bom·bast (bmbst) KEY

NOUN:

Grandiloquent, pompous speech or writing.

Dawkins doesn't need me to educate him about why demonization won't work. He's smart enough to figure that out for himself if he cared to. I'm just a mirror held up by his demonized targets to illustrate why it won't work.

There are few minds with greater analytic insight than Berlinski's. It becomes bombast when"¦ let me guess. He states something you disagree with. Right?

Not at all.

Here is a paragraph of Berlinski's that I mostly agree with, but find painfully bombastic:

Call twice for the numeral "2" on a calculator and the machine returns a neoned "4." Considered simply as a physical object, the machine is shuttling among shapes, configurations of light, which it realizesby means of the way in which it is constructed: it is capable of nothing else. What makes the charming show of light an answer is the fact that someone has been provoked to ask a question. Question and answer belong to the circle of human voices. A purely physical process has been invested with significance, those winking ruby lights given form and content as symbols, representations. Whether the representation is made in
terms of light or by the modulation of a woman's voice, the process is always the same. Some feature of the world has been made incandescent.

Here's another nice example of Berlinski's prose style:

What do we see when we look elsewhere? Stars blazing glumly in the night sky, the moons of Jupiter hanging like so many testicles, clouds of cosmic dust, an immensity of space, a spare but irritating sound track consisting of the infernal chatter of background radiation.

The hyperbolic loudmouths are loud, but most people aren't interested in demonizing those who look or think or believe differently than they do.

Joy,
Perhaps a bit of introspection is in order:

Dawkins' expectation that US and British citizens will surrender their liberties and minds gladly to wannabe totalitarian tyrants doesn't even rise to the level of foolishness.

Dawkins is never going to have the power to force humanity to dance to his malignant, narcissistic tune. Science depends on government for its funding, supplied by regular people out in the real world who do real work and have real families and beliefs they aren't going to surrender to a megalomaniacal madman for whom others exist only to exalt him and bow to his desires.

The hatred he spews is just something that serves to make him seem more 'important' to himself. An illusion he indulges because it serves his ego.

Richard Dawkins is an abuser of others.

My opinion of Richard Dawkins is that he's immature and so stuck on himself that others exist only in an abstract way, for the purpose of aggrandizing his ego. I got that opinion by reading his own words. Maybe he's just a pathological liar and doesn't mean any of it, but that's a whole different can of worms.

…all the other children in all those other families who would be affected by Dawkins' hateful pogroms.

Every generation has to deal with its haters and narcissists and wannabe mind-tyrants, but every generation doesn't have to surrender to their propensity for evil.

There are few minds with greater analytic insight than Berlinski's. It becomes bombast when… let me guess. He states something you disagree with. Right?

Sure, there is Creationist resistance and reaction to the challenges of science to literalist ideology.

Good. So you concede, contrary to your earlier assertion, that some religions are threatened by science.

Then you should expect NDS indoctrination of high school students to successfully convert many people to your metaphysical belief system.

Not really. That assumes that students are fully open to ideas that challenge their strongly-held preconceptions. It also assumes that schools do a good job of teaching evolution. Neither is true, in my experience.

I won't bother explaining the difference between best-guess theory (or scientific 'orthodoxy') and "truth."

Good, because I'm fully aware of the provisional nature of scientific knowledge.

This is why we are told so often by EAs that no one besides them is qualified to interpret the science to metaphysical worldviews - that we must all be forced to accept the orthodox dogma's metaphysical implications as they have interpreted these to support metaphysical materialism, a.k.a. atheism.

Any evidence for your assertion?

A lot of brilliant scientists gave up and drove ski shuttle buses or tended bar rather than bow to the priesthood of 'orthodox' turf-warriors"¦who argued in the end to keep it 'secret' - even after the evidence demonstrated BB to be provisionally 'true' - because if the universe had a beginning in time, it would lend support to theistic metaphysics.

Now that's fascinating — especially the part about scientists arguing to keep the evidence secret. Could you point me to your source for this information? I'd love to read about it.

I had never noticed this. Right in front of my eyes.

Clicking on "Edit This" should allow you to edit your common up to 30 minutes after it has been posted.

I do stand more informed about these matters.

By the way, I made a few errors in my previous post. Can anyone guide me on how to edit after the fact?

Scientific tradition had long considered the universe to be basically 'eternal', so the Steady State was formulated as 'orthodoxy' to do grand battle against the Big Bangers. It was a long and decidedly nasty war with significant losses of brains and talent along the way to the very same sort of persecution tactics we see today in the fields of evolutionary biology. A lot of brilliant scientists gave up and drove ski shuttle buses or tended bar rather than bow to the priesthood of 'orthodox' turf-warriors.

…who argued in the end to keep it 'secret' - even after the evidence demonstrated BB to be provisionally 'true' - because if the universe had a beginning in time, it would lend support to theistic metaphysics. The final death blow was delivered in '65. As soon as the new science books were delivered, the universe had a beginning and it was presented (as SS had been the year before) as if that's the way it's always been. Kids were not taught about the 30+ year struggle against 'orthodoxy', or why some scientists didn't want it taught even when the evidence supported it.

In biology, Mendel's work - which he had sent to Charles Darwin after "Origin…" was published - was pointedly ignored for more than 75 years until mounting evidence of reliable particulate inheritance simply could not be ignored any longer. At that point the Neodarwinian Synthesis was born (*as* 'orthodoxy' from the beginning) with the strictly imposed qualifier that any changes in the physical mechanisms of reliable particulate inheritance had to be "random" in all cases.

Why? Because telic processes in nature, actual design in life, etc. are fearsome. Like BB, teleology might lend support to theistic metaphysics. So this turf war has been ongoing for longer than Richard Dawkins has been alive and will survive his death. It's never really been about 'truth' (big-T or little). It's just dueling metaphysics.

Like the "New Atheism" we see promoted by Dawkins et al., there is also a "New Eugenics" being promoted by many of the same people. There's several blogs in the TT archives under that heading. Society can shut it down if it turns coercive, as such bad ideas so often do. It's a dirty job to keep 'em honest, but somebody's got to do it… §;o)

The hyperbolic loudmouths are loud, but most people aren't interested in demonizing those who look or think or believe differently than they do. If there's demons out there, they usually manage to identify themselves. When they identify themselves *as* science, science is what suffers in the public perception.