Archive for November 2014
Human Trance
People ceased to exist within a panoramic environment, an uninterrupted sequence of immediate events; instead, human beings for whom the outside world was now a thing, the object of deliberate goals and purposes, learned to confront the environment as perspectivistic subjects. To achieve their goals and purposes, they needed a highly developed, highly controlled arsenal…
Read MoreSeven Signs that Humans are Domesticated Animals
Tens of thousands of years ago, humans were wild animals. Our ancestors roamed the land in search of food by day, and huddled together for safety by night. But then something changed. We domesticated ourselves, and this process didn’t just change us profoundly — it changed a lot of other life forms around us, too.…
Read MoreThe Insanity Virus
…after decades of hunting, Torrey and his colleagues think they have finally found the infectious agent. You might call it an insanity virus. If Torrey is right, the culprit that triggers a lifetime of hallucinations… is a virus that all of us carry in our bodies. “Some people laugh about the infection hypothesis,” says Urs Meyer,…
Read MoreThat gut feeling
If aliens were to swoop in from outer space and squeeze a human down to see what we’re made of, they would come to the conclusion that cell for cell, we’re mostly bacteria. In fact, single-celled organisms—mostly bacteria—outnumber our own cells 10 to one, and most of them make their home in the gut. The…
Read MoreInfinite Monkey Theorem
The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that a monkey pressing keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular finite text, such as the Bible… Consider a single biblical phrase, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” How long would it take a…
Read MoreDeconstruction and the Bible
To deconstruct is to take apart something that had previously been constructed by somebody for some purpose…. It is thereby dismantled… to expose the hidden forces that produced it and make it work… Why “deconstruct” the Bible? The motivation is… an intellectual curiosity, an attempt to come to an understanding of how things work by…
Read MoreThe Macaque Test of Infinite Monkey Theorem
In 2003 the Arts Council for England paid £2,000 for a real-life test… involving… macaques, but the trial was abandoned… The monkeys produced five pages of text… but failed to type anything close to… English, broke the computer and used the keyboard as a lavatory. ((http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8789894/Monkeys-at-typewriters-close-to-reproducing-Shakespeare.html))
Read MoreThe Deconstruction of the Bible
Deconstruction is not the same thing as destruction. It is not simply a matter of demolishing something through external force , but of disassembling it… a peeling away of the various layers… whose aim is to expose the arbitrary linguistic nature of their original construction… that results in the collapse from within of all that it touches. ((Is There a Meaning…
Read MoreThe Postmodern Tower of Babel
From their perspective, this left open two equally-explanatory possibilities: either (a) God was sending them a message, to stop building the Tower; or (b), they suddenly suffered a population-wide speech impediment. The story certainly does not compel the selection of (a). In which event, we wonder, how were they supposed to know they were receiving…
Read MoreMonkeys & Shakespeare
According to ancient lore… some accounts have Huxley stating the monkeys could type all of the books in the British Library, including the Bible and the works of Shakespeare! Legend has it that Wilberforce… was forced to concede the truth of Huxley’s point, and as a result lost the debate. ((http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=9&article=472))
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