2b

Interesting point, book sales. It seems that most of the criticism here is directed at ' The god delusion' by far his biggest selling book. Do people hold the same opinion of his work when they look at 'The selfish gene’? IMO an equally thought provoking book, but sticking much closer to his ' area of expertise'.

An assumption is not a theory or a fact . Dawkins' own field of expertise is Biology and i think he is no shrieking violet when it comes to looking at his own ideas. Isn't the whole idea of a theory to put your idea before your peers and have them shoot it down ? The sooner it gets proven wrong the sooner everyone can get back on the right track and discount the idea as wrong. The longer the theory stands the more it looks like a fact (Copernicus had a theory that the earth goes round the sun , it's still a theory but not proven wrong)

While i can see the good in a product like this is it not concerning that you could seem to be dependant ?

May be we are fundamentally evil and we killed them off because we were smarter.

LMAO !!! This sort of fits in with my 'Agnostic with doubts' outlook at the moment.

Gotta agree with you Morg.

WOW ! That is an impressive collection of photos. Just love the veriagated Loph , i want one !

OK thought it may have been close to where i am. Interesting that there are a few members from SW Vic on the forum these days, and Colac seems to have another member.

Which Safeway was it ?

Hmmmm so 'Sapphos' is out of the question as well.....It all seems to be about names and regions in Europe at the moment, Chamaign, Port , Burgundy, Parma , Lesbos.

My local K-Mart in rural Victoria has them so i assume they are available at all stores. They are a preserving jar , just like the old ' Fowlers' jars only made in China. Just have a good look around the kitchen ware section and keep a keen eye out for jars, they are there in different sizes.

K-mart have them on the shelf.

Ironic that Hoffman is in the news and so is this bust. Interesting also that it was out going traffic not incoming. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04...?section=justin Trips over for high flyer following airport drug bust Posted 1 hour 29 minutes ago Updated 1 hour 1 minute ago Map: Darwin 0800 Darwin police allege a man from Adelaide has been found in the Darwin Airport departure lounge with thousands of LSD tabs strapped to his legs. The 23-year-old was also allegedly carrying 950 ecstasy tablets and about 52 grams of MDMA. The drugs are allegedly worth about $100,000. The arrest was made at 2:00am ACST as part of a drug operation involving police dogs. Police have confirmed the man was about to board a plane but have not revealed the destination.

Actually just to split hairs the law only recognises 'natural born people' and 'proprietary limited' companies of which they are.

I would be interested as to who is liable for things posted on a forum ? Next i would be equally interested in how it is proven who was actually at the terminal when the post was made.

I believe young children need wisdom and guidance not a ' hip best friend'. It is wise to teach the truth about drugs. If you teach your children that smoking weed is going to send them crazy,etc....then the first time they do try it(or friends try it) and they don't suffer the problems you loose all your credibility and they wil stop respecting your wisdom.

If my hunch is correct and it was him that made the thread, and if he did delete all his posts then it's not old news to those that have joined in the last few years. I think this book is hysterical, but as a father of two i won't be taking my children down this path. Bottom line is smoking is a bad thing and as a role model to my girls i won't be giving them any mixed signals.

From memory the CS posted about this a few years ago. I aslo seem to recall that Torsten was going to look into stocking the book in the SAB store. NB:There is a good chance that most of the posts CS made have now been deleted by him , so I'm not sure if the original thread still exists ?

Well i can understand that, and it is a valid point. Most water tanks are made in your own town or at least some where near by the district. Most are plastic as it is the most economical. It is not practical to move these tanks far , they are light so when a truck is full to capacity(physically) it still is well under it's GVM.

Yep that's an MSDS.......The only difference between a poison and a remedy is the dose.............

JOP that sounds like it might make sense if you where talking about an old gal tank that is soldered together with lead , or just a crappy old gal tank. Most retrofitted tanks these days are plastic , so if your roof is cool then i can't see where this lead is supposed to come from ?

They have this problem in the UK. They got to great lenghts to recycle glass bottles, then they are shipped of to South America to be recycled. Now the amount of fuel used to send these great ships full of items to be recycled is imense , so much so that it would have been ' greener' to put the stuff in landfill to start with.

Descartes did a lot of work on doubt , in a nut shell you can doubt everything except the idea that you doubt (?!!) So where to from here ? Doubt everything , right down to your own existence and what is left is the truth. Descartes: Starting with Doubt For a more complete formal presentation of this foundational experience, we must turn to the Meditationes de prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy) (1641), in which Descartes offered to contemporary theologians his proofs of the existence of god and the immortality of the human soul. This explicit concern for religious matters does not reflect any loss of interest in pursuing the goals of science. By sharply distinguishing mind from body, Descartes hoped to preserve a distinct arena for the church while securing the freedom of scientists to develop mechanistic accounts of physical phenomena. In this way, he supposed it possible to satisfy the requirements of Christian doctrine, but discourage the interference of the church in scientific matters and promote further observational exploration of the material world. The arrangement of the Meditations, Descartes emphasized, is not the order of reasons; that is, it makes no effort to proceed from the metaphysical foundations of reality to the dependent existence of lesser beings, as Spinoza would later try to do. Instead, this book follows the order of thoughts; that is, it traces the epistemological progress an individual thinker might follow in establishing knowledge at a level of perfect certainty. Thus, these are truly Meditations: we are meant to put ourselves in the place of the first-person narrator, experiencing for ourselves the benefits of the philosophical method. The Method of Doubt The basic strategy of Descartes's method of doubt is to defeat skepticism on its own ground. Begin by doubting the truth of everything—not only the evidence of the senses and the more extravagant cultural presuppositions, but even the fundamental process of reasoning itself. If any particular truth about the world can survive this extreme skeptical challenge, then it must be truly indubitable and therefore a perfectly certain foundation for knowledge. The First Meditation, then, is an extended exercise in learning to doubt everything that I believe, considered at three distinct levels: Perceptual Illusion First, Descartes noted that the testimony of the senses with respect to any particular judgment about the external world may turn out to be mistaken. (Med. I) Things are not always just as they seem at first glance (or at first hearing, etc.) to be. But then, Descartes argues, it is prudent never wholly to trust in the truth of what we perceive. In ordinary life, of course, we adjust for mistaken perceptions by reference to correct perceptions. But since we cannot be sure at first which cases are veridical and which are not, it is possible (if not always feasible) to doubt any particular bit of apparent sensory knowledge. The Dream Problem Second, Descartes raised a more systematic method for doubting the legitimacy of all sensory perception. Since my most vivid dreams are internally indistinguishible from waking experience, he argued, it is possible that everything I now "perceive" to be part of the physical world outside me is in fact nothing more than a fanciful fabrication of my own imagination. On this supposition, it is possible to doubt that any physical thing really exists, that there is an external world at all. (Med. I) Severe as it is, this level of doubt is not utterly comprehensive, since the truths of mathematics and the content of simple natures remain unaffected. Even if there is no material world (and thus, even in my dreams) two plus three makes five and red looks red to me. In order to doubt the veracity of such fundamental beliefs, I must extend the method of doubting even more hyperbolically. A Deceiving God Finally, then, Descartes raises even more comprehensive doubts by inviting us to consider a radical hypothesis derived from one of our most treasured traditional beliefs. What if (as religion teaches) there is an omnipotent god, but that deity devotes its full attention to deceiving me? (Med. I) The problem here is not merely that I might be forced by god to believe what something which is in fact false. Descartes means to raise the far more devastating possibility that whenever I believe anything, even if it has always been true up until now, a truly omnipotent deceiver could at that very moment choose to change the world so as to render my belief false. On this supposition, it seems possible to doubt the truth of absolutely anything I might come to believe. Although the hypothesis of a deceiving god best serves the logical structure of the Meditations as a whole, Descartes offered two alternative versions of the hypothetical doubt for the benefit of those who might take offense at even a counter-factual suggestion of impiety. It may seem more palatable to the devout to consider the possibility that I systematically deceive myself or that there is some evil demon who perpetually tortures me with my own error. The point in each case is that it is possible for every belief I entertain to be false. Remember that the point of the entire exercise is to out-do the skeptics at their own game, to raise the broadest possible grounds for doubt, so that whatever we come to believe in the face of such challenges will indeed be that which cannot be doubted. It is worthwhile to pause here, wallowing in the depths of Cartesian doubt at the end of the First Meditation, the better to appreciate the escape he offers at the outset of Meditation Two. I Am, I Exist The Second Meditation begins with a review of the First. Remember that I am committed to suspending judgment with respect to anything about which I can conceive any doubt, and my doubts are extensive. I mistrust every report of my senses, I regard the material world as nothing more than a dream, and I suppose that an omnipotent god renders false each proposition that I am even inclined to believe. Since everything therefore seems to be dubitable, does it follow that I can be certain of nothing at all? It does not. Descartes claimed that one thing emerges as true even under the strict conditions imposed by the otherwise universal doubt: "I am, I exist" is necessarily true whenever the thought occurs to me. (Med. II) This truth neither derives from sensory information nor depends upon the reality of an external world, and I would have to exist even if I were systematically deceived. For even an omnipotent god could not cause it to be true, at one and the same time, both that I am deceived and that I do not exist. If I am deceived, then at least I am. Although Descartes's reasoning here is best known in the Latin translation of its expression in the Discourse, "cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), it is not merely an inference from the activity of thinking to the existence of an agent which performs that activity. It is intended rather as an intuition of one's own reality, an expression of the indubitability of first-person experience, the logical self-certification of self-conscious awareness in any form. Skepticism is thereby defeated, according to Descartes. No matter how many skeptical challenges are raised—indeed, even if things are much worse than the most extravagant skeptic ever claimed—there is at least one fragment of genuine human knowledge: my perfect certainty of my own existence. From this starting-point, Descartes supposed, it is possible to achieve indubitable knowledge of many other propositions as well. I Am a Thinking Thing An initial consequence may be drawn directly from the intuitive certainty of the cogito itself. If I know that I am, Descartes argued, I must also know what I am; an understanding of my true nature must be contained implicitly in the content of my awareness. What then, is this "I" that doubts, that may be deceived, that thinks? Since I became certain of my existence while entertaining serious doubts about sensory information and the existence of a material world, none of the apparent features of my human body can have been crucial for my understanding of myself. But all that is left is my thought itself, so Descartes concluded that "sum res cogitans" ("I am a thing that thinks"). (Med. II) In Descartes's terms, I am a substance whose inseparable attribute (or entire essence) is thought, with all its modes: doubting, willing, conceiving, believing, etc. What I really am is a mind [Lat. mens] or soul [Lat. anima]. So completely am I identified with my conscious awareness, Descartes claimed, that if I were to stop thinking altogether, it would follow that I no longer existed at all. At this point, nothing else about human nature can be determined with such perfect certainty. In ordinary life, my experience of bodies may appear to be more vivid than self-consciousness, but Descartes argued that sensory appearances actually provide no reliable knowledge of the external world. If I hold a piece of beeswax while approaching the fire, all of the qualities it presents to my senses change dramatically while the wax itself remains. (Med. II) It follows that the impressions of sense are unreliable guides even to the nature of bodies. (Notice here that the identity of the piece of wax depends solely upon its spatial location; that's a significant hint about Descartes's view of the true nature of material things, which we'll see in more detail in Meditation Five.)

I think cold water extraction is the problem, I've got a friend who uses heaps this way. It really is depressing to watch him sleep his days away.

Michael Northcott Professor at Edinburgh University, author of "A Moral Climate" raised an interesting point in an interview about his new book on the ABC this week. He claims that carbon trading will be part of the problem , not a solution at all. I have highlighted the paragraph. This is a transcript of the interview , the original can be found here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/st...008/2199497.htm Michael Northcott, welcome to the program. I have to tell you it's slightly disconcerting to open your book and read an argument that strongly implies that global warming is God's punishment for human idolatry. Michael Northcott: Well of course the argument that global warming is God's punishment is pre-scientific, and I'm not really suggesting that in the book. But I'm suggesting that the way that the Bible reads climate calamities as divine punishment is a reminder to us that God is the creator who is set into the earth a set of relationships and when we as human beings neglect the way those relationships interact and our responsibilities to maintain the relational character of the earth and its creatures, then we may suffer the consequences. That isn't strictly speaking, to say that God directly is punishing us by warming the planet, but it is to say that the planet itself is punishing us one might say. Stephen Crittenden: An Old Testament narrative I guess brushes up against Gaia Theology there. Michael Northcott: Absolutely. I mean of course, James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis has produced a recent book which he calls 'The Revenge of Gaia', and he says that the earth is going effectively to get its own back on industrial civilisation by killing off the species of industrial humans that are creating the problem with all these emissions into the atmosphere. I don't see it so much as a revenge of Gaia, but it is in a way, judgment. It is the judgment of the earth against a civilisation that is out of control, and is sending the planet, and its climate out of control. Stephen Crittenden: Underlying everything in this book is a very simple proposition I guess, which is that global warming is at some level, a moral issue. I doubt there's a single person listening to this broadcast who'd deny that. Michael Northcott: Well I think there are quite a lot of people in Australia and beyond who would deny that global warming is a moral issue, but many people in the world still do not think that global warming is a consequence of human action. So first of all, to understand it as a moral issue, you have to embrace what the science now clearly shows, which is that industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are changing the climate, and that's the first thing. The second thing then is if you accept that industrial emissions are changing the climate, those who have put the most emissions up there historically have a very grave moral duty to act, and act first. Well what is actually happening is that countries like America, and indeed Australia until very recently, have argued that they're not going to act until China and India act. And that's why this is a fundamentally immoral issue because of the injustice of the fact that here in Australia you have 20 tonnes per person greenhouse gas emissions; in Africa you have about 0.2 tonnes per person greenhouse gas emissions, but it's the Africans who are already suffering from malnutrition, whose farms and crops are failing. Stephen Crittenden: The big ethical enemy in the book is neo-liberal economics, and the accompanying loss of a sense of the common good. Michael Northcott: Yes, well I think neo-liberalism is easier to fix than sin. It's a fairly recent idea, or set of ideas, it had its day in the 19th century, it was called laissez-faire economics in those days and it's come back in the late 20th century to affect Australia, New Zealand, Britain and America primarily, but from their influence, much of the rest of the world. And what neo-liberalism basically does is to suggest that human societies are best ordered and maximise their welfare when individuals, consumers and corporations, are free from collective commitment for the common good and from legal regulation. The difficulty is that in fact human welfare has not been advanced. Here in Australia a small number of people have got very rich under the influence of neo-liberalism, but many others have seen their income stagnate or even decline and you've seen in some areas a decline in quality of life, rather than increase, just as we have in the UK, under the influence of neo-liberal philosophy. Now on the global scene, neo-liberalism suggests that the common good is not something we should aspire as nations or as groups or as communities of nations to actually serve, that we'd be better off just addressing partial interest, corporations of consumers and emerging States. But the difficulty is that the atmosphere is the collective commons, and only if we act collectively as nations, to reduce our Greenhouse gas emissions by common agreement, can we address this global problem. Basically neo-liberalism undermines the idea that humans need to act morally in the interests of others, not just to themselves. Stephen Crittenden: You've got a very interesting ethical take on carbon trading. You basically suggest that carbon trading is a product of the same neo-liberal paradigm that gave us the pollution problems and the global warming problems in the first place, and you make the point that it's privatising and commodifying things that are really common goods. Michael Northcott: Absolutely. Carbon trading has been a very effective diversionary tactic by neo-liberal economists, mainly from the States, but also from some other countries, party to the Kyoto negotiations. Economists, when they look at this objectively, have argued that the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is through regulation and control. Basically what we have to do is to keep fossil fuels in the ground and stop putting them in the atmosphere. That the simplest way of doing that is to regulate less use of fossil fuels. The other thing that's troubling about neo-liberalism is it's disabling us from acting collectively and morally, because it trains us only to act individually. So in a sense then it creates a moral climate which suggests that we're all atoms, we're all as individuals or as corporations, or as nation-states, disconnected, and if we act only in our own disconnected individual interests, the argument goes the market will turn that towards the common good. Stephen Crittenden: In your book you talk a great deal about original sin and structural sin and I might get you to explain what those two things mean for the audience. I think what comes through the book is that this whole problem with global warming is emblematic of those two things. Michael Northcott: I think that's absolutely right. Original sin of course is the Christian idea that goes back to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve that there is a condition which human beings inherit that our tendency not always to act morally is not simply an individual trait, it's a trait that is passed on from generation to generation. Structural sin though, refers to the way in which that capacity for us to inherit sin has modified in a world which is much more complex than the ancient world, and where you have structures and social systems which connects us in a range of new ways, which are not just genetic or biological or - Stephen Crittenden: You actually suggest, don't you, that a structure like the global market economy is in some senses a structure of sin. Michael Northcott: Absolutely. Let me give you one example of that. Bananas are traded globally, many bananas are grown on plantations where corporations aerially spray not only the banana plants with their pesticides and herbicides, but workers' houses, workers themselves and their children and their wells, and children get sick, workers' fingernails fall out, many bananas are grown in ways which are very destructive to the environment, and socially very, very unpleasant. But in response to this Christians and others have tried to introduce a new way of trading in the global economy, and this is called Fair Trade, and now in Britain, and under the influence of the Fair Trade movement which began in the churches, a number of companies and supermarkets are now refusing to sell bananas grown in the old unjust and unfair way, and are only selling Fair Trade bananas. Stephen Crittenden: We've reported on this program a similar campaign that's begun in the last year or so in relation to chocolate which is produced under slave conditions in many places. Michael Northcott: Absolutely. And what you see Fair Trade is an example of Christians leading but not only a critique of structural injustice in a global market, but a new way of trading, and Christians around the world have been taking a similar lead in relation to climate change. The global market economy is indeed a structure of sin, and so in a sense is an international market in carbon emissions. Stephen Crittenden: Well one of the most important people that you refer to several times in the book, is the American farmer and essayist, Wendell Berry, who may not be a familiar name to many of our listeners. Tell us about him, because I suspect that his vision for the kind of lives you imagine us all living, in a better, more utopian future, is heavily influenced by him. Michael Northcott: Yes, I think that's very helpful. See what I'm trying to argue in the book is very much along the lines that Wendell Berry writes. Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, he's a southern Baptist, and he's a brilliant essayist; America's finest contemporary essayist. He has a land ethic in which he suggests that industrial nations and industrial people are living irresponsibly on the earth because they don't know how their food is grown, they don't from where their energy comes and they don't know where their waste ends up. And this lack of knowledge and this lack of awareness of their material relations with the earth produces a culture of moral irresponsibility. And it is that culture which is not only causing global warming, but is causing the sixth great extinction of species, toxicity, pollution and waste. Now Berry suggests we need to recover responsibility for all of the material relationships that our lives involve, and one of the most obvious forms of material relationship that we all engage in every day is the use of energy, so when we turn on a switch, do we know where that power has come from, how it was generated? When we turn a key in a car ignition, do we know where that oil was found, how it was sourced, what effects it had on the lives of the people who live near that oil well. And unless we do, Berry suggests we're living irresponsible lives. Another area he focuses on a great deal is the area of food, and of course it is food which is the first area Christians have addressed through the Fair Trade movement. But he says we need to eat locally grown food, we need to eat organic food. We need to eat food that we know about rather than food that we don't know about. Because only when we eat food that we know about will be eat food that has been justly grown by farmers who are able to lead decent lives. So Berry's philosophy is, I think, a very hopeful philosophy because it says to us "yeah we've got these big global problems like we've got global warming. They look horrendous and impossible. But actually" he says " by addressing these big problems we can live both more morally, and also more fulfilling lives". Stephen Crittenden: Professor Michael Northcott of Edinburgh University an d his book, 'A Moral Climate' is published by Darton, Longman and Todd.