Life, consciousness and volition are fundamental realities which disprove the physicalist paradigm.  This is the new and necessary paradigm that is emerging from science.

      Life, consciousness and volition are physically detected phenomena that defy purely physical explanation, but which can be better understood in terms of the new paradigm.

      The current paradigm, or philosophy, upon which modern science is based, is called physicalism.  Physicalism declares that everything in the physical universe can be described by, and only by, other physical things.  It is circular logic. 
      Simply stated, physicalism finds that it is handy to think of the physical universe as an intricate composition of its fundamental constituents.  It declares those fundamentals to be space-time and energy-mass, along with basic forces and mathematical constants, all of which are governed by natural law.  This is the natural-material, or physicalist, universe.  Science has found no practical reason to look outside of, or beyond, any physical explanations for physical phenomena.
      Until now.

        Currently, the science establishment regards life, consciousness and volition (free will) as arising from physical reality.  They do not.  Instead, they are at its core.  If anything, physical reality arises because of them.  The failure to recognize this, is a serious error which limits the potential of physicists to comprehend how nature really operates.

        Among its errors, physicalism denies that true, free will can exist.  In addition, it fails utterly to explain inward consciousness, and it incorrectly defines life as merely a chemical process.  These errors have profound consequences, as demonstrated in the following:

1)      If there is no free will, then there is no true science, because without volition, scientists could draw only those conclusions which nature forces them to draw, regardless of their accuracy or inaccuracy.  Free will is forbidden in the physicalist paradigm.

2)      Inward consciousness permeates our entire waking lives, and yet it is a total and complete mystery to science, not only as to how it arises, but even as to what it is.

3)      Life, although it is the most studied and best understood of the three, is considered to be only a chemical process, nothing more.  Its intricate connection to the very foundations of the universe is considered to be nothing more than happenstance.  The false perception is, that life is the chance byproduct of an unknowing, uncaring cosmos. It isn’t.
    

Natural Materialism (Physicalism) is a False Paradigm.                                                                        

 

        The current paradigm, known as natural materialism, or physicalism, explains physical reality only in terms of itself.  Any evidence that cannot be explained in physical terms is disqualified, based on the rules of physicalism.  The physicalist paradigm admits of no plan, no purpose, and no objective standards of morality underlying nature.

        The circular rules of physicalist science define physical things only in terms of themselves.  Therefore, they automatically exclude, or at the least discourage, investigation into avenues that could otherwise help explain certain experimental results that are currently puzzling scientists.  They do nothing to explain inward consciousness.  They deny that true volition even exists at all.  A new paradigm will, at the least, free scientists to consider possibilities that are currently forbidden to serious investigation.

        The new paradigm might be called “Cosmic Intent,” but let’s not play with words.  The clear implication is that physical nature was created.  The Creator cannot be adequately described, except in terms that recognize it as God.  The new paradigm, then, is best termed, “The God Paradigm.”  It rejects the old idea, the idea that the universe is the product of an unknowing, uncaring complex of chance and purposeless natural laws.  The arguments against the old idea are so numerous and systematic that one must be chained to a physicalist ideology to believe it.

        God is alive, conscious, and exercises divine will.  He does so with a plan, purpose and meaning that we are given the power to investigate—by means of our own life, consciousness and free will, with which He has endowed us.

The God Paradigm Incorporates Life, Consciousness and Volition, Not Random Chance, as the Underlying Principles of Reality

        Life is not merely a chemical process.  Consciousness is utterly unexplained by physical science.  Volition (free will) allows us to make decisions that are not dictated by the physical chain of cause-and-effect.
        The universe was created.  It did not create itself, nor was it created by blind, indifferent forces, nor by chance. 
        If chance is invoked to explain our unlikely existence, then we must consider the most likely outcomes of chance, before relying on the least likely.  Were we the product of chance, then the overwhelming likelihood is that we would exist in a universe that is far less elegant, and far less ordered, than ours.  We ourselves would be far more primitive, and far less likely to have produced the arts, the technology, and the systems of ethics and law, that we have.
        The chances of these things occurring, the likelihood of the conditions in which we live, are so low that they cannot be explained by the random interactions of atoms and energy that physicalism relies upon to describe our existence.
        We have barely scratched the surface in debunking chance.  Planet earth is not merely suited for life; it is prime real estate for the development of a civilization that can reach for the stars, while at the same time, asking why we reach for them.
        Far more likely it is that we should live on a planet that barely supports life, that allows us to eke out a meager existence, the atmosphere of which conceals the stars with clouds, and on which none of the minerals and metals exist from which technology can be built.  It is overwhelmingly more likely that by chance alone, a planet would produce a society in which people are mere slaves to tyrants, people who never yearn to be free.
        Those are the overwhelming odds which would decide who we are.  Instead, we have not merely technology, but also poetry, the Golden Rule, and the ability to appreciate the beauty of nature.
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Forged in Faith

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/9/23/forged-in-faith.html

We can, and should, separate church from state, but we can no more separate faith in God from public policy than we can separate rights from the Constitution.

The inception of the United States of America is rooted in two opposing philosophies. One of them is the Greek tradition of democracy and reason; the other is the Hebrew tradition of faith and discipline. Or, one might ask, are they really opposed?

These two philosophies somehow fused during the years that saw Christianity rise from an obscure cult of Jews into a major world religion. During that time and later, the Greek idea of democracy gradually took ever firmer hold in Europe, which alongside Christianity, began its thousand year journey toward parliamentary democracy.

This unnoticed revolution took hundreds of years to work its way into the psyche of western thinkers. The pinnacle of that revolution was the founding of the United States.

While many secularists deny that America was founded as a Christian nation, the evidence is just too overwhelming to draw any other rational conclusion. Yes, many of the Founders were Deists, not Christians, but all of them were so well versed in the Bible that their writings are saturated with references to the God of Abraham. The Judeo-Christian influence on their thinking was a dominant factor in the formation of our country. Not one of their statements of principle comes from any other major religious tradition.

Despite the fusion of the Greek and Hebrew worldviews, despite their being joined in the formation of the idea that, “all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” despite all that, the two worldviews never quite completed their merger. They remained quietly at odds with each other for centuries during a period of truce.

That truce is over. America is once again separating, philosophically speaking, into two warring factions.

One of them is the familiar Christian faith, along with its Jewish root, the belief in a creator God who intervenes in the lives of individuals and nations, and who reveals to us what is morally right, and what is morally depraved.

The other is the secular worldview, which combines atheism and naturalist-materialism.  This worldview holds that there is no credible evidence of God, and therefore no reason to believe in what it calls the myths of Christianity. That view avers that nature is all that there is, and that nature is composed only of material governed by mathematical rules.

Such worldviews have consequences. One of the consequences of the Christian worldview is that all humans are regarded as specially created by God for a divine purpose, and are therefore to be treasured in their own right, not at the whim of an earthly ruler.

The consequences of secularism are much darker. While one of the tenets of secularism is that, “Man is the measure of all things,” natural-materialism considers humans to be nothing more than a happenstance by-product of natural processes. If we are considered to be nothing more than biological processes, doomed to oblivion in an uncaring universe, then that cannot help but shape social policy, one that instead of being humanist, is inhumane.

That dark effect has not yet reached its nadir, but only because the old moral traditions are still deeply embedded in our culture. They will not disappear overnight, but with time, the Biblical underpinnings of our culture will continue to erode. Legalized abortion is only one visible effect. It has already redefined what it is to be human, defining it downward.  We have seen only the beginning.

As American society turns further away from God, so it will also turn further away from human rights, from liberty and freedom, and toward tyranny.

The monstrous tyrannies of the mid twentieth century serve as dire warnings. Communism and fascism massacred untolled numbers in Europe, and the imperialism of a false god (emperor) murdered millions in Asia . All were based in a world view that considered individual humans to have no sovereignty, no inherent rights of their own. People were deemed to be simply tools of the state, to be sent to their deaths by the millions, in the pursuit of evil purposes.

Faith is not, of course, a political tool. We do not embrace it for political purposes. That, indeed, would be contrary to what faith in God really is.

Instead, faith is embedded in our human nature. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans worship God. We freely choose to accept faith or to reject it. In doing so, we also choose the consequences, which are either humanity or inhumanity.

Faith is not contrary to reason. True, we can no more reason our way to faith than we can count by ones to infinity. In both cases, we get there all at once. Faith gives context to reason. It affirms that our lives have a plan, a purpose and a meaning far beyond merely the biological. Our deeds have eternal consequence.

Apart from faith, nothing makes sense.  Apart from faith, there is no plan, no purpose, no meaning.

Natural materialism strays so far from reason as to even deny that free will exists. Free will makes us into independent, sovereign entities, capable of choosing other than as nature would dictate. Therefore, natural materialism falls apart as soon as it accepts that free will is our nature. Free will cannot be the product of a cold, uncaring universe; it can only be the gift of God creating us in His own image and likeness.

Faith will not destroy reason but uphold it. Faith will not conquer democracy, but give it meaning.

There should be no war between reason and faith, but those who have rejected faith are drawing the battle lines. History is about to repeat itself, but the future is ours.

A Political Court-martial ???‏

So, the decision has finally been made to court-martial Bowe Bergdahl .
But why???

During months of dithering, it seemed that Bergdahl's parents would
be honored with a White House reception -- oh, wait, they were, months ago.

Every signal from the White House since then has been to let the case fade quietly
amid Obama's strutting about proclaiming that ISIS is "contained,"
and that the Obama so-called strategy to win the war against workplace violence
(terrorism) by banning guns (and pipe bombs) was a resounding success.

Break out the confetti and marching bands down Fifth Avenue.

So how did Bergdahl go from war hero to war criminal after all that?

One wonders.  Did the terrorist attack in San Bernardino have anything to do with it?
Or the attacks in Paris?

Heck yeah, they did.  Those attacks even got Obama to utter the "T" word.
He must have practiced for hours before publicly admitting that the
attacks were, as he said, "acts of-- of-- of T-T-Terr-Terr- oh god must I really say it?"

After all that, how on earth was Obama EVER going to announce that Bergdahl was
NOT guilty of abandoning his post during war time?

So now we have the bizarre situation of releasing five terrorist commanders
who go free, while court-martialing a lowly private for doing far less
(but still murderous) than the terrorists did.

It took more than a hundred innocent deaths by terrorist attacks,
but finally, Obama threw his hero under the bus.

May they both get their just deserts.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/14/charges-against-bergdahl-referred-to-trial-by-court-martial.html?intcmp=hpbt1
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USSB: The United States of Spoiled Brats

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/the-patriots-notepad/2015/12/9/ussb-the-united-states-of-spoiled-brats.html

We laugh. We hear college students being asked the most basic questions about American history, and many of them know nothing, or worse than nothing, they attribute lines from the Communist Manifesto to the Constitution. They say that we fought World War Two (or even the Civil War) against Russia. They cannot name the three branches of government.

Ha ha? There is nothing funny about this. These students will soon be running the country, but it gets even worse.

Tomorrow’s intelligentsia are spoiled brats. They are offended by anyone who does not share their most extremist opinions, and they believe that they (but not you) have a right not to be offended. They will tell you that facts do not matter, but only good intentions. When they do not get their way, they shout and scream until cowardly college administrators let them have their way.

A few years ago the company I worked for hired a computer technician, recently graduated from college, to manage our small computer system, which by most standards was very simple. He lasted one day. The poor fellow was lost from the start. Whatever other courses he may have excelled at – social studies, environmental issues or the fine arts – they are no substitute for the cold hard reality of electronic logic circuits. When computers crash, they crash.

Facts are intolerant. They care nothing about one’s feelings. The only way to learn those facts is to listen to the people who speak them, regardless whether the speaker is left or right, black or white, and regardless whether a spoiled brat thinks the speaker deserves to be heard.

Soon the old guard will have retired or died, and young college graduates, emerging from their sheltered lives, graduating from an environment which soothed their every hurt feeling, will confront reality. They will take the reins of social power, but they will discover, to their horror, that reality bites. It bites hard, and it never apologizes, never resigns, and will never be intimidated by an immature tantrum-throwing brat.

They will discover, but never admit, that bad social policy brings bad social result, and catastrophic misconceptions result in social catastrophe. While they send flowers to terrorists, the terrorists will send bombs. While they teach politically correct sex education, the Iranians will continue to murder homosexuals and adulterers. As they cavil about American imperialism, Russian and Chinese imperialists will throw them unceremoniously into gulags.

The very people who can stop this will be blamed. These are the people who work at jobs from which they can get fired if they under-perform. They are the people who make things that work, and then make them work better. They are people who understand that two plus three equals five regardless of who says so. Those people are the ones whom the spoiled brats will blame – blame for being greedy capitalists, blame for being insensitive to the plight of terrorists, blame for everything that has gone wrong since Cain murdered Abel.

Once those people are pushed out of society, then society will collapse. What might emerge from the ruins is anyone’s guess, but somehow I doubt it will be a society founded by white, slave-holding men risking their lives for a better America.

Oh, and one more thing. The environment will not stop changing.

Unmasking Obama

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/11/19/unmasking-obama.html

 

When I was in high school, a classmate told me of his plans to get rich. He would start a business, and hire someone else to run it. The money would roll in, and he would not have to put forth any effort.

 

Little did I know that somewhere in Indonesia, another student would have the same plan, except with higher ambitions. He would occupy the Oval Office in the White House, and let other people do the work, while he vacationed, played golf, and gave speeches. Success would come without him having to put forth any effort.

 

The recent [year 2014] Republican victories in the national [congress] and state elections are going to reveal even more of Obama’s character flaws, and will do so in a way we have not yet seen. To understand this, we have to backtrack to the beginning of his administration, and then jump forward to today.

 

When Barack Obama first took over the White House in January, 2009, his party had full control of both houses of Congress, including a filibuster-proof Senate. Logic would dictate that such absolute power would reveal his character, and it did.

 

He moved immediately to enact what is incorrectly called, the Affordable Care Act, his signature health plan which is proving unaffordable to the nation.

 

It was not just that Obama used one-party control to enact this law. It is the way in which he did it, that revealed so much of his character defects. There were the back-room dirty deals, special exemptions for political allies, and the utter incompetence of those who implemented the law, such as Kathleen Sebelius who managed to mismanage the project from start to finish.

 

Even more revealing of Obama’s character flaw, was that he actually did nothing. The man who had vowed to scrutinize the federal budget, line by line, to eliminate waste, handed over the crafting of his namesake law to congressional Democrats, committees of cacophony who inserted so many incongruous provisions into the law that it became a wish list of socialist pipe dreams. 

 

Obama was a bystander in the process.

 

No one, including the president, knew what was in the law, a fact affirmed by the classically ridiculous assertion of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that we must enact the law to discover what is in it.

 

When its content was indeed discovered, the law was found to be such a boondoggle that Obama had to embark on a long series of executive orders, many of which were illegal, to violate or postpone its provisions. The ACA was nothing like what its proponents had hoped, and everything that its critics had warned of. Only its critics had bothered to read it. No one who voted for it, nor even the president himself, actually bothered to read the law.

 

This, then, is the character of the president.

 

He is not a leader, he is an armchair general, who cannot be bothered with performing even the elementary functions of his office. His governing principle is leading from behind, both in domestic affairs and foreign. He is bored and depressed by national security briefings, and so does not even attend them. He probably does not even read the cover sheets.  Obama is like my old high school classmate, seeking all the benefits of success without actually doing anything.

 

Here we are today, but with a situation very different from 2009. Instead of controlling both houses of Congress, Obama’s party will soon control neither. He is reduced to threatening to take executive actions which he claims are legal, but there are no legal ways in which he can achieve his goals. He can no longer lead from behind. He can no longer outsource accountability for his failures. Success will no longer just come rolling in.

 

What, then, will he do?

 

The first hint came to us in Obama’s post-election press conference, in which he denied the undeniable. He essentially brushed off any personal accountability for his party’s losses, even though he had earlier said that it would be his policies that would be on the ballot. He attributed his party’s losses to voters who stayed home, but as Kirsten Powers (a Democrat) pointed out in a Fox News panel discussion, the voters who stayed home were disillusioned Democrats, who no longer support Obama.

 

Another hint arrived with the disclosure that Obama has secretly been seeking to cooperate with Iran against ISIS. While it is sometimes necessary to join forces with horrible dictators to defeat an even worse one, that is not the case with Obama’s courtship of Iran. Iran may actually be the worse enemy, one which soon will likely have nuclear weapons, and which will assuredly use them at the earliest opportunity, against our allies and against us.

 

We have already seen hints of Obama’s sophomoric petulance, such as his thinly disguised middle finger gesture (literally, there are photographs), his chin-in-the-air arrogance, and his narcissistic desire to be adored, even worshipped, by his mindless audiences. These are clues to a potentially sinister and dangerous part of his character.

 

What we have not yet seen is what Obama will do when deeply disappointed, cornered, and exposed for what he is. He could become dangerous.

 

There have long been rumors— plausible ones— that Obama is simply a passive figure-head, a willing puppet for handlers who hold to a radical ideology. Obama has openly expressed disdain for American power and greatness, and he is clearly anti-capitalist. His initial aims for America were not to dominate the world as a force for peace, but to bow down before foreign powers and let them run the world according to socialist theories.

 

He may perceive that he can no longer accomplish those goals. He may perceive that he has discredited not only himself, but his policies and his allies in the Democrat Party. He may perceive that in January of 2017, a newly elected president will reverse all his executive orders, undo all his legislative accomplishments, and appoint conservative judges who will reverse years of leftist rulings.

 

History may record Obama’s presidency as the disaster it has been.

 

Faced with thorough humiliation and rejection, Obama will do one of two things. He will either cower and whine, as he has so often done, or he will lash out, seeking to bring about his goal of getting revenge on America for every perceived injustice his warped imagination can conjure forth.

 

Time will tell.

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The ISIS Game

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/8/25/the-isis-game.html

 

For those of you who play checkers, chess, or other games of strategy, you have probably noticed that the losing player does not usually lose only on the last move. In most cases, even if he is allowed to take back a move or two, that does not prevent his inevitable loss. The fatal mistake, the losing move, usually has already happened much earlier than that. Once the fatal mistake is made, the rest is inevitable. The losing move loses because it weakens the player’s position so much that no matter how well he moves thereafter, the result is already a foregone conclusion.

 

In the ISIS game, Barack Obama made the losing move at least as far back as his “red line” bluff in Syria, when he made empty threats that he had not the fortitude to carry through, and had to back down.  That mistake drove Syria ever more firmly into the arms of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, while at the same time, opening the door for ISIS to consolidate northern Syria as a base from which to conquer northern Iraq, and eventually,to effectively target Europe and the United States. The game was all but over as soon as  Obama’s bluff was called. What happened later was not only predictable, it was predicted.

 

Thus came into being the reality we now face, the nightmare scenario which was prevented in Afghanistan by President Bush’s decisive invasion. It could have been prevented again, had Barack Obama acted decisively in Syria, and even later, in northern Iraq when ISIS first invaded. That nightmare is a powerful terrorist state that will stop at nothing, literally at nothing, to carry out its ambition of total conquest of the old Babylonian empire. This will be followed by a caliphate over the entire Middle East, and then, using that power-base as a launching point, followed by major attacks on Western Europe and the United States.

 

Russia already knows what the next few moves are. They have already been there. The massacre of one hundred eighty-six Russian school children at Beslan by Chechen Islamists in 2004 was an atrocity that defines the savage intentions of Jihadi fanatics— or at least it did define it until ISIS forces burned through city after city in Iraq, leaving thousands murdered, decapitated and enslaved.

 

Over the years, Russia has sustained many more terrorist attacks, one of the most recent being a gunfight between police and some militants involved in last year’s car bombings at the Volgograd train station in which some fifty people were killed. Three policemen and 4 terrorists were killed in the gunfight this year.

[Update 10/31/2015:  Russian airliner destroyed in flight by ISIS bomb, killing all 224 on board.]

 

Russia is no stranger to this game.

 

It remains to be seen whether ISIS will target Russia with the same massive destruction that it has threatened in the US and Europe. Russia’s stance, however, makes it clear to the terrorists that Russia’s response will not be an empty Obamaesque threat. The terrorists will surely remember that in 2000, the Russians flattened the entire Chechen capital city with artillery and air strikes, prompting the UN to call it the most destroyed city on earth.

 

ISIS can expect nothing better if they attack Russia.

 

Sadly, ISIS assuredly has no fear of the United States. Worse yet, the allies who can most help us in the war against the terrorists no longer trust us. Obama has in one form or another betrayed them all, including the Kurds, the Anbar Sunnis, and even our European friends.

 

In doing so, Obama has already made the fatal move that condemns the United States to the full fury of an ISIS terrorist attack on our soil. While Obama is playing for a draw, ISIS is in this to win it all.  You do not need to be a chess master, or a golf player, to understand why a rank amateur has no chance of winning this game.

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Protecting the Government From Me

http://www.theboldpursuit.com/tbp-journal/2014/10/21/correctly-breaking-the-law.html

When Edward Snowden leaked secrets from the National Security Agency, he exposed high level government wrongdoing, about which highly placed administration officials had knowingly lied to Congress, or at least, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claimed, made the “least untruthful” statement he could under the circumstances. Snowden is accused of treachery, even of treason. He is defended by his supporters on the grounds that he had no other way to protect the American people from a rogue agency. Based on the facts available to me, I remain undecided, but I will presume Snowden innocent until proof beyond a reasonable doubt causes me to consider him guilty.

Lois Lerner, the now retired, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), was accused of violating the rights of American people to dissent from their government. She has been charged by some TEA Party groups of illegally sharing their private information with their left wing political opponents, and using other nefarious means, to prevent conservatives from enjoying equal protection of the tax laws to participate in the political process. In other words, her detractors say, Lois Lerner illegally abused her official position.

I have little doubt that, in their minds, both Snowden and Lerner were doing the right thing. Snowden believes he was protecting me from the government. Lerner believes she was protecting the government from me. Each of them can make at least a tenuous defense of their actions based on the time honored concept of civil disobedience.

Or can they?

Civil disobedience was famously practiced by both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. In both cases, the lawbreakers were opposing laws that many people considered unjust, deplorable, and devastatingly harmful. The harm being done was not only damaging people, but indeed, even arguably undermining the government itself.

One of the central features of justifiable civil disobedience is that the person committing the crime does not seek to avoid the penalty for doing so. Indeed, facing the penalties is a further way of publicizing the alleged official injustice, and of garnering support to overturn the unjust law. Both Gandhi and King willingly submitted to imprisonment for their violations.

Lerner certainly does not fit into that category. Her efforts were not to overturn an unjust law, but rather, to apply just laws unjustly. Don’t get me wrong. I am sure that Lerner regards me as an evil, bigoted, danger to the republic. She felt that she had to do something to protect Barack Obama’s reelection campaign from people like me, people she regards as villainous. Believing that as she did, Lerner was obliged to do all she could to stop me.

She was also obliged to face the legal consequences, instead of hiding behind the exact Constitution which she violated. She was courageous in the battle for liberalism until courage meant something.

Much the same has been said about Snowden. If he wished to expose government wrongdoing, he could have done so through legal channels, or else gone public, and subjected himself to trial.

The difference between him and Lerner is that the government was sympathetic to Lerner. She even collaborated with the Justice Department to both protect herself and to promote administration interests.

Snowden’s only hope of a fair trial under the Constitution, lay with the very government administration he was exposing as violating the Constitution. Not only was the government not the least bit sympathetic to Snowden’s actions, it is very possible, and in my mind very probable, that had Snowden gone to any government official with his complaint, neither he nor his complaint would ever have seen the light of day again. If Snowden feared for his very life, can we blame him?

I do not have enough facts concerning the Snowden case, and probably never will. However, he has in a sort of way been held to account. He has very likely been exiled for the remainder of his life. He will never again sleep securely, knowing that at any instant, the Russian government might use him in a “trade” for a captured Russian spy, in which case, Snowden will meet a dark fate.

Lerner needs fear only a relatively comfortable jail cell, if even that.
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