Re: Findlay's Folly (was Re: plate tectonics and real science)

In article <11naf9qs3n1ihcf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, into@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(Skywise) wrote:

> [1] Yet again you avoid the question of what YOU mean by 'qualified'.
> Why do you avoid this question?

One of the things I have linked into my homepage is this:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/DarkBible/DarkBibleContents.htm

Of course, if you click from there to Home it brings you to this:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/

then you come to:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/problemswithbeliefs.htm

and the very first article is:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/beliefs.htm

The problems with beliefs

by Jim Walker

People have slaughtered each other in wars, inquisitions, and political actions
for centuries and still kill each other over beliefs in religions, political
ideologies, and philosophies. These belief-systems, when stated as propositions,
may appear mystical, and genuine to the naive, but when confronted with a
testable bases from reason and experiment, they fail miserably. I maintain that
beliefs create more social problems than they solve and that beliefs, and
especially those elevated to faith, produce the most destructive potential to
the future of humankind.

Hey, it is a very long article:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/beliefs.htm

and another of my favourite things is from Amy Acheson and she is the reason I
made a page called Dragonscience in honour of her:

http://www.dragonscience.com/index.html

And from there you get this:

http://www.dragonscience.com/view/DynFly.html

Dying and Flying

Changing your beliefs feels like dying. Whether it's religion, politics, or
science, letting go of the complex of ideas that provides an orderly explanation
for your life and your experiences seems like falling into chaos and oblivion.
It seems suicidal even to loosen your grip on that branch of Truth suspended
over the abyss of ignorance.

But every day, with every new thing you learn, you're hopping to another,
usually very close, branch. The Truth you believe in today is a little different
from yesterday's. And sometimes the change is so big you find yourself clinging
to the branch of a different tree: You change religions, or switch political
parties, or experience a paradigm shift.

After doing it several times, you realize that if you gave up believing
altogether, you'd only have to die once.

Then Truth ceases to be a branch you cling to but a forest of branches and the
air between: You can spread your intellectual wings in this larger, more
abstract Truth and fly from branch to branch, choosing truths and viewpoints
according to their usefulness, appropriateness, esthetics, promise. The
moralistic preoccupation with "correctness"--with whether you're clinging to the
"right" branch--is irrelevant. Salvation, in science as in politics and
religion, is simply fear of flying.

Camus addressed this matter four decades ago: Can you live without hope? Without
belief? He concluded that not only can you, but you must--to become truly human
and to avoid the homicidal presumption that you are a god. (Or, in today's
terms, that you know the mind of God.)

Only after you have died to beliefs do you discover real faith--the confidence
that the universe and your part in it will be what it is regardless of what you
believe. Your beliefs (and their opposite polarity, disbeliefs) are the sand in
which your head is buried. They are a mirror, reflecting your own brilliance and
blinding you to the unassuming light of reality. They are a log anchoring your
feet, preventing you from soaring into the universe that is your natural home.


If you had lived in my shoes, you would know that Amy was a very smart woman. It
took me one of those "near death experiences" to see these things, but Amy
obviously knew them long before she died. When she died Mel was going to take
down this web-page, and I am not one who goes round begging to people, but I
begged him to leave it up, and so far he has done so.

I am no longer the young electrical engineer who was qualified enough to get
paid to move to South Africa with my wife and daughter and be running my own
department at age 24, stupidly thinking I could ignore the political reality.
I am no longer the man who started studying geology because my second wife owned
a house in an idyllic location 200 miles from a Volcano that everybody thought
was "dormant" until June 1991, when after more than four centuries of slumber,
it erupted so violently that more than 5 billion cubic meters of ash and
pyroclastic debris were ejected from its fiery bowels producing eruption columns
18 kilometers wide at the base and heights reaching up to 30 kilometers above
the volcano?s vent.

In its wake 847 people lay dead, 184 injured, 23 missing, and more than 1
million people displaced. Hundreds of millions of dollars in private properties
and infrastructure lay in ruins which would require tens of billions of pesos
and several years to rebuild. For months, the ejected volcanic materials
remained suspended in the atmosphere where the winds dispersed them to envelope
the earth, reaching as far as Russia and North America. This phenomenon caused
the world?s temperature to fall by an average of 1 degree Celsius.

And there are all these experts telling me that they want to fix "global
warming" but I do think they ignore the effects of volcanic eruptions at their
peril.

And the world is full of stupid people all concerned about "wars against terror"
but I don't think they live in the real world at all. And I somehow don't think
qualifications are going to be of any importance if a whole lot of people don't
wake up and see what is really going on. It doesn't matter if the world is
expanding or not expanding, what kills people are violent hurricanes,
earthquakes, volcanoes and Tsunamis, and the world is full of people who think
things like:

1. It can't happen to me.
2. They are just "add in whatever derogatory word you like" and they don't
matter.
3. That electronic equipment and technology will somehow survive when the
earth's magnetic field finally reverses, because they never learnt Fleming's
Right Hand law.

Don't you know that during the last magnetic reversal the field was flipping
through 15 degrees an hour? Don't you know that the current magnetic reversal
started 200 years ago? Don't you know that there is no place on earth that the
magnetic field does not reach? Don't you know that an electrical conductor in a
moving magnetic field generates electricity? I do! In fact one company I worked
for described me as an "expert in the field".

And who is going to survive such a scenario? Those who need an electric can
opener or those who can hack the top off with a Bowie knife? And when the cans
run out, who is going to make any more without machinery?

I somehow don't think the world is seeing straight, but at least my children
know how to hack the tops of tins with Bowie Knives.



Alan

"A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the
facts, who refuse to believe that their government and their
media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a reality
contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and
deserves the Police State Dictatorship it's going to get."
- Ian Williams Goddard

Nemesis Peace Centre

http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/protector.html

Abuse of Women and Children

http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/

Nemesis News

http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/

Absolute Anarchy

http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/


.

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