AZMike

I think we all need a thread like this about once a year, that meanders around about religious and tangential issues and lets us all vent and blow off steam. Have we run our course?

This is true. St. Thomas Aquinas believed the universe was eternal, but was created - at a point before the existence of the universe causally, but not temporally.

Sure. Atheists can hold all sorts of screwy beliefs, like the non-existence of God. I just hold one less screwy belief than the atheists do... Some scientific hypotheses just accept views that veer towards magic, without trying to posit a reason, or trying to invoke any known laws of physics or chemistry, Merlyn. The Copenhagen Interpretation insists that all potencies exist until the particle is actualized by measurement. The equations don't tell us how a particle’s properties "solidify" at that moment of measurement, or how reality picks which form to take. But the calculations work, so we use them. "I don't know" is always a valid answer, but we should make sure that methodological bias doesn't rule out reasonable alternatives, as many atheists do. It can't be argued that belief in God isn't reasonable, as about 96% of Americans (presumably including many people who hold reasonable beliefs in all other spheres of existence) do consider a belief in God to be reasonable. Hard to argue that your 4% subculture represents the only "reasonable" views.

And how did those first constituents of life "evolve," Merlyn.? To avoid accepting that many atheists and agnostics do, in fact, believe in the supernatural, you've changed the definition from "supernatural" to "magic" now, I've noticed.

Darwin has gotten a bad rap as a racist, as he was opposed to slavery. Some of his followers, however, took his ideas and ran with them into some pretty racist territory - such as his cousin Sir Francis Galton, who invented the pseudoscience of Eugenics, and whose ideas had a greater influence on Hitler and the Progressive Movement than Darwin ever did, and led to the American fad for laws against racial intermarriage, and for the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 Americans who were designated as "moral and mental defectives." It's not well known, (and certainly not well-taught) in the educational system that William Jennings Bryan testified in the "Scopes Monkey Trial" because he saw the likelihood that Darwin's theories, as they were being interpreted (well, misinterpreted) by the German military and the Progressive movement in America would lead to increased militarization in Germany (he was correct) and increasingly acist policies against African-Americans and the rural poor, who were usually the target of eugenics laws in the U.S., whose proponents cited Darwinism (not religion) as a rationale for their policies (again, he was correct in this instance.) Bryan was not as big a Bible literalist as those whose only knowledge of the Scopes Trial came from watching "Inherit the Wind" believe (as his actual testimony showed), and was actually a Democrat who would be considered a classical liberal - he fought for the enfranchisement of African-Americans and women, opposed Big Banking, opposed colonialism, opposed "dark money" in political campaigns, and as a pacifist, opposed America's entry into WWI (a politically unpopular stance that led L. Frank Baum to satirize him by basing The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz upon Bryan.) Again, I agree with you, Packsaddle, that Darwin shouldn't be blamed for the interpretation that others made of his theories. But those interpretations did give support to some of the most horrid episodes of American and European history.

Many cosmologists believe that quite a number of supernatural things exist, Merlyn - whole universes (billions and billions of them, as Carl Sagan might have said) that are outside nature, per the Multiverse Theories. These universes that exist outside our own universe cannot in any way be observed, examined, tested, only inferred on the basis of theories that only some regard as valid. (Gosh...sounds a little like religion.) One could argue (and I have heard atheists try to do so) that such supernatural universes should still be included under the concept of "_the_universe" and cannot be considered supernatural, even though the concept clearly fits the first definition Merriam Webster gives us for "supernatural": "of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe." Of course, that same claim of potential existence in a wider view of reality can be made for God, Heaven, Hell, and all the angels and saints: under the same argument, they could also be considered not as "supernatural," just another part of the wider nature that would have to be redefined as "all things that be."

Yeah, I was a day late. Noticed that after I posted. Still worth commemorating, though.

Ref S.I. Hayakawa, IMO.

Which religion has taught that the earth is flat?

Daaaaaang. I have to admit, though - I find it peculiar that so many people want to make belief or disbelief in evolution a litmus test for scientific literacy. Why? A man can believe that Eve was literally formed from Adam's rib and that the serpent convinced her, etc.... And what difference would it make to me? There are any number of other non-scientific, or anti-scientific shibboleths that are held by many quite respected people (*cough*RobertKennedyJr*cough*) that are held up as examples or admired, and those non-scientific beliefs can have a far bigger impact on my life, health, and safety than a belief or disbelief in some form of evolution. Some of those are even taught in our school systems. Anti-Vaxxers....a belief held by both those of the left and right, although in West L.A., Santa Monica, Marin County, and Beverly Hills, it is largely those of the politically "progressive" upper class. You can probably thank them for the kids who contracted measles at Disneyland. ("“We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.†- Barack Obama, 2008, long past the point when he should have known better.) Under Obama's watch, the FDA ordered a change from multi-dose to single-dose influenza vaccines because they contained less thimerosal -- the preservative that anti-vaccine activists wrongly believed causes autism. According to Scott Gottlieb, a former deputy commissioner in the FDA, this last minute switch was partially to blame for the vaccine shortages which occurred later that year. Anti-Frackers, although fracking can safely remove us from dependence on middle eastern oil. Anti-nuclear power plant people, although they can save thousands of black lung cases. Anti-genetically modified crops people, although they could save millions of lives in the third world - despite what supposed "Science Guy" Bill Nye has claimed (although he has said he has change his mind, after being berated by real scientists...) All the believers in homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathic medicine, crystal healing, aura alignment, and other forms of hokum healing. While it's true that one won't find many creationism museums in the Bay Area, you can sure find a lot of such quack health parlors. And while an American may have the right to drink some some rotting fungus that looks like something you scraped off the bottom of your shoe if he wants to, under Obamacare, you and I as taxpayers have to pay for it, at least in states that recognize such jiggery-pokery - thank you, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat, Iowa, and President Barack Obama. While every Republican political candidate has gotten the question "Do you believe in evolution?" I would like to hear Hillary and whatever other Democrats who decide to run be asked if they believe that funding those kind of frauds is effective. Given that the science was settled for years before Roe v. Wade that human life begins at conception (as every obstetrics and gynecology textbook stated), I would have like to hear Obama pressed on when he believes life begins, instead of allowing him to duck out of it with a grin and a "that's above my paygrade" joke. Heck, I'd like to hear them be asked if they agree withe the ridiculous nutritional advice that Obama donor Gwyneth Paltrow puts out, or if they agree that genetically modified foods must have a special label? Any of those issues has greater real-world consequences than a belief in evolution. So, why do you all think it is treated with such greater importance than it deserves?

I'd agree with you about the lack of a good argument against religion (by which I'm guessing you mean a belief in God, and the duty to worship Him). I should also add that the trad Catholic viewpoint holds that while evolution can be accepted as a finding of science by the faithful (heck, we owe the science of genetics to a priest, after all), it is not acceptable to believe that the human soul evolved and was not a creation of God, or that there was not an event where the first man and the first woman were imbued with a unique human soul. When that occurred, or what form of human that was or what they looked like, can be interesting to debate but has no real impact on our morality or our salvation. Catholic doctrine does not require a belief or disbelief in evolution, of course. One is welcome to believe in a literal reading of Genesis, and if the account of Adam and Eve were literally true, it would also have no effect one way or another on my salvation.

Say what now? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Gives one hope for Alley Oop, doesn't it?

No, but certainly some have argued that natural selection not only eliminates the need for religion, but can be applied to a wide range of issues which Darwin would probably have scoffed at. From the traditional Catholic viewpoint (which, with the Orthodox, comprises about 2/3 of all the Christians in the world, so it's not an outlier position), natural selection is one of the many natural processes by the natural world is shaped, just as volcanism, tectonic plate dynamics, atomic degradation, and so forth are. In Genesis, God is referred to as both the maker and shaper of creation, and the Hebrew word for "shaped" is used in connection with much of the creation narrative. It seems likely, and has traditionally been taught, that these natural processes were set in motion by God. God intervenes and decisively "creates" at key moments in history - with the creation of the universe, with the creation of life, and with the creation of the human soul - all moments when God is said to have "breathed" these things into existence ("pneuma," the breath, is also associated with the spirit or soul in ancient philosophy.) All three events are ones for which we don't have good explanations, if we solely use the lens of science. Since early in Church history, natural selection has been offered as an explanation for how species change and how the number of species have increased over creation, as St. Augustine proposed. He also wrote that the account of creation in Genesis is true, and also metaphorical or lyrical in its descriptions, probably took much longer than the days described literally in Genesis (The Hebrew word used, YOM or "day" can also mean an era) and that if the facts as revealed by our senses (i.e., empirically, through our sciences) conflicts with the Biblical account, then we are probably wrong in our scriptural interpretation. Biblical literalism, as applied to the Old Testament, is a fairly recent theological belief that arose largely during the Reformation. That being said, the state of scientific understanding of exactly how natural selection has worked over time is kind of chaotic at this point - the timeline on the rate of change in the genome is still quite controversial, and may throw off some of our estimates on the dates of events way, way off: In the past six years, more-direct measurements using ‘next-generation’ DNA sequencing have come up with quite different estimates. A number of studies have compared entire genomes of parents and their children — and calculated a mutation rate that consistently comes to about half that of the last-common-ancestor method. A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution, such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world1. But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between. Last year, population geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues compared the genome of a 45,000-year-old human from Siberia with genomes of modern humans and came up with the lower mutation rate2. Yet just before the Leipzig meeting, which Reich co-organized with Kay Prüfer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, his team published a preprint article3 that calculated an intermediate mutation rate by looking at differences between paired stretches of chromosomes in modern individuals (which, like two separate individuals’ DNA, must ultimately trace back to a common ancestor). Reich is at a loss to explain the discrepancy. “The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us,†he says. “It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite embarrassingly bad and uncertain.†(http://www.nature.com/news/dna-mutation-clock-proves-tough-to-set-1.17079) Whether evolution is a smooth and relatively continuous event (phyletic gradualism) or comparatively rare and rapid period of branching speciation (the punctuated equilibria theory of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge) is up for grabs in evolutionary biology, and the latter theory would be supported by the genomic change problems. As I believe in directed evolution (as a majority of the American population does, per Gallup), neither is really a problem for me.

Jesus also referenced and quoted from the deuterocanonical texts, of which He was obviously aware. As the Old Testament was included in the canonical Christian Bible (after much discussion and debate - some early schools of Christianity (the Marcionites) insisted it should not be, and that the God of the Israelites was not the God of the Christians), one of the keenest arguments for the inclusion of the OT texts was that they prefigured, prophesied, and were referenced by Christ and the apostles. For those reasons alone, it makes sense to include the deuterocanonical texts.

Today is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of the Scouting movement. Lord Baden Powell wrote a rhyme to honor the day: My warmest good wishes I am sending to you And hoping that the winter is through You will start out afresh to follow the lead Of our Patron Saint George and his spirited steed; Not only to tackle what ever may befall, But also successfully to win through it all And then may you have an enjoyable spell Of hiking, and jolly good camping as well. Stamp honoring 50th anniversary of the Boy Scouts in Greece:

Corporations had legal status as persons long before the Hobby Lobby decision. It's why the New York Times Corporation can assert its First Amendment rights to Freedom of Press, just as Hobby Lobby can assert its First Amendment rghts to Freedom of Religion, and why the BSA can assert its First Amendment rights to Freedom of Assembly. I don't think the Indiana Pizza case resulted in any legal action, so SCOTUS won't be involved. It was based on a hypothetical ("would you serve pizza to a gay wedding?") asked by a reporter, they answered they have and do serve pizza to gay people, but wouldn't cater to a gay wedding. The whole question was pretty stupid, as any gay couple that served fast food pizza at a wedding aren't worthy of the name. We just watched that Scientology documentary the other night and there was a reference to the BSA troops they sponsored.

Don't stick your arm Out too far It may go home In another car. Burma Shave!

I think the fault lay not in the software but in me. I hit the quote button instead of the edit button. It's like the old tombstone said: Here lies the body of Jonathan Blake. Hit the gas Instead of the brake.

Packsaddle - No idea. I presume I'm at about a median of intelligence, so some scouters will be better than me, some worse. We'll probably muddle through as we always do. I think most people involved in Scouting want to give a boy every chance he can, so I don't think this will suddenly cause a new Inquisition or anything. Faith is a big part of most people's lives, but it's become kind of a taboo to bring it up in polite face-to-face conversation (other than on the Internet, of course, where we obsess over it.) We are happier discussing the latest diet fad or sports scores or a celebrity breakup than mentioning religion, which is (or should be) a bigger part of most people's lives than all that. I don't have a problem with discussing it in an SMC, as long as it is done in a civil and respectful manner and we avoid proselytizing for a particular denomination in a setting where it is inappropriate (as in Scouting). I don't think it is necessary to avoid discussing an important part of life to avoid discussing faith out of fear of inadvertently "outing" a potential Eagle Scout as an atheist. I hope that by the time a scouter reaches adulthood, he should know how to have a simple discussion about spiritual matters with a boy without getting into denominational issues or being offensive. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I don't see it as a big problem. I've had a few scouts mention some doubts or sticking points they have about God in relaxed settings around a campfire, but they were usually the kind of issues that kids come up with (like "If God created everything, who created God?" or "If God can do anything, can He make a rock so big He can't pick it up?) I usually just mention that those are problems a lot of people have discussed over the centuries, bring up some reasons why I personally don't think they are insurmountable, and leave it at that. Most have never heard those responses before and didn't even think that anyone else had thought about them, and they seemed to satisfy them. I dealt with them in a way that would be appropriate for any denomination, and emphasized that they were my personal opinion. I've never heard any scout every bring up sectarian issues (with one exception, if you could call it that, which kind of required an answer.) Yeah, the Presbyterians in America are cratering. 34,000 Black churches that were in fellowship with PCUSA just broke ties off with them over their recent changes in doctrine. Like many denominations, they will probably find a social niche based on their new beliefs, but I doubt they will ever have the numbers they once had. Just my opinion.

It gets more complicated once we get into the theological weeds. Not every adherent of a religious faith necessarily believes in God (about 1% don't), and about 1 out of 5 atheists do believe in God or some kind of universal spirit. That seems more than a little counter-intuitive, but it is what it is. The same rate of belief shows up in atheists in both the Pew and GIS surveys. For what it's worth, about 1 in 5 atheists also believe in some kind of an afterlife: One of the possibilities is that atheism has many denominations, just as theism does, and because a boy may be flirting with atheism, or what he thinks it is, he may not have the same conception of "atheism" that members of the "New Atheism" movement typically have - a methodological bias towards materialism and naturalism that denies any supernatural (or hypermundane, or whatever you want to call it) component to reality, that is often linked to a somewhat antagonistic outlook toward organized religion. In fact, however, we also find that a substantial minority (a little over a quarter) of self-identified atheists find religion "very," "somewhat," or "not too" important in their lives, so they are probably not all miniature Christopher Hitchens (although they could mean that it is important because they consider it to have a negative impact on their lives, but given the other stats cited above, that's less likely): If atheism is defined as most atheists insist it should be - a simple lack of faith in a god or gods - it can still include beliefs in all kinds of supernatural concepts, including karma, pantheism, reincarnation, and so forth. These are beliefs which many faiths that are accepted within the BSA hold, so if a scout announces that he thinks he may be an atheist in a board, it might be worth (for his own sake) asking him to describe some of his beliefs, in manner consistent with respect and his personal dignity. It's also a pretty common finding that the boy who is questioning his faith today (and who among us hasn't?) is probably - actually, statistically likely - to develop a stronger faith as he enters adulthood. If we avoid the error of static analysis and look at both the rates of people entering and people leaving belief systems, atheists have the lowest retention rate (assuming we define no belief in God, or a belief there is no good - there's a semantic issue there - as a "faith"). Only 30% of kids raised as atheists still define themselves as such in adulthood. So I'm not sure if pushing a boy out of scouts who is simply raising questions or some doubts about God (especially given the poor state of catechesis in many denominations) is such a good thing. The psychological studies of atheists that have been done tend to point towards a loss of faith (if there was a previous religious upbringing) during adolescence. I would give some credence to the idea that for many, that won't be a lifelong turning away from religion.

I was glancing through a copy of Ernest Borgnine's autobiography {"Ernie") that was in a relative's house and saw this: "One of the other activities that helped me become a man and reinforced the notion of teamwork was joining the Boy Scouts. I almost missed the boat on that one because - i kid you not - they couldn't find a shirt that fit me. I only had a shirt that looked like a Boy Scout shirt, something my mother found and dyed. So I put my insignias on that and they let me get by with it...I had thick fingers and I had a hard time making knots. Eventually, though, I got the hang of it. Score one for determination, another valuable life lesson. "I did pretty well in scouting. I was just one merit badge short of becoming an Eagle Scout. More than anything in my formative years, scouting taught me how to be a man - self sufficient and observant. I used to pay very close attention to what the scout leaders told us about the stars, about nature, about survival. I learned how to make a fire by rubbing sticks together. I learned how to cook food in the wild and how to make a crude lean-to as a shelter. After a year or so I became the Assistant Scoutmaster of the troop at St. Anne's Church. It was wonderful. I'd take the new kids on twenty-mile hikes and share everything I'd been taught." Borgnine credits the Scouts with getting him interested in acting, after he performed as a giant baby in a Scout Circus and got a lot of positive comments about his acting skills. Later, in the Navy, he credited the Scouts with teaching him the knot-tying skills that helped him do well. Sounds like the Boy Scouts were good for Ernie!

You are also probably Politically Correct if you feel judges can't be adult leaders in the BSA because you might be prejudiced against gays when on the bench, but feel that atheist judges could not be prejudiced against religious defendants, or that gay judges could not be prejudiced against boy scout leaders who are plaintiffs. If you feel that need to presume that a sitting judge is an infant who cannot separate his personal life from his views on the law, then you are "politically correct." http://nypost.com/2015/02/16/blacklisting-boy-scouts/