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It is a constant struggle, Cynique. I have a LONG way to go before I see myself as truly objective. What I try to do is not remain too attached to anything I believe. I know I am moving into a little bit of objectivity when I begin to black out when even those whom I believe are right, become egotistical and bombastic in their responses. Any attack, to me, causes me to back off and lose a tad bit of respect for those whose views I happen to agree with. I then sink into questioning all sides of a discussion, those I agree and disagree with. All becomes a question and suspect. I ultimately quiet myself and my spirit and just watch and listen. Why? Because I want to be a good listener. I want to be enlightened. I want to find truth. Again, I have a VERY long way to go. Too long. But I am working on it. When the words start to fly in here, I go quiet, sit, cross my legs, close my eyes, and let the sounds flow over me until they find truth.

I'm sorry Del I reject your last statement about my arguing from ignorance. I was expressing what I knew about a subject and was merely informing you that I could not speak to Sheldrake's opinion, because I know nothing about him and have not watched the video. Obviously you have integrated his beliefs into yours, so I figured I need to at least watch the video to better understand where you are coming from. @Pioneer1, the naming of things have nothing to do with how science is practiced. If you look at the names of some of the heavy elements; Americium, Berkelium, or Californium does this mean science worships the western United States? You, like Del, are reaching to to make a flawed argument that science is like a religion, because you two, for different reasons, have an axe to grind against science. I suspect Del dislikes science because it dismisses his strongly held belief in astrology and you because you've somehow associated science with white racism. But, Pioneer if you want to conflate modern science and greek mythology go right ahead I don't want to confuse you with reality.

The ongoing discussion blowing up the board, started out with the question "is science the new religion", and proceeded to morph into a slugfest over whether science espouses religion. As a debate, it exemplified the "irresistible force meeting an immovable object" axiom. The passion with which participants proselytized their arguments was akin to religious fervor, with everybody trying to exorcise the demons of those with opposing views. From another perspective, the heated exchanges were also a war of words, aiming verbal weapons that missed as often as they hit their targets. Truth was twisted and facts were bent. What had an equally interesting effect was the side-liners who chose not to enter the fray or take sides, not to mention a mediator who injected challenges. In the end it was, not surprising, me against Pioneer. Me, trying to rise above my ad-hominem arguments, to say in so many words that they're 2 sides to every question, and Pioneer probably sticking to his guns. This brouhaha was more of a showcase for a clash of personalities than anything. Very little was resolved before the subject meandered off on another tangent, asking whether acknowledging religion was on a par with accepting it. Conflict seems to be a very dominant factor in human interaction. Most people are not only looking for reinforcement of their views but for conversion to them. Everybody wants to be right and in the process the end doesn't always justify the means. Kudos to those mature enough to be open-minded good listeners, and who make enlightenment their priority. When i grow up, i want to be just like you. This is knowledge i have come to comprehend and it's going to the top of my bucket list.

@DelWould you want to be one among the multiple husbands of a woman? What's "open and progressive" about this? It is a form of exploitation, by the person who has more than one spouse. Who would voluntarily want to be in the pecking order for a shared mate? You? It's more beneficial to just be a "side piece".

@zajiYes, objectivity is difficult to maintain and it is easier to be objective when you are not acquainted with the people involved in a debate. Once personality permeates the exchanges, then this has an influence on who you side with. I, for instance, could never be objective about anything Donald Trump says because his smug overconfident demeanor prejudices me. People can be forgiven for being sore losers, but bad "winners" prone to gloating, are the pits. We are all flawed individuals, but recognizing our shortcomings is, in itself, a form of enlightenment.

All of those in parallel universes. Or all of those in the here and now, depending on who is seeing it and their life experiences.

On Peer Review in the Sciences [nothing that follows are my words. i have copied and pasted all items you read below and researched all quotes.] Richard Horton, then editor of The Lancet, contributed a guest editorial for the Medical Journal of Australia (Genetically modified food: consternation, confusion and crack-up; MJA 2000; 172: 148-149) in which he wrote: "The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability - not the validity - of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong." — Today Science is up on a pedestal. A new god has appeared; his high priests conduct the rituals, with nuclear reactors, moon-probing rocket ships, cathode tubes and laser beams. And their territory is sacrosanct; laymen are denied entry.  – Bruce Cathie — In truth, the systemic failure of peer review is one of science’s major, embarrassing open secrets. As Dr David Kaplan tells us, “[P]eer review is known to engender bias, incompetence, excessive expense, ineffectiveness, and corruption. A surfeit of publications has documented the deficiencies of this system.” Australian physicist Brian Martin elaborates in his excellent article Strategies for Dissenting Scientists: Certain sorts of innovation are welcome in science, when they fall within established frameworks and do not threaten vested interests. But aside from this sort of routine innovation, science has many similarities to systems of dogma. Dissenters are not welcome. They are ignored, rejected, and sometimes attacked. — Electric universe researcher and Big Bang critic Wal Thornhill (a REAL scientist) stated plainly in our GFM Media interview that the peer review system amounts to censorship. Fellow independent scientist Gary Novak agrees scathingly: “Peer review is a form of censorship, which is tyranny over the mind. Censorship does not purify; it corrupts…There is a lot of junk science and trash that goes through the peer review process.” — Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in May 2000, Canadian-based researcher, David Sackett, said that he would “never again lecture, write, or referee anything to do with evidence based clinical practice,” over his concern that “experts” are stifling new ideas. He wants the retirement of experts to be made compulsory and I think it’s a brilliant proposition. Sackett says that “…progress towards the truth is impaired in the presence of an expert.” — Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell is the former Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, where she spent twenty years poring over scientific papers, saturated in the dubious practices that pervade the world of medical research. She states bluntly: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” — David Kaplan, a professor of pathology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, has stated that, “Peer review is broken. It needs to be overhauled, not just tinkered with. The incentives should be changed so that: authors are more satisfied and more likely to produce better work, the reviewing is more transparent and honest, and journals do not have to manage an unwieldy and corrupt system that produces disaffection and misses out on innovation.” — Dr. Marc Girard, a mathematician and physician who serves on the editorial board of Medicine Veritas (The Journal of Medical Truth), has written, “The reason for this disaster is too clear: the power of money. In academic institutions, the current dynamics of research is more favourable to the ability of getting grants — collecting money and spending it — than to scientific imagination or creativity.” — In general, peer reviewers — generally not time-rich — don’t try to replicate experiments and rarely even request the raw data supporting a paper’s conclusions. Who has the time for all that? Thus, peer review is, according to Richard Smith writing in Peer Review in Health Sciences, “thought to be slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud.” 
— What about fake peer review? This is where the corrupt and abysmal becomes the theatre of the absurd. For example, Berlin-based Springer Nature, who publishes the aforementioned Nature journal announced the retraction of 64 articles in 10 journals in an August 18th statement in 2015. This followed an internal investigation which found fabricated peer-review write-ups linked to the articles. The purge followed “similar discoveries of “fake peer review” by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing “reviews from fabricated reviewers”. Yes, that means reviewers that don’t exist — recommended as “reviewers” by the people submitting their work for review. Imagine writing a paper and being able to nominate a non-existent person to review your work, and the contact email supplied to the publisher for this purpose is actually one you made up, which routes the paper back to you (unbeknownst to the publisher), so that you can then secretly carry out a (favourable) review of your own work under a pseudonym! — Recently two scientists performed a brilliant Sokal-style hoax on the journal Cogent Social Sciences. Under the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay wrote a deliberately absurd paper loosely composed in the style of “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” — what exactly that is they made no attempt to find out. The authors tell us: “The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions…We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.” And they did. After completing the paper, and being unable to identify what it was actually about, it was deemed a success and ready for submission, which went ahead in April 2017. It was published the next month after some editorial feedback and additional tweaking. To illustrate how deliberately absurd the paper is, a quote is in order: “We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations… and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.” In plain English, they (seemingly) argued here that a penis is not a male sexual organ but a social construct; the “conceptual penis” is problematic for “gender (and reproductive) identity,” as well as being the “conceptual” driver of climate change. No, really. How this ever got published is something to ponder. The paper is filled with meaningless jargon, arrant nonsense, and references to fake papers and authors. As part of the hoax, none of the sources that were cited were even read by the hoaxers. As Boghossian and Lindsay point out, it never should have been published. No one — not even Boghossian and Lindsay — knows what it is actually saying. Almost a third of the sources cited in the original version of the paper point to fake sources, such as created by Postmodern Generator, making mock of how absurdly easy it is to execute this kind of hoax, especially, the authors add, in “‘academic’ fields corrupted by postmodernism.” — In April 2010, Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, used a computer program called SCIgen to create 102 fake papers under the pseudonym of Ike Antkare. SCIgen was created in 2005 by researchers at MIT in Cambridge in order to demonstrate that conferences would accept such nonsense…as well as to amuse themselves. Labbé added the bogus papers to the Google Scholar database, which boosted Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world’s 21st most highly cited scientist. So a non-existent scientist has achieved the distinction of being one of the world’s most highly cited authors — while “authoring” papers consisting of utter gibberish. Congratulations are certainly in order. In February 2014 it was reported that Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), were removing over 120 such bogus papers from their subscription services after Labbe identified them using his own software. Going back at least as far as 1996 journalists and researchers have been getting spoof papers published in conferences or journals to deliberately expose weaknesses in academic quality controls. “Physicist Alan Sokal (of the famous Sokal Affair) succeeded in the journal Social Text in 1996,” while Harvard science journalist John Bohannon revealed in a 2013 issue of Science that he had duped over 150 open-access journals into publishing “a deliberately flawed study.” Bohannon organized submission of the flawed study (technically, many different but very similar variations of the study) to 304 open access journals worldwide over a period of 10 months. 255 went through the whole editing process to the point of either acceptance or rejection. He wrote: “Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s shortcomings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.” The hoax paper was accepted by a whopping 157 of the journals and rejected by only 98. Of the 106 journals that did conduct “peer review,” fully 70% accepted the paper. If peer review was a transparent and accountable process, according to Gary Novak, “there might be a small chance of correcting some of the corruptions through truth and criticism; but the process is cloaked in the darkness of anonymity…Due to the exploitive and corrupt process, nearly everything in science has official errors within it…[A] culture of protecting and exploiting the errors creates an official reality which cannot be opposed.” Returning specifically to the arena of (mainstream) medicine, a quote in PLoS Medicine, states: “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry”, wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, in March 2004. In the same year, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, lambasted the industry for becoming “primarily a marketing machine” and co-opting “every institution that might stand in its way”…Jerry Kassirer, another former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the industry has deflected the moral compasses of many physicians, and the editors of PLoS Medicine have declared that they will not become “part of the cycle of dependency…between journals and the pharmaceutical industry”. In the words of John Ionnidis, “Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.” If most studies are wrong, and most scientists are more interested in their own careers and funding than getting at the truth — while journals daily allow bogus and flawed pharmaceutical research to be published and promoted — then why would anyone in their right mind believe the claims made by doctors about the efficacy of products based upon “peer review” or pharmaceutical “studies”? What does a term like “safe and effective” even mean in this world of deception and subterfuge? — “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. — Richard Horton, Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? The Lancet, 11 April 2015, thelancet.com (Horton is editor of The Lancet) — All the above items, as stated, I had nothing to do with writing. I merely copied and pasted all the above items and researched the validity of the quotes. Below are links to some additional items I found, for your edification. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/04/fake_peer_review_scientific_journals_publish_fraudulent_plagiarized_or_nonsense.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798 (good read) A line from the NCBI piece: “People have a great many fantasies about peer review, and one of the most powerful is that it is a highly objective, reliable, and consistent process.” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/science/science-journal-pulls-60-papers-in-peer-review-fraud.html https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/nov/08/fraud-revolution-scientific-publishing-peer-review http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dozens-scientific-papers-withdrawn-probably-more-come http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full ADDED (Center for Accountability in Science article): https://www.accountablescience.com/peer-review-process-scientific-publications-trouble-paradise

This past Sunday I started rolling out the new website design. There are still hundred of pages that need to be converted some pages will be trivial to convert other will take some time. Many of these pages were created 15 years ago or more using old version of HTML or proprietary code… I’;ll spare you the boring technical details — basically I have more work to do, but a lot has been accomphished. I started AALBC.com in 1997 and have been it only webmaster. Today, dare I say it, AALBC.com is the best website dedicated to Black books ever built Really, AALBC.com is a site dedicated to Black people and joins a list of a many sites, in a variety of niches, doing the work of ensuring black people have a voice, they own and control, on the web. Thank you everyone for your support over the years — without it AALBC.com would be a faint memory, to a few people.

It would appear that Pioneer read both ways. Kudos.

Cynique 　 Translation: " Oh....that..?? Oh....uh...well....see..no I wasn't trying to humiliate or belittle them..... No....see....uh....what I MEANT to do when I said all that was see....well...wha had happened was.....you and me was arguing over red lipstick...and see....THEN.....Zaji had said something and I wasn't sure what she had said...... and see...THEN Del had said something and then...yeah..but ..now we all straight". Lol. No, you didn't make up all those quotes. You simply did what you always do: cherry-pick to make yourself look good. Lol, if my quoting you makes me look good....what does that say about YOU?

Delano I totally support women having the right to marry more than one husband if they choose to do so. For me, polygamy means BOTH men and women having the right to choose multiple spouses as long as all involved are consenting adults. That would be an example of REAL sexual freedom. 　 Cynique My response was to Pioneer's implication equating polygamy with liberating women from the monogamous society which has a history of oppressing them Once again you're ATTEMPTING to misconstrue my position, lol. I didn't say that polygamy either LIBERATED or OPPRESSED women. Polygamy and monogamy have ALMOST NOTHING to do with how advanced or repressed women are in society. For thousands of years women had more rights in polygamous Sub-Saharan Africa than they had in monogamous Western Europe. And today women have more rights in monogamous Western Europe than in polygamous Middle Eastern countries. The point is....one has nothing to do with the other.

The were Christian in Origin. The religion not the principal. Religion (belief )has been linked to Science. Rupert Sheldrake has made the case that Science acts more like religion. Hence censorship not debate. They feel debate is below their lofty ideals. I say that is the approach of the he arrogant elite.

When i said "enlightenment", i meant the possibility of not only learning something from listening to other points of view, but also about the people who hold these opinions. I also associate enlightenment with opening your mind, not closing it; with seeking an understanding of life and those who live it, hoping that in the process you are able to separate what's important from what's trivial. Needless to say, this is a journey.

Enlightment means not arguing.

Most of the colleges in the United States that started over 300 years ago were Bible-proclaiming schools originally. Harvard and Yale (originally Puritan) and Princeton (originally Presbyterian) once had rich Christian histories. Harvard was named after a Christian minister. Yale was started by clergymen, and Princeton’s first year of class was taught by Reverend Jonathan Dickinson. Princeton’s crest still says “Dei sub numine viget,” which is Latin for “Under God she flourishes.”

That is called wisdom; it comes with age (usually). Interestingly you don't become enlightened winning arguments.

@Cynique This is where I would like to be too. Unfortunately, I fail at every day. Thank goodness for tomorrows.

Who says it has to be many women it could be many men.

@Pioneer1 That's your version of things. I never considered you an ally in my feud with Sara. Why would I? You had no influence over anything. You were nothing but a spectator. You, Troy and Del were who wanted me to end my smack-down with Sara, but i kept things going because I was fired up. When Troy wanted to ban her, i asked him to let her stay. That quote you printed about zaji was not me trying to pick a fight with her. That's your interpretation. It was a wry observation which i felt free to make because i don't think zaji expects people here to treat her with kid gloves. She can hold her own, which is why she made reference to "bringing the fire". I tend to think that she didn't respond to my gibe because she has enough self-awareness to realize that she had, indeed, written a lengthy post in making her point which you weren't the subject of; Troy was. Or was i the one who originally said zaji was observing us. When i told zaji i was a cynic in another exchange, she assured me that this was no problem because cynicism was needed when it came to keeping people grounded. That's why i like her because she is confident enough to be broadminded, and intuitive enough to understand the person behind the words. i think we get each other. The long argument about the Viola Davis picture on TIME's cover is when the rift between you and me began. As for my cross-examination of Del, who had always been at odds with you, he responded to me and explained why he had done an about-face. I thanked him for his "heart-felt" sentiments because i was impressed with his sincerity. On another occasion, he explained something about which i could take heed. He had figured out that it's a waste of time to argue with you. You blow all this smoke in an attempt to obscure and justify your insult to Troy. The whole gist of you petulance was that his being honest and admitting that he was wrong was not a sign of good character. Your determination that my compliment was just an attempt on my part to suck up to him, really shows your true colors. You couldn't stomach that he was being praised for having the integrity to concede a point, something you don't have the guts to do. No, you didn't make up all those quotes. You simply did what you always do: cherry-pick to make yourself look good.

　 Troy even try it Brother. You, and everybody else who posts here knows, my admin role is limited to removing trolls, keeping the software and hardware working, and general administration. Saying, "The only reason you're praising Troy is because he's the Administrator," is not just false, but a pure desperation move on your part -- beneath even you... or so I thought Desperation????? Beneath even me???? I'm not the one going around stirring up trouble. Infact, I'm the one who tried to make peace between Cynique and Sara after Cynique's repeated provocations. And speaking of Sara...... If you'll notice the ONLY time Cynique was half-way civil towards me was when Sara was here and she needed all the allies she could get....lol. Cynique i never tried to pick fights with Mel or Zaji because i admire and respect both of them Oh really???? Well HERE YOU ARE attacking Zaji simply for agreeing with me: "Doeth the lady protest too much? i can see how Troy might get the "wrong" impression since you seldom agree with him, and never challenge Pioneer because you 2 are on the same page and reinforce each other's views." "Because zaji is invariably in lock step with him, i now have my suspicions, and while she is watching me, i am watching her. It's too bad that Pioneer is oblivious to all of all of the admonitions and advice she offers, - her stream of conscious monologues that mesmerize us even as she has lapses where she doesn't practices what she preaches... But, hey, nobody's perfect!" https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/4990-the-problem-of-identifying-ourselves-based-upon-whites-concept-of-race/?page=2 And HERE YOU ARE attacking Del simply for agreeing with me: "I can't believe anybody would consider Pioneer a role model when it comes to being open-minded. Does this mean you are now more receptive to Troy's POV on climate change? Or does Pioneer's lack of open-mindness inspire you to not be that way? Or is it because his opinionated pontificating exposes you to points of view you have no problem swallowing? Or is it because you empathize with him for not conceding to Troy? Since you have confessed that you are trying to "improve" yourself, is this because you have decided to be a more tolerant person - or because you didn't realize that you weren't a tolerant person? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Just curious about your mid-life transformation/epiphany. Me, i'm too old to change. Which is why i can't resist taking pot shots at Pioneer. i guess i should congratulate him on acquiring 2 new choir members for his preaching" https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/5005-bringing-fire/?page=1 But I guess those aren't your words. I guess I just made up all those quotes of you attempting to humiliate people simply for agreeing with me.....lol.

Interestingly, the film reflected the fact that spirituality and science are perfectly compatible. In the real world, African cultures did in fact demonstrate this.

I've seen the movie and I think it was great. I thought it has some pretty powerful spiritual messages in it that related to traditional African spirituality. Especially as it relates to the "realm of the ancestors". It reminded me of Shaka Zulu mixed with Game of Thrones....lol. But unfortunately without the NUDITY that is found in both series. Another thing I noticed about the film is that with all the Afrocentric concepts introduced.....POLYGAMY which is so common in traditional African culture...was not such much as even hinted.

I have not heard one person who saw this movie say it was not good. Even its critics concede that it is an excellent representation of its genre. I poke fun at all the hype, but credit should be given where credit is due.

Well I saw Black Panther last night. I was definitely a step above the typical action flick, the plot was a bit deeper. Sure it had all the requisite battles, explosions, fast cars, and attractive women and muscular men engaging in death defying feats aided by super powers -- all of which gives it its universal mass appeal. I thought it was an excellent film. I was not the greatest film ever, but for a superhero action fick it was as good as they come. Certainly better than any that I can recall seeing in the last decade. The audience I watched the move with, in Tampa Florida, which was virtually all white applauded at the end of the film.