NOMA is a Myth?

A FaceBook friend just shared a post called The Myth of Separate Magisteria that argues that Steven Jay Gould's premise of Non-Overlapping Magisteria is flawed. He argues,

"One might as well say that conflict arises between men and women only when they stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble. Science produces discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs (not only religious ones) based on revelation rather than evidence, and the religious must decide whether to battle or accommodate secular knowledge if it contradicts their teachings.

I usually claim NOMA when pressed on whether Science can disprove God. The realms of revelation vs. evidence can be kept separate as long as religion keeps stepping back as verifiable research claims ever more territory. Scientific understanding will keep stepping on religions skirts until the faithful stick to claims that can only be held on faith, and stop claiming "truth" about things for which there is contradictory evidence. God is a fuzzy and non-falsifiable idea. Science will never disprove God. But it has disproved most of what the Bible claims about God's involvement in nature, the Earth, and the Universe. So these ways of looking at the universe do overlap, until such time as the weaker one bows out of the territory. As with the flat Earth, the Sin theory of gravity, the God's Pillars principle of Earthquakes, God's Wrath principle of extreme weather, the Geocentric universe, the Young Earth, and so on.

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Defining issues of our time concern media

A letter I received from Free Press a couple weeks ago lays out some very disturbing things that are happening because of government policies are failing and our public officials are timid. They would rather let corporations put their profits ahead of the public interest. Here are a few of the examples laid out in the letter I received:

The Federal Communications Commission currently does not have the power to protect Internet users or make rules for the communications networks of the 21st-century. It is unwilling to reassert its authority to do so. Google and Verizon have made a pact that could end net neutrality, and with it, the Internet as we know it. But the FCC chairman hasn't said a word against-or taken action that could stop-- this dangerous deal. The Comcast-NBC Universal merger threatens to create one of the largest media empires ever, with vast control over content and distribution. Yet government agencies appear poised to rubberstamp the deal.
Free Press indicates that net neutrality is the biggest battle we are facing right now in media reform:
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the fight to secure the open Internet. The largest phone, cable and Internet companies are funneling millions of dollars a day to politicians and into a massive lobbying campaign to win policies that will turn the Internet into their own private highway.
The letter is a request for contributions to allow Free Press to continue fighting these battles. I would highly recommend anyone who is concerned to visit the Free Press site and consider contributing.

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Putting health care into perspective when discussing the budget

Check out this short comment and the accompanying chart in this Mother Jones article by Kevin Drum. He has some good advice on how to get serious when discussing the budget. If you are not considering spiraling health care costs, you are are not being serious. Connecting the dots, Obama's health care "reform" was not serious. The Republican proposals are even less serious, amounting to government-implemented social darwinism. I would add that our immense military expenditures also deserve scrutiny and the budget axe.

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Make big money running a college

Bloomberg reports on the scandalous default rates at the large for-profit colleges, seen in the context of the eye-popping salaries of the executives that run the colleges:

Strayer Education Inc., a chain of for-profit colleges that receives three-quarters of its revenue from U.S. taxpayers, paid Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Silberman $41.9 million last year. That’s 26 times the compensation of the highest-paid president of a traditional university. Top executives at the 15 U.S. publicly traded for-profit colleges, led by Apollo Group Inc. and Education Management Corp., also received $2 billion during the last seven years from the proceeds of selling company stock, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show. At the same time, the industry registered the worst loan-default and four-year-college dropout rates in U.S. higher education. Since 2003, nine for-profit college insiders sold more than $45 million of stock apiece.
Here's more information about the problems with the nations large for-profit colleges, including Phoenix University.

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Matt Taibbi reports from his front row seat at a foreclosure court trial docket

Matt Taibbi's newest article should be required reading for anyone who wants to support the desires of banks to expeditiously foreclose on home loans. Taibbi showed up at a Florida foreclosure docket to give an insider's view. You will be amazed at the conduct of the judge (it is described toward the end of Taibbi's article). Here's the link: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners: Retired judges are rushing through complex cases to speed foreclosures in Florida. Here's an excerpt:

At worst, these ordinary homeowners were stupid or uninformed — while the banks that lent them the money are guilty of committing a baldfaced crime on a grand scale. These banks robbed investors and conned homeowners, blew themselves up chasing the fraud, then begged the taxpayers to bail them out. And bail them out we did: We ponied up billions to help Wells Fargo buy Wachovia, paid Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch, and watched as the Fed opened up special facilities to buy up the assets in defective mortgage trusts at inflated prices. And after all that effort by the state to buy back these phony assets so the thieves could all stay in business and keep their bonuses, what did the banks do? They put their foot on the foreclosure gas pedal and stepped up the effort to kick people out of their homes as fast as possible, before the world caught on to how these loans were made in the first place. . . . When you meet people who are losing their homes in this foreclosure crisis, they almost all have the same look of deep shame and anguish. Nowhere else on the planet is it such a crime to be down on your luck, even if you were put there by some of the world's richest banks, which continue to rake in record profits purely because they got a big fat handout from the government. That's why one banker CEO after another keeps going on TV to explain that despite their own deceptive loans and fraudulent paperwork, the real problem is these deadbeat homeowners who won't pay their fucking bills. And that's why most people in this country are so ready to buy that explanation. Because in America, it's far more shameful to owe money than it is to steal it.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi reports from his front row seat at a foreclosure court trial docket