February 6, 2010
The prime-minister of Portugal, the Fabian socialist Jose Socrates, is considered by the court of law of Aveiro as a suspect of attempt to restrict the free press in the country, by using big state companies as a tool to create an illegal underground “traffic of influences”.
Several journalists have been either punished by their employers or fired for the unique reason of criticizing in any way the political stands of Jose Socrates.
January 19, 2010
Rationality is scientific, rationalization is mythical.
Rationality uses as tools, calculation (induction) and logic (deduction) based on facts and/or human experience, and is based on the principle that science (or human reasoning) cannot define the Real (reality as a whole) but only can define concepts. For rationality, there’s a part of reality which is not possible to rationalize.
In the case of quantum mechanics, rationality uses the formal logical mathematics (deduction) based upon empirical data collected by means of physical measuring devices.
On the other hand, rationalization is based on the principle that the Real (reality) is forcibly and totally subject to a definition by the human Reason. It consists in a construction of a logical coherence based upon incomplete or erroneous data, or based upon a reductive discursive principle.
Rationality exists not only in the theoretical building ― i.e., in the structure of a specific scientific theory ― as well as it exists through and by means of a dialogue with human experience and with the external world, which is concrete and objective. As soon as facts and human experience denies, jeopardizes, or even put in doubt a given theory, rationality revises its previous standards based on evidence or auto-evidence.
On the contrary, rationalization imposes itself to the facts and makes them void by means of a excessive exercise of logic in relation to the sphere of the empiric, and by refusal of reality as it presents itself to us in all its complexity. Rationalization is a characteristic of the “illuminist philosophizing” by which the symbols acquire themselves an autonomous life and independent from human experience. Through rationalization [which led to the political religions] the reality is accommodated to a specific ideological vision of it.
Science depends upon human rationality which is the axiom (the principle) of science; before and beyond the axiom, there is nothing else and everything depends on it. Therefore, science cannot test rationality in a retrospective way, by putting its own principle in doubt or/and in a jeopardize position.
Human religiosity cannot be a subject of science unless science questions its own axiom (rationality) and therefore denies itself as science by adopting rationalization which moulds reality at someone’s subjective will.
December 13, 2009
Religion cannot be reduced to “behavior towards supernatural agents”, which are “personalities whose existence is believed but cannot be proven scientifically”, i.e., personalities whose existence cannot be proven empirically. The worship of the sun in ancient cultures does not fit in the “non-empirical status” of the supernatural agent, as defined above: the existence of sun was easily and empirically verifiable by those ancient people who worship it ― and we cannot say that the Egyptians considered the sun as a “person”; they knew the sun was something similar to the moon and to all other astrological bodies they use to analyze through their astrological charts inherited from the culture of the Babylonian Zigurats.
The very first thing we must do when analyzing religion throughout human existence ― and not necessarily throughout human history ― is to divide it into two different kinds: the immanent and the transcendent religiosity. Most cultures mixed both criteria. In the case of the worship of the sun, the religion was immanent ― the object of worship was something concretely and/or allegorically belonging to the universe and appertaining to its logical order. Even the Greek gods were immanent because they were intracosmic and symbolized the human phenomena and life. However, alongside with the immanent, most cultures also worshiped the transcendence and the domain of the only master God who created the Cosmos (cosmos= “The Order”) and “after the Creation moved away from human presence and existence”, leaving to the immanent gods the task of ruling the Creation of that “master transcendent God”.
All books of Mircea Eliade are indispensable reading for someone analyzing the religion phenomena.
The problem of biology and neurobiology is that those scientists created a world for themselves, ignoring other scientific data as those coming from quantum physics. Sometimes, neurobiology seems to evolve itself to a sort of “neo-phrenology”.
Those neurobiology scientists are absorbed and exclusively focused by the “research of the effect” (epiphenomenalism) instead of taking into consideration the “causes” by linking their investigation fields to other scientific fields as quantum physics. They simply forget that our brains exist as a structure according to the same principles driving the quantum wave function. They also forget that according to quantum mechanics, quantum waves (which are not matter as the waves do not have mass) transform themselves in particles (matter, because with mass) when observed by a [human] conscience (see Bernard D’Espagnat). What we see in science is that physicists are clearly saying that neurobiologists are dumb; and the latter disregard the categorization and remain proudly in their dumb world.
A neurobiologist may be compared to a guy that is ― in a very dark overcast night ― looking for his lost car keys bellow the street lamp, inspite of the fact of having loosed them ten yards away from the light spot, and because there was no light available on the real spot where he lost the keys. However, they consider themselves as the most-super-intelligent creatures on Earth.
Any comparison between a human being religiosity and the music of the whales and the so called “culture” of the high apes, is irrational because it implicitly considers a sort of “human rationality” either in whales and in apes. The neurobiologists really start from the concrete reality ― or from a real, concrete and objective fact ― and throughout a serial of erroneous induced and deducted thinking ― with an intrinsic logic, however ― they reach to a faulty constructed reality which they call “scientific”.
November 18, 2009
Two weeks ago the so-called European Court of Human Rights published a decision condemning Italy to remove all crucifixes from public schools classrooms. Meanwhile, a German court has ruled that a High School in Berlin must provide a special room for Muslim praying students which are mainly from a second generation immigration. Last but not least, the European Union is menacing a small country as Lithuania to be expelled on basis of “homophobia”.
If ever proof were needed that EU national governments may no longer legislate in accordance with their own cultural traditions, or enact laws which uphold the Christian understanding of the family, it is now evident.
Astonishingly (or perhaps not), the European Parliament has considered ‘Article 7’ action against Lithuania, which could have resulted in Lithuania’s suspension from the European Union. And all because they have dared to confront what they deem to be insidious homosexual propaganda.
In order to have a full idea of the actual European irrationality, please check this figures [PDF] and verify the total inconsistency and incoherence of an insane European political elite.
November 8, 2009
From Illuminism we have inherited an abusive rationalism that assumes that it can explain everything and imagines that alterity could always be reduced to a same predefined condition and without any residual differences.
The “great reason” of Lights should know better and recognize its own limits and stop when facing the unknown. Science is today a Babel Tower: every science field speaks its own language disregarding all the rest.
When quantum mechanics is strongly defying the macroscopic determinism, there’s a new and modern sort of ignorance in this article from Elizabeth Culotta ― but not the kind of De docta ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance) that Nicholas of Cusa taught us about. It’s irrational ― and therefore stupid ― implicitly attribute the human religiosity and teleological judgment to some sort of brain’s epiphenomenal causal determinism.
Rather I would advise people to read two actual books: “Und wir sind es doch—die Krone der Evolution”, by the German Gerhard Neuweiler (“We Are It: The Crown of Evolution”), and “Does Our Existence Have a Sense?” by the French Jean Staune.
The “golden age” in which reason was reduced to objective causality is gone.
November 6, 2009
« Voegelin then concludes his argument with a mischievous sleight of hand, when he further attributes to this range of individuals the beliefs of just one, Comte, presumably on the basis that it is easier to fit Comte’s positivist views into Voegelin’s meretricious argument that all gnostics were driven by the need for immortality, by a need for personal salvation.
This argument must fail because Voegelin is ascribing religious sensibilities to people who are, in some cases at least, not religious. The idea of personal salvation cannot explain the actions of a scientist.»
I do not think that a scientist is an irrational animal, i.e., a person without “religiosity”. I would ask the guy who wrote the aforementioned stuff to be more concise and distinguish between “religion” A or B, and “human religiosity”.
Furthermore, it seems that the blogger does not know much about classical culture and politics ― namely those of Ancient Greece ― as Eric Voegelin knew so well. The same concept of “immortality” Voegelin argues belonging to modern gnostics existed before Christianity with the Roman concept of “tradition”, which was the influence and the remains of Greek culture.
“Immortality”, for the Greeks, was exactly the concept of outstanding and exceptional human acts ― being either in literature, arts, politics or in philosophy (which was considered as “science”, for the Greeks) fields. Eric Voegelin did not create any new concept; rather he just looked back in History before Christianity to verify how a similar concept of “immortality” could be transposed through History and assimilated in a so called “post-Christian” Era.
November 5, 2009
“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” ― Ayn Rand
First of all, let me say that being a conservative, I have absolutely nothing against free enterprise and capitalism. However, obviously I am not a right wing libertarian as Ayn Rand was. Trotsky said once that “a right independent is a leftist and a left independent belongs to the right”. In many ways, the right libertarians unconsciously play the game of the left ― at least they play by the same rules.
The aforementioned citation allegedly quoted from Ayn Rand ― and I believe it is from her own property ― is exactly the opposite of Schopenhauer’s idea about civilization which was conceived as “prison” restraining the ferocious animal called “man”. As I do not sympathize much with Schopenhauer I will skip it.
Jean-Henri Fabre wrote that « Men will succumb victimized by the excesses caused by what is called “civilization” ». This quote implies a vision of History similar to Oswald Spengler’s ― or even to the Italian illuminist Mario Pagano before him. Also carries with it a strong apocalyptical view resulting from a belief that societies cannot regenerate themselves. So let’s skip Fabre.
Let’s try another one: “True barbarism is Dachau; true civilization is, in the first place, that special part of the human being that all concentrations camps intended to destroy.” The French Andre Malraux is the author of this one.
Does this citation coordinates itself with the above one of Ayn Rand? Well, being “free from oppression” is not the same as being “free from men” ― we could be “oppressed” by ourselves in the first place.
We simply cannot be totally free from our next door neighbors (unless we shoot them) and we cannot consider human interdependence and sociability as a sort of “oppression”. May be Ayn Rand considered “men” as a invariable symbol of “oppression”; however, we cannot rationally support this conception of “men”.
Furthermore, I do not see either History (or civilization) as a “process”. When we talk about History we’re talking about multi generations of human beings and not about any kind of “process” as making industrial hot-dogs. The word “process” was applied to History in the first place by Hegel with his tragic “dialectics of reason” followed by gnostics as Karl Marx that caused the Marxist gulags, Hitler and the Nazi concentration camps, more than 200 million victims only in 20th century — and even Ayn Rand is also part of all that “process” as per Franz Kafka.
The best way to understand the philosophy of Ayn Rand is trying to understand Eric Voegelin.
Finally, a quotation from Jean-Edern Hallier:
“Civilizations are mortal only because they become clairvoyant. As soon as they set reflecting about themselves, they blow up…”
November 4, 2009
“Everything is as it seems to be, although it is not. Simultaneously as it seems and as it seems not. Neither one nor another” — Nagarjuna
November 1, 2009
Hayek was a very good economist who made the mistake of contradictorily mixing, in his philosophical theory, Hume’s skepticism with Kant’s positivist criticism and religiosity. Ayn Rand was a good novelist who made the mistake of paradoxically mixing the common-sense with “reality”.
In her theory, Ayn Rand started from the “three axioms” ― existence, identity and consciousness. As we all know, as “principle” the axiom does not depend on anything else to exist as such. On the other hand, Ayn Rand refuses any transcendental spiritual dimension; and that is her main contradiction because in a exclusively classical material world, everything should be determined by causality laws and every effect would have a cause.
By definition, a “principle” as for example “the sum of the internal angles of any triangle is 180 degrees”, or that “no fact can be true or real, or no judgment can be correct without a sufficient reason”, both axioms do not depend on anything else to exist as they are― they simply always existed since the Big Bang occurred 120 billion of light-years ago. The truth about those axioms are atemporal, they exist in a atemporal spiritual dimension in which the human reason has its share and takes part of.
Ayn Rand’s biggest mistake was not to clearly distinguish between human reason which was created by evolution and its capacity of participating in the atemporal dimension of truths. There is nothing at all that could be deducted from experience (empiricism) and remain valid eternally, as the atemporal truths do.
October 31, 2009
The liberal leftists ― the cultural Marxists ― very often invoke the so called “Slippery Slope” logical argument, as follows:
Slippery slope argument
This argument states that should one event occur, so will other harmful events. There is no proof made that the harmful events are caused by the first event. For example:
“If we legalize marijuana, then more people would start to take crack and heroin, and we’d have to legalize those too. Before long we’d have a nation full of drug-addicts on welfare. Therefore we cannot legalize marijuana.”
The same argument is used in relation to same-sex “marriage”: in case gay “marriage” is legalized, they say, it does not necessarily mean that either poliamory or polygamy would be legalized in the future. Or even it does not mean that our children’s sexual age of consent would be lowered.
The argument above is both nonscientific and fallacious (anti logical) itself, because a) it is proven that marijuana leads to hard drugs consumption, and b) you cannot morally sustain a legal prohibition when you’ve started making concessions on matters of principles concerning similar or even identical issues.
The greatest danger from the leftists’ agenda is that they use the systematic lie as the only mean of political action. Their ethics are teleological ― all means are previously justified to achieve their goals, including transforming the “Slippery slope” argument aforementioned in a slippery slope itself.
