Teachings from the Old Testament

DEUTERONOMY: WHEN TO STONE YOUR SON
21:18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:
21:19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;
21:20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
21:21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

This is what the Torah teaches. Now, both Jews and Christians (and, I think, Muslims, too) accept the Torah (or whatever they call it) as one of their religious texts. Stoning in Judaism has been abandoned. But stoning in Islam is still practiced, but only for adultery. The question that arises, if one thinks rationally, is:

Why do religious texts remain unaltered if their teachings are considered dangerous (stoning, hanging) or obsolete (eating certain foods)? Every Jew and Christian, despite the fact they do not (hopefully) still practice stoning, will tell you that the Torah (almost identical to the so-called Old Testament) shall remain unaltered. Why? How can they explain the numerous stupidities, brutalities, nonsense written in it?

Many will maintain that religion and science can be reconciled (and even certain scientists--see, e.g., John Lennox--will tell you that religion is compatible with science) . Wrong! In science, everything is put to test. A theory is tested with experiment, an experiment gives rise to a new theory and hypothesis. Logic is applied. Science never considers anything settled. It constantly rejuvenates itself. This is not the case with religion, as the example above shows: irrelevant, dangerous and obsolete texts will be held as authoritative forever. No questions asked.

Is religion hard-wired in humans?

In the latest issue of the New Scientist, I read an article dealing with the question whether belief in the supernatural is hard-wired. Several scientists ran experiments and have some interesting but still inconclusive findings. Here are some excerpts:

It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

So the taboo of religion has not being lifted. It's time it did. One should be allowed to study why people tend to be religious. Something is amiss here.

One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

Experiments involving children are particularly interesting:

When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on.

And a thought-experiment:

Left to their own devices, children create their own "creole" languages using hard-wired linguistic brain circuits. A similar experiment would provide our best test of the innate religious inclinations of humans. Would a group of children raised in isolation spontaneously create their own religious beliefs? "I think the answer is yes," says Bloom.

Superstitious beliefs seem to be correlated with a lack of sense of control:

Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation. The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says. What's going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking. That would explain why religions enjoy a revival during hard times.

What I also found interesting (and alarming) is the opening paragraph of the article:

While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance. This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times.

Let's hope that the current economic crisis will not cause the same phenomenon. But we never know... People want to believe and will believe even if evidence suggests otherwise.

Four outstanding Greek women guitarists

For classical gutarists around the world, they need no introduction. I just list their names and sites and a few samples:

Antigoni Goni
Un sueño en la floresta (AgustÍn Barrios)
Concerto for Lute in D major (Vivaldi RV 93)


Eleftheria Kotzia
Se ela preguntar (Dilermando Reis)
Guarania (Héctor Ayala)


Elena Papandreou
El marabino (António Lauro)
Tango en skai (Roland Dyens)


Eva Fampas
Sousta (Dimitris Fampas)
Tango (Francisco Tárrega)

Joaquin Malats: Serenata Española

Joaquin Malats (1872-1912) was a Catalan composer and pianist from Barcelona. One of his most melodic pieces is the Serenata Española. It was written for piano but it is its guitar transcription by the great composer and guitarist Francisco Tárrega (1852-1909) that is well-known. Often transcriptions surpass the original composition and this one (click here for the score) is so well-made that it really makes the instrument sing. Of course, it was not done by an arbitrary person but by Tárrega, one of the greatest guitarists. He knew the instrument well.

In the video below we can see Julian Bream perform the piece. Notice the nuances, the expressions, the slurs, the colour of its performance. Truly outstanding!



Incidentally, the score linked above is provided by the site of Jean-François Delcamp, a site devoted to classical guitar, containing both music scores and audio files.

Not for creationists

It has just being discovered that the earliest accepted date for animal life on Earth is tens of millions of years than what was thought to be. Traces of ancient sponges were found in Oman dating some 635 million years ago.

Not very good news for (young Earth) creationists. who believe that the Earth was created within the last ten thousand years, literally as described in an ancient book called Genesis. Creationists are typically not very intelligent people who feel the need (due to their religious belief) to attack science, distort reality and propagate myths. More recently, some creationists, in response to not being intelligent, relabelled themselves as intelligent designers. Assuming this label, they decided to embrace science and use it in order to prove that what creationists believe is true. Unfortunately, every single attempt of intelligent designers to use scientific methods has been discredited. One of their most major proponents of the intelligent design version of creationism is a mathematician called William Dembski. Having failed to produce anything significant in mathematics, he started a career as creationist.

There are many versions of creationism, some more hilarious than others, such as those who think the Earth is flat, the young-Earthe creationists-those who think that the answers are in Genesis, and those who think that...

EARWAX SHOWS GOD'S INTELLIGENT DESIGN!

I read this in the blog of Jason Rosenberg and had a good laugh!

For more fun of the earwax kind, please visit the homepage of the Institute for Creation Research, in Dallas, Texas, specializing in young Earth creationism, rejecting the science of evolutionary biology, abusing the word "research" and "science" and constantly trying to get approval to teach their idiocies in schools.

Closer to home, the Edinburgh creation group, seems to be active in propagating lies such as that Darwin was wrong, that intelligent designers are producing science, and that the (christian) Bible is to be seen as a scientific document! Fortunately, in the UK not many give a damn about such liars, but people like John Lennox are trying to propagate religion through science from a more "sophisticated" point of view, in subtler ways.