Not forgetting the name of the officer that just arrested you for indecent exposure. But – THINGS. ALL THINGS.
That is why Facebook Mania became a Facebook Fast. That is why my blackberry has been so busy sending and receiving messages multiple times every hour. But pardon me while I fart.
Another way of expressing it is that accumulating things will make you very heavy. You need to be nimble, light on your feet, ready to pounce, ready to run. Ready to empty your mind in the face of the Noisy One. On the grand path to the Nameless One. PERFECT. (There is such a thing as “perfect” and I can prove it in three minutes.)
Here I am at one of the most famous facilities for operating on hernias in the world – the Shouldice Hospital which is located in the York Region of Ontario in Canada. Come here and put on the fancy blue hospital outfit. Get a shave from one of their expert nurses. They will shave the hair from your groin area all the way up to your navel. Then go down into the cold room with all the beds and allow the mind altering drugs to take effect as you wait for the experienced surgeon and his knife.
Don’t panic. They have done it thousands of times before. Yes, in a way you are a piece of meat on an assembly line; in a way the surgeons don’t care about you any more than they do the dried skin off the bottom of the heel of a remote relative. But, hell, they sure do seem to know what they are doing. And the food is better than the average hospital fare.
Some sayings and parables come to mind at this time – a time of morphine and middle-aged gentlemen (very few ladies). Please ignore errors to do with grammar or meaning.
In a world where constipation is the norm, even a small amount of flatulence is considered a victory.
I stink and that is a signal from the healing angels that I should get on with that sponge bath.
My parents were not religious and did not understand the laws of the Covenant. That is why I received a circumcision every eight days until I reached my Bar Mitzvah.
A man must master the art of dodging bullets. Nary a fool taketh a sponge bath in the hospital of his choosing than doth the wicked man cobble an unusual shoe.
Suppose a slush fund or an offshore account were offered ye. Would you not accept it with gratitude or would the offer become like a fish caught in the woolly hairnet of your moral quandaries?
There were many more but they were far less worth repeating than these.
Warning! This video contains a lot of red colours.
Rabbeinu Bachya, in his minor philosophical work “The Duties of the Heart” [10th century] misrepresents the argument for design in the following manner:
Do you not realize that if ink were poured out accidentally on a blank sheet of paper, it would be impossible that proper writing should result, legible lines that are written with a pen? Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.
Since this seems impossible in the case of letters whose formation is conventional, how can one assert that something far subtler in its design and which manifests in its fashioning a depth and complexity infinitely beyond our comprehension could have happened without the purpose, power, and wisdom of a wise and mighty designer? (“The Duties of the Heart,” The Gate of Oneness, Chapter 6)
According to the Aish HaTorah Propoganda Central Office, the two most common objections to this argument go as follows:
1. The argument is too simple. There seems to be a big jump from concluding that someone must have made rock formations in the desert to concluding that there is a Creator who must have made the universe.
2. What about evolution? Over a very long period of time everything could have come about as a random occurrence! With millions of years to play around with, isn’t it possible for some kind of order to emerge just by chance?
Oh Aishele, Aishele, Aishele! How you misrepresent things in order to convince people of the God Doll that you sell in your Aish Mall. From Ebon Musings(now get this into your head Aish and stop playing dumb!)
It is clear to see that natural selection, which is not chance but the opposite of chance, is what makes evolution work. If there were no selection, change in living things would follow a pattern called a “random walk” – sometimes the changes would be beneficial, sometimes not, and the population as a whole would wander back and forth across the fitness “landscape” but, on average, never get anywhere. That would be an example of random change, and it is absolutely correct to say that such a process could never produce all the intricate diversity and marvelous adaptations that living things possess.
Natural selection changes all that, by preferentially preserving the good variations and eliminating the bad ones. It is like a ratchet, allowing a population to move only in one direction – the direction of greater fitness. And the changes that natural selection favors are not random, but are determined by the characteristics of the environment. This is why, for example, both fish and aquatic mammals such as whales and dolphins have the same streamlined body shape – because this is the shape that is most efficient for moving through the water in which they live. This shape has evolved separately in the fish and cetacean lineages, in an example of an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence, precisely because it is the best shape for that environment regardless of what kind of creature has it. If evolution were random, we would not see this kind of predictable pattern.
Like all natural processes, evolution is guided by laws that do not change. If you throw a rock up in the air, its path is not governed by pure chance, but by the law of gravity. It cannot fly off randomly in any direction, but will travel in a parabolic arc and land at a predictable point. If you put a hot object next to a cold one, the transfer of heat is not governed by pure chance, but by the laws of thermodynamics. Heat cannot flow randomly in either direction; it will move consistently from the hotter object to the colder one. And if you set a population of randomly mutating organisms in an environment, their future is not drifting at the whim of chance, but is directed by the law of natural selection. Their evolution will not proceed in just any direction, but only in those that make them better adapted to their surroundings.
Now based on your false Aish HaTorah assumptions you can pretend to address these two objections that are coming from uneducated people.
Addressing the envelope for design argument number one
The principle “design implies designer” applies across the board, whether the designer is a Bedouin nomad piling rocks in the desert or the Infinite Regression of all existence. The design from ignorance states that it is the same logical process. In fact, there is more reason to assume a designer in the latter case since the level of design is much higher. And there is more reason to assume that that designer also had a designer since it has already been stated that a more sophisticated being is required to design a pile of rocks, a watch or what not. Especially WHAT NOT!
Simplicity is not an inherent fault in an argument. Perhaps the reason why some people take issue with this application of logic is due to the accompanying consequences. The reason why some people take issue with this logic is due to the consequences. (Oh here we go with the false and intellectually insulting reasons given by Aish HaTorah as to why people don’t accept the design argument. Instead of listening to the logical responses to their argument they will counterattack with an appeal to morality or claim that people just don’t want the inconvenience of keeping kosher or not blending wool with linen. Watch to see if they use the phrase “cognitive dissonance” for that is always a nice “intellectual” insult!)
aish hatorah general meeting: “Since the Bedouin doesn’t make any moral demands on our life, there is no resistance to drawing the logical conclusion that someone designed that rock formation. But when the conclusion points to God,
cognitive dissonance kicks in, creating an instinctive opposition to what one perceives to be threatening.
When the interference of cognitive dissonance is removed, what is the objective standard of design that we need to see in order to conclude something was created? What we need is a control experiment that determines this threshold of design in a case that has no threatening consequences. “The Obvious Proof”, a book by Gershon Robinson and Mordechai Steinman, delivers a compelling presentation of the design argument, and describes such a control experiment involving millions of people concluding the necessity of a designer.”
I am tired of this. Aish HaTorah is a machine spewing out a party line. They think they have everything covered but they are intellectually dishonest and they themselves suffer from cognitive dissonance. You can’t argue with a machine. Garbage in, garbage out as they used to say.
Should you wait until you have content? Shouldn’t you have the idea of the article and then come up with the headline afterwards?
We, at Design Argument and Goldstein Auto, Goldstein Solutions (Classical Mechanics), and Goldstein Subaru emphatically say NO to these two questions. In fact we believe that you don’t need to know anything at all about what you want to write before you begin to write.
God willing we are going to produce 180 articles full of excellent content on the subject of why you should write when you have nothing to say.
You will all to become good monster writers by reading these here articles.
Keeping relevance to a minimum may be important sometimes: Aish Bible Code proving that Paul is dead!
Creationism believes that all life looks designed, and an often used example of this intelligent design is a creature known as the Bombardier Beetle. Defending this claim requires a careful examination of the bombardier beetle and of the definition of the word “design”. Under scrutiny, however, the bombardier beetle can be a proof of evolution and seriously challenges the design argument.
What Makes Bombardier Beetles Special?
Bombardier beetles are so-called ground beetles in the four groups Brachinini, Paussini, Ozaenini, and Metriini and comprise over 500 species. The group Brachinus is the most common group.
Bombardier beetles are amazing creatures. They are so called due to their ferocious ability to defend themselves against predators by shooting a mixture of scalding hot and toxic chemicals from glands in their behinds.
This is how their defensive squirting action works. Secreting cells produce hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide which collect in a bladderlike vessel. This vessel is opened through a muscle-controlled sphincter onto a thick-walled reaction chamber. This chamber is lined with cells secreting catalases and peroxidases. As the contents of the bladder are forced into the reaction chamber, the catalases and peroxidases quickly break the hydrogen peroxide down and catalyze the oxidation of the hydroquinones into p-quinones. This releases free oxygen and generates sufficient heat to bring the mixture to the level of boiling which vaporizes a fifth of it. Under pressure of the released gasses, the sphincter is automatically shut which forces the chemicals through openings found in the abdomen.
Unfortunately, and making real debate and communication almost impossible, creationists offer an un faithful account of the process. The creationist Duane Gish made the claim that hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones would explode spontaneously when mixed without a chemical inhibitor, and that the beetle starts with a mix of all three and adds an anti-inhibitor when he wants the explosion.
In reality, the two simply do not explode when mixed, as has been frequently demonstrated. Gish stubbornly still used the mistaken scenario after being corrected by Kofahl in 1978. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? The same mistake is also repeated in books by Hitching in 1981, Huse in 1983 and 1993, and twice in a creationist magazine in 1990.
How strong is an argument of design if the people making it don’t know what the design looks like?
Irreducible Complexity: The Design Argument’s Best Buddy that Never Calls Back
Just knowing what something looks like doesn’t reveal whether it is designed; for that, we must define “design”.
Although it’s rarely defined, the most important aspect of design as it relates to creationism appears to be complexity. Richard Lumsden says,
Systems that are of high complexity, that is functionally integrated multicomponent systems, systems that are of high specificity where only one or very few of many possible arrangements of these components works, and systems which are of low probability, at least spontaneous occurrence . . . these are the hallmarks of purposefully designed engineered systems. [Lumsden, 1995]
The problem for proponents of intelligent design and the design argument is that the theory of evolution already allows that complex, functionally integrated, low-probability systems can arise via gradual variation and selection. Darwin’sntheory explains how a few photosensitive cells might evolve gradually into human eyes. In order for complexity to be a problem for the concept of evolution, it must demonstrate some property that rules out gradual development. Michael Behe proposes such a property with the concept he calls “irreducible complexity,” which he defines as “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” Although Behe leaves open the questions of whether bombardier beetles are irreducibly complex, Gish expresses the concept with reference to them when he says, “How are you going to explain that step-by-step by evolution by natural selection? It cannot be done!”.
Gish is obviously not as right as he believes himself to be; a step-by-step evolution of the bombardier system is not hard to imagine.
In a future post I will show a potential step-by-step evolution of the bombardier beetle mechanism all the way from a primitive arthropod.
“He’d be dead; ’cause then evil reign.
He is silly weird that smash the limp servant.”
Paul McCartney in the Bible Code
Does the Aish Hatorah Torah Code Prove that Paul is Dead?
Paul McCartney appears in the Bible Code from Aish HaTorah and is being used as Aish outreach for Jews.
Paul is dead aish bible code controversary
Bible Codes, a system which involves recognizing pairs of conceptually related terms in Hebrew scripture using Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS). The system involves choosing or finding sequences of characters making up a name or a date, which doesn’t have to be in the order in which the name is spelled, that is found in the biblical text at equal distances from one another. Thus, the letters of the Hebrew phrase, Paul is dead, might appear every 10 letters in a section of the book of Genesis. The letters of the Paul’s cause of death (purportedly a car crash) might appear in another sequence of say every 13 letters. The assumption is that the close proximity of these two related letter sequences is improbable and therefore not due to chance. The Bible Codes are understood to be the result of God’s Design which placed the Beatles and Nostradamus in the Bible text for us to find. How else can we explain the existence of the names and the resurrection of Jesus in a text that is over 3,000 years old – it is asked.
ELS was first applied scientifically to the Bible by Professor Rip Torn, an American actor who is pretty good with figures, in 1983. In 1985, Rip Torn, together with Dolly Parton and Yoyo “Bad Pig” Kaplansky, conducted an experiment to find the names of famous nazi officers and the dates of their birth or death in the book of Genesis using ELS. The experiment utilized a list of names based on the Encyclopedia of Indecent Dudes in Israel (Hebrew) compiled by Shalamar “The Airport” Havlin. The experiment, conducted using a real cool computer program, resulted in the discovery of the Nazi officers’ names in close proximity to their dates of birth, a result that could not, it was desperately argued, be the result of chance or of things coinciding or two things happening at the same time in a way that freaks you right out. The Bible text used for the experiment was the Koren Hebrew edition of the Bible. The editor of the professional journal Statistical Science requested that the experiment be repeated and it was. Thus, in 1994, Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg published their findings in Statistical Science (vol. 9, 1994, no. 3, 429–38).
Since then, the Bible Codes have become the subject of great controversy. The debate can be divided into three areas: (a) statistics; (b) Bible; and (c) education.
Does Chabad outreach use bible codes?
Chabad outreach does not use the Bible Codes to convince Jews to be religious. Instead, Chabad uses a form of Jewish I Ching which involves giving notes and letters to a dead man usually Paul since he is widely accepted as the prophet of his generation. Then there is a purported response which is generously interpreted in such a way as to impress the neophyte. Interestingly Chabad generally does not believe that George and John are still alive. However, there are fringe groups of Chabad outreach practitioners that believe that John is still alive but not in a way that the average person can perceive. Others believe that he will rise from the dead.
Next post we will continue with more information on the Bible or Torah Codes: Aish uses these in their Discovery Seminars to mislead Jews.
“He’ll be dead: myself was there on bleeding heaps.”
Governor General Michaëlle Jean on a Woman’s Intrinsic Right to Pass Gas
For Governor General Michaëlle Jean, denying more than half of the world’s population the most basic human right to flatulence is one of the worst scandals of our time. This is what has inspired her determination to break down the wall of indifference and give a voice to women.
She believes that flatulence—at home, in our neighbourhoods, in our communities—is one of the basic rights that are all too often abused where women are concerned, even in our so-called progressive societies. That is why she has made flatulence for women a priority in her mandate. It is also a commitment that stems from her years spent working with women and children who had suffered through many forms of flatulence suppression, which led her to help establish a network of shelters for them.
In her view, the struggle for flatulence equality is not just a woman’s struggle; it is the struggle of every person who demands respect, justice and dignity. She strongly believes that we have everything to gain when we give women the means to expel gas. “Empower women,” Her Excellency states, “and you will see a decrease in poverty, illiteracy, illness and gas build up.”
Women’s Historical Struggle for the Right to Pass Gas
It has been well known for centuries that retaining flatus is bad for the health. Emperor Claudius even passed a law legalizing the passing of gas at banquets out of his compassionate concern for people’s health and his reliance and fear of the ruthless and flatulent women of the imperial family.
There are some conservative doctors (those who do not believe in global warming) that confidently state that there is no medical harm caused when a woman retains her flatus, either through a desire to avoid embarrassment or through patriarchal pressure. These politically motivated doctors state that holding your gases in will not poison women as they are a natural component of a woman’s intestinal contents.
These doctors, who listen to a lot of talk radio and did not vote for Obama, are not concerned if a woman develops a stomach ache due to the gas pressure. They care not that pathological distention of the bowel could result if a person holds in gas too much. They are indifferent to the fact that retaining flatus can cause hemorrhoids!
Flatulence is an Argument from Design
The level of flatulence in nature implies that there must be a creator God. We must explain how we think the gassy world in which we live came into existence. Naturalists (atheists, or materialists) would argue that since flatulence is able to enter our world it is possible for chance collisions of molecules to produce farts.
But such an explanation has many problems. For instance, although farts are free to enter the system of our world, what mechanism connects these gasses to the work of ordering chaotic molecules into the precise, complex order needed for a satisfying experience of passing gas? Organizing matter into meaningful structures and the relative proportions of these gases that emerge from our anal opening depend on several factors: what we ate, how much air we swallowed, what kinds of bacteria we have in our intestines, and how long we hold in the fart. Random arrangements accomplish nothing. And randomly assembled molecules cannot evolve into farts because they lack the ability to replicate themselves. The whole complex mechanism involved in DNA and protein synthesis would be required before natural selection could ever come into play. Theists argue that such complexity of flatulence could only arise as the direct result of intervention by someone with purpose and intelligence.
Suppose we put some dynamite under a flatulent person, and blew it up. The system contains sufficient fart energy and the correct building blocks to build the Taj-Mahal. But is it really likely that blowing the bricks up would have this result? The answer is obviously no but this is a distraction from the main theme of this article.
For more information on Women’s Rights, Flatulence and the Argument from Design check here, here, here, and here.
Women Empowered: No More Will We Retain Our Flatus!
That is why Facebook Mania became a Facebook Fast. That is why my blackberry has been so busy sending and receiving messages multiple times every hour. But pardon me while I fart.
Here I am at one of the most famous facilities for operating on hernias in the world – the Shouldice Hospital which is located in the York Region of Ontario in Canada. Come here and put on the fancy blue hospital outfit. Get a shave from one of their expert nurses. They will shave the hair from your groin area all the way up to your navel. Then go down into the cold room with all the beds and allow the mind altering drugs to take effect as you wait for the experienced surgeon and his knife.
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