Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua

A few months after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) began a campaign of undercover anti-terrorism surveillance in mosques, schools, and Muslim neighborhoods, according to NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly in a recent speech given at Fordham University. That surveillance has thwarted 14 terror attacks from that time to the present. On the other hand, one reason the German Catholic and Lutheran churches failed to thwart the rise of Nazism and the deportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps was that Nazi informers infiltrated the churches. It's a question of balance.


Balance against the petrodollars funding the attempts by extremist Jihadi-Takfiris and their mullahs and imams to colonize our American mosques, schools, and Muslim neighborhoods. (As if American Islam were any less genuine or authentic than anyone else's Islam.) The Jihadi-Takfiris use methods of agitation-propaganda and provocation learned from atheistic Communism and thuggish violence learned from idolatrous Nazism in order to intimidate or eliminate their opposition within Islam. They function like an organized criminal gang, except that instead of peddling drugs, they are on a Crusade to peddle their narcissistic ideology, to which they themselves are addicted. Against such moneyed, organized, zealous criminal power, the balance of state power is sometimes needed, even welcomed.


But before we get to blasé about it, think of how you would feel if you went on a camping trip with some of your friends, only to find out, years later, that one of them, whom you trusted, to whom you bared your soul, was actually an undercover cop who was reporting your every word.


Our American Muslims need and deserve our care and respect. Maybe sometimes they also need the help of our law enforcement agencies to resist colonization by the Jihadi-Takfiris. But that help should be used  judiciously and circumspectly. Whenever possible, that help should wait for an invitation. And always, that help must respect and protect the privacy and dignity of Muslims who have given themselves to God, and not to the Jihadi-Takfiri idol of God.

Adapted from the poisonous pen of the notorious Right Wing extremist, David Horowitz:


Last fall, a Muslim, named Talaag Elbayomy, attacked a Pennsylvania man name Ernest Perce who had dressed up like Mohammed for a Halloween parade. The attack was caught on film, witnessed by dozens of parade watchers, and verified by a policeman. 

Elbayomy was charged. But when he was brought before Cumberland County Judge Mark Martin, the judge dismissed the assault charges against the Muslim and dressed down the Pennsylvania man for being insensitive to the Muslim religion. Not only did Martin rule in favor of the Muslim attacker, he lectured Ernest Perce for insulting Islam: "Islam is not just a religion, it's their culture. It's their very essence their very being… And what you've done is, you've complete trashed their essence, their being. They find it very, very, very offensive. I find it offensive."


- End of Adaptation.


I find it offensive, and stupid, too. But in a democracy, being offended does not confer the right to commit violence. Yet Judge Martin unlawfully conceded the right to commit violent crime in the name of religion to Elbayomy, and by extension to all practitioners of the religion of Islam.


I doubt that Judge Martin would concede a right of violent redress to equally devout Catholics seeking revenge against members of the Obama Administration who are forcing Catholic organizations to provide insurance coverage for birth control. In other words, Judge Martin is just another knee-jerk, reactionary, Politically Correct "useful idiot" for Islamofacism, who desperately needs to be impeached from the judiciary, and disbarred from the practice of law. It is the job of the judiciary to defend ordered liberty, not to sell it cheap in a vain attempt to appease its despisers.


You do not have the right never to be offended, because if you do, then everyone else has no rights. The whole world must revolve around your sensitivities. And that's wrong.

So Rush Limbaugh satirized Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law Student, who is advocating in favor of the Obama Administration policy that mandates employers who provide health insurance also provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients. I have yet to hear or read Limbaugh's remarks, or Ms. Fluke's for that matter.

What I can say, is that when my wife and I were Ms. Fluke's age, we were also living on graduate student stipends. We took care of our own birth control costs, and never thought to ask the University to help us with them. Because we assumed that birth control was not our right - it was our responsibility. Birth control is considered a right by people whose ideology confuses license with liberty.

On the other hand, the real issue is not graduate students, but the working poor. When you are bringing in such low wages that you have to count pennies, then maybe you do need a little help to make ends meet. Maybe the government should win this one. But Catholic and some other religious institutions have moral objections to birth control. At least let them have a means test, so that they will only be compelled to provide such coverage to those whom they pay wages too low to afford it.

That will at least provide those institutions a way to opt out of providing coverage for birth control by raising the wages of those lowest on the pay scale, and letting them make their own choices as to how to spend their own money.

The String Theorists and the Loop Quantum Gravitators are busily chipping away at the problem what space-time actually is. For some time, my concern has been that if people can figure out how space-time is put together, then somebody might be able to figure out how to take it apart. In other words, the next paradigm shift in theoretical physics may have weapons implications, just like the last one, which gave us nuclear weapons. The atomic nucleus is not Nature's last word on explosive energy release.

That last word is actually the First Word - the Big Bang that began the Universe as we know it. The question is whether some yet to be discovered physics can yield intentional explosions between the intensity of a nuclear explosion and the Big Bang.

On the other hand, our astronomers are finding that planets orbiting around stars are commonplace. With all those planets out there, surely some are home to technological civilizations, and surely some of them have already discovered physics that is several paradigms beyond our own. If there were any explosive technology based on such physics, and if any extra-terrestrial civilization had used it, our astronomers would have seen it. So far, all the observable explosions and other energetic phenomena in space look natural. Or so we think.

Maybe theoretical physics isn't such a dangerous pursuit after all. Maybe.

Here it is, in their own words, by their own admission.

Well, here's an outrage for you:

http://www.nccivitas.org/2012/state-inspectors-searching-childrens-lunch-boxes-this-isnt-china-is-it/

In an era of constrained budgets, inspectors for the State of North Carolina are searching through children's school lunch boxes and forcing them to eat state/federal-funded, school-provided lunches if what they bring from home fails to measure up to state guidelines.

Now I can see state and or federal guidelines for the nutrition of our nation's precious children. But I object to state or federal employees forcing compliance. Providing proper nutrition is the duty and privilege of the childrens' parents. Unless and until a child shows signs of neglect, or failure to thrive, it is tantamount to illegal search and seizure to snoop into his or her lunchbox. It is wasting scarce tax revenues on needless tyranny.

Or am I wrong? If we are all going to be paying for each other's healthcare, then maybe we all have a legitimate interest in what we may each be eating. Maybe we will all save money in the long run if we pay inspectors to do things like citing and fining me for the donut I ate during a workshop on plasma physics I attended this morning.

Perish the thought!

In the previous two posts we established that we are conscious beings who are have Free Will within the constraints of being human in this universe. Indeed, the purely materialistic argument is that Consciousness and Free Will arose in human populations because they enabled us to gain survival benefit from behaviors that are unpredictable and more complex, creative and powerful than pre-determined reflexes. The atheist/materialist is thus forced to argue in favor of Free Will, rather than against it.

But the atheist/materialist points out that Free Will is incompatible with the usual notion of an Omniscient (All-Knowing) God. If God knows the Future, then the Future is pre-determined. If God does not know the Future, then God is not All-Knowing. And the atheist would be right, if the Graeco-Roman categories of Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnipresence were categories that circumscribed the Deity.

Here I side with the Muslims, when they say, "Allahu Akbar!" which means, "God is greater!" Greater than anything you can imagine, including your philosophical categories. But before we dismiss the argument with a slogan, let us consider an alternate reality that you alone control.

Let us consider your dreams. You are the Creator of every one of them. You yourself are Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent with respect to your dreams. Part of you must know how each one will turn out, because part of you creates and controls the plot. But you are still surprised at what occurs in your dreams. Except for relatively rare instances of "lucid" dreaming, you feel out of control, swept along by the current of events in the dreams that you dream up.

Elsewhere I have argued that the Universe and everything in it seems like one vast, self-consistent dream in the Mind of God. Given that we are made in the "image" of God, perhaps it is not too outrageous to wonder if God experiences something of the same surprise at God's own dreaming of this Universe?

And why should God be limited to only one dream?

Let us return to the first proposition of my friend the skeptic:


"Every human thought is in principle a pre-determined consequence of biochemical processes that are themselves determined by evolution, the course of which is pre-determined by chemistry and physics. Therefore, there is no such thing as free will."

At first, it appears that the question of Free Will is an "either/or" proposition. Either we have Free Will, or we don't. What we actually experience, however is freedom within the constraints of our abilities. For example, you may be free to desire whatever you can imagine, but you are not free to desire what you can't imagine. The limits of your own imagination are the limits of what you can want, or will. I concede that the limits on our Free Will are pre-determined by our genetic makeup combined with our experience and our situation in the world. But within those limits, determinism is dead.


Determinism is based on the notion that if we could know the positions and velocities of every particle in the Universe we could, in principle, calculate the entire future evolution of the Universe. This idea was born from the structure of Newton's equations of motion and held sway for over 200 years, until the 1920's. Then we found out that very small particles begin to exhibit behavior that is masked by the sheer size of large ones. It turns out that the process of precisely measuring a particle's position destroys information about its velocity, and vice versa. That is to say, measuring exactly where a particle is gives it such a whack that we can no longer know where it's going, and measuring exactly where it's going can only be done via interactions that "smear out" where it is. That the position and velocity of a particle cannot simultaneously take on precise values is a statement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and seems to be a fundamental limitation on the measurability of reality.

Now the three gravitating bodies will under certain circumstances, stay within some enveloping region of space. Within that region, it is impossible to predict where they will be over the long term. But they will be (almost completely) somewhere within that region. They are free within that constraint.

Similarly, you are free to think and to desire whatever you want within the constraints of your being human at a certain time and place. That is to say, you have Free Will within limits. You are free to will anything possible. You are free even to will the impossible. But you are not free to will the unimaginable, because you don't know what it is. This is Limited Freedom, rather than an Absolute Freedom. The limits are set only by human nature and physical reality. At least, until we figure out how to change them.

So the dichotomy between Absolute Freedom and being an automaton is false. There is space for freedom with the constraints of being in this Universe. It puts us in a situation that seems paradoxical to absolutists who insist on Free Will as an all-or-nothing proposition. As Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, "We have to believe in Free Will. We have no choice."

"Every human thought is in principle a pre-determined consequence of biochemical processes that are themselves determined by evolution, the course of which is pre-determined by chemistry and physics. Therefore, there is no such thing as free will. In fact, there is no such thing as consciousness. What appear to be sentient beings are just automata that give the illusion of consciousness."

I feel frustrated, even enraged when I hear or read statements like this, whether from scientists and non-scientists. Such a statement is equivalent to saying that the Universe and everything in it is dead — even ourselves. It implicitly permits the most outrageous disregard of everything and everyone, even one's one children. After all, what harm is there in neglecting or even killing that which never was, and never could be really alive?

I'm outraged when people make such statements, because it is that easy and that quick to show that such statements would have grossly immoral consequences, were people to take them seriously. I'm frustrated when people make such statements, because they are wrong. For the rest of this thread, I would like to show you why.

Let's start with basic philosophy. To whom do automata give the illusion of consciousness? This is not just a semantic game. An illusion cannot have itself, nor can an automaton have one. The very idea of an illusion pre-supposes the idea of consciousness on the part of someone. That is, you must be conscious in order to have the illusion (the false awareness) that you are conscious. You might be semi-comatose and in a dream-like state, but that is still a state of consciousness. In fact, consciousness is the prime datum of philosophy, both Western (self-awareness as in Descartes' "I think, therefore I am") and Eastern (a generalized oceanic awareness).

Consciousness is also the prime datum of science. The discipline of science is to get ever more precise and accurate data into one's consciousness, so that one can discover and then test relationships among the data. If you reject the datum of your own self-awareness, then you can claim that anything I do to demonstrate the contrary is unreal, an illusion (which you must be conscious to experience, but since I must be wrong, logic must not apply). That is to say, rejecting the datum of your own consciousness is unfalsifiable, and therefore unscientific. Because science accepts only statements that are falsifiable (capable of being proved wrong), in principle, by some sort of observation (a means of getting data into consciousness) or experiment (a controlled means of getting data into consciousness). Science is thus a way to get to know by successive approximations (trial and error) those aspects of reality amenable to its methods.

In short, claiming that we are unconscious is unscientific, unphilosophic and leads to logical contradictions. And that is, as mathematicians say, "what was to be proven," Quod Erat Demonstrandum, QED.

Of course, it is possible that my friend mis-spoke. Perhaps what he really wanted to deny is the reality of the self. Here he might be on firmer ground, because Buddhism claims that an individual's sense of self is illusory. That is to say, that your own little sense of self is an illusion entertained by part of the Universal Self.

I think what the Buddhists are trying to say, however imprecisely, is that you are not your personality. Indeed, you build your personality on the foundation of your temperament in order to have an interface with the people and the world around you. You use your personality to relate to yourself, as well. The Buddhist koan, "Show me the face you had before your parents were born," is a demand to experience and relate to reality directly, without the intermediary of your personality.

But that doesn't mean that your personality is unreal. If you build a bicycle, the bicycle is no less real for your having built it. If you write a piece of software, the software is no less real for your having written it, or for it being the expression of your ideas. Similarly, your personality is your real creation, more intricate and grander than any art or literature ever created. It isn't an illusion. It just isn't all there is to you. And if your personality changes over time in response to your circumstances, so what? You might want to make changes to the bicycle you built as you grow, or as you age. So too, you may change your personality, albeit with some difficulty, and sometimes with the aid of a psychotherapist.

Having dealt with consciousness, we now turn to the thornier problem of free will. What my friend above should have been trying to establish was not the solipsistic ideas that we are unconscious or have no personalities, but rather the idea that although we are conscious, we only have the illusion of free will. We may be self-aware, but all our thoughts and actions are pre-determined reactions to preceding stimuli. We only think that we actually decide anything. This will be the topic of the next post in this thread.

It appears that someone from the Rick Perry campaign has leaked that someone in the past may have accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment. If any other political office were at stake, I would be interested. But this is the Presidency of the United States of America. Neither Herman Cain nor Rick Perry have done anything that Bill Clinton didn't do. In fact, Bill Clinton was accused of doing worse. But Bill Clinton was a pretty good president. So, I give both Cain and Perry a Clinton pass on this one. I recommend that you do the same.

The nation stands on a precipice regarding its power to influence world events in its favor, while the media focusses on the banal and the trivial. The media are not serving us well. There are other, better reasons to reject or to consider either of these men for the office they seek.

And there are other, more important stories to follow, like crony capitalism on the part of both Democrats and Republicans, the gerrymandering that undermines the foundations of our Republic, and the proliferation of rules and laws that undermine the Rule of Law itself.