Thank you for your message on my talk page, I appreciate it. I don't think you lack intelligence, I think you just haven't read enough on the subject. Books by people like Hitchens and Dawkins are very popular, and they are boooks by smart men. But the fact is, they are also ignorant. What I mean is, they know little of Biblical criticism or Biblical history. A smart person can read the Gospels and say "I cannot believe that Lazarus was brought back from the dead." I think any rational person would share this refusal to believe. It is easy to say that the universe could not have been created in six days or that Jesus did not walk on water. What is much harder is to explain why people told these stories. Biblical historians acknowledge that this is hard. They spend years learning Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and for the Hebrew bible, Babylonian and Egyptian. In addition to learning these languages, they study the mythologies of other peoples, and what is known about their political and economic systems.
Then they do something even harder: they force themselves NOT to imagine that "religion" meant the same thing two or three or four thousand years ago as it means today. I have not actually read Hitchens, so I cannot say anything about his book, but i have met plenty of people who assume that people two or three thousand years ago thought like fundamentalists today. This is intellectually lazy, because all you need to do is guess what a fundamentalist today would think, and then you know how someone two thousand years ago thought. To my way of thinking, it is also implausible. I see the logic - fundamentalists reject the theory of evolution and much of modern science, therefore, people who lived before Darwin and modern science were fundamentalists. But this is speculation and anachrnonistic thinking. The Protestant Reformation challenged Europeans to rething, radicallly, what they meant by religion, and it involved wars where tens of thousands of people died. The decline in power of the Catholic Church led to weird (to me) changes. Did you know that among Catholics there is a belief in the infalibility of the Pope, that under certain conditions the Pope asserts he is speaking a divine truth? This sounds superstitious, so one might think that it is a relic of how people thought back in Roman times. in fact, Papal Infallibility only came into existence in the 19th century. When the "Papal States" were liberated to become part of modern Italy, the Pope proposed this new kind of authority. The rise of Protestantism, which also meant the rise of nationalist religions (e.g. the Church of England) also changed the way people thought about religion - maybe Puritans were protesting the state as much as they were proposing religious beliefs. I think religious fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, that it came into existence in the context of political as well as scientific revolutions in Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. I think it is a reaction against modernity, like communism and the utopianist movements and romanticism were all different kinds of reaction to modernity. So when the question is, "what (or even how) did people think two thousand years ago," my answer is: "I am not so sure." From what I have seen on TV, the problem with Hitchens and Dawkins is, because they think they are smart enough to know some things, they are smart enough to know everything. But in fact, they are speculating.
You brought up something about Jesus from Nazareth from Hitchens - I happen to agree with him, or with you as it was your point. But just as you got it from Hitchents, Hitchens got it from others. There is a long tradition of Biblical criticism and scholar for a very long time - over a hundred years I think - have claimed that Jesus was born in Nazareth and that the Bethlahem stories (and indeed the story of the Virgin beirth) were all added later. Perhaps Hitchens has notes where he gives credit to the actual historians who first forwarded this theory. But Ellegard is just making things up. The one thing he should have learned from spending a lifetime studying the English language is, you need to spend a lifetimes studying something to be an expert in it. But he reached the opposite conclusion: he thought that because he was so smart, he could read some secondary sources and then speculate, and because he is a "linguist" (with expertise in English) he can speak with authority on texts two thousand years old and written in other languages. To me, this is as irrational as Papal Infalibility.
I agree with you that the phrase "theological construct" is unclear and therefor obfuscating. I just do not agree with you about what it obfuscates. I may be misreading you, but I think you think it is obfuscating the fact that something was made up. If you don't mjind (if you have gotten this far you are obviously kindly indulging me) I will try one more time to explain what I mean, and then offer a bit of advice. I want to try to imagine what people two thousand years ago thought, and like I said I feel I have lots of good reasons to assume that whatever they did think, it was very different from religious Christians today. The historical context is so different. Did they take the stories literally, so Jesus' miracles roved that he could break the laws of physics, that scientists are wrong? Or did they read it metaphoricaly, because the scientific mind knows that such miracles cannot occur? I doubt both of these interpretations - because back then they did not know the laws of physics, at least not the big ones, and i do not think that people were really arguing over "religion versus science." (One big argument I know of was between the idealist followers of Plato and the materialist followers of Jesus, and I know that these debates influenced early Christians).
The fact is -and yeah, I could be wrong - I do not believe that people read the gospels in order to learn what you and I would call a "historical accurate" account. Well, I do believe that they knew th difference between what you are calling a truth and a lie (e.g. they knew that the statement "The Greeks lost to the Persians at the battle of Marathon" is a lie) - I am just suggesting that they had other criteria they applied to other kinds of writings. Let me try a crude analogy. I am suggesting that to ask an early Christian whether x really did happen or did not happen is like asking a lover of classical music today whether Beethoven's 9th symphony is the truth or a lie. I think if you asked someone that question they would thinkl you were weird, because they do not even know what it means to say a symphony is a lie. They have completely different criteria for judging music. Now, you can say that there is a big difference between music and a written text. My point is just that there is a big difference between us and people two thousand years ago. This is a complicated point to make ande I agree with you that the way the article is currently written it is not clear enough. We need to improve it. But just saying the text is "wrong" is frankly a lazy and anachronistic (i.e. sloppy history) way out. It had some value to people two thousand years ago, and I think those people were not concerned with whether it was "made up" or not, but something else.
Now, here is my advice: Hitchens may be great if you want to learn about atheism. But if you want to learn about the New testament, you should read works by New Testament scholars. In the Jesus article I added citations for a few, and would highly recommend the one by E.P. Sanders. Other long-term editors might recommend other books, I think Sanders is very readible and sensible.
I appreciate your statement on my talk page that you consider most people sincere. Personally, I add that i think most people are smart. I think people two thousand years ago were smart, and I do not think they were gullible or that they made up fictions to explain what they did not know and then believed these fictions as truths (I think any argument along these lines is pure projection - sometimes it is WE who do not know, for exsample we do not know what motivated people two thousand years ago, or how they thought, so we fill in our own ignorance with speculation). I am not sure what people thought back then, I just do not think it was stupid. On my talk page you wrote maybe you are not intelligent enough to get my point, and i do not believe this either. I think you just haven't read enough books by Biblical historians to understand how they interpret these texts. I be if you read Sanders you would have a better idea. And if you read a few more books you would really understand the different ways historians explain thse things. Hitchens is a great source for an article on atheism. For an article on Jesus, why not read the best contemporary critical scholarship? If you are interested in discussing this stuff, you will find these books interesting and I promise yo you are intelligent enough to undersand it all! Slrubenstein | Talk 11:31, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
Pma jones ( talk) 18:26, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
Just to be clear - it sounds lik you are a Biblical fundamentalist, are you? You seem to be one. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:02, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
By fundamentalist, I mean: you believe that every word of the Bible is historically reliable. That is the only way you could say that Jesus "advocates the use ofeternal torture in hell." I ask because shortly after that, you suggest that maybe the Bible is not historically reliable, but then you write "when it makes extraordinary claims, such as theresurrection, we couldn't possibly take them seriously" and it just is not clear to me whether you consider it reliable or unreliable.
Historians have three choices facing them when they read any document: it is wholely unreliable, it is wholely reliable, and it is somewhere in between. Most Biblical historians believe the Gospels are somewhere in between. They reject supernatural claims (e.g. Jesus was resurrected thre days after being killed) and they accept claims that might have been embarassing to later Christians (e.g. Jesus being baptised by John the Baptist, and Jesus being crucified). There is some debate about pretty much everything else. But if you ever read E.P. Saunders' book, you would get the mainstream view of historians. I believe Jesus existed, but I do not believe he ever said people would be punished in hell. I do not believe that because it is a claim inconsistent with other things he said, and inconsistent with what Jews at the time believed. It is possible he said it, but it seems unlikely. I do not believe that Jesus claimed to be the messiah, because there are very few instances in the Gospels where he makes any such claims - they way I read the Goispels it makes more sense to think that he aspired to lead John the Baptist's followers after John was killed, and believed that the coming of the messiah was immanent. It is possible he believed himself to be the messiah, but I think it is unlikely. I do not believe in the virgin birth because (1) it is biologically impossible, (2) Jews at the time had no belief in a virgin birth (that such a birth meant anything) and (3) for Jews "son of God" does not literally mean that God somehow inseminated your mother. You say you reject Jesus' claims to divinity- I do not believe he ever claimed to be divine. I do not see any good evidence that he claimed he was divine. A claim to divinity would have had no meaning to 1st century Jews (it would not have been blasphemy, just silly). It made perfect sense to Romans, whose emperors were regularly deified after they died. So I think that it just makes more sense to believe that Roman Christians believd this, and put it in the New Testment.
I am just sharing with you some of my beliefs, but the real point here is that there are men like Saunders, or Geza Vemez, who have spent their lives not just studying the new Testament but Josephus and other historical texts of the time, as well as the Mishnah and other Jewish religious texts of the era. They have not just read English translation secondary sources on these documents, they have read them in their original language. And they have taught univesity courses on them. And they have gone to international conferences and given papers on them, in front of other world experts (not Christian clergy or theologicans, I mean other historians). So I think what they have to say about Jesus and the New Testament is worht listening to. I find it intelligent, thoughtful, and provocative. Like I said, if you just want to think more about being an atheist, Hitchens' book is the one for you. But if you want to know what Jesus was probably like - and of course this could still be a Jesus you personally do not like, historians are trying to reconstruct a Jesus as he probably was like, not a Jesus that will be popular! - you would love reading Saunders' book.
You are very kind not to complain about my leaving long messages on your talk page. So I am sorry to say this because i do not want to disrespect you, but there is one thing you write which offends me - when you use the word religion, you write as if the only religion in the world is Christianity. When you write about God, you write as if the only possible God is the Christian God. Maybe you just mean to say you reject Christianity, but you most just talk about God or religion
I guss i should be up front and tell you I am Jewish. I do not believe all the things my fellow Jews believe. But Jews as you know never thought Jesus was divine, and most Jews do not really believe in an afterlife, and definitely do not believe in the Christian hell (i.e. eternal damnation).
You say that religion was the first attempt at history, medicine, science. You are not the only person who thinks this, lots of people think this. All I can say is, this way of thinking does not make sense to me. The first people to write history in our sense of history had specific motives for doing so, and wrote in a particular way, that suited their interests. The Bible is so unlike history, it seems more rational to me to assume that whoever wrote it had very different reasons for writing it than when people write history. Now, maybe the ancient Israelites did have an idea of history. In Numbes 21: 14 the author of this part of Numbers quotes another book, "The Book of the Wars of YHWH." Maybe "The Book of the Wars of YHWH" is a "history book" that the author of Numbers is using as a source?
The fact is, this idea that human history goes through stages - the earliest is religion, the middle stage is metaphysical (or philosophical) and the final stage is scientific, was proposed by the French thinker Auguste Compte in the 1700s. He was articulating an idea that was very popular with Europeans around the time of the industrial revolution: the idea of progress. Another form this taks is, first people were savages, then they became barbarians, and now they are civilized.
What science has taught me is: however things happen, people have many different ways of interpreting how things happened. These different intepretations express different values or lessons people want to draw. Now, there is a word we have for a story told in order to express a moral value or lesson: it is a myth. And I think that it is entirely unscientific, irrational, to believe that all human societies live by myths except us. Yet that is what "progress" claims - that we are radically different from all humans before us, because we are better 9we have science, medicine, history, we just tell the truth). I think "progress" is our myth. And it is a dangerous myth - George Bush said we do not have to worry about global warming because new technologies will fix it (in fact, it is highly un likely that electric cars and windmills will be enough to stop global warming). People look at modern pharmacology and see progress in medicine - when between heart disease and diabetes and othe health problems caused by stress and obesity, we are in many ways far less healthy than people before us. I could go on and on. My point is not that the Bible is "true," my point is just that we have myths just like the ancient israelites or medieval Europeans had their myths, and our myth is the myth of progress, and what it does is this: it leads us to interpret everyone who is different from us by interpreting them in relation to us and that means they are either more like us ("more advanced") or less like us ("less advanced") but the basic point is, the less they are lick us, the stupider they are, or the more inferior. To me this view is completely lacking in objectivity. It is entirely irrational.
I am not criticizing you, I apologize if it sounds that ay, I am criticizing Hitchens and Dawkins and others who may be right that there are many things that they understand better than othes, to believing that they understand everything better than others. That is actully not a scientific attitude, it is just another kind of religion! Slrubenstein | Talk 12:25, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Good call, I'm pretty sure a 20 stone plus, 6'4 prop forward wouldn't make a great jockey!
GainLine
♠
♥
13:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
Your name has been in mentioned in connection with a sockpuppetry case. Please refer to Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Pnelnik for evidence. Please make sure you make yourself familiar with the guide to responding to cases before editing the evidence page. O Fenian ( talk) 18:21, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for noticing, Hopefully I will have more information shortly and we can really get a great page together. I also want to get Booterstown and Monkstown up to scratch. Do you have any suggestions yourself for something that could be dug up about any of those places. Did you know there is a ruin of a castle type building on the edge of the park beside the rock road. I haven't seen anything about this yet, but I am curious as to it's past use. Also, someone tried to set up a cafe in the Martello tower 20 years ago, but it failed. I can't verify that yet. Then not to mention the houses. -- DubhEire ( talk) 12:07, 26 February 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your message on my talk page, I appreciate it. I don't think you lack intelligence, I think you just haven't read enough on the subject. Books by people like Hitchens and Dawkins are very popular, and they are boooks by smart men. But the fact is, they are also ignorant. What I mean is, they know little of Biblical criticism or Biblical history. A smart person can read the Gospels and say "I cannot believe that Lazarus was brought back from the dead." I think any rational person would share this refusal to believe. It is easy to say that the universe could not have been created in six days or that Jesus did not walk on water. What is much harder is to explain why people told these stories. Biblical historians acknowledge that this is hard. They spend years learning Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and for the Hebrew bible, Babylonian and Egyptian. In addition to learning these languages, they study the mythologies of other peoples, and what is known about their political and economic systems.
Then they do something even harder: they force themselves NOT to imagine that "religion" meant the same thing two or three or four thousand years ago as it means today. I have not actually read Hitchens, so I cannot say anything about his book, but i have met plenty of people who assume that people two or three thousand years ago thought like fundamentalists today. This is intellectually lazy, because all you need to do is guess what a fundamentalist today would think, and then you know how someone two thousand years ago thought. To my way of thinking, it is also implausible. I see the logic - fundamentalists reject the theory of evolution and much of modern science, therefore, people who lived before Darwin and modern science were fundamentalists. But this is speculation and anachrnonistic thinking. The Protestant Reformation challenged Europeans to rething, radicallly, what they meant by religion, and it involved wars where tens of thousands of people died. The decline in power of the Catholic Church led to weird (to me) changes. Did you know that among Catholics there is a belief in the infalibility of the Pope, that under certain conditions the Pope asserts he is speaking a divine truth? This sounds superstitious, so one might think that it is a relic of how people thought back in Roman times. in fact, Papal Infallibility only came into existence in the 19th century. When the "Papal States" were liberated to become part of modern Italy, the Pope proposed this new kind of authority. The rise of Protestantism, which also meant the rise of nationalist religions (e.g. the Church of England) also changed the way people thought about religion - maybe Puritans were protesting the state as much as they were proposing religious beliefs. I think religious fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, that it came into existence in the context of political as well as scientific revolutions in Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. I think it is a reaction against modernity, like communism and the utopianist movements and romanticism were all different kinds of reaction to modernity. So when the question is, "what (or even how) did people think two thousand years ago," my answer is: "I am not so sure." From what I have seen on TV, the problem with Hitchens and Dawkins is, because they think they are smart enough to know some things, they are smart enough to know everything. But in fact, they are speculating.
You brought up something about Jesus from Nazareth from Hitchens - I happen to agree with him, or with you as it was your point. But just as you got it from Hitchents, Hitchens got it from others. There is a long tradition of Biblical criticism and scholar for a very long time - over a hundred years I think - have claimed that Jesus was born in Nazareth and that the Bethlahem stories (and indeed the story of the Virgin beirth) were all added later. Perhaps Hitchens has notes where he gives credit to the actual historians who first forwarded this theory. But Ellegard is just making things up. The one thing he should have learned from spending a lifetime studying the English language is, you need to spend a lifetimes studying something to be an expert in it. But he reached the opposite conclusion: he thought that because he was so smart, he could read some secondary sources and then speculate, and because he is a "linguist" (with expertise in English) he can speak with authority on texts two thousand years old and written in other languages. To me, this is as irrational as Papal Infalibility.
I agree with you that the phrase "theological construct" is unclear and therefor obfuscating. I just do not agree with you about what it obfuscates. I may be misreading you, but I think you think it is obfuscating the fact that something was made up. If you don't mjind (if you have gotten this far you are obviously kindly indulging me) I will try one more time to explain what I mean, and then offer a bit of advice. I want to try to imagine what people two thousand years ago thought, and like I said I feel I have lots of good reasons to assume that whatever they did think, it was very different from religious Christians today. The historical context is so different. Did they take the stories literally, so Jesus' miracles roved that he could break the laws of physics, that scientists are wrong? Or did they read it metaphoricaly, because the scientific mind knows that such miracles cannot occur? I doubt both of these interpretations - because back then they did not know the laws of physics, at least not the big ones, and i do not think that people were really arguing over "religion versus science." (One big argument I know of was between the idealist followers of Plato and the materialist followers of Jesus, and I know that these debates influenced early Christians).
The fact is -and yeah, I could be wrong - I do not believe that people read the gospels in order to learn what you and I would call a "historical accurate" account. Well, I do believe that they knew th difference between what you are calling a truth and a lie (e.g. they knew that the statement "The Greeks lost to the Persians at the battle of Marathon" is a lie) - I am just suggesting that they had other criteria they applied to other kinds of writings. Let me try a crude analogy. I am suggesting that to ask an early Christian whether x really did happen or did not happen is like asking a lover of classical music today whether Beethoven's 9th symphony is the truth or a lie. I think if you asked someone that question they would thinkl you were weird, because they do not even know what it means to say a symphony is a lie. They have completely different criteria for judging music. Now, you can say that there is a big difference between music and a written text. My point is just that there is a big difference between us and people two thousand years ago. This is a complicated point to make ande I agree with you that the way the article is currently written it is not clear enough. We need to improve it. But just saying the text is "wrong" is frankly a lazy and anachronistic (i.e. sloppy history) way out. It had some value to people two thousand years ago, and I think those people were not concerned with whether it was "made up" or not, but something else.
Now, here is my advice: Hitchens may be great if you want to learn about atheism. But if you want to learn about the New testament, you should read works by New Testament scholars. In the Jesus article I added citations for a few, and would highly recommend the one by E.P. Sanders. Other long-term editors might recommend other books, I think Sanders is very readible and sensible.
I appreciate your statement on my talk page that you consider most people sincere. Personally, I add that i think most people are smart. I think people two thousand years ago were smart, and I do not think they were gullible or that they made up fictions to explain what they did not know and then believed these fictions as truths (I think any argument along these lines is pure projection - sometimes it is WE who do not know, for exsample we do not know what motivated people two thousand years ago, or how they thought, so we fill in our own ignorance with speculation). I am not sure what people thought back then, I just do not think it was stupid. On my talk page you wrote maybe you are not intelligent enough to get my point, and i do not believe this either. I think you just haven't read enough books by Biblical historians to understand how they interpret these texts. I be if you read Sanders you would have a better idea. And if you read a few more books you would really understand the different ways historians explain thse things. Hitchens is a great source for an article on atheism. For an article on Jesus, why not read the best contemporary critical scholarship? If you are interested in discussing this stuff, you will find these books interesting and I promise yo you are intelligent enough to undersand it all! Slrubenstein | Talk 11:31, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
Pma jones ( talk) 18:26, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
Just to be clear - it sounds lik you are a Biblical fundamentalist, are you? You seem to be one. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:02, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
By fundamentalist, I mean: you believe that every word of the Bible is historically reliable. That is the only way you could say that Jesus "advocates the use ofeternal torture in hell." I ask because shortly after that, you suggest that maybe the Bible is not historically reliable, but then you write "when it makes extraordinary claims, such as theresurrection, we couldn't possibly take them seriously" and it just is not clear to me whether you consider it reliable or unreliable.
Historians have three choices facing them when they read any document: it is wholely unreliable, it is wholely reliable, and it is somewhere in between. Most Biblical historians believe the Gospels are somewhere in between. They reject supernatural claims (e.g. Jesus was resurrected thre days after being killed) and they accept claims that might have been embarassing to later Christians (e.g. Jesus being baptised by John the Baptist, and Jesus being crucified). There is some debate about pretty much everything else. But if you ever read E.P. Saunders' book, you would get the mainstream view of historians. I believe Jesus existed, but I do not believe he ever said people would be punished in hell. I do not believe that because it is a claim inconsistent with other things he said, and inconsistent with what Jews at the time believed. It is possible he said it, but it seems unlikely. I do not believe that Jesus claimed to be the messiah, because there are very few instances in the Gospels where he makes any such claims - they way I read the Goispels it makes more sense to think that he aspired to lead John the Baptist's followers after John was killed, and believed that the coming of the messiah was immanent. It is possible he believed himself to be the messiah, but I think it is unlikely. I do not believe in the virgin birth because (1) it is biologically impossible, (2) Jews at the time had no belief in a virgin birth (that such a birth meant anything) and (3) for Jews "son of God" does not literally mean that God somehow inseminated your mother. You say you reject Jesus' claims to divinity- I do not believe he ever claimed to be divine. I do not see any good evidence that he claimed he was divine. A claim to divinity would have had no meaning to 1st century Jews (it would not have been blasphemy, just silly). It made perfect sense to Romans, whose emperors were regularly deified after they died. So I think that it just makes more sense to believe that Roman Christians believd this, and put it in the New Testment.
I am just sharing with you some of my beliefs, but the real point here is that there are men like Saunders, or Geza Vemez, who have spent their lives not just studying the new Testament but Josephus and other historical texts of the time, as well as the Mishnah and other Jewish religious texts of the era. They have not just read English translation secondary sources on these documents, they have read them in their original language. And they have taught univesity courses on them. And they have gone to international conferences and given papers on them, in front of other world experts (not Christian clergy or theologicans, I mean other historians). So I think what they have to say about Jesus and the New Testament is worht listening to. I find it intelligent, thoughtful, and provocative. Like I said, if you just want to think more about being an atheist, Hitchens' book is the one for you. But if you want to know what Jesus was probably like - and of course this could still be a Jesus you personally do not like, historians are trying to reconstruct a Jesus as he probably was like, not a Jesus that will be popular! - you would love reading Saunders' book.
You are very kind not to complain about my leaving long messages on your talk page. So I am sorry to say this because i do not want to disrespect you, but there is one thing you write which offends me - when you use the word religion, you write as if the only religion in the world is Christianity. When you write about God, you write as if the only possible God is the Christian God. Maybe you just mean to say you reject Christianity, but you most just talk about God or religion
I guss i should be up front and tell you I am Jewish. I do not believe all the things my fellow Jews believe. But Jews as you know never thought Jesus was divine, and most Jews do not really believe in an afterlife, and definitely do not believe in the Christian hell (i.e. eternal damnation).
You say that religion was the first attempt at history, medicine, science. You are not the only person who thinks this, lots of people think this. All I can say is, this way of thinking does not make sense to me. The first people to write history in our sense of history had specific motives for doing so, and wrote in a particular way, that suited their interests. The Bible is so unlike history, it seems more rational to me to assume that whoever wrote it had very different reasons for writing it than when people write history. Now, maybe the ancient Israelites did have an idea of history. In Numbes 21: 14 the author of this part of Numbers quotes another book, "The Book of the Wars of YHWH." Maybe "The Book of the Wars of YHWH" is a "history book" that the author of Numbers is using as a source?
The fact is, this idea that human history goes through stages - the earliest is religion, the middle stage is metaphysical (or philosophical) and the final stage is scientific, was proposed by the French thinker Auguste Compte in the 1700s. He was articulating an idea that was very popular with Europeans around the time of the industrial revolution: the idea of progress. Another form this taks is, first people were savages, then they became barbarians, and now they are civilized.
What science has taught me is: however things happen, people have many different ways of interpreting how things happened. These different intepretations express different values or lessons people want to draw. Now, there is a word we have for a story told in order to express a moral value or lesson: it is a myth. And I think that it is entirely unscientific, irrational, to believe that all human societies live by myths except us. Yet that is what "progress" claims - that we are radically different from all humans before us, because we are better 9we have science, medicine, history, we just tell the truth). I think "progress" is our myth. And it is a dangerous myth - George Bush said we do not have to worry about global warming because new technologies will fix it (in fact, it is highly un likely that electric cars and windmills will be enough to stop global warming). People look at modern pharmacology and see progress in medicine - when between heart disease and diabetes and othe health problems caused by stress and obesity, we are in many ways far less healthy than people before us. I could go on and on. My point is not that the Bible is "true," my point is just that we have myths just like the ancient israelites or medieval Europeans had their myths, and our myth is the myth of progress, and what it does is this: it leads us to interpret everyone who is different from us by interpreting them in relation to us and that means they are either more like us ("more advanced") or less like us ("less advanced") but the basic point is, the less they are lick us, the stupider they are, or the more inferior. To me this view is completely lacking in objectivity. It is entirely irrational.
I am not criticizing you, I apologize if it sounds that ay, I am criticizing Hitchens and Dawkins and others who may be right that there are many things that they understand better than othes, to believing that they understand everything better than others. That is actully not a scientific attitude, it is just another kind of religion! Slrubenstein | Talk 12:25, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Good call, I'm pretty sure a 20 stone plus, 6'4 prop forward wouldn't make a great jockey!
GainLine
♠
♥
13:39, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
Your name has been in mentioned in connection with a sockpuppetry case. Please refer to Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Pnelnik for evidence. Please make sure you make yourself familiar with the guide to responding to cases before editing the evidence page. O Fenian ( talk) 18:21, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for noticing, Hopefully I will have more information shortly and we can really get a great page together. I also want to get Booterstown and Monkstown up to scratch. Do you have any suggestions yourself for something that could be dug up about any of those places. Did you know there is a ruin of a castle type building on the edge of the park beside the rock road. I haven't seen anything about this yet, but I am curious as to it's past use. Also, someone tried to set up a cafe in the Martello tower 20 years ago, but it failed. I can't verify that yet. Then not to mention the houses. -- DubhEire ( talk) 12:07, 26 February 2010 (UTC)