The Flat Earth Thread

[roc_abilly]

Irish social conservatives are easily explainable. It is an island at the edge of Europe after all. Most people in Ireland are three generations from working on the land.

Among the good things that such a background brings, a vivid and well known mythology irretrievably borne of the relationship between the land and people, there are the bad. Like the suspicion of the outsider and unfamiliar ideas and an instinct to reject the new.

'Let no new thing arise' is an old Irish saying and it speaks of the fear of the unknown.

If we're still talking about gender, I don't think it is that at all, it is in fact the international Catholic church at root.

I.e. The crusade against gender began in 1995 in New York, when the term 'gender' was attacked by US based right wing Catholic groups at a preparatory committee meeting for the 4th World Conference on Women.

Then in 1997, you had 'The Gender Agenda' book written by Dale O’Leary – a North American conservative Catholic female journalist, who said it was all an international feminist conspiracy.

Also in 1997, you had Cardinal Ratzinger, in his book 'The Salt of the Earth', write that the concept of gender ‘dissimulates an insurrection against the limits man carry within him as a biological being’.

From the early 2000’s onwards the Vatican really got involved, publishing for example, in 2003, 'Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family Life and Ethical Question', and in 2004, 'Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Man and Women in the World'.

So the anti-gender crusades did not come from grass-roots, or peoples' relationship with the land at all, rather the forces in question were transnational, international, conservative Catholic, at root, no doubt nowadays there are many other ideological forces arrived to bolster the crusade.

(Yes, every force creates an equal and opposite reaction, and there was of course a marked push back, a vicious circle.)

 

[Mystic]

I am struggling to understand what this thread is actually about, is it flat earth or the hard left?

 

[roc_abilly]

I am struggling to understand what this thread is actually about, is it flat earth or the hard left?

The first post of the thread is for amusement mainly, you will get the context from the thread title and the other posts in the thread. The OP made a mess of things, so other forum members had to step into the breach. But write what you like, respond to a post, compose something based on the thread title, whatever you like.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

If we're still talking about gender, I don't think it is that at all, it is in fact the international Catholic church at root.

I.e. The crusade against gender began in 1995 in New York, when the term 'gender' was attacked by US based right wing Catholic groups at a preparatory committee meeting for the 4th World Conference on Women.

Then in 1997, you had 'The Gender Agenda' book written by Dale O’Leary – a North American conservative Catholic female journalist, who said it was all an international feminist conspiracy.

Also in 1997, you had Cardinal Ratzinger, in his book 'The Salt of the Earth', write that the concept of gender ‘dissimulates an insurrection against the limits man carry within him as a biological being’.

From the early 2000’s onwards the Vatican really got involved, publishing for example, in 2003, 'Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family Life and Ethical Question', and in 2004, 'Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Man and Women in the World'.

So the anti-gender crusades did not come from grass-roots, or peoples' relationship with the land at all, rather the forces in question were transnational, international, conservative Catholic, at root, no doubt nowadays there are many other ideological forces arrived to bolster the crusade.

(Yes, every force creates an equal and opposite reaction, and there was of course a marked push back, a vicious circle.)

Well I am sure you will be aware that my view is that the catholic church and pretty much any organised religion is what happens when you give the mentally ill social authority.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

I am struggling to understand what this thread is actually about, is it flat earth or the hard left?

Pretty hard to talk about the 'flat earth' to be honest. 'Tis for me anyway as I have at least a rudimentary understanding of gravity, the sort of motion required to appear to make the constellations move about our heads, have travelled high enough on a clear day across Siberia and the Pacific ocean to have noticed the curvature of the earth, understand quite a bit about how the earth formed and the vastly unlikely proposition that it formed as a flat 'plane in space.

Interstellar physics and gravity wells plus observation of the galaxy around us, along with noting the formation of planets in galaxy means that flat earth theory is total and utter bollocks and an exercise in fooling the stupid.

It is not accident that it is currently popular in the land of the Maga Gom.

 

[Mowl]

Category error.

As in criminality, it's a process of elimination.

What stands after all other possibilities have fallen, regardless of how inconceivable, must be be the truth.

Well I am sure you will be aware that my view is that the catholic church and pretty much any organised religion is what happens when you give the mentally ill social authority.

Leaders and followers - the human variety invariably tend to veer towards the one or the other.

Catholicism acts as a dragnet for the lost and confused - it gives them the opportunity to part of something bigger than they are as a single being, so they allow it to define their morals and they rely on it to save them from themselves. I've met many deeply religious people over the years who, on the one hand - are good people, highly productive and highly moral. But I've met more religious leaders (priests, bishops, the general religious footmen) who are completely the opposite.

The average unthinking Catholic who simply adheres to what he/she is told is right and proper are those who also turn a blind eye to the nefarious actions of the pedophiles in the ranks. Excuses like: 'they're not all bad' or 'not every priest is a rapist' tend to tossed around like confetti.

My moral code didn't come from the church or the religious schools/institutions: it came from life experience.

The moral code of the true believer truly wishes that the likes of myself was raped and beaten by priests and christian brothers.

Odd the way lazy catholics find fire and brimstone entertaining - just like child abuse.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

They are trained to be bipolar. The whole weft of catholicism in Ireland is inherently bipolar. Goes back to Augustine of Hippo, who reverse merged Manichaeism into catholicism and got a buck promotion to 'St' Augustine because of it. Manichaiens believed in the 'duality of opposites' from a Persian belief system.

That's where the bipolarity was added to xtian psychology. If there had to be a heaven then there had to be a hell. If there was good there had to be evil. If heaven was above, then hell had to be below. If there was good there had to be an opposite ('sin').

It is a bipolar psychology. The result being that if you weren't a follower you were evil. It will take another hundred years before the 'flock' realise that.

It is also why they can't understand that atheism isn't a rival belief system. Doesn't compute with their programming.

 

[Buachaill Dana]

If we're still talking about gender, I don't think it is that at all, it is in fact the international Catholic church at root.

I.e. The crusade against gender began in 1995 in New York, when the term 'gender' was attacked by US based right wing Catholic groups at a preparatory committee meeting for the 4th World Conference on Women.

Then in 1997, you had 'The Gender Agenda' book written by Dale O’Leary – a North American conservative Catholic female journalist, who said it was all an international feminist conspiracy.

Also in 1997, you had Cardinal Ratzinger, in his book 'The Salt of the Earth', write that the concept of gender ‘dissimulates an insurrection against the limits man carry within him as a biological being’.

From the early 2000’s onwards the Vatican really got involved, publishing for example, in 2003, 'Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family Life and Ethical Question', and in 2004, 'Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Man and Women in the World'.

So the anti-gender crusades did not come from grass-roots, or peoples' relationship with the land at all, rather the forces in question were transnational, international, conservative Catholic, at root, no doubt nowadays there are many other ideological forces arrived to bolster the crusade.

(Yes, every force creates an equal and opposite reaction, and there was of course a marked push back, a vicious circle.)

They're probably right when you look at how things have spiralled in recent years aka

Up to 90pc of people using gender service may be autistic, audit finds

The National Gender Service (NGS) has estimated that as many as 90pc of the people who used its service in 2022 may be autistic.

m.independent.ie

P.S.

You sectarian clowns will have a different beast to contend with once the awful CC dies out

‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

Many liberals celebrated when Hamtramck, Michigan, elected a Muslim-majority council in 2015 but a vote to exclude LGBTQ+ flags from city property has soured relations

www.google.com

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

No difference between muslim fanatics and catholic fanatics. They are all primitive tribesmen and will go the same way.

 

[roc_abilly]

I know science and technology better perhaps than anyone posting on these Irish fora as far as I can make out, and I can tell you there is an amount of 'woo' in it that might be surprising to many people.

That is not to detract from its achievements. (But I think the device of "science" is running out of capability to continue yielding "benefits" to human beings the way it has for the last two or three centuries).

What device in particular,? Well mainly Descartes' separation of mind or soul or anything you want to call it, from material events.

A splitting that let us admit was necessary to allow scientific types to get on with the analysis of inanimate matter, which they had to see in terms as simple and determinate as possible.

And not forgetting the device of Francis Bacon, that I touched on above of "inductive reasoning", and his fairly arbitrary choices in throwing out a lot of the "science" up until then.

I'll briefly touch on one element he threw out, alchemy. And you know it was the alchemists who gave Francis Bacon his idea of inductive reasoning, the key innovation that lead to the modern scientific method, the idea that we should "test" theoretical speculation in the real world.

You see what the alchemists did was test their inner work in the material world. They did not hold to Descartes separation device of convenience. That's where the idea came from, Bacon writes about it.

Anyway, appealing to common sense, what is it that drives most people to write off the intellect and perceptions of the men of yesteryear as inferior to our own?

Were there really no men of intelligence around? So why was it that only a couple of hundred or so years ago, nearly everybody believed in God? And non-believers were extremely sparse?

This was not because they were afraid of not believing, or somehow forced to. It was because they thought differently.

Or you think for example the Irish monks who went out and spread their knowledge and learning of then "science" in the world and were looked up to as the wisest and most educated in the world were some type of simpletons?

In fact today's looking to modern "science" for truth, answers, wise ways of living, certainty, and assuredness about the future has a lot in common with previous states of consciousness of mankind, if you examine it.

I also observe that there is in fact a religiosity and piousness about the kind of "faith" that most people today put in science and technology.

When you compare this religiosity with the previous religiosity that prevailed the thousand years previously, which asserted, essentially, that inner illumination was necessary to possess meaningful knowledge, well I am tempted to say our own religious conscious in our own times seems to come up short in certain respects.

Are we the wisest culture so far, that our "science" has enabled? What of the Greco-Latin ascendancy which succeeded the Egyptian-Chaldean ascendancy, the ancient Persian ascendancy, the ancient Indian ascendancy, and even further back, other great cultures that imprinted the way of thinking and mindset of the whole world?

The fact that today you have what I consider to be science and technology "fundamentalists" who stand up and say that our way is the best and only way, and scorn any other way, is in my opinion the true mark of the institutionised, religious, mindset.

 

[roc_abilly]

BTW don't conflate the above with what the institution of the Roman Catholic Church evolved into, particularly in Ireland, I have often said this institution and its manifestations is very far from Christ's message. We are more talking about belief in God, generally, and the habits of thought associated with that belief.

 

[roc_abilly]

This is not to make excuses either for the type of Catholic fundamentalists who give succour to flat earthism, and basically get behind anything that might possibly serve to reduce humanity to their own abject state of ignorance, bigotry and idiocy.

I would say they are people who have been left behind in the world's present state of consciousness, and who are a negative force on humanity, and who are are organising and amplifying themselves on the Internet.

The post above that I wrote is a tangent to that, raised by some of the comments made on the thread.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

I know science and technology better perhaps than anyone posting on these Irish fora as far as I can make out, and I can tell you there is an amount of 'woo' in it that might be surprising to many people.

That is not to detract from its achievements. (But I think the device of "science" is running out of capability to continue yielding "benefits" to human beings the way it has for the last two or three centuries).

What device in particular,? Well mainly Descartes' separation of mind or soul or anything you want to call it, from material events.

A splitting that let us admit was necessary to allow scientific types to get on with the analysis of inanimate matter, which they had to see in terms as simple and determinate as possible.

And not forgetting the device of Francis Bacon, that I touched on above of "inductive reasoning", and his fairly arbitrary choices in throwing out a lot of the "science" up until then.

I'll briefly touch on one element he threw out, alchemy. And you know it was the alchemists who gave Francis Bacon his idea of inductive reasoning, the key innovation that lead to the modern scientific method, the idea that we should "test" theoretical speculation in the real world.

You see what the alchemists did was test their inner work in the material world. They did not hold to Descartes separation device of convenience. That's where the idea came from, Bacon writes about it.

Anyway, appealing to common sense, what is it that drives most people to write off the intellect and perceptions of the men of yesteryear as inferior to our own?

Were there really no men of intelligence around? So why was it that only a couple of hundred or so years ago, nearly everybody believed in God? And non-believers were extremely sparse?

This was not because they were afraid of not believing, or somehow forced to. It was because they thought differently.

Or you think for example the Irish monks who went out and spread their knowledge and learning of then "science" in the world and were looked up to as the wisest and most educated in the world were some type of simpletons?

In fact today's looking to modern "science" for truth, answers, wise ways of living, certainty, and assuredness about the future has a lot in common with previous states of consciousness of mankind, if you examine it.

I also observe that there is in fact a religiosity and piousness about the kind of "faith" that most people today put in science and technology.

When you compare this religiosity with the previous religiosity that prevailed the thousand years previously, which asserted, essentially, that inner illumination was necessary to possess meaningful knowledge, well I am tempted to say our own religious conscious in our own times seems to come up short in certain respects.

Are we the wisest culture so far, that our "science" has enabled? What of the Greco-Latin ascendancy which succeeded the Egyptian-Chaldean ascendancy, the ancient Persian ascendancy, the ancient Indian ascendancy, and even further back, other great cultures that imprinted the way of thinking and mindset of the whole world?

The fact that today you have what I consider to be science and technology "fundamentalists" who stand up and say that our way is the best and only way, and scorn any other way, is in my opinion the true mark of the institutionised, religious, mindset.

You would be assuming that 'only a couple of hundred years ago' everyone who said or implied they believed in a god actually did so. You might want to read Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' which was published in 1776 where you can see a healthy degree of scepticism of the xtian story.

The power of catholic and other churches was highly political and only increased in the Victorian era with the birth of a fundamentalism, or have we forgotten the trials and tribulations of Darwin who knew what controversy his thoughts on evolution would bring down?

Bear in mind that even earlier, from the 1600s to the Victorian era the USA was founded by religious nuts with guns, as PJ O'Rourke pointed out, and they were extremists who felt they had to build a new Pilgrim state because they felt that the Old World was a godless place.

So to say 'up to a couple of hundred years ago nearly everybody believed in god' is actually incorrect. Much of that notion is a hangover from the stern Victorian era which in our small state lasted pretty much up to the 1970s when it came to the 'state view'.

Much of this notion that science is a rival to religion is just based on the inability to process anything other than a bipolar view of life mixed in with a bit of surviving 'god of the gaps' argument simply because that which could not be understood two, five or seven hundred years ago automatically became to the bipolar psychology encouraged by priests to be the purview of god.

At one time god was everywhere at all times, in charge of everything. Now god is hidden carefully in the miniscule gap of nanoseconds ahead of the expansion of the universe. That is because of the advance of knowledge, not an attack by science.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

This is not to make excuses either for the type of Catholic fundamentalists who give succour to flat earthism, and basically get behind anything that might possibly serve to reduce humanity to their own abject state of ignorance, bigotry and idiocy.

I would say they are people who have been left behind in the world's present state of consciousness, and who are a negative force on humanity, and who are are organising and amplifying themselves on the Internet.

The post above that I wrote is a tangent to that, raised by some of the comments made on the thread.

The same could be said of anyone in the 21st century who clings to the primitive notion (mostly because they've been trained to do so since childhood) that there is an omniscient cloud god who runs everything who lives somewhere in the aether.

It is inherently anti-human and an abdication of human responsibility to throw one's hands in the air and exclaim 'oh well that's all down to mr god'.

At one time for example the catholic church opposed the use of anaesthetics (that survived into the 1980s in Ireland among the religious orders of nuns) simply because of the lovely bit of suffering that was so approved of by those nutters and their psychology, a suffering that should be 'offered up' whatever that means and otherwise enjoyed by the ghoulish bystander.

Surgery was opposed by the catholic church as it was deemed to be 'interfering with the altar of St Michael' (ie the human body).

It isn't that science attacks religion. Science is agnostic and therefore had to be opposed by those who want to defend the woo-woo.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

I know science and technology better perhaps than anyone posting on these Irish fora as far as I can make out, and I can tell you there is an amount of 'woo' in it that might be surprising to many people.

If you can detect any 'woo' anywhere in a conjecture, theory or proof then as you and I both know what you are looking at isn't science. It is an immediate fail in that regard.

That extraordinary claim that you 'know science and technology better perhaps than anyone posting on these Irish fora' comes across as a very arrogant claim when clearly you won't know the background of everyone who posts on Irish fora, and is therefore in itself a claim made without evidence and can therefore be as dismissed as casually as it is claimed.

 

[Buachaill Dana]

Yiz are 50 years too late lads. The CC is dead and and being usurped by another religion that's growing all the time in the West, Ireland included.

Imam 'surprised' Mohammed is Galway's most popular boy name

An imam at the Galway mosque was “pleasantly surprised” to learn Mohammed is now the most popular name for boys born in the city.

www.newstalk.com

Funny how internet shut-ins see the world, though.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

Going back to this nonsense about 'flat earth'. I'm reluctant to get involved in that crap because the whole point of the notion is to test the credibility of the stupid and commenting upon it at all beyond that level is filling out some clown's crossword somewhere.

You can get people to believe in almost anything where they don't have the capability to challenge it. That's the whole point of the meme itself.

Could be the existence of dragons. Could be the existence of ghosts or car-parking angels. In the Victorian era the prank was around the existence of faeries who had been photographed in a garden.

In a way it is a gullibility test. Which a surprising amount of people fail. The latter not being at all surprising at all in the history of human affairs.

It was less than 40 years ago that thousands of people in Ireland, many of them with driving licenses and office jobs and therefore at least at a minimum of educational standard sufficient to earn a living and buy petrol, were driving to Ballinspittle to exclaim that they could see statues of one of the Europeanised Persian goddesses moving of its own volition.

Think about that for a second.

 

[roc_abilly]

It's gas really.

You get the exact same reaction from these science and technology fundamentalists as from a Catholic fundamentalist if you questioned the immaculate conception.

You point out something like how their "religion" is based on Descartes positing a rather incoherent fissure fracturing Nature right down the middle, that can only be bound to lead to a distorted view of the world, and you get a load of indignant spluttering mumbo jumbo in return.

The fact is the only thing we directly experience is the subjective "dream-image". The objective is always a speculative construction, e.g. we do not have any direct experience of electrons, rather we perceive their effects and speculate upon their nature.

You don't (or won't) see the issue there?

As I said, it was a fine device to assume this split to develop our knowledge of inanimate matter, the physical sciences. We came on leaps and bounds.

But to mention just a few of its inadequacies, it is highly inadequate dealing with living matter, it has major shortfalls dealing with social sciences, like economics, and it has lead to the tyranny of a mechanistic conception of the world, and of the universe, that is increasingly dehumanising.

(The mechanistic Laplacean programme of reducing all reality to matter in motion, which logically lead to the dogma (or conundrum if you like) that any intelligence which possessed at one moment of time knowledge of the ultimate particles of the universe, their velocities and the forces acting between them, could calculate any future topography of the same particles, giving them a complete God-like knowledge of the Universe. I.e. the mechanistic world view speculatively mooted by Galileo and that received its fullest elaboration by Laplace in the early nineteenth century.)

Now it may be true that science when it is done right, should always be continually changing in its presuppositions, premisses, its methods, and everything else.

But we are talking about its very foundations.

I e. This incoherent fissure running right down the middle of nature. And the dogma of "objectivity". Even such assumptions as that an infinite number of observations, which cannot in any case be carried out in practice, would suffice to give us a complete determination of something in nature.

But the faithful disciples of science and technology, with all the drawers and garages in their house as stuffed full of "gadgetry" as the houses of the erstwhile old ladies muttering over their rosary beads were stuffed full of religious paraphernalia, and candles on the wall to the blessed virgin and the legions of saints sending out a 24/7 muted message, just like today's wide-screen TV's, albeit taken off mute to allow no introspection - by and large don't really understand any of these problems in their faith, and they don't want to understand either.

Of course the priests and bishops and cardinals of their faith understand it, at least at the highest levels. To quote one great physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, grappling with the physics of living matter, understanding that the convenient Cartesian duality reaches its limits of explanation, understanding how it completely removed from his equations the individual mind, soul, consciousness that is actually a part of the living organism, perhaps even understanding such deeper insights as William Blake's that "... that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age...".

Schrodinger wrote, "... I think, that I -– I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ — am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature...".

That was written at the end of an exemplary performance of scientific reasoning explaining precisely why present day physics and chemistry could not possibly account for what happens in space and time within a living organism.

I.e. Science was inadequate to the task. Something else was needed. Along the lines of what he wrote above. But can you tell people this today? No, people like Lumpy would have a melt-down. Why is that so is the question.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

If you have to try to draw an equivalence between religious belief and science I think it is a sign that you may not understand science as well as you think you do.

A scientist can follow the scientific process as rigorously as possible and in reaching a conclusion can sit back and look at the results and say 'thank god our theory looks right'. Does that mean they are religious or a scientist. If the approach to the science withstands the test of peer review and replicated experiment by others then that certainly means they are a scientist.

They can also be religious if their life and background requires it. But departing from the science to suggest that at some point 'faith ' is required means they've stopped doing science right there at that point.

A scientist can be a believer and some were, but at no point did they substitute anything within the scientific approach with 'faith'. If they did, they are no longer pursuing science.

Scientists can wax as philosophical as they like on their own time, but what they cannot do is enter that philosophy in the scientific progress where data should be.

Use of such terminology as 'disciples of science' is just a sign that the person using that derogatory description does not understand the difference between science and religion and is inclined to suggest that scientists are just believers in a different religion. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is.

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

Religion is by definition the presentation of conclusions without any evidence.

It isn't therefore at any level the equivalence of science.