There it is... I get hot under the collar...
Some people are trying to play god in re-writing the drama of life and death... And to do so they invent words that try to appear complicatedly serious, but are no more than hot poop describing the studies of bullshit. 
Actually the study of bullshit is more serious than this... Bullshit is about recycling in natural processes and the understanding thereof, as scientifically as possible... In "scientific" religious studies, it's about blinkering nature out of the equation — and about the huffing and puffing of humans trying to humbly fart as high as gods in their own arrogant minds. 
Thus to me, religion, at this point in time, is lazy. It's retrograde. It may have served an ancient purpose to fill ignorant angst with comfort... But to do so it had had to make its dictums with fantasies, illusions and deceit, without looking any further... The study of these retrograde illusions in order to keep them alive and to prop them at the forefront of thoughts is stirring more useless deceit — unless one points out this uselessness and/or the deceit... There is no scientific value there either. 

Here are examples of what stir my cynicism crazy: two of them are the "analysis" of the idea of god, from seemingly "god persons" points of view — while the other — I picked randomly — is one of the original fantasies peppering that book that influenced the development of the present Abrahamic faiths...

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The science of God: The philosophical antecedents of Intelligent Design
Steve Fuller
ABC RELIGION AND ETHICSUPDATED 6 AUG 2012 (FIRST POSTED 5 AUG 2012)
CAN WE NOT EXPECT THEORIES ABOUT GOD'S NATURE TO HAVE SCIENTIFICALLY TRACTABLE CONSEQUENCES, AS THE PROTAGONISTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION BELIEVED, THE MAIN FRUIT OF WHICH WAS NEWTON'S SYSTEM?

"Theomimesis" is my neologism for attempts to acquire God's point-of-view - in short, to take literally that we might "get into the mind of God" or even "play God."

The deity in question is Abrahamic, indeed, the "monotheistic" deity that eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers such as John Toland and Gotthold Lessing abstracted as the rational common core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In practice, this monotheism was usually - but not always - heavily biased toward some version of the Christian deity. This deity is distinctive in that it transcends the world it has created, yet its nature is sufficiently close to our own that we might reasonably aspire to approximate the deity's virtues.

The theomimetic moment has been captured in several ways. Kant, ever the diplomat, spoke of God as a "regulative ideal of reason." More plain-speaking theologians and philosophers have followed the great fourteenth century Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus' theory of "univocal predication" whereby divine attributes differ from human ones only by degree not kind. Thus, God may be "all knowing" but the sense in which God "knows" is the same as our own, except we "know" to a much lesser degree. This in turn allowed for direct comparisons between human and divine conditions of being, resulting in a trajectory of progress - typically presented as a project of species self-improvement from Adam's Fall to (possibly) the construction of Heaven on Earth.

Two versions of this project have enjoyed considerable secular influence in the modern era:

Leibniz's theodicy, which would understand Creation in terms of a divine utility function that tolerates many local harms in service of ours being "the best possible world";Hegel's philosophy of history, which makes temporality constitutive of God's own self-realization, which means that Creation itself is incomplete as long as the distinction between God and humanity remains.

Historically these two secular theomimetic projects are known as capitalism and socialism, respectively. The theomimetic agents are correspondingly known as the entrepreneur and the vanguard.

But once religious believers started to take seriously that the actual world might reflect the design of a divine intelligence that is literally "superhuman" - that is, the ultimate extension of human intelligence - disaffection quickly set in, as God seemed to operate on the principle that the end justifies the means. For humans this normally means "unscrupulous."

To be sure, the Jesuits (God bless them!) had already seen this problem in the Counter-Reformation, proposing the "doctrine of double effect," which aims to dissociate what one intends and what one anticipates. Thus, God always intends good, and through his all-powerful nature can bring about good, but the good of primary interest to the deity is ultimate good, not immediate or transient good. These lesser goods are related directly to matter, which for God is always a negotiable instrument. So while it is unfortunate that many must suffer and die, this would happen in service of an end to which they themselves would have agreed (had they been asked). Both military invasion and land dispossession have been justified on these terms.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/08/05/3561096.htm

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Is there a future for Christianity? The shape of things to come
Ross Douthat
ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS30 JUL 2012
IT WOULD BE HERESY TO ASSUME THAT A CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE IS INEVITABLE. CHRISTIANITY'S RESILIENCE HASN'T PREVENTED PARTICULAR CHRISTENDOMS FROM DECAYING. BUT TO HOPE IS EVERY BELIEVER'S OBLIGATION.

The story of Christianity has always featured unexpected resurrections. Eras of corruption give way to eras of reform; sinners and cynics cede the floor to a rush of idealists and saints; political and intellectual challenges emerge and then are gradually surmounted.

There is no single form of Christian civilization, in the same sense that there is no stereotypical Christian life; across two millennia, the faith has found ways to make itself at home in the Roman court and the medieval monastery, the Renaissance city and the American suburb alike.

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton describes what he calls the "five deaths of the faith" - the moments in Western history when Christianity seemed doomed to either perish entirely or else fade to the margins of a post-Christian civilization.

It would have been natural for the faith to decline and fall with the Roman Empire, or to disappear gradually after the armies of Islam conquered its ancient heartland in the Near East and North Africa was conquered by the armies of Islam. It would have been predictable if Christianity had dissolved along with feudalism when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, or if it had vanished with the anciens regimes of Europe amid the turmoil of the age of revolutions. And it would have been completely understandable if the faith had gradually waned away during the long nineteenth century, when it was dismissed by Marx, challenged by Darwin, denounced by Nietzsche, and explained away by Freud.

But in each of these cases, an age of crisis was swiftly followed by an era of renewal, in which forces threatening the faith either receded or were discredited and Christianity itself revived. Time and again, Chesterton noted, "the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs." But each time, "it was the dog that died."

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/07/30/3556405.htm?WT.svl=featuredSitesScroller

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Of course "faith survives and the dog dies"... Faith is an idea and ideas cannot die, whether they're true or false. Thus the latter proposition is a silly sophism... 
Faith is generally maintained by those who profit from it... I don't mean the churches — who have structured dedicated instruments of faith maintenance (such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), governments (who prefer people to be religiously submissive) and the controllers of morality (those bigots who punish people who sin — including the religious police who will stone to death unfaithful wives) — those who profit directly from faith... 
I mean there is also solid cash to be made indirectly by businesses from people enslaved in faith and the morality associated with it... Submission to whatever is big business. One can pay less for services and one can charge more for goods thus produced... The differential becomes part of the rudder of capitalism... As well, one also can get services from members of the faith group exclusively or preferentially, in deferential episodes of back-scratching... 
Now "faith" (blind faith) is based on stories like the one below from the bible itself... 
That we let ourselves be swindled by such twaddle is not acceptable... 
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Let's be swindled by the conception of Samson, a strong-man who would figure well in today's olympicus cirkus —read it carefully: 
Judges 13

The Birth of Samson

13 -1 And the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.

2 And there was a certain man of Zorah, named Manoah, from the clan of the Danites, had a wife who was childless, unable to give birth. 

3 And the angel of the Lord appeared to her and said, “You are barren and childless, but you are going to become pregnant and give birth to a son. 

4 Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean. 

5 For lo, Thou shall conceive and bear a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite, dedicated to God from the womb. He will take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines.”

6 Then the woman went to her husband and told him, “A man of God came to me. He looked like an angel of God, very awesome. I didn’t ask him where he came from, and he didn’t tell me his name. 

7 But he said to me, ‘You will become pregnant and have a son. Now then, drink no wine or other fermented drink and do not eat anything unclean, because the boy will be a Nazirite of God from the womb until the day of his death. ’”

8 Then Manoah prayed to the Lord: “Pardon your servant, Lord. I beg you to let the man of God you sent to us come again to teach us how to bring up the boy who is to be born.”

9 God heard Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman while she was out in the field; but her husband Manoah was not with her. 

10 The woman hurried to tell her husband, “He’s here! The man who appeared to me the other day!”

11 Manoah got up and followed his wife. When he came to the man, he said, “Are you the man who talked to my wife?”

“I am,” he said.

12 So Manoah asked him, “When your words are fulfilled, what is to be the rule that governs the boy’s life and work?”

13 The angel of the Lord answered, “Your wife must do all that I have told her. 

14 She must not eat anything that comes from the grapevine, nor drink any wine or other fermented drink nor eat anything unclean. She must do everything I have commanded her.”

15 Manoah said to the angel of the Lord, “We would like you to stay until we prepare a young goat for you.”

16 The angel of the Lord replied, “Even though you detain me, I will not eat any of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, offer it to the Lord.” (Manoah did not realize that it was the angel of the Lord.)

17 Then Manoah inquired of the angel of the Lord, “What is your name, so that we may honor you when your word comes true?”

18 He replied, “Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding.[a]” 

19 Then Manoah took a young goat, together with the grain offering, and sacrificed it on a rock to the Lord. And the Lord did an amazing thing while Manoah and his wife watched: 

20 As the flame blazed up from the altar toward heaven, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame. Seeing this, Manoah and his wife fell with their faces to the ground. 

21 When the angel of the Lord did not show himself again to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realized that it was the angel of the Lord.

22 “We are doomed to die!” he said to his wife. “We have seen God!”

23 But his wife answered, “If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have received a burnt offering and grain offering from our hands, nor shown us all these things or now told us this.”

24 And the woman bare a son, and called his name Samson and the child grew, and the Lord blessed him, 

25 and the Spirit of the Lord began to move him in Mahaneh-dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.

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Now, now, there, there.... Calm down, Gus... Calm down... We're in pure fantasy territory... And some people are trying to analyse the truth in such fantasy... and they do this as part of "Epistemology"...
Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. 
As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. This article will provide a systematic overview of the problems that the questions above raise and focus in some depth on issues relating to the structure and the limits of knowledge and justification. 
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"Justified Beliefs"???? There are more real concepts of beliefs in a Salvador Dali painting than in any religious book full of fraudian (yes, I mean fraudian in the sense of fraudulent story telling) interpretations of what is out-there — or even what's not there either... especially on the day when Rover Curiosity just landed on a planet 150 million kilometres away from earth at about US$20 per kilometres... I am glad the NASA boffins called this car-sized thingy "Curiosity"... 
Curiosity is the essence of intelligence and many animal species have this trait... There is ziltch curiosity in religion.

As you know from the start of this blog, I am (re)-reading some of the bible and the unaware punters could say Gus has gone all religiously gaga, as he approaches the final chapter of his topsy-turvy existence... 
Not on your nelly...
I do it to examine the serious ridiculousness of the book (similar ridiculousness on offer in the k'ran) in which one finds — etched in copious amount of fantasy — the greatest excuses for crap behaviour... 

The bible is the book of excuses... especially designed for men behaving badly...
Women, of course, feature as second fiddles — though sometimes they lie — and they do it beautifully, including the mother of Samson herein... 
The men get their arrogant socks full of loopy instructions from god and his angels, while the women who get pregnant from someone else, have to find superb imaginative ways to tell their husband about this unlikely "bun in the oven"... So they use the angel vision explanation plus offerings to god for extra sauce... Magic!!!! Love it... It works! 
This demonstrate the annoying reality that we're often at the mercy of someone else's illusion and/or porkies... And the religious nuts buy this bullshit like god's gold...

One of my great grand mothers was a simple maid who got pregnant from the local noble man (a Count) she worked for... He was married and respectable... Soon, great-granny got the boot from her employer, of course... Pregnant, she got itched to a man who of all things was infertile... The man (and everyone in the village) knew that... Thus he married the woman without after-thoughts nor bitterness... He actually was a good man who was happy to have a kid he could call his own and he gave great-granny the best of lives possible in those 1860s difficult days... God did not feature well in this accepting caper though... Her/his son was one of my grand fathers, who became a professional gardener, and who I suspect may have eventually worked for his genetic dad — in the castle's gardens...
The analysis of religion at top make my back arch a lot with the terminology... "The science of god" is not a science... It's an attempt to reconcile what is and what is not, with old tired fictional stories of well crafted excuses that don't make sense and never made sense anyway in the world we live in... But in order to still maintain the faith, some people read them without understanding their deceit, or they have forgotten the original fantasies, thus they have forgotten the false rungs of this fictional ladder, while they hang up there in their own mind with the latest frothed up illusions from this climb into the clouds... 
For the man, Manoah, this angle on the event limited the shame of having be made cuckold. the event was turned into a glorious victory for himself and an addition to the fanciful narrative of men behaving badly — since Eve tricked Adam into biting the forbidden apple... and Cain killed his brother Abel...

The idea of god is unfortunately easier to gobble up than trying to understand the natural bullshit cycle, scientifically... 
... Crap, CRAP CRAPPPPPPP!!!
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