Re: Creationism, Intelligent Design and Vendanta

On Thu, 8 Aug 2024 11:39:38 +0000, Ernest Major wrote:

On 08/08/2024 12:20, RonO wrote:

On 8/8/2024 5:20 AM, Ernest Major wrote:

On 08/08/2024 10:09, Burkhard wrote:

On Tue, 6 Aug 2024 16:24:30 +0000, Kestrel Clayton wrote:
>

On 06-Aug-24 09:46, RonO wrote:

I found an article on creationism, intelligent design and Vendanta.
Even
though Kalkidas came out as a normal Biblical creationists there have
been Hindu sympathetic to Scientific Creationism and the ID
creationist
scam on TO.
>
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4802803/
>
The author thinks that science is a search for truth.  I have never
considered science to be a search for truth.  It is just the best
means
we have of developing a working understanding of nature.  This
understanding may not be the "truth" but it could be close, and allows
us to improve our understanding of nature and expand a functional
understanding of the reality that we exist in.
>
I do not recall Kalk ever stating how intelligent design supported his
hindu beliefs, and vice versa, but he did quote the Vedas from time to
time.
>
A section of the paper compares Vendata to the ID creationist scam.

>
Huh. I missed Kalkidas coming out as a fundamentalist Christian
creationist. Did he have a conversion experience, or was he a Christian
all along and lying about it?

>
neither, as far as I can tell. Though of course conversions, while
comparatively rare, do happen. But as far as I'm aware, he always was
and  still is a follower of Vaishnavism.
>
He only ever objected to certain labels (with some good reasons I'd say)
so
the use of the exonym Hinduism
>

>
Either way, I'm not all that surprised. For a lot of folks, denialism
isn't about what is, but rather what ISN'T: Moon landing denialists
will
gladly accommodate flat-Earthers, orbit-onlyists,
fake-landings-real-pictures, fake-pictures-real-landings, and even
"secret nazi base on the far side of the Moon" crackpots, as long as
they all agree that the official account is somehow bogus.

>
Well, that's possibly closer the issue, as you, me and pretty much all
other contributors to TO on the science side are dead, we just
did not get the memo yet - the bioengineered Covid vaccine killed
us all, as planned by the oligarchs, for reasons unknown. Or so
Kalkidas
>

>
As I recall, as few months back he said that he was a Christian, or at
least something that was readily interpreted as that.
>

>
When the Top Six came out in Nov. 2017 Kalk tried to go with Glenn and
run from what the ID perps had just told them.  Bill just quit the ID
scam and claimed that he had never supported the ID scam (everyone knows
that Bill has been an IDiot from when he first started to post here).
Bill likely meant that he had never supported what the ID scam had
always been.  Pagano claimed that the Top Six were bogus, and were not
the best evidence for the ID creationist scam.  He tried to put up
Dembski's junk instead, but Dembski had retired from the ID scam as an
abject failure and none of his junk had made it into what the other ID
perps considered to be the best evidence for ID.  Pagano quit posting.
Nyikos was MIA and after his return to TO he was clueless for years
about what the Top Six had done to the ID scam.  When Nyikos finally
addressed the Top Six it destroyed his space alien fantasy.  Nyikos
started going on about god like space aliens from another universe could
account for the Top Six.  It turned out that Nyikos had always been
supporting the ID scam to support his religious beliefs.  Dean kept
claiming that he did not remember not being able to deal with them every
time he came back to post to TO.  MarkE was likely never an IDiot, but
he could not give up on the god-of-the-gaps denial and started putting
the Top Six up one at a time, but he found that he could not deal with
them one at a time either when he spent a lot of time defining what was
around the origin of life gap in order to claim that the gap would never
be filled.  It turned out that the god that filled that gap was not the
Biblical god, and MarkE quit putting up the lame Top Six gap denials.
After a few months of running from the Top Six and just trying to post
the second rate junk that the ID perps were still putting out Kalk
claimed to quit supporting the ID scam.  He claimed that the ID scam
junk was no longer worth thinking about.  Around that same time he
admitted that he was not Hindu, and claimed that he had never claimed to
be Hindu.  That was in 2018, and I recall having to give a link to that
post for someone that had missed the event, but I didn't save the link
anywhere, or I'd put it up again.
>
Ron Okimoto
>

>
Denying that he's a Hindu is not the same as stating that he's a
Christian, and is not inconsistent with Burkhard's characterisation of
his position.

One should also keep in mind that the "what do you believe"
framing that asks people to subscribe to one creed at the
exclusion of all others is already a very Western way of
framing - in India in my experience, the question is often
more "what do you practice" rather than "what do you
believe"? It was always a highly syncretic religion that
absorbed or accommodated other religions too, and quite
a number of followers of "Hinduism" broadly understood
consider Christ either as a sage (acharya) or possibly even
a Shaktavesha Avatar. Or you go even further, with
people like Paramahansa Yogananda, who argued
that Christianity and Hinduism are more or less the same,
and that Christ did not die on the Cross but escaped,
travelled to India, and there did yoga.
And then the other end like  V. D. Savarkar's Hindutva that
excludes all "non-indigenous" religions like
Christianity
So a follower of Vaishnavism can consistently
say things that "sound" as if they are Christians
the way a Christian in the west would understand it,
but interpret this quite differently, and also very
much see themselves as Hindus first and foremost.
Take then someone of a contrarian bend like Kalkidas,
and I'd not be surprised if he posted on occasions
things that "sounded" to the careless reader like an
endorsement of Christianity, understood the western way