccessful in removing the name of one king from their culture, or destroying all of the evidence. Yet you want us to believe that another pharaoh could accomplish wiping out absolutely all traces of a long term habitation including the records of other countries, and any other evidence (from the planet) after the ancient Jews left Egypt?
The other problem with your deeply flawed analogy is that whether Hitler can be proven to have ordered the extermination of the Jews is utterly irrelevant to the fact that the Nazis did try to exterminate the Jews, and the evidence supports it. It is logical to assume that Hitler probably did order the Holocaust since Hitler was the supreme leader of the Nazis, and such an operation required a huge amount of resources and manpower. It's also hardly like Hitler spoke "warmly" about the Jewish people in the first place. The second hand corroboration is supportive to those facts, but not essential to make a reasonable conclusion about Hitler's involvement. Also, Hitler had good reason to hide his direct participation and apparently took pains to hide it before the Holocaust was even started. The Pharaoh of ancient Egypt had no reason to hide anything until after the Jews had made their getaway. It much easier to prevent making a record in the first place (when you're the one in charge at least) than it is to remove/destroy all previously created records after the fact.
Further, the question of the reality of Exodus has nothing to do with whether the Pharaoh at the time ordered the enslavement of the Jews or not, and everything to do with whether the Jews actually were slaves that escaped. Assuming (for the sake of argument) that Exodus was true, even if we couldn't find evidence of the Pharaoh's actions there would still be some other evidence that the ancient Jews were there, but still we find nothing that positively supports the position.
Interesting if true (not my field so I won't argue that point) but unfortunately all it proves (if true) is a change in diet among the ancient Jews, it doesn't actually do anything to prove the veracity of Exodus. That would be a Category Error. In other words, the change in diet could have been through other means and then worked into the Exodus narrative. Cultures can change dietary rules for many reasons. They sometimes then make stories to explain the dietary rules. For someone that complains about the "Second hand quotations (with discrepancies)" that blame Hitler for the Holocaust, it seems odd to put any weight behind an observation that doesn't even rise to that level of evidence. In fact the entire Bible can't honestly be said to rise to the level of a second-hand testimony, let alone Exodus.
True, but a lack of evidence that Exodus is true, is still a lack of evidence. Trying to excuse a lack of evidence does nothing to actually support the position that Exodus is truthful.
LOL! ;-)-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HMB @ #444
No problem. At first I though that you were complaining about my not linking to Dawkins' argument against NOMA. Your later posts finally cleared things up, if you had provided more info in the short posts, we might have been able to explain it earlier. I've gotten burned by the automatic moderation myself.
Yet the ancient Jews did have some culture, history, and traditions of their own before coming to Egypt (distinct from the Canaanites). Why is there no evidence of this in Egypt? Do you really think that they all would have become completely indistinguishable from the native Egyptians overnight? Again, you're trying to excuse a lack of evidence that supports your position. Making excuses for why you have no evidence doesn't make the lack of evidence turn into evidence.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HMB @ #445:
Even stilt houses would often leave evidence, trash and otherwise. Again there is still the curious lack of records and evidence to support the position, and a lack of evidence still doesn't support your position.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I know that I must be sounding repetitive about the lack of evidence for Exodus, but it still seems to be an issue for you. The problem HMB is that you can make up all of the excuses and rationalizations that you want to justify the lack of corroborating evidence for the story of Exodus, but none of the excuses will show that it's real. To show that Exodus was real you'll need credible supporting evidence, nothing else will do.
Lets try a simple example of your problem....
There are today, many gullible people that believe humans were created by extraterrestrial aliens as a slave labor force (to mine gold apparently). They also believe that the Bible (and religious stories from nearly every major culture on Earth) are based on a distortion of the history of the alien slave-masters. You may be familiar with them already.
Now, they have zero credible evidence that supports this position, but they firmly believe it to be true. They consistently try to portray nearly every archeological fact as circumstantially supporting their position, even when logically it really doesn't support them at all. When they are challenged as to the lack of credible evidence to show that aliens were ever on Earth, or created modern humans, they will spin out all kinds of excuses for why there is a lack of supporting evidence, thinking that the excuses justify their position. It of course doesn't justify their position at all, only credible supporting evidence will do that.
While you may (or may not) laugh at these people, you are guilty of performing the same fallacious reasoning to justify your belief in Exodus. How is their belief really any less logical than yours? You both are clinging to what you want to believe regardless of a lack of supporting evidence, and you both are trying to rationalize to same absence of credible evidence.
Please tell us logically how these people, that use the same historical "evidence" that you do (and more for that matter since they often use other culture's histories as well) can be wrong, while at the same time you can assert that your position is correct.
Posted by: help ma boab
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October 4, 2009 12:42 PM
aratina cage
Mmmm. Real sciences: Physics; Chemistry; even Biology; and demonstrable theories like Gravitation, Germ theory etc have little difficulty making real predictions about the real future.
It is a bit like claims that " the theory of evolution is as well tested as the theory of gravity". It isn't. I test and rely upon gravity thousands of times per day. There is no dispute about gravity. But I have yet to rely upon any 'truth' about evolution, nor tested it even once.
Drosera
Do you never entertain the possibility that it could have been a miracle? Do you think it possible that any 'miracle' has ever occurred? If you saw one, would you believe it?
a_ray_in_dilbert_space
"The mass of the planet changes". Mmmm all those extra carbon molecules. I suppose that would have altered the length of the day or year. You wouldn't care to quantify that?
Yes, God intervenes rarely. I did many scientific experiments at school and I don't recall him ever interfering. Maybe I should have blamed him for interfering why the experiments went wrong.
"Criteria"? To reveal himself or bless us, I guess.
Zetetic
Funny, someone was just asking me why God did not reveal himself to other nations, civilisations, religions. You have provided the answer. He has revealed himself to other peoples, but the full revelation was in the person of an individual, who, by definition, cannot be shared out. But his message can.
"Atrocities"? Why not let mankind reveal his true glory?
Agreed. Miracles are observable while they are happening. If you are actually there. What or who causes them is not often clear.
OK, not the best analogy in the world. My fish see their feeding time too. If this analogy doesn't help illustrate what such an interface would be like, I shall try to think of a better. But could fish ever understand the origin of the high quality, low entropy electrical energy that flows into their pump? Likewise, our universe exists because of an unobservable source of almost limitless low entropy energy. Almost as convenient for us as the heater and pump are for the fish.
Shifting the Burden of Proof fallacy: You're the one asserting that your particular god exists, with providing evidence to that effect. It's up to you to prove that your god does exist. The absence of a god is the "null hypothesis", it's up to you to provide evidence otherwise.
If you are saying that religion is non-scientific then that is OK by me. But I do hear people asserting that belief in a god is anti-scientific or contrary to science or that no scientist should believe in god. People who assert this should consider my question. A few minutes thought and they should get a bit of an idea of the interface between any supernatural and the natural world.
But I am still entitled to ask. Can anyone think of such an experiment? Any takers? Don't be shy.
I covered this before. "As soon as you claim that a deity has a physical effect in the real world," then the results are observable. These 'results' resemble in every way ordinary nature. "As soon as you claim" is already too late. You need to observe the before, during and after.
BTW is there any way I can search my previous comments? It's hard to keep track as posts do not stick to single issues.
"it's as though people wouldn't take notice of ... the sun stopping, or oceans parting.
Yes, people do notice and record it in their books.
"Amputees suddenly sprouting limbs", interesting this. I have never heard reported an amputated limb being replaced. I suppose it might happen. But I have otherwise assumed that although God does heal present illnesses, he doesn't appear willing to change the past.
Ok. set up your equipment and instruments (maybe cameras, I guess?) and wait.
I'll take it if it is free. God's salvation is free.
He looks at it that way.
That is the way the world works. They knew, or should have known what they were doing. I understand that some of these experiments have even been undertaken by religious groups. People's actions often have bad effects on the innocent. This is just another example.
Those "bigger, more powerful societies" have the opportunity to follow Jesus today. I don't notice them jumping at it. They probably wouldn't have jumped at it then either.
Firstly, we need not assume that 'omniscient' includes knowledge of the future, (I think not).
Secondly, if it does, your rationale would telescope the entire history of the world into a prederministic nanosecond where God would be able to judge the future actions of every man and reward or condemn them accordingly. This obviously hasn't happened.
It's hard to do that and be able to fool a professional caterer that it is the 'best wine'.
Maybe you should try that in rough weather and in front of an audience of experienced, professional sailors.
Why would they do that?
You do have a few telling points on the Captivity and the Exodus.
That's all I was asked for: records of Pharaoh ordering oppression. And as I said: "The records you are demanding are two and a half millennia older." Though I will consider your points:
1. Egyptian records are much patchier than you may think
2. You are correct.
3. "There is no such evidence for the ancient Jews in Egypt." Don't think of them as 'Jews'. Rather Mesopotamians or nomadic herders.
4. Fairish point. Though I think that such an expectation is a bit high.
5. "Unlike Jewish slavery in Ancient Egypt, we have extensive evidence of Jews being arrested, transported, put in death camps, and murdered."
Getting the Hebrews to make mud bricks (which was part of their life anyway) doesn't require much infrastructure. No arrests, no transportation, no cattle cars, no barbed wire or searchlights, no camps. Just demands for mud bricks.
"No rubbish dumps with any items that correspond to the ancient Jews."
What did you have in mind?
6. "Ancient Egyptian constructions frequently have "graffiti" hidden in them, yet none of it seems to imply any Jewish origin at all."
There is no suggestion that they ever worked as stonemasons. You can scratch your name on as many mud bricks on the Nile delta as you want, but three thousand Nile inundations later they will be long gone.
7. I have no idea which records where: "other countries mention" that you could possibly mean.
8. "Cultural assimilation doesn't exactly happen overnight you know."
Joseph assimilated culturally overnight to the extent that he was unrecognisable to his own brothers.
And please tell me which cultural markers would have identified the Hebrews at any stage of the period in Egypt.
------------
Yes. You are pushing my analogy far beyond my reply to Owlmirror's:
But I shall come back to 'records' later.
------------
Again, what do you have in mind?
---------------
The reed houses/stilt thing was where poor Owlmirror thought he had caught me out on an unsupportable assertion in what was only a mere aside. He wouldn't let it go. He made me go to the bother of looking it up. You can follow this dialogue above.
------------------
I'll think about your last question, from the hip my answer would be that to claim all scriptures as their own would require a large amount of 'interpretation'. But the bible story requires little interpretation to arrive at a gospel of sorts.
Records
I had a dialogue with Owlmirror about pharaohs' names. He was exercised that the pharaoh's in Genesis and Exodus were not named.
He has yet to answer but my curiosity was piqued. I wondered how Necho described in his records his victory over king Josiah, in particular his Egyptian name for 'Josiah', and his subsequent crushing defeat at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar.
I found these records surprisingly elusive. Since there are many here who have strong opinions on the extent of Egyptian record keeping, does anyone know of his name for Josiah?
Posted by: Josh
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October 4, 2009 12:52 PM
There is no dispute about evolution within science.
Well yes, you have...you just refuse to acknowledge it--but you and I have been over that.
Also, I'm sorry I haven't yet gotten back to you on the sharks. This has been a very busy week, and it's much more difficult task to hunt down good references if I don't know what specific sharks we're talking about. I haven't forgotten you, however.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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October 4, 2009 12:57 PM
HMB, still showing yourself to be a "total fool". You have no hard evidence, just your illogical and inane sophistries and biases. You waste your time posting here, not ours. You will never change our minds, since you have no hard physical evidence, which is absolutely required for that to happen. When you finally grasp that simple concept, you will begin moving toward wisdom.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
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October 4, 2009 12:58 PM
tl;dr
Posted by: Josh
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October 4, 2009 1:01 PM
HMB is correct here. The Nile Delta is (and has been through the time period in question) a very good place to graze stock and grow crops.
Posted by: Knockgoats
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October 4, 2009 1:26 PM
Real sciences: Physics; Chemistry; even Biology; and demonstrable theories like Gravitation, Germ theory etc have little difficulty making real predictions about the real future. - help ma boab
You once again show your abysmal ignorance of science. Scientific prediction is from the known to the unknown. Evolutionary biologists make and test such predictions all the time. Such as, for example, the presence of a fossil like Tiktaalik in the very area it was found. The vast majority of chemists, physicists, etc. would of course agree that evolutionary biology is a well-established science, with 150 years of expanding the scope and detail of its findings.
It is a bit like claims that " the theory of evolution is as well tested as the theory of gravity". It isn't. I test and rely upon gravity thousands of times per day. There is no dispute about gravity. But I have yet to rely upon any 'truth' about evolution, nor tested it even once. - hmb
Good grief, that's stupid even for you. Are you really unable to distinguish between the force of gravity and the theory of gravitation? Do you think people had trouble dealing with gravity in everyday life before Galileo and Newton came along? Your body, of course, deals with evolution every day - evolutionary change is the primary reason you need an immune system capable of dealing with novel threats. Fortunately (for you, it's rather unfortunate for the rest of us), your immune system is a lot brighter than you are.
He has revealed himself to other peoples, but the full revelation was in the person of an individual, who, by definition, cannot be shared out.
The depths of your idiocy never cease to amaze. Why not provide multiple such individuals?
But I do hear people asserting that belief in a god is anti-scientific or contrary to science or that no scientist should believe in god.
Believe in gods is irrational - just like belief in leprachauns or werewolves - because there is no evidence whatever for any such entities. Now a scientist may be an excellent scientist and believe in gods, leprachauns or werewolves - but such beliefs are certainly inconsistent with the commitment to rationality that is fundamental to science.
But I have otherwise assumed that although God does heal present illnesses, he doesn't appear willing to change the past.
WTF? How would miraculously healing an amputation constitute changing the past, any more than removing a cancer, which your invisible friend is alleged to do? What does it have against amputees?
"It's not about trying to "dupe God into behaving like a laboratory rat"
He looks at it that way.
Even most of the creobots we get here aren't quite arrogant enough to claim they know the mind of their invisible friend.
"It also means that god is deliberately letting innocent people suffer just to avoid providing evidence for it's own existence."
That is the way the world works.
Because that's the way your invisible friend set it up, on your account. If your invisible friend exists, it's quite clearly a callous shitbag, at best.
Posted by: Josh
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October 4, 2009 1:28 PM
Probably true, but this isn't how floods work. You don't get three thousand inundations affecting the same mudbrick wall. You're using a Sean Pitman view of floods here. Remember, when a river floods, that flood event essentially does two things to the landscape that it affects.
1. The initial surge of floodwaters may do some scouring of the flood plain. This is only going to be a big deal if it's a big ass flood, and it's only going to be locally important even in the area affected by the flood event.
2. The flood is going to deposit sediment. I've personally watched fairly small streams in Pennsylvania deposit almost a foot of sand in a single event. A big flood on a big river can bury half a wall in a day. It's also going to cover up any stray bricks that are hanging around and all of the trash (food related and otherwise) that people love to collect around their dwellings. The people living on the floodplain cannot dig out all of that shit that was buried. Usually, what they do is exactly what we do today: start building again right on that freshly deposited flood sediment. If you have people living in an area that accumulates sediment at the rate of a major river delta, then there is evidence.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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October 4, 2009 2:46 PM
What about meteorology? I'm not sure you ever returned to the Here's our problem thread where I took notes that rebutted your misquotations and misrepresentation of Armand Leroi's TV program, What Darwin Didn't Know. Here is the last of my notes from that program:So, is what you wrote willful misrepresentation of Leroi's words or a misunderstanding of his words? By the way, your very existence is a testament to evolution, sucker.Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
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October 4, 2009 3:28 PM
"I'd rather have people die horrible deaths than lift a finger to save them. That's because I'm a loving god." And people wonder why we're not impressed by their favorite deity.
Posted by: Drosera
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October 5, 2009 3:44 AM
hmb @449,
1. I did as a child (before I was about 10 years old). Later, no. The miracles were too pedestrian, too clumsy for that. A real god would have come up with better ones.
2. In the same way that it is 'possible' that an empty rubber balloon inflates all by itself.
3. Depends on the scale of the miracle and whether or not there would be independent witnesses. For example, if the great pyramid of Cheops would suddenly find itself in my back yard, while disappearing from its site in Egypt, and this would be confirmed because there were crowds of people swarming in my neighborhood to see it for themselves, news reports on all channels, etc., then I might be inclined to consider this a miracle. But even then it could still be a trick played by an alien life form using some unknown technology. If on the other hand something 'impossible' happened that was only known to me, then I would sooner take this as evidence that I was hallucinating or misjudging the event than believe that it was a miracle.
Posted by: help ma boab
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October 5, 2009 7:58 AM
CJO
So he has a "literary craft" but cannot even represent "difficult ... concepts" like 'true story'?
Purrrrleeeeeeeeezzze!
---------------------
You are correct about the text of KH2 which cotains the Priestly Blessing. But you do not mention KH1 which contained expressions found in several places in the OT. This is consistent with the scrolls being an anthology of existing writings, but of course it is not absolute proof. But it does tell against the late-pseudohistory theory. My:
was a quote from Wiki.
It would be pleasant if we could have discussions without accusations such as 'lie about matters of fact' when I do not lie and we are discussing matters of opinion. If you do this again I shall put you in my 'ignore folder'.
Drosera
I suspect that what follows is one of your fallacies. I'm not good at them, so help me out. Is it 'red herring' or 'appeal to consequences'? Or both? Tricky.
Example?
Apart from the ones recorded in the bible many happen today even to the sort of xians who don't believe that God really does that sort of thing any more. Find some sober xian friends and ask them. A bank administrator friend of mine developed pernicious anaemia. It is incurable but his condition was managed by periodic B12 injections. The cyclic deteriorations in his condition were going to force his retirement. He asked his xian friends to pray for him, even though their church didn't really believe that God did miracles any more. His recovery was instantaneous and the medics had to cease treatment. I have heard of many miracles and have experienced one big one. I can assure you that if you ever hear an oncologist utter the word 'Miracle' that you will never, ever, ever, forget it.
It comes as a surprise to most people that there are lots of things that God can't do.
Yes, you have correctly identified a trend. It seems that God is satisfied, pleased, even delighted by quite meagre results. I am quite glad about that.
Knockgoats
You have been behaving yourself so I am tempted to let you out of the folder
No, that is extrapolation. It pays to be aware of when you are doing that. Prediction is when you let go a pencil and predict that in the near future that it will fall to the floor.
Sheeesh! You guys are determined to push Appeal to Authority to the absolute limit. I have a friend who is a real Professor of a real Department of a real Science in a real University. He was telling me that he has been made head of school. We often discuss evolution and it is clear that he knows as much or as little about it as I do. He assumes that evolutionists are as academically rigorous as he is in his area. I dare say he would be appalled at the way terms such as 'observed' and 'fact' are routinely tortured and murdered on these pages.
God revealed himself by coming in the person of his son. That one God has an internal structure of three persons is difficult enough for mortal man to grasp. Thousands would do my head in. We may just have to accept that incarnate God is limited to one place at one time.
Supernatural, perhaps, but hardly 'irrational'. Many xians apply a deal of rational thought to their beliefs. I know I do.
AFAIK there are no replacements of limbs related in the Bible and I have never heard of a modern instance. I guess that cutting off a limb happened in the past. God often halts or cures completely present disease but altering what has been done seems to be different.
There are sufficient warnings in the Bible about putting God to any sort of test, and sufficient warnings against seeking miraculous signs to conclude that he would not be best pleased at these efforts.
Josh
All good stuff. My understanding is that, in the delta, any spot that was immune from flooding was sufficiently valuable as a permanent town where a tell would build up due to collapses due to the limited life of mud brick. Less favourable sites would be protected from the annual inundation by flood management and irrigation ditches but would be in danger from exceptional flooding due to heavy monsoons, the results of which I cited in Romer above. This would cause scouring rather than the controlled annual deposition.Wiki:
The Israelites appear to have been involved in a new-build. This may well have been vulnerable to exceptional floods.
Also note that mud brick structures would be recycled as fertiliser after a period of failed Nile floods and subsequent famine.
It would be interesting to know if any inscriptions on a mud brick have actually survived as some here seem to expect. I certainly don't.
Tis Himself
Yes, because I know more about taxes than he does.
No, because I have heard and seen cases where Doctors have diagnosed and treated gall stones successfully. Evobots do not do anything successfully.
-----------------------
That is the way the world works. God did not originally make it like that and one day he shall put it all right. All of human history is the story of the struggle between good and evil. Choose which side you want to be on. It is your decision.
Posted by: Josh
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October 5, 2009 8:22 AM
It certainly comes as a surprise to me.
Posted by: Knockgoats
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October 5, 2009 8:33 AM
HMB,
No, that is extrapolation.
It is scientific prediction. Of course it does predict the future, because it says "If we undertake the following investigations, this is what we will find." For example, the prediction that a fish-tetrapod intermediate such as Tiktaalik (which you repeatedly lied about in calling it a "mudskipper" - you are indeed a lying liar who tells lies) would be found in the formation where it was found.
We often discuss evolution and it is clear that he knows as much or as little about it as I do.
Well, that's a pretty astonishing level of ignorance. However, he does presumably know that you cannot arbitrarily amputate large parts of science (not just most of biology, but practically all of geology, and large parts of radiation physics for a start) because they don't fit the myths of bronze-age yokels.
God revealed himself by coming in the person of his son. That one God has an internal structure of three persons is difficult enough for mortal man to grasp. Thousands would do my head in. We may just have to accept that incarnate God is limited to one place at one time.
You are clearly capable of believing any amount of complete crap, so I don't see why this should give you pause.
Since you bring it up, though, we do of course know that doctrinally orthodox Christianity is false, because the doctrine of the hypostatic union involves a logical contradiction. Nothing can be "wholly god and wholly man" or "true God and true man", because the attributes of "God" and "man" are mutually incompatible.
I guess that cutting off a limb happened in the past. God often halts or cures completely present disease but altering what has been done seems to be different.
Don't be even more stupid than you can help. The growth of a cancer "happened in the past" just as much as a loss of a limb. Many animals can regrow limbs - are they changing the past when they do it? The Bible alleges that God brought the dead back to life on more than one occasion - how was that not changing the past if regrowing a limb is? The real difference, of course, is that spontaneous remission does happen in cancer, while limbs never regrow - so there are no cases to be falsely attributed to the actions of your imaginary sky fairy.
That is the way the world works. God did not originally make it like that and one day he shall put it all right.
Why let it go wrong? Why not put it right now? Your god, if it existed, could only be a psychopath, indifferent to or actively enjoying human suffering. That anyone worships such a being is disgusting.
All of human history is the story of the struggle between good and evil. Choose which side you want to be on. It is your decision.
Since your god, if it existed, would be a psychopath, its side is clearly the side of evil.
Posted by: Josh
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October 5, 2009 8:42 AM
Yep, as well as a buildup of human trash (biological and non-biological) and a component of wind-blown sediment added in (which, while always present, is a much larger issue on the Nile Delta than it would be on, say, the Orinoco Delta).
To some extent, sure, although I think that the 30 year figure is a bit too short. Also, mudbrick in a tell decays much more slowly once it's buried than while it's exposed at the surface. A good archaeologist can discern pieces of mudbrick in a deposit, even if they're "ghosts" (for one thing, the sediment that makes up the "ghost" will probably be much more homogeneous than that immediately encasing it and might well be a predominantly smaller grain-size (silt versus sandy-silt, say). Combine this with the occasional bone that has cut-marks on it and a piece of pottery here and there, and what does this spell? Evidence of occupation.
Keep in mind, also, that even really big floods, which have an initial scouring component, don't scour universally in the area that they're affecting.
Posted by: Josh
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October 5, 2009 9:02 AM
Science isn't done within the pages of blogs. And besides, many of the people who comment here aren't scientists. The rigor with which readers talk about evolution in the comment threads of Pharyngula has exactly nothing to do with how rigorous evolutionary biologists are when they practice the science. Pharyngula could be the most demanding evolution discussion forum on the planet and it would mean exactly nothing to the science itself*. Turn your eye toward the technical literature. Come back with the same complaint and you'll have a point.
*Except perhaps as a possible sounding-board of review or, I don't know, as a generator of ideas which were then turned into later studies/papers.
Posted by: Josh
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October 5, 2009 9:11 AM
Prediction is also, absolutely, when you say "Huh, I think I'm likely to find taxon A in rocks of X age in this general paleo-region*."
*The cherry on the cupcake is of course when you then go and do exactly that.
Posted by: Drosera
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October 5, 2009 10:18 AM
hmb @459,
No, it’s called proof by example. My thesis here was that the Bible can inspire people to commit atrocities, or that it can be used to justify such acts. After all, the vile mass-murderer Moses is depicted in the Bible as a capital fellow — although it is true that in the end he too upset the sky fairy and didn’t make it into the promised land. But that was not because god had a problem with his war crimes.
Congratulations. I’m happy for you. But such ‘miracles (and everybody has heard of anecdotes like these) merely illustrate our ignorance concerning the workings of our body. Do you really think that your god is secretly stalking hospitals, and now and then, when nobody is looking, decides that this or that hopeless case should be cured? Tell that to the mother of a child that died of a brain tumor.
No, it comes as a surprise that people like you think they can claim to know this.
It’s evidently nothing but a silly invention. God fathered himself to have himself tortured to death to placate himself to take away the sins of people he created himself who ate against his wish of a tree he himself planted in a garden haunted by a talking snake. It never ceases to amaze me that intelligent human beings seriously believe this. It does not make any sense at all. How can you 'grasp' it? Why would you even try?
Posted by: CJO
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October 5, 2009 3:39 PM
I believe 'critical history' was the term I used. Please tell me the ancient Hebrew term for "history" as in 'critical reconstruction of past events with reference to sources and the methods employed to assess the reliability of same'.
It contains a single expression that is found, IIRC, in Deuteronomy and Exodus in slightly altered forms. An "anthology" is not a condensation of similar material found elsewhere into a single expression, it is a collection of disparate materials! Clearly, the influence runs the other way, as the late pseudohistory would predict. Older, formulaic source texts end up slightly altered for use in invented contexts.
Posted by: Knockgoats
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October 5, 2009 3:50 PM
I've come to the conclusion that help ma boab is, in fact, God - or at any rate, thinks he is. How else to explain his intimate knowledge of Old Nobodaddy's dislikes and limitations?
Posted by: Drosera
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October 5, 2009 4:07 PM
Who knows, Knockgoats, who knows.
Posted by: Owlmirror
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October 6, 2009 3:37 AM
Why are you so lazy? This is not exactly rocket science. This was classical antiquity, not some First Dynasty rulers that we only know of from king-lists. Both of these were written about by Herodotus, even.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necho_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apries
What was in the original paragraph: If God were real, rather than a fake, made-up, fictional being, it could provide evidence of its existence here and now.
God could speak, on his own, right here and right now.
Why does a supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing being need losers like you to assert his existence, without evidence?
So you contradict yourself yet again, and pull more nonsense out of your arse.
Not to mention contradicting the actual archaeology. Hey, why don't you go back in time and tell them they were all doing it wrong?
Judahite burial practices and beliefs about the dead
By Elizabeth Bloch-Smith:
(emphases all mine -- so up until relatively late, every Israelite was "doing" grave goods)
You understand wrong, of course, as usual, because you're a lazy moron.
Wikipedia on Ketef Hinnom:
Life in Judah from the perspective of the dead,
Elizabeth Bloch-Smith. Near Eastern Archaeology. Boston: Jun 2002. Vol. 65, Iss. 2; p. 120 :
And so on and so forth.
As I keep having to tell you, you're an ignorant lazy-arse moron who pulls bullshit archaeology out of his arse, and contradicts himself all the time.
If the Israelites "did not have their own culture", they would have been indistinguishable from other Egyptians, and there would have been no way to enslave them out of all the other people of Egypt.
Since the scrolls are (a) later than the first temple built to Yahweh and (b) simply contain formulaic text incorporated in those books, they do no such thing.
And there could be no formulaic texts in praise of the god of their forefather Israel, which you claim they would have been faithful to? Not even the name Yahweh alone?
"Covering their own back"? Are you now trying to claim that Hitler was completely innocent of wanting to exterminate the Jews, and it was all just a conspiracy of lower-ranking Nazis?
Are you insane, or is your stupidity genuinely that deep?
Why not? So much else from Egypt has survived, and the Pharaoh (which damn Pharaoh?) would hardly have been ashamed of it.
I'm astonished you can read English. You so often don't bother that I wonder if you're not just faking it.
Since there was no Exodus, it does not date after it.
And you keep misunderstanding: There is nothing preventing them from having a taboo before it was written down, which would have been evidence for a distinct culture -- or is that the culture that you keep insisting that they both did and didn't have, despite (some of them? most of them? none of them?) keeping faith with the God of their fathers -- or not, depending on which shit you pull from your lazy arse at any given moment to throw at me.
Since it's supported by evidence, it's not a fallacy.
Since you can't muster evidence for a single tiny shred of support for the myth you argue is "true", you have nothing but fallacy.
Nonsense and bullshit, yet again. They maintained a taboo on pork despite the fact that the cult of Yahweh had not yet obtained its political and cultural monopoly.
You're trying to be clever, I suspect. As usual, you fail utterly.
Well, it looks like we are in agreement: Any evidence of the Israelites in Egypt must be pulled from someone's arse, because said evidence does not actually exist, and cannot exist, because the bible story of the Exodus was itself pulled from someone's arse.
You mean besides the fact that your comment contradicts what the bible says?
Once again, your stone ignorance betrays you.
The name "Yahweh" is used throughout Genesis. The last point I can find quickly is in Genesis 49:18, where Israel blesses his sons. Obviously, the name "Yahweh" is intended to have been known by Israel and all of his sons.
This would only be true if the Documentary Hypothesis were correct, and Exodus -- along with the entire rest of the Pentateuch -- is a late fabrication.
Once again, you contradict the bible and pull bullshit out from your arse even after the bible citation has been shown to contradict you.
Why are you such a perverse moron?
Well, parts of it are or were.
Talk to the sedimentologists.
Says the lazy-arse moron who can't be bothered to look up two classical-era Pharaohs whose names have known analogs in the Bible.
I concede that the delta contains excellent farmland.
Urine-flavoured, and marinated up your own arse.
Posted by: Wowbagger, Man-Hating Man of Pharyngula
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October 6, 2009 4:51 AM
Not to mention that fact that, since said god is omnipotent, he knew it was all going to happen and yet never at any time attempted to modify the design in such a way to prevent it from happening.
It's like deliberately installing a faulty washer in a tap and then screaming at it and smashing the shit out of it with a sledgehammer when it started dripping.
Posted by: Drosera
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October 6, 2009 5:25 AM
Wowbagger,
Actually,
godhelp ma boab said @449 that god probably can't look into the future...Posted by: Owlmirror
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October 6, 2009 6:08 AM
So, scripts are the only significant indicator of culture? The Akkadians, the Sumerians, and the Babylonians were all identical? And the English cannot be distinguished from the Italians, who cannot be distinguished from the Germans, who cannot be distinguished from the Finns? Same script, same culture?
How fucking stupid do you have to be to come up with that?
True. Because they were in fact Semites who arose among the Canaanites.
And you fall down with massive FAIL so, so quickly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pottery_in_the_Southern_Levant#Israelite_Pottery
The simplistic copied pottery adopted from the Canaanites was distinctive once the Israelites started using it exclusively.
And if they had used a simple copied style in Egypt, it would have been distinctive there, too.
Except that the bible says they became rich. Gosh, how did that happen?
Neither of the proposed sites are "rotting".
Poor as your own non-existent scholarship?
The actual good scholarship says that the story is a fake.
Moron. Joseph was the one skeleton they wouldn't be finding, once again, according to your own goddamned bible.
Ex 13:19 -- Moses took the bones of Joseph with him because Joseph had made the sons of Israel swear an oath. He had said, "God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up with you from this place."
However, Joseph did have heirs to inherit his wealth.
"We're in the money..."
Don't forget all the loose change that went into the Golden Calf!
Well, I already think of them as proctological phantasies, so that's OK.
Slight, indeed.
And your common sense is as common as shit.
Rank, indeed.
And then Joshua got tapped to be barber-surgeon. What, he snipped several hundred thousand penises all by himself?
Some guys have all the fun.
I don't. The same archaeology that says that the Exodus didn't happen says that the Israelites were not monotheists/monolatrists until after they were conquered.
And their not being good little Yahwists argues all the more that the entire thing is fiction. They're travelling with a God who farts out dozens of miracles, and they don't agree to do everything this God says?
Including beliefs as kooky as, and far kookier than, Christianity. I win.
You claimed above that they had nothing in the desert. Poor, shivering, impoverished waifs.
Different geography, different flood-coping methods (Sudan is flat; Egypt has an actual channel for the river.)
And how late were these actual reed buildings in use?
You mean, the temporary shelters constructed by people who live in brick houses?
I'm afraid so, as far as the Israelite city of Goshen being entirely constructed of reed huts.
Your proctologist should prescribe a Cone of Shame for your arse so as to help keep you from pulling crap from out of it.
Posted by: Owlmirror
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October 6, 2009 6:15 AM
The true name of God whom HMB fervently worships is "Confirmation Bias".
Posted by: Drosera
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October 6, 2009 6:52 AM
HMB belongs to a one-man sect within Christianity.
Posted by: Zetetic
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October 6, 2009 7:17 AM
Sorry again for the SIWOTI everyone.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HMB @ #449:
Is blatantly false on your part HMB. We've already given you examples of some of the successful predictions evolutionary theory has made and there are plenty more, as usual you chose to ignore them because your are so dogmatically close-minded. There are plenty of other examples that we could give you, but you'd would certainly just ignore them too. As for not relying on evolutionary theory, we had already pointed out to you on the "Dilemma" thread that was true either. If you've eaten grains, gotten your seasonal flu vaccinations, used an increasingly large number of technological items, followed your doctor's advise to take the full course of antibiotics, or filled up your car's gas tank...you've used evolutionary theory even if you didn't directly do so, or were aware of it at the time.I know that this may surprise you HMB but in fact the universe doesn't revolve around you,just because you don't think that you use evolutionary theory doesn't make evolution any less true (even if your claim about not using it was accurate). Tell us HMB, if you've never flown on an airplane does that make aerodynamics invalid? Of course not.
First you need to credible provide evidence that an actual miracle actually happened. Odd though, how it's never anything like the impressive miracles mentioned in the bible. Instead when that challenge is issued it's suddenly any event that is in any way uncommon/unusual or very fortunate, but entirely possible without divine intervention, that's a "miracle". It's easy to claim "miracles" when your side continually lowers the bar.
I hope that was your idea of a joke. ARIDS' comment was simply referring to the idea that the mass for the carbon had to come from somewhere and that it would have a mensurable effect. Even if the carbon was just "poofed" into existence, the total mass would be negligible to the planet's rotation.
You have yet to provide credible evidence that your god intervenes at all.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HMB @ #449:
Bwaahahahaha!!! Thanks for the belly laugh! Earlier I had mentioned that you deliberately tried to define your god in such a way as to make it non-falsifiable, here you show that once again. Let's see your "logic".....According to you (HMB) the god of Christianity is the source of human morality.
You seem to deny any other sources for morality.
So now when confronted with the observation that every culture in human history, even those that predate Judeo-Christianity and never came in contact with them (until relatively recently), you consider that to be evidence of a miracle? How exactly do you justify that conclusion? What evidence do you have that positively supports the idea that they got their morality from your particular god? What about their rules that are considered "immoral" by Christianity?
Funny how once again your "miracle" HMB is exactly what we would expect from a world without your god, isn't it? But you again insist on defining whatever observations there are into fitting your preconceptions regardless whether it makes any sense or can be logically deduced from the observation. Once again you are failing to distinguish yourself from the people that believe that aliens made humans. You're just cramming what ever you can to fit your dogma, rather than trying to provide credible evidence of the dogma's validity in the first place.
If only Judeo-Christian cultures had a sense of basic morality, then no doubt you would claim that as proof that your god was real.
But when it's clear that other (not Judeo-Christians) have a sense of basic morality that pre-dates Judaism... well to you that's proof of your god as well.
As usual you want to have it both ways, you're not try to offer proof of your religion's validity. You're trying to rationalize your irrational position.
Nonsensical statement that attempts to dodge the point. Why does your god allow far worse things than the mythical enslavement of the ancient Jews go on without intervention?
Finally some progress! Don't forget though that some of the really big ones should also leave evidence that could be found much later (Noah's flood for example).
Factually incorrect. The Universe already has the energy (needed for life) inside of it from the moment that it came into being. It doesn't need an outside source for the energy needed for life, any more than it needs an outside source for it's matter.
Yes, that is what I've been saying. Glad to see that we agree on that point. The problem is that the assertion that God is real is often supported by arguments that are anti-scientific, such as attacking evolution, attacking an old Earth, attacking the "Big Bang" Theory, etc. As for someone saying that no scientists should believe in God, there maybe some that feel that way, but that is their opinion. For me, the only problem is when a scientist allows his/her beliefs on religion or politics to get in the way of being objective, and tries to use the "imprimatur" of science to lend credibility to unscientific beliefs.My own opinion is that if you want to say something like "I believe in God, I know that it's not logically provable and it's just my opinion, but I believe it because that is what I want to believe." Then, I have no problem with that statement. My problem come with trying to justify one's religious belief by logical fallacies, misrepresenting evidence, attacking science, etc. In my view, that crosses a potentially dangerous line from stating what one clearly recognizes as an opinion, to trying to distort facts to support a particular dogma.
Speaking of logical fallacies....As we've already made clear that is committing the fallacy of trying to Shift the Burden of proof, by insisting that we prove a negative, rather than you proving the positive of your assertion.Can you ask the question? Sure, but it's an intellectually dishonest one, and deep down inside I think that you actually know that. Or, have you found a way to prove that there isn't a magical trans-dimensional dragon living in my garage? When you can answer my question, then it'll be fair for you to ask yours. Or are magical trans-dimensional dragons not your cup of tea? Maybe you can try an disprove there actually is a magical, flying, fat man in a red suit named Santa Claus? Any argument you can make to disprove the mythical version of Santa Claus, can be countered with exactly the same arguments and "logic" that you are using to defend "God" and the validity of the Bible.
Really? So how exactly does water transmuting into wine for no reason "resemble nature"? How does an entire sea parting "resemble nature"? How does a global flood that comes from nowhere (and covers the entire planet, magically leaving both fresh and salt water fish/amphibians untouched, only to disappear back into nowhere) "resemble nature"? How does an eternally burning bush "resemble nature"?The point that you are missing is that any "miracle" that is significant enough that it should leave physical evidence, should be detectable even after the fact. What you are trying to do is once again justify the lack of evidence that you are asserting as a fact. Yes, the more minor miracles (water into wine for example) would be impossible to detect thousands of years after the fact, but you and others assert that miracles also are happening today. Yet you still can't provide good evidence of that. Rationalizing your lack of evidence still does nothing to support your position.
Try using the "find" function in your browser.
They also record lies, myths, and propaganda (which IMO is what Exodus really is) in books, this is why you need evidence to support the claim. By the way, HMB, why don't you believe the claims of miracles from other religious? Let me guess...Because they don't have any evidence supporting the claim?Regardless, you were missing the point..I was clearly alluding to a situation where if such things had happened in recent history. In other words if such miracles actually did happen today. Since you also seem to think that such things couldn't be detected today.
As Knockgoats pointed out...regrowing a limb wouldn't be changing the past, it would be changing the present just like curing a disease. Besides by that logic of yours, curing a disease would also be "changing the past" since curing any disease involves undoing past actions that caused the disease in the first place. You're rationalizing again, HMB.
Been tried and failed. Then someone like you comes along and just dismisses the lack of results by claiming, as you did earlier that your God "can't be tested". Convenient, isn't it for you to have such a "gift" of rationalization?
So are the blessings and compliments of the magical trans-dimensional dragons in my garage. What does that prove?
Really? No doubt "He" told you this, right? Or are you just rationalizing again? (See what I mean 2 comments above?)
Yes, coincidentally just the same way the world would work if there was no God. Gee, I wonder why?
Rationalizing again. How is an innocent person aware of "what they were doing"? Do you really think that babies murdered in a "ethnic cleansing ", knew what they were doing? How about someone that catches a lethal disease for just being at the wrong place, at the wrong time? How should they have known?
Yet your god had no trouble "throwing his weight around" and making it's intention clear before, why didn't it try harder to influence many other societies back then. Again no evidence the it ever tried outside of stories of Judeo-Christian mythology. As for today's societies, there's still that pesky lack of evidence again, and a lack of any objectively clear advantage over more secular methods of society.
So being all knowing doesn't mean being all knowing, huh? My what a convenient rationalization yet again!
Yet again exactly as if your god doesn't actually exist. Weird how reality keeps working out that way, isn't it?
Bwahahahaha! You really don't know much about magic do you? There are many ways to pull that off. You can bribe the "caterer" to make that claim. Social exceptions/pressure will often cause people to say (or even perceive) things differently than that normally would, so-called stage hypnotists rely on this fact of human behavior (what with us being social animals). The most simple explanation though, is to simply buy/acquire good wine and use it in the trick (instead of the cheap stuff). Of course that still assuming the validity of the story in the first place, rather than a story with "miracles" inspired by local magic tricks.
How do you know that those were the actual conditions and not embellishment after the fact? Have credible evidence to support it even happened at all, let alone the conditions? How do you know that some one didn't see a similar trick (under better conditions) or heard about one and decided to add it into the story to give it more drama?
What you think that they lived in total isolation? That they never met or traded with any one else?
You would think that the events at that time, if Exodus was true, would be kind of important to them.
You left out quarters to house them in, food, water, records to keep track how how many there were (as with other slaves), etc.
As usual the only thing you have to support this claim is an unfounded assertion based on the Bible. Tell us HMB, can you learn ancient (or modern) Egyptian well enough to "pass as a native" overnight?
Ancient Egypt was at one time the "superpower" of it's time. Many cultures, such as the ancient Greeks dealt with them. Other cultures refer to Egypt having slaves, but none of them seem to mention Jewish slaves. Also, ancient Egypt getting beat in such a manner would have been a major source of international discussion. Strangely no mention of a group of slaves and their god defeating a major military force at the time.
Gee I don't know....how about finding references to ancient Jewish mythology and ceremonies? How about writings dating to about the correct time, that aren't Egyptian (or are identifiable as one of the other groups at that time)?Once again though it all comes down to you just making a baseless assumption that Exodus is true, because that is what you decided. Some other Christians take it as only an allegory, just like you keep saying the Bible is, when your not taking it literally. Your still just trying to excuse the lack of evidence for something that you have no logical reason to believe is true.
Perhaps somewhat, but you are trying to justify what would have been a major event at the time, lacking any evidence on poor records and people that magically blend into a new culture overnight.
ROFLMAO! So the only difference that you can come up with is that your position takes a little less effort?!?!Actually that's not surprising at all.
I thank you though for admitting that there is no real difference (intellectually) between your own position, and those that think that aliens made humans.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A few observations...HMB @ #459:
1) What about all of the people that had peopl pray for them, but died anyhow? How do you figure them into your determination? Let me guess...God's Will, right? That would be trying to have it both ways again. How about people that have serious illness and get better without people praying for them? What about people that got better that prayed to other gods?
2) The problem with anecdotal accounts is that there are a lot of possible confounders. Sometimes people are misdiagnosed and then credit their "recovery" to a miracle.
3) Sometime people do go into spontaneous remission, it's well know even if not well understood (research is being done on such remissions though). Again it doesn't prove anything except that someone got better.
4) Many cases of "miraculous cures" tend to occur with prayer alongside conventional treatment, but it's the deity of choice that often gets the credit (not the medical staff, or medical science).
So now all-powerful doesn't mean all powerful, just as being all-knowing doesn't mean all-knowing. Yet again you're trying to rationalize your god's failings.
Heh...God the slacker/underachiever. You keep setting that bar lower and lower HMB.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No...Knockgoats had it correct, you're wrong. Once again, HMB, you are demonstrating your lack of knowledge on how science actually works. In science you have to try and make a falsifiable prediction about something that you don't know to be true, but can determine should be true based on the theory (if it's correct). The point of doing so is to challenge the theory, to put it to the test. Note that this is the exact opposite of what you have been doing HMB, where you you only make unfalsifiable assumptions.HMB @ #459:
For example, Darwin and Wallace both predicted that there were moths in Madagascar that had the specialized mouth parts to take advantage of the orchid angraecum sesquipedale. At the time no one had seen a moth that could take advantage of the orchid's 30cm nectar tube. Knowing that (according to evolutionary theory) that the relationship between plants and nectar drinking insects is symbiotic, they predicted that eventually a moth that is able specialized to take advantage of the orchid's nectar (and the orchid taking advantage of the moth's pollen dissemination) would be found. Eventually the moth xanthopan morganii was found, 21 years after Darwin's death.
Another example...according the Einstein's theories on gravity, a rotating body such as the Earth would produce a gravitation effect known as "frame dragging" that couldn't be detected at that time (the technology sensitive enough didn't exist yet). Just a few years ago though, a scientific experiment was able to detect just such an effect confirming Einstein's prediction.
Still wrong even after I had corrected you on that misuse of the term before. Once again you deliberately left out the parts from Knockgoats' statement, that justify why it's not an argument from authority. Knockgoats made it clear in the statement, why the experts hold that position. As we explained to you before, it's not an argument from authority if the experts have a logical reason for their position and evidence to back it up.An argument from authority rests solely on the opinion of the authority in question, not on their rational for holding it.
Funny coming from the guy that doesn't even seem to understand what a scientific prediction is. As we explained before it's you that seems to be having the trouble understanding what the terms mean, and in what context. Josh also already cover the other reasons why your comment has nothing to do with an honest critique of science. If the belief is neither logically justified nor supported by reasonably credible evidence, then it is irrational. Just because many Christians use a superficial appearance of logic to justify their beliefs, as you have done, doesn't make it rational. Just like you, they are trying to rationalize a position that has no objective basis greater than that of any other religion.
I had already pointed out to you the "convenience" of that assertion, and how little logic it actually makes for a being that wants to convince humans of it's reality. Another demonstrably false assertion as we have repeatedly shown you over this and other threads, but you refuse to even look at the evidence in your close-minded dogmatism.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOL! Don't forget his aspects of "Morton's Demon" and "Dunning-Kruger"!Owlmirror:
Hey! That gives us a trinity!
;-)
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Well goodnight for now.
Posted by: Knockgoats
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October 6, 2009 8:21 AM
Owlmirror,
THanks! Brilliant demonstration that not only does
GodHMB know fuck-all about science (and specifically, evolutionary biology and Near-Eastern archaeology), he even knows fuck-all about the Bible!Posted by: Zetetic
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October 6, 2009 3:51 PM
Yes Owlmirror...I second what Knockgoats said. A couple of great posts.
Posted by: Drosera
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October 7, 2009 3:27 AM
PZ has finally put
godHMB in hisignore folderdungeon.Maybe that's the best thing for those of us who suffer from SIWOTI syndrome.
Posted by: nothing's sacred
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October 7, 2009 3:46 AM
It is a bit like claims that " the theory of evolution is as well tested as the theory of gravity". It isn't. I test and rely upon gravity thousands of times per day.
No, you don't; your "tests" don't distinguish between different theories of gravity, including the theory that there are invisible gremlins, attached to objects, that live in the middle of the earth and are trying to get home.
Posted by: Josh
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October 7, 2009 6:14 AM
Following up on comment #463, I was just browsing through the online edition (current issue, volume 326) of Science, and I came across this amusing and relevant little gem in News of the Week:
Posted by: nothing's sacred
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October 7, 2009 6:53 AM
I try not to use the Bible as an authority while I am blogging. So I am not a "Bible-thumper".
...
There are sufficient warnings in the Bible about putting God to any sort of test, and sufficient warnings against seeking miraculous signs to conclude that he would not be best pleased at these efforts.
Another lying godbot banned.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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October 7, 2009 12:26 PM
If anyone is interested, it looks like the boab in the red box was taken down to the dungeon for this insipid remark.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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October 7, 2009 12:58 PM
Trolls might get away with dissing PZ a couple of times, but woe to them who insult his friends and family...
Posted by: Zetetic
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October 7, 2009 4:08 PM
Oh well...I suppose that it's for the best, HMB wasn't getting anywhere.
Posted by: Owlmirror
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October 7, 2009 5:26 PM
A brief epitaph (as it were) for a troll:
He was full of bullshit.
Slightly paraphrased:
Try not to think of what I say as 'statements'.
— "help ma baob"