A Rare Victory

[Urwumpe]

The evidence is overwhelming that the 911 attacks were the result of a plot by al Qaida that had been in the works for many years -- long before the hated George Bush was in power or had even thought about running for the presidency.

Additionally, the investments into weapons and military does not rise as fast as many people wrongfully believe - the end of the cold war only 18 years ago was a huge drop in military funding, now the levels are just slowly rising again, but still far lower as before. The main reason behind this rise is that many militaries are currently updating their equipment at the same time, as such investments got canceled in the ten years after the cold war - lot's of stuff, which should have been replaced did not get replaced because stupid pacifists believed that the end of the Cold War is the end of war itself.

You can say a lot about Bush, and his executive is only one step away from being openly corrupt, instead of just having bad style regarding giving contracts to their former employers. But spending more money for warfare as US governments before, especially in war times, is not their crime.

That the attacks of 911 came surprisingly well timed for the combat plans of Bush was most likely a pure accident - he was planning for attacking Iraq and then these stupid plane suicide bombers forced him to invade this uninteresting distant Afghanistan...

 

[bujin]

Of course he is not. He is just the most prominent at the moment, and life is a game of chess: you allways try to get the king down.

And that's probably where they are going wrong. Dawkins may well be the most well known atheist at the moment, but he isn't the "king" by any means.

What I call ignorance is his pretty blatant attack on religion in general, making it the bogeyman of history. Making Bogeymans is allmost allways a sign for a grudge (psychology is science too, by the way...), and grudges lead to ignorance towards otherwise obvious facts. Such as the historical fact that religion is not responsible for all the bad in the world.

A fact that Dawkins absolutely recognises and has said himself many times. You're not the first person to make this claim about Dawkins, but it simply isn't true.

Dawkins did not write his book for a scientific purpose. Instead he took science as a lever to launch his very own, and as i believe quite personal, attack on religion and christianity in particular.

Dawkins, like many other people in the world, is dismayed by the amount of irrationality in the world. His book was an attempt to open people's eyes to irrational thought by attacking what he sees as one source of highly irrational thinking. His attack is not limited to Christianity at all, however The God Delusion focused on it because that is the culture in which he was brought up, and that is also the culture that the book was mostly aimed at, particularly in America.

No, no one has... and it hurts me that so many of my brethren still don't understand the concept of a scientific proof. Because they still think they got one. But Dawkins actions broke any hope for a solution for this misery. Not his rethorics, not his science, not his proofs, but his attacks. It's alot harder learn from someone who lashes with a whip at you.

On the other hand, atheists have been around for thousands of years, but have rarely made themselves heard. Dawkins has effectively opened the door. Maybe his tactics leave a bit to be desired, but he has certainly raised public consciousness on the subject of religion.

In America, one of the most hated groups of people are the atheists. TGD has allowed many people to "come out" as an atheist and stand up to the persecution.

I'll give you an insider information now: you hear the EXACT SAME argument over in the other camp. This could be a quote by allmost any pastor I know that tried to deal with scientists...

Again, the difference comes down to evidence. As I say, you show the evidence to the creationists and they refuse to look at it. I've yet to see a religious person show evidence which stands up to scrutiny, but we'll always give it a look. So, it's not quite the same thing.

The problem is, both sides have to learn to listen before they can talk, and maybe both would eventually come to the conclusion that they're not talking about the same thing. That's excluding fundamentialists of course, we'll allways have these. In that matter, all respects to Greg, who tries to understand what's going on in other peoples minds.

Greg isn't alone there.

<snip>If you want to explain them that difference, it won't do any good to call them liars.

But in the case of Ham & co, they ARE liars. These are people who claim to be scientifically trained (Ham has a batchelors degree in applied science, with an emphasis on environmental biology) so he either didn't understand what his course was teaching him, or he did understand it and deliberately misrepresents it.

When you have people like Kent Hovind claiming that "scientists believe that humans evolved from bananas", that is either extreme stupidity, or malicious intent to deceive. And I would say the latter is more likely - he deliberately puts forward a ridiculous claim and knocks it down through ridicule in front of a credulous audience.

Is it any wonder why these people never seem to have their debates in front of a scientifically literate audience?

 

[GregBurch]

Economy rules and human behavior creates incentives.
And if there is an incentive, sooner or later there might be a chance that someone seize that chance.

I don't mean to pick on you, Pablo, but since the thread was about reason and things that undermine it, I might as well throw some more petrol on the fire.

You write: "Economy rules." Thirty years ago, I would have readily agreed with this statement, and not been very aware of how that idea came into my head. But today, I have come to see simple economic interest as only one of many -- and often not the most important -- among human motivations. The very case we're discussing, the 911 attacks, presents a good example of why I no longer accept the Marxist view that relationships of power to capital are the sole driving force in human society.

For the 19 men who committed suicide in murdering 3,000 people on 911, it requires absurd mental contortions to cast their motives in economic terms (although this does not stop leftists throughout the world from doing so). They were motivated by irrational religious conviction and wounded tribal pride and ethnic hatred, none of which can really be fit into the mold of "control over the means of production."

For those who are educated in the modern paradigm that is so deeply premised on Marx, seeing the world through something other than the single lens of "class economic relations" can be very difficult -- just as religious people have such difficulty in understanding that the scientific world view is QUALITATIVELY different from theirs. It has become like water to fish -- almost imperceptibly all-pervasive.

 

[ar81]

I understand why you could see those ideas as leftist. I understand your view and you are not picking me. Do not worry.

I was raised after cold war was ended. Therefore I am unable to understand left and right, because I am too right from left and too left from right because I am in the middle looking forward.

I have seen how corruption works, and how economical incentives work. One guy accused of corruption (who is in jail) harassed me, and right after that I had a job where I had to reverse engineer fraud patterns and design financial policies against money laundering.

So my view is not leftist. I see it as someone who understands how economic incentives lead to commit some acts.
I do not believe in evil rich vs good and poor.
I have met rich people who are just like you and me.
I have met important people who treats you with respect, while other common people mistreats you, mistakenly thinking that that makes them powerful.
-------------------------------
As for capital, I dedicated a great amount of my life to find an economic solution to poverty. I discovered that the macroeconomic model designed in Chile had a missing sector: Internal market composed by citizens-customers-people. Chile exported a lot, so customers were in USA.

USA used that model and did not feel too much effect due to low inflation and stable interest rates. But in other poor countries the model lead to the "lost decade" of reforms of 1990s.

After analyzing the model, the output of the model gives different results once you add that missing sector. The complete model brings an interesting concept...

People are the market. People makes money with their jobs, so employment is key to make market to be stable and big so companies can survive. Therefore, fighting poverty is good for capitalism. That idea makes the debate on left and right useless, Marxism is useless there.

One less poor (who got a job) is one more customer. That makes size of market bigger. After I discovered this I discussed this with journalists, with economist Leonardo Garnier who is minister today (I suggested economic measures to reduce effects of US crisis here), and also year ago I got to have the email of president of Guatemala to suggest the concept of "one less poor is one more customer". But Guatemala faces too big challenges like drugs, corruption and violence, before thay can even face the problem of poverty.

So to me, left and right are half of the picture that prevents a view of reality that lies ahead.
------------------
As for religious fanatics, it only takes a liar to create a fanatic and lead him into whatever you want.
So the fact that people commited suicide does not tell me that those who are behind it are not for money.
Even religiuos sect liars in our societies are there for the money.

As a final note, I put ideas to the test.
I do not like to keep them for too long.
An idea that can't withstand some refuting and criticism is not a good idea.
I am not my ideas, I am me. Ideas are tools that help to model solutions.
Tools evolve. I would be silly to use a tea spoon to dig a gold mine.

 

[dougkeenan]

People lie, physics doesn't.

 

[Linguofreak]

The problem with both the ID crowd and the modern scientific "establishment" is that both sides are trying to establish empirically whether or not God exists, whether the universe was created, whether or not evolution is true, etc. But none of this can be empirically proven either way. (I'm not sure though, that there aren't other forms of proof than the empirical).

Evolution and the accepted scientific cosmology I think are pretty reasonable backtracings of the known laws of nature. But backtracing the rules can only empirically establish the history of a system if those rules are never violated, i.e. if there exists no being possessing the source code to the universe and a memory editor (Doesn't somebody here have a sig along those lines), nor any being with "cheat codes" or a "scenario editor" at his/her/its disposal.

But those who believe that God exists are saying that there *is* someone with veto privileges over the laws of physics. At which point backtracing can establish nothing.

Start a scenario in orbiter. Record the MJD. Go up to 1000x time warp for a couple seconds. Go into the scenario editor and mess with your orbit. Reset the MJD back to what it was at the beginning of the scenario. You'll find yourself in an entirely different place than you were when you first started up, even though the MJD was the same. (Actually you can just do this by making a burn, rather than messing around in the scenario editor, since Orbiter doesn't keep track of burns when tracing your orbit back to an earlier MJD).

God doesn't have to make the universe look as if its history were different than what actually happened. If he has interfered, the history of the universe will by definition be different than what we'd get by making a simple backtrace.

I don't always like the way skeptics treat religion. But dealing with 9/11 hoaxers is definitely a good thing. Congrats.

 

[GregBurch]

...

But backtracing the rules can only empirically establish the history of a system if those rules are never violated, i.e. if there exists no being possessing the source code to the universe and a memory editor (Doesn't somebody here have a sig along those lines), nor any being with "cheat codes" or a "scenario editor" at his/her/its disposal.

But those who believe that God exists are saying that there *is* someone with veto privileges over the laws of physics. At which point backtracing can establish nothing.

...

I applaud the honesty with which you acknowledge what, exactly, the traditional notion of god would entail relative to the universe that we actually observe. I urge you to read David Hume's work, On Miracles regarding these ideas.

I actually call this conception of god "the video game god."

But consider this: Some supernatural interventions WOULD leave a trace. But we see none. So, insofar as god is the author of the videogame, he has been very careful to make sure that the simulation is, in fact, perfect, and there is no internal evidence of the matrix. This seems very problematic to me: "You must believe in me --- on pain of eternal torment -- but I have taken great pains to cover up any evidence of my existence."

 

[bujin]

The problem with both the ID crowd and the modern scientific "establishment" is that both sides are trying to establish empirically whether or not God exists

Not really. The ID crowd start with the initial presupposition that God exists and is responsible for the universe. It is not trying to establish that empirically, it just asks everyone to "assume" it. The scientific establishment isn't even remotely interested in whether God exists or not. It is interested in what can be proven. As most people consider God to be outside of nature, it is of no interest.

However, I don't agree with the idea that God, if it exists in any form, is totally outside of nature, as if that were the case, no-one here would know any better and we'd have no religions.

 

[ar81]

I hope I did not sound rude Greg. If I did I apologize.
I know it is too long... but there is some information.
Thanks for refuting me. I like to keep my ideas in shape.

 

[martins]

However, I don't agree with the idea that God, if it exists in any form, is totally outside of nature, as if that were the case, no-one here would know any better and we'd have no religions.

Unless, of course, some smart guy invented one to fill a market niche.

 

[eveningsky339]

Unless, of course, some smart guy invented one to fill a market niche.

The teaching of creationism (specifically this "young earth" nonsense) has always struck me as... well... unnecessary. As a Christian I believe tolerance is extremely important, and forcing a science teacher to teach these irrational evangelist views on Creation would be the opposite of tolerance.

Evolution does have its share of flaws, but materialism has become the popular philosophy in much of the scientific community, so I don't really expect these flaws to be addressed.

But I guess that's the crux of the issue-- teaching scientific theory while avoiding scientific philosophy.

 

[GregBurch]

But I guess that's the crux of the issue-- teaching scientific theory while avoiding scientific philosophy.

It really is the crux of the issue; about that, the creationists are actually correct. Because the scientific world-view is, in fact, fundamentally different from the religious world-view. There is, of course, a great industry in denying this, chiefly promoted by "liberal" theologians: They feel uncomfortable with the conflict between religion and science and know, without looking too closely, that the conflict is damaging to the religious world-view unless science is suppressed. They have absorbed the values of intellectual liberty that underlie the Enlightenment, and therefore shy away from facing squarely the basic discontinuity between reason and faith. They know it would be bad to suppress science (they do like their toilet paper, televisions and antibiotics), so they avert their eyes from the real problem.

While I have disdain for the SUBSTANCE of the fundamentalists's ideas, I actually have more respect for the consistency with which they approach the subject. They're wrong, but at least they're not hypocrites.

GB, THHotA

 

[n0mad23]

I think there's a lot of smoldering 911 conspiracy thought specifically because of the lack of transparency in the aftermath. Lets face it - 43 times more money was spent investigating the sex-life of Clinton than in investigating the events of 911. Which is more important?

It boils down to:
Who wins, who loses, and what's at stake?

I have trouble with a lot of the conspiracy theory here, but I've got just as much trouble with the agents giving us the 'truth'. Where's the anthrax mailer? What happened to the investigation concerning the dumping of airline stock in the 48 hours before 911? The explanation of the Pentagon attack defies logic altogether. It's the failure in investigation here that gives the conspiracy advocates more ammunition.

 

[GregBurch]

I think there's a lot of smoldering 911 conspiracy thought specifically because of the lack of transparency in the aftermath. Lets face it - 43 times more money was spent investigating the sex-life of Clinton than in investigating the events of 911. Which is more important?

It boils down to:
Who wins, who loses, and what's at stake?

I have trouble with a lot of the conspiracy theory here, but I've got just as much trouble with the agents giving us the 'truth'. Where's the anthrax mailer? What happened to the investigation concerning the dumping of airline stock in the 48 hours before 911? The explanation of the Pentagon attack defies logic altogether. It's the failure in investigation here that gives the conspiracy advocates more ammunition.

1. Where does the figure of "43 time more money spent on investigating Lewinsky" come from?

2. The explanation of the Pentagon attack does not "defy logic altogether." The documented facts and straightforward engineering analysis overwhelmingly support that the building was hit by AA Flt 77:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html?page=6

A Google search on "Flight 77" and "Pentagon" turns up hundreds and hundreds of pages of nonsense. It is indeed possible that the Internet has merely served as the world's most efficient bull**** amplifier.

3. have you actually READ the 911 Commission report? Although it's a Big Fat Book, it's actually much better-written than I expected (I read a LOT of bureaucratic prose, so my expectations weren't too high -- I was very pleasantly surprised at how well put together and clear it was).

 

[Andy44]

Greg,

You mention how the religious people see skeptics as "arrogant" and wonder about that. I consider myself to be on the skeptical side, but I have to admit that skeptics and athiests do come off as looking arrogant sometimes, even if it isn't their intent.

Take Mike Schermer, for instance. I have read Schermer's book Why People Believe Wierd Things, and while I think he goes out of his way to not be offensive to people who believe in God, he still has a self-assured attitude about himself, which may be viewed as arrogance by those who feel threatened by him.

It's the "feeling threatened" part which I think is what does it. While we'd like to think of humans as rational beings who can easily change horses in mid-stream when new evidence and facts arise, the fact is that a man who has invested much of his life into his faith and the defense of it has accepted certain views of the world around him which are hard to break. He has decided that he is on the road to a brighter future and that the future is threatened by those who thwart him.

If you've ever seen Schermer on a TV interview he conveys the image of a religious fundamentalist's worst nightmare. Not only is he an athiest, but he dresses in the black turtleneck-and-sport coat style of a New York elite liberal type. He's a nice guy, fairly soft-spoken, but his ideas are seen as threatening. "Evolution leads to atheism, which was the state religion of communism, which is where guys like Schermer will lead us if we don't shout him down." That's what you're dealing with.

And you cannot understate the connection in the minds of the fundamentalists between atheism and evolution! To the fundamentalist, you cannot believe in God and evolution at the same time, even though most Catholics I know do exactly that.

Since there is no shortage of arrogance among atheists, chief among them people like Ayn Rand and Christopher Hitchens, who are not only atheist but belligerently so, even to the point of purposely insulting those who reject atheism, it's not difficult for people to make the leap that science-minded people and skeptics must be arrogant as well.

Humans are not as rational as we'd like. I think we've evolved defense mechanisms that lead us to defend whatever idea it is we've hitched our hopes to and invested our time in.

 

[eveningsky339]

Greg,

You mention how the religious people see skeptics as "arrogant" and wonder about that. I consider myself to be on the skeptical side, but I have to admit that skeptics and athiests do come off as looking arrogant sometimes, even if it isn't their intent.

Take Mike Schermer, for instance. I have read Schermer's book Why People Believe Wierd Things, and while I think he goes out of his way to not be offensive to people who believe in God, he still has a self-assured attitude about himself, which may be viewed as arrogance by those who feel threatened by him.

It's the "feeling threatened" part which I think is what does it. While we'd like to think of humans as rational beings who can easily change horses in mid-stream when new evidence and facts arise, the fact is that a man who has invested much of his life into his faith and the defense of it has accepted certain views of the world around him which are hard to break. He has decided that he is on the road to a brighter future and that the future is threatened by those who thwart him.

If you've ever seen Schermer on a TV interview he conveys the image of a religious fundamentalist's worst nightmare. Not only is he an athiest, but he dresses in the black turtleneck-and-sport coat style of a New York elite liberal type. He's a nice guy, fairly soft-spoken, but his ideas are seen as threatening. "Evolution leads to atheism, which was the state religion of communism, which is where guys like Schermer will lead us if we don't shout him down." That's what you're dealing with.

And you cannot understate the connection in the minds of the fundamentalists between atheism and evolution! To the fundamentalist, you cannot believe in God and evolution at the same time, even though most Catholics I know do exactly that.

Since there is no shortage of arrogance among atheists, chief among them people like Ayn Rand and Christopher Hitchens, who are not only atheist but belligerently so, it's not dificult for people to make the leap that science-minded people and skeptics must be arrogant as well.

Humans are not as rational as we'd like. I think we've evolved defense mechanisms that lead us to defend whatever idea it is we've hitched our hopes to and invested our time in.

I recall on one particular forum I was participating in a discussion about creationism vs. evolution. Upon informing one gentleman that the Hebrew word for day, "yom" (as used in Genesis), did not mean a literal 24-hour period, he gave me negative rep and informed me that I was a demon possessed pervert bound for hell. And yes, those are his exact words.

The moral of the story: fundamentalists don't just reject the beliefs of non-Christians, but also the beliefs of most Christians as well. It's an interesting study in religious fanaticism, but it does little good in the classroom.

 

[Donamy]

Was there ever, nothing ?

 

[n0mad23]

1. Where does the figure of "43 time more money spent on investigating Lewinsky" come from?

Not just Lewinsky, this is the entire K. Starr budget. Contrast this with the original $1 mill budget for the 911 investigation. How much was actually spent?

2. The explanation of the Pentagon attack does not "defy logic altogether." The documented facts and straightforward engineering analysis overwhelmingly support that the building was hit by AA Flt 77:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html?page=6

A Google search on "Flight 77" and "Pentagon" turns up hundreds and hundreds of pages of nonsense. It is indeed possible that the Internet has merely served as the world's most efficient bull**** amplifier.

I agree that the internet has created and perpetuated a lot of BS here, but there are certain things that leave me scratching my head over this one. For instance (and yes the filters are suspect) the photos of the turbines that were pulled out of the wreckage. But here, I think Andy44's explanation above is appropriate - we are in fact irrational creatures that love to have the answers (sorry if my paraphrase went too far). What I'm getting at is the more I started paying attention to what the conspiracy buffs are saying, the more I had to question some of the official explanations. This is not to say that I actually buy any of it, but it does make me wonder.

3. have you actually READ the 911 Commission report? Although it's a Big Fat Book, it's actually much better-written than I expected (I read a LOT of bureaucratic prose, so my expectations weren't too high -- I was very pleasantly surprised at how well put together and clear it was).

I have read this - at least the parts that weren't redacted. Again, I'm not sure I trust it, but again for the same reasons as I originally stated. "Who wins, who loses, and what's at stake?" However, I may be slightly more paranoid than usual as I just finished reading The Ultimate Sacrifice and find some of the parallels with JFK's assassination a little hard to readily dismiss.

The current regime's been pretty fast and footloose with the truth so far. For me this is the biggest problem. Why should I believe any of the official versions of this event, when so many other events have been total fiction?

The problem with conspiracy theory is that our lives are semiotically loaded. Look for coincidence - and behold - there it is!

That said, I'm not sure how this really connects to the original thread, except for the parallels between the need for leaps of faith in conspiracy theory and religions in general. Without paradox, religion fails.

I'm sorry for taking us off topic.

 

[Linguofreak]

I applaud the honesty with which you acknowledge what, exactly, the traditional notion of god would entail relative to the universe that we actually observe. I urge you to read David Hume's work, On Miracles regarding these ideas.

I actually call this conception of god "the video game god."

But consider this: Some supernatural interventions WOULD leave a trace. But we see none. So, insofar as god is the author of the videogame, he has been very careful to make sure that the simulation is, in fact, perfect, and there is no internal evidence of the matrix. This seems very problematic to me: "You must believe in me --- on pain of eternal torment -- but I have taken great pains to cover up any evidence of my existence."

The creationist crowd maintains that such traces *have* been observed. Depends exactly what religion you're looking at, but in Christianity it's stuff like fire falling from the sky, people walking on dry seabeds with walls of water on either side, the virgin birth, people being raised from the dead, the existence of the universe itself, etc.

In discussions like this on science vs. the supernatural I like to refer people to C.S. Lewis' Miracles, which forms the base for my above arguments.

As for God covering up his existence, God doesn't seem to think he's doing so: According to Romans 1:18-20:

"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

If you read further on in Romans 1, you see alot of what is popularly thought of as "sin" mentioned, (sexual misbehavior, murder, etc.), but not so much as sins but as punishments for unbelief, in that they are the natural results of unbelief, but God protects people from their own self-destructive inclinations for a while, but stops and lets them do what they want.

It's like a patient going to a doctor with cancer. The doctor investigates the problem and sets up a date to have the tumor removed (or puts together a chemo or radiation therapy regime). In the meantime he treats the symptoms. The date for the surgery comes, but the patient doesn't want to have surgery and cancels. So the doctor goes on treating the symptoms and sets up another surgery date. The patient cancels again. This goes on, and meanwhile the tumor grows and starts spreading to other locations, and eventually the patient runs out of money and the health insurance company runs out of patience. The patient can't pay anymore and the doctor stops treating the symptoms. Not a perfect analogy (there's no money involved in the transaction between God and man), but workable.

Basically, "You must believe in me --on pain of eternal torment-- because I've gone to great pains to make myself obvious. If you ignore the evidence, I won't protect you from yourself."

 

[Linguofreak]

I recall on one particular forum I was participating in a discussion about creationism vs. evolution. Upon informing one gentleman that the Hebrew word for day, "yom" (as used in Genesis), did not mean a literal 24-hour period, he gave me negative rep and informed me that I was a demon possessed pervert bound for hell. And yes, those are his exact words.

The moral of the story: fundamentalists don't just reject the beliefs of non-Christians, but also the beliefs of most Christians as well. It's an interesting study in religious fanaticism, but it does little good in the classroom.

At one point I would have agreed with you fairly strongly that "yom" does not refer to a 24 hour period. Now my attitude is more "maybe, maybe not."

But in any case, "demon possessed pervert bound for hell" is not a phrase I would use for someone who just happened to disagree with me on a certain theological issue. For one thing, Jesus preached a fire-and-brimstone sermonette or two when the Pharisees said much the same thing about him. "Demon possessed" is best used when somebody is foaming at the mouth and raving unintelligibly. "Pervert" is best used for someone misbehaving sexually. And "bound for Hell," while it applies, I believe, to much of humanity, is not something that should be used as a taunt or an insult. For one thing, it's a serious warning and throwing it around willy-nilly, even to people who are in fact bound for Hell, can make you a bit like the boy who cried "wolf". For another, there are only a few issues of belief in the Bible that really apply to whether someone goes to Heaven or Hell, and I don't think the literalness or symolicism of "day" in Genesis 1 is one of them.

Also, be careful with the word "fundamentalist." Between the different types of people who call themselves fundamentalists, and the different types of people who get called fundamentalists, it can cover quite a broad range. It can mean anything from "islamofascist" to "evangelical" (of which there are quite a few shades) to "member of an obscure mormon polygamist sect," to "anyone that the writer thinks is a good, upstanding Christian," to "anyone that the writer thinks is a religious wacko."

Many people I know would describe themselves as fundamentalists, and many, both religious and non-religious would describe me as such. And, given the definition used by those I know, I'd probably describe myself as such. The only problem is that, after so long of being a word that describes someone as being "solid" in the "religious" community, and a "wacko" outside of it (and even within some parts of the religious community), it has become rather meaningless.