Anticipating Valentine's Day: Love and Chemicals

[Synnical]

http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2008/02/11/love-and-chemicals/

Dinesh D'Souza
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Bestselling author DINESH D’SOUZA’s latest book is What’s So Great About Christianity. read more
Love and Chemicals

Dinesh D\
Posted Feb 11th 2008 4:40PM by Dinesh D'Souza
Filed under: Science, Christianity, Controversy, Atheism

Anticipating Valentine's Day on Thursday, I ask: what is this thing called love? To the materialist, it is nothing but the interaction of chemicals. Physicist Victor Stenger in God: The Failed Hypothesis rejects the idea that humans have souls. "If we do indeed possess an immaterial soul, then we should expect to find some evidence for it." Along the same lines, philosopher Daniel Dennett writes, "Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul." Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker adds, "Every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of the brain." And what happens to free will? "It seems free to you," biologist Francis Crick explains, "but it's the result of things you are not aware of."

The issue here is the effort on the part of atheists-some with impressive scientific credentials-to extend the materialistic understanding of nature to human beings. Yes, we humans are material objects but are we no more than that? Certainly we experience ourselves very differently from the way we experience the outside world. All other things we experience indirectly, from the outside, through the apparatus of our senses; but ourselves we experience directly, from the inside, without the involvement of our senses.

Only about ourselves do we have this kind of "inside information." And when we examine ourselves we discover things about our nature that we don't find in inanimate objects. Based on our privileged and unique access, we know that the external or objective account of reality, however accurate it may be in describing raindrops and tree trunks, is not the fully story when it comes to describing ourselves.

Oh and V-Day is banned in the nation of our "friends" the House of Saud:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/12/saudi.valentine/?iref=hpmostpop

Saudi Arabia bans all things red ahead of Valentine's Day

]CNN) -- Saudi Arabia has asked florists and gift shops to remove all red items until after Valentine's Day, calling the celebration of such a holiday a sin, local media reported Monday.
art.valentine.muslim.afp.jpg

With a ban on red gift items over Valentine's Day in Saudi Arabia, a black market in red roses has flowered.

"As Muslims we shouldn't celebrate a non-Muslim celebration, especially this one that encourages immoral relations between unmarried men and women, " Sheikh Khaled Al-Dossari, a scholar in Islamic studies, told the Saudi Gazette, an English-language newspaper.

Every year, officials with the conservative Muslim kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice clamp down on shops a few days before February 14, instructing them to remove red roses, red wrapping paper, gift boxes and teddy bears. On the eve of the holiday, they raid stores and seize symbols of love.

The virtue and vice squad is a police force of several thousand charged with, among other things, enforcing dress codes and segregating the sexes. Saudi Arabia, which follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism, punishes unrelated women and men who mingle in public.

Ahmed Al-Omran, a university student in Riyadh, told CNN that the government decision will give the international media another reason to make fun of the Saudis "but I think that we got used to that by now."

Cindy in Fort Lauderdale+++

[onager]

1. A Muslim woman wished me happy V-Day...

...here in Egypt, where the stores are crammed with hearts, teddybears and tons of red stuff. So suck on that, you dour Wahhabi bungholes.

The usual tedious backstory:

Every day on my way to work here in Egypt, I stop at big service station/convenience store to buy my lunch. These stores have a huge and excellent selection of junk food, along with fresh fruit and tasty sandwiches.

There are a couple of drawbacks. The stores are owned by a chain based in the Emirates, a place greatly influenced by dour Wahhabi bungholes. So they have a corporate policy (I guess) that recordings of the Koran are blasted thru the place ALL DAY LONG AT LOUD VOLUME.

And all the cheerful young women working there have to wear the head-scarf. Which does not slow them down at all. They are bunch of shameless and highly entertaining flirts. They've all been seeing me for more than 2 years now, so it's sort of like we all know each other.

When I went in a couple of days ago, one of them in fact was stocking a whole rack of Valentine teddy bears. She hollered out "Happy Valentine's Day, Mr. Onager!"

That had me smiling all day.