This is Not a Joke. The "Family Research Council" is
Republican Rep. Joe Walsh was the only Illinois congressman to be named a “True Blue” member of Congress for “unwavering support of the family” by the Family Research Council Action committee Thursday.
Walsh’s ex-wife says Walsh owes more than $100,000 in back child support for their three children.
emphasis mine. Uh couldn’t they have thought of another word ?
I know, I,ve made the following point ad nauseam, but it is always worth while to point out that the purveyors of propaganda are never concerned with the truth or validity of a statement or concept. When was the Family Research Council ever concerned with the truth of any issue. They have an agenda and they do an excellent job of pushing their ideology to their audience even though that audience is most poorly served by that same ideology. Putting God and the family in the front of economic ideas that least serve the flock is an old mechanism that has always served the wealthy and their false prophets.
Lest we forget this basic sociological idea,
“When will the people be educated? When they have enough bread to eat, when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous pens and tongues to deceive them. When will this be? Never.” M. Robespierre
Note the use of the term “treacherous pens and tongues to deceive.” Why are we constantly chagrined by the use of propaganda by deceitful deceivers? The country and the government didn’t get to its sorry state without their instigation.
Jack
note also, “Never.”
The FRC employs its propaganda NOT in the service of an ideology. Rather it exploits the fears of common people about the stability of their families… and their belief that everything that makes life worth living depends on the traditional family.. to stampede them into voting for people who have no interest in the welfare of the family but use their votes to get power to harm those families and blame it all on the liberals and the government.
i do wish liberals would find a way to stop falling into the trap. if you frighten people about their “family values” they will vote against you, whatever you tell them about “economic justice.”
“i do wish liberals would find a way to stop falling into the trap”
We liberals can’t seem to shake our obsession with reason and logic. It’s our primal character flaw. We can’t help but be beguiled by arguments from evidence. Arguments from authority never seem to register. Tant pis.
Joel
while I agree with most of your opinions I am not foolish enough to pretend to myself that even my own opinions are based on “reason and logic” or even “facts.” You simply don’t recognize that your “authority” is “the dominant paradigm.” I might feel, for example, that the weight of the evidence and such reason as I can recognize is on the side of, say, Darwinism, but that wouldn’t lead me to think that either I “knew” special creation was impossible or that the family was not the best way for most people to organize their lives.
I would go so far as to say that the extent that you do, you depart from science as I understand it.
And for what it’s worth, most “conservatives” think I am a liberal. And most “liberals” think I am a pain in the ass. I don’t think either side has enough “logic and reason” to satisfy a moderately intelligent dog.
I think your a liberal, yet I am not a Conservative. No logic, but one fact.
I agree that facts and logic alone can’t lead us to conclusions. If we had no priors we would lose our posteriors.
However, there is still a difference in willingness to update priors given evidence. It can be described as a difference between strong tight priors and weak diffuse priors (which terms in turn can’t be defined objectively as they are not robust to changes in variables blah blah blah squared). But I think this description is innaccurate. Some people feel that they should be open minded and some people feel that they should be of secure and solid faith. People of these different types have trouble sharing a conversation.
By faith, I don’t mean religious faith, but I do think that many people feel that their religious faith should not be shaken by any events and this tends to spill over into other areas of belief such as politics. A correlation not a perfect correlation. Trotsky’s faith made John Paul II’s faith in God look like Diogenes’s cynicism (speaking of a highly intelligent person who acted like a dog).
Hey fellas, the issue isn’t one of science versus faith. The Family Research Council is hardly a good example of either. I wouldn’t confuse propagandist bullshit with faith, and it certainly has nothing to do with science or the truth. The man they have selected as a True Blue member, what ever that is, is a dead beat dad. Get that. His neighbors have chosen a dead beat dad to represent them in the US Congress. It’s an insult to the institution and an indication of their rank stupidity. And it demonstrates the cynicism of the FRC. Science vs faith is a distraction from the related issues of stupidity, duplicity, and bull shit.
Robert
me and Diogenes go way back. There are dogmatic people and many of them claim to be “religious.” But I know many dogmatic liberals and some of them make a religion out of not being religious. I am not trying to be cute here. Only point out what Socrates tried to point out. For which They poisoned him.
Jack
that’s what i was trying to say.
but speaking of faith, let me (try to) make a point i am fond of. faith is not a matter of squinching your eyes and crossing your fingers and saying i believe i believer i believe something i can’t believe.
faith is a matter of taking the next step in the direction you want to go.
and that’s true whether the direction you want to go is the direction you think Jesus pointed at (a rough road by all accounts) or in the direction of a Barbara McClintoch… maybe the same road after all.
“ that wouldn’t lead me to think that either I “knew” special creation was impossible”
As a professional scientist, indeed a geneticist, I would not say that the scientific evidence shows that special creation is impossible. Of course, that’s the false dichotomy of the believers in the Christian sects that hold the English translation of Genesis to be literally true. The fact, coberly, is that science relies on arguments from evidence to show that evolution (not the creationist code-word “Darwinism”) is the best explanation of how life on Earth came to be as we find it. Science makes no claims as to whether it was created specially to achieve this pathway. But there is no evidence, other than argument from authority, for the “special creation” literally described in the English translation of the Genesis story. I eschew arguments from authority in favor of arguments from evidence. YYMV.
LOL! And you would have us believe that you’re sufficiently familiar with Barbara McClintock’s work to make such comparisons? Science doesn’t ask you whether you have “faith” in Barbara McClintock or Jesus, coberly. Science asks what the objective evidence is in favor of Barbara McClintock’s interpretation of how transposons are mobilized and their consequences. Any scientist can offer a contrary testable hypothesis and do the experiment that could falisfy McClintock’s model. Nobody can test whether the caracter of Jesus even existed, let alone whether any of His alleged assertions about the world were ever made or have any validity.
joel
i have a professional geneticist in my family, too. and she is a better arguer than you are, and she still hasn’t convinced me that “the best explanation” has the monopoly on “logical and rational.” i’d say they have a good working hypothesis which is almost certainly “true” by my lights.
but i also point out that the bible literalists’ problem is not that their science is bad, but that their theology is bad. any god worth his incense could invent evolution as easily as “special creation.”
and the evolutionists problem is not that their religion is bad, but that their science is bad. evolution is good science, but as something you “believe in” it is no longer science.
thing is the question of “evolution vs special creation” is sterile. i only give you a bad time about it, because when scientists start sounding like fundamentalists (“my god is nogod.”) i think someone needs to try to remind them of what science is.
the “acting like a dog” was not being “dogmatic.” Rather the opposite (or trying to be perhaps like the dogmatics who make a religion out of not being religious — after all dogmatic is just godmatic spelled backwards). The word cynic is derived from the greek word for dog. The reason is that cynics did not conform to the social norm that one should not defecate in public. Diogenes had a statue of a dog as his tombstone.
Aside from that, he seems to have been a very reasonable person. One of the institutions he questioned was slavery.
Joel
you missed the point entirely, so you are only LOL at yourself. the question is that it is faith that decides whether you try to follow jesus’ or McClintoch’s example. Or both.
Now me, I have no way to test whether or not McClintock ever existed, except by recourse to “authority.” And whether or not “Jesus” ever existed is not a very interesting question. Maybe it was someone else with a different name.
THe point about “Jesus” is that some people wrote a book using that name for their protagonist. And they had their protagonist say some things that look as though they would lead to a more sane life than most of the other gods people worship.
I would say that as a matter of “logic and reason” you still haven’t figured out what the question is.
oh, and trust me (Have faith in me, my son)
testing the ideas of Jesus is something people do every day. whether they know it or not.
Very true Coberly. To be a scientist one must have faith, basically faith that the universe works according to natural laws which are comprehensible to us. Einstein was talking about this both when he talked about his conception of God and when he said that they greatest mystery of the universe is that it is comprehensible.
Data can’t lead us anywhere without any prior, specification or assumption (that some laws remain the same *and* that corresponds to what intuitively seems the same to us). Without some structure which must come from intuition (that is faith) the only thing we can do with the data is decide whether to type them out as rows or columns or maybe a spiral. We can’t forecast or develope technology or anything.
Also atheists must have faith. Not having faith means one is agnostic. I am sure there is no God. This is not the result of logic or examination of evidence. I just feel sure. I don’t have a clue about the origin of my atheist faith, because I don’t remember ever ever doubting the non-existance of God. So I have very firm solid secure faith.
Joel — once one accepts the scientific method, then one can rely on evidence. But there are two issues — one must have faith in the scientific method. One can’t prove it is valid by noting the many triumphs of science, because that would be using the scientific method to prove the scientific method is valid — a circular argument. For me this is no problem as I have faith in the scientific method, but it is faith, it must be.
A more worisome problem is that the scientific method really only is a method during the stage of testing one hypothesis against analternative hypothesis. There is no rule for coming up with hypotheses worth testing.
The case of McClintock is instructive. Many people had looked at Corn, but it took genius to guess that speckles were due to transposons. She was definitely unusual among biologists (being basically very very smart) because her hypotheses weren’t one step beyond the available evidence (and many were also true). Crick is a similar case. In case you are wondering, I have a BA in biology and attended a McClintock seminar (OK I saw her on closed circuit TV because the seminar room overflowed of course).
Another case is the guy who figured out the structure of benzene — the hypothesis came to him in a dream. The reason this is a problem is that we can’t know if someone will have a strange weird hypothesis which has never come to our minds, which we find counter intuitive, which makes us see the world very differently, and which is true.
This worries physicists a lot since they thought they were about done in 1900 and then everything changed, or rather everything stayed the same and they realized that classical physics was approximately true but fundamentally not what was going on in the world. The trauma more or less drove Thomas Kuhn to dispair, but he had at least the shadow of a point.
I’ll repeat myself for the good of original intent, not of the Constitution, but of the direction of this thread. Walsh and the FRC have nothing to do with either science or faith. They specialize in self interest and promotion of ideology unrelated to any worhtwhile concept of god and family.
Go to the Open Thread to discuss faith and scientific truths and any possible relationship between the two. Don’t do the typical liberal agenda thing and let go of a perfectly good story, as in Joe Walsh is a dead beat dad and the FRC is a bullshit organization. Maybe a little research on the validity of Walsh’s claim that his wife and he have agreed not to argue over his child support payments. As though that excuses his dead beat behavior. And who else qualifies for FRC recognition? That our Congress is over run by scum masquerading as responsible representatives of all the people is a far more important issue than faith and science. That’s for arm chair internationalization i.e. mental masturbation.
Robert
actually, i knew most of that. it was entirely by accident that i talked about dogmatic people in the context of an exchange with joel about dogmatic people when you mentioned Diogenes, who, as we know, was a dog. defecating in public is “disgusting” not because it violates a social norm, but it violates a social norm because it’s disgusting. one might suspect something genetic or at least long long racial memory of disease potential.
even some of my dogs know that.
Robert
i would argue with you, but my heart isn’t in it. you are not as dogmatic as friend joel.
i don’t think,however, that intuition is “faith.” i still like my idea that “faith” is taking the next step in the direction you want to go. intuition is probably a kind of sum of synaptic connections that don’t add up to a “linear hypothesis” (made that up… i mean “a rule you can state in cause-effect language.” and of course ideas, even those in dreams, may or may not be intuitions.
the problem for most of us is our ideas, intuitions, inspirations, and insights never add up to useful hypotheses, let along theorems, or even justify the hard work in trying to link them up to the rest of what we think we know.
and then there are people (most of us) who claim to be rational and logical which always turns out to mean “i like the way it sounds.”
Jack
i wouldn’t worry too much about wandering off thread. dead beat dad doesn’t add up to much of a story.
i quite agree with you that FRC is a political organization more interested in power than in families. and i think i was quite on-thread when i wished out loud that liberals would stop falling into the trap of alienating the very people whose interests they claim to represent. “poor” people are not going to vote for you if you frighten them into thinking you are going to take away everything that makes their lives worth living. they are used to being poor, and being treated bad by their bosses. they want a home and family they can come home to.
prating about “the scientific method” does not help you win their support, and is pretty good evidence that you (generic you,not Jack) don’t know what the scientific method means.
and yes i know this is not easy, since the “right” has managed to convince the people that the “left” is out to murder babies and force their sons to grow up homosexual.
well, now that everyone has gone home
i will cry in my beer
that i gave up hope for this world when reader J responded to my observation that it was a matter of “faith” whether you tried to follow the example of JC or Barbara McClintock, with
“now you’d have us believe you are sufficiently familiar with McClintock’s work..”
when you get this kind of response from someone who brags about his “logic and rationality”
you know there is no hope for humans.