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The War in Medicine
Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:12 EDT

Big Brother

You might be curious what techniques our public schools, the news media, our politicians, etc. etc. use to brainwash the public. Their methods are more sophisticated than you probably think. Brainwashing is absolutely essential to the establishment. The reason is that in school or in life you are probably at some time going to run into a "renegade" who just refuses to believe what he or she is told and has a different point of view. It is brainwashing that conditions you to ignore what they say. If you don't believe me, just read on.

Hearing Both Sides of an Issue

To illustrate brainwashing, let me use Darwin's "Theory of Evolution" as an example of teaching what I want to get across, since that is a controversial area in which everyone seems to have an opinion. More importantly, it is the only theory that is allowed to be taught in our schools.

There are two broad categories of theories about evolution: first, are those who think that evolution occurred by total accident. Second, are those who think that God had a hand in evolution or God simply created each species independently. Let us call the first group the "evolutionists" and the second group the "creationists." There are actually several different camps (i.e. different theories) within each group, and there are hybrid groups (i.e. hybrid theories), but let us assume there are only two simple groups.

To visualize the two different camps, suppose there is a large field and there is a fence that bisects the field and you are standing at one end of the fence looking down the fence. On the right side of this fence are the evolutionists (the people who make up the "establishment") and on the left side of this fence are the creationists (the people who disagree with the "establishment" point of view).

You have the choice of siding with the establishment or the renegades. In some cases this choice could affect your job. For example, if you taught biology in a public high school, and you believed in creationism, and taught creationism in your classroom, you might lose your job.

If you are only looking for the benefits, and a promotion, then there is no question as to what theory you will teach. The evolution side of the fence has virtually all the benefits. But let us suppose you are one of those rare people who are more interested in truth than benefits. What are you going to do?

Suppose you want to know the truth (as best as you are capable of honestly determining as an "open-minded" person) - is evolutionism or creationism correct based on the evidence currently available?

Suppose that you decide to start your decision making journey by talking first with the evolutionists; because everything you have heard in school is that evolution has been proven to be true. So you head to the right side of the fence and start talking to an evolutionist.

Suppose this person tells you all the reasons why evolution occurred by accident. He might go into microevolution (what changes can occur within a species that shares the same genome), macroevolution (the creation of new genomes), why transitional species cannot be found in many cases, punctuated equilibrium, all the bones paleontologists have found, and so on.

After this conversation, you start to walk away, but the person stops you. Then this same evolutionist starts telling you all of the things that are wrong with the creationists. He tells you one theory after another of the creationists and why each theory cannot be true and what a bunch of goons they are.

After this conversation, you now feel that you understand both the evolutionist's and the creationist's theories of evolution. You decide it is not necessary to go to the left side of the fence and talk to a creationist because you already think you understand their views and why their views are wrong.

A Common Mistake

If you made such a decision, you would be making a common mistake: you have heard both sides of the issue, but from only one person on one side of the fence. You have really only heard how the people on one side of the fence feel about the issues. But you haven't heard the arguments of the creationists, from a creationist, nor have you heard why the creationists think that the evolutionists are wrong.

There are actually four categories of the two sides (these are the four things you need to hear to make an informed decision):

1) pro-evolution (from the evolutionist side),
2) anti-creation (from the evolutionist side),
3) pro-creation (from the creationist side),
4) anti-evolution (from the creationist side).

In other words, from the right side of the fence you have heard the pro-evolution arguments and also from the right side of the fence you have heard all of the anti-creationist arguments. But note that you have not heard the pro-creationist arguments, from a creationist, nor have you heard the anti-evolution arguments, from a creationist. You have only heard two of the four categories because you have only heard from one person who is on one side of the fence.

Do you really know both sides of the issue? No you don't! You only know one side of the issue and two of the four categories. Until you go to the left side of the fence and hear about the pro-creationist views, from a creationist, and you hear the anti-evolution views, from a creationist, you don't have a basis for making an objective decision.

The Way We Have Been Taught

At this point we need to stop and think for a moment. We have been conditioned all of our lives not to listen to the "renegades." In physics, you hear how wonderful Einstein was, but you are told never to talk to anyone who challenges Einstein (someone like Roland De Witte, for example). In science class you were taught that evolution has been proven to be true, and you have been taught that the creationists are all a bunch of religious nuts.

This same kind of bias has been drilled into you for every conceivable type of issue. You have graduated from school thinking you have all the answers and that there are no open issues that need to be debated. In other words, you think the establishment is all-knowing.

All your life you have been taught not to listen to the people on both sides of the fence. All your life you have been taught by people inside the "establishment" and you have been taught that what the "establishment" teaches is true, and you have been taught what is wrong with the renegades and you have been taught not to listen to them. All your life you have been taught two of the four things you need to make an informed decision. You have been brainwashed.

And now I come along and tell you to listen to the renegades. Why? Because, quite frankly, sometimes the "establishment" is wrong. Actually, it is frequently wrong. There, I said it, sometimes the renegades are right! You will never, never know when the renegades are right unless you talk to one of them with an open-mind!

Did it ever occur to you that what the "establishment" tells you about the creationists is not what the creationists really believe, or perhaps what you heard about the creationists is what only a very small percentage of them believe? You cannot trust an evolutionist to correctly represent the views of the creationists. They are biased. They will pick the most fantastic views of a small percentage of the creationists, then twist and contort their views. They will leave out the beliefs of the other 90% of the creationists. When they are done, what they say may not even remotely represent what a real creationist believes.

"Scientific" Research

But it goes much, much deeper than that. For example, the research done by paleontologists involves the dating of bones. In dating these bones there are a wide range of assumptions that must be made. Rather than give the public a huge range of dates for a bone (due to unknown issues such as moisture, radiation, etc.), they pick one specific date for the age of the bone, and that date is very generous to the evolutionists. In other words, they assume evolution is true when they pick a single date for the age of a bone, when in fact they should pick a very, very wide range of dates due to unknown information.

For example, many bones are found on the edge of rivers long dried up. Even if those bones were next to the river (when it was still flowing) for just a few hundred years, the moisture from the river could have had a huge affect on the estimated date of when that animal died.

Thus, by using generous assumptions, and not making it known that in fact there are assumptions made, they make it look like evolution "has been proven to be true." Evolution has not been proven to be true. Much of the evidence comes from generous assumptions with the data.

I can assure the reader that in some cases (my background is in mathematics and physics), the assumptions they make with the data amounts to 99% of the "evidence" used to reach their final conclusion. This is true in virtually every field of "science."

Truth Versus Benefits

But aside from all of these issues, did it ever occur to you that the people in the establishment have a conflict of interest? Let us go back to the point where you were standing at the end of the fence and had not yet moved. You had a choice to make. Before you ever decided to look into the issues you could have made your decision based on which side offered you the most benefits.

Did it ever occur to you that what you hear in the news media, for example, is being told to you by people who chose the "establishment" side for the sole reason the establishment had more benefits than the renegades? Did it ever occur to you that you have not been taught by "truth-seekers," but rather you have been taught by "benefit-seekers?"

The deciding issue for many people is not which side is right or wrong, but which side offers the most benefits. It is not a debate between truth and error, it is a debate between benefits. And many, many of the people you have listened to throughout your life have been people who have chosen benefits over truth!

We have been conditioned to believe that an "open-minded" person is someone who absorbs the propaganda of why the establishment is always right, and defends the storyline propaganda of why the renegades are always wrong.

So in reality "you" (the hypothetical person who is trying to find the truth about evolution) probably have absolutely no desire to talk to anyone on the left side of the fence. You have heard everything you think you need to hear. Thus, you are a member of the establishment and a certified "defender of the faith" of the evolutionists.

End of story - time to go home.

Your Trip To The Left Side of the Fence

Well, just for the heck of it, out of morbid curiosity and to test your debate skills, you decide to walk over to the left side of the fence and talk to a creationist. You carefully walk up to (gulp, drum roll): Hermann the Horrible Hermit Heretic. Be careful, you say to yourself, close your ears and don't listen, this person is an idiot. Oh well, its cold outside and your hands are in your pocket, so you listen.

You shake hands with Hermann and exchange pleasantries. Right away you are amazed at something: Hermann can talk! You had always been taught that creationists had the IQ of a rodent and wore beenie caps with rotors.

Hermann starts by talking about the first living organism, and about its DNA component and its cell membrane component. He states that even though it is absurd that a 300,000 nucleotide chain (300 genes with an average length of 1,000 nucleotides) can randomly form, even if it did, the statistical probability that the first DNA had a permutation of nucleotides, such that 300 viable proteins could be created by this DNA genome, has a probability that is far less than: 10-30,000 (this is a probability of 1 divided by a 1 with 30,000 zeros behind it).

(Note: the 10-30,000 figure is based on the assumption that 1 in 100 random permutations of 1,000 nucleotides will form a protein vital to a living organism. This is a very generous figure for the evolutionists, because the real figure is probably far, far less than 1 in a billion.)

He then stated that even if it could create 300 proteins, there is an absurdly small probability that these 300 proteins would form a set of proteins that could support the life of a new organism. He did not give a probability for this because there isn't enough known about sets of proteins.

You quickly do some math in your head. You remember from science class that there are 1080 atoms in our universe. Then, you imagine there are 1029,920 universes just like ours in a cluster (that is a one followed by 29,920 zeros). All of these universes combined would have 1030,000 atoms.

Suppose some government wants to do a lottery and in order to win the lottery you have to pick the single, correct atom from among all of the atoms in the 1029,920 universes. The probability of winning this lottery is 10-30,000. You ask yourself: "who is so bad at math they would buy a ticket in that lottery?"

Then you remember what your math teacher taught you: "the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math." Then you realize there are a lot of people who would spend their life savings buying lottery tickets in that lottery. Finally, you come out of your daydreaming and realize that Hermann was talking while you were doing the math in your head.

Then you hear about the ridiculous probability of the first cell membrane forming by accident. For two hours Hermann gives you an earful about how incredibly complex a eukaryotic cell is. It is so complex that even the exobiologists admit that one could not form by accident from a prebiotic pool. Thus, they claim that the first cell was a prokaryotic cell, and that there are conditions where a prokaryotic cell can survive without an organic host (since this is the first cell, there are no organic hosts to feed on). But even so, prokaryotic cells still could not have formed by accident. Then you hear that the first DNA and first cell membrane could not have formed in the same prebiotic pool, and thus you are told it was virtually impossible that they could ever get together.

Hermann then starts talking about new genomes and macroevolution. You then learn about the improbability of irreducibly complex protein systems forming large numbers of complex inter-related proteins in the same random mutation event in macroevolution.

You learn about the mathematical absurdities caused by the issue of viable permutations of nucleotides from random mutations needed to create any new gene in any new genome. You hear that this is another case of absurd probabilities caused by permutations.

You then hear about the "morphing of the embryo." A new creature starts out as one type of cell, but when the "baby" is born it has many different kinds of cells. This means that some cells, when they divide, must divide into two different kinds of cells. The timing of these strange divisions has to be with pinpoint accuracy. You learn that the instructions for this pinpoint accuracy must be built into the DNA, thus making random mutations even less likely to be advantageous (i.e. requiring more precise chains of nucleotides). When Hermann started taking about the morphing "timing" issues and base-2 trees, you started thinking that Hermann might even be smart.

Then Hermann starts to talk about the evolutionists (this is the anti-evolution part, heard from a creationist viewpoint).

He tells you that the first argument the evolutionists use is that "we exist," thus our existence is proof of evolution. Hermann then likens this logic to the theory that all of Shakespeare's plays were written by six monkeys locked in the basement of a building. He states: is it logical that because Shakespeare's plays "exist," that the monkey theory is true?

You then hear how "punctuated equilibrium" is really a super irreducibly complex protein system, and how absurd it is to claim that it was not necessary for irreducibly complex protein systems to have mutated all at once, but at the same time to believe in punctuated equilibrium. You hear why the phylogenetic tree is really a cover-up for the gaps in transitional species. You also learn about the massive assumptions evolutionists make with regards to carbon dating bones. You also hear the totally unproven assumptions and very shallow logic evolutionists make with respect to mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA. And so on.

Ten hours pass and you realize the sun went down and it is now dark - and Hermann is still talking. You also realize it has been four hours since you had a clue what he was talking about. You also realize that this is not what you expected. You expected some wild and crazy theories. But in fact you realize that creationists are not stupid and they really do have some very strong arguments. Then you also realize that what you had been taught by the evolutionists, about what the creationists believe, has absolutely no relationship to what the creationists actually do believe.

You finally go home, very confused.

This simple story demonstrates the very sad state of affairs in America and throughout the world. Neither schools, nor corporations, nor governments want anyone to hear both sides of any issue from [the people on] both sides of the fence. They would rather have a brainwashed student than a thinking student. Schools act as if they have all of the answers and that it is not necessary to teach students to think for themselves. Students are graded on how well they regurgitate "facts," not on how well they think. Students learn very early on that all of the benefits are on one side of the fence and that they should spend their life gathering up the benefits.

* "Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
G.M. Trevelyan

People are taught from birth to assume and expect that those in the "establishment" (such as the schools, the news broadcasters and newspapers):

1) Have no vested interests or conflicts of interest,
2) Have perfect intelligence,
3) Have all the facts for both sides of the fence,
4) Are totally neutral and unbiased,
5) Have perfect integrity,
6) Have your best interests in mind, and
7) Are truly open-minded.

And above all, you are never, never allowed to think that money or power (i.e. benefits) could possibly influence what the establishment teaches you.

Dream on, this is the real world we are talking about.

It is quite probable, that from the time a person starts first grade, to the time they get a PhD or M.D., they never once hear both sides of any issue from the people on both sides of a fence. And even if they do, they have been so brainwashed by one side, or they are so interested in the benefits of one side, they simply pay no attention to the "other side."

As incredible as this sounds, it is difficult to get people to grasp the concept of hearing both sides of an issue from both sides of the fence. All your life you have been taught that it is not necessary. Society always has all of the answers, and anyone who does not agree with society is a crackpot, quack, moron, rebel, incorrigible, mentally unstable, or whatever.

Excerpt from: The War in Medicine, Alternative Cancer Treatments Information Center

Discuss on SOTT Forum


Reader Comments
 
(Register to add your comments!)
 
I Would Venture To Add... By Dant
Dant

that in addition to rules of listening to both sides of the fence on the pro/con issues, it should matter as to whom you are talking with, the person has a proper level of knowledge, and the person is able to provide the data/proof/reference upon request. It is also wise to talk to more than one person on both sides of the fence?


Added: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:00 EDT

I Knew I'D Heard That Fence Argument Somewhere... By Third_density_learner
Third_density_learner

And then I discover it was taken from the "Cancer Tutor" website, an excellent resource for the politics and misinformation behind so many paradigmatic strongholds relating to health and other matters like evolution...


Added: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:20 EDT


 

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