Conservative Society for Action

Conservatives Uphold the Constitution

No Better Than Liberals

I just joined--with a donation--a new organization called the Conservative Society for Action. There is only one reason I did this. The site's sidebar contains quotes from none other than, and no one but, Senator Barry Goldwater.

The conservative lineage CSA claims to follow--as demonstrated by the pictures at the top of the page--are Thomas Paine; Thomas Jefferson; Robert Taft, "the first to fight 'New Deal' Socialism"; Goldwater; and Ronald Reagan, the friend and so-called heir of Goldwater's modern ideology of conservativism.

As the CSA's website makes clear, Goldwater was out to protect the Constitition, quoting him with statements such as:
"I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible"; and:
"It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden."

This is clearly not the conservatism of Washington in the Twenty-First Century. In fact, in was only by the barest standards that Reagan, the "hero" of modern conservativism, can be said to have furthered Goldwater's Originalist politics. He was the best President of the Twentieth Century, but Goldwater had the potential to be a game changer, taking the Constitution back to its originalist roots.

Stephen Flanagan of the National Defense University, founder of the CSA, has it right when he states, "Obama's win means nothing! Capital Hill is the enemy! [ ] As I said before the election, Obama won't really come through on his campaign promises because that would end up hurting HIM. [ ] But here's the REAL danger... The Liberals in this country now control 4 out of the 5 centers of political power. [ ] There's one more item on their checklist and that is the Supreme Court. By the time Obama's presidency is over, they likely will have that too. Five out of Five for the first time in American history."

But as modern conservativism goes, Nixon, not Goldwater, was the next Republican President. Leaving all Nixon's scandals aside, his disastrous (and traitorous) act of taking America off the gold standard eliminates him from rationally conservative status. He unilaterally cancelled the Breton Woods Agreements signed by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations, which adopted the gold standard as the only objective measurement of a nation's wealth. A nation's wealth is now tied only to its "good name," its economic strength, in world market comparisons.

Gerald Ford was a popular centrist in the House of Representatives, but after becoming President when Nixon resigned, he showed none of the strength of that Goldwater lineage. Had he shown any such strengths, he probably still would have lost to Jimmy Carter. Goldwater's radical defense of liberty frightened many Americans who saw him as a hawk who would take us to war against the Communist enemy.

More than likely Goldwater's international policies of strength, and his domestic policies making each American more economically wealthy and thus independent of government charity, thereby enriching the Treasury, would have broken the economic back of the Soviets two decades before Reagan was able to accomplish the same thing when he challenged the Soviets to keep up with our military spending.

Goldwater had objective standards. Reagan had objective goals, but his policies were strictly pragmatic, lowering taxes for the purpose of reaping higher levels of revenue from smaller percentages; America grows wealthy and even lower taxes will have the effect of providing a larger budget. But Reagan also blew the budget, and he left America deeply in debt. Pragmatism is not conservatism, but when used for the purposes of strengthening both our economy and our national defenses, pragmatic Presidents become heroic.

What Ayn Rand wrote about Barry Goldwater could have been written about Reagan, (although she was angered by Reagan's religious conservatism, especially his opposition to abortion based on the idea that the separation of church and state did not apply when in reference to a fertilized egg, a zygote, or a fetus undeveloped enough to live on its own.) She wrote:

"Barry Goldwater is singularly devoid of power lust. Even his antagonists admit it with grudging respect. He is seeking, not to rule, but to liberate a country."

The CSA says its first priorities are these:
ACT to Repeal the Community Reinvestment Act!
ACT to Impeach Barney Frank!
ACT to Defeat Card Check Legislation
ACT to Stop the Flow of U.S. Oil Dollars Going to Hostile Countries
ACT to Stop Congressional Censorship of the Broadcast Media.

To read the reasons behind each of the ACT links is to understand something of the nature of Goldwater's goals. Unfortunately I see no overall philosophical basis for each ACTion that CSA seeks to perform. They are worthy actions, necessary actions, and yes, conservative actions.

But the problem with conservativism is that it does not lay out a black-and-white philosophical strategy, as Goldwater did. Goldwater frightened many Americans because unlike any other candidate since Abraham Lincoln he had an unwavering plan.

The conservatives cannot allow themselves to appear to have the luxury of a black-and-white, unwavering plan. That it is not a luxury but absolutely necessary to break the back of the growing menace of the overpowering, power-hungry federal machine and its leaders is a fact.

"If a [politician] evades, equivocates and hides his stand under a junk-heap of random concretes, we must add up those concretes and judge him accordingly," Rand wrote. "If his stand is mixed, we must evaluate it by asking: Will he protect freedom or destroy the last of it? Will he accelerate, delay or stop the march toward statism?"

Whether or not Flanagan and his staff and the general membership of CSA can ACT with Goldwater-like reserve, and with Jefferson and Paine's committment to individual sovereignty, remains to be seen. Flanagan has the background. Now let's see if he has the vision and the rationality to take on Capital Hill with the balls that are necessary to make him an enemy of the state.

"I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom," Flanagan quotes Goldwater. But Goldwater also said, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Extremism of any sort is frowned upon now, because the Religious Right is extreme but so are the Islamicists. Goldwater's extremism was his downfall even in 1964.

Flanagan has the credentials to be an extremist. Let's see if he has the credentials to sell the extreme position that the Constitution must be adhered to, and sees to it, with membership help, to destroy Goldwater's idea of "necessary but un-Constitutional" legislation.








The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

God, Prejudice, and Alcoholics Anonymous

I'm A Success as Atheist in the AA "God Program"

Bill Wilson is responsible for writing the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," referred to as the Big Book. AA is a spiritual program, and a "God program," meaning it depends upon what AA terms a "higher power" to relieve the alcoholic of his/her need to get drunk.

In many places in the Big Book we read specifically that other things than God can be considered a higher power. The use of the AA group itself with people you come to rely on, friends, and other people with whom you can discuss your problems, are often suggested as a higher power. A man can think of his wife and children, and use them as his "higher power" because of the very real possibility that if he goes on another binge, or gets arrested one more time while drunk, he could lose them.

Anytime one of us who is alcoholic goes to a meeting and says anything like, "When I fought with my son over something stupid, I knew I had to get to a meeting"; or "I realized I was letting myself become hungry, angry, lonely, tired--I knew I had to get to a meeting," we are then using the group and our time there, away from the "outside world", as our higher power, to recoup a bit of our spirituality.

But in the end, AA members are expected, not by any membership requirement, but through the incessant urging of Wilson to "accept" that the higher power he expects us to discover is God. (Accepting God is not a requirement because there is only one membership requirement: the desire to stop drinking. But the constant urging to accept God has made many people see AA as a multi-denominational religious cult.)

"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." [emphasis added] The Big Book page 46

Naturalism, to Wilson, was unnatural. Naturalism was prejudicial. "To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face." For Wilson, his own prejudice made him believe that "to continue as he is [as an atheist or agnostic] means disaster, especially if he an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. page 44

An alcoholic of the hopeless variety can only be hopeless because he does not accept God; to accept God means he isn't hopeless. "There Is A Solution" touts the previous chapter's title, and that way is through God. "This is the great news this book carries to those who suffer." p 17

The expectancy is that eventually all AA members will have "made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the power of God as we understood him"; and it expected to come sooner than later; turning over one's will is the third of twelve "steps". AA dogma, gathered up from the first few years of attempting to find the steps and the means to make them work, was that you could not get to Step Four without "doing" steps one, two and three first. (Step Two is admitting that only "a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"; Step One is "admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.")

But Bill Wilson was an extremely prejudicial and biased man. Do you notice in that quote from page 46 how he deftly turned "a power greater than ourselves" into God Himself, without even the pretext of qualifying "God" with "as we understood him"?

The phrase "as we understood (or understand) him" is always italicized in the Steps, in an effort to be inclusive of all religions. But Wilson had to be talked into accepting that phrase, and then only grudgingly. Yet whenever he wrote of his own experience and how it ought to be used by others, God stood alone and every member was expected by Wilson to "graduate" from using the group or other people or a hope as his/her higher power, to using God Himself--who in Wilson's mind stood alone without need of "understanding." After all, he wrote, "it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." How could He be a God of anyone's understanding when Wilson admits that it was impossible for "any of us" (the original members) to understand Him?

Naturalism, which is necessarily an atheistic doctrine, and agnosticism, were, to Wilson, biases which the new members had to let go of.

"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results..." [emphasis added] page 46

Page 46 is in the chapter of the Big Book entitled "We Agnostics." Wilson was never an agnostic, and he wrote no chapter for atheists, though he mentions them there. He speaks to the agnostics as though he had once been there himself, putting his brotherly arm around them in words, comforting them in the knowledge that things will be alright if they just let go and let God.

He writes in the first paragraph that "you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience can conquer." Many naturalists and others don't believe in the "spirit" because they have always been told it is linked to God, and God is what they are trying to discard by using an epistemology that admits of nothing supernatural. But this is not a problem for all naturalists.

The Deists were theistic naturalists. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

In Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) the spirit, the soul, is a naturally occurring non-supernatural physiological phenomenon of the fact of being human. When someone says he could not do something or was compelled to do something because his "conscience was being affected," it is the naturally occurring physiologically emotive phenomenon we perceive as our soul, that he is referring to.

MN understands existence to be natural and only natural, with nothing supernatural existing within existence. And of course, there is no existence outside of existence. Not even a God can be outside existence, though many believe a God could.

God could not--not without causing an irreparable contradiction within human language. If you believe in God and believe, as did America's Deist Founders, that it was God who gave us Reason in order to be able to solve our own problems without His intereference or help, then such a God would not also have allowed us to conceive acceptable contradictions; they break all the rules of the logic of linquistics. Allow one, you must allow them all. Then "nothing" will be "something," "yes" will be "no", and Reason will be worthless. We will return to the growling animalistic expressions of Man before he gained language, because without Reason language has no expression.

Boethius told us to join faith to reason, "insofar as is possible." Thomas Aquinas and others did that, and the juxtaposition led us to the scientific and then to the industrial revolutions. But at the same time, it did not banish faith by elevating Reason, and the Founders were forced to conceive a nation with a Constitution which assumed the separation of church and state. The assumption was common, was therefore not included in the Constitution in those words, and that common assumption allowed the Supreme Court to declare it a de facto part of the Constitution. The Deists would say it was Reason that dictated the Constitution.

Yet, Wilson tells us we must abandon Reason, for the blindness that comes with "accepting a power greater than ourselves" in the realm of the spirit while upholding Reason in the realm of all other things.

"Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists [There he goes again!] chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word... Rather vain of us, wasn't it?" page 49

But Thomas Paine, in "The Age of Reason", wrote: "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. [ ] I know, by positive conclusion resulting from [my] search, that there is a power superior to all [ ] things, and that power is God."

Paine was one of the most outspoken Deists, even fleeing to France for his life because his devotion to God would not allow him to have faith in anything but a Reasonable God, and no organized religion is Reasonable to a Deist.

"The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists," wrote Paine, "accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud." [emphasis added]

"If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered long ago," Wilson wrote. [p. 44/45] Yet, isn't that what blind acceptance of a higher power is--a supposed better "code of morals" or "a better philosophy of life"?

Actually, Wilson must have realized they were not the same, or he would have said so. Instead he said, "We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be philosophically comforted, but the needed power wasn't there.

"Lack of power, that was our dilemma," he wrote, instead.

Their lack of power was from the desire to turn a wish into reality, without the "mere code of morals" or the "better philosophy." Philosophy is nothing without epistemology. Faith in God is the epistemology of disavowing Reason; faith is the only thing that Wilson serves up.

"Besides a seeming inablility to accept much on faith," Wilson wrote, about the problem of human intelligence as the last word, "we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinancy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. [ ] This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. [ ! ]

"Some of us had already walked far over the Bridge of Reason toward the desired shore of faith. [ ] We were grateful that Reason had brought us so far. But somehow we couldn't step ashore. Perhaps we had been leaning on Reason that last mile and we did not like to lose our support.[ ]

"Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time! [ ! ]

"[A religious doubter] recounts that he fell out of bed to his knees. In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by the conviction of the Presence of God. He had stepped from bridge to shore. [ ]

"His alcoholic problem was taken away."

I sit here and copy and paste and write these things, in order to tell the reader that I had my own spiritual experience, and my "alcoholic problem was taken away."

But my spiritual experience was not what faith would have me believe it to be; it is what Reason tells me it was.

The mind is the most powerful force in human life. My experience was one of a comgination of mind and that natural phenomenon, the human soul, because they are irrevocably connected even in death; the soul follows the mind into the grave. If I could bottle my experience and release it in a room with someone who was looking for God, he would claim his experience that came from my bottle was God, and then try to convince me of it.

Humility seems to be the greatest virtue in AA. It is mentioned specifically on nine pages of the Big Book and those mentions carry various descriptions of how it works and why it works and why we need it. There are many more references to humility in the other AA "approved literature," such as the "Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions". Honesty is mentioned on twelve pages, but we all know a man cannot be humble if he is not first honest.

Men whose humility does not extend to allowing the possibility that an atheist such as myself can have a spiritual experience and become sober by it, despite "the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON;" wrote Paine, "and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself."

Bill Wilson believed in the elevation of faith over Reason. Rather vain of him, wasn't it, to despise the "choisest gift of God to man," Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions;" wrote Paine, "he prays dictatorially; [ ] he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I."

Wilson's prayers were like that: "Relieve me of the bondage of self," goes his Third Step Prayer, "that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power..."

The strictest adherence to Reason is the act of binding one's self to one's self; altruism was conceived as the act of giving one's self completely over to God, without asking for such things as the removal of one's difficulties: one took what God met out. And what kind of humility is it to ask God to remove one's difficulties, then turn and call that "victory over them"?

"It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How, then, is it that those people pretend to reject reason?" Paine

The rejection of Reason was not all Wilson's. It was, and is, endemic of the kind of organization that AA is. The co-founder of AA, "Dr. Bob," wrote in his own chapter of the Big Book, that atheists, agnostics, and skeptics have a form of "intellectual pride which keeps [them] from accepting what is in this book, [and] I feel sorry for you." [emphasis added]

He also ended his chapter saying, "Your Heavenly Father will never let you down!"

Rather prejudiced of him, wouldn't you say?

Note: I get my 3 year token in January. That spiritual experience that I had in my soul didn't put the fear of God in me; it put in me the fear of being drunk--and of dying that way or of killing someone else. That is a stronger deterrent, apparently, than God who I do not accept as an existant. But I am grateful to have found an AA community in which my outspoken atheism is not rejected. I am fully accepted by my home group and other groups, and I currently hold two "service positions" with my home group.

AA works if you find the higher power of your understanding. Mine,
"the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind," is Reason. I trust I will never use any other weapon, a weapon which leads me to the positive conclusion that it is a power superior to all things available to man including the irrational prejudice of belief in God.

Happy New Year to all my readers, to all sober members of AA, and to all those who have not found the means to conquer their alcoholism. Don't let your prejudices against Alcoholics Anonymous keep you from using it to find serenity in sobriety. Accept the things you cannot change and change the things you can, and may you all have the wisdom, as I am grateful myself to have had, to know the difference between them.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Variations on a Theme of Naturalism; and The Wedge Strategy

Variations on a Theme of Naturalism
"As defined by philosopher Paul Draper, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/paul_draper/bio.html naturalism is "the hypothesis that the physical world is a 'closed system' in the sense that nothing that is neither a part nor a product of it can affect it." More simply, it is the denial of the existence of supernatural causes. In rejecting the reality of supernatural events, forces, or entities, naturalism is the antithesis of supernaturalism. -- Keith Augustine http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism/

Augustine continues: "As a substantial view about the nature of reality, it is often called metaphysical naturalism, philosophical naturalism, or ontological naturalism to distinguish it from a related methodological principle."

But as we shall see, the definitions of all of the varieties of naturalism have differences within the definitions that make the use of any typecasting impossible. You can be a "metaphysical naturalist" in one critic's or one scientist's opinion; yet be another type in the opinion of another critic or another scientist.

Richard Carrier, in defending metaphysical naturalism, says we must reject the "conclusion that naturalism must abandon materialism and realism about material objects and other minds." [ibid "Augustine"]

But materialistic naturalism is sometimes contrasted with metaphysical naturalism. "The meaning of the terms naturalism and materialism depends on the meaning of one's conception of matter and nature. One can have, for instance, spiritualistic and materialistic naturalism. Likewise, there is materialistic monism such as physicalism (there is no other matter than physical matter) and materialistic pluralism (for instance, there is biological in addition to physical matter)." http://www.asa3.org/evolution/vandermeer.html
[original document] http://www.iclnet.org/pub/facdialogue/Issue26/METHMAT3.pdf

The same author writes, "My thesis is that Christians are mistaken in their belief that material reality can be understood without reference to non-material created causes, such as mind, or to non-material uncreated causes, such as God."

By definition, some definitions of some forms of naturalism don't admit of the existence of "non-matter," let alone "non-material causes," "mind," "spirit (soul)," or "uncreated causes."

"There is an objective difference between one who has knowledge of something and one who does not. This is true in both the occurrent and the dispositional senses of "knowledge" and "knows. [ ] Can this objective difference among human beings consist in properties and relations that fit within a naturalist ontology?

"[T]hose in the 19th and 20th centuries who insisted upon distinguishing Naturalism from Materialism--have held that it could be. But with the rise and development of the mind/brain identity thesis during the last half of the 20th century, the generous naturalism (as we shall call it) of Dewey, Santayana, Sidney Hook and others has largely disappeared in favor of a narrower naturalism more commonly and more correctly called "Physicalism" (the older "Materialism").

"Only someone who reads "descriptive" (as opposed to normative) in a strongly materialistic or physicalistic fashion would take the opposition of normative to descriptive to be the issue of naturalism in epistemology. Dallas Willard http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=64

So now we must differentiate the "older materialism" as something called "physicalism." "Physicalism is the thesis that, in some sense, everything (beliefs, thunderstorms, people, sounds, etc.) is physical. [ ] A further condition of physicalism is that the physical world is causally closed. The causal closure thesis essentially states that every physical event has a physical cause. More strongly, it often asserts that everything that happens in the world can be explained by the causal interactions that occur at the fundamental physical level. Physicalism is to be differentiated from materialism because materialism is committed to a very particular physical theory in which matter serves as the fundamental entity. Physicalism, while committed to physical monism, is not committed to a particular view of the fundamental physical stuff and recognizes that the basic level of reality could be non-material (e.g. energy, strings, fields)." International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Physicalism [The ISCID is a highly developed enterprise of teleological thinking.]

Then Willard continues, dividing us even more:

"What might be called 'generic Naturalism' has a long history that includes: Classical Naturalism, with figures such as Democritus, Epicurus, Aristotle and Lucretius; Renaissance Naturalism, with Bruno, Campanella and Telesio, and--born too late--Spinoza; Empiricist/Nominalist Naturalism, with Hobbes, Hume, D'Holbach and most of the French Encyclopedists and Comte; 19th-Century Materialistic Naturalism, with Jakob Moleschott, Karl Vogt, Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Büchner, Herbert Spencer and, it is often presumed, Charles Darwin; Mid-20th-Century (largely anti-Materialistic) Naturalism, with Santayana, Dewey and others; and Late-20th-Century ("Identity Thesis") Naturalism, which wavers between Scientism and Physicalism, with Quine, David Armstrong, Paul and Patricia Churchland, John Searle, etc." [ibid Willard]

"What is meant by naturalistic and materialistic explanations? Naturalism assumes that only natural laws are adequate as explanatory accounts for all events or phenomena. Materialism claims that physical matter is the only fundamental reality—that the interaction of matter can explain all processes or phenomena. This naturalistic assumption in explaining all things within science by materialistic explanations is known as methodological naturalism (MN)."
Donald J. Eckard, DDS [italics added] www.textbookaccuracy.org/documents/eckard/PHILOSOPHICAL%20ASSUMPTIONS%20IN-1.doc

From the sidebar of this blog page, we pushlished two definitions of mataphysical naturalism, under the heading of "Phrase of the Week." (This sidebar block is changed each week, but this is what it said:)

"The metaphysical presuppositions established by Newtonian science influenced scholars from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. David Ray Griffin defined this type of naturalism, which he referred to as naturalism (SAM) as encompassing sensationalism, atheism, materialism, determinism and reductionism, sometimes referred to as metaphysical naturalism. In addition to these attributes, Griffin also states that it encompasses what he refers to as naturalism (NS) which he concludes is only a rejection of supernaturalism and casual relations interruption. In Griffin's opinion naturalism (NS) is compatible with theism, whereas naturalism (SAM) is not.

"The present problem is that naturalism (SAM) seems to have dominated science and is synonymous with scientific naturalism. This is primarily represented in the works of Searle, Dawkins, Weinberg, Uttal and others. Although scientific naturalism dominates in the academy, particularly in its methodology and mechanistic varieties, it is increasingly being challenged both inside and outside the academic circles." John J. Eberts http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_124.html

So here are two descriptions of the simple word "naturalism" from the same mind, to be distinguished only by the use of (SAM) and (NS).

How are specific naturalists defined?

"[Daniel] Dennett uses our scientific knowledge of brain and consciousness to ultimately defend an entirely naturalistic and materialistic interpretation."http://www.freeinquiry.com/naturalism.html

On this, Willard would seem to agree. "In the typically "naturalistic" mode he declares his "starting point to be the objective, materialistic, third person world of the physical sciences," and holds "that philosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, the physical sciences." [ibid Willard]

"Willem Drees endorses not only minimal naturalism, understood as the rejection of supernatural interruptions of the world's normal causal processes, but also maximal naturalism, with its reductionistic materialism. Besides arguing that this reductionistic naturalism provides the best framework for interpreting science, he believes that it is compatible with religion (albeit of a minimalist sort). The "richer" naturalism advocated by Whiteheadians is, accordingly, unnecessary. Drees's position, however, cannot do justice to a number of "hard-core commonsense notions," which we inevitably presuppose in practice and thereby in science as well as religion. His naturalism is too poor, in particular, to account for subjectivity, freedom, and mathematical, religious, and moral experience." [italics added] David Ray Griffin http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119157042/abstract

Now we have another division: minimal vs. maximal. Does the subject get more complicated than this? Yes.

For now, let's leave it at this level! My head is spinning.

But I will add one thing: The Academy's "Strong" Definition of Naturalism with its caveats is intenteded specifically to delineate any definition you might come across from that of the Academy. This Academy believes in "soul," "spirit," "mind," and "free will," as natural arisals from empirical existence, as much as the brain is a natural condition of certain atoms that are the basic building blocks--in differing orders depending on the nature of the empirical existent--of all real, knowable matter, and make up absolutely anything that empirically exists.

And while this Academy believes that sentience and cognizance and emotions and the mind are composed of natural, physiological, i.e., empirical events occuring within the form of life that contains them, this does not explain them a "nature deposing free will."

"Free will" is merely the freedom to think or not; and if one has only one or two choices to make with his/her free will, so be it. Circumstances of life are the conditions of life without which sentience and cognizance could not exist. If I am cognizant that I must do the one and only thing open to my choice, I still have the free will to make the choice do nothing at all.


The Wedge Strategy
Secularism in Naturalism was always supposed to be the norm. A Naturalist does not go looking for signs of God, neither does he go looking for means to disprove God's existence. The Naturalists does begin with the epistemic proposition that since "non-existence cannot ever have existed, otherwise non-existence would have been an existent,--which of course is a contradictory statement used only by theists--it is normal that the Naturalist exclude God as a causative agent in the laws of nature. If god exists, he could not have created existence, without that pesky contradiction getting in the way of epistemic integrity.

"If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this,...We call our strategy the "wedge." --Phillip E. Johnson [1]

"With the simplest of metaphors, Phillip Johnson describes the "wedge" strategy adopted in order to advance "intelligent design" theory, the most recent--and most dangerous--manifestation of creationism." Barara Forrest http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/wedge.html

"In Dover, Pennsylvania, the school board decided to introduce Intelligent Design into 9th grade science classes and undermine the teaching of evolution be describing it as merely a theory, different from the rest of science. This was done for religious reasons and the school board was sued. A long, scathing decision explored the religious nature of Intelligent Design and ruled against Dover."

"One of the refreshing things about Judge Jones' decision in the Dover trial was his reference to the infamous 'Wedge' strategy of Intelligent Design supporters. Far from being a scholarly and scientific research program, Intelligent Design was conceived from the outset as a means for injecting more religion, theism, and Christianity into schools and American culture generally." Austin Cline http://atheism.about.com/b/2006/01/01/wedge-strategy-of-the-christian-right-pushing-religion-in-the-guise-of-science.htm

"[T]he wedge strategy is being aggressively and systematically executed by the Discovery Institute's (DI) Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) through an extensive, constant, and sometimes dizzying range of activities which, as Johnson says, are intended ultimately to "affirm the reality of God." [ibid Forrest]

"The Wedge Document is an internal memorandum from the Discovery Institute (the leading proponent of Intelligent Designer "Theory") that was leaked to the Internet in 1999. The Discovery Institute later admitted to its authenticity. Since then, Discovery Institute hasn't talked very much about the document, or the strategy it outlines. The reason is crushingly obvious, since the Wedge Document makes it readily apparent that the Discovery Institute is flat-out lying to us when it claims that its Intelligent Designer campaign is concerned only with science and does not have any religious aims, purpose or effect." Lenny Flank (including the entire "Wedge Document" itself) http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/hangar/2437/wedge.html

“Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.” –Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903

"It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story.

"Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing, at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion.

"It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand: the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints; the Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything; the church became as crowded with one, as the Pantheon had been with the other, and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud." Thomas Paine (1794) "The Age of Reason"

Please send all comments to

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the sm of the
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism tm, the educational arm of the Assemblage.
This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius: A World View

Atomism is incompatible with Judeo-Christian principles. It is because atomism views matter as independent of God that atomism was demoted by St. Augustine from the predominating world view, a view that held sway for nearly 1000 years. St. Augustine turned it into the skeptical position against theism
1) because atomism declares existence exists from eternity, and denies creation by a God; or
2) because atomism's justification for the cause-and-effect laws of nature are independent of control by a God. (Quentin Smith; " The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism"; http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm

All men have a world view that for each, in some way, is his explanation of the meaning of existence, of the world. For those who have not "examined" his or her own world view, Ayn Rand defined that view as "sense of life, a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence." “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto, 25 Whether a person has a world view, a sense of life, or a fully examined cosmology, it sets up the psychology of a his/her emotional responses and the nature of his/her character.

"He who does not know what the world is," wrote Marcus Aurelius, in "Meditations", "does not know where he is. And he who does not know for what purpose the world exists, does not know who he is, nor what the world is. But he who has failed in any one of these things could not even say for what purpose he exists himself." So it is true that some people--perhaps many people in the twenty-first century where the major metaphysical question seems to be, "How can I be sure?"--do not know "for what purpose he himself exists."

But having a world view is something that almost every man, woman, and child have described, only a few hundred years ago, when certainty was required for staying alive.

This concept of a world view is called "metaphysical cosmology," vs. a purely science-related cosmology that explains a physics-oriented world view. World views have been described as: "A [ ] set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world." (James Sire.) As: "A person's fundamental 'world outlook,' or life perspective." (borrowed from the German word "weltanschauung." http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldview.htm

You can even take a test to determine what your world view is. http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=23320

"In the 5th century B.C., some Greeks reasoned that matter cannot be infinitely divisible, and they called the smallest particles in nature 'atoms.'' [ ] Many Greeks believed that atoms 'existed from eternity, for they had not been created.' Lucretius supposed, in like manner, that nothing is ever annihilated and that matter exists in the form of invisible atoms.

"The [atomists] supposed that life had developed out of a primeval slime, man as well as animals and plants. Man was a microcosm of the universe, for he contained every kind of atom. As this is the viewpoint of modern evolutionists, the reader may appreciate that Lucretius, not Darwin, has been the principal spokesman for evolution during the last two millennia.

"Lucretius (c.100-c.55BC), chief proponent of atomism, still offers the prevailing world view of reality. No less than twelve English translations of his poem "On the Nature of Things" are readily available in print, the most recent being published in 1995." http://www.commonsensescience.org/atomism.html

"On the Nature of Things," is a description of what Thomas Paine in 1794 in "The Age of Reason" referred to as "the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of religion.

"It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind;" Paine wrote, "and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel."

So did Lucretius, and this is his telling of his world view, of Man's place in it, and of the evil influence of religion against the better judgments of men. This is only a very small part of it. Go to the link below the title information to see all of it, or search for other sources.

"Lucretius' scientific epic "De rerum natura" is considered a masterpiece of Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus taught that the world could be understood by reason and that religion only arouses unnecessary fear. Lucretius denounced popular beliefs in deities and supernatural creatures.

"As a poem, "De rerum natura" is remarkable [as] a lyrical presentation of what would otherwise be tedious information." "De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things): Introduction." Epics for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 1 September 2008. http://www.enotes.com/de-rerum/

On the Nature of Things

By Titus Lucretius Carus (c.99-55 BCE)

Written 50 B.C.E Translated by William Ellery Leonard

http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html

pro·em noun
1 : preliminary comment : preface 2 : prelude

Mirriam-Webster Online

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Part I
by Lucretitius
Proem

Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men,
Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars

Makest to teem the many-voyaged main
And fruitful lands- for all of living things
Through thee alone are evermore conceived,
Through thee are risen to visit the great sun-
Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on,
Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away,
For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers,
For thee waters of the unvexed deep
Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky
Glow with diffused radiance for thee!
For soon as comes the springtime face of day,
And procreant gales blow from the West unbarred,
First fowls of air, smit to the heart by thee,
Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine,
And leap the wild herds round the happy fields
Or swim the bounding torrents.
Thus amain, Seized with the spell, all creatures follow thee
Whithersoever thou walkest forth to lead,
And thence through seas and mountains and swift streams,
Through leafy homes of birds and greening plains,
Kindling the lure of love in every breast,
Thou bringest the eternal generations forth,
Kind after kind.
And since 'tis thou alone
Guidest the Cosmos,
and without thee naught
Is risen to reach the shining shores of light,
Nor aught of joyful or of lovely born,
Thee do I crave co-partner in that verse
Which I presume on Nature to compose
For Memmius mine, whom thou hast willed to be
Peerless in every grace at every hour-
Wherefore indeed, Divine one, give my words
Immortal charm. Lull to a timely rest
O'er sea and land the savage works of war,
For thou alone hast power with public peace
To aid mortality; since he who rules
The savage works of battle, puissant Mars,
How often to thy bosom flings his strength
O'ermastered by the eternal wound of love-
And there, with eyes and full throat backward thrown,
Gazing, my Goddess, open-mouthed at thee,
Pastures on love his greedy sight, his breath
Hanging upon thy lips. Him thus reclined
Fill with thy holy body, round, above!
Pour from those lips soft syllables to win
Peace for the Romans, glorious Lady, peace!
For in a season troublous to the state
Neither may I attend this task of mine
With thought untroubled, nor mid such events
The illustrious scion of the Memmian house
Neglect the civic cause.
Whilst human kind
Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
Before all eyes beneath Religion- who
Would show her head along the region skies,
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face-
A Greek it was who first opposing dared
Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand,
Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning's stroke
Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky
Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest
His dauntless heart to be the first to rend
The crossbars at the gates of Nature old.
And thus his will and hardy wisdom won;
And forward thus he fared afar, beyond
The flaming ramparts of the world, until
He wandered the unmeasurable All.
Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports
What things can rise to being, what cannot,
And by what law to each its scope prescribed,
Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.
Wherefore Religion now is under foot,
And us his victory now exalts to heaven.
I know how hard it is in Latian verse
To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find
Strange terms to fit the strangeness of the thing;
Yet worth of thine and the expected joy
Of thy sweet friendship do persuade me on
To bear all toil and wake the clear nights through,
Seeking with what of words and what of song
I may at last most gloriously uncloud
For thee the light beyond, wherewith to view
The core of being at the centre hid.
And for the rest, summon to judgments true,
Unbusied ears and singleness of mind
Withdrawn from cares; lest these my gifts, arranged
For thee with eager service, thou disdain
Before thou comprehendest:
since for thee I prove the supreme law of Gods and sky,
And the primordial germs of things unfold,
Whence Nature all creates, and multiplies
And fosters all, and whither she resolves
Each in the end when each is overthrown.
This ultimate stock we have devised to name
Procreant atoms, matter, seeds of things,
Or primal bodies, as primal to the world.
I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare
An impious road to realms of thought profane;
But 'tis that same religion oftener far
Hath bred the foul impieties of men:
As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,
Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,
Defiled Diana's altar, virgin queen,
With Agamemnon's daughter, foully slain.
She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks
And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek,
And at the altar marked her grieving sire,
The priests beside him who concealed the knife,
And all the folk in tears at sight of her.
With a dumb terror and a sinking knee
She dropped; nor might avail her now that first
'Twas she who gave the king a father's name.
They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl
On to the altar- hither led not now
With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,
But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,
A parent felled her on her bridal day,
Making his child a sacrificial beast
To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:
Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.
And there shall come the time when even thou,
Forced by the soothsayer's terror-tales, shalt seek
To break from us.
Ah, many a dream even now
Can they concoct to rout thy plans of life,
And trouble all thy fortunes with base fears.
I own with reason: for, if men but knew
Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong
By some device unconquered to withstand
Religions and the menacings of seers.
But now nor skill nor instrument is theirs,
Since men must dread eternal pains in death.
For what the soul may be they do not know,
Whether 'tis born, or enter in at birth,
And whether, snatched by death, it die with us,
Or visit the shadows and the vasty caves
Of Orcus, or by some divine decree
Enter the brute herds, as our Ennius sang,
Who first from lovely Helicon brought down
A laurel wreath of bright perennial leaves,
Renowned forever among the Italian clans.
Yet Ennius too in everlasting verse
Proclaims those vaults of Acheron to be,
Though thence, he said, nor souls nor bodies fare,
But only phantom figures, strangely wan,
And tells how once from out those regions rose
Old Homer's ghost to him and shed salt tears
And with his words unfolded Nature's source.
Then be it ours with steady mind to clasp
The purport of the skies- the law behind
The wandering courses of the sun and moon;
To scan the powers that speed all life below;
But most to see with reasonable eyes
Of what the mind, of what the soul is made,
And what it is so terrible that breaks
On us asleep, or waking in disease,
Until we seem to mark and hear at hand
Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago.

Any variation in this publication of "On the Nature of Things" that varies from Latin hexameter verse, in which each line has six "feet," or units of rhythm, is purely accidental, and the fault of the copy/paste procedure allowed by the copyright from the website listed above.

On Revelations; Thomas Paine

I PUT the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus
Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and
consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication- after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to
believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.

When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this- for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so- it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

Thomas Paine; "The Age of Reason"; 1794 http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm

Please send all comments to mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.comThe Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the sm (service mark) of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism tm, which is the educational arm of the Assemblage. This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

Quotes and Musings, on Saturday

NEW FEATURES

I have added several new blocks of text at the bottom in the left column. I really think you will find them interesting, valuable, perhaps new to you, and decidedly dedicated to naturalism, objective thinking, and human freedoms.

Besides "The Phrase of the Week," which is really just meant as a curiosity to introduce readers to ideas they have not heard of before (so some of them might appear to be very obscure--or very basic,) I've added some blocks of history in education, philosophy of religion, and other subjects which will make good reading. I will change these as I see fit, but as I see fit right now, they are a perfect juxtaposition from the philosophy of naturalism to educated ideas that promote the value of the human being, and contribute to each of us achieving that state of "Man qua Man."

There is a block "ON SECULAR EDUCATION" by John Stuart Mill; a block on "Sex Between Humans and Gods," by the American Patriot Thomas Paine; a block on "Free Will and Naturalism," by Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D ; and because so many Yahoo Answers readers want to know what "time" is, (though by the tone of some of the questions you just know the questioner is as skeptical that time exists as he is that he himself exists,) called "Consciousness, Reality and Time," by Professor Alek Samarin.

Even though the viewer counter I choose never showed up on this page (I'm not a geek; I can't understand RSS urls and things like how to put a counter on the page!), still, Google tells me in my account how many hits this page has had, and I must say I appreciate everyone of them. I only wish that some of you would comment so I knew what you were thinking, but I hate allowing comments to be put directly on the site without my reading them first, because then I get arguments, straw men, hate messages, irrational ranting, etc. I know that if someone takes the time to click on the link to this email address, that he or she has the constitution to write a logical, rational rebuttal or the knowledge to correct me where I've been wrong, or just to comment one way or another. So the "comments" button won't be coming up on this site anytime soon.

But Saturday is the day I've chosen to lay back and take it easy, posting my own offhand comments, or more than likely some of my (new!) "favorite" quotes from other people. If you're interested in whose quotes I used last week, they are listed under "Blog Archive" for the previous week.

BTW, if you have noticed, there is a link to PHILO, The Center for Inquiry, and Purdue U. at the top of the left column of this page. There are lots of links that might astonish you. Check them out. And while you're at it, click on some of the Google ads that have to do with Naturalism, or Atheism, etc. You'll be be helping me pay my bills! Or click on the pretty, animated ad for Turner Movie Classics. I'm broke.

LAST WEEK'S SERIES ON THE "INFORMED" NATURALIST AND SECULARITY

If you have followed my week-long series based on Dr. Quentin Smith's paper published in PHILO, on the subject of "uninformed vs. informed naturalists," then you will understand why I'm not energetic enough to comment on anything today.

Each of those daily blogs took me approximately four hours of research and writing and editing for format (the appearance, the look,) of the blog. How many online blogs have you read that provide all the necessary links to the websites from which the information came? I want each of you to be able to judge whether or not I "appropriately appropriated" the copyrighted materials of others under fair usage and according to whether or not I was on the mark with the material I used: was it properly supportive of my own ideas? was I creating straw man arguments? did I "appropriate" too much to make a point, or would you have liked me to use more, in order to make my own case as tight as possible?

At any rate, the authors and the holders of the copyrights I appropriate under fair usage deserve--legally and ethically--to have their material linked. And several editors and publishers have given me outright carte blanche to appropriate as much material as I need or want, so long as I give the credit where it is due.

"Dear Curtis,

Many thanks for writing, I’ve put you on our newsletter list. I’m glad to know that you self-identify as a naturalist and we’ll be happy to help in any way we can. You can use and distribute anything at Naturalism.Org and Centerfornaturalism.Org, just cite the source.

I certainly encourage you to promote naturalism using all possible means – talking with co-workers, friends and family, giving talks, writing op-eds and articles. I look forward to collaborating in making naturalism better known as a worldview.

Best regards,
Tom Clark
Thomas W. Clark, DirectorCenter for Naturalism www.centerfornaturalism.org
www.naturalism.org Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses "

Thank you, Tom. We are not related, tho our last names are the same. I've never met Tom. I've never spoken to Tom. Tom and I have each written only one email to each other. But this is the kind of response that people in our field are willing to give to each other.

Dr. Quentin Smith lives right here in my home town and I've met and spoken with him. I wrote him an email about my week-long series, but he never got it. I sent it to the general email address of the Western Michigan University philosophy department, and yesterday when I went there to ask the Dr. what he thought of how I had handled his paper, not only was he not there, but the department secretary said her own volunteer had been absent and had not forwarded the email! But I did manage to get another professor, someone who's bio and photo are not yet up on the WMU website http://www.wmich.edu/philosophy/index.php?content=home to promise to take a look at this site. I hope he shows it to Dr. Smith. I hope he shows it to the whole staff and to any students who are interested in Naturalism, or in whatever else the young professor may find interesing here.

I almost want to say his name was Professor Philo, but that would be too convenient. It only reminds me of "philo." At any rate, Professor, thank you for promising to at least look at my site, and my deepest apologies for having a short term memory loss.

A friend of mine who owns a 50,000+ sq. ft. building suitable for a convention, and I, are hatching the first big idea for the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism. It will probably happen before the Academy begins offering unaccredited courses. I've been looking at several courses that are well regarded in both academic and non-academic circles. But it is not just a matter of finding the right material to advance Naturalism, or to advance the epistemic integrity of bringing secularism back into the field. It is a matter of find the right professors who can work long distance with students who are not in a formal classroom on a formal campus. It also requries hiring a webmaster who can put the package of online learning into the kind of internet superhighway of academic learning that I envision for the Academy.

Oh yeah, did I leave you hanging up there, about the "first big idea" of a convention? I'm going to have to continue to leave you hanging because the whole idea is only a week old, barely old enough to be debatable as to its possibility, let alone as to its probability. Sorry.

Tomorrow is Sunday, the day I take off from my postings. I'm going to an AA picnic today (there is a link to AA International on here, also, if you have not noticed.) It's supposed to be a bright, warm, wonderful day under the naturalistic sun on the naturalistic turf of a large county park on a beautiful and large naturalistic lake. But I just broke one of my smaller toes. I may have a hard time walking tomorrow. It's the same toe I broke a year ago. I limped in my shoes for a month.

So I hope you all have as wonderful a weekend as I'm going to have, and I'll see you Monday with another blog, the subject of which I have no idea yet as to its subject. I'm worn out from thinking about this week's subject, and the many hours it takes to write and publish it, not only here but on my Yahoo 360 profile 360.yahoo.com/curtisedwardclark , and on Scribd. http://www.scribd.com/

Suggestions for topic are welcome, as well as suggestions for the "Phrase (or Word) of the Week." And you are welcome to send original material, as this blog points out in approximately 20 different places.

Until Monday, then, Best Wishes that the naturalist events of the cosmos work to your advantage.

Curtis

QUOTES TO MAKE YOUR DAY

"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. "
Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. "
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

"All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind." Abraham Lincoln

"All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened." Maya Angelou

"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also." Thomas Jefferson

"A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other." Ronald Reagan

"There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva.”
Josh Groban quotes

"Bart, with $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like...love!" Homer J Simpson. http://www.short-funny-quotes.com/top_ten_quotes.html

"I'm an excellent housekeeper. Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house." Zsa Zsa Gabor ibid

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." Rich Cook ibid

"When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room." Woody Allen ibid

"Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity." - Karl Marx (What--Capitalism from the king of Marxism? WTF?)

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

"No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies."
Daisy Bates (1863-1951)

"The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust." Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact." George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (1819-1880)