Misguided ex-Muslim becomes charismatic Christian, claims that Muhammad got his revelations from the Devil himself since the angel Gabriel was rough to the future prophet?!
But that logic, Jesus was a demoniac since he was rough to Paul on Damascus road. Or how about Yahweh wanting to kill Moses?
Presumably, the mass murder carried out by the Angel of Death in Egypt is completely unproblematic, then? After all, Yahweh´s enforcer only killed sinners!
Overheard on the web: the most important figures in Christian history are Valentinus, Marcion and Montanus.
Valentinus because he forced the proto-orthodox to develop a theology. Marcion because he forced them to adopt a scriptural canon. And Montanus because he forced them to appoint monarchic bishops!
I admit that the "demonic Jesus" he is attacking sounds more simpatico than, say, Yahweh. But what do I know...
Today, we celebrate how Deists, Freemasons, Unitarians, Satanists and socialists gathered in Philly to found the secular republic known as the United States of America, backed by French military might and Jewish money, it´s declaration of indepedence being written on parchment made of cannbis!
Some time ago, John Michael Greer wrote that if he ever wanted to lose all his readers, he would write a series of essays on Richard Wagner´s operas "The Nibelung´s Ring" and "Parsifal". Well, it seems the old man is finally about do go there! This is the first essay, recently posted on one of his blogs...
It *does* contain some truly shocking information. I mean, I knew that Bakunin had met both Czarist generals, Swedish kings and US state governors, but I didn´t know he was on a first-name basis with Wagner?!
Tobias Hübinette har gjort en intressant upptäckt...
Invandringskritiska partier har allt oftare ledare med invandrarbakgrund
Not sure wat means? And as per usual, the techno-geeks are offering their five cents (or is it bitcoins) in the commentary section...everyone pretty much disagreeing with everyone else.
Is a "natrium reactor" less efficient than a standard one, but easier to build and operate? Or is it both cheaper and *more* efficient?
I suppose both options are worth looking into. You know, climate change, peak oil, that kind of stuff. Note also who finances this little operation! Hmmm...
Now, do thorium reactors.
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| Credit: Erik Mclean (Pexels) |
Tydligen fanns det inget. En kort artikel av Per Beskow i Signum. Diskuterar de mångomtalade kyrkorna på Gotland.
“Monism as Connecting Religion and Science” is an 1892 article by Ernst
Haeckel, the controversial German evolutionist and scientist. I admit that it didn´t
clarify as much as I hoped! Is Monism really just materialism under a fancier
designation, complete with quasi-religious terminology? To make its mass appeal
easier, perhaps? Or is it actually a covert form of panpsychism and pantheism?
The religious terminology is immediately obvious. Haeckel talks about “scientific
articles of faith”, he says that the human soul is part of a “world-soul” (albeit
in quotation marks), that the one fundamental law that makes the universe move
and evolve could be called “God”, and denies being a “materialist” (apparently
a frequent theological reproach against his Systeme). In a footnote, he refers
to the ether as “God the Creator”. While admitting that there is no individual
immortality in his worldview, he points out that some religions don´t believe
in that either, specifically early Buddhism and ditto Judaism. Besides, matter
and energy are immortal and will always take new forms. But is all this just
exotic rhetoric from a materialist too drunk on Goethe? Or does it mean
something? At one point, Haeckel does call his worldview “pantheistic”, but
it´s possible that the term had a different connotation in 19th
century Germany than it has today. Mabe “pantheism” was just another fancy term
for (de facto) materialism (and another theological reproach), while today, I would
rather suspect a self-professed pantheist to be into something like Theosophy! Madame
Blavatsky, as is well known, constantly dunked on Haeckel…
Most of the speech sounds materialist enough. Everything evolves from
simple, non-conscious, and material beginnings. Human consciousness is a product
of the brain and its ganglia. No immortal soul exists, nor do ghost, spirits or
gods. Humans and non-human animals are only quantitatively different, indeed,
Haeckel explicitly rejects anthropocentrism and regards Darwin as the
Copernicus of biology. He criticizes teleological reasoning and final causes.
The only “dualism” permissible is the dualism between the luminous ether and
mass-atoms, and even this dualism will probably be resolved one day by science
in favor of strict monism, with the ether being the primordial substance
everything is ultimately made of. The ether has something to do with light and
electricity. Indeed, Haeckel likes the ether precisely because it would do away
with all spooky action at a distance (in contrast to, say, empty space being
somehow fundamental).
And yet, at the very end of the article – when rejecting the label “materialism”
– Haeckel actually says the following: “Our
conception of Monism, or the unity-philosophy, on the contrary, is clear and unambiguous;
for it an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as a dead, spiritless
material; the two are inseparably combined in every atom. The opposed
conception of dualism (or even pluralism in other anti-monistic systems)
regards spirit and material, energy and matter, as two essentially different substances; but not a
single empirical proof can be adduced to show that either of these can exist or
become perceptible to us by itself alone”.
But what is this if not actual pantheism or
panpsychism? The key words being that an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable
as dead spiritless matter, the two being inseparable “in every atom”. This
sounds more like Whitehead´s later process philosophy. Or indeed some forms of
occultism.
What is the solution to the riddle of Ernst Haeckel?
So I´ve continued to read articles by Andrew Reynolds, who must have an interesting academic position, since his research seems to combine the philosophy of science with marine zoology. One of his articles on 19th century German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel (no stranger to marine zoology himself) has the entertaining title “Ernst Haeckel and the philosophy of sponges”, first published on the web in 2019.
Sponges (Porifera) are classified as animals, but are extremely primitive compared to more regular Animalia. Once it became clear to the scientific community that sponges are *some* kind of animals (they react to outer stimuli, they feed, they have sperm and ovum), studies of said creatures became important to understand the early evolution of life.
The curious expression
“The Philosophy of Sponges” actually comes from Haeckel himself and is taken
from his three-volume work on calcareous sponges. Apparently it was in this
magnum opus the giant of evolutionary biology first proposed his controversial
thesis that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. He also attempted to prove
evolution empirically and specifically, not just lay out an argument in general
terms (as Darwin had already done). And yes, Haeckel also wanted to demonstrate
the truth of his “philosophy of monism” and pin down the exact place of humans
in the cosmos. Quite the agenda for a work on primordial invertebrates, but
there you go. In case you think the whole thing sounds very…I don´t know…*German*,
Romantic, Goethean, something, well yes, that´s probably it! Reynolds quotes William
Blake´s saying about seeing the universe in a grain of sand…
Since Reynolds knows his poriferan biology by heart, the article is
frankly hard to read, but it´s clear that “philosophy” for Haeckel encompassed
both scientific methodology and an entire worldview. But then, that was
probably how the word was often used at the time (compare Romantic
Naturphilosophie of earlier German generations). Haeckel emphasized that scientists
must do both rigorous empirical observations and theory-building, which sounds
obvious today, but probably was a relatively new idea at the time. Thus,
Haeckel and other scientists had to delineate themselves from both the overly-speculative
Naturphilosophen and equally over-empirical scientists who only catalogued long
lists of facts but never draw any theoretical conclusions from them (yes, this
was a thing – see “American Science in the Age of Jackson” by George H
Daniels).
Haeckel further wanted to provide what he called an “analytical” proof
for evolution as opposed to Darwin´s “synthetic” ditto (Haeckel used the terms differently
from Kant) by actually demonstrating an evolutionary lineage, rather than just
holding out the mere possibility of evolution being true. “Ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny” and attempts to prove that sponges were analogous to a specific
stage in the development of animal embryos were all part of this program.
Haeckel was fascinated by sponges since some of them looked heavily transitional
between different groups. And if both human development in the womb and animal
evolution were subject to the same laws, Haeckel´s monist-materialist worldview
was also proven, since there was no need to postulate anything spiritual or
supernatural above these natural processes.
If Haeckel really succeeded is another matter entirely. It could be argued that he was the last of the Naturphilosophen. His notorious illustrations of embryos were “idealized” rather than strictly empirical, leading later generations to accuse him of science fraud. A fact not mentioned by Reynolds is that Haeckel´s monism has been interpreted as pantheist rather than materialist. Reynolds does point out Haeckel´s lifelong fascination with Goethe, and suspects that the German naturalist at bottom saw himself as an artist rather than a scientist sensu stricto. Haeckel´s scientific theories were his artistic masterpieces, and like all artists, he didn´t suffer criticism of his work lightly. Reynolds ends with discussing the reception of the “philosophy of sponges”. Many contemporary scientists were sharply critical of Haeckel, and it´s clear that he did make major mistakes, such as assuming that colonies of several sponge species were really one “transitional species”.
However, Reynolds also quotes modern scientists
who believe that some of Haeckel´s speculations about sponge or animal evolution
might not have been so wrong, after all. It´s also obvious that he had supporters
in his own day, as when the “Challenger” expedition hired him to analyze their
samples of – surprise – sponges.
With that, I end this little expedition.
So I just tried to read a 48-page paper titled “Ernst Haeckel´s Discovery of Magosphaera planula: A Vestige of Metazoan Origins?”, published in 2008 in “History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences”, apparently a journal. One of the authors, Andrew Reynolds, is a scholar of religion and philosophy. The other, Norbert Hülsmann, is a zoologist. And yes, their paper was quite hard to read!
It deals with
German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel´s discovery of a curious micro-organism off
the Norwegian coast in 1869, a creature Haeckel named Magosphaera planula, the
generic name meaning “magician´s ball”. The organism was only observed and
studied by the German naturalist himself, and only at this one occasion!
Despite this, it played an important part in the evolutionary speculations of both
Haeckel and others during the 19th and early 20th
centuries. It´s still occasionally mentioned in scientific works (and even on
Wikipedia), but only with a huge question mark as to its placement on the tree
of life.
In Haeckel´s theories, Magosphaera was first given the rank of a protist
(Haeckel apparently regarded protists as a somewhat nebulous group transitional
between plants and animals), but was later upgraded to a protozoan (a unicellular
animal) of the “blastaea” stage in the German naturalist´s “ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny” scheme. The fact that Magosphaera had only ever been seen by Haeckel
himself could easily be misinterpreted as science fraud, especially since
Haeckel have posthumously come under fire for his supposedly fake illustrations
of embryos. The two authors are therefore at pains to point out that they are
*not* accusing Haeckel of hoaxing. However, they do believe that he made an honest
mistake.
The magician´s ball doesn´t really exist. With one exception, no other scientist
has claimed to observe anything even remotely similar (the equally dubious species
Magosphaera maggii). The authors have actually looked for Magosphaera-like organisms
in the North Sea on several occasions, but always without success. They also
believe that Haeckel´s illustrations and descriptions of Magosphaera are
inconsistent. Haeckel had made other mistaken identifications, something he also
admitted. The purported missing link in animal evolution was probably two or
three different species of marine organisms temporarily hanging together,
perhaps even one kind of organism parasitizing another kind. I haven´t kept up
to speed on Haeckel-bashing lately, but I wouldn´t be too surprised if both
creationists and Woke evolutionists (who regard the German fellow as a
proto-fascist) will nevertheless use this unfortunate little episode to further
their respective agendas.
The article initially promises to discuss the social construction and “applied
metaphysics” of scientific objects, but there is very little of this in the actual
text, suggesting it´s just a nod to popular trends in academic research.
Obviously, a marine zoologist can´t be a postmodernist!
With that, I end this little conversation.
A spiritual teacher on why he left non-duality. I´m not entirely surprised by his candid description of the milieu of supposedly "non-dual" practitioners.
Maybe humans aren´t supposed to reach non-dual consciousness in the first place? Or only a *very* tiny minority...and they probably already left for greener and (perhaps) non-dual pastures...
